According to the Highland Park Public Library archives in Illinois, which date back as far as 1888, there is no umlaut in the word umlaut.
According to Melvil Dewey, inventor of the Dewey Decimal System back in 1876, books about umlauts would fall in the 400s (the call numbers for Language).
According to the 400s, German writing system & phonology falls on call number 431.
According to Bronx history, Häagen-Dazs was first sold in New York in 1961 by Polish immigrants Reuben and Rose Mattus.
According to foodies and linguists alike, the words Häagen and Dazs are nonsensical, but meant to sound (and look) Scandinavian in nature.
According to music history, the Blue Öster Cult adopted the umlaut in 1970*.
According to metal fans, Motörhead, Mötley Crüe, and Queensrÿche were the best known umlaut riddled bands of the 70s and 80s.
According to Icelandic folklore, eccentric singer/performer/actor/writer/musician/producer Björk Guðmundsdóttir has an official license to use her umlaut without having to pay royalties.
According to climatologists, If you don't like the weather in Iceland, just wait five minutes.
According to meteorologists, however, the mean minimum January temperature in Reykjavík (-3°C) is cold enough to freeze yogurt.
According to the mall culture of Eastern Canada, frozen yogurt was a multi-million dollar industry by the mid 80s, taking a large market share from ice-cream manufacturers.
According to my own experience, Yogen Früz frozen yogurt was the hippie version of the Diary Queen Blizzard back in 1986.
According to Yogen Früz, their 'u' and umlaut combination creates a convenient vertical emoticon of probiotic bliss.
* As an aside, who would have guessed that a fake umlaut on Polish ice-cream from the Bronx, could have influenced heavy metal? And who would have guessed that it would even influence fake metal bands like Spinal Tap (with an umlaut over the 'n') and Deathtöngue.
Marking time is futile. It's like pushing a pin into a roaring waterfall to mark a passing droplet. We're all on a blue, spinning ball that feels, for the most part, pretty stable on the surface. We have days. We have years. We have atomic clocks and calendars. We usually know when our birthdays come around, or when night falls. But it's illusory.
Technology has allowed us to get a bigger and bigger picture of where we sit in space. And we're not sitting still. There are objects moving within objects moving within objects to the power of infinity. It gives me vertigo just thinking about all the orbits within systems within galaxies that are all spinning and speeding and pushing and pulling amongst themselves.
In 2008 we added a Leap Second to the clock. Just to keep things 'in check'. And when I say 'we', I mean the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service. It sounds like an organization from a George Orwell novel, or a Terry Gilliam movie. It's slightly disconcerting that we need to 'adjust' something as simple as a second, that in this day and age we need to 'delay time' to get our atomic clocks back in sync with 'mean solar time'. If it weren't true, you'd accuse me of making it up.
By the way, did you know that the length of a second has been changed? Twice! Once in 1956 (based on a precise division of Earth-around-the-Sun revolutions) and once again in 1967 when they realized that the Earth was slowing down and changed to a measurement based on the vibrations of a caesium-133 atom. Caesium is one of the few metals that can turn to liquid in a warm room, and is named after the latin 'caesius', which means "sky blue." So everything that happens in our world, from shuttle launches to television programs to when you punch the alarm clock and when you leave work, is dependent on the movement of the tiniest piece of liquid metal named after the sky.
So take an arbitrary date, like June 10th (the same date the Mars Spirt Rover was launched back in 2003), and ask yourself if our planet will be in exactly the same location on that date the following year. Not a chance. And will it have gotten their a fraction of a fraction slower than the 'year' before that? Yup. It's all relative. The earth is getting heavier due to cosmic dust from meteors, the Moon screws up our orbit (and it's getting heavier too), as do millions of other gravity emitting space-flung objects like comets and asteroids. It's a giant space/time-crushing cluster bomb out there.
And as we are spinning wildly through space (and time), we are emitting a sphere of radio and television waves out into space. Everything that has ever been 'broadcast' doesn't just travel across the world and end when it reaches our radios or our TVs. Some of it keeps going. Out into space. Forever. Mind you, forever is still less than 100 years, and about 65 light years, but it's still crazy to imagine that we've emitted a tiny ball of noise, not unlike the speck on the clover in Horton Hears a Who. "We're here! We're here! We're here!" This tiny "yop" has reached as far as Alpha Centauri (the closest star to Earth) and now well beyond. This ever-spreading sphere of noise is degrading, like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy, as it stretches through space. Scientists call it the Radio Bubble, and eventually it will just pop and blend in with the noise of the rest of the Universe.
But right now, 20-some-odd-light-years away on planet Gliese 581C, there is a (very, very, very) slim chance that a sentient alien life form with a specialized receiver* might be picking up an Earth-university alt-rock station broadcast from 1990. This alt-rock station might be doing an afternoon of songs from the label 4AD, which might include sub-culture hits from the Pixies, the Breeders, Lush, Dead Can Dance, The Cocteau Twins, and even His Name Is Alive.
Hey, if we can believe that a dancing sky atom can tell us the time, why can't we believe that somewhere up there Joe Alien is banging his space TV, trying to watch the first episode of Seinfeld?
*As an aside, this 'space receiver' would need to account for a) the Doppler effect (you know how the sound of an ambulance siren distorts as it's blaring past you? They'd need to correct that because the Earth is rotating, and revolving), b) the weakness of the wave forms (the satellite dish would need to be about 20 miles wide), and c) the extra static and noise.
flickr photo by sputnik-If there's one wild beast that humans will never stop attempting to tame, it's the stock market: that chaotic transmutable creature, half-bull, half-bear. They do it for the reward, they do it for the thrill, but they also do it to try and bring order to disorder, to become masters of the numbers. If you don't have the stomach to do it for yourself, you can always buy mutual funds and let some other wizard get their hands dirty with your money.Mr. Adam Monk of the Chicago Sun-Times manages a small stock portfolio which is scrutinized by the financial world and often compared against high profile investors. In 2008, he chose to invest in 5 companies, including TIme Warner Cable (mistake) and Marvel Entertainment (good choice thanks to Iron Man). By the end of 2008, with the world staring into the giant maw of a global financial crisis, Monk's portfolio had lost 14% of its value. But he was still beating the market average, as he had for the last four years. In fact, he was doing considerably better than Jim Cramer, the CNBC celebrity fund manager and author of Mad Money. Cramer's 2008 picks were down 29.8%
But the main difference between the two men is that Mr. Adam Monk is a monkey. Yup. A Brazilian cinnamon-ring tail cebus. So who's laughing now?
In the '90s I met with my first financial advisor. She set me up with a 20-pay (a life-insurance tax shelter) and some mutual funds (By the way, I live in Toronto, home of the TSX (Toronto Stock eXchange), and have small investments in a few of the mutual funds listed there. But I have no idea which ones). At the time, I thought the words 'balanced portfolio' sounded complicated. I trusted this young woman (who was no older than myself, really) to plan my future— even though she was on commission. One day I asked myself why she wasn't rich. If she was so good at managing money, why was she still hustling? I decided that if she could do it, I could do it too. I did some research, bought a few books, and began to tackle this financial enigma myself. Many years and many dollars later, I'm doing better now than when someone else was in charge.In early 2008 I bought a few shares of Marvel Entertainment. I certainly wish I had bought more, and bought them earlier. They were my best performing stock: up 81.60% before Disney swooped in and purchased the entire company. The core tenement of value investing, the type of investing done by the likes of Warren Buffett, is to love the company you are buying into. Buy something that you know you'll want to keep for at least 5 or 10 years. I loved comics as a kid. I owned X-men and Spiderman and the New Mutants. I knew that Marvel still had hundreds of characters in their archives to bring to the silver screen. Marvel was always cooler than DC (Detective Comics): Spiderman (Marvel) had angst, while Superman (DC) was just annoying*. The X-men (Marvel) had to deal with mutant prejudice and unpredictable powers, while Batman (DC), although dark and brooding, didn't have a mutant cell in his body. Both Marvel and DC struggled to stay relevant through the 80s, and experimented with smaller, darker offshoots (kinda like Molson and Labatt's creating their own micro-breweries). One of these was DC's more adult Vertigo, which became famous for their Sandman series written by Neil Gaiman (author of Coraline and American Gods).
Another of Vertigo's crazy titles was Enigma, which has been referred to as the first existential superhero miniseries. With an all-powerful, yet aloof anti-hero, and villains who suck brains, teleport people in packages, or re-decorate houses to cause madness, it's not standard fair. In fact the plot takes some dramatic and unexpected hair-pin turns, dealing with identity, sexuality, and the ultimate existence of the protagonist (and the human race). That's a lot to ink about in 8 short comics.
One thing I've learned about chaos (and this includes investing in comic book companies) is that it's best to just go with it. Get in the drivers seat of your life and head toward your destination(s). Don't look at all the problems at the side of the road. If you crash or fail, than at least you'll be the one at the wheel, even if that wheel isn't really connected to the steering column. And if worst comes to worst, you can always blame it on the monkey.
*As an aside, I owned a huge box of Justice League of America when I was a kid, which I acquired through a second-hand book store. I read scores of these comics, and without fail every episode involved evil magic, evil psychics, metaphysical spirits, or Kryptonite. This was the only way the writers could deal with the virtually indistructable (and boring) Superman.
I finally managed to get my hands on the 8-part graphic novel Enigma (published by Vertigo) for my Randomography research. It is strange and existential, and completely unexpected. I will post about it's relationship (or lack thereof) to TSX mutual funds tomorrow after I have finished reading the whole thing. So far it's the most impressive comic book every randomly recommended to me by a user-generated encycopedia. If you don't want to experience any spoilers, you might want to grab a copy from your local library. You can get all the product details here on Amazon.
What do a concert organist and a professional golf tournament have in common? Absolutely nothing. There are very few 'golf albums', and the once that do exist sound desperate. David Barrett's The Music of Golf, for example, sounds like an emasculated Bruce Hornsby piped through an elevator. I triple dog dare you to purchase and listen to the entire album, than write a review as a warning to others. No one else has ever done this, and the album has been out since 1996. Even listening to the 30 second samples on iTunes, especially The Power, makes me want to hammer golf tees into my ear holes. I imagine the lite synth-piano would also make Edward George Power Biggs turn over in his grave.
The most noticible thing about Edward George Power Biggs (aside from his name) is his tragic resemblance to TV personality Bill O'Reilly. But luckily Biggs died long before political (and I use that term loosely) blowhards were made popular on 24-hour news (and I use that term lightly) channels. Biggs preferred to be called E. Power, keeping people guessing about what the E stood for. It certainly wasn't 'Electric', since Biggs despised electronic instruments and encouraged churches and concert halls of his day to instal organs built before hydroelectricity, in the tradition of the Bach and Handel eras.
Biggs emigrated to the United States from the UK at the height of the Great Depression. He used the skills acquired at London's Royal Academy of Music to work with various orchestras and eventually established his own Sunday morning radio program. He went on to commission a master builder from the Netherlands to install a 3-manual tracker-action organ (don't ask) at Harvard University, where he recorded Bach Favorites. I can't help but imagine the kids of the 40s, the same kids who would grow up to become hippies and vietnam soldiers, making fun of their parents for listening to this stuff:
Kid A: My father is listening to a man play with his organ. Kid B: (Snicker) Oh yeah? What's his name? Kid A: Biggs. (Through barely contained laughter) E. Power Biggs. Kid B: (Louder snicker) What's the E. stand for? Kid A: You don't want to know. Kid A & Kid B: (Hoots of laughter)
There is virtually nothing linking Biggs to golf, other than the obscure fact that he shares a birthday with Kirk Alan Triplett. Triplett has won a few PGA* tours, but in 1987 he had only been pro for two years and DNP (that's Did Not Play in PGA slang) the historic championship in Palm Beach Gardens. The reason the 1987 PGA Championship was historic wasn't because the final winning score was one of the highest (re: worst) at 287 strokes. It was because it ended in the fourth ever sudden-death. Sudden-death is a playoff method used by the PGA when a championship game ends in a tie. The golfers must play 3 more holes and the player with the lowest stroke total of these three wins the game. Coincidentally, the first official PGA Championship sudden-death playoff occurred between Lanny Wadkins (winner) and Gene Littler (loser) in 1977, the same year that E. Power Biggs died.
The only other tie between golfing and organ music I could find in my dubious google research library was the Count. For those of you who grew up in a closet, the Count is a purple Muppet vampire with OCD and the metaphysical power to cause lightning strikes when he laughs. He has to count everything he sees, hence the name. The Net Generation might know him best from the viral video The Count Censored, which has over 4 million hits on YouTube at present.
*As an aside, The Professional Golfers Association had a hell of a time acquiring PGA.com. When they finally decided to join the twentieth century and build a website (in 1996), the more tech-savvy Potato Growers of Alberta had beaten them to the domain name. After some intense legal negotiations (also known as a suitcase filled with 26,000 US greenbacks) the golfers won. No sudden-death playoff was needed.
I don't know much about Conan other than he was the barbarian who catapulted Arnold Schwartzenegger to fame and eventually the office of California Governor. I also know that many Conan paperbacks were illustrated by Frank Frazetta, an artist known for his depiction of voluptuous, less-than-dressed fantasy women surrounded by wild cats in far away moonlit fantasy forests. My mom was (and still is) a huge fantasy/science fiction fan when I was a kid. She was also a feminist. Therefore paperbacks with Frazetta illustrations were usually frowned upon.
Before the internet, and before legitimate legal access to pornographic magazines, fantasy illustrations were the closest a geek boy could get to a naked woman (other than the once-a-year Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition). These could be found in Dungeons & Dragons, in Heavy Metal magazines, in comic books, and of course, fantasy and science fiction book covers.
I grew up in a very small town where the parents of the kids I associated with actually believed that if you played rock music backwards you could hear the devil talking. It sounded like garbled gibberish, but it was unmistakably satanic in origin. These same parents also believed that when you examined Procter and Gamble's old logo under a microscope, you could clearly see three sixes, also known as the 'number of the beast'. This town didn't have a bar or a movie theatre (both were considered amoral), dancing and rock music were evil, so the only thing left were games. The young males broke into two social categories: sports kids who played hockey, and geek kids who played RPGs (Role-Playing Games) and video games. I fell into the later category, due of course to my weak ankles.
At one point during my childhood I was a Dungeon Master. This just meant that I had actually read (most of) the rules for how to play Dungeons & Dragons, and I would narrate the scenarios that my friends would navigate through with multi-sided die and loose-leaf binders filled with character statistics. The game is ridiculously complicated, especially for a 12 year old, but I loved reading the rules. I began to collect other RPGs like M.E.R.P.S., Palladium, Heroes Unlimited, GURPS, and more. I would scour second-hand book stores for box sets of Steve Jackson games like Car Wars, or look for the Rifts version of Mechanoids. I read thousands of pages of rules, rarely even playing the games themselves.
One day a mysterious flyer went around the town claiming that kids who played RPGs (specifically Dungeons & Dragons) were more prone to homosexuality, suicide, and/or devil worship. Since I was the leader, the Dungeon Master, of my small group of friends, the mantle fell upon me to talk to all the parents. I had to convince them that I was in control of the game, that the game wasn't in control of me. I had to convince them that we weren't feeling 'gay' or suicidal. During one session a mother asked to look at one of the rule books. The page fell open to a seductive, naked, female Succubus, on all fours. She had long black hair, bat wings, and horns. "Don't worry," I told her. "We aren't anywhere near ready to tackle one of those. We're only Level Fives." Needless to say those were awkward times.
In The Phoenix on the Sword (now in the public domain), Conan has to fight demons of his own. There is a literal ape-like demon which he kills with his phoenix-marked sword (hence the title), but the far more insidious demon is that of fickle public opinion. In a previous story, as penned by Robert E. Howard, Conan saves the people of Aquilonia from the tyrannical King Numedides by strangling him on his thrown. Conan becomes the new savior king, which should be a 'happily-ever-after' moment, if it weren't for the fact that he is much better with his sword than with politics. The people of Aquilonia begin to resent the fact that he is foreign-born and not of royal decent and eventually turn against him and try to stage a coupe.
So why do some people aspire to leadership positions when they are outsiders? Are most leaders outsiders? Does leadership involve giving up what you are good at, or do you spend time doing things you're not good at to become a leader? Why is leadership such a contradiction of love and hate? I'll never forget being told that Creative Directors are usually mediocre art directors (or copywriters). A great Art Director wants to direct art, not manage a bunch of people. I always thought I was a mediocre Art Director because I could imagine someone else doing my job better. Conan may have dreamt of becoming king one day, but once in power he came to regret it. I wonder if the same is true for Arnold Schwartzenegger*, now that he rules a disgruntled, bankrupt state under the Obama administration.
I wonder if the same was true for Charles Kingston. He was an outsider. He was a womanizing, bastard-making politician (who possibly fathered 6 'illegitimate' children) who also happened to win election after election in Southern Australia at the turn of the 19th century. He ruled as Premier for over six years, as the leader of the Liberal party (with the help of a United Labor Party coalition). The South Australia state elections of 1899 were his last, where he somehow managed to stay in power even though the Conservatives won 3 more seats. He was the first Premier to see the political benefits of giving woman the vote in his province (which might explain his lengthy rule), he sat on the committee that drafted Australia's constitution, and eventually served as Minister of Trade and Customs in the first federal Australian government.
Despite all of these achievements, Kingston was considered a bully, unable to negotiate, unable to compromise (before office he once challenged a foe to an old-fashioned gun duel). He resigned from cabinet in 1903 after an argument (that he didn't win) with the Prime Minister. He died five years later of a massive stroke. But that wasn't the end of it. One hundred years after his death, his body was exhumed in an effort to prove that an anonymous business man belonged on a 'revised' Kingston 'extended' family tree. This guy wanted a paternity test.
When I think of Kingston, I'm reminded of those pulpy painted paperback covers. The contradiction of a philandering politician granting woman the right to vote is oddly similar to a feminist reading fantasy novels whose covers depict barely-dressed, objectified women. Whether you're a barbarian king, a cheating politician, or a sci-fi mom, you can't help being inconsistent— you can't help being something different than how you wish to be perceived, or wanting something different than what you have. I used to say, "If someone calls you a hypocrite, thank them for the compliment," because contradiction is what makes us human beings.
*As an aside, Arnold may still become President of the United States some day. I know he is Austrian born, but he has also cultured tissue in the US to organically replace a heart valve. My theory is that eventually enough of this 'American' tissue will be used on his aging body to legally argue that his is 'mostly' born in the USA. Than he'll be eligible to run for the highest office.
There is no random. Random is a word used to describe unfathomable complexity. Unfathomable complexity is when there are so many variables that it becomes impossible for the human brain to create a linear path of cause and affect. Even giant super computers cannot create anything truly random. They use 'seeds' to create so-called random numbers. These seeds are used as a springboard to generate the random number in a range you specify. This seed is usually the current time of the mainframe's internal clock to a millionth of a second, or something that cannot be predicted effectively by the human mind (like atmospheric noise). It is disconcerting to realize that random number generators are not truly random. It is a similar feeling to be told that everything in the universe is pre-destined. I'm a fan of free will and choice, and that kind of thing. I even took a few philosophy classes. I wrote an essay once about Descartes wherein I (somewhat smugly) asked the question of whether or not my essay even existed. The night before I wrote the paper (it was due the following morning) I hadn't even read the text books. My plan was to skim Descartes' Discourse on the Method, where he famously declares, "I think, therefore I am", and write down some stuff as I went along. But there was a problem. In 1992 I was a chronic procrastinator (if you couldn't already tell by my plan to read a book AND write a 2,000 word essay the night before the assignment was due). I was also 20 years old. And my friends invited me to go out and see a band. And that meant a chance to drink too much, listen to deafening music, and complain about how all the beautiful women in the room were already taken. There was another problem: I had just cut my hair. Or rather my roommate had just cut my hair. Previously I had been growing it long in an effort to look like a boy-scarecrow version of Eddie Vedder. Pearl Jam was almost as hot as Nirvana in 1992. Speaking of Nirvana, I decided to try and die my hair a bright red, like Kurt Cobain often did right before a magazine cover shoot. But I didn't get the right dye, and instead of red hair it was more auburn. And instead of moving my personal identity needle from indie rock to alt rock, I ended up in the John Hughes spectrum: my hair flattened and curled inward slightly around my earlobes creating a perfect orange bob. My (former) friends called be Molly Ringwald all night.
When I finally got home from the club it was well after midnight. I was tired, three sheets to the wind, and demoralized, and had less than 8 hours to read the Descartes material and crank out 8 pages for the prof to read. My brilliant idea was to 'Descartes descartes', or in other words, question the existence of my essay, question the existence of this entire assignment. This wasn't a stretch, given my mental and physical state. By the end it was late morning and I was delirious. Without any sleep I stumbled off to class with my paper in hand. I sat through the lecture and actually fell asleep while I was answering a question from the professor. He must have thought I was on 'drugs'. Later that week the prof asked to speak with me in his personal hovel. I was certain he was going to pull an intervention, or tell me to get more sleep. Instead he told me I had written one of the best essays he'd ever read. He told me I showed a real depth of understanding of the material. He pulled out my paper and I could see a red A+ written in the top right corner. Maybe it wasn't red, but my memory certainly makes it so.
What I learned from that experience was that professors, like just about everybody, want to be entertained by a strong core idea. I also learned that people 'read into' what is written, they see and feel things that they want to see and feel (The Bible is a perfect example of this). It was a terrible lesson, actually. It led me to believe I could just breeze through the rest of my English/Philosophy degree without having to try. It lead me to believe that professors just wanted to hear their own voices echoed back at them. It led me to believe that higher education was a sham, and that you could rock and roll all night, party every day, and still game the system. I was wrong. I tried the same thing on my next philosophy paper (about Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason) and got a C.So back to random. What I like about (perceived) randomness is that it jars the brain. A brain always tries to make connections between things, even the most disparate things. Random events often precipitate myths and legends, or superstitions. For example, I'm sure it wasn't always 'true' that a black cat caused bad luck. At first it was just a random occurance: a man notices a dark cat passing by and then gets kicked by a passing donkey. He tells his friends at the pub, and someone else realized that a cat walked in front of him the same day the axle on his turnip cart broke. Suddenly this randomness has been transformed into a pattern by the human mind, and crossing paths with a black cat is a dire omen of rotten things to come. Did the cats cause this misfortune? I don't think so. But I can't prove it otherwise. Remember Chaos Theory? Edward Lorenz claimed that the flap of a butterfly wing could set a chain of meteorological events in motion that lead to altering the path of a hurricane. The point being that humans aren't very good at predicting complex systems, even if they are already determined. image by trackrecordI really didn't want this to devolve into another mediocre philosophy paper. What I want to say is that making connections between disparate, (seemingly) random things, is enormous fun for me. I occasionally fantasize about standing in front of an audience where my role is to tell stories based on random words or topics shouted out by the audience. I realize that most of the world does not share this fantasy (especially since 3 out of 4 people are afraid to even speak in public, never mind ad lib). But forcing connections, often between very different things, is what I do for a living. It is one of the most fundamental skills (after megalomaniacism) to make it in the creative advertising industry. A successful example is DDB's 1999 commercial where 5 friends use a 'random' word to sell Bud beer. Someone (Creative Director Vinny Warren) made a connection between a short film by Charles Stone the Third (called True) and American beer. They spawned the decade long catch phrase, "Whassup?"
Concerning the title of this entry: Randomness Is Next To Godliness refers to the long-held belief that all of this complex determinism we refer to as 'random' actually came from nothing. Science has dabbled with the notion that our universe spontaneously came into existence by the force of a powerful explosion. The chaotic randomness of 'nothing' allowed for infinite possibilities, including the Big Bang. Religion has dabbled with the notion that our universe spontaneously came into existence by the force of a powerful diety. The chaotic randomness of 'nothing' allowed for infinite possibilities put into order by an omnipotent god (or gods). From a religious perspective, the moment of Creation was the 'seed'. From a scientific perspective, the Big Bang was the 'seed' for the Randomness of Everything and the internal clock of the giant mainframe in the sky must have been set to 'zero'. When you know the seed, you can eventually make sense of the so-called randomness of the lottery number, or the slot machine, or perhaps even the entire Universe.
