BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.: Misc Stuff
Friday, August 31, 2007
Misc Stuff
I keep telling myself to post something here every day, but real life things keep eating my hours and energy. This is unlikely to change before December, unfortunately. I hadn't even logged onto the Hellgate: London alpha in two weeks until I vegged out and played a few hours last night. I've got a bunch of cool blog topics to write about, but I don't know when I'll find the time, so in lieu of something good, here's something quick. (The motto of most of the Internet. And sexual encounters.)
I saw a link to this from Pharyngula, and enjoyed it enough to repeat it. It's got to be the best Popeye-related artwork ever created, and while that was formerly not a real steep mountain to ascend, it's now gotten a lot higher.
Click this link to see it full sized and read the artist's comments. It's a real painting, and a pretty large one; the online version is a photo of it. I'd buy that, if I had money and somewhere to hang it.
Elsewhere, I saw a link to an amusing tale of M&M natural selection, Highlander style. I don't remember where I saw it, and a Google on it reveals hundreds of mirrored sources, so it's clearly not new, and has become public domain at this point, whoever the original author was. I laughed, at least.
Survival Of The Fittest
Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.
Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them cracks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.
I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.
Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.
When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."
This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this "grant money." I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.
There can be only one.
Oh, and there's this. It's not new, and I've probably watched it a dozen times in the past year, but it never fails to make me laugh in semi-horrified admiration.
Yes, he said it. "People like him should be wearing cardboard signs and selling pencils from cups." As well as, "pinching his chubby little flanks." The balls to break that out, on national TV, the day after Falwell died, when every news program was kissing his dead white ass and rolling belly up for the supposedly large and powerful right wing Christian demographic, is just breathtaking.
I've been watching videos of various free thinkers from Google videos and YouTube for months, usually playing them while I'm doing some housework, or cooking, or other activities when I an enjoy the spoken word audio. (I can not read or do productive work while listening to someone talking, at least not if I want to absorb the content of their words, or get anything done on the work I'm trying to multitask.) The better speakers, Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins for instance, are wildly entertaining in their blasphemy and often quite informative as well. Dawkins is a biologist who speaks with great lucidity and authority on issues of biology and religion. Hitchens is a writer and much sought-after commentator with the articulateness and vocabulary to demonstrate his brilliant, steel trap of a mind. He's also utterly fearless when it comes to pissing people off and moreover, he's got enough asshole in him that he clearly relishes the opportunity, as the hundreds of videos of his frequent news appearances and public speeches demonstrate.
The irony with Hitchens is that he seems so lucid and well thought out and logical when it comes to most issues of public policy and culture and religion, and yet he's still 100% behind the Iraqi occupation and thinks it's a great thing that Dubya pushed for war, and that the world is far better off with the US squatting atop a burgeoning/ongoing civil war in Iraq. The weird part is that Hitchens isn't delusional about it; he's not your typical neocon who thought the Iraqi people would greet the foreign soldiers with rose petals, and Hitchens doesn't ignore reality and claim all is well, that the surge is working, etc. He's quite pragmatic about the horrible situation in the country and the quagmire the US armed forces are stuck in; he just thinks anything is better than Iraq having nukes, and thinks Iran should be next on the agenda, and that the invasion and occupation of that country that Bush is clearly pushing for would be an equally good idea. (And I think he's right on that last part, with "equally good" being the keyword.)
The difficulty for me, and I assume for others who admire Hitchens' speaking ability and his opinions on culture and religion, is how to reconcile my general agreement with his opinions on religion and culture and faith, with his neocon-leaning policies in the Middle East. Even that's too broad a term, since he's not a neocon. He's not at all sympathetic to Israel, and thinks the right wing Israelis are the ones ruining any chance for peace in their country. Furthermore, Hitchens violently disagrees with and opposes the US Christian fundamentalists who support every bit of violence and war in Israel, since their interpretation of the Bible says that the Holy Land must be united under the Jewish people in order for the rapture and the Second Coming to proceed on schedule. Yet those are precisely the people who are most in agreement with Hitchens on his approval of US invasion and occupation of Iraq and Iran.
My take, after giving it thought on and off during the months I've been watching these clips on Google Videos, is that Hitchens is so vehemently opposed to religious fundamentalism, especially of the overly murderous Arab/Islamic stripe, that he's willing to do just about anything to keep such people from obtaining nuclear weapons, and will believe any claims about those aims, no matter how far fetched. I've even heard Hitchens defend/propound the generally laughable argument that Saddam actually had bombs 'o plenty, and that they were not found by US inspectors since they were smuggled into Syria or Iran or other bordering countries before/during the early days of the US invasion. (Never mind the fact that Saddam hated and had waged outright or covert wars against those countries.)
I don't really agree with Hitchens on that issue, but I can see his point, and I guess I would agree with him if I took a very worst case scenario approach to things, and thought the dam could be kept from bursting with enough fingers in enough leaky holes. What's most interesting to me about it is the bedfellows he ends up with through his views. People like, for instance, Jerry Falwell. Someone Hitchens clearly despised, yet someone who would probably cite Hitchens' support on the Iraq/Iran invasion front, in an, "Even the atheists/leftists agree with this policy!" sort of way. If he (Falwell) weren't dead, I mean.
This is a measure of Hitchens' integrity and the strength of his opinions (or possibly his belligerence); that he will stick to what he believes even when they put him in the same camp with people he loathes in every other way. Few of us are that resolute in our beliefs; I know I'd give something a lot of second and third thought if it turned out that my opinion on it was doctrinally identical to the fundamental principles of oh, Neo Nazis, or fanatical terrorists, or Paris Hilton. Not that I'd change my mind on an issue just because people I disliked and held no respect for agreed with me, but more in terms of "If they like it, there must be something wrong with it." Knowing Hitchens as I do (from watching his TV appearances) I think he probably gets a kick out of it, in some perverse fashion.
You must remember, though, that most who even so much as pay attention to political affairs almost invariably go into an "us vs. them" mentality. Truth is, if everybody would just stop thinking of political opponents as stupid, ignorant enemies and started examining ideas for themselves rather than aligning with a generic camp and "holding the party line," things would be a lot better.
By the way, religion is nothing more than a red herring this day and age. It is true that it gives people license to do horrible things, but that is only after it is politicized and corrupted. In its absence, people would just find some other flag under which to kill each other. Getting rid of religion or even campaigning against it will only breed more hate, and it will validate those who don't think for themselves to bring harm to the large but largely invisible sect of good religious people.
Sheesh...seems the biggest thing this world has to fear are generalizations. If you think about it, that is the true source of most of the major conflicts we've seen recently...
Even though Iraq was not a haven for terrorists before 2003, it is now. Before leaving, we should at least have the foresight to install some secular dictator to rule the country with an iron fist (sound familiar?), preferably with pro-U.S. sentiments. This isn't guaranteed to work, but what other choice do we have?
The cindy sheehans, code pinks, and moveon.orgs would have a much more effective anti-war stance if they had some idea of how to handle Iraq once we left.
