“No pun intended,” and  “Pardon the pun” are two phrases that most of us have heard several times. Why do we apologize for making puns? There seems to be a general, vague impression that puns are a low and unintelligent type of humor, but I cannot help but disagree with this assessment.  Rather than lending a sense of foolishness to a sentence, a well used pun gives a delightful mental burst of simultaneous complexity and understanding.
Recently, thanks to a friend, I was introduced to the Pillsbury Doughboy’s obituary. This little work of fiction is a pun filled piece of writing that can’t help but put a smile on it’s readers’ faces. If you feel like being amused at the expense of the poor Pillsbury Doughboy’s untimely demise, I encourage you to click on the link above and read his obituary.
I have been drawn to art (no pun intended) since I was in preschool. I remember I decorated a wood tree that made my teacher think I was some child prodigy. My Mom still has it, and by the looks of it, I think my teacher was simply trying to boost my self-esteem because my parents had recently gone through a divorce. Whether it was amazing or not, this signified the moment that I felt like creating and knowing art was my thing. At five I knew what I wanted to be an artist. I wish I were as confident now as I was then about my future career.
After a year in the art school at UofM, I decided that was not the path I wanted to follow. My interest in art led me then to Art History, where I am quite content. Recently though, I have a great interest Public Health. When I enter the real world in six short months I hope to participate in some service work that blends these interests. I believe the battles our generation must conquer are environmental and health issues. So, I want to get involved as soon as I can to make my difference.
I see myself playing out this tandem through the integration of art in urban settings. The art can be of any kind; graffiti, urban gardens, and installations, anything to spruce up the environment and to integrate natural and unnatural materials into the landscape. Art in urban setting makes so much sense; I’m not sure why there is not more of it across this country. It decorates our world in a meaningful and powerful manner. Now, I understand how some may see public art as clutter, but these materials would clutter another space, a landfill, so why not integrate them into our society for a purpose? Public art generates self-expression, illuminates an area that was once shaded and inspires others. In the upcoming weeks I hope to write about some places in the US that are merging art and landscape. Look forward to it!
There was a time when the luminous sound of a choral performance was defined solely by the certain resonance of voices in an acoustically-fitting space– a cathedral, perhaps, a high-ceilinged hall with columns of stone soaring into the air and wrapping the sound within its spacious confines. And this is still important, still a staple image, still an ideal rooted in tradition, but it is not the only definition.
The Virtual Choir may be a relatively well-known phenomenon by now, and has probably already been thoroughly discussed by others. This fact, however, does not diminish its impact. Eric Whitacre, who coordinated (and still coordinates) the project, posts sheet music and an instructional video of his silently conducting it on the internet. And the internet, in response, performs his music, as individuals who upload their respective parts onto Youtube. These are then assembled into a multi-track work, the likes of which have never been seen before.
The goal of the project, says Whitacre, was to “not just sing our parts separately and cut them together; I wanted to see if we could actually make music.†And he did. They did.
Aside from the aesthetic, auditory wonder of the music itself, there is also the fact that the shape and nature of what constitutes a community, what constitutes a shared understanding and a shared experience, has been expanded to accommodate this, the Virtual Choir. No longer are those who wish to create music together restricted by geography or personal circumstances or who one is.
A singular idea, the one piece of music, is merely an amorphous concept until it is realized. Under normal [choral] circumstances, a number of people come together, make their individual sounds fit together, and perform. The Virtual Choir, however, breaks that concept into small pieces and disperses them all around the world. Here and there, individuals pick up the pieces, nourish them, and then they are fed back into the system and reassembled once again into a whole, but an entire, fleshed-out, fully realized whole.
This, good people, could very well be the sound of humanity.
In the neurobiology labs, technology is a requisite. A neurobiology lab by definition is pillared by electron microscopes, spectrophotometers, genetically enhanced bacteria that glow and survive and die on command (or by a well-designed experiment). Science and technology reciprocate each other’s ability to perpetuate onwards in this noble quest for the holy grail of knowledge. The superbly sophisticated equipment allow for novel questions to be asked – questions that perhaps even a decade before nobody had dared to pose because they did not have the means to answer it. Perhaps the ultimate emblem of technology in modern day science belongs to the physicists; their Large Hadron Collider on the border of Switzerland and France, which with the turn of a switch measures the trajectories of proton-proton collisions, strives to of course, out-think the philosophers in deciphering what reality really is.
I have no qualms with all of this.
Yet, technology has spawned, on the more commercialistic side of existence, items that allow for a higher efficiency lifestyle that have gone over the edge of superfluous. Unlike central heating, vacuums, and radios which are all technological advancements that justify themselves in some substantial manner by their larger degree of necessity, the Kindle, or the more generic notion of an E-book, is a (relatively) new device on the market that appears to be one of the grosser transgressions of our generation. I will overlook look the fact that the Kindle has been most insensitively, forebodingly anointed with a name that simultaneously is defined by the OED as “to set fire to, set on fire, ignite, light (a flame, fire, or combustible substance).†A paperback book would, yes, fall into the latter category of “combustible substance.†(A sadistic nod to Fahrenheit 451?) While the convenience of an E-book such as the Kindle is clear – carrying a bookshelf that would otherwise cumbersomely weigh hundreds or (for the bookish) thousands of pounds in a bag slung over your shoulder – what it asks for in exchange is an eventual self-induced literary ruin. That is not to say that it is that case now, but we have sown the seeds so that sometime in the far-flung future, second-hand bookstores with all their beautiful musky smells, with all their books blossoming sepia-toned fringes that accompany inscribed marginalia, with pages that hold both a story within the text and within its physicality of being passed from hand to hand up in time and finally (but not permanently) to land in your own, might very well become obsolete. Homer, Keats, and Woolf are instead impersonalized on a quietly glowing screen, a screen calculated by algorithms to best fool us into believing they are what they are trying to emulate: the papyrus, the paper, the ink, the textured print. With hard drives in the terabytes now, it’s not inconceivable to have all the words in the world compressed on a couple data chips. It’s phenomenal, really, that such a feat is well within the realm of possibility, but it is too, disheartening. Much like how it would be tactless to end a relationship through a text message, the same family of principles seems to apply and make it vulgar to consider digitizing all our literary heroes. The visceral quality of smoothing a book’s pages, the proportional weathering dependent on how much handling it gets, and the satisfying weight of it after it has been read will be what we pay for the convenience that we acquire with their new, weightless bodies.
Gone will be the days of wandering and discovering the unpredictable in libraries and bookstores, letting the unread waft through you, luring you to pull its spine from the shelf, dust off its jacket and earning a spot in your home. Instead, we will be targeted with “based on your purchase history†recommendations, although perhaps one day a program that simulates the random encounter with a new book will finally be accurately coded.
Granted, I am looking and predicting a future that is not within ten, twenty, fifty years from now, but hundreds of years (unless I am grossly underestimating the decline of our humanity). I desperately hope this will never be the case, but I must say that I am glad that I won’t be here to see how it plays out.
Sue majors in Neuroscience & English and tends to lurk in bookstores.
Sunday afternoon often only means one thing – Football! But, don’t worry though; I won’t unleash my inner NFL nerd (just kidding!). Instead, in keeping with last weeks post on fashion trends I have decided to dedicate this week’s post to the evolution of the NFL jersey. As a die-hard fan of the New England Patriots (who better get their stuff together in Cleveland), I am partial to their red, white, silver, and blue jersey. Not only is it patriotic, but also it is also way more sophisticated than any other teams’ jerseys (I’m looking at you Minnesota). However, it wasn’t always so classy. To demonstrate, let’s flashback through the various incarnations of the Patriots jersey.
 Though I couldn’t find what the actual uniform looked like during the Patriot’s first year, each of the helmets had an image of a three-point hat with the player’s number under it. This then gave way to the throwback uniforms that we have seen a lot of recently. From 1961-1996, the Patriots wore a primarily red jersey for home games and a white helmet with the mascot (“Pat Patriotâ€) hiking a football. Helmet is awkward and the blood red is blinding.
 In 1996, the clumsy helmet logo and obnoxious jersey color were changed to a more streamlined logo and visually pleasing blue color. Logo is great, but the blue is still a little too bright.
How do you guys feel about the recent trend in wearing throwback jerseys? Do you have a favorite team jersey, football or otherwise? Let me know in the comments section below. Have a great weekend 🙂 (Information gathered from http://iml.jou.ufl.edu/projects/fall05/brownlee/patriots.html).
Scientists and researchers (who could be one and the same, most likely) have discovered new ways to make the science fiction technology become a reality. When things like teleportation devices and flying saucers first appeared in sci-fi films and novels, who would have thought that they could become the real thing? But that’s the beauty of art– we can conceptualize even the most seemingly implausible things and thus inspire other creative thinkers to practically realize the impractical propositions made by art.
And this makes me wonder: Could these advances have been made without art? Without having the authors and the artists who came up with these crazy tall tales about Unidentified Flying Objects and robots on Galactic Republic (Star Wars) and jet packs enabling regular people to fly, could science have taken bold steps in the crazy directions that it has? I’m sure many people have read books or watched films and thought, “Wow, that’s so cool! I want to make that!” and that those people have become the ones who have paved the way for us in the realm of applied science. It’s encouraging to know that even our most out of this world insane ideas can be taken and fiddled with to become a tool of the real world.
With this in mind– what about the Jetsons? If all of these new technologies and gadgets inspired by different art forms are slowly coming together to form a part of our reality instead of just our imaginations, imagine what else could come from the Jetsons! Cars that fold into briefcases, robotic maids who cook and clean for us, and maybe even… aliens?!
 
