Niblets and Quandary

I am instituting a new feature of my blog. At the beginning I’m going to write my big plans for the day or the thing I’m looking forward to for that day. Today’s is going to the dry cleaners after work. And because it’s me, I feel the need to put in a qualifier of “percent chance I’ll actually do it.” Today’s percent is 85.

I came across this quote on a blog. Now I didn’t write it, but it struck my funny chord so harmoniously (liked that extended metaphor there, din’cha?) that I wanted you to hear it too. “Build a man a fire and he’ll be warm for an hour. Light a man on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life.”
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Aside from the morbidity (and unless you’ve actually been hospitalized for burns), it’s pretty funny.

I finally saw "Walk the Line" last night. It was very good. You know what I think’s interesting though? There aren’t many good original movies out there nowadays. Studios put together these formulaic movies that they figure will sell, based on market research or whatever, but they don’t add anything worthwhile to society and are barely worth the 2 hours you spent watching them. Notice how every year, more and more of the critically-acclaimed movies are the biopic films, like "Walk the Line," "Ray," and "Catch Me If You Can." It’s like they don’t know how to write good stories anymore and so they have to look to other people's lives for their raw material. I think it shows how bad things have gotten. I don't know whether it's Hollywood's fault for making people prove their movies are going to sell before they get approval to make them, or whether worldwide creativity in general has taken a downward turn. Are we destined to hear the same old stories recycled again and again from this point on?

I worry about songs, too. More and more lately, the new song I hear on the radio sounds just like 5 other songs I’ve heard, some of them even sharing parts of the same melody. I'm sure the same cookie-cutter marketing philosophy is going on--people could make original stuff, but they don't because it doesn't sell.

But you know, in music, there may be other factors at work, too. I've heard Spanish songs that remind me of English songs, and vice versa. Now we know (or can hopefully assume, unless they're on the same record label) that the Spanish singer and the English singer don't listen to each other's music. So how did they both spontaneously come up with the same tune? I'm thinking they probably don't have many melodies to choose from anymore--there are only so many ways you can combine the 12 notes in the scale--and they both hit upon one they thought hadn't been done yet. Is this an indicator that musical doomsday is drawing near? When every possible melody will have been written, and there is nothing more to write that someone hasn't already done? What then?

They say that if you lock some monkeys in a room and give them a typewriter, eventually (after a near infinite amount of time), they’ll give you Shakespeare. The idea being that a random collection of letters every so often inadvertently spells a word, and therefore, if you wait even longer, you could get a sentence, or even a whole book! (By the way, trippy short story on this idea by Jorge Luis Borges, about a world whose only books were pages and pages of randomly-generated letter combinations.... People tried to extract meaning from the occasional coherent word or phrase, like "the combed thunderclap." Here's a link to it, if you’ve got 15 minutes to kill and want a little brain gymnastics (skip to the last 3 paragraphs for the best part, if you're short on time or your boss is coming).)


Am I making sense?


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What is soy milk? I don't get it. Soybeans are a vegetable. I get how you can get oil out of them, just like you can out of peanuts or corn, but milk? And for that matter, is tofu curdled soy milk, or just fermented soy? Rest assured, I will get to the bottom of this.