DORK BLOG

In Tokyo, finally, after hours of turbulence and stale air!

The skyscrapers are scraping, the lights are blinking, and the food is delicious.

In other words, all is well.

This blog is on one.

For KT,

Because sometimes unreasonable happiness is a requirement.

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… That are novel now, but in five years will be terribly, horribly mundane and trivial:

1. Grocery shopping for things like milk. It is true that I am generally opposed to grocery shopping, since it is expensive and dull in a way that I cannot brag about, unlike a plane ride to an exotic locale, e.g. “Oh, it was terrible getting to Fiji, the trip there took almost ten hours! And we had to travel business class! Can you believe it?” I do, however, enjoy having food, so it must be done. The only other option is to become a farmer, which has been vetoed on the basis that I have never successfully grown corn and that is probably a useful skill for farming. I have successfully grown large numbers of pea plants, but that was mostly in a Mendelian sort of way, a playing God sort of way, a collecting data on the genes sort of way and the Pope is not keen on that sort of thing these days.

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The autoclave is a masterful device of science. It beeps and hums, hisses and sterilizes. It is like a giant, expensive oven that operates using intense heat and pressure.

I often use one to sterilize various tools and liquids in the lab. It is a dreaded experience. I press a button, the thing beeps, terrifyingly vents boiling steam in the direction of my face, and then it sits and waits with its mouth-like opening ajar, ready to destroy all forms of life. One day it might even eat my arm.

Reader, please note that it is a good idea to be cautious around machines explicitly designed to destroy all forms of life. I know grown men with impressive PhDs who fear the machine.

“Autoclave” is also a song on the latest Mountain Goats album, Heretic Pride. It is a brilliant song. It is strangely danceable; the background beeping perfectly emulates that of the autoclave. I have a deep, sick love of the lyrics, especially the first verse and chorus.

Hand me your hand, let me look in your eyes
As my last chance to feel human begins to vaporize
Maybe it’s the heat in here, maybe it’s the pressure
You ought to head for the exits, the sooner the better

I am this great, unstable mass of blood and foam
And no one in her right mind would make her home my home
My heart’s an autoclave
My heart’s an autoclave

“Well,” you’re thinking, “It’s pretty dorky to blog about music, more so to blog about scientific instruments, but what’s the real story here?”

Once upon a time I operated the autoclave while listening to “Autoclave”. And then the universe collapsed in upon itself due to the sheer embarrassing absurdity of the situation. The end.

For Fats McGee,

Because he was dubious about romance and mathematics, yet went on to become a space detective anyway.

Dividing by zero can only end in tragedy.

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Who, what, where, when, why, and how?

It is like Revelation, Philip K. Dick novels, a Pixies album, too much CNN, the rest of cable television, the syllabus of Poetry 101, and an ensemble cast of every actor ever emerged from a large blender, dizzy with success.

It is immensely complicated and so very strange. Neither good nor bad applies, and “drugs” is far too simple an explanation. Artsy science-fiction satire apocalypse, perhaps? Not quite.

At the very least, it is far better than Cloverfield.