Mike Crumbles

2010-07-26T19:16:00.001-06:00

http://kahesofi.angelfire.com/

Green Skyscrapers

2007-06-12T10:52:00.000-06:00

There are some sweet designs in this top-ten list of green skyscrapers. Not all of them are complete yet (most are under construction or still on the drawing board), but I think this is evidence there is some serious creative intelligence focusing on green building these days, along with some serious cash.

Plenty?

2007-05-25T10:09:00.000-06:00

I'm currently two pages from finishing Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally. The basic premise is a couple in Vancouver, BC, who decide to spend a year eating nothing that is not produced within a 100 mile radius of their home. There are many interesting ideas contained herein, information about food miles, the failings of the industrial food system, the degradation of place that modern society engenders, and so on, but to me the overwhelming appeal of the book is not intellectual--I've heard all this stuff before--but gastronomical. I love the authors' descriptions of the various local treasures they uncover during their trial, their joy at discovering some unexpected delicacy, their despair at not being able to source a beloved food locally. There's something fundamentally invigorating about good food, and the food they find in the small farms of British Columbia and the (mostly) fished-out bays of the Salish Sea is some of the best. Truly, you can't beat local produce. It's ripened in the garden, on the vine, not in a truck, and it just tastes better. Local cheese and wine, local meat, local grains--the list goes on.

OK, so there's a little bit of food porn in here. I like to eat. I love to eat, and that's part of the reason I'm fascinated with this book. I'm also fascinated with variety in food. I'll eat and enjoy almost anything. When you go to the supermarket regularly, you soon realize that the apparent year-round plenty of the produce section is reliant on a couple dozen commercially viable species that don't even taste all that good. This throws the variety and freshness of the farmer's market and kitchen garden into sharp relief. I guess this is one of the things I like most about this book. The authors don't just get by on local food, they thrive on local food.

Sure, it's hard for them at first because they don't know where to go for what they need. The farmer's markets and local organic groceries are places to start, but they can't get everything they need there, and the prices at the organic groceries are too high for them to be a realistic everyday source of food. Not to mention a lot of that food is flown in from all around the world. So they dig in. They find farmers growing fruit, beans, wheat, making cheese, slaughtering grass-fed beef. (They start the year as vegans but with tofu out of the picture, quickly start eating dairy, eggs, seafood, and eventually even beef. But they feel good about it. It's one thing to avoid factory-farmed beef, which comes from an unhealthy animal that's practically been tortured most of its life, so poor are the conditions it is raised in, and quite another thing to eat a healthy pastured cow that has been respectfully and cleanly killed by its owner.) Above all, they discover that the local food they find is more nourishing, more varied, cheaper, and just better than the food they've given up. There are certain things they miss--avocados, beer (some of the ingredients even in the local brews are sourced from far away), and so on--but they find many more things they never even knew they loved.

There's also something about their DIY mentality that appeals to me. I love the idea of baking my own bread, fermenting my own yogurt, making my own cheese. Of course, finding the time to do it is another problem for a 9 to 5-er like myself. The authors are freelance writers and journalists and, though busy, have a more flexible schedule that can accommodate tasks like these.

So where does that leave the book? As I said, it primarily appealed to the Epicurean in me, but I did find its other points interesting and salient. Sure, it is impossible and absurd to absolutely refuse to eat ANYTHING grown or raised more than 100 miles from home. But the point being that it is equally and perhaps more absurd to eat only or mostly food grown thousands of miles from home. The transportation costs involved are reliant upon cheap oil and mask a host of externalities that are someday soon going to bite us in the ass. In fact they already are. Not to mention the farming practices in much of the industrialized world are hard on the land and unsustainable in the long run, or even the medium run. A local food system is not only tastier year-round (and not just in Vancouver, as the authors point out with a midwinter visit to a group in northern Minnesota pursuing a similar dietary regimen), it is also more stable and more sustainable in the long run. It also doesn't mean we can't eat food grown in other regions or parts of the world, but such things should be delicacies and not an everyday part of our diet.

Yeah, this seems a little Quixotic. I have a really hard time imagining a majority of people in this country giving up their McBurgers and midwinter spring mixes in favor of canned corn left over from last summer's harvest. But stranger things have happened. And if cheap oil peters out without a good alternative, we may not have much other choice. It also seems fitting that this dismantling of powerful but ultimately self-destructive industrial systems could begin with a return to local food. People have historically been touchy about what they eat, attaching an almost religious importance to diet (or explicitly religious; see Kosher rules or Indian vegetarians). If there is one area where people are finally beginning to see what has been lost in the switch to large-scale industrial production, it is in the food we put on our tables.

As for myself, I probably won't adopt a strict 100-mile diet anytime soon. But I do plan to eat a lot more local food this summer. I've planted a garden (not necessarily because of this book--I planted it before I read it--but it makes me more excited about my garden), and I plan to spend a lot more time at the farmer's market than the produce aisle this summer. Maybe I'll even poke around and see if I can't find some local flour, or local fish. Who know? Maybe I'll find some tasty delicacies I never even dreamed existed. The plains of Colorado seem barren compared to the Pacific Northwest, or the Illinois farm fields I grew up in, but surely they have their hidden treasures, as well. I look forward to finding them.

Spam Poetry

2007-01-16T08:54:00.000-07:00

Why this is the thing that inspired me to my first post in almost a year, I don't know. Maybe it's the line that reads "Ghost my butt bridget." Anyway, this is nonsense, but it's somewhat inspired nonsense, at least as good as a lot of stuff I had to read in college. As long as computers stick to poetry as a way to trick us into downloading a virus, fine. But if they start giving readings in local coffeehouses, we're gonna have a problem on our hands.

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Are You an Extreme Survivor?

2006-03-14T10:57:00.000-07:00

Take the test and find out. I got 12 of 17. I'm alive, but badly injured and maimed for life. With a little effort, I, too, can be an extreme survivor.

Turkey - Ahead of the Curve on Human-Animal Hybrids

2006-03-07T11:48:00.000-07:00

Instead of using genetic engineering, though, they did it the old-fashioned way: inbreeding. Yahoo News reports that researchers have discovered a family of human quadrupeds somewhere in southern Turkey. (Sadly, no pictures to accompany this post.) The five children in the family walk on all fours and are incapable of walking upright. They are also mentally retarded and have some other genetic abnormalities. Researchers think they may be expressing genetic traits our ancestors possessed before our upright stature became widespread.

No disrespect to the mother and father of this particular family, though. I'm sure they have a hard life, made harder by caring for their children, who are undoubtedly unable to function independently in the world. Inbreeding is a time-honored tradition (think European monarchs), and has given us many spectacular mutations, like the white skin and ability to digest milk proteins in adulthood that most Caucasions possess. What would we do without cheese? So I won't knock them for that. It's interesting, though, how much of our heritage remains hidden in the genome, ready to leap back into service given the right, um, pairing.

How Great Were the Maya

2005-10-12T15:25:00.000-06:00

In a recent post, Culture Cult author Roger Sandall uses some incidental passages from Jared Diamond's latest book, Collapse (sorry, having weird cut and past issues with Firefox so I'm not including the convoluted Amazon link), as a springboard to diss classical Maya civilization and compare it rather unfavorably to classical Greece.

Mr. Sandall's main point seems to be that for all the accomplished art and architecture the Maya left behind, precious little of value emerged from their time in the sun. The Maya leadership he describes as bloodthirsty chieftains mainly interested in war, wealth, and the appeasement of their gods, and Maya intellectual achievements are dismissed as astrology and numerology.

For the record, I am unfamiliar with Mr. Sandall's work and have no idea what his knowledge of Mayan civilization amounts to. From this essay, however, he seems very familiar with Greek civilization, less so with Mayan, making it difficult to take his dismissal seriously. He seems unaware that all save three Mayan codices, representing the collective knowledge of millions of people over thousands of years, were burned by overzealous Spanish priests and conquistadores. This makes it hard to apply his Mind at Work standard to the Maya, as any record of a Mayan Socrates or Sophocles was long ago destroyed. It is true that what survived does not approach the level of thought found in classical Greece, but take any three random books from ancient Greece and you'd likely find little more.

It is also the case that Maya civilization was severely, violently repressed with the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, both by means of cultural and physical violence and also by disease. Though it is true that most major Mayan cities were in ruins when Columbus arrived, there was still a thriving population that had by no means regressed to a stone-age level and still existed in a well-connected network of smaller towns and cities. As witnessed in the archaeological record of the Middle East, not all civilizations progress linearly from stone-age huts to world dominance. There are many stops, regressions, and revivals along the way, and as Mr. Diamond details in Collapse, the geography of the Yucatan made it difficult to support large populations even with modern agricultural techniques. Though the Greeks were invaded several times by the numerically superior Persians, they suffered no technological disadvantage (and in fact had technological and strategical advantages over the invading Persians) comparable to the Maya-Spain mismatch and also did not deal with ideologically fanatical occupiers in the Romans, as the Maya did with the Spaniards.

And as for Mr. Sandall's insinuation that the Greeks were less warlike and more high-minded and peaceful because Athens developed democracy? Please. As for the first claim, the Greek city-states were constantly at war with one another, much like the Maya, or at least were mutually hostile. As for the second claim, it is true that Athens gave birth to a fairer system than other governments of the time, but how much freedom really existed in a city where only adult men had the right to vote? This was a great step forward, sure, but I refuse to wax poetic about so imperfect and institution. And Socrates and Plato, two of Athens' more famous residents, advocated enlightened despotism, not democracy, as the ideal form of government.

I will not pretend that the classic Maya offered more of intellectual value to the human race than the Greeks. It is obviously not so, and Mr. Sandall is right in making this point. However, this is due to a specific set of historical circumstances having nothing to do with the intrinsic value of Mayan civilization. Had the tables been turned and had the Greeks suffered an invasion of technologically advanced, disease-bearing Aztec religious zealots who burned most of their literature and killed most of their citizens, I do not doubt that there would one day have been some New World version of Mr. Sandall publicly discounting Greece and Rome as having never produced much of lasting value.

Advertising on the Cheap

2005-08-30T14:46:00.000-06:00

Here's a new one: posting ads in the comments of obscure personal blogs. I thought maybe someone had actually read my blog. I'm sure some spammer thinks he's pretty hot shit because he came up with a cool bot that dumps millions of stupid ads in people's comments. Like anyone would fall for this shit.

Though I have to admit that sometimes you fall for dumb ads when you least expect it. I just took my car into Just Brakes because the brakes started making grinding noises and I freaked. I don't have a regular mechanic yet for my new (old) Saturn and so I panicked and fell back on a radio ad I'd heard from them about cheap brake deals. Ha ha ha ha ha ha!! "Cheap brakes." Yeah, it's gonna be $500. And so after I take it in I decide to do some research on them and find all these complaints about Just Brakes doing work that doesn't need to be done, gouging their customers in the process. Great. Good thing I already signed a form authorizing it. I'm considering this an expensive lesson in the value of researching car mechanics. I just pray that everything works as advertised and I don't have to deal with these jokers again.

Why Intelligent Design Is Wrong

2005-08-30T14:36:00.000-06:00

With clarity and incisiveness, Daniel Dennet has laid out exactly what is wrong with Intelligent Design theory: there is no theory. Oh, sure, ID advocates claim that their theory is that some intelligence, which they refuse to speculate on, created life on this planet. But as Dennet points out, this is not a theory. It is merely an assertion. A scientific theory (well, a hypothesis; it has to be tested and developed before it can become a theory) has to be composed of testable assertions. ID has none. It could. As Dennet says, it would be possible to come up with testable ID assertions, like that aliens designed our 6 million years ago, and then look for evidence to prove these assertions, but this has not been done, presumably because ID advocates know they are full of hot air. Anyway, this is a brilliant piece, probably the most concise and damning takedown of ID that I've seen so far.

I realize, upon reading it, that defenders of evolution are taking the wrong approach by doing just that--defending evolution. It makes it look as though there really is some doubt, something about evolution that needs to be defended. This might work with other scientists, but not with people who are not trying to be rational. Instead, this whole debate could and should be totally reframed in terms of ID. What is ID? What isn't it? Why are ID advocates doing what they are doing? How are they doing it? Why don't they do it with other scientific theories, like quantum theory or gravity or thermodynamics, some of which are on much shakier ground than evolution is? Though this information appears in the media, there has been no concerted attack on ID. I think if there was, and it was done in a way that regular people could understand, ID would have a much harder time hanging on.

Surprise, Surprise

2005-08-25T09:14:00.000-06:00

The Discovery Institute, the Seattle think-tank that has been ramming Intelligent Design into the national nostril this summer, likes to put on a good face. There are lots of scientists on their roster, lots of official-sounding publications on their Web page. But what do those scientists on their roster even think about them? Do they agree with the Discovery Institute? Do they even want to be listed as members? You would think so, but this article makes me skeptical. Like the cute ape pictures and DNA molecule drawings on their Web site, and like ID itself, the Discovery Institute's scientific credentials appear to be nothing more than smoke and mirrors.

Smultronstället (Wild Strawberries)

2005-08-15T11:03:00.000-06:00

My wife and I watched Wild Strawberries Saturday night, an old Ingmar Bergman film. What a wonderful movie. It's the tale of an old doctor driving to a ceremony with his daughter-in-law, where he will receive an honorary degree from a university. Along the way he reminisces a lot and has several disturbing dreams that hint at things he could've done differently in his life. It was a beautiful meditation on loneliness and how even late in life we can find happiness for ourselves and ease some of the pain we have caused others. It has some of Bergman's characteristic dark strangeness, particularly in the dream sequences, but what struck me most about it was how human it was. It deals with ordinary people in ordinary situations, and overall struck me as the sort of film that just isn't made in America anymore. Partially that's because filmmaking and storytelling techniques have evolved, but I think it also has something to do with the worship of celebrity that has infested all aspects of our culture. We can't tell stories about ordinary people unless something extraordinary happens to them. We've forgotten how interesting our day-to-day lives actually are. Of course, I'm sure that if I search, particularly among independent filmmakers, I could find counterexamples, but certainly very little reaches the mainstream that is on a recognizably human scale and is not about some extraordinary tragedy/event/whatever. All cultural vitriol aside, this was a very beautiful and uplifting movie, and I highly recommend it to anyone who thinks ordinary people are fascinating.

Global Warming Irregularities Exploited by Skeptics Are Fixed

2005-08-12T08:42:00.000-06:00

This story appearing in USA Today reveals that a key fuel source for arguments by global warming skeptics has been explained. For some time now, weather balloon data on tropical temperatures has failed to show predicted temperature increases. Skeptics used this data to argue that the models showing significant global warming were flawed. However, researchers have discovered that several of these important weather balloons had drifted off course, and were reporting nighttime temperatures as daytime temperatures. When this was corrected, the reported temps conformed exactly to current climate models showing global warming. The petroleum industry has yet to comment on their smackdown. Take that, you oil-slurping vampires.

Congress Makes Me Sick

2005-08-11T15:29:00.000-06:00

The latest issue of Rolling Stone, of all the magazines in this country, has a brilliant and nauseating article on how, exactly, Congress works. Or doesn't work. I'd always assumed that the majority of congressmen and women were a bunch of lying, corrupt bastards, but it's gross to see how true that is and how the corruption and lying actually happens.

The article follows Rep. Sanders, an independent from Vermont and seemingly one of the few honest men in Congress, as he tries to get several measures passed in Congress. Three of the four amendments he introduced before the summer recess passed by large margins, but none of them made it into law. Wanna know how and why? Read the article. It's truly disgusting, and it makes me think there needs to be some serious housecleaning in Washington, which involves more than sweeping out the Republican leadership, though that would help a lot.

And on a final note, I also think it's very sad that this article appeared in Rolling Stone, rather than Time, or Newsweek, or the New York Times, or some other publication that should be covering stuff like this. Not that Rolling Stone can't have serious journalism in it, obviously they do, but for God's sake, they're a music magazine! Their bread and butter is writing about Britney Spears and the latest flop by Oasis! OK, they've covered political stories since Day 1, I know, but I still think this is one more instance where the major, mainstream news outlets are completely and totally failing to do their job.

Jesus Gonna Be Here... As Soon as He Evolves

2005-08-11T09:42:00.000-06:00

I listen to Slate.com's daily podcast every morning, and today they did an interview with Jacob Weisberg, author of an article on Slate about the teaching of evolution, one of my favorite topics. Mr. Weisberg makes the claim that religious people are right to be worried about evolution; it does, he says, tend to lead people toward atheism or agnosticism. His claim is not that evolution and (monotheistic) religious belief are incompatible. After all, there are people who believe in God and evolution. However, he claims that one of effects of evolution since Darwin's seminal The Origin of Species has been to lead people away from religious belief because it provides a non-supernatural answer to one of religion's biggest questions: how did we get here? Thus he feels religious people are justified in fearing evolution.

However, I disagree with Mr. Weisberg on several points. First, I do not think evolution is a stake in the heart of religion. Rather, it is another nail on the coffin. Western society was already becoming more secular when Darwin made public his theory. The conflict between religion in science began in earnest with Galileo, and is not science's problem. It is religion's attempt to use its weight to support specific scientific theories that is the problem. In Galileo's day, it was fairly obvious to most people that the sun revolved around the earth. After all, they only had to look at its motion throughout the day. However, Copernicus, Galileo, and others discovered evidence that this was not the case. This was a scientific question, but the church decided to weigh in in favor of one hypothesis--the wrong one, as it turns out. This gives them a credibility problem, especially when they claim divine guidance.

It is the same with evolution. Until Darwin, there were few compelling reasons to disbelieve the church's claim that God created the earth in seven days, etc. But now there is good evidence to the contrary. Rather than accepting that a literal interpretation of the bible is not correct, as some denominations, including the Catholic Church, have done, many religious people choose to throw the weight of their belief behind the disproven hypothesis. This does not make it right. On the contrary, it gives them a credibility problem, forcing people who agree that evolution is a resonable theory to choose between religion and science. If religious people did not force this unreasonable distinction, evolution would not make people more atheistic.

At the heart of this issue, to me, is a retention of primitive, mythic thinking. As much as many theologians (and certain biblical authors) point out that God is a transcendent concept that is not reducible to our ideas about it/him/her/whatever, many of us persist in seeing God as the modern analog of Zeus: a big, bearded fellow who sits up in the clouds watching everything we do to make sure we aren't screwing around. In this scenario, God aka Superman basically casts magic spells to create the world, making creatures, mountains, iPods, etc pop out of thin air and start disobeying him. He does all this in the time span of the modern work week, cause he's concerned about the market, too. This is the only creation story that evolution discredits. If, on the other hand, we accept that God really is transcendent and awesome and unknowable, then we accept that the seven days account is no more than it claims to be: a myth, a way of talking about creation on human terms (i.e., the magic spell aspect) while acknowledging that the truth is bigger, greater, and more awesome than anything we can come up with. If religious opponents of evolution would remember this, they would see that there is no problem. From our perspective, maybe God's creation of the world looks a whole hell of a lot like evolution.

I realize this raises problems of theodicy (survival of the fittest, etc) and knocks down man a little in the cosmic scheme of things because we weren't created "special." (Though if man is created in God's image, what about apes and chimps? I'm sorry, but they look pretty damn similar to us, even with the hair.) But theodicy is still a problem even if God did create the world with magic spells in seven days because there is still suffering. In fact, I'd say it's even more of a problem in this system because suffering is an anomaly rather than an integral part of the system of creation. If we accept evolution, we actually have a rationale for suffering and can begin to look at its transformative aspects. And as for man being special, well, we're still the only creature we know of who has language, and who has developed the ability for abstract symbol manipulation, and advanced tool-making, etc. And maybe we aren't special anyway. Why is a man more special than a turtle? Maybe if we stepped down from our pedestals for a moment and actually began helping one another, as Jesus suggests, rather than believing our own press, we really would be a special species that could be worthy of God's praise.

Can Christians Come to Christ?

2005-08-04T12:05:00.000-06:00

The 8/05 issue of Harper's magazine has a wonderful essay by Bill McKibben titled "The Christian Paradox: How a Faithful Nation Gets Jesus Wrong." Unfortunately you can read the article in its entirety only in the print version at the moment, but there are some excerpts on the Harper's Web site.

McKibben's basic point is that despite 85% of Americans identifying themselves as Christians, as a nation we fail to behave in a Christian manner. Jesus told his followers to turn the other cheek, sell all our belongings and follow him, help the poor, sick, weak, and so on, and yet by any metric we are failing to do these things, even when one factors in the donations to and actions of private and religious charities. Compared to all other wealthy, industrialized nations (including Japan, a non-Christian nation, and many European nations where Christianity has become so anemic that they can be considered secular cultures), we have higher murder rates, higher poverty, less health care, worse school systems, and on and on.

This point has been made before (by me, among other people), but McKibben makes it eloquently. He also very interestingly traces the roots of this phenomenon to a series of theological makeovers Christianity has received in this country. The two major thrusts of this makeover are, on the one hand, the millenarians, who obsessively search for signs of the coming apocalypse in the bar codes at Wal-Mart and in some cases hope to hasten the End Times by advocating, say, war in the Middle East, and the corporates, neo-New Agers who basically promote a feel-good Christian pop-psychology in suburban megachurches that says little about Jesus and lots about you, the worshipper, and how you can feel good about yourself.

Of course there are many variations on (and marriages between) these strands of pseudo-Christianity, but they are what they are because that's how people like to think. We (the people) are obsessed with disaster scenarios (witness the popularity of movies like Independence Day or the truckloads of other science fiction books, movies, video games, and so on that touch on post-apocalyptic themes), and we are fascinated by destruction. I am sure that as the Spaniards watched Tenochtitlan burn, some of them were excited about destroying an entire culture and one of the most amazing cities in the entire world. There is a little bit of Shiva in all of us, so it's no wonder that people find this kind of thing compelling--especially if they think religion will give them the knowledge to predict and to a certain extent influence the outcome of the apocalypse. As for the corporates, they wanna hear about how Jesus is going to make them more content at work and deal with their kids better and how they deserve to keep all the money they make and God helps those who help themselves so you don't have to do it and you're a Christian so you're saved, what's to worry about? No matter that Jesus basically contradicted all that stuff.

As I said in my previous post on this, Jesus had a radical message, and that message was love. He wanted, as McKibben says, to radically reorient human relationships around the principle of love. But as Foucault scholars will be quick to point out, human relations, in large swaths of the American Christian community, are based instead on power, often economic power.

Do I follow Jesus' message? No, I don't. Maybe somewhat, but not to the extend that I wish I did. So I'm a hypocrite, but I'm honest about it. The problem with these modern-day moneylenders in the temple like the Christian Coalition and Focus on the Family is that they're not. They say in very loud voices that they represent Christian values when what they really represent is a narrow conservative political view that in a lot of ways is anti-Christian. (Millenarians, get out your pens and start connecting the Antichrist dots.) But they say it so loudly that our culture, as a whole, fails to question them, and a true and vital interpretation of Christianity is pushed to the sidelines. Like McKibben, I hope that one day we will have a truly moral majority, but until that day, all we can do is quietly labor on the sidelines.

Energy Economies

2005-07-25T14:38:00.000-06:00

The August '05 issue of National Geographic has a wonderful article on the future of energy generation. Fossil fuels are still (relatively) plentiful and (relatively) cheap, but frankly they don't have much life left in them. Whether oil becomes too scarce to be the viable base of our economy in five years or fifty, it's inevitably going to happen, and it'll probably happen during our lifetimes. That's not the end of the show, though it will mean a lot of changes in the way we get power and the way our economy works.

This article provides a great rundown on the various technologies currently in the works to step in as a replacement for cheap oil. As the author says, this is more likely to be a congress than a president: there is no one technology or energy source that will fill oil's shoes. Oil is like heroin--the concentrated energy of billions of years of sunshine. Nothing we can do can top that. But many technologies--solar, wind, biofuels, even nuclear--working together can still probably provide all our foreseeable energy needs.

For what it's worth, my money is on solar. Sure, it works better in sunny climes than others, but what I like about it is how modular it is. Solar panels can be popped onto buildings, homes, even cars and backpacks. Solar creates a distributed network of power generation that can be increased gradually and locally depending on need and conditions. It could also create a national or global marketplace where people with extra power can sell their surplus to those in need. (A sunny day in Chicago can cancel out a rainy day in Albany.) And with improvements in battery technology, days or even weeks of power could be stored against a rainy day. Of course, any renewable system, even with battery backups and a power marketplace, is not foolproof, and some combination of solar, wind, hydro, tidal, and maybe even a few relic coal or nuclear plants, just in case, will be necessary. But solar has the potential to be the real democratic future power technology, and I think people will respond to that.

But ultimately, what will be truly interesting is to see what shape the stormclouds take when they arrive, and how easily and peacefully we weather the transition from an oil-and-gas economy to the renewable, self-sustaining energy future.

VapOr?

2005-07-12T15:53:00.000-06:00

I gestured back at the skimmer, seeming to float in the tall, waving grass.

"No room!" I tried to enunciate clearly, speak loudly, even though I knew it wouldn't do any good. "We come back!"

The man looked at me in confusion, then suddenly took several broad steps forward. I involuntarily stepped back, one hand on my pistol. I glanced nervously at Shaun, but he wasn't even looking. Instead his attention was on the woman, the shrouded figure, who seemed to be struggling in her veil.

"Unnnnn...." A low moan rose from the sheets that enwrapped her, something hideous and otherworldly. I felt a chill run down my spine.

I looked back at the big fellow, their leader, and could see the worry and confusion written across his face. I put out my hand and started to step around him, toward the woman. He almost reflexively grimaced and moved to block me.

"No!" I said hastily, stepping back. "I help!" I looked helplessly at Shaun.

But Shaun still wasn't listening. He was sitting down in the tall grass, a slack expression on his long face. The locals standing near him were starting to back away.

I quickly walked over to his side.

"Shaun!" I said loudly. "Are you alright? What are you doing?"

"Mmmn.." he mumbled. "Tired, doc. Can't seem to..."

I started to reach out to shake his shoulder when a rough, strong hand grabbed my wrist, holding me back. I looked up angrily and not a little bit fearfully to see the burly leader fellow, his eyes wide with fear.

"What in the devil..." I began when he yanked me away from Shaun and began jabbering at me again. Of course I couldn't understand what he was saying, but I wasn't really listening. I was watching the now-unconscious form of my assistant as it began to, I'm not sure how to put this, mutate rather rapidly into some kind of cyborg, sprouting antennas and sleek metal nodules and appendages quite rapidly. I looked up at the leader fearfully and could sense his relief now that I was aware of the danger.

Rogue tech. And something strong enough to quickly overwhelm Shaun's defenses.

I wondered how on earth these people weren't dead. Or, for that matter, why I wasn't.

Vapor Cont. 3

2005-07-06T19:34:00.000-06:00

The wind smacked me in the face as the glass on our skimmer rose, smelling of rain and distant buffalo. The folk around us had halted when I raised the cockpit, but now one took a cautious step forward. A tall, imposing fellow whose huge frame belied his gauntness, he wore his brown beard long and hair longer. He was dressed in a simple, dirty jumpsuit, something he'd probably gotten from the generators in U Town or New Omaha. He gave me a fierce look, his gaze narrow as he raised one huge hand in a formal greeting.

"Sor buenoman ke es de skie, esa buenwoma taka muh infima, sor. Vasos tenar te pillen e U Town. Kin puin me aida?

His voice was rough and his accent thick, and though he spoke deliberately, I could understand little of what he said. The locals hereabouts spoke a difficult tongue for me, a much-mutated hybrid of Classical English and Spanish. I had been making attempts at the language since I arrived at U Town, but so far had had little time to devote to it. Like most native-born Martians, I spoke Classical English and Mandarin, but I found I had little facility with the native tongue.

I shrugged in exagerrated confusion to let him know I hadn't understood, and turned to Shaun. He spoke Classical Spanish, having spent some time in the Iberian Hills as a child. I was hoping he had a better idea of what this fellow was about. He nodded and leaned over to whisper in my ear.

"I think they're saying they have a sick woman. They were trying to take her to U Town to get medicine, and they want us to help them."

I nodded at Shaun and looked back at the leader of this little group. I didn't know exactly how we were going to fit this woman into the skimmer, what with our nearly full cargo of bears.

Vapor, Cont. 2

2005-07-05T14:28:00.000-06:00

I took my hands off the stick and looked back at Shaun in surprise, barely noticing the small jolt as the autopilot took over and slowed the skimmer into a lazy circle. He returned my gaze in kind, confusion written over his narrow, bony face.

"Maybe it's a funeral procession?" I suggested, loudly. Shaun shook his head.

"No, I think the locals cremate their dead. They wouldn't come out to the plains for that."

We both looked back down at the ragged band below. Their gestures seemed urgent, almost frantic, pointing up at us and back at the body, its white shroud whipping around in our exhaust and the rapidly rising winds. I considered leaving for a split second, taking our cargo back up to U-Town, but in the same instant I found my hands on the throttle and we began to descend.

The folks below us scattered back to their buggies as we came down, save for two men who carried the shrouded figure back to the edge of the circle, where they crouched among the furiously beating waves of grass. We settled down into the middle of the circle and I cut the fans. For a moment there was a cavernous silence, filled only by the shriek of the wind as it washed over the cockpit.

I glanced back at Shaun, who had slung his Syst8 over his shoulder and unholstered his pistol. I could see the confusion in his eyes, but he said nothing. Outside, I could see several of the locals cautiously moving toward us. Reaching down to feel the reassuring weight of my own pistol, I popped the canopy.

Vapor, Cont. 1

2005-06-30T12:42:00.000-06:00

"Say! Doc!" Shaun yelled right into my ear. I reached around and pushed his head back, scowling.

"What?"

"Some locals at 10 o'clock. Looks like they'd heading for the hills."

And so they were, though they'd never get there in time. I could see a plume of dust rising behind them as they kicked over the bumpy terrain in homebrew buggies, angling toward what was left of the old highway into Longmont.

"I wonder what they're in such a damn hurry for," I yelled back at him. "No way they're gonna beat the rain. What in the heck do you think they're even doing out here?"

The kid called out some sort of reply, but it was all chopped up by the fans. I wasn't really listening anyway. Those buggies had me intrigued. I hadn't seen the locals sporting tech like that before.

I started to bring the skimmer around toward the fleeing locals, thought of the hybrid bears we were carrying and started to pull out, then went ahead, against my better judgment.

In a few moments we were swooping in right over them. I could see six or seven buggies, rather pathetic things made out of old aluminum and carbon-composite car frames, but sporting enormous rubber tires, which really surprised me, and an invisible source of power. I eased back on the throttle and circled around the locals as they drew up into a sort of defensive circle and stopped. They all rushed out into the middle of the circle and started waving their arms around threateningly.

"What do you think they're about?" I shouted at Shaun. "They can't think we're gonna hurt them?"

"I don't think they're threatening us, Doc," he yelled back. "I think they're trying to get our attention."

I looked again, and this time the waving arms didn't seem so menacing, just urgent. In fact, the locals seemed to be lifting something up to show us, something rather long and wrapped in white cloth: a body.

Working Title: Vapor

2005-06-29T14:03:00.000-06:00

We were coming in low and fast over the plains north of Hotspot. It was early May, and stormclouds were gathering over the still-white peaks of the Front Range. I had the throttle wide open, the fans making a tooth-rattling moan as I tried to will the skimmer back to U Town before the storm hit. Shaun was in the backseat fiddling with his Syst8, seemingly oblivious to the gathering storm, and below us, a small herd of buffalo was scattering in fear. I felt a twinge of guilt at disrupting the herd--normally I flew the skimmer high and slow enough to avoid that sort of thing--but we needed to beat the storm, and the upper atmosphere was a seething mass of chaotic air being pushed ahead of the front.

"Those fetuses OK, Shaun?" I yelled, shouting to be heard over the fans. He glanced up from his little terminal and craned his neck around to check the monitors on the foamsteel cases in the skimmer's little cargo bay.
"So far so good, Doc," he called up. "Temp is still 5C, and they're all still suspended."
I nodded, but I could feel the knot of worry in my gut tighten. These blackbear fetuses were in a state of temporary suspended animation, but unlike a grown bear, they couldn't hibernate indefinitely. A couple of days at most and then they'd start to die or suffer permanent damage. I'd stupidly let Howard, up in the Black Hills, talk me into stopping over on the way back from New Omaha so I could see some of the wolf specimens he'd been working with, and now we had precious little time to get these fetuses into the incubators at U Town. Clear forecast or no, I was kicking myself for not being more cautious. Spring in the mountains meant a storm could blow up at nearly any time, and there was no way we could take the skimmer into the teeth of a May squall. If we had to wait the storm out, chances are we'd lose more than a few of these fetuses before we could get back, making the whole trip a waste of time and money.

An Addendum

2005-06-28T15:14:00.000-06:00

I'm making my committment, right here, right now, to myself, my nonexistent readership, and to the cybernetic Genius of the Internet that I will try to come up with one post every day, NO MATTER WHAT. Well, maybe not on Saturdays cause that's my day off from everything, yo. And I'll be gone most of this weekend. But on all other days...

Where Do We Go Now? (Sweet Child O' Mine...)

2005-06-28T14:44:00.000-06:00

So as anyone who may have looked at this blog any time over the last, oh, three or four months has probably realized, it's been a little dead in the water. Partially that is because I was super busy getting married, finding a new apartment, and doing all these exciting things that I suppose I could've blogged about but I didn't. I don't know why. Maybe because I was really busy actually doing these things as opposed to commenting on them, or maybe it's because I'm a little uncomfortable writing about myself. Not that I don't want to write about myself, it's just that I seem to have a hard time going about it straightforwardly.

Which is the real reason this blog has been languishing, especially for the last month. I haven't felt since I started, I suppose, that I've really known what I wanted to say. Sure, I have opinions about lots of different things, but my interests are so mercurial that I've had a hard time focusing my efforts and attention on making this a "something" blog, like a photo blog or a sci-fi blog or a political blog or even just a personal blog. And trying to be an everything blog was too nebulous. It's like reading the paper: so many important events stacked one atop the other that by the end of it you don't have any coherent sense that you've actually done or discovered anything important. And that's how I felt blogging about whatever crossed my table: it was interesting, but I didn't get the sense that I was doing or saying or even bringing to anyone's attention anything of worth. And it was too easy to abandon it.

But at the same time I have the persistent, nagging feeling that I have something to say and I'm simply not saying it. What can it be? Do I want to tell a story? I don't know. Writing is enjoyable, but I haven't had the patience (or maybe just haven't pushed myself) to actually sit down and work out a plot, characters, you know--all the things you need to actually write a story. I want to, but it keeps getting put on the back burner until, you know, one day I have cancer or I'm 90 or I fall into a raging river or something and I've never done it. Never written anything I can be proud of, and I realize as I'm dying that I always could've done it, I just never tried. I don't want that.

So how does that dovetail with the blog? A couple different ways, I suppose. The first is that I want to start serializing some fiction on here. My own private Charles Dickens, I suppose, and if anyone I know or don't know happens to come on here and read something and comment on it, so much the better. Might even get me writing to know someone was reading something I was working on. The other thing is that one thing I do a lot of is reading. Well, I watch movies, too. So I'm involving myself in a lot of narratives, and I'd like to think out loud, so to speak, about what I'm reading and watching. My own little review site, too, I guess you could say. Not that there aren't enough movie and book reviews floating around online already; I don't expect to make any kind of splash, socially speaking. But I think it would help me immensely just to organize my thoughts about things and get stuff out, start writing something just for the pleasure of it.

And if anyone I told about my blog actually comes by to check it after its long dormancy, well, that would be cool, too.

Reading the Past... with SCIENCE

2005-04-18T13:11:00.000-06:00

So classicists at Oxford have teamed up with a team of scientists from Brigham Young University to decipher a huge trove of text fragments from the classical word. The collection of over 400,000 fragments (an estimated 5 million words) was found about 100 years ago in an ancient dump outside the Greek-Egyptian town of Oxyrhynchus. The fragments are mostly illegible to the human eye and even advanced forensics techniques, but new technology can cause the ink residues on the ancient paper to glow, allowing it to be detected by infrared readers and photographed. Already researchers have announced that they have found fragments of a lost play by Sophocles, poetry by Hesiod and Archilochos, and so on. They estimate most of it will be the classical equivalent of pulp fiction, but still expect to increase the number of classical texts by 1/5th. In other words, it should keep classical scholars busy for decades, and might make your old copy of Homer (or Heraclitus) obsolete. You can read all about it here.

Ant Invasions!

2005-03-21T15:45:00.000-07:00

New Scientist reports that, with the advent of global warming, the earth could come under a series of deadly ant attacks. Unfortunately these will not be the frigate-sized mutant ants of 1950s sci-fi. Instead, warming temperatures tend to decrease individual ant size but radically increase the number of ants per colony. This would lead to hideous ant invasions, of the sort I remember seeing once in an episode of MacGyver. (MacGyver saved the day by flooding an irrigation system to stop the ants. I think he used gasoline or something to make a wall of fire, too. Hey, I haven't seen it since I was seven. It made a big impression on me, but obviously not that big.)

Global Warming No Matter What

2005-03-18T11:12:00.000-07:00

According to a news blurb in New Scientist, global warming is now inevitable even if all greenhouse emissions were to stop at 2000 levels immediately (way beyond Kyoto, baby). The reason is basically that the oceans take much longer to warm than air and land, and so they are keeping temperatures lower than they otherwise would be. As the oceans slowly absorb the increased atmospheric heat, though, we'll see our temperatures go up even further.

The bad news is that even if we commit ourselves to no further increases in greenhouse emissions (the furthest thing from reality at the moment), temperatures will still increase for the next 100 years or so and global sea levels will rise several inches at minimum, dooming low-lying countries like Togo no matter what. The even worse news is that if we keep going as we're going and wait until things start to get bad before we start making drastic emissions cuts, it'll take another ~100 years on top of that for the oceans to stop warming, meaning things could get VERY uncomfortable before they get better if we don't start cutting emissions ASAP. Happy Friday.

The Indian Way

2005-03-17T11:36:00.000-07:00

Sorry to anyone who might read this page from time to time, but I've been MIA lately. No, I didn't morph into an up-and-coming singer from Britain; I've just been really flippin' busy at work and home. But now it's time to blog again.

It's lunchtime, so it's little surprise I was drawn to a post on Treehugger about how tasty and environmentally friendly and tasty and healthy and tasty buffalo meat is. In short, it's got less fat and cholesterol than beef, chicken, pork, or monkey brains, more protein, and also it's tasty. Plus most bison is farmed in its natural habitat by small farmers and is fed on native grasses. There's more, but I'm not gonna repeat the nice post I've already linked to. (P.S. I know that buffalo = water buffalo, like from SE Asia, bison = the animal I'm talking about. But everyone calls it buffalo and I don't want to be confusing.)

Sound elitist and expensive? Not really. It's not as cheap as a bag of lo-grade, 30% fat frozen hamburgers from Super Wal-Mart, but the prices aren't bad if you're not buying it at Whole Foods. Check out this list of ranchers and small businesses that sell bison. You can order directly from most of them. The prices aren't bad, though they vary from rancher to rancher, and you can order a bunch and stock up. It's not like you're using your freezer for anything else, unless you're a serial killer. So eat some buffalo today! Or whenever the shipment arrives.

Holy Shit

2005-02-25T08:32:00.000-07:00

Yahoo! has posted a trailer for the forthcoming film version of A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick.

Life on Mars?

2005-02-24T13:12:00.000-07:00

So after Euro scientists announced the discovery of a big honkin' Martian ocean Monday, now we get this: elevated methane levels over this sea! "What the fuck?" you may wonder. WTF indeed. Life, baby. It's a sign, not unequivocal, but a tantalizing hint that there may be life on Mars after all. I say we send someone there to figure it out once and for all. I nominate me. I'm not doing anything important for the next couple of years, and I'd be way into fighting space beasts. Anyone have any friends at NASA?

(Un)Intelligent Design

2005-02-21T08:49:00.000-07:00

This awesome editorial in the New York Times does a brilliant job of skewering Intelligent Design, a theological doctrine, err excuse me, "theory," so preposterous that its proponents should be ashamed of themselves. Christianity has a poetic beauty that transcends its petty linguistic transmission, and anyone who fails to see the (Christian) forest for the (biblical) trees deserves this kind of smackdown.

Dead in the Mountains

2005-02-21T08:28:00.000-07:00

Hunter S. Thompon is dead. Why'd he do it? Who knows? I was skiing at Copper Mountain yesterday (not all that far away from where Thompson lived, at probably about the same time he shot himself), and all the loud, stupid music they were playing at the mountainside restaurants, and all the adverts plastered all over every visible surface made me want to do myself in, too. Whatever happened to our sense of the sacred?

Environmentalist Nun Killed in Brazil

2005-02-14T09:07:00.000-07:00

Sister Dorothy Stang, an American nun and environmental activist who has worked since the 1970s with environmental and peasant groups in the Amazon, was killed yesterday by gunmen. I had a dream last night that I was in Brazil, too. Does this mean something?! No, it doesn't. In my dream I was trying to get a helicopter ride back to Rio from this jungle town and even though I had a ticket, the fat lady who was driving the helicopter wouldn't let me on because it was too full. But there were empty seats, dammit! There were empty seats!

Bush Social Security VS Regular Social Security

2005-02-03T11:26:00.000-07:00

This comes via the Center on Budget and Policy Proposals but it uses nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office figures. This report is long and filled with confusing, boring figures, but the meat is in the innocently titled "Table 2," about a third of the way down. Basically, under the Dear Leader's Social Security plan, a person who chooses to use one of Bush's vaunted "personal accounts" can expect to lose 33-50% of their benefits versus the current social security system. And that's if the market does OK. It could do really well, true, but it could also do poorly. What Bush failed to mention last night is that the money in personal accounts IS NOT YOUR MONEY. You have to pay it back. All you get to keep is any extra money your private account earns above and beyond the 3% it would've earned if the Social Security Administration had kept the money in their own accounts. So if you earn 5% on it, great, but if you earn only 1.5%, whoops, now you OWE SSA money. And since it will cost lots of money to set up and manage these accounts, EVERYONE will get their benefits cut, across the board, not just private account holders.

This is a stupid idea. Social Security might need to be tweaked to keep it going and deal with our aging population, but this "fix" doesn't fix anything. It creates new problems and cuts existing benefits while offering little in return.

An Obvious Point I Need to Make About Christianity

2005-02-01T11:42:00.000-07:00

Jesus was a radical. He was preaching change: religious change. Judaism was (and is still) a mess of complicated rules governing religious belief and daily life. Part of Jesus' radical agenda was to take religion out of the book and bring it back into the world. It is illustrative that his covenant is symbolized by an act (the crucifixion) rather than rules (the 10 commandments). Nowhere is this better illustrated than in this undoubtedly familiar parable: Some Pharisees bring an adultress to Jesus, telling him she's been caught in the act and pointing out, rightly, that Mosaic law demands she be stoned. They ask him what he thinks they should do. He ignores them at first, but on repeated questioning says merely: "He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone." The Pharisees think about this, and then slink guiltily away. The woman remains, and when everyone else has gone, Jesus tells her he will not condemn her, and that she should go forth and sin no more.

What's the moral of this Jesus story? Even if the Bible says something is wrong, you shouldn't condemn someone for doing it. That's not the point of Christianity. Jesus' call was a call to action, to embodying love in the world. It was not to an inconsistent application of confusing and contradictory religious formulae. We modern types, both Christian and not, seem to have forgotten this. Extremist Christians are driven to wicked acts by their rigid interpretations of scripture, just as the Pharisees were, just as non- and antireligious individuals are driven to dismiss Christianity out of hand because it carries baggage that appears outdated or incompatible with their personal moralities. And we are all, no matter what we believe, poorer for this loss.

So if you consider yourself a Christian, what does Christianity mean to you: condemnation or compassion? If you find yourself engaged in the former, no matter what the Bible says about your personal devils and no matter how much good you otherwise do, think about this story and try to figure out which side you're really on.

The Robots Are Coming!

2005-02-01T11:38:00.000-07:00

Robot soldiers of the future (or, well, now...) will be on their way to Iraq soon. And you thought the title was a joke, didn't you?

DJ Shadow vs. GWB

2005-02-01T10:44:00.000-07:00

Download this remix of Radiohead's The Gloaming by DJ Shadow. It's a great remix, and has some awesome Bush sampling at the beginning. This copy actually sounds better, but its hosted on a slower system, so you'll have to wait a bit for it to finish.

Your mission for today: Do not take a bath! We'll teach those bastard water utilities who's boss...

Irrational Objection

2005-02-01T09:28:00.000-07:00

The stock market is dumb. Check it out for your self. Economists say people are rational agents who make decisions in their own self interest, which is patently stupid. Watch 5 minutes of TV and you quickly realize that most of our economic decisions, with the exception of very large ones, are 9 parts impulse and 1 part rationality. Even our biggest purchasing decisions, such as buying a home, have a large irrational component. And now the stock market has been shown to be random, as well.

Bring Your Glacier in Every 100 Years for a Tune-Up

2005-01-31T10:52:00.000-07:00

I wish. Glaciers across the world are disappearing, and this article has the lowdown on some Alaskan glaciers. Before and after pictures provide stunning visual evidence for how much our world has changed already and hint at the transformation to come.

New York Times Profiles Alexander Shulgin

2005-01-31T10:50:00.000-07:00

Alexander Shulgin, father of MDMA, psychochemical explorer, and all-around interesting dude, is being profiled in the New York Times. Read it, grok it, know it's good.

Get Out Your Hot Dogs

2005-01-28T13:18:00.000-07:00

Rejoice in the power of the mighty barbecue!! Jesus provides eternal mound of burning poo for his loyal following in Nebraska! Grok the picture in this article and know in the depths of your sinning soul that those are not mountains, but the manure God gives to his flock. What was I babbling about factory farms yesterday? I take it back. Now go eat meat.

Bush EPA Gives Factory Farms a Free Ride

2005-01-27T08:38:00.000-07:00

So here's yet another piece of evidence that, under Bush, EPA stands for "Encouraging Pollution Association." Factory farms, which stink up the Midwest (formerly a very sweet-smelling region) with their mounds of animal shit, are going to be exempted from the Clean Air Act for two years if they provide data about their emissions. Wow, good idea. Especially since the Clean Air Act already requires polluters to provide data about their emissions. Methane, one of the main emissions of these farms, is one of the worst greenhouse gases, so I'm sure this won't kill us or anything.

Ahh, yet another good reason not to eat meat. (And no, saving poor animals is not a good reason. We're omnivores, life feeds on life, and meat is occasionally delicious.) These farms are a direct result of our overconsumption of meat, and exist solely to keep the price of meat low enough and the supply plentiful enough so that the moo people can continue to buy McHeartAttacks for less than $5. There are so many problems with factory farms, I don't even know where to start. They pollute badly, not just with methane and other air emissions but the shit seeps into groundwater. Plus it's f-ing cruel to the animals. They're like concentration camps for pigs. (And just because I think it's OK to eat meat doesn't mean I think it's OK to mistreat animals. Our ancestors paid respect to the animals they killed, and we should, too, damnit. Eat free-range, people.)

If You Drive an SUV...

2005-01-27T08:28:00.000-07:00

Can't you think of a better way to feel superior than scooting around in a mini-tank? FYI: Your kids are dead meat no matter how big your Bronco is, fool. But never fear, ye sinner: Jesus will forgive you for your ego trip. A new service for environmentally conscious drivers lets you buy CO2 remediation for your carbon-belching frankenwagon, paying in based on how much your car emits, with the money going toward programs to reduce CO2 emissions elsewhere. It's like a plenary indulgence, but it actually does some good and doesn't just pay for gold-plated pope hats.

We Are Fast Becoming Fast Food

2005-01-26T13:29:00.000-07:00

Super-size me, baby. No, I'm not fat, but my country is. My country is also receiving the most nominations for this year's Cheap Styrofoam Containersies Awards. What do I mean by this? Well, it has dozens of subtle interpretations, I assure you, but the only one you need to remember is that GWB is making us a disposable country. "You're either with us or against us," Cowboy George said one night on the range. The world was listening, and they've been giving us their answer. Not in so many words, but in the increasing number of meetings, summits, trade blocs, and military alliances the U.S. is not being invited to. Check out this sobering article in the Financial Times for an analysis of our many recent fuckups. We thought we were the coolest kid in school, but we forgot the lessons of the many movies of the 80s, which taught us again and again that overbearing, too-handsome jocks always lose in the end to the nerds when their mundane malignancy is exposed to the rest of the school and their hot girlfriends dump them for a little geek action. (Who would our hot girlfriend be, internationally speaking? I'd say England, but they're more like our sidekick. Maybe Japan?)

The author of this awesome and sobering article (the one I linked to, fool--I'm the author of this awesome and sobering article) is Michael Lind, whom the rumor mill pegs as a former neocon turned rational. Amen, brother Lind. Welcome to the light.

Judge Not Thyself, for Thou Art Bad at Judging

2005-01-26T13:22:00.000-07:00

I just read an interesting article on the APA's Web site about how people regularly fail to judge themselves and their abilities accurately. This is heavily influenced by culture, as in Western cultures it is more common to believe we really are great at certain things without actually having any evidence to back up these beliefs, whereas in East Asian cultures the tendency is to believe one is not adequately skilled (even if one excels at a skill), with the focus then being placed on self-improvement. I'm sure this is a generalization, but it is still interesting to learn about the ways we routinely deceive ourselves about our skills.

Incredibly Stupid

2005-01-25T08:55:00.000-07:00

So you may have heard about some kind of "controversy" over Spongebob Squarepants and homosexuality. If you haven't, Focus on the Family founder James Dobson made a bunch of remarks at an inaugural dinner last week about poor Spongebob promoting homosexuality in a new video being sent to schools. It's totally ridiculous, and MSNBC columnist Keith Olbermann has a great article about the whole thing. The page also links to a feed of the totally innocuous video that started it all.

As Olbermann points out, there is NOTHING in this video that is even remotely sexual, let alone homosexual. The message of the video is nothing more than tolerating difference, which is the real problem these jerks have with it. They think there is only one right way to do everything--their way--and use their holier-than-thou attitude to damn anyone or anything that doesn't agree with them, or *gasp* suggests that maybe it's OK to be different than they are.

HAHAHAHAHA

2005-01-21T15:40:00.000-07:00

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Oh... Jesus.... Play this game. It's worth clicking the link for the intro alone, though the game is fun, too.

I Steal

2005-01-21T13:20:00.000-07:00

Organized shoplifters calling themselves yomango are spreading their brand/meme through Spanish-speaking countries and, maybe, the whole world. Yo mango, by the way, means "I steal."

Free (Sort of) iTunes Music

2005-01-21T08:43:00.000-07:00

Apple and Pepsi are launching a promo, wherein 1 in 3 marked bottles wins you a free download from iTunes. (That's about the only way I'd download something from crapTunes. I love iPod, and iTunes is a great digital jukebox, but up theirs if they want me to PAY for a track and then tell me how I can use it. If I pay for it, it's mine.) To find out how to ensure you get a free download with every bottle of sugary sludge you buy, look here.

Last Inauguration Post, I Promise

2005-01-21T08:38:00.000-07:00

Since Bush and math were my two favorite subjects in school (not counting cheese), I now provide you, humble reader, with a few inauguration statistics.

Bush Inauguration Donors

2005-01-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of donors to the Bush 2005 inauguration. Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Oh, don't buy things from these people or hmm... What is it that happens? Oh yeah, internal bleeding.

Speaking of el Bush

2005-01-20T14:57:00.000-07:00

Some guy took a snapshot of Jenna Bush giving a hard-rock Satan sign at the inauguration yesterday and turned it into a t-shirt on Cafepress. I wouldn't buy one, but it's pretty funny.

(If I'm being honest with myself, I didn't actually laugh when I saw this shirt. I just thought "ha, that's funny" and decided to put it on my blog.)

Also, all the bands and musical acts who performed at the inauguration suck, without exception. Same thing goes for any inauguration, really, but especially this one. And David Spade sucks. He just isn't funny. But you already knew that, right?

Bush in Numbers

2005-01-20T14:51:00.000-07:00

There's a great post on another blog with some stats about Bush's first four years in le Maison Blanc. They're skewed toward the economic end of things (I'd really like to see some numbers on the environment, such as air pollution indexes, acres of federal land opened to logging and drilling, and so on), but this is almost as good. It's not super dramatic, but the figures range from mild to major decline, not to mention the body count in Iraq. Thanks for voting for Bush again, Colorado! (OK, not that it would've made a huge difference, but...)

Diploma Mills and Distance Education

2005-01-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

Distance ed is fine if your only goal is to learn for the sake of learning, but in no way does it pass for the rigorous training required for work in any professional or academic discipline. The hoops you jump through in academia ensure that initiates have a firm enough knowledge to translate their knowledge into real-world situations. Diploma mills, at best, teach only a basic grasp of theory and cannot teach the kind of mastery one needs a teacher-student interaction to ensure. At their worst, as in this case of fraud in the federal government, they issue fake diplomas from fake schools.

So how do "properly" educated people fail to notice that phony degree holders don't actually know what they claim? In this case, people did notice something was wrong, but it took a while. Part of it, I think, is that distance-ed institutions have risen very quietly in only the last 20 years or so. They take pains to distance themselves from traditional academia, and I think academics mistakenly assume that everyone knows ITT, for instance, is not the same as MIT, or that the University of Phoenix is not a real school, at least not in the same way the University of Arizona is.

But in the real world, people often don't notice the different. Part of it is that diploma mills sound like real schools, and part of it is that we, as a culture, are trained to be impressed by the letters "BA," "MA," and "PhD," well before we look at how those letters made their way to the end of someone's name. Part of it is that people just aren't getting good educations, even at real universities, and however many hoops they jumped through, many people would be hard-pressed to demonstrate much useful knowledge they have retained from their college educations. In an environment like this, it's much easier for holders of fake diplomas to bluff their way into positions they are really unqualified for. However, I maintain that a university education is far superior to an education, if any, that one receives through distance learning.

So should these kinds of schools be outlawed? I'm not sure. I think they are exposing a flaw in modern universities, which in their own way have become diploma mills, focusing more on numbers and statistics than on giving their students the best education they possibly can. Part of this is due to the job market, as the kinds of nontechnical jobs that once provided a solid middle-class lifestyle without requiring a college degree are disappearing (or moving to the Third World). This means people who might otherwise have been perfectly happy in these jobs are being forced to choose between a drastically reduced standard of living or a college degree. However, their hearts aren't truly interested in further education, just the attendant keg parties and the piece of paper that says they've done it. Part of it is due to funding cuts, forcing universities to sell themselves more, trying to attract as many paying students as possible both for their tuition and the greater levels of funds they'll receive from the state. (This of course doesn't apply to private institutions, but they have always been forced to market themselves, and even at world-reknowned institutions have been forced to deal with poor-quality students as a result of market forces.) But when the quality of the student is degraded, the quality of education must also degrade to account for the lower expectations and abilities of those who have no real desire to be in college in the first place.

Does this mean no one learns anything in college? Far from it. The opportunity for real education is still there, and many people pursue it. But it also means modern universities, especially state schools, have become more like diploma mills than I think they'd care to admit. Universities at present are a bridge between the ideals of a liberal education fostered by the schools of the past and the modern need for technical training even the relatively uninterested now have. Is the solution to separate these two camps, those who thirst for knowledge vs. those who want knowledge simply for a job, into two types of institutions? I don't know. At least in the modern university, the opportunity exists for students to move from one camp to the other. Separate is not necessarily equal. But I still think diploma mills point to the problems modern universities, public and private, have with the quality of their education and highlight the need for a solution.

Flogging Wes

2005-01-17T15:52:00.000-07:00

So I went out this weekend to see The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I was intensely curious about, given Wes Anderson's previous films and the very mixed reviews the film has received from practically every quarter. After seeing it, I can understand why they were mixed. Let me just preface this by saying I enjoyed the film immensely, and then follow with a little criticism.

I enjoyed the film immensely.

But it was very unfocused. I wasn't sure, I'm still not sure, what Anderson was trying to say. I'm not sure he knew, either. It was such a mixture of humorous absurdity, tragic absurdity, and over-the-top whimsy that I saw more underlying noise than signal. It felt very personal because of this, as if he were translating both his fascinations and frustrations with life quite directly, more directly than previously, into the film, relatively unfiltered by a unifying structure. That is, it was much more self-indulgent than his previous movies.

What is the Wes Anderson universe? A children's book inhabited by adult characters OR children's-book adults living in an all-too-real world. Probably the former, given the goofiness of the pseudoworld Anderson has his characters romping through. Cate Blanchett's reporter character, 5 months pregnant in the film, says toward the end that, in 12 years, her child will be 11 and a half. "That was my favorite age," Steve Zissou replies. Apparently it's Anderson's, too, a time when his budding, precocious intellect found much fascinating but had not yet learned the sadness that infuses so much of his work.

Speaking of which... What the hell is with Steve Zissou? Emblematic of Anderson's character problems in this movie, Zissou's character is curiously one-dimensional. He spends most of the film wallowing in an antisocial depression whose superficial causes/manifestations are made clear but whose backhistory is never sufficiently explored. This prevents the the audience from developing any kind of understanding of or sympathy toward Zissou, even though one might normally be drawn toward his underdog status. Having said that, Murray does a good job with what he has to work with, throwing enough humor into his character to keep him from being a complete wet noodle.

At this point, I'd like to mention an interesting observation my fiancee made about Zissou and his relationship to Ned. She saw in their dynamic a reenactment of the Christ story, from a decidedly cynical perspective. Ned, who may or may not be the real son of Zissou, nonetheless follows his remote, unloving "father" on his mad quest, sacrificing first his money and ultimately his life for an ideal dad who doesn't actually exist. Christ, from the perspective of a cynical realist who nonetheless thinks there might be something to this God thing, may or may not have been the "real" son of God. God, if we look at the Old Testament, wasn't always the nicest dude. He was jealous, short-tempered, and frequently nastier to his followers than he was to their enemies. Nonetheless, in the name of universal lovingkindness, Christ embraced the concept of Yahweh, transforming him into a loving, forgiving God. He ultimately paid for it with his life. Both Zissou and God, it might be said, were softened by this unwarranted sacrifice. (Ok, please don't comment about all the nasty things Christians have said and done in the name of God. I'm well aware. It's the concept of God I'm talking about, people!)

Anyway, weak characterization is a problem with practically all the characters in the movie. Unlike previous Anderson films, they are not very remarkable in themselves, one-trick ponies who are amusing enough onscreen, but who fail to linger in the imagination the way practically all the characters from Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums did.

But again, in spite of all this criticism, the movie clicked for me. I liked it. I thought it was funny, I felt bad during the parts I was supposed to feel bad in, and I kept, I think, a head for the absurdity, unlike some of my fellow moviegoers, who stopped laughing as much as the film went on. Maybe they were bored, or maybe they were distracted by the admittedly heavy dose of melancholy running through the movie, or maybe I'm just insensitive. I don't know. Maybe you just have to have that precocious 11.5-year-old inside you still, waiting to be both fascinated and appalled by the adult world, to really enjoy this movie. But whatever structural flaws the film had, the feeling I have about it is still positive, and I would gladly watch it again to see whether my first impressions about the structural stuff are borne out on repeated viewings.

India Fighting Future Tsunamis... With Trees

2005-01-14T11:42:00.000-07:00

Trees, long known by the sannyasin of India to make ideal seat covers, also have wave-fighting properties. Good for India for thinking of an environmentally sound tsunami countermeasure. One half imagines that if the same thing had happened in, say, Oregon, the response would be a big concrete wall or something equally dumb. Of course, trees are cheap, and that's why they're doing it, but it lends credence to the idea that some environmental innovations may be more likely to come from the Third World, since First-World solutions are often too expensive for them.

Iceland or Hydrogenland?

2005-01-12T09:50:00.000-07:00

Iceland is planning on switching to a 100% hydrogen economy by 2050! Good for the ex-Vikings. Now what about the rest of us? Link

Mac Mini

2005-01-11T16:01:00.000-07:00

Check out the new Mac Mini. This is what's known in technical circles as a "rad computer." It's the kind of machine that tempts honest men to steal. I can imagine brave but foolish people trekking across dangerous parts of the globe in search of computers like this. So naturally I'm considering buying one, though who knows when I'll be able to afford it. I hear the siren song of credit calling my name. Resist! Resist!

Flaming Lincoln, Part 2

2005-01-11T14:07:00.000-07:00

So apparently C.A. Tripp, the late sex researcher whose recently published biography of Abe Lincoln alleges that Lincoln was a homosexual, may not have been as meticulously researched as it could've been. Or so says Philip Nobile, once co-author of said book with Tripp, in an article he published in the Weekly Standard. (Note that the Weekly Standard is a right-wing journal, so I'm sure they have no bias about homosexuality, especially regarding a Republican icon.) Basically, he claims that Tripp was setting out to prove something he already believed, and like any fanatic he made the evidence fit his beliefs. This so upset Mr. Nobile that he refused to finish working on the book with Tripp. Nobile is also upset that the finished book apparently contains material he wrote and Tripp continued to use, without his permission, after their partnership ended. Does this mean Lincoln was not gay? Like the number of licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie pop, the world may never know. Although "tootsie" is kind of a fruity word, so maybe Lincoln was gay after all. See, I just proved it. Where's my honorary doctorate?

Great Books? Please!

2005-01-10T13:44:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Rose has an awesome article in the City Journal about the importance of classic authors and art to the working classes. Most of his examples are from the late 19th and early 20th centuries in England and America, but his accounts of the joy and inspiration under- and uneducated people derive from classical literature, philosophy, and music blew a hole in my notions of who and what this stuff is about. It's not elitist, it's not irrelevant, and it's something that can apply to anyone at any time. That's why these things are considered classics.

Certainly we should examine the process whereby an author or work is declared to be a classic, something that was dominated for far too long by old, white men. But these books really are great, and by having a notion of certain works being considered classics circulating, it provides a well-demarcated path for self-educating readers to follow and branch away from at will.

The article goes into a lot of detail I don't want to recap here, but if you're at all interested in literature, it's definitely worth a read.

Shamefully Wasting Time

2005-01-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend and I, who have a soft, squishy spots for medeival epics, decided this weekend that we wanted to see the Jerry Bruckheimer diuretic masterpiece King Arthur. So we rented it--from an independent video store! Down with the man!

Where was I? Going into the movie, we thought it would be bad, but perhaps at least mindlessly entertaining. Instead, it made lots of my internal organs, which usually I can't even feel, sear with pain. Including my eyes, though I can feel those. Oh my God, where do I begin?

1. Do not rent this movie. Ever. For any reason. Even if you get it for free, it is not worth the 2 hours you will waste watching it.

2. The acting is awful, over-the-top, and melodramatic.

3. This has nothing to do with history. It is slightly more realistic than the traditional Arthurian romances, but the nod to realism is totally voided by the GAPING PLOT HOLES.

4. They obviously paid their historical consultants about $7 an hour. Otherwise they would've known that chain mail, plate mail, crossbows, and trebuchets had not been invented by the 5th century.

5. I can't even go on. It is too shitty. Here is a review of the movie written by a houseplant we have sitting on our coffee table, an African violet:

I need water to survive. My roots burrow deep into moist, rich soil, pulling nutrients for me to survive. Light ignites fires in my leaves, burning CO2 into delicious food for me. I pull water and minerals from soil, energy from light, I grow more leaves toward the light, plump with water, racing with cholorphyll. More leaves, more light, more water, more soil. I need water, it is drying. There is not enough water. Now there is too much water. It is too moist. The water dries. I draw water from the soil. I live!

This review is ten times as interesting as the movie itself. If you ever feel like watching Jerry Crapheimer's King Arthur, read this review instead for two hours, over and over, and you will be suitably entertained.

A Scanner Darkly

2005-01-08T15:45:00.000-07:00

Philip K Dick is/was an electric python who hid in a dark, dark cage for at least 20 years, burning the mice of lesser writers. Some do not believe in his existence, but the half-eaten, lightning-seared mouse remains littering the streets of the Bay Area to this day are testament to his achievement. What was I talking about? Three amzingly awesome screenshots on Ain't It Cool News from the upcoming film version of A Scanner Darkly being directed by Richard Linklater.

The UFOs Are Winning

2005-01-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

Richard Gere hopes the Palestinian election will go smoothly. He is so passionate about Palestinian elections, he created a moving commerical that was broadcast, in English, in Gaza and the West Bank recently. Palestinians love the commercial so much, I believe they are now going to elect Gere their leader. A Palestinian man in the Yahoo! article expressed his enthusiasm for Gere: "I don't even know who the candidates are other than Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas), let alone this Gere," Gaza soap factory worker Manar an-Najar told Reuters Wednesday. "We don't need the Americans' intervention. We know who to elect. Not like them -- they elected a moron."

Theodicy

2005-01-06T11:26:00.000-07:00

This article from Rob Rosenbaum, a religious columnist for the New York Observer outlines the current debate in religious circles over the question of God's role in the tsunami tragedy.

As with any question of theodicy (the attempt to reconcile the notion of an all-powerful, all-good God who intervenes in the world with the unquestionable existence of evil), the argument basically goes like this:

If God is all-powerful, ever-loving, and willing to intervene in the world, why does he allow bad things to happen, especially to good people? This question has been approached in several ways (such as Job, where the answer is basically that God is inscrutable), but it is a terribly difficult question to address. Of course there are pat answers: "God is unknowable," "these people are better off in heaven," "God doesn't exist, so the whole thing is irrelevant," "God is punishing mankind for their sins," and so on. But the point has not been addressed: God made the mess, so God owns the mess. Even if we don't make God responsible for the mess (Deism), God is still the one who fubared the world.

Anyway, read Rosenbaum because I don't feel like going over this stuff in detail. I didn't like, though, the fact that his article lacked a real conclusion. His only real point was that 1) there are no good, easy answers to the question of theodicy, 2) the need so many people have to exonerate their conception of God from connection with the any form of evil belies their own doubt and incomprehension, 3) attempting to resolve the question of evil in the world is pointless. Or so it seemed to me.

In my opinion, this dilemma arises from a limited conception of deity. By conceiving of God basically as a super-parent, we are continuously confronted with the limitations of our own understanding. Why isn't our super-parent taking care of us?! we wail every time something bad happens.

But why do we experience such suffering? Satan? The Four Noble Truths? No good without evil? Can there be universe without deity? I mean, really, what kind of fucked up, Descartian worldview do we have that compares the universe to a watch? We need a new myth, really a very old myth (read the Upanishads), a biological myth for a biotech age: You, me, and everything are all manifestations of god's being. The universe isn't a machine, it's an organism. The tsunami, in a sense, was God scratching himself. This is a perspective that says "this individual life is not destroyed, but instead becomes another part of God," where such micro-level considerations as the individual life are less theologically problematic.

Of course, the need to discount the individual ego as the priviledged perspective arises, which the Hindus realized long ago. If one child is abused, does that child's suffering count for naught? The child is Brahman, we might say, and what it perceives is illusion related to its misconception that it is an individual, whereas it truly is all things. But I know this metaphor isn't complete. It might be partially valid, but it seems too callous. I would like to think that the experiences of individuals are of some account, but maybe this is wishful thinking.

Another minor gripe about this article: Rosenbaum quotes another author, who quotes the Dalai Lama. Asked about the suffering of a parent who has lost a child, the Lama replies that when you lose a child, you are constantly thinking of the child in your imagination. Rosenbaum thinks this means the parent is comforted by the child's memory, but I think he means something much more practical but cold. When you lose a child, that child is no more. It has no reality. The child exists only in your imagination, and your suffering is tied to what is essentially a phatasm, a figment of your imagination. If you recognize the nonexistence of the cause of your suffering, you can be freed from it. If this is what he meant, I can see why he might be ambiguous about how he says it. This is not the kind of thing you want to tell a grieving parent, however true it might be. If it's not what he meant, well, what a callous boy am I!

Lincoln, Kinsey, and the Violets of May

2005-01-05T11:15:00.000-07:00

Gore Vidal has reviewed C.A. Tripp's new book on Abe Lincoln. I found the review fascinating, though I probably wouldn't want to read the book-length treatment of the subject. I've never been particularly interested in this topic, but it was intriguing to learn there's considerable evidence that Lincoln was homosexual, or at least bisexual. This is a conclusion that's been drawn before (Carl Sandburg, according to Vidal, noted Lincoln had a "lavendar streak" and a fondness for the "violets of May"), but apparently never in such detail or with such overwhelming evidence.

Tripp, one of Kinsey's former researchers, draws from Kinsey's material the fact that men who go through puberty early are less likely to have hang-ups about sex (and life in general) and, possibly because of this, are more likely to have homosexual experiences than late-bloomers. It is apparently fairly well-documented that Lincoln went through a massive growth spurt, evidence of puberty, around the age of nine. I found this fact intriguing. I'm thinking now about reading Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (and his follow-up, the Human Female) if it contains such gems as this.

Winter Driving Tips

2005-01-05T09:01:00.000-07:00

It's snowing like mad here today (OK, not like mad, but it's coming down pretty thick), and I was thinking on the way to work of a few tips I could pass on to anyone who was interested, a few things you should definitely not do while driving in the snow.

1. Look at your new shoes to see if the snow melting on them is messing up the leather.
2. Admire the pretty pattern the melting snow on your rear windshield makes as it refreezes at the bottom.
3. Flip through your CD book trying to find the perfect music for the moment.
4. Daydream about playing blisteringly heavy rock to all the hippies at Woodstock and really blowing their minds.
5. Driving 20 miles per hour below the speed limit with a line of cars behind you when you're only a couple of miles away from the office, you jackass!

I hope these tips help you as much as they didn't help me.

US Tsunami Aid = 42.27 Hours in Iraq

2005-01-05T08:42:00.000-07:00

I just saw this on Boing Boing. (I know, I need to stop reposting stuff from there.) Anyway, this was too good to pass up. This dude, Frank Boosman posted a very revealing calculation on his blog this morning. In short, the amount of aid the U.S. government has promised to tsunami victims in Southeast Asia is equal to approximately 42.27 hours worth of military expenditures in Iraq. Link.

So Tired...

2005-01-04T13:08:00.000-07:00

I woke up last night about 2:30am and couldn't get back to sleep. Usually I sleep pretty well, but once in a great while this happens to me. With me, it has a lot to do with foreknowledge, the ability to plan and think ahead. By thinking about and ultimately fixating on the knowledge that I have to get up at a certain hour and knowing how tired I will be if I don't sleep, I catch myself in an unenviable feedback loop, where the longer I lie awake, unable to sleep, the more nervous I get, thus imparing my ability to sleep.

Eventually I did go to sleep, but it was only a series of micronaps. I drifted off several times only to snap awake after an unknown but depressingly short amount of time.

I tell you this, my humble reader, because I am still caught in this neurotic cycle, unable to do much other than fixate on my own weariness. I shall undoubtedly break out of this spiral tonight, when I'll be too tired to do anything but sleep, but until then...

My Top 7 CDs of 2004

2005-01-03T13:24:00.000-07:00

This will probably change because I'll think of new CDs and configurations, and also because I still haven't acquired all the CDs from 2004 I'm interested in. But here, in no particular order:

1. The Arcade Fire - Funeral
2. DeVotchKa - How It Ends
3. Wilco - A Ghost Is Born
4. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - Shake the Sheets
5. Joseph Arthur - Our Shadows Will Remain
6. M83 - Dead Cities, Red Seas, and Lost Ghosts
7. Ray Lamontagne - Trouble

I'm also really interested in Franz Ferdinand, The Futureheads, Snow Patrol, Death from Above 1979, Flunk, and a few others I can't think of off the top of my head. They didn't make my list because I haven't heard those CDs much. If I had money or, ahem, I would probably have them already. Relative poverty has kept my stereo (relatively) empty this season.

Curry Fights Alzheimer's

2005-01-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

Curry fights Alzheimer's! Quite well, too. Better than commercial Alzheimer's drugs. This may be one reason this isn't more widely known because this is not the first study to reveal the plaque-zapping powers of India's spicy foods. I remember reading several years ago in Discover about a similar study. Why isn't this more widely reported? More people should take their parents (and themselves) out for Indian food, especially if they have a family history of Alzheimer's. Plus Indian food is extremely delicious, so delicious it can probably give you psychic powers if you eat a lot of it.

SF Blog

2005-01-03T10:59:00.000-07:00

Just found a cool Canadian SF Website and blog called The Website at the End of the Universe. Check out their free 2005 sci-fi calendar.

Sri Lankan Animals Avoid Disaster

2004-12-29T15:16:00.000-07:00

This is wild. Apparently officials in Sri Lanka have yet to find any animals killed by the massive tsunami, not even rabbits, who are DUMB. (If you don't believe rabbits are dumb, try getting a rabbit to review a book, or change a tire, or prepare a tasy meal. Rabbits can't do anything, but people still love them. What gives?) How do animals figure this stuff out? I think it's intuition, or maybe Jesus protects them with some kind of ray. What do you think, my nonexistent readers? Link to this incredible story.

Public Enemy #1

2004-12-28T09:33:00.000-07:00

PE rules. Incidentally, so does KEXP Seattle for playing "Lost at Birth." Also, I'm not black. Does that change the authenticity of my love for Public Enemy? I don't think so...

Red Cross Donations for Tsunami Relief

2004-12-28T09:28:00.000-07:00

In the off chance that for some reason someone will read this blog I just started and feel compassion or at least guilt and decide they should somehow help tsunami victims: Donate to the Red Cross, too. They do good work. Oh, thanks for reading my blog, too.

Donate to Help Rebuild

2004-12-27T17:30:00.000-07:00

I don't know if anyone will read this, but if you do, consider donating to Architecture for Humanity to aid in the rebuilding efforts in tsumani-lashed areas.

Environmental Degradation Increased Tsunami's Power

2004-12-27T17:24:00.000-07:00

Yahoo had a really interesting article up on their top headlines for a few moments earlier today about the effects the dredging of coastal areas and the destruction of mangrove swamps had on the tsunami. Mangroves especially blunt the fury of incoming waves, and a good many have been cleared out to make room for shrimp farms. It almost goes without saying that most of said shrimp makes its way to European and North American markets. That doesn't mean it's our fault, and even with the swamps in place this probably would've been a terrible disaster, but overdevelopment only made it worse.

Germany Opens Huge Solar Installation

2004-12-22T19:17:00.000-07:00

The Germans, having done the kind of 180 I dream of here in America (OK, we're not that bad, but still...), are putting up loads of renewable power sources all over the country. Just recently, they opened the largest solar power installation in the world, in Bavaria. They've also implemented heavier taxes on petroleum products to help encourage a switch to greener power sources. The installation was built by an American company, PowerLight. Thankfully Germany and other forward-thinking countries are keeping companies like this afloat, so we'll have them around when we realize it's not just a good idea, but vitally necessary.

Ennui of the City Streets

2004-12-22T18:52:00.000-07:00

I hate commuting. I never wanted to commute, and I moved to the middle of a city (Denver) hoping to find a job somewhere in range of my bike or at least the city bus. So after three months of fruitless job searching, I finally found something. Where? You guessed it: the suburbs. And not just any suburb, but Longmont, which is really not even a suburb it's so far away. So now instead of floating in my cheery urban bubble, I have to haul ass out of town every morning and home every night.

This is more trying than I first thought. Usually when I leave work, I'm tired, but not freaking exhausted. Plus I'm pretty pumped to be coming home, so I can get some dinner, see my girlfriend, and do some reading (not necessarily in that order, dear). But after driving through worthless amounts of traffic on I25, I AM freaking exhausted. Traffic on I25 southbound in the evenings is freakishly heavy. Usually not as bad as northbound, but I can't figure it out. When I drive north in the morning, traffic is usually pretty light. I laugh at the people driving into Denver, who are usually going about 10, but I secretly wish I could trade jobs with one of them, someone who works close to downtown, preferably with a nice office. (OK, as long as I'm wishing, I wish I had an awesome job as a mountain guide or renewable-energy researcher. Yes, I'm a nerd and that would excite me.) I guess southbound traffic is just heavy, no matter what.

So here's the point of my excursion into traffic patterns: Why do we put up with this shit? I like driving sometimes, when there aren't a lot of people around, and it's nice to have a car sometimes so you can get certain things done without sitting on the bus for hours just to go 5 miles across town. But when I'm going to work, the same route every day? I would pay bankloads of money to get to ride a nice train or subway to work. I could read, listen to music, or just relax. Let someone else worry about running into stuff or crashing in a snowstorm. I honestly don't get why Americans are so into driving. It's become one of the major headaches of modern living, and if we only had decent public transit I think people would realize this.

Pitchfork Top 50

2004-12-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

Looking for something to buy? (Why not just P2P, biznatch?) Pitchfork released their top 50 list for 2004 today, so you know what's on their ultra-hip Christmas lists this year. As with most top lists, I agree with about half and disagree with the rest. What's a music-lover to do? Congratulate your taste where it meets theirs and write them off as irrelevant critics the rest of the time, I say.

Christmas

2004-12-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

It's been said before, but... I think it's interesting to note that Christmas has become so divorced from its Christian roots and has become primarily a capitalist holiday. Sure, Christmas is still an important holiday in the Christian calendar and is duly celebrated by many faithful in memoriam of the birth of the prophet Yesu bin Yosef. But studying Christmas from a purely phenomenological perspective I think is very revealing. The majority of thought and effort related to Christmas regards the purchase of vast quantities of stuff--presents, food, decorations, music, and on and on. This is something that can be shared across cultural lines, anywhere the cult of materialism and work has taken hold. It is the most important, indeed the only important, holiday in the capitalist calendar, a time when lost revenues from a few days' vacation are more than compensated for by the orgy of consumption that has paved the way for this rest, which we all sorely need after the nerve-wracking experience of holiday shopping. (Especially if the 'we' in question is quite poor in the midst of all this largess. It takes an advanced soul, indeed, to not feel the bitterness of poverty in such circumstances.) Fat merchants chuckle over their fatter balance sheets as we rest atop the piles of junk we've dutifully purchased, loyal subjects. Every year they exhort us to buy more (must keep the economy growing!) and every year we faithfully obey. It is the only way the cult of materialism knows how to fete itself, by growing yet another appendage. We all participate and wonder at all of our things, these chimera of the natural world we neither need nor, after a few days or weeks, want. This is the only transcendence materialism can offer. And we love it. We are all rapt devotees, myself included. It may be sick, but what an illness!

deus minimus

2004-12-22T14:22:00.000-07:00

I have a blog now. Being validated by the Web, I can tell you, feels great. Now. Now... Now? Something will happen.