Youth In Asia

With the missus off Factoring Moose in our Gentle Neighbor To The North, I gots some time on my hands.  Like most of you - ok, both of you - sometimes when I read movie reviews, something about them sticks in my mind and a "Ding" goes off in my brain when I see them among the bazillions of movies the nice folks at Cox bring me each month for slightly less than $200.

This week I got dinged twice: once with "Festival Express", a documentary about a trainload of hippiepinkofags including Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, The Band, Buddy Guy and others of their ilk riding west across Canada in 1970, doing gigs every other night and jamming on the train in between.  Little wonder most of em's dead now.

Tonight I caught "The Sea Inside" which I'd remembered getting real good reviews from peeps I'd agreed with pastly.  It's a Spanish film, subtitled, and man oh man.  I knows there's chick flicks and stuff, but this one had me getting all puffy-eyed and sniffly before the end of the third act.  Superb acting, understated directing, amazing subtlety, what I used to call a Powerful Film until the daughters threw that term back at me after I made them watch Free Willy -  a Paarful Film.

Back to the narrative:  so I google (that's a verb now, right?) the film, to see how other cogent (sorry) viewers reacted to the flick.  Here's the first I review I happed upon, no kidding:

Boriest film ever

I can't understand why people LOVE this movie. People is like sheeps, one follow the others. Let's see. If we change the end of the movie, suppose the man decides to doesn't kill himself... The movie would be the BORIEST FILM EVER !!!. There's nothing to catch your attention at the begining, nor in the middle of the movie. Has no argument!, except the obvious and constant idea of suicide and decoration with a poetical script, and extremely boring by the way. One guy thought: "If we make a movie about eutanasia?, is an Oscar subject!!", so, he take one real life case, filled it with boring dialogs, some landscapes and that's it, you have "The Sea Inside". Now I'm sure. The Academy gives awards with no criteria.

 

Ok then.  Maybe I was wrong, mofo.  But you sends you old lady nort for a week or more, and less see but youse aint all sniffly and shit wid da death and dying shit too, man.  Dat's what I'm talkin about.

Ciao, Gala

The circumstances through which Gala came to live with us are lost in the murky mists of my miasmic memory, but it was before the kids got married, and that will be ten years this November.  Regardless, she and her step-brother the orange and garrulous SnapDog have been here to greet us, foul up the a/c filter with pillowcase loads of hair, and cough up fur balls for more than a decade.

Gala always acted as if I'd recently given her the beating of her life, and that another assault was imminent.  If I came into a room, she'd skulk out of it.  When unbeknownst to me she'd nap between my desk back and the wall, if I tarried too long in the kneewell, a sudden burst of black and tan would dash across my feet and flee the room, all the better to languish under some safer place.  This was not conducive to cordial relations between us, but I gave her her space and we co-existed.

Gala'd been sick of late.  The fur balls were gone, replaced with a vile mix of bile and partly digested - well, suffice it to say, she was real sick, several times a day, several different places in the house, and even if you got on the carpet spot immediately, it was permanent.  The carped took on the look, if not the texture and desireability of some of my beloved's favorite clothing items. 

This type of thing happens with cats, but it wasn't getting better and in the last few days she would cry out just before offering up another odiferous emanation.  Then Herself decided we were getting new carpet.

This morning I took Gala to the vet.  On the trip she described to me in copious detail the many wrongs I'd done her, and tried to enlist the aid of passers-by, many of whom stared at my truck, their unspoken question obviously "What can he be doing in there to that poor creature?"  The vet's rejectionists quickly ushered me into an exam room, as Gala was upsetting not only the other pets but their owners as well.  I hung my head, my body language clearly professing innocence.  The vet's exam didn't take long, and certainly did nothing to assuage Gala's protestations.  He could operate, of course, if I insisted, but this was a cancer, probably of the stomach, and she was almost certainly in her last days.

The grief/cremation consultant slunk through the door.  A cadverous young woman, here to share my grief.  A hug, a murmured 'Perhaps it was meant to be."  (What the hell does that mean? I wondered.)  And luckily, in the onset of my mourning, my choices were two:  For $243.22 (where did they get that number?) Gala could be given a Private Cremation, after which her ashes would be returned to us in an Urn Suitable For Your Mantle.  Appearing to carefully consider the view to the mantle from my chair at the dinner table, I queried, "You said there are two options?"

For $44.25 (another odd number) Gala could become part of a Mass Cremation.  "Mmmm hmmm?"  I pondered.  She continued, "They do a real good job (I'd know a bad cremation?) and they have a lovely pond on site, where they scatter the ashes afterwards."

In my mind's eye I have a vision of Gala's ashes being scattered across the pond, not unlike the way the dust is scattered across the lawn if I'm not careful when I empty the flapping vacuum bag.  Now I'll have to go poke out my mind's eye.

Venus vs Mars

This is a supposedly true story that happened in an online English Comp class at the U of Phoenix.

The professor told his class one day: "Today we will experiment with a new form called the tandem story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person sitting to his or her immediate right. As homework tonight, one of you will write the first paragraph of a short story.

You will e-mail your partner that paragraph and send another copy to me.  The partner will read the first paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story and send it back, also sending another copy to me. The first person will then add a third paragraph, and so on back-and-forth.  Remember to re-read what has been written each time in order to keep the story coherent. There is be absolutely NO talking outside of the e-mails and anything you wish to say must be written in the e-mail. The story is over when both agree a conclusion has been reached."

The following was turned in by two of his English students:  Rebecca and Larry.

THE STORY

(First paragraph by Rebecca)

At first, Laurie couldn't decide which kind of tea she wanted. The chamomile, which used to be her favorite for lazy evenings at home, now reminded her too much of Carl, who once said, in happier times, that he liked chamomile. But she felt she must now, at all costs, keep her mind off Carl. His possessiveness was suffocating, and if she thought about him too much her asthma started acting up again. So Chamomile was out of the question.

(Second paragraph by Larry)

Meanwhile, Advance Sergeant Carl Harris, leader of the attack squadron now in orbit over Skylon 4, had more important things to think about than the neuroses of an air-headed asthmatic bimbo named Laurie with whom he had spent one sweaty night over a year ago. "A.S. Harris to Geostation 17," he said into his transgalactic communicator. "Polar orbit established.   No sign of resistance so far..." But before he could sign off a bluish particle beam flashed out of nowhere and blasted a hole  through his ship's cargo bay. The jolt from the direct hit sent him flying out of his seat and across the cockpit.

(Rebecca)

He bumped his head and died almost immediately, but not before he felt one last pang of regret for psychically brutalizing the one woman who had ever had feelings for him. Soon afterwards, Earth stopped its pointless hostilities towards thepeaceful farmers of Skylon 4. "Congress Passes Law permanently abolishing war and space travel," Laurie read in her newspaper one morning. The news simultaneously excited her and bored her. She stared out the window, dreaming of her youth, when the days had passed unhurriedly and carefree, with no newspaper to read, no television to distract her from her sense of innocent wonder at all the beautiful things around her. Why must one lose one's innocence to become a woman?" she pondered wistfully.

(Larry)

Little did she know, but she had less than 10 seconds to live.  Thousands of miles above the city, the Anu'udrian mothership launched the first of its lithium fusion missiles. The dim-witted wimpy peaceniks that pushed the Unilateral Aerospace Disarmament Treaty through the congress had left Earth a defenseless target for the hostile alien empires that were determined to destroy the human race. Within two hours after the passage of the treaty the Anu'udrian ships were on course for Earth, carrying enough firepower to pulverize the entire planet. With no one to stop them, they swiftly initiated their diabolical plan. The lithium fusion missile entered the atmosphere unimpeded. The President, in his top-secret mobile submarine headquarters on the ocean floor off the coast of Guam, felt the inconceivably massive explosion, which vaporized poor, stupid, Laurie and 85 million other Americans. The President slammed his fist on the conference table. "We can't allow this! I'm going to veto that treaty! Let's blow 'em> out of the sky!"

(Rebecca)

This is absurd. I refuse to continue this mockery of literature. My writing partner is a violent, chauvinistic semi-literate adolescent.

(Larry)

Yeah? Well, you're a self-centered tedious neurotic, whose attempts at writing are the literary equivalent of valium. "Oh, shall I have chamomile tea? Or shall I have some other sort of ---ING TEA??? Oh, I'm such an air headed bimbo who reads too many Danielle Steele novels that I simply can't decide."

(Rebecca)

Asshole.

(Larry)

Bitch.

(Rebecca)

---- YOU - YOU NEANDERTHAL!

(Larry)

Go drink some tea - whore!

 

(TEACHER)

A+ - I really liked this one

 

"I'm Going Away Now" - Alex

Alex, an African gray parrot with extraordinary cognitive and linguistic skills was found dead ten days ago in his cage at Brandeis University.  For 30 years, Alex was the subject of experiments that challenged the most basic assumptions about animal intelligence.  He invented a perfect term for an almond: "cork nut".  He understood the concepts of bigger, different, same, could count and differentiate colors.

Skeptics dismissed Alex's feats as subtle forms of conditioning, but he clearly could pull together a few concepts into one cohesive train of thought, such as "The nut in the blue cup on the tray."  But was he actually conscious, in the some way that some humans are? - knowing that we know, and that we know we know?

Next to infinity, one of the hardest concepts to grasp is zero.  Toward the end of his life Alex may have been coming close.  As in a carnival shell game, an experimenter would put a nut under one of three cups and then shuffle them around.  Alex would pick up the cup where the surprise was supposed to be.  If it wasn't there, he'd go a little berserk, which could be understood as a small step toward understanding nothingness.

A bigger leap came in an experiment about numbers, in which the parrot was shown groups of two, three and six objects. The objects within each set were colored identically, and Alex was asked, "What color three?"

"Five," he replied perversely (he was having a bad attitude day), repeating the answer until the experimenter finally asked, "O.K., Alex, tell me, ‘What color five?’ " "None," the parrot said.

Bingo. There was no group of five on the tray. It was another of those moments. Alex had learned the word "none" years before in a different context. Now he seemed to be using it more abstractly.

What was it like to be Alex that last night in his cage? We’ll never know whether there really was a mind in there — slogging its way from the absence of a cork-nut to the absence of Alex, grasping at the zeroness of death.

It Was Thirty Years Ago Today

Sgt Pepper taught the band - - -no, no

It was 30 years ago today that Voyager I was launched, looking like a school bus-sized spider.  It sent back the most amazing pictures of Jupiter and then Saturn.  At that time you could write to NASA and they'd send you pictures, and they sent me maybe twenty 8 X 10 glossy color photos I hung around my office, which featured wallpaper depicting Earthrise from the surface of the moon.  Hey, it was the seventies and I was in the dirt bidness.

Today Voyager I is almost ten billion miles from us - a distance from which it takes 14 hours at the speed of light for its signal to reach us.  A 28 hour round trip between "Are you still there?" and "Yes, thanks for asking, still tradfatting along out here." 

That's right, it's still out there humming along with its gold plate of ninety minutes of music and photos.  (My brother and his wife gave me a book with most of the pictures and content of that disk, if you ever want to see what's going to be picked up some day by some alien being.)

Here's something else that's totally cool.  How much power do you think is behind those increasingly distant signals from near the edge of the heliosphere?  Nope.  Only twenty watts.  Yep.  Less wattage than you need in your nite lite, and they're still able to pick up a usable signal.  I think that's incredible.