Talk about getting old gracefully! “He’s almost 90 but he looks like a boy!” says the middle aged Belgian presenter. She’s in Cuba at a party for old folks, they are DANCING up a storm; one 84 year old man has all his teeth, healthy as an bear. Free healthcare has its advantages you know. But, but, but “freedom!”, “the free market!” will make it all better. Look, I’m not saying Cuba doesn’t have its problems; met plenty of musicians who came here to escape it. But getting old happy is worth a lot in my book and not being ashamed of being old is a big part. When’s the last time you say literally a hundred people over 80 dancing?
Rocket League
2600! The Atari 2600! My, or I should say our (my brother was co-owner!) very first gaming system! I’m talking 1979 or so, and those games were literally 4 kilobytes of code! As a matter of fact “Combat” was only 2kB! An entire game with music, graphics and gameplay in a thousandth of the space a 2 minute MP3 would take up. Joust was my favorite…. two player! Oh my God we had lots of fun…..
Now fast forward to 2018 and my neighbor and I have been getting really deep into Rocket League. The premise is simple: 3 on 3 soccer, with rocket powered cars! You can ‘ride the walls’, you can fly… that is, once you learn how to control yourself. The depth of this game is mind-blowing. The level attained by the top guys is nothing short of amazing, and now that I’m 450 hours (?@?!?2!?2) in and Alberto has about half of that, we are getting our asses handed to us, STILL, on a pretty regular basis! Then again, we have learned a lot of technique and tricks: lunging by a well timed double tap, saving rocket boost for just the right time. It’s ALL about timing, flying, positioning…. a lot like chess: easy to learn, exceedingly hard to master, but always fun along the journey. Just let the term ‘air dribbling’ sink in for a second……
Unique and amazing: you can play cross-platform mulitplayer online! That means someone with an XBOX can play another with a Playstation and another with Steam on Windows. Equally cool is that on Windows you can connect controllers from both systems simultaneously! My neighbor has a PS4, I use an XBox One S model, in the same game split-screen.
For $19.99, and often on sale for half of that, this is simply one of the greatest games of all time. The physics engine is awesome, there are endless training sequences available, plenty of totally free multiplayer servers that work fast and smoothly, with plenty of players looking for games, competitive or not. There are even experimental modes, with weird tweaks like fists and lightning, and a bizarre “hoops” mode where getting the ball in the air is crucial; you catch my drift. Simply AWESOME!
Brain Machine Interface
What would we do without the VPRO? From before I was born, this Dutch Public Television broadcasting organization has been bringing us arguably the best TV anywhere. From some of the funniest stuff ever made (Koot & Bie!) to incredibly intelligent, truly independent documentaries, if I had to choose only one thing to watch for the rest of my life it would be the VPRO. Time after time, its series called “Tegenlicht” teaches us so much, without ever getting in the way with opinions and the episode from April 10th of this year was another mind-blower.
Called “Het Gretige Brein”, or “The Eager Brain”, it deals with the learning capacity and desires of our most potent organ. My goodness, it was fascinating. Connecting directly to neurons is now part of what’s called the Brain-Machine Interface, or Brain-Computer Interface. Scientists have already literally connected two monkeys’ brains through the internet, one in Brazil and on in the US! Things taught to one, affect the mind of the other. It’s crazy! There are people talking about ‘liberating’ the mind from the limitations of the physical body, something that’s been speculated on for a while, but now they’re throwing in predictions of the year we will start doing it: 2035. It’s been shown that we can teach our grey matter to control robot arms, as if they were original equipment, merely by imagining the movement of a real limb, and reading the part of the brain that normally controls such thing. We’re making some serious progress here…
You know, it’s pretty scary actually, especially because of the proven gullibility of the typical human. We are setting ourselves up for something, that’s for sure. Imagine if we all upload ourselves to some giant mainframe, preferring to live without our fragile bodies. The funny thing is that we could literally be erased out of existence by wiping one system! Seems far more fragile than our imperfect bodies, doesn’t it? Just like we are blindly going headfirst into the progress that digital technology gives us. We are going to give up our POTS (plain old telephone service) copper wiring, to be replaced by VOIP systems that are worthless without all the computers necessary to operate them, ripping out an infrastructure installed over many decades. After the earthquake here in 1994, guess what still worked and what didn’t…….
Nick en Simon in Cuba
You know, all my serious music friends in Holland have no respect for these guys, or at least so it seems. They do sing sappy songs in Dutch, are white as the driven snow, but I dig ’em. First of all, they have talent and real skills, and they know the difference. Here they are in Cuba, where nobody knows their names; wrote a song, translated into Spanish, ended up in what looks like a barbershop, with a 95 year old singer…….the man sings and the tears start rolling….man, the sound coming from this human being captivates everyone…it’s a class act that lets others be the stars of the show. BTW, you can book this man; he’s working on a tour of Europe in 2014. Of course his appearance is dependent on being alive!
I remember an old episode of Dutch TV where Nick en Simon were in South Africa. The ended up on a balcony with some local musicians who still hold Graceland in high regard. They jammed Diamonds On The Soles Of Her Shoes so beautifully, so in tune with each other, grounded in that foundation of admiration for the song and music in general. People growing up half-way around the globe from each other, in perfect synch because of a simple song. It’s these humble, quiet things that commercial TV lacks, at least the kind paid for with advertising.
Kaas
Last night at the Oyster House we had the final Cheese Night hosted by Big Johnny and me; he’s moving to Colorado soon, and this was an incredible send-off! The big man featured his regular favorites: an aged Provolone, delicious Salami and Prosciutto, fresh Ricotta and a wonderful selection of olives. I brought Dutch cheese, a 1000 day old, a ‘gras-kaas’ which Trader Joe’s calls ‘meadow cheese’ as in ‘it was still grass 2 months ago’, and Old Amsterdam, in addition to a nice aged New Zealand Cheddar from grass fed cows. Jeff brought a younger Cheddar with caramelized onions, a splendid Brie and the same some assorted cold cuts. We had 3 kinds of bread, Irish butter, crackers and even more cheeses that didn’t even get opened…….boy, life is good!
