Some smartass has signed me up to the Christian Family Coalition mailing list. Either that, or they are conducting an apocalyptic e-mail address Soul Harvest. Blasphemy will get you kicked out of heaven, but it won't deter conservative Christians from hitting you up for money.
Anyway, in the spirit of crisatunity, I am going to make good use of their spam by publicly mocking it.
To: hime@[redacted] Subject: Thousands of Christians Rally in San Francisco to Protect Marriage!
Even in San Francisco, where homosexual extremists have taken over the
political establishment and have used their "power" to discriminate against
Christians, the message was loud and clear about marriage.
On Sunday, nearly 8,000 Christians from more than 180 churches came
together for a rally supporting traditional marriage. Chinese, Korean,
African-American, Caucasian, Hispanic, Filipino and Vietnamese people from
the San Francisco Bay Area lined the streets and held signs that read,
"Honk for Traditional Marriage," sending a strong message to the California
Legislature and Gov. Schwarzenegger (R) that marriage is the union of one
man and one woman.
"We applaud Pastor Kwong, the event organizer for his bold courage and
determination in standing up for marriage in California", said Anthony
Verdugo, Founder and Executive Director, Miami-Dade Christian Family
Coalition.
According to Pastor Kwong, the event boosted morale in the San Francisco
area and emboldened the community to take a stand. Pastor Kwong said it was
a "wonderful assurance of the Lord that this is His will, and His plan for
His people is to stand in San Francisco and be salt."
The award presenters are introduced in the form of a mystery, i.e. various facts about the presenters are revealed as clues before their names are stated. (Incidentally, the flow of bad puns shows no sign of ceasing.)
I am at the Edgars. The ceremony opened with some ridiculous song on acoustic guitar. They have now moved on to bad puns. More updates as events warrant.
I leave tomorrow (today, technically) for NYC, and will return Sunday. Therefore the posting frequency here will probably continue to be low. However, tune in Thursday night for possible live blogging of the Edgar awards (depending on just how inconspicuously I can tap away on my phone).
While I'm gone, I recommend submitting an entry to the Kerry-oke songwriting contest.
Most people seemed to know last week's quote, which was from Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode 2x16 "Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered":
Amy: Oh, I don't know, Xander. Intent has to be pure with love spells.
Xander: Right. I intend revenge. Pure as the driven snow.
The local Jack in the Box has recently set up their drive-thru speaker to play a recorded message when a car pulls up: "Welcome to Jack in the Box, how may I help you?" This has led to some hesitation on my part since, while the recording seems to be asking for my order, there's no guarantee that anyone is actually listening. I can think of at least three approaches:
My blogging time has been sucked away by other activities this week, and it's difficult to brainstorm interesting posts when one is thinking about networks of copper tubing all day. Maybe this weekend I'll have more opportunity for recreational thought and can be more active in this space.
There are a number of interesting posts on Crooked Timber today, notably this one on Graduate Students and Technology, which raises the question: "How much technical knowledge/ability should we require our graduate students to have[?]" The author, a philosopher, suggests:
Here’s some suggestions for skills graduate students should have.
- How to use Powerpoint in lectures
- How to manage a large course website, including interactive features
- How to setup maintain a large database for administrative tasks
As for maintaining large administrative databases, I believe this is usually something physicists leave to their secretaries, but I gather secretarial resources are rather less abundant in philosophy departments.
In experimental physics there are a number of technical skills which are important for graduate students to learn, but the importance of knowing them decreases thereafter in one's academic career (since one has one's own graduate students to do these things):
(Or: Contribute to my public humiliation)
On Tuesday, May 4 I will attend Kerry-oke, a John Kerry fundraiser at a Berkeley karaoke bar. The event is described as follows:
Sing for Kerry! Come out and show your Karaoke skills. Rewrite lyrics to your favorite song for John Kerry, for America, or for the 2004 election.
Last week: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. This week's difficulty: Moderate, 2 points.
Here's a piece in the NYTimes explicating some tiny fraction of the film references in Kill Bill. Contains some minor spoilers for vol. 2.
You may not want to click below if you haven't seen Kill Bill vol. 2 yet.
Continue reading "Kill Bill Comments With Spoilers"Since Kill Bill was originally one movie, split into parts, once I had seen the first part it was natural to try to extrapolate what the second part would be like. The first thing I will say about vol. 2 is that my extrapolation was very far off; I was surprised by how different it was, in a lot of ways, from the first part.
Anyway, I'm still absorbing all of it, but it was very good. The second part spends much more time on character development than its predecessor, and it really pays off; The Bride, Budd, Elle Driver, and Bill are all incredibly interesting and well-drawn, and at the end my deepest impressions of the movie are centered on these personalities.
Also, Tarantino seems to have been reading his Joseph Campbell. I think all the elements of the classical hero myth are in there.
On another note, the audience was very well-behaved except for one really obnoxious guy. So naturally he was sitting almost directly behind me. Since my copy of Quicksilver was sitting on my lap, I considered re-enacting this Penny Arcade strip, but that would have required taking my eyes off the screen.
At about 8:30 this evening I started to feel a rather intense need to see Kill Bill vol 2, and it occurred to me that midnight showings might exist, even though my chances of getting a ticket seemed rather slim. Two hours later, having watched the first volume on DVD, I was driving across the Bay Bridge with Battle Without Honor or Humanity playing on the stereo. Now I'm updating by phone from the (very long) line at the theater. Spoiler-free review to follow later.
My post yesterday got me thinking about statements of the form "X is a gift from god" where X is actually some human achievement. In particular I was reminded of Mark Twain's treatment of this in Letters from the Earth. What he wrote was even more appropriate than I remembered. It's a little humbling to see that yesterday's blog post was a poor imitation of something written 95 years ago:
If science exterminates a disease which has been working for God, it is God that gets the credit, and all the pulpits break into grateful advertising-raptures and call attention to how good he is! Yes, he has done it. Perhaps he has waited a thousand years before doing it. That is nothing; the pulpit says he was thinking about it all the time. When exasperated men rise up and sweep away an age-long tyranny and set a nation free, the first thing the delighted pulpit does is to advertise it as God's work, and invite the people to get down on their knees and pour out their thanks to him for it. And the pulpit says with admiring emotion, "Let tyrants understand that the Eye that never sleeps is upon them; and let them remember that the Lord our God will not always be patient, but will loose the whirlwinds of his wrath upon them in his appointed day."They forget to mention that he is the slowest mover in the universe; that his Eye that never sleeps, might as well, since it takes it a century to see what any other eye would see in a week; that in all history there is not an instance where he thought of a noble deed first, but always thought of it just a little after somebody else had thought of it and done it. He arrives then, and annexes the dividend.
This morning, being on page 112 of Quicksilver, I was 832 pages behind in Neal Stephenson's Baroque Cycle. On the BART, I read eight pages. (It's a short ride.)
Now I am 1,656 pages behind.
I was unable to watch the press conference last night, and have therefore been reading the blogs to find out what I missed. Kevin Drum gave out awards, including this one:
Best performance: The second to last question. "I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country's gift to the world. Freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world." He was genuinely animated and seemingly full of conviction on this one.
So what does Bush's conviction about an obvious falsehood tell us? I can think of a few possibilities:
Because it would be too hard to resist doing this.
New Negative Campaign Ads Blast Voters DirectlyA controversial 30-second TV spot for Kerry that aired throughout the Midwest Monday blamed the country's ills not on Bush's policies, but on the "sheer stupidity" of America's voters.
"In the past four years, America's national debt has reached an all-time high," the ad's narrator said. "And who's responsible? You are. You're sitting there eating a big bowl of Fritos, watching TV, and getting fatter as the country goes to hell. You ought to be ashamed of yourself."
I actually enjoy certain kinds of nightmares, at least upon waking up; I find the experience somewhat akin to having just viewed a very immersive horror movie. A dream I had last night was of this type.
In the dream, a grad student in my department had been found murdered, and I had somehow taken it upon myself to investigate. Naturally my questions attracted the wrong kind of attention, and I soon found myself abducted off a dark street by some conspiratorial men in black. And this is where the dream started to get weird.
I was taken to a church service for a secret religious sect. The church itself was windowless (maybe underground), and the sides of the pews were painted with the major arcana of the tarot. As I entered an usher handed me a tarot card: Moon. I sat down in one of the pews at the back, but an elderly man next to me saw my card and indicated, wordlessly, that I should move to a different spot. I gathered that the symbol on the card was incompatible in some way with the one on the pew I had chosen (though I don't remember what the latter was). There was a sense of panic behind the man's eyes and I realized that he was not here of his own free will either.
During the service, the preacher would call newcomers up to the front, one-by-one, and engage them in some sort of role-playing exercise (the details fled my mind upon awakening) to demonstrate the danger to one's soul of not being fully committed to this particular cult. There was a clear subtext here that, hellfire aside, insufficient loyalty would be punished in this life through violent reprisals. I realized that this is what had happened to the grad student whose death I had been investigating. But before I could contemplate this further, it was my turn to go to the front of the church.
I don't remember what happened in this part of the dream, just the feeling of it -- the fear that my hostility to the organization would somehow be drawn from my mind by the preacher. I had to bluff my way through the encounter, pretend that I had been scared into obedience, even though I was already trying to think of ways to fight these guys once I got out of the lion's den. Somehow I passed muster and returned to my seat. A choir began to sing. I was wondering what else I would have to endure before I could make my escape, when my alarm went off and brought me back to reality.
It's overanalysis time. Some interpretations that come to mind:
A: (Null interpretation) It's meaningless subconscious debris.
B: (Obvious) I dislike religion, and find it rather creepy at times.
C: The cult in the dream isn't a religion at all, but represents academia. The ill-fated grad student embodies my observation that a lot of people in the pre-tenure stages of their academic careers are made unhappy by the extreme pressures involved, and I am looking for an escape from this.
D: The dream expresses a subconscious need for individuality. The persona of the lone investigator that I found myself in contrasts starkly with the cultist's demand for conformity.
E: (Gratuitous political interpretation) The dream expresses my fears about the increasing power of right-wing religious elements in our country, and especially their anti-science agenda.
Or, suggest your own. I have no idea about the significance of the tarot cards, although reading the description of Moon about doubled the creepiness.
Last week's quote: Cowboy Bebop, session 18: Speak Like A Child, English dub. Faye's call to the Bebop is answered by Ein, so when Ed shows up, she says: Well, I'm glad I reached a life-form that's capable of speech.
New quote is Difficulty: Easy, 1 point.
If, like me, you would like to see heavily armed preacher Roy Moore run for president, check out the new Draft Moore website. (via Slate) Roy Moore has taken a strong stand against the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded, and for that he fully deserves the nomination of the Constitution Party for President of the United States. (However, he should hold no political office higher than dogcatcher, and possibly not even that.)
I started Quicksilver yesterday. Already much more fun than the other historical novel I just finished. (Sorry, Dan.) I just hope Stephenson doesn't fall into the Shanghai Knights trap of "Look, our protagonists are encountering every historical figure of the era!" This gimmick very quickly gets old.
Anyway, I wanted to comment on this paragraph:
He'd stayed a week or two in Wilkins' chambers, and attended meetings of the Experimental Philosophical Clubb. This had been a revelation to him, for during the Civil War, practically nothing had been heard out of England. The savants of Leipzig, Paris, and Amsterdam had begun to think of it as a rock in the high Atlantic, overrun by heavily armed preachers.
Brad DeLong posted yesterday on the coffee habits of academics. My reactions:
Damn daylight savings time stole an hour of my weekend. Why don't we "spring forward" at, say, 4 pm Friday? Someone should look into this.
Last week's quote was, of course, from the 1985 film Real Genius, as all you "Pacific Tech" alums should have recognized instantly. The new quote is Difficulty: Formidable (4 points).
Ok, but where's the laser cannon?
List of movies to see in the next (approximately) 5 weeks:
Yesterday I ran across this post on American Street discussing the increasing involvement of churches in politics (an easy incitement to rant for me).
Churches on both the left and the right are getting more and more involved in the political process. That isn’t a bad thing (as long as the churches on the left win). The United Church of Christ is offering a new web site on how churches can become involved in the political process and still adhere to IRS laws for non-profits. Churches cannot, for example, endorse political candidates and maintain their tax exempt status. Yet churches can endorse ballot measures or reversely urge their congregants to oppose measures.
A second and more general reason this is bad, even in Bizarro America with its liberal churches, is that religion is simply not a good basis for policy formulation. Even if some churches occasionally take the right position on some issues, there's still no reason to believe that the sacred texts of the various religions were written by people expert on policymaking, especially 20 centuries removed. Nor do we think that the church leaders interpreting such texts should be considered particularly wise in areas like tax law or energy policy, especially when they've already demonstrated poor judgement by going into the clergy in the first place. (Ok, that was a cheap shot.) Now, I freely admit that it will be impossible in most cases to convince a religious person that this argument is correct, but that doesn't make it any less accurate.
And what's up with churches being allowed to endorse positions on ballot measures? Is this just a loophole, or is it somehow substantially different from endorsing a candidate for office? It seems to me that part of the deal with granting tax-exempt status is that churches stay out of the political process entirely. I can see that if a preacher declares that "it is God's law that marriage is between a man and a woman", this is not very different from an endorsement of California Proposition 22 (from March 2000) - ballot measures cover single issues and churches are certainly allowed to take positions on single issues. On the other hand, I do think there is a line, albeit a fine one, to be drawn between statements like the above and "Jesus demands you vote yes on 22". Surely we can, and should, prohibit the latter kind of endorsement for tax-exempt churches.