Totally Random Stuff

This page is a mix and match collection of miscellany, begun in December, 1996, and not updated for a long time. Sorry. crescent(

December 30

The Caryl & Marilyn Show aired a program celebrating the beauty of shapeliness. Carnie Wilson and Richard Klein were great in promoting women with healthy figures despite Hollywood fashion.

December 31

The New Year's Eve specials were pretty decent, especially since they were kind enough to spare us yet another appearance of Celine Dione. She's been everywhere this year, once even ending up on Letterman, an award show, and a Sea World special back to back all in one week. I could retch. Anybody ever notice how positively nasal and slurring her singing is getting lately? Just compare her performance of Eric Carmen's "All By Myself" on the Caesar's Palace special last week with the clarity of her "Where Does My Heart Beat Now?" from the beginning of her career (at least her American one), and you'll hear the change. I think her producers, agents, and whoever have hyped her to superstardom too soon and have unwisely encouraged her to take on "stylish" vogues and other such artificial postures of her voice. They've obviously ruined the good thing she had. It's Whitney Houston all over again.

January 3

I saw a cool NOVA special called "Cracking the Ice Age." It seems the Himalayas just might have caused the last great Ice Age, which lasted from 40 million years ago to (I think) about 12,000 years ago, when human civilization first appeared. Get this, 40 million years ago is also when the Indian continent crashed into the bottom of Asia and eventually uplifted the Earth's crust up to 5 miles above sea level along the fault boundary. The combined mass of the Himalayas and the adjacent Tibetan Plateau created a major windbreak on the Asian continent that drastically rearranged air flow patterns over the (new) Asian continent. It encouraged both the rainy climate in the southeast and the deserts in the area now known as the Middle East. As this new Asian climate evolved, the rain now fell on miles and miles of land area that it had never reacted with before. And as basic chemistry students know, exposing more surface area to a chemical reaction creates a faster, stronger reaction. The rain accelerated its chemical weathering of the land so much that it took giant masses of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and deposited thick layers of a heavy strontium isotope upon the ocean floors from that era. The significant loss of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere made the global, not just continental, climate dramatically drop in temperature. So it seems that plate tectonics, climatology, and the evolution of life on Earth all do fit together. Neato!

January 6

Today is Epiphany, or the date when the Magi, or Three Wise Men, visited baby Jesus. Also, I think the Eastern Orthodox Church affirms this as Jesus's actual birthdate. And in the 20th century, Epiphany has also been declared by some esteemed Sherlockians, for rather sketchy reasons at best, to be Sherlock Holmes's birthday.

January 7

Ever notice that UPN's Homeboys in Outer Space is really just an all black, American-slang version of the British series Red Dwarf?

January 14

Anybody know where the phrase "hoist by his own petard" came from? Whenever I look up "petard" in any dictionary, it will only say that it's a rocket or bomb, nothing else. But I've heard it used in two senses, one which understood "petard" to mean the (ahem) bottom, and one which from the context meant that someone was losing an argument by their own badly chosen premise. I personally would go with the more literate meaning, although neither of them go with a "rocket or bomb" derivation at all.

January 23

My birthday. Hooray! I'm 20.

February 7

Chinese Lunar New Year, or in Vietnamese, Têt. (The word is pronounced "Thet" so as to rhyme with "wet.") This year is the Year of the Ox, for those who are curious. This will not be the same New Year date for next year, because lunar calendars do not correspond to solar calendars, and dates are apt to change around. Here is a reference for the Chinese Zodiac.

February 9

In an effort to get this back to being interesting stuff, rather than my asking inane questions, I will put here a poem you might find offensive, or at least relentlessly annoying. Skip it, if you like.

I wrote this at a time that I was hating both men and women with a vigorous passion. I was going to put it in the Zoid collection, but found it too harsh and jarring against the group.

Collegiate

Your feminism is so sheltered it makes me sick.
The learned have much to learn
Don't you know that education's not supposed to please?
Don't you know history's meant to disturb,
To shudder you inside out
As it throttles and maims your every comfortable assumption?
The complexities of the past are beyond the grasp
Of any of your two-cent, soundbite truisms that you spout, Ms. Liberated.
History's too good for your blind modernity.
Assassinated ideals and annihilated generalizations are all you'll have
If you stop being cocksure long enough to look and learn closely.
There are no innocents here, no categorizable cardboard flats in place of human beings.
No one comes out saints!
No one comes out spotless.
A slave in one era is the vicious despot in another.
A great public benefactor and genius is a personal villain and sadist.
Fanaticism, xenophobia, and hate come and go like epidemics
From which some people never choose to recover.
The innate equality of the race is the equality of aggression.
If you're not humbly crushed in sum,
You're blind.
Every person is a web of paradox and impenetrable equivocation of the soul,
Every person a matrix of liberality and intolerance.
How dare you, blanket-judging, raise one group at the sacrifice of the others?
How dare you claim utter innocence for every one of your sisters,
Whether they were heinous, selfish witches or not!
Feminism has got nothing to do with blame-pinning and revenge-taking!
It's the principled exercise of universal redemption.
When did you discover that statistics and semantics
Were the whole and substance of the problem?
When did you have the revelation that one breed of human is superior to another?
Somehow your path of enlightenment has taken a mistaken trail,
Blundered into an encumbrance in words.
Oh they are blessed that you will so magnanimously admit your superiority
And have them all begging on their knees for your pardon!
Oh they are blessed that you can catalogue to them their thousand-dozen tyrannies
And crimes upon your sacrosanct freedom!
And, dogmatic fool that you are, you'll correct their millennia-long mistake
By automatically discounting every other thought they may have ever had.
Purveyor of mental oblivion!
There must be uneasy truths about yourself, your kind, that you discover in history,
Else you have learned but phantoms and false-intentioned PR.
History is supposed to tear you and your world to pieces
And trace each part back to its shadowy, sometimes disturbing root.
To argue for woman's blessed, but captive, superiority,
Not her equality, is a perversion of the cause, you cocksure ranter.
You are a true feminist, you say?
You do know the proper path?
Tell me then,
When did you last apply equality to your living?
To your loving?
When was the last time you touched your man amorously, hungrily?
Took an active part in the passions of a lovers' embrace?
Expected as much involvement from your own self as from him
In mutually writing the lovers' pact of consummation?
How can you speak of deciding to sleep with him because it's the next logical move,
Because it's expected,
But not because it's what you emphatically, emphatically, desire?
Your virginity or your self-control is not what you sacrifice to him,
Not what you let him take, nor what you indifferently give away,
But what you joyfully destroy
--Not for his sake, not for love's sake--<
For you,
For your selfish pleasure in just running your hands over and over his body.
What kind of sickness are you in
That you can call your passivity, your timed responses to his actions,
A sufficient participation of you in the creation and nurture of love?
Your talks with him are even worse.
What in hell kind of wall of relationship-ese are you constructing to shut him out?
Where do you think you're getting by cultivating the inane pursuit of romantic gossip?
Do you think this is natural to your psychology?
Do you think the woman's mysterious talent for reading a person
Is a healthy trick learned out of a strong, stable social status?
You apposite human, you pruner of an opposite sphere of existence.
Do you think separate but equal is a triumph?
How can you say you respect yourself
And are equal to man on every count
If in love you twist and dally and frustrate all mutual dialogue
So you can pretend to be some alien species,
Some fashionably mysterious and coy and hollow phantom
Which he can never consider his own kind, let alone his equal?
When you won't express any rage, nerve, desire?
Any sign of body-wrenching heartache and fire that he can comprehend on his own terms
And see, blindingly, that you are the same as he,
A creature of the flesh, of one basic emotive soul?
When did you ever apply your vague, rote-learned principles to a positive effect on actual behavior and mutual treatment?
He has a right to demand modification of your codes of operation
As much as you do him.
Love is not a game, but a communion of the soul.
If your relationships are so childishly empty of all emotional and psychic bonds,
You cannot be ready to espouse those pretty, lofty phrases.
If you don't understand the meaning of interconnection and desire,
Then you don't even know what humanity is, let alone a woman.
Your inconsistency and your irrelevance
Are undermining the very foundations of our cause,
Giving the unbelievers a warped view of our purpose.
Choose your method, and damn you, be consistent.
Look closer, pay attention, think,
And somehow conquer that
Incompetence
That must have taught you your roots.

Now that we've had that little lecture, Sisters, repeat after me: "Whatever proverbial wisdom or a best-selling book may say, I am NOT from Venus, and my Brothers are not and will never be from Mars. We are one in the same."

February 19

Ever wonder just what those TV and film pirates are talking about when they speak of "sailing the seven seas"? According to page 8 of Arthur Goldshmidt, Jr.'s A Concise History of the Middle East, 5th edition, the term is from back when the ancient world was really small, and people attached enough importance to the juncture of Europe and Asia that "to sail the seven seas" really meant one had had large experience of traveling. The "seven seas" are the Black Sea, the Bosporous, the Sea of Marmora, the Dardanelles, the Aegean Sea, and the Mediterranean Sea. Notice that two of these, the Bosporous and the Dardanelles, are technically straits rather than seas. Yet their locations along this all-important route from inland Asia to the Mediterranean justifies their being on the list.

March 15

"Beware the Ides of March...." as they say. Possibly you remember the way that Shakespeare immortalized the death of Julius Caesar on this day in 44 B.C. (I would put B.C.E., a non-Christian abbreviation I have seen, for "before the common era," except that I'm beginning to wonder if that too isn't an artificial cultural imposition, even though it's not a Christian one. The corresponding substitute in this system for A.D., anno Domini, is C.E. for "of the common era.") Though some people might carelessly refer to Caesar as a Roman Emperor, do remember that he actually only got as far as Dictator for Life. His adopted heir Octavian, later to be called Augustus, would be the first to claim the title. Of Ides, see also April 13, third paragraph.

April 13

Thomas Jefferson's birthday. I adore him. He's the most human person I've ever learned of in history. :)

The birthdate is given in N.S., or New Style. In 1743, America (and England) had yet to adopt the Gregorian calendar from Roman Catholic Europe which (when finally adopted in 1752) would correct for 11 days accumulated error from the Julian calendar. --Special thanks to Les Moskowitz for correcting MY error! (It should be noted that this 11-day discrepancy applies equally to many of our other founding fathers, such as George Washington or John Adams.)

April 13th is also the Ides of April, for, whatever your English Literature teacher told you while explaining Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, the Ides of the Roman calendars usually fell on the 13th, except for particular months like March, when it fell on the 15th.

Another Ides of April baby is Peter Davison, the British actor from, among other things, All Creatures Great and Small, Doctor Who, and Mystery!'s Albert Campion series.

May 3

Not having found any really interesting new facts lately, I thought I'd share with you my analysis of My Fair Lady vs. Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion.

Though both my interests (JB) and my academic studies ought to make me favor one or the other, I'm still always rather torn between the musical and the play.

On one hand, you don't get any beautiful songs while reading the play. On the other hand, the musical completely ruins the ending. (Sorry--no matter how intellectually stimulating a guy is, and no matter how much his obnoxiousness is a charming part of his personality, he couldn't at the end tell me to fetch his slippers and expect me to smile at him!)

On the one hand, you get to see a 70-year-old actor skipping about happily in a part that was made for him. On the other hand, you miss out on the true importance and seriousness of Alfred P. Doolittle's proving that middle-class morality is artificial, and that the only thing that keeps the middle class from behaving like Doolittle and his "old lady" (soon-to-be wife) is that they carry the burden of having to be respectable.

On one hand, you miss the perfectly exasperating farce of Higgins's servants singing "Poor Professor Higgins" while Eliza suffers and loses out a treat to a stupid bird. On the other hand, you don't have to wince every time an obviously dubbed singing voice woefully does not fit the character.

On one hand, you miss the gloriously overdone wardrobe and scenic designs. On the other hand, you miss experiencing Shaw's distinctive spelling and punctuation system--(the s p a c i n g out of words that would normally be italicized always thrills me!).

On the one hand, you miss out on hearing Eliza's famous scowl actually pronounced. On the other hand (the last hand!), all of Shaw's social message is lost. It's a pity, since Shaw had the rare gift of being able to write consciously propagandist and morally/intellectually challenging plays that yet were still witty and enjoyable. His Major Barbara and Of Arms and the Man were other great examples, even if you find yourself hotly objecting to his assertion of the Weapons' Dealer's Code of Honor in Major Barbara. No one said Shaw was out to please. Incidentally, Of Arms and the Man was also made into a piece of romantic piffle called The Chocolate Soldier. I personally don't know, though, how much that that Shaw play got wrecked.

May 14

Did you know that Queen's song "Bohemian Rhapsody" runs an awful lot like the plot to Albert Camus's 1942 novel The Stranger? No really, I'm serious. I read Camus's famous existential/absurdist novel in my senior year Advanced Placement English class in high school. At about that time Wayne's World was all the rage, especially the music video for "Bohemian Rhapsody," which was on the movie's soundtrack. But I could never figure out the song's weird lyrics. It seemed divided into two totally conflicting halves. The first, a serious, dark, moody piece about this guy who murders somebody and then shouts pathetically for his mother (his "Mama!" as the song goes); the second, a farcical nonsense chorus about Galileo, Beezelbub, and a "poor boy" whom nobody loves. (I'm the obsessive type who will puzzle over the meaning of lyrics until they make some kind of sense to me, by the way.) As my AP English teacher was going through explaining all the difficult, abstract meaning in The Stranger, it struck me that the novel and the song were really the same. Camus's main character is this guy listlessly drifting through life, and who would do just about anything on impulse, including shoot somebody without any reasonable motive. He too had a problem about his mother, because the main reason the jury condemned the man was that he had shown his mother little affection and normal, humanly concern. To the jury, 'guy doesn't love his mother' = 'guy is a cold-blooded psychopath who is not fit to live'.

So anyway, I noticed all this quite a while ago, but now I finally got confirmation when I recently found the complete lyrics to "Bohemian Rhapsody" on the internet, and saw that I was not mis-remembering the lyrics. (And no, it's not "Beelzebub has a devil for a son"!) Anybody else think this resemblance is weird? As Sherlock Holmes would say, "There is nothing new under the sun. It has all been done before."

July 2

July 2, 1997, Jimmy Stewart's much-grieved death. I'm sure we'll all miss ol' George Bailey from Bedford Falls

July 22

The feast of St. Mary Magdalen, the most often mentioned female in the New Testament gospels, and yet I think in some ways, the most enigmatic. Much has been theorized about her, but little actually known. Historically she was often depicted as a penitent, weeping woman with long hair, and her name, (which is pronounced Maudlin by the English) gave rise to the female name "Maud" and to the adjective "maudlin," which refers to soppy sentimentalism.

Whoever she truly was, I've been slowly but surely building a small obsession around her. I collect everything, including the sweet "I Don't Know How to Love Him" song from Andrew Lloyd Webber's Jesus Christ Superstar rock opera.

Here is a poem that, among other things, got me fascinated with Mary Magdalen. This is from John Donne's "The Relic," in which the narrator wonders what would happen if his grave was dug up, and if a token of his beloved's hair was discovered with him.

When my grave is broke up again
. . . . . . . . .
And he that digs it, spies
A bracelet of bright hair about the bone,
Will he not let us alone,
And think that there a loving couple lies
. . . . . . . . .
Then, he that digs us up, will bring
Us to the Bishop, and the King,
To make us relics; then
Thou shalt be a Mary Magdalen, and I
A something else thereby
. . . . . . . . .

In the appended notes to this poem which I found in the Oxford collection of Donne's works, I learned that a certain lore existed in the 17th century which suggested that Mary Magdalen and Jesus were lovers. I'm not endorsing this one way or another, but I should make clear that Donne also assumed that an age that would support this blaspheme would be an age that would stupidly not realize that Jesus could not possibly be found in a grave, being resurrected, after all.

July 23

In your leisure time, you might want to check out the British journal article by A. Shkolnik, C. R. Taylor, V. Finch, and A. Borut, (Nature, Vol. 283, Jan 24 1980, pp. 373-374) which finally solves the perennial mystery of "Why Do Bedouins Wear Black Robes in Hot Deserts?" Or you might read the brief summary of it which appears in the 4th edition Fundamentals of Physics textbook by David Halliday, Robert Resnick, and Jearl Walker, (published by John Wiley & Sons, 1993), at the end of the chapter on Heat.

It's fascinating stuff, because although it's a fact that the temperature of a black robe can be as much as 6°C (almost 11°F) hotter than that of a white robe, the black robe has better air circulation than the white. Because the air is hotter underneath the black robe, it rises more quickly up and out of the loose robe and is replaced by the cooler air beneath it, which soon also heats up under the robe and rises. Therefore the wearer of the black robe or black veiling--the veiling of an Islamic woman is not just her face and head covering, but her entire floor-length, shapeless garment--is better cooled by the fresh air currents than he or she would be by wearing a white outer garment.

October 23

It's Avogadro's day! Avogadro's number is a scientific constant for the number of items in a mole. The mole is 6.022 x 10^23 items, usually atoms or molecules when used in chemistry. However, Avogadro's number is without units, so you can say "I have a mole of water molecules", "I have a mole of chocolate puddings" (and a mole of calories, probably!), or "I have a mole of moles"! (The earth burrowing kind.)

So what's Avogadro's day? It's a made up holiday, probably invented by secondary school teachers who wanted to get their students interested enough in science to distinguish Avogadro from avocado. Every October 23, (10/23), good Math and Science Club members meet with their teachers at 6:02 PM (note that the second two denotes PM, as opposed to AM), and have cake and punch to celebrate.

Dec 14

Since I've asked inane questions on this page before, and would sometimes get responses, I'll ask once more.

I am desperate--practically begging--for help in identifying a song I've heard rarely, on the radio. I'd like to know the artist, the song title, an album it can be found on, etc. I guess it's easy listening/soft rock from the '70s or early '80s. It sounds like a whole band, (not just a back-up crew), with a male lead singer. The narrator speaks about a woman whom he loves, and I think loves him, but they are kept apart by the fact that the woman also loves someone else, a man whom the narrator respects and doesn't want to betray. I'm guessing maybe a best friend, brother, or other loved one. The great and haunting thing about this song is the simple, melancholy chorus:

And the reason that she loved him
Was the reason I loved him too.
And he never wondered what was right or wrong.
He just knew.
He just knew.

I'm not quite sure whether to take "He just knew" literally, or to believe that the Respected Loved One merely vaguely senses the tense situation surrounding him. In any case, I just want to find this song, for its pace and lyrics are terribly interesting.

--Hooray! I have found it on lyrics websites. It's David Crosby's "Hero."

Dec 15

In celebration of having read Laurie R. King's interesting theological explorations in her Holmes pastiches, particularly her Letter of Mary, I decided to put some information up on Mary (that's Mary Magdalen).

Here is a John Donne poem, circa 1602, which discusses Mary. He is dedicating a book of his hymns to a patron of his.

"To the Lady Magdalen Herbert"

Her of your name, whose fair inheritance
Bethina was, and jointure Magdalo,
An active faith so highly did advance,
That she once knew, more than the Church did know,
The Resurrection. So much good there is
Delivered of her, that some Fathers be
Loth to believe one Woman could do this;
But, think these Magdalens were two or three.
Increase their number, Lady, and their fame.
To their Devotion, add your Innocence;
Take so much of th'example, as of the name,
The latter half; and in some recompense
That they did harbour Christ himself, a Guest,
Harbour these Hymns, to his dear name addrest."

Jan 15

After recently seeing and enjoying the marvelous Anastasia movie, I was nevertheless shocked by the amount of glaring historical errors in the film. So I've located some information to set the record straight.

There's the original and imaginative My Name is Anastasia site, and the mystery game Clicking Anastasia.

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