Couldn’t write a thing for a few days thanks to my shingles vaccine. The microchip doesn’t play well with the Covid version apparently 😉
But I felt well enough today to write another one of those drafts that sits in the app, 90 percent done waiting until it’s just right or chickening out. I don’t want to be seen as someone I’m not, but I have thoughts. So I write drafts…
I’ve seen some signs that more people are craving the real, the sincere. Maybe I can get in on that early and catch the wave.
Still it’s risky to be sincere on the Internet, especially when you’re between tribes like I am, trying to grow and stay out of boxes.
I have some sincerity lined up for tomorrow. Maybe folks will be charitable with me. I’m going to talk about being a progressive in a MAGA state, and why I saw it coming.
I don’t have any answers, but I know that we’re not going to get anywhere if we can’t talk. So tomorrow I talk.
The Internet feels like End Stage Tower of Babel these days. Even when you think you share a language, you don’t.
Maybe it won’t stay that way. Maybe people will take me as sincere and return the favor. Like I said, rays of hope.
Still I better give that draft another once-over in the morning.
I’ve decided what I think makes the Netflix Show Travelers so interesting. It’s a time travel story, but really it’s a story about the ethics of human sacrifice.
The fact that the time travelers arrive in the 21st century by taking over other people’s minds, sets the tone right away.
They take the high road by (mostly) taking the minds of people who are about to die, but that’s a rather weak justification.
They area clearly trying to do the right thing, but they are still playing a hardcore game of Trolley Car Problem.
You know, the dilemma where one person is tied to one track, five people to another. You can throw a switch and kill one or do nothing and five will die. Which is the moral choice?
Travelers raises the stakes even higher. Which and how many individuals must be sacrificed in the past to save humanity in the future?
We make similar decisions in the real world. We can’t know the future, so there’s no way to justify the sacrifices of others that our society makes for supposedly greater cause. But we sure try don’t we?
The Director is in a better position than we are. It can know the future, sort of. But because it exists in multiple timelines, it can’t base its decisions on certainty, only probability. It’s very smart and it means well. But it makes mistakes, so do its operatives.
There’s no way to “win” the trolley problem. You have to make a bad choice. But you know the main characters are the good guys – because they’re the main characters.
Just like all of us. The stakes might not be as high as they are in Travelers, but everyone gets into damned if you do, damned if you don’t situations.
We also know when we didn’t really have to make that bad choice… But we know we’re the good guys – because we’re the main characters.
I have to talk about this guy: Farya Faraji. I really like his attitude.
He’s a singer, musician and a composer, but more than that, he’s an evangelist for culture. Persian music, Greek, Turkish, Balkan, Byzantine, lots more. They all get handled with skill and respect…
“My goal is to showcase musical traditions from all over the globe, regardless of culture, ethnicity and religion,” he says on his About page. “I want this channel to be like a musical world museum, a library of musical traditions from all over the world and all over time.”
I think he’s right. The world is hungry for this sort of thing. Real culture. Real roots. Everybody’s. Something that connects us to the parts of our culture the modern world threw away.
I like that he’s trying to give us a taste of the real thing, real culture and not the Hollywood corporatized version of culture. I approve. He’s already taught me a few things. I didn’t really understand just how Hollywood our concept of Greek music is.
I’ve always thought of Greece as Eastern, but not THAT Eastern. It has also caught me off guard, hearing Greek music that sounded Middle Eastern, but what he says makes sense. Cultures in close proximity to one another are going to have things in common. Greece is a lot closer to Persia than it is to England. What else would it sound like?
I hope his channel really takes off. I hope to see similar projects from other musicians. I’d say Peter Pringle is a good example, taking us WAY back, to the Mesopotamian cultures.
So many of us have forgotten how precious culture is. We’ve lost touch with the earth. We need to appreciate music that comes from the roots – our roots and everybody’s roots. Stop getting riled up over other generations’ wars and just enjoy the music.
I say this as an American Southerner who wishes he’d listened to his great uncle play the fiddle when he had the chance.
Science fiction helped keep me sane when as a kid. Whatever troubles might be going on in my life, I could dive into a book and be halfway across the galaxy.
But science fiction is more than just an escape, or it can be. The wild adventures and mind-bending scenarios can actually make you better.
If you let them.
I really enjoyed the above discussion by John Vervaeke and Damien Walters about ways science fiction can be a framework to help us find meaning.
I had to chuckle at the last part, starting around 1:13. They could have been talking about 20-year-old me. That isn’t me anymore. But I remember the mindset.
Ringworld – the quintessential “hard SF” novel.
For a long time, “hard science fiction” was almost all I read. (Think Andy Weir’s The Martian, or Jurassic Park.)
Back then I thought all fantasy other than Lord of the Rings was a waste of time. That shelf space could be better filled by the likes of Larry Niven and Poul Anderson, I figured.
Obvious science mistakes pissed me off. Han Solo “made the Kessel Run in less than 12 parsecs”? Please. Parsecs are a distance measurement.
Which gets to the heart of my snobbery about hard SF.
I wanted the science to WORK. I wanted to believe the adventures I read about were at least possible.
Walters and Vervaeke get into the Hugo Awards controversy. The Sad Puppies, protectors of the old guard, battled it out with writers and fans who wanted to expand the definition of science fiction.
There was a time when I would’ve rooted for the Sad Puppies. Walters was close to the mark when he speculated that the fight is really about personal fantasies.
I had a personal fantasy that I was almost unconscious of. Science fiction helped me deal with existential angst.
I might not get to be the adventurer in that somewhat scientifically accurate sci fi novel, but one day someone would.
A lot of people are mad at John C. Wright over his role in the Hugo Awards fight, but his Golden Ocumene trilogy is pretty damn good. I’ve read it and I got my mother to read it.
It bothered me to know the sun would swallow the earth one day. I coudn’t handle the idea of human extinction, even billions of years in the future. I thought, why not colonize the stars and outlive the sun?
Good Christian or not, I kept that possibility in my back pocket just in case. I wanted to go to heaven. But failing that, I thought maybe science would give us a kind of immortality.
The reason I never got laid in college.
A few stars seemed to be within reach. When I took Astronomy in college, I made a little chart of some of the likely candidates. Anti-matter might not take us as far as it took the Enterprise, but 3 or 4 light years ought to be doable. Right?
And once we had a couple of nearby stars under our belts, who knew what we might accomplish. I still have to scratch that itch sometimes. Movies and shows that do that for me are far too few.
Movies like Ex Machina, Interstellar and series like The Last of Us and Westworld kind of do it for me. I also enjoy watching videos by futurist Isaac Arthur, who explores those massive engineering feats that might be possible if we put resources and effort into them.
Futurist Isaac Arthur digs into one of my favorite concepts: the space elevator, something I think humanity could, and should pull off. If there’s one thing I haven’t changed my mind about, it’s that: we must continue to fund space technology.
When it comes to science fiction novels, I’m a lot less interested in the scientific rigor than I used to be, especially now that I understand how hard it is to separate perception from reality.
Phillip K. Dick is more my speed these days when it comes to sci fi. I figure if we can’t figure out the human mind and tame our irrational behavior, there isn’t much chance of accomplishing those grand projects anyway.
I’m no longer particular about how I define science fiction. I really enjoyed N.K Jemisen’s Hugo Award-winning Broken Earth Trilogy, which contained a lot of fantasy elements. (The world-building was incredible.)
New Weird also does for me what science fiction used to do, with elements of science fiction, fantasy and horror.
Annihilation, from Jeff Vandermeer’s Southern Reach trilogy is a good example. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville is another. They seem rather appropriate for the times we’re in. How to deal with the world when it makes no sense…
Foxy – Get Off. I got such a kick out of this video. I remember thinking this song was cool, back when I only heard music on Top 40 AM radio. Not sure what I would’ve thought if I had seen this as a teenager.
Seeing this over the top video of Get Off, by Foxy really took me back. I thought the song was cool when I heard it on the radio. What teenager wouldn’t? It’s about sex. But I definitely imagined them looking so much cooler.
I liked disco as a kid – until I didn’t. It was just one kind of pop music, like R&B or rock. Not that I thought of music in terms of genre back then. You just listened to the Top 40 station (KTSA) and you either liked it or you didn’t.
This is a little playlist I threw together of disco hits I remember liking. There were a lot more.The songs actually sound pretty good to me now.
I was a freshman in high school when I saw a long-haired rock ‘n’ roll dude in a “Disco Sucks” T-shirt. I remember thinking “Somebody had to say it.” I didn’t hate disco exactly. I just realized I was really really tired of it. The fact that I’d just discovered album rock played a big part also.
I didn’t yet know about the “Disco Demolition” incident in Chicago where they blew a bunch of disco records at a Chicago White Sox game and caused a riot. But I wouldn’t have been surprised.
I understand a lot of people put the anti-disco backlash down to racism and homophobia. That was probably part of it. My friend’s dad had some choice nicknames for disco. I’m sure there was a lot of heartburn over the Village People getting as popular as they were.
I liked Disco Duck by DJ Rick Dees – when I was 12.I don’t really want to hear it again.
But mainly I think it was over-saturation. The market did what the market does: took something popular, tried to squeeze out every penny, and ran it into the ground. It was in movies, TV, advertisement jingles. There had to be a disco version of everything, from classical music to jazz.
And you couldn’t escape the Bee Gees, who frankly were too good for their own good. If they weren’t on the radio or TV, they were producing somebody else’s song and singing backup. After a while enough was enough.
It’s been long enough now that I can listen to disco again and enjoy it. Even the Bee Gees. I also like that younger generations don’t have those prejudices against different types of music. Disco is as legit as anything else.
My father died on this day in 1997. On the Fourth of July. Does that spoil the holiday for me? Not exactly. I’ll just say it’s complicated.
It wasn’t always. July Fourth was a time to reminisce about Dad, who one of the most patriotic people I ever knew. He was literally buried in a casket with a flag under the lid.
He was a soldier musician – a clarinetist in the National Guard band with a sharpshooter medal .
Independence Day was his holiday.
He liked to celebrate with fireworks, as did I. Mom would send him out to stop us kids from blowing each other up and next thing you knew he’d be tossing them in the air, saying “here’s how you do it.”
He grew up playing with cherry bombs, which can totally blow your hand off, so Black Cats and pennyrockets didn’t faze him in the slightest.
I inherited that from him. I’d be in a firecracker war right now if I could.
But now on the Fourth I just wonder what Dad would make of America if he was still around. I’m kind of glad he didn’t live to see it now.
I used to see myself as a patriot and I guess I still do. I was in Boy Scouts. I learned how to raise and lower the flag, how to fold it, how to display it.
These days I don’t think much about the flag unless I see it in public. I have one in the house somewhere, but I can’t find it.
I know how I used to feel about the American flag, but how am I supposed to feel now that I’ve seen it carried next to Nazi flags and Confederate Battle Flags? Now that I’ve seen someone beaten nearly to death with one on TV?
Now I’m kind of afraid to display the flag. I have to wonder what it will say about me to others who saw those same images. I wish I didn’t have to feel that way.
So the saga of the billionaire submersible comes to an end. It seems the underwater craft imploded, ending CEO Stockton Rush and his wealthy passengers in the blink of an eye.
It’s been interesting to see how people have been reacting. There are exceptions, but for the most part people don’t seem very fazed by the tragedy. I’ve seen a lot of “too soon” jokes and not much finger wagging.
The Titanic – A spiritual field recording by Alan Lomax at St. Simons Island, April, 1960. Performers include John Davis, Bessie Jones, Emma Ramsay and Hobart Smith.
A lot of it has to do with the hubris and foolhardiness of the CEO. He apparently did it on the cheap, used off the shelf parts and ignored the warnings of people who knew how dangerous it was.
James Cameron made a good point. Kind of ironic how similar Rush’s fate was to that of Captain Smith of the Titanic. One thing’s for sure, Rush will be remembered. He’s become a myth, like Icarus flying too close to the sun.
I can’t say I wouldn’t have done myself in if I’d had the resources to make a submarine. How hard could it be? I grew up on shows like Salvage 1, where Andy Griffith plays a junk man who makes his own spaceship. A lot of the Golden Age sci fi I read had premises like that.
TV in the ’70s was so dumb – and fun. Pretty sure I watched every ridiculous episode.
Mostly though, the lack of empathy toward the CEO seems to be about class. Like why should we care about billionaires when they don’t care about us?
I understand the sentiment to an extent. I was excited when Robert Ballard discovered the wreckage of the Titanic. The thought of colonizing other planets excites me. I have a much harder time caring about “extreme tourism” for the wealthy. Billionaires in space or billionaires under the sea – the rest of the world could really use those resources.
If you’re not careful though, you can get carried away. The guys who died in that sub didn’t deserve it just because they were wealthy.
If you think of it, the wealthy are just as trapped by the system as the rest of us. I’ve actually met a billionaire and I like the guy. He runs an ethical company and believes in paying his taxes (he’s European).
Money is survival and wealth is security. If you don’t have enough, the system will let you die. But how much is enough? If you have a lot, you’re gonna want more, just in case.
The more you have and the less everyone else has, the more you have to close yourself off. You can do it with walls and surveillance, private security, or distance. You can use your influence to keep the people you’re scared of away.
The Bastille was a prison, but so was Versailles. Nobody wants to get robbed or Marie Antoinetted. But the worse life becomes for those people you never see, the more likely it becomes. Poverty is a trap, but so is wealth.
I don’t know how we’re gonna get out of this mess, but billionaires do have a lot of resources. If enough of them could be convinced that we’re all in this together, they could do a lot of good.
It’s worth remembering that FDR, who helped the country out of a depression and got us through a world war, came from the wealthy class.
Who needs drugs when you can trick people’s brains into making their own drugs?
I used to use OK Cupid in my lonely old bachelor days. I got a few nice dinner dates out of it, but they had gaming features that kept you on the site. Veeery counterproductive if you wanted to find a mate.
People thought they could trade up from an 80 percent to a 90 percent match, so you kept seeing the same faces pop up over and over. After meeting my wife, it really seemed like bullshit. My wife and I are practically opposites and we’re stuck together like magnets.
I have actively prevented myself from becoming a gamer, because I don’t think I can handle it. I had issues with simpler games before. I got tendonitis saving the Princess in Mario 3 (twice). I thought Angry Birds and Wordfeud were gonna get me fired. Bathroom breaks can only be so long till the boss notices.
When I first discovered Reddit, I let that take over my life. I became addicted to “karma” and spent hours upon hours trying to figure out how to get more of it.
I finally broke the cycle by nuking my account and getting another one I didn’t care much about. Downvote away…. Same way I kept those apps from getting me in trouble. Deleted the apps.
I also saw a marriage break up because of World of Warcraft, so however legit gaming might be these days, I just can’t.
I know my weaknesses.
Language learning app Duolingo uses gaming features to keep you motivated and it has helped me learn a fair amount of Spanish. I was able to have a basic conversation with a Venezuelan after just under a year.
But again, I have to face it. I have other activities that need my attention. And early arthritis in my thumb…
I’m an old white guy and I am very confused about the word “woke.” It’s one of those new slang words that just popped up and now it’s everywhere. I know where it came from, but I am very confused about where it’s gone.
I can’t make it very far through a social media thread these days without seeing “woke” used as a complaint about something I had no idea I was supposed to be worried about.
If I could just address one question to my fellow white folks… I would just like to know this: Where the hell did you even pick that up and how did it turn out to be this huge catch-all word?
“Woke” is an AAVE word (African American Vernacular English). A dialect most people who look like me don’t speak. There’s not a damn thing wrong with having a dialect. We all have one – I grew up in the country and most of us certainly did.
I know this because I first heard it in Dear White People, a show on Netflix that white people tend not to watch. Ironically enough. I like to watch things I suspect weren’t targeted at me. I like seeing things from new angles.
Us white folks always pick up black slang. Gradually our dialect changes. It’s the way languages work.
I enjoy listening to AAVE. If you’re into hip hop you can hardly miss it. I’m sure it’s a good percentage of my vocabulary by this point. But the way we use it sometimes…
In Dear White People, a character asks, “Are you woke?” And it sounded strange at first, the way all new slang always does, but it in the story it meant “Are you aware of the unfairness of the system?” It seemed obvious. I went, huh, picked up a new word, and moved on.
“Do you hate white people?” or “Do you want to bring down Western Civilization?” never once popped into my head. It was just a new one for the file, like “no cap” or “ish.” (That last one is clever as shit.)
So you would think woke-ISM would mean, the process of seeing through the unfairness of society. Sounds pretty based to me. Who in hell, except for the wealthiest capitalists, thinks this society is fair – for any of us?
How the hell did seeing through the system and trying to reverse it become a catastrophe? Seems like it would be the other way around.
I swear I’m a music lover, not a music snob. All snobs do is turn people off. Sure it feels lonesome being the only one who knows or likes a band and having no one to discuss it with, but taste is subjective. If you wanna listen to K-pop, listen to K-pop.
Mr. Bungle – Air Conditioned Nightmare
Unfortunately there’s a little asshole in my brain I call Mr. Hipster. He’s one of the Jungian shadows I try to ignore. Every now and then he comes out like Mr. Hyde and sneers at somebody for liking something “objectively bad.”
“You have a right to your wrong opinion,” he says to my wife, who just rolls her eyes. (She doesn’t like The Beatles, which doesn’t compute for Mr. Hipster.)
He’s usually right, but he’s damn annoying. He made dating so difficult.
Mr. Bungle – California, full album. Listen to it however.
I was listening to Mr. Bungle a little bit ago and wanted to make sure my friend knew how awesome their album California was in case I forgot to mention it, and nag him until he listened to it. I do that to people (in my defense, he does it too).
That article killed me. For one thing, the feud was way more ridiculous than I remembered.
For another, Greg Gutfeld at Fox going off on the Chili Peppers because he was a rabid Faith No More fan, was just too much.
If you’re gonna have a strong opinion about something, better it be about an ancient feud between musicians.
Mr. Bungle cover Under the Bridge while pretending to be the Red Hot Chili Peppers – to mock them. Note how many comments sound just like Gutfeld and Mr. Hipster.
“Nothing personal,” says Mr. Hipster. “But how anyone could listen to Mr. Bungle’s California album and still give a shit about the Red Hot Chili Peppers is a legitimate question.” That’s how he talks.
Oh, and he would also like to add, “Flea is still awesome.”
If I’m serious, Mr. Bungle is an acquired taste. If you want to acquire it, start with California.
Their albums Disco Volante and the self-titled debut were kinda rough to listen to at first, though now I can’t figure out why I had a problem with them.
There are a couple of fan-made Mr. Bungle videos I wanted to include, for “Pink Cigarette” and “Retrovertigo,” but they’re really violent. They’re also really creative and kind of funny in a dark way. I think the guy who made them has Hollywood Horror movie potential.
Secret Chiefs 3 – Exodus
Incidentally, I may be MORE of a fan of Mr. Bungle guitarist Trey Spruance’, after discovering’s band Secret Chiefs 3. It’s as unique as Mr. Bungle.
They rock with a Sufi/Bollywood vibe, but they’ll throw in any style including death metal. They’ve made some incredible albums and they’ll come up again on this blog. Mr. Hipster insists.
Late Boomer's Den 
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