Hi there.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of something I made with a meme generator.
Saturday, October 30, 2021
Monday, October 4, 2021
2021
This morning I went to church. We had about a third of our usual attendance. Everyone was wearing masks, had to show documentation of personal medical information to be allowed into the building, and was careful to stay six feet away from anyone who isn't part of their own household.
Then we all sang a song with the refrain, "I'm no longer a slave to fear..."
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a one-eyed dog. Bonus trivia fact: Genesis have recorded two songs about one-eyed dogs. That was not a major factor in having this one's eye removed. Not that it was nonzero, but the glaucoma was the main reason.
Wednesday, November 4, 2020
Mid-Election Hooptedoodle, 2020 Edition
I wrote this not long after the 2008 election:
Someone else came over to me the day after the election and, clearly hoping to gloat, asked what I thought of the results. I said, "What a horrible, humiliating night...for Obama."
Their eyebrows shot up, and they asked how I could possibly say that.
"Easy. After Bush's two terms, given his incredibly low approval ratings and popularity, the Democrats should have been able to nominate a lava lamp and get almost 500 electoral votes. Obama's under 400. His winning by that close a margin is like me playing one-on-one against Michael Jordan, and his winning by ten baskets to seven. Nobody expected me to win, but the fact that it was that close is embarrassing to him."
Multiply that by... well, a really big number to understand how mortified Biden and his supporters should be by the current uncertainty. The mainstream media and the jobless left have spent four years caterwauling nonstop about President Trump. Some small percentage of it was even justified. He's been continually and loudly condemned as a monster, a buffoon, a tyrant.
And the best and brightest that the Democrats could muster, with four years to prepare, is currently in a dead heat with him, too close to call. Imagine being pitted against the love child of Hitler and Charles Manson in a popularity contest and having the voters unable to decide which of you they prefer.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of sunglasses.
Friday, April 24, 2020
2020
Anyone who's upset over the government easing COVID-19 restrictions should be relieved that the virus isn't transmitted by licking boots.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of otters.
Saturday, August 31, 2019
Reading Log: Playing Catchup
The last few years have gone by much more quickly than I'd expected. I never stopped intending to write "Reading Log" entries for each book I finished, although I was developing a backlog even when I was blogging regularly. I've kept adding books to a shelf reserved for future articles. That shelf is overflowing. When I look at it, I honestly don't remember ever having opened some of them. The article below will be based on my memories and impressions of the books, and may contain wild inaccuracies at this point, especially as my brain exaggerates things I really liked or hated.
This is a meagre attempt at briefly acknowledging some of these books, largely so I can get rid of them and reclaim the shelf space. My original plan had been to go much deeper into each one.
Keep that in mind as this gets long. I wanted it to be even worse.
Anna Karenin by Tolstoy - this was part of my push to read some of the "classics" of literature. It was a slog. So many pages of rambling about farming techniques and the boring lives of the idle rich (who are nonetheless plagued by money problems - cutting back on the "idle" part would probably help with that).
My memories of Anna herself are that she's a horrible character. Completely selfish and irresponsible. The second-most contemptible female protagonist I can remember ever reading about. (First place will show up shortly.)
Finally, from the back cover of my Penguin Classics edition:
"In this tragedy of a fashionable woman who abandons husband, son, and social position for a passionate liaison which finally drives her to suicide..."
Dude, spoilers!
Nice use of the serial comma, though. All is forgiven.
Suicide Squad: Trial By Fire v1 by John Ostrander, Luke McDonnell, et. al. - I started reading comics when I was a toddler. For many years, all my favourite comics and characters were from Marvel. I had a massive Spider-Man collection, and lengthy runs of many of Marvel's other titles. Although I was well aware of DC and had a few hundred scattered issues of their books (compared to several thousand Marvels), I only really followed Teen Titans and special events like Crisis on Infinite Earths.
Suicide Squad hit the stands not long after I hit adolescence, just as I was outgrowing straightforward stories of good versus evil and was ready for some moral gray areas. Things don't get much grayer than Suicide Squad. It immediately became my favourite comic, a position it held until Hitman - another book with a thoroughly non-heroic protagonist - came along a decade or so later. Hitman and Suicide Squad were also two of the very few titles I kept when I sold the vast majority of my collection.
This is a compilation of the first few issues of the 1980s incarnation of the Squad, plus a few bonus features. It's a fine collection, and one I was surprised and disappointed to find on clearance at a comic shop. Too bad its cover reprints the cover from the second issue, not Howard Chaykin's striking art from the premiere.
Overall the comic holds up well, and is far better than the movie. Although the movie shares a basic premise and some story beats from Ostrander's original series (including Slipknot's attempted escape at Boomerang's urging, with the same explosive result), it was far inferior. The inclusion of Harley Quinn and the character assassination of Amanda Waller were mistakes. In the comics, although Waller will ruthlessly sacrifice her field agents for the sake of the mission, she's deeply loyal to and protective of the Squad's support staff. In the movie she personally slaughters a bunch of her own office staff for no good reason.
The Chrysanthemums and Other Stories by John Steinbeck - this is a tiny book. 58 pages, about three by four inches. I noticed it for a couple of bucks when I was browsing ABE.com, so I ordered it because it was a Steinbeck book I didn't have. My interest in Steinbeck resurged somewhere in the last few years, and I resumed gradual pursuit of my old goal of reading his entire output. At least the fiction. I'm not sure I'm interested in reading the travelogues.
In addition to the title story, this pocket-size edition contains Flight and The Murder. All three demonstrate Steinbeck's penchant for never giving anybody a happy ending. And although I'm far from "woke", as only mindless drones say unironically, even I found the gender politics of The Murder problematic. A quick Googling told me I'm far from alone.
I found a few oddball little collections like this over the years, short stories in varying combinations, often overlapping but usually containing a story or two I hadn't read yet. Then it occurred to me to check into the publication history, and I learned that all the stories were from The Long Valley, so I stopped accumulating samplers and bought that instead.
Not Dead Yet by Phil Collins - this is a terrific memoir. Funny, informative, and insightful. Phil exposes a lot of his own faults and failings, and comes off as immensely likeable.
Some of the anecdotes are gold. I especially liked the story of his being cut from George Harrison's All Things Must Pass album and later being teased - and pranked - about it by Harrison himself.
Musically, my favourite member of Genesis is Tony Banks, the group's keyboard player and for many years primary composer. Tony doesn't come off as well in this book. Although it's clear that Phil likes and respects Tony, he doesn't gild that Tony can be abrasive and hard to work with. Mike Rutherford's memoir said the same, perhaps even more bluntly. (I read that one too, but don't own a copy, so it isn't on the shelf for me to discuss any further.)
My ownership of this book has a funny history. I don't think I even knew it existed when I stumbled upon cheap copies on ABE.com (where a lot of my books come from these days). I bought it, read it, enjoyed it very much, and gave it to a friend who I thought would appreciate it. Then a few months later I was given a brand new copy as a Christmas gift. I was glad to get it, because I was hesitant to part with the first one.
Beyond Freedom and Dignity by B.F. Skinner - I have no memory of reading this book. It's got one of my stickers inside the front cover, with my name, when and where I bought it, and how much I paid for it, and it's been highlighted, as is my wont when reading non-fiction (and sometimes even fiction). But when I picked it up from the stack to write this entry, I didn't remember ever having seen it before. That's going to happen a lot here.
I remember B.F. Skinner, certainly. I remember reading Walden Two (which may be further down the pile), and I remember writing a paper on him on the way to getting my psychology degree. I remember that some of his conditioning principles are quite interesting and useful for educational purposes, but potentially totalitarian if applied too broadly.
From a quick skim through the passages I highlighted and the first line on the back cover ("We can no longer afford freedom, says B.F. Skinner"), it's plain that we're crossing into totalitarianism here. Funny how so many people see nothing wrong with removing all sorts of essential freedoms from others - as long as they're the ones who get to decide who's restricted and how. Just as apocalypse stories are popular because everybody imagines themselves as one of the survivors, fascism fantasies always involve being one of the (very few) rulers, not one of the (very many) subjects. Skinner was just another wannabe tyrant.
Long ago one of my friends dismissively summarized libertarianism as, "Do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt me." I corrected him by saying that it's closer to, "Do whatever you want as long as you don't hurt anybody." This is why libertarians should, and often do, oppose abortion as a violation of the non-aggression principle. For Skinner, and other elitists who think their principles should be imposed on others, the non-aggression principle gets tossed out the window before the car leaves the driveway.
Super Freakonomics by Levitt & Dubner - the original Freakonomics caused a stir by suggesting that normalizing elective abortion reduces crime rates down the road, because many of those abortion victims would have grown up in circumstances that correlate highly with criminal activity. Levitt & Dubner went out of their way to insist that they weren't endorsing this, they were just observing the logical connection. There may be a technically valid point there, but it's still repugnant. It amounts to preemptive, speculative capital punishment. It's almost unbelievable that we now need to explain to some that it's wrong to kill people because of what they *might* do in the future, but here we are.
As for this sequel, once again I have no memory of having read it. That's not a good sign. I love books about unintuitive connections and surprising phenomena. Whenever I read something by Malcolm Gladwell or Nassim Nicholas Taleb, I bore the people around me with, "Hey, did you know...?" stories for a while afterward. Even skimming the back cover and table of contents for this one brings back nothing. That's a pretty good indication that there was nothing interesting there when I actually read it.
That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis - as with Steinbeck, my goal of reading all of Lewis's works plods along glacially. And again like Steinbeck, I make an exception: I have no interest in reading Lewis's early poetry, partly because he wrote it before becoming a Christian, and therefore before becoming relevant, but mostly because, well, it's poetry. Pass.
This book, Out of the Silent Planet, and Perelandra (amusingly referred to on the back cover of this book by the apparent alternate title "Voyage to Venus") together comprise Lewis's "science fiction trilogy." I usually dislike the entire sci-fi genre. I've never seen a single Star Trek episode or Matrix movie, and although I've watched Blade Runner repeatedly in hopes of catching a glimpse of what others enjoy about it, it just gets worse every time. However, I liked Lewis's trilogy. That may be partly because it's a playful, innocent form of science fiction. One of the books hinges on an interplanetary journey taken in a spaceship constructed in an English backyard garden, presumably using household tools and materials. It's like reading about the Backyardigans or Muppet Babies taking a voyage to the stars, and is clearly not meant to be taken seriously or analysed as to scientific plausibility. For these books, the allegories and spiritual messages are the point. And on that level, Lewis succeeds entirely.
I actually listened to the entire trilogy as audiobooks, and enjoyed them very much. I read along with That Hideous Strength as I listened, and noted passages in the audio that weren't in my printed copy. There's a preface by Lewis in which he acknowledges the abridgement "to a length suitable for this edition." I may continue to watch for an unabridged copy, if such a thing is readily available.
The entire trilogy blurs together now. I couldn't tell you now which story elements were in which book. I enjoyed it all, though, and appreciated the Christian themes throughout. There's a planet of unfallen inhabitants who are corrupted by a visit from Earthlings; the humans become the Serpent from Genesis, tempting the pristine creatures into sin. And one section was particularly creepy, with a cosmonaut trapped in a spaceship with a demon-possessed colleague who just kept staring at him and calmly repeating his name, over and over, until it nearly drove him to madness.
We The Living by Ayn Rand - and here we have that worst female protagonist mentioned earlier.
Ayn Rand is a complex figure. She had some good philosophical ideas, mostly around individualism, personal responsibility, and the immorality of socialism. This leads to many conservatives, especially young ones, admiring and referring to her. However, when you dig deeper -and it doesn't take far - you quickly see that Rand elevates individualism to selfishness and personal responsibility to condemnation of altruism. Her responsibly self-reliant citizen quickly becomes a sociopath. The conservative, especially the Christian conservative, soon has to part ways with most of her principles.
Rand herself was a thoroughly unpleasant person. In an appearance on Donahue she was cranky and unreasonable, insisting that anyone who questioned her was being rude and didn't deserve a response. This is an early prototype of the modern leftist tactic of accusing sane people of whatever bigotry or other heresy they can think of and urging that dissidents be silenced ("deplatformed"). Her personal life was no better. She may have had the germ of some good ideas (I still have hopes for Atlas Shrugged, which is in both my to-read pile and to-watch folder of movies on a hard drive), but she should not be seen as any sort of role model.
On to the book. If Anna Karenin was a five out of ten on the selfish-and-irresponsible scale, Kira, the protagonist of We The Living, is a solid ten. She's utterly amorally pragmatic, with no concerns past what benefits her. The costs to those around her, those who for some reason care about her, don't matter, and "right" and "wrong" aren't relevant categories in her mind.
Kira is more than willing to use sex as a tool to manipulate the men unfortunate enough to cross paths with her, freely getting naked and swapping fluids at will. I'm pretty sure there's a word (maybe more than one) for women who barter access to their bodies for personal gain. Even stranger is that despite the frequency of her liaisons, I never had a sense that Kira took any pleasure or gratification in sex. It was just mechanical. She seems almost personally asexual but willing to broker her anatomy with all the passion of a salesman spreading open the pages of an encyclopedia for display to a prospective customer.
So, Rand wrote a book with an awful protagonist. Doesn't mean anything about her as a person, right? We don't think Vince Gilligan is a monster because he created Walter White.
Hey, what's this quote from Rand on the back cover?
"..it is as near to an autobiography as I will ever write....The specific events of Kira's life were not mine; her ideas, her convictions, her values, were and are."Welp, I guess we're done with this one.
Thy Kingdom Comics by Adam 4d - I'm a big fan of Adam 4d's work. He's a contemporary C.S. Lewis. He's not saying anything revolutionary or new, but he's teaching Christian truths clearly, with humour, and accessibly enough to reach a broad audience.
Adam's comics are freely available online at https://adam4d.com/. I bought the book for the same reason I buy most of the books, movies, and music that I bother with these days: because I wanted to financially support his work. I bought extra copies to give away.
Fun side note: for a long time I thought he was just using a nickname, and when I told people about his work (which happened frequently), I pronounced his name as though he were a Star Wars robot: "Adam Four-Dee." Turns out his name is "Adam Ford."
Magical Mystery Tours: My Life with the Beatles by Tony Bramwell (with Rosemary Kingsland) - Tony Bramwell worked for the Beatles in varying capacities from the group's earliest days to the end, then went to on a long career behind the scenesd in the music industry. I assume this book holds to the rule of "with" authorship - Kingsland probably interviewed Bramwell, took notes as he recounted anecdotes, then went off and wrote the book with his direct involvement being minimal at most.
I wasted way too much of my life on the Beatles. One task yet remains, as I assemble and catalogue my collection of Beatles music, books, and memorabilia in preparation for liquidation. As a rule I no longer buy or read Beatles-related books, but for many years I bought and pored over every such publication I could get my hands on. I picked this one up because it was very cheap (oddly, it doesn't have one of my usual stickers inside the cover recording the details of its acquisition) and, frankly, I didn't remember who the heck Tony Bramwell was, so I was hoping for some new perspectives.
I wasn't disappointed. Bramwell (/Kingsland) offers up lots of fun insider stories. Not much sensationalistic dirt - he clearly still likes the Beatles and most of his colleagues in their entourage. There's one notable and entertaining exception. Bramwell makes no secret of his dislike for Yoko Ono and includes plenty of shots at her. That makes it well worth at least a skim for any Beatle fan.
Lectures in Systematic Theology by Henry C. Thiessen - just as it says on the tin. This book contains a thorough and rigourous systematic theology, covering the relevant topics in depth but in a style that's comprehensible to the layman. I can easily imagine using this book as a reference when leading studies on a wide variety of topics. The Scripture index at the back, listing every reference to any given Bible verse in the book's text, is especially useful.
Bone Volume One: Out from Boneville by Jeff Smith - this is a modern classic of the comic genre. My copy is a 2004 Scholastic printing, in colour. I think I bought this for my son to read when he was very young.
An earlier edition of this book gave me a great story from my days running a comic shop. For that alone it will always hold a special place in my heart.
Collected Works of Oscar Wilde, published in 1997 by Wordsworth Editions Limited - another artifact of my vague goal of reading the loosely-defined canon of western literature. Wilde is too prominent a name to ignore. The first oddity about this book is a typesetting error that runs throughout its 954 pages: somewhere in the process the apostrophe character was lost and replaced with spaces. "Can't" becomes "can t", "Dorian's" becomes "Dorian s." It's inexcusable for a publisher to have allowed this distracting, annoying error to reach shelves.
Wilde's writing is generally quite entertaining even now, over a century later. Almost every page contains a one-liner or two that's funny or insightful. I read this book with highlighter in hand, and found no shortage of targets.
Despite his own well-established hedonism, Wilde's writing often reflects the widely Christian culture of his day. It's taken for granted in the social backdrop in a way that would be foreign to most modern readers. However, Wilde goes horribly off the rails when he tries to write about Jesus directly. It immediately becomes obvious that although Wilde knows a little bit about Jesus, he does not know Him personally. The most egregious example is in the essay The Soul of Man Under Socialism:
"And the message of Christ to man was simply 'Be thyself.' That is the secret of Christ."
No. A thousand times, no. Jesus did not come to Earth, be born of a virgin, suffer, die, and rise again to tell us to "be ourselves" (whatever that even means). He did it so that we can accept His sacrifice, embrace His salvation, and be forgiven of our sin so that we can spend eternity in His kingdom. Wilde's is a disastrously wrong belief that can lead nowhere except Hell.
Nothing else Wilde wrote could possibly matter in the slightest if he left this life with such a heretical view of Christ. I hope he repented before then.
Holy Lands: One Place, Three Faiths from Life books, no credited author(s) - another one I barely remember. This was published in 2002 by a western journalism company, so I would expect it to be an apologetic for Islam. A new skim appears to support that expectation. An article on the Koran ends with:
"As with the Old Testament, there is violence, sometimes meted out in Allah's name, but the Koran more often urges mercy and compassion."The dangling participle, demonstrative of the writing skill I expect from "professional journalists," leaves it unclear whether the Koran contains more exhortations to mercy and compassion than does the Old Testament, or the Koran encourages mercy and compassion more than it encourages violence. Either way I doubt the claim.
The introductory paragraph on Christianity demonstrates a view of that faith that is so incomplete as to be laughable. Presented sentence by sentence with commentary interspersed:
"In Israel, 2,000 years ago, a child was born to a Jewish couple."First of all, what is that first comma doing there? More importantly, Jesus was not born to a "Jewish couple" unless they consider God Jewish. He was borh to a Jewish mother and into a Jewish home, but this sentence subtly asserts that Joseph was His biological father and the virgin birth is a myth.
"Jesus grew to be a charismatic preacher, gathering disciples as he went."[SIC] throughout because of not capitalizing pronouns referring to Jesus, but that's admittedly a stylistic decision. Other than that, this sentence is unobjectionable, if a little minimizing.
"This Son of God performed miracles, they said: raising the dead, calming these waters of Galilee."
"They said" is subtle but pernicious, encouraging the reader to reject these claims.
"Jerusalem's authorities, perceiving a threat, had Jesus executed."Fine.
"His followers, taking up the cross, built the world's largest religion in his name."That's it. Not a word about the Resurrection. Not a word about sin, repentance, or salvation. Not one iota of what Paul considered of primary importance (I Corinthians 15:1-5). This is Christianity as mere philosophy, which is no Christianity at all.
I'm sure Islam is given just as skeptical an introduction, though. Let's take a look:
"More than 1,300 years ago, a man in Mecca was visited by the archangel Gabriel and received an extraordinary gift: the word from Allah, the one God."Stated as fact, no qualification.
Welp, I guess we're done with this one.
Bizarre Phenomena - Reader's Digest books, no credited author(s) - a worthless compilation of pseudoscience and urban legends. If you're looking for a book that suggests the Loch Ness Monster just might be in there somewhere, based on long-discredited photos, this is for you. Dishearteningly, my local library has a copy of this on the shelf. In the Science section.
Being Born and Growing Older: Poems and Images Arranged by Bruce Vance - this, as the title suggests, is largely a collection of poetry, and I don't like poetry. I've owned it since the days when I would sweep up any and all books on religion (and several other topics of interest) that I found in library book sales, flea markets, or other cheap sources. In a mental Freudian slip I misread the title as "Being Born Again and Growing Older" and assumed it was about aging as a Christian. Nope.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the bookshelf that housed all of these. And still a bunch more.
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
2018
My greatest accomplishment in 2017 was realizing I could safely add "essential oils" to the list of terms that indicate I can safely stop listening to someone.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of an octopus containing my family.
Sunday, May 14, 2017
Reading Log: Gonzo Dylanology
I'm encouraging anybody who's ever met me, heard me or even seen me, to get in on the action and scribble their own book. You never know, somebody might have a great book in them. -Bob Dylan
If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. - I John 4:15 (NIV)
Time for another confession. Despite my credentials as a music nerd with a major in the sixties and post-doctoral research in the seventies, I was never a big fan of Bob Dylan. I'm aware of his work, and acknowledge and respect his contribution to the canon of modern music, but his stuff just never did much for me. His collaborations with George Harrison were his only works that really interested me.
Dylan's far from alone in that category. There are many "major artists" whose work hasn't held my interest beyond an overview of their catalogue. The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, Queen, U2, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin - I'm familiar with all of them, and have their work in my collection, but rarely listen to them for fun.
In the eighties and early nineties, I knew Dylan primarily as a source of comedy. Unfortunately, he tended to come off as the butt of the joke, not as a conscious participant. "Conscious" has more than one meaning that works in that sentence.
I was watching live, and probably taping it, when Dylan went into a fugue state while receiving a lifetime achievement award at the Grammys. Thanks to the magic of Youtube, that moment has been preserved for global posterity right here. Saturday Night Live did a great Dylan bit shortly thereafter, with Dana Carvey as Dylan and Mike Myers as his interpreter, Tom Petty, but it doesn't seem to be on Youtube and NBC's site doesn't acknowledge that a world beyond the U.S. border exists, so forget them.
In 1992, Dylan appeared on David Letterman's 10th anniversary special. This was toward the end of my seven-year streak of not missing a night of Letterman, so again I was watching, and probably taping. It was hilarious. Paul Shaffer had assembled an amazing band that included Steve Vai, Doc Severinsen, Carole King, and Mavis Staples among its dignitaries. Dylan came onstage, and this huge rock orchestra started into Like A Rolling Stone (a song I probably didn't know at the time). The band was rocking and grooving as Dylan stepped up to the mike and... proceeded to mumble incoherently for a few minutes. He just made vaguely rhythmic nasal sounds, occasionally punctuated by "DIDEN YEWWWW" or "HAWDZIT FEEL" (my best guesses, based on phonetics). Youtube to the rescue once again - you can watch it here.
I recently read Paul Shaffer's 2009 memoir, We'll Be Here For the Rest of Our Lives (a candidate for a future Reading Log entry). He confirms that Dylan was disengaged and uninterested, sometime not bothering to sing at all during rehearsals. Shaffer was just grateful that Dylan came through for the actual show, although he calls the performance "a more than decent 70 percent."
In recent years I decided to check out Dylan's explicitly Christian albums, from his "born again" phase. Until then I only knew of this work from the mocking of critics, notably "Serve Yourself", John Lennon's childish response to "Gotta Serve Somebody". I listened to the three albums, Slow Train Coming, Saved, and Shot of Love. The only songs that really stuck with me as a whole were Solid Rock and In The Garden, and the latter was significantly improved in the live version found on the bootleg album Rock Solid, which I also added to my collection. I talked about hearing these albums a bit way back in this entry, over eight years ago. Not a bad followup turnaround time by my standards. (I started working on this article in 2014.)
Dylan was far more explicit about his newfound faith than I had expected. These albums weren't the least bit subtle. He was preaching a message of fire and brimstone, warning listeners that only Jesus saves. As is often the case for me and Christian music, although I didn't care for the music, I loved a lot of the lyrics. Saved, the second album, struck me as much more strident than the first. Jody Beth Rosen described Saved well: "It’s as dogmatic as they come, and it’s Jesus-fearing, and unlike other Dylan records its prediction of the apocalypse cannot be interpreted as anything other than what it is."
Dylan's Christian walk seemed to have followed a path similar to my own. Even after surrendering to Christ I was briefly a weak universalist, followed by a season of legalism before settling into a more relaxed attitude that I would have earlier seen as complacency.
This music made me want to know more about Dylan's personal story. I wanted to learn how God lit this fire inside him. I wanted to hear his testimony. Unfortunately, it was at this point that I learned that Dylan is a notoriously closed book to interviewers and would-be biographers. A detailed account of his spiritual journey would not be easily forthcoming. He granted only a few interviews that touched on the subject, many of which are linked on Dylan Devotional.
I was discussing this with a co-worker who's a far bigger Dylan fan than me. He loaned me a couple of Dylan books from his extensive library, hoping they'd help satiate my interest, as well as a copy of Infidels, which my friend considers something of a coda or postscript to Dylan's overt born-again period.
Thus, we come at last to the reason why this entry is a Reading Log. However, it's an unusual one in that I usually actually finish a book before writing about it.
The borrowed books - which, as is my wont, I've kept for way too long - are Sam Shepard's 1977 Rolling Thunder Logbook and Robert Shelton's 1986 No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan. The former was intended to give me insight into Dylan's mid-seventies life, and the later is a straightforward biography.
I think I read most of the Rolling Thunder Logbook, maybe even all of it, but I didn't care for most of it. It's written in the "gonzo journalism" style that Hunter S. Thompson popularized and his colleagues at Rolling Stone ran with. The style is marked by being disjointed and full of pretentious literary allusions, many of which consist solely of mentioning the names of better writers. Here's an arbitrarily chosen sample passage - this is a complete section / chapter / piece entitled "Hotel Crypt":
It's not long before the nucleus of us takes its shape. Who's who in theThis is typical of the book. Lots of simple declarative sentences, often lacking subject, predicate, or both. If 184 pages of this appeals to you, then I can unreservedly recommend this book. I might also recommend any of several twelve-step programs. This is not to say that the book is entirely without charm. I particularly enjoyed the account of Dylan deciding partway through a play that he found the content offensive and shouting all the way out of the theatre, thoroughly disrupting the proceedings.
galaxy of things. A small band with all the implications of the Big One. The world we slide through like it's never there. But now it seems reversed. Like we're not there and all around us life is going on about
its business. Waitress serves and goes back home. Back to REAL LIFE.
Back to MOM and DAD or KIDS and HUSBAND or both or all. And us sitting. Us sit eating crab legs in a hotel crypt.
Shelton's book is a traditionally structured biography. I've read hundreds of similar books about dozens of different artists (I probably have 50 biographies of various Beatles alone), but had never invested the time in Dylan to have read one of his. And I still haven't, really. At some point it occurred to me that just because I enjoy someone's work doesn't imply that I should care where they went to elementary school, how many siblings they had, or when they lost their virginity. That's when I stopped reading most biographies. Not all, by any means, but these days I generally need to have some particular interest in the subject or some time to kill to bother reading any sections that could be headed "The Early Years."
I checked the index for Beatles mentions and skimmed a few passages, but in Dylan's case I'm really only interested in the story of his faith. I want to know how it grew to the point where he felt the need to express it so boldly, and more importantly why he stopped. Maybe it's as simple as Larry Norman's account: the audience didn't like it and told him to stop.
Unfortunately, Shelton's book stops short of the period in Dylan's life that interests me. Despite being published in 1986, Shelton's narrative disappointingly ends in 1977. An epilogue mentions only that Dylan had converted to Christianity, offering no further insight.
Perhaps tired of being constantly on the defensive, Dylan was reluctant to discuss his faith. He spent much of a 1984 Rolling Stone interview declining to explain his beliefs.
Dylan upset some moral conservatives in that interview by refusing to condemn abortion, dismissing it as "not an issue". As both an Evangelical Christian and an ardent pro-lifer (two separate matters, despite popular perception; my opposition to abortion is not primarily a matter of religious belief, and predates my conversion to Christianity), I think I get what (I hope) he meant. In a very real sense, abortion is not a root problem, just as theft or lying are not root problems. Sin is the root problem. In that light, theft, lying, and abortion are only symptoms.
The interesting question for me is where Dylan's faith journey wound up. That same Rolling Stone interview mentions that he was by then affiliated with an "ultra-orthodox Jewish sect", implying that he no longer held the New Testament in such lofty regard, and that his son had a bar mitzvah. Paul Shaffer's book seems to support this, noting that he's had to schedule some collaborations with Dylan around the Sabbath. Dylan may have reverted to straightforward Judaism, or adopted a Messianic Jewish faith.
The Infidels album offers few clues. It contains several songs touching on Biblical themes, but no Saved-style overt declarations. Neighbourhood Bully and Man of Peace seem to be about Israel and the Anti-Christ, respectively, but beyond being in favour of the former and opposed to the latter contain no particular insights into the specifics of Dylan's beliefs. I and I, personal favourite track on the album, has been seen as an allegory for Israel. Union Sundown is a surprisingly right-wing statement for someone in show business, but despite their frequent conflation, conservative politics and evangelical beliefs don't necessarily move in lockstep.
Muddying the waters, if Dylan had indeed renounced Christianity, it would be reasonable to expect him to have abandoned the explicitly evangelical songs he wrote and recorded on the "born again trilogy". However, the index of tracks performed live on Dylan's own site show that he continued to feature his gospel material in concert for many years afterward.
For a few years Dylan hosted a radio show called Theme Time Radio Hour. In 2006 he did an episode on the theme of the Bible. Lots of great old gospel blues. Interestingly, when he was naming books of the Bible early in the episode during the explanation of the theme, he included apocryphal / deuterocanonical books (e.g., Maccabees) in the list.
That program, the only episode of Theme Time Radio Hour I've ever heard, showed me a side of Dylan I'd never really considered. I'd long thought of Dylan as somewhat foggy and addled, possibly due to the cumulative effects of marijuana use. However, in that show I heard something new in him: a sense of humour. Now I think Dylan is well aware of his image as a doddering space cadet and is probably quite amused by it. He's willing to play up that image to maintain both a mystique (how can someone that burned out write such insightful songs?) and a distance from his audience, which has probably been necessary for him to maintain anything resembling a private life. Similarly, since getting past the stage of zeal of the recently converted, Dylan is probably content to let people speculate about his religious beliefs. It may even entertain him.
One interesting note - believers generally want to pass our faith on to our children. Although I've never head any explicit declarations of belief from Jakob Dylan, at least two Wallflowers songs touch on religious subjects: "Hospital for Sinners" and "First One in the Car", both from the 2012 album Glad All Over.
"Hospital for Sinners" is about the oft-forgotten truth that a church is "a hospital for sinners - ain't no museum of saints." It offers a vague but positive assessment of churches, concluding that "you ought to be in one." Referring to "statues and apostles, and other Godly things" implies that the churches described aren't all necessarily Protestant, but it certainly doesn't sound like a synagogue either.
The theology of "First One in the Car" is even less definite, but it's clear that the speaker is concerned with spirituality, even if that concern is only a nagging sense that prayer is sometimes appropriate ("I ain't superstitious, but it's making me nervous - now shouldn't we at least say something first?"). The song's refrain, however, actually contains a perfectly good prayer: "May God be the first one in the car, may He be the last one out of ours." The speaker is embarking on a new chapter in life, the nature of which is hinted at but not spelled out. Asking for God's presence and guidance in that sort of situation is to be expected from people of most faiths. I've heard a lot of prayers over the years that included variations of "Lord, please be with us as we..."
The bottom line regarding Bob Dylan's current religious beliefs is that we don't really know, presumably because he doesn't want us to. And that's fine. It's not my job or any other mortal's to judge the state of his soul. I certainly hope that he's got a saving faith in Jesus Christ, in keeping with Paul's statement about Christian conversion during his trial before King Agrippa: "I pray God that not only you but all who are listening to me today may become what I am" (Acts 26:29, NIV). Whether he does or not, some of the music he created from 1979 to 1981 has no doubt blessed and encouraged many believers all over the world.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of something that happened in my kitchen.
Monday, April 11, 2016
Some Achievements Are Their Own Reward
Congratulations are in order to the great state of Mississippi, for finding a way to keep Bryan Adams out!
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a shadow on the grass.
Saturday, July 11, 2015
2015
Over a year. Huh. I thought I'd last posted this spring, not a year-and-change ago.
I've been playing a lot of Magic. My wife and son both play now, and we have friends over for Commander many Sunday afternoons. Other Sundays we have friends over for Last Night On Earth or Game of Thrones: The Board Game. I've still never read a page of a GoT book, nor seen a minute of the show, and probably never will (I'm an outcast even among nerds), but the game is fun.
There's a gaming store in my town now, so we all play Friday Night Magic. I've also gotten to draft for my first (and second) time ever, and enjoyed it enough that I can foresee it becoming a real money sink, especially with the whole family participating.
My older PC, Levi, had become my son's over the last couple of years. Sadly, Levi suffered a power supply failure. The age of his other parts didn't make him a good candidate for a transplant, so we sent him away to live on a big farm where he's got lots of room to run and play with all the other computers. At least that's what I told my son.
Actually, Levi got hollowed out like a pumpkin in autumn and I bought the parts to build my most powerful PC yet: Intel i5 4590 quad-core processor, 12 GB RAM, 128 GB SSD. Video and sound integrated on the motherboard, which includes HDMI out, because my needs in those areas are modest. A 3 TB storage drive will be added as soon as I finish setting up the SSD to dual-boot Windows 7 and KXStudio. I hate to even include Windows, but it's still an occasionally necessary evil.
This has implications for my primary PC, Judah. The new arrival, to be dubbed Dan when construction is complete, will bump Judah to being my son's computer. Since Judah's been my filesharing machine for a few years now, I'm going to lose a lot of share ratio history when I start over. That's why I'm posting this update on my current ratios. Someday my grandchildren may read this and understand why I accomplished so little with my life. Anything with the same name as one of my old share ratio posts is the same torrent, still seeding away. This is probably the end of the road for my seeding these, unless I get really ambitous about transferring data to Dan. Seems unlikely.
The Ken Ham / Bill Nye Creationism Debate 191.91 (!)(I guess some people want a copy for offline viewing.)
A symphonic orchestra sample / soundfont collection 95.87
World English Bible Audio Bible 86.49
AVLinux 6.01b 62.40
Ubuntu Studio 13.04 62.21
Gentoo Live 20121221 29.14
AVLinux 6.04 24.99
Paul McCartney 2013 concert 5.57
Deep Purple 2012 concert 4.79
Ubuntu Studio 14.04 3.44
Ultimate Boot CD 5.33 1.47
Paul McCartney 2002 Concert DVD 0.94
Maybe I'll be back in less than a year this time. Ooh, cliffhanger ending!
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my shoes on a hotel room floor. No, I don't know how colour balancing works, why do you ask?
Wednesday, February 26, 2014
Arizona Governor Vetoes Anti-Slavery Law
Yes, opponents of the proposed law that just got vetoed in Arizona claim it's all about civil rights. It would have protected the rights of business owners to refuse to engage in transactions that they found morally offensive on the grounds of objecting to homosexuality. A photographer could have refused to photograph a gay wedding, or a baker could have refused to bake a cake with icing pictures of two grooms, or a printer could have refused to print flyers advertising a pride rally.
Now they can't. There have already been test cases where homosexual couples wanted to force businesses to provide services at their "weddings". Now, in the state of Arizona, there is no question. If a homosexual wants a business to provide a service, they must.
Never mind that any successful service business occasionally turns away prospective clients for any number of reasons. Never mind the concept of freedom of association. If you own a business in Arizona and a homosexual says "jump", you ask, "how high?" or spend your foreseeable future in court, where you are now guaranteed to lose.
If a business owner cannot refuse to serve a client, that business owner is not free. You could even say they are no longer the owner. They are a mere servant of the state and their new homosexual masters.
This is slavery.
There is one depressingly amusing upside to this debate. All the commentary on this law assumes that religion is the only reason one might object to "alternative" sexual lifestyles. I often see the same view expressed in abortion discussions: if you're opposed to abortion, it must be on religious grounds. The idea that one might have moral convictions that are not grounded in religion is anathema to pro-gay and pro-abortion sides.
Yet, atheists (who share a large Venn diagram space with the pro-gay and pro-abortionist groups) act deeply offended when theists explain that without an objective external source for morality - i.e., God - what you call your morality is essentially a cluster of personal preferences that can't really be logically justified.
So, they claim that they can have morality without religion. But when someone raises a moral objection to something they like, it's assumed that religion is the only possible reason for doing so.
In other words, religion isn't necessary for morality when they don't want it to be, but it is when they do.
It's refreshing to see this hypocrisy on such blatant display. I just wish more people could see it.
"Satan, who is the god of this world, has blinded the minds of those who don’t believe." - 2 Corinthians 4:4 (NLT)
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a tower my son built from Lego (R) brand building bricks, as the lawyers insist on calling them. Note Spider-Man bursting forth from the microwave.
Thursday, January 30, 2014
Old Man Canada & Infant Israel
Conservatives often make the communications mistake of overestimating the intelligence of their audience. Not necessarily the audience that's actually in the room with them, but the wider audience that's only going to hear the sound bites that the media feeds them.
As I explained a long time ago in a blog post not so very far away, a basic truth in public communication is that when writing, whether for publication or verbal presentation, you need to assume that your audience is stupid and mean. Stupid, in that if anything you say can reasonably be accidentally misconstrued, they will do so. Mean, in that if anything you say can be manipulated and taken out of context to sound damaging, they will deliberately do so.
When conservatives are speaking, the media members in the audience usually provide the mean and trust the wider public to provide the stupid. The public rarely lets them down.
Consider the recent flap over Mike Huckabee supposedly saying that women can't control their libidos. He said nothing of the sort, of course, but if your information diet consisted of mainstream media sound bites, you'd be convinced otherwise. Here's what Huckabee actually said:
And if the Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe that they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing for them a prescription each month for because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of the government, then so be it. Let us take that discussion all across America because women are far more than the Democrats have played them to be, and women across America need to stand up and say, ‘Enough of that nonsense.’Contrary to the gleeful soundbites and tweets, Huckabee is clearly not insulting women. He's just pointing out how Democrats do. To claim otherwise is disingenuous at best.
While researching the preceding paragraphs, I saw that the narrative has shifted somewhat. Now that the left-wing media is having trouble selling the lie about what Huckabee said, they're shifting to saying that they never tried to lie about it in the first place and conservatives are big meanies for claiming that they did. Yeesh.
Another great example of this was when Sarah Palin knew when the Boston Tea Party happened, and knew that her live audience knew it too, but "Gotcha"-playing
The attentive reader may notice that I'm not linking to liberal attack sites. That's not an accident. It isn't because they're hard to find or because I can't document sources, but because I'm not interesting in taking the chance of giving them more hits. I prefer to link to credible sources rebutting them. However, for this last item, which inspired this post, I haven't seen anyone else challenging it yet. I'm hoping it catches on, because I'd love to see Michael Coren or Mark Steyn eviscerate the writer.
Heather Mallick is a left-wing shill who writes for the Toronto Star (at the risk of repeating myself). If it's not atheist, pro-abortion, liberal, Liberal propaganda, she's against it. Stephen Harper could rescue a hundred puppies from a burning high-rise building and she'd complain that he didn't brush them and clip their nails on the way down the stairs. As a good leftist, she's also not real fond of Jews, although she spends a chunk of the column I'm describing protesteth-ing that point too much. (Protip: if you claim you're not anti-Semitic but protest every security initiative Israel takes on to defend its citizens, you're actually arguing that Jews don't have the right to self-defence, effectively endorsing their slaughter. No sale on the whole "not anti-Semitic" thing.)
I had wanted to go point-by-point through her column correcting the logical errors, but that would take longer than I'm willing to invest right now. I don't want this piece to join my collection of half-finished posts that are no longer even remotely timely. I really need to point out one particular jaw-dropper, though. Mallick takes it as a point of faith that Stephen Harper is a bumbling, uninformed hick. She uses this example in an attempt to hammer that point home:
Here’s the most uneducated thing: Harper claimed Canada is the "polar opposite of Israel” as it has "much geography but very little history." The state of Israel is 65 years old, Canada is 147 and humans first arrived on this continent perhaps 16,000 years ago.I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Wow. Just wow.
And this woman is a professional journalist. By thinking that the nation of Israel sprang into existence ex nihilo in 1948, Mallick demonstrates her place in the ranks of the painfully ignorant.
For those who don't know (which is arguably fine, as long as you don't think you're being really clever by trying to smugly rebut someone who does), the nation of Israel was established in, umm, Biblical times. Even if you reject the idea that the Bible was divinely inspired or that there was anything supernatural involved in Israel's rise and fall, there is no question of Israel's existence prior to the adoption of the calendar by which we now measure years. Israel was sacked by the Romans in 70. That's the year 70, as in one thousand, nine hundred, and forty-four years ago. Almost two millennia since it fell, and considerably more than that since it was founded.
But by all means, Ms. Mallick, please continue to impress us with how much less history Israel has than a country that's been around for about a buck-and-a-half, and how "uneducated" Stephen Harper is.
I'm guessing Ms. Mallick didn't do so well in math class. If you insist that 1944 < 147, your teacher will probably mark it wrong.
Oh, well, for those who are terrible at math (and history), I suppose there's always journalism school.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of a bottle of something of which my wife has a bottle. And of which she took a picture.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Just For The Record
The more I hear from him, the better I like him.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the picture I already posted, because it bears repeating.
Friday, December 20, 2013
High Purr Bully, Not Hyper Bowl
Today I am a broken man.
My whole world has been shattered.
I thought nothing could shake my faith.
I just found out that Hall & Oates are being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
I don't know if I can ever believe in anything again.
(I thought my whole world had been shattered once before. Turned out it was just the lens of my glasses.)
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of what I can't unsee when I look
at the patio stones in my back yard.
Thursday, December 12, 2013
Turns Out The Batusi Is Not The Sign For Anything
It's probably wrong that I think this is hilarious:
JOHANNESBURG, South Africa - A man who provided sign language interpretation on stage for Nelson Mandela's memorial service, attended by scores of heads of state, was a "fake," the national director of the Deaf Federation of South Africa said on Tuesday...sign language experts said the man was not signing in South African or American sign languages and could not have been signing in any other known sign language because there was no structure to his arm and hand movements.I used to think finding stuff like this funny made me a jerk. Now I realize it's just a symptom of the underlying condition.
I need to update my will. I hereby request that at my funeral, somebody who doesn't know sign language should stand up at the front making random gestures as people speak. Rudeness is encouraged. If at all possible, work the Macarena in there somewhere.
We can only hope this episode inspires a new fad on Youtube: superimposing fake sign language interpreters at famous speeches. Imagine having someone standing to the side looking like they're playing charades and/or having a petit mal seizure (a fine line, that) as Reagan talks about tearing down this wall, or King talks about having a dream this afternoon (it's always a good idea to catch a nap before giving a big speech), or Obama lies through his teeth and says you can keep your plan if you like it, or Walter White proclaims himself The One Who Knocks. Internet, make this happen!
The Gettysburg address would be a good one, but for some reason I can't seem to find it on Youtube. With all those people gathered to hear the president's big speech, you'd think somebody would have brought a camcorder.
At first I assumed that this was a prank that got way out of hand. Maybe the guy was one of Johnny Knoxville's buddies, or one of Ashton Kutcher's Punk'd accomplices. Maybe the ghosts of Dick Clark and Ed McMahon are orchestrating bloopers and practical jokes from beyond the grave. The fake signer probably thought that surely somebody would call him out before the event actually got rolling. It wasn't until showtime that he finally decided between fake sign language and an homage to Garrett Morris's assistance for the hard of hearing.
Or maybe it was a wacky misunderstanding, like that time a cab driver got shanghaied into appearing on the BBC as a computer expert.
But no, turns out this isn't the fake signer's first time to the rodeo:
The man also did sign interpretation at an event last year that was attended by South African President Jacob Zuma, Druchen said. At that appearance, a deaf person in the audience videotaped the event and gave it to the federation for the deaf, which analyzed the video, prepared a report about it and a submitted a formal complaint.
Seriously, guys, checking references isn't a bad thing. Next time at least Google the name of your prospective hire.
At least this kind of thing is too ridiculous to be a widespread problem, or even a regional one.
Wait, what?
Bogus sign language interpreters are a problem in South Africa, because people who know a few signs try to pass themselves off as interpreters, said Parkin, the principal of the school for the deaf. And those hiring them usually don't sign, so they have no idea that the people they are hiring cannot do the job, she said. "They advertise themselves as interpreters because they know 10 signs and they can make some quick money," said Parkin.This reminds me of Marge Simpson's plan to give piano lessons despite not knowing how to play the piano: "I just have to stay one lesson ahead of the kid."
I have a nephew who lives in South Africa. I wonder if he can account for his whereabouts on Tuesday. Assuming he wasn't involved in this fiasco (which is probably the case, given that he's seven), I have a moneymaking suggestion for his future reference.
This situation has only gotten funnier / more disturbing as more information has come out:
The man accused of faking sign interpretation while standing alongside world leaders like U.S. President Barack Obama at Nelson Mandela's memorial service said Thursday he hallucinated that angels were entering the stadium, suffers from schizophrenia and has been violent in the past....
Thamsanqa Jantjie said in a 45-minute interview with The Associated Press that his hallucinations began while he was interpreting and that he tried not to panic because there were "armed policemen around me." He added that he was once hospitalized in a mental health facility for more than one year....
Asked how often he had become violent, he said "a lot" while declining to provide details. Jantjie said he was due on the day of the ceremony to get a regular six-month mental health checkup to determine whether the medication he takes was working, whether it needed to be changed or whether he needed to be kept at a mental health facility for treatment.... He said he has previously interpreted at many events without anyone complaining.
......
......... Anyway, that's a thing that happened.
As for Mandela himself, I have no opinion. I used to think he must have been a great hero, because Rolling Stone magazine said so. There were even songs about him, and surely bad people never have songs about them released on major labels. However, in accordance with 1 Corinthians 13:11, I've long since stopped blindly believing what the media tells me. The death of my former liberalism was the inevitable result.
My travels around the Net leave me unsure what to think of Mandela. Sorry, no links because I didn't keep track. However, you can probably type "Nelson Mandela" into a search engine as easily as I can, or even easier since you can just copy and paste it from where I just typed it. Looks to me like he was a communist sympathizer (at least), explicitly refused to renounce violence while in prison, and didn't even qualify for any sympathy from Amnesty International.
Standing up against Apartheid is certainly a huge point in his favour. He also seemed to keep things pretty peaceful once he was in power. If there was a lot of revenge-fueled racial violence in post-Apartheid South Africa, it's been kept pretty quiet (which is a distinct possibility).
However, Mandela was also a mover and shaker within the ANC, which has used some pretty questionable tactics over the years. I have a hard time endorsing the organization that invented necklacing. The enemy of my enemy can still be pretty reprehensible.
I was discussing this uncertainty with a friend who said, "You have to respect his spending 27 years in prison."
I replied, "Manson's been in longer than that. You may want to chose a different yardstick."
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of the patio stones in my back yard.
Friday, October 11, 2013
The One I Forgot To Title
This is a purely self-indulgent diary entry - but then, aren't they all? I have (hopefully) more interesting stuff in the pipeline, but I am, after all, so very lazy.
This is just an update on share ratios, as discussed a couple of entries back. Now I've really got to stop seeding some of the obsolete items, because I'm in desperate need of hard drive space. A few of these haven't shifted a single byte of data in weeks, so I'm going to nuke the files. Before I do, though, here's a list of my current seeding ratios for several torrents:
Ubuntu Studio 13.04 56.02
World English Audio Bible 46.04
AVLinux 6.01b 37.73
AVLinux 6.0 17.23
Ubuntu Studio 12.10 10.79
Gentoo Live 20121221 2.71
LibreOffice 3.6.4 installer 1.83
Deep Purple 2012 concert 0.54
LibreOffice 3.6.4 Help files 0.41
Paul McCartney 2013 concert 0.52
These torrents represent a total of over 375 GB of data I've uploaded. I may not be able to code anything more complex than a Forge card, but this is one small way I can contribute to open source software.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of one of my co-workers dressed as a cowgirl. I don't know why either. She promised me severe bodily harm if this photo got distributed, so let's not tell her.
Wednesday, August 7, 2013
This Is Not True At All
I turned on my TV the other day, and was shocked to see such a brazen display of bigotry, intolerance, and outright homophobia. I watched for almost twenty minutes and didn't see a single program about a married gay couple adopting a baby! Not one!
I refuse to sit quietly and subject myself to that sort of hatred.
And that's why I'm boycotting The Weather Channel.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of my dog in the kitchen.
Saturday, July 20, 2013
Saturday Night's All Right For Blogging
This is an experiment. Every day I have a pile of ideas to write about. My backlog of notes stretch back for years. Almost every day I intend to write, but don't. So today I'm going to start up this text file, add arbitrary bits to it throughout the day as the urge strikes, and post it late tonight. It may be a lot, or very little indeed. We'll see how it goes.
I've been filesharing since long before filesharing was a thing. It started with copying programs on cassette for my Commodore Vic 20. Then the Commodore 64, with its 1541 disc drive and a program called Fast Hack 'Em (itself copied, of course). Weird side note: I once got a new bank card with the randomly assigned PIN of 1541. I didn't change it, because it was so easy to remember. Every time I used that card, I just had to visualize putting it into a Commodore disc drive.
A little later, when my friends and I started getting seriously into music, we habitually took turns buying albums (cassettes at this point). Only one of us would buy any given album, then the others would run off copies.
Around 1986, we had just started getting into Genesis. We only knew the singles from Invisible Touch that got radio play and an hour's worth of videos that were on a two-part MuchMusic Spotlight, which I still have it on a VHS tape somewhere. I remember (future-)Pastor Derek and I deliberating over who would buy which of their albums. I picked Abacab first because it included Keep It Dark. I don't remember which one he got - I think it was Duke or A Trick Of The Tail. Either way, he got the better of that arrangement.
I also remember that no one wanted to buy Trespass. We had never heard of any of the songs on it, and there were only six tracks, so it had to be really short and therefore a ripoff, right?
We would learn.
Given this well-established propensity to piracy, I was all over Napster when it came along. I still have the issue of Maximum PC that included the client software on a bundled CD-ROM. Over the years, I went through many other alternatives. Usenet, BearShare, Kazaa, DC++, Shareaza, WinMX, and many others whose names I have forgotten have come and gone.
Nowadays, of course, torrents are the way to go. I used uTorrent when on Windows, and have settled on KTorrent here in Linuxland.
I've always practiced hit-and-run strategies for any files that a copyright holder might object to having passed around. That is to say, any commercially available material. My default settings in KTorrent are to stop seeding as soon as my download completes. Impolite, perhaps, but it's kept me out of court thus far.
When I have something that I can safely leave seeding, though, I happily do so. Free open source software, concert recordings (usually safe to share, although not always), and anything with explicit permission to distribute stays seeded. I leave my torrent software running most of the time, and I've managed to rack up some good share ratios. Here's what I'm currently seeding, with ratios as of this writing:
Ubuntu Studio 13.04 41.32
World English Audio Bible 36.01
AVLinux 6.01b 17.35
AVLinux 6.0 17.23
Ubuntu Studio 12.10 10.42
LibreOffice 3.6.4 installer 1.83
Deep Purple 2012 concert 0.54
LibreOffice 3.6.4 Help files 0.41
Paul McCartney 2013 concert 0.28
(Sorry the numbers don't line up all pretty. I could insert a table or play with the spacing, but that sounds like more work than not doing either of those.)
I'm especially impressed that the newer version of AVLinux moved ahead of the old version so quickly. I've been seeding version 6.0 for over 59 days (actual seeding time only), but 6.0b for only 13 days. I'll probably stop seeding the old versions of AVLinux and Ubuntu Studio pretty soon, if only to free up some hard drive space, since all the demand is obviously for the newer versions. I'm also pleased with the demand for the audio Bible, although of course I'd like it to be way out in first place.
Volumes have been written about Kermit Gosnell, with much wringing of hands from the pro-abortion side, alternatively claiming that he did nothing wrong or that he is an aberration, a stain on the fine profession of abortionist.
The simple truth about Gosnell is that he's nothing unusual. The babies he killed wound up no more dead than those killed by any smiling ghoul in a clean gown, working in a well-lit facility to terminate the pregnancies of women who don't even look pregnant yet.
The stage of gestation is not the issue, the killing is. The actions of every abortionist are as vile as those of Gosnell, and deserve the same condemnation.
My bit about my new saw includes one joke that pleases me far more than it should. I know it's poor form to laugh at your own jokes, but if I don't, who will?
Anyway, there's one joke in there that seems like an easy, stupid pun but which actually works on a whole other level. Which is still a stupid pun, but one that generally gets missed. I've gotten eye rolls from people around me when I pointed it out, which makes it no less entertaining to me.
I'm glad Dexter is wrapping up. I've had a complicated relationship with this show. I like the premise, and I like Michael C. Hall's acting, so I figured it was worth a shot. About a year ago I borrowed the first two seasons from a friend, and... obtained... the rest of the seasons (remember my first big topic today?).
Season 1 was awful. Around the time that Dexter found the doll parts in his freezer, I turned to my wife and said, "The killer's going to turn out to be somebody from his past that he doesn't know about. If it's his long-lost brother, I'm out."
A few episodes later, the killer was revealed as Dexter's long-lost brother, and I was out.
Oh, yeah: spoiler warning.
If only there were some way to go back up and insert that warning earlier. Ah, well, perhaps someday such technology will be within reach of the common man.
Anyway, I gave up. My wife persevered. She assured me that it got better after season 1, and I really enjoy Jimmy Smits's acting (he's why I started watching my all-time favourite show, NYPD Blue), so I decided to give it another chance, at least until Smits did his bit.
The writing still varied widely, but was good enough to keep me in. Barely. I loved the John Lithgow and Colin Hanks / Edward James Olmos seasons (the Hanks / Olmos twist is the only one in the entire series that I didn't see coming). However, I despise the "long lost relative" trope, and they've gone to that well twice.
I've long gotten the impression that Dexter has a senior writer or two with a lot of clout but no fresh ideas. They churn out the hackwork, and generally drag the show down to the lowest common denominator. However, the writing staff also includes at least one or two people with good ideas but little influence. They manage to slip some quality material past the guards here and there, but mostly get quashed. If those fresher voices had been louder, the show could have been great.
They're three episodes into the final season, and I'm glad it's ending. I want to ride the show out to the end at this point, but I wish they were only doing six episodes. Everyone involved seems to be phoning it in this year.
This season seems like a Greatest Hits compilation, only in Dexter's case they're revisiting the worst aspects of the series. Deb being whiny, ineffectual, and so annoying that I spend every episode hoping someone - anyone - will kill her? Check. A serial killer expert shows up and makes Dexter nervous? Check. New character has extensive but never-before-hinted-at ties to Dexter's past? Check. Painfully bad dialogue, especially in Hall's narration? Check. Misuse of technical terminology by characters who are supposed to be experts and therefore know better (there's a difference between "psychopath" and "sociopath", and every time Vogel opens her mouth she proves she doesn't know it)? Check, Check, a thousand times Check.
Even the technical aspects of the show are getting lazy. Watch any scene with dialogue between two characters. Every time the camera angle switches, say from a front-angle two-shot to a shot over a character's shoulder, the actors' head positions jerk around wildly. They go from looking straight at one another to one looking down to either or both staring off into the distance with each new shot. Nobody involved could be bothered with little details like continuity between shots.
I can't imagine Bryan Cranston tolerating Breaking Bad sliding off a cliff this badly.
All dramatic writing is about getting from Point A to Point B. With Dexter, I often hate Point B (long lost relatives ahoy!), but how they get there can be interesting. On The Walking Dead, Point A and Point B are consistently good, but how they get there can be lazy. Case in point - everyone disagreeing with Dale about whether to kill a prisoner, even though several of the characters would clearly have sided with him. However, they needed to alienate Dale from everyone to make his death later in the episode all the more tear-jerking ("I never got to tell him... sniff..."). The characters get moved around like pieces on a chess board, characterization to this point be hanged.
Oh, yeah: spoiler warning.
The Walking Dead has gotten better on this score. I think the writers may have even realized their mistake. Glenn gave an out-of-nowhere speech in a later episode about how Dale had been right and he shouldn't have abandoned him like that. Well, yeah, Glenn, and you wouldn't have if your writers had been more conscientious.
For the ultimate in good writing, though, nothing beats Breaking Bad. Point A and Point B are both terrific, and how they get there is always compelling and unpredictable. I'm not glad that Breaking Bad is ending, but I am looking forward very much to seeing how they do it.
Helen Thomas, the terrorist-sympathizing former journalist, has passed away. The CNN Breaking News e-mail bulletin says, "Thomas retired in 2010 after she made controversial comments regarding Jewish people."
I guess you could say that. She accidentally let her anti-Semitism show in front of the camera, and "retired" a week later. If a public figure to the right of Mao had made those kinds of statements, they'd still be reviled and propped up as an example of the "racism of the right". But since Thomas was a credentialed (literally) leftist, it's a dog-bites-man story and the media lets one of their own "retire with dignity".
I've been listening to the new, complete audiobook version of World War Z by Max Brooks. It's pretty good, and the voice cast is top-notch. It probably works better as an audiobook than as a novel. One of my main criticisms is that the dialogue doesn't really offer different "voices" to each character, with little to distinguish them in terms of vocabulary or speaking style. Having different actors play each character ameliorates that problem, but doesn't solve it completely.
I will one day watch the movie, which by all accounts I've been able to take seriously appears to be a soulless Hollywoodized disaster, just out of geeky completionism. I certainly won't pay ten bucks to watch it in a big dark room with noisy texting strangers. I'll wait until the DVD
What?
I think they missed a bet with the World War Z adaptation. It should never have been a movie. It should have been a TV series. The self-contained episodic nature of the book would have made for a great series. Each episode could have had the interviewer going to speak to another survivor, switching to their story told in flashback as they spoke. Of course, you could have the interviewer's support staff, UN personnel, etc., as recurring characters. It would essentially be an anthology series with a stable framework. Although anthology series are a tough sell to an audience these days, I think the zombie / survival horror fanbase would be large enough to get the show off the ground.
Alas, what could have been.
I haven't finished the audiobook yet. If Brooks ever reveals what happened in North Korea, don't tell me. Everybody hates spoilers, right?
What?
A woman in the U.S. found out that her unborn baby has down syndrome. Unwilling to raise the child (for the record, I have no problem whatsoever with her making this decision - giving a child up for adoption is always an option), she put the word out: if anyone would adopt the baby, they could have him or her. (I try to avoid referring to unborn children as "it", which concedes important linguistic ground to those who would deny the child's humanity.) If no prospective adoptive parents stepped up, she would have an abortion.
The plea went online, and over a thousand people volunteered.
I've frequently railed on the cognitive dissonance and refusal to accept facts that are inherent in the pro-abortion position. Can even this case make them finally pack in the ludicrous "who's going to raise all the unwanted babies" argument? Probably not, but I can hope and pray.
Parents are available for unwanted children. I have friends who waited years for adoption. We're a long, long way from running out of loving homes for any child who makes it through the gauntlet that the world offers those with doubts about having a baby.
There are no unwanted children. There are just a lot of people who project their own unwillingness to be a loving parent onto others.
I was almost in an adoption situation myself several years ago. My wife heard a woman say that she just found out she was pregnant, and wasn't happy about it. She wasn't seriously considering abortion, but was hesitant to raise the child herself and was musing about trying to find adoptive parents. My wife told me that she very nearly volunteered on the spot. She wasn't 100% sure I would agree, but knew that it was a pretty safe bet. She was right. I assured her that if she's ever in a situation like that again, she has carte blanche.
The pregnant woman wound up keeping the baby and raising her herself. They live in our neighbourhood, and that no-longer-baby goes to school with my son. Everything turned out OK, as it usually does.
There is no shortage of homes for "unwanted" children, at least in North American society. I can't speak for the rest of the world, but last I heard international adoption was a thing that people do. Anyone who clings to the "all the unwanted children" argument is demonstrating that they're too ignorant (willingly or unwillingly) to take seriously in a discussion of life-and-death issues.
"You can't argue with results" is just a prettier way of saying "the ends justify the means."
"To each his own", depending on context, is usually just a prettier way of saying "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law."
I recently saw this listing on a classified ad site. I've touched up the grammar and punctuation, which were atrocious, partly because I couldn't stand them and partly to make tracing the post to its source (not the point) less likely:
$290.00 Crib Voucher for sale! You pick out the crib, and I'll buy it at the store for you (the voucher has my name on it). Reason for selling: I have no space for the crib at the moment. Selling it for $225 (brand new).I can't come up with any theory for this that doesn't involve words to the effect of "The kid can sleep in a cardboard box. Mommy needs crack money!"
Can anybody else?
This has gone better than I had expected. I think I'll stop now.
Enough rambling. Here's a picture of some of my PC Gamer magazine collection, rotated to maximize the nerdiness.
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