This Guy's Going Back in the Ground

So, it's the end of the month and I'm making a few changes around here.  I've decided to retire this old profile photo.  The most fundamental problem with it was that it was misleading, because it's not actually a picture of me.  I just posted it as a kind of warped joke, but I let it go on a little too long, and I'm tired of it.  Besides, it creeps me out a little.

I realize that people often use a wide variety of things for profile pictures other than a photo of themselves, such as cartoons, pictures of their cat, and whatever the hell this is.  But in those cases it's always clear that you're not looking at the person's actual picture.  If there are other cases out there where it's not clear, well...then I guess they have the same problem I do.  

It's not really a question of vanity one way or the other.  In the course of reading other people's blogs, and in a lifetime of reading in general, I've noticed the importance of putting a face to the words you're reading.  I find that I usually take a quick glance at a blogger's profile  photo when I first encounter their blog.  I do this unconsciously, but yet that glance at the photo colors every word I read thereafter, and in the absence of a photo, my mind usually just makes up a face to accompany the words.  I don't know if this is true for everyone or just for me.  The visual and the abstract tend to bleed together in my brain.  Nevertheless, I'm tired of the corpse of Jimmy Olsen over there representing me, and I replaced it with a real picture.  There is actually quite a strange story behind that photo.  It's one of the most fascinating and cryptic mysteries I've ever heard, and I strongly urge anyone who has the time to follow this link.

In other news, I've finally added a few stand-alone pages.  I've wanted to add something for a while, but I wasn't sure what.  I didn't see the point in making an "about" page.  I'm not even sure what it's all about myself, and if anyone else has any hope of figuring out then their best guide would be the posts themselves.  So I came up with some pages where the readers could have some input and...well, you can check them out for a fuller explanation.        

The Ghost Theory

Someone once said that a belief in ghosts was really a sign of optimism, because it demonstrated a certain faith in the after-life.  Well, I have a theory about ghosts that isn't very optimistic, nor do I find that it comforts me much with the promise of an existence beyond the grave.  It's not that it denies such an existence, it just doesn't make a statement about it either way.  You see, I don't think ghosts have anything to do with the afterlife, although I do think it's possible that they're real...in a certain sense.  There is a borderline between mind & matter, between perception & reality, between what the eye sees and how the brain interprets that information, and ghosts exist somewhere along that borderline.  

The easiest thing to do would be to dismiss the whole thing as hallucinations or symptoms of mental illness, but the sightings of ghosts go as far back as recorded human history and they have occurred in every culture through-out the world.  There have been millions of incidents, and it's a little hard to sweep them all under the rug.  Yes, primitive cultures often misinterpreted the workings of nature for the activities of conscious spirits, and there are obviously people who suffer from hallucinations symptomatic of a mental illness, but there are many other cases which have involved otherwise perfectly sane people, and which have persisted well into the modern age.  Besides, the ignorance of primitive people concerning natural forces does not quite explain the actual seeing of ghosts.  It's the "seeing" that I'm concerned with.  I don't care that Grog thought that a spirit was making it rain.  I'm more interested in the ghost he saw while he was hunting in the storm.  

So let's assume for the moment that maybe there is something to all this ghost business.  The generally accepted idea is that these ghosts are manifestations of the souls of the dead.  People tend to believe these are conscious entities, disembodied and doomed to walk the Earth or haunt a house or whatever.  They are the same person, with the same mind they had in life.  There are variations on the idea.  Some people think the ghosts don't realize they're dead, or they wander about in a kind of sleep-walking state.  Some people think that the souls are trapped in a certain place, a building or a house, that they inhabited in life.  Some people even think that these ghosts latch on to one specific person and haunt them exclusively. 

The common theme to all this is still the idea that the ghost is a conscious entity with a will directing it's actions just like a living person.  The problem is that the observable actions of ghosts that have been reported really don't make any sense when interpreted this way.  This is the reason for all the rules and restrictions people try to place on ghosts, as demonstrated in the variations above.  Why doesn't the ghost just leave the house?  Ah, it must be trapped there.  Why does the ghost keep cleaning the floor; why should a dead person care about a clean floor that it can't even touch?  Ah, it must not realize it's dead.  It's still behaving as though it were alive.  And on it goes.  They keep treating the actions of the ghosts as if they were the actions of a living person, and then they throw up the kind of obstructions that would prevent a living person from doing something.

I have an alternative explanation.  Now, I've had several people tell me ghost stories; I'm sure we all have.  I've had a few strange experiences myself, but nothing worth mentioning.  So I'll illustrate my point with an example I heard about a year ago.  Someone told me that they had seen a woman several times coming down the stairs of their house carrying a large metal pot.  Every time it was this same thing, the same woman, the same pot, and always coming down the stairs.  Most ghost stories that I have heard have followed a similar pattern.  The ghost is seen performing the same routine action over and over again.  In fact, this mindless repetition is often the most creepy aspect of the encounter.  It's as though the person were seeing an inexplicable fragment of a film being replayed over and over on a loop.

I think that is precisely what they are seeing.  I don't think these ghosts are the conscious spirits of the dead.  I think they are manifestations of a moment taken out of time.  I think people are seeing moments of the past being replayed, moments whose true significance and context remain a mystery.  Who knows why the woman was carrying the pot down the stairs, and why this was a significant event in her life?  One day, long ago, that woman had a carried a pot down the stairs and that mundane action had played a part in some larger event.  It might have been wonderful, or it might have been tragic, but I believe that something happened that was powerful enough to leave it's mark on that place and at that time.  The ghost that the person saw was not the ghost of that woman, but the ghost of that moment.   

My only evidence for this theory is the behavior of the ghosts themselves.  You could go on forever making up countless rules to explain their constricted actions, but I believe I'm offering a far simpler explanation.  The ghosts are trapped, but not by the convoluted restrictions of the after-life.  They are prisoners of time.  They are not free to act in the way a living, conscious person would, because they are not living and they are no longer conscious.  They are long gone to...wherever, and what remains is just an imprint and image of their lives.  Their ghost is no more free to act than a photograph of them left behind is free to change it's expression.   

No doubt some people might tell me about very active and aggressive encounters that they had with ghosts, thinking that this refutes my idea.  They might tell me about times when the ghost knew they were there.  But I would recommend that they reconsider their interpretations.  Let's say they saw the ghost of a woman turn, look at them, and then rush across the room at them in a rage.  Isn't it possible that the woman had once had an argument with her husband where she had walked into the room, looked at him, and then flown into a rage?  Isn't it possible that you could be standing in the husband's past shoes?  I believe that there are times when the wires get crossed and the observer finds themselves incorporated in the scene they're observing in place of one of the former participants.  In such a case, it would be easy to mistake the ghost's behavior in the past as an active response in the present.

I started off this post by saying that ghosts exist in a borderline between mind and matter.  You see, I don't think the ghost is really there when the person sees it.  However, I do think that the energy that causes the mind to manifest the ghost might be real.  I think things happen sometimes, powerful things, and they leave a mark on a place.  This mark takes the form of energy which certain sensitive minds are able to tune into the way a radio picks up a signal.  Without the radio, the signal is just a signal.  It takes the radio to turn this signal into sounds and music.  Likewise, it takes the mind to manifest the ghost as a visual presence, but the event they're seeing projected really did happen in the past.  The signal is real, even if what they're seeing isn't.  This is the unexplored borderline.  This is where the real & the imaginary, memory & experience, past & present become indistinguishable.  Is there a promise of immortality there?  Smile, you're on the Universe's Camera, and who knows where and when someone might stumble across this footage in the dark.             

This is a Dictionary; Don't Make Me Smack You with It.

A few years ago a couple of co-workers of mine got into a conversation about gun control one night.  One of them went off on the typical conservative rant on the subject, and I pretty much kept quiet and stayed out of it.  It's not that I have particularly strong opinions about gun control.  Sometimes it's the thought process, or lack of it, that went into the formation of a person's opinions that's more of a problem than the actual opinion itself.  It's like having a guy tell you that they shouldn't have trials for rapists; they should just execute them on the spot.  It's not that you're pro-rape.  You just know that you'd be wasting your breath arguing the merits of due process with a person like that.

There's a 30 day waiting period, Comrade.

So anyway, at one point, as this guy was ranting along at a nice pace, he mentioned something about gun control being "communist."  He kept hammering away at this point.  After he had dropped the word for the fourth or fifth time, I couldn't restrain myself any longer from throwing my two cents in.  "Communism is an economic system", I told him, "It really has nothing to do with gun control at all.  You're thinking of 'totalitarianism'.  People usually confuse the two terms, because communism in practice tends to lead to totalitarianism, but it's not the same thing.  Communism is just the equal redistribution of wealth.  That's it."  Naturally these guys looked at me like I had just landed here from another planet, and eventually the whole thing somehow led to me having to have this stupid conversation with someone yet again.  I probably should have just kept my mouth shut. 

But as a writer, I get very annoyed when people abuse the language and carelessly throw words around without knowing what they mean.  It seems like it happens the most with derogatory terms, or at least terms with derogatory overtones.  It's the overtones that people really enjoy.  They just love how insulting a word sounds, and they're not going to let a little thing like meaning slow them down when they're really on a roll.  Some people even have their favorite term of reproach that they use to pass judgment on nearly everything.  My mother is a very religious person and she throws around the term "humanistic" as though she were being paid for every use.  The pastor at the church we went to when I was kid gave a sermon on Humanism once, and she's been entralled with the term ever since.  Any type of idea, theory, or practice of any kind that leaves God out of the equation is denounced as "humanistic" in her book.  The IRS is probably humanistic for not praying before they send out our 1099 forms.

 The internet is a fertile breeding ground for misused words.  "Irony" alone has a long and confused history.  At first it was used indiscriminately to describe any coincidence, cleverness, or circumlocution.  Any chain of events that fell together in a neat way was applauded for being "ironic."  This vast electronic market of words was flooded with the term.  But then the backlash set in.  These days it's the in thing to instantly attack anyone who uses the word.  Whisper the word "irony" in even the most obscure corner of the web and someone will immediately pop up and dismiss you as idiot.  Ironically, there seems to be no acceptable definition of the word that anyone can agree on.  To be fair, irony is a somewhat elusive concept and I've yet to find a dictionary that really does the word justice.  I've always thought of it as a twisted connection between cause and effect, but I'm not sure that really covers it either.

The internet even struggles with its own special terminology.  There are not enough bridges in all of the kingdom to provide shelter for everyone that gets labeled as a "troll" on a message board.  The word was useful enough to begin with, and it designated a certain specific phenomenon.  It's a person who deliberately irritates and mocks people on a forum, solely for the sake of getting a reaction.  There's no real sincerity behind anything they say.  They just want to piss people off.  Period.  That's a troll, plain and simple; nothing more, nothing less.  Yet, people call anyone they don't like or anyone who irritates them a "troll", and the word has become completely devalued as a result.  It's like "Epic Fail"; it's become a cheap insult, ready at hand, and easy to use....and virtually meaningless at this point. Someone gets mad, and the "T-word" starts flying.  Yeah!  That'll show 'em! 

I try my best to be conscientious with the words I use.  I confess that I also have a special affection for certain words; I just like the way they sound.  But I try to make sure I know what the word actually means before I use it, especially if I'm preserving my own words in writing.  There are times in the course of working on post like this that I'll have a word that I'm planning to use, and I'll be pretty sure I know what it means or I'll kind of have a vague idea.  In those cases I'll always look it up.  In fact, I've done it three times during the writing of this post, and no, I'm not telling you which words.  Some things are best kept a trade secret.  Anyhow, I have to say, I have an almost perfect track record.  The word nearly always means just what I thought it meant.  But it's always better to double check and be sure.  I'd hate to get caught with my pants down and end up looking like an idiot because I confused the difference between "affect" and "effect".  Which brings me to another story:

About nine years ago I was working as night security guard at a salt mine.  It was just a few months after the Sept. 11th attack.  One night, just around shift change, a semi truck pulled into the lot.  There were two Arab men in the truck, and they got out to ask me for directions to a nearby town.  As we stood there and I gave the men directions, the 2nd shift miners were leaving and they all stared as they passed us in the parking-lot.  Tension was running high then, of course.  A few hours later I got a call from one of the miners, and he starting going into this whole thing about how he had noticed that the semi's trailer wasn't properly sealed.   "I don't mean to sound like a pedophile.", he told me.  Well, the thought hadn't really crossed my mind until then.  I didn't have the heart to explain his mistake to him.  I can only hope that he doesn't find himself feeling paranoid around the wrong people.

Anyway, so I do my homework.  Big deal.  Still, I feel like I owe it to myself and to anyone else who has the misfortune to be listening to me, to try to know what I'm talking about if I'm going to bother opening my mouth.  At the very least, I can get the words right.  If I started tossing around any multi-syllabic gems that I've picked up in my travels with reckless abandon, then I'd risk the possibility of exposing myself as a fool and coming off looking pretentious.  And don't even get me started on that word.               

Seven: The Grim Masterpiece

In its basic form and structure the movie Seven falls into the genre of the police procedural.  It's a familiar genre.  Two men on the trail of a killer, digging up clues at crime scenes, following leads that sometimes lead nowhere and other times right to the killer's doorstep.  But there is an element to Seven that raises it above this genre.  The murders under investigation are not mere crimes, but rather, part of a work of art; a twisted and psychotic work of art that disposes of human life in its composition, but a work of art nevertheless.  This is not to say that the movie is an advocacy or an admiration of what John Doe does.  It is simply that the crimes are by definition art. 

            THE WORK

There are several defining factors which qualify John Doe's murders as art.  First, there is a message and abstract meaning to the murders.  They are demonstrations of the lethal consequences of the seven deadly sins.  In each case it is the sin itself that is the victim's undoing.  The situations they are placed in are extreme and contrived, but this is seen by John Doe as a way of forcing them to confront the transgressions which have become an habitual part of their everyday lives.  But these demonstrations are not primarily meant for the edification of the victims, but rather for the population at large and the citizens of the unnamed city of the story.  The crimes are not committed simply to satisfy a murderous impulse and then covered up in the darkness.  They are exposed before an audience, to be admired, appreciated, and contemplated as a work of art.

Secondly, the limited number of the crimes also shows a sense of composition and control that helps define them as art.  Again, they are not the result of an unbridled impulse.  There is a carefully planned structure behind them.  They are a series, predetermined by the seven sins.  There is a completeness to the work; an aesthetic unity of form characteristic of art.   This is not say that the work is beautiful.  Far from it.  It's revolting, disturbing, and disgusting.  But it has a clear and well ordered design.  John Doe stands back from his blood-stained canvas and nods in satisfaction.  

            THE ARTIST

For John Doe the truly inspired touch to his masterpiece is his own inclusion in it.  He is practically giddy with excitement as he rides in the back of the squad car.  To him, this is the element that will make it contemplated and "puzzled over and studied and followed, forever."  It is the fact that he has not excluded his own guilt, that he has not stood outside or above his message, that he feels will give his work the mark of authenticity.  He is not "special", he declares, and the anonymity of his name testifies to this.  The work of art itself is all that matters, and John Doe is quite willingly to literally lose himself in it.  He sees himself immortalized in it.  Artists speak of suffering and sacrificing themselves to their art, but John Doe paints with his own blood.  His victims have been laid out in a morbid composition like sculptures molded out of human remains and John Doe eagerly climbs onto the last pedestal marked "envy" and becomes absorbed into the work.

And Envy is indeed his sin.  He lives on the margin of society.  It's easy to mistake his smug insinuations for insincerity when he tells Detective Mills how much he envies his life.   He is baiting him, stirring his wrath.  But if he's smiling, it's only because he's rehearsed this moment countless times in his mind, and he knows he's about to put the finishing touch on his work.  Still, he means what he says.  It is envy that has driven him to lash out in spite at the world that has rejected him, denied him the life and the things he wanted.  He believes the sinful nature of the world is to blame for this injustice, and that guilt has to be thrown back in its face.  But this "throwing back" is driven by his own sin, and he has to atone, just like the rest.

            THE THEME

But the work is not complete with the murdering of the representatives of each of the seven deadly sins.  There is another murder which is necessary to complete the composition, both practically and thematically; the murder of Detective Mills' wife, Tracy.  Tracy is killed in order to stir Mills to wrath, but she herself is innocent.  In the work, she assumes the place of the "victim."  She is made to suffer and die for the deadly sins of the others.  It's hard to say whether this was intended by John Doe, or just the inevitable consequence of his plan.  It's possible he only killed her to provoke Mills, and gave no thought to the significance of the act, although considering his intellect and his attention to detail in regards to the rest of the work, this is doubtful.   At any rate, there are always subtexts and meanings in any work of art that grow beyond the control and the intentions of the artist.  

Whether he intended it or not, Tracy's death assumes an important place in his work and makes a significant statement about its meaning.  John Doe may be the artist, but in the composition he is only a marginal element.  Tracy, although her death is almost a side note  in the fall of events, is actually the centerpiece.  Her death is a demonstration of the innocence that is destroyed by the seven sins.  The fact that she is killed, not for her sins or even for any real personal reason, but rather merely as a means to John Doe's artistic ends, only serves to drive this point home even more.  It makes her a sacrificial victim in every possible sense.

So, what is the point of a movie about a man who composes a work of art out of brutal murders?  It seems like an appalling glorification.  But that's the point.  Through-out the film Somerset and Mills have an on-going debate about the corruption of the city they work in.  The issue is raised again and again by Somerset of how to deal with it, how to go on being exposed to it and not to lose your humanity.  The city could be any city.  It doesn't really matter.  It's the world's corruption pushed to an extreme, and in this world murder is an art form, a subject for macabre fascination, a public spectacle placed on display.  John Doe stands in judgment of this corruption,  and ends up as the ultimate symptom of it.  It's not a particularly pleasant vision, but Seven isn't a particularly pleasant movie. 

Trying to Understand Relativity (part 4)

So, let's return to our thought experiment.  I mentioned last time that I found a flaw in the scenario I laid out in part 2.  I had my houses a light year apart and I put the guy from house B aboard a rocket on Jan. 1st 2010 and sent him to visit his neighbor in house A at nearly the speed of light (figure 1).  Considering the constancy of the speed of light, I thought I had found a clue to the time dilation effect of special relativity.  I said that if the guy in house A watched from his window, he wouldn't see guy B leave from his house until 2011 because of the time it took the light to reach him.  Furthermore, I said if guy A stayed at his window and continued to watch the journey, he wouldn't see guy B at the midpoint of his trip until June of 2011, because from his vantage point the trip began on Jan. 1st 2011 and it would take another six months for guy B to reach the midpoint.  Therefore, I concluded that guy B couldn't arrive on Jan. 1st. 2011, as I had originally thought, because he couldn't be sitting in guy A's house while guy A was still at the window watching him make the trip.  He couldn't arrive until 2012, after guy A had spent a year watching him make the trip.  So guy B would leave on Jan. 1st 2010, fly for a year at near the speed of light, but yet he wouldn't arrive at his destination until 2012.  

Figure 1.

However, I soon found a problem with this.  If guy B leaves for his journey on Jan. 1st 2010, then he reaches the midpoint of his trip in June of 2010.  At that point he is half a light year from house A, so the light from his ship will take six months to reach house A arriving on...yep, Jan. 1st 2011 not June as I had figured last time.  In fact, if you consider guy B's position at any point in his trip, the light will always arrive at house A on Jan. 1st 2011.  For instance, guy B will reach the 3/4 mark in September 2010.  He will be a quarter of a light year away, and the light will reach house A once again on Jan. 1st. 2011.  So it seems that guy B can still arrive on Jan. 1st 2011 and not beat the light there.  It seems that we're right back where we started from.

Will my efforts to understand Relativity be forever frustrated by my inadequate abilities to use the MS Paint program???

But yet there's a fundamental contradiction here.  What would guy A see from his window then?  He can't see guy B zip across the distance between their houses in a matter of seconds.  That would violate the whole idea of light traveling at a constant speed.  Guy A can't see guy B coming towards him faster than the speed of light.  It's impossible.  As I explained last time, light travels at the same speed regardless of its source.  So guy A's persistent vision of guy B's ship absolutely cannot look like it's traveling across the space between their houses at faster than the speed of light.  

For the sake of argument, let's say that guy B is traveling at a percentage of the speed of light that would land him at guy A's doorstep at the very last minute of the day on Jan. 1st 2011.  In other words, he's traveling at a speed where he crosses a light year in a year and one day.  If guy A were watching this from his window, and the light were reaching him from the different points in guy B's journey in the manner laid out above, he would see the rocket cross the distance of a light year in one day.  The persistent vision of the ship would have to reach him at 365 times the speed of light!   

Wow, that pickle is really Cruising!!!

So here you have two seemingly logical explanations that are yielding different results.  If you consider it from a static viewpoint, if you consider guy B at any one specific point in his journey, then you have the light reaching guy A on Jan. 1st 2011.  But if you look at it from dynamic viewpoint, if you put guy A at the window watching the whole thing in motion from the window then...then time has to expand to accommodate the speed of light!  In fact, the faster guy B races over to meet his neighbor, the more time will expand to compensate.  If guy B travels at the speed suggested above, a light year in a year and one day, then for guy A to watch the trip from his window and not have his persistent vision of the ship exceed the speed of light, then I believe that the trip would have to take 365 years from his point of view.  Yes, quite a long beard indeed!

Alright, so I may have it, and I may not.  It's a little early to pop the cork on the champagne just yet.  I'm still going to go back and read Einstein's original work as fellow blogger Martin Redford suggested yesterday.  A suggestion so obvious, I feel like an idiot for not doing it before.  Still, I thank him for his help.  Anyway, I'll read Einstein, see what I find, see if I've really made a break-through here or whether I'm still completely lost.                            

After These Messages

I tried out a new ad program out yesterday.  It didn't work very well.  First, it took hours upon hours to activate, so that for most of the day there was this thick, blank, blue strip taking up half of my sidebar.  Then, I checked on it last night just before leaving for work and it was ready.  I turned it on and there was this ad for dog biscuits with the picture of a bulldog.  As I scrolled down, I discovered that, much like any dog, this ad was following me.  It must have thought I had food.  This quickly got on my nerves, so I deleted it.  I'm sure it's available for adoption at the ad company if any of you other bloggers are interested.  I already have my hands full with my real dog.  

This ad business is a touchy subject with some people.  Obviously, I don't really have a problem with it.  This blogging can be fun, but it can also be a lot of work, and if someone wants a few bucks for their trouble, more power to them.  However, there's a fine line between making your ads visible, and shoving them in your visitors' faces.  I've seen some blogs that are an absolute mess.  Banner ads that overlap the text, making it unreadable.  Cartoon bunnies holding flowers and wandering all over the place.  I think I even saw a wizard selling car insurance, but I may have been hallucinating just as I was about to pass out from sensory overload as I was mumbling weakly, "Where's the stuff I'm supposed to read?"  If I were presumptuous enough to start doling out advice after a mere two months of blogging, my first tip would be: If people can't can't even find the post, then you have a serious design problem.

Me, I like to think I run a pretty clean ship around here, sometimes obsessively so.  One day, I spent nearly three hours working on the header for my other blog, cropping and resizing the background photo so that it would fit, and playing around with the contrast and the focus so that it was faded enough that it wouldn't intrude on the title but still visible enough to just barely make out what it is.  It's sad, I know, but we'll have to leave the diagnosis of my obsessive compulsive disorder for another day.  For the moment, my point is that although I haven't made two nickles to rub together from Google's Ad Sense program, at least the ad is relatively neat and unobtrusive and it doesn't chase me around the page.  I kind of like that little box off to the side.  Even though you'd need a master's degree in accounting to figure out Google's payment algorithm, I think I'll keep it.  I even see some interesting stuff on there sometimes. 

The Amazon "favorites" boxes along the sidebar haven't really done much either, but I think I'll keep those too.  They look nice, and I like the fact that I got to handpick all of the products myself.  I see that people often list their favorite books and whatnot along their sidebar or they fill out those tedious "about me" forms with the boxes for their interests and hobbies.  I just figured that this Amazon widget was a means of basically doing the same thing AND displaying a few ads at the same time.  Honestly, I think it's the neatest advertising idea I've seen so far, and I'm surprised that I don't see it more often on other blogs.  I can't recommend it for its earning potential at this point, but I do really like the idea.

Now, please, don't take this post as a desperate attempt to drum up business or something.  I just wanted to mention my advertising misadventure from yesterday and talk about ads in general.  It's probably bad taste to even discuss your ads, and it might even be considered rude, and I suppose it might make some people uncomfortable.  I guess there's no easy way around that.  It's like sitting down next to someone who's eating in a restaurant and mentioning that you're hungry.  No matter how much you protest that you're just making conversation, someone will always suspect you of ulterior motives.  Besides, I'm sure there's nothing that makes people feel less inclined to click on an ad than being fed some sob story begging them to do so.  It's part of our common rebellious streak and our natural aversion to all things pathetic.  And hey, I get it.  If you come here at all, it's not to look at ads, or click on ads, or...well, read posts about clicking on ads.  I'm just glad you're here, and I really appreciate all the comments and feedback I've gotten so far.  That's all that really matters.  Thank you.      

More Than The Sum of Their Songs

There are certain albums where the album itself, in its design or concept and composition, transcends being a mere collection of songs, and becomes a work of art in it's own right. The following is collection of some of my personal favorites in no particular order:

Vitalogy: Pearl Jam

From the album's title to the encyclopedia-like booklet to the strange tracks scattered through-out the album, the whole work conveys the feeling of some sort of bizarre 19th century text-book complete with instructional phonograph record.  The illustrations in the booklet take on an unsettling quality in the context they're placed in, and the raw cut & paste composition of the random scraps and pieces makes the whole thing seem like the manifesto of a deranged inmate of an unsanitary asylum where a bespectacled doctor is smoking his pipe and trying to decide whether shock-therapy or a frontal lobotomy would be a better course of treatment.  Tracks like "Aye Davanita" and "Bugs" help establish the atmosphere of cobweb-covered, grungy creepiness, and "foxymophandlemama" may be just about the most disturbing thing I've ever heard.  

Appetite for Destruction: Guns 'N Roses
Yep, this one was the real deal.  It was the product of a certain time and place.  It came out in the middle of the whole "glam" era when everything was all posing and choreography and hair spray.  This album was a kind of backlash against all that.  It was gritty, hard rock 'n roll.  It was like the rock-bottom dregs of a whiskey bottle that people had been throwing their cigarette butts in all night.  It made everything else look fake and ridiculous by comparison.  These guys were the real thing, and the album told the story of the raw side of the rock 'n roll lifestyle.  Not to mention it was really, really good.  Every track is excellent with Slash's unmistakable and inimitable guitar style and Axl's versatile vocals and scathing lyrics.  The final track "Rocket Queen" is the perfect example of the album's driving concept.  They didn't just dub in some orgasmic sound bites.  They brought an actual groupie into the studio and...well.  It's controversial, messed up, and a little too brutally honest, but that's Appetite for destruction.  And how many album's could be forced to discard their original, controversial cover-art and come up with something just as iconic to replace it?  

Dark Side of the Moon: Pink Floyd
It's hard to pick just one Pink Floyd Album for this list.  They were the veritable masters of the "concept album."  It's a close call between this and The Wall, but in the end I have to go with Dark Side of the Moon, even though The Wall probably has more of my favorite songs on it.  No, I have to go with Dark Side of the Moon because of its tight composition and unique sound.  Nothing else sounds like Dark Side of the Moon, not even another Pink Floyd album.  It has this soft, dream-like quality about it.  It's soothing and unnerving at the same time.   Roger Waters wrote each song about the different pressures in modern life that drive people insane, and you feel just a little bit like you're going to lose your mind listening to it.  Pink Floyd is great at making music that actually...sounds like things.  The intro to "Time" sounds unmistakeably like a giant, massive clock towering over you, oppressive in its stoic indifference to human mortality.  "Money" sounds like a hedonistic orgy of excess amid piles and piles of cash.  I won't get into the whole "Wizard of Oz" thing; it's probably nothing more than a coincidence or synchronicity.  But if someone were crazy enough to try and pull something like that off, it would be Pink Floyd.    

Home: The Dixie Chicks
This might seem like a strange entry on the list, but there are really very few good solid country albums.  Most of them are just a random collection of songs with no real theme or style holding it all together.  In the world of country music Home is almost a concept album.  It has a very stripped-down bare bones style to the sound that runs through the whole album.  It has the charm of sounding like a family gathered around a campfire singing songs; a really talented family.  It's just basic old school, down home, country music.  The songs are great from start to finish, from the catchy "Long Time Gone" to the haunting "Top of the World."  It's unfortunate that their country music careers got sidetracked over their comments concerning the Iraq war.  Their name is unmentionable in certain country music circles even today.  But people's opinion of their political views really should have no bearing on their evalution of their musical talent.   

Bat Out of Hell: Meat Loaf
If you haven't heard this album, you're really missing something.  The term "Rock Opera" gets thrown around, but nothing quite captures the essence of the idea like Bat Out of Hell.  The lyrics are almost deliberately cheesy, bordering on the ridiculous, and yet it's all so damn...uplifting.  You find yourself swept away by it all in spite of your better judgment,  and that's kind of the whole point and the real achievement of the album.  Even after listening to it like a million times, it's hard to say whether there's a single storyline here or just a bunch of separate love songs.  I like to think it's all one big story.  It's a kind of tongue-in-cheek treatment of the male fear of commitment and the restless yearning for conquest that finally gives way to tenderness and true love.  It's epic musically and in its concept.  There are only a few things, books, movies, ect. that I would describe as "the great things in life" with the hope that you would know what I'm talking about.  Bat Out of Hell is one of those things.

Melancholy & the Infinite Sadness: The Smashing Pumpkins
Much like Vitalogy, Melancholy & the Infinite Sadness is held together more by a style than a concept.  There's something about The Smashing Pumpkins' music that conjures up images and memories from early childhood.  It's that brief glimpse of the rocking horse in the sunbeam or those colored blocks you used to play with.  It's that time you chased fireflies with the neighbor girl or you cried because you were lost in the dark.  It's the illustration of the fairy god-mother in your book of bed time stories that lulled you to sleep when your hair was still wet from taking a bath.  Nowhere is this feeling more evident than Melancholy & the Infinite Sadness.  This is definitely the band's masterpiece; the full achievement of their signature sound.  As a double album, it's overflowing with creative energy.  Nearly every one of it's 28 tracks is indispensable.  As long as it is, I can listen to the whole thing through without growing restless or bored with it.  Time slips away as I'm lulled into it's unique dream.

This is hardly a comprehensive list, and I could probably go on.  But I think that's enough for now.  I might do another one of these lists some time.  I'll see what the response is to this one.  It might read as a collection of over-enthusiastic plugs to some people, but whatever.  This is my blog, and if I can't occasionally use it as a platform to ramble on about the things I love, then really...what's the point?                         

The 20 Million-Year-Old Man

Several years ago the Voyager probes were launched into deep space.  On each of these probes was placed a gold record which contained information about humanity for the benefit of any intelligent life which might stumble across it.  I have often wondered what might happen if we went a step further.  What if rather than merely sending information, we send an actual DNA sample of a human being, say a strand of hair or something, with instructions on how to clone a human being from this sample.  I wasn't too surprised to find that this idea had been anticipated to some degree and that plans were already underway to send DNA into space, most notably Stephen Hawking's.  But the possibilities are at once amazing and horrifying at the same time, and I was surprised that there wasn't a little more controversy over this.  There's a certain moral grey area here.  Millions of years from now a human being created from such a sample could walk the surface of an alien planet and make contact with intelligent, extraterrestrial life, but it's hard to say whether this possibility would be worth some of the potential moral problems involved.  I want take a moment to consider some of these problems.    

First, of course, there's the whole issue of cloning itself.  At a quick glance, it might seem that the issue is irrelevant, since it would be the hypothetical aliens who would or would not do the cloning.  We're just talking about sending a tiny piece of ourselves into space.  But what is the real issue with cloning?  When you put aside people's suspicion and superstition on the subject, you're left with the basic matter of human rights.  There's the old argument of growing human beings solely to harvest their organs, and so on.  Many of these arguments are based on a gross ignorance of genetics, nevertheless the issue is a legitimate one.  If unlimited copies of a person could be created in a lab, at what point does their value as unique human beings become undermined?  And so, if we're talking about sending a sample of DNA into space with the potential that a human being could be cloned from that sample, don't we have to consider the implications of the life that we would be consigning such a person to.  I guarantee you, if we were talking about sending fertilized embryos into space that could somehow be preserved for millions of years, someone out there would be writing a letter.  And rightly so.  You might say that a strand of hair is miles apart from a frozen embryo,  but when the potential exists that a human being could be created from either one, is there really a fundamental difference in this case?

So that brings us to the next issue: What sort of life would we be consigning such a person to?  It's hard to fathom what it would be like being born on an alien world, having no idea who or what you are and finding out that the species you descend from most likely long since vanished into dust.  In some sense, I suppose, it would be like a cosmic variation on the old legend of the boy raised by wolves.  He would identify with the aliens that raised him.  He would learn their language and follow their ways and generally consider himself one of them.  But there would still be that loneliness that would come from being the only one of his kind.  Maybe we could send two samples, one male and one female.  We can only hope that they'd get along, and that there aren't any snakes or apple trees nearby.

But even that is really just considering the best possible scenario.  We really don't know what the hypothetical aliens would be like, or what kind of intergalactic foster parents they would be.  Maybe they would display their newly grown human in some sort of space zoo.  Or maybe they would use the sample to pump out hundreds of Stephen Hawkings, assembly line style, to be used as slave labor.  I just hope they realize that those don't come with a warranty agreement.  

From all of this it might sound like I'm against the idea of sending DNA into space, but really I'm just pointing out some things that ought to be considered.  I don't think that shooting our fingernail clippings out into space should be taken lightly.  I think we should be aware of the gravity of what we're doing.  However, I guess I support the idea.  I have some reservations about it, obviously, but the idea is just a little too compelling for me to completely dismiss it.  The possibility of preserving humanity for millions of years beyond its shelf life here on Earth is definitely a big argument in its favor.  Add to that the possibility of a human being standing face to face with intelligent life from another planet.  Sure it would be a human being that knew nothing of Earth or where it came from, but it would still be one of us with a toothbrush and an encyclopedia of human history packed for it as we send it off into the great unknown.                   

Saving Daylight

It happens every year.  Actually it happens twice a year.  I wake up on a Sunday morning, and since I usually doze off on the couch on Saturday night, the first clock I see is the one on the cable box beneath the TV.  If it's on a certain day in spring, I might think, "Wow, I slept for a long time."  If it's on a certain day in the fall, I might think, "Wow, I'm up early."  Usually somewhere along the line, when I'm stumbling around the kitchen for my second or third cup of coffee, it finally dawns on me that the clock in the kitchen shows a different time than the cable box.  Oh yeah, that's right, it's Daylight Savings Time again.

I complain about this ridiculous practice every time it comes around and to anyone that will listen, and I'm not alone.  A quick Google search of "Getting Rid of Daylight Savings Time", which I freely admit is a fairly biased collection of keywords, nevertheless returns several pages of outrage on the subject.  The complaints range from claims that it's bad for your health to claims that it's bad for the environment.  I think it's mostly just a nuisance; a small nuisance, sure, but a relatively pointless one too.  Is it really worth all this running around resetting clocks just to squeeze another hour out of those long summer evenings?  Does anyone really, truly care?  And yet we all go on doing it, slaves to our own collective routine.  Even though there is a significant and growing group of voices yelling, "Why do we keep doing this?", we keep doing it anyway.  Is it laziness?  Are we just too lethargic to get together on this and put it to rest?  It's like a man who puts a bucket under a leaking pipe that he has to dump every day instead of getting the pipe fixed.  Sure, he's doing more work in the long run, but he's being lazy just the same by continually putting off the simple solution to his problem.   Have we all, as a society, really fallen into such a slump?  We'd rather re-set fifteen different clocks twice a year until the end of time than take five minutes for some bureaucrat to stand up and say, "The Hell with this"?  Or is someone out there really crazy about Daylight Savings and they don't know how they'd live without it?

Well, I could certainly live without it.  On a personal level, I have my own specific reasons for being annoyed with this practice.  I work 3rd shift, from midnight to eight in the morning.  From mid-October to mid-March, I'm lucky if I see the sun at all.  But gradually, as the year goes on and rolls into spring, the sun comes up a little earlier each day, and I finally get a little bit of light to shine in on my last few hours of work.  But then we all crank forward the hands of time, and I'm thrown back into the darkness again.  Yeah...thanks.  You call it "Daylight Savings Time"; I call it "Daylight Stealing Time."  It's not enough for you people that you get to work and laugh and live in the sun all day, every day, you have to take that tiny little bit of sunlight that I get too?  Yes, I represent a small segment of the population, but shouldn't there at least be an even ratio when it comes to the distribution of something as universal as the sun?  Some people are so oblivious to my caste of society that they think the Daylight Savings system actually affords them an extra hour of daylight, as though this extra light just fell from the sky.  Well...it does, but you know what I mean.

I get the short end of the stick on the other side as well.  You know that precious, extra hour of the day, the one that's got us all running around changing our clocks?  You know what  I'm trying to do during that hour?  I'm TRYING TO SLEEP.  I'm just trying to get a couple of hours before I have to go to work, but there I am tossing and turning.  The heat is already unbearable enough, but then I have to deal with your extra hour of sunlight hitting me right square in the face.

So here I am, adding my voice to the general dissent on the subject, for all the good it'll do.  I'm sure, long after all our cites have crumbled and our civilization has fallen, we'll probably still be ritualistically re-setting the few rusty time pieces that remain.  Knowing my luck, this pointless practice will probably be the one thing to endure, long after we've forgotten why we even keep doing it.  We don't even seem too clear about it now.  We claim it's for the farmers, but then the farmer perks up at the mention of his name and says, "What?  Don't look at me.  This was your idea."  But what are you gonna do?  Anyway, I gotta go.  I have a bucket to dump.

                       

The Future's So Bright....

This might be old news, and I might be the last person on the internet to hear about this, but whatever.  In looking for pictures for my last post, I came across this photograph:

The photo was supposedly taken in 1941 at the opening of a bridge in Canada, and it supposedly hasn't been tampered with.  Notice the guy in the middle of the crowd with the sunglasses.  Given all the buzz this past week about the person with the "cell phone" in that 1920s film, I figured this was worth mentioning.  Naturally there must be a logical explanation.  Maybe his outfit isn't as modern as we might think.  Maybe someone is just really good at Photo-shop.   Maybe this guy woke up from a really bad hangover, and found himself about 50 years in the past.  We've all been there, haven't we?     

When Did Thomas Edison Become the Bad Guy?

Sometimes I feel like there's a meeting I missed, like there's some committee that gets together in the middle of the night and makes changes to the culture.  Everyone else seems to be instantly on board with these changes.  No one else seems thrown or confused by them.  In fact, sometimes I wonder if anyone else even notices that a change has happened.  I never hear anyone ever mention it.  There just seems to be this unspoken understanding that the thing is different now.  If I were living in the world of 1984, I'd be the bewildered guy wandering through the crowd asking, "But weren't we just at war with Eurasia?", that is until the Thought Police hauled me away and put a rat cage on my head and showed me the error of my ways.

For instance, I can't remember the first time I went into a restaurant and  a "server" took my order, but I definitely remember that they used to be called "waiters" and "waitresses."  I understand the reason for the change in terminology, obviously, the whole politically correct agenda behind it all.  I just don't know when this was decided or by whom.  There was never any big announcement on TV or in the town square where someone got up on stage and declared, "Henceforth, they shall be called 'servers.'  Woe be unto them who use the gender specific job title....Oh yeah, and by the way, we're getting rid of 'actress' altogether."  No, it all just seemed to happen overnight, and everyone fell right in step with it as though the job had never been called anything other than 'server'.

Another odd example I've noticed is "they" changed the "B.C/A.D." dating standard to "B.C.E/C.E.", which means "Before the Common Era" and "The Common Era" respectively.  What the heck is the "Common Era"?  Common to what?  The years haven't changed.  We're still dating everything from the same moment in history.  Isn't it disingenuous to discard the religious references in name but to keep them in number? At least when the French Revolution threw God out the window they started over with year one.  So far, I've only heard this one on TV and it seems confined to academic circles, but what do I know?  When the date comes up in casual conversation, people rarely feel the need to specify, "that's 2010 Anno Domini...in the year of our blessed Lord.  Amen."  So for all I know, the change might already be widespread in the public consciousness.  But I doubt it.  Even the world of historical TV documentaries seems to be struggling with this one.  I think I caught one of them using good old "B.C." the other day.  Maybe the secret midnight committee got together and decided, "This one just isn't catching on." 

Even the news often makes me feel like I've been left in the dust.  It used to be that the anchorman would come on at six, tell you what was happening in the world, and leave it to you and your friends to scratch your head over the human condition.  Now, with the proliferation of the 24 hour news channels, I constantly feel like I've walked into a room in the middle of a conversation.  They've already moved on to speculating about the meaning and the impact of such & such, and I still have no idea what they're talking about.  A few years back, I heard people gossiping and grumbling about Rev. Jeremiah Wright for a month before I even had the slightest idea who the man was and what he had said to get people so worked up.

The process sometimes even extends to history itself, and there they even have a name for it.  They call it "Revisionist History."  The problem with this term is that it's used indiscriminately.  On the one hand, it's used as a pejorative term, meaning someone who distorts or misrepresents the facts of history in order to promote a specific agenda.  On the other hand, it's used again as a pejorative term, but this time meaning someone who has brought new facts to light that challenge a common, established, and traditional view of a historical subject.  People are rarely willingly to admit that they're using the term in this second sense, but I have actually seen a few cases.  Mostly the term just gets thrown around as a vague accusation in cases of historical disagreement.  The problem is, watching these arguments from the sidelines, the double meaning makes it easy to get confused and awfully hard to keep score.

I remember Christopher Columbus was an early target.  Some time in the early 1990's some nebulous powers-that-be seemed dead set on burying this man's reputation.  Some people objected to this, calling it "revisionist history."  But the nature of the objection wasn't always clear.  Some people meant, "They're making stuff up to make Columbus sound bad."  Then there were other people who meant, "Columbus is a revered American icon and you're ruining his image by bringing up facts that make him look bad.  I'm going to stick my fingers in my ears so that I don't have to hear about it...la-la-la-la."  Then, of course, there was a lot of grey area between these two viewpoints, where people we're just pissed off about the whole thing, but they really hadn't thought out why.

But somewhere in all this crossfire, I get to feeling like I can't keep track of what the truth is.  You grow up hearing one thing about history and then the secret midnight committee has another one of their damn meetings, and the next day everyone's saying, "Nope, it actually happened like this."  What are you supposed to believe?  Is this new information any more reliable than the old information?  You certainly can't dig up Christopher Columbus and ask him if he really chopped off an Indian's hand. 

For instance, not to sound like some lunatic fringe, holocaust denier, but until about 8 years ago I had never heard about these Japanese Internment Camps that they had in America during World War II.  I never learned about it in school.  I never heard anyone talk about it.  This information just seemed like it popped up out of nowhere, and everyone acted like it had been common knowledge forever.  I'm not saying it didn't happen; I'm just wondering why I never heard of it.  Then, of course, there's Thomas Edison.  When I grew up, he was the symbol of the American dream, a genius and a great man.  Now, it appears he stole all of his ideas, destroyed brilliant careers, engaged in all kinds of illegal acts, and probably strangled puppies because he didn't like the way they wagged their tails.  

There are two possibilities, and sometimes it's hard to tell which side of the line Occam's Razor falls on.  One, people of the past were ignorant, unenlightened, bigoted, and apparently willing to credit Paul Revere with feats of daring and bravery solely because of the rhyming potential of his name.  Or two, someone is fabricating a bunch of elaborate smear campaigns to push an agenda or cause trouble or just to let people know they're too original and clever to be impressed by the conventional image of Thomas Edison.  I guess it all comes down to the real question:  Who are these people, and where are they holding their damn meetings?    

                          

Memento: The Burden Of Memory

Memory may be the most essential element of the human mind.  It serves as our connection to the past, all that we have known, learned, and experienced.  It also serves as the expansive reservoir of our personality, which we draw from moment by moment in all of our responses, our actions and reactions to everything in our lives.  It is the weathered and worn seat of our souls and the cornerstone of our emotional existence.   A song or faded photograph or even a faint scent in the air can tap into this deep well of stored feelings.  All of our triumphs and regrets, our shame as well as our fond recollections, reside in out memories.  But even aside from all of these lofty characteristics, memory also serves a simple, utilitarian purpose.  It facilitates our practical ability to function in life.  It grants us the ability to retain the knowledge of who, what, and where we are, and most importantly, what we need to do.  It is primarily with the nature of memory in this last capacity that the movie Memento is concerned.

To start with I want to share three examples of things I do to help me remember things that I need to remember.  They're certainly not unusual examples, but they'll serve as useful illustrations that I'll be able to refer back to.  Anyway: 

1. When there's one important thing that I absolutely need to remember I usually write myself a note with a pen on the back of my left hand between my thumb and my forefinger.  Being left-handed, it would probably be easier to write the note on the back of my right hand, but being left handed also means I use my left hand more, so I definitely see more of the back of that hand.  So the gain in visibility is well worth the awkward effort of trying to write with my right hand.
2. I don't make a routine practice of making "to-do" lists; it's definitely not something I do every day.  But when I feel like I have an overwhelming pile of stuff to do, and especially when I feel like I'm having a hard time jumping in and getting started, sitting down and making a "to-do" list can be very helpful means of breaking it all down and making it all seem just a little more manageable. 
3. Like most people I keep a list of contacts in my cell phone.  I have it all organized by people's home, cell, office, email, etc.  One of the first things I do when I get a new phone is sit down and copy all the contact information from my old phone.  I refer to this list regularly.  If I'm talking on my home phone, I look up the number on my cell phone before dialing.  If I'm using the cell phone itself, I don't dial; I just hit a button.  If I'm filling out a job application, I have the numbers of many of my previous employers saved on the phone, so that I can refer to them.   

 Now, I noticed something about the first two things.  Although their primary purpose is a means to remembering things, I find that they also bring a certain sense of relief.  Once I write the note on the back of my hand, I'm pretty much free to forget about it.  I can release the tight grip my concentration has on this little piece of information.  I no longer have to worry about forgetting it.  The information is right there on the back of my hand.  In fact, I find that nearly 80% of the stress in my life comes from this endless responsibility to remember things.  That's why the "to-do" list comes in so handy.  More than half the aggravation of having a pile of errands to attend to is the necessity of having to remember it all and keep it straight in my head.  The "to-do" list removes that problem, and reduces it to the simple task of checking things off one by one.  So while these techniques help me remember, they also help me manage stress.  They take the edge off the burden of my responsibilities.

However, like most things in life, there's a trade-off, which brings us to the third item on the list.  Since putting these numbers on my cell phone, I've noticed a definite drop-off in my ability to remember phone numbers.  In the old days, I used to have dozens of phone numbers floating around in my head that I could recall effortlessly at a moment's notice.  Now that I've started putting them on my phone, I have trouble even remembering my own mother's number.  I don't even remember the number to the cell phone itself.  It's on the the phone itself under "phone information", so why bother?  So it seems the phone has taken the place of my memory.  While this relieves the stressful burden of remembering the numbers, I'm in serious trouble if I lose or break the phone.  

Although this may all sound like a dry and difficult subject to present dramatically,  Memento manages to pull it off.  It does so by presenting an extreme case, a man who has no short term memory whatsoever, a man who relies completely on the kind of reminders described above.  Rather than writing notes on his hand, he covers his body in tattoos that remind him of who he is, where he is, and what he has to do.  The task of which needs to be reminded is more that simply buying groceries and paying the water bill.  He's trying to to find the man who murdered his wife and robbed him of his ability to form new memories.  Yet, despite these exaggerations, the essential principles remains the same.  

For Lenny, the protagonist of the film, these "mementos" take on a life of their own.  Others take advantage of his condition and use this system of his to confuse and manipulate him.  In  fact we eventually learn that Lenny has even used the system to trick himself.  He is at the mercy of these mementos.  If he writes a note on a Polaroid telling him to trust someone, the note itself achieves the status of an unquestionable judgment, even if it turns out that he made a huge mistake when he wrote the note.  The mistake is long forgotten, and only the note remains as his sole guide.  Even his own drive and purpose fade way, replaced completely by task set down for him in this accumulated pile of notes and information.   In the end it seems that the task may have even been completed long ago, or might not even have been real to begin with, but Lenny deliberately perpetuates it because these notes and what they tell him to do are the only sense of direction and purpose he has left.

By showing us a man robbed of his memory, Memento demonstrates the importance and function of memory through its absence.  Lenny is a man adrift in life.  He lives in motel room, and the only reason he knows he lives there is because he has a picture of it in his coat pocket.  His entire world revolves around the leads that he believes will help him find his wife's killer.  He thinks of nothing else.  He has surrendered completely to his mementos.  He has been freed from the stressful burden of memory, and he has lost all control of his life in the process.  So the next time you write a note reminding yourself to "buy milk" or you jot down a phone number, and you breathe a sigh a relief that now you don't have to worry about the information slipping your mind...just remember that relying on your own mind might not always be a bad thing.