Finally digging into a few blogs I’ve left hanging on my Bloglines subscriptions, I find with great delight that Wooj, the blogger at Blog of the Pythi Master, has a series going on “Getting Caught”. They tell the hilarious story of his youthful experiences with pornography. Read Blog of the Pythi Master: Getting caught — Episode 1 here, and follow up with Episode 2. If that doesn’t make you laugh, I don’t know what will. I just hope he doesn’t turn into some kind of pornographic Darth Vader in Episode 3.
Month: March 2005
Why Nerds Are Unpopular
The roots of all kinds of problems in America (and, I daresay, in Canada and plenty of other places that use the same educational system), are to be found in the schools? I wouldn’t have come to quite that conclusion on my own, but this essay by Paul Graham, titled Why Nerds are Unpopular, posits that thesis. It’s a wonderful piece of writing that certainly threw light on my own middle-school and high-school experience. By all means, read it for yourself. But especially if you know any young people going through school now, having an obviously hard time of it …
Regardless of what you think…
I hesitated about whether to place this under sci/tech or politics in my archives. Regardless of what you think about religion, the move to demand that creationism be taught in schools is bad, bad, bad. The investiture of faith required in science is only to believe that there is a world, the workings of which are explicable and understandable—to some degree—by humans. Meanwhile, creationism is flat-out religious dogma, recently garnished by a ton of pseudoscience. The pseudoscience has done nothing to advance our understanding of the world, of our bodies, of how to survive on this planet. Arguable religion has …
Church Objects to Silly Conspiracy Novel
My mom grew up in a time when the Church still instructed people not to read Sartre and Camus—at least in Quebec. So when a Cardinal starts trying to give reading instructions to people, it makes me want to read whatever he’s telling people to avoid. The Da Vinci Code, though? I mean… it’s fiction! Pop fiction! Why doesn’t the church go back to trying to keep people from great philosophical works of literature? You know things are bad when they’re stooping to worrying about the popular response to fictional depictions of the Church, rather than, say, the forceful discussion …
The Last Five Wishes
The devious Adam asks: You lucked out – you found a lamp with an extremely generous genie. 100 wishes, and all for you! What are the last five wishes you make? Okay, 100 wishes is just too many. You’re bound to screw up. Could you undo #23? Yeah, wait, I don’t want that car after all, though… wait, could you give it to my parents? They use cars. Scratch the spaceship, now that the galaxy’s been colonized and all… No, wait, wait, I want #23 back. Okay? Uh, wait, can I start over again? Seriously though, given a hundred wishes, …
Empire and Language, and a Strange Future Imagined
It’s pricey, but Guardian Unlimited Books | By genre | Review: Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler looks interesting to me. The original link is from Conservative blog for peace, where the posted muses on the possible fate of the English language. Me, I enjoyed the moment in Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire when an old Polish (I think it was) photographic artist stated plainly something like, “English? Nobody writes poetry in English anymore.” Sterling writes that the poetry fell out of English when it (futuristically) really became the global language, and from then on people turned to their vernaculars …
Inhumanity
Okay, I have no idea why suing Caterpillar makes any sense, even in context, but this makes me mad. When the Israeli Justice Minister Tommy Lapid attacked home demolitions being conducted by the army, what did his opponents do? They complained that he was comparing the Israeli Army to the Nazis. “The demolition of houses in Rafah must stop,” he said. “It is not humane, not Jewish, and causes us grave damage in the world. At the end of the day, they’ll kick us out of the United Nations, try those responsible in the international court in The Hague, and …
Hub of Asia?
This is a rant. You may wish to skip it, unless you want to see yet another example of a ranting, furious foreign who was offended by a widely accepted practice in Korea.
Is Hate Really All Bad?
I love smackdowns. Textual ones, anyway. Adam Lipscomb used to excel at them on an online mailing list where I first met him (ah, the sordid little story of that… ah, never mind). Actually, he still excels at them. I take immense pleasure in Adam’s smackdowns because basically, he and I have the same politics. The difference is that in the case of a disagreement with, say, you, I’ll just calmly unpack all the facts and implications that prove you’re an idiot, at length, tirelessly. (Well, tiredly too, sometimes.) Adam, he does things a little differently. Differently like a butcher …
Oh-oh…
Strange how a tiny sound can bring back a whole moment, a whole person to mind, isn’t it? I don’t know why I am listening to Tori Amos right now—yes, I’ll admit I am, but clarify that I’m not at all depressed. Perhaps it was my lengthy writing about apostasy in the previous post, but something put me in the mood. The album is Under The Pink and the moment and person who came to mind was an old classmate and friend, Chiraz.