It is a little-known fact that Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon wasn't actually written to be a soundtrack for The Wizard of Oz. And as proof, I have taken the trouble to write down what WOULD have been the lyrics if this urban legend were actually true.



Part I (First playthrough of side one)
1. Speak To Me (Instrumental)
2. Breathe
"Hey! Auntie Em!
Toto could lose life and limb!
Gulch! That wicked witch!
Wants him dead, she's such a bitch!"

Guys with hats work on a cart,
One sucks his hand because it smarts
Maybe they can help her out?
No, they've no time to hear her pout.

Shunned, she feels shunned
Hammer time, work's not yet done
Distracted now, he'll hit his thumb
And spin around, man, that was dumb

While she's walking way up high
On the fence between the sties,
Her balance fails along the way,
and sends her falling to the hay

3. On The Run (Instrumental)
4. Time (Breathe)
Taking away your doggie in my little basket
Off to the pound, then the ground, in a wooden casket
But poking around, not making a sound, on the bike now,
Toto the ninja escapes without making a racket

Tired of grownups powerless to save your doggie from the pound,
You might think that home just isn't good enough to stick around
And then you've made your mind
Toto and you must find
Someplace else that's much more fun
You two are on the run

(Instrumental)

And you've told this man that you plan to fly over the rainbow
His magical powers can help him to show you the way
Lighting a candle the conventional way, but that's ok
Don't need conjuration, you just need divination

Mystic man is fraudulent, but we know at least he's kind
He looks inside your basket, but you think he looks inside your mind
Hang on, now, he needs to work his magic in the mystic way
The spell is done
The hard part's over
Let's see what the ball will say

"Home! Run home again!"
"I'd rather leave it if I can."
"But Auntie Em has caught a fever!
I think that now is not the time to leave 'er!"

Far away, across the fields,
The brewing of the epic storm
Spins the twister 'round and 'round
The others will take shelter underground

5. The Great Gig In The Sky
(Instrumental)
Whooaa-oah woah-oah waaaay-ee aay-aay aaAAAAAAAAAAYY oooo-oooo-ahhh-ahhh-ayyy
Whooaa-oah woah-oah HIIIIII-iiii-iii iiii-iiii-iiii aaa-aaaa-aaaa-aaa-aaaa
aaaa-aaaa-aaa-a-aaaa-a AAAAAAAAHH
AAAAAAAAAA AAAA
AAAAAAAAAA AAAA
AAAAIAIIIIIIIIIIIII
whhooaaoaoaoaoaoaoaoaoaaa ahhhh
wah wah wah wah wah wah wah
WWWWWWHHHHHHAAAAAA!!!!
WHHHAAAAHHHHH!
Wharrgarbl!
WWHHHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!
(Instrumental)
ooh ooh oooooh
ooh ooh ooooooh
woh woh woh woh
ooooooooooooooooooh!
ah ah ah ah, yeah, aaaaaahhhhh
ohhhh, oohhhhh, ohhhhh,
ooooohhhhh, ohhhh, ohhhhhh
whooooahhhh, whoooahhhh, waaaaAAAYYYY
Whoooo ooo oooo
Ohhhh!
Ohhh ohhh ohhhh ohhh
AAAAAAAH ahhhh AAAAAhhhh ahhhh
aaaaaaaay!
Oh oh oh, oh oh oh, aaaay!
whooo!
(Something like that... Ok, this part is totally exactly what would've been written.)

Exhibit A: Sherlock Holmes, only now it's about sex, slapstick, and explosions.
Exhibit B: Robin Hood, only now it's... Gladiator.

So... what's next? Angelina Jolie as Dorothy? We can call it Wiz. Maybe the ruby slippers can be buried in a tomb, or something.

Seriously, help me out here. Come up with something. Make my eyes bleed just reading about it.

I needed a video clip for a slide show about my math research, but I couldn't find it.

I need a clip from Looney Tunes or something like that where the water is shooting up out of the floor, and someone's trying to plug the holes, but then new ones pop up all the time. But I tried, and my Google Fu is weak.

The second sketch, about Cirque du Soleil... yeah, I totally noticed that a long time ago, and it took a while for the full incongruity of it to hit me. At Cats I was thinking to myself all like, "those dudes in the tights who were dancing with each other and not with women... they're probably gay, but we're clapping for them so I guess it's ok... sort of... only not really, but here we are clapping." WTF?

This is my favorite meme. I haven't seen anyone on my list do it yet this year, so I'll get the ball rolling.

Just post the first sentence of your first post from every month for the past year. Put them in the form of a paragraph. Sometimes the paragraph makes sense, often it doesn't. Here's mine:

Everyone I know is better at keeping things to themselves I am. I feel strong today. Step 1: be a crazy insomniac. This weekend I lost my favorite pen and my drugs. Do you want me to tell it likes its boy meets girl and the rest is history? Its okay, I'll just high five myself. Things that are on top of my fridge: I really miss driving. Late to work today because I keep forgetting shit. Waiting at LAX for my flight to Reno. Its a little early, I know, but I'd like to send a big fuck you to 2009.

"We Iranian men are late doing this," Dabashi said. "If we did this when rusari was forced on those among our sisters who did not wish to wear it 30 years ago, we would have perhaps not been here today."

(Found by unusual_music on Shakesville.)

...I should add that there wasn't much of an internet 30 years ago, so you would've had to do something else, like mail out Polaroids or something. We'll see if this catches on, though.

Why are you not going for the person you want?
Oh, I always do.

Where's the last place you went?
Borders. Afternoon coffee, bagel and work aversion ftw.


Are you looking forward to something as of right now?
Horses. Dylan tomorrow. Coffee tonight. A million dollars, eventually.

Have you ever worn false eyelashes?
Even trift store fairies do on halloween.

What was the last job you applied for?
CIA waterboarding technician.

At the moment, are you more warm or cold?
Lukewarm.

Do you find guys with facial piercings attractive?
They do have a certain magnitisim. (Get it? GET IT??)

When was the last time you saw snow?
Day after thanksgiving. We chopped down our own christmas trees in the forrest.

Who are your favorite people to talk to when you’re down?
My favorite people are animals.

Have you ever crimped your hair?
I was a middle school girl once. Of couse.

Who was the last person to insult you to your face?
Probably Frosting, but of course it wasn't actually to my face, but my facebook inbox.

Has anyone ever tried to shove their religion in your face?
Yup.

Who was the last person you sat next to?
Chelsea!

How old will you be in 10 months?
21. Party!

What did you do today?
Went to work, avoided doing any actual work.

What did you do yesterday?
Watched TV, took naps, ate steak, made out, more naps.

Who was the last person who texted you?
Tony

Who can you tell anything to?
Blank paper.

What are your plans for tomorrow? Work (see "what I did today")

What did your last text message say? "C u then"

What are you thinking about right now? Trying to help some client but her fax isn't working and her email won't open attachments.

Do you smile often?
Yup.


When was the last time you cried?
I don't cry often, but I had a bad day a few months ago. There was a lof of irrational crying. Mostly about bugs in my apartment.

Do you prefer an ocean or pool? Ocean. Pools are good too though. I really like water.


Why is your relationship status the way it is?
Hidden. Lots of reasons.


Last thing you ate?
Bagel!

Who told you they loved you last? Bagel.

What color are your eyes?
I think they're hazel, anyone who's spent any time looking into them says brown.

Last person you hugged?
Ryan

Who do you dislike currently?
Nazis, beanie babies, root beer.


Are you wearing make-up?
Nope.


If you could have something right now, what would it be?
Steak with Horseradish sauce.

What is the last thing you thought about?
Steak with horseradish sauce... Horse... Horsie!

Do you think you're conceited?
I prefer to call it pretentious. Or elite!

Who's your favorite family member?
I have a lot of favorite family members.

Are you annoyed at anything right now?
My work computer is being fucktarded.

Have you ever smoked weed?
Yes.

Do you have any sexual fetishes? Yes.


Are you a drama queen?
I eat drama queens for breakfast.

Do you know someone who is?
Yeah, but not for long. Om nom nom nom!

Are you close with your parents?
Yeah.

Do you believe in pre-marital sex? This is a dumb question. Pre-marital sex exisits regardless of my "belief" in it. Next.


Have you ever cheated on someone?
Yes


Have you ever faked an orgasm?
Not on purpose. I've had guys be like, "omg, you came so much!" And I'll be like, "actually, no." Or just let them believe it. Sometimes I don't care.

Do you talk to yourself?
Oh yeah. Esp sitting at my desk or in my car.

What kind of cookie do you dislike?
Oatmeal rasin. Blech.

Did it rain today?
Don't believe so.

What brand of lotion do you use? The cheapest non-fragrence stuff at the drugstore. I pretty much only buy it when I've got a fresh tattoo. I use bag balm on my hands in the winter though, they get so dry and cracked.


Do you have a piggy bank?I have the bank of ryan trask?


What size drink do you get at McDonald's? Who goes to McDonalds? Honestly.


What do you like on your pizza?
Another pizza.

When did you last play a board game?Trivial pursuit at some coffee shop last winter.


Have you ever eaten a living thing? Steak!

Do you dance in random places?
I don't even dance in non-random places. Unless Dylan Ross is there and I've had a lot of weed.

What kind of cell phone do you have?
Blackberry.

Do you write poems or lyrics?nope.

Do you drink coffee?god yes.

Have you ever had or do you have any friends with benefits? Most of my friends have benifited me at some point or another.


Do you care what others think of you?
The population in general, no. But there are people who I respect and want to be the best person I can be because of them.

Do you know anyone famous?
Yeah.

What is the sexiest part of the opposite sex's body?
Personality. The rest is secondary, but still important.

Have you ever made up/sang a song for someone you cared about? Nope.

Ever had a song sang about/for you? A few. They all pretty much sucked though.


Is there a baby in the room with you right now?
No.

Do you know how to dance?
No

Where do you sing the most: In the car, the shower, or other?car

What is your favorite thing that is green?


Boxers, briefs, or boxer briefs? Black cotton Jockeys, string bikini cut.

What is your middle name?
Ann

What is the way to your heart?
Humor, conversation, cookies.

What do you smell like?
Like I haven't showered since thursday.

What's in your pocket?
None pockets today. Dress!

Anything in your mouth?teeth

Ever hurt yourself playing Wii? No, but I have hurt other people. Mostly boys. Actually all boys.


Do you have freckles?
Oh yeah.

How many languages can you say "hello" in?
Who cares.

What's the last movie you saw in the theater?
2012.

Ever jumped/fallen/been pushed in a pool with your clothes on?yep.

Are you wearing any clothes that you wore yesterday?yep.


Name a song that you know all the words to. Lots of them. But not as many as I don't know the words too.


What's the last thing you watched on TV?
Live free or die hard


What's the last video game you played?Batman Arkham Asylum demo, probably.


Who is your dad?
Harry

Can you do the alphabet in sign language?nope.

Do you have an uncle named Joe? no

"Do you wear glasses?
Yes. I am blind as fuck.

What can you hear right now?
Chelsea is humming something. It could be the theme from "the banana splits show" but probably not.

Did you feel better or worse or the same yesterday?meh

Ever been overseas?
Nope

What was your favorite childhood show?
SWAT Kats: the radical squadron. Noone has ever heard of it but me, apparentlty. Didn't people watch cartoon network in the mid-90s??


Are you close to your siblings? None siblings.

Do you like your feet?
I'm closer to my feet than my siblings.

Do you sleep well at night?Yeah. And during the day, and in the afternoon, and the early evening.

Yeah... I got that from iisz. Good stuff!

Sexting kills!

(I got that from admnaismith.)

(Slut-shaming is just a force of nature, and there's like nothing anyone can do about it. So you might as well suspend a teenager from school for a week for showing some boy a jpeg of her boobs, just to show that the grownups still are in control of the situation and have the general order of things under control. Better to kill one girl now than to have everyone die in a virulent sexting plague.)

(Or something, I don't get it.)

In the study of stellar evolution, there is this concept called the main sequence, a well-defined band that you see whenever you survey all the stars in the sky and plot their color on one axis and their brightness on the other. Not all stars fall into the main sequence, but the vast majority do; there's even a lovely image of the graph here.

It seems the same is true of relationships. Stellar evolution and stellar nucleosynthesis map with remarkable fidelity onto relationships, I've observed, with a plot of "intensity of relationship" (as a function of emotional investment and expectation of continuity) vs. "sexual boundaries" showing patterns startlingly similar to the main sequence. At least to me.

So for example if you plot sexual boundaries horizontally and relationship intensity vertically, you might see something like this:



The sexual boundaries increase from left to right, with the classifications as:

A: Anything goes. Unbarriered, unprotected, full-on squishy fluid-bonded sex.
B: Barriers for anal and PIV sex
O: Unbarriered oral; no penetrative sex.
F: Fisting and/or fingering without barriers; barriers for anything else.
G: Gloves for fingering; no wet and squishy contact, even manual, without them.
P: Pants stay on; above-the-pants contact allows.
M: Makeout partners--no removing of clothing.

Now, not all the partners one can have fall in the main sequence. Along the top of the graph, we see partners distributed in Type Ia and Type Ib classifications: these are people you will schedule regular orgies with or a regular BDSM play relationship with, which may or may not involve sex (directly) but do involve a high level of emotional investment and commitment. Some of these folks might even be considered "family."

If you're part of the sex-positive community, you might go to orgies or play parties on a regular basis, and see the same folks over and over. These are folks you don't necessarily have squishy sex with, but you might have some sort of irregular or semi-regular play/makeout relationship with. There's not necessarily a high level of emotional investment, but you notice when you show up to a party and they aren't there.

Type IV partners are most commonly found in poly relationships. These are the "Too Complicated To Explain" partners--they're not necessarily partner partners, and they're not necessarily part of the family, but they're not not partners either...

A branch from the main sequence sometimes occurs for metamours, who a person might have some sort of sexual relationship with, but might not continue if that person's partner breaks up with that person, but then again, sometimes these relationships do continue on their own, and...yeah, it's complicated. Past a certain point, it's not always clear from a single partner whether that person is main sequence or metamour.

A scattering of partners exist with a high level of sexual contact but a low level of relationship investment. These partners tend to scatter along the Friends with Benefits and One-Night Stand axes.

Sorry for not posting in what seems like forever. I've been very busy as the semester comes to a close.

Mexico City proved to be a very nice vacation. It managed to much better than the multiple warnings I received regarding my health and safety. It was actually quite nice. Granted, I was smart about everything I did, but I wasn't uptight like I thought I would be.

I ended up taking away a lot from the SEM conference. There were a lot of good papers and I got an idea of how the academic conference works. It's a lot different than the cons that I'm used to, although there are many similarities. I'm looking forward to the next conference that I go to.

Other than that, life has been fairly routine. I managed to buy a new watch and a new ukulele. This Ohana ukulele has a pickup in it and I look forward to being able to play it amplified. I actually think it sounds a bit better than the Martin that I've been playing on since I started a few months ago and I'm glad that I've got this one that I don't really have to worry about in terms of sentimental and monetary value. I'll get a video of myself playing it sometime tonight or tomorrow.

Grad school apps are coming along well and I'm glad that I'm applying. I'm still trying to shrink the list down by a few schools and we'll just see how that goes.

This weekend is going to be packed with things, but I'll be looking forward to it. I've got a lot of work to get done, but I'm fairly confident in my ability to successfully manage my time and complete the tasks at hand.

I've mentioned this before, but one of the things that baffles me the most when I say I want to live forever is the folks who say "Wouldn't you get bored?"

The question totally boggles me. Bored? Who on earth has time to be bored? Life changes constantly. In the last two thousand years, we have gone from Bronze Age tribalism through the Iron Age, the rise and fall of the empire of Rome, feudalism, the Renaissance, the discovery of a new continent, industrialization, the rise of mass communication, to atomic power and the beginning of the exploration of the physical universe. In all of that, we have seen incredible changes in society, philosophy, science, art, engineering, customs, tradition, and knowledge. Who would say of a man born in the time of Jesus and still alive today, "But aren't you bored?"

The question to me seems to show a projection of the present onto the future--I almost wonder if the folks who ask aren't envisioning people commuting to work, stopping for lunch at McDonald's, listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, heading home through rush-hour traffic to watch reruns of "Friends" on TV in the year 6,000. I think that's particularly strange given that, in the memory of people who are still alive today, the United States has moved from a largely agrarian nation to a post-industrial nation, pausing along the way to split the atom, tame Niagra Falls, and put men on the frikkin' MOON.

No, I don't think I'd be bored.

In fact, I've started to make a list of some of the things I would like to live long enough to see--things for which a single "ordinary" human lifespan is insufficient. The next thousand years offers exciting prospects for the human species unmatched in the last ten thousand, and I want to see what happens. For example:

What will happen when we discover evidence of life elsewhere in the universe? Given the incomprehensibly vast scope of the physical universe, it seems profoundly unlikely that we alone live here. If the emergence of life is so unlikely that it happens even once out of ten billion solar systems, that would mean it's everywhere--the physical universe is just that big. If, as seems more likely, it develops and takes a foothold anywhere that it is not prevented from doing so by the laws of physics, then it's probably ubiquitous. What does it look like? How does it work? What would it mean to us to learn that we're not alone? What form would it take? Where will we find it? What implications will it have for philosophy, religion, morality, our conceptions of ourselves? What will we learn from it? Will the knowledge that it exists make us feel more connected or more disconnected from the universe and from each other? Will we see life as being more sacred or less sacred?

Will we succeed in moving beyond our own fragile home on earth? Where will we go? What will we learn? How far will it be possible for us to extend our reach? How will we change in the process? Will knowing that we have left the only home humanity has ever had for its entire existence change our conceptions of ourselves, and in what way? How will we adapt?

What does a post-scarcity society look like? From the stone knives used by our earliest hominid ancestors to the Large Hadron Collider, everything we have ever built has been built in the same way--by taking the materials we find and heating, cooling, chipping, hammering, carving, cutting, and pounding away at them until they're shaped to do the task we want. This crude method of building things, which has been refined only in degree but not in kind since the days of flint knapping and bearskins, necessarily means resource scarcity, because it is limited both by the natural raw materials available and by the man-hours of labor needed to fashion the raw materials into finished things. But what happens when we gain the ability to put things together on a molecular level exactly as we want to? Oh, then everything changes. Then it becomes possible to make just about anything--food, Ferraris, fuel, iPods, spaceships--from dirt and sunlight. No more scarcity means no more resource competition, no more competition between the "haves" and the "have nots," no more division of nations into "first world" and "third world." What will that mean for human society? How will it change the way we interact with each other? Who will be the first to figure out molecular assembly, and how will that affect everyone else? Is it true, as some folks say, that wars are fought for resources first and ideology second, and if so, will a post-scarcity society really make war obsolete? Or will we simply shift from competing for material resources to competing for ideas?

What happens when we gain the ability to control ourselves on a molecular level? Biomedical nanotechnology is a hot field of research, barely out of the starting gate--the state of the art right now is roughly at the state of the computing art during the time of Charles Babbage. We know it is possible to build machines that can change and repair living organisms on a cellular or molecular level--we just don't know how to get there yet. But what happens when we do? What does a human society look like when you take away the inevitability of deterioration, aging, enfeeblement, and death? And more than that--what does it mean to be able to make modifications to to ourselves on the level of our DNA? When you give people the ability to change in that way, will you see a society of nearly-identical supermodels, or a society of people with orange fur and tails? Will we begin to enforce common standards of physical appearance, or will we start changing ourselves in all sorts of novel and interesting ways? If people can change their physical sex at will, and be completely functional in whatever their chosen physical sex is, what will that mean for gender differences? How will that affect society, when some of our most basic assumptions about what being human means become obsolete?

What happens when we remove the biological limitations on our brains and bodies? Human brains and human bodies do not have infinite capacity. Our brains are limited, both in terms of raw processing power and in terms of the concepts we are easily able to imagine and comprehend. Are there things about the physical universe that we simply do not have the capacity to understand, in the same way that a dog does not have the capacity to understand calculus? Are we nearing the limits of what we are able to understand about the physical world around us? What will it mean if we can re-wire our brains to add capacity? What will it mean if we can change our bodies to give ourselves abilities we lack now--the ability to breathe underwater, say, or to adapt to hostile environments? How much of what we consider our "humanity" is a consequence of our limitations and of the environment we live in? If we begin to diverge from one another in these ways, will we lose our ability to relate to one another, or will this simply serve to underscore the ways in which we are all connected? What will we learn about ourselves? What will we learn about the world we live in?

What happens when we encounter the first non-human intelligence? There are many ways this might come about; it could be an AI, a non-human race, even an animal that's been modified to have a higher level of cognitive capability. How will seeing an intelligence that isn't ours affect us? What will we learn about ourselves? Will we discover new ways of comprehending the universe? Will we discover blindness in our own way of thinking, and if so, how will we be better for it?

What kind of macroengineering projects are we capable of? The largest-scale engineering we've ever done is really, when you get right down to it, not that far above Stonehenge. But what happens when we become capable of building on a global scale, or larger? The Space Elevator is a good beginner's macroengineering project, but what comes next? Will we be able to terraform planets? Build ringworlds? What will those things look like? How can they be done? How will they extend our capabilities as human beings? How will transforming the physical universe transform us? Will we encounter anyone else who is already building on this scale? What will that mean for us?

Now, to be perfectly honest, even if these things were not on the horizon, even if things would always be as they are now, I would still want to live forever. There is hardly a day that goes by that I don't encounter something that is so mind-blowingly beautiful that it makes me grateful to be alive; the world just as it exists in this instant in time is so filled with wonder and beauty that I could live for thousands of years and never grow tired of it. There is so much joy to be had, all around, that I can't quite fathom living in anything other than a perpetual state of awe.

I completely ignore (well, to the best of my ability) the holidays. though I enjoy how people I miss come to town, I interpret it as mad coincidence. and convince myself that trees blooming electrically is mother nature adapting. but I do keep seeing an old guy in red with a big beard everywhere, mostly in stores, when I'm just buying things, and minding my own business. I think he works for the CIA.

in other news, I keep meaning to update here. usually that precipitates an actual post. we'll see.

One of my housemates is moving out, so we need a new retired lesbian electrician to sharpen our knives. Actually, we'll consider anyone nice, but a woman is preferred to keep the sex balance. If you know someone (or if you're someone yourself), send her our way!

See http://jholomorphic.livejournal.com/194768.html for a general description of the house; the difference is this is a front room on the first floor, with wood floors and a nice big closet. It's $411. Available in 30 days, but the occupant would be happy to leave as early as Jan 1.f