Reevaluation

I've been setting new records on the depth of pondering I've been engaged in. Topics like, "What is education?" or "Is our tendency to try to understand what a movie is about applied to our own lives erroneously?" or "If a person goes insane, then will he not distrust anyone who tells him he has gone insane? And if he believes them, then doesn't that also make him insane?"

This culminated this evening with a few essays. One essay was about a complicated theory that I appreciate involving the prediction of eventual artificial intelligence, and it becomes hostile a la The Terminator, and then invents a time machine to punish people today who were not enabling the eventual artificial intelligence. Follow me? Now, that scenario doesn't interest me as much as the theory I have that autistic misanthropes are currently controlling the path of mankind and it's happening irrevocably and nefariously. This whole notion occurred to me around 2003 when someone mentioned the memory capability of computers was increasing predictably and I thought, "How can that be predictable when it involves research? How can something like that be guaranteed?"
The answer is a generation of people who are the opposite of ponderous Oggy. Where I philosophize about the nature of memory, they are automatically researching data storage. Do they ponder their existence, or at least their chose course of study and development? It's a simple question. We have to accept they are indeed flesh and blood, and have free will, and even if they are high functioning autistic whose brains act like computers, they still have the facilities to ponder their existence and the ramifications of their acts. But my suspicion is that, no, they don't ponder anything except development of memory storage. Everything else is irrelevant. So, they are acting like a programmed T1000 from Skynet and polluted lakes in China are unavoidable, predestined. This is hard to swallow because my whole approach to teaching guitar initially involves programming...but that contradicts the goal which is free-form expression. Why not start with free-form expression?

More embroidery

Don't Get Around Much

It was few years back that I recorded this Duke tune and I still play it frequently when the dark clouds of nostalgia capture me, ghosts from the past, feathered promises drying like fillets of Labrador cod on Hemlock wood racks. If heartbreak lets me appreciate Duke Ellington on a deeper level, then that's a price I'll pay. I'm cheap about everything else, but it's only because morality clings to each dollar and it's a form of responsibility to boycott everything. Rains came to Guatemala and I am scratching my Mexican sunburn until it bleeds. I noodled around on this tune and decided I had some new things to say with it, my vocabulary of grief has grown. I missed the Saturday dance. I heard they crowded the floor. I couldn't bear it without you. I don't get around much anymore.

Lago Atitlan

Forlorn Oggy looks back at the van

I don't have much to say about this famous lake. It's certainly unusual, but again, like all of Guatemala, it's the kind of place one should take a bus to. Let someone else suffer the trials of the road. The obstacles driving El Conquistador there are a test of all my facilities and detract from any kind of enjoyment of the landscape. Even in this picture I'm looking back at the ridiculous grade I need to climb in order to get out of the lake area. On the drive back to Xela a truck full of concrete blocks tipped over and blocked 3 of 4 lanes with construction debris. Another car hit the side of the mountain and caused major problems. Many many vehicles were blocking the road at one point or another due to malfunctions. If one does not focus on the task then the vehicle is either going over a cliff or will run over a 2 foot pile of broken concrete blocks or over a person drunk and sleeping in the middle of the road, or possibly into a ditch or huge pot hole. There is no moment the vehicle is moving that it's a good idea to look around and enjoy the scenery. Lago Atitlan was especially dangerous to reach. Take a bus. Hell, I almost abandoned the van there and took the bus back to Xela. But my fate is tied to the van so I got back in and spent about $10 for every mile of the 50% grade I had to climb. Dogs died in the road, children fled. It's exhausting in every sense but was unavoidable for me to keep my van in Guatemala without being deported.

Artificial Intelligence?

I'm avoiding ice cream after some recent dental scares

Computers are pretty cool. They are artificial intelligence, right? I mean, technically? You input information and then they will sort that information depending on parameters or questions you ask. That's intelligent, right? It's more than I'm capable of on most days. Well, sometimes we have artificial so intelligent that we have to outsmart it to prove that we are not also artificial intelligence. Isn't that odd? It's like Skynet. You only have to do these word scrambles if you want to comment using a google approved identity. But I have an option you can comment anonymously and I think it works ok. I want honesty most of all and I feel I can delete anything without any loss of communication because you know you typed it and I had to read it in order to delete it so the point was made. But I felt it no longer belonged in the internet, but it's still in my head and that counts for something in this fucked up world.
I want to apologize to anyone who has to answer this kind of matching game: select all ice cream> What the fuck is this? to make a comment I have to prove I'm human and I'm going to do that by comparing pictures of food and other things and determine which are ice cream and which are cakes or platters of fruit? This really irked me but I have no control over it as the spam filter is automatic. Is every fucking thing I do going to involve jumping through hoops to prove I'm human?

Funk IS Back

great lyrics from Mark Ronson
"Ride to Harlem, Hollywood, Jackson, Mississippi
If we show up, we gon’ show out
Smoother than a fresh jar of skippy

I’m too hot (hot damn)
Called a police and a fireman
I’m too hot (hot damn)
Make a dragon wanna retire man"


When I first heard this Uptown Funk tune I thought to myself, "Did someone really cover Le Freak by Chic?"

Yes and No.

Because Funk is and will always be awesome artists are hoping a ride back to 1978 with rearrangements of classic funk tunes from Marvin Gaye and Chic. The performance by Bruno Mars also returns to mid career Michael Jackson, but I dig it. The same way The Rolling Stones modified Mississippi blues to their own devices, Bruno Mars is modernizing traditional funk. The modern arrangement is very good. I prefer it to the original because the horns in the modern version replaced the strings of the original and it's good.
I merely want to point out that recently the team who produced Blurred Lines got sued by Marvin Gaye's family for as much copyright infringement that is now being overlooked in the comparison of Uptown Funk and Le Freak. The producers actually reached a settlement with The Gap Band oversimilarities, but Uptown Funk is really a blending of several songs, layered on top of one another. It's an original rearrangement with cool lyrics. A song like this would have to be split so many ways that you might as well say it's the price of being in the music business, that whatever you do today may be rearranged down the line with much more success.
Even though Mars and crew still objectify women in the video when the lyrics aren't really related to objectifying women, I wish him well.

Love & Mercy