I was giving some thought to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah the other day.

Most of you will be in broad terms familiar with this fairy tale, but let me sketch it out in brief terms anyways. In the ancient middle east, there were, according to this story, two cities named Sodom and Gomorrah which were exceptionally sexualized societies. The details are a little sketchy, but it seems that homosexuality was not frowned upon, and it is heavily implied that gang rape was a pretty socially accepted sort of thing as well. These were, in short, people who were pretty committed to this whole “sexing” thing. The christian (or, at the time, Hebrew) god, Yahweh, decides that he doesn’t care for the looks of this place too much, and, in one of his frequently not-actually-all-that-omniscient-after-all moments, decides he needs to investigate this town. He makes a deal with his sycophantic toady, Abraham, that if there’s so much as a single person in the city who conforms to his morality, then he’ll let the matter slide.

He sends a couple of his angels on a fact-finding expedition, where they lodge with Abraham’s nephew in town, Lot. While there, they make quite the impression upon the population, who mob Lot’s house in an attempt to get freaky with these angels. Lot, whose sense of family values seems to be about as shakey as that of his uncle, decides that he would rather see his daughters gang raped in the street than allow two angels who could plainly take care of themselves to be confronted by an unruly and evidently horny mob. The mob is having none of it, though, and the angels announce that, as a result, their god is going to have them murder every living thing in the cities. As such, Lot and his family are told to leave and not look back, which 75% of them manage to do (Lot’s wife bringing the family’s total grade down from a solid A+ to a merely respectable C by glancing over her shoulder as she ran and being killed by the angels for the act in a kind of puzzlingly vindictive dick move).

When they’re up in the hills, with the city being rendered a flaming and stinking ruin (the benefit that using fire AND brimstone rather than just fire is not made exactly clear, but one assumes that the unpleasant aroma is meant to be some sort of additional penalty), Lot and his two daughters settle down for the night, and his daughters demonstrate that they were not altogether untouched by the culture of their hometown, as their very first impulse is to drug and rape their father, which they do with gusto.

There’s something that occurs to me, when I think about all of this, though; even if we assume that each and every person in these cities were somehow irredeemably evil, and we assume that Yahweh has the moral prerogative to murder them all as a result (which is a central assumption within the story, so I won’t really get into it here and now beyond calling it “bullshit”), there’s still the sticky question of the children and babies which resided in town, especially vis a vis murdering them for the fact that they happened to have had the wrong parents.

( Read more... )

The other day, US president Barack Obama, in his good-will tour of the far east, committed the
insufferable social gaffe of spreading good will. Specifically, while meeting Japan’s emperor, he
bowed at the waist in an approximation of the traditional Japanese gesture of greeting for a respected
figure. I say an approximation because, traditionally, one does not also shake hands while doing so,
which Obama did in this instance, but neither he nor the meaningless figurehead monarch seemed to
mind the fact that Obama bowed any more than the Emperor minded shaking hands. It was very much
a meet-you-half-way sort of gesture of politeness which no reasonable or rational human being could
honestly find fault with.


It should therefore come as no surprise, then, to learn that former US vice president and current
professional whiner, Dick Cheney, found fault with this, saying that America’s enemies would see in
this simple gesture of politeness a weakness which they could exploit. How demeaning and belittling
the sitting US president in this way is supposed to have weakened America less than seeing him act in
a polite manner is a little bit vague, as is the question of why, if Cheney is so concerned with
America’s president appearing strong, Cheney does everything in his power to weaken him a little bit
more each day. How, also, these un-named but presumably dark-skinned enemies might go about
exploiting this weakness is not a detail which he saw fit to elabourate upon; perhaps he envisions them
sending a group of Japanese emperors into the battlefield, and then, when American forces, emulating
their Commander In Chief, bowed before them, the enemy forces could take advantage of the
momentary distraction by opening fire upon them.

The more realistic* scenario is that Cheney woke up in the morning, rose from his coffin, ate his
traditional breakfast of freshly-plucked baby hearts boiled in a broth of virgins’ tears, and then
searched “Obama” on Google News to see what specific act there was in the news that day which
Cheney could publicly criticize. Finding Obama bent at the waist in one of the photographs, he grunted
“Guess that’ll have to do”, and had his bug-eating manservant call around to the usual media outlets to
see who would give him a platform for the criticisms he was even then formulating.

Indeed, I envision a parallel universe which is in all way identical to our own, save that at that moment,
Obama chose not to bow, but rather simply to shake hands. I envision, in that universe, Cheney having
words somewhat along these lines:

“President Obama’s failure to observe something as simple but as important as this culturally-
significant gesture indicates precisely what myself and others have been saying about him for some
time now. It shows his ignorance, his arrogance and his elitism. I think that America’s enemies will see
this failure on his part as a sign of weakness, if you will, and one which they can exploit. A president
which cannot be bothered to understand foreign cultures, as President Obama has shown himself to be
today, is one which will also be unable to understand the threats posed by certain radical elements
within foreign cultures. It is precisely this sort of inexperience that should have precluded him from
holding an office he is plainly unqualified and unprepared to hold, and this sort of hubris and self-
importance which keeps him so out of touch with the world around him.”

In two other, somewhat more distant parallel realities, in both of which John McCain won the 2008
presidential election, wherein McCain met with the emperor of Japan and, in one, bowed before him,
and in the other did not, the Dick Cheneys of these worlds had nothing whatsoever to say on the topic,
recognizing it as so trivial as to be unworthy of comment.

*It's all relative, really.

It is once again Wednesday, and with this turning of the week, we once again find ourselves in line for that most exciting and fruitful of occasions; Share the Wealth Wednesday!

For those who do not yet know, and for those who have forgotten, allow me to elucidate in brief: Every Wednesday, we share some Neat Thing we have discovered on the net which others can share in and enjoy with no more than a few mouse clicks. A YouTube video, a video game, a webcomic, or whatever. While things which are new are always to be preferred, since things which have not existed for long are more likely to be new and novel to a larger number of people, the fact remains that even the very oldest of websites are as new as the day’s sunrise to someone who’s never seen them. Therefore, each Wednesday, we Share the Wealth, posting about these Neat Things here, for the benefit and enjoyment of all.

For my own contribution this week, I put truth to my own words by presenting something which has existed for the better part of a decade but which I only became aware of a month or so ago. There exists in the city of Austin, Texas, a public access television show entitled “The Atheist Experience”, which exists as a sort of outreach program for a group called the Atheist Community of Austin (or ACA, if you prefer), serving not only to discuss a wide range of topics – though predominantly religious and philosophical by nature - from an atheistic standpoint, both to educate the larger, largely christian community of Texas, as to who and what atheists are, and to show that they’re not the monstrous devil-worshippers that their preachers would have them believe they are.

In this, they are only partially successful.

Because, you see, this is Texas. And Texans are ORNERY. They’re aggressive, brash and loud. This applies to both the atheists on the show and their largely-christian callers. For you see, this is a call-in show, and their calls are always awesome, being, as they are, dialogues between two equally abrasive and loud groups with wildly differing world-views. I absolutely love watching this show. Doing so is possible because they not only also stream their show online – giving it a global audience – they also have an impressive archive of past shows going back some four years or so, which are freely downloadable and/or viewable online. I have lately been going through them at a rate of two or three episodes per week, and absolutely loving them. Give ‘er a look, eh wot?

Here's one of my favourite episodes, in which the hosts discuss in some depth the prevelant and ongoing meme of "Those angry atheists".




So! What about you folks? Share the Wealth!

This morning, Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany, took part in the Armistice Day ceremony at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Paris, France. This is the first time a German Chancellor has done so since the practice began after WW2. France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, called this an "historic act", and indeed it was.

This morning I wrote a letter to christian super-evangelist, Ray Comfort, with regards to a point he has made a few hundred million times before, and which I felt I needed some clarification on. I thus present the complete text of the e-mail I sent him below.

***


Dear Mr. Comfort.

Earlier today, I read an interview with you on the topic of your abridged version of The Origin of the Species, and specifically your introduction to the book. In it, you made reference to the science of evolution's “undeniable connection” to the holocaust. This is not a new claim, and not one that I am not unfamiliar with, but on this occasion, I felt motivated to investigate the claim for myself. I found that, broadly speaking, there is some truth to what you say; some of Hitler’s stated justifications for the holocaust do indeed include his misinterpretations and misapplications of the science of evolution.

This says nothing whatsoever about whether or not the science of evolution is valid or true, though; merely whether or not it is of benefit to society that people be aware of it. Assuming, for the sake of argument, then, that you are correct, and that without having this body of knowledge to misinterpret and misapply as Hitler did, the holocaust would not have taken place (which I am dubious about; it seems to me that he would have found some other justification to hang his irrational hatred of “the other” on, just as so many creeds, philosophies and religions have been abused for the purposes of over the course of human history), I wonder if you will then apply this same standard to other bodies of knowledge without which he also could not have accomplished the horrible deeds that he did?

For example, will I hear a similar denouncement of the science of metallurgy for its undeniable connection to the holocaust? Without access to this body of knowledge, Hitler’s forces would have had no train tracks, no trains, no bullets, no gas chambers, no metal fences, among many, many other implements which were critical to his execution of the many “undesirables” during the holocaust.

Will I be hearing of your outrage at the science of masonry, and its undeniable connection to the holocaust? Without the ability to produce bricks and construct buildings of them, the nazis would have been unable to house the infrastructure of their murderous war machine, and their death camps would surely not have been the inescapable prisons that they were. Nobody will claim that masonry is not a valid field of knowledge, but neither can the claim be made that without it, the nazis would have been all but powerless to carry out their extermination regime.

Indeed, even the body of knowledge of language itself has the very same undeniable connection to the holocaust that the science of evolution does. Indeed, it has an even deeper and more fundamental connection; without knowledge of language, Hitler would never even have had access to the ideas that he did, would never have been able to convey them to the German people, and would never have been able to conduct his orders to the countless thousands of devout Christians who worked as death camp guards and operators*, without whose enthusiastic support, Hitler’s will could never have been executed. Will I therefore be hearing you tar language itself with the same brush that you apply to evolution? And if so, how do you plan on doing so without employing the Nazi-related science of language?

I ask these questions because I know that as a man of god and as a man of learning such as yourself, honesty, integrity and consistency are indispensable and invaluable, and that your condemnation of these bodies of knowledge must surely be merely waiting in the wings alongside your condemnation of the body of knowledge which is the science of evolution, and that you have simply not found the time or opportunity to make clear your moral outrage that these knowledges should be allowed to be taught, given their shared history of nazism. If this is the case, I am more than prepared not only to hear this condemnation from you, but to tell all who would listen that you are indeed a man of conviction, of principle and of integrity, and that you are willing to apply the same standards to all of the sciences which Hitler and his forces made use of in the same manner and to the same extent, and indeed for the same reasons.

I thank you for your time and attention, sir, and eagerly await your reply.


•    I realize that a lesser man than yourself might be tempted into falling prey to a “no true Scotsman” fallacy in responding to this point, but I have every confidence in your ability to rise above such obvious traps.

Yesterday, I saw this cheery little video which really got me thinking: 



Thinking so hard, in fact, that I felt the need to produce a response.

I have received delightful news: My groundbreaking video, The World's Most Terrifying Penises: The Echidna is now YouTube's #1 search result for the word "Echidna". You cannot know how this delights me, to know that when someone searches that site for information on this repugnant little animal, my cockpunching video, and the horrific mysteries unveiled therein, are the first things that any prospective viewer will be exposed to. This is an honour which I am more than happy to receive, knowing that this is my primary contribution to the great cultural exchange which is YouTube.

And in commemoration of this accomplishment, I re-post this instant classic here for those unfortunate few who have yet to bask in its radiant glory. Because the tens of thousands of viewers whose attention and adulation catapulted it to the much sought-after title of "Top Result in the Search for the Word 'Echidna' on YouTube", cannot possibly be wrong. 


In slightly-related news, there's a bunch of stuff brewing. A tenth The World's Most Terrifying Penises entry (and maybe video, if you're lucky) is in the works. A new NewDog15 re-write is about half-way done. Some new body painting sets are in the offing...

And of course, the saga of Vince, the Parasite King, continues to unfold...

Part 1

I’ve been pretty active in the online atheist community for the past ten years or so, in one form or another, and in that time, I’ve heard all sorts of arguments for and against all sorts of crazy religious beliefs. I had a thought, today, which I realize that I’ve never, in all of those years, heard brought up, and that surprises me a great deal. I’m sure if I looked around a bit, I could find it being discussed somewhere, and perhaps I will later, because I would love to hear what Young Earth Creationists would say about this one.

Okay, so Young Earth Creationists (hereafter referred to as “YECs”) say the world was created about 6,000 years ago. They have a specific date, but I don’t care quite enough to check it out. 6,000 is close enough for my purposes here. Now, let me paint a little picture of what, if they’re correct, a certain element of human history would have looked like:

In the beginning, there would have been not one single star visible in the night-time sky, because even the nearest star to the Earth (aside from the sun, obviously) is about 4.37 light years away. This means that, some four years and four months after the creation of the Earth, a little speck of light would have appeared in the hithertofore nearly-empty night sky, as the first rays of light from our nearest cosmic neighbor finally reached us. Gradually, as time went by, one by one, more and more stars would have begun to appear, as the light from them, travelling at a known and constant speed, arrived on Earth.

Throughout history, astronomers should have been reporting more and more new stars appearing in previously-empty spots in the sky, the heavens seeming to populate themselves more and more densely with each passing day. But this is not the case: the star charts of astronomers from thousands of years ago are remarkably consistent with what we can see today, and there exists no record of a gradually-decreasing black void in the sky.

Today, with our marvelous telescopes, we should be able to see the light of stars which are 6,000 light-years away burst into existence in real time. Indeed, since the bible teaches us that Yahweh created all of the stars in a single day, we should be seeing a black shell of nothingness all around us, some 6,000 light years in radius, gradually retreating at a rate of one light second per second. If we did see that, it would be pretty much impossible to make a serious argument that the universe were more than 6,000 years old, or that it wasn’t all created in one day. The evidence would be conclusive and irrefutable.

But of course, that’s not what we see, is it? What we see is the light from stars which are more than 6,000 light years away. Much more. Thousands of times more. Millions of times more. This should not be possible if YECs are correct. Indeed, if they were correct, to be able to see light shining from stars which are more than 6,000 light years away, that light would literally need to have been created, in-transit, between the stars which supposedly emitted them and the Earth.

Think about what that would mean: As we watch what we think is a star located more than 6,000 years ago, what we’re actually watching is an elbourate illusion created by Yahweh, of a history which never took place, of an object which did not in fact exist at the time we think we’re seeing it. We believe we’re seeing the story of a star which is, say, 7,000 light years away, but what we’re actually seeing is 1,000 years of bullshit and deception before the first ray of light from that star ever reaches us.

In fact, the christian god would not only have needed to spin this elabourate lie in order to beguile and deceive us into believing that the universe was more than 6,000 years old, he would have needed to create a consistent illusion, with rays of light carrying illusions and lies to us from every point in the heavens in such a way as to consistently indicate and provide evident support for a history which never took place.

It seems like a lot of trouble to go to just in order to dissuade us from believing in him. One would have thought that planting all of those false dinosaur fossils would have been sufficient, but I guess he’s a perfectionist when it comes to trying to prevent us from believing in his own inerrent word. It just seems like it’s desperately important to him that we don’t believe in him.

And of course, many YECs are really very preoccupied with finding evidence for their specific and literal interpretation for the bible. You can go to one of their hilariously Flintstones-esque “Creation Museums” and learn all about how the Grand Canyon scientifically proves that the story of Noah’s Flood is real and proven history. Physical evidence is extremely important to them, even if it needs to be massaged and twisted and distorted until it suits their specific purposes. So I wonder what they say about this matter of physical evidence...?

Part 2

Okay, so since writing part 1, I’ve spent several hours looking into this topic, and as I’ve surmised, there’s a lot written and discussed on this issue. A whole lot. Like, “hundreds of thousands of hits on Google” lots. I’m frankly kind of stunned that this has never once been on my radar, so to speak, but what the heck. Better late to the party than never to show up, right?

First off, it seems that, as I guessed, the “light created in-transit” idea was in fact in vogue for a while among YECs, until they realized that it did in fact seem to implicate their chosen deity as a kind of mischievous trickster-god. They didn’t care for this notion too much, and so discarded it as inconvenient to the point they were trying to make.

There followed a number of other ideas, which I won’t touch upon beyond saying that they eventually realized that the facts did not seem to support these notions, and so they too were discarded. Bully for them, I say, for having the wits and character to do so.

The current popular notion is a bit of a head-scratcher for me, and one I’m going to have to look into a bit more deeply when I have the time. Basically, as I understand it, the concept goes like this: The Earth is the centre of the entire universe (as befits its place as the cornerstone of their god’s creation), and therefore has around it a massive gravitational field, caused by a ginormous white hole spewing out all of the matter and energy which comprises the rest of the universe (but which is not visible to us and which has none of the “wiping out the solar system and all of its contents in a matter of seconds” sorts of effects that such an object would, one would expect, actually produce). From what I’m reading, it seems that white holes are not understood to actually have this sort of effect on gravity, but here I concede that I am simply over my head, physics-wise. At any rate, the effect of this, they claim, is that time is dilated in the neighborhood of our solar system, such as that, while the rest of the universe experiences the many billions of years which the evidence tells us that it has, LOCALLY, here on Earth, only 6,000 years have passed since the beginning of time.

Physics, as I’ve said, are not my strong suit, and astrophysics even less so, but I can’t help but think that this is the sort of thing that doesn’t really work. My first impulse is to ask if, if we assume this concept is correct, they’ve considered the idea that a super-dense gravitational field around our solar system would seem likely to cause all of the matter in our immediate vicinity to collapse into a black hole. My second impulse is to wonder if, if this is the case, whether or not they simply declare “god doesn’t want for that to happen, and so he waves his magical wand three times and causes it not to happen.” From what I’ve been able to discern, there seems to be a certain amount of deliberate hand-waving on this count, of the “this theory does not address this point in a meaningful way” variety.

My third impulse is to chuckle bemusedly. Because it seems to me that even the YECs have been forced to retreat in the face of the available evidence; they concede that, yes, the universe is billions of years old, there’s no more denying that. But we can still say that the Earth itself is only a few thousand years old, because – due to this relativistic effect – we’ve missed out on most of those billions of years, and indeed, it’s not even that the rest of the universe is billions of years old; it’s that it’s experienced billions of years of growth and change during the 6,000 years of “real time” which the Earth has experienced, which is the only time worth mentioning or counting. Which sounds like an amazingly semantic argument to me.

My fourth impulse is to laugh a little bit. Because it seems to me that they’re positing a god which has gone to an amazing amount of trouble to create a situation which SEEMS to have been a product of billions of years of natural development, and which SEEMS to disprove the story he ostensibly wants us all to believe, when simply plopping things down in such a way as to produce the “ever-expanding shell of visible stars” model I proposed above would have been just as easy, and would have, again, presented clear and irrefutable evidence of the veracity of his creation. But instead, he would have had to go out of his way to create a universe which seems to obscure and obfuscate this truth, as though attempting to mislead anyone who doesn’t make some massive and seemingly-unfounded leaps of faith in order to get to the “proper” conclusions. I laugh because a god which would do all of this still seems like the mischievous trickster-god which they rejected in the first place.

Honestly, the mental gymnastics these people put themselves through in order to never have to admit that they’re wrong is amazing. As a sort of mental exercise, it’s almost admirable in a Rube Goldbergian sort of way, but as an actual approach to life, the universe, and everything, it’s a little on the horrifying side.

We humans are tribal creatures. We evolved in such a way that require the support of the extended family which is a tribe both for our physical and our emotional and mental well-being. And yet in this modern world, where so many of us live in these giant cities, such connections are in the traditional sense impossible. We live in clusters of people so enormous that it's impossible to know or feel any connection with them, and so we typically make no effort to. Most people I know make no effort to get to know their neighbors, and I'm as guilty as anyone on this count.

I don't think we benefit from this.

In part, I'm sure it's the way I was raised. I grew up in a small town where I know the people were reasonably friendly with one another, but my mother, who raised me more-or-less on her own, was from the big city of Toronto, and brought that alone-in-a-crowd mentality with her. I never spoke with any of my neighbors after early childhood, and neither did my mom, for the most part. Since moving to Vancouver, I've certainly never been more than a friendly acquaintance with any of my neighbors, at most, and that's not too good.

I keep meaning to go around to the neighbors I have in my building - those people on my floor and the ones above and below, and say hello. But it just seems so wierd, you know? Almost an intrusion. Almost an abuse, even, to impose myself upon the people who just happen to live near me and expect them to be friendly to me.

For the past year, Vince's presence has prevented me from acting on this impulse, anyways: I keep wanting to invite the neighbors over for a cup of tea and a bite to eat, be friendly, be "neighborly" in the classic meaning of the word, but it's tough to do so when you live with someone you refuse even to speak to. But soon enough, he'll be gone. I'm thinking of proposing a sort of pot luck dinner, inviting all of the neighbors over, and seeing who I can get along with.

The other day, I had to field a noise complaint from my landlord due to some noise Vince had been making late at night, and the absurdity of it struck me: someone living right next door to me went to the strata council of the building, who went to the building's owner, who went to my landlord, who then called me. Just think: if that neighbor and I were friendly with one another, they could have just come and spoken to me (or Vince), and dealt with it without involving all of these uninvolved people. But that's the ugly reality; we aren't friendly. We don't feel like we can just talk to each other. It's absurd, and I think I should change it.

Because the idea of living in an actual community of people who know each other and can speak to each other in a friendly, neighborly manner, appeals to me.

So what about you: Anyone out there friendly or even "neighborly" with their neighbors? Anyone have any thoughts on the topic?

The English language is beautiful.

This is not meant as a chauvinist remark on the quality of my particular language as opposed to other languages; I’m sure that many, if not most languages can, when made use of by one who cares enough about the subtleties and nuances of expression and vocabulary within that language to learn and familiarize themselves with them, are capable of producing sentences and ideas, songs and stories which are in their own unique and varied ways, beautiful. The English language simply happens to be the language I’m most familiar with and which I happen to have devoted myself to. And for my part, and in my experience, it is beautiful.

When I open my mouth to speak, there’s always just a little bit of excitement which accompanies the act, and no less so when I sit down to type one out. I feel like a painter sitting in front of a blank canvas, with a palette of a thousand different colours of paint at one side, and a million brushes laid out for me on the other. The opportunities for expression are nearly limitless. I can produce something wonderful, exciting, memorable, amusing, disgusting, thought-provoking, bizarre or precise. So many options which are available to me! And I love them all. I always say, if you have the opportunity to say something in a manner which is memorable and awesome, and the opportunity to say that same thing in a manner which is dull and plain, why would you ever choose the latter? Who could possibly benefit from further exposure to the ordinary who would not benefit more from exposure to the extraordinary?

And in this modern world, where we have so many literary and oratorical sources to draw upon, so many thoughts and notions, so many dialects and vernaculars, it’s an incredibly heady experience to really contemplate what kind of range of verbosity is available to a student of modern English.

And yet, for a distressingly large portion of the population, any expression of the English language which extends beyond the mundane and banal, no matter how modern it may be, always just sounds to them “like Shakespeare.”

And they are not shy about sharing this observation with you. Indeed, they seem to view it as a solemn obligation that they be the one to inform you of this notion of theirs.

It’s depressing. Shakespeare, as eloquent and as full of wit as he was, was a product of his time, and that’s a time which is four centuries in the past. Is there not a single common touchstone for excellence in the field of expression in the English language in the four centuries since the death of the Bard which has had any lasting or significant impact on the common man? Is there nothing that suggests to them that a person who speaks well and in a thoroughly modern manner might be more reminiscent in their use of the language of a playwright of the 20th or 21st century than one of the 16th?

It’s all the more perplexing when one of these vulgar brutes then decides to start peppering me with “thee”s and “thou”s, as though in imitation of my own speech, seemingly convinced that they’re “ripping me a new one” with their cutting satire, when I can guarantee that I had never done so in their presence.  

What does it say about a culture that any significant portion of its population cannot even imagine anyone in the modern day being well-spoken and eloquent, without it being an imitation of someone nearly half a millennium dead? I would almost be prepared to receive it as a compliment if not for the fact that they are so unrelentingly mocking in their tone. They sound no different to me than the kids in high school who would call me “Mister Dictionary”, and discourage me from eloquence by telling me that “using big words makes you sound dumb.” And yet these are often adults themselves, whose adulthood experience with the English language and the culture which surrounds it is so impoverished and so shallow that to them, the act of making good and thorough use of it is somehow worthy of mockery.

I’m long past the point where their mockery hurts me in any way. What It says, though, about the cultural experience that produces these thoughts? That hurts me. That hurts me deeply. Because I know that they have the same opportunities that I do: They have that same blank canvas. They have that palette of a thousand colours. They have those million brushes. And they choose to take a handful of brown and grey paint and smear it haphazardly upon that canvas without a care in the world for the other linguistic tools they have available to them, and find those who do avail themselves of them to be a bizarre anachronism.

Who “talks like Shakespeare.”

A while ago, my friend Ray brought over a DVD of a movie entitles “Sukiyaki Western Django.” I had never heard of it, and Ray seemed oddly hesitant about sharing it. It was plain that he wanted to do so, not only in that he wished to watch it himself, but I think, wisely, he did not wish to watch it alone.

This was very wise of him.

Sukiyaki Western Django, you see, is not a good movie. Moreover, it’s the sort of movie which is so spectacularly ill-conceived that it is honestly difficult to imagine why anyone would think it could ever be a good idea. The fact that it could go all the way through the production process without anyone ever stopping said production and saying “Hold on, wait. Are we really sure this is a good idea?” is genuinely mystifying to me. Don’t get me wrong: As I’ve quite recently demonstrated, (and indeed less-recently demonstrated), I understand the appeal of coming up with outlandishly bad ideas for cinematic productions. The difference is, I would not then go about putting these ideas into practice. Herein lies one of various differences between myself and the creative minds behind this unimaginable train-wreck of a film.

Let’s start with the basics. The movie is set in some sort of bizarre version of mid-1800s Nevada. It’s plainly an old west town, in some sense, because of the set dressing and general atmosphere. The populace of the town, however, is less equivocal in this respect. For you see, they’re all Japanese. All of them. And not only are they all Japanese, they’re obviously native Japanese speakers. You can tell this because they speak English with extremely, and indeed sometimes incomprehensibly, thick Japanese accents. The reason for this is obscure. Are they meant to be first-generation Japanese immigrants? If so, why – when there does not appear to be a single native English speaker in town – do they not speak their native Japanese in their own company? This question is not addressed at any point during the movie.

From a production standpoint, a conceit such as this is fairly eyebrow-raising: What audience did they think they were serving by this approach? An English-speaking audience isn’t going to benefit from an entire cast of actors who not only don’t speak English very well, they seem in some cases not to be able to speak the language at all; it appears that at least a few of them are pronouncing lines which they had memorized phonetically, with no knowledge of what they were actually saying. To say that this limited the amount of pathos they could bring to the roll is an understatement. A Japanese audience, likewise, would seem to be better-served by a cast who actually speaks Japanese; even an audience who craves the authenticity involved with having cowboys speaking English is likely to balk at one which does so in such an obviously inauthentic manner.

Although to call them “cowboys” might be a little bit of a stretch: They dress in a manner which seems more closely in line with modern Japanese street gangs, while simultaneously apparently being members of mediaeval Japanese Samurai clans. This bizarre mish-mash of elements blend together remarkably poorly, even as a sort of alternate-universe type of setting.

It also bears pointing out that there is one single exception to the above casting decisions, in the person of one Mr, Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino’s role is probably the single most baffling element of the entire film. Not only is he the only native english speaker in the film, this point is never brought up by any of the characters involved. He stands out like a sore thumb who is speaking perfect english in a sack full of Japanese-speaking sore thumbs. Moreover, his role makes not one lick of sense. He appears at the beginning of the film as a young man, and after a brief introductory segment, he begins to tell a story from long ago, which turns out to be the rest of the movie. Incomprehensibly, however, he also appears later on as an elderly version of the same character. Allow me to stress this point by means of the ancient art of “all caps” thus: DURING THE COURSE OF THE STORY HE IS TELLING AS A YOUNG MAN, HE APPEARS AS A VERY OLD MAN IN A BIZARRE MECHANICAL WHEELCHAIR. He concludes his appearance as an old man by remarking to the man he’s speaking to “I suppose I shall always remain an Anime Otaku.”

It was at this point that I turned to Ray and said to him “This movie is crazy.” And it was understood between he and I that I wasn’t speaking in a kindly or jolly manner. I meant it made no fucking sense. No explanation for any of the many baffling parts of this are ever offered.

And you know, if they had decided to run with this sort of “LOL, Random!” humour, it could have redeemed the movie and made it bearable. It really could have. Ray and I began to speculate: If the cowboys are all Japanese, then maybe the “Indians” could all be blonde-haired Russians, who play their ancient and traditional player pianos out in the desert. Perhaps the Mexicans could be Irishmen. If they went that way, it could have become genuinely fun and enjoyable. But no. Aside from Tarantino’s bizarre and inexplicable appearance, everyone, cowboy and Indian alike, are poorly-spoken and badly-acted Japanese people.

This movie is so spectacularly bad that it probably-unintentionally succeeds in being sort-of-kind-of good in the sense that, while I didn’t enjoy the movie itself, I enjoy COMPLAINING about it. And to that extent, it might be worthwhile to watch with a group of friends who go into the experience with the intention of mocking it during the course of the viewing.

There is certainly nothing else redeeming about this overwhelming clusterfuck of a production, which honestly places alongside Battlefield Earth in terms of ill-conceived abominations of film-making.

I’ve long been aware of certain irregularities with regards to the things which people call places, and it has long bothered me.

Some years ago, I had it explained that the barbarians and lunatics down south of the border refer to the region of their country clustered around the Great Lakes as the “Mid-West.” This immediately rang false for me, looking at a map of their country; the entire region was plainly in the eastern half of the country, albeit somewhat bumping up against the mid-point of the country, in such a way as to come as close to the west as one could come without actually BEING west in any meaningful way.

I offered up the observation that, being in the eastern part of the middle of the country, it could reasonably be called the “Middle east”, or “Mid-East”, if you prefer. Indeed, a case could be made that in that it’s on the far western edge of the eastern half of the country, I would even accept the idea of it being called the “Western-East”. Though I acknowledge that doing so brings with it a certain amount of confusion, at least it is a confusion which could be dispelled with a reasonable explanation, in which sense it has a leg up on the current “Mid-West” fiasco.

Not to be entirely culturally elitist, I must admit that this is a problem which exists even in my own country, and nowhere more glaringly than in the apocalyptic wasteland of the mind which is Alberta (or “Cold Texas” as I like to call it). There’s a conversation I’ve had a number of times with various Albertans which has had only minor variations from person to person, which can best be characterized by one particular instance from a couple of years ago:

I had ordered a couple of small pizzas at work, and one of which was of a type with three tangible toppings and one intangible topping, each of which are vital to the appeal of the dish. The tangible toppings were and are green pepper, feta cheese and shrimp. The intangible one is spite. This came about as something of an unexpected surprise; some years earlier, I had been forced to spend time with an appalling toad of a man named Alex, who claimed to be allergic to all sea foods. I came up with what I thought would be a deliberately disgusting combination of toppings which I had planned to eat with exaggerated relish in front of him in an effort to offend his sensibilities. To my considerable surprise, the pizza was conspicuously awesome. I credit this, as earlier-implied, at least in part to that fourth intangible topping, but the merit of the first three cannot be under-sold either. I’ve introduced a great many people to this combination since then, going about it with a sort of missionary zeal, and it was on one such an occasion that I attempted to get an Albertan to eat some.

“Naw, I don’t eat anything that comes out of the water. I guess my tastes are too Western”, he droned. The capitalization of the word western here is deliberate; it plainly couldn’t have been a reference to a direction so much as a named culture, for reasons which I articulated thus: “If you go far west enough, you know where you end up? In the OCEAN. Seafood is thus the most definitively and inarguably WESTERN food there is! If your issue is one of ‘western identity’, then I can assure you that you stand no risk of betraying it by eating sea food!”

He would have none of it, though; to him, as to many Albertans “Western” had nothing to do with concepts as concrete as longitude or geography. It was just something they felt, somewhere deep in their skulls, where the brain would in any other case be located. It was a brand name, a label, a state of mind. The Albertans had long ago claimed for themselves the identity of “Western Canada”, and fuck anyone who claimed to be more western than them based upon evidence as flimsy as a compas’s wavering needle. To be more western was to be more definitively Albertan, which meant among other things being more closed-minded to ideas such as that “west” was an indication of direction which was relative to the actual spot where you happened to be standing.

He ultimately refused to taste my cockpunchingly awesome pizza, and in retrospect, there’s a part of me that’s glad; I’m not sure I would have wanted to share it with someone whose concept of direction was as arbitrary as a man standing at the north pole’s might be. I feel it would have sullied my awesome Spite Pizza in some way, and then it would have been cursed with the presumably-less-delicious second intangible topping of dismay. And I know for a fact I wouldn’t pay for a Dismay Pizza. The very thought of it fills me with a certain nameless sense of agitation, alarm, anxiety, apprehension, and so-forth on down through the alphabet.

tl;dr: Stupid people shouldn’t get to name regions in ways which involve directions without first consulting a map of the landmass they’re standing on and a geography teacher capable of explaining the concept of longitude to them.

In my last post, astute readers will have taken note of my use of the term “cockpunchingly”, and taken a moment to marvel at the nearly crystaline clarity of the term and its implications. Less astute readers may instead have stopped and scratched their heads for a moment at it. Less curious ones may have breezed right past it without a second thought. For the benefit of these latter two groups, allow me to clarify.

“Cockpunchingly” is a conjugation of the word “cockpunch”, which I have employed in a novel fashion here. Whereas the word has been employed and defined in a literal sense before (such as in the definition at urbandictionary.com, which in part reads “A closed fist hitting of the male genitalia, meant to evoke surprise and/or pain.”), I wish and endeavour to expand upon this rather pedestrian definition, and in so doing stride boldly into the realm of neologism.

We are all familiar, of course, with the term “kickass”, which is used in order to express strong approval for a given person, object or phenomenon, such as in the sentence “That was a pretty kickass cockpunch you gave that guy, buddy!” And indeed, this term is not without its merits, in that it evokes an action which is both aggressive and contemptuous, thus demonstrating both a decisive and entitled position.

However, it occurs to me that to kick one in the ass also carries with it a connotation of cowardice; coming up to one’s foe from behind, skulking and craven. And a kick? A kick is delivered by a foot. And do you honestly mean to tell me that a foot is ever as awesome as a fist? If you do, then I decry you as a liar and/or a fool.

A punch to the cock, then, to me, is the next step beyond a kick to the ass, and excelling in ways which a mere kick to the ass can never excel. Braver, more forthright, and above all, more fisty. On that grounds, I would like to put forth “cockpunch” as a word which can be understood to mean “Like kickass, only better.”  

In the coming days, weeks, and even months, I expect and intend to make use of this term frequently, both in service of purposes of demonstration and description. It is my sincere hope that you will all come to see the merit of this term and take up its torch, then use it as it is intended; to set fire to the very culture of the english language itself, that your very conversations themselves may be a vast, cockpunchingly great sacrificial pyre to the greatness of this new term.

Today I had a conversation with a friend of mine on the topic of fashion.

As anyone who knows me knows, I dress exclusively in black, about 99% of the time. This is not a question of slavery to some external trend or movement; I’ve never considered myself a goth, for instance; I realized in high school that, as much as I liked the way that goths dress, it’s mostly about a music style which doesn’t speak to me in the slightest, and that in any case the idea of suborning my own sense of style to anyone else’s expectations of what I ought to look like or present myself was just sort of fundamentally ridiculous and loathsome to me.

Similarly, anyone who has known me for more than ten years – which is admittedly a vanishingly small list at this point – knows that this has not always been the case; my later days in high school were a process of experimentation for me, as they were for many people. In my case, I worked very aggressively to define myself along very personal lines so as to prevent anyone from being able to sort me into any group or clique at the time. One day I would show up in a suit and tie, wearing leather loafers and a briefcase. The next day, I would be dressed head to toe in bright green, including an elabourate facepaint design (which would come to be the foundation upon which my body painting skills would later be built). The day after that, a blue housecoat, tattered jeans, orange reflective safety vest and floppy brown leather hat. It was only very gradually that I fell into a single style which I felt comfortable with and which I felt represented me well to the world, and this is a style which to one extent or another I’ve stuck with ever since.

I’ve had any number of people attempt to dissuade me from this course, of which the most laughable was a horrendous little cretin named Jason Engel, who worked day and night to conform to every “goth” stereotype he could, and was among the most superficial adults I’ve ever met. He viewed my dressing exclusively in black as a sort of trespass into “his” territory, and one I wasn’t entitled to. He attempted to get me to dress more colourfully in the service of his own vanity. I laughed in his face and remained steadfast.

Today, I’ve had a friend attempt to get me to wear colourful t-shirts and bluejeans so as to make myself more superficially appealing to women. The thought was utterly repulsive to me; being told that in order to find that right woman, the thing to do was to toss aside my own individuality and sense of visual identity in favour of a sort of generic mediocrity; blending in with the anonymous and faceless crowd. I don’t deny that this might be effective if my intent was to find some woman who were attracted to the bland and the generic, and I needed some camouflage or disguise in order to deceive her into believing that I was one such person, but I daresay that this illusion, and the feelings built thereupon would be shattered quite swiftly the moment that I began to discuss virtually any topic with her. Besides which, what use would I have for such a woman? It would be a trying ordeal for me to be involved with such a lady, I fear, and a trying ordeal of a relationship, startling as it may sound, is not actually something I’m actively seeking out.

Besides which, there are practical concerns, ranging from the physiological to the psychological. My legs are twin pillars of rippling muscle, bulging against the world with seething power. There is a terrible cost to this, however; they also bulge against one another in a manner which is fairly destructive; as my thighs press against one another, the friction caused ends up destroying the inner thighs of any pants which I wear. Even this, though, is preferable to the fate which awaits me if I were to wear more durable pants; a pair of blue jeans would rub against my legs no less than my preferred slacks, but whereas slacks would give way, the heavy weave of jeans would cause my flesh to be worn away, leaving a pair of oozing blisters in their wake. Not only is the agony of this sensation – which is all too well-known to me – a significant disincentive to following this advice, there is the question of how attractive oozing and infected sores on my inner thighs would be to that prospective Miss Right.

Then there’s the psychological, and here I cite no less an authority than one Mr. Albert Einstein. Einsten decided early on in his life what fashion was comfortable and serviceable to him, and he stuck by it. So consistent was he, in fact, that he came upon a startlingly utilitarian approach: He simply bought dozens of identical suits, and they formed the entirety of his wardrobe. Every morning, he could simply pick any shirt, any pair of pants, any jacket, and not waste so much as a single moment, a single spare thought on the topic; there was no question of what mood he was in, what went well together or what the occasion was. This was a guy who had bigger fish to fry with his brain than a question of what to wear. “But Dave”, you may ask, “What about the ladies? What about making a good impression with the ladies? Don’t they demand of their suitors a sort of blind adherence to an arbitrary sense of style chosen for them, against their will, by the mindless pressures of the society around them? How could a man of even Einstein’s towering intellect possibly be a role model for you in this regard, given that he must logically have been a romantic failure in light of his decision to be happy with his own appearance, rather than abandoning his own principles in an effort to satisfy the mindless shrieking demands of the collective unconscious?”

Well let me tell you a little about that. Albert Einstein married his cousin Elsa. Most women would be like “Ick, no! I will not grant you access to my vagina! Incest is disgusting and wrong!” But Einstein, being the cockpunchingly pimpin’ guy that he was, was able to brush that shit aside and be all like “Shit, bitch! I’m Albert motherfucking Einstein! You gonna let a little thing like THAT get in the way of you gettin’ with my fuckin’ same-suited, no-haircut-gettin’, not-shavin’-my-moustachin’ self?” And she was all like “Aw, what the fuck.” Cause you know why? Because chicks dig confidence, that’s why. And a guy like that, as confident as he was of the way he looked and dressed and groomed himself had a lot going on in that regard.

I’m not trying to put myself in Einstein’s bitch-gettin’ league or anything here; he plainly had a great deal else going on that I could only ever asprire to. Why, he once had a three word conversation with William Golding!* What have I done that can compare to shit like that, right? But as far as role models go, I figure I could do a lot worse.



* This conversation, retold in Golding’s essay “Thinking as a Hobby”, took place atop a bridge over a small river at a time when Golding knew about one word of German, and Einstein knew about no words of english. As a fish swam under them, Golding remarked “Fisch”, thus expending the bulk of his german vocabulary. “Ja, fisch”, Einstein responded, entirely accurately (one presumes; in fairness I’m actually giving the two of them the benefit of the doubt here; they could have as easily mistaken a bit of garbage for a fish, in that neither of them are known to have been marine biologists of any repute).  

So the other day, I had my first encounter with a Mormon. Mormons are pretty rare here in BC, and for most British Columbians, our main exposure to them is reading about that Mormon splinter group that lives up in the mountains and still practices polygamy, and so I’ve sort of wanted to have a chance to play with one of them for some time now. Predictably enough, it didn't go so well for him.

( Poor Elder Gonzales. )Edit: I also posted this in the atheism community, where there's some decent discussion in the comments worth checking out:  http://community.livejournal.com/atheism/2043912.html

A couple of weeks ago, I watched a fantastic documentary from Nova called "The Bible's Buried Secrets". As people who know me are well aware, this sort of thing is like crack to me. It essentially looks at the very early history of the Israelite people by means of a combination of approaches and creating a synthesis which is very compelling to me. They seek to disentangle the actual history of these people from the various strands of mythology which you find in the bible. And it does treat this book as mythology, and moreover, a sort of Frankensteineian hodge-podge of four DIFFERENT mythological traditions which were spliced, over the course of centuries, into the early books of the Torah (or "Old Testament" as the Christians somewhat condescendingly call it). It doesn't do so in an unfriendly or hostile way at all; it approaches the early history of this people as an engaging historical saga which has been obscured and confused by a series of myths which nevertheless served various useful purposes to the culture of this struggling people. It goes into a number of different corroborating sources for different elements of the story being told, many drawn from archaeological digs performed in the area over the last sixty years or so, mainly by Israeli archaeologists who have a vested interest in discerning the truth of their own early history.

I've shown this film to a number of friends, who have all enjoyed it tremendously, and I suspect many of you will as well. I know I fully plan on buying the DVD when it becomes available for sale in February.

For the time being, the entire thing can be viewed for free by Americans at Nova's page for the film here: http://www.pbs.org/nova/bible

For those outside of the US, there are a number of opportunities. For example, some helpful soul has broken it up into 12 parts and posted them on YouTube, the first of which I post here: 




If that's not to your tastes (as Youtube video quality can be a little on the weak side), there's always the torrent option : http://www.mininova.org/tor/2030190