The Day Storke Tower Broke

I went to college at UCSB, the campus of which centers around Storke Tower, a 175-foot phallus erected in honor of Thomas Storke, who helped found the school. It’s not just mere penis worship: Storke was also the editor and publisher of the Santa Barbara News-Press, and during his tenure the paper published a series of editorials condemning the John Birch Society that ultimately won Storke a Pulitzer. It’s fitting, then, that the office of the college paper, my once-beloved Daily Nexus, sits beneath it, even though this should logically mean that its situated in the tower’s pubic forest or possibly the ball sac, if you’re extending the penis metaphor (and when are not?). The tower also houses a 61-bell carillon that spells out the university motto, “Let there be light,” at ten to the hour. It does this by striking a series of bells that are assigned to letters of the alphabet. In practice, it sounds amelodic, but spend enough time on campus and you get used to it. Besides, you just try and get the bells in your genitals to play anything symbolic every hour. Then you’ll see how hard it is.

Sometimes, however, the carillon breaks and that’s when it gets especially interesting. When the bells are just being struck at random, it lends the campus this strange, Hammer Horror atmosphere. Back when he still had reason to be on campus, Spencer recorded the bells sounding all creepy one day. And just now, I found the clip and figured I’d put it on YouTube. Brief though it might be, it gets the mood across fairly well.

May this me the most amelodic portion of your day. Onward toward more melodious tomorrows.

Storke Tower Was Broken

NOTE: The file I linked to no longer works, so I reposted the clip as a YouTube video. You can hear it here.

Picture it: May 18, 2009. The UCSB campus. The Storke Tower carillon goes off-key or breaks a cog or gets possessed or something and fills what I imagine to be especially foggy air with creepy, atonal lullaby music. Spencer wisely thought to record it with his phone.

Seeing as how Spencer has now graduated and no longer has reason to hear any of the music played at Storke Tower — cacophonic or not — I felt I should put this up. May it be a lingering memory of UCSB for all of us graduates.

The Power of Mu Compels You

Yesterday I saddled Super Intern Devon with the task of writing an article on a UCSB professor who's being published in a major scientific journal for his defense of the Large Hadron Collider, which, if you haven’t been paying attention, is the particle accelerator being built near Geneva that will, among other things, create small black holes for infinitesimal amounts of time. The project has created some concern that the black holes formed in this monstrous machine — which, really, sounds like something a mad scientist would cook up specifically for nefarious purposes — could end up sucking the earth and, indeed, all existence into a celestial nothing spot and collapse all mass into a single nanoparticle. Or something. (I’m actually not sure what happens to matter upon entering a black hole, but I’m willing to bet that scientists don’t know for sure either.) Scientists say the collider won’t, in fact, erase the earth’s past, present, and future — and the UCSB man agrees — but I can’t help but feel a little concerned.

After all, black holes exist off in outer space, and I feel maybe like maybe we shouldn’t change that fact, because they’re big and scary and powerful and, as far as I know, exist for no other reason than to suck things into them. (They’re like sorority girls, in that way.) Maybe creating them closer to my house, where al my stuff is, could turn out badly for existence. “But Drew,” the scientists would argue, “the evil black hole machine will be all the way in Switzerland? Surely you have no need for concern.” But I worry that — if matter does, in fact, collapse — then the distance between my house and Switzerland will become considerably shorter. Zero, in fact, because neither my house nor Switzerland would exist anymore. Nor would Tahiti, and I’ve never even been there yet. This all may make me sound like a Luddite, and I truly would like to have faith in the science men in the white coats, but so many other scientific discoveries have wrought destruction upon us: the ability to split atoms and gun powder and television chief among them.

So while Devon prepared to talk to Mr. Published Scientist and ask questions about what the black hole creators hope to achieve by making this miniature abominations — “Okay, pretend I’m stupid and don’t know anything about large hat iron collisioners. Now tell me in extremely simple terms what’s being gained from this.” — the rest of us in the newsroom brainstormed about what benefits of black hole technology could be for Average Joes. What we have so far:

• Extra storage for people who live in apartments
• Alternative to a handgun for single women.
• A way for me to get out of carrying either a briefcase of a messenger bag,
• Junk disposal. (Though that does raise the question of whether we’ll get a crumpled-up note popping back out of the mini-vortex that reads “Quit throwing garbage into our dimension.)
• Portable body dump. (Don’t have to drive to the Nevada desert anymore.)
• Looney Toones-style portable hole.
• Means to taunt your Bizarro-self.
• Quick clean-up after parties.

But in the end, of course, the black holes created will probably result in little kids in the Midwest trying to play hide-and-seek in one of them on a hot summer day. And we all know how that goes.

All life begins with Nu and ends with Nu. This is the truth! This is my belief, at least for now.

Shear His Hair

George has a post up about Harry "Without Me 'The Simpsons' Could Not Exist" Shearer's apppearance last Sunday at Campbell Hall, in which he notes an interesting tidbit Shearer let slip regarding the "John Jay Smith" episode, in which Homer befriends a mental patient Leon Kompowski. I quote:

Then he told about the time Michael Jackson was the guest artist (yes, MJ really did do the voice in that episode about the 300 pound white man from the asylum who thought he was Michael Jackson). When it's time to record the show, Jackson does all the speaking parts, but when it comes time to sing a song ("Happy Birthday, Lisa" a take-off of "Ben"), some white guy at the table sings. Shearer leans over to Yeardley Smith (the voice talent for Lisa) and says, "I guess we paid enough for the talking Michael and not the singing Michael."

And I thought that was cool.