Blog That!

There are some things I read on the Internet that just scream for a blog post.

Like this: scientists can now un-boil a hard-boiled egg. You can do it too, and it takes only minutes. You need two things: one, a chemical called urea, and two, a vortex fluid machine. You can buy urea at a fertilizer store, and as for the vortex fluid machine – you may already have one gathering dust in your attic. Go up there and look for it. It’s probably in a box labeled Ronco®.

The scientists claim to have un-boiled some egg whites, but they haven’t un-boiled any yolks, yet. They said that un-boiling the yolks would be easy to do, but they just don’t have any need for un-boiled yolks at the present time.

The scientists also said that they can un-cook a chicken. That’s really handy to know. I can’t tell you all the times I wanted raw chicken and all the store had was rotisserie-cooked chickens. Science is amazing.

There are some other interesting things in the news. For instance, underwater pole-dancing. Women dress up in billowy gowns or bikinis – depending on their mood, I suppose – and dance on a pole … underwater. Don’t ask me why. And there’s a carnival festival in a small Spanish village in which men throw flour on each other. What fun! (You see what happens when the cable TV goes out?)

I’d like to write more, but right now I have to go up to the attic and dig out my old vortex fluid machine. I can’t wait to un-cook something.

Winter Storm

For a long time after I awoke, I lay in darkness and listened to sleet clinking on the windowpane above the bed’s headboard. I knew sleep was out of the question for the remainder of the night, so at 4 AM I got out of bed and looked outside. The window awnings were growing icicles. I sat down at my computer and checked the weather radar. It looked like a child’s coloring book, with different colors for rain, sleet, and snow. The worst of the storm was yet to come. Ice was accumulating on my sidewalk and on the street. Before the morning is over, cars and roads and tree limbs will be glazed in ice. There will be numerous automobile accidents around town and on the highways. Some tree limbs may come down, taking power lines with them. Some schools will open late; some won’t open at all. It’s a good day to be inside.

A few hours later, a gray sky dawned on central Virginia’s wintry landscape. Every blade of grass, every leaf, is encased in its own cocoon of ice. And yet, as winter storms go, this first one of the new year is not a bad one. It won’t knock out power for days. It will breeze into town, hang around for a few hours, and move on. It will leave few traces it was here, except for icicles, bent sheet metal on unlucky automobiles, and perhaps a few scrapes and bruises from falls on icy pavement.

The fact that this will be a relatively mild event does not stop local TV meteorologists from preempting network programming in order to drone on endlessly about dangerous driving conditions, nor will it deter reporters from going on the roads to get videotape of traffic and – if they’re lucky – an accident to show their viewers. I have to ask: do we really need talking heads on TV to tell us it’s icy out there? Won’t finding our cars covered in ice be a tip-off? Don’t people know icy roads may be slippery? Do we need to be told to be careful? It seems kind of … patronizing. I half expect to hear this over the radio some cold morning: “All right campers, rise and shine, and don’t forget your booties ‘cause it’s cold out there!” * But, I suppose they mean well.

Pentatonix Revisited

It’s 7:20 AM and I just finished breakfast: an omelet stuffed with sautéed mushrooms, onions, and cheese. (Ketchup is optional.) It was pretty tasty. Now I can get back to this blog post, which I may or may not finish.

I started writing it yesterday morning. The temperature was 37°F and a cold rain was falling. In the pre-dawn darkness, it seemed like a good time to write.

So I wrote a few paragraphs and thought this is no good and quit. Now it’s 24 hours later. The temperature is 37°F and a cold rain is falling. Mother Nature is in a rut. This may be a good time to write a couple more paragraphs.

I wanted to write about the a cappella singing group Pentatonix (a.k.a. PTX). But there has been so much written about them in the past two years, it may be pointless. So I’ll just hit the high spots and leave the reader to follow up if she/he feels so inclined.

I’ve written about many musicians and bands whose work I’ve enjoyed. The first time I mentioned Pentatonix on this blog was in November, 2013. They’ve exploded in popularity since then.

The group was formed in 2011 when three friends decided to drop out of college in hopes of winning the NBC a cappella show The Sing-Off. Those three were Mitch Grassi, Scott Hoying, and Kirstin “Kirstie” Maldonado. Through friends, they found their basso profondo, Avriel "Avi" Kaplan. Then they added Kevin Olusola, a beat-boxing musician they found on YouTube.

The group went on to win the third season of The Sing-Off, receiving $200,000 and a recording contract. They have a YouTube channel with more than 7 million subscribers and more than 785 million views. Their YouTube channel is the 12th most subscribed-to music channel and the 42nd most subscribed channel overall.

In 2012 the group released PTX, Volume 1 followed by PTXmas. Their third release, PTX Vol. II, debuted at number 1 on Billboard’s Independent Albums chart and number 10 on the Billboard 200. In 2014 the group released PTX, Vol. III and two full-length compilation albums. Their second holiday release, That’s Christmas to Me, was certified gold by the RIAA and platinum on December 24,  2014, and became the highest-charting holiday album by a group since 1962 and the fourth best selling album in the United States in 2014.

By now, January 2015, they’ve released 5 albums which all charted in the top 20 of the Billboard 200. They had the number one Christmas album in 2014. Their first national tour in fall of 2012 was sold out in all 36 cities. Their second national tour was in 2013. In 2014 they toured the United States, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, and South East Asia. They performed on Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin’ Eve with Ryan Seacrest 2015 (video) and on the final episode of Wetten Dass? (video), a long-running entertainment show in Germany. They participated in the 2014 Macy’s Thanksgiving Parade, in NBC’s Christmas in Rockefeller Center special (video), in the season 5 holiday special of The Sing-Off (video) and in The Kennedy Center Honors award presentation (video) for Tom Hanks. They were presenters (video) at the 2014 American Music Awards. They’ve won awards from YouTube Music Awards for the song “Radioactive” with Lindsey Stirling and from the Streamy Awards for Best Cover Song, “Daft Punk.” They’ve been nominated for a Grammy Award, which is pending.

You don’t come this far, this fast, unless you are something special, and Pentatonix is (Pentatonix are, if you’re British). They are hugely talented and seem to have the perfect mix of voices. They make distinctive arrangements of the songs they cover and they produce good original material. When I am listening to them, I have to remind myself that five young voices are making all the sounds I am hearing. A cappella: no instruments, just vocal cords.

There are plenty of articles about Pentatonix on the Web, and there are plenty of YouTube videos that show the group performing. I’ll suggest a few clips here that will give you a flavor of their music.

White Winter Hymnal

On My Way Home

“Daft Punk” Mix

La La Latch

Say Something

Mary, Did You Know

I Need Your Love

I hope you enjoy the music. And why not live a little dangerously and try some ketchup on your eggs?

The Virginia Way

Bob McDonnell, the ex-McGovernator of Virginia, who was convicted of taking bribes, was just sentenced to two years in lockup but still claims he's innocent. He says he did nothing that previous Virginia governors didn't do. They all took bribes.  I mean gifts, dang it. In return for, you know ... favors. It has a name: the Virginia Way.

But wait, if you give money to a state official in return for a favor, isn't that bribery?
No, are you stupid? I just told you, it's called the Virginia Way.

Point being, there are no Virginia laws against bribing state officials. Ya hear that? No laws against bribery. What is plainly illegal in other states is just called the Virginia Way here. That's how we do business. We don't need no stinkin' ethics laws. You scratch my back, I scratch yours. One hand washes the other. It's the Virginia Way.

Take that, you other states, with your high-and-mighty anti-bribery laws and limits on gifts. In Virginia, we're above all that.

Whale Life

Did you know that bowhead whales can live for 200 years and they rarely get cancer? It’s true. Something in their DNA repairs age-related damage, suppresses tumors, and allows them to live a long life. To find out how their genes accomplish this, scientists recently crossed a bowhead whale with a mouse. It’s true. Read about it here. The only downside, scientists report, is feeding this whale-mouse 5000 pounds of cheese every day.

It’s all true. You read it on the Internet.

Whales have it pretty easy most of the time, except when they’re being harpooned by humans or being eaten alive by killer whales, which are really not whales at all, but rather really big dolphins. A whale can dine on seafood simply by swimming with its mouth open. Humans aren’t supposed to eat with their mouths open, but if you’re a whale it’s your job! If someone tells a whale that it’s “big as a whale,” it’s not an insult. No one expects whales to diet or lose weight; they’re whales, after all.

And whales have blowholes on the top of their heads, which is kind of cool. Imagine the fun things you could do with a blowhole on top of your head. Like spouting water. Imagine how you would stand out in a family photo if you were spouting water out of your head. I wonder if scientists can insert a blowhole gene into human DNA. Probably not. But maybe they could insert it into a mouse. I think a gargantuan mouse with a blowhole would be interesting to look at and could probably land its own reality TV show. The future has so many possibilities.

Alex G

I was looking for something on YouTube and happened across a video from a young singer from Colorado who calls herself Alex G (Alex Gronlund). Here is Alex G covering a Stevie Nicks hit: Landslide. She has more music and interviews on her YouTube channel. (What’s not so good is the “artsy” style of video in which the performer is barely on-screen. I hope this is a fad that will disappear soon.)

Adilyn Malcolm

This girl, whose nickname is “Audacious Adi,” has some amazing dance moves. Currently, she has 4 videos on her YouTube channel.

 

Plane Crash

There was a story in the news today about a 7-year-old girl who survived a plane crash in rural Kentucky that killed her father, mother, 9-year-old sister, and 14-year-old cousin. Despite being dressed for Florida weather in shorts and t-shirt, after the crash she climbed out of the upside-down plane wreck and hiked 3/4 of a mile through a cold drizzle. She hiked through rugged, wooded terrain, across briars and brambles and creeks and fallen trees. She had no shoes and just one sock. She arrived at the home of a 71 year old man, who took her in and called 911. She was treated at a hospital for non-life-threatening injuries, and then released to a family member.

The airplane was a twin engine Piper PA-34 – what the aviation industry calls a “light twin.” The girl’s father was the plane’s pilot. He was a former commercial pilot and a flying instructor. He had been a pilot since the age of 16. According to the FAA, shortly before the crash he reported he was having engine trouble and was diverting to a nearby airport. The airplane crashed about 4 miles from the airport.

Some might be surprised that an engine failure on a twin-engine airplane could lead to a crash. Aren’t multi-engine aircraft supposed to be able to fly with one engine disabled?

Actually, that applies to commercial aircraft. Many light twins are not able to gain or hold altitude on one engine. You would expect an engine failure to reduce total thrust by 50%, but it’s always more. Thrust can be reduced by 80% or more. With a twin-engine plane, the best thing to do if an engine fails may be to make an emergency landing on the closest flat, open piece of ground and forget about trying to get to an airport. Thus the saying, “The advantage of a second engine is it gives you enough time to pick out where you want to crash.”

But there is more. With one engine dead, the pilot has to cope with asymmetrical thrust which wants to make the airplane yaw in the direction of the dead engine. Because of the way the airflow is disturbed by losing an engine, the rudder is less effective at controlling yaw. And the wing with the running engine has more lift than the other wing, and that disposes the airplane to rolling. The pilot gets into a pickle pretty fast, having to contend with a plane that is losing lift, yawing left or right, trying to roll, and with an engine that may be sputtering and creating drag on one wing. It’s not surprising that pilots have, while trying to kill the dying engine and feather its propeller, sometimes mistakenly shut down the remaining good engine instead of the failing engine.

I would say that an advantage of having one engine is that if an engine fails, you’re in a glider and you land. You don’t wrestle with the flight controls; you don’t have to decide between landing on a field or highway or trying to get to the nearest airport. This pilot who crashed in Kentucky thought he could get to a nearby airport; after all, one engine was, presumably, still running. By the time he realized the airplane was descending too fast to get to the airport, he was committed. There was more forest behind him than between him and the airport. At that point, he would have done what any pilot would have done: he would have flown his airplane to its very last microsecond.

The Intelligence Conjecture

An economist named Jonathan Gruber got his name in the news because he called the American people “stupid.” Come on, Gruber, even if your fellow citizens are stupid, isn’t it stupid to say so in front of cameras and microphones?

A while back I had to call the police to my house. (Nothing major – just dumbassery committed by college-age kids who should know better.) The officer and I talked and he took notes and then our conversation took a tangent and we were discussing people in general. At one point the officer said this: “People are dumb, and they’re getting dumber every day.” Cops deal with people all day long, so if anyone knows whether people are getting dumber, a cop should know.

I turned on the TV and a quiz show was in progress. A contestant was asked to define an astronomical object named Miranda. It was multiple choice; he had to choose the correct answer from four possible answers. After a few seconds of indecision, the contestant stated: “I’m not a smarty astronomist, so I’ll use my lifeline.”

Smarty astronomist?

I have my own theory about intelligence. The amount of intelligence in the world is nearly a constant. That means, average IQ multiplied by the number of people is a number that doesn’t change or changes only a little. So as the population goes up, the average IQ goes down, because there is less intelligence to go around. Inversely, in earlier times when the population was smaller, the average IQ was higher.

Think about it. Modern humans don’t know how ancient Egyptians built the pyramids. Oh, we’ve worked out methods of handling stone blocks that the ancients might have used. In theory, we could build a pyramid today. But do you really think modern Egyptians could build a duplicate of, say, the Great Pyramid of Cheops, using copper tools and without machinery made of anything besides wood?

There are countless other examples of ancient ingenuity, such as the cities of Machu Picchu in Peru and Tiwanaku in Bolivia. Their stonework is so incredible that some people have proposed that they were built, not by human hands, but by the advanced technology of visiting space aliens. I have no doubt those cities were built by humans – just smarter humans than are around today.

Why has every civilization on Earth collapsed at some point? It’s because a civilization is founded by smart people. Then the population grows and grows until eventually the people of that civilization simply grow themselves into stupidity. They become too stupid to keep their civilization going and it collapses. It’s probably what happened to Atlantis.

We don’t have to go back to ancient times for evidence. If you’re a senior citizen, think back to your childhood. Weren’t people smarter back then? Sure they were. Heck, we went to the Moon in 1969! The flippin’ Moon! And the engineers who designed the rockets back then made their calculations on slide rules – pieces of wood (or plastic or metal) with numbers and markings printed on them. The most powerful computer of that era had only a small fraction of the computing power that is in your mobile phone. And we went to the Moon! Now it’s almost 2015. Have we been to the Moon lately? No. Not since 1972. We have no way to get to the Moon. It’s almost as if … we forgot how.

Thousands of years from now, America will be a myth, a legend. And when humans finally return to the Moon and discover the pitted and bleached skeletons of their ancestors’ landers and rovers, they will marvel that humans made it to the Moon in such a primitive time as the twentieth century. Doubtless some people will insist that we present-day humans must have had help. Help from – what else – an advanced race of space aliens. But no, we didn’t have help. We used slide rules and our brains, and they were enough because we were smart.

Christmas Day 2014

Another Christmas Day is done. And what did I accomplish?

I slept late, just because I could. I didn’t get out of bed until after 8 AM. I shuffled to the bathroom and peed last night’s special Christmas Eve blend of Sauvignon Blanc and 80-proof vodka. While doing that, I observed my face in the medicine cabinet mirror. My hair looked like a crazy man’s hair. Maybe I am a crazy man. If I am, would I know it?

I shuffled to the living room and grabbed the cord on the window blind and pulled the blind open. I could see blue skies in the west. Sunny day. That’s a nice change; it’s been cold and rainy for the past 3 or 4 days.

I turned on my computer and while it booted up I scanned the TV channels. Regular morning programming seemed to be all that was available. Meh. I read email and then surfed the news for a long time. There is so much interesting stuff on the Web. After a while I decided to fix breakfast: fried eggs and pork sausage links, a tasty combination of high cholesterol and a sage-flavored fat-bomb. To which I say: “Yum!”

Then I watched 1992’s My Cousin Vinny. I saw it years ago and felt like watching it again. It was the movie that brought Marisa Tomei international visibility playing Mona Lisa Vito, Vinny’s (Joe Pesci) fiancée. I really like the movie, but it still seems to me that Tomei, who was 28 at the time, was too much younger than Pesci, who was 49, for them to realistically be a couple. It turns out the role of Mona was planned for Lorraine Bracco, who was 38, but she turned it down. Trivia: The American Bar Association's publication, the ABA Journal, ranked the film #3 on its list of the "25 Greatest Legal Movies.”

After that, I watched The Interview. In case you’ve been on Mars for the past month, that’s the movie at the center of the Sony Pictures hacking. It’s the movie that garnered threats of world annihilation if Sony should release it. There are plenty of reviews on the Web so I won’t write another here, except to say that one reviewer described it as “scabrous, puerile and scatalogical.” In other words, uproariously funny if you’re a 14 year old American male. Although it didn’t make me laugh, I confess I almost smiled several times. If you like the Seth Rogen/Evan Goldberg brand of comedy, you’ll think this film is hilarious.

After that, I walked down the street to my friend Butch’s home. He asked if I preferred to come inside or go for a walk. I chose the healthy option and we walked a couple miles around the ‘hood, and our conversation went like this: “Remember what that used to be? … Yeah, that used to be … ” followed  by the appropriate noun – the post office, the barber shop, the bank, the drug store, etc. Eventually we arrived back at Butch’s house.

Butch has a small Christmas tree sitting on a table in the corner of the living room. I’d be willing to bet serious money that if he didn’t have a wife, there wouldn’t be a tree. Having a woman in the house can have that domesticating effect on a man. I scoff at his tiny tree, and he scoffs at my never having a tree. I tell him he’s wrong; my tree is in my head and I can see it just by closing my eyes, and though his tree is nice, the tree in my imagination is much prettier and much less work. So I’m happy with it.

After some time, a carload or two of his family arrived so it seemed like a good time to make my exit. I snagged a couple of his wife’s homemade cookies on the way out and walked back to my house. When I turned on the TV, I saw that some kind of musical Christmas special was on. It was called A Hollywood Christmas at the Grove and the next band up was going to be Pentatonix. I happen to like Pentatonix, but in small doses. I mean, a cappella music gets old quick, but they do it quite well. Trivia: music is older than language. Bone flutes have been dated 40,000 to 80,000 years old, and experts assume that people were singing (or at least humming) before they began making flutes. In Judaism, the Torah was set to music as a way to remember it before it was written down.

And so my day ended like this: TV reruns and this blog post. Which I will now publish to the Web. It’s the only thing I’ve accomplished today. At least, it’s the only thing I can point to; the only tiny scratch I’ve made on the Universe today. It’s my Kilroy was here, my Mr. Chad, my Foo was here. I blog, therefore I exist.

And now it’s midnight. I’ll watch some Pentatonix on YouTube followed by Modern Family reruns until bedtime. Goodnight, all.