A quick one while he's away

Yes, this is a quick entry, but I also am using this entry as a beginning of my declaration of love for The Who. "A quick one while he's away" is a song ostensibly about a girl who's man goes away, and finds solace in the arms of Ivor the Engine Driver after friends suggest the very thing. Her man returns, finds out she's been unfaithful, but then forgives her. Its a 10 minute long song comprised of 4 smaller, 2:30 second songs. If you haven't heard it, I suggest you find it and give a listen. Pete Townshend is on record saying that the song is about child abuse, but since all 4 members collaborated on the song, I'm not so sure that the rest of the band would agree.

I'd also like to mention, at least start to mention, because I could go on about this for pages at a clip, is how The Who are far more influential to rock and roll than The Beatles. The Beatles really weren't rock and roll, they were pop artists. They started off very poppy, and then got eclectic, but had a time shaking that pop outlook and sound. There's plenty of songs in their later days, after their "rebirth" of Sgt. Peppers, that remained popular and attractive to the general populace. The Who certainly had their share of popular songs, but they also had songs like the one I mentioned above, as well as another rock operetta, "Rael" that were innovative and completely ahead of their time. In 1966, when The Who were releasing songs like "A Quick One..", "Happy Jack", and "Cobwebs and Strange"(a blog post in itself), the Beatles were releasing songs like "Paperback Writer", "Good Day Sunshine", and "Taxman". I've heard critics extol their Revolver album like it was the second coming of Jesus or a really good dump after a hard night's drinking, they go on and on about how refreshing and revolutionary it was. Bull. Some compare the drum playing in "Tomorrow Never Knows" to "Cobwebs and Strange". When they do, I immediately discount their opinion.

The Beatles weren't the best band of their time, they were simply the biggest pop stars. They didn't have the most talent, they didn't have the best song writers, they didn't have the best musicians, and they sure as hell didn't have good stage presence. They would stand there like they were on display at Madame Tussaud's, and play their little instruments and sing their little songs like the good little organ grinder monkeys that they were. No, at that time, 1966(just for reference), there were The Who and The Rolling Stones, and soon after came Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd. But focusing on what the Who were doing in 1966, they were rocking the hell out, destroying stages, and being real god damned rock stars. At the same time, they were collaborating on songs like "A Quick one while he's away", expanding their repertoire and range.

Getting back to the beginning subject(hah!) of this post, go have a listen to the song. If you like Tommy, you'll love it.

Mental Stability

What makes someone "mentally stable"? First off, before anyone thinks that I'm pulling a Tom Cruise, I fully believe that such a thing as mental illness exists, and that there are chemical imbalances that can manifest in a person's mental state and well being, as well as environmental influences that can affect a person's outlook, behaviour and many other aspects of their life. No, I'm not questioning that, I'm questioning the other side of the scale, mental stability. What constitutes being sane? I think it was put very well in 12 Monkeys:

JEFFREY: You know what "crazy" is? "crazy" is "majority rules". Take germs for example.

COLE: Germs?!

JEFFREY: In the 18th century there was no such thing! Nobody'd ever imagined such a thing -- no sane person anyway. Along comes this doctor...Semmelweiss, I think. He tries to convince people... other doctors mostly...that there are these teeny tiny invisible "bad things" called germs that get into your body and make you...sick! He's trying to get doctors to wash their hands. What is this guy...crazy? Teeny tiny invisible whaddayou call 'em?..."germs"!

The same case can be made for a number of scientific beliefs, including a heliocentric solar system, the nature of atoms and atomic makeup, etc. Many of the people who first espoused these beliefs were considered, at the least, eccentric, and at the most, crazy and/or heretical.

Now, I'm not saying that everyone who's mentally ill is just misunderstood. I'm saying that it can happen to anyone at anytime, and it doesn't preclude that person from having valid views or opinions, necessarily. I read a blog written by a well-spoken, intelligent, funny guy who just happens to have crippling anxiety and depression. Does that make his thoughts or ideas any less valid? I don't think so.

I was writing this blog when the news came across the wire that Terell Owens supposedly tried to commit suicide by eating several(35) pain pills that he was taking for his current injury. Its completely out of character, and odd, given his previous self-aggrandization(is that a word?) and arrogance, as well as his worry-free lifestyle of fast cars, women, and all the gold he can carry. I was crass when I heard the news, saying "I wonder if he washed the pills down with Cristal?" It just goes to show you that it could happen to anyone, though, and no matter how perfect a life a person seems to have, they may have that voice inside of them that says they're not good enough to live, or that life is too difficult, or not worth continuing.

Now T.O.s publicist and friends(one of whom is noted coke-head Michael Irvin) are claiming that there's no way that he could have attempted suicide, and that the police must be wrong. The police are now starting to retract their statement, which, if you ask me, is only happening under threats of libel, slander, defamation of character, and other nasty sounding legal terms that would lead to the department and possibly the city getting sued.

Night Lights

I'm a geography nut, of a sort. Global geography enthralls me, and wow, did that sound horribly mundane. "Hi, my name is cow, and I like geography and watching paint dry." Ig. Anywah, I do like geography, and my slightly more interesting...interest is astronomy. I'm sure that you've seen the "night sky" picture shown below, and closer to life size at http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0208/earthlights02_dmsp_big.jpg.

Some interesting things that I notice, combining my love of geography and astronomy:
1)Look at the Nile. A ribbon of light in the otherwise dark expanse of Africa. None of the other great rivers of the world are so outlined, even the Mighty Mississippi. Also, I am surprised to see as many lights in the middle of the Sahara, relatively speaking.
2)Compare India to a big chunk of Iran and Afghanistan. Huge difference. I'm sure some of that has to do with geography, but how much of it has to do with politics and wealth?
3)The Trans-Siberian railroad sticks out like a sore thumb in the wastelands of upper Russia.
4)Even from space, the grid-like nature of middle America is easily seen.
5)Compare Cuba to Puerto Rico and even Jamaica. For having 4 times the population, Cuba's pretty dark.
6)This is the most telling part of the map/picture that I can point out. Look at Korea. Specifically the difference between North and South Korea. The border is such a distinct feature, it looks like South Korea is an island.

Another thing I'd like to point out about this picture is the staggering amount of people who, when after 9/11 happened, believed that a section of this picture(North America) was a single picture, taken from space, of people lighting candles in memory of those lost in the hijacking/bombings. This displays an ignorance about weather,(no clouds?) time,(it was supposedly taken at 10:30 PM EST, yet there's no terminator off the west coast) geography(why were Mexico and Canada, and especially Cuba lighting candles?),the amount of light cast by a single candle,(even millions of them wouldn't produce nearly as much light as is shown in those pictures) and an overall sense of self-centerdness that Americans, and humans as a more general group, have. A single human is so infintessimal on the scale of the Earth, let alone the Solar System or our galaxy, that its laughable. So with that happy note, I'll bid you adieu until next time, when I might regale you with my theory debunking the "butterfly effect". Yes, I may be mad-scientist-crazy.

(Sorry for any spelling errors, I can't get Blogspot's spell-checker to work. *pokepokepoke*)

White Rabbit

Much like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland, I am obsessed with time. Its a driving force in my life, I'm constantly thinking about what time it is, and I'm constantly in fear of being late when I need to be somewhere, even if its a self-imposed deadline. I always have two sources of time available to me, usually a watch and a clock of some sort, be it computer, analog, phone, or other. I'm constantly calculating how long it will take me to get somewhere, or how much faster I could get if I went this way, or how long I spent doing this, or that, or how much time is needed to go this way or that, etc.

This obsession with time is even more interesting when you take into account my wife. Her concept of time is nearly the opposite, time is a very fluid thing to her, both time of day and periods of time. 5 minutes to her is "just a short amount of time", and thats how she'll measure it in her head, "just a short amount of time". Realistically, this may be anywhere between 5 minutes and an hour. It may sound like I'm bashing her for this, or that I think this is a problem. I admit, it can be frustrating to a time slave such as myself, but that is more of my shortcoming than hers. I admire her ability to not care about time, and to be able to see it as a more flexible thing, because it releases one's servitude to the clock and allows her, in turn, to be more flexible in her daily life.

I'm not sure if I want to "fix" this time obsession, because a) it would be very difficult to change, b) it would make things interesting when it came to getting places on time, and c) I'm no so sure I want to change it. Temper it, perhaps, but not discard it completely. I need to be more flexible when it comes to measuring my time, and thats going to take some work.

"Inchworm, inchworm, measuring the marigolds, could it be you stop and see, how beautiful they are"

8 Hours of Knots

Sorry, ApocalypseCow , for sending so many "whats my password" emails to your email account. I'm a semi-retard sometimes, and it can often take me several attempts to realize that I am in fact making the mistake, and not whatever I'm working on. So instead of realizing that I should be logging in as BrewCow, I logged in as ApocalypseCow, a name I've been using on the net for more than 10 years. I'd like to think I was the original Internet Apocalypse Cow, but I'm probably wrong.

My stubbornness knows no bounds, and when I get latched on to a problem, I will work on it until a workaround is figured out or the problem is solved. Some say thats a good thing, but others, including myself, see it as a curse of sorts. I often give up actually thinking about how to better solve a problem, and just resort to brute force. Oh yes, I'm a terribly lazy man, and as I always say, "Laziness is the father of innovation". However, I can sometimes be lazy about my laziness, and end up back in brute force land.

All that being said, sometimes tenacity can be a good thing. I once spent over 8 hours unknotting a skein of yarn for my wife. About 3 or 4 hours in, she told me to stop, that it was just one skein, and it wasn't worth it. I wasn't having any of it though. It was going to get untangled, dammit, I was not going to let it beat me. Think about that. I spent 1/3 of a day untieing knots. How bloody rediculous.

I'm sure that ties in with my work ethic, I'll beat my brain against a problem until its bloody and raw, and I have a hard time backing away. I've mentioned this in job interviews, as both a strength and a weakness, and interviewers, if they've got a lick of sense, see this honesty, and appreciate it. At least I damn well hope they appreciate it, because underlying the stubbornness is a willingness to get the job done.

I think I've always been this stubborn, and the idea of anything being possible, given enough time, has been around for a while. In "The Phantom Tollbooth", Milo and Tock are given the task of moving a pile of sand one grain at a time with tweezers. I believe this was done to illustrate the concept of infinity, but at the time, I remember myself saying "Well yes, that would take a lot of time, but certainly not an infinite amount of time."

The geeky part of me will probably now go into a mathematecal equation to figure out exactly how much time it would take them to move a 10 ft high conical pile of sand.

But I'll let you have that fun yourself.

Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Isrealite?

I heard an interesting report this morning on NPR from the middle east. It basically stated that Iran is getting uppity because of the wars that the US has waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US, in taking out two of Iran's major rivals, has allowed Iran to take up the political space, reinforcing their power in the middle east. The fact that Iran is a theocratic republic ruled by Islamofascists is just gravy on their pilaf at this point, adding fuel to their growing geopolitical power in the region, and thusly fuelling their nuclear program.

The US comes along, with the UN, and says "No nukes for you!"
and big GWB wants to of course "bomb the shit out of em". No, he didn't say that in public, but I'm willing to drop odds 4-1 that he did say it in private . Iran knows they can't retaliate directly against the US, so they do the next best thing, they pick on the US's little cousin/nephew/life partner/whatever, Israel, knowing that the US is so concerned with the Israeli plight that getting Hezbollah to toss a few bombs might take the US back a few steps.

Now, none of this is news, or it shouldn't be, if you're paying more attention to the world at large than to which Hollywood psychopath is pregnant. What I'm here to complain about is the fact that the US cares SO much about Israel, and is willing to go to war, if not several of them, to protect its little buddy. Take a look, people. Israel is FAR from defenseless. Its army is just as powerful as any in the middle east, if not moreso, and it has a powerful nuclear force, more powerful than Pakistan, India, and even the UK.

So, why continue protecting them? Take a look from an outside point of view at the middle east mess, and hopefully you'll see that there are MANY countries involved in the conflict, and its most definitely not an "everyone vs. Israel" conflict. Hell, even if it was, why does the US have to get involved? Israel's a big boy now, they can fight for themselves, and they can win or lose their wars on their own. Let the whole mess go down, and stop giving the islamofascists reasons to hate the US. Or at least give them one less excuse to hate us.

Before I get any comments that I'm anti-semitic, I'm not. I'm treating Israel like it SHOULD be treated, as a country, not a religion. Just because our leader wants us to believe that every country should be identified by their religion doesn't make it so. Israel is, last time I checked, a democracy, and while it has very strong roots to Judaism, maybe they'd be a bit better served by telling Shlomo to ease off the gas on the fanatacism bus. Or better yet, stop looking to the US to get your back when you go wading into the donnybrook of a bar fight that is the middle east right now.

BlogCow

Well, here I am, in the blogosphere. I feel a bit dirty. But, every once in a while, I need to get some random thoughts about stuff. I'm not going to apologize for my views, nor am I going to shove myself into a label such as "liberal" "democrat" "wacko" or anything else. So, come on in, enjoy your stay.