The End

The trentaffair.com is going away at the end of this month. Download while you can, and thank you.

For now this blog will be archived at thetrentaffair.blogspot.com but no further updates are planned.

Wash it down

Sniff-sniff, what's that smell? Why it's a buttload of frozen water on Mars. Pee-yew. Why does it smell a posteriori like a locker room laundry bag? En realidad it does not. The experience is psychosomatic, O'Grady. All this water means we the species are a dance step closer to finding microbial life on another planet. This will be the most signficante discovery of the new century, Shirley (O'Grady). Begorrah the blarney, science destroys the irrational again. Haps to the Pats, my wee 'un.

"The deposits, up to 2.3 miles thick, are under a polar cap of white frozen carbon dioxide and water, and appear to be composed of at least 90 percent frozen water, with dust mixed in, according to findings published in the journal Science."

First thoughts on Neon Bible

On the Neon Bible's most anthemic track, the drums may as well have been looped for all their verve, and the track ends with a cliched double snare hit followed by a crash. It almost negates the otherworldly pipe organ, which delivers an unbelievable emotional lift. And I miss the group chorus. I want those seven or eight voices together. While his more controlled vocals are employed to great effect, it was the singer's desperate top-of-the-range yelp on the last album that was its emotional hook.

Despite these comments, I cheer the Arcade Fire for releasing a great album that manages not to repeat its great predessor. The songwriting and arrangements shine like the memory of your first kiss. There is the country kick of (antichrist television blues), the celtic folk-influenced Keep the Car Running, which reproduces the Arcade Fire march on uncommon acoustic instruments, the 80s shot through an orchestral swamp of Black Wave/Bad Vibrations, and the early morning dirge of the title track sounds like it was recorded so as not to wake children asleep in the next room.

If there was doubt or caution before, it's now apparent we can anoint them as the next great band.

No iridium either

Through the winter haze the island of Molokai is barely visible. It's new to this part of the ocean, just as is the one I stand upon. There is a reason no dinosaur bones have been found here. The Hawaiian islands are only a million years old. That is 65 times younger than the dinosaurs.

Beach elf

Y'all know if any hotties be beachin theyselves soon? I ain't gonna front -- I'm all about gettin my whiskers wet.

Shit, I'm hungry.

Survival of the stable is the game

The tide came in and I gots out
I chills on the rocks while the predators pout
They was a tiger shark coming at my ass
And Shamu-y tried to woo me like Teddy Pendergrass

An honored assignment

I just wrote a newspaper article on Professor Richard Dawkins, for which I got to meet and interview him. Here's an excerpt:

Me: I was wondering, does evolution occur only in response to changes in the physical environment? The reason why I ask is, assuming humans will evolve, can actual physical change occur in response to memes or culture?

Richard Dawkins: When you say 'does it occur only in response to physical environment,' physical environment can be narrowly interpreted meaning something boring like the weather, tracking ice ages and droughts. Already in talking about arms races I've moved away from that. Evolution is progressive because predators respond to prey, and prey respond to predators, parasites, and so on.

You're talking it one stage further and asking about memes, which is another way of saying cultural evolution. I suppose I could interpret your question by saying there's co-evolution between culture and biological genetic evolution. One drives the other and the other drives the one. This point of view has been made, and I think it is an interesting one.

Genes are being naturally selected in a world which includes culture. Culture is itself evolving in a non-genetic way orders of magnitude faster than genetic evolution. And so there could be theoretically a co-evolutionary arms race between cultural evolution and genetic evolution.

An example might be the origin of language. Cultural or genetic evolutionary change made language possible. Then language itself evolved by non-genetic cultural means. That created a new environment for genetic evolution in which those individuals who were best at exploiting the culture's language were the ones who reproduced best. That changed the conditions in which cultural evolution could take place. You could imagine a kind of software-hardware co-evolution. So yes, I think so.

The decline of observation

Fewer 'stanis are tearing out their hair. At a lilt they find a light powd'ry florality to the air, air unseeded and almost unnoticeable even were there wind off these ice cream peaks. The climbing time is over. Everything is tilted on the downhill, not for destruction, but for momentum. What has changed is not the cycle of life, nor evolution, not a single culture, but the culture of all. Uncommon tongues like uncommon odors no longer equate to the strange. The chill is the same felt by every underdog partisan who lived. One absorbs their birdsong ululations face to face, the perches discarded, the binoculars trampled on the ground.

Hear ye

GYOZA EPIDEMIC RISING IN PACIFIC WORLD
Bland Meat Pockets Newest Sponge-Like Mistake
Stomachs across nation 'a little dominated'
Ailing kidney machines snake towards horizon on march across verdant veldt, bedpan

Now available to order, San Tropez

My book that was serialized online, There Are No Tropes in San Tropez, is now available to order in print. It's $9.99 through lulu.com, 196 pages, 27 chapters, and very readable with good margins like a Vonnegut paperback.

Also, to celebrate I redesigned my website.

I revised the book too, so this printed version is the definitive version. There are no new chapters, but I went through and made changes and tightened things. It's better now and this is the version I'm happiest with.

It remains a stinger

The hex hurts. Whether cast at the apogee of zest or while stranded at a foreign airport your plane stuck in the snow, it remains a stinger. Just as cupid's arrows e'er prick with love. Yet the context chuffs you on your bum shoulder. It is the act that fancies interpretation. It is the rest that is as it is. A maelstrom makes you smile, when I trace it on your tiny belly.

Dome-sized weighted seafaring net

By the Gulf of Golgotha he will stand down. Down. Down. Oh sure, he'll spaz back and forth a bit like a guppy dodging a net, but we're talking dome-sized weighted seafaring net here, adept at capturing 1000-pound marlins as much as curvy seahorses. It is foregone. But he ain't there yet. He's still got weeks to get full, get empty, get dry, get wet, get up, get tired, get naked, get dressed. There's some nice things to look at while he's doing these things, and some nice things to hear and smell, and maybe some nice things to taste and touch, if he's lucky. And by being here, he is.

My sense of home

Aphids plant their appendages in the invisible pumice holes that dot the outer facade. The tiny nicks cover my home. They have ruined my feeling of comfort. I am inside this egg, suspended and warm, then, wishing for something smooth, and now aware of the appendages playing hopscotch in the holes outside. But I don't need choking clouds of bugspray. I have music. I turn it loud. I regain my sense of home without having to crack this shell and kill them.

My all-time favorite comic book

An issue of the Amazing Spider-Man. Harry got a job scraping bird crap off the rocks in the penguin pen at the aquarium. Gwen dumped him cause he came home every night covered in green and yellow slime. As he was hunting for a new apartment a beatnik in the Village gave him some acid, which Harry dropped on the spot. The next day at work Harry had a climatic battle with the Vulture, only it was really an emperor penguin. Harry's fragile psyche cracked. He soon became the Fecal Goblin, an early precursor to the second Green Goblin. Meanwhile Peter spent the issue on assignment for the Daily Bugle, fretting about Aunt May.