Unintelligentsia

The Great Wave of Suck

I have yet to fully read this study but I found the summary intriguing:

Bad moods can actually be good for you, with an Australian study finding that being sad makes people less gullible, improves their ability to judge others and also boosts memory.

The study, authored by psychology professor Joseph Forgas at the University of New South Wales, showed that people in a negative mood were more critical of, and paid more attention to, their surroundings than happier people, who were more likely to believe anything they were told.

“Whereas positive mood seems to promote creativity, flexibility, cooperation, and reliance on mental shortcuts, negative moods trigger more attentive, careful thinking paying greater attention to the external world,” Forgas wrote. “Our research suggests that sadness … promotes information processing strategies best suited to dealing with more demanding situations.”

Furthermore:

The study also found that sad people were better at stating their case through written arguments, which Forgas said showed that a “mildly negative mood may actually promote a more concrete, accommodative and ultimately more successful communication style.”

Vindicated! See, I’m not a sour-pussed pessimist, I’m just smarter than you.

Salt! Good fer yer body, bad fer the earth. Maybe.

Winter is official here again, along with all the fun that comes along with it, snow, ice, sleet, wind, cold, all the various forms water takes when cold is applied really, and of course, salt. Up here in the Northeastern United States many cities dust the roads with salt to melt the snow and keep traffic flowing. This has always bothered me. It has been said that the ancient Romans after defeating the Carthaginian empire, and sacking the capital city of Carthage, sowed salt into the fields so that no crops, and thus, no city, would ever grow there again. This story, whether it’s apocryphal or not, highlights one key issue, that salt, while beneficial to the overall health of people when eaten, can do horrible things to surrounding environments hen spread about en masse. So I wonder, what’s the effect of all of this salting on our lakes, crops, plants, animals, on us, on our ecosystem? Does anyone even know? My guess is no, no one has any clue if it’s harmful or not, and my other guess is that yes, it is very fucking harmful. So not only does winter suck, but it’s also killing us! How’s that for sensationalism?

I sad.

The internet loves lists. Don’t believe me? Just go over to Digg, Reddit, or any other news aggregation site and count the number of “top ten”, “top five”, “top whatever”, lists. There’s probably as least four or five on each of them. They’re easy to read, easy to write, easy to publish, everyone wins!

Yes, lists are indeed wonderful, and as I haven’t updated this site in a while, I figured it might be fun to do a run down on the major topics that have happened in the weeks since my last meaningful post, and just go over them quickly in one long list.

So here we go, in no particular order, other than the speed it takes me to remember them, my current events list:

Michael Jackson, DEAD: – It’s amazing that the public went to such lengths to mourn a man who has effectively been dead for years.

Health Care, DEBATE: – This was old before it was new. I feel like this country has had this debate countless times over without ever getting anywhere. The issue is as cloudy as it is clear, and what I mean by that is, we definitely need socialized health care, but there are so many corporate concerns, political action groups, unions, stakes holders, etc, all with monetary stakes in this, that the issue is clouded and rife with emotion. Collectively we cannot win.

Goldman Sachs, AMERICA PWN – Goldman Sachs, or, “Goldman Sucks”, it turns out, manipulated the market politically and economically, all the while betting against it in order to make oodles of cash off the misery of the general populace. Big surprise, and you know what? If I could have, I would have.

President Obama, MAN OF PEACE – Dude wins a Nobel Peace Prize despite being currently engaged in two separate wars, one of which he is trying to escalate. I like it. I deserve to win something I am actively fighting against, do they have an award for political correctness?

Swine Flu, YAWN – This is the biggest non-issue in the last ten years. I believe the tally is up to fifteen people in this country that have died from this. More people have died by falling on pencils than from the swine flu, yet everywhere I turn I have to hear about how dastardly it is.

Iraq, Afghanistan, CONTINUES – Yep, it’s been a couple years now and these two wars are going on as strong as ever. About the only thing that’s changed is we no longer refer to them as “the war on terror”. Of all the things we as a country deem we can afford to do in this time of economic blight, two absolutely pointless (and expensive) wars, seems the unlikeliest of all. And yet, here we are. Amazing.

Bernie Madoff, JAIL – Well they put Madoff away for a million, billion years, and I hear he’s getting his ass kicked in jail. But, he should be able to console himself by the fact that “his likeness was one of the most popular Halloween costumes this year”:http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/bernie-madoff-halloween-costume-top-seller-halloween/story?id=8958831. I wish I’d thought of it. He’s like a modern day Robin Hood, stealing from the rich to give to his wife and relatives to hide and spend in case he ever gets paroled. How is this man not considered an American hero?

The Economy, FUCKED – The economy took a nose dive amidst of bunch of market funny business centering around an inflated housing market, and guess what, it still hasn’t recovered. So the average asshole like you and I, lost a bunch of money, got set back a few years (decades?) on our retirement plans, and a handful of people got rich. America!

What am I forgetting? Comment and let me know!

Wolves in the Throne Room

The following is taken from an interview with “Wolves In The Throne Room”, a black metal band I like and respect. I posted this because I thought it was a wonderful insight into why we listen, other than, “it sounds good” of course. Originally this was on my Facebook page, but fuck Facebook.

Definitely, we have nothing but disgust and hatred for the overproduced, homogenized, pro-tools drivel that mars so much contemporary metal. Don’t get me started on drum triggers. We recorded on analog equipment and mixed on the board: no computer. Still, I don’t see how this makes for a natural sound. Nothing about what we do is natural. From top to bottom, black metal relies on modern luxuries and space-age technology to exist and disseminate itself.

One of the many contradictions of black metal is that it is a music that decries civilization, but relies on so many modern contrivances to exist. I don’t think it is a natural sound at all. It is really the sound of paradox, ambiguity, confusion, being caught between two worlds that cannot be reconciled. I have had people throw this in my face before how can you play music that is supposedly anti-civilization on electric guitars? Frankly I find this line of reason boring and pointless. I remember a common line against rioters trashing the Nike store in downtown Seattle. There was a famous picture of some black-clad kid smashing the Nike sign, but zoom in and ah-ha! He’s wearing Nike sneakers! I say, who fucking cares? Catharsis is our objective, not a lilly-white and guilt free existence. We are all hypocrites and failures.

True Norwegian black metal is completely unbalanced that is why it is so compelling and powerful. It is the sound of utter torment, believing to ones core that winter is eternal. Black metal is about destruction, destroying humanity; destroying ones own self in an orgy of self loathing and hopelessness. I believe one must focus on this image of eternal winter in order to understand black metal, for it is a crucial metaphor that reveals our sadness and woe as a race. In our hubris, we have rejected the earth and the wisdom of countless generations for the baubles of modernity. In return, we have been left stranded and bereft in this spiritually freezing hell.

To us, the driving impulse of black metal is more about deep ecology than anything else and can best be understood through the application of eco-psychology. Why are we sad and miserable? Because our modern culture has failed we are all failures. The world around us has failed to sustain our humanity, our spirituality. The deep woe inside black metal is about fear that we can never return to the mythic, pastoral world that we crave on a deep subconscious level. Black metal is also about self loathing, for modernity has transformed us, our minds, bodies and spirit, into an alien life form; one not suited to life on earth without the mediating forces of technology, culture and organized religion. We are weak and pitiful in our strength over the earth in conquering, we have destroyed ourselves. Black metal expresses disgust with humanity and revels in the misery that one finds when the falseness of our lives is revealed.

Our music, then, is not true black metal for we have moved beyond this fantasy of a nihilistic apocalypse; beyond our own misery and failure. Our music is balanced in that we temper the blind rage of Black Metal with the transcendent truths of the universe that reveal themselves with age and experience. Our relationship with the natural world is a healing force in our lives.

Hippies? You mean like navel-gazing aficionados of the grateful dead? I hardly think so. I think that most people are so disconnected from a natural existence that anyone who doesn’t see the joy in playing first person shooters or dining regularly at pizza hut is a hippie. Frankly, I don’t have much interest in the opinions of urban lay-abouts. Also, it must be noted that radical environmentalism is very much a part of the tradition of the radical right. Even rabidly anti-Semitic NSBM has a strong ecological sensibility, following the Nazis explicit and well documented interest in preserving a pastoral, pre-modern Aryan utopia. At the same time, centrists decry organizations such as the ELF, who come from the anarchist tradition, as fascists and anti-humanists. Clearly there is a strong link between radical ecology and black metal, coming from the perspective of both the extreme right and extreme left. I don’t understand how one could find an earth-centered ethic and black metal incompatible to me, they are one-in-the-same.

If you listen to black metal, but you don’t know what phase the moon is in, or what wild flowers are blooming than you have failed. It is shocking to me that one could be seriously interested in black metal and not be deeply committed to radical ecology. Is black metal supposed to be about concrete highrises, suburbs, television, an easy modern existence with access to 4-tracks and corpse paint from the local hot topic? No! The music is about wild forests, unfettered rivers, nature: furious and vengeful.

Frankly, I think a good portion of black metalers haven’t thought too hard about why they are into the music. I remember reading an interview with Garm of Ulver, I think in Michael Moynihans Lords of Chaos. Garm just couldn’t say enough horrible things about the youthful malcontents who buy the majority of Black Metal records; I tend to agree with him. Black metal is a fairly easy thing to get into. There is a style, a sound, a set of beliefs its all there to be purchased or downloaded with nary a thought of ones own needed to get the whole package. There is deep truth underneath the facade of grim posturing, but one needs to search for it.

Princess Theodora...

I like porn, by which I mean, I secretly watch as much as the next guy, but to me, modern pornography is about as boring and indistinguishable as you can possibly get. Two, or more, orange colored, plastic people afflicted with alopecia, get together and begin trying to create fire by rubbing their genitals together as fast and as hard as possible for about twenty minutes, and then, when they fail to create said fire, cut to the ubiquitous facial ejaculation scene which was filmed nineteen minutes prior.

But some it seems are able to break this mold and inject some slight, almost imperceptible, hint of eroticism not found in your everyday pornographic movie. Be it, the glimmer in her eye that means she might actually like what she is doing, the coo she makes that makes it seem like she is doing this for some reason other than money or fame, or maybe just the fact that she looks different. And it is precisely this difference that allows some in the pornography industry to transcend pornography and gain a level of fame reserved for athletes, pop stars, or Hollywood actors.

The current starlet who seems to have begun this process is one Sasha Grey, whose recent fame even landed her a role in a horrible, straight to DVD, Steven Soderburg film. In it, she plays a robot, well actually, her character is supposed to be a whore, which you would assume she’d be perfect at, but she decided to add her own take on the part, and she went with “android”. Get it? That means she fucking sucks at acting. But that doesn’t matter! She is so hip right now the Wall St. Journal and the N.Y. Times decided to do a piece on this movie, a movie mind you, that no one cares about. She could have come on camera and delivered a racist tirade against blacks and the Jewish plot to control the world and still everyone would have been enamored with her for being a porn star… in a movie!!!

Sasha Grey is supposed to be a porn star with a brain, and that doesn’t just mean she wears glasses in her scenes, although, she does. Her stated aim is to “push the boundaries of sexuality”. You would think that with a statement like that, she means, to make sex, at least in this country, something that doesn’t have to be a secret or something to be ashamed of. That nudity and sexuality is something normal and unnecessary to freak out about, like when wardrobe malfunctions cause a national uproar. But no, that isn’t what she means. Nothing quite so sedate and reasonable as that. What she means, is turning everything and anything into a potential sexual act, oh, that baseball bat? I could put that directly into my ass. Oh hey, why don’t you gag me with that coke bottle?

Sasha Grey is nothing more than what every other women who has had sex for money or fame has been since Empress Theodora let geese eat seed from her vagina, common. It’s all been done a thousand times before. This isn’t anything new. It’s a new age slut trying to go further than anyone else without realizing there is no longer any point to it.

When I used to go to Crystal Beach there was an old defunct pier that I used to jump off of. It was quite menacing, with rebar poking out all over it and being quite high up from the water. It was a helluva swim out there, but I did it every time I went because it seemed dangerous and invigorating. But one day I swam out to the pier to find there was a group of little kids doing back flips off of it. After that the old menacing pier lost it’s intrigue and I never made the effort to swim out there again. Once one porn star rams a bat in her ass, there isn’t any further need to do it once the message has been delivered, unless that is, you enjoy putting bats in your ass.

So in short, Sasha Grey? Meh.

Twatter

Twitter is supposed to be a micro blog for people who are too lazy to write a story or construct an opinion other than a one line sentence about what they had for breakfast or the shit they just took. I understand that it could be relevant in certain situations like a fan following his favorite athletes daily routine, or a celebrity staying in touch with their fans, but this doesn’t stop me from thinking that Twitter will last about one more year before it goes under.

The problems facing any site on the internet, and especially “social networking” sites, are two fold. First, there is the issue of technical maintainability, which is my term for, shit easy enough and safe enough for someone with Alzheimer’s to use. MySpace initially was the best at this, allowing a easy to use personal site which was essentially a free-for-all for users to post whatever the fuck they wanted. But it proved to be a security nightmare, so people moved over to Facebook, which is now increasingly bending under the strain of it’s millions of users (twitter is struggling with this too). And this strain is a technical maintainability issue that they will have to address for Facebook to continue to be relevant. Why the fuck would I go to Facebook if it takes an hour to pull up my profile page? Or if there was a chance my account could be hacked by Russians? The answer is, I fucking wouldn’t.

I just sent this letter to Twitter this morning:

So, I keep changing my password via the website and I still cannot seem to login. And now your captcha system keeps coming up with words I can’t read so it might even be that preventing me from logging in, PLUS, this is on top of the other issue I have where I cannot change my profile picture

I know you guys have millions of users, some of whom are far more important than I, but christ, it seems like of all the technical intricacies behind your site, logging in and profile pictures would be the two easiest to solve, especially for a company/idea that is concerned about being a passing fad. Anywho, when you get the chance if you could make your site not suck that would be rad.

If this crap persists, I will simply delete my account. Fuck them. How many engineers does it take to fix a profile picture uploading problem? Idiots.

Problem number two is about content creation, or in more simplistic terms, stacking that motherfucking cheese. People come to your site to read, view, or interact, with something, anything, and that’s the rub, how do you get people to generate content people want to view? On my website, I write shit, and maybe 10 people read it, and only 10 people read it because ultimately, no one wants to read what I write. The same goes for Twitter, I’m mildly interested in what Lance Armstrong does on a day to day basis, but damn, not that interested. After the fifteenth post about how far he rode that day, I am going to stop checking.

People don’t even pick up newspapers anymore, so why is Twitter any different? It isn’t. Once the novelty and ego centric addictions to posting wear thin, especially when the service is ham stringed by niggling technical woes, the idea will fade into obscurity faster than a white Michael Jackson.

So why am I dedicating my first post in months to a service I believe to be irrelevant? Because I am bored out of my mind at work and have spent the entire morning trying to change my Facebook, Twitter, and MySpace profile pictures. It’s sad, but true.

So here’s a picture of some old broad smoking dope in her underwear. Wow.

Some Old Broad Smoking Dope

Motherfucking DA of the year nigga!

I was walking into work one morning, and right as I was about to enter the my building, Jack McCoy, district attorney from Law & Order busts out the door, he tells me that he needs my assistance with a big case. As we walk towards the parking garage I tell him we should take my car since its closer. “Good idea” he says, but as we get nearer to my car it becomes apparent that someone has stolen my tires!

Strangely, even though the process of removing a tire from a rim is very difficult and time consuming, the thief still decided not to take the rims, only the tires, which is made even stranger by the fact that I left the car naught ten minutes before!! Bum bum bummm! Good thing Jack McCoy is here to help me catch the perp!

The security cameras are no help at all! Dammit! The car is obscured behind a cement pillar. We’ll have to interrogate the staff. McCoy is great at this. He slaps a parking attendant around and eventually learns that perhaps we didn’t investigate the scene of the crime closely enough. Sure enough, the perp, a Mexican immigrant, is sleeping in the back seat! He was so sleepy after removing the tires that he stashed the tires in the truck and took a nap in the back seat. Another case solved by the team McCoy! Yeah!

And THAT is why it’s an extremely bad idea to take two Benedryls before going to bed.

Freaks on Display Circa 1909

In the late 19th and early 20th century, America was a growing country. It was a land of amazing innovations and inventions, from the electric light bulb to the assembly line and even the cotton gin (I threw that one in because I got an A on a report about the cotton gin in the 5th grade. Whoo!). It had a large and vibrant population, bolstered by immigration and westward expansion. It was a land of industry, with some of the largest corporations the world had ever seen. And, it had freaks.

Circuses like Barnum & Bailey traveled around the country showing off the amazing abominations of nature hidden away in the corners of this great land. Freaks like the bearded lady, snake man, or the guy who could take a cannonball in his fat gut. Yes sir, it was heady days for America. We had more and better freaks than all the other nations of the earth combined.

But these days, it seems as if the rest of the world is rapidly catching, if not surpassing the number and greatness of our freaks. India has the gentleman with super long fingernails, and more recently the six armed baby, whom some even thought was the mortal embodiment of the Lord Vishnu, and now China has this dude:

That is a way better wolf boy than we ever had in the US. He’s like China’s answer to the Geico caveman. America is definitely on hard times when we can’t even produce, and then exploit, a super hairy kid for capitalistic gain. It’s sad really.

But on a positive note, at least we, and in “we”, I mean I, were the first to discover the forecasting possibilities of the “freak index”. Yes I think it’s high time that I receive additional funding, on top of my meager unemployment that is, and perhaps some statistics grad students, so that I might better solidify this freak index I have created, because I feel it’s a far more accurate indication of wealth and power than any strictly economic survey. Pay me!

Bored as fuuuuuukkkk.

I wish I was in front of my computer the moment inspiration strikes. It comes quickly and unexpectedly. A sudden desire to shout something at the world. But it passes quickly also. Lost in the ennui of the day to day. Nullified out by some opposing outrage, like two tidal forces canceling each other out.

The other day I was watching CNBC and some idiot mouthpiece made a comment about the economy, that I can’t even recall now but at the time it made me furious, and before I could sit at my computer and hammer out an article about my theory on “age based communism”, I decided to make a cup of tea, then Charlie Rose came on, then I thought I saw a naked breast on Google news, and the article I was going to write was finished before it ever began.

I’m home all day thinking of interesting things to write about, and not doing a damn thing about it. This excitable and fairly creative mind of mine is the force that allows me to come up with all this dumb shit, and it is the same force that prevents me from doing anything productive about it. And now I am writing about not writing. I’ve become a monster!

Although, I recently, as in, five seconds ago, took a huge leap forward when I finally figured out how to disable my laptops touchpad in Vista. That will at least lower the frustration level when trying to type down to “Elevated: Significant Risk of Irritation”.