And a half hour later…

Slow news day. But I did stumble across this item at the always-reliable Grim Reviews site. Seems that some bored Canadian researchers (Canadian!) have gamed out what the zombie apocalypse will actually look like. And it ain’t pretty.

If zombies actually existed, an attack by them would lead to the collapse of civilisation unless dealt with quickly and aggressively.

That is the conclusion of a mathematical exercise carried out by researchers in Canada. They say only frequent counter-attacks with increasing force would eradicate the fictional creatures.

So I guess my original plan — to find a way to Undead Molly’s house, where her expertise and zombie-killin’ accoutrements would greatly increase my odds of survival — is still a good one. But let’s hear again from those science-types:

In their scientific paper, the authors conclude that humanity’s only hope is to “hit them [the undead] hard and hit them often.”

They added: “It’s imperative that zombies are dealt with quickly or else… we are all in a great deal of trouble.”

You don’t say.

“The paper considers something that many of us have worried about — particularly in our younger days — of what would be a feasible way of tackling an outbreak of a rapidly spreading zombie infection.

“My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie then it’s dead forever. So perhaps they are being a little over-pessimistic when they conclude that zombies might take over a city in three or four days.”

And there you have it. Check out the full article here. And Molly, let me know if you need another pair of live bodies for your anti-zombie shock troops. I’m pretty handy with a machete.

I swear to you, I did not write the following piece — it literally showed up in my inbox this morning. That said, it’s too good NOT to publish. This item is apparently a response to rumors that Ayn Rand‘s capitalist comic book Atlas Shrugged will soon be transformed into a big-budget motion picture.

Here’s the bio that was attached to today’s unsolicited submission:

Feral Priest is the is the son of a Baptist preacher, raised by more belt than Bible. Part Reverend Mitchum from “Night of the Hunter,” part Bat Boy, he has returned to nature and resides somewhere in the middle of Montana.

——————————--

Listen up, Hollywood: Atlas Shrugged won’t film itself. The tumescent novel must be adapted, produced and directed for the screen by a creator who can match Ayn Rand mind for mind. Who is John Galt? His name is Tommy Wiseau; his achievement is The Room.

Wiseau evinces Rand’s bold reversals of mood and self-regard, unmarred by humor. He shares her empathy for betrayed nobles. He speaks, like her, to the angst of persecution. Wiseau confronts his viewers with a singular, unyielding Truth in every scene. The parasites do not earn the producer’s wealth, they do NOT.

In The Room, Johnny loves Lisa, who cannot support herself. Johnny provides everything for his princess. But Lisa defrauds him, exchanging the lies of a parasite for the offerings of honest labor. In the end, Johnny squanders his virtuous love on a looter, destroying his noble mind. Johnny is not understood or supported by his apparent friends. So, he must abandon them all, depriving them of his bountiful virtue. When he’s finally gone, they repent.

Tommy Wiseau sees beyond the overblown debates over selfishness versus altruism. Tommy Wiseau grasps the real divide, the one setting the looters against the TRUE lovers. Like Tommy Wiseau.

——————————--

Wow, huh? That’s why I love running this little empire. It really pulls in the best and brightest. . .

Imagine if you could listen to essentially all the music on the planet, instantly, without necessarily owning it. Imagine if this music played all through your house via top-shelf speakers. Imagine that this same setup gave you access to satellite radio and any one of the multiple thousand live webstreams from around the globe. Imagine if it also let you tune into “predictive radio” like Last.fm and Pandora, where the “stations” are tuned to your particular taste. And what if it was all controlled wirelessly with your iPhone?

I call that living.

Sonos systems are fairly pricey. Actually, I probably would have never have bought the one I’d originally drooled over, due to not quite being able to justify the expense. But the S5s are compact “shelf” units that are comparable to those Bose jobbies you see advertised. Except these actually sound better and are cheaper. It’s crazy how balanced they are. No matter where you stand, you’re in the sweet spot. Probably has something to do with the fact that there are five separate speakers in each rig. Whatever the reason, they sound awesome. Check out the demo here.

I picked up a pair mostly because it was the first Sonos system I could theoretically afford. And I did get a VERY generous discount (which I shan’t divulge the amount of) courtesy of being in “the music industry.” Yes, kids, there still is a music biz.

I’d like to say that setup was a breeze, but there were problems updating the system due to my arch-rivals Comcast, aka THE MOST EVIL FUCKING COMPANY THAT SHOULD BE CONSIGNED TO THE INNERMOST RING OF HELL, THE ONE RESERVED FOR CHILD MOLESTERS AND GLENN BECK.

But I digress. After battling with the weak-ass cable broadband that I pay an exorbitant amount for and have to reset at least five times a day, I was able to bring my Sonos system online. Suddenly, I had all the music I could think of at my fingertips: my iTunes collection, the aforementioned web stations and listen on-demand via Rhapsody — a paid streaming subscription service. So if I’m tipsy and need to hear “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun,” I can do so without downloading a 99 cent file. Good deal.

I’m psyched at what this system has already done for my at-home music listening, which was definitely at a low ebb. I’m done with plopping CDs in the player (my system wasn’t that good anyway) and I get enough of headphone/earbud listening at work. It’ a real treat to be able to call up almost anything I can think of remotely and get that instant gratification. I also love being able to split my system into “zones,” meaning, I can play stuff in one part of the house or both, and independently control the volume on each. And it’s a huge advantage to be able to use my iPhone (which is basically in my hands at all times anyway) to run the system. And, unlike other iPhone applications, the music doesn’t stop when you close the app.

The only downside is Comcast. Even though I have a brand-new, high-powered router, the signal is very iffy. Sometimes it works great — other times I have to stand in a certain spot in the living room to get the iPhone app to “dial in” to the system. I’d bitch to Comcast, but it literally wouldn’t do a shit bit of good — in our four years with the company (love that competitive broadband marketplace!) we’ve been “escalated” six ways from Sunday, and had a battalion of service people come to our home to… not solve anything. And that’s when they bothered to show up at all.

The good news is that my Comcast nightmare may soon be over: Verizon has checked the condo as a preliminary for installing Fios, and I think we should be up and running by the new year. Which will make my Jetsons home that much better.

I can think of no single person in my lifetime (40 years) who has done more for advancing critical thinking and the popularity of science education than Carl Sagan. He saw beauty and majesty in the cosmos and communicated his excitement about and fascination with the natural world eloquently.

When his PBS series, Cosmos, aired in the early 1980s, I was living in the same town as Sagan and his family — Ithaca, New York. His son was in my grade and went to the middle school down the road from mine. This made him seem like a neighbor to me who I watched on TV. I never actually met the man, but his influence on me and my world outlook was profound, from that TV show and book (I still have the copy I bought in Ithaca in ‘82) to his skeptical masterpiece, The Demon Haunted World, which I plan to pick and up start reading again tonight in honor of his birthday.

Sagan co-founded The Planetary Society and The Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (he is responsible for the famous line, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”). He was also instrumental in getting the Search for Extra Terrestrial Life taken seriously as a scientific endeavor.

This list just scratches the surface of his impact as a scientist and educator. Do yourself a favor and pick up one of his books (Contact is actually really good SF, but I recommend one of his non fiction books) and spend a few billion years with Sagan. You’ll be glad you did.

Victim In Fatal Car Accident Tragically Not Glenn Beck

This evening marks the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In remembrance of the occasion, British performance maker Martin Butler has organized a wide-scale happening, the Mauer Mob. The project will create  a human chain of 33,000 people in order to recreate the path the wall took in its division of the city, the nation and its people.

I will be participating as a member of Group 55, at Behmstraße, just up the street from my house and right next to Bornholmerstraße — the first checkpoint to be opened on the evening of November 9th, 1989. The Mob is seeking to bring together a wide variety of nationalities to help illustrate the multicultural nature of the city 20 years since the fall. I will be doing my part — attending with Canadians, an American, an Ukranian and my beagle, a German-American dual citizen.

Above is a quick map I drew for my second-graders showing the island that was West Berlin as part of West Germany (BDR), within the sea of Deutsche Demokratische Republik (DDR). A cartographer I am not, yet the remoteness of what was formerly West Berlin is easily noted.

Here is a piece from Slate.com about the significance of Berlin within the context of the Cold War. It should provide a useful reference for the importance of tonight’s remembrance.

For good measure, below are two songs that many associate with this historic time and that most Germans still hold fondly in their hearts:

Ride on, Michael Knight. Your claim of having a hand in the fall of Communism in Europe has not fallen on deaf ears.

A sweetly smiling Catrina in honor of El Dia de los Muertos. Last night we went to a beautiful Day of the Dead dinner where we ate and drank and remembered. Take a moment to remember and say ‘hello’ to your departed friends, family, and pets.

• Who amongst us hasn’t considered making his or her own orgone device?
• No skulls for you!
• Well, duh.
• Hard times for Scientology.
• Podcast interview with Mitch Horowitz, author of Occult America: The Secret History of how Mysticism Shaped our Nation.
• Podcast interview with Stephen Asma, author of On Monsters: An Unnatural History of our Worst Fears.
• Danger! Throw out that leftover Halloween candy right now!
• The occult in Judaism
• Exorcism tales from the Phillipines
• Kevin Jackson’s “Top Ten Vampire Novels“. Seem like pretty solid choices to me.
• The music of the spheres….
• El chupacabra?
• Very sad: Tanzanians born with albinism being hunted for their bones.

That’s all for this week!

I love you. Please be good to each other.

Molly

(Note: those are not my boobs.)

Greetings from the bigoted, hatefully ignorant state of Maine. Here’s me reacting to the news that the right to gay marriage has been repealed:

(Note: this is not me. Neither my mind nor my heart is made of stone, unlike the majority of Maine voters.)

On that subject, those who follow me on Twitter (@sacredmusick) may have noticed my comments about the nutjob patron who came in last week. He overheard one of our volunteers discussing sides of a tax issue up for vote, and commented that as long as we were all voting to repeal gay marriage, he didn’t care how we voted on taxes. He then told me that, since voting in favor of gay marriage, the state of Massachusetts has begun showing “explicit” videos to all the elementary school kids that show them how to make love to their partners. The videos also, according to this educated gentleman, teach the kids “HOW TO PEE ON THEIR PARTNERS.” He said if we continue to allow gay marriage in Maine, our kids will be shown these videos as well.

I found this rather funny at the time, but now that the state has voted to repeal our law, the humor is gone. It seems this gentleman is not just a random inbred freak: he is the average Mainer.

Moving on.

Of course, there has been change in the book price war. Amazon extended the period of their special deal, which was originally only intended to last while the selected titles were on pre-order. Once the books were published, they would return to regular price. Amazon says no. The others, meanwhile, have raised their prices. In more recent news, Wal-Mart and Amazon are now battling over prices on upcoming DVD releases. Bored yet? Me too.

While we’re on the subject of evil bastards shaking up the book world, guess who is quickly becoming the Oprah of guy novels? That’s right, it’s Glenn Beck! Apparently, having “written” (with two other authors) the novel The Christmas Sweater, which Publisher’s Weekly called a “lightweight parable” which “cruises on predictability, repetition and sentimentality,” and which reportedly actually ends with ‘it was all a dream” — a technique generally avoided by anyone who knows a thing about writing — means that Beck knows something about writing. Word is he is an avid reader of thriller novels, and often interviews authors on his show. While I certainly support the fact that he generates book sales and gets people reading, I just can’t bring myself to feel good about this. Glenn Beck’s most recent book, Arguing With Idiots, features transcripts of Beck talking to himself. (Note: this is probably not what the book is actually about.)

Publishers Weekly has come under fire for the lack of female authors in their list of the 10 Best Books of the Year. PW’s reviews director, a woman, said gender was not a factor in the selection of the books. While I have not read most of their selections, and while my list will be very different, I think the argument is ridiculous. Male and female authors being equal should mean that their work is viewed with an equally open mind. It should not necessarily mean that half the list is by male author and half by females. Because when you think about it, that isn’t really equality, is it?

On a lighter note, here’s a page with five myths about librarians. Note my picture at the top (again: that is not me). To top that, here’s a more in-depth and more accurate expose on 10 myths about libraries and librarians.

Until next time, friends, remember going to the library does automatically make you smart (see first story), but it sure can’t hurt…