Looks like somebody beat me to it. I bet if she could talk though, she’d be telling us all about her favorite soda.
So recently I read this article. I understand that you all might be in a hurry, but you might want to at least peruse the article, because the entire review is sort of based on it.
Or…. I’ll summarize. It seems that some forensic scientist in Japan, for whatever reason, was commissioned to determine what the person who was the model for the Mona Lisa would’ve sounded like.
Probably having spent at the very least hundreds of thousands of dollars to do this, apparently for no other reason than to say “We did it! BOOYA JIM!” even though nobody really ever questioned their ability, this seems like the most collossal waste of time since I sat through “Big Bully“.
Maybe it was all a publicity stunt for the DaVinci Code, considering the article doesn’t actually say who approached the Japanese, or maybe it just was a pull for the scientists to win another “Ig Nobel” Prize, awarded for research that “makes people laugh, then think”. Just the idea of an award like that sort of makes me a little upset. I bet by looking at the list of past winners, you’d be able to see some of the biggest misuses of resources possible. I mean, just look at what these Japanese people won the award for doing a previous time:”for promoting harmony between species by inventing the Bow-Lingual, a dog-to-human interpretation device”.
I really don’t know what’s worse, that somebody actually spent money on a scientific process to create something that can never be proven or disproven, or that the people in charge actually thought that the public would care enough for it to not be a waste of time. Granted, I don’t know much about modern Japanese culture, and I’m not a renaissance art enthusiast, and those are probably the people that it would be aimed at the most (hence the reason why nobody here in the U.S. has made a huge deal over this “breakthrough”), so I could just be missing the boat. I suppose there is the whole “science for the sake of science” thing, like trying to determine if there ever was life on Mars, but there are some things that are more weighty than others.
To me though, something like this has little to no easily accessible evidence to prove that it’s actually correct. Sure, these scienticians can make all sorts of claims about how big her vocal chords were and what her voice-related anatomy was like, but there are so many “X-Factors” at work here, like “what if she was deaf?”, or “what if she smoked?” (although that’s probably highly unlikely, but some sort of outside force on her voice could be possible), “what if she was from some other area not in Italy and was visiting, and didn’t even speak Italian?” Or, here’s one to make you think, “what if she wasn’t a real person at all?” Maybe I’m just a cynic, but I don’t see the point in hypothesizing about a topic that is so insignificant to our everyday lives and can’t be shown to be fact anyway. That’s like saying that if Bagwell or Biggio hadn’t hit that game-winning ninth inning homerun against the Phillies last year that Philadelphia would’ve made the playoffs, and gone to the World Series, or if Roethlisberger hadn’t made that tackle at the end of the Indy-Pittsburgh game last year that Manning would be wearing a Superbowl ring right now. These events are in the past, and, at least with the first one, highly unlikely. In addition, it’s all speculation and therefore useless to those of us but the dreamers. When zombies roam the earth and Mona Lisa wakes up from her grave, maybe then we’ll get a better insight into how she speaks, but even then, she’ll probably only moan, “ZOMMMMBIIEEEE“, probably in her mystery Italian dialect, and we’ll still be as clueless as we are now.
But really, who am I to argue with the people who mastered the canine language?
[rate 1]
I’ll give them one whole star for the amount of work that they put in, but I view it as a wasted effort, because there’ll never be any way to prove that they’re right, and nobody will ever care.
One response to “the voice of mona lisa”
[…] August 11th, 2006 Nate Oh, those kids. Always at it. You guys really shouldn’t’ve. So here we are at the first of what may be a few reviews of our first milestone, 100 reviews. Not only is this the first review of this milestone, but of what could be very many milestones. We here at the Bookshelf like the word “milestone”, and don’t believe in Thesauruses. So here we go, our first hundred in a nutshell. The first actual review happened way back in October of 2005… remember that time before the Steelers won the superbowl, before “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” movie, before Dick Cheny accidentally shot his friend while hunting, and before Bristol, United Kingdom celebrated the 200th birthday of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (actually April 9) by relighting the Clifton Suspension Bridge? Dan’s first review was aimed at complaining about post-game hype surrounding an extremely long baseball game. Of course our readers probably care about boring Astros-Braves baseball games as much as they seemed to care about my terrible review of the dictionary. Even though that picture was good, it was nowhere near the five star quality of this image. I too tried my hand at reviewing food, but it was an utter failure. On the plus side, my review of the letter to the editor is one of my favorites, and my first review actually got eight comments, including this link. The few following that grilled chese review focused mostly on music, my opinion of “Good Night, and Good Luck”, a particular episode of Trading Spouses, and Dan’s opinion of My opinion of “Good Night, and Good Luck”. Dan also said that the Colbert report wouldn’t last, which seems to have been proven false. October seemed to be us finding our footing. November saw Dan’s Cleveland Trifecta, a diatribe against horses, a road that he liked, an episode of “Coach”, and his complaints about how much he aches, now that he’s an old man. I started the month strong with the Beth review, but struggled through the rest of it, with lame reviews like Thursday, a type of tooth”paste” that doesn’t work for me, and an insightful, yet completely unnecessary complaint about my nosebleeds. My FAO Schwarz review kinda made up for them, but the highlight of the month involved Dan and I sparring about how Christmas is coming earlier every year, and something about me being a time-traveling sheep. November didn’t see much improvement over October, but the Christmas stuff was entertaining. December got a bit better, even with a few less reviews. I busted out the old NES games, for a few reviews that I swear are not trying to copy off of XE, another personal favorite, Christmas Cards, Adam’s first review, Dan throwing the hate down on Pitchfork media, and a suprising amount of people commenting on Roger Ebert’s take on video games. The biggest advance in December was the pop-ins, that added added some clarity to our parentheses-obsessed-writing. December was a highly engaging and entertaining month, even with only nine reviews. 2006 rolled around, and January saw Dan get political, review half of a book, not like warm winters a lot. I only contributed three of ten reviews that month, but all three of them were relatively alright, mostly because “Where In Time is Carmen Sandiego”, and “The Simpsons” after season 9 is so easy to complain about. January’s topics fell off a little. February, while being the shortest month, was also a monster for us, as far as number goes. A whopping twenty-one reviews. To be fair, 17 of them came in our envelope-pushing live superbowl reviews, the biggest stunt pulled in the history of reviewing anything and everything on a five star scale. The only other reviews of any substance were my Gauntlet Review of the Beatles albums, and Dan’s digging up of our one-issue underground high-school newspaper. Despite the big stunt, and two good reviews, February was kinda lacking. March just plain sucked. Four reviews total. One by me. Three mega-reviews by Dan. April was slightly better, with another of my top five of my reviews, Legacy of the Wizard. The other four I would give an average of 3 stars to, but since there were only four during the month, that’s going to cancel out the Legacy of the Wizard bonus and take it down a half star. For my money, May was our best month yet. Dan’s contribution was the lengthy three-part TV landscape review. I threw out quality stuff with my Songs for Silverman, and Degree Navigator reviews. The shorter American Dreamz and Davinci Code video game reviews were serviceable, but my immense LOST season 2 review tops everything. June fell off a bit. Four reviews total. Split two and two. Mine were based on a ridiculous news story, and anger at other people for coincidentally coming up with the same ideas as me. Dan tried to put everything into perspective by seeing how well the entire history of human ingenuity and artistry stacked up in the interstellar community, and complained a little about how the national geography of roadways isn’t designed to suit his needs. July was filled with the (I gotta admit my ignorance as to the relevance of this phrase… and wikipedia does nothing to help) Navel Gazing set. I was had for a few minutes by a Jimmy Kimmel hoax, and I thought the critics were a little too harsh on Shayamalan. Despite the mediocre numbers for the month, I’d give it a 3.5 This gives us a per-month average of 3 stars, which isn’t too shabby. In my first ever review, I reviewed the concept of this website. I claimed that we wouldn’t be able to keep it fresh, that we’d run out of ideas, and that we wouldn’t be able to stay somewhat funny at least. I believe my exact quote was “It has the potential to provide hours of entertainment for readers, and shape their lives for years to come. However, the downside is that it could get old real soon, and provide us with nothing but an excuse not to get real jobs.” Well, I think we’ve significantly proven wrong every single point that I just brought up. We have 29 categories, 19 subcategories, and even two sub-sub categories. We’re still writing about reasonably different things, and while we may have slacked on the funny in recent months, we still bring the ‘A’ game on occasion. As far as my quote goes, I’d be willing to bet that we’ve provided maybe a few hours of entertainment for a handful of people, which probably did nothing to shape their lives for even the near fututre. On the upside, it hasn’t gotten old, and we have gotten real-ish jobs. For all of these reasons, I’m willing to up our star rating by half a star, over the average rating of 3. I’ve also realized that my method of calculating the rating might not be the best, so I’m gonna throw in another half star for a final rating of 4 stars out of five. And for those of you playing along at home, yes, this technically is the 100th review and so therefore should be included. This review receives 3 stars for not having much to offer in the way of witty musings, and for having a faulty overall rating method, but for packing so many subjects and links into one review. […]