Today I learned that a group of chickadees are collectively known as a banditry.

-diggy

Hooooooooooly fucking shit. Alright, you’re gonna want to sit down for this…
…Oh, right. Well, fuck you smartass, stand up then. Wait! No, go to your car. Seriously, go to your car and look at the fuel gauge. You see that little triangle next to the gas icon? Today I learned that that little icon is always pointing in the direction of your gas cap. So if you’re ever borrowing or renting a car, and you don’t know what side to fill up on, just look at the triangle on your dashboard.
Yeah, how’s your mind? Kinda blown, right? Yeah!
Cool.
Yeah.
Alright, well if you need me, I’m gonna be in my room crying, so…

-diggy

I’m going to Vegas this weekend.

I don’t know anything about gambling, except that I like to do it and shouldn’t.  I play roulette, because it’s easy to understand.  Roulette isn’t a game of odds.  It’s a game of expectation management.  I like to spread out my bets so I lose slowly — I can bet a bunch on every spin, and there’s almost always money coming back to me (if not quite as much as I put on the table).

Pretty sad, huh?

Last time I was in Vegas, Casey and Lance hung close to the slot machines, which makes sense if you don’t really want to gamble much, just find a place where they will bring you free booze.

I hate slot machines because they are bright and loud and overstimulating and, after a while, you become a reverse ATM, just mindlessly handing out twenties to whatever catches your eye.

But last night I learned that slot machines are always tuned to C-major, which Bob Dylan once referred to as “the key of strength, but also the key of regret.”

Makes sense, when you think about it.  Imagine how awful it would be if they were all dischordant.

-andy

Last night, after watching L O S T, my brain was pretty fried, so this was about as much learning as I could handle, courtesy of Jorge Garcia’s blog:

You start with the cup cake.
First you peel away the paper. (Trust me it gets better.)
Then tear off the bottom portion of the cupcake.
Place the torn-off portion on top where the frosting is.
Give it a little squeeze.
And there you have it. Eat it like a cream-filled cake sandwich.

I ate a lot of asparagus last night, which I do from time to time because a) it’s delicious and b) it’s hilarious.

It’s a total mystery to me why people object to eating produce.  Nearly every fruit or vegetable has some property or potential that makes it well worth eating.  Come on, how could you not want to eat something that makes your pee smell funny?

And I’ve always wondered why there aren’t ads promoting these properties.  ASPARAGUS: YOUR PEE WILL SMELL FUNNY.  BRUSSELS SPROUTS: A GREAT EXCUSE TO EAT BACON.

Today I learned that it’s because vegetables are an undifferentiated commodity:

A single grower could promote its product but who looks for a specific brand of grape or tomato? (Some do, but not many.) The meat and dairy industries have solved the collective action problem so we have seen advertising for those products (”The other white meat.” “Got milk?”) The question is, why are some food industries able to organize and not others?

I know I should be learning that, hey, economics is an interesting discipline, but instead I’m thinking: Maybe what we need is a 527 — an independent expenditure.

“Citizens for Asparagus”?

-andy

Today I learned that if you peel a banana from the base to the stem (the opposite of how everyone does it), you don’t get any of the weird stringy parts that are usually left behind.  Apparently, this is how monkeys do it.  Monkeys are smarter than people.

-andy

After a fantastic piece linked to by gothamist, I started doing more research into the ties between Haitian Vodou and the Roman Catholic Church. I learned that upon being transplanted to the New World as slaves, practitioners of Vodou were obliged to “hide” their deities in the context of Catholicism, even going so far as to incorporate many Catholic rites and rituals into Vodou ceremonies. One of the quirks this causes is a sort amalgamation of religious figures, or saints and deities being perceived as manifestations of each other. Damballa for example, the Vodoun deity most closely associated with snakes, is often represented as a facet of St. Patrick (made famous for driving snakes out of Ireland).

This convocation of sorts is made easier by the inherent “eccentricities” of Catholicism; compared to most other forms of Christianity, Catholicism is practically rife with pagan rites and imagery. During it’s heyday of the first few centuries, Catholicism was incorporating every single religion into it’s Papal umbrella. A sort of melting-pot effect occurred, where the iconography of a thousand religions became all scrambled together into a hodge-podge of mutated sacred truths (e.g., Druidic worship of trees + celebration of the Winter Solstice + honoring the birth of Christ = Christmas. Don’t even get me started on Easter). It’s like a big religious Mash Up.

This actually happens all the time in religion in a process called Syncretism. Ideas from separate cultures or geographical locations get rolled into each other, either by conquest or Diaspora or just cultural evolution. I’m sure somewhere in there a sad argument can be made against losing the rich and diverse tapestry of mythologies to the ravages of time.  Or that it’s important to maintain sociological borders so that cultural heritage isn’t lost. But, like, fuck it. Between the internet, Bullfinch’s and Alan Moore comic books, that shit’s going to be in the collective subconscious forever, right? I say we combine everything into a Super-Religion that worships a Sun God that’s got a cat’s face and Anger for arms or something.  Oh, and lots of Mondays off.
I could use the extra sleep.

-diggy

Today I learned that there is a plant called the coyote tobacco (Nicotiana attenuata) that grows out west and flowers at night.  The hawkmoth, which is apparently a thing that exists, pollinates it, but leaves behind eggs, from whence come caterpillars that like to eat the plant.  Problem, yes?

Well, apparently:

N. attenuata strikes back in a novel way, according to scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology in Jena, Germany. As they describe in Current Biology, it shifts the time of its flowering to mornings and attracts a different pollinator, a hummingbird.

The plant decides to start flowering in the morning?  Why is a plant better at adapting than, I don’t know, me?

-andy

I had to do all sorts of research on something called the Wild West Shows, which were like big fake elaborate versions of what life was like during frontier times, 19th century America and all that bit. They were enormous productions which drew massive amounts of money during the early 20th century before hopping over to Europe and being even more popular. They had all the classics: Annie Oakley, Buffallo Bill, fake battles against the Indians, all that. And then the money started to dry up, and this massive production couldn’t sustain itself. There were dozens of them at one point, but they all essentially became extinct within 5 years of each other. So today I learned all that.

That happens all the time of course. A co-worker was lamenting how tough the internet’s been on the porn industry, while another co-worker talked about how small development companies doing tinier games with more online interactivity are killing the big game development and distribution companies. Whenever people talk about the death of industry, the seem to omit the countless others that are springing up all the time. The world’s in a constant turnover, and sometimes things have to end so other things can begin.

I don’t want people, anyone really, losing their jobs and livelihoods, but I also don’t want the policy of the great American Empire being decided by the corn industry. Isn’t it okay for some old things to die off, even if they are as awesome as Cowboys and Knife Tricks?

And that’s when I start watching Dr. Who again…

-diego

Yesterday the Barrs learned about the Terra Cotta Warriors of Qin Shi Huang, the First Emperor of China.

Listen, how about instead of me explaining to you what this is and why it’s cool, I just say that the figures you see above have been there for like 2300 years, and I saw them in a museum yesterday, and if you want to know more, you should read Wikipedia like everyone else.

Now, I don’t necessarily give too much of a shit about history.  I think our minds have been so saturated with pop-culture alternate universes of the past, present, and future that it doesn’t really make extra impact to know so much about a real one.

But it was still impressive to contemplate what a massive waste of time and effort went into the construction of 8,000 meticulously-crafted soldiers so they could be buried with the Emperor.  And as a simple feat of physics and chemistry, it is pretty cool that some of them are still around in pretty good condition for me to look at while trying not to punt obnoxious field-tripping children.

-andy