Happy Earth Day!
Currently Reading: "Last Tales" - Isak Dinesen
This picture is from a series of images taken from the International Space Station, they go rather well I think with a song my friend SN just recommended on FB (although for the purposes of the game I play it seems to originally have been featured on the show 'Grey's Anatomy', so minus another three points for me).
I have been rather down on the whole music scene this week since the really bad, fawning reporting coming from the first days of Coachella this year:
"... if Cut Copy's new single "Take Me Over" doesn't become THE anthem of summer 2011, then I'll personally put on a pair of gold-plated diapers"
??? Really? I looked up "Cold Cave" as well having never heard of them before and they sound almost identical to the electro parody "Kraftwerk Orange". The main review sites have had nothing better to offer journalistically of course, but late last night I settled down to watch the film "The Kids Are All Right" and saw this trailer featuring The Strokes and relented. I'm glad to see that Sophia Coppolla has absorbed some Rohmer and ALL OF THE CLASSIC ITALIAN DIRECTORS since her last film, and maybe not all heavily favored modern music is really, really bad. Tame Impala performed in California too this week I guess, I should probably look up their performance at some point.
Earlier last night I went to a reading by the author Patrick Rothfuss, who read some of his early love poetry (he was apparently way into Cyrano De Burgerac), and a children's book he wrote after whipping out some brain scans performed by some friends of mine at the lab (although one of my friends warned him that a certain area of his brain were a bit narrow, he did not seem to believe this would reflect badly on his behavior). I have honestly never read anything he wrote, but one of my favorite bookstores in town just went through a major remodel, so I was curious to see how things now looked.
The main reason I am writing today however is because when I woke this morning I stayed in bed for half an hour half-consciously debating with myself whether all of my brain regions were truly now activated for the long dangerous journey out of my bedroom. I concluded after a great period of internal debate through the presentation of several alternate models of explanation that I was in fact a dolphin, because parts of the dolphin brain sleep in shifts so that some parts are always active to keep the dolphin swimming and performing necessary higher-dolphin functions, so that even impaired in cortical availability of such things as who I was or where it was I needed to go I still must rise as my entire brain was not needed, so that I should soon start wiggling my toes because studies show that this more quickly wakes individual man-dolphins. HOWEVER going online later today what should I see but THIS?
ONCE AGAIN I HAVE PRESUPPOSED SCIENCE
It now annoys me a bit when this sort of thing happens because it means my statement on retrocausal brain-states might be wrong (a theory building from this), or the "collective unconscious" discussion from "Waking Life" or the game-show QI may be strengthened when in fact all of this is a much-more-likely-but-harder-to-accept case of either selection bias or coincidence. Alas I have no extra-sensory powers of magical thought-theft.... ALTHOUGH there are indeed two new interesting works on mental surrogacy in the press today discussing the powers of reading on situational assimilation and interrelative brain distinguishment (however our individual thought-distinguishment capabilities are now known with some high degree of certainty to be absolutely terrible).