Lake Superior State University (Lake Superior is a state?) does the world a favor every year by maintaining this list of banished words for the year—words and phrases that have been generally overused and abused through no fault of their own. These are the sorts of utterances that make you wish there was such a thing as copyslap; the ability to just slap someone who uses them after their reasonable expiration date. As you can see from my own mutation above, the phrase “Orange is the new black,” and its innumerable iterations are a particular architecture of bone-picking with me.¹ Definitely, a second runner up is the phrase, “It is what it is,”—a phrase that requires more energy to utter than it has power to explain. In other words, to use that phrase is like letting the Universe die just a little.

The whole business of the media picking a catchy phrase or term and just beating it with the rubber truncheons of mediocrity, until the belief that it was ever clever in the first place seems about as remote as the possibility of a blonde cable news anchoress being ugly, makes me want to email Susan Blackmoore to let her know that she could some up her talk in about 19 fewer minutes by simply pointing out that all memes are bad.² I’m very certain that George Orwell would agree. These phrase fads are just bad for all of us. They reduce conversation to a level of bipolar uselessness. The funny thing is, I really don’t blame us. That is to say, I don’t want to <sarcasm>throw modern culture under the bus</sarcasm>.³ I do think the media is to blame, the Media with a capital ‘m’, that is—the crew that’s a shill for paid advertising and wouldn’t know a serious story if it stopped them in a dark parking garage. You just don’t hear this kind of regurgitated drek on PBS Frontline. We hear these phrases over and over again and it induces a laziness of thought, a willingness to give in to the agenda of other people’s choice of words, rather than making the effort to think of something new for yourself. I don’t think it’s the end of the world or anything, but it just adds to the drudgery, you know?

So, I’ll end this bitter goodbye to the sheep-thought of 2008 with a New Year’s resolution for the writing on Banapana in 2009.⁴ In the coming year, I resolve to do my best to not use but identify these black holes of ingenuity and only mention them when I intend to call them out. Enjoy and Happy New Year’s Day to you!

Consider a simple glass. It is not a complex object in shape. And it is not relatively complex into terms of its materials. To simplify it, we can just say that a glass is made out of sand. But that’s not all that makes a glass. To construct a glass requires energy. It also requires information. The glassmaker must know the temperature to heat the glass to, how to cool it, and numerous other things. The more complex the structure of the glass, the more the glassmaker must know. But the information is not transferred to the glass. The energy it takes to sustain the glassmaker, the energy his motions require, that energy is transferred to the glass. Gradually, if that glass were left on a sandy beach somewhere, natural forces would tear it apart. We call this increase in disorder in the universe entropy. Glasses tend to shatter and not form themselves from nothing. It is as if the natural resting state of the universe is total disorder and randomness and everything is moving in that direction. Everything except the glassmaker, that is.

Archaeologists are quite able to find human tools that are tens of thousands of years old. They are able to identify the tools because of the telltale signs of work that were performed on the stones. But the stones don’t possess information. They retain the structure leftover after forces had done their work. And you can further illustrate this fact by not asking an archaeologist if the stone was made by a human but how the human made the tool. A good scientist will tell you that she can only speculate on that, however. And given the simplicity of the task, she might even likely be right. But the reality is, the information on how any particular stone tool was made, is lost forever when the cybernetic organism that built it finally succumbed to entropy—just like the glass or the tool that it made. And its not just us; spider webs follow the same path along with the spiders that made them.

What is this force, then? Or rather, what is this particular locality of a lack of entropy? In fact, one would have to go so far and say anentropy. It’s not really a word, don’t look it up in the dictionary, but I’ve seen it tossed around and I think its fair to refer to life as an anentropic arrangement of the universe. Life seems to do little else in common other than replicate itself in a defense against entropy. If the individual organism cannot be sustained, then parts of it can be used to make new life. And so far as we know, it is an extraordinarily fleeting arrangement of matter and energy. Consider the vast stretches of nothing between galaxies and between stars. Consider the relative densities of stars versus galaxies (stars are much more dense). Consider the acres and acres and acres of barren rock and gas on all the other planets accept for our own. And even on our own, the biosphere, is nothing but a fragile and thin skin on the surface of a massive iron and dirt orb filled with magma. Places in the universe where entropy is decreasing are very hard to come by—even if there are more worlds out there like our own—we are vastly outweighed by a Universe that would prefer to scatter our atoms evenly across the Cosmos.”