Jack Kerouac: the gamer? I just read that as a kid, Jack Kerouac invented a fantasy baseball game that he played (by himself) for 30 years. He had a notebook in which he recorded 40+ games, but the note book was stolen in Mexico in 1961. Thats… pretty nerdy.
I’ve been reading a biography of William S. Burroughs. He had many many weird ideas. One of the really weird ones is that he apparently believed that if you do exactly the same thing at exactly the same time everyday, you will cause a rupture of the space time continuum. The biography says that this was based on his understanding of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, but I suspect that it was a bizarre interpretation of Pauli’s Exclusion Principle (I.e. two particles cannot he in the same quantum state) 📚
My family listened to a couple of hits by Abba. They were extremely good at writing catchy melodies, but it’s all ruined by the famous harmony singing. The chorus is tedious and make all their songs indistinguishable from each other.
We played two records today in our Saturday breakfast time. Incidentally, they were made around the same period of time: Herbie Hancock’s Empyrean Isles (1964) and The Beatles’ Revolver (1966). I thought that the latter would pale in comparison to the former, because in the 60’s, jazz was very mature and sophisticated, while rock was just starting to outgrow its teenage music root. But I was wrong. Revolver sounded as rich and exciting as Empyrean Isles. No wonder jazzmen like Miles Davis would soon begin to move closer to rock.
Stanislaw Lem likes to invent fictional branches of human knowledge. Many of them seem to be jokes, but in His Master’s Voice, there is an interesting one: Thermodynamic Psychoanalysis. It doesn’t seem to be plausible to me, but I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody actually tried to link psychoanalysis to thermodynamics. 📚