Post-Apocalyptic Snowman

Sigur Rós: "Untitled #1"
2005
Directed by Floria Sigismondi

Maryland is Flooding

Well. Serves us right for all of our sunshiney weather. It's finally getting humid around here, and unusually rainy. A website for the bored and interested: http://adlab.microsoft.com/DPUI/DPUI.aspx

A demographics viewer. Pretty fly.

Entering "http://www.xanga.com" reveals a disproportionate number females (82% confidence range) who search/hit the site. Most of the users also seem to be teenagers. Livejournal falls at a 60% confidence range that most users are female between the ages of 18-24 (aging with the years livejournal first gained popularity 6-8 years ago). The gender/age distribution for Blogspot seems to be more even, with mostly female users (at 60% confidence) ranging in age from 18-34 (teenagers and adults over 50 seem to be the outliers). Not sure how they figure this stuff out, but I'd buy it.

Addiction Vs. Paradise

Interesting article in New York Times Magazine about medicating addiction. A lot of it is stuff that any of the neuroscience/bio majors probably know already, but this excerpt cites a study from 1978 that I've never heard of:

Alexander is among a vocal group of addiction researchers who argue that focusing on a pill to treat addicts fails to address the primary cause of becoming and staying hooked: our unhappy, disconnected lives. Beginning in the late 1970's, Alexander and his team of researchers at Simon Fraser set out to study the role of our environment on addictive behavior. Until that point, most scientists studying addiction put rats in small, individual cages and watched as they eagerly guzzled drug-laced solutions and ignored water and food, sometimes dying in the process. This phenomenon was noted — first by researchers, then drug czars, then parents trying to keep their children off drugs — as proof of the inherently addictive quality of drugs and of the inevitable addiction of any human who used them. This was false, of course. Most people who use drugs don't become addicted.

So what made all those lab rats lose their minds? Bruce Alexander and his research team had a rather simple hypothesis: The rats had awful lives. They were stressed, lonely, bored and looking to self-medicate. To prove it, Alexander created a lab-rat heaven he called Rat Park. The 200-square-foot residence featured bright balls and tin cans to play with, painted creeks and trees to look at and plenty of room for mating and socializing.

Alexander took 16 lucky rats and plopped them into Rat Park, where they were offered water or a sweet, morphine-based cocktail (rats love sweets). Alexander offered the same two drinks to the control group of rats he left isolated in cages. The results? The rat-parkers were apparently having too much fun to bother with artificial highs, because they hardly touched the morphine solution, no matter how sweet Alexander and his colleagues made it. The isolated and arguably depressed rats, on the other hand, eagerly got high, drinking more than a dozen times the amount of the morphine solution as the rats in paradise.

Pretty good overall, although they gloss a lot over and I think they blew all their momentum at the end with that "hole in the soul" crap. Check it out. I also want to read the original paper, and once I get myself set up at the Weill-Cornell Hospital I'll download it there. But anyone with access to download articles can find it here.

kinda gross and kinda awesome, but mostly gross

cockroaches!

Knowledge Junkies

An interesting new study from a noted visual recognition researcher suggests that the reason humans seek to understand concepts, recognize visual displays, and do perhaps any number of other cognitive tasks is because it stimulates our pleasure-producing endogenous opiates. Think about that all you school nerds next time you try to argue that learning and thinking is a more worthy pursuit than bypassing that process altogether and stimulating your opium receptors by a more direct, but less natural means. Just kidding - don't do drugs. But it is curious how the same reward systems can motivate such disparate courses of action, and in both the physical and mental realms.

Gnarls' Woody

New York Times Magazine just did an article on Gnarls Barkley, which can be found here. Overall it's pretty good, and interesting to hear what Danger Mouse has to say when not interviewed by Pitchfork. One part that I thought was particularly cool though is in the beginning, when Danger Mouse talks about how he wants to make music like Woody Allen makes movies:

"I don't make a band's next album," he says. "I don't like making someone else's songs better. I'm not interested in that. This is where the Woody Allen thing comes back in. I have to be in control of the project I'm doing. I can create different kinds of musical worlds, but the artist needs the desire to go into that world. I won't fight with people to try and make the sounds I hear inside my head. What I want is for the leader of a group to come to me, and then I lead that person. Because even with some of my favorite bands, I only like 30 or 40 percent of what they do. I'd want to make that 30 percent into the whole album."

What do you guys think about the artist's desire to go into the world he's created? I'm trying to look at it from an authorial standpoint, which is obviously problematic, because unless you want to write yourself into your own story (aka be an asshole/postmodern) you can't interject yourself into your work in quite the same way. But I'm not sure of too many other directors who cast themselves in their own movies, or who even write characters so clearly based on themselves. But then again, I'm not sure of too many other directors that I like as much as Woody Allen, or that have made a body of work as impressive as his. So go figure. I'm not sure what my point is here, but it's an interesting idea I hadn't thought of before.

For Cartney Specifically

From the Onion:

"When the sun first strikes the Martello Tower, the first notes of 'The Rose of Castille' shall ring out, the streets shall run with rashers, kidneys, and sausages, and I shall forge in the smithy of Dublin's soul the uncreated conscience of my race!"

(click for full text)

Oh goodness...it's on like Donkey Kong...and Link...and Snake

Yes!

That is all.

Respect

For those of you interested in jazz, you should check out The Respect Sextet.

I've been going to the Rochester Jazz Festival all week, and I've seen a few pretty awesome acts, but on the whole I'm feeling like this year is a bit of a step down from last year. Tomorrow night should be pretty good though, since I'm seeing McCoy Tyner.

Anyways, one of the highlights was this group, The Respect Sextet. They're a bunch of Eastman grads playing together. I know at least two of them are Rochester locals. I know the brother of the drummer, and I've actually played with the sax player before when I was in high school. He sat in on some groups I played in. He was pretty damn good back when he was in high school too (he'd gig with the local professionals, some of whom also play nationally).

As a group, Respect is really tight. They all know how to play. They play a whole range of stuff, from straight up to stuff that can get a little bit out there. It never goes too far though, because when they start pushing the line too much they bring it right back to the structure. After listening to them live yesterday as well as listening to one of their CDs, I've noticed that one of the themes of their music is the dichotomy between structure and chaos. They manage to combine the two pretty seemlessly, moving fluidly from one to the other and back again.

Their music is also full of humor, something which isn't necessarily a sought after trait in instrumental jazz. Sometimes its a very subtle humor only apparent to other musicians, or even other jazz musicians. For example, they did something I thought was hilarious yesterday. They were playing one tune, and a lot of it was full of unison or very simple harmonic structures that followed the rhythm of the melody. That tune really accentuated how tight the horns' playing was. Then, in the next tune they played, the horns started playing slightly out of tune with each other (very subtly so, it took me a little while to figure out what was going on). And while they were all playing the same melody, they weren't quite fully synchronized. It sounded like a mediocre high school ensemble: together, but not quite all the way there. The thing is this was all on purpose, just for fun, and that made me laugh. It might not sound funny to you guys, but maybe you had to be there (also, I'm the guy who laughs during peoples solos when they play something comical and the rest of the audience looks at him funny).

Anyways, those of you into jazz, especially the kind that pushes into the slightly weird while maintaining a foothold in the realm of modern straight ahead jazz, check them out.

-Yoshi

Edit: I was just looking at their website and noticed this in the 'about' section. It starts with a list of quotations like, "'This is a band that's given me some of the best listening experiences I've had over the last couple of years.' -Robert Iannapollo, Cadence/Opprobrium"

The last one is this: "'Nothing is good, I see, without Respect. Methinks it sounds much sweeter than by day!' -William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice"

This band is about having fun, and I love it.

Coffee saves your liver

Booze it up, and drink some coffee to protect your liver!

http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/06/13/coffee.liver.reut/index.html

Rootin' Tootin'

Among the many activities that I participated in this weekend (Giants-Pirates game, free OAR/Cake concert at Golden Gate Park, country dancing bar, and Haight-Ashbury street fair), I would have to see that the most interesting was the annual Livermore Rodeo. That's right, a for real rodeo. My area of "California" is a little different than I thought it would be. Please allow me to share with you some of my experiences and learnings from that day.

So, we arrive at the rodeo and see the standard fair/carnival entrance: a bunch of tents set up selling things, and junk food stands with corn dogs galore. I was in heaven from that point forward. As we climb up the back stairs and reach the bleachers, before me lies a dirt arena with green steel fencing and animal pens. We arrive a bit late, so the first event I saw was cowboys roping calves from atop their horses and then hog-tying them. The real fun started when the Bucking Bronco event came up, where the cowboys try to stay atop bucking horses for 8 seconds. This is where I learned my first interesting tidbit:

Horses don't just buck for the hell of it. There is a certain procedure to make it happen. A leather harness is tied around the horse's posterior and tightened around said horse's testicles. Upon tightening, the horse gets very angry and bucks until the wrangler (the guys making sure everything stays cool and under control) loosen the harness. Alls I know is that if a tight leather harness were around my boys, I'd be in a corner crying rather than bucking. Horses are tough.

The other highlight event was "live cow milking." This entailed one cowboy roping a wild cow around the neck and his partner cowboy going up and putting the cow in a headlock to subdue it. The first dude then jumps off his horse, whips out a bottle, goes up behind the cow, and takes some milk from the udder. He then has to run the bottle back to the main platform, shortest total time wins. I saw one guy put a cow in a headlock and get trampled twice before he finally subdued the cow on the third try. I also saw another guy put the cow in such a headlock that the cow fell over. It was friggin' awesome.

That's all I've got for now, except that I busted out the Alan factoid that the first manmade object to break the speed of sound was a whip. Hope y'all enjoyed the edyoocation!

--B

Brain dump

Several thoughts on a Friday morning:

I just finished the website for the comic book company my home/camp friends and I started. Check it out here. I'm pretty pleased with how it turned out. Thanks Andy for the dreamweaver help.

If you'd like your very own dvd copy of The Eric and Diana Show, email me your address and I will send. It's done! Done done done!

I'm leaving for camp today, my address is thus:
748 Hamilton Rd.
Becket, MA
01223
Feel free to send gifts, moneys, bribes, etc.

I went to see Radiohead with in Boston on Monday with Di. They were pretty great, but three particularly great things stood out:

• Thom Yorke is the greatest dancer of all time. So much wiggle, lots of joyeous lateral head bouncing... check it out.
• Lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood's face was obscured by his hair the entire concert, but he was rockin out the whole time, playing a half dozen instruments while rhythmically flailing his awesome hair. Convinced me to grow my hair long and play a beatbox machine slung over my neck. I don't know who's computer I got it from (I'm looking at you Alan), but I've been listening to Jonny Greenwood's solo album Bodysong and it's pretty wild. I'm glad that dude got as bored of standard guitar rock as he did. The now classic Kid A is clearly his baby.
• Two old couples standing in front of us were passing around a doobie and getting progressively drunker and higher as the concert went on. The yoga-practicing health-food-eating doobie-smoking former hippie lady at the end was flirting with the backwards bosox hat-wearing kid next to her. He seemed to enjoy the attention. I enjoyed observing the friendly interaction between generations that a band like Radiohead can inspire.
  

War News Radio: Student Radio at its Finest

Students at Swarthmore College produce a syndicated journalistic radio show called "War News Radio" which aims to "rediscover the voices of real people" ignored by coverage of the Afghan and Iraq Wars by mainstream media. To this end, they interview Afghan women, Iraqi realtors, young U.S. military recruits, old Army Reserve members called to foreign service and doctors and journalists in the war zones. WNR has won several awards and been featured in the New Yorker, the Philadelphia Inquirer, BBC and Fox. You can access all their archives here.

Imagine the possibilities...

I found the baby that Bryan always wishes he was!






















Complete story at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/three_armed_baby

The Jug Put It In Me

Hello all! I'm trying to make a concerted effort to stay in contact with everyone to a much larger extent than I usually do during the scholastic off-season, so here's an attempt at that.

You may be asking, "What did the Jug put in you, Bevan, what??" Laughter. Allow me to blaspheme for a moment. As I was waiting for takeoff in the lovely Logan Airport (whose name just makes me want to watch X3 again) on Saturday afternoon, I found myself bored and missing my family, who sadly couldn't follow me through the security checkpoint. This made me think of my other family, yous guys, and in honor of one whom I so often deride, I chose to stay my boredom reading an issue of the Brown Jug, cover to cover. I of course had the foresight to place a few random copies of said magazine in my backpack for such an occasion, so I pulled out the "Living for Dummies" ish and started plowing away.

And, somewhat to my surprise, it made me laugh. Out loud. Not, however, on the floor while rolling. Nonetheless, I must congratulate the staff of the Jug for making me giggle in a public airport. I kept hoping that people would glance over and think to themselves, "someone actually buys those help guides?!" and then, upon noticing the title would remark, "what daaa fuck?" Granted, HilJay needs to learn to use things other than lyrics to express herself, but other than that I was impressed by the witticism of most pieces and the coherence that permeated the entire issue.

By reading that magazine and finally recognizing the thought and effort that went into it, I came to appreciate the creative power and critical intelligence that all of you possess. Therefore, I've made it my mission to slowly but surely go over all of those extra links and goodies that you guys put in here, because they stimulate me in a way that I find pleasant. I'm currently up to date on all the PIITJ posts and comments, I just need expand on some of those other treats. So, keep 'em coming guys, and I promise I'll be a more active contributor as well. Latah suckas!

--Bevman Weissman

P.S. Andy, a quick specialized Jug comment: I really liked that the Living for Dummies issue didn't have bylines or a table of contents...it just made the whole thing seem more connected. I also read the Do It Yourself and Time issue, which I liked in that order. Also, whatchu got against Kafka? Bitch!

On the Change-of-Address Pack

Anticipating my departure from Providence, I headed to the Thayer Street Post Office last week to acquire a change-of-address form. What the friendly postal workers gave me, though, was an official "Change-Of-Address Pack," consisting of an overstuffed envelope containing coupons redeemable for services provided by U-haul, Home Depot, and other companies that might have something to offer relocating Americans, as well as the simple form I sought. This hefty and brightly-colored pack made me wonder two things.

1) To what extent should official transactions between a citizen and his government have corporate sponsorship? If my Change-of-Adress form is padded with Home Depot deals, should my tax forms be brought to me by H&R Block; my passport bookmarked with a flyer promoting Continental Airlines; and my birth certificate stapled to a deal for AIG life insurance?

2) How much waste is directely associted with advertising? Surely millions of trees are felled and hundreds of landfills are swollen with America's disregarded fliers and junk mail. But what about the waste of mental power begotten by an ad-saturated society? How much human consciousness--the most valuable human resource of all--has been drained as we stare at billboards and T.V. commercials, as we are captured and captivated on city busses and at stadiums, and even as we seek to fill out our change-of-address forms? What ideas could we have generated, and what perceptions could we have perceived were our minds not occupied with the new Norelco Razor, an attorney who can defend us from DUI's, or recent price slashes at Wal-Mart?

I think the latter kind of waste--waste of mind--is grossly underestimated in our considerations of the relative benefits and costs of advertising. Fortunately, we can strive to reclaim our minds from the inane and ubiquitous grasp of corporate advertising. I have two suggestions

1) As citizens we can demand that corporate advertising be eliminated from our governmental transactions. Yes, this will result in decreased governmental revenue with which to produce things like change-of-address forms, but the savings of physical and psychological waste will be significant; and the ideal of a democratic government that represents the people, and not the interests with enough money to advertise on a national scale, will be preserved. (While we're at it, we can strive to reduce the incredible influence of corporations on government by advocating for a little friggin' campaign finance reform).

2) As consumers, we can reduce the prevalence of advertising in our lives by consuming fewer advertising-soaked services, or by paying for alternate services that have fewer advertisements. Entertainment via the Internet is an increasingly great alternative to sitting sessile in front of a T.V. And I'm salivating for the near future when the rise of satellite radio will save us from the idiocy of fm radio.

Those of you who have just moved and want to file a USPS change-of-address form without the official "Change-of-Address Pack" can do so here.

NBA Dreams

In honor of the NBA Finals being played in a few days, I've been reading up on NBA history. Because, you know, I wouldn't be reading about this stuff without a very good excuse. Here are some things I've found:

1. The first minority to play in the NBA was not black, but a Japanese-American from Utah named Wataru Misaka. He played 3 games for the Knicks in the 1947-48 season (the same year that Jackie Robinson joined the MLB) and scored 7 points before being cut from the team. He eventually earned an engineering degree in an effort to defy being stereotyped as "just another Asian ballplayer."

2. The first African-American to play in the NBA was Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton (oldschool athletes definitely had the best names). He signed with the Knicks in 1950 after having played 2 and a half years for the Harlem Globetrotters, alongside Goose Tatum, Meadowlark Lemon, and Marques Haynes. We all need similar nicknames, like "Railyard" Gordon, "Tiny" Tyler, or "Bevan" Weissman.

3) From 1946-1949 Providence had its own pro basketball team, the Providence Steamrollers. Holding to the city's tradition of greatness, the Steamrollers compiled the all-time record for fewest wins in a season, with a final tally of 6 wins and 42 losses. At least Providence isn't the best at being the worst: the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76'ers had a season record of 9 wins and 73 losses

4) Eddie Curry has cardiomyopathy, a potentially lethal enlargement of the heart. Jamal Crawford is ugly... heart-stoppingly ugly. Both of them play for New York - compound that with the fact that coach Larry Brown is pushing 70 and seems to hate all of his players enough to murder them at a whim, and the Knicks might break the record for most members of the organization to die in a single season. Providence Steamrollers, your record 6 wins is going down.



Go Steamrollers! Enjoy the finals!

Themes of Transience

One of the last times that we had everyone together at the Governor house, Ratatat's Seventeen Years started playing from Bryan's computer. Alan pointed out that during their last road trip, someone (I think Bryan) decided that Seventeen Years embodies loss. The song begins with a series of glitchy beats, power chords, and nintendo-style beeps before it buils to a sort of soaring melodic point in which it all comes together. But the soaring section only lasts for about 20 seconds, and by 1:40 into the song it all crashes into handclaps and more glitchy beeps. You've got 1:40 to enjoy the buildup, and then another 3 minutes spent listening hard for that part of the song to come back. But it doesn't. The song only fades into gentle harmonies and then dies out.

Warning: the following could all be a function of my current mood. But I've been listening to a lot of Ratatat lately, because it seems like an apt soundtrack. Seventeen Years might represent loss, but I keep thinking there's more than just that. Each song follows a similar motif - open song, build themes, resolve themes, move on, build new themes atop similar beat, resolve these thems, continue. The concept of verse-chorus-verse doesn't exist in Ratatat's world. So rather than loss, I think that the album as a whole embodies transience. Each song blends fairly seamlessly by way of thematic melodies that open, build, resolve, and give way to new themes. You don't even really notice it happening, because the background beat changes very subtly if at all. Once in a while you'll come back to a theme, and you sort of remember it, but can't tell whether or not it's part of something from a previous section or if you're just still in the same section of the song.

Considering that most of us have just graduated, I've been considering transience quite a bit. We go off to college for 4 years, about midway through our time there we begin to call it home, become familiar with the themes that we've built overtop our shared background beat, and then those melodies resolve and we disperse.

The last few days, I kept on asking people in the house the annoying question, "What's next? What do we do now?" Most people kind of just took it in and didn't say anything, or offered the usual answers. Which is fine, because it's a stupid question. What's next is the same thing - we're going to build new themes around ourselves, and we're going to grow familiar with them until we have a home nestled within these melodies. But right now, what I find more comforting is that the background beat will be the same. Because after 4 years of knowing each other, I don't think that the beat we march to can change more than subtly, in ways we won't even notice. So these new themes will be built, naturally and in such a way that they grow from rather than supplant the old ones. When we see each other again we'll remember the old themes, and I hope that we won't know whether we're revisiting an old melody or just still just in the same section of the song.

I miss you guys.

PENIS!!!!!!!

Dear Ursine Jug-Journal,

I attract the most bizarre characters on the planet. A magnet for them. I'm a magnet, and they drive me to tears. I have spent the past six days with a research lab type of person, the kind who revels in smelling like beta-mercaptoethanol, A COMPLETE LOSER. For whatever inane REASON, he beseeches my company, and then proceeds to be unpleasant for the hours we are together, probing and prying about, demanding that I define friendship, define this, define that, challenges me on my notions of Darwinian evolution, or the exact unabbreviated name of the molecule responsible for altitude sickness. He must make sure, very sure, that I am of his intellectual caliber (but not above, nor below), before he officiates our friendship. He does not say "hello" or "goodbye" because such formalities he regards as superficial (WHO ON EARTH?), and does not ever, ever make eye contact during conversation.

I am sure I could find him in one of the hefty textbooks my family has been good enough to finance me with, on top of our exorbitant tuition costs that have granted me a degree in Neuroscience. A case study in "avoidant neurotics". But let's be real; let's be honest - he is not drooling in his soup, chained to a hospital bed in a catatonic freeze, and because of that, we call people like that "PRICKS". What have I done with my education. What have I done. How dare I venture into the maw of behavioral studies. How absolutely arrogant of me to think I could help anyone in the world with their lives.

Sucking on a pillow,
Jen

Poop freeze!

Now that Bryan has opened the door to juvenile humor, I will include the subject of doodie. Heh. Doodie.

Someone has created an amazing product for poop cleanup: Poop Freeze. It freezes poop so you can pick it up easily. I'm tempted to throw this stuff at people we don't like. I'm sure some of you are also tempted to throw it at people we do like, given the recent kiwi assault on Andy. What more fecal products will we see in this brave new world we live in?

-Yoshi

boobies!

Both "tit" and "jug" are in "putitinthejug." Haha, tit.