Base Materialism

John Winkelman

A couple of eagerly awaited packages from Amazon.com arrived today. First was the DVD of Equilibrium, a terribly under-appreciated movie when it hit the theaters. Watching it again…wow. It could be called derivative, but then again, name one movie in the past ten years which wasn’t.

Second, Cages, by Dave McKean. Cages is a 500-page, hardcover graphic novel. McKean both wrote and illustrated it. In a couple of weeks, when I have finished reading it, I will post a review. For right now, again…wow.

So tell me: what have you been doing lately?

Lucky Thirteenth

John Winkelman

My time, as usual, is not my own. Far too much to do, and far too little time in which to do it. At last count, four friends are getting married this summer. Well, eight friends. Four weddings. This in addition to a martial arts tournament, a martial arts demonstration, a holiday, a vacation and a girlfriend. Suddenly it’s September, and where did the summer go?

On a positive note, my brother just proposed to his girlfriend.

On another positive note, yesterday I figured out how to properly pleat and wear a great-kilt (for a wedding this weekend).

And last but not least, we’re-here is back !

Unintentional Decorations

John Winkelman

Julie over at the Skinny Daily has an excellent post up about scars . So I thought I would chime in on the subject.

Just above my right eyebrow I have a scar. It is about an inch long and runs at a perfect 45-degree angle up toward the center of my forehead. When people ask, I tell them that I got it saving a busload of wolverines from a ravening horde of schoolchildren. Or that it was part of a rite of passage to get into one of the local churches. Anything to keep the masses amused. The truth is infinitely more mundane.

Toward the end of my college career I worked as a prep cook for the local (I kid you not) Polish-Mexican restaurant. A year of making bratwurst burritos had removed any novelty which could be found in the job and I was looking to get out.

One September morning I was chopping up the fixings for the days tacos with a knife which probably hadn’t been sharpened since Easter. Parts of the blade were as sharp as a razor; others as sharp as a stick of butter. I wasn’t really paying attention to what I was doing, so when a dull section of the knife slid across the surface of a head of lettuce and a sharp section bit halfway through my thumb, I didn’t notice until I felt air where I had never before felt air: on a bone.

Several thoughts went through my head, “fuck” being the most prominent, closely followed by “I hate my job” and “sauerkraut and refried beans are a terrible combination”.

Running the wound under cold water was astonishingly painful so I wrapped it in a wash-cloth and sat down in the employee break area. A few seconds later I opened my eyes and thought “I don’t remember tiling my bedroom”, then “I don’t remember hanging cook jackets over my bed”. Then I watched a spray of blood arc gracefully from somewhere above my field of vision and hit the wall. The full horror of the situation hit: “No, seriously. A sausage-taco salad?”, and “I have a degree?”, and “what happened?”

Later the guy who worked the dishwasher – who might have worked me over while I was passed out on the ground – said he saw me walk back to the break area, sit down, stand up, and do a face-plant into the floor. He said I “fainted”. I preferred to think of it as “temporary stress-induced unconsciousness”.

So our new manager (her first day!) drove me to the med center, where I was by far the most interesting thing to appear that morning. The doc put me on a bed and numbed my head (shaddap!) and sewed me up, While watching the needle disappear and reappear from my field of vision I had a brief hallucination that he was tying pigeon feathers to me and was going to go fly-fishing when he was finished.

So I got the rest of the day off. When I finally looked at myself, covered in blood and stiched and unexplained bruises all over my face, I felt inexplicably proud. I still had little feeling in my head (i said shaddap!), so it seemed a grand idea to hang things from the stitches. Necklasses. Earrings. Safety pins.

That evening, still decorated, I drove out to Grand Valley to visit those unfortunate friends who had not yet graduated. This was the beginning of the semester and they were participating in a “Student Life Night” where everyone tries to recruit everyone else into their [club|frat|cult]. One of the booths was empty so I grabbed an enrollment sheet and made a sign, and the “Head Piercing Club” was open for business. I got about a dozen signatures, mostly from stoned freshmen in tie-dyed Grateful Dead shirts (made in Thailand). Then The Man shut me down. Said university insurance didn’t cover stupidity.

The next morning I went in to work with a safety pin through the stitches. One of the waitresses thought I had put it in because one of the stitches fell out. Yup. Not kidding. Others thought it was disgusting, what with me mocking myself by making fun of an injury. Didn’t I have any feelings for me? Didn’t I know I was part of an oppressed minority? Why, I could get the ACLU to sue me for a hate crime! (I kid. Most of my co-workers couldn’t spell ACLU).

A few days later I had both my stitches and my job removed and began a long career at a bookstore. One of these days I will tell you THAT injury story, which is at least as funny as this one.

Morphing

John Winkelman

Do not leave this page. There is nothing wrong with your browser. There is nothing wrong with this website. I am in the middle of a massive re-design, and I figured What The Heck, I will do everything out in plain sight. Be patient; it will be worth the wait.

By the by, X-Men 2: X-Men United rocks. Go see it. Now.

Deliberate Ignorance

John Winkelman

Boy, Arts and Letters Daily does a good job of making my blood pressure spike. Today it is a review of the book The Thought Police.

The book brings to light something I have noticed more and more over the last ten years: ignorance is being touted as a virtue. Here is a clip from the review:

…Among those rejected by the “bias and sensitivity” panel was a passage about the patchwork quilts made by 19th century frontier women: “The reviewers objected to the portrayal of women as people who stitch and sew, and who were concerned about preparing for marriage.” The fact that the passage was historically accurate was considered no defense for its “stereotypical” image of women and girls.

Basically, anything which might conceivably, through some radical stretch of the imagination, be considered to enforce a stereotype, is simply not to be discussed. Someone, somewhere, might be offended. If I make a remark about a woman (my mother?) baking a cake (for my birthday?) it is seen as enforcing the stereotype that baking a cake is women’s work…EVEN IF I AM TALKING ABOUT THE TIME SHE BAKED ME A CAKE!!!!

Anything mention of anything that the Left (anything which might conceivably be construed to be saying person A is in any way different from person B) and the Right (anything which might conceivably be interpreted as going against “tradition”) don’t like is no longer allowed in textbooks.

So there can be no mention of slavery (shows insensitivity toward Black Americans), reservations (ditto, American Indians), athletics (the handicapped), smart people (stupid people) or skyscrapers (acrophobes). And these are the more rational decisions. Witness:

…a story about a heroic blind youth who climbed to the top of Mt. McKinley was rejected, not only because of its implicit suggestion that blind people might have a harder time than people with sight, but also because it was alleged to contain “regional bias”: According to the panel’s bizarre way of thinking, students who lived in non-mountainous areas would theoretically be at a “disadvantage” in comprehending a story about mountain climbing.

Let us now consider logical fallacies.

One: Discussing historical events == the enforcing of stereotypes

FALSE!!! Discussing historical events is discussing historical events. Black Americans in large numbers used to pick cotton. Historical fact. To discuss it is NOT equal to saying “Black Americans are the kind of people who pick cotton”.

Two: Not exposing someone to something == protection from that thing

FALSE!!! Not exposing someone to something (e.g. guns) merely means that person is ignorant about guns. Facts have not been offered. That is why kids shoot themselves. Not because the gun is within reach, but because they were not taught why guns are dangerous.

Three: All [men | women | races | cultures | creeds | religions] are in all ways equal and equivalent to all other [men | women | races | cultures | creeds | religions]

FALSE!!! It is more accurate to say that none of the above are in any way like any others of the above. The flattening of ability and talent (outcome-based education) to comfort the lowest common denominator is terribly damaging to everyone involved. It erases all texture and color from the cultures of the world and turns them into Disneyland amusements. Safe Disneyland amusements.

There are ten thousand reasons to be angered by this trend in education, but for me, the worst is that it tries to erase the struggles and achievements of people throughout the entire history of the human race (I will probably get flack from people because saying “human race” doesn’t take into account all of the great accomplishments ostriches have made in the last two millennia). Not talking about slavery hamstrings the entire civil rights movement. Not talking about alcoholism means the guy curled up in the doorway doesn’t really have a problem, he’s just sleeping. Not talking about Florence Nightengale because stories about her portray women as the kind of people who are nurses, erases a hundred years of struggle for equal rights.

Talking about controversial issues is by no means the same thing as advocating controversial issues. It is exactly and purely the dispelling of ignorance.

What is happening in schools is the deliberate, willful glorification of ignorance, and the destruction of our history. However, there are precedents for this behavior:

In Egypt, about three thousand years ago, when a public figure became unpopular with the Powers That Be, that person’s name was taken from all statues, public records, scrolls, plaques and pillars. That person, for all intents and purposes, was removed from history. Apparently talking about criminals was considered insensitive to non-criminals.

During the French revolution the names of the months, among other things, were changed in order to remove from common usage anything which might remind people of the decadent religious past. Thus April became Germinal (seed), and August became Thermidor (heat).

The Communist revolutions in Russia and China tried very hard to get rid of every bit of history which led up to the revolution, including the destruction of art, artifacts, places of worship, the imprisoning and murder of educated and talented people, and the state-approved vilification of anyone not toeing the party line. Obviously, anyone who didn’t approve of what the government was doing was not patriotic enough.

More recently the Taliban in Afghanistan destroyed the two largest Buddhas in the world; giant statues dating from 400 to 600 AD were blown up because they showed insensitivity to Islamic extremists.

This is EXACTLY the same line of thought used by the people who enforce this particularly stupid and dangerous form of political correctness. So dig out your old highschool textbooks, because even the ones which talk about Indians and Negros and Women Staying Home and Making Babies are more honest, open and accurate than the Socialist Realist tracts now being used in our schools.

Burn a book and I’m stupid for a day.
Burn a library and I’m stupid for a lifetime.

Absolut(e)

John Winkelman

Had an interesting talk about the notion of absolutes over on 12Stone today, to wit: Is there such a thing as an absolute?

So: Is there such a thing as an absolute?

Without defining a specific thing as being “absolute”, we are dealing with abstract mental models. So in my opinion something which is absolute must exists wholly unto itself and have neither external influences or external dependencies. Therefore an absolute must be a closed system. Assuming the ultimate truth of the laws of Thermodynamics, the universe could be said to be a closed system. At least, from the inside it is a closed system. From the outside…well. Things get a little more complicated than your standard Venn diagram.

The set containing the numbers {1,2,3,4,5} is a closed set. From within it is exactly and only those five numbers, and the existence of the number 6 does not alter the existence of the first five. Neither does the existence of the numbers 1,2,3,4, and 5 influence in any way the number 6. Using mental models any number (heh) of absolutes can be discovered.

When trying to apply the notion of ‘absolute’ to ‘real’ things the argument immediately breaks down. Buddhist tradition has it that no single thing truly exists, because there are no things which exists completely unto themselves. A coffee cup is a combination of the materials of which it is constructed, the time involved in creating it, and the human-imposed concept of ‘cupness’. Take away any one of those things and it is no longer a coffee cup. That which we call ‘coffee cup’ is an identifiable point in a process which started at the beginning of the universe and which will (might?) stop at the end.

So where does that leave the Absolute? An absolute can be identified when the sum total of it is observable. That knocks everything out of the running except the Universe, and that must be taken on faith because, stuck in the warp and woof of it as we are, it is impossible to see it from an outside perspective. And let us not get into the religious ideas of the Absolute.

An absolute is a thing which must exist free of context.

So this whole long discussion ended up fragmenting, as online discussions often will. I have a lot to contemplate. One of the participants posted a link to a fascinating Socratic dialogue regarding free will, called Is God A Taoist? , which I enjoyed immensely.

The Elimination Dance

John Winkelman

If you require a certain pen to write.
If you have been intimidated by a raccoon.
If you ever made an aesthetic modification to your car which earned you a ticket.
If you have a “thing” for women in sweat pants.
If you count your time surfing the ‘net as “reading”.
If, after watching the movie PI, you spend unusual amounts of time staring at leaves/smoke/the sun.
If you weep for the future.
If you feel the guilt of ancestry.
If you have ever claimed to be “A descendant of…”
If, in a fit of youthful ignorance, you once made a “fuzzy navel” out of peach Schnapps and orange Tang.
If you drank more than one.
If you have ever given/received bleeding rug-burns during sex.
If you kill the fish you don’t keep.
If you feel superior at inappropriate times.
If you really think food can be decadent.
If you have ever looked up at a tall building, caught a reflection of the clear sky in a window, and momentarily thought that the building had not finished rendering.
If you have seen a sundog.
If you have ridden a cow.
If you have ever laughed yourself awake.
If you have ever changed religions for less than a day.
If it left you feeling unfulfilled.
If you know the taste of a spear.
If you think it is too loud right now.
If you still don’t think you will ever need to know “that”.
If you have been hospitalized by a paper cut.
If you think the word “organic” is often misused.
If you think silence is awkward.
If you once considered returning to school because of something you saw in a movie.
If you think the motions are running through you.
If you have ever bullied someone with your knowledge of their religion.
If you have ever, out of fear of others reading it, censored yourself in your private journal/diary, and then gone back a few days later and filled in the missing parts, only to have someone confront you about what you have written and accuse you, among other things, of being “wishy-washy”.

(with a nod to Michael Ondaatje )

PHP, XML, DOM, and Other Such Acronyms

John Winkelman

For one of the projects at work I dove into the DOMXML capabilities of PHP. DOMXML is a close-to-w3c-standards way of manipulating XML in PHP. Or it is now that Modwest has updated their version of PHP to 4.2.1. It went like this: I sent an email on Monday saying “Any plans to upgrade etc. etc. ?” And they said “Yup. In the next couple of weeks.” and then they said “Done” and I said:

$fName = $root ->get_elements_by_tagname("name");

…and it was good.

So: My next project is to redo the admin section of es.o to reflect the new powers at my disposal, and maybe post a short tutorial on using DOMXML, because documentation for the thing is practically non-existent.

In other news, yesterday I picked up a library card at the newly-reopened downtown branch of the Grand Rapids Public Library.

Let the masses rejoice; reading is cheap again. My current borrow is In Search of the Perfect Language by Umberto Eco.