On Sunday evening, and well into the night, I was compelled to draft a 34-page legal brief. I am too old for that sort of thing. And so, now, I am pretty worded out. Thus, here, I think I am just going to free-associate. And see what happens.

Once I asked my brother what was the difference between a "canyon" and a "gorge."

He replied: "It requires fewer teeth, to say 'gorge.'"

Then he added: "And it requires no teeth at all, to say 'arroyo.'"

My brother, he was a man of many wisdoms.

He liked Beethoven's Sixth Symphony. The "pastoral" one. He called it "going home." A reference, in part, to the film Soylent Green, where it was featured heavily on the soundtrack.

I ran that film for someone some years ago. After which she said, "I'm glad I waited to see this until it became a documentary."

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdfnW5DT7Vg]

Beethoven, he consumed mass quantities. Quite commonly, the man would pour huge tankards of booze down his throat, all day, and all of the night.

In fact, some say it was alcoholic cirrhosis, that killed him. While others say, no, it was syphilis. Then there are the lead-poisoning partisans. And the people of hepatitis. The sarcoidosis devotees. And those who cleave to Whipple's disease. This last, I think it involves an irresistible urge to squeeze rolls of toilet paper.

There are still various Beethoven hairs and skull fragments floating about. And so, periodically, some Science Man, he will subject one or more of these to Tests, and then write a Paper about them.

Because, for the dead, there really is no "rest in peace." Not any more. Someone is always digging you up, rolling you into some Lab. Even if you go to the trouble of having yourself cremated, this may not stop people from, decades on, writing whole biographies, about your balls.

The father of Gore Vidal, Eugene, he had three balls. Apparently they were all the same size. So far as I know, they are not in a Lab.

Gore Vidal, who only had two balls, he observed that there was irony in the fact that these days George Santayana is pretty much forgotten, except for something he said about forgetfulness: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

This is too bad. Because Santayana, he had many wisdoms. For instance, he knew that "chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything."

But if Santayana were going to live for but one remark, I would prefer it be his observation that "there is no God and Mary is his mother."

The brain, it can play with that one, and a lot longer, than with the "past" thing.

"Santayana," that is not a rock band. But it could be.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdmevPWZTRg]

When I was a youth, there were two pop songs that would cause my father to want to stab and shoot. "Windy," and "A Horse With No Name."

When I determined that my father needed to be Punished, I would play the latter, over and over again.

My brother, he possessed a copy of the Woodstock album, with a skip right where Joe Cocker, in "With A Little Help From My Friends," erupts into a massive, prolonged, vomit-scream. This hideous noise, it was eternal, until my brother nudged the needle. Which he would refuse to do. On those occasions when he believed the parents, they needed to be Reprimanded.

"Vomit": that is one of those words that looks and sounds just like the thing it describes. It's pretty gross.

Then there's the Australian variant—"chunder." One pictures with that word, someone like Russell Crowe, sweating, weaving, heaving heartily, in some tumbledown back-of-beyond booze-shack, as he prepares to toss another dwarf.

There is, for no reason known to me, some genetic programming in cats, that commands them to keep moving, whenever they vomit. Generally the cat, when beginning the barf beguine, must heave in at least three distinct places. I asked the tubes why this is, but they wouldn't tell me.

This current crop of cats, they are unusually sensitive to the emotions of human beings, as expressed through the television. Any emotion, high or low, that pulsates out the TV, causes the cats to get up and leave the room. It's just too unnerving.

The radio, now that is not a problem. A clinically insane person, like Runt Limprod, or The Mad Bomber, or The Hairball, they can screech without surcease, there on the radio, and the cats don't care. Maybe the difference, with the television, is that there the humans, they are also visible.

The cat buried out there under the naked-ladies birdbath, it took him a while to get acclimated to the reboot of Battlestar Galactica. There was so much death and anguish, particularly in the early episodes, that he needed to express, via vomiting, his solidarity with the suffering.

My brother, he was one of those human beings who was consitutionally unable to vomit. He only heaved twice in his life; on both occasions, after consuming a corn dog at the county fair. This makes sense. A corn dog, that is such a monstrous object, that any human body, it is going to want to get rid of it, and as quickly as possible.

Back there in mid-March, I erased The Hairball from this universe. It happened: trust me: it is just not fully manifest yet.

It is like sometimes, in battle, a soldier, he will be running, and he will be shot, and killed, but he doesn't notice it for a while, notice that he's dead, and so he keeps on running. For a while. That is sort of what is going on, now, with The Hairball.

But he is definitely fading out. He does not know how to have even the delegates he has won, and even his number-one fangirl, she is estranging herself. Also, he is no longer a menace in my dreams. For a time there, nightside, he was a real annoyment: showing up to, like, bellow his nonsense right into my earhole, as I was trying to drive a bus.

But last night, he was old and bent, teeth bad, not much hair, a burnt-out carny, trying to urge people to his county-fair booth, out on the midway, to there throw baseballs, at milk-bottle stacks. But people weren't interested. They just kept walking on by. It was sort of sad, really.

This universe, you know that it is basically just fucking with us, when you learn that the loudest natural animal noise on the planet, it is made by a penis.

99.2 decibels, blares the thing, sounding forth from that wee beastie monikered the "lesser water boatman."

I am surely glad, that human males, they are not able to produce sound with their members. Because then all the world, it would be deaf.

The boatman, he creates what actual Science Men have termed "this colossal acoustic din," by rubbing his johnson against the ridged surface of his abdomen. The entire noise-making assembly measures about 50 micrometers across, or roughly the width of a human hair. Which should provide fresh meat for the perennial "does size matter?" debate.

The little loud guy, he starts rosining up his bow when—you guessed it—mating time comes around.

[The dude] can create mating calls as loud as 99.2 decibels, which is the equivalent of sitting in the front row of a loud, full-blown orchestra, or standing 15 meters away from a hurtling freight train.

"Remarkably," said Stratchclyde University's James Windmill, "even though 99 percent of sound is lost when transferring from water to air, the song is so loud that a person walking along the bank can actually hear these tiny creatures singing from the bottom of the river."

The Science Men were at first Confused, but now they are Sure. Says Windmill:

"We were very surprised. We first thought that the sound was coming from larger aquatic species such as a Sigara species [of] lesser water boatmen. When we identified without any doubt the sound source, we spent a lot of time making absolutely sure that our recordings of the sounds were calibrated correctly.

"If you scale the sound level they produce against their body size, Micronecta scholtzi are without doubt the loudest animals on Earth."

The Science Men rushed their discovery to a conference in Glasgow, where they "are now keen to bring together aspects of biology and engineering to clarify how and why such a small animal makes such a loud noise[.]"

Hell, the "why" of it is answered easily enough. Guy wants a woman.

I didn't make any noise at all here, Saturday, much less any "colossal acoustic din" of 99.2 decibels. For I failed then utterly, in my duty to post the Saturday open thread. Because AT&T ripped out my tube at 5 p.m. PST Friday, and didn't reconnect it until late Saturday night.

They gave no reason for this.

I only have the one tube. A thin green wire, coming out of the wall, that goes to the skeletal Arris monolith, and from there to the Mac Mini, the Ooma, and the Roku.

I have no other computers. I have no smellphones.

So, when they clog this tube, I am back in the 19th Century.

It was sort of relaxing, really.

But then they unclogged the tube. And so now I am back on Medicine.

I don't get why it's called an "open thread." Because a "thread," it is not generally "open." Nor is it "closed."

Weird.

People, they are always whining and moaning, about human overpopulation. But what about chickens? There are 19 billion of those things running around. Three times as many chickens on the planet, as people.

The extraterrestrial film director Werner Herzog, he has observed that when you "look into the eyes of a chicken, you will see real stupidity. It is a kind of bottomless stupidity, a fiendish stupidity. They are the most horrifying, cannibalistic and nightmarish creatures in the world."

A chicken is key to the finale of Herzog's Stroszek, in a sequence which pretty much sums up the human condition.

At the time of fliming, Herzog's own crew scorned the footage: they "all found the scene very stupid and embarrassing; everyone asked whether we were really going to shoot such rubbish after spending so much time on this stupid film. 'Please,' I said to Thomas Mauch, 'just point the camera, press the button and let it roll until the film runs out. This is something very big.'" And so it is.

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vo2Leu-HQIc]