Writing, society, magic… thought spirals out of control, comes back around, but is never the same
Alexander Skarsgard: “Always be curious, because curiosity is insubordination in its purest form.”
Andre Gide: “Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.”
Rita Mae Brown: “Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment.”
George S. Patton: “If everyone is thinking alike, then somebody isn’t thinking.”
Henry David Thoreau: “It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.”
I know I haven’t written in awhile; I’ve been doing the family holiday bounce. Tonight I’m sitting at my parents’ house, full on good food while my husband and sister talk about wine.
Life is good. I hope yours is, too, however you’re spending the ends of ‘09.
… my German/Irish/Italian husband and I (a Scandinavian/Celtic/Gaulish girl) could produce this child? Any?
Have you seen this one yet? Apparently hugging is bad for your soul. Well… I’m gonna go with ripping off hip-hop in some disastrous way while using slang that you obviously don’t know what it means is bad for humanity.
And, while less wtf, still not sure I want my medical employees thinking like this (although at least they have talent).
Not a movie, but an Amazon review. Either this Amazon book review for Going Rogue (no, there’s no link; if you want the book, you can find it pretty easily on your own) is a clever piece of satire or… please, Powers That Be, let this be satire.
By Gen. JC Christian, patriot (Tremonton, UT United States)
There are many kinds of truth. There are truths based on facts, truths based on faith, and truths based on something that sounds as if it should be true (truthiness). Then there’s the kind of truth we find in Sarah’s book: stories and concepts that become truths simply because she states them. She’s a lot like our Lord and Savior, Glen Beck, in that respect.
Sometimes, she states truths that would be considered ludicrous if uttered by someone else. Her claim that the McCain campaign forced her to spend $150,000 in RNC funds to dress her family in designer clothes is one example of that. Although it might be easier to believe that she acted like a trailer park Zsa Zsa who’d found a credit card left behind at a possum feed, she blames McCain staffers. That’s good enough for us, because we have faith; we want to believe her truths.
But the book isn’t perfect. As much as I enjoyed the few short paragraphs in which Mrs Palin laid out her policy objectives, she could have condensed it all into one sentence: “I’m going to grab an Oxo Good Grips Stainless Serving Spatula and go all mavericky on your non-white, non-Christian and non-heterosexual butts.”
The book also fails to expose Mrs. Palin’s intellectual brilliance and keen grasp of foreign policy issues. Why wasn’t the text of her recent speech in Hong Kong included? Although it remains secret, it’s rumored that she viciously rebuked the Vietcong king for his assault on the Empire State Building. That’s a speech we’ve been waiting for nearly 75 years to hear. It’s big news and should have been included.
As you read other reviews of this book, please remember that Mrs. Palin has many enemies who are eager to pan her work. The Palin family’s most potent nemesis, Levi’s johnston, is no dpubt fully erect and ready to spew globs of misfortune upon them for a third time. And reason-adoring intellectuals are certain to point out that an interview on Good Morning Topeka doesn’t qualify as a policy summit in the Far East.
But a few bad reviews won’t stop her. She’s seen much worse from her kitchen window. It can’t be pleasant to gaze upon Antichristograd every morning as you brew your coffee.
My review isn’t complete, but I think I’ll quit anyway, because writing reviews, like governing, is just too darned hard to finish.
You see satire, right? Reading it again, I’m going with definitely satire. The fact that he gave her 5 stars just through me off at first. So satire, of course, means, really, you SHOULD have.
And… since I can’t have an entire post of madness, here’s…
Normally I’m not a science person; it was totally my dreaded subject in high school (even more-so than math, if that’s possible). But on Sunday I was checking out the local Unitarian Universalist Church (they got a cool philosophy) and found out that they do a lecture every week with a different speaker on totally random topics. This Sunday an astronomy professor gave a talk on stars. I went in with Walt Whitman running through my head (“When I heard the learn’d astronomer; When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me… How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick…”). I love the stars, but talks on them seem to devolve into math with alarming regularity, and then I just get lost.
He was fascinating. I learned that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, that our sun (at 5 billion) is about half-way through it’s lifespan, that stars (which usually fuse hydrogen into helium to produce their heat), after their first death can have new life by fusing helium into other elements, and those elements into other elements… until stars make iron. Then they die for real. I learned that dark matter – which potentially 75% of the universe is composed of, and we don’t even know what it is – is pushing the universe further and further apart, so we likely won’t collapse back into another big bang like I’d been taught once upon a time. This sort of changes some of my meaning-of-life philosophy, but that’s OK; I’m flexible on our reason for existence.
But most importantly of all, I learned that the universe didn’t have any carbon when it started. Carbon was created by stars and their fusion power, and spewed out into the universe when some of them went supernova (at least I think it was during supernovas; I know that stars made and spewed carbon). Life, at least as we know it, is made from carbon. You are made from carbon. So am I. So is your cat. And your houseplant. So if you think about it, we don’t need to wait to become stars, as promised in “I Sing the Body Electric”. We already are.
Baby Avery was frowning at me when I came over, and I told her that she was made of stars – science had proved it. She smiled an enormous smile and laughed. I think she already knew that, but it was a good reminder.
So, I leave you with a quote from Eben Harrell’s article for Time magazine titled: “Did a Time Traveling Bird Sabotage the Collider?” :
Particle physics has a long history of zany theories that turned out to be true. Niels Bohr, the doyen of modern physicists, often told a story about a horseshoe he kept over his country home in Tisvilde, Denmark. When asked whether he really thought it would bring good luck, he replied, “Of course not, but I’m told it works even if you don’t believe in it.”