Action figures in drag advertising, what else, a drag night at a gay bar in Manila. They’ve got Harry Potter in Hermione’s skirt, Darth Vader in Leia’s brass bikini, and Superman in Wonder Woman’s bulletproof bustier.
It’s a wonderful world when we can see gay Phillipine club flyers all over the world.
John Scalzi went to the Creation Museum awhile ago and wrote a report that helps make it understandable to those of us who live in the real world. It begins “Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. And we’re not talking just your average load of horseshit; no, we’re talking colossal load of horsehit. An epic load of horseshit.” He also took a whole bunch of photos and posted them over at Flickr. At first it made me laugh, but right now I’m getting increasingly irritated.
You see, the horseshit seems to be leaching into the groundwater and getting into mainstream life. It’s not just Chuck Norris endorsing bible study in schools, it’s The New York Times op-ed contributor Paul Davies totally failing to understand what science is.
He writes “All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed.” Horseshit.
I suppose he’s right that science begins with the assumption that nature is intelligible. But rational? There’s no particular reason for gravity. It’s a force. Science looks at gravity, describes how it affects apples as they fall out of trees, and makes predictions about how it will affect pears when they start dropping later in the fall. A scientist looks at the universe and sees a jumble of odds and ends interacting with each other, and tries to find the ways in which those interactions are consistent and predictable. Does a scientist ask why gravity exists? No. A scientist tries to figure out how gravity works. Why is for philosophers and priests.
When a scientist begins to say that there has to be a rationale (not merely an explanation, but a reason) behind the existence of the universe is, if you’ll pardon the repetition, horseshit. That’s not something science explains. That seems to be the problem with a lot of theoretical physicists: They bump up against the edges of the universe, poke their noses into wormholes in their areas of expertise, and end up stumbling around the philosophy department with their heads up their asses.
In Davies’ case, he’s written a column that manages to confuse scientific laws with human laws. It’s as though he thought that someone out there decided we needed gravity, got the bill through the galactic senate, and required objects with mass to be attracted to each other. Uh, no. Human laws require; scientific laws describe. You learn the difference in junior high school. The similarity is a giggle when you’re an MIT freshman with a t-shirt about how the real speed limit is a constant known as c. But to most educated adults, it’s just a quirk of language we don’t fret much over.
But Paul Davies, for some reason, either doesn’t understand or has forgotten the difference. This is a man whose facility with logic suggests that he shouldn’t have passed high-school geometry, and yet he has a Ph.D. in physics, a tenured position at the decent (if non-prestigious) Arizona State University, and a featured op-ed in the newspaper of record. I can think of very few explanations for this situation. He might, as I suggested first, have gotten lost in a wormhole and come out in the philosophy department. He might be part of a wingnut affirmative action plan that aims to make the New York times more like the Washington Times. He could also be losing his mind after years of exposure to high-energy physics experiments. Perhaps too much time staring at a particle accelerator has caused a brain tumor of some kind. Finally, someone might have stolen his identity and written the column posing as him.
In a rational world, he’d have to issue a retraction of this horseshit. But I do not expect the world to behave rationally. I’m accustomed to thinking scientifically, and I know that human behavior, while rarely predictable, is predictably irrational.
Vieve once told me (OK, wrote yesterday in an email) that there’s a special place in hell for people who cheat at Scrabble. In this case, they’re not cheating against someone. It seems like they’re collaborating with someone to get improbably high single-word scores. Clever, really, but also kind of bizarre.
Similar in spelling but not at all related to my friend Vieve is Vive Cool City, an Australian video series you might call soft news if it weren’t so damn cool. Your local Fox affiliate will tell you about a new trend in health food or the latest kitten-related human-interest story, but these guys will fill you in on where to buy marijuana in Melbourne and how to have sex on one of those giant yoga balls. Here’s one bit on how to do some quick and easy home surgery:
http://www.dailymotion.com/swf/5YfXvJBcN1L5tmSqR
The phrase “stick to your knitting” will never be as boring as it used to be, because now there’s Knitted Porn. It’s kind of safe for work, I guess. It’s softcore with knitwear, plus explicit knit sculpture. I’m … bemused? Is that the right word.
Sticking to my own knitting, I’m spending the next couple weeks with my parents and my grandmother. I’m thinking of recording my grandmother’s various digressions and complaints and putting them into a regular podcast. Grandma complaining about random crap dot blogspot dot com. Last night she explained to me in excruciating detail how to cook a pork chop. The secret is not to overcook it. You see, if you overcook it, it gets dry.
This evening, I had dinner with my parents. They talked about their days: Lunch with graduate students, meetings with frustrating administrators. I said, “my triumph today was coming up with a new insult for Heather Mills.” Surprisingly, my parents knew who she was. That didn’t stop them from looking dismayed at the thought that their darling boy had grown up to be a professional bitch on the internet.
While I’m out with family, I’m getting back in touch with old friends. One emailed me and asked “what have you been up to” and I had to think back to when we’d last spoken. I ended up beginning with “Well, I majored in Spanish…”
Today’s friendly reunion wasn’t quite that extreme, but I met up with a friend with whom I had six years of catching up. She’d gotten married and divorced and started running marathons. I had my usual stories, but they were new to her, so not yet boring. She looks great and seems happier than I’ve ever seen her. Charlottesville is a good town to come back to, really.
My review of “Quarterlife,” a new show from MySpace TV, is up at TV With MeeVee. Spoiler: I am highly critical of the project.
One of these days I’m going to have to write a nice review about something, just as a surprise.
Actually, this weekend’s featured blog post at MeeVee is going to be my interview with the guys from “Tim And Eric’s Awesome Show Great Job,” and that’s not negative.
So there! I do have a nice bone in my body!
It’s my patella.
Video contains swearing, wear headphones…
I will tolerate furries in a variety of contexts. They may exist on DeviantArt and LiveJournal and on obscure blogs. They may be mentioned and referred to in mainstream magazines as examples of weird but harmless fetishists. They make great sacrifices for their kink, and I respect that.
But goddammit, who the hell put them in charge of an ad agency and gave them the Orangina account? I can no longer drink this beverage! Now that otherwise delicious concoction is forever linked to yiffing, and that totally squicks me out.
Pardon me if I say “well, duh.” The Times says:
Happiness is clearly real, related to objective measures of well-being. Happier people have lower blood pressure and get fewer colds. But using it to guide policy could be tricky. Not least because we don’t quite understand why it behaves the way it does. Men are unhappiest at almost 50, and women at just after 45. Paraplegics are not unhappier than healthy people. People who live with teenagers are the unhappiest of all.
This one’s for Aaron Flynn, who’s trying to stay pure, and for Joel Brown over at Hub Arts, who seems to have a pretty good handle on balancing filthy lucre and creative drive.
One of the last times I talked to Aaron Flynn in person, before he moved off to the alternate universe where housing is not overpriced (i.e. Texas) he told me he didn’t ever want to be one of those people who got through life saying “it’s good enough.”
I said, that’s funny, because that sounds like a pretty good deal to me. Do something good enough every day until you die. Acceptable life. Aaron looked at me not just with pity, but with irritation in his eyes, as though I’d told a particularly offensive joke at his expense. Well, I have to admit it was hard to tell. We were in a car and it was dark, so I couldn’t see him clearly, and also I had just farted, so he could have been annoyed about that. But I think that it did not make him happy that I had so casually dismissed his life’s goal of constant, uncompromising artistic excellence.
But really – can anyone really hope to live a life free of artistic compromise? Isn’t artistic compromise often a great lesson?
This comes back to me defending mediocrity, which sounds scandalous but isn’t. What I mean is that Good Enough is, by definition, good enough. If I cut my finger chopping vegetables, I’d be thrilled to have absolutely perfect stitching that leaves no scar. But to be honest, as long as my finger doesn’t develop gangrene and fall off, I’m happy. When I say good enough, I mean it meets or exceeds my standards of acceptability. My corner pizza shop is not the best pizza in town, but it’s good enough that I eat there when I want a quick slice and I don’t complain about it. It’s tasty, it’s hot, it’s a buck fifty a slice. Good enough!
I don’t just mean that you have to pick your battles for excellence. I may accept merely adequate pizza for dinner, but should I be satisfied producing merely adequate writing? I think I should, because the alternative to going through saying “it’s good enough” is going through life saying “it’s not good enough.” Constantly striving to do better may lead to excellence, but it also means being dissatisfied at every turn.
I feel guilty and shameful saying that.
I’ve been raised to believe that being satisfied, leaving well enough alone, and doing just OK is a cop-out. I’m surrounded by perfectionists and strivers. But isn’t there something other than greatness to strive for? Happiness and satisfaction? Is that even possible?
On November 1st, I woke up to find about a half-dozen police cars (marked and unmarked) parked on my corner. One in my driveway, one in my neighbor’s driveway, a couple around the street. My girlfriend, who watches cop shows, noted that there were detectives as well as patrol officers on the scene (they dress differently, I guess) and that the detectives had on rubber gloves. Crime Scene tape went up across the driveway of one neighbor. Within a few minutes, though, everything looked pretty normal… I mean, aside from the cops. There wasn’t any tension, they were standing around talking, no ambulances running around, no helicopters or SWAT teams or obvious CSI type stuff.
I felt like it would be rude to go and ask, but the subject did come up on the Davis Square livejournal community. We waited for the Somerville Journal’s weekly police blotter, but that didn’t have anything in it.
Later I heard from a neighbor who did have the guts to go ask the police: It wasn’t a crime, so it didn’t get into the police blotter. What it was was just horribly sad. The people who live at that house have a couple cars they’re fixing up, parked ’round back. A homeless guy broke into one of those cars (were they even locked?), sat down, fell asleep, and didn’t wake up. Cause of death not known.
Secretly Ironic 