How do I talk my way out of this one

Omni, the reclusive caretaker of Every Topic in the Universe(s?) has been engaging me in a dialogue, trying to flesh out my worldview. He wants to know how I think the cosmos fits together. Good question.

You've been warned: I can't hope to explain all the various philosophies I'm going to breeze through here, that is the stuff of textbooks. I probably don't understand any of them well enough to do you or them justice. For that I'm linking liberally to Wikipedia, which is a good introductory source, to sate whatever curiosity you may have. Please comment with any questions and I'll try and answer them, or at least link you to something.

I think I most closely ally myself with empiricism. It's just too simple and intuitive to not fall in love with. I just don't like placing undue emphasis on Reason, which I think is a deeply flawed human faculty. Nor am I into the Cartesian game of questioning the veracity of my existence and all that crap. It just seems silly to worry about whether my senses are decieving me or if there's some malevolent poultergeist keeping me in the dark. And as the whole of modern (that is, descartes to like, Kant) Philosophical discourse showed, the requirement for absolute certainty that led to "I think there for I am" leads, upon hundreds of years of obsessive over-inspection, to solipsism and extreme philosophical skepticism.

I'd much rather assume, as a starting point, that everything I'll ever need to know will come rushing into my brain from one of the various holes in my skull. Further, I believe that these info holes are more or less accurate in quickening the truth on up to my brain.

There's less to obsess over that way.

It's also a monistic philosophy, which I like--again for simplicity's sake. However you choose to characterize it, as matter, as energy or whatever, there is only one kind of stuff around. This is contrasted with dualism, which, thanks to a certain Jewish carpenter, has been confusing the hell out of the majority of the Western world for two thousand-odd years. It's the whole soul / body problem. If you've never bothered much with philosophy or examining existence, then you're almost definitely a closet dualist. Descartes was a dualist, and one of the most influential thinkers of all time. He has probably had a deeper impact on the mindset of the modern world than Jesus himself.

Seriously.

Have you ever wondered how, if the soul and body are these to totally different and unique things, how could they possibly communicate with each other. Where would be the common ground? Not even Descartes could answer that one.

Monism is intuitively simpler, but it has a few huge problems. Humans are wierd animals, and when we look at the world we tend to see ourselves as fundamentally different than all the other crap lying around. We can think. We can reason. We can take in stimuli, evaluate it, pass judgement upon it, make a decision, and act on that decision. We can then look back and critique ourselves, our performance, our place in the situational context. What other creature can do that? So far it's just us. So we exist in the world, but we seem fundamentally different than the world.

We seem to have free will. This is some crazy shit, especially when it seems pretty obvious that the rest of creation runs algorithmically, constrained by a rigid, non-dynamic set of laws.

That's the draw of dualism. Matter exists in the physical world and is subject to its laws. The soul is somewhere else controlling things somewhere outside the spatio-temporal constraints of the physical world, free to do as it chooses.

The problems with this are legion, and enumerating them will just make me pissy, so suffice it to say I'm a monism man, through and through.

But how then, within a monistic framework, do we reconcile what seems to be free will with the physical world, which seems to be determined?

Short answer: Either free will is an illusion, or the material world is an illusion. The road less travelled, compatibilism, is a tough row to hoe.

I'd like to hoe it for a little while, just to flesh out some ideas I had the other day. I know almost nothing beyond lay science, so if what I'm saying is utterly idiotic, I'm sure Mike will pounce strong and swift. I welcome it.

Compatibilism is like the holy grail of modern scientific empiricism--great to fantasize about, tough to find, and easy to clown of people for believing in. Not that long ago though, when quantum mechanics became shit hot in pseudo-scientific circles, people saw the principle of quantum indeterminacy as the tonic compatibilism needed. There was hope that scientists who like the idea of free will might finally be able to have it both ways.

The problem with this is that, regardless of how particles act at the micro (subatomic) level--how crazy and chaotic those electron clouds can be--the world at a macro level still works like a well-oiled deterministic machine.

There have been further theories presented that quantum indeterminacy isn't quite so indeterminate after all, but this is not yet mainstream thought (I did a paper on this, I'll try to dig up some of my sources--don't hold your breath).

So if quantum level determinacy has no bearing on deterministic laws on a macro (atomic and larger) level, then this doesn't help the free will issue, because brains are macro level things.

The other day though, I had a thought, and I'm throwing this out mainly because I have no idea of what merit it has.

***

I commute and I hate it. What I've done to make it more bearable is listen to happy music and develop operational programs to avoid spending time completely stopped in the 13th most congested traffic system in America.

I noticed that, despite all the insane people dashing in and out of lanes, doing crazy retarded things, if I stopped thinking of my fellow commuters as individuals, and started studying their patterns, I could make it through a commute without coming to a complete stop. Once I figured this out and developed an algorithm--forcing my better judgment (free will) into the passenger's seat. I can now make it to work 10 to 20 minutes more quickly than before. I rock.

As much as I love self-aggrandisement, there is a deeper point. I think this is a good model for the micro-macro dichotomy. If you get bogged down on the level of quanta, where shit is swirling and nothing is predictable, nothing important gets accomplished. If you pull back too far though, you miss the nuances of the algorithm, you just see masses of crap travelling in mostly the same direction.

See where I'm going with this?

What if there is a middle area, somewhere matter at the subatomic level (probably better described as energy) interacts with matter on the macro level. I can really think of no better place for this than in a brain, where larger-than-atomic level structures shoot energy back and forth across vanishingly small expanses. Admittedly, I don't know the nature of neurological firings, what this energy is made up of, but I do know that science has had a hard as hell time trying to map the brain in any meaningful way.

Is it possible that quantum-level energy can exert a non-deterministic push onto the macro level neurons and whatnot, building a kind of pseudo--more like a mitigated--novelty into the structure of the brain as it goes?

This would seem to jive with the way the brain constructs it self from infancy to age, building and destroying pathways, making and breaking connections seemingly at random.

It's probably most likely that we just can't yet get our hands around the laws of neural physics at this point--that time and science will find a deterministic answer.

However unlikely, it's intoxicating to think of a hinterland where indeterminism and determinism coexist and create beautiful novel structures like the human brain.

Anyway this was a flash of thought I had the other day, I've done no research to flesh it out beyond speculation so science buffs: have at me.

Read the full thing here.

The descriptive arts

A few weeks ago I gave a fairly measured review of M. Night's The Village. It wasn't what it could have been, but it wasn't what most movies are. It was somewhere in between, in the lower half of the Shyamalan Canon, in the upper, say, 25% of the rest of mainstream Hollywood.

Sorry I couldn't be more forceful, but he gave me nothing to love or hate with anything approaching zealotry.

That's why I'll never make it as an upstart Indie journalist. I can't fake zealotry, I can't mock worship or loathe something for the sake of readership.

Case in point:

"Is it me, or is this something an aged Rod Serling might have dreamed up while masturbating on crystal meth?" Village Idiot, Small World, by Steve Wiecking

The article is funny, self-consciously so. It's crammed with as many obscure pop-culture references as one man could possibly fit into a column, and most of the analogies don't hold up

"William Hurt, who’s apparently chosen to ape William Shatner’s distinguished acting technique (Mr. Hurt, we . . . want your . . . Oscar . . . back)"

Hurt sounds nothing like Shatner, he sounds nothing like anyone, neither does anyone else in town. That's the point. In hindsight, what most people complain about as clunky dialogue, I now consider a quiet statement about the nature of the community M. Night has created.

This utopia, like the language the people use, is heavy-handed, artificial and altogether vulnerable, not due to encroachment from without, but from internal collapse.

But I don't want to rehash my review. The point of this is that I'm probably not good enough at the Keith Olbermann school of pop culture journalism to pull off any kind of indie rag writing. Olbermann is a genius, no one tops him--but that doesn't stop every twenty-something in America from trying.

The problem I think is that this new wave have made Trivial Pursuit knowledge a sign of status--an end in itself rather than an added dose of color to the issue of central importance. With this shift of focus, they've also brought a liberal dose of haughtiness. It makes me laugh, probably because I'm also a twenty-something with an intellectual axe to grind. But what does it accomplish aside from establishing a loose pecking order of minutiae-obsessed vainglorious sarcasmbots?

It's also just not that hard. Ahem . . . quiet, I'm creating.

"the whole movie I felt like I was watching something dreamed up by Oscar Wilde on one of his eponymous Opium binges. He could have shat this out, typing with his tongue whilst shooting smack into his eyeball in a carriage on his way to clusterfuck Gilbert and Sullivan and still leave time to recieve the stigmata from Pope Gregory before afternoon tea."

God that's edgy. The best thing about this freeform criticism is that you get to ignore grammar, chronology, veracity and tact. Tact is the last thing you want. Tact doesn't sell free papers.

The worst part is that this is encroaching on the mainstream. Some guy on Dennis Miller (who is the smoldering wreckage of his former self) last night gave a stupid free-form rant about something or other--which amounted to nothing really.

So I've realized that not only is the political discourse being systematically stupidified, all discourse everywhere is meeting that fate.

I know this isn't the blog I promised Omni, I got worked up. I'm drafting.

Read the full thing here.

It's harder to ignore now

In the interest of personalizing this staid site template, I added a little DHTML to the mix, showing off some of the pics from my photoblog.

The code is courtesy of Andrew and Dynamic Drive DHTML.

It took FOREVER to code, because I'm on dialup at the moment, and each little page preview took about a minute to load. Using the guess and check method of HTML coding doesn't help matters either.

This is why I didn't follow through with the CS major. I'm a sloppy coder.

The DHTML itself was problematic too. You could set sizes for the thumbnail sized pics, but I have a sneaking suspicion that there's no way to constrain the larger version (seen in my right toolbar) via the code itself. So that required a little photochopping.

Still I think it looks good, though the font sizes for the heading and subheading get smaller between preview time and publish time. I can't figure out why--must be a conflicting bit of CSS. If anyone has an extra hour or two, get on that for me will ya?

Aside from the aesthetic, I want some honest criticism on my picture taking.

Have at it.

Read the full thing here.

Occam's razor and Christmas in Cambodia

Okay, I've decided to apply a little logic to this bullshit game of he said he said.

I saw some guy named Steve on Scarborough Country talking about how he killed a child because of Kerry's negligence. They then took a VC man and wife taken into custody or something.

Steve says he has an after action report that said they killed like 4 VC and handled 2 CIA (captured in action).

Steve says Kerry made this report. Steve says Kerry is lying. Steve isn't particularly wellspoken, but he has the designation of being the only member of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth that was actually on Kerry's boat. This makes him important.

He also says John was lying about spending Christmas in Cambodia. Fine.

This rigamarole happened 35 years ago. Barring a miracle or a time machine, there will be no forensic or archival evidence to corroborate this story one way or the other.

So it's one guy against another guy . . . who is backed up by some other guys.

I ask this: is it more likely for one guy's recollection, perhaps over time and through the gradual erosion of memory by personal bias--whatever--is it more likely for one guy to get the story wrong, or is it more likely that there be a collective dellusion in which only one guy--out of a group of ten or so--is left telling the truth?

Further, assuming one of these groups is actively lying, or has been coerced to lie, is it more likely that one man would decide or be persuaded to falsely slander another, or more likely that an entire group of men would decide or be persuaded to falsify events to prop up that same person?

Let's apply occam's razor here and draw conclusions from there, since it's pretty damned obvious that there will never be conclusive proof. All we'll ever have is one group's word against another's.

I'm sick to death of these unimportant satelite issues monopolizing the discourse. It's driving me insane.

The problem now, though, is that neither side can comfortably back away from this issue, even if they wanted to. The disgruntled veterans have the entire process over a barrell. If Kerry trys to switch focus to what he should be talking about, things like the current war and the unimpressive economic conditions in America--which is what all the polls suggest people really care about--he'll be painted as a liar who got caught and is trying to distance himself.

Likewise, if Bush comes out against the veterans, he risks alienating a segment of his base that is vital to his reelection, the veterans, who are apparently abandoning the Kerry ship in droves.

So I think we'd better content ourselves to listen to this crap for a while, it's not going anywhere.

"The integrity of Mr Kerry is absolutely--he has none . . . that's absolutely, categorically yes" --jeenyus Steve Gardner, graduate of the George W Bush School of Public Speaking.

Read the full thing here.

How to fail Interior Design

I thought I'd done enough damage for the night and was about to kick off. It had been a full evening: A half-assed, reactionary blog; a half-dozen knee-jerk blog responses; a similar amount of similarly poor comments on other blogs. Yep, a pretty full night.

But bed wasn't in the cards, Fate had other plans.

I'm house-sitting with Shannon while her parents are away. They have a nice house--lots of big bookshelves with lots of old books and lots of signatured baseball memorabilia. It's cozy in a don't-touch-anything kind of way. Cozy in the middle, the stuff to be left alone resides on the periphery. So it's a nice, relaxing place as long as you keep to the thoroughfares.

For all it's niceties and creature comforts, which are legion, going to the bathroom downstairs is an exercise in sheer terror.

There is a mirror. The mirror is the entire length of the wall--at least 7 feet. It's probably 5 feet high. Huge.

I'd have to get out a tape measure, but it must have roughly the same surface area as the whole of the walking space. It's a tiny bathroom with a big, big mirror. A mirror that size is obviously compensating for something--especially when it's in the auxiliary downstairs half-bathroom.

The problem, besides being an affront to God, is that it looks directly across onto the toilet.

It is always there, staring at you, hoarding secrets.

From where I sit I can see most of my torso and head. If it wasn't an involuntary reflex, I'd have given up bowel movements altogether.

The feeling is like staring down the absurdity of the entire human paradigm--looking it right in the face. The face that stares back is screwed up in some indescribable fashion teetering between ecstasy and revulsion. The two of you just sit there mimicking each other until you're done.

What are you going to do, stare down at your junk? Look around the room? Tell me, have you ever tried to avoid looking in a 7'x5' mirror when you were 18 inches from its gleaming surface?

It is total and complete vulnerability. I don't like it one bit.

Read the full thing here.

The politicization of everything

I hate this. The political dialogue is so coarse and each side is grasping at so few positive talking points that now nothing is out of bounds.

Latest case in point: Bush takes credit for the Iraqi Olympic team.

Christ.

He also takes credit for the Afganistani team, but no one cares about them because their soccer side didn't beat Portugal. This makes sense, because this is an administration of winners. We're a strong, independent people and we build strong, athletic nation-states. Here, Bush's blog makes the direct connection between Iraq's stunning victory and the American occupation.

The story itself is amazing. It's a fantastic tale of transcendence, perseverance and dedication. I find it incredibly inspiring. It should not, however, be a partisan success story. These athletes are not Republicans, despite how desperately the administration wants them to be.

I found this at the Daily Times, which is a Pakistani paper, I think. Apparently the Iraqi Olympic committee got its funding from coalition forces.

So this is where the reconstruction dollars--that huge deficit--are going? To the creation of these kinds of heartwarming stories tailor-made to draw emphasis away from the upsurging death toll of Amercans and Iraqis caused by the administration's repeated failures and missteps? Pave a fucking road.

I'm mad about this. It turns out that the Iraqi national team is angry too. This is a member of the team Bush was blogging about:

"I want to defend my home. If a stranger invades America and the people resist, does that mean they are terrorists?" Manajid says. "Everyone [in Fallujah] has been labeled a terrorist. These are all lies. Fallujah people are some of the best people in Iraq." -- Manajid, Iraqi National Soccer Team

He and his handlers have cheapened the life or death struggle of Iraqis and made it a political anecdote--a diversionary fluff piece at that. I'd be angry too. I am angry, but that's nothing new.

Before the partisan backlash begins, we all know I skew liberal, so I'm naturally more tolerant of Kerry than Bush. Having said that, if Huckleberry Hound would have come up with this, I'd sell him up the Mekong River in a leaky ass swiftboat so fast his enormous head would spin.

Further, we all know no one reads this blog, so any backlash would be me making a bunch of anonymous comments to give the appearance of a bi-partisan dialogue.

This election isn't politics, it is pageantry. I understand the game is 90% image, but this too damned much. I don't know. Maybe it's always been like this.

Maybe I just didn't notice. Maybe I'm only now old enough to realize what bullshit our process is--what sheep our people are.

I want Gallop to do a poll on what people thought of that commercial. People that matter that is, not the Iraqis we feature in our political ads--real people.

Infuriating.



Anecdotally: this is from a rally Bush held in Redmond, just miles from where I was sitting in gridlock because of his visit:

"At the opening ceremony, Team USA marched alongside men and women from Afghanistan and Iraq, nations that four years ago knew only tyranny and repression"

No one asked him if the tyranny was limited to the latter two nations he mentioned.

Read the full thing here.

Give and Take

I couldn't be less excited about the Olympics. I haven't watched one second of coverage. Nothing about these games excites me. Maybe I'm just getting cynical or bored . . . or out of shape. Maybe watching world class athletes run in circles subconsciously wounds me in the part of the brain that also wants to run in circles--the part of the brain that quietly chastises me for not running in those circles since . . . ever. I think this part of the brain shares common nodes with my failure cortex.

I expend lots of energy ignoring this part of the brain.

It's probably an unimportant part anyway, having obviously developed independent of evolutionary stressors. A circle is the worst possible shape to use for evading predators. A circle returns to the same spot after all, and marks its trajectory in yawning arcs. When a tiger sees you running away at full speed, listing to the right as you go, even he knows you'll be back.

Zig-zaggy lines are better.

Even the various species of parallelograms are better. Even though you're doubling back on yourself, at least you look like you're running straight away, until you cut abruptly to or fro.

That all tracks in the world are oval speaks not just to the utter absurdity of that one sport, but to the absurdity of sport in general.

Sport are acts of pointless athleticism. In that they are pointless, they are like almost every other benchmark for prowess humanity has cooked up. See Also: conspicuous consumption.

See also: IQ Tests.

Maybe it's unfair to call these things pointless. They convey bragging rights. They produce self-contained, artificial hierarchies.

In the case of the Olympics, they provide fuel to the fire of nationalism. America is not leading in the gold medal count yet. Know who is? The fucking Communists (reg. req., count might have changed by the time you read this). If this were the Cold War, we might have had to boycott in dignified protest of our not being as good as them.

Now that most of our cheap goods and free labor come from there, even China is worthy to compete with, and even beat the great American athletics juggernaut. God bless free trade.

The fact that the Dream Team sucks, that some Hamm other than Mia is making headlines and that one American swimmer won't be able to top another, older American swimmer, is fodder for statisticians. Because, of course, the US will eventually emerge the victor. That was a foregone conclusion.

If you're looking at the far left column of the medals table and wondering why America isn't on top despite having far and away the most total medals, let me remind you of something: "The plaque for runner-up is in the ladies room."

Only gold matters baby. That's something even Mav and Iceman can agree on.

So athletics are good for America, just like standardized tests. They are a self-fulfilling litmus test for the ego of a nation. They show us once and for all that, as a country, we've got the best ball-manipulators, the best ring-swingers, the best lead-throwers, the best oval-runners.

We're the goddamned best.

It also takes our mind of the muddier things. Things like war, which involves athleticism, and the war on terror, which requires intelligence. But such things aren't pure because they are not athletics qua athletics or intelligence for its own sake. They have purposes, they have an end goal.

Those are the kinds of unfortunate things, war and intelligence gathering--things with ends--that Americans tend to fail at. A lot.

See also: the drug crisis.

Still we are good sports about it. Failure that is. We'd never give up something when we realize the game is so patently ridiculous and flawed as to suggest failure by definition. Even if we dictated the terms to begin with. We're not quitters. Why not let taxation and rehabilitation be the arbiter of a certain issue among consenting adults? Change the rules? Isn't that like cheating? Drugs are bad anyway you goddamned communist.

So, thank a double thank-you to the Olympics for showing us the multi-ethnic though homogeneous face of American success, while allowing us to forget, briefly, the unilateral but multifaceted face of American failure.

Criticizing something means you hate it.

Read the full thing here.

The sum total.

I called in sick to work today citing sinusitis. I made the most of it . . . or rather, I made the more of it buy expending lots of energy making a photoblog. It's the sum total of non-crappy pictures I've taken since I got my wonderful Canon A80.

Be Gentle.

I want to find a way to do link the pics similar to the way Smacktooth does. It's a cool style I think. Except I'd probably have the pics across in the header. Actually, I think I'd just like thumbnails of the (x) most recent posts linking dynamically to the (x) most recent pics. Mike, any ideas?

Anyone else?

Read the full thing here.

Regarding the impending Civil War

I was thinking about the divisiveness of the political discourse in this country, the polarization, the outright hatred from both the extreme left and right. I was thinking about the terror level, Burt in most of the country and Ernie in New York City and DC.

I was thinking about fear as a vehicle for recruiting conservatives.

Think about this. Why do we call Republicans "conservative"? Look at their platform. Legislating to ensure the survival of "traditional American values" and leaving the rest to big business. They want to conserve the way of life begun by our--predominately--Puritan forefathers. This is fine in itself. I like Jesus and his teachings. I think Jesus was a great guy.

I think Jesus, were he alive today, would be more inclusive with his love and respect than both the current Republican Administration and most of the groups who have devoted their lives to his worship (the Catholic Church as a whole, the Southern Baptists, et al). But that's kind of beside the point.

They have a conception of a country and of a culture they like. They feel these things are in jeopardy; they desperately want them to persevere unchanged.

Let's look at culture as a function of evolution. Cultures are fluid, this is an observation, not a partisan value judgment. They change, this is inevitable. Conservatives, by definition, are resistant to change. Republicans, as a party, are resistant to cultural change. They think our country is in danger of falling into a moral fissure. Certain others feel our country is struggling to climb its way out of that fissure. These are value judgments.

So culture. How does it change? More importantly, how does it change the fastest? I'm not going to cite sources or attempt to convince you, I've got a concert to get to. Cultures, in my opinion, change the fastest when imposed upon by outside cultures, this kind of synthesis is much better at evolving a culture than a culture left to its own devices. Realize that I'm not using evolution as a term of teleological movement. When something evolves, biology teaches us, it isn't "better" per se, it isn't moving towards perfection, it is merely changing.

Just as scientists propose a spike in the pace of biological evolutionary change when asexual reproduction gave way to sexual, the pace of cultural evolution speeds up when cultures are fused, or when people of divergent cultures integrate.

If you buy this idea, what then, is the most present danger the our cultural sovereignty faces? I submit it is influence from other, radically different cultures. Outsiders.

What is the best way stifle this? I think it's fear. Fear of the other. Xenophobia. When our nation's terrorism alert system is inextricably linked with a group of people, we send the message that outsiders are inherently dangerous, or at least suspicious, and to be avoided. Similar in its functionality is the doctrine of unilateralism pushed by this administration.

GWB said, "America will never seek a permission slip to defend it's sovereignty," or something to that effect. It's them against us, all of them.

How much hatred of the French has this caused? France, a country who has been our longtime ally. Now the French are selfish communists and a divisive global element only concerned with their own (evil) agenda and a thorn in the side of the peace-loving world. Just like the Terrorists (Islamists). The peace loving are made up of a curiously small number of countries: England, Canada, Australia, etc.

Hmmm.

The coalition of the willing is not only deeply tied to us economically, but also very similarly composed culturally.

I'll probably add more depth to this later, but these are my thoughts and I have a concert to get to. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Photos (of the concert, not coalition) to (hopefully) follow.

Spellcheck works with Mozilla, now I really need to change my blog title. Strangely, blogger's spell check doesn't contain the word "blog".

Read the full thing here.

Weekend Roundup Mark II

BLLLLARGHGHGH. All yesterday I kept trying and trying to post to blogger. It would save, but not publish. Rather than the cute little status clock thing coming up telling me my blog was 50 . . . 70 . . . 100% published, I got the big 404 error. Maddening.

Still, it seemed like a site problem. When everything else is working and a single page seems to be down, I generally assume it isn't a client-side error.

At least not until now. In Internet Explorer's constant battle to drive me insane, the bar has been raised.

It was as an afterthought that I tried publishing in Firefox. It worked just fine. Go figure.

I've known IE (actually, Crazy Browser, which is IE hacked with tab and integrated Google functionality--up till now the most convenient browser I've ever used) was taking on water for a while now, I just didn't want to switch. I'm lazy. Also though, Firefox doesn't seem to like the Flash installs I do. I install, and Flash works until I reboot. I then have to reinstall. Annoying. So maybe it's IE for browsing and Firefox for the important stuff.

My eLife is beginning to take on the complications of my real life. So much for escapism.

Also, for some god-unknown reason, IE won't display my picture of Vizzini from the blog about Socialism. I had to get image hosting because I'd been just direct-link ganking pictures from sites to suit my needs, but every picture of Vizzini I could find was hosted on Angel Fire or some other site that doesn't allow direct-linking. So I got some space at imageshack.us. Except the pic wouldn't render. I tried a few different things, but eventually gave up.

Then today, on Firefox, there is Vizzini in all his glory. Bleh.

And now this brilliance. Firefox keeps the formatting from Word when I cut and paste. That's something I would expect from a Microsoft browser. Firefox it is.

“I fell asleep, he musta crawled in there for warmth.”

* * *

The other day Ben offered an apology after the fact for his provincial humor. I feel bad I haven’t done the same with my highly localized angst. Sorry.

That doesn’t mean it’s going to stop.

Tonight, I see David Byrne at the Pier. I saw him I guess three years ago at the Fox in Spokane. This is a fundamental flaw with Spokane. He sells out a venue bigger than the Spokane Coliseum in Seattle. He played to empty seats in a renovated movie theatre in Spokane. There weren’t a lot of empty seats, but the point remains.

These are the things upon which my decision rests.

The funny thing is, I met him after the Spokane show, and all he could talk about was how he’d never played in a place as great as the Fox, that it rivaled his favorite New York clubs. His band seemed to agree. I’m sure it was lip service, or that he was really high, but we talked for about 10 minutes. He was in no hurry. Nice guy.

I can guarantee I wouldn’t get within half a mile of him at tonight’s show. Sometimes when a flaw involves less need for crowd control, it can be a strength.

I had a similar experience with Colin Malloy of the Decemberists, which I kind of expected, considering he was working the band’s merchandise rack after the set. He seemed amused that I was leaving after his set and before the headliners came on. If you want to hear a juvenile tirade, ask me about the Long Winters sometime. Preview: I hate them, I hate them, I hate them.

Anyway, I felt like a tool asking Byrne for his autograph—after we’d connected on such a superficial level—but I’d just paid 30 bucks for one of his books. I had to protect my investment.

“Can’t I just be sad about a horse without some touchy-feely Freudian bullshit?”

Read the full thing here.