Graymatters

I just read this sentence out of I.A. Richards’s Practical Criticism.

Reasons for this order will make themselves plain as we proceed, for these difficulties depend one upon another like a cluster of monkeys.

I do not think that I am familiar with this terminology.

-th

…not good bedfellows.  I know that by posting this no one is going to read my earlier post about the Mars lander, but if I don’t post this now it’ll lose its relevance.

I was walking from my carrel to the periodicals room, and as I entered the hallway connecting the south and north wings, I smashed into someone coming out of the stairwell (see diagram 1).  This someone was a smaller woman who was holding a bunch of books and papers, which she dropped when I smashed into her.  Oh, yeah, also she was listening to her fucking ipod!  I know this because she had to turn it off after I knocked her shit all over the place.  She gave me a mean look and for a moment the thought of kicking her crap down the stairwell flashed through my mind.  Instead I shrugged and went on my way.

I contend that although I ran into her, this was mostly her fault.  I am wearing my Keens which make a lot of noise, especially in the echo-y and squeaky halls of the library, so if she had not been listen to music, she would’ve heard me and not thrown herself into my path so recklessly.  Therefore, I would’ve been completely justified in kicking her shit down the stairs had I not decided to be incredibly magnanimous in just walking away.

-th

The possibility that the Phoenix lander will find evidence of life on Mars is very exciting for many geeks like myself raised on Star Wars, Transformers, and Ender’s Game. In my looking around for more information on the landing, I ran into some people that are not excited about the possibility of life on Mars (religious types mostly). One article, however, I found interesting.

Nick Bostrom writes in an article called “Dread Planet” that evidence of life on Mars would be bad news for humanity. He discusses Robin Hansen’s notion of the “Great Filter.” This idea posits that since we have not had any hint of extra-terrestrial life, despite the overwhelming numbers of possible starting points, that there must be some obstacle in development that has stood in the way of our detecting life. I am not sure how sound this idea is; nevertheless, Bostrom makes the point that this obstacle can either be behind us or still to come. Either we have somehow, improbably already gotten past the stumbling block that trips up life everywhere else, or the block remains in front of us. Bostrom thinks that if we find evidence of life on Mars that I’ll will mean that it is more likely that the obstacle is still in front of us, and this, for him, is a scary thought for humanity.

I think, however, that Bostrom has actually got it all backwards. When we begin to think in these larger time scales it is easy to fall back into the myths of progress, that there will always be a future and it will always be brighter and better than now. This is the opiate of technological society: the limitlessness of the future. So, I think that Bostrom has got it backwards. What we need to think is that we have no future, that there is a barrier which life cannot pass. It seems like thinking that we has no future, that we should not think about the future, would be incompatible with goals like environmentalism, but it actually increases its urgency, because we do not change in order to make the world better for the next generations but to make a better now. If I hated you all more, I’d talk about Foucault’s “What is Enlightenment?” for a while here. Luckily, I’m feeling generous.

So, in the end, I guess that I’m excited about the possibility of finding evidence of life on Mars but for quite the opposite reason than my twelve-year-old self would be.

-th

I’ve got to get assigned a family crest by royalty. Just finished a tour of the old Jameson distillery in Dublin (Thom expect a golf related Jameson gift and expect my loyalties to shift from Glenmo to Jame-O) and the Jameson family was given a crest by the UK royals for their ability to sink, burn, and take pirate ships a-prize. I think it needs to be adapted/stolen for past, present, and future sailing trip family. Sine metu apparently means ‘without fear.’ What say you to ’sine ETOH et murio’?

Dear people with blogs without the RSS feed feature turned on,

Turn on your fucking RSS feed. You know who you are.

Sincerely,

T

The concert was a lot of fun. I definitely prefer seeing him with the Decemberists (although there is a certain amount of entertainment value in watching him sing and play guitar on the verses and then say, “And then the horns go: bah bah bah, bah bah bah bah bah bah”) but there were bonus features in the solo concert - as when he and the opening singer did a cover of “Cupid” by Sam Cooke that was pretty awesome, or when he sang a new song, a work in progress that might be on their next album. This song actually provided my favorite moment of the concert, when he forgot a line, remembered it, and sang it very quickly as he moved on to the next, prompting me to turn to Kevin and say, “Did he just sing “Your irreproachable blackguard of a father”?” To which Kevin replied, “Yes. That’s what was said to the inconsolable daughter.”

Start getting excited about the next Decemberists album, people.

Gwen

King Kong Vs. T-Rexes (2005)

This, also, is utter bullshit. It is universally known that I have very low standards when it comes to movie coherence and ‘realism’ (cf. The Core), but the idea that King Kong does not just survive an attack from three T-rexes but kill them all and save his girl-friend requires an inhuman suspension of disbelief. The idea is offensive not simply to our sense of natural order but to our aesthetic sensibilities. Who wants to see the monkey win? King Kong isn’t a badass; in fact his wallet probably has “wannabe carebear” written on it. Seriously, I’d take Bill Paxton on my team before I took “King” Kong.

-Thom

So I know that normally I let Thom and Ed handle the marine-related posts (I’m surprised Ed has been mute on the subject of the French ship just commandeered by pirates off the coast of Somalia!) but I have a personal connection to this story:

My parents were on a tourist ship that struck rocks in the Greek islands!  They were safely evacuated by local fishing boats, but not before my dad formed an unfavorable impression of the Greek Coast Guard.  You can read about it here, and here is the photo of their ship:

See, Thom?  I told you it was a real shipwreck!

Gwen

This commercial makes me so angry. The yogurt eating tart deliberately misleads the seamstress and then treats her like a moron.

-George Orwell