Because I Require Stimulation

More fashion tips to be found in my Image Junky Gallery.

See this? S

That’s a capital S. Now, picture the base of that capital S as the top of my pelvis. The pelvis should be pretty level along the horizontal. Now, see how the curve of that S juts out the left?

Yeah, my spine does that.

I went to the chiro and he took x-rays. Then he read the x-rays and then he kind of threw up in his mouth. And then he told me that I’ve got some choices. I can do four months or so of adjustments and physical therapy or he knows a really good spinal surgeon he can refer me to.

Since I’m a hemophiliac, the surgery is right out. And by right out I mean it’d be better for me to end up in a wheelchair than have spinal surgery because I’d have a far better chance of surviving a wheelchair than I would back surgery. On the upside, he fixed the pain in my back and the sound coming from my lower spine was enough to make everyone in the office take notice.

So on the back side of things, I am well fucked and far from home. I have spinal curvature that would make a professional wrestler cringe. Thus, I’m kinda done with running for a little while. And you know what? That depresses me more than anything. I love running. Then again, I also love living, my family, my kids, my job, and I’m very partial to the whole “walking upright” thing as opposed to “I think I need to grease the wheels on this chair” idea.

FML, as they say. But really, it could be worse. We’ve caught it at a stage where something can still be done about it that doesn’t involve high grade anesthesia, scalpels, several units of whole blood, and enough clotting factor to fill a tanker truck.

As for the PT, I’m really thinking about supplementing it with Tai Chi or Yoga. Basically, I have to focus on the muscles on the right side of my spine because, well, apparently I barely have any muscle there at all.

Stay tuned for further developments along with complaining, bitching, whining, poor me, and perhaps even some crying when it really hits me that I’m not going to need running shoes for a good three months.

In other news, I can understand those governor’s aides misunderstanding him. He told them the truth about what he was doing. They just misheard him. After all, “I’m hiking the Appalachian Trail” does sound a lot like “I’m having some Argentinean tail.”

(rimshot)

Guys tend to like two things in quantity, boobs and explosions. This is why the girls with guns thing is always so popular. Guns make explosions and some guns make lots of explosions in a shot time. Hunter Thompson, a regular gun fiend, was into guns on that very level. He’d shoot stuff just to hear the explosion of the firearm coupled with the explosion of whatever he happened to be shooting. (He was very keen on propane tanks.)

Here we have another layer added to the mix. You have porn star Lisa Ann posing as Sarah Palin and holding an assault rifle. So you’ve not only got girls and guns you have porn stars and power.

Not bad, eh?

More insanity in my Image Junky Gallery.

Hi. I have a Question. Here he is.

But I have another for you too, so read on.

So I’ve had this feeling of nostalgia recently. I’ve been thinking about life back in the day (the early 90s in this case) and my old BBS and those of my friends. I was thinking about setting one up here. Not a WWIV BBS, mind you, though I suppose I can do that. Still, I’ve used a WWIV online BBS recently and let’s just say that, while I have a lotta love for that software, there’s no reason to sledgehammer a square peg into a round hole.

WWIV wasn’t created with the internet in mind, and thus it’s really kind of crap on the internet. But there are plenty of programmes that work just fine for this kind of thing.

So, I have a question for those out there who tune in here to read my prattling on. If I set up a BBS/forum thing here, would you bother checking it out? I’ve got a little survey on Survey Monkey to collect answers and I’ll let the survey run for a few days and see what’s said. If I get a positive response, I’ll set up a nifty BBS/forum thing here for y’all to come play at. If folks won’t bother checking it out, then I won’t bother wasting my time, or your time, with the thing.

So take the survey and let me know. It’s just one question so it’s pretty quick.

Thanks!

This looks like something out of a deleted scene from 2001 or something. (It’s from Logan’s Run. Thanks, Tim!) Either way, I really dig on the sort of retro futuristic thing the image has going for it. The outfit she’s wearing is pretty provocative. It’s revealing, yet everything is still covered up. It’s that hint of what’s underneath that makes fashion sexy, I suppose.

And for some reason that I’ve never been able to figure out, the future is incredibly white. I don’t mean that in a racist way, or at least that’s not my driving intent. It’s just that many of the movies I’ve seen that are meant to depict a sort of utopian future society have a lot of white decor in them. Perhaps it’s supposed to evoke purity or something.

Either way, I’m still not sure whether she’s supposed to be a companion or just someone who seats people.

More evocative images are found in my Image Junky Gallery.

Found this over on Tokyomango. It’s one of those pictures that just struck me. I love trains and they’re a primary form of transportation in Tokyo.

But it also hits me how one can live in a massive city, and still be alone.

Here come ol’ flat top he come

Groovin’ up slowly

He got joo joo eyeball

He one holy roller…

The Beatles recorded a lot of songs, but Come Together is my favourite. No two people interpret the lyrics the same. A quick search of the Internet tells me that some folks think its a call to action while others think it’s about a threesome.

A long time ago, I happened across a Flash animation for this song and I have to say, even though this Flash is old, it’s still damn good. It’s been hosted on Albino Blacksheep for god knows how long and the work could be its own music video on MTV. Then again, that’s assuming that MTV showed music videos anymore.

It amazes me how many people haven’t seen it. So if that picture on the right doesn’t look familiar, you should really go dig on it.

When I was in my early teens, I suffered from the delusion that art was just something you looked at. You either thought a particular piece was beautiful, or you didn’t. Art was simple, you admired (or not) and then you moved on. The idea of spending an entire day at an art gallery made no sense to me. Surely you wouldn’t even have to break stride as you looked at the paintings and sculptures. You could just wander through and then go on to the next activity.

Now, I’m not a religious man at all. But I am eternally grateful for a mousy little Catholic nun named Sister Wendy Beckett.

She’s not an imposing person. Indeed, she’s a contemplative nun. In our parlance, she’d be classified as an honest to goodness hermit. So she lives a life of silence, poverty, and prayer. Oh yes, she also happens to be an expert on art and, on the rare occasions that she speaks, she’ll probably be talking about art. That’s when the magic happens.

I caught Sister Wendy’s documentaries one day while flipping through channels. It caught my eye because, after all, a nun talking about a Renaissance painting is something one doesn’t see everyday. After the first couple of minutes the novelty wore off because she was no longer a nun to me, she was an instructor. And I’m not talking about your stereotypical Catholic school teacher, I mean she became my art professor.

She spoke about art not as a thing, but as an entity. She pointed at paintings and told their stories as if she were telling you about her good friends and their lives. For the first time, I really started to care about the story and the meaning behind great works of art. Sure, I thought Saturn Devouring His Son by Francisco Goya was a work of fantastical horror, but when Sister Wendy explains something like that, it becomes something so much more. It could be related to Goya’s relationship with his son, or it could be a depiction of the horrors of war, or many other things.

In other words, it ceased to be a work of horror and became a story, just as much a story as that told in the pages of a book.

Sister Wendy opened my eyes to art. Now, when I enter an art museum or gallery, I plan on spending time there. I plan on coming back because, if it’s of any size at all, there’s no way I’m going to make it through the whole thing in one go. I’ll take some paper with me so I can make note of pictures and sculptures to come see again.

After all, it takes more than a few minutes to read a book just like it takes more than a few minutes to really appreciate a work of art.

Further Information and Reading:

Sister Wendy- The Complete DVD Collection (Amazon)

Sister Wendy’s Story of Painting (Amazon)

Sister Wendy Books and DVD (via Worldcat. Search your local library!)

Daddy’s Girl, originally uploaded by Faceless Librarian.

Yeah, she’s kind of into the computer thing too!

So the WordPress directory that holds my blog? I, um, accidentally deleted it.

Yeah, I’m a fuckin’ idiot. I was using a graphical FTP programme (FireFTP actually. It’s one helluva plugin for Firefox and a really good FTP client. It works even better if you’re not a fuckin’ idiot.) and I meant to delete the directory listed above the WordPress directory.

Now, GoDaddy can restore it back to new… for a small fee of US$150.

Um, no thanks. I love my blog, but it ain’t with $50, let alone $150.

So for the next few days you might see some changes here and there, and a few old posts, as I work on rebuilding this sucker. Really, I don’t mind. The initial shock sucked, but this gives me a chance to do a few things I wanted to do anyway.

For those who do the blogging thing, might I recommend Windows Live Writer? See, this is an instance where Microsoft screwed up and made something good and useful. Live Writer is a blogging client that connects to Live Spaces, Blogger, WordPress, and other accounts. It fairly rocks but today’s saving grace is that it archives you old posts on your computer. So I didn’t have to rewrite anything. I did have to go fetch images again, but that wasn’t hard.

You know what I need? I need a new spine. The one I currently own is defective.

It seems like every few months or so it’s got to act up and be a prick, which is totally uncalled for since it’s supposed to be a spine and not a prick. I don’t even know what makes it hurt. Sometimes it’s running, sometimes I guess the sun is in the right house of the zodiac and Mars aligns with Ceres and thus the cosmos fucks my spine.

Since I’m unlikely to get a new spine, I do want to get one little invention that I saw in, of all things, a James Bond movie. In the movie Thunderball, Bond goes off to some kind of health spa for a little R&R and to have lots of sex with the female masseuse. There’s a machine in that health spa that was used to stretch the spine and literally sort of pull on it from both ends.

THAT IS TOTALLY WHAT I NEED.

I remember the masseuse character saying that some patrons of the spa called the machine “The Rack.” Fine. If it stretches my spine, that’s what I want.

So, does such a machine exist? I don’t know, but if it does, can someone let me know?

In the meantime, I’m on a cane for the next week or so. I freakin’ hate that because I can’t really run on a cane, but it does help me get around the library.

I’ve always wanted to get into the urban exploration thing.

I think it’d be incredibly interesting to poke around abandoned buildings and sites and take photos. Hell, there are two housing developments around here which never got finished due to the economic collapse. I should just go and photograph that. There are some really nice, and very unfinished, houses over there. I’ve jogged those streets and, even during the day, it’s kind of spooky. It makes you think you’re running around in a world after they dropped the bomb.

For now though, I’m content with the internet and its ability to deliver unto me some fantastic photos of abandoned and forgotten places. I’ve seen a lot, but these images from DirJournal Info Blog are incredible. Even if I do get into the life, there are places I won’t see anytime soon just because of their remoteness. Pripyat is enthralling, but it’s also in a place I will likely never go.

You think you’ve got problems?

Hey, keep in mind that, at the beginning of each day, you can look skyward and take pleasure in the fact that the class G star in your sky is parked a safe 149,600,000 km away from the ground you walk upon. Some planetary systems, well, they don’t have it so lucky.

Sometimes, a primary just needs to eat a planet, okay?

Wow.

I’m serious. I kind of find this beautiful in that same exotic way that I think plants that bugs are beautiful. Though what I really find interesting about this clip is that the guy on banjo* is so totally into this song and she looks like she’s completely bored and would rather be doing anything else than singing out in the cold.

Ladies and gentlemen, um… well.. these guys.

*Yes, I know that’s not actually a banjo. But what else would you call it if you don’t actually know what it’s called?

Hi!

Did you know there was an episode of Tiny Toons where they basically made a music video for Istanbul (Not Constantinople), one of the greatest songs They Might Be Giants ever recorded?

Did you also know there was an episode where Buster Bunny, Plucky Duck, and Hamton all got ripping shitfaced on beer and go on a drunken terror the likes of which would make Hunter Thompson nod his head knowingly and express kinship?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I didn’t become an astronomer even though I was well on the road to that after Carl Sagan’s documentary series Cosmos and his many books influenced my thinking and devotion to science.

My parents had a fairly good library in their basement and besides a couple books on space, there was a good amount on history. So I soon learned that I liked reading books about World War II and other historical stuff. So even though I had my sites set on science, history fascinated me as well.

It never dawned on me I could do both, combining one with the other. At least, not until I was a junior in high school. One afternoon, while sitting in an honours history class that netted me absolutely no honours at all, the teacher made the decision that he didn’t want to teach that day. So instead he was going to show us a movie. He fired up the VCR popped in a tape and I was treated to this grinding sound and then the activation of an arc light.

I actually knew what an arc light was because we used them in my theatre tech class.

Then this man with a lovely accent started talking about history and science and how seemingly unrelated things were actually connected. That made sense, since the man was James Burke and the show is called Connections. He ran through a series of events and demonstrated how the invention of the plow not only could save civilization but also created civilization. More than that, he discussed the history of science. Up to then, I didn’t even know that there was such a thing as science historians.

After that, we got to watch another episode later on. And he demonstrated how Mediterranean traders rubbing gold on touchstones led to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

James Burke not only makes history interesting, he makes it fun. This especially comes out in the next couple of Connections series where he starts doing the historical bit, while drinking.

My kind of historian there.

I was hooked and my academic direction was forever altered. Just as Carl Sagan put me on the path to science, James Burke threw a fork in the road and I immediately shifted my focus to history. Today I have a degree in history and a bi-weekly history podcast where I do something very like James Burke’s Connections series. The biggest difference is that Mr. Burke has a research team while I can only draw upon the historical talents of me, myself, and I.

Further Information and Reading:

Connections DVD set (from Amazon.com)

Connections (from Amazon.com)

Connections DVD set (via Worldcat. Search your local library!)

When I was about five years old, I watched a lot of PBS. There wasn’t any educational reason I did this. My parents weren’t the type who let me watch nothing but PBS. My reasons for watching PBS were very simple and kid-like. I was (and still am) a rabid fan of Sesame Street and I knew that, if I watched long enough, I’d see some Muppets. I had no idea how television schedules work. My parents never subscribed to the TV Guide. I just knew that PBS showed Muppets and thus I watched PBS. One night, sitting on the floor of my living room, I awaited Muppets. I was a little miffed at the animal programme that had just gone off and hoped that the next show would have Muppets.

It didn’t.

The next show started with some odd sound effect and orange lettering which spelled out WGBH. Then the most beautiful music I’d ever heard (at the age of five, mind you) started playing and stars floated on the screen. It was a show about space. I liked space shows so maybe I could watch this until Muppets came on. Besides, the music was nice.

Then a very passive, very soothing voice started to talk about space and the wonders of the cosmos. That voice belonged to Dr. Carl Sagan and the name of the show was Cosmos. My parents were more than a little amused that their kiddo was enraptured by a show about stars and planets. After it was over, I remember turning to my mom and dad and saying "I want to be an astronomer when I grow up!"

Cosmos changed my life in two very important ways. To this day, I am fascinated by space. I’ll read anything you give me about space whether it be a popular science article in a magazine or a scholarly paper in a prestigious scientific journal. It’s a testament to the effect Dr. Sagan had on my life that, even though I didn’t become an astronomer, I know enough about it that I can follow along with a serious scientific essay with little trouble. Usually I get lost in some of the math. I can do calculus, but not that well.

It’s no wonder why Cosmos won so many awards. After all, Sagan was able to explain incredibly complex astronomical concepts and make them understandable to a five year old boy.

I mentioned a second way that Cosmos changed my life. Well, the soundtrack for the documentary was done by the Greek new age composer, Vangelis. Soon after hearing that music, I wanted to try that piano sitting over against the wall. The first real song I learned was Chariots of Fire, by Vangelis.

I introduced my oldest kiddo to Cosmos a year ago. Every so often he still asks me “Daddy, can we watch that movie about space?”

Further Information and Reading:

Cosmos DVD Set (from Amazon.com)

Cosmos (from Amazon.com)

Cosmos DVD (via Worldcat. Search your local library!)

Cosmos (via Worldcat. Search your local library!)

Sometimes, all we need is a clear explanation. We need someone to take something complex and talk to us about it in a way that we can grow to understand it on some level. We may never achieve expertise, but we walk away more intelligent, and just a tad wiser, than we were before.

I want to talk about a few people who explained things in excellent ways. I don’t look up to many people as "heroes" in the classical sense, but in my book, these are the people who changed my life and, in a very real since, made my life. So over the next few days, I want to tell you about some of my seven favourite explainers and how they affected me. Perhaps, if you have some time, you could seek them out and learn from them too. If nothing else, I can guarantee you that they’re entertaining. So, at the very least, you won’t be bored.

Whether or not I bore you is a completely different matter.