Chopping cotton in The Garden of Forking Paths

 There's something called "the Mandela Effect". In short, it's the idea that there's something wonky about reality because people's memories are faulty. Some popular examples are the idea that the universe flip-flops between "Froot Loops" and "Fruit Loops," than the comedian Sinbad played a genie in a movie called Shazaam, and the concept's namesake, the idea that Nelson Mandela died sometime in the '80s while in prison.

 Now. I want to go on record here and say I think the Mandela Effect has less to do with the rubbery nature of reality and more to do with the idea that people's memories are faulty. Similar to how people's perceptions are questionable, even at the best, makes me question concepts like ghosts, physic phenomenons, and so forth. I've done peyote and read Kant. Everything you see is a couple thousandth of a second late, and that's just how it is.

 Your senses don't tell you the Truth, they tell you what humans have evolved to understand so they can make it through reality. We've yet to catch up with moving faster than roughly 30 miles an hour, evolutionarily speaking, so when you're driving down the road, your brain can't process everything so it just "fills in empty spaces". Isn't that a fun thought?

 Anyhow, I said all that to say all this. In the last 48 hours, I've discovered the music of a guy named Roger Tillison. He was a singer-songwriter from Tulsa who came up during the '60s and '70s. He was friends with that whole Tulsa crew, like Leon Russell and Jesse Ed Davis, and spent time in Woodstock when Bob Dylan, The Band, and Bobby Charles were doing their thing. He filled in for Eric Clapton when the latter was too strung out on heroin to play for George Harrison's Concert for Bangladesh.

 He put out a record on Atlantic's Atco subsidiary in 1971 called Roger Tillison's Album. He does a Dylan song ("Down In The Flood"), a Band number ("Get Up Jake"), and a Woody Guthrie deep cut ("The Old Cracked Looking Glass") among other covers and originals. I'd heard the Dylan and Band song, on the same album, actually, but I'd never heard the Guthrie song. It's pretty good. Guy's a solid singer and there's some neat raw, rockin' country-influenced playing, the sort of stuff I really dig. Imagine a grittier Flying Burrito Brothers.

 He didn't put out another record until 2003, Mamble Jamble, and that was initially released only in Japan. He spent most of his time playing in and around Tulsa, occasionally recording with old friends and picking up the odd gig touring. He died in 2013 at 72, and apparently really enjoyed his life the whole time. Good for him, far too many of us don't get to do that.

 Every now and then, I come across a musician or an author I should know about. It happened with Swamp Dogg. Didn't know him from Adam's housecat, regardless of my love for Southern soul, and now I'm a fanatic. Country singer Little David Wilkins cut an album back in the '70s with a classic honky tonker "Who Ever Turned You On, Forgot To Turn You Off". I mean, that just screams Urban Cowboy.

 All that Harper's Letter trying to save well-off op-ed writers from being criticized? There's some dude, name escaped me, but he's such incredibly insufferable bourgeoisie douchebag - like David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan double-teamed Maureen Dowd - that I have no idea how I managed to keep him off my radar for so long. The older I get, the more this happens, and it never fails to blow my mind.

 There's an explanation of the weirdness of quantum mechanics called the Many-Worlds Interpretation. Essentially, since we can't tell a subatomic particle's attributes until it's observed, the who subatomic realm is really weird compared to how the macro-world works. One interpretation, the Copenhagen, is the most popular and says everything is just mathematically a probability until it's observed, wherein it collapses into reality. It's just math, though, the best we can observe because we physically don't have the tools to be more precise.

 The MWI is similar, except that every conservative splits off a different reality. It goes back to Schrodinger's Cat; once the box is open, two universes form. One where the cat is alive and one where it's dead. Again, it's just the math they do to make the science works. Quantum mechanics is an actual thing and one of the best theories in science. It's just weird as shit and makes no sense because the reality we can see and touch doesn't act this way.

 The thing about quantum mechanics is that it's so weird and so hard to wrap your head around, a lot of folks just go nuts with it. From the Tao of Physics to What The Bleep Do We Know, quantum woo has been a lucrative stroke for a lot of folks. In the same neighborhood is the idea that reality and consciousness are tied into the quantum level. There's some legit science going on working on the idea that there's something tying them together.

 I'm not going to pretend that I understand it, because I don't, but the general gist is since the brain uses electrical impulses, it ties into the quantum world. Since it affects that and that affects the macro world, consciousness can affect reality. Now, modern neurobiology doesn't really swing with this and considers whatever computational aspect there is in the quantum world, it doesn't have anything to do with how the brain works or how reality is.

 Still, it's an interesting stroke. One of the more far-out theories - and I think it has something to do with Robert Anton Wilson's "reality tunnels" but I can't recall - is that reality isn't so much defined by consciousness, but consciousness experiences different reality. It's somehow connected to the MWI, but the little splits in the universe are very localized. It also ties into Douglas Adams' who stroke with Probability and the Whole Sort Of General Mish-Mash.

 So maybe I drift through a constantly changing universe, where things pop into and out of existence. I thought for the longest time that country singer Terri Gibbs was so freaked out by her song "Somebody's Knockin'," which talks about being seduced by "the Devil," that she went back to singing purely gospel music. I also thought for the longest time that Michael Martin Murphy used to be part of a family gospel group until drugs and the high-life of the gospel music world wrecked his marriage and drove him to country music. All boosh-whah made up in my own imagination, and I have no idea where it comes from.

 Here's something else to think about. I haven't smoked any pot in over six months. Imagine what I'm like when I'm stoned, and I used to stay stoned all the time.

Friday, January 17, 2020

 I've been putting this off, I admit. Not in the mood, really, sort of generally indolent. Still, a man has to do what a man has to do, and I am wired & inspired.

Monday, January 13, 2019

 Let's see how weird this week will be. Let's see if by the end of the week if wingnuts are still pretending to care about Iran. I'm not saying they're hypocrites - though they are - I'm just saying the news moves so fast these days, it's barely worth it to try to nail them down. Marshall McLuhan was an optimist.

 Anyhow, in the last 36 hours or so, we've had two more hopefuls for the Democratic nomination drop out and neither were Michael Bloomberg. Cory Booker and Marianne Williamson both called it a day, as it finally became obvious that they weren't going to claw themselves out of the basement. All I'll say about Williamson is I never thought her bid was a serious one; that is, she went into it wanting to spread wisdom rather than actually win. There's nothing wrong with that, despite what people who enjoy the smell of their own farts will tell you. Selling a book isn't an easy thing.

 Like with Julian Castro and Kamala Harris, though, I am a little disappointed that Booker's campaign didn't catch more fire. Very centrist and perhaps a bit too skittish about rocking the boat, but he said a lot of good things about poverty and prison reform, something no one else is discussing. Granted, given the ongoing horrors in Mississippi's law enforcement, I am a bit biased towards this topic - seriously, click that link, it's a booger - but I digress.

 Another problem with Booker dropping out is the game board gets that much whiter and, at the risk of ageism, over 70. I don't see Tulsi Gabbard or Andrew Yang making much more of a dent than they already have, and apart from Bloomberg, does anyone really know who's in the race beyond Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttegieg and Joe Biden?

 Still and all, Booker's out and it remains to be seen where he goes from here. He would be a prime candidate for Vice-President and remains a solid voice in the Senate. The race is starting to heat up with or without him, anyway.

 That being said, we may be wanting it to be hotter than it actually is. Media reports are saying that back in 2018, when discussing possible runs for 2020, Bernie Sanders told Elizabeth Warren that a woman can't win the Presidency. Apparently, four different people have verified this conversation went on, but differ in how things were said. For their part, Sanders has denied he said anything like that and Warren won't even acknowledge the question.

 And, of course, liberal/left-wing Twitter has been in a three-alarm tizzy all day. This is another example of Bernie's rampant sexism while at the same time a bit of rat-fucking by Warren since she's the DNC's golden girl this time around. It's just another example of both candidates attacking the other, like they have the whole campaign even if they never did it out loud and it was generally their followers looking for reasons to get huffy.

 Or it could be a nothing that the Corporate Media is blowing up because they're lazy, this sort of thing is a reliable page-filler, and it will always pull in eyes or garner clicks. Something to think about, maybe? I mean, it is possible that Sanders did indeed try to torpedo Warren's hopes before they got off the ground, assuming she'd be his biggest competitor for the left-leaning vote. Or it could be that Warren is actually blowing up this as yet another example of her trying to trash Bernie because he's got a grip on the left-leaning vote.

 It could also be that 95% of the political experts on Twitter have absolutely no idea what they're talking about, no clue how politics works and a naive if hopeful view of how journalism operates. Instead of looking for conspiracy theories in everything objectionable, maybe consider the press is full of lazy drones who depend on eyeballs to pay their rent and get little Lisa her braces. It's bad enough the press is that indolent and rote that they'll print another version of the same story they've been running at least since I've been paying attention to go looking for more sinister reasons. Does no one remember the whole PUMA thing?

 And, yes, that sort of view is naive. Looking for some grand plan when it's as often as not just people trying to hold onto their own is distracting and pointless. It's like thinking the Illuminati is behind everything or that every misspelling in one of Trump's tweets is a secret message to the Q folks. Sometimes shit just is. Really, half of the existential angst the average American boob suffers is because they're looking for fairies at the bottom of the garden instead of just enjoying the flowers.

UPDATE: I finish this and sit down to supper to find out that Warren is corroborating this story but doesn't consider it worth too much consideration, as Sanders wasn't saying so much that a woman shouldn't be president but that Trump would use sexist tactics against her. That should surprise no one and Warren repeated that her friendship with Sanders and shared progressive goals overcome any media punditry wanking. Meanwhile, Twitter's huff-o-meter pinged out in righteous indignation.

 Okay, that's about it, but a couple more quick shots. Trump apparently authorized Soleimani's killing seven months ago which sort of pokes holes in the story he initially gave, but no one's going to care by this time next week. Here's a neat story about the Hubble Deep Space Telescope finding little clumps of dark matter (maybe), and here's an interesting piece about Artificial Intelligence and the fundamentals of quantum mechanics. Here's an interesting video about the connection between nihilism, existentialism and absurdism from a literary perspective. If that don't pull your little red wagon, here's another from a philosophical perspective. Both talk about Albert Camus' The Stranger, which is a pretty good read regardless.

 So, yeah. Have fun.

Sunday, January 12, 2020

 The rain's moved on and today was clear and sunny. A rather damp and sodden "clear and sunny," but there you go. It's turned off cool, as well, resetting the winter weather wheel of fate. We're supposed to get more rain next weekend, maybe even some snow. Anyhow.

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