Do Christians even read letters that weren't written by St. Paul?

I just recently read Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation. It is short, but easily the most succinct and clear work on a perils of religion in the modern world. I can't emphasize this enough: READ THIS BOOK! Seriously, READ THIS BOOK!!

Dental Misadventures

Last night I was flossing, as suggested by my dentist, and my new temporary crown came off (for the second time). I figured this morning that I would just jaunt over to the campus dental clinic (about 2 blocks from studio). I tried to call first - the line was busy - so I figured, they'll be able to squeeze me in for a five-minute session to get the crown attached.

How could I have been so naive? I completely underestimated the amount of bs involved in a simple medical visit. Here's a transcript (edited for flavor!)

Me: Hi. I have a temporary crown that came off, and I need it reattached.
Desk Bitch: Okay, when is your appointment?
Me: I don't have an appointment, I just need this crown put back on.
DB: Oh. Did you call ahead?
Me: No, I was right here on campus.
DB: It's usually better if you call in first. We'll need to schedule an appointment. Are you a student or staff?
Me (rapidly losing patience): Student.
DB: What's your ID number?
Me: Takes out wallet, gets UCard, reads number.
DB: Looks at screen. Brian?
Me: Yes.
DB: Did you have that done here?
Me (extremely annoyed by now): No, my regular dentist is in Rochester.
DB: What kind of insurance do you have?
Me: Hands insurance card to her with heavy sigh.
DB: Will your insurance let you see a different dentist?
Me: Out of patience at this point. I just need the thing reattached.
DB: Right. But they'll charge you --
Me: Or maybe I can go without?
DB (Impervious to sarcasm): [I don't even remember what she started saying at this point, because:]
Me: Just gimme my card. Takes insurance card and walks out.

Of course, I still need the thing fixed. I just couldn't deal with her bullshit any longer.
SO I walked back to studio, then called my good friend Mary over at Information. She connected my directly to the dental appointment desk, & I set up a 2:45 appointment to get a crown reattached - again, this is about a 5 minute job. My favorite part was the last thing the chick said: "We'll need you to show up about 2:30 to fill out paperwork."

Student apologizes for Holocaust

In light of the state of Virginia apologizing for slavery, and the fact that the movie 300 has upset modern Iranians (because of its portrayal of ancient Persians as "barbaric"), I've realized that I need to apologize to members of the Jewish community for the Holocaust. Yes, I know that my German ancestors (and ancestrices) left that country long before either World War. But who knows? Maybe some of their relatives were involved in the Nazi party at some level. At the very least, they had the gall to exist in Germany during the War, so one can only imagine what manner of horrors might have happened within 100 or so miles of them.

So, here it is: I formally apologize to all Jews for the Holocaust. I hope that makes things better.

I probably ought to apologize for the Crusades while I'm at it, despite the fact that I'm no longer a Catholic. I mean, better safe than offensive, right?

I'll have to get started on a comprehensive catalog of the horrors done by the British Empire (for the British part of my heritage) and anything else the Germans might have done in, oh, the past 10,000 years. I wonder if that includes the Germanic tribes that invaded the British Isles ... oh, shit. I now need to apologize to myself. Fuck.

Then again, how many of you owe me an apology for your ancestors' actions against mine? Money would be nice, too. It would really alleviate my mental anguish.

I'm waiting....

Nice Pants

I went to get a couple new pairs of jeans, and had to go three different stores to find jeans that didn't have hobo creases. You know, those creases at the top of the thigh, where they would normally show up after you've worn them 3 or 4 days in a row? Why would I pay for a pair of jeans that looks like it was stapled to a hobo for two weeks? They look filthy and torn up, and I'm supposed to pay $45 for them? Screw that.

How to make a fundie's head explode

What if there was proof that being gay was strictly genetic, and you could test a fetus for gayness? Would it then be okay to either abort it or manipulate its genes to make it straight?

When I grow up...

I want to be a Japanese school girl. They're adorable! Who can resist their charm?

Psst, have you heard the Secret?

The latest self-help/Oprah craze is called The Secret, and it reeks of bullshit. The central premise is the so-called "law of attraction," and it claims that if you think positive thoughts, positive events and things will be attracted to you. Check out the trailer, and notice how many great minds of the past "knew" this alleged "secret." It's a who's who of who's whos: Beethoven, Shakespeare, Einstein. (Let's not apply any critical thought and ask things like, "What evidence do we have that these people were familiar with this concept?")

I also love the people who say it will change their lives forever. If I cared about them enough, I'd revisit them a year from now and ask if their lives are better, and if so, if it's because of this hocus pocus baloney sandwich of crap.

Check this fun clip from Ellen. The guy says that if I think about getting out of debt, I'm still thinking about debt, and will attract it. He goes so far as to claim that this is the reason so many people are in debt. I'd like to suggest that people (in this country, at least) are in debt because of a consumerist credit-oriented culture. But that might be too obvious a connection. He says "start to see what you want rather than what you don't want." I could be stupid, but isn't "not being in debt" a thing that people want?

Oh, and that FedEx thing is a nice distracting gimmick that has absolutely nothing to do with the point. It has nothing to do with "seeing the universe in a different way." It's a simple cognitive issue. The brain focuses on the foreground element. The "arrow" is simply empty space between the letters that happens to make that shape. Yeah, it's cool, and ever since I first saw it (about 8 years ago) I can't look at the logo without seeing the arrow. But that's because I know it's there, and I think it's neat, so I focus on it.

===REDEEMING QUALITY ALERT===
That one guy did make a good point with his 3rd law, about taking action: Shit happens when you DO SOMETHING to make it happen. The only correlation between positive thinking and success is that those who think positively are more likely to take action to make things happen. It's the doing that makes it happen, not the thinking. However, it is important to know that thinking is a prerequisite for doing, and visualizing yourself succeeding can give you the drive to go out and get what you want, to make things happen. For example, if I want to get rich, I visualize myself dressing up this same concept in a new hat, writing a book about creepy motile cheese, and going on Oprah to take money from her idiot followers. Then I DO those things, and voila! I am awash in hundred dollar bills.
===END REDEEMING QUALITY ALERT===

I have two great examples. Ben and I once had a pretty hefty amount of credit card debt. We worked hard to get out of it. We didn't think about being rich, or winning the lottery, or getting a great job that paid us $200,000 a year for sitting on our asses. We worked to get out of debt. It took time, and it wasn't always easy, but we took action and made it happen. We didn't use little cellular magnets in our livers to make the universe send us money. We learned to reprioritize our financial habits. No big secret there.

*UPDATE* I need to make note of the fact that up throughout this time, not only did we not spend time sitting around visualizing our way out of debt, but I personally made frequent comments about how horrible it was, having all that money to pay off, and how horrible our (financial) life was and would likely continue to be. AND STILL, despite all this negativity on my part, we worked our way out of it.

My other example is more recent. I had a midterm exam last week, & had heard from a classmate that took the class a year previous that the exam was brutal. Granted, a new professor is teaching the class, but I still spent 2 days freaking out about it. But I also studied, and the exam wasn't that tough. So, what's the lesson here? The lesson is, it doesn't matter what you think. It only matters what you do. My thoughts were consumed by "Shit! I'm going to bomb this exam!" The action I took was to study, thinking, "I'll just have to try my best, & hope for a C." I haven't got the grade back yet, but after taking the exam, I'm counting on a high B to low A. So much for the big secret.

Goddammit, people can be stupid sometimes.

Gettin' nekkid in tha airport.

Invasion of the naked body scanners. Apparently the technology now exists to do a low-level "backscatter X-ray" that looks through clothing. Hanes is probably already developing lead-lined underwear. It's all about security, & the need to detect non-metallic objects that might be stored on your person for use in a hijacking.

If you're upset, first read the whole article. Looks like they're working to preserve anonymity - separating the images from your face & name, making sure that no person sees both you (in the flesh, so to speak) and the digital images of your flesh. Plus, it's not (yet) being applied to everyone, from what I gathered.

Enjoy the new world order, kids. It's not going away anytime soon.

Stephen Colbert....

just said, "It's pi-day today, 3.14. That must be why I'm feeling so irrational."
(yeah, it's a replay of "yesterday's" show)

Are they even trying anymore?

Flipping through the channels on the cable... 11:30 pm, and obviously there's not much on. The Learning Channel (not exactly sure what I'm supposed to be learning from this channel...) has a show on called "When Sleep Goes Bad." The description is "A profile of three people who are experiencing severe sleep disorders." Okay, I get the idea of a show about sleep disorders. But could they come up with a more tabloidy name please? I wonder whe runs that channel? Maybe TLC stands for Tabloid-Like Channel?

But "When Sleep Goes Bad" isn't on till midnight. So what's on right now? "The Man Whose Arms Exploded," about a guy who got so jacked up on steroids that his biceps "exploded." I'm not even really sure what that means, but maybe that's not the important part. Granted, I'm not sure what the important part is, or if there even is one. Given that they can't even find enough material about this guy to fill out the hour (45 minutes, really), and need to spend a lot of time talking about the steroid trade in Britain and the negative consequences of various gym drugs, maybe they shouldn't be calling it "The Man Whose Arms Exploded." Maybe they should call it "Idiot Muscleheads and Their Adventures with Drugs."

Oh, and can a just mention, bodybuilders are gross.

Make my certain part of the male body bigger!

Have you seen those ads for ExtenZe? Its a pill that is "scientifically proven" to make your wang bigger. So many things about these commercials annoy me. Obviously, there's the idiocy that underlies the concept. And the idea that people will be fooled into buying this stuff. And the "doctor" who has personally researched the drug blah blah something.

But I think my favorite part is that they can't seem to use the word "penis." The two or three times they refer to it, they say "certain part of the male anatomy." I guess their medical objectivity only goes so far.

Good ice cream shouldn't be low-anything

That's what Alton Brown just said, & I'm so glad that someone has the balls to say things that need saying. Why should I buy crappy "low fat" or "low carb" that tastes like ass, when I can just moderate my portion intake of something that actually tastes good?

What exactly is "best" about Best Buy?

Ben's monitor started acting up on Saturday, so we decided we'd go out & get a new one. But where to shop? He used my lappy to check out a couple of options, & we tried WalMart & ShopKo, with no luck. As a last resort, and since there are no other actual electronics stores in town, we ended up at Best Buy.

We looked at a few monitors, & picked out the one we liked, then started searching the shelves for it. Of course, there weren't any there. So we asked an employee (always a risky venture, interacting with Best Buy staff, but we had no choice). Turns out the model is discontinued, but had been very popular, and the floor model was all they had left. She offered to sell it to us, & said she could cut $20 (almost 10%) off the price. That sounded fine to us.

So she starts the transaction, and when it gets to the discount part, she tells us that she has to put it on a gift card. WTF? First of all, you should've told us that right away. Also, it's not really a discount when they just give you store credit. Why am I surprised that Best Buy in particular would do this sort of thing? They seem to be at the cutting-edge of customer "service" most of the time.

Did you just eat a colon polyp?

Just saw a commercial on the telly from the American Cancer Society. Three people in a diner, all in their 50s, two women & one guy. The guy says something about getting tested for colon cancer as a preventive measure, & one of the women says, "How can getting tested prevent you from getting cancer?" The guy says, "I'll show you." (Yeah, I'm skeptical at this point too, but it's Sunday morning. How bad can it be??)

So he uses is spoon to trace an "S" through his mashed potatoes, and then puts a lima bean near one end. He says, "They look in your colon, and if they find a polyp, they take it out before it becomes cancerous." Then he scoops out the lima bean & eats it.

This might encourage me to get my colon checked for polyps, but I think the lima bean farmers of the world might be ticked about the sudden drop in demand. Plus, what is the doctor going to do with the polyps after he takes them out....?

Nike sucks

Well, duh. But anyway, looks like the U of M athletics dept is in the process of signing an exclusive contract to have all university branded apparel produced by the Nike corp. So what? Big business is always doing this type of thing, & it's just a fact of our modern economic system, right?

A recent editorial in the Minnesota Daily suggests that it behooves the University to reconsider (and ultimately not approve) the pending contract. Key to the argument are Nike's use of sweatshop labor and former president Mark Yudof's 2000 statement that "The University of Minnesota must unequivocally insist upon safe, decent working conditions for those who manufacture University-licensed apparel."

There is also an economic argument here: keep jobs in the U.S.

I'd like to suggest an ecological argument as well. Shipping things from third world countries requires the avoidable burning of fossil fuels.

Think about signing this online petition if you feel the same way.

words words words

I have in the past been accused of linguistic prescriptivism. Denial would be silly, as I have tended to take a normative view of usage and grammar in the past. And, to be sure, in some ways even the most staunch opponent of prescriptivism must understand that there need to be certain standards in the use of language. Take, for example, the case of someone relating a story about a woman "giving a long misogynistic speech," completely unaware of the meaning of misogynistic. I think the lesson there is: you have to know what a word means if you plan to use it. Barring the existence of conventions and rules of some kind, of windmill campfire hoping above compost a lamp the, pre-chaplain fries yes.

The question of conventions and rules, however, is not whether we need them in language. Rather, it is an issue of where do they come from? A prescriptivist holds that rules need to be imposed by ... someone. They maintain that there are certain ways in which words can and should be used, and that phenomena such as verbing are anathema to the vitality of language and its ultimate utility. Descriptivism, on the other hand, is focused on how language actually is used rather than how it should be used. Verbing is not a new phenomenon, for example. It has been occurring for as long as we've had language, and is a basic process in the growth of language. Crying about it won't make it go away. Ever. And while I agree that solution as a verb sounds ridiculous, I in no way suggest that it impossible, in 100 or 200 years, it will commonly be used as such. Good? Bad? No. Just different.

The best thing I've read of descriptivism, and a work that has driven the last vestiges of prescriptivism from my blood, is Guy Deutscher's The Unfolding of Language. It's humorous, readable, and informative. It achieves a level of accessibility that is rarely, if ever, seen in books about linguistics. Four stars! The book is not an examination of the prescriptivist/descriptivist debate, but rather describes how languages change over time, from our ancient ancestors' first primitive grunts and gestures to the elaborate variety of languages we hear today. However, in outlining this history, the author implicitly undermines a prescriptivist approach to grammar and usage.

A favorite example of mine is orientate. The verb orient is related to orientation in the same way that create is related to creation. Dozens of verbs ending with -ate have a related noun that ends with -ation. But when you look at the orient/orientation pairing, that pattern doesn't hold. Craving an orderly system, people see the -ate/-ation pattern in other words and apply it to orientation, and, ta-da! Orientate!

So, at the risk of causing a logical paradox and bringing about the end of the universe: What happens if a descriptivist maintains that rules should arise organically from the language itself?

This week in stupid

So the state of Virginia is apologizing for slavery. Various headlines surrounding the story include: NAACP urges Ga. to follow Virginia's lead, apologize for slavery, Virginia's regret is a step in the right direction, and I'm proud of Virginia's 'regret' over slavery.

Favorite line: "The resolution does not carry the weight of law..." How would that work? Would people (presumably just the whites) be fined if they did not personally regret their state's role in slavery? Would they have to perform community service? Maybe they would have to participate in a "Spend the day as a slave" program, wherein blacks would have white people wash their underwear? And what about people whose families moved into the state after slavery was abolished? Would the law mandate genealogical searches on every (white) resident to find out which ones need to be most regretful? Descendants of the families that owned slaves would be required to express the most regret, while those whose families stood idly by would have to express only regret for not intervening, and for families that weren't there at the time, a special card would be issued absolving them of the need to express regret.

Am I the only person who finds it difficult to believe that a political entity can have human emotions? Never mind the fact that nobody is alive today who owned slaves. That fact seems lost on people who are so caught up in their anger and emotion over slavery, decades after it ceased, that they can't seem to look to the future. Why are they so obsessed with the past?

Now, I'm not a big fan of "forgive and forget" - especially the "forget" part. But why are people being held responsible for actions that they had no part in, since they weren't even born yet??? If those folks who fuss and moan over slavery reparations put half of their effort into improving the present and future (and spent the other half baking cookies or drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa), society would soon see radical improvements in racial equality.

Can I get an "Amen"?

Winter Wonderland

As in, I wonder when all this snow is going to stop. Not that I'm complaining about the snow per se, since we're still a ways behind the historical average snowfall. And besides, what's the point of complaining about the weather? There's no will behind it - it just happens. And we can't do anything about it (in the short term, at least - and our long-term effects, whatever their degree, have been consequences of other activities rather than the goal themselves, and wildly unpredictable).

[Sidebar on climate change: (a) It's happening. (b) Human activities are likely the primary cause of it. (c) No god is going to swoop down out of the sky and save us at the last minute, nor is this an indicator that jeebus is about to make an appearance. (d) Now what?]

Look! Kitties!