I’ve figured out how Twilight and Football are the same
Girls supporting Football is like guys supporting Twilight: most of them are just doing it to cull favor with the opposite sex by demonstrating acceptance for their coping mechanisms. Genuine enjoyment of the sport/fiction among the opposite gender of the typical audience is rare.
This is because both are usually vapid and bland for uninitiated spectators.
In spite of this, sometimes (albeit rarely) both display elements of sexiness that can be used for the purposes of advertising.
Both are largely used as a social channel to vent hormones and therefore serve an important purpose to society whilst simultaneously declaring their historical value impossible to ascertain from the text/football game alone. Twilight and Football both highlight what’s wrong with New Criticism: context can sometimes be more interesting and relevant than content. If you want to make either Twilight or Football sound their best, make sure to document what they’re doing for illiterate emotionally damaged/stunted people the world over, as well as the economy: especially the halo effect on the book world (See: Harry Potter). Case closed.
P.S. - As an aside for the sensitive I should note that generalizations about both Football and Twilight (and their fans) are not to indicate the illogical pattern–If you like A or B, then you are necessarily C–but rather that most people who like A or B (as in more than half) fit this description. If you are better (as most people think they are) than the stereotypes associated with the object of your interest, then so be it. My point was to draw a comparison: if you feel like your taste is insulted, then bear in mind that we probably shouldn’t talk about books or sports since you can’t accept conflict in your conversation. Seriously, isn’t it okay for us to like different things?
To Know–to Dare: to Blaspheme
If you only see learning as a process by which you, ignorant, empty yourself of the nothing you have fed your mind and devour the truth (absolute and filling), then you have missed the point. Yes, you are ignorant, but you are also brilliant! We all are. We flower from infant buds into impressively multifunctional adults. We may marvel at the beauty of nature, but it is ridiculous for us to lose sight of the splendour of our natural birthright, perspective, and the potential it offers to Humanity.
In times when we are wrong, or teach ourselves something which is logically inaccurate and damages us, our thoughts still come to bear: they are simply not our best. Instead of minimizing these mistakes, we must celebrate them with our open scrutiny! This is the essence of learning–if we forget the difficulties which have brought us (and others!) to wisdom, then we have failed to learn the truth: instead we have learned ‘a’ truth.
To be individual, we must retain all of ourselves, and abandon the notion that our sins are something to be purged from our minds and memories. If you are not familiar with the dubious origins and dangers of these practices of repression, there is a great deal of historical material available which sheds light on the matter. Adherence to dogmatic absolute thinking cannot, and will never allow human beings to achieve a higher state of mental existence. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge is not poison!
As we eat more Apples of Knowledge, we place more of God in ourselves. I agree with those who consider this blasphemous, but was Satan not created by God? Are the first steps of a toddler, whose muscles and reflexes are infirm, not blasphemous to whatever memory it has of its infant state? To dare is to blaspheme as to see is to not see everything else which you are not currently looking at; one connotes positively and the other connotes negatively, but both are core components of the learning process.
When Humanity is at its most base, we lack empathy, logic, and contextual comprehension. We wave standards for our beliefs as though we know infinity on the authority of our ancestors, and murder one another in cold blood: in spite of our stated belief in our mutual origins. If we may learn anything from history, it is that beliefs have masked the greatest tragedies as well as the greatest successes of our species.
Belief in the holiness of celibacy rests for many in direct contradiction with the commandment, the biological impulse, to reproduce: unless marriage is involved. What does marriage connote, beyond the obvious commitments between the partners? Marriage is a statement to Humanity that two minds have met, that they understand one another, and that they believe that their lives will achieve more potential together than apart. If producing a child enters into the equation (1 + 1 = 3, or in Adam and Eve’s case, 1 + 1 = everyone who has ever lived and died), then that new life must be understood by both parents as their responsibility.
Accidental production of children may (and should, and will) occur, but we must remove the primitive blindfold which tells us, “We do not decide who lives and dies.” We make those decisions every day. After thousands of years of struggle with this issue, technology has finally reached a point which allows us to practice population control through mindful use of medicine. Now that we have the means, we must learn to apply wisdom to our reproductive practices with the goal of maximizing our lives’ potential within the limited economic framework which we provide one another, and therefore provide a future to Humanity. In order to accomplish this goal, we must not only plan to have children, but plan for our children. We must teach them all the information that we can, but we must also teach them wisdom, so that their stumbles retread ours as little as possible, and so that they may have plans for themselves beyond ours and fixing our mistakes. The essence of genius is making new mistakes: not repeating clichés for the sake of validation.
No person can accomplish alone what large, organized groups are capable of. A civilization as a whole may arrive at genius, when circumstances are right, and produce gifts to Humanity which may be uniquely identified by their era and culture. The clichéd mistake human civilizations make is to end in war. The financial and human cost of war is now available in concrete figures to us, and accounts of how many trips to Mars (or even Europa) could be afforded if we forsake war are themselves thoughtlessly forsaken for more war. Our allegiance must be to our species and to life itself; murder (and often, life) exclusively for individual gain is pointless and only delays and blocks Humanity’s progress.
I love October.
Click through to see the whole photo.
Now if you’ll excuse me: I have a mosquito to kill.
The room is laptop-lit, and the October air is friendly. If I dangle my chillum from my knuckles in front of the window, I can’t help but adjust my fist to slide the tip in line with one of the twin tangerine dots of light marking the other side of the street. The lights are for the front door of one of my neighbors’ houses, but that doesn’t matter. The air is what matters. The state of mind it induces; the memories–sights and sounds of a dead time–are lovely, and childhood seems very near. It’s not that I require an escapism from now in yesterday’s business.
No.
I merely mount the frame of those experiences on the windowsill: among the old dust and insect corpses which stand as a macabre, as-yet ineffective ward against live insects. Perhaps if their bodies pile high enough, the bastards will evolve away from trying to be around me.
This is a wonderful time. I am quite happy. The Appalachian mountain bugs sing a melancholy song that drifts pleasantly through the enormous square passageways of my screened windows of six-legged terror. Across the street and to the side, my neighbor in the cluttered house has an enormous bug zapper lantern. It is no wonder that they are not afraid of me: these fuckers are seasoned veterans of a kamikaze world they were designed to conquer.
If there is anything that can be learned from our position in the world (relative to mass), it is that smaller size supplies suffering to larger entities. Whether more have died by the boulder than the bullet, I am unsure–but entropy has certainly won out over them all (although malaria is up there). With nanotechnology and a ripe supply of fissionable nuclear materials, humanity may make a stab at catching up: starting with the most awesome wasp nest destruction (WND) devices ever known.
I am convinced that the collective human unconscious has an ingrained racial bias against bugs. Bug is a synonym for annoyance. Cockroach is an African insult implying racial inferiority. We abhor biological weapons for use against humans, but we will sell them to minors for use against insects in convenience stores. Poison is for bugs. Right? It’s pretty sick.
Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, and Dan O’Bannon have all made serious bank from bug hate. Heinlein addresses our most pathetic fantasy: a world where the bugs are a mortal enemy against whom our entire species militarizes to fight. Watchmen took the philological approach to this concept, but the idea that it’ll take evil bugs to get us to cooperate speaks so optimistically of humanity that I can’t help but be enamoured of it. Card evokes the same images of organized xenocide, but does so with a conscience: after the bugs are slaughtered, they are romanticized like 20th century Native Americans–but not until then. O’Bannon had a goddamn nightmare about killer bugs born to do unspeakable things to human beings. It’s undeniable: in many of our darkest thoughts… there are bugs. Wicked bugs. In District 9 they were popping like popcorn for our conscience. Millions sold.
I hear a cat meowing outside the window. Now that I’m focused on the sounds again, I hear a motorcycle driving down in the valley. I wonder if its rider’s face is getting splattered with bugs. I hope his face ruins them all. Is this evil?
We Will Part With Paper (and What That Means)
Staples and Office Depot will go out of business. When we lost Circuit City, I saw it as clear as day. These companies are overwhelmingly being supplanted by centralized, catalog-based suppliers for office furniture and local liquidators/resellers. Kinko’s and FedEx/UPS stores will continue on the path of convergence and absorb some duties of these relics of the analog age for a time, but they will fade as well. Don’t worry; there’s time. Barnes and Noble and Borders will have to merge and die first. Amazon will be holding the candlestick in the parlor.
Don’t believe me? The Free Library of Philadelphia has lost its funding. That’s how the death of something starts: the most vulnerable public manifestation will have its funding slashed in a tough time, and even if the economy recovers, the government will not relinquish its grasp on those dollars. Books will stop having their own stores except for little independent shops, and these will persist as a novelty for generations. Unfortunately for them, they will fade in relevance as the pages yellow. Office supply stores are next.
You see, as bound books become less commonplace (and they are already outside of college campuses), they will be replaced by various e-readers. People will realize that reading words over a backlight is agony, and eInk will see a roar in revenue. If not, a competitor offering a similar product based on different patents will emerge and wipe the floor with eInk. The functionality will be the same though, and we’ll see color before long. Long before these devices are inexpensive and ubiquitous, offices will no longer require paper.
Already, digital distribution is streamlined and simple. The Kindle store, RSS, and Facebook are excellent models, but newer, more efficient infrastructure will replace them. Once eInk is at all viable, PDFs will be sitting in people’s hands like magazines, and finally users on the client side will be seeing what we on the publication assembly side have been looking at since Adobe Pagemaker; only at higher resolution.
Pictures on foldable electronic paper will move like those in Harry Potter newspapers. Sound functionality already exists in the Kindle. Adding video only requires an evolution of the display technology, which is simply a matter of time.
With HD Paper around, who needs the old tree kind? One sheet per person lasts for years. On a long enough timeline, digital paper becomes the most cost efficient option for businesses.
Say goodbye to staplers. Say goodbye to reams of 8.5×11. No more hole punchers. Say goodbye to newsprint. No longer will it be a privileged, rich few who have access to the press… It will be everyone. Mourn not these relics: the world will be better off without their resource consumption.
So what do we do in a world where everyone with a camera is potentially press, and everyone has a camera? We teach journalistic rights and responsibilities intelligently in school. We prioritize these things. We enter into a new age of accountability simultaneously with a new age of surveillance. None can say how society will react… except that it will be badly, as always.
It is imperative that we come up with an inexpensive method for backing up data that is not electronic or magnetic, which can be read from both analog and electronic devices. Why? Solar electromagnetic pulses. Recall the burning of the great library of Alexandria, and bear in mind that desperate humans post-EMP will burn what books are left for fuel and fun. Nearly all electronic data will already be completely gone. If you look up the history of solar EMP incidences, we do not know that stronger ones than were experienced in recent times are not likely or possible. When it comes to humanity’s wealth of knowledge, we should not be so callous as to think that we are immune to this potential loss.
The only way to keep electronic data remotely safe from a strong solar EMP event is to store and maintain copies in several disparate portions of the world.
What troubles me the most is that if we do lose everything, no one will be able to look back on these words of mine (and others) and say: “Those idiots knew it was a possibility, and still… they did nothing.”
What America’s Getting For Her Money: Corrupt Cops, and a Corrupt Judicial System
Speed camera pranksters in Arizona are dodging their illegal tickets, and Arizona Department of Public Safety Officer Jeff Hawkins is saying “These are what you probably consider as people who don’t really respect the law at all.”
Officer Hawkins and the State of Arizona should bear in mind that while these cameras are ‘legal’ in Maryland as well (among a few other states), they have yet to be challenged on a Supreme Court level: as they should, because other state courts have determined that their use is in violation of the Fourth Amendment. I realize that Officer Hawkins believes that he is following the letter of the law, but as they say in law school:
Legal is not right. Illegal is not wrong.
You may notice that the Fourth Amendment has been largely shot to pieces by the Supreme Court over the past century. However, it has yet to be established on a national level whether and if so under which circumstances an automated camera can be used as a reasonable means of convicting a person of any violation of the law.
If this use of speed cameras is as illegal according to the Constitution as it appears to be, then it is within the rights and responsibilities of SCOTUS to deliver a clear opinion on this matter. Speed cameras have affected Americans in many states with corrupt taxes, which have been profiteered from by the private industry contractors that build these devices. So, in other words, these cameras are not exactly legal Officer Hawkins; no matter what they’re telling you over at the corporate (or is that state?) headquarters that cuts your paychecks.
Until our courts explicitly state to me that they intend to spit in the face of the Constitution that our soldiers are sworn to defend with their lives, I refuse to pay a single one of these nonsense tickets. I would rather not exercise my licensed privilege to drive if it means that I will continue to have unreasonable fines levied against me for not driving in a way that requires that I brake heavily every time I go downhill, so as to maximize fuel consumption and prevent proper use of momentum.
There is nothing logical, moral or true to the values upon which these United States were established about these devices.
I would also rather not drive if I am to be forced to slam on my brakes whenever I come across an unexpected camera and risk being rear-ended by a less conscious driver. The State of Virginia’s Department of Transportation reports that forced braking caused by automated cameras make injurious accidents more likely.
I don’t need a permanent back injury just because local governments need to find new revenue streams during a recession. If these people need more breathing room in their budget, they should look no further than firing extraneous police officers and reducing their respective departments’ budgets. Each officer is a massive expense, and the fleets of brand new, expensive to maintain cars they require are doing nothing to increase my safety.
Within this past decade, I have been:
- Physically assaulted by a drunk off-duty police officer in downtown Rockville, less than a block from the courthouse. The police report was ‘lost.’
- Told by a DC Metropolitan police officer that my muggers from Metro Center wouldn’t be caught even though they were on CCTV from several angles.
- Pulled over and ticketed for driving the speed limit by two police officers who didn’t understand the parallax illusion of speed created by a car driving the speed limit against a backdrop of significantly slower cars (had to go to court for this, they did not show: they merely wanted to rudely lecture me and make me late to my class at Montgomery College).
- Jailed for two days in Virginia and fined over $1000 for speeding on a practically empty highway at night, during the early AM hours, far from any populated area.
- Detained illegally in July along with two friends on the side of a road barely more than two miles from my parents’ house by four Montgomery County, MD squad cars and a K-9 unit for two hours near midnight. My left tail light went out and I was driving slightly under the speed limit. Under, mind you, and not over. This was used as a pretext to give me a field sobriety test (I volunteered to take a breathalyzer, but they did not issue me the test). According to one officer (among five) who did not even issue me my field sobriety test, “something” about my test results told them that I may have been under the influence of narcotics. When I asked him politely what aspect of my test results gave that impression, I was shouted at for questioning the police’s ability to do their job. They’ve been trained, you see. However, that was not the nature of my question. I wanted to understand why I was being detained for a tail-light. I was never given an explanation beyond this.
I was asked if they had my permission to search my vehicle, and I did not give it. I had my cabin light on, and was clearly cooperative in all other ways, and I had no reason to consent to any unconstitutional searches. The drug dog walked around my car, found nothing, and wagged its tail until I received my tail light repair order and went home exhausted. I lost sleep before work the next day due to this completely uncalled-for imposition. My friends were visibly shaken.
Not once has any compromise of my safety ever been resolved by the intervention of a police officer. Ever. And if it had, just once, that would not compensate for the compromises to my safety, health, and security that have been rendered unto me by police officers. Corruption should not be looked at on a scale: it should be rooted out with an even and just hand.
***
If I am going to be fined and mistreated whether I drive under or over the speed limit, whether I have committed a misdemeanor or not, and whether there is anyone to bear witness against me or not, then I am no longer living in the United States of America that I read about in the history books. Perhaps those will be rewritten soon to fit with the Orwellian enforcement cameras and fascist thugs that have replaced our officers of the peace. I doubt it though: they’ll need that money to put heated seats in the next all-terrain stinger missile-equipped squad cars. Who has no respect for the law? Me, or police officers who have no idea of or interest in the spirit of what the law actually stands for?
He could surpass Sublime. Dub FX deserves to take the world by storm.
So the first time I see Australian Ben Stanford, aka Dub FX, perform I’m sitting in a darkened basement and StumbleUpon is dragging its internet-hoe in sad memetic trenches along the seafloor of Youtube and he has appeared amidst several extreme America’s Funniest Home Videos rejects. He is nearly stumbled away from, but his talent is too evident.
Stanford walks up to a mic and a couple pedals, and sequences his voice into amazingly textured, layered music. It’s barely more than his voice. His grooves reek of Bradley Nowell, Sublime’s tragically deceased frontman. But Dub FX is too fast and too smooth to be compared to Brad Nowell. His style is unique.
His album? Diverse. “Everythinks A Ripple” is available from http://dubfx.net and traverses so many genres that categorizing it as pop, hip-hop, dub, a capella, or electronic music would seem narrow… even ignorant. An opinion on this artist cannot be rendered from any single song.
What excites me the most about Dub FX is not necessarily his present offering: it’s his potential. Brad Nowell never had a chance to musically escape his origins and evolve severely as an artist due to his drug problem. Dub FX… he could be an interesting sidenote in musical history, or he could explode across the world like aural pyrotechnics. Only time will tell. Of course, on his track “Future” he says… “We could equal Sublime.”
If he applies himself, I think Mr. Stanford could easily surpass Sublime.
Recommended tracks: Time Will Tell, Made, Flow, Wandering Love, Free My Soul (live in Italy)
Hair Loss: Implications
If anybody I know is going to have a quarter-life crisis anytime soon, it’s not going to be me. I finished with that years ago. I look at my hairline and I see it peeling back ever so slowly, and I know that the first signs of aging are upon me. I have been looking forward to them in the mirror, as the marks of youth have for so long seemed unfaithful to the person that I am.
Instinctively, any man’s response to hair loss is denial–at first. Grow a little extra, comb it over the affected area, and think about it later. As it becomes more difficult to ignore, accept the loss and purchase Rogaine and other similar products. Perhaps, if rich, consider grafting hair from other locations. A man’s instinctive response to a problem is to fix it.
But hair loss is not a problem: it is merely a symptom of mortality. If mortality were a problem to be solved, we would have more than fables regarding the fountain of youth. Mortality is the most beautiful thing we have. The reason the world is at all worthwhile to us is that we recently experienced it for the first time, and it therefore still has new things to offer us. We came, we saw, and maybe we didn’t conquer, but we breathed, and some of it was good… and so that we might understand that some of it was good, the rest was neutral or bad. For reference.
It’s not that I don’t instinctively want to preserve the status of my hairline. I do. Survival instincts are natural. But as we may learn from phobias: instincts commonly misfire. Open spaces are not inherently scary, nor are closed spaces, or in my case, dogs. Similarly, hair loss is a natural progression related to aging, and all that can be done to manage it is to accept it and progress happily forward towards the grave.
My survival instincts will be put to better use shunning industrially processed foods and excess fats. Baldness is not nearly as threatening as heart attacks.
Some shave their heads entirely and embrace the bald identity. Some develop a strange head-hugging hairstyle reminiscent of an egg wrapped in fur. I do not yet know which way the wind will blow on this one, but I do know which way it will not: I don’t need a toupee or grafts or a comb-over or any of the other paralytic traits which mark a narcissistic person incapable of accepting reality.
Let it fade.
Tape on the Fishtank
My brother is a mischevious guy. When he was very young he once decided that throwing marbles around the living room would be fun. At the time we had a tropical fish tank. You see where this is going? When I discovered him attempting to use Scotch tape to prevent the water from leaking through the spiderwebbing crack in the middle of the glass surface; I told him that it wouldn’t work. His response? “But it has to!”
Mind you, he was very young then and I think now he’s a bit better at taking responsibility for his actions.
Yesterday I was listening to NPR on the way back from work, and heard a comment on graduation rates at community colleges. Since enrollment is up because people can’t find jobs, the fact that graduation rates are abysmal is seen as an on-the-radar problem that should be tackled by the kinds of experts who speak on prestigious talk radio. I found this somewhat depressing. No amount of research you do can quantify this for you, but as Editor in Chief emeritus of the student newspaper of one of the best, largest community colleges in the country: I’d like to set the record straight.
Graduation rates at community colleges are poor because a disproportionately high number of people who attend community college either: should be out of school and in the workforce because they are too inept to successfully proceed with their education, or have a crisis of self-esteem that is preventing them from attaining their maximum potential in school. Many students are faced with a mix of both problems. The former problem can be tackled by making admission to degree dispensing programs at community colleges require a demonstration of merit based on a probationary period of consistent performance. The latter is a problem of the human spirit, and no bureaucratically ordained action has yet and likely will ever make any difference there. But if they want to, these disembodied voices can feel free to put tape on the fishtank.
If a racehorse develops bad knees but a lot of people already bet big money on him, how can we make sure these people get their money back? The best answer I’ve got that cuts losses is to shoot the horse before the race. Apparently the owner (whose head is in the sand) thinks that surgery is the answer. We all know that the horse won’t ever run the same, and therefore he’ll never be a contender again. The best thing for wise gamblers to do is move their money to a healthier candidate: preferably a younger one that shows promise. The federal government, by bailing out GM, is putting tape on the fishtank… but some of that is my tape, and it has my last name on it, and I don’t want people to think that my kids want to claim ownership of said fishtank. I really wish they’d have put that to a national vote.
If humanity learns one thing from mortality it should be that death is inevitable. When death comes knocking, we should all have the dignity to answer the door with a smile.
Origins of Spiritual Euphoria
I find it deeply satisfying that the only official response to this article thus far was from a user evangelizing an addiction. I’ve heard the same pitch from cigarette and cannabis smokers, as well as alcoholics and opiate abusers.
Once you’ve [used my drug], you won’t need anything else!
I think the missing link between predisposition to addiction and the habitual formation of addiction (which were discussed in the article, which you should read) lies in the process by which a religious person reaches an ongoing spiritual high. Particularly, what conditions must be met in order for a person to become spiritually high? At least part of the answer lies in the anonymous comment on the linked article.
It is selfless love that provides lasting happiness because that is the means to having a relationship with our Creator. To *know* that there exists a Being Who created you and loves you beyond your comprehension fills the unquenchable thirst that people try to fill destructively.
Cultists and religious fanatics first subvert and suppress the set of priorities and identifiers that comprise the self. After achieving mental and physical isolation from the self, these people train their brains to feel pleasure that is not dependent on any variable: essentially, they learn to love nothing. If you can convince yourself to love nothing, by extension you’ll be a giddy mess regardless of external stimuli, as you’ll always have an infinite supply of nothing on hand.
People mistake this nothingness for a property of a specific deity, but any casual observer of religion can identify it as a transitive concept. Interestingly, this mental state is attained in different ways by different religions. Chassidic Jews get their religious high from group chants, songs, and dances. Buddhist monks obtain Zen by conditioning their minds to retain focus in spite of physical setbacks such as starvation or extreme temperatures. Evangelical Christians find ecstasy in throwing themselves to the ground and thrashing about, babbling nonwords and phrases in a process that seems to be a cathartic rejection of normative human behavior.
What all these processes have in common with a teenage girl cutting her legs with a razor blade and a skydiver holding off on pulling the parachute cord for just another second are the conditioned release of dopamine, and the absence of physical substance intake. If I had a research grant, I’d be scanning the brains of people who are able to release dopamine without drugs. If this process could be isolated, simplified, and reliably duplicated by a majority of people trained in it, it could create an apolitical alternative to drugs and religion for managing happiness and revolutionize psychiatric care.
