PASS THE CASSETTE

We are not luddites here at Mango Pudding Blues. And yet we use a creaking, groaning mechanical Sony cassette walkman that is actually dragging magnetic tape over reading heads in order to deliver us the music that makes our walk to work more enjoyable. We are forced to rummage around in the back bins of dusty suburban record stores to get our hands on the last few blank cassette tapes that are still around so that we can tape our superb mixes the same way we used to back in the 1970s. We are not proud of it. We would rather be burning ourselves CDs, but frankly, we don’t have a burner and we are having trouble justifying to ourselves the capital outlay, considering that we would also then have to buy a CD walkman, and one of the pricey ones that don’t skip at that. Or do they all not skip nowadays? And if we are gonna spend money on a burner, then we have to consider that maybe we should just by a whole new Mac, one which includes a burner, rather than throwing our new money after the old. Or we have also to consider that we might want to leapfrog technologies and bypass cds altogether and just get ourselves an MP3 portable, the way some countries in Africa are said to have bypassed wireline telecommunications and gone directly to wireless.

But we must do something. The cassette is now past the age where it seemed useful and still not yet old enough to be quaint or retro or anything other than cringeworthy. I mean, just consider the name; cassette. Cassette! Younger readers probably don’t even know what we’re talking about. And surely our squeaky little steam-propelled walkman can’t last much longer.

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THE SERENDIPITY ALGORITHM

This morning on the way to work I figured out an algorithm that would allow Google (or any other search engine) to include, in the results of every average search, a set of seemingly random items that would be wildly fascinating to the searcher. Links that would open almost magical holes in the internet down which the unsuspecting seeker would spelunk, finding new areas of interest, new sites and documents that would activate hitherto untapped capacities of intelligence and energy. The bored housewife, the frustrated accountant, the aimless hipster, the unwashed masses who struggle quietly, desperately, with the feeling that there must be something more? They would find it while they thought they were searching for something else. New trails of activity would be blazed, new flowerbeds of connections would bloom, hearts would race and eyes would mist with tears of gratitude as the serendipity algorithm worked its profound mathematical alchemy upon lives that might otherwise have been wasted.

But I didn’t have a pen with me, and by the time I got to work I had forgotten it.

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TIME DIVISION MULTIPLEXING

Multitasking? Pfui! At Mango Pudding Blues we have transcended mere multitasking and practice instead time division multiplexing. We slice every second into chunks and parcel out the chunks to whatever tasks we are up to. If we are doing, say, five things, each thing gets 0.2 of a second per second of our attention. Our multiplexing is so smooth and our attention so intense that, to the outside observer, we appear to be able to devote ourselves completely, unerringly, to all five things as though we were doing them one thing at a time. That’s time division multiplexing.

It’s a telecommunications metaphor. They do it with your old-school long-distance calls. It’s not the same as packets, though. Packet switching? That’s a whole ’nother ballgame. We do that too, but it’s way too complicated to explain.

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SUPERSTITION

Our terrific technical assistant today asked us today if we were at all superstitious and we initially said no. But then we thought it over and realized that we believe all sorts of howlingly funny things, such as that if one works hard and is honest, one will be rewarded. Hoo, boy! That’s rich, huh?

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WE ARE RENEWED

The skaters are back on the canal. The snow is piling up like mad. Our break from winter ended along with the month of January and now it’s back to the cold and cruel business of winter as usual here. However, we are not dissuaded. We are not discouraged. We are facing life with a renewed vigor. Listen; we weren’t gonna tell you this, but we had actually began to wonder whether Mango Pudding Blues, the blog, was worth the trouble. We were considering packing it in. We were uncertain about carrying on. But yesterday and today we went back and read all those old mangos and decided that by and large, they’re okay. We decided that we’re okay. We decided to keep on churning ’em out.

We also decided to put on a Django Reinhardt album nice and loud and go clean the bathroom, which we’ve been avoiding doing for so long that its surface is now covered with a mysterious fuzz. We might even go buy some new shoes after that.

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