Alphabetology Vol.13
Posted: 29 April 2021
Imported from substack so the formatting is messed up, it looks better on substack.
It can be hard to sleep with Hayfever... This might not be a bad thing... There is also a lot of other things that can cause you to become a "zombie"... Tiredness has a lot of Differentials you know...
- Anonymous, Wikipedia Talk page for [Allergic Rhinitis]
My allergies are going nuts. I used to take Benadryl, which only helped a little (I would still have a runny nose and sometimes sneeze). I have tried Claritin in the past but it has never helped. This year I’m trying Zyrtec, which so far, seems to be working really well. My face has been pretty bloated, but maybe that’s the allergies and not the medicine. Who knows.
I am going to watch A Colt Is My Passport (1967) sometime this coming week.
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Art
Lucian Freud and Tremendous Hardwood Floors
Nutrition
Pine Nut Syndrome
Pine Nut Syndrome Part 2: Funny Joke
Music
* Mulatu Astatqé
Relient K
Black Pyramid
Pentagram
Art
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Lucian Freud and Tremendous Hardwood Floors
I followed a twitter account which would post a Lucian Freud painting every couple of hours and seeing these paintings day in and day out has laid upon me a curse most foul — I am unable to look at any paintings without noticing how much space hardwood floors take up in them. The reasons for this laid out below:
With the above painting, you might be tempted to think that there is a wall of some sort behind the red haired man. I assure you, that is the floor. The wooden floor stretches from the bottom to the top of the canvas. Seen more clearly below, in a more mature work with finer wood grain details:
Honestly this is such an incredible painting. I’m in awe. But also, look at the floor!!!! It takes up the entire painting. It’s beautifully rendered. But it’s inescapable. A few more examples of his gigantic, lovingly detailed floors:
And finally, possibly Freud’s opus in detailed flooring, and my favorite painting of his:
The color balancing of the photos looks off in every version of this painting I could find uploaded online, but that’s life, I guess. But look at that floor!!!! Unbelievable. Immaculate.
Look at all the floors in general! Whenever he painted someone sitting or laying down, odds are good that you would see a tremendous hardwood floor. It’s an intentional choice to make — the perspective is warped. It makes Freud, as the artist, seem 100 feet tall. He towers over his subjects, shrinking and pushing them into the corners and edges of rooms. He is domineering, standing far above, looking down. No wonder everybody in his paintings seems to be uncomfortable or in pain.
They’re excellent paitings. But at this point I am unable to look at his work without zeroing in on his floors. The settings of his works are central to them and at least as important as the people in them. And now, when I see work by other artists, and they have a lot of floor going on, my mind jumps to Freud. Do these other artists take up the mantle and tackle the very difficult task of turning their floors into living, breathing characters the way Freud did? Not often enough, I think.
Nutrition
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Pine Nut Syndrome
There’s this thing called Pine Nut Syndrome, or Pine Mouth, which are both absolutely ridiculous names. If someone told me “I have Pine Nut Syndrome” I would tell them “Yes, you do.” But it’s a phenomenon/medical issue that started popping up on people’s radars in the early 2000s which causes, a day or so after eating pine nuts, everything to taste like metal. This lasts for anywhere from a week to a month. The opposite of Covid-19 removing your sense of taste, in a way.
We don’t know why it happens. It only affects a tiny portion of the pine nut-eating population. There’s a [study] about it which had one guy who reported PNS (this is… the worst acronym… for the worst named syndrome) and they found that he is also a “PTC taster,” which means he can taste this molecule called PTC. It’s a bitter molecule and only some people taste it, depending on a genetic variation. Anyway, they have no idea if PTC has anything to do with PNS. [1] [2]
I bring this all up because I think the sense of taste is really weird. There’s this thing called a [miracle fruit] which makes everything taste sweet for an hour. As mentioned above, Covid-19 has completely eliminated some peoples’ sense of taste (at least temporarily). Some people think cilantro [3] tastes like soap. What’s kind of interesting about miracle fruit and cilantro is we, on a chemical level, understand why they cause the tastes they do. We don’t know why Covid eliminates taste and we definitely don’t know about PNS, but if we find out, it’s probably going to be on some sort of chemical/DNA level. Taste is weird. It’s weird that our experience of taste can change.
Pine Nut Syndrome Part 2: Funny Joke
Here’s a joke: A bright-eyed student arrives on campus for their first day of college, and, feeling adventurous, smokes weed for the first time. The group they are with has some other people who are also smoking for the first time, and they all decide to play a game. They write down what they think the most interesting question in the world is, and put it in a hat. One by one, they go around pulling questions out of the hat and answering them. The first question:
How do we know that we all see colors the same way? Maybe my red is someone else’s brown.
Some people glance around, confused, but there is a lively debate. Everyone is laughing and having a good time, some have had their preconceptions about the world shattered. The next question is pulled out:
What if colors are different for everyone?
Laughter abounds. Surely, it cannot be? They pull out question after question:
Do we all see colors the same way? Is my red someone else’s green?
Do you think colors are the same for everyone?
Could my red be someone else’s blue?
And everyone learned an important lesson.
Thank you for reading my funny joke. The point in including this after writing about PNS is: if you replace colors with tastes in the above, I don’t think it makes any sense. Taste seems more intuitively universal than color, even though we have proof that this is not the case (cilantro soap chemicals, PTC). I have no further comments.
Music
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* Mulatu Astatqé – Éthiopiques 4 (Ethio-jazz)
This album is so sick. Impossible to listen to and not feel great about the present, about the past, about the future. There is mystery and intrigue and life is worth living. Astatqé’s music stays with you — you’ll be able to recognize it instantly out in the wild. It is uniquely beautiful and haunting. “Yègellé Tezeta” is one of the my favorite songs ever.
Relient K – Two Lefts Don’t Make a Right… but Three Do (Pop Punk)
I liked this. I can see how people got into them, and I can see how you wouldn’t pick up on the Christian rock sensibilities from casual listening. Some of the ballady songs are not my favorite but the traditional pop-punk fare is fantastic.
Black Pyramid - Black Pyramid (Stoner/Doom Metal)
I thought this was pretty good. Some of the tracks miss, like “Visions of Gehenna,” but there’s a lot of cool stuff like “Mirror Messiah” and “Twilight Grave” to bring you back. It’s interesting to me that this band think of themselves as a doom metal band over a stoner metal band, see below for further elaboration.
Pentagram - Relentless (Doom Metal)
Metal genres are impossible to keep track of. Doom metal is just like, hard rock but about demons and witches. But wait! Andriy, that’s just stoner metal! Close. Stoner metal is not quite hard rock, and it’s usually really slow and chuggy, and the singers growl a lot. Doom metal is a genre of bands that are somewhere on the spectrum between Iron Maiden and Black Sabbath. Evil Iron Maiden.
Anyway, this is cool. I’m really glad that I have finally figured out a genre of metal that is chuggy and bluesy like stoner metal but with singing I don’t mind listening to. Doom metal! Nothing like black metal or death metal. “Sign Of The Wolf” is a great song.
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[1] I was originally planning on writing a little about the lone star tick and meat allergies after writing about Pine Nut Syndrome but decided against it, since it’s not really about your sense of taste, but about allergies.
[2] Anecdotally, I have been eating pine nuts this past week, and I have not had this experience of everything tasting bitter and terrible. My saliva tastes really metallic but I might just be hyper-tuned in, because food has tasted fine. Maybe saliva always tastes like this. I also burned the roof of my mouth eating pizza yesterday so that’s a little metallic. I don’t know. I regret writing this footnote.
[3] Cilantro is the same plant as coriander???? ????? ??? ??????? The leaves are cilantro and the seeds are coriander???? ????
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That’s all for this week. Have a great day :o)