Congratulations! You are Newt Gingrich: Despite strangely strong public affection for dinosaurs and space exploration and shocking contempt for the women you routinely divorce, you actually made it big in politics—15 years ago.
This is, like, SO not fair. I’m not even gay-married!
Squee! I’m so excited! My new little buddy will be the perfect companion to keep me company on those long northern nights when the sun is never anywhere near the damn yardarm and if it were, it’d be too dark to see it by anyway.
I know, I know, many people have warned me that taking care of a pet is no small matter, and that my life is not exactly a settled one (nearly bought a hippie schoolbus to live in the other day, but am firmly decided on building a houseboat sometime in the next two years, if I don’t get rich and buy Krac Des Chevaliers in Syria and don’t bet against me; have you got any IDEA what’s happening to my shares on Empire Avenue lately?) but still, I am optimistic. He’s compact, omnivorous, self-sufficient, and doesn’t use too damn much vermouth.
“The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of “style” to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it’s not just depressingly dull, it’s also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized homes. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It’s the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don’t know where to start because no one has ever told them there’s such a thing as Quality in this world and it’s real, not style. Quality isn’t something you lay on top of subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must start.”
— Robert M. Pirsig
The precise value of the Golden Ratio is expressed mathematically as the never-ending and never-repeating number 1.6180339887…., a number that can go on indefinitely. Because of its infinite capacity, the Golden Ratio cannot be expressed as a whole number or as a fraction; it is therefore considered an irrational number. Greek mathematician Hippasus of Metapontum has been credited with the distinction of discovering this irrational basis of the Divine Proportion.
According to tradition, his discovery shocked the Pythagoreans whose world view is based on the integrity of whole numbers and their ratios, an integrity that has been extended beyond numbers to the harmonic progression of notes in musical scales and the cosmic harmony of the spheres.
Also: what is it with the boys in the red shirts? They sure don’t last long as ensigns on Star Trek, but they obviously have their heads screwed on right; they’re the smartest ones on the video. And someone needs to switch that little girl in the splashy dress to decaf, stat!
Care for a flashback, Interwebs? The Original Numa Numa, with an estimated 700,000, 000 hits and counting.
Also, the next time some agency drone says, “We can make you a viral video” think about this. Think about the randomness, thing about the abandonment, the Gonzo, think about the passion that existed just in that one moment, just in that one take, and to which nearly three-quarters of a billion people have responded. And then ask yourself why this agency drone thinks they can do that for you, and then realize that he is knowingly lying to you.
Virality happens, and it happens for certain reasons, but some of those reasons are not adequately explained in a course on digital marketing, are they?
Thank you, Charlotte Young, for this interminable (and delightful, once translated for the benefit of civilians) Artist’s Statement, which I have stolen from Gawker.