Being Mr. Kenny

I don’t mean things like the combustion engine or the secret of flight. Things like that come about because someone sees something obvious like an explosion and then goes “how can I harness that power”; or they watch a bird and say, “Hm, that looks like fun, let’s try it.”

I mean things like coffee, and steamed milk. And pasta. Things like copper, and glass — stuff that’s not obvious.

Who was it that saw a coffee bush and thought, “I’ve just had the best idea, I’m going to open up those red fruit, get the seed, roast it, grind it, put it hot water, and then drink it.” How do people arrive at these conclusions?

Who decided to push steam down a small metal tube into some cold milk? Who decided to grind up wheat and mix it with eggs and things to make spaghetti? (Incidentally, it’s generally considered that pasta was discovered independently in every culture. Just like bread, and alcohol.)

Actually, to use some very poor style I’m going to refer to something outside of parantheses that I just wrote in parentheses: who discovered alcohol? Who thought that it would be a good idea to let fruit go bad and then drink the fluid? I do believe I remember reading a Björk interview where she said that she’d seen a video of elephants hiding apples and waiting for them to go bad and then getting drunk on them. That’s quite funny.

Anyway, I have no idea how these things came about, but I’m glad that they did.

Mysteries solved.*

* Check it out, no mysteries have been been solved at all!

Answer: that tapping noise in my room whose source I have narrowed down to: somewhere on the street where I live.

It’s not so much the constant tap tap tap (although it sounds more like “tap tap tap … tap? … tap tap tap … tap?”) it’s the fact I have no idea where it’s coming from. If I knew I wouldn’t care, I’d be able to label it as “pipes” or “car door” or “electrical fire starting under the floorboards”. That way I’d at least be able to get some sleep, but not knowing is the most annoying thing there is.

It’s stopped now, and for some reason that makes it more annoying. Anyway, it’s my birthday today, and I am 23 years of age! I must now commence the eating of chocolate.

Because mine is. What I think has happened is that years of listening to Björk has almost completely battered my ears out of shape. At least that would explain why I am totally abandoned to a CD I’ve just bought.

It’s full of salsa remixes of popular songs like Coldplay’s Clocks and Maroon 5’s She Will Be Loved.

I’m not really doing it justice: the music is really brilliant. It might sound like a cheesy, terrible idea, but honestly it just makes you very happy. Well, it makes me very happy. Kinda like dancing on the tables happy. You can’t really sit still.

Anyways, check it out at www.rhythmsdelmundo.com and judge for yourself. I recommend you buy it! Plus it’s for a good cause: Climate Change (Global Warming).

1. MS Paint — sometimes I just want to make a crappy drawing with a crappy image editor. MS Paint is to Photoshop what Notepad is to Word.
2. XP’s photo viewing software. Under XP you can open one image file and then view all the images in the same folder with the next and previous buttons. You can view photos fullscreen and as a slideshow. Mac’s only solution to this is to either open all the images in Preview, but then you can’t see them fullscreen, or to use iPhoto, the clumsiest most overblown piece of software I’ve ever used. It takes ages to start up, and for that reason alone is useless. I want to vew photos immediately, not a couple of minutes from now. And I’ll thank you not to organise my photo files behind my back!

Last week I answered a question that mankind has been asking itself for centuries.

Can stones be shaped like human livers?

The answer, as I discovered, is yes. Well who knew?

Let me tell you about a little game that all men play at some point in their lives. Some of us have only played it once or twice, some played it while they were students but stopped shortly after it, and some have never stopped playing it.

The game is called Washing Up Mountain, and you play it when you do the washing up. It’s also called, in some parts, “No Look, What’s The Point, Gravity And Evaporation Will Do It For You Anyway”.

I’m talking about not drying the dishes, of course. I think Washing Up Mountain is one of my favourite-est ever games. The challenge is to wash everything up in the right order (glasses, then cups/mugs, then cutlery, then plates, then pans — it must always go from cleanest to dirtiest) but then pile everything really high and not let anything break or fall off. So you have heavy pots and pans precariously balanced on delicate little glasses.

The winner is the one whose pile of washing up stays there the longest. Sometimes you can even free up cupboard space by just storing everything in the drying-up pile. Use, wash (or sometimes just rinse), and replace on the pile.

Let me know how you get on.