it’s time to get serious about links
Saturday 29 July 2006 | I like a cookie
With, you know, maybe just a cute picture or two. Such as this, from a survey I received yesterday in the post.
Well, the plates we collect mostly to put the fettuccini on; coins in order to do the laundry, I guess; and as for villages, it just got so they were taking over the house, the little woman started in complaining all the time, said it was too damn cluttered, and then there was the smell, because, you know, they have all those little barn animals, and of course, the tiny idiots and the drunks….
First up, the NYT obituary of Dika Newlin, possibly history’s only Schoenberg-trained pianist and avant garde composer who was also a working punk singer and horror-movie starlet when she died, aged 82:
Her latest incarnation was as leather-clad, bright-orange-haired punk rocker and occasional Elvis impersonator, belting out songs like “Love Songs for People Who Hate Each Other,” which she wrote herself. Her flamboyant image was not exactly dulled when she posed in her 70’s for a pinup calendar. [And will someone please tell me why, Why, WHY the NYT thinks it acceptable to use apostrophe to indicate a plural?!]
Dr. Newlin, who never married, leaves no immediate family members. She has a surviving cousin and was close to her cat, Spot. She once kept eight or more cats. Reporters noted that she slept on a mattress on the floor with a medieval suit of armor dangling above.
Dika was named by her mother after one of Sappho’s lovers, entered university at 12, got her doctorate from Columbia at 22, and dear God how come I’m not that freaking cool.
In lieu of consummate coolness, the above are some boxes o’ pain the Brujo and I spotted one night in a mall bookstore. They remind me of a running Letterman gag where he talks threateningly about opening up a big can of whup-ass. The Brujo thinks they’d make a great cover for a trade paperback—short stories of romantic angst, e.g., or perhaps self-help (such as the one I hope to write with Mandarin, about how to survive the weevils).
Next, a delightfully grisly New Mexican piece (I’m sure Dika would have loved it) in which the Albuquerque missing persons division apparently believes that the best way to deal with unidentified, unclaimed bodies is…to boil them?! Man, even in backward Santa Fe, we’ve heard of cremation.
After all efforts to ID the body have been played out, it goes to Wendy Potter’s office for “processing.” She is the forensic-anthropology assistant.
During “processing,” the body is stripped of its flesh and dismembered. The parts now are ready to be cooked.
“We put it in a big pot and boil it,” she says.
The pot, about 2 feet tall and 1 1/2 wide, is filled with water and Borax and put on the stove at a slow simmer to get rid of the remaining flesh. A fresh body—which is boiled 24/7—will take three or four weeks to cook down. One that has already started decomposing won’t take quite as long. [well thank goodness for that]
After the soup [ar ar] is done, the now-clean skeleton is put in a type of oven and dried. The pieces are later collected and put in a 3-foot-by-8-inch cardboard box. Extra-tall people need two boxes. [whereas the Brujo and I could probably fit comfortably in the same one]
Ms. Potter is clearly, I must grimly and sotto voce opine, a severely repressed but entirely unreformed serial killer.
Finally, the University of Arizona gives you the chance you’ve always wanted to play YHWH and smite the earth with a massive, life-obliterating projectile. Apparently someone at Arizona repented him that he had ever made man (”I wish I had never seen the ring!”). And even if no one else takes advantage of his applet, at least this journalist for space.com seems to have experienced an inordinate amount of glee exploring the possibilities:
Hurling big virtual rocks at the planet is admittedly kind of fun. I started by dropping a 9.3-mile-wide asteroid—the estimated size of the suspected dinosaur killer—on San Francisco.
The Bay Area doesn’t do so well.
The resulting crater, at 113 miles wide, pretty much tells the story. The entire metropolis vanishes faster than you can say where you left your heart. What isn’t consumed is knocked over in an earthquake of magnitude 10.2, bigger than any in recorded history. Heat from a scorching fireball would turn much of the state, and parts of others, into toast.
The quick end to the Bay Area turns out to be a blessing compared to what Los Angeles residents face.
About 10 seconds after impact, radiation from the fireball sears Southern California, igniting clothing and even plywood. Within two minutes the ground under Hollywood begins to shake. Weak brick structures crumble. Concrete irrigation ditches are damaged. Frame houses not properly bolted to their foundations are knocked off. Even tree branches fall.
And then it gets nasty.
Six minutes after impact, much of earth that used to be under San Francisco has soared high into the atmosphere and begins to fall on the City of Angels (and just about everywhere else). Ultimately, a blanket of ejected material nearly 18 feet deep is deposited in and around LA.
“If you’re close to the site of a major impact, some pretty bad things happen,” said Jay Melosh, an expert in impact cratering at the University of Arizona. […] “We could have put in some worse stuff, but it started getting grisly,” he told SPACE.com.
Gee, thanks for sparing us the horrifying apocalyptic details.
M. once reassured me, though, that it will be many millions of years still before the sun (which is a mass of / incandescent gas) engulfs the earth in its fiery death spasms, millions of years during which it’s entirely possible that life could evolve all over again (hopefully this time with some improved beta trials).
Or, as another great complexity scientist once said, Life finds a way. Anyway it does every few weeks in my driveway, before my landlord comes out with the hoe and chops it down again.
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