MASER! ....That's a nice name.
Cheers to anyone who can guess from what movie I've taken the title. I'll give the answer at the end of the post for the movie buffs out there.
I've come home to a commenter and a pushy one at that. Only kidding :) Ms. Token, you just made my day. Cheers to you whether you get the movie title or not. And I thought I was just talking to myself here :) In honor of the occasion I thought I would put aside precision-crafting a post on the lost highways of modern art, and just be ruby_maser for a post.
For the record, there is no great mystery to the pseudonym "ruby_maser". It actually comes from a quote in the movie Contact. John Hurt's character (S.R.Hadden), in reference to Jodie Foster's character (Ellie Arroway), states that "[she] did breakthrough work on the lanthanide-doped ruby maser, dramatically increasing the sensitivity of radio telescopes". MASER is an acronym for Microwave Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation. A maser is basically a laser that operates outside the bounds of the visible or ultraviolet spectrum of light.
Ruby is just one of a host of material mediums through which a maser can... well, mase.
Maser is the red-headed stepchild of the family. Laser is the class clown, getting all the laughs, probably getting all the chicks as well. Everyone's watching Laser because its oh-so "visible". Its mesmerizing, and it might just blind you -- similar to some of the train-wreck style reality shows on nowadays.
Meantime, Maser is oh-so "invisible". He's out there in the trenches, handling the bulk of the electromagnetic spectrum, getting no thanks, no credit, bills are piling up, probably doing crack and smokin' them tweeds just to keep from snapping from the knowledge that Laser is all things to all people.
It's a sad story but a cool name nonetheless. Hi-tech sibling rivalries never help; they always hurt. If you're still not convinced that I've gone too far in defining this ridiculous nom de plume, have I got a link for you. http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/faqs/maser.html Knock yourselves out.
And I'm spent.
While I'm all done for now, I might be coaxed into lifting the travel ban on some of my poetry, etc. at a later date. We'll see, but I think that, until then, it is a very nice suggestion that I force myself to post more often and with less deliberation. Mental calesthentics gets me breathless quick though as this post has revealed.
In other news, the movie (among many, many others) that attached itself to the ragged shirttales of my memory and won't let go and also spawned this post's title is... Finding Nemo. I slightly modified it to fit my name, kind of like I slightly stole a movie still from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the previous post. And I'm gonna do it again, dagnabit...
I've come home to a commenter and a pushy one at that. Only kidding :) Ms. Token, you just made my day. Cheers to you whether you get the movie title or not. And I thought I was just talking to myself here :) In honor of the occasion I thought I would put aside precision-crafting a post on the lost highways of modern art, and just be ruby_maser for a post.
For the record, there is no great mystery to the pseudonym "ruby_maser". It actually comes from a quote in the movie Contact. John Hurt's character (S.R.Hadden), in reference to Jodie Foster's character (Ellie Arroway), states that "[she] did breakthrough work on the lanthanide-doped ruby maser, dramatically increasing the sensitivity of radio telescopes". MASER is an acronym for Microwave Amplification by Stimulation Emission of Radiation. A maser is basically a laser that operates outside the bounds of the visible or ultraviolet spectrum of light.
Ruby is just one of a host of material mediums through which a maser can... well, mase.
Maser is the red-headed stepchild of the family. Laser is the class clown, getting all the laughs, probably getting all the chicks as well. Everyone's watching Laser because its oh-so "visible". Its mesmerizing, and it might just blind you -- similar to some of the train-wreck style reality shows on nowadays.
Meantime, Maser is oh-so "invisible". He's out there in the trenches, handling the bulk of the electromagnetic spectrum, getting no thanks, no credit, bills are piling up, probably doing crack and smokin' them tweeds just to keep from snapping from the knowledge that Laser is all things to all people.
It's a sad story but a cool name nonetheless. Hi-tech sibling rivalries never help; they always hurt. If you're still not convinced that I've gone too far in defining this ridiculous nom de plume, have I got a link for you. http://einstein.stanford.edu/content/faqs/maser.html Knock yourselves out.
And I'm spent.
While I'm all done for now, I might be coaxed into lifting the travel ban on some of my poetry, etc. at a later date. We'll see, but I think that, until then, it is a very nice suggestion that I force myself to post more often and with less deliberation. Mental calesthentics gets me breathless quick though as this post has revealed.
In other news, the movie (among many, many others) that attached itself to the ragged shirttales of my memory and won't let go and also spawned this post's title is... Finding Nemo. I slightly modified it to fit my name, kind of like I slightly stole a movie still from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for the previous post. And I'm gonna do it again, dagnabit...
posted by ruby maser at 5/25/2005 09:20:00 PM
3 Comments:
Thanks for the laugh.
Ms. Token was a new one for me. My friends just call me Annex.
Very insightful and quite sad, that Maser feels shadowed in Laser's greatness (I don't know, can that be a pun? Can lasers have shadows?)(I'm not really asking).
I haven't done much reading on the medium of which you speak, but occasionally find it interesting (like that one time I was at the Science Museum).
I've seen Contact, but mainly remember the tree and the water in her dream/vision/experience.
I totally knew that movie still was Fear and Loathing... I will never "get over" that hotel scene after the party and all the shit floating in it.
Get back to the mundane, feel around with your eyes closed or something, your blog was still too polished.
;-|
That's my mean face.
I hope I can avoid another mean face even though I posted a very polished piece on Matisse and Picasso. :D
It was a draft saved long before this post was created, and I needed to get it out. I promise.
I will continue my pursuit of the visceral starting now. No, wait! Okay, now. ...Uh, give me just a second. Alright, I'm ready. For real, I'm ready. Damnit, start over. Okay...
:D
Aha! I didn't read this comment until well after my suspicion that you didn't just write that essay for your post.
[foot tapping]
On with it!
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