Month: June 2007

…First?

Destined to become the Hampster Dance/all your base/such-and-such ate my balls/Swatch internet time/Star Wars Kid/O RLY?/Numa Numa/Chuck Norris/Lazy Sunday/Dick in a Box/LOLcats/Drama Prairie Dog of its day, here’s my requisite 2 cents on the iPhone phenomenon.

It shouldn’t be long until I get my own! After all, here’s me first in line at the Apple store in Century City…

…what do you mean the line starts around the corner? What do you mean there are 400 people in line already??

After looking at that long and tiresome list of internet memes, I can’t help but feel a little sad that I can recall all of them from memory, but can’t remember how to find the area of a triangle. Now just let me re-cut this post as a horror movie/romantic comedy trailer and I think we’re all set.

Spam: the great educator

As a bachelor on the go, I don’t have a lot of time for book learnin’. So I’m grateful that spammers have taken it upon themselves to forward me the classics of contemporary literature. Today, Vicki Rosenberg (a.k.a. wandelas_21@hotmail.com) decided to send me a few excerpts from Tony Burgess’s classic novel A Clockwork Orange.

fat stinking billygoat Billyboy in poison. How art thou, thou globby
bottlesometimes to slooshy what some of these starry decreps had to say about
lifegoing "Oh oh oh." I said, smiling very wide and droogie: "Well, if it isn'tmore
than ten, she creeching away but with her platties still on. Billyboyyarbles, you
eunuch jelly, thou." And then we started.number for an auto, and six being the
outside limit for gang-size. Sometimes Of the four of us Dim, as usual, came out
the worst in point of looks,singing. The song went:losing his guard and
letting in old Dim with his chain snaking It was round by the Municipal
Power Plant that we came across Billyboysomething was orbiting within, or like some
very rude interrupting sort of athat came out of his filthy old rot. Then we went on
our way.go of this boo-hooing little ptitsa, there being plenty more where she came
So we cracked into him lovely, grinning all over our litsos, but hegangs
would gang up so as to make like malenky armies for big night-war, butsort of a
world is it at all? Men on the moon and men spinning round theshut up singing
and started to creech: "Go on, do me in, you bastardthat came out of his
filthy old rot. Then we went on our way.veshch I could never stand was that. I could
never stand to see a moodge allthat came out of his filthy old rot. Then we went on
our way.number for an auto, and six being the outside limit for gang-size.
Sometimessomething that made me want to sick just to viddy his fat grinning
litso,still went on singing. Then we tripped him so he laid down flat and heavy

Can’t wait to find out how it ends! Please, continue to send me unsolicited emails in the future. Hopefully I’ll get the rest of Thoreau’s Walden in the next missive from my good pal “Heightened libido“.

(Also, anybody know where I can score some cheap Valium?)

Make it Quick

While poring through my own overlong posts pontificating on concepts I do not fully understand, I came to realize why most writing on the web sucks. It reminds me of the quote from Blaise Pascal (or maybe Mark Twain) that goes something like: “I sent you this longer letter only because I did not have the time to make it shorter.”

Consider brevity and you’ll make a stronger point. Either that, or write for Wikipedia.

(That diminishing return of useful knowledge mentioned above is the effect of what’s known as the bike shed problem.)

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Shiva and the Case for The Big Crunch

Yes, the universe is expanding, and I’m sad to report, it’s speeding up. By this time a dozen billion years or so from now*, all the matter in the universe will be so dissipatted that each celestial body will be beyond the reach of the other’s gravity and the universe will keep expanding and cooling, until it’s nothing more than the proverbial dust in the solar wind. Enjoy it while it lasts.

*assuming you aren’t reading this in 12,000,002,007 A.D.

Why is the universe expanding and where will it all end? This deserves a longer explanation than I’m capable of, involving gravity, dark matter and the cosmological constant. But what I can do is sum up the end of the universe thusly:

Have you ever known an explosion to collapse back in on itself?

Continue reading “Shiva and the Case for The Big Crunch”