the_black_monk

Shorter Dante:

2007-02-11T19:09:35Z

You'll never amount to anything if you don't get off your fat ass and get moving.

Help me Steve Jobs, you're my only hope

2007-02-11T19:04:10Z

How come digital clocks only come in red and that weird blue-green? Sure - digital watches come in black, but not clocks. Seriously - go look around, you'll see. Are they made of light sabers or something? Wouldn't a nice soothing yellow-orange work just as well or better?

Ford for the 21rst century: You can have a digital clock in your favorite color as long as your favorite color is standard light-saber. . .

Cluster Buster

2006-12-28T18:50:52Z

Gretchen observed that holidays celebrating similar things from all religions cluster around each other on the calendar. Christmas, winter solstice, Hanukkah, etc are all about turning points and hope in long nights and all celebrated around the longest night of the year. Similarly Easter, Passover, and spring equinox are all about new beginnings, re-birth, and life springing up from death.

It's tempting (and Joseph Campbell-y) to think that the clustering indicates that seasonal holidays are just twists on a basic theme that people have been celebrating since time immemorial. That would help explain why, despite a lot of evidence that Jesus was born in August or something, Christians celebrate Christmas around the winter solstice - it's just when people celebrate things like the hope that the new-born Christ represents.

But here's a counter example. All three major monotheistic religions (which account for a small majority of all religions) have similar holiday periods of repentance, of making amends, and of making oneself more holy - Jews celebrate Yom Kippur, Christians do Lent and Advent, and Muslims observe Ramadan. Yom Kippur is around the fall equinox, Advent around the winter solstice, Lent around the spring equinox, and Ramadan can come at any time of year. No clustering there.

Why don't these cluster? What affects do their not clustering have on our impressions of other groups? What are the social consequences of their not clustering?

What can we infer from these cleansing holidays' refusal to cluster in a season? Does it speak to our firmly held belief that we are more holy than the next person? Does it suggest that we are right and everybody else is wrong? Does it mean it's an artificial holiday (as opposed to those other organic campbell-y holidays)?

Penny for your thoughts...

Comedy is Tragedy + Time

2006-12-27T15:04:42Z

Tragedy!

Kyrie sent me a fabulously cool "Free Palestine" hoody for christmas and it's too small!!!

Good thing the folks are visiting her in February. I'll send them on a Free Palestine hoody-that-fits finding mission.

But who knew that hoody's came in anything but big? Not me. And not Aristophanes, either...

Free Association

2006-12-22T18:52:09Z

So I hear that the kid sister's boy is stuck in a london fog, and I remember the openning of Heart of Darkness:

The NELLIE, a cruising yawl, swung to her anchor without a flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the wind was nearly calm, and being bound down the river, the only thing for it was to come to and wait for the turn of the tide.

The sea-reach of the Thames stretched before us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing the sea and the sky were welded together without a joint, and in the luminous space the tanned sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of canvas sharply peaked, with gleams of varnished sprits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.

Great book.

First Post to LJ

2006-12-17T15:06:16Z

Okay. I figure since everyone keeps using this live journal thing to check in on my kid sister and nobody but hard core political junkies check my blog at TPMCafe, I should start doing at least some of my less political blogging here on LJ. Make sense? I thought so too.

So here's a starter post:

You know those ads at the beginning of DVDs that go "you wouldn't steal a TV. You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a DVD" and then go on to say that dowloading music and getting bootlegged DVDs is stealing? They're very dramatic, and I hate them.

I really hate those things - and not just because I have, like, 130 DVD-9s from China. I hate those ads because they imply that stealing a TV or a car is equivalent to stealing a DVD, and it's just not. That equivocation really bugs me because it misses differences in both degree and kind.

Stealing a car is different from stealing a DVD in degree. A DVD is like $20 while a TV is like $200 - $2000 and a car is like $20,000. That stealing one is different than stealing the other should be obvious to people poor enough to care about the difference between $20 and $20,000 and rich enough to comprehend the difference. I don't know who makes those ads, but I suspect they got paid way too much.

More importantly the theft of a car is different in kind from the downloading of a DVD. I'm not just talking about the mechanism, although that's obviously different too. I'm talking about the outcomes. When you steal a car, you steal it from someone. You take what belonged to some else and appropriate it as your own. They lose. You win. It's a zero sum game. But when you download music or rip a DVD, you're not taking it from someone. Sure - it causes somebody to not make money they would have otherwise made, but they don't actively lose money. You win. They're no worse off than they were. See how that's different?

But the thing I hate most about those ads is that they're on almost *all* my Chinese DVDs.