Incoming

Today's Track: Soundtrack: Monty Python and the Holy Grail

Call me a geek if you want, but PBS is great television.
No, really. Not only is it educational, but, at times, it can be downright inspirational.
Case in point: On a recent episode of long-running series This Old House, the crew was engaged in remodeling a house in one of Florida's more hurricane-intensive regions. The show's host/commentator/irritating bore was questioning the project's architect/designer on camera. The subject of windows was addressed, being highly crucial in the sense that the house had, at that point, very few of them. According to the interviewee, the house's new windows would represent the highest and finest state of the modern window-design art. They would have to be of significantly higher quality than average to stand the abuse of potential hurricanes. They would in fact need to be--and here I really, really wish I'd been paying enough attention to have gotten the exact quote--capable of sustaining the impact of a coconut traveling at 100 miles per hour. (And that's only in it's paraphrased form. To hear the man himself deliver the original line, utterly deadpan, was much better.)
Now I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking: How much do I have to pay to get to see that?
As a responsible human being, I feel as though I should state that hurricanes are terrible, destructive things, often laying waste to life and property for miles in every direction as they pass. With the added danger and demolition potential of airborne coconuts, it's a real nightmare.
That having been said, think about it. How would you feel if you looked on helplessly as a bunch of coconuts--dense, heavy, hair-covered projectile vegetation from Hell--thundered into a building at almost three times the municipal speed limit?
You'd laugh until you fell face first in the mud, probably. I know I would.
I realize that natural disasters are no laughing matter, as we are so often reminded by stern-faced media spokescreatures. But--due in large part to the efforts of the Fox Network--it is now almost impossible to view any catastrophe less devastating than the Crimean War without mentally adding a cartoon soundtrack and amusing voices.
Besides that... I mean, it's a coconut!
I personally know of several people who would wait in line for tickets to see that. The only problem is getting the things in flight on demand.
--Swallows?--
Hurricanes, as a rule, are not generally available at command. But I'm sure someone somewhere has already come up with an idea that would do the trick--if so, please let me know.
I'm frankly surprised the U.S. military has not looked into coconuts as a practical and humorous waste of taxpayer defense dollars.
(Unfortunately, I don't have a link to any of the documents relating the Air Force/Navy project which involved the aerial release of incendiary device-equipped bats, which would really have gone over well at this point. I urge you to look into it, though.)
In any case, I bet you'll never look at a palm tree in quite the same way again.

By the way, for those of you who want to know, yes, I think I would laugh if it happened to my house.

Untitled

Today's Track: Monday, Monday--The Mamas and The Papas

After the other day, I almost feel like pouring myself a Guinness or three and singing "Feelings" to a coat-rack. The poor thing would probably skitter away in fear.
Somewhere along the way, this thing has undergone some sort of spontaneous format shift, becoming less a lighthearted poke at humanity and more a sort of ongoing digitized mawkish rambling. Needless to say, this is not at all what I had in mind. For what it's worth, I hope that it doesn't turn out to be permanent. But then what's the use of maintaining this exercise in typographical futility if I can't occasionally indulge in a little maudlin gibberish? And really, I doubt that the earth will suffer a significant decrease in angular momentum for want of a few cynical sociological mini-treatises, nor will mankind seize up and jump the evolutionary rails due to a lack of flippant pseudo-philosophy or another Pat Robertson/Al Gore jokes (I forget the precise wording, but the punch line involved a monkey, a vacuum cleaner, and a roll of duct tape). All the same, I don't think I have it in me to be overly deep at this particular moment. I think instead that I will aim somewhere near the middle ground, and talk about my day.
It rained.
Not much, but I assure you that's the most entertaining bit.
Ok, new tack. My week:
Hmm, not much there, either. Which is not really all that surprising, considering there have been only two days of it thus far. Despite the fact that some would have you believe that today is Thursday, it is, in fact, only just Monday. Thus, Sunday being the first day... You get the idea. Returning readers--I assume there are a couple of you--are now, more than ever, unshakably assured in your conviction that I am a Pat Buchanan-caliber lunatic. But I can provide an explanation which is, if not thoroughly satisfying, at least satisfyingly confusing. You see, I've listened for years to people endlessly complaining about having committed acts of which they are ashamed, or of making terrible and/or simply stupid mistakes, or having spotted, at a later time, some simple thing which should have been done but wasn't. The upshot of all this is that these people fervently wish for the ability to retrace their chronological steps and relive their past days, purportedly for the purpose of righting things. After many, many of these rants, and having explained the concept of causality until the concept sickened me, something finally occurred to me: I need to find some less irritating friends.
No, while that also might be true, what I realized as a result of these numerous holdings forth was that, like so many other things, the obvious solution to this problem--that of being unable to correct an unsatisfactory past--was stupefying in its simplicity. You can’t travel back in time to fix things to your liking. There are simply too many paradoxes, many of which might conceivably involve you being shot by your grandfather. So the obvious thing to do would be simply not to submit a day as having been completed until you are completely satisfied with its disposition. In other words, don’t move on to a new day until you’re happy with the last one.
Well, the last few days, beginning late Sunday, have been somewhat...unpleasant. I don’t yet have a firm grasp on exactly what I might do to rectify this, but I refuse to undergo another day until these are sorted out. Accordingly, I’ve been diligently struggling with Monday for a while now, and fully plan to be ready to tackle Tuesday by the beginning of next week. As to why this is, well, maybe I’ll attempt that at another time. For the moment, I have something else that I wish to talk about.
Unfortunately, I’ve forgotten what that is.
So I’ll just take this opportunity to ramble on about a few random things that I do recall presently.
I have yet to extricate my beloved--and rather blackened--lawnmower from the hands of the helpful citizens who insist that it absolutely will not be completely repaired until the day after I am forced to declare bankruptcy. Yes, apparently that "minor fire" I wrote about earlier this month is only going to cost a few hundred dollars to repair. And I narrowly avoided getting a new dog out of the deal, too. As it is, I have yet to see the first trace of dog or strange man again. Of course, it's been quite a while since I last saw my mower, too. I'm not entirely sure I miss either of the three of them. Meanwhile, the lawn is doing nicely sans mower, and I've finally established peaceful relations with the members of the small proto-civilization that has sprung up in one of the more heavily vegetated regions of the property.
I've recently decided to curtail my pretty much nonexistent campaign against public education. As I've often pointed out, the only thing the modern school system has managed, after years of experimentation, to get right is the practice of suspending children who break the rules. Not only does this get the troublemakers out of the classroom--allowing the dedicated students to concentrate on such crucial scholastic matters as discerning the effects of chalk dust on the human digestive system or testing the physiological responses of frogs with pushpins--but it also assures that said disobedient youngsters are sequestered for a few days at a time with their parents, which guarantees that the parents learn the value of raising children who are not intolerable hellions. But I digress. To recount, this practice is the only aspect of public education which is not, at best, an ironic joke. I used to worry about this a great deal. Not so any longer. I've just realized that modern videogame technology is now more than sufficient to counter any of the negative effects--such as actual education--that the public school system might be having on America's children. Plus, videogame consoles don't drink coffee, thus limiting their potential exposure to surreptitiously introduced chalk dust.
And lastly, I'd just like to take this opportunity to point out that the comment-posting gadget on this page need not necessarily be restricted to registering comments about the actual blog. I'd be afraid to comment on most of this stuff. So if you happen to be reading and think of something you think the Masked Logician, or his other three readers, should hear, leave a note behind. It doesn't matter if it doesn't seem important, or even rational. I don't hold myself to such unreasonable standards, so why should I expect it of you?
Think on.

P.S.: Chickens can't vote, why can idiots?

Just Thought You Should Know

Today's Track: Wrote a Song For Everyone--Creedence Clearwater Revival


First, yes, I do in fact realize that it's been a while since my last post. For the last few days, I've been a bit under the weather. Well, alright, to be perfectly honest, my real problem was a sudden shortage of inspiration. I considered filling the blank space with some half-hearted commentary on the latest media drivelling, or perhaps chronicling mindless “day-in-the-life”-type stuff. But, to begin with, nothing terribly interesting had been happening in my life, and other people always seem to get angry when I try to follow them around and write down stuff about their lives. And it is my firm conviction that there are already far too many bloggers out there playing at being underground journalistic juggernauts. I couldnt possibly compete with the good ones, and I won’t imitate the leser ones. Therefore I had very little to say.
Sometime yesterday, I got a notion for another snarky “Philosophy For Humans” piece. I got sidetracked, however, and it was really late before I got a chance to deal with it. Then, before I got it posted, I got involved in some personal things, and my blog quickly paled to insignificance. I had planned on putting up the post this morning, maybe throwing in a few really good Richard Nixon jokes just for variety. But I’ll tell the truth. It just suddenly doesn’t seem worthwhile at this point. As I have been informed, my writing falls far short of actual cultural/social significance, and I’m fine with that. But some of the things I talk about are of more importance, at least to me, than others. And of all the things I have to say, all the things I feel like I should say, even if only for myself, “World Peace in Three Easy Steps” (the other bit’s title) just didn’t seem to carry all that much weight.
I have something I want to share.
Whether or not it’s of any worth I leave to you to decide. In either case, I ask your leave to wax profound for a while.

At one time or another, everyone has had this experience, in one form or another.
Search your memories, you’ll know what I’m talking about.
Maybe it was a childhood crush on the little boy down the block. Or perhaps a starry-eyed infatuation with the golden-haired Venus in blue jeans in your homeroom class. Could be there was some very special person close to you that you always thought about, or it might even have been some cute stranger you met once or twice. Maybe all you feel is that quiet little tingle at the back of your heart. Or maybe it’s a great, all-consuming fire which fills your every waking moment. It matters not whether you’re twelve or 112. Oh, it works on us in different ways at different times. When you’re young, you’re convinced that it’s the great Shakespearean romance, passion for the ages. As you age, and, supposedly, grow wiser, you may not feel quite like floating barefoot above the clover anymore. Or, then again, maybe you do. Whatever it is, you’re in love. So, you think to yourself, do something about it. Be it a passed note, flowers from a secret admirer, or, more simply, just walking up and asking him/her out, just do something. But you don’t. You assure yourself that you have good reasons. Or you tell yourself that you have no chance, so there’s no point in bothering. Possibly you’re just scared: scared of denial, scared of exposing your feelings, scared of your feelings themselves. For whichever of these reasons, or so many more, you say nothing. You just go on wringing your hands, writing poems no one will ever read, and languishing in your rose-petal dreams.
But life never hesitates, does it?
The days just keep right on going, and one day you look up and realize that nothing is the same anymore. Things change, people move on, and chances get missed. And you spend the rest of your life wondering: “What if?” Maybe you forget, mostly, or maybe it’s with you every day. But from time to time it comes back. If I’d done this... If I’d said that... If...
It’s not pleasant, is it? To take a line--woefully out of context, but valid nonetheless--from Christopher Stasheff:

Hell is not knowing.

Life is all what you make of it, I’ve always heard. I can’t speak to that, for I don’t really know what that’s meant to mean. But what I do know, or at least what I believe, is that whatever life is, it’s all about the choices we make. And it’s the missed--or ignored--choices that hurt the most. Sure, it hurts to have your heart broken, to embarrass yourself, whatever. But how much worse it is, years later, to have that little helpful voice at the back of your mind which reminds you that it might have been different?
Yes, it’s happened to me.
More than once I’ve held words inside which might well have brought me happiness if but invested. I know, that’s difficult to believe. Yet it is true. I, the Thousand-Word Wonder, Lord High Potentate of Verbosity, have found my words to fail when they were most important. How many of you can say the same?
And now I’ve come to the end, almost. But I just want to leave you with a few simple words.
If you have something to say, say it. Now. There will be no better time.
What you’ll regret most are the chances you never took, and all the times you have to ask yourself: “What if?”
And last:
If you love someone, tell them so. There’s too much bad in the world to shy away from one of the good things. And if you think they know, tell them again; no one ever got tired of hearing that they were loved.

Go and live life, friends.
Pax vibiscum

For you who have not heard the song I noted above, there’s a simple reason it was chosen to accompany this post. In it, John Fogerty, songwriting genius, says this:

“Wrote a song for everyone; wrote a song for truth. Wrote a song for everyone, and I couldn’t even talk to you.”

I’m sure some of you, having once listened to the song, might be tempted to debate the relevance of the rest of the song, but that line was worth the price of admission.

Caution: Random Venting

Today's Track: Two Thousand Light Years From Home--The Rolling Stones

I think someone with a good working knowledge of Javascript should design a little browser toy which automatically creates a link to every single page you visit, referring it back to a homepage you, the user, have previously specified. Why? Why not? The internet is supposed to be all about the free and unfettered exchange of ideas and information. Links help us to easily navigate to sites of interest, possibly containing valuable and pertinent information, much more easily than if we'd had to search or them manually. At least, that's the theory.
In truth, links help us to quickly, almost instantaneously, access vast amounts of useful data without the tedium of actually having to think about what it is we want to know.
Everyone, if you haven't already, should devote at least one day to link-jumping. That is, continuously moving, link by link, through web pages, not concerning yourself with the site's contents, but using it simply as a place to find the next unvisited link. In this way it is possible to cover enormous swathes of the web in relatively little time. True, you won't necessarily learn anything, but odds are you weren't going to anyway.
Incidentally, if you do decide to try this--or if you have already--let me know how well you did. My personal best is almost eight consecutive hours...

The Tilapia Did It, Officer

or
Of Bicycling Drummers and Intellectual Discontent


Today’s Tracks: Zombie--The Cranberries and
Another Saturday Night--Sam Cooke


Every so often, even the most oblivious of us are given to make a blinding insight.
Only then do we truly appreciate the sentiment so aptly expressed by one Mr. Elmer Fudd upon making acquaintance with one of Newton's more disagreeable laws:

"Ignorance is bliss."

I'll level with you. It wasn't actually the Tilapia that caused all the trouble. As far as I know, he was quite profoundly dead at the time. In fact, it may very well be that he was long since eaten by the night in question. Therefore, it's only just that I lay the blame elsewhere, namely squarely on the shoulders of the cycling fishmonger (who one might, I think, fairly call a peddler), as, I've no doubt, the aforementioned slanderized fish would have done.
The evening began, as so many do, quite innocently. I sat on my couch late one evening, eating a sandwhich. It was not in any way a remarkable night, unless the remark be some sort of comment on the staggering dearth of anything at all happening. Nor was it a particularly good sandwich, save in the sense that it might well have rescued me from starvation, if I'd not eaten in the course of the previous days, which of course I had. So, both a sandwich and an evening on which to consume it, and neither of them particularly pleasant in any way. In fact, I only mention either for the purpose of illustrating the essential dullness which had pervaded my being at this time.
As is my habit at such moments, I switched on the television. Not out of any real hope of finding a satisfying program to watch, exactly. More out of habit, and the overwhelming feeling that, no matter how dejected or apathetic I may have been feeling about the night, the meal, or anything else, matters could only conceivably be exacerbated by having to endure it all in a dark room whilst staring at a blank television. My faithful set, once more earning its rock-solid reputation, failed utterly to provide any viewing option more engrossing than a standard laundry rinse cycle. But it was one of those nights. I'm sure--as substantiated by the phenomenal sales of products such as motorized fishbait and lighted boxer shorts--that you've all had more than a few of them in your lives. After a couple of hours, you would really watch your washing machine. So I assumed my dauntless channel-surfer guise and waded into the murky waters of off-primetime television. For those of you keeping score, this was far from my first mistake that day, but good call nonetheless.
After skimming through every available station approximately thirteen times, I stumbled upon some sort of documentary program--perhaps it was National Geographic--about life in one of those small, sweltering, rice-producing third world nations, whose precise name I don't recall at present. I'm certain this lapse of memory owes a great deal to my dog and her pet alligator, but that's a tale for another time. Anyway, as I had few other calls on my time that evening, I decided to watch for a while. The premise, as I came to understand it, was, basically, that life as a rice farmer or his wife is insanely difficult. Factor in a bustling lot of children, uncertain climatology, and an omnipresent film crew, and things went downhill steadily. I sat through probably half an hour of exhaustive videography devoted to the fine art of watching futilely as crops failed to grow. Likewise, I watched as the farmer made structural repairs to his "home away from home", so that he and his wife could be dry and safe while practicing said art. In other words, I was rapidly approaching catatonic boredom. Then, without warning, he appeared, that grim harbinger of internal unrest:
The bicycling Tilapia salesman.
A small, nondescript man on a rusted two-wheeled relic of forgotten engineering, on which was strapped a box full of relatively recently deceased fish. I sat up and took notice. He approached the farmer's wife, whereupon they proceeded to traded a bit of small talk before getting seriously about the business of dickering.
Pointless nattering and haggling over fish.
And I could not tear my eys from the screen.
I hung on every word; that sun-scorched tableau became my world for a few moments.

I cannot explain the feeling I was left with when I returned to a slightly more sensate condition.
I was subjected to the spontaneous realization that, intellectually and socially, I had completely atrophied.
For a shot time, I was completely out of touch with reality. Completely mentally disarmed and utterly unmanned by the steady, numbing stream of pseudo-stimulus washing over me from the pretty glowing box.
I had abdicated that which we intellectuals like to perceive as the very essence of humanity; the one and only thing that truly separates us from the lower orders of life. And all so easily...

We are in danger, friends. It is slowly happening to us all.
Plus, though I don’t remember for certain, I believe it was on a Saturday night.
Now that’s sad.

All Quiet In The Left Hemisphere

Today's Track: They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haa!--Napolean XIV

Sometimes I wonder.
For all of our generations of speculation about things like evolution, cosmology, theology, and the true nature of rock and roll, sometimes I really do wonder whether or not man was truly cut out for the deeper issues of life.
Out of respect for issues long--and rightly--laid to rest, I won't bring up such threadbare object lessons in idiocy as the 2000 US Presidential election, P.E.T.A.'s apparent inability to come to terms with the concept of a food chain, the public education system (Motto: "Shaping the minds of the daytime talk show guests of tomorrow"), or former life-sized Executive action-figure Danforth Quayle.
No, while those are good examples, there are simpler and much more obvious ones.
Just this afternoon, I spent no fewer than two hours discussing the local lottery with a gentleman who, in deference to the fact that he happens to be closely related to me, I shall not identify. For the benefit of those of you who, like myself, have absolutely no desire to hear a two-hour dialogue on the subject of state-sanctioned confidence artistry, I will summarize:

• The lottery is not a waste of money because:
  
  
  
  • you're not really losing any money if you stand to make a big payoff, and
    
  • it's only five dollars a week, so you're really not sacrificing anything;
  
  
  
• "Besides, if I win, you'll feel pretty stupid."

What can you say to that?
Obviously, my carefully crafted mathematical arguments fell far short of the mark, and my systematic appeals to logic earned me a good solid round of relatively mean-spirited laughter. Of course, this is from the same man who believes Pat Buchanan is a liberal...

If you can't beat 'em, hide.

Pointless Mental Exercise

Today's Track: Magic Carpet Ride--Steppenwolf


How many people dream?
Trick question, because obviously everyone does.
Have you, then, ever had a nightmare?
Yes? Good. That is, probably not good, but acceptable in the sense that you know what I'm talking about. You do know what I'm talking about, right?
Really?
Wow, I'm impressed.
In that case, to continue:
What makes a nightmare frightening?
Well, you say, it has to be the seven-foot-tall, three-headed, slime-dripping monster with fangs the same size as municipal flag poles. Duh.
Perhaps it is.
But what makes the monster scary?
At this point, you no doubt point patiently at the above description and don your best talking-to-the-inmates face and wait for me to finish gibbering.
Obviously you are not going to cooperate, so I'll just handle this on my own, OK?
Nightmares are scary for the same reason that pleasant dreams make you feel so good. They seem real.
More to the point, to the dreamer, they are real.
While you dream, that dream is your whole world. It is only after you wake that they begin to seem like the preposterous foolishness that they are normally held to be.
Dreams really are silly, aren't they? Once you wake in the real world again, that is.
The real world.
And of course we make this distinction offhandedly, because it's perfectly plain that that in which we wake is always the real world, the familiar world of cars and jobs and wars and Rolling Stones concerts.
But why is that?
Why is what, you ask?
Why is it that we are so sure that we wake up in the "real world"?
Well, where else would we wake up?
Good question.
However, I'm sure, at one time or another, everyone has had one of those dreams in which you think you have awakened, only to find that you are still dreaming. And in case you haven't, let me assure you that it is terrifically disorienting.
Which, of course, is perfectly understandable. Here you are, sleeping comfortably and dreaming away, just like every night, when suddenly you "wake up". Immediately your mind falls into its accustomed waking mode, and you make a good approximation of going about your "real life". Then, suddenly, you realize that things are not at all well. Perhaps it is that the laws of physics seem to have been waived temporarily. Or it could be that the fearful beasts from your "dreams" are proving strangely reluctant to give over the chase. Whatever it is, you must grudgingly admit that this could not possibly be reality as you more normally accept it. And so, in due course, you wake. Ah, reality, sweet reality...

Are you sure?

Whilst you dreamt--in the beginning--you knew that what was presented to you was nothing other than the good old Earth, just as you'd always known it. Then, after your "awakening", you harbored not the slightest doubt that you opened your eyes on a perfectly acceptable, perfectly ordinary world, just like any other morning. And then, with a silent (or not so) sigh of relief, you finally reassume consciousness in your bed, in your home, right where you left it, and all is perfectly normal once more.

Is it?

Sleep tight, friends.