I note that unlike most North Americans, I understand the roots of Labour Day. And while what I do has no relationship to organized labour, I do find something bitterly ironic about taking a day off to celebrate the standard work week (among other things) when I am regularly working some hours almost every week night to accommodate Australian coworkers,… Read more →
Picking At Religion Again
And now for your intermittently recurring muttering about the extremely religious. Christianity: The belief that some cosmic Jewish Zombie can make you live forever if you symbolically eat his flesh and telepathically tell him that you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a rib-woman was… Read more →
Sometimes you have these thoughts…
So, about that whole mind-body divide thing. What if we go with the assumption that it’s a kind of hardware/software situation: that the chemistry and the organics are a machine that manipulates a something else–a pattern of energy, an emergent system. The changes in this pattern result in what we perceive as consciousness. Hell, maybe the pattern can even exert… Read more →
I’ve been waiting to hear exactly that
“Our mission is to restore America’s influence and position in the world. We must use all the weapons in our arsenal, above all, our values. President Obama and Vice President Biden will shut down Guantanamo, respect the Constitution, and make clear once and for all, the United States of America does not torture, not now, not ever.” —Senator John Kerry,… Read more →
Things I Did Not Know Last Month
The reason I didn’t know what a rowan tree looks like is, apparently, that I’ve always seen them labelled as either “European Mountain Ash” or “Dogberry” trees. So, rather than being some esoteric European tree, they’re all over the place. This will make my offensive against the malevolent beings much simpler. The oldest joke in the world is a fart… Read more →
Old John Paul is keepin’ a tab
My musical crush on Montreal blueswoman Dawn Tyler Watson continues. While “Hey Hey” is still the top of my playlist, some of the covers from the recent En Duo album are climbing up. For instance the cover of Patty Griffin‘s tune “Wiggley Fingers” (lyrics) on the album is pretty amazing. Something about Dawn’s voice, especially when she gets to the… Read more →
Context
Have I spoken of the Lapham’s Quarterly blog? It’s a fine, fine thing–they take current topical news stories, and link them to something contextual from history to provide a different view, or highlight a particular nuance, etc. A recent piece, contrasts some US election pandering with… well, that would be telling, but anyway you should check it out. The editors… Read more →
What’s the -philia for books?
…because man I love books. I love the good stories, and I love the well-crafted physical objects as well. Love ’em. So let’s talk about a whole bunch of book-related topics, to give me a book fix. First I’d like to do a little bit of a rant about books as commercial objects. Actually, as I’m intelligent enough to understand… Read more →
Damn I Am Old
Nothing on this year’s Beloit College Mindset List hit me quite as hard as this one: Windows 3.0 operating system made IBM PCs user-friendly the year they were born. Damn. Read more →
Indie Artist, multiple media
My pal Danny Michel just whipped up a homemade video for the track “Tell Sally” from his latest album. Check it out. Apparently the budget for making this video was… $9.00. I love living in the age of digital media. Speaking of making art with digital toys, Danny has also made the all the raw tracks from his latest album… Read more →
For the record
Time flies
How is it that four years have gone by so fast? Does it really only take four years to turn a gang-sign throwing newborn into a young lady who uses facepaints to make herself into a tiger? 2004-08-18: 2008-08-18: I found myself at breakfast this morning with the birthday girl, her mom, and her grandfather. During a moment alone with… Read more →
T-shirts from futures past
After four years of wearing only solid colourMostly black, I admit. t-shirts for everyday wear–primarily a habit I developed during my daughter’s infancy, as between her and I several shirts a day were suffering various stains, and I wanted cheap, “hot swappable” clothing–I am starting to pick up a few new interesting printed shirts. (Yes, I have lots of “not… Read more →
Silence Falls On Mecca’s Walls
And now, because I couldn’t turn up a copy of this online todayGoogle so rarely fails me these days, and ironically, once I had looked it up I was able to find a copy with a non-title search. when I wanted to refer to it during a heated discussion of US foreign policy, and I had to go pull out… Read more →
Still more on evolution
I read the drepessing statistic today that only 58% of people across Canada will support the notion of evolution. Actually, it’s 58% more or less consistently across Canada, except in Alberta, our little bit of Jesusland here in the heart of Canada, where the number is 38%. (Note: it’s not an accident that our current minority government of Bush/Cheney style… Read more →
