A Weekend Miscellany

(You may not think it’s the weekend, but since I have Friday and Monday off, and my late night meeting with Australians is done, I am now into my weekend.)

OK, let’s talk unexpected interpretations in cover tunes. Sarah Nixey covers Human League‘s Black Hit Of Space [via jwz]. Petra Haden covers Journey‘s Don’t Stop Believin’ [via Scalzi]. Ophelia Blitz covers, well “kind of” covers, Sandi Thom‘s I Wish I Was A Punk Rocker (With Flowers In My Hair — note that the cover is definitely NSFW, but it’s a lot less bland than Thom’s version [via the video’s director Alex DeCampi].

Scans_daily brings us the William S. Burroughs pages from The Big Book Of Weirdos. Then you can go watch 103rd Street over on YouTube.

I had one of those “damn, that makes a lot of sense and I’ve never thought of it that way” moments when reading SF author Karl Schroeder‘s recent piece at WorldChanging. It makes a very compelling argument for the species survival value of space exploration that I hadn’t considered before. A snippet:

If we knew how to live on Mars, we’d know how to reduce our footprint on Earth. Space colonization is the Rosetta stone for earthly sustainability because it’s entirely about living in the absence of ecosystem services. The Moon, Mars and the asteroids are a great experimental laboratory that we’re ignoring at our own peril.

And, this week’s entry in the “Asian culture seems weird” stakes is the story about the spas where you pay to get eaten a little bit at a time by tiny fish. I have nothing I can say that would add to this story.

I am in full agreement with Charlie Brookers opinion piece in the Guardian about the dubious charms of the nightclub .

Clubs are despicable. Cramped, overpriced furnaces with sticky walls and the latest idiot theme tunes thumping through the humid air so loud you can’t hold a conversation, just bellow inanities at megaphone-level. And since the smoking ban, the masking aroma of cigarette smoke has been replaced by the overbearing stench of crotch sweat and hair wax.

Clubs are such insufferable dungeons of misery, the inmates have to take mood-altering substances to make their ordeal seem halfway tolerable. This leads them to believe they “enjoy” clubbing. They don’t. No one does. They just enjoy drugs.

I’m fairly certain I’ve never enjoyed myself at a night club unless it was functioning as a concert venue. Since almost every time I actually went to a nightclub was part of chasing a girl, or girls, I am fully prepared (and pleased) to say that my nightclub days are entirely in the past. Except on Drake’s birthday–and that’s just a function of Halifax’s weird licensing laws. (I may occasionally miss seeing “the shooter girl” though, because I am settling nicely into my “dirty old man” role.)

While it has been said that “There is no theory of evolution. Just a list of creatures Chuck Norris has allowed to live“, I’m afraid that the list of physical feats that Bruce Lee is documented to have performed pretty much locks Bruce into the All Time Master slot. (Or, think of it the way Anne Ishii puts it: “The brilliance of Bruce Lee was precisely that he wasn’t a nice guy in the way that all people who are trying to sell you something are nice guys. He was dark, troubled, maniacal in his pursuit of perfection, possessed by something that transcended the dumpy generic mediocrity of the films that surrounded him.”)