Why are agriculture classes the first time I've learned extremely basic info about nutrition and how digestion works. Why isn't this stuff in health textbooks or any easily accessible resource about healthy eating.
I unironically really enjoy the opera-rap + tuba sections.
Okay so it’s finals season which means I’ve cracked and need to go on my ramble about one of my favorite pieces of music of all time: The Most Unwanted Song.
The thing about this song isn’t that it’s bad. It’s a special kind of horrific. It’s so bad it crosses the invisible artistic barrier and becomes brilliant. And it was designed for that.
See back in the 1990s these two artists decided to make a series of paintings (I promise it’s connected). Graphic designers Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid sat down to create the “best” and “worst” paintings based on opinion polls. There’s commentary about public opinion in there, but that’s not the point right now. The point is, they were approached by a gallery owner and asked to make a CD using the same principle.
So they started polling people. Turns out, the American public, when asked about what they hate in music, has a lot of answers. Winning answers included bagpipes, opera, rap, intellectually stimulating music (hah!), cowboy music, swearing in music, long songs, songs about America, children’s choirs, advertising jingles, and accordions.
And then they set out to put all those things into one song with the help of Dave Soldier.
And boy did they succeed.
In order to make this song work, they couldn’t just have all the individual elements working separately. There wasn’t time for that, and they would have lost a lot of unity. So they went the inventive direction. So that’s why we have a opera-rap soprano singing lyrics with casual profanity about being a cowboy and philosophical discussions. That’s how we get this:
It’s 22 minutes long. 22 minutes to consider your place in the universe.
People also hate politics in songs, so at the end someone screams a protest rant through a bullhorn. At one point it sounds like someone is throwing up in the background.
The best part of this, of course is that it was done by professional musicians. It’s pretty clear that they know what they’re doing and are choosing to do it really really badly. It adds to that flavor of chaos.
I genuinely believe that everyone should listen to this song at least once. If nothing else, it will be funny.
“i’m not the same as who i was before [x] thing happened to me” does it help to know that you would not have stayed that person regardless
when i first heard the term "lolcow" i thought it would be pictures of cattle with captions like "u no can haz cheezburger"
The way most autism literature describes "literal interpretation" is often not at all similar to how I experience it. Teenage me even thought I couldn't be autistic because I've always been able to learn metaphors easily.
In fact, I love wordplay of all kinds. Teenage me was fascinated to learn all the types of figurative language there are in poetry and literature.
But paperwork and questionnaires are hard, because there's so much they don't state clearly. Or they don't leave room for enough nuance.
"List all the jobs you've had, with start and end dates." What if I don't remember the exact day or month? Is the year enough?
"Have you been suffering from blurred vision?" Well, if I take off my glasses the whole world is blurred, but I'm fairly sure that's not what the intake form at the optometrist is asking.
Or the infamous (and infuriatingly stereotypical) "Would you rather go to a library or a party?" What sort of party? Where? Who's there? I work at a library. Am I currently at the library for work or pleasure? Does it have a good collection?
It's not common figures of speech that confound me. It's ambiguity, in situations that aren't supposed to be ambiguous.