TV, Facts and Ideas

I just got back from the East Coast where I spent a week visiting my elderly mother. She’s 82 years old and has Parkinson’s disease, and as the things she used to enjoy doing become more difficult for her, she tends to watch more TV. She’s very liberal, and quite politically active. You will occasionally still find her behind the table, at public events, encouraging her fellow Virginians to vote Democratic, so of course, she loves The Daily Show, Late Nite with Steven Colbert, and Samantha Bee.

She watches plenty of news, and she also enjoys several British mystery and drama series. She especially likes the Big Bang Theory, a sit-com that revolves around the fictitious lives of four very brainy, but socially awkward young professionals. The show is very popular, has been on for a long time and now runs in syndication. I got the impression that if you have enough channels, you can find an episode of the Big Bang Theory to watch any time of day or night, and in the week I spent with my mother, I saw so many episodes of that show that the theme song, and it’s bizarre, objectified, reductionist myth about the history of the universe is still ringing in my head days after I’ve returned home.

I haven’t seen that much TV in a long time, and I noticed something interesting about TV programming in general, that lies at the root of what’s wrong with political discourse in America. It comes down to the difference between facts and ideas. You can learn a lot of facts by watching television. TV will give you historical facts and up to the minute facts. You’ll get scientific facts, medical facts, and even the facts of life. Not only will TV give you the facts, but TV rehashes the facts, debates the factuality of the facts and quibbles about the details of the facts.

 

Besides that, TV glorifies facts in fictional programs. Clues turn into facts that solve mysteries. In dramatic series, the hero pulls some obscure fact out of his deep memory and applies it to his current dire predicament to save the day, and in sit-coms, like the Big Bang Theory where four science geeks bludgeon each other with scientific facts as ridiculously as the Three Stooges did with face-slaps, head-bonks and eye-pokes. Even the commercials tell you to “get the facts,” because “facts matter,” and “that’s a fact.”

On the other hand, I saw very few ideas on TV. For all of the facts TV spews, they all came at me from within a very narrow perspective, divorced from context. TV does not present nearly enough ideas to make sense of the facts they bombard us with. We get the Republican perspective and the Democratic perspective, neither of which contain enough ideas to make sense of the world, both of which share the same fundamental belief system, which is always assumed, and never questioned.

You will see lots of programs on TV about the latest scientific breakthroughs, and we marvel at the new products they hope to create with them. Why do we never see programs about alternative economic systems or alternative political ideas, and marvel at the potential improvements in society? Why don’t we see programs about Social Ecology, or even biological ecology for that matter? TV buries this paucity of ideas beneath an avalanche of facts. As a result, instead of debating ideas in our public dialogue, we bicker about facts.

That’s why I don’t believe that journalists help us much. The facts don’t matter if you don’t have enough ideas to make sense of them. Without context or perspective, this parade of facts becomes a blinding snowstorm of distraction.

Meanwhile, this is what people have come to expect from political discussion, a rehash of recent facts, and two, superficially different knee-jerk reactions to them. While TV may have expanded our horizons, by showing us images from around the world, this constant barrage of information warps our perception of reality, narrows our perspective and diminishes our ability to think.

The Lonely Pseudo-Scorpion

 

 

 

Biologists have found 27 different species of pseudo-scorpion living in the twiggy mounds which dusky-footed wood-rats build to raise their young. 27 different species of pseudoscorpion!

That just boggles my mind. First off, a pseudoscorpion is a tiny little arachnid, about the size of a tick, but a pseudoscorpion is not a parasite. Pseudoscorpions hunt and eat small parasites and mites that the rats attract. That explains why scientists find so many pseudo-scorpions in a rat’s nest, but it doesn’t explain why they find 27 distinct species of pseudo-scorpion in rats’ nests.

All pseudo-scorpions look pretty much the same. They look a little bit like ticks, except that instead of the long pointed mouth parts, a pseudoscorpion has a pair of large pincers on it’s foremost appendages, like a scorpion.

In fact, a pseudoscorpion looks just like a scorpion, except for its tiny size, and the fact that pseudo-scorpions have no tail, and no venomous sting. They are harmless little creatures who spend their time in dark shadowy places, like rats’ nests. Besides that, they can barely see with their very tiny eyes.

When two pseudoscorpions meet, they do a sort of dance where they face each other and engage each other’s large front claws.

If the dance goes well, they might mate.

If the dance does not go well, one pseudoscorpion, the larger, usually, will drive the other away. Most of the time, the dance does not go well, and this amazes me. How did pseudo-scorpions get to be so particular about who they fuck?

What makes one pseudoscorpion clasp claws with another, gender-compatible, pseudoscorpion, and go “Eewwww, yuck, gross! I wouldn’t fuck you in a hundred-million years!”? I don’t understand that at all. I’m like, “Come on, it’s dark. We’re both pseudoscorpions, We’re both horny. Let’s do it!”

To get 27 species of pseudoscorpion, the female pseudo-scorpion, and you know it’s the female pseudoscorpion, has to say, “You’re not my type.” categorically, at least 26 out of 27 times.

That tells me that female pseudoscorpions strongly disagree with each other about what they find attractive in a male pseudoscorpion.

Apparently, these strong preferences have almost no effect on the species’ ability to survive, since they all continue to thrive together, as they’ve done, through multiple extinction events, changes in the composition of the earth’s atmosphere, and climatic shifts, for something like 400 million years.

Pseudoscorpions can be counted as some of the earliest known terrestrial animals on Planet Earth and their descendants have changed very little in the ensuing eons.

 

Probably only a female pseudoscorpion or a knowledgeable aracnologist would recognize the difference between a 400 million year old fossilized pseudoscorpion and a modern living specimen. To the rest of us, they’re just another bug.

What could a pseudoscorpion possibly be so picky about?

It’s not like one of them has a nicer pad, or takes them to better restaurants. They all live in the same rat’s nest, and they all eat the same mites and parasites. They’ve lived together, side by side, for eons, and endured many global changes, but they’ve never learned to find each other any more attractive, so each species continues to pursue it’s own aesthetic, it’s own habits and it’s own proclivities, and each individual pseudoscorpion selectively chooses from individuals of the same species, even if that means a pseudoscorpion has to endure 27 categorical rejections, just to get one real rejection.

That’s got to be rough on those little guys, who already kind of look like ticks, which can’t help their self-esteem any. You might even say that pseudoscorpions kind of look like ticks who work out too much to compensate for how little they are.

By being so particular, they practically guarantee themselves a lifetime of loneliness and I suppose that’s why, when you see a pseudoscorpion, say in the bathroom, behind the toilet tank, they are usually alone. If you do see a pseudoscorpion, however, take a close look, because they are really quite cute, and you should tell them so, because I’m sure they don’t hear it enough.

The Southern Humboldt Health Care District Wants to Know

The Southern Humboldt Health Care District wants to know what I think of their plans for our local hospital. They sent me a survey to fill out, and when I didn’t respond, they sent another, reminding me that I had not responded to their previous inquiry. I haven’t responded to that one either. I suspect they want to know how I voted in the last election, and how I’m inclined to vote in this one, so they can decide whether to cut me out of the district or not. Last year Blocksburg voters voted more than 2 to 1 against the hospital tax. This year, Blocksburg voters, and land-owners, have been excised from the health-care district, and the potential tax.

Personally, just thinking about health-care feels like stepping into the La Brea Tar Pits. I’d rather not think about it at all, until, God forbid, someday I get stuck in it, after which I expect to struggle futilely, until death becomes my only escape. I don’t want to think about health-care; I want to know how to avoid the health-care system entirely because I know I’m fucked if I ever need it.

That’s how it is for most people around here. We can’t afford health-care, because the bills quickly become even more debilitating than the disease. Health-care in America is a dark, sticky pit full of twisted logic, untenable compromises, and vicious, heartless greed, dusted with a thin layer of boring-as-fuck. I can’t even pay attention to the subject of health-care, let alone afford it, and I am disinclined to throw any more of my money into that pit. Apparently, a lot of people around here feel the same way, and with good reason, I think.

First, we should never forget that the health-care system in the US was not designed to promote health, or even to treat disease. Our health-care system was designed to make money. Our health-care system has been so successful in this regard, that it has blossomed into a central pillar of our economy. Unfortunately, the success of our health-care system lies in it’s coercive ability to extract absurdly high fees from people, at the very moment when they are most vulnerable.

Because of this, our current health-care system has become both a major source of wealth and a major source of poverty here in the United States. The system creates wealth for health-care providers, hospital administrators, insurance companies and their share-holders, while it creates poverty for the unfortunate people who chose any other career path, but find themselves in need of medical services.

As health-care professionals become more enriched by this system, they find that they tire quickly of the time they must spend with poor sick people, and they start looking for ways to insulate themselves from us. They often move to more affluent neighborhoods, where they can charge even more for their services. Eventually, that leads to the extreme situation that we face here in SoHum. We have a building that looks like a hospital, but the only doctor there probably just flew in for his shift at the ER, and he has no intention of providing services to anyone, except to offer directions to the nearest real hospital, in Fortuna, where our closest local doctors actually live.

We can’t even convince a hospital administrator to live here, no matter how much we pay them. When Harry Jasper worked here, he was probably the highest paid man in SoHum who didn’t carry a gun, but we had to pay him an extra $30,000 a year, as a housing allowance, so that his family could live in a nicer community, and his kids would not have to associate with ours. No wonder it didn’t last.

Without a doctor, a hospital is just an expensive building full of expensive equipment and overpaid people with nothing to do. Even with a doctor, that’s pretty much what we have here in Garberville, because most people who live here already know that all they will do for you in Garberville is send you to Fortuna, and stick you with a fat bill.

If you live in Garberville, and you have a heart-attack, there’s a chance they could save your life at Jerald Phelps Hospital, because they have a defibrillator and know how to use it. For almost anyone else, you might as well forget about our local hospital because all you are likely to get from them is a fat bill on your way to another fat bill, so the hospital offers very little value, as a health-care provider, to the people here in SoHum.

On the other hand, the illusion of a hospital has an important role in propping-up property values. Prospective real-estate buyers notice signs pointing to a hospital, and the building itself. These features make many prospective buyers feel more secure about purchasing land in such a remote place. Few of them actually check to see if the hospital has a real doctor. Because of this, our mostly useless hospital mostly benefits real-estate agents looking to pad their commissions, and land-owners looking to sell-out. Fuck them!

The sooner our real-estate bloodsuckers move on to greener pastures, the better, and sell-out dope yuppies will take whatever they can get for their land now that the black market gravy train has left the station. For the rest of us, I think we should work on becoming the kind of community where a good doctor might want to live, because unless we can convince a good doctor to move here and open a practice, we might as well get used to driving to Fortuna to see one.

We aren’t going to attract a good doctor by waving our black market profits at them, even if we still had them to wave, and we aren’t going to get a good doctor by voting for a new tax. The only way we are going to get a good doctor in SoHum is by being better neighbors. If we can’t do that, we might as well save our money.

More Music From Recycled Materials

This new track features a few of my favorite homemade instruments:

I started this piece by putting down a bed of percussion sounds played on the Spring Box. The Spring Box was the first electro-acoustic instrument I built, and the inspiration for it came from the DeKalb, IL circuit-bending band, CMKT 4, who first showed me how to make a contact microphone out of a piezoelectric disc. In fact, I started building this instrument using their equipment, at the workshop they held here at the Vets Hall in Garberville a few years back.

This kind of device has a long tradition in radio and motion-pictures for producing sound effects. The sounds this one makes remind me of something you might hear in an experimental film from Eastern Europe. Sometimes, I can almost read the subtitles. Besides springs, the Spring Box has a pair of tiny tine chimes that I extracted from an infant’s toy, a small thumb piano made from coping saw blades, and a few bottle caps that act as tapping pads, and provide a variety of textures. I love the sounds it makes, and you can hear a fair sampling of them here, although no sampling was used in the making of this track. I played all of the parts live, in real time.

The first truly bizarre and indescribable sound you’ll hear on this track, I made with a modified walkman-style cassette player. You hear it first, just a couple of seconds in, and periodically throughout. I separated the tape head from the transport mechanism and spliced a couple of feet of coaxial cable between the tape head and where it attaches to the circuit-board. I also removed the motor, gears and belts from the cassette player, to save battery power, reduce noise and because they were no longer necessary. Then I wrapped a small piece of wood with a few yards of cassette tape from my old copy of Pink Floyd’s Atom Heart Mother. I made the noises you hear on this piece by rubbing the tape-head against the magnetic tape, manually.

I played the plucked strings, including the bass on this track with my brand new Cookie Tin Guitar. I just built this instrument recently, and this is the first time I’ve recorded it. It also has a piezoelectric pickup and seems like a very capable instrument.

I look forward to playing it more in the future, but the string instrument I most love on this track is the Tin Can Violin. Sometimes I call it the Tin Can Fiddle, depending on how I play it. The Tin Can Violin has become my go-to instrument in so many situations, and the more I play it, the more I love it.

The Tin Can Violin sure doesn’t look like much. I built it from an old tin can and a stick, in an afternoon. It is quite primitive. I’ve never played a real violin, or any other bowed string instrument before, but practically everything I play on this instrument sounds great. I picked it up cold and laid down that lovely string track in one take. A harmonizer adds a voice an octave below the pitch I’m playing so it sounds a little like a string section. I don’t know how I could improve upon it. The Tin Can Violin makes almost no sound on it’s own and relies entirely on the output of the piezoelectric disc, and amplification in order to be heard.

Way deep in the mix, you can hear me play an alto recorder, pitch-shifted down two octaves so that it sounds more like a bassoon. That’s the only normal musical instrument on this track, but it sure doesn’t sound normal. I found the images for this video in a movie titled Nightmare Castle, now in the public domain, and available at the Prelinger Archive.

I hope you enjoy my music, and I hope you’ll understand that it’s been more than seven years since I’ve taken a vacation from writing, and I’m quite enjoying it. Perhaps next week I’ll get back to it. We’ll see.

My Recycled Rock-n-Roll Rhythm Section

…and while we’re at it. Here’s another new music video I made:

Crash! features a didgeridoo driven rhythm section that includes two homemade instruments that I’ve written about before: the Record Breaking Guitar, and the Spring Bass. On this track I distorted the sound of the Spring Bass to make it more percussive, and it functions more like a snare drum.  Here’s the video I made of the Spring Bass back when I first created it

The Record Breaking Guitar sounds just as jangly and twangy as it did in the video I made about it when I first built it.

Speaking of video from back then, I extracted all of the video images in Crash! from old silent films and home movies, now in the public domain, and cataloged for your convenience in the Prelinger Archive.

I hope you’ll check out all of my music and music videos at my music blog:  http://www.electricearthmusic.wordpress.com