indicative of nothing whatsoever

just noticed that the first and last albums in my library, if excluding those named with numbers (18, 40 oz. to Freedom, 1984-1989, etc.), are Achtung Baby and Zooropa, both U2. this in spite of the fact that if pressed, i would pick neither as their best albums.

fotD 11

merry christmas, you little ingrate.

screw the whales - save yourselves

I read a lot of environmental stuff—blogs, green group magazines, articles in other-than-green sources, books, etc.—so the increasingly common phrase 'save the environment' has had more and more opportunity to stick in my craw.

It's a good thing that awareness is increasing on this issue, and that everyday people are starting to take action, but doing so to save the environment as if it's some external, and separate, thing that can even be saved is fallacy. It's not the environment, all the fluffy animals and trees out there that we can decide whether or not to help; it's our environment, the thin and complex envelope that makes our existence possible. It will continue to exist with or without us - our only imperative is to learn to screw with it as little as possible so that it doesn't kill us.

I'm just being cranky I guess toward a couple of admonitions from various green bloggers out there for perpetuating that phrase, and for in the latter case sounding laughably snotty. We're already a bunch of treehugging, hemp-wearing, plastic-bag-fishing, SUV-hating nerds - do we really need to give anyone more easy ammunition against the movement as a whole by being overbearing pricks too?

So if you check out those links, great. But while you're wrapping your hot water heater in insulation consider some bigger things you can do to save your ass:

• Eat mostly local, and toward the bottom of the food chain
• Have fewer children
• Figure out how to make a buck off recycling, alternative energy, and anything else green
• Vote
• Influence policy - David Brower could've driven a gas-powered whaling ship to work every day and still had a net positive effect on the globe
• Give your time and money to orgs like The Nature Conservancy and Sierra Club

the appeal of dumb, ugly guitarists

Trying to catch up on my Bloglines reading (at which I do only a mediocre job and then just mark the rest of my roll as 'read' so I'm not taunted by the hundreds of maybe interesting things that I actually haven't). Got distracted into an alpha male tutorial which is funny and un-David Byrne-ish (not less, just different) while also catching up on my very David Byrne-ish David Byrne blog reading, and realized I was reading about the same thing.

From Halley's Comment:

So I always think of some early Alpha Male caveman trying to come up with some THING to show his Wilma Flintstone counterpart. He probably tried a lot of things that didn't work, like a tuft of grass -- boring, boring, boring -- or some water. A little more interesting but no great shakes. So then, at his wit's end, he looks over and she's at the door of the cave watching Eohippus gallop by (the dawn horse, of course) and he thinks, "Well, shit! Here I am showing her a handful of water and she wants to look that pathetic Eohippus. How the hell am I supposed to get her over here to stand next me, so I can smell her and she can smell me, and then we can fuck, when all she wants to do is look at that stupid animal?!"

It hits him out of the blue and he grabs some old charcoal from last night's meat roasting fire and draws a pretty lousy picture of a running horse on the cave wall. And then he's got a pointy stick to show her -- now that's a cool thing -- and a picture. Now he's getting somewhere. And she comes over to see the thing he made. And she likes it and likes the fact that he noticed she was watching the horse out the cave door and understood that he could please her by drawing the horse for her. Maybe, she reasons, as cavewomen were rather savvy I must say, maybe he could please me in other ways. Hell, she thinks, maybe he'd show me that other thing of his. So she stops looking at his etching and turns to look at him ... (and get ready kids, since the two of them are about to start history as we know it).. and she smiles at him and one thing leads to another.

From Byrne:

Appropriately enough, just as I head to Miami for the Miami/Basel art fair extravaganza I finish the chapter in Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind on art [links mine, not Byrne's]. It’s sure to be controversial with this art fair crowd, as he posits that art evolved as a kind of display useful for sexual selection. One immediately thinks of the peacock’s tail when one hears display, but the peacock doesn’t make his tail — he’s born with it. Art is a display outside the body, made by the skill of the hand and mind. Miller posits that the ability of our minds to charm, seduce, captivate and enrapture — via artistic work, conversation, language, dance, sport — gives proof to potential mates that not only are we physically appealing, which can be assessed relatively quickly, but that we might have deeper levels of genetic fitness beneath the visible surface. Art, amongst other pursuits, is, according to this idea, one of a number of gauges of deeper fitness, creativity and skill.

Before you get all warm and fuzzy, your blog probably doesn't count as art, and it certainly isn't a demonstration of physical prowess. Buy flowers, or as the guy in the SoBe commercial says, "maybe learn to play the guitar."

good review by someone who doesn't get paid to review

Defective Yeti serves up a well-written critique that I might just agree with if I had seen Stranger Than Fiction... "a worthy DVD rental on an evening when you want something that manages to be both slightly unusual and thoroughly conventional."

With a Bomb and a Smile

My buddy Malcontent and I were power-segueing from a critique of our new office chairs into discussion of the belief that some suicide bombers evidently take with them to their deaths; that 72 virgins are going to be waiting for them in paradise.

What we quickly figured out was that the bombers are right AND god is just.*

72 virgins? Seriously? Not only are they virgins, a demographic viewed as highly desirable only to the most silly and crass, as every two-bit comedian has pointed out since 9/11, but there are seventy-two of them. 72 morning breaths, 72 ‘why don’t we talk anymore’s, 72 ‘when are we going to get married’s, 72 ‘I really want you to meet my friends’…

And to think they enthusiastically went to their martyrdom. Enjoy your hellish fruits, boys.


* Mal’s a believer; I laughingly blaspheme in his presence almost daily.

infamy

December 7^th, 1941, 7:55 am

2,388 killed and 1,178 wounded, 21 ships sunk, beached, or damaged, and 323 aircraft destroyed or damaged in two hours.

4 out of 5 crewmembers, or 1,177, of the USS Arizona died, the worst loss in US Navy history.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the photo

you'd think they could get an accurate count

David Sedaris was just in town and gave a show that was very funny and more quietly personal than any stand-up or spoken word I've seen.

Thanks to NPR and books on tape, I've heard him tell two good Christmas stories. Here's one of them:

malicious intent

An interesting post from Malcolm Gladwell on racism. Given his penchant for using headlines as an opportunity to channel and reveal the zeitgeist, he draws on the recent Kramer and Mad Max tirades to tease out how to consider hate speech (and surprises me with his judgment of Richards’ rant as I hadn’t looked deeply into the story behind the hysteria). He offers three criteria for judging a statement as to its degree of acceptability: content, intention, and conviction.

While I think his criteria are effective and descriptions of ‘content’ and ‘conviction’ are spot-on, his description of ‘intention’ sticks in my craw:

Was the remark intended to wound, or intended to perpetuate some social wrong? Was it malicious? I remember sitting in church, as a child, while our Presbyterian minister made jokes about how "cheap" Presbyterians were. If non-Presbyterians make that joke, it might be offensive. But a Presbyterian making jokes about Presbyterians with the intention of making Presbyterians laugh is fine, because there is a complete absence of malice in the comment. I think that Richard Pryor or Dave Chapelle's use of the word "nigger," or the Jewish jokes told by Jewish comics fall into the same category.

The leap from ‘was it malicious?’ to ‘all of us Presbyterians are cheap’* doesn’t follow because it implies that people can’t say malicious things to those within their own group, and at face value it excludes the possibility that a Catholic may be telling a cheap Presbyterian joke to a bunch of friendly Presbyterians. I know Gladwell didn’t miss this point, but his words did (with the exception of ‘might be offensive’), and that gap is most important because it’s right in there where all of our inter-racial relations are defined: are you who’s running your mouth friend or foe, and do you realize that you’re being treated with generosity? That’s why the room either goes dead cold or busts out in gales of laughter depending on who is using the n word and why understanding that fine line of whether you’re allowed to speak that way or not indicates a tremendous sensitivity to those around you and their perception of you, completely independent of whether you’re ‘part of the group,’ and this is where this whole issue gets fascinating.** It’s the gooey analog center of understanding race and our relations with each other in a world that prefers the can-can’t of digital explanations. There are a lot of cues as to whether the guy with the black leather jacket and shaved head telling the Jewish joke is doing it with malice or not, and we can’t assume malice based only on general social exclusion. To revise Gladwell, anyone making jokes about someone with the intention of making them laugh is fine only if there is a complete absence of malice in the comment. It’s hard because it’s up to each of us to perceive maliciousness or its lack, and using only the cue of 'is he like me' doesn't cut it.

* Why is it always cheap? Is there a group of people that hasn't been stereotyped at one time or another as cheap? 'Joke: What did the Scot, Jew, and Presbyterian say when they walked into the bar? Punchline: Who's buying?'

** I’d bet this is part of why Richard Pryor was allowed to make fun of white people long before Carlos Mencia*** (or an earlier groundbreaking non-black comedian that isn’t springing to mind) was allowed to make fun of blacks; a desire on the part of many whites to include blacks into the group—a desire maybe not conveyed on the macro level by blacks toward whites until later, if indeed it has yet. Mencia also goes to great lengths to make fun of himself in addition to his race and maybe this too is why he’s allowed to say the things he does about others.

*** And this is also why Mencia is funny, but so many of his fans, when recounting his shpiel the next day, are anything but.