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A month and a day ago I left for a quick vacation in Utah, to see the family. I wanted to hold off on writing about it until my computer got back from the shop, and after a half-dozen updates on the tortuous repair process, I can finally say it's all better now. Meanwhile, I recruited my laptop from work as a backup computer. My laptop is nice and feather-light and easily fits in my backpack and all, but most definitely wasn't designed for extended, heavy-duty work sessions. A couple hours of hunkering over the computer, squinting at the screen and tapping on its elfin keyboard, and my entire shoulders-and-back area has fused into one granite-hard mass of tetanic agony. I had lots of phun with Dad, the brother and the sister-in-law, Julia-san. However—and please forgive me—I have to get some griping off my chest first. (To pass on the rant, skip to the next section, after the delimiter. You'll find some pictures of mountain scenery and wildflowers behind the cut.) It was impressed upon me, within the first minute after emerging from the terminal, that most people of Utah are in an advanced state of denial. It's hardly a surprise— Happy Valley has been disconnected with reality for generations—but I think that as my connection with the place wanes over time, I find it more and more depressing to return. If you just looked at the streets, and ignored all the prices on the gas station signs for a second, you'd never guess that we were in the middle of an oil crisis. Dad's car was wedged between two vehicles that could have been trucks, and could have been aircraft carriers—we weren't tall enough to tell which. And soon it became clear that nearly everybody is still driving the largest possible gas hog as fast as the laws—of physics, not of the state of Utah—would allow. And then some. "Vroom, vroom: look at us in our gigantic cars, safely insulated from the natural universe." Just about the time I arrived, GWB announced his intention to develop oil-shale reserves in Utah to ease the energy crunch. Of course, the Utah state legislature was delighted—nay, giddy—with the prospect of forging an alliance with their beloved president to reassert their perceived superiority over nature. "Legislature pleased with prospect of utilizing oil shale," the front-page headline ran. Never mind that extracting petroleum from oil shale requires the establishment of a completely separate refining industry, or that oil shale, as a source of energy, is more costly in greenhouse gas emissions than even the poorest of useable coal deposits. Nope—as long as it can see a quick fix and some fast cash for industry, the Utah Legislature will jump at anything, no matter how scatterbrained. In fact, poor planning seems to be an asset, if not an outright requirement, for any initiative emanating from the Legislature that impacts economic growth or the environment. It goes without saying that the editorial sections of all the local newspapers were fraught with demands to push aside those Commie environmentalists and drill, drill, drill in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge already, as is our God-given right. Again, even if this oil were available immediately—and in actuality, it would take years from the start of drilling to see any benefit of ANWR oil—the net effect of exploiting the ANWR would be to put off the inevitable by only several years, at most. So, instead of a crippling energy crisis, we’ll have a crippling energy crisis and an ecological catastrophe a couple years later. Can’t see any drawbacks to that plan, no way, Jay. In sum, the fundamental problem with the large majority of Utahns is that they stubbornly refuse to learn that when their peculiar little worldview doesn't square with reality, it isn't reality that has to change. The place (and Las Vegas, too, but for other reasons, mostly having to do with the water supply) reminds me of the guy who fell off the top of the Empire State Building. At first he was terrified, as he plunged in free fall and the wind howled past, but as he approached terminal velocity, he began to relax. As he passed the tenth floor, he thought to himself, "Well, I've fallen 90% of the way and nothing has happened yet…."
( Happily, though bruised, Mother Nature isn't yet beaten… )
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[This entry is in two parts. I now know that LJ has a length limit for individual posts. This post, as I originally wrote it, was exactly 11,111 words long. I had to split it into two pieces. The second half may be found here.] I was on vacation when George Carlin died. Kathy actually called me up to tell me the news. I’m glad she did: it would have been a shame to hear about it from some talking head on the radio I can't really call Carlin a hero (Isaac Asimov fills that rôle), but he has played a crucial part in developing my sense of humor, and thus has made a profound (and possibly crosshatched) impression on my personality. Surprisingly, I was a Carlin fan through much of my childhood as well as all of my adulthood. The sister brought home a copy of FM & AM one day, when I was about eight or nine. Some of the themes—over-the-counter birth control, for example—puzzled me, but I could appreciate most of the humor on that album. Who would understand Carlin’s objection to arbitrary prohibitions against perfectly good English words better than a kid? (Having a sister six years older, and eight years ahead in school, in many ways accelerated the expansion of my worldview. By the time I hit puberty I’d been reading early 1970s issues of Mad and National Lampoon, from a time when both bordered on the subversive; I’d heard a fair amount about “Women’s Lib” in a context other than the utter degradation of right, God-fearing society; and I’d committed George Carlin’s second album to memory.) But I also admired Carlin’s talent as an imitator: thanks to FM & AM, I’d been schooled in Ed Sullivan impressions decades before I actually watched any of the show. Alas, the family, for some reason, didn’t find any necessity in expanding our Carlin collection, and so my career as a fan slumbered. It missed one chance for revival in high school, during which time my friends Thompson and Thorpe introduced me to Occupation: Foole. Though I had the means, at that time I never felt the inclination to purchase any Carlin albums for myself. In retrospect that seems really strange. No, it took watching the HBO special Carlin on Campus to really tip me over the edge. My friend Thorpe played it for me one summer evening in 1986. Within six months I owned, and was well on my way to memorizing, Carlin’s complete discography (up to that point). By an odd coincidence, Kathy and I started dating at that time. How she could stand me, I still haven’t figured out, for half the words out of my mouth during my junior year at college were Carlin’s. By another odd happenstance, my serious plunge into Carliniana coincided with the comedian’s gradual, ominous transformation from crazy hippie to bitter old man. Still, I kept current until about the mid-1990s, after which I watched his comedy concerts—live, when I could—but did not buy the albums. To honor my favorite comedian, I decided to transcribe some excerpts of his material that have special significance. They consist mostly of quotes that have entered the canon of Things We Say in Certain Situations, along with enough context to provide a flavor of the routine from which we adopted the particular passage. Some routines are so rich in quotes that I gave up trying to take excerpts and just copied down the whole thing. As you can see below, the project kind of got out of hand. I’d intended to add excerpts from Carlin on Campus (the album, very hard to find) and Playin’ with Your Head, but I hit a roadblock at about the 9,000-word mark, and I’m all tuckered out from transcribing for a while. Though I can recite many of these passages from memory to a high degree of accuracy, to do the job with the proper reverence I transcribed them directly from the albums. I’ve learned quite a bit about transcription in the meantime. Sometimes it was challenging to assign punctuation, especially when he’s talking fast. I had to make compromises between the conversational meter of Carlin’s monologues and the conventions of written speech. Often, he switched voices away from his “normal” narrative voice—mostly to imitate people’s conversations. I’ve enclosed all such passages in quotes, even when Carlin was speaking figuratively or to no one in particular. (I nearly wore out my quote key in so doing. It squeaks now.) After recording FM & AM, Carlin remarked on his tendency to play other voices heavily in his routines: “About a year ago I discovered I was no longer in my ‘act.’ The main reason I had become a comedian was missing—self-expression. The act wasn’t me. It was all disc jockeys, quiz contestants, newscasters, little old ladies and weathermen. Now I’m in there again. This album represents that transition.” The material transcribed below mostly represents what I think of as the canon: FM & AM (1972) through A Place for My Stuff! (1981). In sheer hilarity, the HBO special Carlin on Campus outdoes any of these albums; however, if I were to begin on that one, I’d feel it necessary to do the entire thing, and my sanity—strained under ordinary circumstances—might not manage to weather a painstaking, nitpicky effort of that magnitude. The preponderance of our best liked, and most oft-quoted, material hails from what I call “middle Carlin”: Toledo Window Box (1974), An Evening with Wally Londo, Featuring Bill Slaszo (1975), On the Road (1977) and A Place for My Stuff! (1981). You can find a considerable portion of each of these albums yonder. Other transcriptions are available for at least some of this material. ( Here’s a notable one from Carlin’s Supreme Court case instigated by the FCC.) I like mine better: I paid more attention to the details of Carlin’s pace and inflection than others appear to have. On the other hand, I did not attempt “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television” or “A Place for My Stuff,” simply because both routines are so famous that it hardly seems worthwhile to add another transcription to the vast collection already floating around on the Net.
I now present you (the large majority of) the best of George Carlin: ( Excerpts: Killer Carlin, Take-offs & Put-ons, FM & AM )( Class Clown )( Occupation: Foole )( Toledo Window Box )Tags: george_carlin
Tunes: The collected discography of George Carlin
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What a night for fireworks! Utterly calm air and clear skies, yet very little of that summer haze that collects over the course of most sunny days. Temperature: just a tad on the chilly side of perfect, cool enough to discourage the mosquitoes but not so cold as to call for a jacket. Too bad I wasn’t interested in actually watching any fireworks. The Y-chromosome-linked pyromaniac gene somehow went silent around age 25. Perhaps more to the point, my reluctance to spend two hours late in the evening in a car, traveling at the breakneck speed of one mile every five weeks while the 27,000 powder-singed chuckleheads ahead of me try to remember how to get home, has kept me home on four consecutive 4th of Julys now. (Too bad they didn’t put in the effort before flooring the accelerator and half-cooking their engine just to get ahead of me leaving the parking lot.) (Fourths of July? July 4ths?) Still, the lovely weather made for one kick-ass sliver moon: a two-day beauty hanging a bit below and well north of Mars and Saturn. Alas, it set just before the fireworking hour. As it happened, however, none of the metro area’s fireworks displays were close enough to us to see over the suburban oaks and maples that form our horizon. That reminds me: ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) chillyrodent used the term “fingernail moon” to describe Friday’s sliver moon. It’s a very apt term, especially for those of us who do their best thinking whilst paring our nails (and, at a much slower rate, our incisors). I must point out, however, that the fingernail’s official anatomical moon, or lunula, does not occur at the tip, but rather at the base. Isn’t that interesting? Every little part of the body that stays even remotely constant across individuals has a name—except, of course, those two flesh lines that run from your nose down to the red part ( rubrum) of your upper lip. What are they? Edit: P.S. Look to the west Thursday evening after dark for a conjunction of Mars and Saturn. Tags: sliver_moon
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Alas, my computer at home went belly-up over the weekend; and it's still in the shop. It only took me four days to realize that my laptop from work can tap right into our DSL with a minimum of fuss. Guess I'm baked! Nearly a lunar month has passed since the sliver moon of June 5, and I never did write about it, until now. As usual, I didn't think I had a chance of seeing the slender crescent, but it did manage, just for a minute, to peep through a chink in a solid wall of early evening stratocumulus. You can always rely on the Astronomy Picture of the Day for excellent pictures of sliver moons to enjoy when your local weather isn't cooperating. NASA collects sliver-moon photos from all over the world: the past year's collection includes sliver moons sighted in Lisbon, Portugal, Bretagne, France (a very slivery moon, that one), İstanbul, Turkey, and Turini, France (another mighty slivery one). If you have a clear evening on Saturday, look for the three-day crescent moon some time after sunset. If it is dark enough, you will also observe Saturn and Mars and the bright star Regulus (alpha Leonis) nearby, forming a shallow arc. (Props to Lisa C. of the AccuWeather Astronomy Blog for the tip.) Tags: sliver_moon
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My father, in his pediatrics practice, liked to play with his patients' minds. When he saw a child about three or four years old, he would check for hearing and/or speech deficits by asking his patient a question. Usually, he'd inquire, "How old are you?", because most kids that age knew the answer, and because the replies often held telltale clues about certain potential speech problems. A fair number of kids, however—little connivers—refused to play along. When asked, "How old are you?", they would respond with a baleful, tight-lipped glare and four raised fingers. So my father would look aghast and exclaim, " Seven??" More often than not, that would elicit an indignant verbal reply.
He also enjoyed giving the parents an occasional poke. Occasionally a mother would bring in a baby girl, completely bare-headed except for a few wisps of blond hair that had been painstakingly arranged to minimize her apparent baldness. Surely this wasn't a problem in someone so young, but that didn't prevent Mom from feeling horribly self-conscious about it. Sensing her discomposure, Dad would invariably remark, "Oh, look! A Farrah Fawcett-Majors hairdo!" Later, he updated his gold standard to Cheryl Tiegs. Better yet was when an infant was brought in by his or her 32-year-old grandmother. Then, Dad never missed an opportunity to drop the word Grandma in conversation. "Nurse, could you get some cotton swabs for Grandma to take home?" Nature or nurture, it's pretty obvious from whom I derive my propensity for sarcasm ; and for this I am eternally grateful. Tags: dad
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You know someone's using far too much aftershave if you're standing on the sidewalk and you can smell it on someone driving by at 25 MPH (40 km/h).
Here's a little spatial reasoning problem you can try to solve in your head, if you haven't already seen it in real life. Suppose you have a bumper sticker on the rear window of your car. (I do; it's this one.) You've placed it on the outside of the window so that the driver behind you can read it normally. Also, suppose the sticker is translucent, so that when you look in the rearview mirror you can see what's on it. Now, when you look at your bumper sticker through the rearview mirror, do you see the message in the proper orientation, or reversed? Unfortunately, I saw the answer before I could think it through. An equivalent problem is: if you want to write a rude message on your friend's rear window so that she can read it looking in her rearview mirror, do you write it the normal way, or as a mirror image? In high school I wrote a phrase of music on my band teacher's back window, but I got the orientation wrong, alas.
I have another driving-related conundrum for you. Say your car gets 30 miles per gallon (MPG) on the highway and 20 in the city. Also, assume that you drive half your miles in town at 20 MPG, and half your miles cruising the great outdoors at 30 MPG. What is your overall MPG? Hint: It ain't 25. (You can do this one in your head if you choose the right number of total miles driven.) This is one reason why I'm wasn't impressed when the Hummer 3 was first put on the market amid much fanfare that it could attain an amazing 20 MPG on the highway (using the old, inflated EPA standards, natch). Here's another: Salt Lake City are Wendover, NV—right at the Utah-Nevada border on Interstate 80—are separated by just about 120 miles by road. Imagine driving from SLC to Wendover during the day at an average speed of 60 MPH, and driving back at night (after the cops have all gone to bed) at an average of 120 MPH. What is your average speed for the round trip? (The last two problems are equivalent. I first grappled with a question of this type in the ninth grade, whilst taking a math exam as part of a statewide competition. The exam taught me some humility: my score was 2.5 out of 100. Two point five. I thought of this particular set of numbers on my way back from Wendover one night, with the full moon chasing me on my right, softly illuminating the Bonneville Salt Flats in an eerie, blue-white glow.) One last problem for the super-geeks—and this one will require a calculator and some elementary physics: If you start at rest in Salt Lake City, and accelerate at exactly 1 g (9.8 m/s 2) for half the distance, and then immediately decelerate at 1 g until coming to rest in Wendover, how long will the trip take—again assuming a distance of 120 miles = 192 km—and how fast will you be traveling at the midway point? Such a trip might be possible if we engineered a maglev train that ran through an underground tunnel in vacuum. (As a comparison, my personal best for that particular excursion was 1 h 35 min one way—average speed 76 MPH, including the five miles inside the city through which my maximum speed was 35 MPH. Yes, it was three in the morning.)
I'm in a quandary about the boundary of the foundry, so I guess I'll stay home and do my laundry.To be a good speller in English you pretty much have to have a touch of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
( Back to cars and driving... )Tags: cell_phones, fundies, random_shit, suvs
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We usually expect physical constants, such as the speed of light or Boltzmann's constant, to have exact values. In other words, any uncertainty we have in trying to evaluate these unknown parameters of the universe derives from our inexact method of measurement, and not from variability in the constant itself: if we had the means, we could measure these constants to any degree of precision. (There is some evidence that some constants are very gradually changing over billions of years, but that is a different matter.) In contrast, some of the measurements that we use in everyday life—especially in cooking—have built-in uncertainty: variability is part of the unit. Examples are the pinch, the dash, and the dollop. Inexact units in the culinary arts confer multiple benefits. They save time, freeing the chef from painstakingly measuring out minuscule quantities. They also add a touch of spontaneity to the dish. After all, what fun is it if a meal comes out exactly the same every time? However, uncertainty terms can complicate matters when we need to convert one unit into another. For example: Suppose that we define the pinch to be equal to 0.5 ± 0.1 g, and the dash to be 1.0 ± 0.2 g. Do two pinches make a dash? If we assume that the plus-or-minus value to be a standard deviation or a 95% confidence interval, the answer is no. Two independently measured pinches, added together, turn out to be 1.0 ± 0.14 g (approximately). Though the average is the same as the average for a dash, the error term is not. The dash contains more variability than two pinches. I can see no way to get around this problem except to ignore it. I suppose that it is in the nature of inexact sciences that they cannot be described exactly inexactly. And don't get me started about how many dashes there are in a smidgen.
Thinking along the same lines, I really get annoyed when I'm reading a restaurant menu and see a claim that some item has been prepared "to perfection." Unless the kitchen has an entropy nullifier on duty, I'm not buying it. And even if the chef is able to banish entropy from his domain, and prepare the Platonic ideal of, say, grilled cheese, by the time the meal gets to your table, you know that a little randomness will sneak in and clunk!—no more perfection. Instead of perfection, what is meant, I believe, is an ideal amount of cooking, or seasoning, or whatever, has been applied. Though imperfect, the meal is as delightful as it can possibly be, and still remain that particular dish. Needless to say, even this tempered claim is utterly unreasonable, because it supposes an objective measure of succulence—and of course, what is ideal to one particular palate may be way off the mark to another. But let's suppose that such an objective measure exists, and that we use "to perfection" in place of the more accurate "for maximum enjoyment." Then we can imagine a multidimensional graph of delectability as a function of a particular set of cooking and seasoning parameters, with an overall maximum representing the most ambrosial possible state of that dish, given all the ways it can be prepared. (There's an xkcd comic in here somewhere.) We may choose to simplify things and hold all parameters constant except one, and strive for "perfection" within the range of that single parameter—and, in fact, this is what is usually done. Thus, a steak "broiled to perfection" has been broiled for exactly that time (and temperature) unequaled by any other. We also might have multiple optima within the one-parameter function of excellence. An example might be the flavor of buffalo wings with respect to the quantity of hot peppers in the sauce. And sometimes, the maximum may occur at zero. Obviously, the ideal number of anchovies on a pizza is zilch. In consequence, a plain pepperoni pizza may be said to be "anchovied to perfection." One other thing about "to perfection" hyperbole: it is only applied to common cooking procedures (broiled —, spiced —, etc.). Why not use a really weird verb for a change? Take planked salmon. "Our salmon is flown in from Alaska, and planked to perfection on virgin white cedar." Doesn't that just sound delish? If in some alternate universe I ever inherit a bar and grill, my specialty will be Prime Rib, Lightly Incinerated to Perfection.
This news brief from The Onion brought to mind a commercial I saw a whole bunch of times about 30 years ago, for a prepackaged, potato-based side dish. I don't recall its name—just the flavor: Sour Cream & Chives. The announcer claimed, while lauding the product's salient features, that it was seasoned with "just the right amount of chives." Once again, we have the supposition of the existence of some quantity of chives universally regarded as optimal. Perhaps the concept of "just the right amount of chives" isn't even limited to human experience. Maybe it's a fundamental physical constant: the Chive Proportionality Constant. Imagine a nuclear physicist testifying before Congress: "We only know the Chive Proportionality Constant to an accuracy of four decimal places. More research funding is critical to all Americans' enjoyment of baked, mashed and scalloped potatoes." And with that, I've come full circle. Tags: random_shit, words_i_detest, wurds
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