The Last Candle

Twice I’ve received pick-up slips from the USPS, and twice the packages came from Russia. No joke. I have a serious problem.

I should clarify that I expected the packages, since I ordered them in the first place. Also, I should mention that I lied just now and am not actually in any kind of trouble. Nope, not a smidge of trouble unless Ann Arbor is under siege and the Reds are implicated as the provocateurs, in which case a government agency might rap at my door to inquire why Vladimirsky insists on sending me satchels from the Motherland every couple months.

If the Big Government Agency does knock and ask to see the package contents, I might be in trouble: the liner notes of the imported goods distinctly say “For sale only in RUSSIA!” If my illicit importation is discovered, hopefully the bottle of 120-Minute IPA I have sitting in my fridge will appease them. If the beer itself doesn’t work, maybe the bottle itself will be more coercive.

The other day’s Red Arrival brought me The Poodles’ latest album, a disc of some fine hard-rock tunes that despite the name doesn’t feature a squad frilly men wearing tutus and playing guitars. Instead, the frilly men are wearing various types of vests, which is by my estimation one of the high marks of Swedish manhood. Swedes sometimes don three, even four vests of different fabrics, threads and leathers when out for a night on the town, or at least I’ve heard that, or else I’ve just made it up. I’ll ask Paul, my merry Swedish friend, if he’d be willing to wear multiple vests to a jazz show and will report back here with the answer in due time.

This Poodles album arrives on the tail end of a very musical couple of months. Beginning around the start of February up to the present, I’m averaging about 2.5 new albums a week. On one hand, the plethora new tunes is an absolute boon, for the obvious reasons: rock and roll will never die, Britney will hit it big again one day, etc. On the other gloved hand, attempting to fully digest and appreciate, or digest and reject, roughly two albums a week is nearly impossible. But, whatever. Music, aye? I’ll take it.

One of my favorites is called The Human Equation and comes courtesy famed Dutch mastermind Arjen Anthony Lucassen and his Ayreon project.

Ayreon, the concept, relates the forlorn tale of Ayreon, the 6th Century minstrel, who is able to receive broadcasts from the late 21nd Century via some crackpot scientists and a little thing they call the Time Telepathy Experiment. In what must be some kind of torture, these far-future jokers are sending back notices to poor Ayreon that their time is in the midst of some existential crisis — world’s about to collapse, explode, be eaten by the Sun, that sort of thing. The actual cause of Earth’s impending doom is not clear, but the Time Telepathists make it obvious that, Oh yes, later in this 21nd Century is going to be very rough.

(The actual apocalypse purportedly occurs in 2084, so neither Lucassen nor I will be around to see the skies falling. Too bad — I wanted to be in line to take a crack at Time Telepathy to harass a few bards, or maybe a pharaoh or two. Imagine what kind of stories the inside walls of pyramids would tell if King Tut had received a few broadcasts from the collapsing 21st. Then again, some folks might already say those stories are already on the walls. Migods!)

Lucassen develops the whole concept through a series of vaguely-connected albums, all under the Ayreon name, but for what I’ve been able to garner this far it’s all pretty foggy, ham-handed stuff. The album Into the Electric Castle is well-known in the metal world for its musicianship and quality production in the prog-rock vein, but the summary of the concept looks like a bad post-modern cocktail of quack psychiatry, 7th-grade science-fiction, and hallucinogenic drugs: several parts of the plot are trying to coalesce into a definable thread, but in the end the whole thing just looks a mess.

Being unable to clarify and trim off the philosophical garbage from a concept is an epidemic in the progressive- and power-metal genre. That’s not to say that no compelling or well-composed concepts exist in the metal world, but I’ve listened to quite a few in my day, having frequently sought out story-based productions for some strange, masochistic reason. Maybe my continued patronization of the quill-wielding hoardes of metalheads is a result of discovering Blind Guardian as one of my first true power metal bands, a band who has written rich and highly-programmatic instrumentals (for power metal, at least) and whose concepts are frequently really good.

As for Ayreon, I’ve bought two albums from Lucassen’s intergalactic space-time mumbo-jumbo hodgey-podgey butter-bread opera, and he’s batting .500 so far.

The more recently-released and recently-purchased album is 01011001 (yes, that’s the real album name; yes, it does represent something in the concept; no, the thing in the concept is not represented in base-2 for a good reason).

Within the past couple of weeks I’ve spun both discs of 01011001 a couple times. After the 100 or so minutes of narrative and high-effect guitar and Hammond organ, and after frequent repartee between the 11 different vocalists, including Lucassen himself, I can’t figure what in the Universal Migrator’s underpants is going on. Maybe my lack of understanding is because I’ve picked up on the whole Ayreon deal at the tail end of the concept and skipping all the basic, integral bits, but sheesh, if my ability to derive the overall story from a fairly complex concept is this bad, then it’s a wonder I can pay attention at my job during the day. (And about that job, I had the big annual performance review last week, and the bosses think I’m doing a bang-up job. Dig me.)

The short review for 01011001: a big confused pile. Good music, bad storytelling. Those who enjoy brevity can stop here.

Maybe 01011001 needs to be played a half-dozen more times or so before I really get into the meat of the subject. From what I can tell so far, the principal character — or characters, really — is a sentient race that lives on Planet Y — and Y can be represented in ASCII character code by the number 89 — and the base-10 number 89 can be represented in base-2 by the number 1011001 — har, har, har — that has incredible mechanical and biological technology. The race is immortal, but somewhere along the highway of life they took a sharp turn to get off at a rest stop in the mountains, and the luggage with their emotions packed away slipped off the top of the turbo-charged VW van and tumbled down into a big dark ravine, lost forever. That’s how I see it in my head, at least.

So the concept begins with a bunch of super-geeks who can’t feel emotion, which is odd considering that they do more than their planet’s share of moaning and groaning throughout the production. The general lamentations of this sorry group is further exacerbated by the fact that Planet Y is dying, because all the space tuna have gone back to their home planet or something, which is always a bummer. (At least they won’t have to worry about the heavy-metal poisoning from the frequent and delicious tuna melts — now the fellows just need to watch out for the other kind of bad heavy metal, the kind that comes out of a speaker. Zing.)

Fortunately, the Emo Collective is a clever bunch, and they seed a comet with their own biological makeup and fire it off into the cosmos, sending their progeny out to landfall on a totally different world to be cultivated. (This is, more or less, an actual hypothesis of biological creation, although the supporting evidence has thus far been thin.) Note that the wise guys themselves aren’t actually riding the comet: the intergalatic-travelling body will just smash into some accommodating planet and generate a new breed of emo-geeks, and the Collective will oversee the general upbringing.

That’s basically disc one’s plot in a nutshell, although I skipped a few tracks such as the one where Simone Simons, the golden-voiced lead singer of Epica, plays the embarrassing Anonymous Internet Hottie and tries to dig on some random fellow via an awkward and, ultimately, completely banal e-mail exchange (and that’s no joke). Disc two opens up with the comet — happily, and fortunately! — smashing into a nice, lush, breed-friendly planet. The Collective sees life on the planet prior to the comet’s landfall; when the comet hits the larger organisms will be wiped out, but the cosmic smarty-pants decide that a bunch of lizards don’t matter much when this brand-new, totally awesome species takes root and evolves.

By the way, those lizards that are killed off when the comet hits? It was the dinosaurs, as in our dinosaurs, or at least the dinosaur remains we keep digging out of prehistoric strata. The song where the comet wipes out those poor feathered pea-brains is called The Fifth Extinction.

The final song on 01011001 is The Sixth Extinction and takes place in — wait for it — the year 2084, which just means after the whole morbid trip that the Collective screwed up yet again! In a way I feel badly for those poor sods, what with all that work resulting in complete failure for the sixth time.

A bunch of strange and magical and surprisingly boring events occur between that Fifth and Sixth Extinctions, all working up from prehistory through the current day, and man, I’ve been really trying hard to care about it all, even just a little bit. One of the tunes is named “E=mc²” and has some chanting about “breaking the equation,” so maybe I’ll tune back into that one and see if it drops any hints towards that Pulitzer Prize in physics I’ve been meaning to land for a few months now.

Of course, I could just read the Wikipedia article for the album and take in the whole darn story at once, but then I probably wouldn’t listen to the album after that, since all of the unintentional mystery would be gone.

Fortunately, 01011001’s shortcomings are more than made up by The Human Equation.

But I’ll ramble about that one some other time, because the auditorium surely has cleared out by now. Seems like a pretty good idea to me — I’ve done plenty of moaning and whining for one day.

(San Francisco pictures are here. I spent enough time on ‘em, so I’m gonna plug ‘em. And now, back to regular, er, blogging content.

Anyone who’s spent any amount of attention to the news lately — or if, like me, you don’t read the news at all but spend a lot of time reading science blogs and science-oriented sites — is probably aware of the recent big controversy about autism and vaccines.

If not, here’s the basic dish: an outspoken lobby of parents, naturalists, evangelists and outright kooks has hypothesized that vaccines are at least partially responsible for causing autistic spectrum disorders, or ASDs. Actually, hypothesize is probably too tame a word — wholly charged and convicted is more appropriate, as the lobby is completely convinced one way or another that vaccines are, without a doubt, the root cause of ASDs.

(This guesswork regarding the autism-vaccine is not necessarily the problem — good scienctific methodology requires beginning with a hypothesis, so you have to start somewhere. The problem is when support for the hypothesis is continued and prolonged after trials and experimentation has proven, through the best-available methods and evidence, that the hypothesis is wrong. Later on in this post I’ll direct the reader towards posts that dissect the hypothesis and present the evidence, but I wanted to just wanted to make the point that supposing a cause and effect is in itself not necessarily bad. The problem is that this case has gone way beyond the disproven point.)

The anti-vaccine movement is composed in part by parents. Last year, a large group of families with autistic children filed roughly 5,000 suits en masse to the government’s Vaccine Court. Hearings of individual cases began back in June 2007 and continue grinding away slowly today. A ruling in favor of the plantiff — an admittance that an administered vaccine caused harmful reactions in the treated patient — results in monetary compensation. While individual cases are important for medicine and proven compensation, the stakes for cases within the Autism Omnibus are much more important: rulings could not only set a precedence for other similar cases, but could affect how vaccines are administered to children.

And vaccines are — duh — important. Cases of polio and measles, two diseases that have established, effective vaccines available, have rebounded in African and Japanese populations, respectively, after families refused vaccines for various reasons. Continued vaccinations could lead to the complete containment and eradication of these afflictions, just like the reduction and removal of smallpox via vaccines in the 1970s.

The recent outcry in the media and anti-vaccine groups was about one of those Autism Omnibus hearings: a special master overseeing the case decided that 9-year-old Hannah Poling, who was diagnosed with autism early in her life, was indeed affected harmfully by an administered vaccine. The anti-vaccine lobby and many media outlets, seeing red meat (but landing a classic case of post hoc ergo propter hoc instead), is now put this case on a pedestal as definite evidence that vaccines are indeed responsible for causing ASDs.

In actuality, the studies and evidence for the vaccine-autism connection — that is, the studies have revealed that the connection is false. And this is where I’m going to let the scientists take over.

The science blogging community has been combatting what they’ve deemed the “Mercury Militia” (the mercury moniker comes from the anti-vaccines lobby that thimerosal, an ethyl-mercury-containing additive to vaccines that has since been removed nearly all vaccines, was the particular component causing the autism) for many months, far before the Autism Omnibus hearing began in June 2007. Most of the bloggers commenting on this issue (at least, the bloggers I’ve been reading) are MDs or PhDs, or both, and all of them are critical thinkers, which is the very least you could ask for when dealing with such a sensitive issue.

I’m no scientishian, but I, um, read blogs — a lot of blogs, actually. Not only can I read (and write!) words larger than a few syllables, but I can make one smart-looking unlinked list in HTML. So, putting all of my intellectual abilites to the utmost test, here’s a list of a few blog posts from favorite science and medicine blogs about the autism-vaccine firestorm that’s cooking hot these days.

• Orac, at his indispensable and irreplaceable blog Respectful Insolence, has been traumatizing the anti-vaccine crowd with his logic-, evidence-, and derision-bat for months and months. He’s been very much on top of the debate, and recently created an aggregate link-post for his own blog. Orac orients the audience towards a lot of good posts with his single post, so begin digging with this one.


• After his link-love blog entry, Orac followed up with another autism-vaccine-based that summarizes the whole argument from both sides. It’s a lengthy argument, which made a lengthy post, but it’s a great crash course in the issue at hand.


• Skeptico links to the same Orac aggregate-post that I did above, but he (she?) offers some additional commentary in his typically cogent, well-articulated and frank manner.


• Dr. Steven Novella is not only the ringleader of the terrific Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe podcast, but he also runs a really tight ship on his Neurologica Blog. Earlier posts by Dr. Novella were linked through by Orac (again! He covers everything!), but the doctor has since lambasted presidential-hopeful and pseudo-scientific nitwit John McCain for recent autism-vaccine connection comments.

I don’t read political blogs anymore because fighting that hydra didn’t bestow satisfying benefit: the fight would go on and on, and whether or not I disengaged myself from any particular debate early or if I followed through the entire ordeal, the knowledge or information stores gained felt worthless once the next battle began. The tectonic plates of politics are largely moved by emotions and fallacies, and less by the straight-forward presentation of evidence or sound arguments. Reading up on that kind of news of the day just made me irritable and worthlessly argumentative with no personal payoff.

But now I read a whole heap o’ science blogs, and although the fight still exists (see: all of the above post), after the smart dust has cleared, I possess not only a greater knowledge of real-world workings, all of which are more amazing by the day, but my critical-thinking faculties are a bit sharper. In a debate I’d be more likely to trip over the podium than actually put forth a serious contention, but my toolkit of moves for fightin’ within the argument arena is slowly developing into a formidable opponent.

The collection and support of evidence and the methodlogy of critical thinking is a lengthy, time-consuming and dauting journey, but progress is noticable, and the proper practice makes the weak spots in the opposition as evident as pink skin showing between two plates of armor. But anyways, go read.

San Francisco picture gallery.

San Fran City, February 2K8

I dabbled with the color settings and framing of the photos a bit but kept the photo sequencing, i.e. the date and time when I took the pictures, pretty close to straight chronological. Combine the ordering with the keen little map of where each picture was taken, and it’s like the viewer is transported right to their own vacation in fancy ‘Cisco! Oh, so lucky!

Great trip, but I dunno when I’ll take the next one, since the April plan to San Fran is now in the can: the Summer vacation came down to either SF or San Luis Obispo, and I am goin’ to SLO. When it came to that decision, I didn’t even have a dog in the fight for ole’ sourdough city.

But I hope anyone who indulges the new picture gallery enjoys it, even if it is a bit weak on the good photos and heavy on the comment nostalgia. A video of the Sonata Arctica concert is in the works too, but as usual, no guarantees when it’ll be ready. The final production ought to be a treat, whenever it arrives.

Somewhere along the line, I became some kind of content-hoarder. Good content, sure, all of it, and something of a loving necessity in my daily routine. But the sheer quantity of all the content is edging towards a genuine problem (and the good kind of problem, really): I can’t keep up with it all.

• Google Reader is keeping track of 90 syndicated feeds. Last week, and just before a desperate and marginally-successful trimming, the number of tracked feeds was above 115. That’s about 150+ new articles to read a day.


• Besides the new media of RSS feeds, I’ve apparently rediscovered books and magazines, since I have about a dozen different tomes and copies of them laying around unfinished. Besides my own books that are perched on the shelf or strewn about in variable states of bookmarking and upside-down spine-cracking place-marking, I borrowed three books from the library in the past week. Haven’t started any of ‘em. As for an indication of the magazine realm of content, I haven’t finished reading Scientific American from four months ago.


• Twenty audio podcast feeds. This is getting a little ridiculous, yes? A few of those ‘casts are updated daily; almost all of them are about an hour apiece. Nothing is finer in the evening than a new episode of The Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe and a walk, but I’d need to cover about 26 miles daily to stay up to date.


• New music: Three new albums this week, and two new albums last week. This is a normal frequency, and, honestly, the continuing discoveries make me a happy dope. I will make time, between minutes if necessary, to discover and enjoy new artists and albums and songs. But being able to take in the deluge of new music still needs to be squished in between all of the other stuff.


• The games — oh, those poor games. Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney is here but still shrink-wrapped because I haven’t finished my game of Trials and Tribulations that began back in November. Anyone remember the Beating Old Games project from a couple years ago? I haven’t completed the second game out of the big ole’ list. The BOG Project is dead, dead, dead.


• And then there’s projects. Two current web pages to redesign; one goofy new page in the works that will likely never touch a real server. Playing guitar. The blog. The tumblelog. San Francisco picture gallery. Project 366. Scripts and code business.

And that’s just the personal itinerary. All of that usually is shoved aside for visiting and consorting with pals, which occurs a few times a week.

But there’s hope: the great pruning of books, magazines, podcasts, projects, and Web feeds has begun. (Notice that music stays put, and good that it is.) Well, maybe hope exists for getting a few things done once in a while after the firing line quiets down, but a lot of excellent, worthwhile content and potential is going to be up against the wall.

Something of a sign of the times, I think — new stuff is just too easy and convenient to procure in large quantities across many mediums all at once these days. Now I just need to learn the fine art of priority and organization.

I’ll look into it tomorrow.