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Cake day: August 11th, 2023

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  • I actually haven’t listened to any other Zappa albums, but probably will at some point.

    I love the titular track, so I was excited to listen to the whole thing, but I think I found it 30 years too late. I get he was trying to go Reefer Madness style with his Central Scrutinizer telling a parable of how rock music leads to self-destruction, but the jokes just fell flat for me.

    Obviously the nice girl who ended up having to do wet t-shirt contests to get home, the gay prison sex, the robot sex, saying Africans don’t have record players, etc. were all supposed to be absurd, but it’s very 70s humor that nowadays feels more denigrating than biting satire. I also didn’t really get him corpsing in the voiceovers: I’m guessing it was supposed to be a reminder not to take the story seriously, but I personally found it distracting.

    I did find it cool that he mixed solos from his live shows into his songs, but it wasn’t enough to save it for me. It’s like when you go back and watch older movies or tv shows, and suddenly something just blatantly racist or sexist just pops up and immediately dates it way more than the technical aspects do.

    In short, it feels like Zappa is trying way too hard to be edgy, and it sucked the life out of the album for me. The opening song still slaps, though.







  • Gattaca was taking a lot of license for the sake of the movie. A lot of diseases are multifactorial and while genes might play a role, they’re not the only factor and often not even the main factor. The movie ignored things like epigenetics, early life exposures, lifestyle, age, sex, and just plain variance that are all factors that can play into chronic diseases.

    That being said, allowing parents to make decisions based on genetic testing isn’t itself eugenics. Eugenics is a top-level idea revolving around the idea of improving the quality of human genetics as a whole. And that requires an institutional judgement of what are good quality genes and bad quality genes, which necessitates us saying some people are better quality than others and opens up the door to racism/homophobia/transphobia/ableism/etc. Eugenics is always bad, while personal medical decisions based on genetics can be reasonable.