After a few hours of puttering about online, trying (somewhat futilely) to catch up on my blog subscriptions, I’ve found something quite worth a few minutes’ attention: an essay on “the new agnosticism” over at Killing the Buddha. Nose still a little running, head still a little cloudy, I still have the energy to disagree, but respectfully. My philosophical agnosticism is closer to Auguste Compte’s than anyone’s, in that I think taking a position on the “theist/atheist” question is simply taking a position on a rather closed, circular little binary of possibilities. Why would the universe be limited to just …

Though I’m somewhat sick today (bleah, ugh), I managed to produce a new bit of writing on the long-neglected New Sophists’ Almanac. It’s mainly about the kind of “game-playing” I think we engage in when we watch scary movies, and how I think this may relate to what the hell is going on when we are experiencing “art”.

My sister just sent some more pics of my new nephew! Isn’t he adorable? But I was trying to figure out which side of the family he resembles, and got nowhere except that dark, dark hair seems a Pineault thing (ie, my mom’s side of the family, unless some branch of Troy’s family also has that). It’s hard to see from a couple of photos, though. He looks like a bright fellow, though, from this next pic: When Lime saw these pics, she declared that she thought he looked a little Asian, which once again made me wonder how much …

Oh, a hot night of… reading books together! Yes, my honey came over and we sprawled on the floor, reading books together. Not the same book: she’s reading some kind of mystical adventure in Korean (퇴마록, it’s called, which I’d roughly translate as “The Exorcism Story” if you use the word exorcism in a more general sense than it has taken on since the advent of the Christian us of that word…the banishment of evil). It sounds fascinating, some kind of pitched battle between people all over the world and ancient forces of evil that they’re fighting to banish and …