Ummmm.

Notes from today:

I used an urinal in the mall today that was equipped with an automatic flush sensor positioned roughly at my navel. As I moved away it engaged and made what sounded distictly like an electronic simulation of the sound a camera shutter makes. I laughed like this: ha.

Having to kill an hour at the mall while I waited for my next class to begin, I pulled out some headphones and listened to some fine music while I read my book and people watched. Two songs seemed to sync up handily to my environment:
-Jesus of Surburbia by Green Day is a remarkable song made truly fascnating when turned up just a little too loud through my headphones to the unknowing footsteps of University Mall Food Court patrons.
-Karma Police by Radiohead was rocking my world as I read Elemental Mind by Nick Herbert. Specifically during the anecdotes regarding the human brain's untapped ability to enjoy a heightened sense of smell. What follows is what I was reading around the 3 minute mark of the song:

"The human sense of smell seems to consist of seven basic components, a sensitivity to camphoric, floral, ethereal, musky, minty, pungent, and putrid odors. John Amoore and his colleagues have shown that the first five of these basic odors correspond to the shape of the molecule that produces the olfactory sensation, and in the case of putrid and pungent, to the electric charge(+ or -)carried by the odoriferous molecule. These five basic shapes - the five aromatic solids, as it were - fit into five complimentary holes in receptor sites located in the olfactory epithelium near the bridge of the nose. Our sense of smell acts as a kinf of biological microscope, feeling out the shape and electric charge of invisble molecules in the air, then reporting this essentially tactile data to the mind in a peculiar olfactory code. It is interesting to speculate whether the sense of smell could ever be retrained to operate as a literal microscope, by teaching the nose to recognize the seven basic smells with pictures of the appropriate molecules."

This while in the food court of a mall. This and other less public ironies abound.

A post about songs and what they mean coming up tonight or tommorow.