Month: July 2008

What’s so funny ’bout peace, love and understanding?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LeFlPxMTP24&hl=en]

Happy Independence Day from Portland, Oregon.

Reading Roger Ebert’s post titled “When a movie hurts too much”, I’m reminded that, at least since my mother’s initial run-in with cancer, through the nerve-wracking days when my niece was born and had to spend extra days in the hospital, to my mother’s second and final run-in with cancer, and brought to complete sad fruition when my sister’s father-in-law went to a hospital and never left two summers ago…

I can’t watch any movie scene set in a hospital room without at least tearing up.

The only exception is watching “Scrubs”, but that’s rarely about actual hospital stuff. But if they show a patient, in that distinctive bed, and the little monitor is beeping…. yeah. Tears.

These three songs came up on my iPhone this morning, and each one earned a second listen, even though they all evoked different feelings and memories in me.

First, Moby’s “At Least We Tried”:

Second, Bad Religion’s “Honest Goodbye”:

Finally, Bob Marley’s “Satisfy My Soul”:

I love random music because it’s a hotbed of apophenia.

On this day one-hundred and fifty-seven years ago (1 July 1850) Alfred Russell Wallace and Charles Darwin gave a joint reading of their papers to the Linnean Society in London, outlining their independently-reached theories of the process of natural selection. Natural selection was the first plausible mechanism that explained the alreadyobserved process of evolution, or change in species over time, and in fact explained the rise of new species from the contingent history of previous ones.

As P.Z. says, that makes today a scientific Independence Day.

G’head and celebrate by blowing some fireworks up or somethin’.