New York City – They Might Be Giants
The Only Living Boy in New York – Simon and Garfunkel
Hey all, sorry for no posting for the last week. I made an impromptu trip to New York which left me without computer access for several days. Normal service will resume this week, and in the meantime, here’s an assortment of random thoughts I’ve had over the past few days.
* I love Shakespeare, and there’s no better way to experience it than in the theater, especially if it’s Hamlet and the theater is in the middle of Central Park. Seeing Hamlet again, and watching the Doctor Who episode about him have both helped me to re-acquaint myself with the astonishment I often feel when pondering how so much genius could come from one man.
* I had never heard of Olafur Eliasson until yesterday, but I am now a huge fan. If you get the chance, definitely stop by the Museum of Modern Art before the end of the month to see his exhibition. It’s an absolutely stunning display of color, texture, and atmosphere.
* Am I the only one whose mind immediately turned to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy when I read about the way John McCain has tried to back away from his support for Social Security Privatization? Matt Yglesias puts it nicely: “he stridently denies that he wants to favor privatizing Social Security. He just favors policies that are the same as the policies that were called “privatizing Social Security” before the GOP found out that privatizing Social Security is unpopular.”
And the relevant section of the Guide is of course the scene from the radio version discussing the Lintilla problem:
The problem of the five hundred and seventy-eight thousand million Lintilla clones is very simple to explain, rather harder to solve. Cloning machines have, of course, been around for a long time and have proved very useful in reproducing particularly talented or attractive – in response to pressure from the Sirius Cybernetics marketing lobby – particularly gullible people and this was all very fine and splendid and only occasionally terribly confusing.
And then one particular cloning machine got badly out of sync with itself. Asked to produce six copies of a wonderfully talented and attractive girl called “Lintilla” for a Bratis-Vogen escort agency, whilst another machine was busy creating five-hundred lonely business executives in order to keep the laws of supply and demand operating profitably, the machine went to work.
Unfortunately, it malfunctioned in such a way that it got halfway through creating each new Lintilla before the previous one was actually completed. Which meant, quite simply, that it was impossible ever to turn it off – without committing murder. This problem taxed the minds, first of the cloning engineers, then of the priests, then of the letters page of ’The Sidereal Record Straigtener’, and finally of the lawyers, who experimented vainly with ways of redefining murder, re-evaluating it, and in the end, even respelling it, in the hope that no one would notice.
* Finally, I spent a lot of time while in New York making a mental list of all the places mentioned in They Might Be Giants’ “New York City” and checking items off as I visited them. Is that weird? I think it’s probably weird.