The bright side of a Moon
Sagan and Hawking sing a duet to the Cosmos.
Or, rather, are made to sing a duet, mixed and re-mixed by melodysheep.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSgiXGELjbc&border=1&color1=0x2b405b&color2=0x6b8ab6&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
Beautifully strange, just like the universe itself.
(hat tip to Dale at Faith in Honest Doubt)
From today’s “Since You Asked” letter, by Cary mother-fuckin’ Tennis, he writes to a girl who is tired of dating and ready for something more long-term:
Give away what you have been withholding and withhold what you’ve been giving away. That doesn’t mean follow “The Rules.” It means get real. Tell him you want a man to fall in love with and stay with, and if that’s a problem for him then OK there are plenty of chicks. Plenty. Next. Not to be crass. But you have to come from a place of complete honesty and vulnerability and pain. Because if you want a lifetime relationship that is what it will be full of: honesty and vulnerability and pain.
Man, I am so ready. He may be writing for a woman, but the general advice still holds true.
I want to figure out what I’m holding back, and what I’m giving away, and reverse it. I’m ready to be honest and vulnerable and hurt and yet still with someone I love.
Bring it, world.
Even though I’ve gotten rid of my cable TV, and even though I don’t have a digital converter box for other-the-air broadcast TV, I’m still watching quite a bit of television. I just watch downloaded and streaming television on my ‘net connection.
Between Hulu, which handles ABC, NBC, Fox and their associated lesser channels, and TV.com which as near as I can tell pretty much just handles CBS, I’ve got most of what I need. The rest I can get by having “friends” (on the internet) record them and convert them to a downloadable form for me.
Here’s what I’ve got in my queue right now:
I’m also looking forward to the return of Better Off Ted, LOST Season 6 (the final one), How I Met Your Mother, and The Simpsons.
Did I leave anything out?
Just typing that out, I’m struck by how many of these shows (by which I mean all but Dollhouse) are essentially about a strong, ethically- or socially-challenged male character. That’s not to say that progressive feminist values aren’t apparent in at least some of them. For example, for all of the blatant sexism, racism and homophobia of the 1960s in Mad Men, check out Amanda Marcotte’s review of Mad Men Season 2 (needless to say, spoilers abound), told from a feminist perspective. The women on the show may be dismissed and treated by the male characters as less than human, but the ladies also exert a fair amount of social power in their own way. And watching the show made me realize just how little has changed in 40+ years; many of the same attitudes are on display, even in progressive Portland, OR. It’s made me much more aware of how I think and what I do and say to others.
And, of course, Dollhouse rests on the twin pillars of the acting talents and star power of Eliza Dushku and the writing and vision of Joss Whedon. Whedon comes by his feminist credentials honestly, having explored female empowerment in the context of a typically male-dominated genre (action-adventure and sci-fi) for his entire career.
Can you tell I like social commentary? So what am I missing out there? What recommendations for new shows do y’all have?
I haven’t been blogging much lately.
Sorry.
Here’s a cat with what appears to be a hangover.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KswnjMa-MQ&color1=0x6699&color2=0x54abd6&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
At least that’s what I do when I’m hungover.
Enjoy your weekend. I probably will, too!
I really wish that there was some kind of nutritional food bar or packet that I could eat in one serving, such that three of these packets a day would provide me with all the calories, carbs, protein, fat and miscellaneous nutritional value that I needed for that day.
What would happen if, for example, I ate nothing but green salads and Cliff Bars for every meal? Would I be denying myself some important anti-oxidant or enzyme or amino acid that, over time, would cause me to become ill, weak or stupid?
I’m kinda fed up with my having to select and prepare (or just select and pay for, if I eat out) something from my surroundings each and every day. There are too many choices, and, if left to my own devices, I select for deliciousness and (I’ll admit it) sweetness, and not for the overall balanced calories and nutrition that my body and brain need.
If I could just go to the store and select a box of 21 “food bars” for a week, maybe supplement it with a vitamin and some occasional green veggies and water, that would be so easy. I could just add up the numbers on the bars and see exactly how much I’m taking in of the essential minerals and vitamins and carbo-do-hickeys.
Yeah. That’d be great.
After seeing the first trailer for Inglourious Basterds, and learning that Quentin Tarantino’s next flick would be a World War II movie, I could not wait to see it.
I’ll admit it up front; I’m a huge fan of Tarantino’s work. The more seemingly-pointless dialogue, the more senseless bloody violence, the more homage and in-jokes, the better.
But here and there, little hints seeped in. I saw the headline of IO9’s review, but did not read the body, and saw the phrase “alternate history”, for example. Well, sure. That makes sense. Any movie is going to be fictionalized. So I had some hint that maybe things wouldn’t turn out the way they did in our timeline.
And the satirical article in The Onion, headlined “Next Tarantino Movie An Homage To Beloved Tarantino Movies Of Director’s Youth”, followed by a rant from a co-worker who had seen the movie about how every Tarantino pastiche was on display in Inglourious Basterds, gave me another hint. “48 minutes of two people talking while sitting at a table!” he said. “They don’t leave!”
That was all I knew. Oh, wait, one more thing; several folk on Twitter told me to go see this movie.
Saturday I finally did. The short version is, I enjoyed it very much. The long version, mild spoilers included, begins now.
And it was, indeed, a Tarantino movie. There wasn’t one single 48 minute long scene of people sitting at a table, however. There were, by my hazy memory, 5 or 6 scenes that were people sitting around a table and talking about something other than the obvious topic. And in each of those scenes, the tension is incredible, because the audience knows something that not everyone at the table knows. The cumulative effect of scene after scene after scene of this, though, is a ridiculous (but enjoyable, to me) self-awareness that this is, in fact, a Quentin Tarantino movie.
The action, when it comes, is heightened by all the tension created through dialogue, and all the more so because it’s often so matter-of-fact to the characters – casually cutting scalps from Nazi soldiers’ heads while discussing something else entirely, for example.
And even though Brad Pitt is shown, prominently, in the trailer, hamming it up with his chaw-filled mouth and his goofy Tennessee accent, this movie is not about Lt. Aldo Raines at all. It’s about Shoshanna Dreyfus, a Jewish girl who tries to hide from the Nazis in occupied France and operates a movie theater. Yeah, Quentin loves old movie theaters, so how perfect is it that so much of the film is set in one?
Except for a few background-fillling-in flashbacks, though, the story is told in a straight linear fashion, which is not a Tarantino cliché at all. Instead of jumping around, as he’s done in so many other movies, this one is a direct line from past to present. Perhaps he focused on the “table dialogue” so much to counter the fact of such a simple story?
Who knows?
I loved it. Not as much as Kill Bill: Vol 1 and Kill Bill: Vol 1, mind you, and not as much as Pulp Fiction… but still, I loved it.
It’s nice to know that I’m not the only one sending letters to President Obama.
And it’s nice to know that he reads some of them.
And it’s nice to know that he responds to some of them.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eG00mM8QEGk&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1]
I wonder if the detainees in Gitmo and Bagram write him letters?
Or the insurance industry executives;do they have to write him letters? Do they send checks? Or can they just visit him in the White House?
…sorry, is that overly cynical of me? I voted for him, I supported him with energy and money during the campaign and in the early days of his presidency, and I still believe that in some ways he’s far superior to #43, and represents some of my concerns far better than Sen. McCain would have (not that either of those is a very high bar to surpass, mind you)…
…but there are still some serious concerns that President Obama has utterly failed at in defending the country and the Constitution; particularly in his approach to our two wars, our continued detention of prisoners captured in the “War on Terror”, the investigation of the obvious crimes of the previous administration, and the illegal gathering of surveillance of Americans, to name just a few. I’ve documented my concerns to the best of my meager ability. I just wonder if President Obama has read my letters/emails, or others like them. What would he say?
Maybe I’ll find out some day.
(And sums up my opinion of said critics, as well. Who the hell doesn’t want people to have health care?)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KHJbSvidohg&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
A quick recap of the D&D game from the other night, a first draft of an ongoing, improvised story…
Player Characters:
In the town of Warjos Dos, in late fall, on the farthest edge of the Old Empire, a group was formed in the weeks just prior to the festival of Redtoberfest…
It all started, as it often does, in the tavern down by the docks. Over beers and dinner (fish and cranberries), Willie and Xanril reminisced and Maira and Matla were looking for work.
Ilbhaan the Dark, keeper of the lighthouse, did not show up for his normal afternoon round of drinks. Some sailors, three men, remarked that they might not get their shipment. Maira questioned the sailors and they were cagey and did not want to answer any questions, and immediately beat a hasty retreat. The bartender asked Willie if he could check on Ilbhaan since it was so out of the ordinary
Xanril followed them to the docks, and was able to overhear a conversation between the captain of the ship and the leader of the gang about their shipment, which apparently is “building supplies”. The captain said to keep an eye out for the half-elf girl, but that she was of no concern. He ordered them to go find the dwarf. The sailors did not want to go back to the tavern, where they thought the half-elf girl was, so instead they began searching in the marketplace.
Xanril caught up with the rest of the group and filled them in. Willie and Xanril knew of several dwarves in town, but couldn’t think of which one the sailors could be looking for. Matla decided to go check out the lighthouse.
At the lighthouse, they found the dead bodies of Ilbhaan’s wife and 12 year old son, murdered in their beds, with slashing weapons.
While the others debated what to do, Matla decided to search the lighthouse. On the first floor, they found a library – and Maira immediately went looking for spellbooks. To Willie and Xanril’s surprise (because they never knew Ilbhaan was a wizard back in the day), there were not just one or two, but eight full spellbooks.
They search the rest of the lighthouse, but find nothing: no other clues, no other people… or creatures. They light the fire at the top of the tower, and prepare to guard the bodies until they can take them back to the cathedral in the morning.
Shortly after nightfall, as Maira and Matla stood guard outside, someone approached: a dwarf from town, by the name of Mavel. He’s suspicious, until he sees Father Willie. Mavel is saddened by the deaths, and over beers and dinner (fish and cranberries), Mavel shares his story. He is looking for his brother, Gorm, who, many years ago, was an adventurer with Ilbhaan and Worjos. On their last adventure, they found… something… out, something that was enough to make Ilbhaan swear off magic entirely. But that was many years ago; now Gorm, who is a miner by trade, has been approached by the same sailors that were acting suspiciously earlier. Mavel didn’t think that Gorm was in any kind of trouble, but he also didn’t think his brother wanted anything to do with the sailors.
After dinner, Fith the snake felt some creatures approaching, and Maira felt it through her empathic link. The creatures were approaching along the beach, below the cliff on which the lighthouse stood. The group went outside and tried to spot them; Willie stood and loudly demanded that they reveal themselves, and Matla tossed his torch down onto the beach to get a better look, but all they could see was shadows.
Willie was pelted with stones from down below! The creatures, who hid in the shadows at the base of the cliff, were attacking! Xanril, Willie and Maira shot arrows and crossbow bolts, and Matla climbed down the cliff to take the creatures on face to face. Xanril took down one creature, which Willie identified as a kobold, before taking a deadly blow to the eye with a well-placed sling stone; he was unconscious and bleeding to death…
Willie was able to heal him with the loving power of Rhoban, but when Xanril returned to the top of the bluff to take aim, he was hit again!
Maira got off another shot but missed. Instead of continuing, she picked up on the way the kobolds avoided the torch on the beach and cast a light spell on a rock near the center of the group. The yapping little creatures scattered, half of them going north and the others going south – straight for Matla, who had had some blood drawn by a slung stone but was still ready for a fight!
Matla’s greataxe made quick work of the small creatures, and soon only one was left. The cowardly kobold, wounded by Willie’s crossbow, threw down its spear and prostrated itself before the mighty barbarian. Matla showed it mercy and told it to go – and with a leap, the creature was off and running to catch up to its comrades.
Xanril once again felt the power of Rhoban, and the group convened to watch the lighthouse for the rest of the night, which passed uneventfully.
In response to Lindsey’s comment on my earlier post, the parallel between what the woman believed happened and torture seems pretty clear in my head. From her words, it seems to me that she was thanking God for having the power to deflect the arrow just enough to prevent it from causing the death of the little girl. The power to do this, though, comes in some invisible, insubstantial form. The God Who did this is also the same God who created the world and everything in it, including the person who shot the arrow.
The woman was offering her thanks to God for sparing the life of this little girl – the same God Who (the woman believes) created the little girl in the first place.
My first question, looking at these assumptions (a God Who wields both the immense power to bring into creation an entire universe, and the subtle power to nearly deflect an arrow in its path), is: why wouldn’t this God use his immense power in this case, rather than his subtle power?
And just asking that question, I can already hear the apologists begin their rationalizations. But I’ll leave that argument for others to make, and I’ll simply ask this: if a human being had both of those levels of power, and chose the subtle one – wouldn’t we consider that person a monster? Wouldn’t we view a person who could have completely prevented the accident in the first place, but instead chose to physically injure a little girl, cause her the emotional trauma of, y’know, being hit in the neck with a freakin’ arrow, and cause the financial and emotional burden to her and her family… wouldn’t we view that as a form of torture?
But somehow, when it’s God, people just assume that “He works in mysterious ways”. We give God, Who is supposed to be the source of our morality, a pass when it comes to actually applying our ideas of morality to Him.
And this leads in to why I am so strongly motivated to exposing the delusion (for I see it as such) of belief in such a God: because that same mindset affects me in a very real, direct way, and my hope is that by explaining it, I can show you how it affects you and everyone around you, as well.
The mindset that sees this way is one I have trouble understanding, and I see it in the way a certain sizable number of my fellow citizens do not wish to see our leaders held to the same standard of lawfulness that everyday Americans are held to – of which the most horrific example I can think of are our flagrant violations of the civilized laws against torture and indefinite imprisonment of people without formal charges. I don’t understand how presidents, regardless of their political party, are allowed to blatantly violate laws that specifically apply to them in regards to collecting intelligence on American citizens on American soil, or to ignore laws and treaties (not to mention simple human decency and the moral high ground) that ban torture and require known acts of torture to be prosecuted, to choose just two examples out of the many that come to mind.
The conservative movement has been building their power over the last 40 years. They’ve steadily built a constituency out of the same folk who believe in the same kind of God Who has the ability to have created us in a perfect state, but chose instead to doom some of us to eternal torture. And the conservative movement, who have collected primarily in the Republican Party (much like a pus collects in an untreated wound) but who also infect the Democratic Party to a degree (or at least their leadership), have wooed and inflamed those beliefs and transfered that moral blindness and obeisance to authority to themselves.
I view the rise of authoritarianism, and the rise of the Christianist Right, as linked (because they are, in myriad documented ways) and as a danger that must be fought. The election committee of our 43rd president for his second term campaigned in (among other places) the mammoth corporate churches, the ones with million-dollar facilities and CEOs and flashy media networks, in spite of the laws against separation of church and state. The Republican presidential campaign used enlisted men, in uniform, to speak in those churches to collect votes, another violation of tradition and prohibitions against the politicization of our armed forces. They were able to get away with this because authoritarian, evangelical Christians already accept the idea that “these laws are for you, but not for God”. Our 43rd president described his war of choice against Iraq as a “crusade”, a word with obvious and heavy-handed religious connotations.
That’s why I get so worked up about this. It’s not an abstract, philosophical point to me. Fundamentalism has brought about policies of torture, oppression, and death, for Americans and foreigners. So the least I can do is try to draw people’s attention to it. Sadly, yes, I realize, writing on my little blog isn’t a great effort, but it’s a small start.
And finally, you’re right, I’m never going to disprove God’s existence. That’s actually not possible, for several reasons, not least of which is that one can’t prove a negative. Likewise, God as He is worshiped in the real world, by real people, has been defined in such a way that it is nearly impossible to prove or disprove His existence. Of course, to me, that’s because the real world gives no evidence, positive or negative, of God’s existence or intervention; if all someone has to show me that says God exists is that a little girl didn’t die of an arrow wound in the neck, can I show them a story about a little girl who died when she crawled into a washing machine?
In both cases, a theist will see the hand of God. To me, if God did both of those things, He’s a sadist. The more likely explanation, though, is that both of those events, and the millions and billions of others that happen in the world, are the result of people’s misluck, carelessness, stupidity, and greed.
In other words, random events. In that, I think Lindsey and I agree, I think.
How about you?