DoggieWoggiez! PoochieWoochiez!

That.

There was this....

There was....

Okay.

So, imagine — imagine Koyaanisqatsi, except it's more disturbing, and there's a smoke machine on stage. Just a relentless, plotless barrage of images and jarring music and unsettling mirror effects, for like an hour and a half. With a smoke machine. And also Koyaanisqatsi is made entirely from found footage of dogs. Only it's actually not Koyaanisqatsi but The Holy Mountain, which I have not seen, remade with the found footage of dogs, including Bible-toting dogs and surfing dogs and Wishbone and werewolf transformations and ghost dogs and Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai. And then after the credits roll three anthropomorphic Banana Splits-style dog-mascots come onstage and urge the audience to throw VHS copies of Jerry Maguire at a dog-catcher with elongated forearms while Bruce the Cat, who is a guy in a black face stocking and cat ears and a suit, plays Radiohead's Creep on a mini keyboard.

That...actually happened.

I am broken. It took 'til like ten minutes from the end, but it broke me.

This is why I love. This. Town.

(Also I love my wife, who reminded me that Everything Is Terrible! was going to be at the Coolidge, which I now know I can bike to in ten minutes flat if I need to.)

How to make kettle corn

Last night, prior to running off to Everything Is Terrible! I was just putting in a DVD of the 1958 B movie Fiend Without a Face when I decided I wanted popcorn. The popcorn package had this extremely simple recipe for kettle corn on the back, which I tried, became addicted to, and now pass on to you:

• Use half as much oil and sugar as popcorn. If you want to pop half a cup of popcorn kernels, use 1/4 cup of both oil and sugar.
• In a lidded pot large enough to hold the popped popcorn, heat the oil over medium-high heat until shimmering. Heavier pot is betterer.
• Dump in the popcorn. Immediately sprinkle the sugar over the popcorn and put the lid on, clamping it tight with your hand.
• Start shaking the pan on the burner. Do not stop until the popping stops, which will be in about two minutes.
• Remove from heat, remove lid, and sprinkle with kosher salt to taste. The salt will trickle down through, sticking where it needs to.

The end result is fluffy popcorn coated in a crisp, glassy layer of sugar that causes the kernels to adhere lightly to one another in fantastic shapes, not nearly so densely as in a popcorn ball. 1/4 cup of popcorn was a good amount for me alone — it produced perhaps a quart of popped popcorn. I intend to experiment with other oils and sugars.

MoS Def

kdsorceress, who has a membership, took me to the Museum of Science today. There were the usual awesome things, like the room of math and the dinosaurs and the lightning fossil, and an unusually large number of geckos, which were the current special exhibit and the chief excuse for this visit, and also some new things that struck me as particularly nifty:

• A basin with rice in it, which could be mounded into hills and valleys. An overhead camera monitored the height of the rice, and a projector projected images onto it: colored maps of elevation, slope, water flow, shadows, and...a fifth thing that escapes me at the moment. The result being that you could form a mountain and a lake with your hands, then a moment later see them painted orangey and blueish, respectively, in an instant topo map. Above the basin, a video screen displayed a POV image of the landscape someone standing on the edge of the basin would see.


• A big thermal-imaging screen, which displayed a moving image of my heat map. I saw that my moustache was cooler then my face, and turned it invisible by breathing on it, and jogged in place for a while and watched my chest turn orange, and drew designs on myself with a fingertip. Very fun.


• A nice implementation of a tabletop cloud chamber. These are commonplace, but, despite having a degree in physics, I'd never seen one in person, and stared at the vapor trails of alpha particles and beta particles for a good long while. We saw one alpha trail that took a sharp corner, which presumably marked an impact with one of the water alcohol molecule nuclei in the cloud.


• The museum has five different models of wind turbine on the roof, connected to a big bank of screens and buttons and diagrams that allow you to see how each one is performing at a given moment, and how they've performed over time. One model was clearly best at high wind speeds, producing power scaled to wind speed all the way up to 60 mph; another clearly gave the best performance at moderate speeds, but shut down above about 30 mph; another crept along with very little output, but was able to output something even at speeds as low as 5 mph.


• They have a singing Tesla coil now, like on the internets, that played a very creditable William Tell Overture. You can see a video of an audience volunteer playing a tune on it on the Wikipedia page for singing Tesla coil.

Excellent excursion!