Though I loved Dr Who (Tom Baker jelly-baby stylez, yo) as a kid, and still think it a cool show, I haven’t actually watched the new ones.
Until today.
Today I watched part of "Blink", an episode from series three (somewhat oddly named, as David Tennant is in fact the tenth Doctor).
ER. MAH. GERD.
I have to say, the Weeping Angels absolutely eat the Daleks for breakfast in terms of scariness, cleverness, coolness, spine-tinglingness… Holy. Hell. Such a brilliant concept, and really really well done. My hair stood on end just thinking back to it as I started this post. Awesome.
Thus, today I have ordered series 3 on dvd. 8)
Oh, also: David TENnant is the tenth Doctor. Haha. xP And according to IMDB, at age 3 or 4 he decided to be an actor, inspired by (dun dun dunnnnn) Doctor Who. How super-cool is that?
It’s hot today. And I forgot to take a hairband with me to work (not counting all the hair bands on my iPhone – ha ha ), so I’ve been looking like Jesus all day.
Well, looking like Jesus if he had scored a Vidal Sassoon beard trimmer for his birthday/Christmas (always combined presents, dammit!) and got the whole designer stubble thing going on.
Anyhoo, it got me thinking, as the wind whipped my hair in front of my face for the umpteenth time, and my neck grew hotter and hotter with my hair floating around. There are a whole lot of reasons that long hair is a major hindrance. And I’m not even trying to run from sabertooth tigers and hunt antelope. For our hunter-gatherer ancestors long hair would have been a real problem. It gets in your eyes, in your mouth, can catch on branches and things, could be grabbed by a predator or competitor, and makes it harder to cool down (though the latter might not have been such an issue before we began wearing clothes).
And yet for some reason human beings (both sexes) grow long hair on our heads. It doesn’t seem to make sense…
… Until I realised that there must be a positive evolutionary selection pressure for Awesomeness. 8) You see, long hair is awesome (basic unalterable fact of the universe), and so groups of our ancestors with longer hair would have had more awesomeness than groups with shorter hair. Over millions of years, those with longer hair were more successful (and awesome), and so in the end Homo Sapiens Sapiens has long hair. And is awesome.
You doubt? You mock? You don’t believe there would be such an evolutionary pressure, that long-haired louts would be more successful (and awesome) than their short-haired counterparts? Well how about Aragorn:
vs Viggo Mortensen
And it’s not just we of the XY persuasion. Oh no. Here’s Kate beckinsale:
vs (believe it or not) Kate Beckinsale:
It cannot be denied that long hair is Awesomeness with hot chilli sauce.
Further proof for the nay-sayers: how else could we explain that of the awesome male metal singers in the 80s and 90s, Sebastian Bach is the one who still has all his awesomeness … and all his hair. Samson effect, baby. This is one of the two bits where I think the bible got it right (the other being “Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward”, but that’s something entirely different ).
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So: long hair is awesome. Therefore our ancestors with long hair had more awesomeness, and were thereby more evolutionarily successful, meaning we can grow long hair upon our heads. Q.E.D.
This is absolutely stunning. The Bad Astronomer has posted a wonderful photo of an absolutely incredible number of stars.
How does a brain truly grasp “a thousand trillion”? It’s really actually beyond comprehension. Though we can talk about it, and make it somewhat more manageable by talking about powers of ten, we can’t really take it in. We have no frame of reference, and are just left floating in an ocean of immensity
Oh. Baby. Yeah. I’m here today to tell you: there is nothing – nothing – like a custom guitar. No way will a production instrument compare. To illustrate, I will describe the guitar I have just collected.
Oh. Hell. Yes.
This is truly a fantastic instrument; I can hardly keep my hands off it. It plays like a dream, and the tones it produces are fantastic. It looks awesome, and is mine – all mine. Everything about it is how and what I wanted. It’s not the product of corporate compromise, or appeal to the lowest common denominator; the good stuff isn’t kind of “averaged out”. The care and attention to detail is something that of course doesn’t happen in a mass-produced instrument, and it really does make a difference.
Anyway …
Mostly custom
This all started some years back, when for the first father’s day after our daughter was born, my wife and I agreed that I’d get a custom guitar made by Adrian Hamilton – a friend, and wonderful luthier in Auckland, NZ. The result of that was actually more of a mostly-custom, as it involved a body from an old Rockson (though Adrian made it about a googleplex times better: fixing up screwy bits, putting in beautiful bevels in the cutaways, staining it up …) and an Ibanez neck (also modified, with the locking nut gone, and replaced by a graphtech nut – and little paua buttons in the back where the screws for the locking nut used to come through). Starting points/limitations notwithstanding, it’s a fantastic guitar, and attracts a lot of comments and questions on my YouTube videos.
When we had our son then, my mind was full of plans for the fully-custom guitar that I would get for him. (N.B. by “for him” I mean that if he wants it when he’s old enough, he can have it … and I haven’t yet decided how old that is. Same deal goes for my daughter and the guitar I got for her.) Anyway … looking at what I had already, what was most obviously missing was a 2 humbucker fixed-bridge set neck sort of affair. Kind of like a Les Paul, only not – since I don’t like Les Pauls (except for Billy Gibbons’ Pearly Gates; Pearly is awesome, but all other LPs seem to have a weird fizzy, honky, quack thing going on – even with replacement pickups). Read more [+]
), so I’ve been looking like Jesus all day.
Beautiful beautiful stuff 8)
