Pax Arcana

I don’t know about you, but I’ve been pretty stressed out lately. The economy is in the shitter, the Mets effing suck, and it’s done nothing but rain for two months in a row.

In dark times our spirits beg to be uplifted. What I need — what we ALL need, I say — is something positive to hook our hopes on to. Something that transcends the snark and cynicism. Something that cuts through the bullshit make-work and drudgery of our quotidian life. Something that offers our souls the sweet release they yearn for.

We need to go to Lowell.

Not for the murderous local newspaper or piles of duck corpses lining the Merrimack River, but because our friends at Lucy the Blog and the Western Avenue Studios are hosting the 1st Annual FoWAS Funk Brunch — a FREE celebration of the arts featuring live music from Glen David Andrews. I’ve posted a YouTube video of the man himself down below. I think you’ll see what I’m talking about. The July 26th event coincides with the Lowell Folk Festival, so you can make a whole day of it.

Anyway, the hosts of the FoWAS Funk Brunch want you to be a part of the celebration. You can find out more details on Facebook by searching for “1st Annual FoWAS Funk Brunch.” Here are the basics:

1st Annual FoWAS Funk Brunch

Now onto some songs:

Welfare Bread — King Khan and the Shrines
Twilight Galaxy — Metric
The Lie and How We Told It — Yo La Tengo
Call me Calmly – Barenaked Ladies
Plastis Wafers – Of Montreal
Mind’s Eye – Josh Ritter
Down in the City — The Sea and Cake
Hey Jude — The Beatles
Energy Spent — Liam Finn
Together — The Raconteurs

Bonus Video:

I’ll Fly Away — Glen David Andrews

The Rules: The Friday Random 10 is exactly that — random. We open up our iTunes, set the thing on shuffle, and listen to 10 songs. We are not permitted to skip any out of embarrassment or fear of redundancy. Commenters are encouraged to post their own.

Father Scott

My dad is the only person in America who still sends chain emails. (I think they probably still do it in China, because Web sites aren’t allowed.) Anyway, I usually ignore them because I’m terrified that they will be horribly inappropriate and cause our company’s Web people to come up and light my computer on fire. But one today was pretty interesting.

I don’t have a link to share (because, again, it’s a CHAIN EMAIL), but the photographic credit apparently goes to Jeff Moore. Check this freaking oddity out. Women, be prepared: it’s an adorable tiny animal.

This tiny deer was delivered by Caesarean section at a wildlife hospital after a car killed his mother.

Little Rupert, who is so small he can fit in an adult’s hand, was born after vets failed in their battle to save his mother.

At just six inches tall and weighing just over a pound, he is now in an incubator in the intensive care unit at Tiggywinkles Wildlife Hospital in Buckinghamshire.  He has only recently opened his eyes.
Les Stocker, founder of Tiggywinkles, said, “Rupert’s mother had very severe injuries.  We brought him out and got him breathing, and then he went into an incubator on oxygen.  He is now being fed by a tube.”

Tucked up:  Rupert in an incubator.

Rupert pulls a striking pose for the camera..

Staff members are optimistic that Rupert, now five days old, will make a full recovery.

“Deer are very, very tricky, but this one has spirit..  He’s an extremely feisty little guy and quite pushy,” Mr. Stocker said.

Asleep:  Rupert takes 40 winks.

Now, how can I figure out how to get this into Pax and Mrs. Pax’s new pad? And would it be more or less creepy than this?

Pax Arcana

I spent yesterday afternoon erecting a vivarium to house the menagerie of zoo animals I plan to rescue from the Franklin Park Zoo. Because I’m a super tough guy, I was working with a jackhammer in one hand and a pile driver in the other, driving railroad ties through reinforced concrete like a human sewing machine made of equal parts testosterone and rocket fuel.

That went well. Then later I stubbed my toe climbing into the bubble bath to catch up on my US Weekly.

“FUCK!” I screamed.

“FUCKING FUCKFACE ASSFUCKER SHITFUCK ASS!” I continued.

Turns out all that screaming did more than convince the neighbors that the Mets had lost the 2006 NLCS again. It also made me feel better. So says a group of British scientists, who report their findings that cursing helps manage pain. They know because they had a bunch of student volunteers stick their hands into freezing cold water. The ones who swore reported less pain and were able to keep their hands in longer:

How swearing achieves its physical effects is unclear, but the researchers speculate that brain circuitry linked to emotion is involved. Earlier studies have shown that unlike normal language, which relies on the outer few millimeters in the left hemisphere of the brain, expletives hinge on evolutionarily ancient structures buried deep inside the right half.

One such structure is the amygdala, an almond-shaped group of neurons that can trigger a fight-or-flight response in which our heart rate climbs and we become less sensitive to pain. Indeed, the students’ heart rates rose when they swore, a fact the researchers say suggests that the amygdala was activated.

Taking things one step further, I suggest that people who swear all the time do so to manage the pain of their everyday lives. Some people probably rely on cursing as a crutch to help them dampen the soul-crushing dullness and misery of their own existence. Fucking losers!

Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief [Sci Am]

Pax Arcana

Sorry for the extreme paucity of highbrow musings lately. There are several reasons for this. The first is that the radiant and scrupulous Mrs. Pax Arcana and I are in the process of painting our house — the only human activity that goes from “exciting” and “fun” to “suicidally excruciating” faster than being governor of California.

The second is that my laptop caught a case of the fizzles yesterday, so until my technical team can replace it I’m stuck with a loaner that I believe was crafted out of discarded braces, watch batteries and graham crackers. Shit is slow.

It’s not that I don’t want to provide you with a hot tub full of greasy, sexy blogging. Trust me — I want to slather your body parts in stories of racist Philadelphians, men in tiny boats, gas station exposés, grand optical illusions, the greatest baseball game ever played, anachronistic uniform components, impish impulses, and the New York Times’ hilarious warning against eating raw cookie dough.

It’s just that I can’t right now.

So let’s skip ahead to the songs:

Listening to Otis Redding During Christmas — Okkervil River
A-Punk — Vampire Weekend
The Funeral — Band of Horses
Another Man’s Done Gone — Wilco
In the Garage — Weezer
Pot Kettle Black — Wilco
That Time — Regina Spektor
Born to Run — Bruce Springsteen
Punch Drunk — Bush Tetras
Song #1 — Fugazi

Bonus Video:

Land of the Freak — King Khan and the Shrines (Live)

The Rules: The Friday Random 10 is exactly that — random. We open up our iTunes, set the thing on shuffle, and listen to 10 songs. We are not permitted to skip any out of embarrassment or fear of redundancy. Commenters are encouraged to post their own.

Pax Arcana

My soft spot for the newspaper industry is well-known, as is my despair for the wont of real ideas for saving the most important news-gathering apparatus in existence today. (Less well-known is that my pheromones attract badgers. It’s a sexy but painful curse.)

The latest idea comes from James Rainey of the LA Times. Rainey is a smart guy with a dumb idea — newspapers should host more food festivals and shit like that to raise money. Because the business world is just like high school, and there’s no way they’ll shut down the drama club if we have, like, the best bake sale ever.

Then there’s Mediaite, a new Web site that ranks media personalities on a completely contrived power scale. It’s like fantasy football for the criminally douchey. Or as Will Leitch puts it:

The site is called Mediaite, and according to publisher Dan Abrams’ mission statement, it hopes to become “the must-read for anyone interested in media, the business of it and the personalities behind it.” At this point, it is perfectly acceptable for the rest of you to throw a shoe at your computer.

But still, it’s not the Raineys or Abrams of the world who are to blame for the mess in which the industry finds itself. That honor falls to the poop gobbling fucks who run the media companies — the idiot upperclass twits who fling millions in bonuses at executives who ran their papers into the ground and insist that the only way to save newspapers is to force the public to pay for an inferior product.

Let’s see if you can guess how these sacks full of farts and dead mice are spending their week in the face of the most dire crisis in the industry’s history. If you guessed that they’re recruiting innovators from Silicon Valley to build the news delivery platform of the future, then you’ve got egg all over your face, egg face.

While reporters at the New York Times are being told to save money by not texting or calling 411 on their company cell phones, the luminaries of the media universe took the private jets to Sun Valley for a week of hob-knobbing with other knobs. You are not invited, egg face:

For one week a year, the affluent resort town in central Idaho is transformed by Allen & Co, a boutique investment bank, into a playground of billionaires. They stroll along manicured pathways in its tranquil grounds and meditate by the duck ponds over the future of the media business and perhaps the next transformative merger.

Hopefully one of the ducks from the duck pond can point out the irony to these assholes of flying to Sun Valley for a weeklong golf and hooker escapade with their Princeton classmates while demanding massive layoffs and labor concessions at their various media properties.

Duck: Hi Mr. Media Honcho! You look depressed.

Media Honcho: I am. My companies are falling flat on their faces. If this continues, I might have to sell my private island! What will the boys at the club think?!

Duck: Maybe you shouldn’t have borrowed hundreds of millions of dollars to build new printing presses when the future of journalism is clearly online.

Media Honcho: Who let this duck talk to me like this? You there! Yes, you! The Mexican-looking fellow. Shoot this duck.

Pax Arcana

Last week the Internet shark that processes my student loans changed its online payment provider, requiring me to create a new account on some other Web site for some goddamn reason. Of course the thing asked me for my User ID and Password first — things which I didn’t actually have since the site is brand new.

So I click on the Forgot User ID or Password? button to have the site email me my login information.

Two minutes later I find out that my default password is a random smattering of numbers (yay student loan company!) but my default User ID is my social security number (boooooooooo student loan company!).

SSNs are notoriously bad security devices. They are easily stolen since every American has been forced to hand that information over to credit card companies, DMVs, hospitals, universities, employers, and many other institutions typically run by idiots.

And if the Washington Post is to be believed, that’s not even the worst of it. Turns out that a reasonably sophisticated software program could actually GUESS your social security number based only on your date and place of birth:

The Social Security number’s first three digits — called the “area number” — is issued according to the Zip code of the mailing address provided in the application form. The fourth and fifth digits — known as the “group number” — transition slowly, and often remain constant over several years for a given region. The last four digits are assigned sequentially.

As a result, SSNs assigned in the same state to applicants born on consecutive days are likely to contain the same first four or five digits, particularly in states with smaller populations and rates of birth.

Using only birth-related information in the so-called Death Master File, researchers at Carnegie Mellon were able to guess the first five digits of the SSN for 44% of dead people born after 1988 on the first try. They were able to guess all nine SSN digits for the same group 8.5% of the time in less than 1,000 attempts — an effort that would take only fractions of a second using a software program.

Most thieves wouldn’t even have to get all nine, since the only digits unique to you are passed around like blame at a congressional hearing:

Linda Foley, founder of the Identity Theft Resource Center, a San Diego based nonprofit, cited another potential problem. She said many businesses have errantly rely upon or have moved to redact all but the last four digits of a person’s SSN, the very digits that are most unique to an individual.

“Because of the way the SSN has been designed, asking for the last four numbers of the SSN puts people at risk because those are the only numbers that are unique to you and cannot be guessed easily by someone who might want to use your identity,” Foley said.

The Carnegie Mellon research has some — including the Social Security Administration — calling for private business to stop using the number as an authentication number. Companies resist this because it will cost money — plus consumers don’t want to have to remember dozens of totally random numbers for each bank or other account. I think the answer is to let people create their own authentication numbers in whatever sequence or language they like and then use that everywhere. Mine would be “serendipity” only the e’s would be made of dolphins and there would be a rainbow from the s to the y. Just like my lower back tattoo.

Researchers: Social Security Numbers Can Be Guessed [Washington Post]

Pax Arcana

Don’t expect much in this space, as the sunny and composed Mrs. Pax Arcana and I are tending to our Western properties in California this week.

Not to worry — the capable Perry Ellis will attend to our gardens (Topsy Turvy Estates) and my Hungarian manservant is fully capable of caring and feeding Father Scott in my absence.

In the meantime, I may find some opportunities to post pictures from our journey. God speed for a good week at work, bitchez.

Pax Arcana

As is so often the case at times of great upheaval, the world now looks to me to make sense of the death of Michael Jackson.

Very well.

Michael Jackson was the capstone of a line of cultural touchstones who bridged the gap between “white” and “black” music. Like Elvis, Otis Redding, and Smokey Robinson before him, Michael Jackson had the uniqe gift of extreme cultural synthesis — fusing elements of many different musical styles into an art form that rose above description and categorization. For a 15 year period from the late 1970s through the early 1990s, Michael Jackson was the transcendent human of his age and likely the last megastar of the music world.

Also, he wanted to put his wiener in your children.

The songs:

Dig Your Grave — Modest Mouse
The Swell Season — Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova
Car Radio (Different) — Spoon
Suck My Kiss — Red Hot Chilipeppers
Chesley’s Little Wrists – Pavement
Boot on the Seat – The Donkeys
Golden Age — TV on the Radio
Do What You Gotta Do — Okkervil River
Saltwater – Beach House
Mango Pickle Down River — M.I.A.

Bonus video:

I’ve Been Loving You Too Long (Too Stop Now) (Otis Redding cover) — Cat Power

The Rules: The Friday Random 10 is exactly that — random. We open up our iTunes, set the thing on shuffle, and listen to 10 songs. We are not permitted to skip any out of embarrassment or fear of redundancy. Commenters are encouraged to post their own.

Pax Arcana

A few days ago we brought you the not-really latest on Australia’s adorable political scandal, and quoted a pundit wallaby on the matter. Several readers wrote in to complain that wallaby pundit’s language was more gibberish than the queen’s English.

“These blowies are cross as a frog in a sock, but all this earbashing is just furphy really,” he said. “Now if you’ll excuse me I’m gonna go chuck a sickie and go hit the turps. I’m dry as a nun’s nasty today.”

At first I dismissed the gibberish claims, on the grounds that most Australians sound like they’re speaking a language invented by drunken Japanese John Wayne impersonators.

But lately it has come to my attention that the wallaby population down under is struggling with a major drug problem, which may be the cause of wallaby pundit’s curious vernacular:

Tasmanian poppy growers have a bizarre explanation for crop circles found in their paddocks: drugged out wallabies. It has been found the marsupials are breaking into opium poppy fields and getting high after eating the poppy heads.

Tasmania’s Attorney-General Lara Giddings said the intoxicated wallabies then hopped around in circles, making the formations.

“The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles,” Ms Giddings told a Budget Estimates hearing.

Of course wallaby pundit isn’t going to take these accusations of drug abuse lying down. In an interview on the Qantas Vegemite News Hour,  he vigorously disputed the charges leveled against him and the rest of wallaby-kind:

“These knockers have me flat out ropeable! It’s London to a brick that my shonky ex-sheila and her stickybeak sister have gone troppo in some tall poppies and are full whacka — tits and all. Besides, even if I was full as a goog in a field somewhere, I doubt I’d be turning circles. Those Chinamen could hardly have built those railroads if they all had the wobbly boot on, right?”

Wacked out wallabies creating crop circles [Live News]

Pax Arcana

Baseball hall of famers are really just like us. They put their pants on one leg at a time, then they take them off in the nearest restroom at the Bellagio.

Via The Wright Stache