The Mother of All Inventions

Dear Robyn,

I was chatting with someone on formspring yesterday and I came across two questions you asked me on there some time ago:

1) If you could invent something, what would it be? and
2) If you could have anything technology wise – what would you choose?

They’re cool questions. But I never asked you so I am wondering what your answers to them are!

This is what I wrote (man, you wouldn’t think I was a geek or anything…)

I’d like to invent:

1. A Munchkin style card game where Aliens attempt to take over the world and Men In Black try to stop them. The Aliens are only allowed to communicate in crop circles and the MIB are only allowed to speak in secret code. Alien and MIB characters can be spawned or killed using Conway’s “Game of Life” mathematics, control their spaceship and weapons using Turing Machine style state registers, move strategically like chess men, fool each other with Poker style bluffing and if there is an uneven number of people playing one person becomes a spy for any side they choose and no one knows who they are playing for or when they are going to switch alliances! OK, no one will play this unless they are Sheldon from Big Bang Theory but it will be funny to make it anyway!
2. A guitar overdrive effect that spits randomly like a Rally car. At them moment all overdrive FX seem to just go RRRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH! as one ear splitting, continuously homogenous cacophony.
3. Consciousness, Artificial Intelligence and self determination for a robot. (Followed very closely by “Empathy For Living Things”, “Don’t Do That” and “Go To Your Room” modules….)
4. A self interpreting programming language for the internet that anyone can use without being a programmer to make sites (or anything else) they like intuitively, and that can interpret itself perfectly without needing any other 3rd party browser.
5. The computer program that passes the Turing Test

If you could have anything technology wise – what would you choose?

1. A robot with a personality you can change with a screwdriver to suit your mood
2. An alien spaceship
3. A Mercedes MacLaren SLR supercar or Ford Mustang for when #2 is not available
4. A professional Canon digital SLR camera like yours with a Macro lense to do high speed close up photography of miniature, split second things that happen in nature we can never see with our own eyes
5. A private space jet that goes from Auckland to space and lands in Blenheim in 2 minutes so I can visit you whenever I like (hmmm, I predict that by the end of our lifetimes we’ll think this is ordinary!)
6. An intergalactic wormhole that connects Auckland to any other city or planet I feel like visiting instantaneously (I hear the latest version comes bundled with #2)
7. A newer bass guitar than the 25 year old one I have now and bass FX that can make a growling sound like Marilyn Manson’s voice
8. A guitar rig that’s as awesome as my Tremonti Signature axe.
9. A keyboard that is easier to program than my existing demon KORG and sounds less like it was designed exclusively to produce dance music for nightclubs – a bit disconcerting considering I hate nightclubs!
10. The latest version of Cubase or Protools recording software
11. Adobe CS5 Web Premium software (because, I am not quite smart enough to invent the self interpreting language in one lifetime)
12. An alarm clock that plays a nice tune instead of BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! (which at 6am in the morning sounds more like Marilyn Manson going RRRAAAAAAAARRRRRGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!!!)
13. An iPhone or similar with all of Muse’s songs and Govenor of Poker on it (hmmm, maybe this has a friendly alarm clock that will play Muse perhaps?)
14. A recording studio with a monster desk that’s so long you need to roll your chair from one end to the other to reach all the buttons
15. Chairs with NASA grade castors for withstanding the abuse at #14
16. A more grunty computer that can tolerate all the work and Muse crap I put in it and allows attempts to create robot brains
17. A memory chip and GPS for my own brain so I can remember stuff longer than 2 seconds ago and will no longer get lost walking around my own flat
18. A microscope that can see things as small as those proposed in Superstring Theory (oh look! That’s where I left my keys…)
19. A time machine that pauses time indefinitely so everyone can eventually make all the weird inventions dreamed up they can never finish in one lifetime.

What are yours?

Morgan 🙂

Image courtesy of Iva Villi

An Intriguing Resistance

Dear Robyn,

I did a naughty thing this week. I splurged some cash on a CD. Not sure if you have ever heard Crowded House or Muse before but being two of my favourite acts (and Neil Finn and Matt Bellamy my favourite songwriters), I thought it about time I bothered to review their latest albums. This year has seen new releases from both of them – “Intriguer” from the House and “The Resistance” from Muse.

The albums have a few similarities. Both Matt and Neil own recording studios and the albums were recorded therein, releases came with great DVDs, both have stunning artwork and both are written by excellent songwriters who are articulate, intelligent and have a knack for extracting emotions from the dark fringes of your imagination that you didn’t know resided in you (the whole point of writing songs in my opinion). Being a recording nut of course I have to have a serious drool over any studios… I like Matt’s the most being all neat and tidy and seriously “pwoper” and all but Neil’s looks very “intriguing” with an oddball artsy touch you don’t expect in a studio. I hear it’s world class and the website is super cool.

Years ago when Crowded House didn’t even exist, I was a teenager in highschool and Neil Finn had only just taken over at the helm of Split Enz, I somehow accurately predicted that he was going to leave and do something big with his next band – whoever the hell they were. And I turned out to be right – which is just as well because I went on and on and on and on about it in our music dept ad nauseam and drove all the teachers bonkers. I have to say when I saw Neil Finn recently and that he had apparently grown a small rodent on his top lip (is he competing with son Liam for a prize in facial hair pet growing?) I started wondering about my judgement. And then he started on about the Intriguer;

“a mythical character that we have felt his presence for quite a number of years now whenever life has become difficult and problematical but strangely fascinating, you sense the Intriguer’s presence and you only catch little glimpses of  him, in fact it’s very hard to say who or where or what he is but when he’s not there life becomes boring, predictable and plain.”

I did start to think that perhaps Crowded House had lost the plot. My intuition about musicians is usually spot on but thankfully for once I am completely wrong. Crowded House have not lost it even if the musings of their frontman are a little out there. The album is brilliant.

Neil Finn’s lyrics are always a mesmerizing encounter – like sitting out in the sun beside a river and watching the water gently flow past in an endless stream of fascinating reflections and shapes. They are gorgeously crafted and lack the jerkiness of poetry with lines that jarringly rhyme at the end of every cadence and break your reverie. I’ve always been fascinated how he can make words appear to flow together with a circularity that simultaneously remains coherent and structured whilst painting the vision of something distinctly ethereal and formless. But the most fun about them is they lead you off on a journey of blissful random imagery and just when you get comfortable jolt you back to reality with some poignantly personal line that Paul Hester remarked once would always make the band say to him “Neil, do you really want to say that?!” upon first hearing it at rehearsal. I love those moments.

You arrive like a dragonfly
Float above the grass
Trembling still
Think you might
Open up your heart
One day you will
There’s always a way
To end this isolation

The music is great too. It doesn’t exactly smack you in the face with some wild revelation that leaves you dazed for six months, but it is charmingly magical and addictive to listen to. If you don’t care about having your mind wander absentmindedly off into la la land (not looking at anyone in particular) then this is the album for you. The most intriguing thing comes in the song Isolation, most pointedly in the video of the live version at the Auckland Town Hall (my favourite local haunt for gigs). All is going swimmingly fine in the usual Crowded House way until the second verse when suddenly the voice of a Goddess appears out of nowhere and immerses the hall in wonder. This is Sharon, Neil’s wife who is shyly hiding behind a speaker cabinet on the side of the stage like a session musician who has been hired by a small band to fill out their sound live while remaining firmly sequestered in an unlit portion of the stage! What a pleasant surprise. She has a youthful and unique voice which seemlessly melts together with Neil’s. In my opinion this is the prize moment on the album. Perhaps if we are lucky there will be a Mr and Mrs Finn album sometime.

While Neil Finn will take you on a journey akin to floating down a river made of elegantly constructed poetry and tangental hook lines, Matt Bellamy will remind you there is every reason to believe you should be feeling paranoid and looking sideways at everyone above you. Muse’s new album “The Resistance” comes from a guy who has two years supply of freeze dried lasagne, 50 cans of beans and an axe stored in his basement for that “just in case” moment when “THEY” – the upper echelon, or chosen few who are plotting to suppress the masses, take over. And his preparedness even extends to killing his own chickens. (But at least they can be comforted by the thought that when he executes them it will be with the same talented hands that created masterpieces on the guitar like the riff from Plug in Baby he is so famous for. So they will be honoured chooks). It’s easy to scoff but when the universe collapses down a super massive black hole, or there is a carefully constructed zapping of half the world’s population from the HAARP site we will all descend upon him in a starving heap – the guy who planned so efficiently for every imagined eventuality (See – must be another paranoid INTJ with a wild imagination…).

The Resistance is an album about Romeo and Juliet quality love, liberation and sticking up for the right thing with a vengence. I give this guy full credit for alleviating the nagging, apathetic feeling induced by reading 1984 (which he read as part of the inspiration for The Resistance). I am sure there are many other people like me who have read 1984 and gotten excited at the moment Julia and Winston discover each other and make passionate plans to overthrow Big Brother’s hold on them. I remember reading that as a teenager and being excited by the idea that they were going to win big time and the book would have a liberating, driven ending. Instead it ended depressingly with Winston spinelessly screaming “Do it to Julia, Not me! I don’t care what you do to her. Tear her face off, strip her to the bones. Not me!”. A reminder that when the moments like this come many of us are spineless wimps and will abandon each other – at least according to George Orwell. Apparently this is not good enough for Matt Bellamy and the album boasts of a neverending commitment and loyaty – and with the idea that love is the most powerful force in the universe, ascends in a neverending conquer the world vibe instead….

They will not force us
They will stop degrading us
They will not control us
We will be victorious!

Well, it does end with sending a lone guy off into space who will never be able to return and who must rescue humanity from a dying planet … but that guy is victorious also. Unlike Crowded House this album has more of an epic quality complete with Floydish sci-fi cover art, a conquer anything plot and Dr Who synth sounds. The nice thing is that for all the seriousness on there, Muse are also adept at taking the piss and there are lots of hilarious moments embedded in the song too – like their screaming Queen harmonies for one.

Adam Clayton from U2 recently remarked that Muse are a tight operation and would give them a run for their money at Glastonbury. That’s true. I thought many bands were superb until I heard Muse. And then I realised those bands actually are superb – but Muse really needs a word invented of it’s own for “way the hell above everyone else”. You don’t really notice this until you listen to them for a while and then go back to something you thought was excellent previously and discover the gaping chasm. This is their best recorded album and remarkably they did this one completely themselves, learning about much of the technical process on the way. Add to this feat a symphony recorded with a real orchestra and the last 3 tracks of Resistance (Overture, Cross-Pollination and Redemption) become a vast expanse of inspiration that soars off into the future, sending Mr Man off on his mission to save us all…. may he win.

In short, both these albums are fantastic and deserve an 11 out of 10.

Morgan 🙂
To listen to or watch either band;

Muse: www.muse.mu
Crowded House: www.crowdedhouse.com

If You’re Friends with a Geek

Dear Robyn,

Tonight I was talking to our wonderful mutual friend Lia, Lia, Lia (no idea why I call her that) on the phone and she read me this wicked poem she’d written for her friend Lisa to cheer her up (since Lisa has just had her leg amputated). It was all about the humourous benefits of missing a leg… it’s hard to think of any but she did! Ingenious. She really has a knack for doing nice things for other people – like swimming 10,000 lengths of the Millenium Institute pool this year to raise money to help the 10,000 people with Leukaemia (Story in North Shore Times here).  She’s bored today since she has the flu so she decided to write a poem about ME which is embarrassingly accurate and brilliant.

Thought you’d get good laugh out of this considering I have frequently

1. Come to your house to visit YOU but ended up instead lying on your sofa/floor with Kass the cat on top of me snoring/reading a book/hijacking your laptop…. (well you would go and befriend an absentminded introvert…. not sure what Kassia’s excuse is)
2. Come to your house to visit you but ended up hiding under the sofa with Kass because I am petrified of the kid’s cartoon movie on the tele….
3. Turned up in the wrong century because I got lost in a time warp wormhole somewhere on my way over (read ‘got sucked into a Supermassive Library Blackhole’ on my way there – yes, they exist and are calibrated to be particularly magnetic to passing INTJs!)
4. My ability to tell time (learnt this – finally – on a kiddies watch with 10 past, ¼ past, written on it when I was 29) is about as impressive as your ability to tell left from right (you’re still figuring this out aren’t you! Remind me never to give you directions while you are driving unless we want the car to go somewhere it wasn’t designed to go.)

Here’s the poem. I think it’s brilliant!

If you’re friends with a geek…

There’s is a lady that I know
Who is a self-confessed nerd
She talks so much that you’d be hard pressed
To get in a single word

She talks all day of aliens
Abductions, and sci-fi
She reads books about psychopaths
And will tell you your personality type

INTP, ESFJ, ISFJ and more
She’ll examine your personality
Until she can analyse no more

She’s a techno-geek, audiohead
Muse fan extraordinaire
She likes Rammstein and the Beatles
No similarities there

She writes her own songs
You should know that
But don’t let her sing them
In front of your cat
For she sings them with passion
Of her songs she’s so proud
But the cat will go running
From the singing so loud

And never ask my friend
The self-confessed geek
To meet you at any particular
Time of the week
For she cannot tell the time
And even if she could
I dont’ think that it’d matter
I don’t think that she would
For she goes by her own time
And I still don’t know what that is
Somewhere perhaps between your, her and my time, and his

But she will never be short of something to say
An opinion to give, and a laugh on the way
Just make sure that when laughing
A coffee she’s drinking
And she’ll barf it all up
Without even blinking

As for blinking, if you want her to simply close her eyes
Rent a movie and watch it, you might be surprised
You see, a phobia she has
Movies she finds scary
So turn on the movie
After her trip to the dairy
She’ll come 3 hours late with chips to share
She’ll put them in a bowl
Right in front of you there
But once the movie starts
With her eyes firmly shut
She won’t notice at all
If you eat them all up

She’s a loveable geek,
And very entertaining
She’ll fall asleep on your sofa
If outside it is raining.

I haven’t seen her for a very long time
But then if she can’t tell it
It’s her fault not mine
But then, alien time may be different you see
And perhaps the fault doesn’t lie with her, but me

So I will no longer suggest a time to meet
I’ll just wait, and I’ll wait, until I grow 2 more feet
I wouldn’t mind that you see
If the time she forgot
Because i’m not that attached
To the feet that I’ve got

Perhaps she’ll come visiting
On her spaceship one day
And she’ll take me to some alien planet far away
They can give me new feet, and a new language to speak
The benefits are endless if you’re friends with a geek.

Morgan 🙂