You may already be

Things you may already be and not even know it, ranked by Google:

• a felon 
• enrolled in Obamacare 
• vastly wealthy 
• a victim of identity theft 
• networking 
• participating in regular forms of exercise 
• practicing forms of shamanism 
• under the control of alien invaders 
• part of a liability—ridden general partnership 
• getting a jump on this job 
• a big goal setter and big thinker 
• under billback 
• a victim, many times over 
• seen as untrustworthy 
• mentoring 
• an everyday hero 
• a stress expert 
• cloud computing 
• involved 
• repurposing 
• living a rock-star lifestyle
• a victim of Linux
• helping wildlife
• on the chopping block
• a United States citizen
• part of a class

Mr. Burns

I caught a performance of Mr. Burns yesterday, and I would highly recommend it except that I think that was the last of its run in San Francisco. This was a meta enough production to satisfy any nerd — a play about the nature of memory and narrative, whose own story is about survivors of a somewhat unspecific apocalypse trying to keep their lives together by remembering and re-enacting old episodes of The Simpsons.

It occurred to me that Mr. Burns is doing for the future what Art Spiegelman's Maus did for the past. That is, both grapple with issues that are too horrible to contemplate directly by going at them through an ostensibly non-serious medium.

[update Aug 2020: there are now several videos of the play online. This one is a highschool production but looks, if I may say so, "ex-cell-ent". ]

Against Pi Day

I don՚t want to poop on anybody՚s celebration of Pi Day, but while pi itself is certainly something to be wondered at and celebrated, the fact that an arbitrarily numbered point on the human calendar aligns with the decimal approximate representation of something transcendental and timeless does not excite me in the least.

What I՚m saying is, we live in a universe where pi pops up everywhere, so every day (defined by a rotation of our pi-manifesting spherical planet) should be pi day.