Bite me, said the Big Apple, and so we did - pt. dos

Continuing the tales of my New Yorkian adventures, this part is dedicated to the Metropolitan Museum. The student price was 10 dollars, half the full entrance fee, but it was “appreciated” if you paid the full fee so as to ensure that the Met stay open for visitors. This threw me for a loop, as just the number of visitors walking around the entrance hall would probably be able to keep it open for quite some time even if all of them paid the reduced price, not to mention the fact that due to renovation large parts of the museum were actually closed. I don’t know what kind of student would enter the Met thinking “well sure, I guess I could pay 20 bucks to see half of the stuff you would usually get to see for just 10, what the hell”. Students who are bad at math, probably.

Long story short: we paid 10 bucks, got a neat little pin that marked us “paying visitors” and went in.

In a moment of selfprofessed genius, most likely generated by copious amounts of booze and severe delusions of logistic grandeur, some asshat thought it would be a good idea to dig up an entire Egyptian temple, slap a little sticker on it that reads “MINE”, and transport the whole fucking thing to the States. I have to say, I couldn’t agree more. If I had the money, I would claim all kinds of ancient cultural shit from all over the world and transport it to my backyard, starting with the Eiffel Tower. That oughta teach those damn Frenchies…

Anyway, what’s more important is that while I sympathise with the concept of transporting other people’s shit into your own museum, I do NOT get why that would make you want to throw your pocket change into the pond surrounding it, as illustrated below:

How does this work exactly? “Oh look kids! It’s an ancient Egyptian temple! Here’s 5 cents, make a wish and maybe Horus’ll give you that fire truck you wanted for Christmas”. What the fuck is Horus going to do with some tens of dollars in small change?! Or maybe I’m missing the point entirely, and some people just enjoy throwing money into shallow water, at the same time showing the world they have absolutely NO clue as to the workings of luck in general and imaginary deities’ influence on it in specific.

Also, if people keep throwing their petty cash into the water, at some point the museum is going to want to collect at least some of it, in order to keep the general atmosphere from turning from Egyptian to “cursed pirate booty”. I’d hate to be the guy in charge of this, but I guess this is were cheap immigrant labour comes in: “Jorge! JORGE!! Where the fuck’s… Ah! Jorge, since you’re the one responsible for yesterday’s little fuck up, I’m putting you in charge of collecting the money from the temple po—NO ‘BUTS’, Jorge!! Here’s your little net, I’ll be back to check up on you in an hour or so. Now get going or your ass will be shipped back to Mexico faster than you can say ‘illegal alien’. VAMOS!!”

Poor Jorge…

Among various marble titty statues and expressionless faces we found this guy. Isn’t he awesome? Fuck Michelangelo’s David, this guy just took number 1 in the “best marble statues EVAH” listing. I mean, he looks like a guy—let’s call him Hank—who just found out that his wife Johanna is actually a convicted murderer called John, who escaped from prison years ago and had a rudimentary sex-change to escape the law, but who then in an unforeseen personal emotional breakthrough found himself in love with previously mentioned young Hank, and who had hoped that their newfound love for each other would help Hank overcome the initial shock and disgust he would undoubtedly feel when he would reach between the legs of his new-found love—who admittedly sports a few uncanny male-like features—only to find the grossly disfigured remnants of the penis the failed surgery had left John/Johanna with… ON HIS HONEYMOON. Or he could be trying to wrap his mind around string theory, but I’m pretty sure it’s either one or the other.

The third and final part of this little triptych will be up later this week, so come back then if you somehow find yourself craving pointless banter.

Wikipedia’s typing monkeys

UPDATE: Another paper! This one’s about Keen’s flawed arguments on collective intelligence and Wikipedia. Not my best work, but I’ll make it up some day by delving deeper into the veritable armada of weirdly ridiculous arguments that bitter sack of shit we all know as Andrew Keen has come up with in order to deal with his own failure as an Internet entrepreneur. Get over it, bro.

Direct link

Bite me, said the Big Apple, and so we did - pt. 1

They say time flies when you’re having fun, and by that logic I must have been having some real goddamn fun lately because it’s been a shocking 3 weeks since my last post. Oopsie.

In my defence, I had to write a lot of papers and teamed up with my good friend Alexander to visit—you’ll never guess this one—New York City. Now, I really do want to share some of my experiences from the Big Apple, but I am also very much aware of the fact that since you’re already on the Interwebz, beautiful pictures of the Statue of Liberty, Empire State building and Lindsay Lohan’s dog are only a click away, which would probably far outrank my amateurish attempts at capturing NYC in digital imagery. Accordingly, I have decided to skip the touristy stuff in favour of my much more exciting personal experiences.

This was our room in the Big Apple Hostel. It pretty much consisted only of two bunk beds, an airconditioner and the occasional sleeping French guy, but it did the trick. Next slide.

Walking through Central Park, we came across this beauty of an enigma. Whatever is under there, it is apparently so dangerous it had to be covered by a garbage bin, which is blocked from public examination by three iron fences forming a triangle (just like every road sign signalling “danger”, coincidence? I THINK NOT), which were then wound with tape bearing the texts “CAUTION” and “CAUTION DO NOT ENTER”.

My initial thought that there might be a small carcass of, say, a rabbit or a squirrel under there which they wanted to screen off from unsuspecting passers-by quickly dissipated when I realized that a black container combined with the temperatures and sun exposure characteristic for midsummer New York might in fact be THE worst solution imaginable to this particular problem, and would pretty much guarantee biochemical disaster in a matter of days, if not hours. This left me with two possible alternative answers:

Underneath this heap of discouraging signifiers could be either a) a beehive, hornet’s nest or a reasonable facsimile, or b) the entrance to someone’s secret lair. Although Occam’s Razor would dictate that my first option be the most credible, there are a number of reasons why I think it doesn’t quite fit the situation. First of all, I have it on authority *cough* WIKIPEDIA *cough* that Western honey bees build hives somewhere between 1 and 5 feet above ground, not ON it. Second, wouldn’t a beehive so close to the walkway be noticed way, WAY before it would even become necessary to cover it with a garbage bin? No, all things considered, I have come to accept that my third and last hypothesis has to be the right one: there is a secret lair under Central Park, the entrance to which is cleverly concealed with common roadside objects. Unfortunately, I never found out just who’s lair this is, as I then passed a nearby pretzel vendor and my at times childlike mind moved on to the more current issue of what to stuff my mouth with.

And what better to stuff your mouth with than a fresh, up-until-just-now-alive steamed Maine lobster, in none other than the Grand Central station Oyster Bar. I can’t quite figure out if it was the promise of soft, sweet lobster meat that will melt on your tongue like butter, the fact that they were going to kill one of God’s little creatures by boiling it alive just for moi, or the idea of finally getting to wear a big-boy bib that made me choose this classic dish, but boy was it great. And don’t we look handsome in our little bibs, holding our little claw crackers?

I have a lot more interesting pictures that come with even more interesting stories, but in favour of those of you with short attention spans I have decided to cut all this up into a few parts, the rest of which you will find here over the next two weeks or so. Good enough for ya? Great. Now go outside and walk your dog or something.

Ah, the UEFA Euro 2008…

When a team of eleven men brandishing national colours suddenly gain the questionable ability to make grown men in ridiculous costumes cry by managing not to kick a pigskin truncated icosahedron into a designated area measuring 7.32 by 2.44 metres. Good times.

Would you like some cancer with your newborn?

Christians are retarded. I say this because in a country where you are as of next month no longer allowed to smoke in public areas because all those poor non-smoking people might somehow die from second-hand smoking, it is the Christians—in the form of the Dutch political party Christen Unie (Christian Union), or CU—who have made it their personal task to ensure that screening embryos for breast cancer will NOT be included in our pre-implantation guidelines. They are doing this, of course, because all but one of those poor little embryos in a pre-implantation test get tossed out the window, which in their eyes prohibits perfectly good ‘potential life’ from being lived.

What a bunch of bullshit. I mean, I’m willing to argue about abortion and the point at which it becomes unacceptable to abort, but we’re talking about little clusters of cells here! To illustrate this mind-boggling, deranged statement, I have mapped my understanding of how this works exactly below:

~0   = not life                      = 0

( )    = not life                      = 0

~(0) = life worth protecting = 1

What gives, Christians? You can’t add two zero’s and get one, any pre-schooler will tell you that, unless you want to tell me that ‘the soul’ is implemented at the exact moment the little sperm enters the little egg or something. Get real. In this schematic, the difference between being dead and alive isn’t the soul at all, but about 1 second. An embryo is alive in the same way plants are, sure, but it’s not a life. Hell, at this point, ‘killing’ an embryo would probably offset your karmic balance in about the same way as not watering your plants would.

To complicate things, the CU has also stated that, while they don’t want to have breast cancer added to the list under any circumstances, they ‘respect’ the current practice, which is mostly concerned with genetic diseases that will manifest themselves at some point during life, 100% guaranteed, like Huntington’s. So I guess we shouldn’t really pity people with cancer, because God himself says Huntington’s is like, way worse. This would be a really funny thing to say, if it weren’t for the fact that some so called ethicist from the ranks of the CU actually went on record saying that cancer is getting more treatable all the time, so it’s not needed to include it in the guidelines, which is actually a nice way of saying ‘do whatever the fuck you want, as long as it doesn’t involve anything I think my god may or may not have wanted’. The woman sitting next to him, who had herself had breast cancer, was shocked to say the least. But I guess when you’re all busy saving as of yet non-existent people’s possible lives you can’t very well be bothered to consider their actual well-being for too long. Given this particular attitude, they probably ‘respect’ people selecting embryos for Huntington’s in the same way I respect people trying to sell me ringtones thirty fucking times each commercial block: they just haven’t found a way to credibly convict them for witchcraft and burn them at the stake… yet.

I would think that the possibility of erasing a very nasty disease from the human genome some time in the future (which is effectively what this would lead to if everyone with the gene would pre-test) would be a good thing in and of itself, but I guess the net potential of a little gooey lump of cells is worth more than an actual person’s well-being. So thank you, Christians, for once again putting a screeching halt to scientific progress and preventing people from utilizing a technology that would actually benefit their children.

Maybe in a few months, when the dust has settled, they could propose a law that forces people to sleep with their hands above the covers. Everyone knows that would save loads of little kitties.

P.S. If you’re wondering why it took slightly longer for me to put something up here, all I can say is: Metal Gear Solid 4 is friggin’ AWESOME.