35. Nick Cave's Meow Mix Murder Ballads

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June 22nd, 2020

1 hr 12 mins 33 secs

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Lords:

Topics:

Microtopics:

  • Staying inside and definitely being totally sane.
  • Being on the Hypnospace Outlaw soundtrack but not being Seepage.
  • Driving people away from you and writing songs about how they're gone.
  • Betraying the concept of music by putting it in advertising.
  • Singing about the fish you're going to eat.
  • Listening to music for a decade before realizing it's horrifying.
  • Being deeply obsessed with an art form others explicitly disregard.
  • An eight year old singing a pop song about sex.
  • Assuming that a song written in the first person is autobiographical.
  • Writing a song about cheating on your wife and everybody assuming you're endorsing it so you write a last verse that's like "/s"
  • The last verse of "I Want Your Sex" being about how George Michael doesn't really want your sex.
  • Putting together a choreographed dance routine to "I Want Your Sex" at summer camp.
  • Whether Dad Jr. has anything to say about it.
  • An angry crowd proclaiming that Jesus is a slut.
  • The Robert Browning poem where he evidently thought "twat" is an item of nun's clothing and rhymes with "bat."
  • Describing the white whale as obsidian and ebony because you don't have the internet and can't look up what obsidian means.
  • A beautiful desert with amazing food where you have scorpions in your house.
  • A microwasp stinging your hand leaving a patch of cell death that lasts for almost a year.
  • The dirt being impossible to dig in so there are no storm drains and when the monsoon comes the water rises up to your windshield.
  • The front door's doorknob being too hot to touch in the summer.
  • The process of getting into a car when it's 118 degrees outside.
  • Sedona being much more livable than most of Arizona because it's in the mountains.
  • Growing up in Oklahoma where it's incredibly hot during the day and cools down two degrees at night.
  • Going tide pooling where there are dozens of species of snail that
  • A subtropical jungle with stunningly beautiful coral reefs where all the wildlife is lethal.
  • Going tide pooling where dozens of species of cone snails are extremely interested in your death.
  • A fish that looks like a rock in a stream that will kill you if you step on it.
  • Encountering a dozen lethally venomous animals every time you go to the beach.
  • Living in the Bay Area where we have programmers.
  • Resenting programmers but getting along with them really well.
  • Getting a tech job and having to practice your self-compassion.
  • Repping the city in the world with the biggest economic disparity.
  • The power company shutting your power off because they can't be bothered to keep the lines clear of trees.
  • Discerning the different kinds of plants that are burning in a brushfire by smell.
  • Being performatively off-put by brushfire smoke that smells different from brushfire smoke in your hometown.
  • Cheese scarcity in Okinawa.
  • Whether or not you're allowed to bring suitcases full of cheese into Japan.
  • If Gandalf really liked cheese.
  • The Scottish guy who sells cheese in Okinawa for $100 per kilogram.
  • Long grain rice connoisseurs in Japan importing basmati from California.
  • Being unable to export farming and food preparation processes because your are getting assistance from local microbiomes.
  • Japanese laws restricting rice imports so they don't corrupt the local rice microbes, but they don't give a shit about the cheese.
  • RNA sequencing the brine from a batch of pickles that turned out really well.
  • Celebrating the 69,000th generation of your yeast culture by posting "nice" on Twitter.
  • Toddlers learning a lesson far too well.
  • Telling each other stories from the spreadsheet of all the ways machine learning has failed.
  • Breaking land speed records by falling over really fast.
  • Reassembling Barack Obama's audiobook into a story about a demigod with the head of a dog who recreates the world after the apocalypse.
  • Reality now being more ridiculous than your satire from four years ago.
  • Spending a lot of time trying to identify birds.
  • The basis for discussion of whether something is something or isn't something else.
  • Convincing the people with the money that your field of study will eventually help somebody some day.
  • The growing sense in the world that maybe not all progress is good and maybe we should skip out on some knowledge.
  • The number of lines of code it takes to destroy society.
  • Doing science because there is a trust that some day someone will want to know your results.
  • Wanting a place to have a conversation about anything other than Elon Musk's kids name.
  • Starting a podcast and never talking about anything depressing.
  • Trying to transplant your neighbor's leafcutter ants into your own yard because you are a field biologist who can't go outside.
  • Being waylaid by ant stings because you are allergic to wasps.
  • Ants biting you with their mandibles, but only to hang on so they can sting you like wasps because they're technically in the wasp family.
  • Ants being around long after humans are gone.
  • Filling an ant colony with lead because humans will get more value out of a model of an ant colony than the ants get out of being alive.
  • Filling an ant colony with jello and having a tasty dessert.
  • Ending up in an ant lab and doing ant things.
  • Studying the effects of climate change on Pokemon.
  • The exchange rate between Pokecoins and Bitcoins.
  • Coordinating Pokemon Go raids on Nextdoor.
  • Asking Pokemon Go players if they're registered to vote and they answer that they're doing a raid when that doesn't tell you whether or not they're registered to vote at all.
  • Trying to avoid the Audubon society losers at the ornithology conference.
  • Birds permitting you to identify them even though they could easily fly away.
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