Dreamer Easy

The Symphony of Science. Watch and listen, in this order:

The Poetry of Reality

We Are All Connected

and then

The Real You

From Richard Dawkins to Alan Watts in three steps!

(These rather lovely works will tell you a lot about my own spirituality, especially the sheer exuberance of living in this clever universe of ours.)

Battle of the sexes - one gene keeps us either male or female, scientists find

DNA's guardian gene found in placozoans. The common genetic heritage of life on Earth ever fills me with glee. We share genes with yeast, starfish, you name it - the same basic toolkit, recycled and remodelled over and over again.

Homosexual selection: The power of same-sex liaisons What role does a preference for same-sex partners play in evolution - and vice versa?

Where Science Comes From

big city noise disappears
succoured punch is in your heart
light is reason light is clue
what shape is shapeless in your suit?

chrome lit eyeballs reflect and roll
the simple sun is slowly sinking
roman shoes and pretty hats
little bulbs that beat the beat

you comb the night 'cause you're a cruiser
and you never get enough
when you're cruisin' down the street
and takin' off the heat
in your arms the moonlight runs

load injects and pigs in jets
forget the treatment grab a cab
set aside the screaming fish
tell the world why you're so glad

flip the switches pull the plug
you always write for better news
you need a hit you need a succour
you don't easily get amused

"The smell of that chick's just put my spine out of place!"

Jack continues to be the most popular Australian boys' name.

The "Quick and Easy Veggie Meals Under a $1.50" FAQ

... gah. Anybody got anything else light and amusing?

ETA: Moving Tribute to Michael Jackson. God bless you, Nick Walters.

Jammin' up the floor / won't look her in the eye
The fire of her vision / his mother just went by

Susan's got a tuba, ooba dooba dooba!

I bought this double CD album so that I could finally have a legit, decent quality copy of The Settler's The Lightning Tree, aka the theme to Follyfoot, a song which despite its soft arrangement can still make my hair stand on end. (I'm a bit of a lightning tree myself.) But it's surrounded by am radio disasters so bizarre and ghastly that even 2CC, rubbish am radio beacon of my childhood, appears to have shunned them. The album opens with Lee Marvin's version of Wandrin' Star and only gets more inexplicable from there. There's a limp MOR cover of the overture from Tommy; something which appears to be a cover version of the London Symphony Orchestra's cover version of Whole Lotta Love; something else which may be a misguided attempt to bring prog to am listeners (Another History, Ekseption); nighted blasphemies like Richard Harris' sickly My Boy and a version of What the World Needs Now is Love featuring an innocent child being interrogated about racism; a sub-sub-sub-sub-Monkees effort, Toast and Marmalade for Tea; and everything from a Swedish woman chiding her unpunctual boyfriend to a man who only thinks he's Bob Dylan conversing with a goony bird.

The album is from Holland, which may go a long way to explaining the bizarre selection of tracks. (In the liner notes each song is followed by what looks suspiciously like satirical remarks in Dutch.) Or perhaps it was simply that the music destroyed the minds of the record company people like an insidious DRUG. Not every track is a car crash, and some of the soppier ones like Rainsun Song are the sort of thing the Muppets would've made a good fist of. OTOH, now that I am a spaceman, nobody cares about me. Quite right too.

Cockatoo dancing to Queen. This is well worth watching the whole way through.

This Zero Punctuation about trailers for video games gave me the giggles.

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

Sony Releases New Stupid Piece Of Shit That Doesn't Fucking Work. This is an uncanny reenactment of what I sound like when trying to update my iPod, etc.

Yesterday I could use "AutoFill" to put podcasts on my iPod Shuffle. Today, after updating the software, I can't. *^$&#$%@