According to a post on Reason’s Hit & Run Blog, The Mooninites were spotted, and subsequently mistaken for weapons of terror, by the Boston authorities.
Is this a sign that one of the stars of my fantasy team, The Mooninites, is about to see the return of Bean Town stud Paul Pierce? And that he will begin a reign of terror that will render my team invincible?
Read the rest of this entry »
Have you guys checked out the “The Bible Says (God Hates Fags)” music video? YouTube removed it, but you can still see it here. Then check out Love God’s Way Ministries. Donnie’s video blog is especially great. Props to Andrew Sullivan.
Last week I watched Mike Judge’s newish movie Idiocracy
Private Joe Bowers [played by Luke Wilson] , the definition of “average American”, is selected by the Pentagon to be the guinea pig for a top-secret hibernation program. Forgotten, he awakes 500 years in the future.
During his sleep, stupid people bred rampantly, and smart people had few if any children (not at all a far fetched vision of the present, much less the future). By the time he wakes up, his once average IQ is by far the highest in the world.
Like Judge’s Office Space, Idiocracy is funny, easy to enjoy, and offers some real social commentary; nothing unexpected or subtle, but good commentary nonetheless. It’s not as funny as Office Space, but it comes close to making up for it in novelty of concept.
One of the recurring jokes of the movie, is that many of the services in the future are, as it were, very full service. Starbucks’ number one seller seems to be a hand job, and they offer something called a “full body latte.”
The notion that our society’s breeding habits are reversing the direction of evolution is pretty scary, but at least we are already seeing some of the upside.
Sigma has a radical new idea - stick the best image sensor on the market in a compact camera at the cost of dropping optical zoom (the user can just use digital zoom/crop the picture in Adobe later). Read more here.
Over at Beliefnet, there is a no-holds-barred religious/anti-religious debate going on between two of my favorite modern thinkers: Andrew Sullivan and Sam Harris. Sullivan is one of my favorite bloggers, the original “South Park Republican”, and a gay Catholic. Harris is an atheist celebrity and has authored The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation.
It’s probably obvious to most of you whose side I come down on here. Religious moderation has long angered/frustrated me even more so than religious fundamentalism. Though I am a Christopher Hitchens-loving antitheist, I find religious fundamentalism more defensible than religious moderation (though I would of course rather get hammered with a socially liberal religious moderate than a conservative religious fundamentalist). I have never understood how one could have “faith” in religious texts, and yet choose not to believe part of them (in part claiming that they were written for a different time period). Once doubt is let into faith, wouldn’t the whole thing be rejected? Sam Harris claims that religious moderates at least partially legitimate their fundamentalist fellow faithful. I personally don’t think that Christianity, Islam, etc. will ever be rejected as the ridiculous superstitions that they are until political and social (religious) moderates, who already reject many of the tenets of their holy books, reject them entirely.
All of us have been exposed to general debates over the existence of god; I find this debate particularly interesting, though, because it specifically concerns religious moderation.
Some money quotes (in order but out of context):
Harris: Given my view of faith, I think that religious “moderation” is basically an elaborate exercise in self-deception, while you seem to think it is a legitimate and intellectually defensible alternative to fundamentalism.
Sullivan: The reason I find fundamentalism so troubling …is its inability to integrate doubt into faith, its resistance to human reason, its tendency to pride and exclusion, and its inability to accept mystery as the core reality of any religious life. You find it troubling, I think, purely because it upholds truths that cannot be proved empirically or even, in some respects, logically. In that sense, of course, I think you have no reason to dislike or oppose it any more than you would oppose my kind of faith. Your argument allows for no solid distinctions within faiths…
Sullivan: …I do not see reason as somehow in conflict with faith - since both are reconciled by a Truth that may yet be beyond our understanding.
Harris: Second, many religious moderates imagine, as you do, that there is some clear line of separation between extremist and moderate religion. But there isn’t. Scripture itself remains a perpetual engine of extremism: because, while He may be many things, the God of the Bible and the Qur’an is not a moderate. Read scripture more closely and you do not find reasons for religious moderation; you find reasons to live like a proper religious maniac—to fear the fires of hell, to despise nonbelievers, to persecute homosexuals, etc. Of course, one can cherry-pick scripture and find reasons to love one’s neighbor and turn the other cheek, but the truth is, the pickings are pretty slim, and the more fully one grants credence to these books, the more fully one will be committed to the view that infidels, heretics, and apostates are destined to be ground up in God’s loving machinery of justice.
Harris: How does one “integrate doubt” into one’s faith? By acknowledging just how dubious many of the claims of scripture are, and thereafter reading it selectively, bowdlerizing it if need be, and allowing its assertions about reality to be continually trumped by fresh insights—scientific (“You mean the world isn’t 6000 years old? Yikes…”), mathematical (“pi doesn’t actually equal 3? All right, so what?”), and moral (“You mean, I shouldn’t beat my slaves? I can’t even keep slaves? Hmm…”). Religious moderation is the result of not taking scripture all that seriously. So why not take these books less seriously still? Why not admit that they are just books, written by fallible human beings like ourselves? They were not, as your friend the pope would have it, “written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost.”
Granted: I have quoted Harris at greater length. This is because, at least so far, Sullivan has had little to say that actually makes sense.
This one’s for Zmurder, but I think everybody will think it’s pretty amazing
Google Operating System has a post about a new Google tool called Gapminder that allows the user to visually see the relationships between per capita income, population size, geographic area, and life expectancy over the last 30 years.
Using Gapminder, you can visualize World Development Indicators from The World Bank. You will see a scatterplot where each bubble represents a country. The position of the bubble is determined by the indicators on the axes.
Reading the latest Reason online article, “Jumping the Loan Shark” by Jacob Sullum, further confirms that I am becoming, or perhaps have always been, a conservative. One of the Dems’ biggest promises last November was cutting interest rates on student loans. And it seems they have succeeded, at least as far as passing the House with a bill that would cut interest rates in half. This would seem to be a good thing, what with the average student carrying $18,000 in debt when he graduates. Sullum argues, however, that since the value of a college education is so great, there is no need to subsidize it, and that market interest rates (7-11% as opposed to 3.4% as proposed by the Dems) would still allow student loans for a college education to be an incredible investment.
According to U.S. Census data, the average college graduate earns about $1 million more over his lifetime than the average high school graduate. That’s a pretty good payoff for the investment in tuition, whether the money is borrowed at the rate promised by the Democrats (3.4 percent), at the current government-subsidized rate (6.8 percent), or even at the market rate (now ranging between 7 percent and 11 percent).
Advocates of increased aid worry that the average college student carries a debt of almost $18,000 when he graduates. But owing the cost of a Hyundai Sonata for a loan that yields an extra $20,000 or so in earnings every year does not seem like a bad deal. It’s certainly a better investment than the Hyundai.
Aid supporters also note that the cost of attending college has been rising faster than the rate of inflation for the last two decades. Yet easy money at taxpayers’ expense fuels this escalation. Basic economic theory tells us that boosting the demand for a product or service, which is what government loans and grants effectively do, tends to raise its price.
Back in poly sci, I had a student write a paper making a nearly identical point, though his was aimed at the misplaced uproar over tuition increases. The tuition increases were warranted, said the student, because the value of a college education was so high, and that value was increasing at a rate higher than tuition increases. The Sullum piece connects with my student’s by showing that tuition increases, right or wrong, are partially the unintended consequence of lower-than-market interests rates for student loans.
[of course, having never paid a dime for college, it may be easier for me to agree with Sullum than someone paying back thousands in loans]
Taken from cmj.com:
The Arcade Fire returns March 6 with their highly anticipated sophomore album, Neon Bible. The 11-track follow-up to Funeral was primarily recorded in a church outside of the band’s hometown of Montreal and features contributions from Final Fantasy, as well as members of Calexico and Wolf Parade. The band will begin a month-long overseas tour in Dublin March 5.
Tracklist For Neon Bible:
01. Black Mirror
02. Keep The Car Running
03. Neon Bible
04. Intervention
05. Black Wave/Bad Vibrations
06. Ocean Of Noise
07. The Well And The Lighthouse
08. Antichrist Television Blues
09. Windowsill
10. No Cars Go
11. My Body Is A Cage
Album that is Terrible of the Year:
TV on the Radio: Return to Cookie Mountain
I swear to Gilbey’s Gin that I tried to get into this album. My boy Andy bought it when it came out, and I quickly ripped it and forgot about it. Then, Denver Daniel put “Wolf Like Me” on a festive holiday collection for me. Now this song, though it ultimately sucks, is damn good the first time you hear it. So I was psyched to get into the whole album. Then I was met with crap like “Hours”, “Province”, the unbelievably horrible “Let the Devil In”, really the whole damn rest of the album. A track or two are simply mediocre (”I Was a Lover” and maybe “A Method”), but most of the album is downright objectionable. Bad. I appreciate the fact that TVotR’s “Hours” stole its introduction from the Talking Heads’ “Slippery People” (only the version from Stop Making Sense), but that’s not making this album for me. Pitchfork calling this album the #2 of the year is unforgivable. This is by far the worst album that I have tried to get into. Most such albums are simply not that good. This one is that bad.
Some Albums that were Good, A Top 10
10. T.I. — King
pretty good rap. only one incredible song: “I’m Talkin’ to You” (Lauren’s favorite song of the year…seriously)
9. M. Ward — Post-War
an OK alt-country record. “To Go Home” and “Requiem” are damn good.
8. Islands — Return to the Sea
now we’re talking. Unicorns were better, but Islands are sweet. me likes “Swans” and “Humans” the best.
7. Thom Yorke — The Eraser
this shizzle’s nearly as good as that solo Thom Yorke Bridge School Benefit thing I got from Fayetteville Daniel back in the day. I really really like “Atoms for Peace”, “Black Swan”, and “Harrowdown Hill”.
6. Danielson — Ships
“Did I Step on your Trumpet” is good enough to get this on the top 10. “Cast it at the Setting Sail” and “Ship the Majestic Suffix” are good enough (this year) to get er to number 6.
on to the Top 5 already: Read the rest of this entry »
I found a lot of good new music in 2006 considering that I spent the first half of the year listening to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s Howl (a 2005 release).
Let’s start with the 3rd tier albums:
If the touchscreen keyboard works ok, then this will be, finally, the only portable device I’ll need to carry unless I’m doing something that requires a large screen or lots of typing. wifi, web browsing, email, video, audio, 8gb just small enough to still allow for a great screen, Google maps, weather, 5hrs talk time, 16 hrs audio playback and a combination can opener/bottle opener/screwdriver/fish hook remover
You’ve got until June to save up. Trust me, you’ll need to save up.
Sometimes my writing has more cliches than you could shake a stick at. I know I need to straighten up and fly right, but I don’t want work my ass off finding all those tired cliches, because at the end of the day, all work and no play makes Joel a dull boy. That’s why I was pleased as punch to find The Cliche Finder (via Lifehacker) to find all those little turns of phrase that, once upon a time, must have been real gems, but now come off flat as a pancake and deader than a doornail.
Now, I know that this post was a bit annoying; i wasn’t born yesterday. But, you know what they say: When it’s all said and done, life is just too short to look a gift horse in the mouth.
2006 was a disappointing year in music. Or maybe I’m just getting old.
2006 was at least a year of change. Just look at Pitchfork’s annual list of the top 10 albums or Metacritic’s top 30. The familiar bands that have dominated my musical universe these last few years–Wilco, Radiohead (Thom York, alone, doesn’t count), Spoon, Modest Mouse et al.–were all absent. And the others that did put out albums— Flaming Lips, I’m talking to you here— were just disastrous disappointments. Instead, the critics’ top picks are filled with new and unfamiliar names, Scott Walker?, Boris?, TV on the Radio?—all acts I’d never heard of before 2006.
And it’s not that I didn’t try new things. TV on the Radio, Band of Horses, Phoenix, Cat Power, Cold War Kids, I tried them all. And, to be fair, each has their shining moments, that one song– invariably the first song you’d hear off the album—that would make you say, “$%#^$%$ YEAH!” And for that, each deserves an honorable mention because each shows some real promise for the future. But none of their albums was consistently strong.
In contrast, there was Tapes ‘n’ Tapes’ The Loon, which suffered from a similar yet opposite affliction: pretty much the whole album, song-for-song, is consistently good… but not great. The best songs on The Loon are nowhere as near as good as the best song on the other of my honorable mentions. But, the worst songs on The Loon are by far better than the mediocrity that fills the rest of my honorable mentions.
And so, this year, for my best albums list, I could do only muster two: one familiar band and one new artist.
1. Belle and Sebastian, The Life Pursuit. When I first reviewed this album, I called it “a disappointing follow-up” to Dear Catastrophe Waitress. Now, I wonder, what I was thinking. I still think I’m right, that Dear Catastrophe was a harbinger of a new B&S sound, and that The Life Pursuit was this new sound in full fruition. But, hey, this new sound is really great. It would be stupid to think that B&S could go back to their If You’re Feeling Sinister-era sound. And they would be stupid for them to try to. Instead, The Life Pursuit reflects a new, mature, and confident B&S. But the band is still playful, creative. And as for those “unforgiveable” songs that managed to make it onto The Life Pursuit? At least, (a) they’re few. Moreover, (b) it’s their constant willingness to experienment within familiar confines that has made B&S a still rewarding band for now over a decade.
2. Joanna Newsome, Ys. I don’t normally like female vocalists. And Joanna Newsom is not really an exception. In fact, her music is not really my cup of tea. It’s broody; it’s pretentious. It’s stringy; it’s harpy. But, it’s also a novelty. The songs on Ys are incredibly complicated and rich. They compliment the listener’s intelligence (which is, frankly, probably why I like it.) The best music I think expresses latent ideas in new ways, and I’m not sure that Ys falls into that category. But it is a refreshing and impressive attempt to do something new, and worth the listener’s listen.
As for 2007, things promise to pick. Although the Shins’ new album, which will be released this January ain’t all that great– a step back from their first pair– releases by Radiohead, Wilco, and Arcade Fire should put me squarely back into a familar place: listening to thoughtful, rewarding, and good music.