Dr. Amazing's Fantabulous Device!

Just before I woke up, I had a dream that involved some sort of super-advanced technological device. It appeared to be a marble-sized, shiny, metallic ball from a ball bearing, but was capable of all sorts of vaguely spelled out activities. It was an autonomous computer. Specific memories are that you could roll it around in your hand but it would never roll off, it acted as a magnet to your bones or something. It could also change shape, and get this, you could put it in your mouth and it would simulate being an everlasting gobstopper!

I nearly forgot about it but was reminded of it again while thinking about the capabilities of my phone. In a 45 minute period, I used it as a musical instrument on a recording, unplugged it from the computer, stuck headphones in it and used it as an mp3 player while I rode my bike, took two pictures with it, and subsequently posted them to Twitter. I could have even written this blog with it, I suppose, but I still struggle with the tiny keyboard. The future is now. :)

Last night I used it to scratch a part of my back that I couldn't reach. I found that pretty amusing:

It is a post-apocalyptic landscape, in the ruins of what was once clearly a major metropolis. A lone, hairy bipedal being is foraging and discovers an iPhone. He examines it curiously, sniffs it, then discovers it can be used to scratch an unreachable spot on his back. It is an exciting discovery, he can't wait to show the others...

Unofficial St. Patricks Day(What Condition My Tradition Is In)

Once upon a time, an astute local owner of several bars, Scott Cochrane, happened upon a brilliant idea. You see, on the biggest drinking day of the year, St. Patricks Day, 10s of thousands of customers, college students, were away on spring break. "So, why not" he thought, "invent an 'Unofficial St. Patricks Day', before spring break?". So he did, and it worked brilliantly.

This started in '96 and eventually became a phenomenon over the years, one unbelievably massive party, so massive, that according to one article, 18000 people will be coming into town. I have been living on campus now for around 2 1/2 years, and have beared witness to the event, but been relatively unaffected by it. This year is different however, I'm am not merely living on campus, but in it, so to speak. I was assuming that it would be on 12th, but have come to find out that it is this Friday! Yikes!

Aside:
I have written a blog post about this before, on a blog that no longer exists, so I have this feeling of repeating myself, even though the tiny amount of readers I had on that blog did not follow my migration to twitter and will not be reading this. It was however, a massive following compared to this one. ;)



While the city and the university have both tried to do things to quell this faux holiday, it has gained so much momentum as to be permanent, a 'tradition', if you will, that will last indefinitely. Makes me wonder just how many 'traditional' things were thought up by people wanting to make a buck...quite possibly all of them.

Dreams of chemical teleportation

So I thought I'd write a brief synopsis of this dream I had last night. I was going to tweet about it, but rather than cramming it in multiple tweets, thought I'd just blog about it, as I want to do this more.

A girl was claiming that she'd had figured out how to teleport, but that you needed to be high on Xanax to do it. I have never taken Xanax, and in the dream I only had a vague idea of what it was supposed to do. I googled it, and it is some sort of anti-anxiety med.

Anyway, I think that is pretty interesting and am curious to try it, and I end up drinking liquid Xanax with a couple of other girls. I don't drink a whole lot, because I have absolutely no idea what the drug does or what it's effects will be. It ends up making me woozy and disoriented, lot's of strange thing happened on the 'trip' that I can't really remember.

While I was rather unimpressed with the Xanax experience, one of the girls was telling me that it had given her paranormal abilities, and that people's thoughts appeared as balloons over their heads. I said something along the lines of "How much did you take?". She said that she never realized how much her parents didn't like me.

Don't know how interesting that is, really, but I made a point of remembering it so here it is. :)

Do electricians dream of electric lights?

I had one of those dreams last night where it was dark in a room, I tried to turn on a light, and it didn't work. This is one the more universal dream experiences that there is. How do you know your dreaming? Try to turn the light on(or off). So what's the deal with that?

Well, a light switch in the 'real' world completes or breaks a circuit, causing the light to go on and off. In the dream world, there is no causal connection between the switch that you're imagining and the lightbulb you're imagining. They are both essentially stage props, framing whatever weird thing is happening around you. There is no circuit, no electricity, so why should the switch work?

I'm not sure exactly why this idea fascinates me, or exactly when it occurred to me, but I roll it around in my mind, now and again. I feel it reveals something about how dreams work, and also reveals something about our relationship with, and understanding of, modern technology. It seems to say, that for most of us, turning on a light is magic. I've wondered if the lights work in an electrician's dreams.