Things I’ve Learned Recently

(this post was written by Kyle on June 18, 2009, and it concerns & & & & )

Back when this blog was young, I wrote a post that took about a week to write. I called it Gobbledygook. Some people kind of liked it, and they asked me to bring it back. So hey all, lookee here! Hey all, lookee here!

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Here’s a couple of things I learned recently:

  1. ….from moving pictures:
    • That the Thank You message at the end of Zach Galifianakis’ stand-up special on Netflix, which he might have intended to be funny, is actually kind of sad.
    • That I have no idea whether the last photo shown during the end credits of The Hangover is real, but it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it was. If Steve Carrel could sacrifice himself for comedy in that chest-waxing scene, then is it so hard to believe that Galifianakis would “take one for the team” in that photo?
    • That I’m Not There might be a fantastic example of creative nonfiction.
    • That you can’t helping judging your friend when she tells you she “wants you all to watch this movie…just mark my words and enjoy,” and you mark her words, and you rent that movie, and it sucks.
    • That while The Wrestler was a great movie, it didn’t compare to the truth.
    • That I agree with Giovanni Ribisi when he said about his scene with Bob Dylan in Masked & Anonymous that he (Ribisi) had stressed for days on his monologue, practicing it over and over again, really trying to get to the core of his character, and that when he got on the set, and started filming, he just nailed it, absolutely nailed it, and then, when he was done, and Bob Dylan speaks his two lines, he (Dylan) says it with such pathos that everything Ribisi just did gets blown off the screen.
    • That Natalie Portman is too regal-seeming to pull off the role of “sexy witch.”
  2. ….from static pages:
    • That Conor Oberst (a.k.a. Bright Eyes) is kind of a douche, not a frat-boy, backwards-baseball-cap wearing kind of douche, but new age hippie, takes his self way too seriously kind of a douche; the kind of douche whose profile is headlined, “Conor Oberst’s Mystical Awakening”
    • That Einstein could only consider “denominational religions…historically and psychologically; they [had] no other significance for [him]“
    • That I agree with Einstein when he wrote, “It seems the human mind has to first construct forms independently before we can find them in things… Knowledge cannot spring from experience alone but only from the comparisons of inventions of the intellect with observed fact.”
    • That, in the world without us, Vermont’s landscape will look much like it does now, minus the houses, which won’t last much longer than a hundred years. We escape the massive changes that effect the cities and deserts and islands by virtue of our protected forests and reclaimed farmlands. “New England,” the author writes, “is the nearest thing to a baseline of how nature might reclaim cultivated land.”
    • That dogs won’t survive long without us, but cats should do just fine — in fact, cats will probably do so well that all the song birds in North America will probably disappear under the feline onslaught.
      Various studies credit alley cats with up to 28 kills per year. Farm cats…get many more than that. Comparing their findings with all the available data, [researchers] estimated that in rural Wisconsin, around 2 million free-ranging cats kill at a minimum 7.8 million, but probably upwards of 219 million, birds per year. That’s in Wisconsin alone. Nationwide, the number likely approaches the billions.

    • That “except for a small amount that’s been incinerated…every bit of plastic that’s been manufactured in the world…still remains… somewhere in the environment.” No one knows how long plastic will last, because no plastic has ever “died a natural death.” The best guess is 100,000 years, but that’s assuming something evolves to digest it.
    • That the radioactive materials created by humans will emit radiation “for more years than the planet has left,” so if we die off, and another creature evolves to the point where they can pursue archeological-like investigations, there’s a good chance that if they ever dig up some of our stuff, they’re gonna be fucked.
      The U.S Department of Energy is legally required to dissuade anyone from coming too close [to one of our radioactive burial sites] for the next 10,000 years. After discussing the fact that human languages mutate so fast that they’re almost unrecognizable after 500 or 600 years, it was decided to post warnings in seven of them anyway, plus pictures. These will be incised on 25-foot-high, 20-ton granite monuments and repeated on nine-inch disks…randomly buried throughout the site. More detailed information will go on the walls of three identical rooms, two of them also buried. The whole thing will be surrounded by a 33-foot-tall earthen berm a half-mile square, embedded with magnets and radar reflectors to give every possible signal to the future that something lurks below.

    • That Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes compares favorably with Robert Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants, and as such, could provide further elucidation of my theory “on fucked-up-ness.”
    • That I can get on board with the definition of intellectuals provided in Randall Collins’ The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change: “Intellectuals are people who produce decontextualized ideas. These ideas are meant to be true or significant apart from any locality, and apart from anyone concretely putting them into practice.”
    • That I’m still trying to get my hands around Collins’ notion that “The flux of interaction ritual chains determines not only who will be creative and when, but what their creations will be.” I’m about 230 pages into his 1000-page argument, and he’s making a convincing case, but I still feel like I’m missing something (probably 770-pages worth of something).
  3. …from the web:
  4. …from life:
    • That despite what I said above, I really wouldn’t be your hit man if you took care of my student-loan debt; I’d probably even call the cops if you tried to contact me about it.
    • That life would be so much easier if, instead of making a big deal out of nothing, I would just empty the dish-rack for my wonderful, stressed-out, overworked wife.
    • That teachers really, really, really deserve summers off.
    • That Bailey’s Irish Cream is worth the couple extra bucks when you compare it to Saint Brendan’s.
    • That Crimson Nectar from Tea forté is absolutely delicious, as is every other flavor I’ve tasted of theirs, but that their tea costs WAY TOO MUCH to buy on a regular basis (20 tea infusers costs about $24.00; compare to Bigelow, which will sell you 120 tea bags for $17.75).
    • That the UU church is about a million times more my thing than the Catholic Church ever was (not that I’d call myself a UU-er at this point, but when the morning’s reading comes from Mark Twain rather the the Gospel of Mark, you know you’re closer to my worldview).
    • That maybe the reason I gave up doing Gobbledygooks is that they take so friggin’ long to write.

And that’s it for this week’s edition of Gobbledygook. Come back tomorrow for the next installment of The Questioner!