Sunday Morning Reading Material (First Sunday in Chanukah.)
(Actual political rhetoric from the Adams/Jefferson campaign of 1800)
It’s Sunday. Sundays are for waking up at 7am so you can shoo your house guests out the door so they can go have fun at Dickens Fair. Sundays are also for performing at your first choir concert in about a decade. If you’re very lucky, Sundays might be for snuggling with your cat and dreaming deeply.
This week the world did not engulf itself in nuclear fire, though there’s always next week. Also: anonymous sources told the world that American diplomats are competent, capable and know how to keep their mouths shut about things they shouldn’t be talking about to anyone other than their superiors. The same sources also revealed that Nancy Pelosi scares the crap out of the Chinese Government. NASA found a type of life (on Earth) composed of poison. Comedy writers everywhere thanked their deities for reasons to blow the dust off their EX-Partner jokes.
I want to start off preaching. Well, I’m not going to preach today. I never preach on Sunday Mornings. Fred Clark? Yeah he can bring the gentle nudge in the tuchus that some folks– most folks– including me and you (probably including Fred Clark)– need. Here’s a sample: “We chose to hike the road to Jericho rather than the road from Jericho because, even though it was the same path, the latter route is a much more grueling walk. Jericho, you see, is 850 feet below sea level, while Jerusalem at the other end of the road is about 2,500 feet above sea level. So that road provides a vivid illustration of what is true for all paths — the experience of traveling on it varies according to the direction of the traveler.” Go read the rest.
Several years ago when Baen started giving away e-editions of their books as loss leaders, it was a fantastic idea. People don’t care to read an entire book while chained to their desktop– or even their laptop. Now that Ebook readers are becoming cheap, ubiquitous and just plane nice to use, I wonder how long their strategy will remain effective. In the mean time, here are all the works of Lois McMaster Bujold. If you enjoy sci-Fi diplomatic fiction, this is good stuff.
It is really easy for a lawyer for accidentally create an attorney/client relationship. This seems kind of problematic, actually. I’m sure there’s a fairly good reason it’s this easy, but for the life of me, I can’t think of a great one.
I normally dislike putting links in the Sunday post that reference the news of the week. This owes to my long-standing hatred for all things meta. This sentence exists to let you pause for laughter. Anyway: Leigh Alexander takes the opportunity afforded by Wikileaks to meditate on the responsibilities owed by journalists towards the people they might hurt by telling secrets. Frankly, I think our media has a too-cozy, too unskeptical relationship with their sources. Nevertheless, I’m glad to see the thought process.
One of things we learned from wikileaks is that our government classifies first and asks questions later. Frankly, that’s the part of the whole thing that scares me the most: our government is starting to consider itself separate from We the People. Not, I think in the legislative branch, but the executive branch is routinely engaging in bad behavior. For instance: they will create criminals so they can prosecute them. Makes me kind of sick.
Obviously the entirely legislative branch isn’t blameless in the race to monstrosity.
Oprah has magic powers
I’m of the opinion that the fullest explanation of the human condition is a multi-disciplinary affair that excludes no genre. Life is short, however, and 95% of everything is crap. Therefore, if someone says “this is the best example of THING X”, we should make it a priority. Tl;DR: Go read The greatest science-fiction story ever written.
Speaking of great writing, I don’t really care about food writing. So when I say “Go read this recipe”, you should click that link. Even if you have no intention of making the chili, go be a connoisseur of the descriptive process.
Real zombies are less scary than sloppy thinking and failing to think something all the way through. For instance, what’s wrong with the sentence I wrote immediately before this one?
I watched Airplane this week. Well, why not? Leslie Neilsen had just passed on. One of the jokes is that for “light reading”, someone is given a “pamphlet” detailing “great Jewish athletes”. It’s easy to miss the inherent racism of that 10 second segment. After all: “everyone knows” there aren’t many Jewish athletes. It’s easy to stop thinking there at the common sense answer. So it can be a bit jarring to read that Jews were once considered the dominant “race” at basketball. I like to think about that whenever I see someone perpetuating a stereotype.
It would be incredibly easy to read the Disney cartoon of “The Little Mermaid” as a deeply sexist story about a woman needing a man like a fish needs gills. That’s even a correct reading. But I rather like this overthought article about Ariel being representative of the entire human species. That reading makes the inherent sexism besides the point: we are all female. And male.
There is no way to read this, however, that isn’t sexist.
Dick Cheney may not be an endemic problem like racism and sexism, but he is an odius little toad who shouldn’t walk the streets with decent people. Let me be clear what I mean by that: Pimps should turn up their noses at the sight of Dick Cheney. The day Cheney stands where Milosevic stood will be a good day for justice. Nigeria is bringing some charges.
For that news, this track is appropriate.
55 years ago this week, Rosa Parks decided to sit down in the front section of the bus. I can only imagine what kind of courage that must have taken, knowing that she was inviting the wrath of a government– her government, your government– that was allowed to use physical, crippling (and possibly deadly) force to keep her from sitting in the seat she wished to. If you can’t see the connection between that effort, and the one to white-wash Confederate history, Mr. Coates can help explain.
There may well be someone to whom celebrating the abortion of a nation known as the CSA is merely about “heritage”. But the creators of these videos are mangling their facts, and that makes them liars of the worst sort.
Got your wet suit? Surfing season started this week.
My hometown is a deeply weird place. It can be hard to keep the same perspective as everyone else.
San Francisco celebrates the season with Santa. We have our little traditions…
Good thing we didn’t bring out the Santas before the 1st of December.
It was touch and go there for a while, Hellmode is back!! This article is a mediation on the history of morality in video games. Computer games are like any bit of software: a collection of numbers. If something can’t be quantified, it can’t run. Turning that quantification process into a system of morality is an incredible challenge, yet a lack of morality would send even the best game into the deepest pit of the uncanny valley.
This week we looked at the way lazy thinking perpetuates the patriarchy, and different ways to subvert it. This post was also incredibly self-referential. Therefore this week’s question is: What is the most “meta” thing you’ve ever done?
And now, the internet:
