The Owl's Nest

new (?) drink: the Ginny Weasley

2010-01-06T21:38:00.001-08:00

Is it really possible that no one has yet invented a drink called the Ginny Weasley? A cursory googling turns up nothing ... so here's a recipe I'm toying with:

- gin
- tonic
- Pimm's No. 1

Pour equal parts gin and Pimm's No. 1 into a glass. Add tonic. Garnish with cucumber and blood orange.

new media

2009-12-20T22:37:00.000-08:00

For this article on the inventors of the McNuggetini, the NYTimes took a screenshot of a YouTube video and used it to accompany the story:

change we shouldn't have believed in

2009-12-20T09:09:00.000-08:00

Glenn Greenwald sums up the state of health care reform:

One finds [the corporatist trend] in far more than just economic policy, and it's about more than just letting corporations do what they want. It's about affirmatively harnessing government power in order to benefit and strengthen those corporate interests and even merging government and the private sector. In the intelligence and surveillance realms, for instance, the line between government agencies and private corporations barely exists. Military policy is carried out almost as much by private contractors as by our state's armed forces. Corporate executives and lobbyists can shuffle between the public and private sectors so seamlessly because the divisions have been so eroded. Our laws are written not by elected representatives but, literally, by the largest and richest corporations. At the level of the most concentrated power, large corporate interests and government actions are basically inseparable.

As well as the civil liberties situation:

So, to recap: we have indefinite detention, military commissions, Blackwater assassination squads, escalation in Afghanistan, extreme secrecy to shield executive lawbreaking from judicial review, renditions, and denials of habeas corpus. These are not policies Obama has failed yet to uproot; they are policies he has explicitly advocated and affirmatively embraced as his own.

He quotes Time magazine:

Beginning in the first two weeks of May, Obama took harder lines on government secrecy, on the fate of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay and on the prosecution of terrorists worldwide. The President was moving away from some promises he had made during the campaign and toward more moderate positions, some favored by George W. Bush. At the same time, he quietly shifted responsibility for the legal framework for counterterrorism from Craig to political advisers overseen by Emanuel, who was more inclined to strike a balance between left and right.

And I have to agree---it is a crazy world we live in when extraordinary rendition, indefinite detention, and trial by military commission are considered moderate positions. It's the absolute nadir of the two-sides-to-every-story way of doing journalism, combined with the premise that the two available poles are What The Republicans Say and What The Democrats Say.

I got home to find this month's copy of Harper's, which begins with an essay (subscriber-only, I think) on regulatory capture. Here's how the state of the legislature is described:

The polite word for regulatory capture in Washington is 'moderation'. Normally we understand moderation to be a process whereby we balance the conservative-right-red preference for "free markets" with the liberal-left-blue preference for "big government." Determining the correct level of market intervention means splitting the difference. ... The contemporary form of moderation, however, simply assumes government growth (i.e., intervention), which occurs under both parties, and instead concerns itself with balancing the regulatory interests of various campaign contributors. The interests of the insurance companies are moderated by the interests of the drug manufacturers, which in turn are moderated by the interests of the trial lawyers and perhaps even by the interests of organized labor, and in this way the locus of competition is transported from the marketplace to the legislature.

The results:

... Mediocre trusts secure the blessing of government sanction even as they avoid any obligation to serve the public good. Prices stay high, producers fail to innovate, and social inequities remain in place.

Because the competition doesn't happen at the market, the current Republican rhetoric (pro-market, anti-socialism) is just a non sequitur---consumers can't exert any pressure on corporations to produce better products, and the emphasis on free choice is a red herring. And the Democrats, well, they've been captured. And apparently the whole business about a public option, the expansion of Medicare? Total sham. Obama and co. never wanted to do any of that---they just wanted to force people to buy from the insurance industry, with subsidy, i.e. funnel tax money to the very corporations whose inefficiency and protection from the market have made reform urgent.

From the start, assuaging the health insurance and pharmaceutical industries was a central preoccupation of the White House -- hence the deal negotiated in strict secrecy with Pharma to ban bulk price negotiations and drug reimportation, a blatant violation of both Obama's campaign positions on those issues and his promise to conduct all negotiations out in the open (on C-SPAN). Indeed, Democrats led the way yesterday in killing drug re-importation, which they endlessly claimed to support back when they couldn't pass it. The administration wants not only to prevent industry money from funding an anti-health-care-reform campaign, but also wants to ensure that the Democratic Party -- rather than the GOP -- will continue to be the prime recipient of industry largesse.

Reminds you of the bank bailout, doesn't it?

philosophical platitudes

2009-12-14T21:49:00.000-08:00

So I just realized today, while looking at this review of Roger Scruton's Beauty, that there's a thread in philosophical method that leads from today's Anglophone philosophy all the way back to Aristotle: begin with platitudes.

- David Lewis: Collect all the platitudes about x, then construct a Ramsey sentence from those platitudes.

- Bertrand Russell: "The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it."

- Hegelian dialectic? Not sure about that one.

- Aristotle: dialectical reasoning begins with endoxa, the widely accepted opinions (or reputable opinions, or reflective opinions, depending on who's translating).

And maybe we can count Plato, who doesn't self-consciously endorse this method (iirc, he doesn't like the doxa), nonetheless has Socrates e.g. bothering Euthyphro for his thoughts on piety, which might count as an extraction of received opinion.

This is a pretty short list. And it ignores everything from Aristotle to Russell, as well as contemporaries of Russell like Husserl, who invented his own method. So I'm making a pretty weak generalization, but nonetheless I'm struck by the ancient heritage of this method, and I suspect we could add more philosophers to the list. (E.g. probably the pragmatists would fit here, too, and maybe Moore's "defense of common sense.")

three (or so) links

2009-12-13T23:49:00.000-08:00

- Michael Walzer argues that the war in Afghanistan is just, as is Obama's planned prosecution of it.

- How could I forget to link to the Wheaties Fuel website?

- The results from the PhilPapers survey are in. I was at first amazed to see that on the question of classical vs. non-classical logic, 33% of target faculty said "other," including 5% who said "both." My first thought was how could you fail to choose one or the other? either it's classical or it isn't ... and then I remembered what happens when you give up classical logic.

but he can't be a man, 'cause he does not smoke the same cigarettes as me

2009-12-12T23:03:00.000-08:00

Still working on a follow-up to the last post. In the meantime ...

Every time I read one of President Obama's speeches I'm impressed. I don't know how much credit goes to Obama himself, as opposed to this guy or any other White House speechwriter, but they're solid and organized and often nuanced. So I looked forward to reading the Peace Prize speech, wondering how he'd talk his way out of the fact that he's got two wars running, and had just decided to escalate one of them. It was a pretty good job, I thought, considering that he wasn't going to give an academic talk on just war or foreign policy. But what really surprised me was this:

And most dangerously, we see it ["identity"-based violence] in the way that religion is used to justify the murder of innocents by those who have distorted and defiled the great religion of Islam, and who attacked my country from Afghanistan. These extremists are not the first to kill in the name of God; the cruelties of the Crusades are amply recorded. But they remind us that no Holy War can ever be a just war. For if you truly believe that you are carrying out divine will, then there is no need for restraint -- no need to spare the pregnant mother, or the medic, or the Red Cross worker, or even a person of one's own faith.

Could we really be hearing an American president say that religion deranges people? Let's read on:

Such a warped view of religion is not just incompatible with the concept of peace, but I believe it's incompatible with the very purpose of faith -- for the one rule that lies at the heart of every major religion is that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Dang. Apparently no true Scotsman would believe that religion requires violence. And also the very purpose of faith is ... to follow the golden rule? Man, I don't know. What about this episode from 2nd Kings?

From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some youths came out of the town and jeered at him. "Go on up, you baldhead!" they said. "Go on up, you baldhead!" He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the LORD. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the youths. And he went on to Mount Carmel and from there returned to Samaria.

I don't know that I generally agree with Richard Dawkins, but on the Old Testament god we agree: batshit crazy. Of course there are lots of examples to pick on, but sending bears to murder children is one of the more entertaining ones. Anyway I just don't know how anyone can say that religious killers are somehow "warping" their doctrine---the violence is there, right in the books, God-sanctioned and God-wrought. Sure, you can marginalize it and say that the golden rule, or the sermon on the mount or whatever, is the "heart" of some religion, and I do think that those are better lessons to follow than the ones about holy violence. But that, too, is a warping of religious teaching; it's cherry-picking the parts that fit your favorite worldview.

(N.b. the golden rule is actually a pretty bad moral precept: if you think that you'd rather die than live as an infidel, you're all set to start murdering.)

There's this thing by Dave Eggers I ran across, which I'll probably quote again soon, but part of which needs quoting now:

Do not be critics, you people, I beg you. I was a critic and I wish I could take it all back because it came from a smelly and ignorant place in me, and spoke with a voice that was all rage and envy.

It reminds me of a thing I read David Foster Wallace quoted as saying, which I can't seem to find right now, but is something like "making art requires finding the voice inside you that is willing to love."

Hey, here's an explanation of that Elisha business. The whole thing is worth reading, but here's the punchline:

In summary, 2 Kings 2:23-24 is not an account of God mauling young children for making fun of a bald man. Rather, it is a record of an insulting demonstration against God’s prophet by a large group of young men. Because these young people of about 20 years of age or older (the same term is used of Solomon in 1 Kings 3:7) so despised the prophet of the Lord, Elisha called upon the Lord to deal with the rebels as He saw fit. The Lord’s punishment was the mauling of 42 of them by two female bears. The penalty was clearly justified, for to ridicule Elisha was to ridicule the Lord Himself. The seriousness of the crime was indicated by the seriousness of the punishment. The appalling judgment was God’s warning to all who would scorn the prophets of the Lord.

He couldn't have warned people by, I don't know, ridiculing the demonstrators back? God's omnipotent, right; he could probably make them feel just really ridiculous.

I've been reading some of this guy's reviews, and while I don't share his sense of humor, this has got to be the best summary of Devo's cover of "Satisfaction":

(0:01) Stilted 5-hit drumbeat begins
(0:03) Speedy palm-muted two-string five-chord guitar line begins in right speaker
(0:05) Two strange zooming guitar noises appear in right speaker for no reason
(0:07) Ultra-catchy bass line starts up
(0:11) Hideous Chuck Berry lead guitar parody begins in right speaker and slowly makes its way center
(0:21) Vocals begin
(0:36) Second guitar line (a pattern of eight strange individual notes) appears in left speaker to interplay with the original riff
(0:57) A synthesizer begins doubling the second guitar line
(1:48) Singer begins saying "Baby"
(1:58) Singer finishes saying "Baby"
(2:08) A third (fuzzed-out) guitar begins playing the three rising notes of Keith Richards' original "Satisfaction" riff, but only one time each
(2:12) Backup vocalists begin chanting "Satisfaction"

Someone deserves a prize for this headline: "For Those Who Want Their Cereal Extra Manly". Some of the credit belongs to General Mills, of course, who took it upon themselves to create the male-oriented breakfast cereal market. Why set foot in heretofore uncharted terrain?

“Nobody in this enormous category is speaking to men,” said David Clark, a marketing manager at General Mills. “Men don’t use their wives’ razors or deodorants; why would they be eating their cereal?”

Indeed! Indeed.

top ten albums of 2000--2009

2009-12-04T09:43:00.000-08:00

Is it Albums of the Decade time already? The Guardian and Pitchfork are on the job already. Here are my favorites:

1. Deerhoof - The Runners Four (2005)

Deerhoof made a lot of good records during the last ten years, but this one is probably my favorite, and it's certainly the deepest. It's got ideas that grab you on first listen as well as some that surface only after many replays, and the more I listen to it the more I'm amazed at the way it sounds. Compared to their other records, it's crisp and lonely, like they recorded it in a walk-in freezer, and the mix is unusual (guitars panned stereo pretty hard, bass to one side, drums a bit low). But like the rest of the catalog it's brimming with ideas you've never heard before, arranged in a way that's often hard to predict but makes all kinds of sense once it unfurls. Raising melody + chords by a half-step for a quick bar in the middle of a phrase? Yes. Extending a phrase just a little beyond the point where you expect it to end? Check. In fact, phrases show up in all kinds of lengths that aren't integer multiples of 4---like the Dismemberment Plan and the Pixies and lots of bands I admire going back to the (late) Beatles, Deerhoof is just excellent at trimming the fat.

2. Converge - Jane Doe (2001)

Jane Doe has got to have one of the more aggressive album openings ever: five seconds of fuzzed-out tritones, ten of guitar stabs on the upbeats, then a quick atonal run into a wall of screaming guitars, screaming vocals, and near-blastbeat drums (watch the video in the last post!). There are metal bands who can do things faster or heavier, but Converge's mathy/punky/hardcore blend hits hard and fast and precisely in a way that straight-up death or doom or sludge metal doesn't. Fantastic stuff if you're into that sort of thing.

3. Matmos - The Civil War (2003)

Matmos put a version of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" on this record, and it's sort of a miniature version of the whole thing: a swirling, evolving stream of timbres that makes equal use of thumpy acoustic instruments, glitchy electronic noises, wheezing, choked filters, and unsteady field recordings. You've got choruses of slightly-detuned reeds, gentle rocking drum-machine kicks, marching-band bass drums, things that sound like prepared pianos. Autoharps or zithers or something, bright electric guitars, crazy shuffling slithery things that might be leaves or sandpaper or samples of fire. I'm making it sound like mere audio collage (writing in sentence fragments probably doesn't help), but there's really a purposeful, musical sequence of ideas here, at both the track and album levels.

4. Enon - Believo! (2000)

Some reviews of this record tout it as a) a bellwether for the indie rock of the '00s and b) the sort of thing that wasn't even possible until 2000. I'm tempted to agree with those, even though I can't think of any clear examples of Believo!'s influence on future albums, and even though I can think of a few similar records that showed up earlier (Cibo Matto's two LPs, 1996 and 1999; Self's Breakfast with Girls, 1999; maybe Portishead's self-titled, 1997). But those are late-'90s albums, and even if Enon's influence isn't directly visible, Believo! is nonetheless a prototype of '00s-rock features: a suitcase full of unconventional sounds and instruments; dalliances with dance genres (in this case, jungle and downtempo); synthesizers used for fatness, grit, and fuzz; digital modulation of vocals. Subsequent Enon albums refine these things, but part of what I like about Believo! is its unrefined bits. The production has this hazy feeling to it, and a lot of the tracks lurch along on a sludgy bass. Plus the songs are, with a just a couple exceptions, straight-up pop songs at their cores, and good ones at that; it's the noisy delivery that takes them from good to holy-crap-how-did-they-make-it-sound-like-that.

5. Animal Collective - Sung Tongs (2004)

This album is just about two albums in one. For the most part, the first half is melodic and (relatively) concise; the second is mainly long textural tracks that move sort of aimlessly through acoustic fog. But both halves share an aesthetic of computer-burnished organic sounds, like if Voltron had been made of wooden robots and lived in a cabin recording songs. The guitars and autoharps in particular sound brilliant and springy, and the digital effects gurgle and sparkle like a stream. And an occasional indulgence in odd meters and unusual song structures aims Sung Tongs right at my musical predilections. I've heard other Animal Collective records, but none of them are quite as exuberant as this one.

6. Fantômas - The Director's Cut (2001)

It's too bad that this record will probably appeal only to metal fans; it's so much more than a metal record. Metal is certainly one of the vocabularies that Fantômas deploys on The Director's Cut, but they make equally good use of choral hymns, Morricone twang, symphonic percussion, big band, and (speaking literally) various bells and whistles. It will probably come as no surprise to some listeners that half of Fantômas was also in Mr. Bungle. But while the latter band's genre-hopping seemed partly an end in itself, Fantômas's use of different vocabularies is more restrained, and always serves the songs---which on this record are all themes from horror or suspense films. If you ever wanted to hear the heaviest possible rendition of the theme from Rosemary's Baby, this is the place to find it. (Or, um, here.)

7. Radiohead - Amnesiac (2001)

For some people, Radiohead died after OK Computer. I disagree---I think they got far more interesting---but it's hard to single out one of the post-OK records as the best one. So having to make a forced choice, I'd go for Amnesiac. At this point Kid A feels too controlled and sappy, Hail to the Thief is uneven, and In Rainbows is like the chiclet of the Radiohead catalog: insipid pretty soon after the first taste. But Amnesiac has only grown on me, and it's enjoyable from beginning to end. (Even the stuttering "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors", which struck me as a bunch of digital wankery at first.) And like Enon's Believo!, there's a hazy, dark feeling to the production that sounds amazing, especially with the synths (dig the bassoon-y thing in "Morning Bell/Amnesiac").

8. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Yanqui U.X.O. (2002)

Some Godspeed records draw my ear directly to the Godspeed formula: build build build build build some more build BUILD BUILD ok come down for a while now build build etc. And then it's like watching a card trick when you know how it works---it can still be interesting, but it's hard not to think about the manipulation that's happening. Yanqui U.X.O. never does that. I'm always waiting impatiently for the triumphant dissonant guitar lead at the end of "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls," with the screaming tremolo strings and the wah pedal sweep and the thumping, crashing drums. Every time.

9. Stereolab - Sound-Dust (2001)

From the Pitchfork review of the Stereolab EPs collection Oscillons from the Anti-Sun:

More space winds up occupied by newer material, much of it from after the point where some fans (this reviewer included) fret that Stereolab's output began to feel vaguely academic; something always seems to have gone amiss when a band that could float gorgeously on two chords starts throwing in pedal-steel interludes just to keep you interested.

To which I say: come now, rag on Margerine Eclipse if you want, but not Sound-Dust! (Pedal-steel interlude is at 1:36 on track 3.) There's no question that this record is late-period Stereolab, more cool/cerebral than fuzzy/urgent, but it's not as if it's merely an exercise in producing a record in the style of late-period Stereolab. The whole thing fits together more strongly than any of their other records; each idea within a song leads right to the next one, and the end of each song cues up the beginning of the next, like a perfect Stereolab mixtape.

10. Fugazi - The Argument (2001)

Fugazi spent the '90s putting out good and great records, and by the time they made this one they clearly knew their stuff. I can't think of another band that wrings so many different textures out of the standard guitar/bass/drums/vocals lineup, and on The Argument they put that versatility to work in service of pure craft. On occasion they help themselves to some extra things: a second drummer, a piano, whistling, maybe a Rhodes; but most of the time they're just getting sounds out of their normal equipment. Seriously, I'm not sure it's ever occurred to me to admire a straight-up rock band's skill at arrangement until I heard Fugazi. (If you've never listened to Fugazi, or maybe tried once but got turned off, this is the album to go to.)

11. Dillinger Escape Plan with Mike Patton - Irony is a Dead Scene EP (2002)

This gets the bonus #11 slot for being an EP rather than a full-length album. (If Dillinger's Calculating Infinity hadn't been released in 1999, it would certainly have made the top five.) Irony is a Dead Scene is in some ways a different animal from Calculating Infinity, most of those ways being the presence of Mike Patton, whose vocals add a variety of personalities to Dillinger's otherwise studious aesthetic. There's a bit of Patton's old Faith No More-style rap/barking, but there's also gasping, screaming, monkish chanting, whispering, and melodies both tonal and atonal. The band itself also makes more extensive use of synthesizers and samples, and in general the song structures are less verse-chorus-repeat than anything they've done before or since. In the same way that the 1998 Under the Running Board EP laid out the major elements of the DEP's vocabulary in less than 10 minutes, Irony is a Dead Scene set the tone for all subsequent Dillinger releases in just under 18. (Though I wish I could say that latter-day Dillinger's Patton-band pastiche is anywhere nearly as good as this EP.)

Honorable Mention:

- Mastodon - Leviathan (2004)
- Starlight Mints - Built on Squares (2003)
- Autolux - Future Perfect (2004)
- Mew - And the Glass-Handed Kites (2005)
- Tortoise - Standards (2001)
- Hot Snakes - Audit in Progress (2004)
- Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf (2002)
- The Unicorns - Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? (2003)
- Aphex Twin - Drukqs (2001)
- Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (2007)
- Tin Hat - The Sad Machinery of Spring (2007)
- Mylo - Destroy Rock & Roll (2004)
- Coalesce - Ox (2009)

best of the '00s, part two

2009-12-03T02:40:00.000-08:00

#s 1--5:

best of the '00s, part one

2009-12-02T06:08:00.000-08:00

So I'm kicking around a post on my favorite records of the past decade, and while I'm finishing that up I thought I should post samples from each of the top ten (plus one EP). Isn't Youtube wonderful? Here are numbers 6--11 (sorry about the Godspeed song, but Youtube has some kind of length limit):

fluid piano

2009-11-30T20:35:00.000-08:00

Allows microtonal adjustments to each key:

obscure English in Korea

2009-11-30T09:17:00.000-08:00

One thing I've noticed here is that the English being used can sometimes be conscripted from the farther reaches of the language. Take for example the Samsung AnyCall Haptic phone:

Do any native English speakers besides psychologists and word geeks know the word 'haptic'? (If you don't, haptic:touch::olfactory:smell.)

And there's a kind of public bath thing here called a jimjeelbang, which has showers and saunas and rooms of different temperatures. The bathing areas are translated by 'sauna', but the area with the many-temperatured rooms is translated by 'fomentation room'. I sort of knew the word 'foment' before, but I couldn't figure out what it had to do with the jimjeelbang. Turns out there's an archaic sense of the word that means "to bathe with heated or medicated lotions," from Latin fomentum, meaning 'poultice, lotion'. The noun 'fomentation' is in the OED from the 15th to 19th centuries.

Maybe this kind of thing is less common than I think (telling, perhaps, that I can't think of any other examples right now). But I feel like there are a few other times I've encountered this.

does utilitarianism require sophistry?

2009-11-26T01:11:00.000-08:00

Here's an interview with Peter Singer about his new book and about the Peter Singer position generally. A lot of it is a rehash of typical objections and responses, but there was a bit at the beginning that got me thinking:

"I don’t think I’ve diluted or changed anything of substance,” says Singer, who is unapologetic about the book’s populist style, which favours dealing with objections from students at Glennview High rather than professors at Harvard and Oxford. “I want it to be read by more than professors and students of philosophy. I do want to make a difference to people, I want to persuade as many people as possible to do something about world poverty. So I’ve got to reach a wide audience."

The usual norms governing philosophical writing---at least among professional academics like Singer---include "write what you believe to be correct" and "provide what you take to be good arguments." (As well as a bunch of others about brevity and relevance and what have you.) But for someone like Singer, whose impartial utilitarianism is unlimited in scope, moral norms might well override these norms of professional discourse, since writing and publishing philosophy are acts like any others. And so he might in fact be required to argue for something he doesn't believe is correct, employing arguments he doesn't take to be good, all for the sake of convincing others to do things which conduce to the aggregate good. I.e. utilitarianism might require sophistry.

In fact, I'm pretty sure it does, at least in some cases. Which makes me wonder why Peter Singer hasn't been engaging in it from the get-go. (Or maybe he has. But you'd think he'd do things differently if he were trying to change people's behavior...)

bonus comic

2009-11-25T19:24:00.000-08:00

it's not comforting, cheery, or kind

2009-11-25T00:41:00.000-08:00

Yet another food book is out, or soon will be, and this one's by Jonathan Safran Foer, so it's making the news. Foer had a precis published in the New York Times, got a few reviews there, and even shopped his thing around on television, I think. But no review I've read has been as good as this one. Here's one of many choice quotations:

A little consensual transgression spices up any recreation. Honest meat eaters admit that the titillation of eating a beast that has suffered is part of the fun. Adrenalin may make the meat of a thrashed dog taste better, but whose adrenalin, the dog’s or the beater’s? Perhaps a bit of both. What’s queer is that many of these same meat-eaters will go out of their way to perform a play of mock revulsion at vegetarians who eat fake meat. At fake meat specialty stores you can get veggie kidney, gizzards, shark’s fin, eel. I propose they add veggie kitten, dolphin, panda, and elephant.

I doubt that "honest meat eaters admit" that sadism is tasty, though maybe that's an attraction for some. But Golberg has a point here: just like Democrats and philosophers, vegetarians need to be more than "against x;" they need a positive platform that's attractive to people. Maybe cheese made from human milk isn't one of the planks (or hey, maybe that will catch on), but the general idea has got to be right. And we need to drop the way of framing things where we're like "no really guys, vegetarian food can be tasty, I promise!"

It must just be the general salience of food writing that made the NYT decide to publish this op-ed by Gary Steiner, a philosophy professor and strict vegan. Now I'll grant that there isn't much in the way of argument in Steiner's piece, but it's a short essay and anyway it seems mostly intended to draw attention to just how thoroughly the use of animals pervades our lives. Still, it got some letters in response, and holy moly do they run the gamut from bad argument to irrelevant point.

Here's "we can't draw a line between A and B, so we shouldn't try to minimize A":

Soon after I read Gary Steiner’s article, my wife asked me to kill a spider, which I did. This made me feel guilty. Spiders are living creatures, too; perhaps I should have gently caught it and carried it outdoors?

It is hard to imagine where a line can be drawn. We kill so many living creatures when we build a house, construct a road, drive down that road or just walk on a path. How far do we go in protecting them?

When we plant and harvest crops that vegans would find acceptable to eat, many animals are killed and their habitats are destroyed.

If we all decide to consider animals as precious as humans, the only logical place for us is back in the jungle. But even then if we were to survive we would have to kill some animals in self-defense.

Alexander Mauskop

Here's "humans evolved to x, so x is permissible" plus "animals evolved to feed us, so it's ok to eat them" with a little bit of compositional fallacy (species/organism edition) and just a hint of misdirection (veganism is dangerous):

Gary Steiner’s case for veganism founders on the facts. First, the human digestive system has evolved to accommodate an omnivorous diet, not a purely vegetable one.

Indeed, many paleoanthropologists maintain that the evolution of the large, energy-hungry human brains depended on a transition of our ancestors’ diets to include meat.

And vegans must tread a very narrow line to avoid all sorts of deficiency diseases, while omnivores have very broad latitude in diet, as a survey of world cuisines makes evident.

Second, our food animals have co-evolved with us. Cows, domestic sheep, chickens and many others would not survive if they were not raised for human consumption, protected from malnutrition, disease and predators.

Professor Steiner is entitled to his beliefs and his tofurkey; most of the rest of us will enjoy our turkey without guilt (but with vegetable stuffing).

Lawrence S. Lerner

Here's "if a human's doing something is wrong then an animal's doing it is wrong" combined with "we ought to prevent all wrongs from occurring":

Gary Steiner recognizes that many of us justify eating animals because we believe we are superior to them. Mr. Steiner rightly rejects this view as morally flawed.

Humans can acceptably consume animals precisely because we are not superior to them at all. Wolves eat sheep. Tuna eat mackerel. We are animals ourselves — and are no more (or less) than the animals we consume, or than the predators that would otherwise consume them.

If we are not justified in eating mackerel ourselves, are we not also morally obligated to stop the slaughter brought on by the tuna?

Such an obligation would make us the protectors of all species, and the destroyers of every ecosystem on earth.

L. David Peters

Here's "being perfectly moral is impossible, so there's no point in trying" plus "if I cared I'd stop functioning" (seriously, Sandy?):

I will rise to the challenge Gary Steiner presents. He’s right: I don’t care deeply about the suffering of animals I eat, wear or otherwise benefit from. Suffering and injustice are inherent in life, and time is short.

Moreover, I find no way to shine a moral spotlight on one corner without letting shadows fall on another. I radically limit my conscious sphere of concern (just as Mr. Steiner must).

My moral boundaries may be rational or reflexive, expansive or selfish — who can judge?

I also recognize that alleviating suffering in one area may cause pain elsewhere. My mind and spirit are continually tested by outrages, from the countless dead innocents in current wars to the limited life prospects of my son’s first-grade classmates with drug dealers for parents.

Were I also to internalize the pain experienced by animals, I’d simply shut down. Whose lot could that possibly help?

Sandy Asirvatham

And here's another "where do you draw the line" plus "you're inconsistent so I don't have to take you seriously":

I was shocked to read that Gary Steiner thinks his cat can’t appreciate Schubert’s late symphonies. It’s not the feline lack of musical discernment that I found disturbing (I don’t “get” Schubert’s symphonies either), but rather that Mr. Steiner owns a pet.

If he wishes to make no distinction between animal and human life and rights, how does he justify keeping an animal in what amounts to captivity?

And where does he draw the line between keeping a cow for milk and keeping a cat or dog for comfort or gratification?

Alice Desaulniers

A few of the letters express sentiments of support or commiseration, but only one really challenges Steiner's position in a relevant way:

Mr. Steiner might feel less lonely as an ethical vegan — he says he has just five vegan friends — if he recognized that he has allies in mere vegetarians (like me), ethical omnivores and even carnivores. Some of us agree with his outlook, but just don’t have the fortitude to make every sacrifice he makes.

In fact, a whole lot of semi-vegans can do much more for animals than the tiny number of people who are willing to give up all animal products and scrupulously read labels. Farm animals also benefit from the humane farming movement, even if the animal welfare changes it effects are not all that we should hope and work for.

If the goal is not moral perfection for ourselves, but the maximum benefit for animals, half-measures ought to be encouraged and appreciated.

Go vegan, go vegetarian, go humane or just eat less meat. It’s all good advice from the point of view of doing better by animals.

Jean Kazez

Anyway, cheers to the NYT for publishing this stuff; I'm glad to see food and animals getting the attention.

smooth operator

2009-11-23T08:42:00.000-08:00

So most of the music I hear in Korea is, to my ears, pretty bad. It sounds like it's made by people who think the Backstreet Boys would be just the bees' knees if only they'd have sung in Korean. Another contingent takes its cue from Celine Dion, still another Britney Spears circa 1998. And this stuff is everywhere---coffee shops, clothing stores, restaurants, the sidewalks in front of businesses, where outdoor speakers regale your walk past. So I'm relieved when I hear one of the few currently popular songs that's got an interesting part in it, or is at least catchy. The other day I remarked to Chris and Hong-Eun, "Hey, I like this one."

And that's when I learned I'd been listening to a phone commercial. Apparently one of the major girl groups here recorded a song about the new LG Chocolate phone, and I've been hearing it a lot. But seriously, I mean I've been hearing it in the rotation when I'm sitting at the coffee shop working, which means---I think---Korean corporations not only control pop music, they get songs produced that advertise their products, and those ad-songs then top the charts and get played in stores, cabs, bars, and homes all over the country. It's like that episode of The Simpsons where the Navy manufactures a boy band and has it sing a song with backwards-message Navy propaganda, except that there's no attempt to mask this one.

So here it is. Does it make you want to buy a phone?

Bonus: Here's Son Dam-Bi with After School singing about the new Amoled. (Subtitles can be turned on from the triangle in the lower right.)

they call it "xanadu"

2009-11-22T01:24:00.000-08:00

This piece in Slate is interesting and depressing. Basically the argument is that the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will make all the old Bush-Cheney war-on-terror policy into flat-out law. The defense will, quite legitimately, point out e.g. that the defendant was tortured repeatedly, imprisoned indefinitely, etc, so as to make his statements inadmissible. Then the judge and jury will convict him anyway---nobody's going to let this guy off---and then, in the appeals process,

a higher court will countenance the cowardly decisions made by the trial judge, ennobling them with the unfortunate force of precedent. The judicial refusal to consider KSM's years of quasi-legal military detention as a violation of his right to a speedy trial will erode that already crippled constitutional concept. The denial of the venue motion will raise the bar even higher for defendants looking to escape from damning pretrial publicity. Ever deferential to the trial court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will affirm dozens of decisions that redact and restrict the disclosure of secret documents, prompting the government to be ever more expansive in invoking claims of national security and emboldening other judges to withhold critical evidence from future defendants. Finally, the twisted logic required to disentangle KSM's initial torture from his subsequent "clean team" statements will provide a blueprint for the government, giving them the prize they've been after all this time—a legal way both to torture and to prosecute.

The zombie hands of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, and Yoo are dragging us back to their swampy grave. Thanks, guys.

In other news, yesterday we discovered that Chris's cell phone alarm is the theme from Xanadu. For the past three years, he's been waking up to a corny midi-fied version of this already corny original:

What I want to know is: how did this end up being the default alarm on the LG Cyon?

take your medicine

2009-11-19T03:16:00.000-08:00

So last week I went to a hospital on account of having had a cold last a couple weeks. The whole episode, from walking in to walking out with medicine, took half an hour, maybe 45 minutes, and came to about $24. That's astonishing by U.S. standards, right? Also I had no insurance or government ID. Count me impressed.

but everyone wants to see that groovy thing

2009-11-18T09:37:00.001-08:00

Tim just linked me to this NYTimes story about the current state of the Spiral Jetty, and the "conservation" it's undergoing. Interesting stuff; I had no idea when I visited that the silt inside the spiral wasn't there at its creation, but had accumulated over the years. Anyway the bulk of the article is about documentation, and features this striking aerial photo:

Beats a camera phone, doesn't it. (Click the photo for a bigger one.)

odd friends

2009-11-18T08:24:00.000-08:00

Just testing the way flickr photos post:

perpendicular to the name of this town on a desktop globe

2009-11-18T00:36:00.000-08:00

Maybe anyone who still checks on this blog already knows this, but I've set up a flickr account to post some photos from Korea.

we have our own song // and we want to get it recorded

2009-11-17T01:12:00.001-08:00

Over the last couple weeks I've been tooling around with Reason, and came up with this Nintendo-inspired version of a Contrapositives song: Song 8.

In other news, I'm in Korea. Might post about that in the near future.

air traffic control? it's me

2009-08-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

Well, Pictures for Sad Children is officially my new favorite comic.

I will no longer hear the MCAS Miramar fighter jets in quite the same way.

good morning, how are you / I'm Dr. Worm

2009-08-12T11:44:00.000-07:00

Caterpillar update: I took one of the guys off my porch and put him in an aquarium, with some dirt to burrow in and a few sprigs (can I say 'sprigs'?) of tomato to eat. Yesterday its aorta showed up along its back---supposed to be a sign of maturity---and sure enough, by evening it had burrowed under the soil. I'll try to get a photo of the moth once it emerges.

got a secret message, send it by worm

2009-08-04T23:33:00.001-07:00

So over the last few days the tomato plant on my front porch has been almost completely eaten by these guys, tobacco hornworms. They're pretty impressive caterpillars---the big ones are as big as my index finger, maybe a little bigger, and they grip the plant like crazy with feet that look like the ends of velcro-covered tweezers. I'd like to keep one in an aquarium while it's pupating, but apparently they dig to pupate, so maybe I can't.

the spiraling shape will make you go insane

2009-06-24T17:33:00.001-07:00

Last week I fulfilled one of my life goals: to see the Spiral Jetty in person. More photos to come soon, but for now all I've got are my crappy phone shots:

It's hard to see from these photos (although #4 shows a hint of it), but the water on the north side of the Salt Lake is shockingly pink, like a glass of dilute Kool-Aid. And since almost nothing can live in the saline water, it's fully translucent and disturbed only by the wind. The whole place is eerie and silent, kind of post-apocalyptic.

you and me baby ain't nothin' but mammals

2009-06-08T14:32:00.000-07:00

Deresiewicz on evolutionary aesthetics:

The appeal of evolutionary psychology is easy to grasp. Just think of Annie Hall. The last few decades have left us so profoundly disoriented about the most urgent personal matters--gender roles, sexual norms, the possibility of creating lasting romantic relationships, not to mention absolutely everything to do with family structure--that it's no surprise to find people embracing a theory that promises to restore order. Once we had religion to tell us who we are. Then, for a while, we had Freud. Now we have evolutionary psychology, which, as an attempt to construct a science of human nature on Darwinian principles, marshals two of the most powerful ideas in contemporary culture: science, our most authoritative way of knowing, and nature, our highest ground of moral appeal. No wonder the field is catnip to journalists and armchair theorists alike. Equip yourself with a few basic concepts--natural selection, inclusive fitness, mating choice--and you, too, can explain the mysteries of human existence. That evolutionary psychology has no real intellectual credibility, that mainstream biology regards it as a house of sand, rarely seems to come up. EP is the Malcolm Gladwell of science: facile and glib, but so persuasive and charming that no one wants to ruin the fun.

How's that last sentence for a double snap? A really nice essay overall, but the positive claims at the end are kind of unsatisfying (as is to be expected, I guess, for a review essay):

Both [Dutton and Boyd] seem to miss the fact that science and art are different ways of knowing, equally valid but incommensurate.

so take a look

2009-06-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

A while ago someone told me about iReadFast. I haven't used it enough to know whether I retain what I read that way, but it makes 800 words/minute seem surprisingly comprehensible. I sort of feel like what Data must have when he's sit down every so often to read the entire contents of some library on the Enterprise.

Sadly, I couldn't find a video of one of those scenes. But I did find this:

baked potato // potato chips

2009-06-02T13:06:00.000-07:00

Precisification in action! There is a lot of interesting stuff there, but the first thing that struck me was the judgment that "a Pringle is 'made from potato flour in the sense that one cannot say that it is not made from potato flour, and the proportion of potato flour is significant being over 40 percent.'” It looks like that court endorsed the principle that, for vague F, x is F if: it's impermissible to assert 'Fx' and x's F-ness is "significant." Does anyone know if that's a commonly used principle in legal decisions?

I'm interested in it since one of the hallmarks of vague predicates is their strange behavior with negation. When we say someone is "not unkind," for example, we're not saying that that person is kind; double negation fails. But what the VAT and Duties Tribunal ruled is that, on this example, if we can't say that someone is unkind, then they're kind (provided they have some "significant" proportion of kindness).

The essay concludes:

In the end, as Lord Justice Jacob noted, a judge can only look at the relevant factors and draw an overall impression. His common-sense approach was a rebuke not only to Procter & Gamble, but to everyone out there who insists that the only way to read laws correctly is to read them strictly.

So now I wonder: can we please get Adam Cohen to slap Ross Douthat around? It ought to be possible; they work for the same paper.

because the president believes in god, like all good soldiers should

2009-05-28T14:21:00.001-07:00

Of course there's a Wikipedia entry on hotdish; I can't believe I didn't look for it sooner. And hotdish on a stick! Who knew?

In other news: we always knew there were religious overtones to the Iraq war; turns out that's because the fundamental itself was pure piety.

if I could turn back time

2009-05-26T13:04:00.000-07:00

Braid is now available for Mac OS!

one thousand years old // sure, I'd say that's old

2009-05-18T21:49:00.000-07:00

This is going to be one of those oh-man-it's-been-such-a-long-time posts; annotated links, etc.

- Probably you are already reading Arts & Letters Daily at least once in a while already. I still do, but I discovered 3 Quarks Daily a few months ago, and on any given day I will probably like its links better. And the videos posted there are usually awesome.

- A while back I started reading Pictures For Sad Children, which, like all good webcomics, deserves to be read from the beginning. But these are some of my favorites: this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, this one, and this one.

- Apparently biology textbooks in the '70s had incredible illustrations?

- Here is some pretty hilariously good term paper advice.

- Man, is this what I sound like? I worry that that is what I sound like.

- Rise Against is basically the Def Leppard of 2009:

nazi punks

2009-03-03T18:00:00.000-08:00

Language Log doesn't disappoint, as usual. I'd seen a couple of these, but none so good as this one:

For more discussion: here.

Also, this is the most complete post I've yet seen about how to support claims about linguistic norms.

freedom from choice is what you want

2009-02-27T12:01:00.000-08:00

I haven't read the decision yet, but the summary is effing incredible. Seems to me that Wolfe's take on this---with all its metaphysics about persons and consequentialism and so on---is beside the point. The judiciary is subject to constraint by the constitution, right? And precedent, whether it's about the interpretation of the establishment clause or the meaning of interpretive standards like strict scrutiny, fails to treat the state as an individual, right? I'm no scholar of constitutional law, but this just sounds crazy.

And isn't it also crazy that a decision like this is coming from the "conservative" Alito? No advocate of judicial restraint or "textualism" could possibly rule this way, right? If the only point is to secure the place of Christian displays in public life, then I can see how a self-identified "conservative" would do this. But to uphold public Christianity at the cost of giving the state free speech rights is profoundly un-conservative. I guess it's consistent with the old Bush 43 strategy: secure the ideological goals of "our side," financial prudence and rule of law be damned.

why don't you ask him what's going on?

2009-02-09T11:59:00.000-08:00

Thom Yorke is a little embarrassing here, but the arrangement is great. Best use of a marching band since Tusk?

ooh, that smell

2009-02-06T12:13:00.000-08:00

You would think that when an extraordinary, eight-gold-medal-winning athlete is spotted with marijuana, it might challenge the notion that weed is for lazy criminals. Sorry, Michael---should have stuck with the legal drugs.

Also, the idea of a New York City crack team of Smell Detectives is delightful. My favorite line: "An analysis of all known maple syrup smell incidents revealed telling trends."

Rainbow Silhouette of the Milky Rain

2009-02-02T12:39:00.000-08:00

I liked this article. Also, if you love Deerhoof (and why wouldn't you?), there are some new live performances to see: One, Two, Three.

please drive faster

2008-10-02T17:00:00.001-07:00

I'm completely late to the party on this one, but for those who are even later than me: Braid is the best game I've played in years. Basically every aspect is superb.

the return of the thin white duke

2008-09-12T11:07:00.000-07:00

So thanks to Evan, I can share this with you:

And this sketchbook is awesome, too (don't miss part two).

And just so I'm not merely re-posting what Evan did, here's a sweet recording of "Station to Station"---I'm pretty sure that's Adrian Belew on lead guitar.

you know we came to party

2008-09-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

At JC's wedding I met up with some old bandmates, who told me about the website erected in our honor: uglymantheband.com. I was part of only the most recent lineup, recordings from which are available on this part of the site. And if you look through the photos, you can find some pictures of the old warehouse space JC and I lived in for a year.

I am really excited to finally have access to these recordings, but a little sad that we a) played "2-3-74" a bit slower than usual, and b) opted for live-in-the-room recording, which was a reasonable choice given time limits but beyond our ability to control. (Most vocals are overdubbed somewhere else.)

rise from your grave

2008-09-06T15:31:00.000-07:00

A lot of things have happened since Tuesday, February 19, 2008. To name a few: classes ended, I got a job at the nearby coffee shop, went to the San Diego Comic Con and presented a couple papers there, J. and L. came to visit, C. came to visit, I went to Philadelphia for J.C.'s wedding, and I've turned in several drafts of my prospectus along the way. Lately I've been trying to beef up/revise the prospectus some more, and generally spending a lot of time worrying.

It would be nice to get this blog going again. Today I'm just going to link to some good stuff I've run across:

There's this xkcd.

I thought I'd seen the best of the nerd tattoos, but this guy went and put the ZFC axioms on his arm.

If only putting on pants were as esteemed as skateboarding, we'd have more videos like this one:

dinner bell, dinner bell, ring

2008-02-19T23:40:00.001-08:00

It is good to know that philosophers are working on genuine problems once in a while.

so many things

2008-01-17T15:46:00.001-08:00

I'd recently been thinking about compiling a list of philosophers with animal surnames, but it looks like I've been beaten to the punch, and then some.

I love hearing about fantastic fossil finds, like the recent giant rodent and hadrosaur with skin.

As usual, the news on the drug industry is not reassuring.

There is a weird tribute to Garfield and Jim Davis made by wild overachievers.

Let this comic be your appetizer before devouring the Quotation Marks Blog:

toothpastefordinner.com

Oh, Wisconsin. (Thanks, Mike.)

Some slang I encountered in St. Louis is getting some press.

america, america

2007-11-19T15:57:00.000-08:00

Sometimes browsing old folders on old hard drives is like looking through an old jacket to find $20 you didn't know you had. The other day I found this little gem, which apparently I made back in 2003.

love me tender

2007-11-13T11:40:00.000-08:00

First of all: is everyone reading Language Log? Everyone should read Language Log.

Next: there was this annoying piece of fMRI-driven political "analysis" in the NYT, which garnered this well-deserved criticism at Language Log. I swear, it doesn't get more fatuous than OMG AMYGDALA ON! ROMNEY MAKES ANXIOUS!

Finally: the SkyMall is always funny and alarming, and the latest edition doesn't disappoint---there's the usual array of highly specialized niche products ($3675 zero-g airplane flight), the laughably asinine (MLB "action shot" photo with your name superimposed on a player's jersey), the gadgets-for-gadgetry's-sake stuff (remote-controlled robot that cleans rain gutters), and the fruits of outright quackery (the Q-Ray Ionized Bracelet, which "balance[s] the negative (Yin) and positive (Yang) energy forces in your body to achieve the state of 'Chi', where you will feel and perform at your best"). There's also a fierce-looking reproduction of an eagle sculpture, the ad for which is accompanied by this jaw-dropping enthymeme:

If God is indeed "in the details," this incredible eagle speaks to the American spirit!

Needless to say, the resin-cast bird is pretty detailed, individual barbs on the feathers and all. But the pièce de résistance of this particular SkyMall is its cover-featured product, The Sharper Image's Alive™ Elvis® Animatronic Robot. Here's (part of) the catalog copy, which I am not making up:

"Alive™ Elvis®" is a lifelike and life-size bust of Elvis Presley. Multiple infrared vision sensors, stereo speakers, 10 precision motors with motion-capture facial animations and 21st century materials combine to create an animatronic robot that looks, feels, sounds and moves like "The King." You can touch his soft hair and sideburns, stroke his skin, feel his black leather jacket, look into his clear baby blues, and marvel as his lips form their distinctive "curl" before he sings in that soulful voice.

And at only $299 for all that touching, stroking, feeling, looking, and marveling!

a modern day warrior / mean, mean stride

2007-11-06T09:20:00.000-08:00

From the bacon blog, this beautiful phrase:

as American as Tom Sawyer lighting a corncob pipe off a tightly rolled Indian treaty

Beautiful.

fill our tanks with oxygen and step outside our homes

2007-10-25T23:47:00.000-07:00

Like Evan, I fear for my post's title's poor taste. But this was really the most tasteful thing I could think of. Nixed candidates were:

"This fire is out of control" (too close to home)
"We didn't start the fire" (true, but a terrible, terrible song)
"burning down the house" (also too close to home)
"let me stand next to your fire" (insincere)
"disco inferno" (false)
"I've got a match" (also false, plus depressing)

Anyway, the fires haven't reached here, and they probably won't. I'm lucky enough to have gotten by with only the occasional bout of acrid, terrible air, and nothing worse. School was canceled for the week, which was a mixed blessing: no attending lectures or holding meetings is nice, but it sharpens the guilt over not doing enough research.

I've got grumpy, cynical, mean things to say about the president, his trip here, and the federal government's response to the fires; but when you can't say anything nice ....

As usual, I've been meaning to update much more regularly than I've done. There are various summer things to report, but right now I'll just mention the kittens:

This is Paisley.

This is Falafel.

And this is Falafel again, looking to me like an enemy from Final Fantasy 6, or maybe 4.

it's a big, big world

2007-07-09T21:47:00.000-07:00

The Road Trip is done. In three weeks I saw Denver, Madison, Appleton, lots of Wisconsin, Chicago, and Albuquerque, not to mention many places along the way (Saint Louis; Yuma; Clinton, Oklahoma). Here are some things seen:

Wisconsin
- The Mermaid Cafe, Madison. I had a sandwich called an OMI, which if I remember correctly was scrambled egg, avocado, tomato, cheddar and some kind of coconut curry bechamel, all on foccacia and grilled to melty.
- Camp Tekawitha, Shawano. Recycled-materials chapel, butterflies that drank from the wet sand.
- Thousand Islands Nature Center, Kaukauna. Deer closer than my fridge.
- the Gordon Bubolz Nature Preserve, Appleton. Obviously well-fed turtles.
- "Gardens of the Fox Cities", Appleton. I had no idea this existed. Got to see damselflies laying eggs in floating plant matter, which was pretty neat.
- Simon's Cheese, Little Chute. Seven-year super-sharp cheddar.
- Olbrich Botanical Gardens, Madison. More carnivorous plants in one place than I've ever seen.
- Cave of the Mounds, Blue Mounds. Our tour guide helpfully pointed out the stalagmite that looks like Patrick from Spongebob Squarepants.
- The House on the Rock, Spring Green.
- The Spring Green General Store, Spring Green. The biggest surprise of the trip---good coffee, good (vegetarian) food, free wireless, ginger peach iced tea. Beautiful building and friendly people.
- Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin Dells. What a disappointment to find that the dells themselves can't be seen except by paid tourist boat trip. Saw a faun in the road.
- Mirror Lake, near Baraboo.
- Various towns, Door County. Excellent ice cream, lots of coffee, giant ships.

Chicago
- Shedd Aquarium. The lizards exhibit was a surprise, and included the most astonishing chameleon I've seen.
- Field Museum of Natural History. So many good things, but the Darwin exhibit was superb. There is also a walk through Earth's biological history which has fantastic fossils.
- The Chicago Diner. Chili twice-baked potatoes ....
- Tortoise! This was one of the best rock shows I've ever seen.

Albuquerque
- Dos Hermanos. Excellent breakfast burrito (green chili).
- The National Atomic Museum. Needs so much copyediting.
- Flying Star. Huevos Rancheros (red chili).
- Satellite Coffee.
- Astro Zombies. The only comic shop I've seen that has LPs.
- Kelly's Brew Pub. Excellent portabella sandwich, sweet potato fries, and red/green chili cheese fries. Also a good oatmeal stout.
- TinkerTown. Possibly the most compulsive work of art I've seen. Inspiring.

Anyway, those are the main items that have websites.

the world is a vampire

2007-07-06T15:21:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Albuquerque, a place I never thought I'd see. I am 90% through an insane road trip vacation (San Diego - Madison - Appleton - Madison - Chicago - Albuquerque - San Diego) that in the end will take almost three weeks, which is a long time for me to be away from home.

Perhaps you are thinking about seeing Transformers? Let me tell you, there is only one reason to see it: CG robots fighting. If you want anything else from a movie, stay home. This is a movie that begins with the line "Before the beginning of time ..." And, astoundingly, it only gets less coherent. I guess there might be a second, perverse reason to see it, if you like seeing movies that feel like they were slapped together to meet the end-of-semester deadline. Oh, and a third, if you were wondering whether Qatar is in the Middle East. In that case, Transformers has got you covered: the words "Qatar - The Middle East" are superimposed over the first establishing shot (yes, it's a sweeping, sun-baked desert), and then again about five more times throughout the film.

Not to mention the sounds ... the sounds in this movie are some of the most intrusive I've ever heard. In case you couldn't tell that Sam's sudden slouch & gape was an expression of indignant dejection, the soundrack is right there to let you know, with one of those stopping-the-record-player noises. When the movie finally fades to credits we're treated to some of that unbelievably annoying autotune-emo-rock, led by just the synth-keening vocals. It's a perfect little bit of auditory synecdoche, reminding you what computer-assisted pablum you just saw.

Thanks to some high-class ineptitude, I got to see the previews twice. Here's a run-down of the latest little gems:

Chuck and Larry: Two manly-men firefighters decide to get married in order to preserve one's pension. But---here's the catch---they have to pretend to actually be gay! And there's a pretty lady involved, and Adam Sandler has to pretend to not be interested, even though, as a straight man, it's all he can do to stop himself from grabbing her ass and belching in satisfaction.

Hot Rod: A guy has a dream, but oh goodness he's sort of inept, so he has a hard time realizing it. Fortunately for us, his dream is to be a stuntman, so he gets hurt in a lot of hilarious ways. Oh, and he's got a really good heart. I swear to fucking god the trailer for this movie was nothing less than the whole story, told in 3 minutes. I will bet anyone $20 that this movie will have a montage sequence of failed stunts set to a hard-driving rock song.

Balls of Fury: So many layers of irony, it looks like a veritable dick-joke baklava. See, everyone is really hardass and tough, but they're playing table tennis! And you've got a determined athlete, but he's kind of chubby! And he plays a match against a little girl, who kicks him in the balls! Get it - balls? And they got Christopher Walken to be in a comedy movie!

Oh, and in the hallway there was a poster for an upcoming Bratz movie. To hell in a goddamn handbasket, I tell you.

the words get in the way

2007-06-13T15:30:00.000-07:00

Oh my goodness I hate writing papers. Writing per se doesn't seem to be the problem---here I am, writing words this very second---but something about having to produce an organized, clear, cogent, and responsible argument that runs ~15 pages is dreadful. I know that the trick is to approach it piecemeal, but that's very hard to do when the end product is supposed to have every last word in just the right place.

So, here's to getting the writing juices flowing:

One of my papers is investigating the "scientific" status of Aristotle's famous Doctrine of the Mean. (That is, squaring the Doctrine with Aristotle'c conception of science, not our own.) I am leaning toward the view that the Doctrine is not itself a first principle of ethics, but rather is justified in terms of a more primitive principle of skills. Aristotle thinks that skills with imprecise matters, like navigation, medicine, and athletic training, consist in judgment that aims toward the mean---excess or deficiency in any of these skills will ruin their object. So, since virtue is a skill like these, virtue aims at the mean.

Another paper is basically detailed, boring exegesis of Derek Parfit's view of personal identity. Parfit appears to hold the view that there isn't much to identity, just a bunch of mental states through time. I will argue that his own considerations don't secure quite the radical view he thinks they do.

Finally, I owe a paper from last quarter on logic and logical consequence. This is the least-worked out paper I've got going, which is extra sad given that I've had twice as long to work on it. I am going to try to weave some of my various hunches about logic into a single coherent paper, hunches such as:
- logic is the study of inferences, and so an account of logic ought to apply equally well to any sort of inferential structure---argument, diagram, experiment, mental images, maybe even nervous tissue.
- logic includes the use of formal structures, but these are tools for studying inferences, not the subject-matter.
- deductive inference is only one sort of inference; we ought to look at inductive and abductive inferences as well, and maybe even the sort of inference underlying object perception.
- logic is a discipline in human science, which means that some old canards about logic need to be recognized as such. In particular, logic is not a priori or necessary. Its special epistemic and modal status are things that it has arrived at by gradual regimentation of its own subject-matter, in the same way that other sciences refine folk concepts to enable powerful inferences.

Clearly I'm being flaky, and these hunches step on all sorts of philosophical toes, and I can't possibly be responsible and at the same time defend each of these. So I'm going to try to use them to diagnose various disagreements between people in the logical consequence debates.

... that's better. Spellbinding prose, here I come.

and they smell like rotting beef carcasses

2007-05-19T21:36:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Toronto, where the fauxhawk is king. Walking the streets here, you see walking caricatures of decade-fashion. It's not just that the hip kids borrow things from the time before their time---though they do that---but that there are dudes and ladies in full black leather-and-denim with bleach-blonde Joan Jett half-mullet; burned-out hippie styles with dreads and freedom guitars; I even saw some chick in distressed Zubaz pants, hi-top Air Jordans, day-glo vest and dyed hair. Lots of the male grad students here are sporting a haicut that lies in the middle of a forced-march Sorites from crew cut to true fauxhawk. It's a little disconcerting. Leave it to philosophers, I guess, to accessorize with borderline cases.

My talk went ok for being on too little sleep. After fumbling a couple responses, I at least engaged some of the questions, if only to defer deflection.

This city is beautiful. The streets are basically dappled with trees, and the trees are dappled with sunlight, and the trees and sun dapple the sidewalk with shadow. There is a lot of dappling in this city.

our yaks are really large

2007-05-18T19:18:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Toronto, where even the panhandlers are impeccably polite. I swear, this place is like goddamn Sesame Street---friendly conversations on every corner, multiracial groups of kids running and playing on stoops, tree-speckled walkways with businesses converted from old houses, skateboarders and bikers and pedestrians everywhere. Christine Korsgaard spoke today, and she was really impressive; very clear, had very interesting things to say about Hume's and Kant's pictures of human interaction.

I met the other presenters today, and not only did they all seem to know who I was, but a couple had actually read my paper ahead of time, knew me as "the guy defending Williams," and one guy was even throwing objections my way. It's going to be an interesting, intense conference.

our country reeks of trees

2007-05-17T23:15:00.000-07:00

Greetings from Toronto, where the time is three hours ahead of San Diego's, and it is three hours more difficult to go to bed early. I remembered to bring socks and all of my toiletries (hooray), but forgot to print out the paper I'm presenting (boo). I've received comments on my paper, to which I'll have to reply Saturday morning, and wouldn't you know that I don't remember Williams's own response to one of the comments. Which is slightly embarrassing, given that I'm presenting Williams's objection. And of course I forgot to bring Williams's book with me.

Toronto seems like an exciting place to live. After being holed up between office parks and condo sprawl in San Diego, it is invigorating to be in the middle of a city full of shops and restaurants that stay open late, a subway system, large public spaces, stately townhouses, and brisk spring air. Somehow the sky looks different here, something I've also noticed when I go back to Wisconsin. Something to do with the clouds, maybe?

I didn't bring a camera, so there will be no sweet photo updates with funny captions like on other blogs. But there will be tales of white-knuckled philosophical suspense, oh there will.

when their eloquence escapes me

2007-05-13T22:01:00.000-07:00

Since I've ordered a few volumes of the Collected Works of John Dewey from the Southern Illinois University Press, I get their catalog a few times a year. I was paging through the most recent catalog and found Teaching/Writing in Third Spaces: The Studio Model, which included not only a puzzling forward-slash in its title (the ampersand isn't good enough anymore?), but the following sentence in the blurb:

The focus on interactional inquiry challenges traditional power hierarchies within classrooms and shifts the nature of discourse.

The rest of the blurb portrays a quite reasonable-sounding book in quite reasonable-sounding language---the tale of two composition teachers' creation of a writing studio where students could work on essays for other courses. I guess even the most level-headed catalog copywriter has a fit of jargon once in a while.

I know that you're probably sore

2007-05-06T14:51:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe it's been a month since the last post, but it has. As predicted, some things fizzled:

- I've been producing far less than 10 pages per week; more like 4.
- I've skipped one meeting of the normativity seminar
- the Pragmatism group never met, and won't for the rest of the quarter
- I bailed on the Roush presentation

All of which is really too bad, except for maybe missing the one seminar; there's only so much discussion of motivational externalism that I can take.

So I thought that this weekend would begin a bit of a break for me, since the Roush mini-conference happened yesterday, and I'd already have sent off my revision to Toronto, and the writing program applications would be in, and I could avoid the anxiety bug until going to Canada. But it turns out that this week I've got to meet with the grad adviser for my yearly evaluation, and meet with my third-year committee, who will try to make me settle on a dissertation area. Not to mention the three papers to write before the term is over, and the ninth-week presentation, and some devastating objections to think up answers to, so as not to look foolish in Toronto when I'm confronted with the same objections all over again.

Anyway, right now I'm warming up for some more writing by posting here, listening to the old Muse album, and entertaining the thought of a second pot of coffee. Animal Crossing is tempting me, but I'd better not. There's a pretty great article on depression, drug companies, and the DSM in the May Harper's. The Lavender Diamond has a new video, which I think is their first. And Jonathan Wolff wrote a short essay on what it's like to tell people you're a philosopher, which seems pretty right on to me, and I don't even ever tell people "I'm a philosopher." Admitting I'm a philosophy grad student is risky enough.

a whole lot of precious time

2007-04-07T22:12:00.000-07:00

It's the first Saturday of the new term, and I am already working into the evening. (Well, not at the moment, you know, but you get the idea.) Like that pair of velociraptors that took down the warden, the academic commitments flanked my ass. I'm now being devoured by:

- a seminar on Aristotle's philosophy of science
- a seminar/writing-workshop that requires 10-20 pages of material per week
- auditing yet another seminar, on the normativity of ethics
- the Pragmatism reading group, which is reading Dewey's Art as Experience
- a presentation at the upcoming mini-conference on Sherrilyn Roush's work
- the reading group that's reading Roush's Tracking Truth
- revising an old paper for presentation at the Toronto Grad Conference
- writing a score for a seven-minute dance performance
- finishing a paper for an independent study from last quarter on logical consequence

Something will probably have to give. Some things aren't fully required of me, which is kind of reassuring, but those things are also interesting and useful.

I've got an uncontrollable urge

2007-04-02T15:26:00.000-07:00

I just finished Nicholson Baker's The Fermata, which I started over spring break last week. Possibly it is the funniest book I've ever read, and certainly it is the dirtiest, and it has the most delightful puns, one of which is so good that (as I exclaimed at the time I read it) it deserves a cash prize.

(much better than the) owner of a broken heart

2007-03-29T00:38:00.000-07:00

Do you love Yes? Do you love the Yes of 90125? Maybe you will like this.

I spent the winter with my nose buried in a book while trying to restructure my character

2007-03-18T18:40:00.000-07:00

Oh man it has been a long time. I've thought of a lot of things to write about since that last post, but for one reason or another they haven't made it to this inter-space. Here is a brief and totally incomplete list of them:

- A response to the article Jon linked to in the last comments section, declaring my agreement with the writer, my love for old-school shoot-em-ups, and my frustration with the games that just take you on a protracted, marginally challenging ride
- the Deerhoof album Friend Opportunity and the long shadow of The Runners Four
- the Of Montreal album Hissing Fauna, are You the Destroyer?, and its many debts to David Bowie
- the mystifyingly large number of Gatorade varieties (regular, Fierce, Rain, Xtremo, Frost, X-Factor, and now A.M., not to mention the "performance series")
- the awesome power of keyboard shortcuts in Mac OSX, such as command-tilde and option-arrow keys
- the ideas I've been kicking around for my term paper this quarter
- more about the problems raised by illiberal groups in liberal states

Maybe one of these things will make it to the front page? Anyway, if you haven't already heard, get yourself psyched for Approximate Pi Day. Or maybe get a sweet piece of the action over in Iraq!

the soap shoved in the mouth to cleanse the mind

2007-01-24T11:39:00.000-08:00

I liked this article on radical Islam by Francis Fukuyama, until I got to this part (emphasis is mine):

... the old multicultural model has not been a big success in countries such as the Netherlands and Britain, and ... it needs to be replaced by more energetic efforts to integrate non-western populations into a common liberal culture. The old multicultural model was based on group recognition and group rights. Out of a misplaced sense of respect for cultural differences—and in some cases out of imperial guilt—it ceded too much authority to cultural communities to define rules of behaviour for their own members. Liberalism cannot ultimately be based on group rights, because not all groups uphold liberal values. The civilisation of the European Enlightenment, of which contemporary liberal democracy is the heir, cannot be culturally neutral, since liberal societies have their own values regarding the equal worth and dignity of individuals. Cultures that do not accept these premises do not deserve equal protection in a liberal democracy. Members of immigrant communities and their offspring deserve to be treated equally as individuals, not as members of cultural communities. There is no reason for a Muslim girl to be treated differently under the law from a Christian or Jewish one, whatever the feelings of her relatives.

I'll be danged if this doesn't just beg the whole question. Fukuyama is right if he means that, as a matter of fact, group rights are inconsistent with classical liberalism. But as a normative political claim, it's just some heavy-handed table-pounding, leaving unanswered the very problem he posed at the beginning of the essay:

Modern identity politics springs from a hole in the political theory underlying liberal democracy. That hole is liberalism's silence about the place and significance of groups.

It sure sounded like he was going to provide a solution for filling in that oversight, or at least some reasons why it was a sagacious silence rather than an unfortunate but understandable failure to consider the significance of sub-national groups. Damn you, Francis Fukuyama, and your seductive exposition!

Anyway, the part where he summarizes Roy's thesis is well worth reading. And now I'm going to have to think harder about patriotism.

they probably used to eat meat when they were kids

2007-01-17T00:13:00.000-08:00

A long book about the history of vegetarianism gets reviewed here; an exciting excerpt:

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the resonance of the term “Pythagorean” was more dietary than mathematical.

I crack the eggs and make a smiley face

2007-01-11T23:24:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the Wikipedia, I've lately been obsessed with Egg in the Basket, a dish which apparently some people have christened 'Osama egg Laden', 'bread uterus', and 'Opeth in toast', among other things; and my personal favorite, 'goatse toast'. Also hilarious is a bit of spite from Alan Moore. About the scene in V for Vendetta:

They don't know what British people have for breakfast, they couldn't be bothered. 'Eggy in a basket' apparently. Now the US have 'eggs in a basket,' which is fried bread with a fried egg in a hole in the middle. I guess they thought we must eat that as well, and thought 'eggy in a basket' was a quaint and Olde Worlde version.

I don't understand a thing you say; I cannot understand a single word

2007-01-03T14:31:00.000-08:00

So it seems that NYT article on free will is gathering some attention; this philosopher sees that fact as a sign that

... on the rare occasions that central topics in philosophy are discussed in the newspapers, or works of analytic philosophy reviewed that are directed at general audiences, they tend to be received with great enthusiasm. ... the skill that makes for an outstanding specialist philosopher translates to addressing broader audiences.

Well, maybe. The Times article deals mostly with the concerns from neuroscience, physics, AI and logic that motivate most people's sense of despair over determinism. The philosophical attempt to show the coherence of compatibilism is met with a scoffing eyebrow:

I have to admit that I find these kind of ideas inspiring, if not liberating. But I worry that I am being sold a sort of psychic perpetual motion machine. Free wills, ideas, phenomena created by physics but not accountable to it. Do they offer a release from the chains of determinism or just a prescription for a very intricate weave of the links? And so I sought clarity from mathematicians and computer scientists. According to deep mathematical principles, they say, even machines can become too complicated to predict their own behavior and would labor under the delusion of free will.

Is this evidence that the concerns of analytic philosophy - much less the work of analytic philosophers - is heartily appreciated by non-analytic-philosopher audiences? Even Dennett's book, which really failed to ease my incompatibilist worries when I read it, was mostly about evolutionary biology and artificial life. Seems to me that the popularity of this article is due to the scientists' work, not the philosophers'.

And where does Prof. Stanley get off saying that people like Rorty "have based significant portions of their careers pandering to our fellow humanists' disdain for our discipline"? It's not like the humanists are alone in finding some or most of academic analytic philosophy recherche, tiresome, tedious, circuitous hair-splitting. Has Stanley tried talking to other academics from even the closest academic disciplines - cognitive science, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, political science, and economics, for example?

I'm not saying that the scientists who have no patience for philosophical work always have good reasons for doing so. Surely sometimes they don't fully understand the place and value of philosophy in the production of knowledge. But Stanley's post smacks of a "they don't like us because they're too stupid to understand what we do" haughtiness, which is both distastefully arrogant and counterproductive of interdisciplinary work. Seriously now, whose fault is it that philosophers' work is kept in the dustiest corners of the ivory tower?

three turtle doves

2007-01-02T20:37:00.000-08:00

There has been a lot of interesting/edifying stuff in the newspaper lately:

- From some physicians, a statement of caution about the medicalization of everyday life. I'm happy that this view is getting mainstream press, because (to the best of my knowledge) it almost never does, because it's my view too, and because being at home and seeing alarmingly frequent drug ads for restless leg syndrome, depression, erectile dysfunction, anxiety, etc. has got my hackles all bristly.

- From a NYT science guy, a surprisingly adept piece on the scientific incursion into the problem of free will. It's much better than the Economist's recent bit, which is just downright glib. In the print edition's full article, they "defend" the philosophical work on this problem by basically saying "Ok, we know it sounds crazy to sit and think about a problem, rather than to run out and do experiments; but remember, Einstein got great results by sitting and thinking about things!" As if scientists in general don't have to sit and think before designing and running experiments?

- A biographical/survey article about a Prof. Levitin, a record-producer-turned-cognitive-scientist who studies human perception of music. A provocative quote:

“Nobody else’s piano sounds quite like that,” he said, referring to [Elton] John. “Pop musicians compose with timbre. Pitch and harmony are becoming less important.”

Pitch and harmony might be becoming less important (though surely not in the sense that people don't care if things are in tune), but I wonder about that "composing with timbre" claim. Timbre is definitely the biggest cue for a listener when recognizing a performer. What does it mean that pop musicians compose with it primarily?

four turtle doves

2006-12-25T21:19:00.000-08:00

In the spirit of the day, I've come bringing gifts:

- First and foremost, the Founding Fathers' inaugural track: "Bespectacled Ladies". This is of executive quality. Can you spot the MC?

- If you didn't already hear me complain about it, I took a music class last quarter. It was frustrating, and culminated in this piece of garbage, made from field recordings I made in my kitchen.

- Wikipedia says that Black English is a type variety ("dialect, ethnolect, and sociolect") of American English, itself a variety of English. British English also is a variety. So if the wikipedia is to be trusted here, the verdict is: same language, different varieties, themselves families of many varieties.

- Brandom's Locke Lectures are posted here (as Word documents!), and they look promising. I'm only halfway through the first of them, but am excited about the synthesis on the menu.

my perfect name

2006-12-13T00:11:00.000-08:00

Everyone of pop-minded minds ought to listen to the song "Again and Again" by the bird and the bee. The other songs there are more or less good also; watch out for the Astrud Gilberto tribute cameo!

Did you know about The Cube Researchers? Maybe you did. Maybe you already know one, perhaps a friend or colleague?

Pretty dang soon I will post here my final project from the music class I took, and perhaps a rap song about bespectacled ladies that I didn't write.

but that's totally feather pluckin' insane

2006-12-05T23:28:00.000-08:00

Evan has reminded me that I once considered this man my archnemesis. His ubiquitous cackle haunted me for several years of my life, from the formative Disney Afternoon years to the college reruns of Jackie Chan Adventures. Also: 'voiceography'?

It turns out that there is more Marmaduke backlash than I thought. Oh, and there's an actual Marmaduke fan.

Also: River City Ransom!

I saw you, it was incredible

2006-11-29T13:02:00.000-08:00

Contrary to popular speculation, I am not shirking the blog duty because of the Wii. I've been playing very little in the way of video games (except for that new high score in Grid Wars), mostly just holding down the grading and Thanksgiving responsibilities. It's also paper-writing time, so I might end up posting more often, both to float ideas and to procrastinate. I also have to create a project for the music class I'm taking, which I'll post up here when I finish it.

A recent email from Will began: "Are you, like all others, inundated with links?" It made me think, yes, I am, and just when did this inundation begin? People have probably been trading links since the inception of http, but these days the links are just everywhere. I blame YouTube, but that's an unscientific verdict.

In that spirit:

(Thanks Chris and Matt.)

Stephen Colbert is a D&Der?

Oh, and a new drawing is up at the other blog, this time in a proper thumbnail-and-link style.

new blog alert

2006-11-08T00:28:00.000-08:00

I've started a new blog, for posting drawings that I've done. It's called I am Learning to Use Photoshop. There are a few things there already, and hopefully I'll add to them relatively regularly.

freedom of choice

2006-11-06T15:55:00.000-08:00

So, as the good doctor has reminded me, tomorrow is election day. Go vote! It is exciting.

Also, I'm curious about what the States provide their citizens with in the way of election information. California sends a big old packet of stuff, including the full text of proposed amendments, two levels of summary for each, arguments for and against, and some background information about relevant things, e.g. state bond debt. I was really impressed by the volume of information. But then, I don't recall ever getting anything like it when I was a Missouri voter. So, you folks in other states, what did your state provide you before the election?

it's deja vu ...

2006-10-23T18:20:00.000-07:00

Looking to get angry all over again? Look no further.

I'm a genius, a super-scientist, greatest man who has ever lived

2006-10-19T12:23:00.000-07:00

Steven Pinker throws the gauntlet in George Lakoff's face, Lakoff picks it up, throws it back, Pinker volleys.

gently on the master fade

2006-10-16T12:42:00.000-07:00

Also, check out this video by Martin Dosh, who opened for (and played with) Andrew Bird:

who will save your soul?

2006-10-16T12:14:00.000-07:00

Browsing a magazine rack a few days ago, I saw the latest issue of Guitar Player proclaiming "Avenged Sevenfold: Saviors of American Metal!" Two built, tattooed dudes graced the cover, holding guitars and looking angry. I thought, does American metal need saving? What about Mastodon, or the Dillinger Escape Plan, or Cephalic Carnage, or the many Pitchfork-hyped stoner metal bands? What about that New York Times article about the resurgence of art-inclined metal bands?

This sort of rhetoric crops up every so often. Remember when the Strokes and the Queens of the Stone Age were being hailed as saviors of rock? At the record store I saw the newest Starlight Mints album, pacakged with a blurb from Pitchfork claiming that the Mints were saving pop music (from this review). But is pop music's soul so damaged that it needs saving? You'd think the reviewer hadn't heard the Flaming Lips, or Of Montreal, or the Magnetic Fields (or Deerhoof). But seriously, anyone who works for Pitchfork has probably memorized those bands' entire catalogs.

Is there any genre of music that needs saving? Suggestions would be appreciated.

On, Wisconsin

2006-10-03T11:02:00.000-07:00

Russ Feingold speaks to the rest of the Senate.

what could a businessman ever want more?

2006-10-02T17:54:00.000-07:00

This is a fantastic article about manual work, thought, the history of US capitalism, and the future of the "knowledge economy."

and the Academy Award for ridiculous overacting goes to ... you!

2006-09-29T14:43:00.000-07:00

Ok, that was a bit dramatic. But seriously: this administration is dangerous.

all good soldiers crack like boulders

2006-09-29T12:32:00.000-07:00

I know it seems like all I do lately is link to other things (or gripe about our gov't), but this piece on the latest "antiterror" legislation is worth looking at, if only for the links to other sources. I'm amazed again and again at the lines of reasoning our elected representatives are willing to speak aloud, in front of the press no less. The whole "government secrecy keeps you safe" line is getting really tired, especially when the president himself can detain US citizens in secret prisons, suspend habeas corpus, appeal to "secret evidence," and send so-called "combatants" to other countries to be tortured. Does the president know what 'habeas corpus' means, and why it is important? Does he have any respect for the rule of law? Does he know why there is a separation of powers in the US Constitution? One gets the feeling that he just likes to use majestic words---'freedom', 'terror', 'democracy', 'evil'---but that he couldn't pass a 9th-grade civics exam. How does democracy differ from mob rule? What does it mean to represent a constituency? What were the Alien and Sedition Acts, and why don't we have them anymore?

Is there a shred of cognitive dissonance when sixteen third parties conclude that his war in Iraq has galvanized violence of all political stripes, and he tells the country that we need to put more elbow grease into the "war on terror" on account of all the new terrorists he's created? Is he actually personally offended, as he appears to be, when anyone so much as suggests that his policies and practices might be misguided, counterproductive, illegal, or immoral?

This is perhaps the most "Bush-bashing" post I've written. I don't usually like to hear people personally insult the president; I feel like it crosses the line from legitimate dissent to juvenile partisan invective. But this is the man's sixth year of presidency, and the assault on the United States Constitution and the citizenry has been so sustained, and the doublespeak so audacious, that I really question whether GW Bush knows the most basic principles of our country's system of government. How else could he proclaim the greatness of our nation while simultaneously undermining the legal principles that have made it great?

I sometimes hear people say "love it or leave it," or "if you don't like it here, just leave." It makes me want to scream. I love my country enough to care about its laws and policies, and the ways those laws and policies affect people both within and without its borders. I am perceptive enough to know that governments are made of human beings, who don't leave their faults behind once elected, who can really fuck things up for the rest of us if they're allowed to do so. I am patriotic enough to demand that my country isn't hijacked by small-minded religious bigots with imperial ambitions. If you think I should leave because I think our leadership is misguided (at best) or unspeakably corrupt (at worst), you can piss off. Go give your hugs and handjobs to your authoritarian friends. Don't expect me to nod and clap along with you when another naked man shows off his fantastic new outfit.

Remember five or six years ago, when the neoconservative chatterboxes openly uttered the word 'empire'? For five years since, Bush supporters have been downplaying the term. Take a look around you now, and see if you don't see a child emperor, ready to take control of his empire.

'dinosaur' means "terrible lizard"

2006-09-28T12:27:00.000-07:00

Vicarious retribution for terrible comics here (thanks Mike). And remember this previous bit of retribution?

If I'd a knew you were coming, I'd a baked a cake (?)

2006-09-27T21:45:00.000-07:00

It turns out my birthday was on National Punctuation Day. Oh, if only I'd known!

X-Presidents

2006-09-25T13:49:00.000-07:00

See Bill Clinton cut through shallow media bullshit here. If you're impatient, read the transcript. It is so refreshing to see someone smart (who doesn't have to worry about reelection) refuse to play into the hands of the disinformation campaign. Highlight: Clinton calling them out on the fear-mongering, election-baiting, and active manipulation of the public by lies.

vote Bear Patrol Party 2006

2006-09-11T14:21:00.000-07:00

From today's Washington Post:

Cheney said it is "hard to say" whether there are more terrorists now than five years ago. But the fact that al-Qaeda has launched no successful attack on U.S. soil since Sept. 11, 2001, shows that the administration's policies are working, he added.

"I don't know how you can explain five years of no attacks, five years of successful disruption of attacks, five years of, of defeating the efforts of al-Qaeda to come back and kill more Americans," Cheney said. "You've got to give some credence to the notion that maybe somebody did something right."

Apparently, Vice President Cheney expects us all to play Homer Simpson to his Lisa.

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The Bear Patrol must be working like a charm.
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: Thank you, dear.
Lisa: By your logic I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Oh, how does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: It's just a stupid rock.
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

anybody trust that man, who puts the rifle in your hand?

2006-08-30T13:04:00.001-07:00

Here is a pretty great resource documenting the chronic dishonesty of the present U.S. government. Also, high score update: 1,975,715.

anybody trust that man, who puts the rifle in your hand?

2006-08-30T13:04:00.000-07:00

Here is a pretty great resource documenting the chronic dishonesty of the present U.S. government. Also, high score update: 1,975,715.

we made love like a pair of black wizards

2006-08-28T00:12:00.000-07:00

So I was recently turned on to Grid Wars 2, and I'm hooked. I might rant about how great it is in a future post, but for now I'll just note that this guy is pretty much right on, even if he sounds crazy. My current high score is 1,958,489 (23 minutes or so).

when you know it depresses me

2006-08-03T00:12:00.000-07:00

More shameless disrespect here.

because the president believes in God, like all good soldiers should

2006-07-26T22:46:00.000-07:00

This is just the next most odious, underhanded, and insulting piece of garbage that the doublespeaking rats in our government are trying to pass: "The American Values Agenda." It boggles my mind that even after parts of this package have already been considered and defeated, they're putting them on the table again, because they'll serve to rile up "conservative" voters anyway. This is crass, transparent, insulting. The moralizing of this presidency and its goddamn toadies is fucking shameful, but far be it from them to countenance the least bit of shame; "the president is always right." At least the Daily Show's viewers will get a laugh over this.

\rant

twinkle, twinkle, Ringo Starr, George and John and Paul

2006-07-24T21:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the last day of this year's Comic Con, and I have a lot to post about. Since the whole thing would be unmanageably long and boring in one dose, here's the first half:

Thursday

Thursday began with an early meeting with my quasi-employer, who got me a press badge and said a brief spiel before attending to his own things. I bummed around for a bit, then settled at a meeting of the Comic Arts Conference (an academic conference that takes place within Comic-Con). I saw half a paper on the differences between the film and comic versions of V for Vendetta, which was pretty good, and half a paper on the "crisis of confidence" that movie studios have in the comic art form. I left that presentation pretty quick, though, because the guy was basically just venting about how studios wouldn't put superheroes in their "proper" costumes. Also, he sounded like the comic-book guy from the Simpsons, and was just as smug about his own wit.

After drifting from panel to panel, I settled in again at the CAC for a panel called "When Pictures and Words Collide!" I'm not sure why it was advertised that way, but 2/3 of it was great anyway. The first speaker was R.C. Harvey, who pretty much just told non-sequitur stories and showed comic strips while narrating them. Rick Geary was the second speaker, and though his work looked interesting, he was a stupefyingly boring speaker. The star of the panel was Chip Kidd, who treated the audience to a dramatic reading of a Batman story (or really, a Bat-Man story) he and Tony Millionaire did for DC's Bizzaro World collection.

I had some time to kill, so I arrived early to the room my first assignment was in, and managed to catch a bit of Kevin Munroe speaking about the upcoming TMNT animated movie, and saw a couple clips. The movie is a CGI feature (go figure), and just considering the visual aesthetic, looks like it straddles an uncomfortable saddle between the unapologetically stylized (Toy Story, etc.) and the hyper-realistic (such as the various effects in the Lord of the Rings movies). Trailer here.

After the TMNT panel, people filtered in to see the Lionsgate panel, which featured three upcoming films: Crank, Skinwalkers, and Saw III. This was the first panel that I covered, and aside from having to avoid looking at the screen during the Skinwalkers clip, everything went smoothly. Basically I just write about what I see and hear during the panel, and then immediately upload it to the site. The jobs are over almost as soon as they start, and it's even kind of refreshing to just write fast and loose and not worry about the sloppiness of my exposition.

(Anyone who is bored enough to read my updates should visit the Latino Review. The stuff I've written appears on the left bar, which says "headlines" or "news" or something. I've done the Comic Con Reports on the following panels: Crank, Skinwalkers, Saw III, The Reaping, The Wicker Man, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Superman Returns, Battlestar Galactica, Southland Tales, Splinter, The Covenant, The Grudge 2, The Hitcher, Fearless, Balls of Fury, and Hot Fuzz.)

As part of my gig, I was given a pass to a screening of Accepted, which doesn't come out for a while. I'd like to say how the movie was, but I can't responsibly do so, since I walked out on it after 20 minutes. People in the theater seemed to enjoy it, but I wasn't really getting it.

Thursday ended with about 45 minutes' worth of Hero Tomorrow, an independent film being shown in the con's IFC room. The movie was amusing at times, but what with the shoddy acting, lighting, and pacing, none of us watching it could stand to endure its second half. It's basically a young-adults-relationship story, but the male lead, David, is an aspiring (and lukewarm) comic artist. He is "really into Native American mythology," and somehow this interest is responsible for his superhero---Apama, the undiscovered beast. David spends a lot of time in his Apama costume (taking Polaroids in various poses, beating up teenage punks on Halloween, etc.), and I guess that's where most of the movie's humor comes from. My advice: if it comes to a theater near you, go see it. But only if you're really bored.

Friday

Friday began with a whimper. I was really excited to see a panel entitled "Ray Harryhausen: King Kong and the Colorization of Merian C. Cooper's She," but Ray Harryhausen did almost no talking, and no clips were shown. Instead, we were treated to a bunch of other old guys talking about the Empire State Building.

So I left after a while, and headed to a promising-sounding meeting of the CAC on Visual Language. The main speaker had already handed out flyers for his talk, and I was excited to hear someone who had spent some time (and apparently a book-length treatise) arguing that there is such a thing as visual language, with its own peculiar syntax. His talk was preceded by a guy who was an extremely poor presenter, and from whom I learned nothing. Then Cohn stepped up, and gave half a dispiriting presentation before I had to leave to cover another panel. Basically Cohn didn't know how to present his main concepts, some of the basic concepts in linguistics - syntax, semantics, universal grammar, etc. I'm hoping to read some of his online essays, and that those essays do a better job of presenting an argument.

So next I covered the Battlestar Galactica panel, which was unbelievably crowded. Apparently this show has a lot of fans, because the crowd waiting to get in was unmanageable; what started as two lines became a mob trying to squeeze through a single door. It was like those toy models of solute diffusion through a semi-permeable membrane that you get in biology classes. Even once I was inside, I still felt a bit lost, since I'd never seen the show. But I managed to write some things anyway, and even got caught up in the sentiment when Edward James Olmos stepped on stage and everyone went apeshit.

Since it was running late, I had to leave the Galactica panel early in order to get to the Southland Tales panel on time. This is the new film by Richard Kelly of Donnie Darko fame, and it looks pretty good. The whole story is being told across (at least) three graphic novels and one film. We saw a bizarre clip, which I've described here.

Next on my schedule was a Bruce Timm retrospective, which was pretty great. Mostly he talked with some other producer about the various shows they'd done, and we were treated to some fanboys asking very specific questions.

I skipped the Snakes on a Plane panel to get some dinner at Pokez, the best punk rock vegetarian Mexican restaurant that I know of. After dinner I caught some of the "Worst Cartoons Ever," followed by another installment of Spike and Mike's Sick and Twisted Festival of Animation. The latter was pretty annoying, just because of the audience. But I won't bitch about that now.

the sea is foaming like a 1000 lb. keg

2006-07-17T22:33:00.000-07:00

Man, surfing is just about the best thing: it's exercise, it happens in the ocean, and it's fun. And I'm lucky enough to live next to a gorgeous stretch of beach and cliffs, which glows near sunset:

In other news, I just read about Trevor Horn, whose career has been unbelievable. Check the Wikipedia article here. The Buggles, Yes, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Band Aid, Paul McCartney, t.A.T.u, Belle and Sebastian ....

we don't get fooled again

2006-07-15T18:36:00.001-07:00

Man, I have been meaning to get back to this thing for a long time now. The comment thread on the previous post was encouraging, but I wanted to let it go for a while, to see what would develop. (You guys know me well enough to write the damn thing yourselves, although some details were dead giveaways---Chris, I can't believe you thought I would get up at 9am in the summer.)

One thing (among many) keeping me away from posting has been a sense of futility---so many blogs, so many words, what the hell is it worth, anyway, and the pompous I-am-important-dammit style of blogging is tiresome. But I realize that I enjoy reading my friends' blogs, and there are things I've been meaning to post here by way of letting people know what I'm up to.

- I have a series of photos detailing the progression of facial hair styles I underwent in April/May, from full beard to friendly mutton-chops to a couple handlebars and other, wimpier mustaches. But I still have to edit the files, so that'll have to wait.

- At some point in April, Matt and I played a show at the pub on campus, under the name of Mr. Venn's Diagrams. You can find some blog entries and photos here, and a recording of the show as a .zip file. I guess you can see one of my mustaches in those photos.

- a couple weeks later, Mr. Venn's Diagrams played a second show at Mike's old place. There are blog entries (with photos) here and here, but no recordings, which is probably just as well, since the room was loud and we had no amplification.

- Soon after the second show, Mr. Venn's Diagrams became defunct. Well, really I quit the band. It was a lot of fun, but too much in the way of time commitment, what with another band on the side, teaching to do, and papers to write. I suppose technically Mr. Venn's Diagrams is on hiatus, since future shows are possible, and some studio projects are in the works, but for now, nothing's doing.

- I finished off the Spring Quarter on June 19th, at which point I turned in my grades and basked in the fact that I now have no more Incompletes to finish. (Unofficially, I owe one professor a paper, but it's not an `I', so the pressure is relatively low.

- I got a job for Summer Session II (Aug. 7 - Sep. 9) as a TA for 6th College again. This time I'll be working for the upper-division requirement, in which the students have to write Montaigne-style reflective essays.

- Until Aug 7 I'm unemployed, but I've managed to keep pretty busy, what with

- helping people move (5 to 7, depending how you count)
- planning, hosting, and cleaning up after a July 4 barbecue
- visiting Stephanie in L.A.
- having 2x weekly band practices
- finishing off Dewey's Logic and the corresponding reading group
- reading Shafer-Landau's Moral Realism, in prep for a reading group
- gathering and keeping pet snails

- the San Diego Comic-Con is fast approaching, and as of today I have a gig covering some of the Con's film panels for the Latino Review (apparently it's cool that I'm white). About once a day during the Con, I'm supposed to attend a panel, do some kind of write-up while I'm there, and upload it immediately to the site. Breaking news, and all that. (I was hoping to be in on New Line's Snakes on a Plane panel, but looks like that's not going to happen.) In exchange for this, I get a free press badge for the con, which saves me a cool $60, and lets me bypass some lines or something.

Anyway, before this all gets too long I'll stop here. Look for more frequent (maybe) updates, unless I go the way of the bitterness, and decide to delete the blog, which can now be found by googling my first and last names. I'm not sure I like the idea of my students reading this thing.

I got eyes, ears and noses, skin and tastebuds

2006-06-16T03:00:00.000-07:00

Though this blog has been dying a slow, gasping death, I am alive! It is about three days until the end of the quarter here and I have been writing papers all over the place. Somehow I am not as stressed out about the process as I usually am. I wish I knew why, so that I could harness that power and have even less stressful future writing sessions. I am probably going to write some raggedy-ass arguments, but at least I'll have turned in some work.

So, one and a half papers to go. I've meant to post a hundred things to this blog in the last month, and they'll show up eventually. But for now, I wanted to link everyone to The Snow Leopard's photos page, which underwent an enormous update a few weeks back and deserves a good long look. My favorite photos are the ones where Chris is on the Great Wall of China, and he is wearing the Spock vs. Q shirt. Take that, globalization.

second verse ...

2006-05-05T23:58:00.000-07:00

... same as the first. From the NY TImes:

"We went from totally believing in Bush to really having our doubts," said Wayne Toomey, who owns a house with Ms. Tuttle in the nearby suburb of Parrish. "It comes down to his lack of care about gas prices."

Well, I'm glad something got your attention, Wayne. I might have thought the steady stream of criminal acts would make you "really have your doubts" about Bush and company, but hell, as long as you're paying attention now.

are we a nation of six year-olds? (redux)

2006-04-30T13:13:00.000-07:00

Seriously, now:

U.S. religious leaders seek God's help -- to reduce the spiralling cost of gas

Religious leaders were to meet in Washington today to pray publicly for gasoline prices to ease, organizers with the group Pray Live said.

"It is our hope that seeing and hearing some of the nation's most powerful preachers gathered around a gas station and the United States capital as a backdrop, will remind everyone who is really in charge of our world -- God," said Wenda Royster, founder of Pray Live, a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week live prayer line, e-worship centre, and Internet radio station.

Several leaders of Protestant organizations from Washington plan to participate in the event.

The rise in prices at gasoline stations has raised concerns in the United States, leading President George W. Bush to demand a federal inquiry to ensure Americans are not being swindled at the pump. AFP

Gas prices are high? Why, we must be getting swindled!! Call in God - no, not their swarthy god, our God, the one who helps us win football games and kill all the ragheads who hate our freedom. He'll make sure we're getting a fair deal on gasoline, now.

I suppose these people helped re-elect Bush, too. The level of discourse on national policy is just Goddamn insulting sometimes.

we all know art is hard

2006-04-09T15:15:00.000-07:00

Today was basically my last day in London. Technically I'll be here tomorrow, but it's a traveling day. Jess and I went to the Tate Modern today, which was awesome. Here's the rundown:

- I saw the first Jackson Pollock that I've ever really liked - "Summertime." I like how the paint dances across the long canvas.

- Francis Bacon: ZOMG more terrifying than I ever knew.

- Picasso painted a few pieces based on a goat skull, a bottle, and a candle. The one that I saw was like a small Guernica.

- Anish Kapoor's "Ishi's Light" is great - it's a very simple, very disorienting piece of ceramic and fiberglass that transports you someplace very weird. I wish an image could express the feeling.

- Thomas Schütte had some great photos of caricatures in sculpture.

- I can't believe it took me this long to realize the similarities between the forms of Alexander Calder's mobiles and Joan Miro's paintings.

- Duchamp is hilarious. I saw this in miniature.

Tune in later for some photos of the actual building, and a crazy installation made out of casts of boxes. Also, I will rant on the use of 'suggest' in artist statements and gallery plaques.

people still actually give a shit about the queen

2006-04-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

10:20pm

Stephanie, you win the Gold Star. On the flight over here I read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and enjoyed it very much. Though I didn't consciously try to emulate its style, I do remember thinking that the lists were a very effective way of communicating both content and the mental life of the narrator. I was probably so impressed that I just adopted it without thinking ... so here, then, is some more:

Further ways London differs from San Diego:

- the redhead quotient here is higher by an order of magnitude or two
- Quasi appears on ads for CD compilations

Further ways London is similar to San Diego:

- in elevators, everyone looks down silently
- on public transport, everyone looks at each other surreptitiously but tries not to make eye contact
- pop music is hilarious

Thoughts I had while browsing the National Gallery:

- there are really a lot of similarities between Mannerism and the Northern European Renaissance, like the weird elongated figures and the weird pinks and blues

- the surrealist Delvaux owes a debt to pre-Renaissance Italians like Duccio, what with the spare architectural elements in one-point perspective

- the painted depictions of the Ascension are bizarre; Jesus and the choir of angels sit up in this weird portal in the sky; they reminded me how absurd it is to anthropomorphize God (ok, this is a nativity but whatever)

- "Saint Veronica with the Sudarium": weird and terrifying

- Albrecht Dürer = awesome

- Holbein's "The Ambassadors" is huge, and the brushwork is unbelievably detailed; for example, the fabric draped on the table in the background is woven, and each square of stitching is articulated

- the Dutch anticipated the Ames Room by several centuries by building dioramas that had three-dimensional perspective when viewed through a peephole; awesome

- when seen in person, Constable's paintings are huge and messy, with big old globs of paint everywhere; this was a surprise because I'd always thought of them as meticulously wrought

- "Sunflowers" too has a crazy thick texture; the petals basically stand in spiky relief

- the Arnolfini Wedding is much smaller than one would think, which really makes it more impressive; and the contrast between the well-wrought clothing and the weird-looking faces got me thinking about pictorial convention all over again

Ok well it is maybe bedtime. More news tomorrow, from the Tate Modern.

on my trip to England I learned something quite obscene

2006-04-07T14:12:00.000-07:00

1:38pm
It's about 20 minutes until Martha Nussbaum's talk, and I have successfully completed the things I needed to complete before she starts: ate breakfast, got dressed, printed out my paper, read through it once, and ate lunch. Now all that's left to do is listen to the talk, and then run to the Bentham House where I'll give my own.

I'm a bit terrified about Nussbaum's talk. It precedes mine immediately, and it's titled "Mill's Feminism: Liberal, Radical, Queer," and I suspect that the following terrible things will happen:

- she'll take my line on Mill's feminism
- she'll do a much better job than I have, being
- better read
- smarter
- better looking

I am also afraid that the following terrible things will happen:

- Martha Nussbaum will show up at my talk and tell me what's what
- someone at my talk will have heard Nussbaum and will tell me what's what
- everyone at my talk will say "yeah, whatever" because Nussbaum already said it
- no one will come to my talk because they have had enough feminism for one day
- the following people, all of whom have published articles on Mill's feminism that I have not read, and who I did not know would be here, will show up at my talk: Nadia Urbinati, Wendy Donner.

Here are some other ways London is apparently different from San Diego:

- chips are called "crisps," and they come in flavors like "Sweet Thai Chili," "Prawn Cocktail," and "Lamb and Mint"
- the student union cafes carry samosas
- coffee shops do not carry half-and-half; only whole and skim milks are set out, and one must ask for heavy cream

Man, maybe I should not have had all the coffee I did at lunch. I have enough trouble speaking slowly as it is.

(Also, do any LaTeX users out there find that its heavy use of the '\' interferes with your HTML skills? I do.)

10:11pm

Well, Martha Nussbaum's talk was pretty damn good. She basically situated Mill's feminism among four current varieties: liberal, radical, difference, and queer. Her line, which I agree with, is that Mill is basically a radical feminist, with some of queer feminism's insights (gender norms ought to be challenged). Of my previous fears, none were realized. But something rather bad happened anyway; no one wanted to talk about my paper. When I finished reading, the chair had the next speaker present her paper, and when we were both done, basically no one had any questions for us, which was a bit embarrassing. But it's over now, and I can put another notch on the old c.v.

After the talk Jess and I went to a pub for dinner, and then we took the tube over to Westminster Abbey and the houses of Parliament. In an act of complete duncery, I dropped her camera when trying to take a picture of the abbey, basically as soon as we got off the train. I'm hoping it can be fixed tomorrow morning before our weekend of sightseeing, but I suppose that depends on just how broken it is. Anyway, I'm exhausted now and need to sleep.

the most truly repellent techno music ever made

2006-04-06T13:03:00.000-07:00

12:30 pm

Greetings from London, where I am now halfway through the John Stuart Mill Bicentennial Conference. Yesterday I saw some plenary addresses, and a sweet panel on Mill's rule-utilitarianism, where I shared a moot court room with the likes of Roger Crisp, Brad Hooker, Henry West, John Skorupski, and Peter Singer. I am definitely one of the youngest people here, if not the youngest, though thankfully not the scruffiest. Many of the professors here are practically parodies of the Old British Professor, as if deliberately trying to outpace the Old-British-Professor prototype in abstract vector space. Then again, maybe I'm just habituated to certain UCSD professors, who are not afraid to wear plain white t-shirts with socks and sandals.

Here are some apparent ways London is different than San Diego:

- I've heard about a dozen different languages, rather than three
- cars drive on the left, which is so much more disorienting than I thought it would be
- pedestrians and cars fight over the roads like hungry dogs over table scraps; even when traffic is moving past at a regular clip, pedestrians are all leaning into the road, hoping to get an elbow in
- there are pedestrians
- white people are actually white, and even the Indians and Pakistanis look a bit pale
- everyone seems to wear only black, brown, or dark blue; I am the only person I've seen wearing green
- coffee is really good basically everywhere
- there are a million of these ready-made sandwich places (Pret-a-Manger seems to be the most ubiquitous) where they make fresh sandwiches ahead of time and then you pick one off a refrigerated shelf
- there are women in full-on burqas
- public transportation is awesome
- it's brisk outside, and the sun shines infrequently
- it seems like everyone smokes, and smoking indoors is permitted

Here are some apparent ways London is rather like San Diego:

- fashionable young ladies wear big sunglasses and tight pants with boots
- Starbucks is everywhere

Life seems cheap here, until I convert pounds to dollars. I see the numbers '2.20' by a sandwich and think great! cheap lunch, but only later remember that I just paid almost $5 for a small sandwich, or $14 for a pizza, or $28 for a train ticket. I think it's going to cost me about a month's rent to live here for a week.

Ok, well, I suppose I had better get back to work. I'm putting some finishing touches on the presentation I'll be giving tomorrow, the text of which I'll try to post after giving the talk.

9:04pm

I saw Peter Singer speak this afternoon; he gave a talk called something like "Mill's Relevance: A Personal View" in which he discussed what he found to be the best and most meaningful parts of Mill's work. Singer was very focused on philosophy's import for living, which made me very happy, and he didn't shy away from politics, touching on David Irving, the Danish cartoons, Bush & company's legal moralism, the war in Iraq, and of course euthanasia and animal rights.

Next I attended a panel on Mill's "proof" of the principle of utility, which sounded promising but turned out bad. None of the presenters were native English speakers, and only one paper was actually about Mill. Unfortunately, I couldn't understand what she was saying. The other papers were on Sidgwick and Bentham.

At John Skorupski's talk yesterday I learned that Mill was an empiricist about even logic and mathematics, and that A System of Logic sounds a lot like a work of American pragmatism. Consider me intrigued.

Man, it is like a million degrees in this damn "Cyber-Cafe" and I feel like I am going to fall asleep. I'm also feeling a bit sick, and very dirty. I can't tell if I get dirty because of all the walking I do, or because the air is dirty here, which it seems to be. I must say, I am a bit nervous about presenting tomorrow, but I am really nervous about missing as much school as I'm missing, and very nervous about trying to jump into my TA job a week later. Also, there's career anxiety, life anxiety, and the general anxiety of being away from home to contend with. I went into a pub looking for dinner tonight, but freaked out and left immediately because the place was crowded, loud, smoky, and I didn't know how the service system worked. I guess that kind of sums up how I feel here, like I'm always in the way and out of place. Everyone is always rushing everywhere and seems to know exactly what they're doing, and even when I return to the hostel at night there is no place that is my own, so I still feel in the way. And when I think about how much I'm paying for this, it makes me wonder why I came. Also, why is there a damn television in the room where people are trying to work?

Ugh. I guess this got rather negative, sorry. Hopefully I'll feel better when the conference is done and I'm on (almost) proper vacation.

the groop played spage age bachelor pad music

2006-04-01T17:59:00.000-08:00

As some of you already know, I saw Sterolab on Wednesday, at the House of Blues downtown. I was excited, because it was my first time seeing one of my favorite bands, but also wary, because they have basically passed their heyday, and a very important part of the band was lost when Mary Hansen died a few years ago. It turned out that both attitudes were appropriate.

The Groop opened with a couple songs from their new album, Fab Four Suture, which were both pretty good. I was immediately impressed by how good and how Stereolabby everything sounded. The bass was huge and warm and rubbery, the Strat was sharp and precise, the horns and keyboards melted together, and Laetita Sadier sounded just like she does on the albums. (At the end of the show we learned that they had brought their own sound guy along - mystery solved.) I was somewhat surprised to see that they hadn't replaced Mary, since her backing vocals were such an integral part of their signature sound, but I could see how they'd feel like replacing her would be sacrilegious. Instead, they had a guy playing French horn and trumpet (among others), filling in some of her vocal lines, which sounded new but familiar and put interesting variations on old themes. All told, there were seven people on stage, most everyone playing more than one instrument:

- vocals/trombone/tambourine/synth
- synth/guitar
- drums
- bass/guitar
- synths/laptop/bass
- guitars
- horns/synths/guitar

Most of the set was pulled from obscure parts of their catalog, which like most everything else about the show was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I was very happy to see a band not pandering to their audience by playing only the new and best-known material (cf. They Might Be Giants). On the other, they ended up playing a lot of their mid-90s drone stuff, which is generally my least favorite. Only one song apiece came from Emperor Tomato Ketchup and Dots and Loops - those being "Cybele's Reverie" and "Miss Modular" - and nothing at all came from Sound-Dust, one of my favorite albums. I can't really speak for Cobra and Phases Group or Margerine Eclipse, since I don't own those. But a majority of the set actually came from the B-sides included with their singles; I only know as much because I picked up the Oscillons from the Anti-Sun collection a few months ago. It's cool to hear them do their drone thing for a while, but at least half the set (including the encore) was drone-heavy. I mean, I like space-age noises as much as the next guy, but I also like songs.

They had some interesting video being projected behind them. I didn't catch most of it, but some highlights I saw included animations of nitrogen and oxygen molecules, some mitochondria, some sort of abstract color-bar constructions, and time-lapse footage of amusment park rides at night.

As for The House of Blues, I'm (you guessed it) ambivalent. The sound is excellent there, the place is clean, the lighting is very nice, and they have flat-screen monitors all over the place so that you can see the stage even if you're stuck behind people. On the other hand, the drinks are $7, the shows are generally in the $20 range, they have a special cordoned-off seating area for the big spenders, and the place is clean. It almost feels like a Disney habitat - decorated and painted with meticulous precision, down to the stairwells and light designs. You sort of expect animatronic Ackroyds to dispense paper towels in the bathrooms. (Actually, they do have bathroom attendants - human ones - and an assortment of colognes and hair products and stuff.) In other words, this is not the dive venue I grew up with.

Archer Prewitt and Sam Prekop (of the Sea and Cake and Gastr del Sol fame) opened, with some songs that sounded halfway between demure Chicago post-rock and solemn adult contemporary singer/songwriter. They were ok, but made the best comments of the night, observing that the audience's favorite part of the show is when the band fucks up, and that they might as well be playing the House of Chat. They weren't kidding; people were just talking away the whole time.

"I'm happy, hope you're happy too"

2006-03-30T22:06:00.000-08:00

It is spring break, and it is going too fast. Thank you to everyone who commented or talked to me about the words of two posts ago. That conversation is far from over, but there is a comfortable pause right now. I don't have much to report right now, but I can deliver on an old promise:

And here's the artfully-cropped-for-your-desktop-wallpaper-pleasure version:

Well, that about exhausts my Photoshop skills. Everyone tune in next month for the exciting procession of facial hair styles!

wolverines in dark brown suits

2006-03-27T09:33:00.000-08:00

From a paper I just graded: "I believe that in order to prevent the occurrence of past mishaps such as the genocide of Jews one must learn from his mistakes and adapt."

Mishap?

destination failure

2006-03-26T19:38:00.000-08:00

Well, I feel like absolute shit right now. In the last five days I have been unable to finish a single paper, and that is all I have been working on. I will be taking incompletes in both of my classes this quarter, and will possibly be receiving an 'F' for the incomplete I took last quarter, since I will be handing in that paper tonight at the earliest, much later than is reasonable.

I know my work habits could be better, but this whole quarter I have been playing catch-up, desperately trying to finish assigned reading before seminars, planning my sections the day they happen, finishing grading at the last minute, and so on. It's not like I haven't been working. I have spent the last several weekends at home or coffee shops, working on grading and trying to write papers. I skipped most of the GPC talks so I could work. Yet somehow it just wasn't enough.

I am really starting to feel like I just can't swing this philosophy grad school thing. Last year was easy enough - I had a lighter TA load, and two out of three quarters I was taking only one seminar - and still I felt so stressed that leaving school occurred to me several times. This year is much more work.

It doesn't help matters that even when I have some unbroken time to do nothing but work on papers, I seem to have nothing to say. Even if I do finish the current paper tonight, and even if that is enough to prevent my 'I' becoming an 'F', the paper is going to be an insipid piece of crap. Yes, my standards are high, but so are the standards of professors.

I've agreed to write my Leibniz paper over spring break. Even ignoring the fact that I do not want to spend my spring break writing a paper, I have got nothing to say about Leibniz. Even after ten weeks of reading and discussion.

This profession is quite possibly not for me. I am already considering my exit strategies.