Dinner Conversation Gone Below the Belt: Busting a Drupe

 

“I’d really like to try a coconut that’s more solid inside… You know how coconuts have like different periods of development?”

“Like puberty?”

“That’s why they’re hairy.”

“This is why we can’t have conversations at the table; immature comments like that.”

“Perhaps it’s the subject matter.”

“This isn’t immature. It can be scientific. For instance, the coconut’s scientific name is ‘Cocos nucifera.’ See? Not immature. Educational, in fact, dare I say enlightened, dropping science-y words and stuff.”

“Now it has an international flavor about it; historical if you count the whole ‘dead language’ thing. This just went all Mensa. And ‘Cocos nucifera’ translates literally to ‘nut bearing.’”

“Which explains why you want one in your mouth. NOW it’s immature. See what you brought upon yourself?”

“I’m done.”

“You were done when you chose to talk about solid, hairy nuts.”

“Drupes, to be technical. A drupe has an outer skin with a semi-solid shell and a pit or seed inside. A coconut is a drupe… and technically, your nuts are closer to drupes.”

“And even more so as you get old, and they touch the toilet water.”

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Enslaved by Zero

“You haven’t done enough Math-type stuff lately,” you say?

How about this:

Being Tuesday, let’s look at dividing by zero, and what it does to a Facit ESA-01 mechanical calculator. Neat (and a fine impression of a car I had in College that ate lifters as a steady diet), but what does this have to do with Tuesday? I mean aside from the fact that the resale value of that car I mentioned was precisely zero dollars.

Consider that Tuesday in many languages has connection to Mars, which, having exactly zero oceans, it has zero elevation with regard to sea level.

More? Consider that it was Merton Davies who selected a line along the crater Airy-0 a the Prime Meridian 0.0° longitude as the reference point for determining geospatial coordinates on the red planet. Davies was born on September 13, 1917, which was the 286th day of the year. Two minus eight gives us negative six, and adding six to that gives us… Zero.

All things are delicately interconnected, kids.

No, It Wouldn’t Be Cool OR Plausible

Look at you, fan of the sciences: You saw that pic and re-posted the whole “gosh, if our moon were replaced by Saturn” bullshit concept. Some third-rate hack with Photoshop learned a layer technique and boogered a few planets into a poorly-framed shot of the horizon, and suddenly you’re Neil Degrasse Tyson, pondering the mysteries of the universe with regard to altering the makeup of the solar system as though it’s yours to fuck with. It’s not all about YOU. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that I can make this all about ME. That is, after all, the point of social media, right? “Look at ME!”

 

Sorry to burst your bubble, cupcake, but let’s be honest here. It wouldn’t look all neat-o with Saturn hanging there with those rings all silhouetted against a blue sky. In fact, it’s doubtful that your dumb ass would be here to see it, assuming that one approached this fucking idea logically, and realized that between the extremes of heat caused by never-ending plate tectonics and volcanic activity (not to mention the debris thrown skyward as a result), any atmosphere that could survive the gravitational pulls and releases would be opaque at best on a clear day (perhaps whatever higher power there is had a spark of compassion, and in its almighty pity sent a little functional weather your way and blew a few metric tons of poison gas and particulates out of the way). I mean we’re not even getting into the really important things like orbital shifting and irregularities that may have severely altered the processes of life and evolution, rendering your existence improbable in even the remotest sense. And then there’s the whole pesky fabric of space thing, which would have buckled, drawing the two objects into a collision. resulting in one mass, floating in (and causing) a destructive field of massive rock fragments and near light-speed particulates, which (judging from the makeup of the two planets) may have just enough energy to create something entirely different altogether.

 

And let’s say that all of that physics talk took a day off, and you managed to somehow evolve into the social sharing fuckwad credit to your family of obvious inbreeders that you are today… Each day on your wondrous ring-bedazzled moon-having planet would be many, many times the length of a current hollow iron space station moon-having current habitat (Scientology, motherfucker!). And that might lull you into a sense of false security when blocking an entire aisle as you debate between the store brand and the name brand Oreos as you text back and forth to your bros about how great the new Star Wars movie is. I mean it only took you eleven viewings, because REAL fans have to see the same shit nearly a dozen times to fully grasp the whole intricate layering of Han and Leia having bred some evil, whiny prick that talks to Voldemort in an obvious rip-off of Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy. And don’t even get me started on the whole comparison of a certain character dynamic that rings awfully close to a little chunk of the last Star Trek film. But rest assured, I still have to waste MY time on THIS planet (with an atmosphere I can see through – even if it has been poisoned by the illuminati – and solid ground and weather and an orbit that makes some sort of sense) standing behind YOUR self-absorbed ass.

 

The problem isn’t some dumb Photoshop or social share, and it isn’t even the fact of having a moon that would somehow be roughly ninety-five times the mass (or over seven hundred and fifty times the volume; although Earth has it beat on density some eight times over… and we’re not even getting into the rings and the shit-storm THOSE would cause… not unlike that bratty-ass kid of yours, orbiting around your cart and sneezing and coughing on everything) of the planet that it orbits. It all comes down to ME simply wanting to squeeze by so that I can get the fuck out to my car and inspect the latest ding from some lazy asshole who just threw a cart into the quarter panel, versus trudging the extra eleven feet to the CART RETURN with it’s wonderfully bright signage, so designed as to stand out against the blue sky which lacks what? Fucking Saturn hanging there like some childish cut-and-paste nightmare.

History All Aglow

Little-known fact about Christmas Eve, via Brian’s “Lost History and Other Shit They Can’t Be Bothered to Teach You in School and Stuff Secret Bunker of Knowledge”.

Today’s installment: “All Things Are Delicately Interconnected Via Rubbers.”

Pining for his never-to-be love interest on this day back in 1933, Albert Einstein pens a letter to the woman he’s become smitten with, one Marie Curie from his New Jersey study as his wife prepares their usual evening treat, a fifth of wood alcohol and an eight ball chaser. Unbeknownst to Mrs. E, her husband is about to make history once again; this time in the field of photography.

After snapping the world’s first selfie (on the world’s first instant film camera, no less; the man was a fucking pioneer), he inscribes the photo with the words “Me equals meat squared,” and sends the image off to his crush.

Her second husband at the time, Stanley Czeirnitkovielskiweicz intercepts the pornographic portrait, and proceeds to poison his wife – whom he incorrectly perceives as being unfaithful – by utilizing a glow-in-the-dark condom that night, which he fashions from lambskin coated with radium-laced, self-luminous paint.

While the prudish history books of old may tell of her death being the result of she and her first husband Pierre staring for hours at a glowing batch of radium extracted from pitchblende, the cold reality was that it was a warm, glowing rod that sealed her fate years later via a photograph of a very disturbed (and naked) German, thus sparking the Polish-German war of 1934. As we all know, the war cam to an end with the Treaty of Lubin, wherein private manufacture of condoms was outlawed, and as a blanket punishment for the Polish people in general (based unfairly by virtue of his last name alone – Stanley was actually a Korean immigrant living under an assumed name), the Polack joke, once considered taboo, was to become the go-to icebreaker of choice in all pubs across Europe.

Richard Feynman Helped Me Find My Way

Richard Feynman, when asked in an interview about his ability to talk easily with scientists in other fields (versus, say a playwright) if perhaps this natural comfort was because he read the “scientific magazines”, Feynman responded by saying “we don’t have to have magazines or gossip; we think originally. We think of a new idea.”

For about 30 seconds after hearing that, I felt that I shared a place… a brief moment of kinship and understanding with one of the greatest minds to ever inhabit the Earth. He summed up in less than twenty words EXACTLY what I feel about designers wasting time discussing what car was featured in what magazine, and trying to draw any inspiration from what was happening in the three months since it was printed… Not to mention the years of build time preceding that, or even the years of refinement into the idea that sparked a cool build or just a part of one.

Fucking awesome.

It may not mean anything to you, but to me it was like having a light go on, and now I can see right where it all needs to go with regard to my career.