Or else
I showed the page "The Fantasy Novelist's Exam"
to my wife who is the fantasy literature nut in this family. She found
it funny, although she wondered how come none of the questions were
about unicorns or telepathic companion animals. That must be a bit
different subgenre.
I got some new (to me) Depeche Mode songs that I am playing in the background. Especially "Lilian" is a catchy tune. This song works well, since it seems to me that the name "Lilian" is pretty much the optimal woman's name to be used as a name of a song and repeated throughout it. First, this name rhymes with so many other words, and second, its last syllable can be stretched to serve as an aaah-sound that follows the short and melodic double-li preceding it. Somebody was quite a smartypants in discovering such beautiful simplicity.
Even though I really don't want to know about the band itself but am content to enjoy the music of Depeche Mode, as I get to hear more of their songs I can't help but notice constant Christian themes and lyrics in all their music. Could Depeche Mode secretly be the most successful Christian pop band of all time? (Even though the members of U2 are God-fearing good Christian boys, I don't consider their music really to be "Christian rock".) Also, another question for those in the know: is the song "Flies on the Windscreen" written and recorded in a serious manner or could it be a sneaky parody of angst-ridden goths? "Death is everywheeeere..."
After we have grown tired of listening to Depeche Mode, we can listen to Bill Cosby singing about drug dealers: "
Dope Pusher".
"Tom the Dancing Bug" has long been my favourite web comic. I do have the printed collection "All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned from My Golf-Playing Cats" of his earlier strips, and it is very interesting because you can see the seeds of the future work and ideas. However, the comic tends to fall flat on its face every time it tries to do political cartooning. It would be excellent if there was a collection that included only the strips from the always-great categories "God-Man", "Super Fun-Pak Comix" and "Billy Dare, Boy Adventurer", and left out all the political stuff and especially every single "Louis Maltby" and "Charley the Australopithecine" strip.
Speaking of comics, I had already forgotten the great blog "Dave's Long Box", in which the proprietor writes about his comic book collection.
When I first saw the comic strip "The Outbursts of Everett True", I thought that some skilled modern-day prankster had drawn the strip about a lovable violent sociopath in olde style to trick people, since the comic seemed suspiciously modern in many respects and used words that I don't think existed in that era. But apparently it is a genuine article. Note the strip for March 13, 1908. If they ever made an Everett True movie, Don Rickles would be perfect to play the part.
The comic strip "Lesbians" is probably not that unrealistic in some cases. The site has many other funny pictures too, although many are NSFW.
Chris Mooney with his All-American boyish looks is best known for his vigorous defense of science against the conservatives. But not always. The post "Firing Chickens from a Cannon" describes an old science experiment that the Mythbusters could perhaps try repeating some day. I can already see this episode in my mind.
Since I recommended the blog "Philosophy, Et Cetera" earlier, maybe I'll recommend another philosophy blog too, "Thoughts, Arguments and Rants". The old post "Philosophy in Questionable Taste" lists breakup lines for various schools of philosophy, and the commenters add many more. My own favourite by a mile was the emotivist line "boo-hoo, boo-hoo".
It's usually pointless to link to great posts of Marginal Revolution or Steve Sailer, since if you did so, you'd be linking there pretty much every day. However, the latter has a new post "Liberal diversity-worship as conspicuous consumption" that presents a simple hypothesis that get more undeniable the more you think about it. This simple and concise hypothesis is blindingly obvious in retrospect, and it truly explains pretty much everything.
I hate it that the excellent term "reality-based community" has been adopted mostly by all kinds of New Agers and stalinists. For this reason, it's as refreshing as ice cold water on a hot day to read Mark Kleiman's old post "Bring back the nukes!" that defends nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is such a superior form of energy production that anybody who opposes it must be either stupid or evil, and there are no other real alternatives. This makes opposition of nuclear power a very handy tool for me to immediately tell if somebody is stupid or evil so that I don't need to take them very seriously. The gooberheaded "arguments" against nuclear power plants and how "dangerous" they are even though all other serious forms of energy production kill orders of magnitude more people each year kind of remind me of the way leftists criticize America and other Western nations for real and (mostly) imagined crimes that are chickenfeed compared to what the rest of the world is doing.
Video stores are in trouble, as I explained in my post "Almost like the Jetsons". In "Don't be surprised if Apple saves the day for Blockbuster Video", Robert X. Cringely presents one possible future in which Apple buys the Blockbuster chain and uses it to physically deliver movies to iPods. I was a bit suspicious first, since movies are just bits and using physical means to move bits around is so silly, and this scenario is based on the idea that there will be plenty of people who want to watch videos but for whom broadband will not be an option. I doubt this, but if anything is going to work for video stores for the next ten years, this would be it.
In certain smaller countries where slavery hasn't been abolished yet, the military takes pretty much every man for compulsory military service. A large nation (in many ways than one) such as USA or China can be a bit more selective. The news article "Uncle Sam wants you, Generation Y, but not all of you" reminds us of the fact that not everybody could get in the military service even if they wanted to. In fact, according to this article, the majority of people in the age bracket 17 to 24 would not get in. The military also doesn't seem to have heard of the concept of "fat and fit", meaning that one can be obese and still run rings around other people. I wonder why that is: you might think that the fatties who can live for months on 1000 kcal a day and not lose weight would make excellent rangers to go deep behind enemy lines.
After all this rootless cosmopolitanism, it might be good to look at what happens in my home province. According to "Money Talks", the province is flush with money for transportation and education. When the government will give you a $2,000 tax break if you buy a hybrid car, I wonder if we will soon see a mysterious $2,000 price increase in such cars. Nah. In other news, the college students still don't get to study since their teachers are on strike. They are apparently unable to find their way to the local library, as in that movie about a guy who didn't bother to study but who was so smart that he instictively knew what the mathematical symbols on the blackboard meant.
My wife brings home a free Toronto Star from her work at the end of the day. I always read Royson James's column, since my man Royson always tells it like it is. In other news, according to today's paper, the city of Toronto is gathering a volunteer force to tally the number of homeless people (estimated to be about 20,000 or so) and give them a study to fill about how long they have been homeless and why. My wife suggested that I should volunteer to join this task force, but I had to refuse this suggestion, since I will only enlist in the War on Poverty if it is fought with live ammo. Perhaps tomorrow I could go interview some homeless people on my own before going to teach the class, seeing that I am about to become a Canadian citizen earlier that day.
I got some new (to me) Depeche Mode songs that I am playing in the background. Especially "Lilian" is a catchy tune. This song works well, since it seems to me that the name "Lilian" is pretty much the optimal woman's name to be used as a name of a song and repeated throughout it. First, this name rhymes with so many other words, and second, its last syllable can be stretched to serve as an aaah-sound that follows the short and melodic double-li preceding it. Somebody was quite a smartypants in discovering such beautiful simplicity.
Even though I really don't want to know about the band itself but am content to enjoy the music of Depeche Mode, as I get to hear more of their songs I can't help but notice constant Christian themes and lyrics in all their music. Could Depeche Mode secretly be the most successful Christian pop band of all time? (Even though the members of U2 are God-fearing good Christian boys, I don't consider their music really to be "Christian rock".) Also, another question for those in the know: is the song "Flies on the Windscreen" written and recorded in a serious manner or could it be a sneaky parody of angst-ridden goths? "Death is everywheeeere..."
After we have grown tired of listening to Depeche Mode, we can listen to Bill Cosby singing about drug dealers: "
Dope Pusher"."Tom the Dancing Bug" has long been my favourite web comic. I do have the printed collection "All I Ever Needed to Know I Learned from My Golf-Playing Cats" of his earlier strips, and it is very interesting because you can see the seeds of the future work and ideas. However, the comic tends to fall flat on its face every time it tries to do political cartooning. It would be excellent if there was a collection that included only the strips from the always-great categories "God-Man", "Super Fun-Pak Comix" and "Billy Dare, Boy Adventurer", and left out all the political stuff and especially every single "Louis Maltby" and "Charley the Australopithecine" strip.
Speaking of comics, I had already forgotten the great blog "Dave's Long Box", in which the proprietor writes about his comic book collection.
When I first saw the comic strip "The Outbursts of Everett True", I thought that some skilled modern-day prankster had drawn the strip about a lovable violent sociopath in olde style to trick people, since the comic seemed suspiciously modern in many respects and used words that I don't think existed in that era. But apparently it is a genuine article. Note the strip for March 13, 1908. If they ever made an Everett True movie, Don Rickles would be perfect to play the part.
The comic strip "Lesbians" is probably not that unrealistic in some cases. The site has many other funny pictures too, although many are NSFW.
Chris Mooney with his All-American boyish looks is best known for his vigorous defense of science against the conservatives. But not always. The post "Firing Chickens from a Cannon" describes an old science experiment that the Mythbusters could perhaps try repeating some day. I can already see this episode in my mind.
Since I recommended the blog "Philosophy, Et Cetera" earlier, maybe I'll recommend another philosophy blog too, "Thoughts, Arguments and Rants". The old post "Philosophy in Questionable Taste" lists breakup lines for various schools of philosophy, and the commenters add many more. My own favourite by a mile was the emotivist line "boo-hoo, boo-hoo".
It's usually pointless to link to great posts of Marginal Revolution or Steve Sailer, since if you did so, you'd be linking there pretty much every day. However, the latter has a new post "Liberal diversity-worship as conspicuous consumption" that presents a simple hypothesis that get more undeniable the more you think about it. This simple and concise hypothesis is blindingly obvious in retrospect, and it truly explains pretty much everything.
I hate it that the excellent term "reality-based community" has been adopted mostly by all kinds of New Agers and stalinists. For this reason, it's as refreshing as ice cold water on a hot day to read Mark Kleiman's old post "Bring back the nukes!" that defends nuclear energy. Nuclear energy is such a superior form of energy production that anybody who opposes it must be either stupid or evil, and there are no other real alternatives. This makes opposition of nuclear power a very handy tool for me to immediately tell if somebody is stupid or evil so that I don't need to take them very seriously. The gooberheaded "arguments" against nuclear power plants and how "dangerous" they are even though all other serious forms of energy production kill orders of magnitude more people each year kind of remind me of the way leftists criticize America and other Western nations for real and (mostly) imagined crimes that are chickenfeed compared to what the rest of the world is doing.
Video stores are in trouble, as I explained in my post "Almost like the Jetsons". In "Don't be surprised if Apple saves the day for Blockbuster Video", Robert X. Cringely presents one possible future in which Apple buys the Blockbuster chain and uses it to physically deliver movies to iPods. I was a bit suspicious first, since movies are just bits and using physical means to move bits around is so silly, and this scenario is based on the idea that there will be plenty of people who want to watch videos but for whom broadband will not be an option. I doubt this, but if anything is going to work for video stores for the next ten years, this would be it.
In certain smaller countries where slavery hasn't been abolished yet, the military takes pretty much every man for compulsory military service. A large nation (in many ways than one) such as USA or China can be a bit more selective. The news article "Uncle Sam wants you, Generation Y, but not all of you" reminds us of the fact that not everybody could get in the military service even if they wanted to. In fact, according to this article, the majority of people in the age bracket 17 to 24 would not get in. The military also doesn't seem to have heard of the concept of "fat and fit", meaning that one can be obese and still run rings around other people. I wonder why that is: you might think that the fatties who can live for months on 1000 kcal a day and not lose weight would make excellent rangers to go deep behind enemy lines.
After all this rootless cosmopolitanism, it might be good to look at what happens in my home province. According to "Money Talks", the province is flush with money for transportation and education. When the government will give you a $2,000 tax break if you buy a hybrid car, I wonder if we will soon see a mysterious $2,000 price increase in such cars. Nah. In other news, the college students still don't get to study since their teachers are on strike. They are apparently unable to find their way to the local library, as in that movie about a guy who didn't bother to study but who was so smart that he instictively knew what the mathematical symbols on the blackboard meant.
My wife brings home a free Toronto Star from her work at the end of the day. I always read Royson James's column, since my man Royson always tells it like it is. In other news, according to today's paper, the city of Toronto is gathering a volunteer force to tally the number of homeless people (estimated to be about 20,000 or so) and give them a study to fill about how long they have been homeless and why. My wife suggested that I should volunteer to join this task force, but I had to refuse this suggestion, since I will only enlist in the War on Poverty if it is fought with live ammo. Perhaps tomorrow I could go interview some homeless people on my own before going to teach the class, seeing that I am about to become a Canadian citizen earlier that day.
You don't really want to know anything about Depeche Mode as a band but still you want to know more than just what you can hear in the music and the lyrics? Now be careful, you are about to cross the line even if you are just asking your readers to connect their band knowledge to the songs instead doing it yourself.
Posted by Rebyk | 3:07 AM
All overweight Finnish men I know who have done their military service clearly lost weight during the service. Well, to be exact, some of them were slimmer only at some point during the service but gained the weight back as their duties became physically less demanding at the end of service.
I wonder if the Finnish Defence Forces have secret information how to make people lose weight or if they know how to choose only those overweight men to military service who are able to lose weight. As we know, the secret just can't be the healthy food and the amount of exercise. It can't possibly work for 80 percent of Finnish men of certain age who do their military service yearly.
Or perhaps they secretly mix some weight-control drug in the food served to conscripts. All Finnish men already "know" that the army mixes a drug controlling sexual desires to the food. Now _that's_ a myth I'd like to see Mythbusters to bust :).
Posted by Rebyk | 3:36 AM
Steve Sailer's commentor's idea on conspicious consumption was on your blog's comments first (16 January 2006):
"It is easy to understand why people argue or vote against their interests, like a well-off person voting the left, if you bring in sociobiology.
A rich person usually shows off among his peers by spending money on useless things like unnecessary large house or even handing out money in terms of charity. This shows that they are so wealthy that they do not have to care about money (for men this is something to use to pull in females as well). You do not have to be millionaire for this to happen all the time.
As charity is not a big thing in Europe, the wealthy intelligentsia votes the left and and also tells that they vote the left. They show this way that they can support for example high taxes which is against their own interests. This is perceived as generous among the surrounding society. Among their right-voting peers they are not thought to be as greedy and frugal, both negative adjectives for rich people."
Posted by Anonymous | 7:26 AM
Now be careful, you are about to cross the line even if you are just asking your readers to connect their band knowledge to the songs instead doing it yourself.
Right.
Steve Sailer's commentor's idea on conspicious consumption was on your blog's comments first (16 January 2006):
You're right, that was "geenistö"'s comment in my post Paying the Rent.
It would be great to think that my blog had been in the forefront of distilling new knowledge.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 8:40 AM
Sorry Ilkka,
I just found it funny that you don't want to know about the band itself because usually a thought "how did they come up with these lyrics" leads people to find out more about the band itself. From that point of view, your question about Flies on the Windscreen _is_ a question about the band itself.
Posted by Rebyk | 12:39 PM
You might find my blog an interesting inside look at the world of nuclear power, though after 20 years of working with it, my zeal doesn't quite match yours.
Posted by James Aach | 1:09 PM
I just found it funny that you don't want to know about the band itself because usually a thought "how did they come up with these lyrics" leads people to find out more about the band itself.
You are right. Certain questions are unavoidable. However, I just don't want to see some 80's promo photo or a music video that is as stupid as all other 80's promo photos and music videos.
Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen | 6:15 PM