Mood:  lyrical

Lazy Sundays are made for bein' lazy...

At the moment I'm listening to the Missa Solemnis (latin for... uh, big... scary mass...) This is the one everyone tends to get wet over, and its said that The Big 'B' never produced anything finer...

Since I'm neither educated or smart enough to critique such monumental opuses on their worth, I can safely say that I prefer the Mass in C without being ridiculed by those in the know. Ignorance, it turns out, is bliss.

Yeah, the Solenmis might be 'greater', but it's so... so...

solemn.

Mass in C is like Ode to Joy: any idiot can be apprciative of it. If the Missa Solemnis is, say, Moby Dick (follow me on this one...), then the Mass in C is The Wrath of Kahn: it's got the same general themes and thesis, but with a far more accessible presentation and emotional context.

Beethoven wrote the Missa Solemnis with technical finess and reverence. He wrote the Mass in C with emotion (says I, at least...).

Mass in C is also notable for containing the best damn Kyrie ever written...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:23 PM ADT

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Mood:  irritated

I think it's safe to say that the state of journalism, in general, and especially cable TV, is in a sorry state...

I know that sex and death sell (in that order) and that it may very well be that we all want to be shocked and entertained rather than informed, but honestly, the media could try to at least SLOW their inevitable decline into cartoonish purveyors of sensationalism and 24/7 'misery-TV'.

Trash-TV purveyors masquerading as journalists (two names that come to mind are 'Greta' and 'Nancy'...)  are a dime a dozen, but I'm dismayed by the sheer volume of sensationalism out there.

Don't take that 'Running Man' reference too harshy... most TV personalities do not actually kill their interviewees (and I do say MOST...)

Journalism could indeed be worse, but it's pretty bad all the same... 

Just one example: 

"Muddy river of Death"?

My heart goes out to the victims of this tragedy in Minnesota, especially since they're now the 'cause du sloth' of the journalism community: a story that takes A COUPLE HOURS of genuine air-time (a report on casualties and causes, followed by an investigation into responsibility) will be beaten like a dead horse, nonstop, until someone either goes missing  or some celebrity suffers a 'mishap'.

The media have little respect for the dead: they'd as soon cram a camera into your coffin if they could get the 'final thoughts' on your situation (but emotional TV sells, so you'd need to be very (re)animated to make the air...)

that's just a little gallows humor...

never mind.

Incidentally (and somewhat unrelatedly), another thing the media seems to adore is a good catfight.  I've never been into those, honestly...

well, I've got exceptions:

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 2:52 AM ADT

Updated: Saturday, 4 August 2007 2:58 AM ADT

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Mood:  bright

Writers of really good sci-fi know what a good spacesuit is...

Not only is this baby hard on the eyes, but it's soooo difficult to accessorize to... 

Enter MIT (who else?) with their fashionable BioSuit. I'm not sure just exactly when the folks over at MIT got an eye for fashion, but it's quite striking. Think of it: a nice, skin-tight spacesuit. How practical is it in the long run? Eh, who knows...

But it does something that other suits just can't do: it can make an astronaut look sexy.

Let's compare:

 A model (not likely an astronaut...) wearing the 'BioSuit' developed by MIT...

And my Tears' Shower Squadron's Liefde-class suits:

Now, to the untrained eye it looks like I just inked some Poser bodies black and scrubbed out the naughty bits and genitalia, but no: these are indeed state-of-the art science fiction space suits (say you believe me or I will hunt you down...), and if you painted 'em white, they'd look an AWFUL lot like that cushy MIT number above...

...seriously, they would... 

Only question I have now is: who do I see about filing a breech-of-copyright lawsuit? I'll bet MIT's got deep pockets...

Anyway, that sleek little BioSuit is just the thing to be sporting while you tie on your third one on your way over to put the beat down on your rival for astronaut love...

Hey, even space explorers need to unwind every now and then. Mine get to have terrible (and sometimes wonderful) hallucination inside their ships. NASA pilots don't get to have any fun...

But I'm sure that these catsuits-- er, 'BioSuits', will reclaim the Space Administration's reputation of dignity and professionalism from its current 'frat-house' image.

At the very least, it'll give those flyboys and girls some impetus to get rid of that beer belly... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 5:01 PM ADT

Updated: Friday, 3 August 2007 5:11 PM ADT

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Mood:  caffeinated

Genetic engineering has brought us glowing tobacco plants and glowing fish.

Researchers didn't stop there: now we've got schizophrenic mice  (I don't think they're luminescent, although they might believe that they're glowing fish or glowing tobacco plants...)

Neat implications. Was a time you could simulate mental illness and psychosis in mice by rattling their cages for three days straight (that's not a joke...) but now, apparently, the researchers say that the genes they screwed-up in their mental mice are good candidates for the analogous schizophrenia-causing genes in humans.

No offense, but that's kinda like spraying a building full of anti-fortification ordinance and then claiming that one of the load-bearing walls was responsible for the place's collapse...

Eh, someday this data should prove quite valueable. Until then, however, we're stuck with a pack of mice like this one:

Scientific progress goes scurrying straight into the nearest wall...

 (Photo taken from National Geographic... and doctored... but the real psycho mice are rumored to harbor similar delusions...)

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:04 AM ADT

Updated: Thursday, 2 August 2007 3:07 AM ADT

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Mood:  incredulous

Guess the Ruskies are a little put-off by that fact that America beat 'em to the moon with the ol' Stars 'n Bars. Now they're trying to up the ante by planting a flag in the 'opposite' direction...

Before commenting on this... uh, interesting venture, I'll share a fantasy related to this kind of mission: 

Putin is a totalitarian wanker at heart, and the fall of Communism never really sat well with him (and he's not had much luck in getting some people to be willing 'pawns' in his authoritarian ambitions).

This whole move reeks of Soviet-era posturing: the puffery of a system past its prime. Sure, Russia wants to CLAIM the territory down there (although the legality of an unseeable, underwater flag is dubious... after all, even the US's quite visible extraterrestrial flag didn't amount to much).

What the CCCP- (sorry, the Putin Administration) won't say is that only foreign companies can actually get to the resources down there because Russia's technological investment front is as dynamic as a collapsed lung.

But make no mistake: Russia desperately needs this cache of resources because the supply of natural resources seems to be the only tool left in the country's 'diplomatic negotiations' with others...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 8:32 PM ADT

Updated: Thursday, 2 August 2007 3:08 AM ADT

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Mood:  d'oh

I was just thinkin', maybe there's a way to reeeeeeally discourage porn-surfin' at work...

Think about this guy...

and now imagine management bosses everywhere hooking their unproductive employees up to their own computers: sweaty bods become cattle prods!

Dumb idea? Maybe, but it'd REALLY motivate employees to think about the most unattractive things imaginable to avoid that increased galvanic skin conductance... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 2:53 PM ADT

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Mood:  happy

My personal verdict's in: 3.5 out of 4-stars.

The science is close enough (minus the obvious error in stellar physics), and we'd be pretty close to 4-stars if not for the last third (a slasher fest). The scene where the crew boards the 'abandoned' sister-ship ranks as one of the creepier movie moments I've ever seen... 

They needed bigger Ray-bans, though...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 10:03 PM ADT

Updated: Wednesday, 1 August 2007 8:34 PM ADT

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Mood:  not sure

This weekend I think I'll be investing my entertainment dollar in some Sunshine in lieu of Simpsons (or both, maybe...)

I just heard about this little sci-fi venture the other day, and it's to be release in America today! (figures: that's actually a little more press than your average firm-to-hard sci-fi movie ever garners...)

It's a gamble: most complaints about the flick criticize the science as getting progressively paltry, and then the film devolves into a slasher flick (not necessarily a bad thing, but...)

Part of the problem with the premise- as I see it- is the fact that somehow, in only FIFTY YEARS' time, humans will have the explosive power at hand to statistically affect a small portion of the sun itself...

riiiiight.... lemme throw some sunshine on the perspective (image courtesy of Apple's Science Website):

The sun is NOT massive. The sun is not 'big': it is gigantic on a scale of near imcomprehensibility.

 Even with a weapon capable of vaporizing Earth ten-times over, the effect we'd have on Mr. Sun would be infenitesimal to the point of pointlessness. Apparently the gist of the film is that we've gotta 'explode' a 'Q-ball' pocket inside the corona...

...okay.

 To be most scientifically sound, the movie's premise should be about some kind of rogue asteroid with wierd-ass particles coming near the sun and threatening to cause some strange interactions. Unlike the Sun, humans of 50 years from now COULD concieveably affect an asteroid...

But the result of that scenario would probably be a both boring and very bad movie... 

Gonna get me a ticket, anyway: I can forgive a story's lack of scientific rigor (lord knows my own spiel has enough of that to go around). Good story trumps bad science... as long as the science isn't THAT BAD...

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 11:54 AM ADT

Updated: Friday, 27 July 2007 11:58 AM ADT

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Mood:  mischievious

Anyone who needs proof on the power of infant neural plasticity,  one should check this guy out.

To be clear: HIS BRAIN MASS IS STATISTICALLY NOTHING: the central ventrical has expanded to SUBSUME the guy's whole god-damned noggin, 'xept for the very edges...

More proof that nature provides: this man's neurons literally made something out of NOTHING: all basic functions, respiration, temp reg, heartbeat, in addition to a smattering of intellect (he's Forest Gump, by all reports, but LOOK AT THAT PICTURE AGAIN: he has almost NO brain).

This goes to proves what the most amazing piece of biological tecnology ever invented by natural selection really is...

We shouldn't discriminate; after all, some people here in America without a detectable brain in their head do very well for themselves... 

I need to stop now. 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:49 AM ADT

Updated: Friday, 27 July 2007 12:18 AM ADT

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