Aurora Night,
The one who laughs all the time,
Burns right through eyelids
Haloes right through walls --
A shiny thing distraction:
Nothing gets done.

Bouyant, coffee'd, hamock ease

magnetic glow electricities

charged and polar
libraries.

High window sun
unblonded freckles
stare at walls
'till yellow speckles.
Can I be in on every joke you're laughing at?

The obvious is obvious --
isn't it obvious?
Unless the light is yellow,
everywhere,
and I can't see:
Aurora Night,
eyelid vein roadmap:
followed to nowhere.

Cops, Cow Farts and Angry Birds

Cow flatulence contribute between 4 - 9% of methane, a troublemaker in the world of climate change. You know who else contributes? Policeman sitting with the engine running outside the gym. The whole time. I don't get it. CO2 is also a pretty naughty Nellie when it comes to climate change. And that's mostly human caused.

All this talk about climate change really makes you think of the budget brawl - a metaphorical midget wrestling match complete with chairs, easily distracted refs and a bunch of people watching, some of them not even knowing if it's real or not.

Let's start with climate change. Mother Nature is moody. Climate goes through cycles. An ice age here. A drought there. Thrown in a few volcanos, meteors and El Ninos and weather is hard to predict. The one thing you can observe is a trend. You can watch the trends and make generalizations. So let's say there was no industrialization, mostly just cow farts and the resulting tornados. And lets say you were, somehow, with your complete lack of technological advancement (resulting from a lack of industrialization), you managed to observe and calculate (with your hand-whittled abacus) that temperatures were trending higher and that the ice on top of mountains in Pakistan was going to melt, raise the oceans and mess up the oceanic currents that assist in tempering climate. You would think two things: When that ice melts, it will make it a lot easier for the Pakistani government to go in and finally take out the Yeti. Second, you would think: holy crap, how can we stop this? And your answer would be, well, it's completely out of my control. I guess I just have to accept that significant portions of the population will be lost or displaced. Then a meteor that you didn't calculate for on your hand-whittled abacus (because you were SO busy with climate change) would crash into your house instantly killing you, your dog, Bruce Willis, and incinerating your precious wood-beaded calculator. Dang.

Okay, a slightly less depressing scenario, you learn that the heat trend will melt some of the ice in Pakistan, cause some waters to rise, will be really inconvenient for some trade routes, but for the most part, it looks like everything is going to get really close to total devastation, but you are going to be able to weather it (see what I did there). A meteor does come crashing into your neighborhood but it is so eroded by its travels through your atmosphere, that it ends up a small rock that bounces off the dog house in your yard, and Bruce Willis, your little Jack Russell terrier, picks it up in his mouth and buries it in the yard.

Now let's pretend that you were in Scenario #2 above, but you are in an industrialized world in which the industrialization contributes to a slight degradation of the atmosphere. If that's hard for you to imagine, picture you are in a world just like ours but try to believe, just for a minute, that CO2, produced by industrialization, really does contribute to degradation of the atmosphere. Got it?

Okay, so here you are with Bruce Willis and an automatic dog ball thrower by your side. You are on your tablet computer (oh let's just say its an iPad since no one knows what the eff a tablet computer is but they know what an iPad is), and you use it to observe and calculate trends in weather and see that over the past 200 years, you are trending back towards some pretty heavy duty climate change only this time its slightly more accelerated than the past. This may not seem feasible to calculate, but remember, you're using an iPad, it's "magical". You realize that if you can just curb a little bit of the CO2, you have a shot at preventing scenario #1 above and are willing to settle for scenario #2. You explain it to Bruce Willis saying "Bark!", which roughly translates "It's like having a glass of water with room for about 2 more ounces before it spills over. Mother nature is going to add one more ounce, no matter what, so we are going to have a very full glass. But our freakin' CO2 is another 2 ounces of water. Maybe if we can just use 1 ounce of water, we'll at least be good till the next cycle, whenever that is." Bruce Willis responds with "Bark", which bowowly translates to "I could really go for a meteor right now."

Easy enough to understand, right? Republicans get this concept. Like with the budget.

Before I say to much more, let me be out with something. I am a socialist. That's why I voted for Obama. Of course that was before I knew the only thing he wanted was to steal all of our white women and use them to populate his secret service and call them the Amazonian Guard. Oh wait, that's Gaddafi. Wouldn't it be funny if, instead of the Amazonian Guard, they were called the "Muammar Effers"? I know, right?

Okay fine, I'm not a socialist. But I'm not a raging capitalist either. Just kinda goin with the flow. Ideologies are for chumps.

SO back to the budget. Republicans totally get the 2 ounce more concept. No tax increases. They are sitting there with their "tablet" computers, looking at economic trends of the past 150 years and saying, bigger taxes is like CO2. The economy goes in boom and bust cycles. That's capitalism. But if someone doesn't stand up and protect the revenue generation of lower taxes, it will take us to Scenario #1, a scenario from which the wealthy would not recover. Unfortunately, this wasn't a calculation made on actual data trends but rather there ability to get three stars on varying levels of angry birds in which pig outsourcing was used to build cheap, easily destroyed wooden structures. But hey, three stars is three stars.

The concept is the same though. And that's why Republicans are so soundly united on the Fix Climate Change and No Tax Increase ideologies.

Wait a minute. No. No. I'm pretty sure that's right.

A Chemical Overanalysis of Catching Grenades

I had the fortuity Monday morning to find the power button on the radio in my bedroom (without looking - booya) and hear a little tune called "Grenade" by Bruno Mars, released last October for those scolding me for being behind the times. The lyrics caught my morning-subdued attention:

I'd catch a grenade for ya

Throw my hand on a blade for ya

I'd jump in front of a train for ya

You know I'd do anything for ya

I would go through all this pain

Take a bullet straight through my brain . . .

--Lyrics pinched from "Metrolyrics.com", which really should be an "enough said" situation, but that's not really my thing.

While modern society provides few opportunities for exhibitions of such formidable self sacrifice, this is basically a tune about dying for a chick (or whomever may be the current love interest of Bruno). If you think I'm jumping to conclusions about the songs meaning, here is one previously omitted lyric "Yes, I would die for you, baby/ But you won't do the same". Sadly, it appears, these violent, self destructive tributes are unrequited.

I'm concerned a bit for Bruno, his proclamations and his ability to carry them out. I've run this question by several people: Should Bruno really make these kinds of promises?

There are few available avenues where promises such as "I'd catch a grenade for ya" can be cemented. It's true there are several conflicts and wars raging at this very moment throughout the globe, but Bruno is unlikely to find himself in any of them. Fulfillment of this promise would be two fold: Given a situation in which a grenade, hurled at the lover of Bruno Mars (for whatever reason we can only speculate), Bruno would need to be there to intercept and have the fortitude, in that moment, to make a life altering (and most likely one time only) decision to do so. It's easy to say I would intercept a grenade for someone, but put in that exact situation (which the presence of all of my limbs and a lack of tissue filled shrapnel can attest I have not been in), who is to say I wouldn't cross my arms over my head and scream "Holy crap, something like a rock is flying right towards us."

The second fold in the origami of Bruno's grenade-centered libretto is this: you have one chance to make that catch. True, it's close to the size of a baseball. But you don't have a glove. It's not coming towards you, exactly, but instead a lover, who, by Bruno's account, won't be too close by considering the implied indifference. And, you haven't had the chance to warm up at all. Finally, what if the sun is in your eyes. And, not to put to fine a point on it, but if you successfully catch the grenade, assumably in your hand, does your hand really have the bulwark or stopping mass at all to prevent the intended target from meeting with lethal harm?

Consider also, the rhyme pairing of the chorus provided above. Ya is rhymed with Ya. Several times. The Ya rhyming has an unhealthy degree of rhyme saturation. The formula for determining verse saturation (similar to Carbon-Hydrogen saturation) is:

Cn + Rn

in which C is Couplets and R is the number of Rhymes and n is the number of couplets.

So you can imagine if you have 4 couplets you will have 4 rhymes. C4 + R4

Here is a structural diagram:

*This use of C4 is just a coincidence and not an attempt to continue the explosive themes started by the grenade.

A typical song will keep with this formula, though some will push a more saturated formula (typically rap) in which multiple rhymes will occur within a couplet. The formula for that is

Cn + Rxn

in which x stands for the number of rhymes within a line.

So you can imagine if you have 4 couplets, each containing 2 additional rhymes (x=2), you will have C4 + R(2)4 = C4 + R8 providing increased stability and unity throughout.

Bruno Mars has here, has initiated an unstable synthesis by rhyming the same word times itself, repeatedly. The dangerously unstable rhyme formula, based on 12 lines all rhyming with the same word, is

C6 + R1

What a mess! The diagram is completely reversed. Not since Charlie Sheen's acoustic cover of Rebecca Black's "Friday" have we seen such instability. You'll recall that "Friday" is a catchy little tune sticks with you with it's eclectic lyrics such as:

Partyin Partyin yea

Partyin Partyin yea

Fun

Fun

Fun

Fun

Lyrics pinched from RepetitivelyricsRepetitivelyrics.com

I'm not even going to try to write the formula for that one. And we all remember the last time rhyming this dense was used, which I suspect has the same perpetrators. You'll notice that the writing of "Friday" has the John-Hancock-style-signature of it's authors --Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons. Recall some of their other lyric endeavors:

I wanna rock and roll all nite

and party ever day

(repeat)

Lyrics pinched from excess skin around the neck of Gene Simmons.

My final critique comes from the sound of Bruno Mars voice, which I think sounds like Foreigner. If you don't know who Foreigner is, you're in pretty good shape. If you do and you just got one of their songs in your head, I'm terribly sorry! But if you don't know what Foreigner sounds like, you'll have to imagine Don Henley (formerly of the Eagles), stretched back in a giant, human-sized slingshot, kicked in the groin and launched and asked to sing while in the air. That's Foreigner. Full disclosure:

Bruno Mars seems like a nice, talented young man.

I hate Foreigner. They are from the '70s.

I leave you with the conspiratorial scale coincidence of an album cover, from a seemingly unrelated musical venture. This final image could easily be used for Bruno's song, which lends to this criticism the validity of a Glen Beck chalk board (and also loosely describes Glen Beck):

Grenade. Caught.

Discontensity

You are a kind of fiction

With coconutted, blistered red

Chlorine soothed, aloe fed

Bare shoulders.

My imagination overhears you,

The crunch of summered citrus blooms

Dried out in the roomless rooms,

Your mythic soul, sandpaper smooth.

I invent your thoughts of me,

A spider web, a branching tree,

Artificial passion fashioned,

Not controlled or maturely rationed

With measuring spoon reality.

You smuggling tunnel, you border fence

You're existence verses common sense

Is suppressed, sequestered in dream suspense.

Backed up against the yellow wall

There never was a chance at all.

As summer burns off one more year

Baked with coast-less, top-up, "Here"

In soundless waves and sand veneer

By reasons force, you disappear.

Liturgically Dominated Synapses misfirings.

So maybe it's the organic chemistry or boredom or maybe it's the thrill of 2012, all I know is I sat there thinking, doing my level best to stop, but my brain had other ideas. Several at once. Jumping around like I had nothing better to do. Sometimes I wonder if our brain is like a room full of unruly toddlers, all in potential danger, not heeding anything you say and all going in different directions. But for some reason, amongst the varied thoughts of: my O-Chem lab partner becoming the next Chemistry professor @ ASU, a loosely formulated plan to hike (yardwork) on South Mountain, wondering whether or not (I need new shoes) to get a coffee, contemplating SN1 and ("Friday, Friday" by Rebecca Black sounds like "Baby, Baby" by everybody's favorite Beiber) SN2 reactions and considering if it was too early to (chocolate muffin) return a phone call; the following thought occurred to me: if you say "get a coffee", as opposed to, say "get some coffee", you are probably going to get a foo-foo drink. Think about it, “I'm gonna get some coffee.” Your going to just have coffee. But if you say "Let's go get a coffee", you have a little more specific aim.

Okay, that's actually not the thought I was having at all. I mean it was, but not the one I was talking about in the first place.

The thought was, if I can remember it: In cultures in which reincarnation is prevalent, there is also a caste system. You are stuck (I just googled for like 20 minutes and then came back to this spot) for your whole life. Hope is that you will come back in a higher level of the caste next time. Contrast that with a culture like the United States where there is a concept that all are equal at birth, but can achieve hierarchical success through one's own skills, talents and pursuits (whether you believe this idea is exactly true or not is up to you). This is the same culture that produced the church of Jesus Christ of Later Day Saints. Make your own conclusions.

Unamended Christianity, or at least sects of Christianity old enough to be witness to the genesis of America, have similar concepts of one’s personal skills and pursuits affecting the afterlife outcome (save Calvinistic branches - which could be seen as a bridge between the previously stated Christianity cultural impacts and the ramifications of reincarnation religions in caste systems). This leaves me with a "chicken v egg" conundrum.

You can easily suppose that the various religions and cultures work to reinforce and evolve each other, in some cases the religion propagating cultural concepts and in other cases, the evolution of the culture giving birth to the religion (ie., LDS). One could certainly see the ideals of Christianity in the US Constitution: "All men are created equal" trumping the early Jewish notion that the sins of ancestors have a direct and proportional affect on the life and afterlife of the present generation. As ideologies sanctified by (or less condescendingly put "advocated by") the Republican party self-perpetuate notions that one’s lot is caste solely by their own action, you can see the reinforcement of the Christian ideals. One could also imagine, as human society left to this Christian/Darwinian ideology will inevitably develop its own hierarchy, that a religion born and steeped in this culture would emphasize its connotations into its own framework. Here I return to LDS which supposes an afterlife hierarchy otherwise missing from the Christian canon (or at least not so prominently featured).

In conclusion, I would like to say: coffee is delicious. I hate O-Chem. And I like turtles. Anybody want to go hiking?