Your Horoscope, January 2017, Explained?

by Lauren Drayer

It’s that time of year again. December: when people gather and prepare to be nice to one another for a night and most of the next day. And, to send us off into the merry season, Usher and Young Thug have taken it upon themselves to remind us of the following: there are no limits to the fun we could be having this month, next month, all year, all day every day. Except it’s a lie. Some of us are not going to start the New Year with glee or whatever else people with hope and strong resolutions feel. 2017 will blow hard for a select few: Pisces, Scorpios, and everyone else, actually, in no particular order. A detailed analysis follows:

Aquarius: You will suffer. In January, Jupiter will pivot on a different meridian every twenty-eleventh hour, obviously disrupting our moon’s spin cycle. As a result, every third-and-a-fourth day, the moon will force the oceans’ currents into an increasingly concentric, semifluid, and geometrized flow that will broil your soul via low emitting alphanumeric radio waves. This soul broiling will cause you headaches. Having headaches will cause you to suffer from choleric humors. You are going to have a grumpy January. 

Pisces: You will suffer a little less than Aquariuses (Aquarii?!). Jupiter doesn’t affect you, so thank goodness for that. However, Pisces like romance, and what is going to happen to you will be very meaningful with regards to this trait. You will meet a woman on a wooden-floored pathway near a body of water on a day of the week that you usually hate. She will predict that you will meet the love of your life in February. The fortune-teller will have wrinkles and long, white, expertly manicured eyebrows, so you will be somewhat dubious but willing to believe—she reminds you of a relative. She will feel for the veins on your ankle, and, finding none, will tell you the love interest is definitely a Peruvian citizen. You have your eyes set on that Norwegian person though, so you will be confused for the rest of January.

Aries: You sound like an air sign, but society dictates that you are actually a fire sign. You will spend all of January looking for evidence that your sign is misclassified. To assist your search, Jupiter’s Brownian meridian spin will open up your third eye momentarily on a Thursday. This will allow you to examine your problem from all sorts of vantage points. Also, stay away from BART between 7:00 am and 8:00 am. Every day. At those times Venus is in its second rendering, which will make you susceptible to germs. 

Taurus: You will get extra possessive in January. You won’t let your boss use your post-its and you will get demoted. If you’re unemployed, ignore the message and work on your résumé. Jupiter won’t help you much because, like Pisces, you are immune. But Mars will enter geothermal rejuvenation around January 12, and exit the mutational phase on January 22 at 2:00 pm. During this time frame, you will feel less self-conscious about your ridiculous and outdated political views. Still, don’t share those views with anyone until the moon settles into its retrograde, forward-waxing house. At that point, sometime in March, nobody will care about you anymore anyways.

Gemini: If you are right-handed, beware. My vision isn’t clear, but I feel like right-handed Geminis will just need to be on the lookout. But, what for? As Saturn glides into first position, my January forecast for this Zodiac sign becomes unreliable. Or, more unreliable than usual. So, no further comments. Just beware. 

Cancer: As a people, you do not like it when others criticize your moms. Sadly—and again, because of Jupiter’s upsetting, unconventional gyrations—January will send all other Zodiac signs into a critical frenzy. Cancers! Your mothers will be judged. But don’t worry. A benevolent Methuselah will enter your fifth astrological chamber around January 16, momentarily eclipsing the moon for 53 seconds, and during that time your general sadness will become less acute. 

LeoVirgoLibraScorpioSagittariusCapricorn: Just substitute your sign for any other sign mentioned above. Whatever seems least sucky to you. 

You can reach me for personal guidance and horoscopic intelligence telepathically. Please, no solicitors.

Lauren Drayer lives in a small town and thusly writes about small topics.

Hillary Clinton and Millennial Contempt

by Chris Alarie

Recent polls show a tightening of the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But rather than Trump poaching voters from Clinton, the race is closer now largely because significant segments of voters are choosing to back third (and fourth) party candidates Gary Johnson, a Libertarian, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party. Four-way polls consistently show that these two candidates draw more support away from Clinton than they do from Trump. Interestingly, Johnson and Stein both find high levels of support from millennials, voters age 18 to 29. Clinton's problem with younger voters and the way that she and her supporters respond to it demonstrates a larger problem within the Democratic Party and our society as a whole: the mutually reinforcing contempt between Baby Boomers and millennials.

The Democratic primary contest between Clinton and Bernie Sanders was much closer than Clinton and her allies within party leadership expected thanks in large part to millennial voters' strong preference for Sanders over Clinton. While Clinton eventually won the nomination,¹ she has struggled to win the support of those young voters. Even Clinton's vaunted and all important advantage with non-white voters is significantly less pronounced with young minorities. Her message from the primary that she is the most experienced candidate did not register with a generation that has come of age in an era where the consequences of the economic failures of the Baby Boomer generation have fallen hardest on the youngest cohort. Indeed, Clinton's decades of experience may be more of a burden than a boon in her efforts to connect with millennials. Young voters see her as a part of the corrupt political and business establishment that wrecked the economy and housing market just as the millennials began to graduate from college. Her close ties to the finance industry and her penchant for raking in corporate speaking fees do not help matters.² These sorts of qualities are not appealing to young voters. In a Harvard IOP poll conducted late last year, voters between the ages of 18 and 29 put significantly more value in "integrity", "level-headedness", and "authenticity" than either business or political experience as the most important qualities for a presidential candidate. Simply put, millennials do not trust Hillary Clinton.

Since she clinched the Democratic nomination, Clinton has made some efforts to appeal to young voters. But she has mostly waged her general election campaign under the seeming assumption that millennial voters—who are more progressive than previous generations, dislike Donald Trump much more than they dislike her, and have overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama—will come around eventually. Indeed, if she paid any heed to millennial concerns about her lack of trustworthiness and long standing connections to wealthy elites, she likely would not have spent the better part of the late summer fundraising from those elites at private events. However, these recent poll numbers indicate that Clinton erred in her assumption and millennials are not, in fact, coming around. Clinton's supporters are not happy about this development. But rather than express frustration with their candidate for failing to pay anything other than lip service to the concerns of young voters, Clinton supporters have taken a different tack—one that is generally common among Baby Boomers on a whole number of subjects: blaming the millennials themselves.

A tweet from Mother Jones co-editor Clara Jeffery is representative of the response by older Clinton supporters³ to these recent polls:

i have never hated millennials more https://t.co/q042TC2Lul pic.twitter.com/zHoqYJ2UwO

— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) September 15, 2016

Some frustration on the part of Clinton supporters is understandable. Clinton, for all her serious flaws, is nowhere near as bad as the rolling disaster and looming existential threat that is Donald Trump. And Clinton supporters can make the case that their candidate has made a genuine attempt to address millennial concerns with her domestic policy agenda. But this response, in addition to being so obviously condescending, completely misunderstands the situation. Sure Clinton has made some small effort to appease millennials with her genuinely progressive domestic policies. But by continuing to comport herself as the ultimate, experienced insider, she is completely ignoring the central issue of her trustworthiness that is so important to those voters. Also, by assuming that millennials will consolidate behind her now that she is the Democratic nominee overestimates how significant party loyalty is to a generation that generally prefers to eschew the sorts of identifiers and labels that matter so much to Boomers and Generation X. Clinton's overreliance on the threat of Donald Trump's near guarantee of chaos and her championing of herself as the solemn, serious defender of the status quo ignores how badly the status quo has been for young people. Millennials supported Bernie Sanders because he was genuine, trustworthy, and revolutionary. Hillary Clinton has made no effort to be any of those things yet she still expects those same voters to support her. In reality, she is actively pushing young voters toward two candidates even more flawed than she by refusing to take any of young voters' concerns seriously

This follows a typical pattern of interactions between Boomers and millennials on any of a number of subjects. Boomers, by the virtue of antecedence, are in large part responsible for the conditions of the world that the millennials are in the process of inheriting. For a whole host of reasons, the Boomers have been far less than satisfactory in their role in this process. When millennials offer criticism, the Boomers actively ignore the concerns of millennials, belittle them, and complain about how different they are from how the Boomers were at a similar stage in their generational development, all the while refusing to acknowledge their own dramatic failings. It has even led to a laughably terrible journalistic genre known as "Millennial Bashing". This is, essentially, what Clinton, her Boomer supporters, and her campaign surrogates have done throughout the election. And while it is ultimately unlikely to cost her the election, it is at least putting it at risk. It also leads me to wonder if there is a looming generation schism within the Democratic party and progressive politics in general.

One of Clinton's more pathetic attempts to pander to younger voters is her campaign's laughably out of touch use of memes and internet culture.⁴ Perhaps the meme researchers on her campaign need to familiarize themselves with Old Economy Steven. In this meme, a photo of a teenaged Baby Boomer from the early 1970s is overlaid with, at the top, a typical Boomer complaint about millennials and, at the bottom, some assertion demonstrating either how much easier it was for Boomers when they were young or how badly they have failed the younger generation in the intervening years. It is, as Kevin Roose and Stefan Becket write, a "wry commentary on the way today’s young people struggle with student debt, unemployment, and other recession-era economic concerns, only to be described as lazy and entitled by members of an earlier, luckier generation." It is also the meme that far and away best represents how millennials and Hillary Clinton view each other. Were she to adopt it, it would likely be one of the first times that younger voters could feel that she is being authentic. That honesty alone would not be enough for her to garner their support, but perhaps it would be a first step toward the candidate acknowledging the concerns of a crucial segment of her electorate.

Chris Alarie is Spectacular Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

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1 And the endorsement of Senator Sanders.^↩
2 Nor does her reluctance to divulge the content of her speeches.^↩
3 Born in in 1967, Jeffery is actually right on the cusp between Boomers and Generation X. But her attitude fits squarely within the typical Boomer view of millennials.^↩
4 Both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein have made similarly pathetic attempts to glom onto meme culture. Trump, on the other hand, has been adopted by a particular sector of the internet with a love of both frog memes and white nationalism.^↩

The Perfect Pizza

by Lauren Drayer

Whether you are a supertaster (someone with high tongue papillae density) or a subtaster (someone with a subpar tongue), you have experienced the Perfect Pizza. It was the ideal combination of hand-tossed ingredients, baked at the ideal temperature for the optimal amount of time, and placed on your plate (or napkin…or bare hand…) exactly so many seconds after coming out of the oven (or microwave, if you’re that kind of person). If you ask around, you probably won’t find two exact descriptions of what makes the Perfect Pizza. For some people it might actually be perfect after it defrosts for fifteen minutes in the back of the car on the ride home from the grocery store. I have to remind myself that: 1) not everyone likes warm pizza, and 2) maybe eating pizza close to its frozen state preserves its vitamins.¹ In any case, it is realistically improbable that anyone will be able to create a universal Perfect Pizza, on account of the fact that everyone has unique tastes.

But, what if a chemical trick could reconcile all taste buds and we could indeed make the One Pizza everyone uniformly loved? After all, tongues are only tongues, and they can surely be tricked into believing they are tasting the best pizza ever. Something similar already exists. It is called miraculin, extracted from the miracle fruit, which grows in West Africa. Miraculin makes sourness turn into sweetness for a while, until it lets go of your papillae. But that’s not enough for our thought experiment. Miraculin might make lemons taste sweet, but the change isn’t uniform: some people will perceive the same lemon as more or less sweet, depending on their personal preferences. What we need is a chemical that will trick tongues into tasting exactly the same thing: our Perfect Pizza.

Sadly, there are many roadblocks.

For one, taste is not only about papillae. There is an element of smell as well, which would not be controlled by our synthetic taste-altering chemical. What to do? Personally I would trick the brain directly. By targeting the parietal lobe, where taste is processed, and the frontal lobe, where smell is processed, I would have total control over how people feel about my Perfect Pizza. But designing a drug with such capabilities might have even better applications. We could make Brussels sprouts taste like pizza. We could make durian smell like pizza. We could make downtown San Francisco smell like pizza. Why? Why not! I would definitely pop a pill in the morning if it helped me navigate the city without gagging until I reached the safety of my classroom. This would be a true boon to people everywhere subjected to terrible food and terrible cooking. If they could make their food taste great, the quality of their lives would improve. Think of our friends, the vegans! Think of our friends who are allergic to nuts! How awesome would it be to eat sunflower seed butter (it’s alright…) while it tasted like peanut butter (yeah!).

In many ways developing this drug would be both horribly difficult and horribly shortsighted, but I think we should focus on the good. The benefits outweigh most of the problems I was able to identify,² so we should give it a shot! Miraculin is bound to break into the market in the near future, so scientists should definitely explore the synthesis of more molecules like it. Issues of taste affect everyone, every day of their lives. I am sure it’s a project that can be monetized, which is a good reason to start any endeavor, and it would truly improve lives. On the other hand, if you could have a Perfect Pizza every night, when would it stop being perfect? After a week? A year? Then what?

Lauren Drayer lives in a small town and thusly writes about small topics.

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1 Cooking some foods does reduce their nutritional value, according to www.theproducemom.com, but I don’t know if I trust that website.^↩
2  Such as encouraging people to keep eating terrible food, since they can make it taste good^↩

Oakland's Dirty Snacks Ensemble Explores the 'Tidy Universe' on Their New Album

by Chris Alarie

"Tidy universe" seems like a contradiction in terms. After all, the universe is an unimaginably vast, chaotic, hostile place composed primarily of mysterious substances such as dark matter and dark energy. But even in this vast chaos, the laws of physics function as an underlying order. On Tidy Universe, the new album by his Dirty Snacks Ensemble, Oakland-based vibraphonist and composer Mark Clifford similarly balances order and possibility in a set of songs that explore the intersections and tensions between composition and improvisation.

Among the tags for Tidy Universe on the Dirty Snacks Ensemble's Bandcamp page is "chamber jazz". This is an apt description. Clifford—who plays vibraphone and keyboards in addition to his compositional and occasional vocal duites—and his ensemble certainly have jazz chops and the album features some impressive improvisational passages, particularly saxophonist Aram Shelton's work on the album. But Clifford's background is in composition and all of these songs¹ lean heavily on that foundation. To return to the cosmological metaphor, if the Ensemble's improvisations represent the chaos and possibilities of the universe as we observe it, Clifford's compositions are the laws of physics that dictate the shape and contour of those possibilities.²

Clifford's compositional skills are impressive and the sophisticated, multi genre songwriting is one of the most enjoyable things about Tiny Universe. Considering that Clifford's main axe is the vibes, it is unsurprising that the most immediate touchstones are late-1960s, early-1970s albums from Bobby Hutcherson and Milt Jackson, such as Now! and Sunflower. Similarly, one can hear the influence of Andrew Hill and Eric Dolphy—both of whom featured Hutcherson on some of their greatest albums. But the album also brings to mind Joni Mitchell's mid-70s fusion albums,³ Canterbury scene prog weirdos like the Soft Machine, and even Sleepytime Gorilla Museum's prettier moments. All of these influences coalesce into a collection of complex-but-catchy songs that reward repeated listens.

Clifford offers a decidedly different interpretation of the phrase "tidy universe". He explains that it comes from Carl Sagan's "Pale Blue Dot". To Clifford, it serves as an indication of earth's small position in the universe and a reminder not to worry too much about the difficulties in creating an album such as Tidy Universe.⁴ The album's cover, a painting by Austin Matthews of three hikers walking a path beneath mountain spires reaching toward toward a star-filled sky, encapsulates both interpretations of "tidy universe". A hiking excursion is not unlike the performance of a musical group such as the Dirty Snacks Ensemble. Each hiker explores his or her own path just as each musician finds his or her own way to perform their parts. But at the head of the line is their leader and at their feet is the trail on which he leads them, just as Clifford leads his ensemble through the paths of his compositions. Alternately, the image evokes the sense of one's small place in an expansive, expanding cosmos. Clifford ties the Ensemble's genesis to the canyonlands of Utah, where he draws inspiration from the "freedom [he] get[s] from feeling so small in a place that is so vast."

Tidy Universe will be available from Recollect Records and the band's Bandcamp page on June 11. The Dirty Snacks Ensemble will play a record release show for the album that evening at The Peralta Station in Oakland, California that evening.

Chris Alarie is Spectacular Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

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1 Save for the three thankfully brief "Bobby" interludes.^↩
2 I've had a number of conversations over the years with Clifford about his frustration with finding the right balance between composition and improvisation in various groups that he's played in and written for. He's found the right balance on this album by leaning more toward the composition side.^↩
3 "Peepee" is especially reminiscent of Mitchell's "The Jungle Line".^↩
4 He also says it is a bit of a playful dig at himself for being a disorganized person. Having played in a band with him for three years, I can attest to the veracity of this bit of self-criticism.^↩

Doug Explains Pennies

by Douglas Slayton


The penny has long been a mystery. The penny's original purpose has nearly been forgotten. These days, they are more closely associated with self defense and pigeon control than their original purpose: currency. Long gone are the days of candies, movies, cars, spaghetti and all the other daily necessities that would be paid for with pennies. The penny, once the basic unit of cost for all things, is now disgraced due to smear campaigns by reality television personalities and talking vacuums. But even with all of this hate, the stalwart copper piece bearing the likeness of some old white guy with a beard¹ because of one secret that no one will talk about anymore.

President Fred Breining

Pennies are alive.

I am putting myself at great personal risk for speaking these words aloud to the person I have hired to type everything I say for my eventual memoir,² but change will not come until someone speaks up. Pennies are not made of copper; they are single celled organisms bred in a secret compound in Rhode Island.

Pennies have been on Earth longer than humans, shaping history for their own purposes. Secretly desiring a "society" in which they were the focus of all things, they shepherded humanity—the only creatures with thumbs who were self important enough to think anything they created has value—to "dominance". Most of the world rejected their siren song, because fuck Pennies. They are stupid and taste awful. But the European settlers who found the Penny breeding pools when they landed on what would eventually be the United State really fucking fell for it, because they were dumb as shit.

These humans were not in control of their own destinies—mostly because they were hella dumb and wanted to impress these tiny fucks who wouldn't shut the hell up. Humans are inherently selfish and irresponsible. They have done many terrible, awful things: war, dance, television, Jell-O, furniture, space exploration. But humans are lead largely by the tiny sounds that emanate from their pockets. These are the Pennies leading us to a society where they are all that matter. But like all science experiments,³ humanity grew too out of control for the Pennies to retain their position of prominence.

Thomas Edison, history's greatest monster, created a series of objects that added low level humming into the daily lives of humans. That humming cancelled out sound of the Pennies, and most people have forgotten the tiny sounds they made. The breeding pits in Rhode Island still exist because we have no idea how to stop their breeding. Several attempts have been made to cover them up with concrete but the darkness only makes them grow faster.

Pennies remain as a reminder that we are dumb dumbs and are all going to die because we can’t control our own lives without some shitty living coin telling us what to do.

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1 Your uncle? I don’t remember his name. If you do, please write to your local congressperson. Waste someone elses time for once, you ingrates.^↩ 2 Bury Me Where I Stand Because I Can’t Stand Myself: a Life Unlived.^↩ 3 Space exploration, am I right?^↩

Douglas Slayton is Professor Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

Working Hard?

by Chris Alarie

Chris Alarie is Spectacular Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.

Suicide Exercise

by Chris Alarie

Chris Alarie is Spectacular Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.