Sunday Burst of Weirdness

It’s been a good week for weirdness out there!

:: Not actually weird, but really pretty cool: Lynn linked a post on another blog about a minimalist composer named Rhys Chatham who recently contrived a work that is scored for electric guitars. Plural. And not just two or three, but four hundred electric guitars. It’s nothing “heavy metal” like at all; all those guitars combine to form a fascinating soundscape. There’s nothing about unusually-massive musical forces that require a resulting work to be trashy; Hector Berlioz was a master of huge orchestras, and he postulated that the effect should be “powerful” rather than tasteless. I’d like to hear this entire piece. An MP3 download of the first movement (quite a large file) can be found here.

:: As usual, good weirdness at MeFi, in particular this thread devoted to a possibly spoof “dating site” for “beautiful people”. As usual, the key attraction to MeFi threads like this is the snarky commentary:

Fantastic website. All the most nightmarishly shallow, ignorant, irrelevant people you truly need to avoid, in one convenient location…with pictures, so that you know who they are without a doubt.

Mmmmm.. I’m feelin kinda Ayn Randy I am.

it’s survival of the fittest … if it was survival of the cutest, kittens would have ruled the earth long ago

The majority of the most thoroughly screwed-up, personally repugnant (aka batshitinsane) people I’ve ever met have been very visually attractive.

You know what makes me laugh? When two really pretty and vain people get together and create really goofy looking kids. That makes me laugh. And only a little bit because I have beautiful kids. Mostly because I like it when vain people get a little reality smackdown.

My parents are both more beautiful than me. Can I sue Darwin?

But then the thread gets all serious and stuff. Do we have to always derail good snark with serious discussions of sociology?

:: CNN ran this article the other day about the season debut of the long-running (second only to The Simpsons) FOX animated show King of the Hill. It’s a pretty good article, actually; what’s weird about it is the goofy list of “bullet points” at the top of the article, in a box labeled “Story Highlights”. Have we become so poor readers that we need a helpful list of bullet-points, summarizing an article before we even read it???

:: And this week’s winner, via Shamus. The brain nearly shuts down, trying to list all the ways that this is just plain wrong.

I await the fuzzy-kitten version of King Lear….

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