Pepperland

Have I talked about Pepper? I might have.

Pepper is a cat, black with white paws and belly. She belongs to my downstairs neighbor.

With cats it can be hard to tell the difference between skittish and playful. When I enter the stairwell from outside she sometimes runs up or down the stairs away from me, but sometimes lingers. I do pet her when I get the chance, and tonight put my nose right up to hers. So maybe we're building trust.

I won't try to pick her up, though. I'm not suicidal.

Lost in the weeds

Looking at my neighborhood. Well, not so much the street I live on, but the extended area. The streets between here and the supermarket. I notice among the litter, there are these black plastic envelopes. The envelopes originally held medicinal marijuana, as you can tell by reading them.

Now it's true that there are oodles of liquor bottles on the sidewalks and in the streets too. Not like any particular substance has a monopoly on litter. It's just that you think of potheads as being one-with-the-earth types. Let's hear it for busting stereotypes, I guess.

Tackled

Okay, so that happened.

Monday night I noticed myself feeling a little under the weather. Tuesday, Christmas Day, I found myself in the grips of a full-fledged cold. It got old pretty fast. This morning I was feeling kind of nauseous, then after contact with the cold tiles of the bathroom floor I spontaneously got over it.

So that was the worst of it. Still finding my feet. Happy Christmas, all.

Table for two

Dogs Kitchen Dogs from Katelyn Costello on Vimeo.

This is about as expressive as I've ever seen those Wiggly Eyes craft pieces. Which you can apparently get a 120-pack for less than $2 at Target.

Getting dogs to eat sitting at the table is one thing, apparently. Getting them to use utensils? Well...

Behind the mask

There is, it's safe to say, a lot going on with The Phantom of the Paradise. It's a collaboration between Brian De Palma, who as a director had just recently started going in the thriller direction he's best known for, and Paul Williams, who is best remembered for writing songs for Muppets and Karen Carpenter. Williams wrote all the songs for the movie, a musical/horror adaptation of Phantom of the Opera, which hadn't yet gotten the Andrew Lloyd Webber treatment. Williams wrote all the songs and also plays the chief villain, an evil reflection of Phil Spector. (The real Spector's murder conviction was quite a ways in the future.)

Things are primed for weirdness and De Palma delivers. The film starts with a voice-over from Rod Serling itself, leading into a doo-wop extravaganza that plays like if Sha Na Na were more death-obsessed. This is an introduction into the world of Swan (Williams), which is even more sordid than you might guess. At this point the antihero/secondary villain, Winslow Leach, is just a songwriter, a very naive songwriter who hands over originals of his work for Swan to critique, and three guesses how that works out. Before his lengthy but quick list of misfortunes and disfigurements, Leach looks like a wimpier Warren Zevon. He's played by frequent De Palma collaborator William Finley, who manages to keep much of his dopey innocence after the character has become a monster and a killer.

Are there flaws in the movie? Oh yes, yes indeedy. For one thing Leach's grand work is a rock opera about the Faust legend, but he doesn't balk at signing a contract in blood. And Swan's scheme unravels at the end due to what seems just a random discovery.

Still, there's fun to be had. De Palma has probably directed better movies, but this one has a go for broke spunk and absolute indifference to realism that keep it lively. He's never seemed to have more fun as a director.

The abyss

Stellar encounters also make occasional fireworks, which are noteworthy because they're superimposed on such a cold and endless night. A pair of white dwarfs can collide or merge to make a supernova explosion if the combined mass exceeds the threshold for violent detonation.This time the math is: ember + ember = firework. An even rarer event sees a pair of neutron stars or a pair of black holes (or a neutron star and a black hole) colliding to emit an intense burst of high-energy radiation, the flash briefly outshining the rest of the universe. When these dense objects merge they also distort space-time and unleash a spasm of gravity waves.

The last fizz of stellar fusion is a slideshow in a circus completely run by gravity. In the era of stars, life was kept interesting by a battle of competing forces—radiation released from the creation of elements versus gravity. By 100 trillion years after the big bang, gravity may have lost some battles but it has won the war and has nobody left to play with but itself. Gravity playing solitaire turns out to be pretty interesting.

Been reading Chris Impey's How It Ends: From You to the Universe. The "you" part is only sporadically interesting, but speculating on how the galaxy and the universe will fizzle out holds a certain fascination. Call it a catastrophe or just the natural order of things, it's kind of galvanizing. Of course this isn't something any of us expect to see in our lifetimes.

Somehow perfect musical accompaniment by Joan as Police Woman playing the Reader's Digest version of David Bowie's song suite, and Bowie with the original.
 

Bar and button

My clock radio has a snooze bar and a sleep button. You know how these things work. Snooze means you get another few minutes of peace. Sleep means you turn the whole thing off until the next day.

So yes, sleep goes with button because it's just a little round thing, and the snooze bar is a long rectangle. Now I've had experiences when I've been woken up by the sounds of the radio and hit the sleep button, meaning that I didn't really wake up until well after I meant to. Anyway, now while I'm going to sleep I repeat to myself "bar, bar, bar," in order to remind morning me which one to press.

Could there be a danger of waking up and having the urge to hit a bar and get blotto? Maybe, but the bars around here aren't open that early. This city isn't that classy.

Another preview of coming attractions

Should be in with a movie review at the end of the week. Well, not a review exactly, not probably. More a play across my brain. Not telling what the movie is now, because I want to hold onto at least some surprises. But the movie looks weird enough to be worthwhile, even though it comes from a hit-or-miss director.

Hopefully the library will have it ready for me in a couple of days. It better, I ordered it Monday.

One leaf to leave

Leaf blowers are a funny thing. That mechanical mixture of growl and whine. You hear one, and then another joins it. And then another. Stand there for twenty minutes and you'd swear that twenty of them have formed an army, declared a war on mulch. But really there might only be three, getting turned off and on again. They're just so loud your auditory system doesn't perceive when there's one less.

We're about at the end of leaf blower system. Soon the snow blowers will arrive, although we haven't gotten to that part of the year yet. For some reason they're not as tricky.

Man on a one way trip

In recent decades, the figure of Christopher Columbus has come in for a lot of scrutiny, especially as regards his relations with the native peoples of the Americas. What few understand is just how much worse he could have been if given the opportunity.

Working from an ancient Christian calculation that the world, from Creation to Judgment, would survive for 7,000 years, he concluded that "there are lacking about one hundred and fifty-five years for the completion of the seven thousand at which time the world will come to an end." Signing his name as Christoferens―Christ-bearer―Columbus saw his expedition as just a part of a final crusade that would destroy the Muslim empire and usher in the Day of Judgment. By sailing west, he planned to open China and the Orient to Catholic missionaries, who would seal off the Muslim empire of Gog from its rear.

That's a brief passage from Martin Ballard's The End-Timers: Three Thousand Years of Waiting for Judgment Day. The belief that we are in or near the End Times can make Christians and other religious people abandon their faith's morals, and indeed all ethics. Catholic St. Augustine and Protestant Jonathan Edwards both pushed back against apocalyptic thinking, perhaps for this very reason. They were moralists whether you agree with their lessons or not.

Every rule has its exception and no doubt some end timers are and have been ethical. Columbus wasn't really an exception, though.

Intermission

More news soon. For now I just want to pause and consider the strange combinations that arise in life, the seemingly unlikely justapositions.

One fun exercise with this clip is to watch David Crosby and ask yourself whether he's hallucinating or just thinks he is.

←

As I've gotten older, I've become satisfied with holding fewer opinions. Less certainty. I still believe things, sure, everyone does. But I'm not invested in having opinions for the sake of having them. I've seen through example where that can lead.

Sure, this can make me appear wimpy. But that's not the truth. The truth is that my best survival strategy is to keep on looking and learning without unnecessary burdens.

Radio it's a sound sensation

WBRU was never as bold as it wanted to consider itself. Switching from a standard rock format to an alternative one around the start of the 90s, it kept to a pretty predictable course.

Still, it wasn't a bad station. It was depressing earlier in the year when the station sold its place on the dial. The wavelength was bought by a network of Christian stations that are largely indistinguishable from city to city. I dropped that station immediately. A lot of religious programming seems to operate on the assumption that Christians have no taste or discernment, which could be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

'BRU has returned as an online only station. Actually that's not the whole story. It plays on the air too, but it's signal is fatally low for today's market. I can't play it on the radio, and probably only people who live within a few blocks of the transmitter can. It's now a collaboration between Brown and, I think, AS220.

I'm not sure I heard a DJ's voice when I surfed to its website today. If anything the selection has gotten a little broader. This was one of the songs I heard, which I approve.



Not sure I'll become a heavy listener. I would probably set my clock radio to it if I could

[citation needed]

So I like—need, really—to stay mentally sharp. Just to make sure everything is clicking.

Crosswords are a pretty routine way to do this. I tend to do one in the morning before class.

Deep-dive wiki editing is a pretty good exercise. I thought I'd be over Wikipedia by this point. I actually have wandered away from it many times. But the siren song of showing off calls me back.

Not stuff like adding a new category. That I do, but it's too easy in a way. Finding sources, now that's a trip. And creating a new article? There you have to provide a handful of sources to prove the subject's significance and make sure no one marks it for deletion as being "non-encyclopedic." It gets you thinking strategically.

Break for black comedy

I'm sure I've stated my love for Gahan Wilson before, but just for the record, I love Gahan Wilson. This elderly couple, you may or may not like them, but you've got to believe them. They're just right.

And way to get maximum value out of a literalized metaphor.