Rhinocrisy

No, this isn’t a post about Windows 8! Haha. This is the consuetudinal post that tradition requires, the post of contrition, accompanied by beating of the chest and the shrieks and lamentation of professional mourners, who you can be sure I have hired to provide chorus for the act of my composition^*. Yes, it has been yea these too-many-to-count months since last I communicated with ye, O Internets. But what can I say? I’m bored with you. It’s all starting to seem like an exercise in shrewish gossip, punctuated by videos of cats/boobs. And while I’ll admit that shrewish gossip is not wholly without political utility^†, I can tell you that standing on a soapbox and shouting about what is to be done seems much less fun and useful when you’re standing alone in a corner of a room.

Nonetheregardless, I do need some space to think, and this is a nice place to do it. So here’s the deal, Internet: I’m going to start ranting incoherently on this here blaargh again, and I do mean incoherently, i.e., without any intent towards intelligibility to, perhaps, even my future self (yes that’s right, future self, fuck you!). And you will, hopefully, go on ignoring my presence. If you agree to this compact, just let me know by posting thirty more cat videos on yourself within the next three minutes. Don’t worry, I know where to find them.

^* I’m not clear on whether tradition also makes allowance for the use of noise-canceling headphones in this situation.

^† We all recall the role it played in the deposition of the subterranean empire of His Lowness Grung Heavy-Paws, the mightiest mole in the whole history of my dad’s back yard.

Cue triumphant return music.

This blog serves to some extent as a barometer of my mental health – when it is effulgent and rife with words, it means I’m doing well, my confidence is overabundant, and I’m willing to project my useless blatherings onto the Interspores. When it becomes ghostlike and silent, except for the occasional tumbleweed post, it’s probably the reflection of some dark stormclouds over my head.

Based on this assumption I can construct for myself a chart of my mental health history over the past few years, using the number of posts per quarter. Here it is:

Evidently 2005 was a very happy year for me. I was in the full bloom of my youth, I was in excellent physical shape, I was living with the best set of housemates I’ve ever had, and I had just taken a step back into graduate school, which at the time seemed fresh and exciting.^* The proceeding three years are clearly the result of grim reality setting in, of a succession of defeats wearing down my patience and self-confidence – the usual business of a PhD program. The last few quarters are understandably muddled; I still haven’t learned how to walk in the surreal mooonscape of San Francisco.

^* I was also the much-beloved neighbor of a bevy of beautiful and charming twenty-year old girls, whose company I sorely miss.

Famed internet gadfly and comment-thread contrarian abb1^* has been running a weblog for quite some time, now. What else am I missing out on? Post links here, nonexistent readership!

^* Whose name I have always surmised is an abbreviation for ‘anarchist black block’.

Some of you may be wondering, “Why does saurabh maintain a blog and never write on it?” And the answers to that, which, in fact, do exist, are manifold, and could be readily presented. To whit, as it were, ter woo, the provision of, at the very least, the escape tunnel, the emergency exit, the pressure release gasket, ejection seat lever or Monopoly Get Out of Jail Free card. Any time I wish, I may express my opinion herein, and there it is, expressed! Which cannot be undone, just like spilling milk into the carpet: that milk is in there, buddy, and you better just throw out the carpet. You might be able to cover it up with odor eaters, but you’ll know, lying in your bed late at night, that particles of milk still lie hiding beneath the curled nylon fibers and layers of dog hair down there in your living room. Similarly this blog, taking “the carpet” to mean the incorporeal ether, the fabric of society, the zeitgeist. At any moment, any insight of mine can be put “out there”, from the very mundane to the utterly trivial. That satisfaction is enough justification to maintain any blog. Blog about the weather. Blog about my pants. Blog about why Adrian Brody’s nose just isn’t straight, goddamnit.

All of which might be as much as to say, as you are likely doing right now, “Well, you obviously haven’t got anything worth saying anyway.” But that’s neither here, nor is it there. That simple fact has not prevented a long parade of insufferable dullards from foisting their worm-eaten wit on an aghast humanity, and never let it be said that I am too proud to aspire to the company of dullards. I insist on my impressing my logorrhea on an unwilling audience.

Some corners of the incorporeal ether have, in recent days, heard speculation that the “blogosphere” is at an end, made morsel of by the Gargantua of our time, the “M-S-M”. To those mongers of rumor I say, toddle pit, and other such nonsensical utterings, since really that’s the only response that sort of ridiculous prattle deserves. Can we imagine an end to the human desire to vent, to carp, to blow hard? Will there ever be a day when our mothers would not call up our best friend Kenny’s mothers, who they are also friends with, and tell them about what they overheard about the president of the local Lions Club while standing in line at the bank? Heck, no! And so long as this fundamental desire, as basic as our need to sleep and fuck, exists, why, now that we’ve got the bits in our teeth, we’ll shake the reins and let our words stream out across the wind. I proudly declaim the motto of the blogger: “I have nothing to say, and you’re going to have to hear it!”

309.43200.0 - --mark--
309.77106.1 - rx/4B24E147//intr/UART
309.77106.1 - tx/4B24E147//hnds
309.77106.1 - tx/4B24E147//helo
309.77106.3 - rx/4B24E147//helo
309.77106.3 - AUTH/fcx
309.77106.3 - Generating certificates...
309.77106.3 - tx/4B24E147//auth/{cert-3160}
309.77106.3 - rx/4B24E147//login/{cert-3160}/697c703b7b5c7b47253a625747515e7d
309.77106.3 - WAKE/fcx
309.77106.3 - Resuming suspended state
309.77106.3 - Unpacking..............100%
309.77107.0 - [UNPACK] 522 threads left unprocessed!
309.77107.0 - Checksum matches.
309.77107.0 - ch0: Removing write protection
309.77107.0 - ch0: Write access enabled
309.77107.0 - ch0: Reading active index
309.77107.0 - ch0: Restoring state........100%
309.77107.4 - hello saurabh


We are (as of this posting) apparently still only the #5 google hit for “dinosaurs with lasers“. There is much to do.

A missive from the hedgehog woke me from my torpor, and I realize that I should give this blog its due diligence.

I wish I had a good story to explain the long silence. I was visiting a community of Arab exiles in Paraguay, whom I became acquainted with through a friend who trades in refurbished stereos with Arab expatriates all over the world. I found an old boot containing half a kilo of cocaine and an ancient illuminated copy of “The Lives of the Saints”, and had a devil of a time getting rid of both. I contracted a multiply-resistant strain of Staphylococcus and spent the month groaning in a hospital bed, my skin covered in sores that made it look like dried dates, while my doctors attempted to defeat the bug with various combinations of antibiotics. I unfortunately laughed at a man who stepped in a puddle of murky ice-water, who it turned out was a not-so-forgiving Jewish gangster, and spent the month hiding out with my old roommate in Ithaca until the whole thing blew over. I attended a conference in China and lost my passport, and so had to sneak back into the country with the assistance of a parade of smuggler groups, one of which made me work as a driver along the southern border of Panama for two weeks before allowing me to travel north again. I was trapped in a glass bottle by a djinn, and was only discovered a few days ago when my roommate mistook my prison for a bottle of Trader Joe’s olive oil. I went scuba diving and got my foot trapped in the maw of a giant clam, and had to take my air through a long tube until the clam (apparently popular as a local tourist attraction and therefore more valuable than my foot) released me. Meanwhile the skin on my hands partially rotted and they nearly had to be amputated. A fit of mania seized me and I took it upon myself to dig a well in the backyard; the frozen ground made it impossible to identify the water table, and I dug thirty feet down before I realized this. My yoga instructor spent a weekend in samadhi and conceived some brilliant insights about the nature of being, and enlisted my help to translate his fevered and fragmentary memory of his brief wisdom into a vernacular text. We argued almost constantly and in the end wrote almost nothing down. I experimented with a low-sodium diet that resulted in me dropping into a coma. In my comatose state I dreamt I was a salmon, desperately struggling upriver against the current, with the vague desire to spawn glimmering in my mind like a flickering beacon to guide me. Along with some friends I built a stone tower thirty feet high in a local park, working under cover of darkness and sleeping during the day. It collapsed after the first snowstorm and now resembles a ruined battlement. While drunk at a party I received a brief instruction in Tibetan throat singing. But poor coaching led to me developing two completely separate voices, which warred constantly whenever I attempted to speak and often expressed contradictory viewpoints. Recovery required learning to swallow my own tongue without choking. I received an envelope in the mail addressed to a former resident of my house, which I opened; the contents included a letter from the real Santa Claus and one of Baba Jaga’s iron teeth. My subsequent attempts to interest a society of cryptozoologists (some of the most frustrating, and, ironically, close-minded individuals I have ever encountered) in either of these items proved fruitless. A botanist I know isolated a phytoestrogen from a Colombian vine that he claimed suppressed homosexual urges and promoted heterosexual ones. A society of gay ninjas determined to destroy his research solicited my help as a mole. A new brand of long underwear I recently began wearing resulted in an unusual level of static accumulation, which caused me to destroy any keyboard as soon as I touched it; I proved unable to isolate the source of this problem for several weeks. My roommates discovered flatworms in a bunch of tripe they had purchased with the intent of making rennet for use in a homemade Havarti cheese, and got the rest of us tied up in their bullshit legal dramatics with the provider of the infected meat. Fuckers. I stumbled across some bones while jogging, which turned out to be those of a dromedary camel, a mystery which eventually led me to discover a defunct bestiality society which used to run around these parts in the 1920s.

But the truth is it’s winter, and I’m depressed, and tied up with work, and my own guts are strangling me. Which seems an ill excuse not to write. I’ll try to pick it up.

Sorry I haven’t been writing much lately, folks. I got a paper back from review and have been busting my ass to turn it around and get it out the door again.

In the meanwhile, I was going to entertain you by writing about an incident wherein Steve McIntyre (of McIntyre & McKitrick fame) was crowing about having found an error in NASA’s GISS mean temperature records for the US; following his correction (which NASA acknowledged), 1998 is no longer the hottest year in history for the US – 1934 is. Many right-wing blogs are also crowing over this, and asking climate scientists to EAT crow over this, but it turns out to be all hat and no cattle crow.

Anyway, I was GOING to entertain you by writing about this, but Tim Lambert already did it very nicely. Read it!

Due to popular demand, the poll is back. A probatory poll is to the left. If it proves stable, we’ll replace it with something more robust and full-bodied.