Interdum stultus opportuna loquitur...

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

NonRant: Smell the Fish...

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There will come a day when youth will pass away...

That is something Joyno used to say - this is going back 22 or 23 years now... before the Internet, before much of the technological progress that has interconnected various massive global knowledge repositories, and reduced the marginal cost of new information to near-zero.

Joyno never mentioned where he got it from, and I seriously doubt that it was from the David Lee Roth version of "Just a Gigolo", for the simple reason that Joyno was saying that phrase years before Lee Roth left Van Halen, and the only person I have ever known who owns "Crazy from the Heat" (1985) is... me. (The title track is actually one of the best Van-Halenesque tracks since "Panama").

The Louis Armstrong version (1930) is something Joyno would never have heard in his life. And yet for all the power of the interwebs, a search for "there will come a day when youth will pass away" on the intertubes yields nothing but the song.

The only reason I wonder about it, is that it was one of only two poetic things that Joyno ever said - and he said it all the time. It was the Joyno equivalent of Mav's two universal responses: "It's All Meat" and "My Life is F#cked".

Joyno's other favourite saying was "He who hesitates is lost" - usually made whenever we were too slow to enter a roundabout (through hesitating) at which point everyone would simultaneously say "Where are we?". {We were young - you can't expect us to have had a developed sense of comedic stylin's}.

That second one -"He who hesitates is lost" - was also a saying for which Joyno never provided a provenance, but the interwebs tells me it apparently comes from Cato by Addison (1713), but appears in loads of other places.

Joyno is also the first person I ever met who could bench twice his bodyweight - only one person in a million can do that.

Anyhow... the reason I mention this is that by any normal metric I have just gone past the half-way point in the lifespan I might actuarially be expected to live. (The maths is pretty simple - at 42 I have an actuarial age - the age that accounts for my habits, medicall profile and what-have-you - of about 35.5 and the average lifespan for a right-handed man born in 1965 is currently 71).

Don't get me wrong - I'm not dying in the next 42 years. Not by a long shot. The current human cohort will be the first which has the opportunity to live several hundreds of years - if not indefinitely - and I plan to do the latter. I strongly adhere to the ideas of Kurzweil and others - that humans and other sentient animals can transcend their meatbags, andcan become either 'virtual entities' or will be able to be hosted in high-spec mobile receptacles with better performance specs than the current skin-sacks that we put up with.

OK... digressing again.

Still, until such time as my titanium and diamondoid mobile repository for my mind is ready, I have decided it is about time I reduced the amount of subcutaneous lipid deposits on my current mobility device to try and prolong its useful life.

Apparently I have been putting too much fuel in mine, and I've been using the wrong type too. Mostly it's because I've been eating too many bits of other animals' mind-mobility devices (I believe animals have minds). I'm not going to stop doing that altogether, but I am going to start doing pointless things in my own skin-bag... like walking with no intention of actually going anywhere, and riding a bike with the same net effect. The key metric I plan to rely on is the circumference of the middle of the aforementioned meat-bag... it will become smaller once the subcutaneous lipids start being dis-stored.

Yes, it's that time of year again: I've got to have one last crack at dragging myself that last three inches (waist measurement) from 38 down to 35. Maté has a 35 inch waist (nd a six-pack).