Who said the Swedes were allowed to make movies?

I had no idea that those fine folks who delivered unto the world those delicious Swedish Fish also made movies. I just got through watching The Seventh Seal, which is about neither numbers nor hairless aquatic dog-like creatures (as far as I can tell), but quite interesting nonetheless.

I had the night off work tonight. My first Friday night off since the end of January--wow. I'm wow'ing because I actually did work tonight, but only for three hours or so. It feels like I didn't work tonight, let's put it that way.

The Athens Twilight Criterium bike race / festival is this weekend, so downtown was absolutely ridiculous tonight. They blocked off about half the streets and set up beer gardens and stages and such. Pretty crazy town I live in. Tomorrow night I'll be at work, and I'm almost glad. As much fun as it would be to see the race taking place quite literally at my doorstep, I'd rather not deal with the crowds. That is, the loud drunken buffoons looking for an excuse to get more belligerent and hopefully not stumbling off the sidewalk onto the street where the bikes go whizzing by at 40 mph.

We are a strange generation. I don't even like such distinctions, as much fun as they can be. That said, we are a strange generation. I suppose when I say that I'm talking about the so-called Generation-Y. We're not quite gen-x'ers anymore, and they're going to have to distinguish between us and the next group of kids, the current infants through 15-years olds. They will be the generation who grew up with the internet, the ones who don't know life without e-mail and instant messaging and pop-up ads. This may sound like a strange distinction to make for a generational divide, but I'm right, no matter what the goofy sociologists say some day.

That said, that said, we are a strange generation. We are college-educated because that is what we are supposed to do after public high schools finish babysitting us. We grew up watching twenty-five-year-olds portray us as sixteen-year-olds in bad television teen drama. Half or more of us grew up with only one of our actual parents in the house, and most of us are thankful for that fact at this point. Now we are at college and we (or most of them) go to bars packed so full of flesh you can't move in any direction without making some very special new friends. Here we get loaded to the point of falling down stairs and just plain down, so drunk that the only thing we remember the next day is our name and how many times we vomited last night. We have turned popular music into some really awful shite, and attempted, at least as much as predecessors, if not more, to eliminate any notion of learning from what even fairly recent history has to offer.

But we too will one day rule the world. We will make the art that changes what art means. We will declare the great american novel dead, and we will rewrite our own history before anyone else has a chance to figure us out.

I have a lot to say about this, and in a much more specific way, but I'm being asked to be done with this, and it's bedtime and all that.

Goodnight.

Fluoridation of our drinking water is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face.

You can all blame Augie for the lack of a post recently. He's a filthy thief, and he's been hogging all the bandwidth for the last few days illegally downloading a television show, rendering the internet unbearably slow. Hey feds! Go after him! He's constantly thieving, and I can provide all the relevant personal details about his whereabouts, eating habits, social security number, and permanent address.

We did a record night at work tonight. $4587.67 net sales, almost exclusively in $5.00 large one-topping pizzas. It was pretty crazy. Everything ran fairly smoothly, though.

The header of this post is a quote from a really great movie. It's a lot easier than the last one. Gold star to the person who can name the movie and the character who says it. And by the way, it was a David Bowie song last time. Come on, people. Get on the ball.

I knew personally two people who died very recently, and they died in about as opposite ways as possible. The first was a co-worker. He was young--23 or so. He died of a drug overdose. So it goes. He's the first young person who died while I was still interacting with him on a daily basis. It's really strange--I can't say that I was terribly surprised or even terribly sad. He was a near-constant abuser of drugs, and it was obvious that he didn't place too much value on his own life. I guess that's the sad thing. He was a really sweet guy and a hard worker, though rarely a competent one. I hope that he is at peace now, given the chaos of his physical life. I can only imagine that his consciousness that survived is now able to recognize the fundamental immensity of his being.

The other person who died was in her mid-eighties, but really even older. So it goes. They knew she was going to die, it was just her time. Apparently she accepted the fact of her death with grace and died peacefully. That's the way to do it.

I am both excited and scared out of my mind about my own eventual demise, like most people, I think. Mostly I'm afraid that I'll leave some unfinished business, that I won't get done what I expect myself to get done here. I'm excited because I can barely wait to answer the unaswerable questions that I can barely rationally philosophize about here. Does it occur to anyone else that pending physical death is the one thing that we all have in common, but the last thing anyone ever wants to talk about? We'll wax on about pointless political debates and irresolvable moral differences but won't touch our own mortality with a ten-foot pole.

On a lighter note, the book of Deuteronomy says that a woman found not to be a virgin when married should be stoned to death by the townspeople (Deuteronomy, Ch. 22, verse 20-21). Same goes for rebellious children (Deuteronomy, Ch 21, verse 18-21). And apparently any wearing of such clothing as a polyester and cotton mix, or a cotton and wool sweater, or any such evil mixing of threads in one garment is right out, because god forbids it (Deuteronomy Ch 22, verse 11). (This is, of course, the classic argument put forth as to why god hates gay people--fags love those poly-cotton-silk blends.) And by the way: "If you are not careful to observe every word of the law which is written in this book, and to revere the glorious and awesome name of the lord, your god, he will smite (!) you and your descendants with severe and constant blows, malignant and lasting maladies." (Deuteronomy, Ch 28, verse 58-59.) I think I just changed my mind about the god-of-the-bible thing. First of all, smiting is always cool, and he's going to do the smiting with severe and constant blows! What a badass.

I can always count on some old testament proclamations to cheer me up. Deuteronomy is especially fun.

The horror of life is that a simple five-minute conversation with any random human being can sometimes be so profoundly absent of rational thought and completely void of meaning that you realize the fight against whatever it is I'm fighting is hopelessly out of reach. The beauty of life is that a simple five-minute conversation with any random human being can sometimes be so perfect that it reminds you what incredible, infinite power we have to overcome the forces in the world that would have you believe in your own insignificance. Smite this.

The time is fast approaching and I'm spending all my time writing philosophy papers and getting underpaid to run a pizza place. Watch as the years go flying by and the world comes to an end. The war is here. Communication is our only weapon.

Enough late night rambling! Maybe someday I'll do a real post again. Goodnight all.

Oh! You pretty things...

It's been a while, I know. I've been busy! Way too many papers and such to do in this college place.

I really don't have much to say tonight, either. Far too tired. Maybe if i just ramble on a bit I'll figure out something to talk about...

Let's play a game. The title of this post is the name of a song. Name the artist! Can you do it without Googling? Without cheating at all? If you do it without cheating you get a gold star.

Einstein once threw a bowling ball at his sister and hit her in the skull. And mom thought Chris and I were too violent.

Note to self: Don't make fun of teenaged sister on the bobblog, because it pisses off the fundies.

How in the world does one insignificant post about the terrifying nature of thirteen-year-old girls end up sparking the most heated debate thus far on this site? Enough of that. Most everyone reading this knows how I feel about what was being discussed on that thread, and I know I'll never get anywhere trying to convince some of the people I care about and love a great deal that what they believe at their core is wrong. Certainly not in this forum, anyway. My final comments on the matter are as follows...

I tried to avoid talking about my own personal morality in my previous comments, and I think I did so with good reason. I was trying to point out that as I see it, there is only one "fundamental" law that human beings ought to follow. That law is: The freedom of any given individual extends only so far as the freedom of another individual. That is to say that I should not infringe in any way upon the freedom of someone else. By freedom I essentially mean the will. I don't think this law really needs much further explanation...if it does, let me know.

Further moral rules can, and do, exist for each individual. It is necessary, by my view, that if these are to be truly moral rules, those rules cannot (by definition) contradict in any way the fundamental law of freedom. My personal morality dictates that when I have children, I will attempt to pass on to them the same core of self-respect and respect for humanity that I have realized myself. Mom and dad and Unk Gil and Louise and Brian and Augie and Lori and my countless other teachers in this life contributed in their own very specific ways to force me to question myself and my beliefs, and I am greatly indebted to all of them for helping me realize my own belief structure. I aim to become that teacher figure to my own children...and ULTIMATELY... THE WORLD. Bwahaha. (Insert evil, world-dominating laughter, dim lights, play string instruments loudly, generally heighten dramatic mood ten-fold.)

I haven't outlined a personal morality here (beyond that one law) because I can't argue for it, I can't support it, and I can't claim that it should apply to anyone but myself. I will in the future hope that my children respect my morality and adopt chunks of it themselves, but hope in one hand and shit in the other and never, ever touch me again, please. The problem is that far too many people believe they have found the answers to every moral question that exists and that their moral laws should be everyone's moral laws. I won't even begin to play that game here by setting myself up by outlining my morality. Hell, I doubt I could if I tried, anyway.

I've been accused here of having a warped view of christianity, and my only response to that is quite simply, no I don't. When I talk about christianity, I'm not talking about the teachings of Jesus Christ, because I don't believe that the majority of christians are actually following what Christ taught. Jesus himself would have agreed with the fundamental law of freedom I mentioned above--in a less distilled form the law could be explained as "love your neighbor as you love yourself". If he actually believed he was the son of god to any greater degree than you or I are sons and daughters of god, then he was delusional. I'd rather believe that the people who followed him saw his life as an opportunity to create a religion around a man, and did so rather successfully. But maybe he was nuts. A very enlightened nut, but a nut nonetheless.

I don't think I have created a "straw-god" either. The god I refer to in the previous comments page is indeed a god who, according to his most ardent supporters, allows some people to suffer in hell for eternity. This is not a god I could ever believe in, or respect. I am not exaggerating when I say that I'd rather spend eternity separated from such a god (if he existed) in hell than with him in heaven. I cannot put this any more bluntly. In believing that an infinite god would punish, that god could hate (straight from the most hardcore christians I know), you have created god in your image and, unfortunately, your own self-image is not pretty.

But I really, really, really, don't want to turn the bobblog into a running debate about christianity. By all means, within the context of comments on this post and the last one, please keep it up. And I will no doubt return to the subject, but I don't want to make this site about that. Believe me, it is tempting--not only can I talk about it endlessly, I actually see it as a goal of mine to change people's minds about those beliefs. But I'm not yet fully equipped to do so.

I think that's all I have to say for now. Philosophy papers need finishing, and at some point I should probably get some sleep. I'll be done with the most overwhelming part of the schoolwork I have to do by next Tuesday or so, and by then I hope to get back to connecting the will thing with the all possible worlds thing with the rest of my philosophy.

Note to Augie...thinking about the interconnectedness/network thing. Will devote a post to it soon...

Thirteen year-olds are horrifying humanoid creatures.

It was less than a decade ago that I was thirteen years old. It occurs to me now that either everything has changed since I was that age, or I have intentionally removed from my memory my entire adolescence. Maybe I should qualify the lead up there... I should have said: Thirteen year-old girls are horrifying humanoid creatures. Maybe they've always been horrifying--this is certainly possible. But technology isn't helping. The wrenching 'tween drama and anarchic "grammar" of my sister's AIM away messages alone is enough to curdle my stomach acid. And the music the kids are listening to these days! And no thirteen year-old should ever use the phrase "hook-up" in reference to peers of the opposite gender-bias. If I ever have female offspring, she will go to boarding school in the Yukon at age three, where there will be no MTV or internet or anything but snow. This is for her own good. She will know I love her because I will send her giant winter parkas and thick winter blankets on her birthdays because it is cold in the Yukon. I only know that it is cold in the Yukon because of the Calvin and Hobbes comic in which Calvin and Hobbes head for the Yukon, and ultimately fail because Calvin is six years-old and Hobbes is a stuffed tiger, and because the Yukon is remote from all of society, but good for sledding, For Christmas she will be allowed to return home, but in a bubble. Yukon, Ho!

That's pretty much it for tonight. I'm mulling over a lengthy conversation I had with the Unk Gil, and wondering how close something we were talking about was discussed in more literal (though ultimately unacheivable) terms by Habermas.

And how 'bout them Braves? Little 13th inning magic from Chipper Jones goes a long way. They've now scored a remarkably pitiful 2 runs in 22 innings, but are 1-1 on the season. I can live with that.

A note on the $86 million I didn't win tonight.

Providence dictates that I win the lottery at some point--probably sooner than later. I guess I'll just have to wait for the $102 million on Friday night. Providence, you confound me. I would have settled for the $86,000,000.

I don't want to talk about the Braves' first game. It was a bit rough. I actually feel like it was good for Smoltz to get knocked around a bit for his first start since june of 2001. Hopefully it will take the edge off a bit for his next start, in Atlanta, on Sunday--where I'll be.

Peter Jennings has lung cancer. He too will die. So it goes. I always liked Peter Jennings, even though he leaked a tear or two after Bill Clinton's farewell address. I watched his coverage of 9/11 from the moment he came on the air until he finally went off at some point 18 or so hours later, and will likely always associate the event with his presence. Always seemed liked a good guy, even if he is part of the evil propagandizing globalist news media new world order illuminati mason skull and bones conspiracy designed to prepare the earth for the return of the Atlantians, whose nice city of Atlantis sunk into the ocean oh so long ago. Ever listen to Coast to Coast AM? Good stuff.

Let me try and clear up the free will thing, which I kind of glossed over and left hanging at the end of the last intelligent-sounding post...

I used the example of the window that never breaks. The window will never break, but it is, of course, still breakable. Classic philosophy 1000 stuff, perhaps meant to convince cowering freshman to go running back to church, hysterically crying to their preacher about the devil-thoughts being dangled in front of their eyes at college. But what do I mean by the example? Maybe it's a bad example for what I'm trying to say, and then again, maybe examples are just an excuse to avoid getting at the heart of what I'm trying to say. So I'll just be as clear as possible.

When people talk about the will, it seems to me that they far too often talk about it as something external to them. Christians, in the religious "Christ is the forgiver of my sins" sense, believe that free will is a gift from God, something given to humans, and is perhaps what gives us our greatest resemblance to him. A lot of the philosophers I've read seem to make a similar mistake--when talking about free will it is often discussed as something that exists outside of the human condition, as a trait or characteristic but not as a necessary factor of being human.

Let's play under someone else's rules for a minute... If there is a God, in the Creator sense, it is mistaken to think of him/her/it as "having" a will. If such a being exists, it would have to be simply WILL. When God says in the Bible "I am who am," I think he makes a mistake. (Cocky son of a gun, eh?) He is making a statement of ontological significance, talking about his being. God can't be a who at all...if God is uncreated himself, his essence would have to be simply the will. If he were anything more than the WILL at the beginning, something had to have pre-dated his existence that decided what his traits would be. He's not a who, if he exists at all, all you could say about him is that he is the will. And haven't a bunch of somebody's said a bunch of times in bunches of ways better than me that the most egotistical thing we can do as humans is create god in our image? Suggesting that god has traits or characteristics like we do does just that...calling him the will does not.

Okay, if I have explained the above to a reasonable degree, hopefully the rest won't be so hard.

Now, instead of thinking of yourself as your physical and mental characteristics, your personality and pants-size, what if you thought about yourself as simply the will. What defines you as you at your core is "willing". This is not to say that your personality and pants-size don't also represent you in some very real sense, but rather they are what is external to the actual you--instead of your will being considered that which is external, perceived as some sort of gift, it is the essential.

If you accept that premise, it seems to me that the rest is gravy. My finite circle of infinity is the result of my will, my existence. It is who I am, in it "I am who am." It cannot possibly be contrary to my will...it is my will. (Look! I'm doing it too! Calling it "my" will. This sort of thing can be hard to escape.) Not "my" will, but me. I am inseperable from my will. I can't say it any better than that right now, which is frustrating.

Maybe that has cleared some of the window thing up. I think it does. If not, just forget about the window example completely and go based on what I said above here. I'm getting back to all possible worlds soon, I think.

By the way, I'm a sucker for knowing who has been reading this thing. Just a hello to let me know who is reading, even if you have nothing to actually say about the post. I would greatly appreciate it.

Goodnight all.

Back in the saddle again.

I saw the movie "Sin City" tonight. Let me preface the following comments by saying that this is not a movie I am recommending to everyone. Did you hate Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs? A Clockwork Orange? Starship Troopers? Don't see this movie. Mom, if this movie was actually a meal you were sitting down to it would be a bloody slab of steak next to a pile of bacon with a pitcher of beer to wash it all down. Not your bag of chips. That said...

Sin City is one of the coolest movies you will ever see. Is it violent? See the above movies, and put them all together. Is it gory? Remember the stomach-turning brain-sucking bug from Starship Troopers? Yeah, it's that bad (good). Are most of the female leads scantily clad throughout? Like it was 1973. Even the mom from Spy Kids shows up in the buff. Is there some sort of moral or message? Hell no. As far as I can tell, the only message is "Be glad you don't live in our town."

Remember in Pulp Fiction when every character you meet is just plain cool...so cool that you know this is a movie because there aren't that many cool people in the world? You meet Travolta and Sam Jackson, and they're spouting old testament fire and brimstone as they blow away their victims. You think, whoa, those guys are cool. Then you meet Bruce Willis, and damn, he's cool too. And then you meet Harvey Keitel, and he's so cool he makes everybody else look like an umbrella-in-your-pink-lemonade-loving nancy. This movie takes that to the next level. Every character is a warrior, with maybe one notable exception. They all chew asphalt for breakfast. They're just plain cool but you wouldn't want to hang out with a single one of them.

But this movie is about the visuals. And they are perfect, brilliant, and indescribable. This is what digital filmmaking is all about. What a movie. Highly recommended.

I'll be going to the Braves game on Sunday...as far as I can tell, it will be John Smoltz's first start in Atlanta in years, assuming the rotation holds up for the first week. Opening day for the Braves tomorrow in Florida...4 p.m. on TBS.

Go buy the new Beck CD. Immediately.

It's called Guero. It's fantastic. It rocks and grooves. He will be remembered as one of the greatest.

I'm taking a little break from the philosophy-speak tonight. You try working with a bunch of 16 year-olds all night and then thinking clearly afterwards. I have a newfound respect for parents, and a slightly less vague idea of what dad means when he says "your life is over as soon as you have kids." All teachers probably need to be commited.

A note about feminism, and most other ism's...why is racism bad but feminism good? Racist, supremacist, elitist, fascist, socialist, communist, fundamentalist...feminist. Maybe that's the point, though. Maybe the oppression of women is so complete that even their movement gets lopped in with all the other ist's, relegated to the trash heap of discarded and humiliating parts of human history. But then again, maybe it belongs there.

I'm taking a feminist philosophy class this semester. There is about as much philosophy going on in this class as you might find in a Waffle House thirty miles south of Macon, GA at four in the morning. Speaking of which, ever notice the Waffle House policy of the waitress calling out the order to the cook instead of writing it down for him? Such faith in the literacy level of your employees you have, oh WaHo.

But back to feminism...I don't think it should be completely ignored. The women's rights movement was indeed essential for the growth of our country and western society as a whole. (Now that I have copped out...) But get over it already, quite simply. The authors that we are reading conflate the situation of western women today with American slavery, domesticated animals, and Coca-Cola products. All of this while they live in a society that lets them speak their mind, publish their fundamentalist garbage, and do basically whatever they want--at the same time that the religions and cultures of the east really do treat women as property and while 97% of women in Egypt are still genitally mutilated. But man oh man, have they got it rough here.

And I guess it all boils back down to fundamentalism. If there is only one truth, and you've found it, it can be tough to let go, to ever admit that your one Truth is nothing but the worst of your own biases and psychosis emotionally manifest as Clarity.

So. Don't ever take feminist philosophy at the University of Georgia taught by Sherman, though it has provided a great deal of entertainment, and more violent, destructive, dream fantasies than any other class I've had.

As Father Kurt says, there is nothing to be said about a massacre except what the birds say. Poo-tee-weet.

Terry Schiavo is dead. So it goes. I have nothing to say about that situation except that Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity deserve 15 years in limbo between dead and alive for turning her situation into a talking point for the republican party. Go read the constitution, please. And no, I'm not talking about the New Testament, Rush, though you would benefit from a better understanding of that, too. Heil, heil, heil.

But seriously. Go get Guero. Tune out the awful cycle of broadcast hatred for a little bit. Next time I'll be in a better mood. Goodnight all.