Wholphin

Teeth are gleaming at their absolute gleamiest in Park City this year! Gleamier than ever before, if you can imagine such a thing. We love white teeth. But it seems sometimes blindingly-gleamy teeth can be perhaps a shade too white. It becomes impossible to turn away. They are unused bones. We are not intimidated by all the blinding gleamyness around us. Wholphin has gleamy-ish teeth too, despite what some children say. We will share our personal teeth-whitening regimen with you: eat blueberries before bed and don’t brush your teeth. That’s what we do. The blue stains we acquire somehow seem to counteract the yellow stains from all the coffee we drink. We don’t know why, but in the morning our teeth are mysteriously gleamier! It is a matter of light refraction. We think. This is a personal revelation about our personal grooming habits and we hope you will not use it against us.

According to Genesis, there was a time when human beings understood one another. They spoke one language and began building the Tower of Babel. However, the Lord caught wind and quickly disbanded the members by eradicating the common tongue.

It’s a good story, sure, but we think it’s crap. People never understood one another. And that’s why we need art. Art and Mitchell Rose’s short instructional video, Learn to Speak Body. You have no idea the degree to which your face offends.

PLAY LEARN TO SPEAK BODY

For a few hours on Tuesday night, Club Mezzanine became the material manifestation of my own personal Shangri-La. I of course refer not to James Hilton’s mythical place, where lazy people drank honey dew all day, but to the much more productive Ticonderoga-class aircraft carrier, the USS Shangri-La, commissioned by President Roosevelt in 1944. The place was in full force is what I’m saying. In one corner, our friend Dr. Steve Haddock from the Monterey Bay Research Institute displayed mind-melting new creatures from the deep, like this living amoeba made of glass called a Radiolari –

– and squirted people with his bioluminescent squirt gun –

– and impressed us all with his ability to bridge the gap between science and party. In another corner, a high-speed camera shot 1,000 frames a second to capture the world’s fastest tongue in a raspberry contest that was as popular as it was childish (at the movies, you see 24 frames a second). The winners will be posted soon, but until then here’s a sample of the current contenders:

Jeff B.

Colin D.

David, our webmaster…

…here’s my attempt…

…and Emily’s, on the same camera model, but black and white and four times slower. It was a crowd favorite.

On top of all that, Brian Fischer from Cal Academy brought over a small colony of gravity-defying trap-jaw ants. As owners of Wholphin No. 3 know, these ants are the new world-record holder for fastest predatory strike in the animal kingdom. In other words, sexy. Here’s an excerpt:

But the main event of the night was a showing of a selection of films from all three issues of Wholphin, people cheered after Walleyball; and I got a little teary.

Fun night. We’ll post some pictures soon.

David and Nathan Zellner seem like the type of kids that rocked your playgroup growing up. My guess is an average afternoon went something like this:

You’re all coloring quietly in the living room when someone suggests playing Pirates. You reach for the construction paper and start cutting out cute little eye patches and paper swords. Then the Zellners arrive. They relocate to the backyard, cut into the water mains, flood the entire block and within twenty minutes have sailed away with all the cutlery in the neighborhood.

PLAY QUASAR HERNANDEZ

Arm-in-arm with the Zellners at this weeks’ Sundance Film Festival. See their latest film, Aftermath on Meadowlark Lane, here and their art-gone-awry piece, Floatsam/Jetsam, on Wholphin No. 3.

Even the most advanced thermometer on Earth, one invented by a man named Dwight Adams, cannot measure down to absolute zero. It can only measure to .0009 degrees Kelvin. As Dr. Adams once told me, this is because “cooling to a lower temperature is a process of lowering entropy.” Entropy is a measure of the disorder or randomness of a system. [i.e. a measure of motion.] Because the entropy is approaching 0 regardless of the state of the material providing the cooling, the amount by which you can decrease the entropy (and the temperature) in one step gets smaller and smaller. Perhaps the analogy of walking across a room to the opposite wall will help. If you cut your steps in half each time, you would have to take an infinite number of steps to reach the other side of the room.

Basically, lowering entropy is lowering motion, randomness, chaos, and thereby heat. In other words, there must be no love in San Francisco today. It is that cold.

Tactical Advantage director Daren Rabinovitch, also in San Francisco today, advises us that the perfect movie to watch on an afternoon approaching 0 Kelvin is Three Women by Robert Altman.