World Music “Olympics”

Yeah it wouldn’t be called the Olympics because that would be (for lack of a desire to be more articulate) stupid.

Somewhere between competition and pageant, though neither of those are at all appropriate either. I’m sure there is some old retired half-dead word out there that would serve admirably in this role. That’s the thing about words, a lot of times the older and deader the words are, the more useful they become.

What these not-Olympics would be is a contemporaneous gathering of the greatest musicians in the world from each country. It would happen concurrently and uh co-spatially with each of the regular olympics but would be separate from the IOC.

The basic thought behind this came while thinking about the athletic Olympics and the idea that this gigantic world interaction really doesn’t really provide any real permanent benefit. All we get out of it, at least from the content of the actual Olympic events, is who is better than who at what. I think that that is a actually a worthwhile thing and not as dumb as it sounds. But I also can see a situation in which each country, each culture, puts forth its most striking examples of its own music, its own rhythmic interpretation of life, where, when it was over, we would not only have seen who was the best but we could take the best home with us; it could enlarge the world and open it in a way that the long jump never could.

I think it should be a competition of sorts because nationalism and pride and a desire to be the very best are (at least in this format) good and useful and even great things. I’m not sure how the categories would be set-up or how each country would decide which musicians would be sent but something could certainly be worked out.

The Double Barrel Toilet

A messy subject, indeed.
But an ubiquitous one.

The function of the modern flushing toilet, at the least the western* variety I am familiar with, is to remove solid waste; yes liquid waste as well, but that is rather easy to do, which is largely the point of this post(at least on a practical level).

*supposedly the western toilet’s Asian and particularly Japanese counterparts are some sort of highly advanced precursors to the singularity.

My point about the distinction between solidish waste and its liquid counterpart is that the need to use water in disposing of the former is non-existent in the latter. Flushing liquid is kind of a stupid thing to do. And yet the modern toilet makes no distinction between the two tasks. According to the (at the time) drought conscious parents of a childhood friend of mine:

“if its brown flush it down, if it’s yellow let it mellow”

It’s a nice enough idea in theory (or maybe it isn’t) but in practice it comes up short. Coming across a bowl full of yellow, either of my own doing or someone else’s, generally tends to cure me of any notions I might have entertained about my own meager commitment to the cause. The fact however remains that at a systems level, flushing water is dumb, so dumb in fact that I am writing a blog post about it.

What is to be done?

Half the problem could be solved (the male half) by running a direct pipe from the outlet to a small and separate receptacle on the side of the toilet. This could theoretically be achieved with nothing more than some PVC pipe and half a milk carton, though I would imagine most normal people would want something a bit more civilized; maybe you could paint flowers on it. Like I said though, this would only solve half the unnecessary flushing problem. It might be however that female liquid flushing, involving at least one solid in the form of toilet paper, along with sundry other possible rituals and procedures to which I will not pretend any useful knowledge of, may simply have to just follow the standard flush method entirely.

Even if we as one big happy global village were to just cut down on all the male miteration related flushing we could significantly reduce the wastewater throughput in the world today.

I don’t really see the separate urinal catching on in any form however, milk carton or no, mostly because the separate urinal has not caught on, at least in the private restrooms I am mostly talking about.

What all this eloquence is supposed to be getting at is my brilliant idea of some sort of hybrid bowl design. I don’t really have an exact picture in my mind of how this would be built but I think it could be done in a doable way. The concept I like the most is to just have a small tube-like structure suspended above the waterline that you could pee into, you would miss a lot but an acceptable majority of the payload would reach its target and the collateral damage would only consist of hitting the regular part of the bowl. The problem would come in playing defense. One would imagine that such a structure would be rather highly susceptible to acts of intestinal violence and the ensuing cleanup would likely be more unpleasant than the free market would bear. Maybe a much better solution would….hmm..that might actually work and be economically feasible………..Maybe I should put it on my ridiculously long list of things to patent.

This site was created largely to be a reprieve from my habit of constantly writing stuff down that I should patent but that won’t ever patent(or do anything else with whatsoever). Not that patents are even good or worthwhile. I think I need write out my opinions on this subject so I know what I actually think.

as a side note: The word miteration apparently does not exist, or if it does it is spelled in some bizarre manner beyond the capacity of Google to intuit. Did the Coen brothers just flat out make up an entire word? I found a small number of people, myself now included, that have used the word but none of those people were dictionaries or, by most appearances, remotely associated with anything of a dictionary like nature.
(edit: the word is micturate apparantly, a la the comment section, I don’t eally feel like changing this though)

And now for some bizarre reason, I suddenly have a bloody nose. I feel like I’m ten years old.

Crevassemobiles

I was just reading an article about scientists in the antarctic and their snowmobiling into crevasses and how they would really rather not do that. My first thought, for whatever reason, was to attach large longitudinal poles to the snowmobiles that would act as a sort of bridge or something like a shish-ka-bob to suspend the unfortunate traveler above the yawning chasm’s gaping maw. My second thought was to post this on my little repository of things that I will never actually do or make but will at least have thoroughly discussed with myself.

The Rightness of Things

The absence of artifice, water in a net, nearness to the flame, the love of god, earnesty.

Fan Cycle-Switches Bitches (itches)(Stitches)

Why:
You have to reach up and pull the draw cord every time you want to turn the fan on/off. Also you have to cycle through all the speed levels to do so and you are never really quite sure if you have actually turned the fan off until it stops spinning. Also also, fans can often be in awkward places like over dinner tables or beds, making reaching them for the 5-15 seconds it takes to turn one off ,if you don’t have the speed-cycle and position memorized, even more irritating. Another annoying and even pretend dangerous situation is when the room is completely dark but the fan is on, which means that the fan light is turned off at the chain, so in order to turn on the light so you can do things, such as see, you have to sort of slowly wave your hand near where the fan should be, hoping you find the chain before you find the orbiting blades of death; also you feel like an idiot when you are doing this.(this might actually be the worst paragraph I have ever written)

To “fix” this problem it would be possible to have a relay switch wired into the fan, that reacts to the presence and absence of current in the following pattern:

On once- just lights
off-all off
on twice- lights and fan
off twice- fan on, lights off
etcetera

The downside of this is that the process of simply turning on the lights would become slightly more complicated which, depending on usage habits, may be more of a burden than its worth. One possibility would be an override switch/dangle-chain that could be activated during the summer when the fan will be used frequently and disabled in other seasons.

Of course you could just wire in a separate switch for the fan independent of the lights, but that would require wiring in a separate switch independent of the lights.

Wempires

Another slight digression but I would just like to call dibs on the word Wempire

I made it up(as far as I know) and it’s hilarious and or mildly amusing.

It is a portmanteau of web and empire, original I know, but unlike Blog which might be the most unfortunate neologism of the 21st century thus far, Wempire is both sonically and conceptually ascendant. For some reason Wempire makes me think of Julius Caesar drinking out of a sippy-cup.
Wempires can best be thought of as vast tracts of virtual real estate, blog-facebook-myspace conglomerates, seas of link farms, porn kingdoms, a slightly derisive vision of the electronic frontiers, ripe for the taking; available to the rough and ready, the hardy adventurers who are willing to step outside of their digital doorsteps and claim their lives as their own; the viciers of the digital age. I will stop now.

Schpam

Like an email service specifically for spam.

Brilliant.

Im not kidding….

(elaboration later perhaps)

Signs of Life

This particular post is not delusional at all really. Maybe a little overly specific on a relatively minor and rare problem. Nevertheless it needs to be posted somewhere.

Basically if you have ever read stories of death by crowd you know the value of what I am going to propose – Eye witness accounts of being forced beyond ones control to step over or on lifeless or even still living bodies, completely unable to do anything about it other than try your damnedest to not slip down.

Now what if there was a universal distress signal that consisted of a hand straight up in the air and shaped into an easily recognizable sign. Instead of having no recourse to the body underfoot problem aside from trying to yell over likely very loud music or just more loud yelling, someone could raise their distress signal instead. Almost certainly the people near you who also have encountered the injured/dead/dying person would also raise their hands and now you have a small group of people who at the very least demand the attention of the people around them and can presumably both offer the inch or 2 of space they have to offer which maybe is enough to let the person get back up or they can be informed of the problem and also raise their hands garnering the attention and aid of their neighbors as well. Reasonably quickly a decent group of people could have their hands up and, given a grave enough emergency and a correspondingly large amount of hands in the air, the band if there is one would likely take notice and could stop playing and could mediate through the PA system. The other scenario would be that a single person needing help or a group containing an injured person could face away from the band or source of the crowds attention and use the hand signal to let people know that they need to be let out of the crowd. This second scenario would actually be helpful in a lot of ways to the much more dire first because it would be much more common and therefore its more frequent use would familiarize people with the meaning of the hand signal.

The one potential flaw of this system would be that the hand sign gets used to the point of meaninglessness. I don’t really see this happening but it is possible and one defense against that would be to make the signal awkward and lame enough that people would not really want to use it except in an emergency. The other tool to help avoid this is to explicitly promote this as meaning an injury has occurred. Not I’m sick or my boyfriend is ignoring me and I want to leave but that there is something important going on and it demands your attention and respect. The other flaw I guess would be that not enough people know what the sign means but, considering the amount of money insurers and concert promoters have staked to people not dieing at their shows, not to mention the bands who have actually had the terrible experience of this happening during a performance, one can imagine that there is a large group of well funded and listened to people who would be very happy to see something like this gain cultural viability.

My Proposal is that it should be the 3 main fingers splayed outward with the thumb holding the pinky finger down. This configuration is easily recognizable from a distance, can be illustrated well on posters, is uncomfortable and dumb enough looking that its flagrant use would likely be restrained. Also it, somewhat cornily but helpfully, is actually a reverse OK sign which could help in the public education and word spreading.

Of course there are many other situation besides in large crowds where a non-verbal readily available and easily seen and understood distress signal could be useful, so yeah.

Hand signal to indicate an injury in a crowd

Bed Straws

Straws – giant flexible straws long enough to reach from the floor to the mouth of a person lying peacefully but thirstily in bed.

(this submission was inspired by a fantastic hangover)

The reason this would be an improvement over…say…a cup, is that in order drink from a cup one has to sit up, and in order to sit up one has to no longer be laying down; a tiresome and annoying procedure that is the exact opposite of what one is lying in a bed for in the first place.

Case Closed.

Whether or not the effort that would go into both the use and maintenance of a giant hangover straw would effectively counterbalance the above mentioned value of such a system is largely irrelevant. Any arguments to the contrary should reference the the fact that I do in fact have a fantastic hangover and subsequently am not listening.

Spaceballs

Could giant extra-geotic helio-orbital spaceballs be the key to mankind’s collective future? Find out in the next installment of…this paragraph. Really the answer is almost certainly no, however this is the Delusional Grandeur Repository so according to the iteration of reality which is this repository..the answer is yes, yes giant spaceballs will be the endothermic and ultimately exothermic jesus christ’s of energy translocation systems.

So here goes: Postulates of the Spaceballs Hypothesis:

-The sun is really hot. Like really really hot.

-energy is useful

-Our continued oxidation of the enormous amount of the terrestrial carbon fixed through photosynthesis over millions of years of life on this planet is for one thing, finite and ultimately terminal, for another thing, slowly skewing the equilibrium of the CO2 \=\ O2 +Cxx cycle, not only altering the otherwise fairly stable climate that resulted from that equilibrium but also returning the free oxygen levels (which we need to.. you know..live) back to primordial levels ( or 0).

-its not really all that hard to make energy stay where you put it

Soo..the only sane logical conclusion one could draw from the above arguments is that we should make giant space rocks and hurl them in a very near and highly elliptical orbit around the sun, and then harvest them for all the sunshine they soaked up when they get back.

Q)How would this work?

A) it wouldn’t
A2) the crux of the idea is that when you add energy to something it often stays that way till you do something else to it. If you carry a G.I. Joe with a napkin based parachute up the stairs, the energy you imparted to your GI Joe by carrying it up the stairs remains stored until you remove the impediment to the energy release by exchanging your hand for an open window. The same principle works with materials or more specifically molecules, if you add energy to certain molecules in certain ways, those molecules will rearrange themselves in a higher energy or lower entropy state and will stay in that state until some specific action is taken to release that energy(keyphrase: activation energy). This is a basic principle behind batteries, not to mention photosynthesis and respiration. The adjective for this type of chemical action is endothermic i.e. you add heat(or really any type of energy despite the latin) you get something new that’s chock full o’ energy. Because this is possible and there are a number of molecules which this process can successfully occur, one might imagine that if one made a giant spaceball consisting of this type molecules and one then hurled said giant spaceball around the sun, when it came back one would have done the equivalent of turning worthless co2 into very energetic and useful 02 and Cx; but likely with different atoms than carbon and oxygen.

If this system was earth based, it would certainly not work, however a space based facility might be able to pull this off, assuming the materials could be harvested from nearby low gravity asteroids. The best possible form of this would be to be able to simply divert an entire asteroid with the correct composition, into a near sun orbit, and just use that instead.(this just keeps getting stupider and stupider). I really have no idea what the chemical composition of something like this would look like but it totally seems like this should probably work.

Thats pretty much it…