Boyd's Life

Reforming Tort Reform

2011-06-28T16:56:00.000-07:00

HBO fires off what may prove to be a new battle for your hearts and minds over the issue of tort reform, with the film Hot Coffee.

Besides your basic legal and human rights, there are a few issues to consider whenever discussing the issue of Torts and the fight over them.

First: there are vast amounts of money involved in both sides. When I say "vast", I mean billions. Richard Scruggs became one of the world's wealthiest people by litigating torts. The insurance companies and other firms pushing for tort reform are also some of the largest corporations in the world. In this environment, it's nearly impossible to keep the actual rights of citizens at the forefront.

Secondly: There are massive political implications and involvements on both sides of this issue. For the last thirty years, races from local judges to governors to congress all the way to the president of the united states, all are heavily influenced by the issue of tort reform.

Thirdly: The right initially fought this issue by using anecdotes like the McDonald's Coffee suit, which the film explodes, but proceeds to argue the case for the left using new anecdotes of their own. Just like the Right uses talk radio to propagandize you, the Left now uses documentary films. Neither does a very good job of helping regular people make clear and rational decisions on these issues.

Fourthly: The marketing of this film has nothing to do with the film itself, and there has been a huge, huge push for the marketing of this film, nine or ten times the amount of money normally spent on a documentary film; and it comes not from the people wishing to profit from the film, but from the people wishing to score some sort of support for political reform from it.

Fifthly: The trailer for this film is incredibly misleading, jumping from case to case giving the clear impression that they are all one issue. The most egregious example being the jump cut from footage of the hot coffee case to a clip of Al Franken saying "She was Drugged! She was raped!", from a completely unrelated case.

Sixthly: If you think the guys on the left of this issue are unreasonable and dishonest, the guys on the right are worse!

It's important that you're able to make up your own mind on this issue without the Trial Lawyers or the Chamber of Commerce or any of the other involved entities making it up for you. Watch the film but keep in mind that it aint the whole story either, and be watching for a return volley from the right to come soon after.

West Capitol Historic District

2011-06-26T22:03:00.000-07:00

Application for Inclusion in the
National Register of Historic Places
Oct. 30, 1979
West Capitol Historic District
Jackson MS

Original can be seen here http://pdfhost.focus.nps.gov/docs/NRHP/Text/80002248.pdf

The West Capitol Street Historic District is primarily commercial in character, but includes as well a railroad depot, parking garage, and two office buildings. Almost all buildings are brick. Architectural styles include Queen Anne, Sullivanesque, Colonial Revival, Art Deco, and Spanish Colonial Revival. Party-wall commercial structures line the north side of West Capitol Street for one block and the south side for one-and-one-half blocks. The majority of buildings on the north side of Capitol Street which is the main, east-west thoroughfare in Jackson, were constructed by 1900 and form a unified row of low-scale structures in sharp contrast to the adjacent new Federal Building. Unique architectural features of these low-scale buildings include the Palladian facade treatment as well as the original storefront and interior of Bourgeois Jewelry Store at 220 W. Capitol St., the Queen Anne-style facade and original cast-iron columns of 218 W. Capitol St., the intact Colonial Revival facade with multipaned transom incorporating the Cohen Brothers store name at 224 W. Capitol St., and the pilastered facade treatment of three other "buildings In'the row. Buildings on the south side of Capitol Street were constructed later, the earliest ca. 1895 with the majority between 1904 and 1923. These structures retain a higher scale, ranging from three to twelve stories. Architecturally outstanding structures on this side of Capitol Street include the Dennery Building, with corbeled drip molds and Queen Annestyle cornice, the Sullivanesque McCleland Hardware Building, and the Colonial Revival King Edward Hotel (entered on the National Register in 1976). Completing a square block on the south side of Capitol Street is the Standard Life Tower, a sixteen-story Art Deco skyscraper constructed in 1929, together with a one-story Art Deco commercial row and a two-story parking garage constructed in 1926. Extending north to Mill Street, the district includes several significant Colonial Revival-style buildings: the two-story train depot constructed in 1925, when the elevated railroad tracks which form the western boundary of the district were built, the Noble Hotel, ca. 1908, a three-story building located on Mill Street across from the depot, and a one-story commercial building, ca. 1915, originally constructed as a car showroom. Interesting street features of the district include three sidewalk decorations, a mosaic walkway with "Bon-Ton" spelled in tiles at 209-211 W. Capitol Strand two Art Deco sidewalk motifs in front of the two entrances to the Standard Life Tower, which match decorative panels of the building's exterior.

The most obvious architectural changes to the district include the loss of decorative parapets at 226-230 W. Capitol St. and the Bon-Ton Building, 209-211 W. Capitol St., and the loss of architectural features on other buildings in the district from cladding or infilling of facades. Original wooden canopies have been removed or replaced with aluminum. The Millsaps building, constructed in 1913, was originally six stories high but was raised to nine stories in 1945. Despite these changes the district retains much of its former character, especially when contrasted with the surrounding area, which is currently undergoing demolition and new construction.

The West Capitol Street Historic District contains the earliest intact commercial facades in Jackson and some of the finest Art Deco architecture in the state of Mississippi. Reflecting the earlier importance of West Capitol Street as a turn-of-the-century commercial center and the subsequent growth and development of the capital city in the 1920s, the district is vitally important as a visual record of the commercial history of Jackson.

Prior to 1885 there was little commercial activity on West Capitol Street, the main business center being located near the Old Capitol on State Street and extending down East Capitol Street only as far as President Street. Only a few commercial establishments served the old railroad depot located where the present one stands, two hotels, a drug store, and a dry-goods store. Of these early commercial structures only the dry-goods store, at 232 W. Capitol St., retains a resemblance to its original appearance. By 1890 Jackson seemed to have recovered from the Reconstruction period. The population had increased and new houses were being built northwest and south of the old section of town. A newly established board of trade had begun to attract new industry to the city. In 1899 Jackson got its first electric street car. Thus new markets and improved transportation contributed to the new business activity on West Capitol Street so that by 1900 brick commercial blocks ha.d been constructed on the north side of the street as far east as 214, and the 200 block entirely completed by 1925.

Alfred Bourgeois first located his jewelry store in 1886 on South State Street. Several years later he moved his business to West Capitol Street and by 1900 had built the brick building at 220, just west of his shop's relocation. This store has remained in the Bourgeois family for almost eighty years and according to the owners is the oldest continuously owned family business in the state. Containing its original cherry display cases and ceiling of German steel pressed in a floral pattern, it was the first completely fireproof building to be constructed in the area and the floor is said to be the first tile floor in the state (Jackson: Bourgeois Building, Hinds County, Statewide Survey of Historic Sites, Mississippi Department of Archives and History, Jackson). S. P. McRae located his first store at 216 W. Capitol St. in 1902. McRae's is now the largest locally owned department-store chain in Mississippi. By the 1920s he had moved east on the same block to 200-202, where the store remained for more than thirty years. Also located on this block, at 232, were the law offices of prominent black attorneys Beadle and Howard. Perry Howard later moved to WasM'ngEon and became leader of Mississippi 1 s "Black and Tan" Republicans (Carroll Brinson, Jackson/A Special Kind of Place [Jackson, Miss.: City of Jackson, 1977], p. 211).

Development of the south side of West Capitol Street was slower, with construction not being completed until 1929. The commercial block which now incorporates 209-215 W. Capitol St. was one of the first commercial blocks on the south side of the street and housed a bank, dry-goods store, and grocery. Part of the building later became the Bon-Ton Cafe, one of Jackson's fanciest restaurants. The Dennery Building, constructed by 1900, is outstanding for its upper floors, articulated in the Queen Anne commercial style, and its first floor, which has been compatibly modernized. The four-story McCleland Hardware Building at 217 W. Capitol St., one of the few Sullivanesque structures remaining in Jackson, was built in 1904. It remained the home of the McCleland Hardware Company until 1926, when the building became the Montgomery Ward Department Store. Constructed in 1913, the Millsaps Building, at 200-205 W. Capitol St., was the first home of the Jackson State National Bank. Rapid development of the remainder of the block began in 1923 with the completion of the King Edward Hotel, considered at the time to be the "most modern in the country" ("The New Edwards Hotel to be Opened Saturday; Most Modern in Country," Clarion-Ledger, [Jackson, Miss.], Dec. 28, 1923).

In 1925 the present depot was constructed and the hazardous tracks which crossed Capitol Street at ground level were elevated. In 1926 the classically detailed garage on the corner of South Mill and Roach streets was built for the R. E. Hines Motor Company as a Chrysler dealer showroom, and in 1929 the Art Deco Tower Building was constructed by the Enochs, who owned the King Edward Hotel. Constructed as a monument to the family who had acquired wealth in the lumber industry, the Tower was built in five and one half months, with twenty-four hour shifts stopping only on Sundays (Stephen Rassenfoss, "Construction Raises Capitol (Property Values," Clarion-Ledger [Jackson, Miss.], real estate section, July 29, 1979, p. 1).

Designed by Jackson architect, Claude Lindsley, the Tower Building is one of only three Art Deco skyscrapers in the state and is outstanding for both its interior and exterior detailing. Utilizing the typical set-back design the building also displays decorative panels with geometric motifs which are highlighted with 14K gold leaf. This motif is replicated (minus gold leaf) in the sidewalks in front of both entrances. The interior hallway is particularly lavish utilizing a variety of materials and geometric forms. Linking the skyscraper with some of the lower scale buildings in the district is the 1-story building just north of the Tower which employs a different Art-Deco motif in each bay. Visually, the transition from low-scale to high-rise is not abrupt. Buildings on the south side of West Capital Street which vary from two to nine stories make the transition between the 2-story buildings on the north side of West Capitol and the Standard Life Tower on Pearl Street.

Structures Within the District

Abbreviations at the end of each entry are "P. S." for Primary Significance, "C. S." for Contributing Significance, "M" for Marginal Signifiance, and "I" for Intrusion.

1: Smith-Pate Auto Company Building
(126 N. Mill St.)
Ca. 1915
Colonial Revival style. One-story three-bay brick commercial building. Modillioned cornice of concrete. Concrete diamond-shaped frieze ornamentation. (P. S.)

2: Commercial Building
(118 N. Mill St.)
Ca. 1930
One-story 2xl-bay brick commercial building with hinged brick corners and original corrugated metal canopy. (C. S.)

3. Noble Hotel
(108-114 N. Mill St.)
Ca. 1908
Colonial Revival. Three-story 4x2-bay brick building with metal block cornice. Concrete cornice at first-floor level. (P. S.)

4. Union Depot
(W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1925
Colonial Revival. Two-story 5x6-bay brick building with classical ornamentation in concrete. Round-arched windows with radiating muntins. One-story addition on west side above which is constructed elevated railroad tracks. One-story gable-roofed building attached at rear. (P. S.)

5. Gulf Finance
(236 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1940
Two-story 2x10-bay commercial building clad with concrete. Enamels-paneled first floor. Casement windows. (M.)

6. Capitol News
(232-234 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1928
Spanish Colonial Revival. Two story four-bay commercial building of concrete block. Tile roof. Round-arched windows. Urns and corbel table detail. Storefronts altered but one rope-turned column still visible. (C. S.)

7. Commercial Block
(226-230 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1885, altered ca. 1910 and 1945
Two story ten-bay commercial building with concrete-clad pilastered second floor and horizontal band of marbelized glass between floors. (C. S.)

8. Cohen Brothers
(224 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1895, altered ca. 1918
Colonial Revival. Two-story two-bay brick commercial block. Modillioned cornice on first and second floors. Raised brick rectangular enrichment with concrete corner blocks. Multipaned transom with "Cohen Brothers" in center. (P. S.)

9. Commercial Block
(222 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1895 with later alterations
Two-story two-bay brick commercial building with patterned brick frieze to match 220 W. Capitol St. Recessed rectangular panels above windows. Rosette tie-rod caps. Aluminum panel covers transom area. (C. S.)

10. Bourgeois Jewelers
(220 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1900
Colonial Revival. Two-story three-bay brick commercial block with Palladian facade treatment and patterned brick facade decoration. Leaded glass transoms. Original interior. (P. S.)

11. Commercial Block
(218 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1897
Queen Anne. Two-story four-bay brick building with bracketed iron frieze and bracketed window lintels. Rectangular ventilator panels with metal grates. Original cast-iron columns. Date 1897 in frieze. (P. S.)

12. Lott Furniture Co.
(216 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1895, altered 1951
Two-story six bay brick commercial building with glass block windows. Original openings altered. Original decorative grates remain. (C. S.)

13. Commercial Block
(210-212 W. Capitol St.)
Before 1885, storefront ca. 1945
Two story four-bay commercial building. Concrete infilled facade, but shape of original cornice still apparent. Ornate cast-iron lintels visible. Original rosette tie-rod caps. (P. S.)

14. Commercial Block
(206-208 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1910
Classical Revival. Two story six-bay brick building with pilastered upper story. Metal modillioned and denticulated cornice. Corbeled brick above pilasters. (P. S.)

15. Commercial Block
(200-204 W. Capitol St.)
Constructed as two buildings: 202-204 (western section), four bays constructed ca. 1910; 200 (eastern section), two bays constructed ca. 1915. This building,now clad with concrete, once matched 206-208 W. Capitol St. Pilasters remain but cornice has been removed. (C. S.)

16. Dennery Building
(113-117 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1898
Queen Anne. Two-story 5x5- bay brick commercial block. Bracketed cornice. Windows set in recessed bays. Raised brick drip molds with corbeled ends. (P. S.)

17. Commercial Block
(119 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1925
One-story former Spanish Colonial style recently remodeled to "Old Town" appearance with brick veneer facade, round arched windows, and metal grill work. (I.)

18. Mayflower Cafe and Thomas 1 Great M. Store
(121 W. Capitol St.)
East section of building ca. 1898, west section ca. 1901. Two-story 4xll-bay brick building with stucco front ca. 1945. Original windows with segmental-arched heads and raised brick drip molds as well as corbeled cornice remain on west elevation. Art Moderne canopy with neon enrichment. Art Deco neon sign. (C. S.)

19. Millsaps Building
(203 W. Capitol St.)
First through six floors constructed 1913. Seventh through ninth floor added 1945. Nine-story 3x7-bay brick commercial building with paired windows recessed between pilasters. Corbeled cornice. Original classical feeling of building altered more toward Art Deco when building raised. Original rusticated concrete and console keystone remain visible on one section of the first floor. (C. S.)

20. Boston Investment Co.
(207 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1913.
One-story two-bay commercial building with stepped parapet roofline clad with marble panels. Original facade treatment was probably same as first floor of the Millsaps Building. (M.)

21. Bon-Ton Cafe
(209-211 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1890, later alterations
Two-story brick commercial building. Upper stories covered with enamel panel. Tile sidewalk reads "Bon-Ton Cafe" (I.)

22. Liberty Loans
(215 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1890, later alterations
Two-story commercial building with concrete-clad upper story, enamel paneled first floor. (I.) 23. McCleland Hardware Building (217 W. Capitol St.): Ca. 1904. Sullivanesque four story eight-bay brick commercial building with corbeled cornice and curved, stepped parapet. Windows recessed in four-story arcaded bays. (P. S.)

24. King Edward Hall
(221 W. Capitol St.)
Ca. 1960
One-story three-bay building with recessed entrances at end bays. Mosaic tile on first floor. Concrete solar screen on second floor. (I.)

25. King Edward Hotel
(Capitol at Mill Sts.)
Ca. 1923
Colonial Revival. Entered on the National Register in 1976. (P.S.)

26. Garage
corner of Mill and Roach Sts.: 1526
Classical detailing. Three story brick and concrete garage with large rear addition. Central bay decorated with pilasters, topped with curved parapet. Scrolled ornament adorns doorway. Corner pilasters with geometric designed. Horizontal bands of concrete divide the floors. (P. S.)

27. Standard Life Tower
(127 S. Roach St.)
Ca. 1929
Art Deco sixteen-story 5x8-bay skyscraper of concrete and brick. First two floors are designed in low scale with setback battlements and stepped window openings. The main block of the building rises from center of the two-story section. Setback design. Enamel spandrel panels on twelveth and thirteenth floors, which utilize Art Deco motif and match sidewalk pattern at entrances. Art Deco lobby intact. (P. S.)

28. Commercial Block
(111-121 S. Roach St.)
Ca. 1929
Art Deco one-story six-bay commercial block. Each bay recessed between pilasters and decorated in a different Art Deco motif. Parapeted roofline of each bay also articulated in an individual Art Deco design. (P. S.)

9 - MAJOR BIBLIOGRAPHICAL REFERENCES

Jackson City Directory. Jackson, Miss.: Tucker Printing Co., 1922, 1925.

McCain, William D. The Story of Jackson. Jackson, Miss.: J. F. Hyer Publishing Co., 1953.

Maloney, T. J. Maloney's Jackson, Mississippi, City Directory. Memphis: Interstate Publishing Co., 1904, 1907.

Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Jackson. Statewide Survey of Historic Sites. Hinds County. Jackson: Bourgeois Building, Street scenes.

Mississippi Department of Archives and History. Jackson. Subject File. Jackson: Capitol St.
Rassenfoss, Stephen. "Construction Raises Capitol Property Values," Clarion Ledger [Jackson, Miss. ], real estate section, July 29, 1979.

Sanborn Insurance Maps of Jackson, Miss., for the years 1895, 1900, 1904, 1909, 1914, 1918, 1925, 1948. New York: Sanborn Map Co. Originals located at Mississippi State University Library, Special Collections, Starkville, Miss.

Resolving Urban Decay With Better Laws

2011-04-30T12:59:00.000-07:00

One of the biggest reasons we have urban decay is the simple fact that it's usually more profitable for developers to start with undeveloped land than to renovate or re-purpose existing structures.

We could level the playing field by using the tax code. The result would yield huge economic, ecological and sociological benefits. There already are some elements of this in the tax code, but more is needed.

I would even go so far as to say, we would benefit if the tax code made it significantly more profitable for developers to renovate and reinvest in existing areas than to bulldoze new undeveloped land.

One of the biggest reasons people give for abandoning their cities and moving to bedroom communities is lower taxes. That's pretty easy to fix. There should be a tax on the people living in these bedroom communities and let the proceeds go to the city they abandoned but still feed off of economically.

Movie Nicknames For Jackson Buildings

2011-04-24T23:07:00.000-07:00

Ghostbusters Building

For years, Jacksonians nicknamed the Standard Life Building, the "Ghostbusters Building" after the 1984 comedy. In the film, they used a real apartment building at 55 Central Park West, NY, that does have a reasonal resemblance to the Jackson structure, mainly because they both utilize the same architectural style and were built the same year (1929).

The "Real" Ghostbusters Building

The Jackson Ghostbusters Building

I always thought the SLB looked more like the Empire State building, with a less elaborate finial.

Darth Vader Buildings

Some locals have taken to calling the City Centre development on Lamar St. (formerly the Milner and Petroleum Buildings) the "Darth Vader" buildings for their black glass and chrome exteriors.


Darth Vader Buildings

The Signature Dish for Jackson

2011-04-13T14:03:00.000-07:00

What's the signature dish for Jackson?
Maryland has crabcakes, Memphis has barbeque, New Orleans has po-boys and gumbo, but what dish best epitomizes Jackson? Do we even have a signature dish?

I posed this question by twitter and face book and directly with some restaurateurs and chefs I know and got some interesting answers. Cheese grits, fried catfish and fried pickles were all mentioned, but the one dish people most associate with Jackson is Comeback Dressing.

Comeback Sauce really is the perfect signature dish for Jackson. Our historic claim as its birthplace is pretty solid. Although it's popularity is growing and spreading rapidly, Comeback Dressing appears to have originated in Jackson in the 30's and 40's, first at the Rotisserie Restaurant (now closed), then spreading to the Mayflower Cafe and the Elite Diner (both still operating).

Growing from downtown, many Jackson restaurants now serve their own version of the sauce, as well as restaurants in Oxford, Hattiesburg, Vicksburg and the Gulf Coast. There's even a bottled version you can buy online.

Being a condiment rather than an entree, Comeback is an extremely versatile dish, complimenting not only salads, but sandwiches and fries as well. Old timers swear by serving it just on saltine crackers. There are endless possibilities for the sauce among creative chiefs, giving them an opportunity to put their own stamp on the local favorite.

How Does it Help Us?
Jackson is suffering from something of an identity crisis following a painful twenty-five year economic decline. I'm convinced that an important part of the city's recovery can come from identifying its significant and indelible cultural markers like what our signature dish might be.

Ideas like this form signposts from restaurant to restaurant, letting people know they're still in Jackson, culturally if not physically.

Besides just serving the sauce, I think we should celebrate it as well. Perhaps having a contest to see who makes the best Comeback Sauce, or maybe who makes the most interesting and tasty dish with it. People love a contest, and it might be a point of pride for the restaurant who can say they have the best comeback sauce in town.

Mississippi Mummy

2011-04-09T13:33:00.000-07:00

Mississippi State Capitol forgery

In the 1920s, the Mississippi Department of Archives and History purchased a large collection of Native American artifacts from Colonel Brevoort Butler.

Included in these artifacts was one item that was clearly not of Native origin, an Egyptian mummy.

For decades this item was on display in the State Capitol Building, becoming a much-loved attraction and source of local pride.

In 1969, Gentry Yeatman, a medical student with an interest in archeology, asked the museum for human remains to study for evidence of disease. Permission was granted to remove the mummy and for it to be sent to the University of Mississippi Medical Center for an autopsy. Radiological examination showed a few animal ribs and several square nails holding together a wooden frame.

Upon closer examination it was found to be primarily composed of papier-mâché. German newsprint was found as well as an 1898 issue of the Milwaukee Journal. The fake mummy has now become more famous than ever and transformed into a prized possession linked deeply to the folk history of Mississippi.

The Case of the Dummy Mummy

Vintage View of Downtown Jackson

2011-03-15T21:12:00.000-07:00

This image is from a post card circa 1940 showing a good view of Capitol and Pearl streets with the Heidelberg Hotel in the lower right in tan, the King Edward Hotel in the top right in red and the Standard Life building to the left.

The Heidelberg Hotel was torn down in 1977, but many of these other structures still exist.

These post cards generally begin with black and white photographs with colors added in the re-printing process.

Grocery Delivery Service In Jackson

2011-03-12T15:59:00.000-08:00

Last week my sister mentioned a new service in Jackson that I might find useful in my new downtown apartment. She hadn't tried it herself yet, but it seemed like a pretty good idea.

The company is AisleAte.com and their business model allows you to order regular grocery items from their website for delivery to your home or office. Grocery shopping is not a chore I enjoy, so I was more than willing to give this new company a try.

The ordering process on their website is pretty simple and intuitive. They have a sufficient (but not huge) selection of products at moderate prices. The beauty of what AisleAte offers though isn't selection or low prices but the convenience of having someone bring it to you rather than having to go get it yourself.

I placed my order Friday evening for delivery Saturday. It wasn't a huge order, but covered a fairly broad selection so I could test the water.

I have to say the test was pretty successful. My order came complete and in good condition. My frozen items were still frozen and the delivery was simple and easy.

The owner is David Chase, a fairly recent Millsaps graduate who opened AisleAte for business in July of 2010. Their physical plant is on Baily Ave., but their delivery range seems to cover most of Jackson and 25 neighboring zip codes.

Moral Question: Wrong Numbers

2011-03-03T08:22:00.000-08:00

Moral Question:

If somebody calls your house, obviously the wrong number, but carries on to you as if they were talking to the party they really wanted, are you obligated to tell them they have the wrong number?

Here's the scenario: A guy calls my fax/DSL number, doesn't say "hello", doesn't say "is this such-and-such company?" he just goes into his spiel:

GUY ON PHONE: How much do you charge to convert a Chevy six cylinder

ME: forty-two thousand dollars

GUY ON PHONE:: It costs Forty-Two Thousand dollars to convert a six cylinder truck?

ME: Yeah, but we finance with only twenty seven per-cent interest.

GUY ON PHONE:: Man, you mean to tell me people pay that much for a conversion?

ME: They do if they want me to do it for them. That's how much I charge.

GUY ON PHONE:: I was thinking more along the lines of six hundred dollars.

ME: That's if you do it yourself. If you want me to do it you'll have to pay forty-two thousand dollars.

GUY ON PHONE:: Brother, I got to call you back about this. I just don't think I can go that high.

So here's my moral question: Was I obligated to tell the guy he had the wrong number or was it ok to let him hang up thinking what-ever-the-heck kind of conversion he wanted costs $42K?

What Happened to Jackson

2011-03-03T05:26:00.000-08:00

As part of my decision to move back to Jackson, I've been reflecting a lot on the question of "what happened to Jackson?". What made the city change so dramatically in terms of the racial and class structure of the population?

If you look at a graph of Jackson's population, you'll see that it's population peaked in the early 1980's, then had a dramatic falling off after that with significant changes in race and class. Not only do you see this pattern in Jackson, you see it all over the South, including cities New Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta and others. At the same time you see a corresponding growth in what were mainly rural areas around the city.

Obviously this was an example of "white flight" changing the fabric of Jackson, growing into a full-fledged flight of the middle class regardless of race by the mid 90's. So what caused it? What about the 1980's broke the camel's back?

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 contained in it most of the elements of what we consider Fair Housing law. Prior to this people (particularly in the South) used all sorts of statutorial, contractual and under-handed means to keep "white" neighborhoods "white" now made illegal by the Civil Rights Act.

Many suggest White Flight began with the fair housing laws as white people began to move away from the black people moving into their neighborhoods. If that's so, then why did it take 15 years for the population to peak in Jackson?

One possibility might be that, when the law was passed it had no immediate provision for enforcement, but by the 1980's the federal Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity was fully operational and becoming one of the largest public advocacy departments in the US government. There were several instances, like this, during the Civil Rights Era where the laws changed, but didn't have much effect until the feds put in some form of enforcement.

With the latest census data showing just how much Jackson changed (and how much it's shrunk) there's been a great deal of hand-wringing and rhetoric about "what are we gonna do?" and "how are we gonna fix this?" like they didn't know it was happening all along.

I don't fault the Civil Rights Act of 1968 at all here. Sometimes you have to force people to do the right thing, even though doing so will cause a very damaging resistance. That's been the history of the civil rights movement in the South since the move for emancipation began in the 19th century.

This isn't the first time the city of Jackson found itself suffering mightily from these social changes either: the end of slavery meant burning Jackson to the ground. We did recover though, and rebuild, and even with the Great Depression, Jackson began to thrive again by the 1930's.

The ancient Greeks believed you had to suffer from your hubris before you began to recover from it. Maybe Jackson's slump is just our suffering from the hubris of the Jim Crow mentality we followed for many years. I think Jackson, and many of the cities in the same situation, will recover. It won't be immediate, but we've recovered from worse before.

Back In Town

2011-03-02T18:30:00.000-08:00

After more than 25 years away, I'm moving back within the Jackson City Limits.

Although there were a number of choices among renovated nicer old neighborhoods to choose from, I decided to pick the oldest: downtown.

Standard Life on the left, Three Foot on the Right.
Note the similarity.

The King Edward Revitalization Company restored the 18 story Standard Life Tower building, built in 1929, and made it into 75 flat apartments, one of which (right in the middle) will be mine.

The original architect was Claude Lindsley of New Orleans. Lindsley used many of the same design elements the next year (1930) for the Three Foot Building in Meridian, MS.

Lindsley must have been impressed with the design for the Empire State Building in New York (which was going up at the same time as these two structures) because he borrowed many subtle and not-so-subtle design elements from it.

The Lobby of the Standard Life building could be an extension in miniature of the ESB lobby.

Lindsley really made his mark on Jackson, also designing the old Central High School, Dulling School, The Hinds County Courthouse and more.

What if Ron Paul Ran America

2009-05-31T19:39:00.000-07:00

Although soundly rejected in his presidential bid, people keep talking about Ron Paul. It got me to thinking about what life today might be like if Ron Paul were in charge for the last one hundred years.

Without progressive taxes and anti-trust legislation, the middle class would be much smaller. Most Americans would be working class or poor with a small, but much wealthier, upper class. Small businesses would be much smaller and mid-sized business would all be either bought up, or crushed by the corporate trusts which would run the country.

With our currency tied to precious metals, the dollar would be very strong, but there wouldn't be enough available capitol to develop small businesses. Without banking or insurance regulations there would be just a few, very large banks, each owned by one of the trusts, and none of them particularly interested in the needs of the average American.

Lacking adequate health care or housing without medicare, medicaid, welfare, food stamps, ADC and other programs, the poor and the elderly would live in squalor and there would be few opportunities for people to move upwardly from one class to another. If you think it sucks to be poor now, things could have been much, much worse.

Without our involvement in foreign wars, Europe and Asia would be controlled by either the fascists or the communists, leaving us in a real bind when it comes to foreign oil, but it might not matter because far fewer Americans could afford automobiles.

There would be no Hoover Dam, no National Parks, no Panama Canal and no NASA. Advanced sciences, particularly advanced physics, would all be based in Europe or Asia as there would be no funding for it in the US.

I think it's important to have somebody like Ron Paul around, because there are always some really cool things about the path we don't choose in life and it's important to have someone to remind us of that. It's also important, though, to remember there were reasons, usually very good reasons, why we chose the paths we did, and although there are problems with the way things worked out, they could be worse if we had gone another way.

No Politics or Religion at the Dinner Table

2009-05-30T18:52:00.000-07:00

Many people have a rule about not discussing politics or religion. There's actually a very good reason for that: most of us use politics and religion, not as a philosophy or theology, but as a means of defining ourselves and placing ourselves within our vision of the social spectrum.

Most people don't mind if you challenge a philosophy they espouse, but if you challenge their politics and they use their political affiliations as a means to define themselves, then you're posing not an intellectual argument, but a threat to their very sense of being.

Humans are social creatures, but we're not communal (like ants or bees) so we constantly seek ways to position ourselves within our affiliated cultures and sub cultures. Because we can't actually surrender our individuality to the group, political and religious affiliations and behaviors become a prime method of expressing our desired social position. It becomes a matter of security and has a strong impact on our sense of well-being.

I actually love discussing, even arguing, politics and religion and philosophy. I find it very stimulating, but I've learned through the years that many times I should avoid it because the people I'm arguing with don't see it as an intellectual exercise, they see it as a challenge to their espoused sense of self, and honestly, I don't have a right to do that just because I enjoy discourse.

It's hard though, because the more a person uses these things to define themselves, the more illogical their arguments become and it's really, deeply difficult for me to leave an illogical argument laying on the table.

I am a gentleman though, (or at least I try to be a gentle person) and although I still slip up a lot, and it's not up to me to correct anyone on how they should define themselves, so I do try and bite my tongue quite a bit.

I do fell sorry for them though. This business of trying to define ourselves (socially in particular) is a fruitless effort. We are, by nature, utterly individual and undefinable. This concept of society and culture is really just an illusion we came up with to try and cover how very individual and alone we all are. Often I get the sense that the people who try the hardest to define themselves socially are actually the most lonely and the most insecure.

I get this outlook from my grandfather. Although my grandmother never agreed, my grandfather thought the people who ran around town joining every club and going to every party were fairly silly. As a result, he formed his own club with the express purpose of not trying to establish yourself socially, but to be silly and laugh at being silly and to use social situations, not as a means of positioning yourself, but as a time to enjoy friendships.

It was something of a horror for him when the second generation members in his club began to turn it into the very thing he and his generation formed the club to be against. Since there were already several clubs dedicated to men trying to position themselves socially, my Grandfather's club was no longer unique and since it lost its purpose, it eventually folded from lack of use.

If you know me, then I probably have argued politics or religion with you at one time or another. Please understand, for me, these things are pretty impersonal and external. Intellectually I know this isn't the case for most people, but like everyone else, I'm pretty much locked into my own point of view on the universe and it's often difficult to remember the way I see things aint necessarily so for anyone else.

The Better Choice for Gay Marriage

2009-05-27T22:03:00.000-07:00

I wonder if both sides of the argument are headed in the wrong direction with regards to gay marriage.

As it stands now, the states provide a one-size-fits-all social contract for marriage and many states are arguing whether or not homosexuals fall into that one-size umbrella. What most gay rights supporters believe (and I agree) is that whatever statutory rights a heterosexual couple have, a homosexual couple should also have, but I question whether or not the state should be involved in any marriages, gay or straight.

When most current statutes regarding marriage were drafted, there were very limited opportunities for women to support themselves outside of marriage and the marriage contract was the principal instrument for determining parental rights and responsibilities. The main purpose of these laws was to prevent men from abandoning their wives and children without providing a means for their support should he want out of the marriage.

Things have changed a great deal since then. Most women have as many opportunities to support themselves as men and the issue of parental rights and responsibilities have been defined in the law separately from marriage out of necessity.

The cultural and religious institution of marriage really is a matter for the individual churches to decide, not the state. If gay couples belong to a church that supports homosexual marriages, then that should be the end of it. If not, then perhaps they should join another church, or simply go without a religious blessing all together. After all, why should they support an organization which does not support them in return?

As for the more practical aspects of the marriage contract, couples can, and probably should, reach a social contract between themselves in a manner similar to other contracts without state involvement as well. Many people do this already with prenuptial agreements. It would be a simple matter of couples seeing legal council before entering into the contract to make sure their contract meets their needs. Certainly, most marriages would fall under the same contractual template, but there are many others that don't, and in either case couples should be making the choice of what their marriage contract entails individually, not following the form provided by the state.

Rather than battle over who gets to enter into these outmoded forms of marriage, I believe we should reconsider the entire arrangement so that it better suits the actual form of our culture as it exists today. If marriage indeed is a matter of choice for the individuals involved, then perhaps we should start over in our consideration of how the state gets involved, if at all. Marriage, after all, is a personal decision between two people and we shouldn't allow the state to supersede that decision.

I'm Not White Flight

2009-05-22T15:55:00.000-07:00

Twenty-five years ago I moved to a house on the Rankin County Reservoir. I don't call it the "Ross Barnett" Reservoir because it embarrasses me he was ever governor much less naming anything permanent after him.

My original thought was that it would be really cool to live on the water and the only places like that in Jackson were triple my price range and situated on pretty pitiful ponds. At the time there were about nine or ten houses on my street and most of the land around us was pine forests. At the time, nobody thought the white-flight from the public schools might eventually lead to people moving out of Jackson all together.

I never particularly had a problem with the concept of living around black people. My parents were pretty liberal and I knew a lot of black folks so it never really crossed my mind. I liked the idea of semi-rural living though and the area I was moving to was pretty undeveloped.

What I didn't know at the time was I was just a couple years ahead of a mass migration of white people out of Jackson into Madison and Rankin counties. Pretty soon the pine forests around me were clear-cut and turned into middle-class and working-class homes. My street went from mostly empty lots to no empty lots and commercial real-estate produced store after store and eventually a sprawling mall on both sides of Lakeland Drive.

I never thought of myself as being part of the white-flight movement, but here I sit in the middle of thousands of white-flight refugees from Jackson. The only bright spot in this development is the refugees aren't all white. There are a lot of middle-class and working-class black folks out here was well, far more than similar developments in Madison county.

My heart was always with Jackson though, and I'll always consider myself a Jackson boy. Some people say I should move back to the city and I've given it a lot of thought. I still like being on the water though, and I hate moving, so we'll see what happens. This isn't the trip I signed up for though. I'm not white-flight, although I do find myself in the middle of many who are. Either way, I'm not all that happy about the way things turned out.

Race in Municipal Politics

2009-05-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

There really are just two points of view when it comes to race.

The liberal point of view holds that race is just a social construct and we're better off trying to overcome and ignore these differences.

The conservative point of view basically says "my side comes first and the rest don't matter. They're probably inferior anyhow."

During the civil rights movement you saw both sides emerging in the black community. Martin Luther King Jr was a liberal and tried to work for a color-blind society. Malcom X headed a more conservative movement that really was only concerned with advancing people of African descent, not the whole culture.

If you have a problem seeing Malcom X as a conservative, remember he was a practicing Muslim and on pretty much every social issue Muslims are very conservative. His Nation of Islam followers might have espoused communism and socialism, but that really was just a means to the end of getting more economic and political power in the hands of ex-africans.

These opposing positions are pretty well evident in today's Municipal Elections in Jackson.

There is an element who wants to work with white Jacksonians and try to encourage white business people to invest in Jackson. They're opposed by a faction who wouldn't be all that upset if all the white people left Jackson. They want all the power and control for themselves and couldn't care less what anyone else wants.

The problem with that second point of view is that we've been there before, only it used to be white people looking for total control where now it's black people. It was a bad idea then and it's a bad idea now. No community functions well with just one side controlling everything.

We've seen this cycle all over the country. As demographics change, white people move out of a city at first voluntarily because they're afraid of change, but in the middle of the cycle the growing black power base starts actually pushing them out to gain more power for themselves, then at the end of the cycle, as the city gets poorer and poorer, white business interests are able to move back in and buy up land at pennies on the dollar.

The right get richer and the poor get poorer and nothing changes. Somebody could actually break the cycle by working to keep a city racially balanced by encouraging white people to stay in the city and invest in the city, giving black politicians a tax base sufficient to actually do something to help their constituents with.

That's probably not going to happen in Jackson. From what I've seen there's a pretty strong movement to actually prevent white business people from investing in Jackson or getting involved in municipal politics. That's probably exactly what's going to happen. Most of these guys aren't going to go where they're not wanted, especially when there are successful suburban communities practically begging them to invest in their cities.

What really hurts is that poorer communities have a higher need for social services like police and fire protection, but as the tax base shrinks, the ability to fund these needs shrinks as well, making the quality of life in these poorer communities worse and worse and ironically, as black citizens gain political power, they lose the ability to do anything useful with that power because they're no money in the budget.

The logical move would be to really push to keep middle class people, white and black, living in the city to keep the tax base high enough to fund needed projects in the poorer side of town, but since that might dilute the political power of black politicians I don't see it happening.

I hate seeing Madison prosper while Jackson deteriorates. It's Jackson's legacy to make really bad decisions when it comes to race though, so maybe it's the future as well. Even though the races changed, the stupidity remains the same.

Chokwe Lumumba Makes History

2009-05-18T18:11:00.000-07:00

And so it begins...

If you've ever heard of this guy before, then you know there's never a dull moment around him. I kinna hope he wins just to see the Marshall Ramsey cartoons about him.

If you read his platform he's gonna bring the people jobs and justice and medical care and all sorts of great stuff if he's elected. He doesn't actually say how he's gonna do all this, but I guess that's not really important.

Lumumba is convinced white people hate him because he's black, when really they hate him because he's from mars.

From WLBT:

Posted: May 18, 2009 07:18 PM
Is Chokwe Lumumba a Democrat?

JACKSON, MS (WLBT)- Eleventh hour controversy surrounding Jackson's Ward 2 City Council race.

Democratic candidate Wydette Hawkins says he was shocked to see a YouTube video of his opponent, attorney Chokwe Lumumba, saying he is not a Democrat although he's running on the party ticket.

Lumumba is seen speaking to a group of people in which he says he's running on the Democratic party label only because he did not have to sign an oath to the party. And could not win as an independent candidate. The video was posted February 13th. Hawkins claims Lumumba is misleading the voters of ward 2. Here is a portion of that video and response from both candidates.

Video: "It's an election we intend to win. But there is no question we are not a Democrat like Barack Obama. We are not a Democrat period and I make that statement clear."

Hawkins: "He is running as a Democrat, but he has emphatically stated that he is not a Democrat. So my question is he misleading our people from day one and as a candidate I'm very concerned about it I'm bringing it to the attention of everyone."

We asked Lumumba, "Are you a Democrat?

"I am a Democrat. I am a Democrat, in that I believe the people be represented in the government. I believe in that I meet all the qualifications I am required to meet to list myself on the Democratic ticket," Lumumba said.

Lumumba says he is affiliated with the Mississippi freedom Democratic Party and that qualifies him to run on the Democratic ticket. He also says he intends to make history if he wins by creating a new political party.

Here's the YouTube video where he says he's not a Democrat:

80's Music Videos Are Just Weird

2009-05-17T13:16:00.000-07:00

80's videos are just weird. This video of Bonnie Tyler singing Total Eclipse of the Heart is a great example.

To look at this without the sound you'd think it was a horror movie. Choir boys with glowing eyes, who take flight for no apparent reason fighting a dozen dancers in Conan the barbarian leather costumes--and all with remarkably large hair.

I guess the choir boys with glowing eyes is a reference to the line "turn around bright eyes" in the song, but Holy Crap! These guys are worse than those kids in Village of the Damned.

Flying choirboys, leather clad half-naked male dancers: do you get the impression maybe the director was both gay and catholic?

Link YouTube

Welsh Girls Dream of Cowboys:

Bonnie Tyler is Holding Out For A Hero, but of all the heroes from British history, what Bonnie really wants is a cowboy.

I wonder if this is the same director that brought us the flying choirboys in Total Eclipse of the Heart. The production values on these videos are pretty high. Who knows how much they paid for the helicopter shots in the Grand Canyon.

I knew guys who would turn themselves into zombies staying up all night watching this crap on MTV. You really gotta wonder what the hell we were thinking.

Oh yeah, did I mention the glow-in-the-dark bull whips?

Link: YouTube

Ok, if there was any doubt Bonnie Tyler's director was gay, the greco-roman mud wrestlers in this one pretty much gives away the ending. Not only was he gay, he apparently did a lot of drugs too. Giant spider webs? Nurses from the blitz? What the hell is going on here? You'll notice her hair gets progressively bigger with each video. In this one it's just short of a full afro.

Link YouTube

Atheism and Ritual

2009-05-16T21:10:00.001-07:00

I used to say scientific atheists had everything they needed to be a religion except a deity and a ritual, then I realized they had the greatest religious ritual ever.

The scientific method is a ritual of prophesy. Lots of religions have prophesy rituals. They're a laid out set of steps, and if you follow them correctly and with due diligence then your reward is revelation of higher knowledge. Many of them include narcotics as one of the steps, and often the "higher knowledge" they receive is bullshit, but the form is essentially the same as the scientific method.

Children are taught the ritual of the scientific method at a young age. We even have festivals where children can display their mastery of the ritual called science fairs.

Most rituals appeal to some unseen mystic powers to make the process work. The scientific method appeals to the unknown rules of the universe to make it work. With religion, people often try to assign personalities to the rules of the universe, whereas scientific atheists believe the rules exist by themselves without any sentient force behind them. I can't tell you which is correct, but I have a problem with the concept of self-creating or spontaneously-creating rules.

Ancient mystics went to their oracles to find out why crops were failing and what to do about it, and today we repeat the same process replacing the oracles with scientists.

I don't think science ever intentionally tried to mimic religious behaviors. I think these patterns are just the way people work and we'll always repeat them no matter what our beliefs are.

In the end, science really is just an evolution of religion. I get pretty frustrated with scientific atheists because they present themselves as very separate and superior to religion when really they're doing the same things, just in a different way, and even then, sometimes the differences aren't all that great.

The Empathic Life

2009-05-15T23:51:00.000-07:00

I'm not psychic by any means, but I am empathetic. It's not that I can always tell what other people feel, but I almost always feel what they feel to some level.

I think we're all born with this ability, but learn to tune it out as we get older. If you watch small children, they laugh when other children laugh and they cry when other children cry, even if they don't know what they're laughing at or crying about. As we get older, these empathetic feelings get in the way of whatever we're trying to do or whatever we're trying to feel so we learn to block them out. They're still there though, always there.

The problem is that most of the time other people feel angry or annoyed or frightened or distracted and almost always lonely. Feeling those emotions of your own is bad enough, but when you share them from the people you encounter, it can become quite a burden.

It can be such a burden, that sometimes I prefer not to be around anyone at all. Feeling nothing but my own thoughts and my own emotions, although quite lonesome at times, is often better than sharing the suffering from the rest of the world.

A friend once suggested that I surround myself with happy, successful people and then I wouldn't mind sharing their empathetic experience. There problem there is that most happy, successful people don't usually feel that way, and if they do, they're often almost completely empty inside.

There is a payoff though. People do sometimes feel joy, love, laughter and beauty. Sharing these emotions with them can be a privilege. These things are valuable though because they're rare, and sometimes it can be a long dry patch between bright moments.

Sometimes I meet people whose need to share what they're experiencing is so great, that being around them almost crushes me. I let them do it though because I can feel how badly they need to share their experience, but it's pretty draining, and afterward I usually need sometime alone to recharge.

John Donne said "No man is an island", but he's wrong. All men are an island. We're close enough to signal each other and exchange goods, but ultimately we have to isolate ourselves to keep any identity at all.

Darwin's Reputation and Dark Matter

2009-05-14T19:01:00.000-07:00

Critics of Darwin like to say "evolution is only a theory", which is true, but misleading. Evolution is a theory as opposed to a hypothesis, but there's a heck of a lot of work which substantiates the theory.

I've seen supporters of Darwin who come back saying a theory is the "highest form of scientific thought", which isn't true, but is more accurate.

The highest form of scientific thought is a law. Laws are theories worked out to a point where we can model them mathematically and use these models to accurately predict outcomes. That's the difference between Newton's Laws and Darwin's theory. Evolution will probably never become a law. There are too many variables and too many aspects of the process we don't understand to ever become a law.

People generally credit Darwin with the idea of evolution, but the concept that life changes gradually over time from one form to another predates Darwin by some four thousand years. That concept on the formation of life is actually contemporary to the creation story in Genesis, although from another culture.

What Darwin brought to the table was this idea of Natural Selection as a mechanism to drive evolution. Darwin saw random chance as the initial movement in Natural Selection which is how he ran afoul of religious people. Had he said God motivated natural selection, the religious community probably would have embraced him.

Natural selection is a pretty solid concept and comes pretty close to something we could model mathematically. The aspect of random chance creates a problem though. The problem is time. Just relying on random chance in conjunction with natural selection, there hasn't been enough time since life began on earth to explain the variety of life forms we see now.

There has to be some other force or forces acting on evolution besides random chance and natural selection. I'm not saying it has to be an intelligent force (there's simply no evidence for that) but there has to be something, and if we knew what that something was we probably could develop mathematical models for evolution.

Even though there's no evidence for it, I happen to believe there is some sort of intelligent force driving evolution. It's probably not a kind of intelligence we currently understand though, which would prevent us from finding any evidence for it. It might be something much closer to the Greek concept of universal forms rather than the Abrahamic concept of God.

If you have trouble believing there are layers to evolution that are still invisible to us, consider this: science is only now becoming faintly aware of what they're calling Dark Matter and Dark Energy which we still have no way of measuring or perceiving but can only deduce its existence mathematically.

It'd be one thing if dark matter and dark energy were rare and distantly removed from us, but if current thinking is to be believed, dark matter and dark energy are far more common in the universe than the matter and energy we know. The idea that the most common elements of the universe are completely invisible to us and undetectable by us should really change your perspective on the very nature of reality itself.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy -- Shakespeare; Hamlet Act 1,

Sheriff McMillin Defends His Actions

2009-05-13T11:41:00.001-07:00

Recently Bert Case interviewed Sheriff Malcolm McMillin and asked if Karen Irby got preferential treatment after her accident and when she turned herself in for arraignment. Sometimes Bert asks the really hard-hitting questions everybody already knows the answer to.

It turns out, it does help to be rich and sort of a local celebrity when you get in trouble with the law. Gee, aren't you shocked? Mostly it helps with stuff that ultimately doesn't make a whole lot of difference though, like getting a deputy escort into the detention center to keep the media away and allowing a person to turn themselves in rather than sending a deputy out to bring them back in handcuffs.

What counts is what happens in court and preferential treatment is a sword that cuts both ways. She might be more comfortable in these early stages of the case, but there's no place in the country where they can try either the criminal or civil aspects of this case and the jury won't be prejudiced against the accused because of her wealth and privilege. The more she uses the privileges of her class, the more juries will resent her for it.

Lawyers know this, that's why it's always an issue over whether their client shows up in court wearing street clothes or an orange jumpsuit. On one hand, an orange jumpsuit might make the client look like a criminal, on the other hand, street clothes might make them look like they're getting preferential treatment.

It works like this: If you go to a restaurant and act like a big shot throwing money around and show your behind, yeah, you might get the best table in the joint and get seated ahead of everybody else, but it won't keep the waiter from sticking his thumb in your soup and you don't even wanna know what the cooks did to the steak.

It's the same thing with the law. Preferential treatment might help the defendant in some aspects of the process, but it hurts them in others which are actually much more important.

In the end I think the Sheriff probably did the right thing. Some people were denied the spectacle they wanted, but he also saved the county thousands and thousands of dollars in medical expenses by delaying her arrest. I think he did the right thing in keeping her initial processing from turning into a circus too. Some people at home might get a thrill seeing her do the perp walk, but it does nothing for the people who died.

Some may not agree with this, but Sheriff McMillin has a reputation for trying to allow even the poorest of people who go through his system some dignity in the midst of their ordeal. Some might say it makes him soft on crime. It suits me fine though, and I know of cases where he did it and the accused didn't have a dime to contribute to his campaign.

The Illusion of Justice and the Reality of Forgiveness

2009-05-11T23:32:00.000-07:00

Have you ever considered how much we spend on the concept of justice?

All over the world, hundreds of thousands are in prisons. Maybe even millions. We pass around lawsuits like Christmas cards and the people: police, lawyers, judges, clerks, wardens, secretaries, guards, bondsmen, on and on, every country has an army of people all trying to find justice.

And the armies. How many wars have we fought seeking justice? All of them? How many died fighting wars for justice? How much property destroyed? How many wounded inside and out?

The thing is: for all we've done to find justice, but have we ever done it? Even once? Did we even come close? Or, was it all just vengeance?

Tom and Ben get in a fight and Tom shoots Ben in the head. Whatever happens in the future, however wrong and illogical his thinking was, in that moment Tom thought he was justified in doing what he did. Only now Ben is dead, and whatever was happening between the two of them, now it's a matter for us all.

Justice is the one thing we can't have here. Justice would be to turn back time and make Ben no longer dead and have these men resolve their differences without injury. Because we can't go back, because we can't undo what was done, justice is something we'll never have.

Because we want only this justice we can't have, our mind slips back into the most primitive parts of our brain and brings forth the only answer we've ever known: revenge. "You killed him so now we'll kill you".

It's not justice. We had one dead person, now we have two. Even if we don't kill Tom, we have one dead person and another in prison or some other punishment we devise to satisfy this craving for revenge. That's not justice though, that's just two suffering people.

Jesus offers us an alternative. Instead of vengeance, he offers us redemption, mercy and forgiveness. You don't have to believe in Jesus to see this though. Logic will tell you these are superior choices.

No matter how much the beastly side of our brain screams out for it, logic tells us that punishment doesn't cancel out any transgression. You can't undo what's been done.

Justice is an illusion. We can never have it. Forgiveness though, forgiveness is real and available to us all.

Some of you may think, it's easy for me to talk about forgiveness because I've never been transgressed against. You're wrong. I've been sinned against many, many times and I've sinned many, many times as well.

This is hard. It goes against human nature to forgive, our nature cries out for revenge and only revenge. We're not bound to our nature though. We can transcend beyond it, if we choose to.

Andy Mullins Lecture about Jackson Schools

2009-05-11T04:09:00.000-07:00

Below is a video of a lecture Andy Mullins delivered to the Mississippi Teacher's Corps last year.

I first became aware of Andy when he was a history teacher and football coach at St. Andrews. He left by the time I was old enough to play on the high school team, but he did coach my brother and the boys seemed to really like him. Andy was really dedicated to education and soon drew the attention of a lot of people who were also interested in education, particularly former governor William Winter.

The lecture is to students with MTC who would be working in around Jackson and he gives them a really interesting, concise and complete evaluation and history of the educational situation in central Mississippi including issues of poverty, racism and white flight. If you're from or interested in the Metro Jackson area, you might find this a very interesting discussion.

In particular I enjoyed shot stories he tells about two guys from Jackson I always really liked. One is Bob Fortenberry who was the Superintendent of Jackson Public Schools most of the years when I was growing up. He was also an avid fisherman.

The other is Joe Lee Gibson who was a janitor at Millsaps College for many years. You really had to go to Millsaps in the 70's and 80's to know what Joe Lee was all about, but if you recognize the name, you'll enjoy the short bit Andy tells about him.

Video Link You Tube

Mississippi Teacher Corps Website

Starting the Horrible Machine for Karen Irby

2009-05-11T00:07:00.000-07:00

This week a pretty grotesque spectacle begins here in Jackson.

I suspect Karen Irby wants nothing more than to return to her old life, but because two people died from her actions, she'll be the center of a vast, horrible machine trying to find justice instead. Her life will never be the same.

I think justice really is just an ideal. It's a concept. We reach for it and we struggle for it and we devote whole portions of our society and culture to it, but it remains forever beyond our reach. Real justice would mean bringing the dead back to life or making the injured whole again. That's not possible though so we try and get as close as we can to it, which is usually pretty pitifully far away.

The process she'll go through is vile and dehumanizing and really quite beneath us, but it has to happen. We have to try and make things right, even if it is impossible. Vast amounts of money and energy will be spent prosecuting her and defending her but none of it will be any help to the dead.

Sometimes I feel really sorry for lawyers. They're only engaged when the worst of us comes out. They're the gladiators, pirates and garbage collectors of human frailty. We'd like to think they're Atticus Finch or Clarance Darrow, but most of the time it's not like that. Most of the time they're defending or prosecuting people who aren't bad, even though they are guilty.

Some will say, "whatever the legal system does to her won't be nearly as bad as what her actions did to two innocent people" and that's probably true. It is different though. The incident that caused these deaths was the result of just a few people acting, maybe just one, but what happens now with the criminal and civil process acts on behalf of us all and that makes it very different. Barbarism from the acts of one individual or a few is an apparition, barbarism on behalf of us all is a judgment of mankind.

This process Karen faces must happen because without it, the people of our society would seek justice on their own and that can only lead to chaos. We call it justice, but let's never forget it has a true name: vengeance. Calling it vengeance should help us remember that what happens now isn't a sport. It's not entertainment. It's cruel and ugly and it's a side of life we really should want to keep hidden, only we can't keep it hidden because we must know it's done without preference or favor.

Any of us could be where she is. We want to distinguish ourselves from her and say we'd never do that kind of thing, but we all do things that are stupid and selfish and could hurt innocent people, although for most of us it never happens that way.

Any of us could have been Daniel Pogue or Lisa Dedousis too, in the wrong place at the wrong time and suffering for it. So often that happens and there's nobody to blame, so when we do have someone to blame for the random suffering of innocent people, we make the most of it.

I can ask for mercy for Karen because I ask for mercy for anyone, no matter what they've done. No matter how upsetting the actions of one person may be, it's nothing compared to the terror of our whole society's wheels grinding in on one person, no matter how guilty they may be. This has to happen, but let's never forget how horrible it really is.

No Civility on the Internet News

2009-05-08T12:05:00.001-07:00

In the old days, I might read an article in the Clarion Ledger, and I might make an ugly comment about whoever they were writing about, or my friends might, but we never dreamed of letting anybody else know what we were saying. We'd even shut up when the waitress came to our table so even she couldn't hear our gossip or gripes.

We all do it. We have opinions about the people in the news , and we might want to say something unpleasant, but it's never intended for public consumption. It's just us blowing off steam to people we know. If people we don't know hear words like that coming out our mouths, it's actually quite embarrassing, or it should be.

At least it used to be that way before the news was on the web, and every story had a segment at the bottom where just about anybody could throw in their two cents no matter how vicious or vile.

I like reading the news on the web. It's more convenient for me and I don't have to muck around with a physical paper, but it shocks me when I read an article on the Clarion Ledger website and get to the end and see what people are willing to post in the comments section.

I know people always thought like that, but it was a very different deal ten years ago when they'd have to be satisfied with venting their bile at home rather than laying it out for the world to see. I wonder how many of these people would be willing to type these posts if their real name were attached to it rather than an internet pseudonym.

I think they forget that Jackson's still a fairly small community, and the people they spew such vitriol toward on those message boards have friends and family who read those posts.

It's actually pretty cool that regular people can now add whatever comments they want to a news story, but have a little class about it will ya? And for heaven's sake, don't attack another poster for their comment while you're making yours. The whole point of the thing is to let people say what they want to say, not start a riot.

Some people say the C/L should moderate the comments more carefully, but that's no good either because then somebody has to go in and decide which comments to leave and which to cut and there's no way to do that without giving preference for people speaking from your own bias.

The answer is for people to remember that the internet acts and feels like any other avenue of social discourse and act like it. Ask yourself how different your comments might be if your real name were attached to it.

Politicians Don't Lie

2009-05-07T11:26:00.000-07:00

We put far too much faith in our leaders.

Suppose a guy ran for Mayor somewhere, and as part of his campaign, he promised the city's professional sports team would make the playoffs if people elected him.

People really love their sports. Making that kind of promise should give a candidate enough votes to win the election, but the sports-loving candidate came in last place. Why is that?

Nobody believed him. They probably would vote for a guy who could deliver a spot in the playoffs, but most people know politicians can't really do much about sports, so the guy who promises wins on the field if he's elected mayor is either deluded or stupid or just lying.

This sort of thing happens every election though, and people fall for it all the time.

When you see a candidate promising things like more jobs and less crime, try and remember these are things politicians can't really do very much about. If they could, somebody would have done it long ago and these things wouldn't be problems anymore.

People have this blind faith that the right leader can do almost anything, but it's simply not true. Leaders are great, and a good leader can make a difference, but in the real world, individual people have far more control over what happens to them and around them than any politician ever could.

Lyndon Johnson energized America when he promised a war on poverty. For forty years we've acted on his promise and done our best to deliver on it, but statistically there's just about as much poverty now as there was when we started.

Johnson really did want to "do something" about poverty. So did all the people who followed in his footsteps. It's just not that easy though. What Johnson should have promised was to make life easier for poor people. That's a promise he could deliver on, and the way things turned out, that's exactly what we did. There's still as much poverty now as there was forty years ago, but it doesn't suck quite so bad to be poor.

Frank Melton is another example. Melton was elected on the promise that he'd "do something" about crime. He meant it too. Once elected, I never saw a politician try harder to "do something" about crime as Frank Melton. He was fanatical about it, and repeatedly put his own life and reputation and fortune on the line in the effort to fight crime.

If all it took was devoted leadership to diminish crime, then Jackson would be crime-free by now. That's not what happened though. Crime actually went up a little when Melton was mayor. It wasn't his fault though. In the real world, politicians simply can't do all that much about crime, no matter how much they may want to.

The only thing politicians can actually do to reduce crime is build really big prisons and put as many people in them as they can. Your city has less crime, but it also has a lot of people in prison who shouldn't be. Iran is a great example of this. They have far less crime than the United States, but the people live in constant fear of false persecution. Would you really want to trade your life for theirs?

We need politicians to administer our shared resources and make our laws. You have to be realistic about them though, and remember it's a lot easier to make promises than to deliver on them. Most of these guys believe what they say, they really do, but that doesn't mean they'll actually be able to do it. It's true what they say: when somebody tells you something that's too good to be true, it usually is.

Saying this is probably pointless though. The next time a Ronald Reagan or Barak Obama comes along, people are going to line up in the desert ready to be led to the promised land just like they always have. Try to remember this though. You're far more likely to make it to the promised land under your own guidance than by following anyone.

I Hate College Sports

2009-04-29T09:57:00.001-07:00

It's not just the corruption, or the vast scale of the corruption, or how invasive and pervasive, or even how everybody knows just how corrupt it is but still lets it happen, That's not why i hate college sports.

I hate college sports because everybody lets it happen because they just want their team to win. They're afraid if they do it right, if they do it the way it's supposed to be, they won't be able to compete and win.

It's the only reason I can think of. If people suspected there was academic corruption at just a small fraction of what goes on in collegiate sports, they'd call for a complete overhaul of the system.

What they don't realize is that corruption in sports almost guarantees corruption in academics. If a school admits an unqualified student so they can play sports, that's academic corruption. If a school "arranges" for athletes to pass their classes so they're eligible to play, that's academic corruption.

Go to your average college campus. Compare the facilities and budget they have for sports to the facilities and budget they have for the arts and letters. Compare the cost and age of the football stadium to the cost and age of the library. Worse than that, compare the number of people who go through the stadium to the number of people who go through the library. Now, tell me if you think corruption in sports doesn't lead to a corruption in academics.

You might say "it's boosters and donors who pay for the stadium", and that's probably true, but all that tells me is the people who support the school are more concerned with the football team then they are the academic life of the college.

If we allow the popularity of college sports to overshadow the academic life of the school, then we're contributing to the corruption, not only in sports, but corruption of the academic program as well. We shouldn't even be talking about the academic program vs. the sports program. Sports is an extra-curricular activity. It's supposed to be something you do in your spare time, with spare money, not become the life of the college.

I don't think you can repair college sports. Since the end of World War II, it's just gotten worse and worse and we're at the point now where the only way we can possibly change the trend is by shutting the whole thing down for a few years and starting over from scratch.

As a governing body, the NCAA is a joke. It should be shut down and it's members tried for misappropriation of public funds.

The American academy from Junior High all the way through Graduate school is rotten and corrupt and it's only going to get worse until we decide to put a stop to it and I can't think of a better place to start than with the most corrupt part of the whole system, and that's sports.

My Dream Production of A Midsummer Night's Dream

2009-04-28T20:52:00.000-07:00

Unlike a lot of directors, I've always believed Shakespeare's comedies should actually be funny. Actually, to be fair, most directors try to make them funny, but all too often, they're not very funny themselves, so the result is pretty boring.

The scripts themselves usually do have lots of funny bits in them, one only needs to present them in funny ways to complete the task. Therein lies the rub.

Most people try to make A Midsummer Night's Dream beautiful, even though none of the characters in the play act beautiful. Most of them are self-obsessed, boorish assholes--which is where the comedy comes in.

My dream project would be a film of A Midsummer Night's Dream. It would mostly work on stage, but, since it's a dream project, there are a couple of special effects I'd like to add, but probably not what you think.

TWO WORLDS
The play has two worlds. The human world, which despite having classic Greek heroes as characters, the people are petty and incompetent and have a much higher opinion of themselves than they should.

Then there's the fairy world. Here's where most directors go wrong. The fairy world is a sort of absurd reflection of the human world. If the humans have over-inflated egos, the fairies have insanely over-inflated egos. If the humans make stupid mistakes, the fairies make three-stooges level mistakes.

THE FAIRIES
Since it's a film project, I'd make the fairies actually fairy size, maybe a foot tall. This presents a slight problem when Bottom encounters Titania, but since he's enchanted anyway, it's no problem to shrink him down for the scenes of him amongst the fairies.

If the fairies are a reflection of the human world, then I'd have them create their world using found objects from the human world. A thimble might make a nice hat. A cup could be a wagon, a handkerchief a coat and so on. The fairies aren't beautiful. They have big noses and big feet and big ears. Their hair is a mess and they have no taste at all. They believe the are beautiful though, so the actors would have to present themselves like they were really grand, even though they're just ridiculous.

THE LOVERS
Usually there's a problem with the four human lovers. Most directors cast four equally beautiful young people which becomes a problem because four equally beautiful young people are basically interchangeable so there's no conflict (and no comedy) when they fall in love with the wrong person. The audience must have a sense of who belongs with who just by looking at them. That gives them some concern that they end up with the right lover.

Hermia and Lysander belong together and Helena and Demetrius belong together, but at the beginning of the play, Helena believes she should be with Lysander and Demetrius believes he should be with Hermia. Now, how do you make this funny instead of tragic?

Since these four are supposed to be teenagers, why not use high-school stereotypes? Hermia is a cheerleader, she could even wear a cheerleader outfit, and Lysander is the quarterback on the football team, he could wear a letter sweater. They have perfect hair and perfect smiles and in the Athens High School Yearbook, they would be the most beautiful couple. They're the kind of people who are so perfect, it's fun to hate them.

Since most of the comedy comes from Helena and Demetrius, why not make them nerds? Hermia calls Helena a "maypole" so maybe she's the tallest of the four, much taller than Demetrius. Demetrius should be short and scrawny. When he demands Hermia's hand at the beginning of the play, the audience should react like "dude, give it up".

Now, this set up gives you unlimited comedic possibilities whenever these four are on stage. Stereotypes are funny, no matter what anybody says, so just get over it. The adage "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" comes up several times in the play, and having Helena and Demetrius realize they're really hot for each other at the end plays into that.

THE MECHANICALS
What's funny about the mechanicals is that they're actors playing actors. There's a good bit of comedy already in the script, but there's much more to be had if you cast actors who match the type of actor each character represents. Then it becomes a matter of trusting them to find their own sensibilities about the character and the situation and develop the comedy already in it.

A director should probably spend more rehearsal time with the mechanicals than with any of the other sets of actors. I would look for people who are not only really good character actors, but also good at improvisation and use that improvisational sensibility to bring out the comedy. Fortunately, they are written as fairly mature characters, so you can hire fairly mature and experienced actors. Bottom is, of course, the plum role here, but any of the mechanicals have the potential of stealing the show so don't scrimp on these guys.

PUCK
A lot of people spend a lot of time on Puck, but Puck really is just the catalyst for the other characters, so don't over do it with Puck. He should be well spoken, of course, because he has that last soliloquy. Other than that, Puck tends to be the straight-man for other characters, so he should be a very generous actor.

OBERON AND TITANIA
I like the idea of double-casting Theseus and Hippolyta with Oberon and Titania. What's fun with that is you have them set their characters at level five when they're human, but level ten when they're fairies. What's funny about these characters is their egos, and since you're working with actors that shouldn't be a problem. The comedy is pretty broad here, so don't be afraid of going over-the-top when they're in fairy form. They should be loud and brassy and bossy and completely unaware of how completely incompetent and impotent they really are.

The other characters should react to them like they're sucking up to the boss, because they are. The fairies act very obedient and respectful when the king and queen are looking, but as soon as they turn their backs, the fairies show how they really feel about being ordered around like that.

CONCLUSION
I knew a fellow one time who was directing this play, and he told me he wanted it to be "a gay sexual fantasia". Those were his exact words. When I saw the finished product, that's exactly what he got and I can't tell you how dull it was. Thank god he cut out about twenty pages or I never would have made it all the way through. I don't pretend to think my interpretation is the ultimate version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, but I gotta think it'd be better than that!

I Hate Target

2009-04-27T15:36:00.000-07:00

I went by Target today because, although disillusioned long ago, I'm still fascinated by marketing and store design and when it comes to these things, particularly class position marketing, Target is the best of the best.

First you have to understand Target makes not the least pretense at reaching the straight male market segment, so my presence there is pretty alien, both for them and for me. I put on my NASA approved containment suit and forged ahead though, in the interest of science.

Target does an amazing thing. They make a living selling consumer goods and household products to women who consider themselves slightly better than Walmart. They have a men's clothing department, but that's only because, shopping for husbands and sons, women actually purchase more men's clothes than men.

Target walks a pretty fine line though, because their customers actually prefer the same brands offered at Walmart and Kroger, so Target has to offer them in the same price range. Since they don't have Walmart's volume, they're probably making less profit on these products than Walmart, even though they sell them for a few cents more. They also have higher per foot real estate costs because they put their stores in locations slightly more visible than Walmart.

To make up the difference, they add a few premium sections to the store. They can't have a premium clothing section because women are pretty particular about where they buy their clothes and the market segment they're going for wants their work and dress clothes to come from boutiques rather than mass marketers. They may be mass market boutiques, but let's not split hairs.

I think Target generates a lot of their profit from their confections, coffee, furniture, and linens sections. The one I went to even had a Starbucks at the front of the store, which is interesting because the Walmart down the street has a Subway in the same spot. When it comes to class marketing, Subway vs Starbucks pretty much tells the whole story.

You could never have a Target for men. Most men simply aren't as attuned to the fine striations of class as women are. Not all men are immune to this type of marketing, but usually the stores who market to men that way are much smaller and locally owned and usually restricted just to clothing. People who try class marketing in typically male stores like hardware or electronics usually fail. They're still out there though, but their customer base is pretty small.

The only stores that have much consistent luck at class marketing to men are some brands of automobiles and sometimes Apple computers. At Lowes or BestBuy though, they actually shun class marketing because they know it could drive many of their customers away, regardless of their income.

Although I recognize class and all it's machinations in human society, I tend to think it's bullshit, so I usually think of class marketing as a fine, seven-layer, serving of bullshit too. One day, I think people will come to realize that all these folks who serve them by observing class distinctions are really manipulating them and there'll be some sort of backlash against it. Until then, I'll visit stores like Target occasionally, just fascinated to see what these people are up to now.

Telephone Pollsters

2009-04-26T15:58:00.000-07:00

There's been a lot of talk recently about Zata3's poll about the Jackson Mayoral race. Some say it's valuable and accurate, some say it's not, but what nobody's talking about is how really annoying telephone polls are.

I find it pretty dehumanizing for anyone to try and reduce my opinion to a point on a graph and damned annoying that anyone would call me saying they want my opinion, when they really don't. They want to know where I fall on their pre-determined graph, not what I think.

Many of these companies conduct their polls without human operators, but those who actually do employ live human beings give them a script that reduces them to a mechanical operand so they might as well be a computer.

If a computer-controlled, recorded pollster calls, I just hang up. I refuse to have a telephone conversation with a non-biological entity saying it wants my opinion when it's incapable of even understanding what human beings are.

If I'm lucky enough to get a human operator, I generally find it terribly unfair that they want me to give them information, but they won't give me any, so I turn the tables on them.

First I ask who they work for. I think they may actually be required to answer that question. It's a matter of ethics really.

Next I'll ask who their client is. The poll company isn't calling for their own sake, they make money collecting opinions for other people. Most of the time, they won't tell me who their client is.

If someone's calling to get information, "who wants to know?" is a fairly logical response, but usually the pollster doesn't want us to know who's probing our psyche so they won't say. I find it terribly unethical for someone to know who I am and try to gather information from me, but remain unwilling to say who they represent. If they refuse to answer, then I usually hang up.

Most pollster calls never get past the second question. If they do, then I hit them with a third question and so far nobody has ever gotten past that. "And what is your name?" I ask.

It's a reasonable question. They have my name, my telephone number, and god-knows what other information about me, but you'd be surprised how many don't want me to know their name. If they do give me a first name, then I insist on knowing their last name.

I've never actually had one give me their last name. One went so far to say it was a matter of security. "Matter of security?" They call my house, but I'm unable to find out who they are as a matter of security? What am I going to do? Call them at their house just like they've called me at mine?

I suppose there is some useful purpose for opinion polls, but when it comes to politics, I prefer the actual ballot itself, which is the only opinion poll that really matters.

I Hate Andy Warhol

2009-04-26T11:16:00.000-07:00

I never much cared for Andy Warhol. His contemporaries like Andrew Wyeth and Jackson Pollock did amazing things working with the traditional elements of painting like, form, line, light, color, and texture. Warhol had some mastery of these elements, but no more than the average art student.

The primary element of Warhol's work was culture. By presenting us with a rectangle full of familiar images, he re-contextualized the television experience. Television though, constantly contextualizes itself, so Warhol didn't really add anything.

People are more likely to buy a painting if there's somebody famous in it. Artists have been doing this for thousands of years. You can go down to Jackson Square in New Orleans this very afternoon and find a couple dozen artists doing exactly what Warhol did in that respect.

The art movement attributed to Warhol would have happened without him. The television experience was already producing dozens of artists doing exactly what Warhol did. By the time he retired, there would be thousands. Now that his techniques are fairly easy using a computer, there are millions.

Warhol's fame comes mainly from being at the right place in the right time. The New York art scene has a way of propagating and inflating bullshit to mammoth proportions and Warhol became its beneficiary. His work and his personality made him, effectivly, the Perez Hilton of his day.

I'm glad we live in a world where an artist can become as famous as Andy Warhol; I just wish it'd happen to better artists. My suspicion is that better artists would shun the social situations Warhol thrived on, and since those social situations are probably the biggest part of Warhol's fame, it's probably unlikely that a better artist will ever achieve his level of noteriety, at least in their lifetime.

The Cockroach: Victim of Our Perception

2009-04-26T10:02:00.001-07:00

I sat on my deck yesterday and watched a cockroach climbing on a tree. It was one of the big European cockroaches people hate so much, and it made me think about how limited and how selfish our perspective really is.

The first thing you have to understand is cockroaches are remarkable and beautiful animals. Clean and efficient, they are perfectly suited for their environment. Their bodies have evolved to the size and shape and color of a pine bark nugget, which is good because their preferred environment is pine forests, which is why they're so common in the South.

We hate them, not because of they're ugly or dirty or carry disease or are dangerous in any way. None of that is true. We hate them because they inadvertently enter our homes. We'd hate bluebirds and unicorns if they occasionally showed up in our kitchens.

The reason we don't find bluebirds and unicorns in our kitchens is because they're not able to get into the house because of the doors and windows. Cockroaches, on the other hand, evolved to navigate small spaces and crevices so windows and doors are no obstacle for them. I doubt they even know they've gone from "outside" to "inside" out homes, since the concept of "house" probably doesn't mean anything to them. To them, it's just another pile of dead wood, and for them piles of dead wood is where they find food.

Because cockroaches are food for other creatures in the forest, they evolved to hide in the shadows and either run or freeze when they detect large movements. That makes them extra creepy to us because they remain hidden when we're moving, cooking or cleaning or doing things around the house, but they come out when we settle down to eat or watch television. We see it as an invasion, but they see it as simply a sign of "all's clear".

It's doubtful cockroaches even have a very good sense of who or what we are. Their eyes can't focus so they probably don't have any idea at all about our shape or form. Their minds can't comprehend the idea that we built the structure they're in. As far as they know, our homes are just another part of the forest and we're just another large animal moving about the forest, like a cow or a triceratops. (Yes, they are old enough to have experienced the triceratops.)

Most people probably won't read this article because of the title. If they did read it, there were probably moments when they experienced completely unnecessary senses of revulsion. That's how much a slave to our own perceptions we really are, even though we have the mental capacity to see beyond them. Our crazy perceptions make us believe these completely innocent and beautiful creatures are disgusting and close to evil simply because they are inconvenient to us.

Consider this: Raccoons eat cockroaches. If raccoons lived in houses, they might see the occasional entry of cockroaches as a surprise gift. To them, cockroaches would be beautiful and delightful, not repulsive and ugly. For us, it'd be like coming home and finding a ripe, red apple sitting on the counter.

100 Years of Magic Drawings

2009-04-25T13:38:00.000-07:00

Sometimes artists many years apart have similar ideas.

Below is J. Stuart Blackton's The Enchanted Drawing, produced in 1900

YouTube

Over one hundred years later, Dutch artist Evelien Lohbeck updates Blackton's idea to incorporate modern technology.

Noteboek from Evelien Lohbeck on Vimeo.

A Vision For Millsaps

2009-04-24T20:08:00.000-07:00

One thing I keep hearing about this fight between the president and faculty at Millsaps is that some people worried the president didn't have a vision for the college. I've been worried Millsaps might lack vision too, but I don't blame Dr. Lucas for it.

The American Academy as a whole has gone so far afield of its stated purpose that I don't see how any college comes up with a meaningful vision for itself.

What people want from the college experience is to get themselves or their children into the middle class. There's actually no direct connection between academics and the middle class so colleges all over the country struggle to find ways to make themselves relevant to what people want from them.

My dad once told me "Americans want the University system for their colleges, but they're not very interested in the University Ideal. Most of them don't even know what it is."

His solution to the issue of a vision for the college was to build up the business and pre-med. departments which actually do help students enter middle class lines of work. It worked great for a while, but before too long all of the colleges we compete against developed the same plan. Dad died before he could figure out what the next step might be. He had some ideas, but none of them were developed enough to deploy yet.

Several colleges Millsaps' size decided to pick one side of the culture war and turn that into their vision, making the college a sort of extended boot camp for the left or the right. The culture war doesn't particularly have anything to do with academics, but it has everything to do with the middle class life, so it was a successful move for them. I would never attend a college like that, and I question what those parameters do to their academic integrity, but I can see their point and if that's what they want out of life, then I suppose that's the kind of college they should have. It's a steaming pile of bullshit though, and I just wanted to go on the record saying so.

Major Millsaps had a great vision for the college and we've made good use of it for over a hundred years now. The problem is, most Americans don't really care all that much about that sort of thing, no matter what they say.

If you ask most people how their alma matter is doing, they'll say how the football team did last year, or how many pledges their fraternity got, but ask them what's happening in the academic life of the college and they haven't a clue. When was the last time you heard somebody say "Wow! Dr Moore presented a great paper on the Peloponnesian War last month. I'm SO glad I took her class."

That's what college is though folks. It's not football teams or fraternity life or manicured campuses, it's the pursuit of knowledge, only we've gotten so far away from that, nobody really cares anymore.

Our motto is: "Ad excellentiam", short for "Ad excellentiam consequendam", or "In Pursuit of Excellence". The excellence it refers to is academic excellence, which is a pretty good vision for any school, if you can keep up with it. The problem is that the pursuit of excellence in knowledge for its own sake isn't what most people really want anymore. You can't have a college just for academics. Nobody will support it.

They want a three bedroom house, with two and a half baths and granite counters. They want a winning football team and their candidate to win the election. They want their favorite show to stay on the air. They want the blind kid to win American Idol. In a land of such rampant mediocracy, can you really blame Millsaps for struggling to come up with a relevant vision for itself?

I say college education, since the war, has become so a matter of course, and such a fashionable necessity, for those either of or aspiring to the vast middle class, that we espouse it as a matter of right, and we have ceased to ask, "What is it good for?"
--David Mamet, Oleanna; 1993

The Ghosts Among Us

2009-04-23T17:27:00.001-07:00

As a lot of you may know, Millsaps is going through some turmoil right now. This is pretty hard for me because Millsaps was always part of my life and will always be really close to my heart.

I'm really having a hard time resisting the urge to call my dad or call my mom to talk about this. I know they're gone, but I guess they're still such a big part of me that I still really feel like I need to talk to them.

I guess, no matter how long somebody's been gone, if you still love them, they're never completely gone from inside you.

The God Box Paradox

2009-04-23T00:26:00.000-07:00

Suppose I gave you a box. A simple cardboard box like a gift box without the wrapping and a simple cardboard top.

Then I told you, inside the box was all the proof you ever needed and all the information you ever wanted about God. There's just one catch: if you ever open the box, it'll be empty. So long as you keep the box closed, then it's full of the most amazing thing you could imagine, but if you open it, there'll be nothing.

Would you believe me? Could you believe me? If you believed me, could you keep from ever opening the box, just to make sure? Would you shake the box and weigh the box and put your ear next to it, hoping for some clue about what's inside?

If you believed me, how would it change your life to know you had this box with all the mysteries in the universe inside, but you could never open the box and see them.

That's what faith is like. You have a box, and you believe a bit of God is inside the box, but if you ever open it, if you ever try to prove to yourself there's something in the box, there will be nothing in it, but as long as you keep the lid on, it's the most amazing box possible.

It doesn't mean there's nothing in the box because you can't see it, it's that trying to see it will make you unable to see it, but if you accept that you can't see it, then you'll always know it's there.

That's why there are atheists. They opened the box and, just as I predicted, they found it empty. So now they say the box was always empty. Surprisingly, many atheists have no trouble understanding the paradox of Schrodinger's Cat, but they'll just laugh at my God Box paradox, even though it's the same idea.

Some people will say you can prove God's existence without opening the box, but they're wrong. Trying to prove God makes the box empty no matter what you do. The only way to keep the box full is by accepting you can never open it. So long as we know we can open the box any time we want to, but are willing to keep it closed, then we're able to keep God with us forever.

So, what about you? What would you do if I gave you a box?

The Bully Bullshit

2009-04-22T12:34:00.000-07:00

Kids are pretty smart and they're pretty good at knowing when we're feeding them bullshit.

We tell kids to avoid bullies and gangs, but then we send them to school where the biggest gang of bullies are on the payroll. The teachers and administration have one simple rule for kids: do as you're told or else! If that's not a bully, then I don't know what one is.

Kid bullies might cause temporary discomfort with wet willies, wedgies and purple nurples, but that's nothing compared to the punishment the adult bullies dish out with suspension, expulsion, failing grades, sitting in the corner, running laps and more.

When I was a kid, it didn't take me very long to figure out this was bullshit in its truest form. A lot of times, I had a better understanding of the material than my teachers. They'd been repeating the same data for so long that it ceased having any real meaning to them.

To me, it was new and exciting and I wanted to know more, but the teachers wanted me to follow their set pattern of exercises and tests and hoops and carrots and if I didn't, then I'd be in real trouble and then I'd get to see just how much of a bully these people were willing to be.

I wasn't very long before I said "screw that" and went my own way. My grades suffered horribly, of course, but learning was beautiful for me and I wasn't going to let these assholes, whose only concern was for me to shut up and do as I'm told, ruin it.

You see, life is easier for grownups if kids do as their told, whether it makes any sense or not. It's even in the bible. Leviticus gives parents license to stone children who don't obey. STONE them, as in: throw rocks at them until they're dead.

It sets us up for a life, even as adults, where everyone has a level of power where people with more power get to tell you what to do and you get to tell people with less power what to do.

We allow it because societies and classrooms must have some order to function and this is a fairly effective way to create and maintain order. There are other ways to achieve order, but they require more time and effort which generally boils down to more money, so we choose not to employ them, because they're just children after all and it's not like we get much return for investing in children.

It's not just about money though. I went to the most expensive schools in town, and even they were convinced this was the best model for teaching children. There are other models out there, but in the U.S. only people with extreme political or social issues use them.

Homeschooling and tutors are the oldest forms of education, but they require a pretty hefty commitment from the parents so they're the least employed. The European model requires the least commitment from parents. With fewer responsibilities at home, parents can then devote more time to the factories and fields, so most governments favor it.

Here's my proposal. We're far from full employment in this country. Most of these unemployed people could be pretty good educators with the proper training, and would do it if they could make a living at it. If we turned these people into educators, then we could tear down the militaristic European model educational system and build something that makes much more sense and works much better.

To pay for it would require a real commitment though. We could afford it if we reduced military and social spending by a third and ended the war on drugs. These are moves that would solve a lot of other problems as well.

None of this will happen for a million reasons though. I think the biggest reason is that people like the feeling of telling somebody else what to do. It makes them feel powerful, even if the person they're bullying is just a kid.

It's OK to keep doing what we're doing, you just have to always remember, there are better ways if we were strong enough to commit to them, and what we're doing now comes with a really big portion of steaming bullshit.

Republican Melt-Down 2009

2009-04-22T00:15:00.000-07:00

If you haven't noticed, the Republicans are having some sort of a melt down.

Part of it is just because they lost the election and there's always a purge after losing an election. Since they lost both the presidency and congress, this purge might be worse than most.

The other part is that the Republicans have always considered themselves masters of the economy and no matter how much people criticize their other stuff, they've always been able to point to that to justify themselves. When we went into a recession with the Republicans on watch, with some of their policies in the spotlight as the probable cause, it kind of threw them into a state of shock.

Normally a purge isn't that bad, but it creates a power vacuum and right now they don't have anybody to fill it, so they're dredging up some old horses like Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich. Both of them were pretty well discredited years ago though so their return is pretty impotent.

Some of the faithful have left the party and now call themselves libertarians. I can't see them really embracing most of the libertarian agenda though so that probably won't last. There's an outside chance they could end up taking over the party from the real libertarians, which would suck because they serve a useful purpose as is.

Historically, when a party is in power for a long time, they end to take things too far, so the electorate eventually gets tired of them and kicks them out. If you look at our history, this see-saw from left to right has happened several times, so rather than pull their hair out, the Republicans should probably use this down time to work on their fundamentals and clean up their act and just wait until it's their time again.

They could also work on their sportsmanship some too. Losing is part of playing the game and you have to take it with some grace or you come off looking like an asshole. The Democrats aren't much better when they lose, but it's never too late for somebody to come forward and start acting like a grown-up about it.

Sarah Palin Assaults Bigfoot

2009-04-21T04:01:00.000-07:00

For years, scientists have debated the existence of the mysterious creature said to roam the northern pine forests, but photographic evidence surfaced recently that proves without a doubt that Sarah Palin is real.

As presented in the Weekly World News, the beast once known as John McCain's running mate was captured on film after she shot and killed a native Sasquatch resident of Alaska.

Link: http://weeklyworldnews.com/celebs/2605/palin-bags-a-bigfoot/

Libertarians Vs Progressives. Who the Hell ARE These People?

2009-04-19T10:05:00.000-07:00

I've written before how the Democrats don't want to be called "Democrats" anymore, they want you to call them "Progressives". Well, now the Republicans have gotten in on the act and they want to be known as "Libertarians".

They're the same people they always were, with the same affiliations and the same beliefs, but they're not happy with the press their party received over the past few years so they're looking to re-brand themselves.

There actually already are Progressive and Libertarian parties, and I'm sure they're just thrilled with all the new members. Neither party has anyone elected to congress, so they must see this new-found popularity as a real opportunity. Ten years ago the Libertarian and Progressive parties had to join forces just to have enough people to field a softball team. Now, they're having to bring out the folding chairs so their new members have a place to sit.

These people who used to be Democrats will probably be shocked when they find out the biggest success the progressive party ever had were little programs known as Prohibition and Teddy Roosevelt's New American Empire.

The people who used to be Republicans will probably be shocked when they find out that, until recently, the biggest planks in the libertarian platform were the legalization of drugs and prostitution, making abortion more accessible and eliminating the FCC's decency regulations.

You see, Re-Branding is bullshit.

These people don't want to join a new party, they just want to get rid of all the negative baggage their old party carried around. It doesn't really work though because everybody knows it's the same old bus, just with a new coat of paint.

You see, parties aren't too good at achieving their stated agendas. What they are good at is achieving their member's real, hidden agendas, the ones even they are ashamed to admit.

The republicans say they want smaller government, but what they really want is power, so government grows substantially when the republicans are in office.

Likewise, the democrats say they want to help the common man, but what they really want is control, so life gets worse for the common man when the democrats are in office.

Both parties actually do their best work when they're out of office. The lack of power forces them to stick to their stated agenda, and a lot of times, that's when they make the most progress at getting what they say they want.

Curiouser and Curiouser

2009-04-18T21:39:00.000-07:00

Not an hour after I posted saying I was sorry for spreading the Susan Boyle meme and comparing her to Celene Dion singing the Titanic theme, and somebody sends me a link to Boyle singing that very song on Larry King live.

Link: YouTube

Who is Guillermo, Why I Twitter Him and Why You Should Too

2009-04-18T18:14:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things get really big and I have no idea why.

Twitter is probably the least useful of all the social networking sites, but right now it's all anybody wants to talk about. Likewise, Oprah Winfrey and Ashton Kutcher are people of really moderate talents, who, for some reason, amassed huge followings.

Recently, these massive but impotent forces combined. Kutcher challenged CNN to a duel to see who could get more twitter followers and beat them, only to have Oprah announce on her show that she was starting to twitter and have her twitter followers suddenly challenge Kutcher's minions.

I hate mob mentality. It just goes against everything I'd like to believe about human beings.

To battle these evil forces, I'm trying to get everyone I know with twitter to follow Guillermo Rodriguez, the parking lot security guard from the Jimmy Kimmel show. Just follow this link http://twitter.com/IAMGUILLERMO to begin following.

Even if you don't use twitter, join now and start following Guillermo, just to show the world how much you hate Oprah and Ashton. It'll also give you an idea of what the twitter experience is all about and why it's just...bullshit.

Sorry I Infected You

2009-04-18T17:35:00.000-07:00

Last week I inadvertently exposed you guys to the latest internet viral meme.

Susan Boyle, also known as the ugly Brit who can sing like an angel, was seen originally by an estimated eleven million viewers of Britain's Got Talent, then her segment was posted to YouTube where in just a few days various copies of it received over twelve million hits.

That's just the beginning though. As I write this, five of the top twenty videos on YouTube are copies of the Boyle video. At this rate, she should be bigger than Chocolate Rain and the Star Wars Kid combined in less than a week.

Back in the real world, Boyle is getting some compensation for her internet fame as requests for interviews roll in, including one for the coveted Oprah Show.

I apologize to any of you who read my post and have since gotten really, really tired of seeing the same video, over and over again. Just because I was an early adapter doesn't mean I didn't contribute to this really pernicious viral meme.

Rest assured, the Susan Boyle video won't do any harm to your computer, but you may soon start having a negative reaction to hearing her sing, the same way people eventually started reacting to Celene Dion singing the Titanic Theme.

For more about the Susan Boyle phenomenon, check this news story.

The Last King of Scotland

2009-04-15T19:23:00.000-07:00

I'm fascinated by Africa, both its history and its present, although I have to admit, most of it I don't understand. Americans, both white and black, know and care very little about the history of Africa and there isn't all that many works available about it, so I was pretty excited about the film The Last King of Scotland.

In most movies about Africa, the actual African people are usually less important to the plot than the wildlife or the scenery. There are a few exceptions though, and The Last King of Scotland is one of them.

The film is historical fiction. Some of the people and events are based on history and some are made up. Set in the 1970's Uganda, that presents an unusual problem in that it's pretty hard to know what was real and what wasn't.

It tells the story of the first part of Idi Amin's presidency. Amin is thought responsible for killing an estimated 100,000 to 300,000 people in Uganda. Just the fact that there's a 2/3 margin of error in these estimates gives you some idea of what must have gone on in those days.

Because the film and the novel it came from were intended for a western audience, there had to be a western guide to the utterly alien world of African culture so they created the fictional character of Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, a Scottish national who travels to Uganda after medical school to minster to the villages, but ends up as the personal physician to the new dictatator, Idi Amin. Garrigan was fictional, but most of the other characters in the film were based on real people.

I've watched the film twice now and it's still very difficult for me to take it at face value because so many of the forces that shaped the modern world also shape the film itself. It's impossible to tell if the characters shape this story, or if they're just floating on the waves of historical and social issues that make up the fabric of Uganda in the '70's.

If you come to the film without knowing the history, it's a fantastically powerful human drama, and a true tragedy in the original Greek sense of the word. You see hubris change a man who truly loves his country and his people turn into an ogre and slave to his own insecurities and ambition.

If you come to the film knowing its history, then it's all those things plus an intricate piece of the puzzle that is modern Africa. To give you an idea how difficult it was to divorce the story from it's history, the climax and end of the film occurs right at the beginning of the infamous raid on Entebee, that so shaped the course of the modern conflict over Israel. To bring it back to the world of cinema, there are four other entire films that begin at the very end of The Last King of Scotland.

Forest Whitaker was nearly buried in an avalanche of awards and nominations for his portrayal of Amin, including the coveted Academy Award for Best Actor. He struggled mightily to humanize a man remembered in history for atrocities approaching the levels Hitler or Stalin. Part of his struggle was knowing how the white, western world uses stories like Amin to dismiss Africa and Africans as hopelessly savage and alien.

I think he's wildly successful in his portrayal, although it gives us no clues how to respond to what's going on in Africa, even today.

If you're wondering about the title. Uganda was once a colonial holding of Great Britain, as is Scotland. As a young man, Amin took a job as soldier for the British African Corps and the officers of his unit were all from Scotland. Amin saw similarities between Scotland and Uganda, which, ironically obtained it's independence from Great Britian before Scotland. During his presidency, Amin sought to wring out the forces of colonial control in Uganda and make it stand on its own. He never forgot his Scottish friends though, and offered himself as the new King of Scotland to help free the Scottish from Great Britian as he'd done for Uganda. He even invited himself to visit the Queen to discuss the matter, but she declined.

How to Stop the Haters

2009-04-13T00:58:00.000-07:00

When you see people like the Westboro Baptist Church do really crazy things, one has to wonder what in the world they hope to accomplish with their outrageous antics.

Their stated goal is to make the United States stop allowing homosexuality, stop allowing any non-christian activity and become something the United States never was and never was intended to be. Even though they say this is what they want, you have to think they know this is highly unlikely, if not impossible: so, what is it they really motivates them?

Since they can't logically get what they say they want, shouldn't they just give up and go away?

The same holds true for most terrorist organizations. When Al Qaeda does something outrageous, they usually follow it up with a list of their demands. If you read what they want, immediately you recognize that it's just ridiculous. They'll never get what they want. Some of it isn't even possible and surely they know their actions will only make us angry and make it that much less likely that we'll ever give what they want.

First you have to recognize that what they say they want isn't what they're really after. They'll give us a list of what they think we should do, but they know we'll never do it.

That doesn't mean their activity is fruitless though. Attacking us raises their status among their own peers, who also hate us. Attacking the U.S. or protesting the funerals of U.S. servicemen might make you a pariah in the U.S. and even hunted by our forces, but among their small social band, it makes them look extra brave and highly devoted to the cause.

This situation is especially true when you're dealing with a pretty small group like the Westboro Baptist Church, which is really just one extended family and not even all of them are in the group. With a small group, their hopes and goals and actions can get so far afield of the larger culture that they might as well be from Saturn.

Look at the Manson Family. They knew those murders weren't going to change the country or eliminate the people they called pigs, but participating in the murders raised their status among their demented little community to an almost god-like level.

Teenagers do the same thing. As adults we scratch our heads when teenagers skateboard down a flight of concrete steps, busting out a few teeth and breaking their arm. It was a completely stupid thing to do. So why do they do it? Because other teenagers think it's cool. Risking their necks for something completely pointless and stupid makes them a hero to their peers.

With adult groups there's another motivation as well. They might not get what they say they want, and they might not get but a very few converts, but there are enough people out there who also hate homosexuals or hate Americans who might lack the courage to actually do anything about it themselves, and they may not want other people to know they think that way, so they'll send these folks a few dollars. They're certainly not getting rich, but they do bring in enough money that way to continue doing what they're doing.

So, when you run into people like this, keep in mind they want radical confrontation. That gives them the most brownie points with the people back home. The best way to get rid of these people is by not giving them what they want. Embrace them. Love them. Don't even mention that you don't agree with them. Getting hugs from the opposition gives them zero clout with the folks back home. If we stop feeding their true desire, then pretty soon they'll pack up and go home, which is what we really want.

Ego, Confidence and Ability

2009-04-13T00:14:00.000-07:00

There are three scales that control pretty much everything in a person's life.

The first is ego and the second is confidence and the third is ability.

Ego is a measure of what you think you deserve. On one end of the scale, you're worthless and should be swept away with the trash. On the other end, you're god himself and should be worshiped by everyone.

Confidence is a measure of what you think you can do. At one end of the scale, you're helpless and hopeless and should live in an institution where people can take care of you. On the other end of the scale, you're superman and can do way more than anyone else on earth.

Ability is the measure of what you really can do. That one's really hard to determine because ego and confidence tends to pull it in opposite directions. You think your ability level is completely different from where other people see your ability level which is completely different from you actual ability level.

Ideally, you'd think these scales should balance each other where what you think you deserve matches what you think you can do and what you actually can do. It's usually not that way though.

These scales can get way out of whack with each other. People with really huge egos can have really low levels of self-confidence. They set themselves up for failure. They think they deserve everything, but their ability is just average so since they don't get what they think they deserve it makes their confidence sink like a rock.

People can get out of whack in the other direction too. Some people have really high confidence levels, but really low ego levels so they never really accomplish as much as they could, because they're convinced they'll never get anything in return.

Sometimes, both a person's ego and confidence levels can be much higher or much lower than their ability levels, so they end up just lost and confused most of the time.

As we get older, these levels do tend to balance out and meet each other, but, boy, does it take a long time and it can be a really painful process.

The best advice here is probably what your parents and teachers and others told you when you were a child. Push your ego down as much as you can. Push you confidence up as much as you can and seek with patience to discover your real ability.

The Ugly Cover Is Beautiful

2009-04-11T23:26:00.000-07:00

48-year-old Susan Boyle is funny looking. Hair like a freight wig, pudgy, a little mustache and eyebrows like a neanderthal, but she has a secret no one would ever guess.

When Susan went on Britain's Got Talent, she told producers she'd never had a boyfriend, never been kissed and lived alone with her cat.

She walked on stage and as soon as Simon Cowell saw her, he was ready sweep her off the floor with the fleas and fur left over from the dog act that went before. You could see him already calculating the hurtful comments he'd throw her way soon.

She said she wanted to be a professional singer like Elaine Paige, and the whole audience chuckled. "This poor woman is so deluded", they thought.

And then she sang....

You really have to watch the video below to appreciate this woman's performance. With the first sound out of her mouth, the judges and the audience gaped in awe. The sheer beauty of what she could do swept over them like a wave, washing away the snide cynicism and judgmental attitude they held just a moment before and bathing them in real joy.

Even the judges gave her a standing ovation (two of them anyway).

They say you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover. We all know it, but we all do it. Every so often though, you'll run across somebody like Susan Boyle who shows you the truth of that adage in a way you'll never forget.

Link: YouTube

Unintended Consequences: Tea-Bagging Washington

2009-04-11T16:28:00.000-07:00

A lot of people on the right don't much care for how much money Obama is spending. No surprise there. They worry that all this spending will lead to tax increases above the ones he's already recommending. Well, Duh.

To register their discontent, some thought it'd be a really cool idea to model their protest on the Boston Tea Party. So far so good, only not so good...

To begin with they had the idea of sending actual tea-bags to Washington. Remember how after 9/11 there was a crazy guy sending out letters with anthrax in them? It seems folks in Washington take a dim view of anyone sending bags full of unknown powders to the capital building and sending said bags to your congressman might prompt an unannounced visit from the FBI, so then they got the idea of cutting off the tags from the tea-bags and sending those or taking pictures of the tea-bags and sending those, only some people decided to email them and the whole thing just started to be kinna lame.

...And then there's this problem with the word "tea-bag". If you're fifty and republican, then you probably don't know that "tea-bag" is a word used to describe a practical joke and a sex act, a homosexual sex act, and not a particularly wholesome homosexual sex act.

Organizers of the tea-party tax revolt tea party all around the country scratched their head in bewilderment when hipper, younger people burst into snickers and outright guffaws when they heard republicans talking about teabags and sending tea-bags to Washington or tea-bagging congress.

Sometimes, it's best to just quit while you're ahead. Having protests based on the Boston Tea Party might work out fairly well, but just leave anything involving tea-bags out of it.

The Reverse Sacrifice

2009-04-09T20:46:00.000-07:00

Nearly every religion has an element of sacrifice in it, but sacrifice isn't what you think; in fact, it's just the opposite.

When people sacrifice to God or the Gods, they say they're doing it to show submission and gratitude, but what they're really doing is trying to bribe the fates and obligate God to act on their behalf.

The idea is simple: people want God to not destroy them with a flood or a volcano or they might want a bountiful harvest and lots of children or they might want God to forgive their sins so he doesn't punish them, so they leave him a gift, food or money usually, with every expectation that God will take their gift and grant their wish in return.

Consider this: what use does God have for money or food? It's the priests who benefit from your sacrifice and they use their false authority to make people believe God will grant their wish.

Then the Jesus story comes along and turns this idea inside out. Instead of men sacrificing their valuables to God, God sacrifices his most valuable to men. He gives in sacrifice his own son, a sacrifice he kept Abraham from making so many years before.

Instead of men obligating God to them with their sacrifice, God obligates men to him with his sacrifice. We don't really know what it means when we say Jesus was God's only son, but we do know we have nothing to give in return of nearly that magnitude.

It wouldn't be long before Christian priests returned to the old ways and started accepting sacrifice on behalf of God again. The worst being the selling of indulgences in the middle ages. God's reverse sacrifice was too powerful a concept though and it never took very long for men to realize they had to set things right again.

I don't know if Jesus knew he would be God's sacrifice to man, but when he went to the great temple, he knew this idea of sacrifice to God was a scam and the money changers were the most obvious manifestation of the scam. Jesus profoundly wanted people to see through their own delusions to what God really was so he attacked the money changers, even though doing so put his own life at risk.

This idea that God sacrificed for us is hard because it's much easier if all we have to do is offer up a lamb or a dove and believe God will grant our wishes. It's not that easy though. God's not for sale. He wanted us to know the truth. He tried several times to show us the truth, but we always returned to the easier path, so God brought the story of Abraham full circle by offering to us what he wouldn't let Abraham give to him: his own child.

Unintended Consequences

2009-04-09T13:35:00.000-07:00

Sometimes things don't go as planned. Sometimes we do things hoping for one result but actually get exactly the opposite.

We've heard a lot about Unintended Consequences with the financial crisis and all the efforts to cope with it, but Cracked.com takes a lighter look at the same phenomenon.

In today's post, Cracked looks at five well-known public health campaigns that had unintended consequences and ended up accomplishing exactly the opposite of their original goal. They include D.A.R.E., England's Bully Beating Campaign, Nebraska Safe Haven law, California's Healthy Lunchbox Program, and The Phillip Morris Talk: They'll Listen campaign.

Cracked.com is all that remains of Cracked Magazine, which those of you who grew up when I did, might remember as a blatant rip-off of Mad Magazine. Print is dead so Mad evolved to television and Cracked went to the web.

Link: http://www.cracked.com/article_17224_5-retarded-health-campaigns-that-backfired-hilariously.html

There's Something Strange in Loch Ness

2009-04-09T03:30:00.000-07:00

Filmmakers for the History Channel's MonsterQuest recently discovered something totally unexpected in Scotland's famous Loch Ness.

Using remote operated vehicles to film underwater, Mike O’Brien of Louisiana-based SeaTrepid LLC was hoping to find evidence of the Loch Ness Monster when his cameras showed something else...

Golf balls, thousands and thousands of golf balls.

Besides mysterious lake monsters, Scotland is famous as the birth place of golf. Apparently locals and tourists have been using Loch Ness as a driving range for some time now and evidence of their activity is building up on the lake's bottom.

Although the monster can probably handle it, there is some concern for other life in the lake as golf balls can emit toxins as they deteriorate. Even though the ecology is somewhat fragile, there is no plan to retrieve the golf balls yet because they're in a part of the lake that's too deep to use regular scuba equipment.

MirrorMask: A Jim Henson Fantasy

2009-04-08T21:22:00.000-07:00

Most of you are probably aware of the two fantasy films Jim Henson produced in the 1980's, The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, but many of you may not know there is a third Henson fantasy film, MirrorMask, released some fifteen years after his death.

MirrorMask is the dream-quest of Helena, a young girl who lives and works with a family circus until her mother falls gravely ill. Originally conceived as a sequel to The Labyrinth, MirrorMask is Helena's coming-of-age story. Although it has many of the same story elements of Labyrinth, MirrorMask uses them in much more subtle, but yet much more powerful ways. It's the story of Helena growing up: what she wants to keep of her life as a girl, what she wants for the future, what she wants from boys, and most importantly, her relationship with her mother. It even explores the relationship between artists and their creations.

Toward the end of his life, Jim Henson realized he had taken physical puppetry about as far as it could go and began experimenting with the then, new field of computer generated imagery. After his death, his children Brian, Lisa, Cheryl, John and Heather continued taking the company in that direction.

Although there are some physical effects in MirrorMask, they realize most of the film using CGI. Unlike most studios who use CGI just as an effect, The Hensons use CGI as an art in itself, just as their father used puppetry, and like their father's work, MirrorMask is a stunning and unforgettable visual experience.

Henson was most proud of how he used the work of a single designer (English artist, Brian Froud) in The Dark Crystal. For MirrorMask, his children chose to go the same route by using English artist Dave McKean. Like Froud's work in The Dark Crystal, McKean's art fills the entire universe of MirrorMask, sets, costumes, backgrounds and character design.

McKean's designs are quite different from Froud's. His work is more psychological and iconic and abstract. McKean's work is strongly reminiscent of Tim Burton and Edward Gorey, and like Burton and Gorey, most of his work begins as a pen or pencil sketch.

Since neither The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth did very well during their studio release and made most of their returns in VHS and DVD sales, the studio decided to have a limited theatrical run for MirrorMask and focus their efforts on selling the film in the secondary market. The plan soon fell apart though so the video release of MirrorMask received little, if any, advertising.

Because the marketing plan for MirrorMask collapsed, most of the people who might enjoy the film never heard of it, which is a shame since MirrorMask is every bit as good, if not better, than either The Dark Crystal or Labyrinth. You can still find the film on DVD though, and if you love fantasy films like I do, then I really, really recommend it.

Open to the Experience

2009-04-07T18:44:00.001-07:00

I've been laughing because Easter's coming and I have stupidly wounded myself in the palm of the hand. I call it my partial stigmata. It's not a very big wound, but it's right in the palm of the hand, just like you see in the paintings of Jesus.

I've had some really minor spiritual experiences in my life. To be honest, they could easily have been just my imagination. I've always been fascinated by the prospect of having some sort of major experience though, like a real stigmata or vision.

I've been something of an asshole at times, so I've never really considered myself a candidate. Guys like Paul or Buddha were much worse though, so I suppose it's still possible.

My first reaction would probably be to seek psychiatric help. I've been around people with real delusional emotional problems before and there's some of it in my family, so if I ever had a vision or anything like it, that would most likely be my first thought. Mohamed reacted that way at first, too. For a while he kept his visions a secret, but finally talked to his wife about it to see if she thought he'd gone mad.

Most of us go through life never quite sure about our purpose or direction. I have to think some sort of contact with a spiritual entity would make the answers to those questions a lot clearer. I've never really thought about spending my life as a prophet, but who knows, maybe it'd be really cool.

The great majority of humans go through their entire lives without anything even resembling that sort of experience, and of the few that do, many of them meet pretty unpleasant ends but I think it'd be worth a painful end though to have even one second's glimpse into the larger universe.

I've never really expected any sort of contact with the other side or another dimension, but I can't imagine anything more interesting or more worthwhile.

People have a tendency to follow anyone they believe had these kind of experiences. I wouldn't want that. A vision wouldn't change my opinion that people serve God best when they learn to follow themselves. I could be a witness or a messenger, but never a prophet who leads a flock.

If there are any spirits or higher entities out there reading my meager scribblings on the internet, try and make contact some time. I'm open to the experience. Tell me something I could never know any other way. Give me a glimpse of how you see the universe. Who knows, maybe I could make something of it that might help somebody somewhere someday.

Capitalist Overlord Reveals the Truth to Howard Beale

2009-04-06T20:46:00.000-07:00

Not long ago I wrote about my favorite scene in the movie Network. I neglected to mention that there are actually two incredible speeches in the movie. The first has Howard Beale challenging us to throw open our windows and shout "I'm as Mad as Hell!", the second has the great Ned Beatty as Arthur Jensen, the chairman of the board of the company that owns Beale's network.

It seems Beale has been too successful at revealing the truth about how the world works and is starting to challenge the hidden masters ability to ply their trade. Rather than killing Beale or simply taking him off the air, Arthur Jensen believes he can convert the television prophet to his philosophy so he calls Howard Beale into his office to reveal the truth about how the world works.

Link: YouTube

What's great about this is that both men are telling the truth and both are right even though they're saying exactly the opposite things. The *truth* is so complex and so diaphanous that sometimes the only thing you can do is present both sides and let people's minds try and mingle the two together.

Arthur Jensen: I started as a salesman, Mr. Beale. I sold sewing machines and automobile parts, hair brushes and electronic equipment. They say I can sell anything. I'd like to try to sell something to you.

You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear?

You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!

You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU...WILL...ATONE!

Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?

You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those *are* the nations of the world today.

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do.

We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that . . . perfect world . . . in which there's no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused. And I have chosen you, Mr. Beale, to preach this evangel.

Howard Beale: Why me?

Arthur Jensen: Because you're on television, dummy. Sixty million people watch you every night of the week, Monday through Friday.

Howard Beale: I have seen the face of God.

Arthur Jensen: You just might be right, Mr. Beale.

More Futility and Determination

2009-04-06T15:53:00.001-07:00

Last time it was a blond on an escalator, this time it's a hamster in a wok. (note: no hamsters were hurt in the making of this video.)

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=El0b0-hoU1k

Super Vitamin Ring

2009-04-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

Underdog's superpower came from a vitamin pill he kept hidden in his ring. Now you too can have Underdog powers with this hidden compartment Viagra ring.

Sweet Polly Purebred Gives it a thumbs up!

Futility and Determination On An Escalator

2009-04-06T11:22:00.000-07:00

Some might say this video demonstrates how blonds can't understand how escalators work, but personally I'm impressed with her determination to get to the top despite everything working against her.

She does eventually get to the top, but the same number of steps on a regular staircase would have taken her five times as far.
Link: YouTube

How to Pray

2009-04-06T10:30:00.000-07:00

We don't control prayer. We control only when we pray and how we pray, but only God controls when and how he answers prayer.

Too many people use prayer like letters to Santa Claus: "Dear God, I want this, this, this and this, and please hurry, I need them by next week." No matter how faithful you are, it just doesn't work that way.

There's a very good reason it doesn't work that way too. Suppose God really liked Tom, so he gives Tom a modest .5% return on his prayers. That is, God gives Tom what he prays for one half of one per-cent of the time.

One half of one per-cent doesn't sound like very much, but consider this: if Tom made one hundred prayers a day, with a .5% return on those prayers, in about a years time (depending on what he prays for), Tom can amass enough answered prayers to rule the world.

God wants us happy and successful, but he doesn't want us to use prayer to amass selfish power so he reserves for himself the decision on which requests through prayer to answer and which to leave undone. One could even argue that God tries to help us as much as possible whether we pray for it or not, so asking for things in prayer might be pointless.

When Jesus taught us to pray, he said we should only ask God to provide our daily bread and forgive our sins. By "daily bread" he means we should ask God for the most basic things we need every day. God must answer those prayers because nearly all of us who were alive last week are still alive this week.

There are times, like famines and droughts, where our daily needs aren't met and people literally die from want. If you look at droughts and famines historically, they're almost always caused by human greed or stupidity. Even then, there's always actually been enough food and water to go around, just not enough people willing to share their excesses with those who have none.

One of the great criticisms of faith is that there's no correlation between how often good and bad stuff happens to people and how often they pray. That's absolutely true. You can pray your church doesn't get hit by an asteroid, but it won't change the odds that it might.

Prayer isn't a super power. Being faithful doesn't mean you'll get stuff while the rest of the world goes without. Faithful prayer means you recognize all the things we need come from God, even though he doesn't require us to recognize him before he provides for us.

You can pray to get stuff if you want, but remember God knows both your needs and your desires even before you do, and only he decides whether to help you with these things, or leave you to get them on your own, or even to keep them from you, and he does it whether you pray or not.

Jesus gives us several ideas on how and when and why to pray and they all make a lot of sense. In short, Jesus says we should keep prayer simple, private and modest. I don't see how you can go wrong with that plan.

April Foolery From Google

2009-04-05T14:14:00.001-07:00

As you might have guessed I use some form of online services pretty much every day.

April 1'st greeted me with two stunts from services I use from google.

The first was a message in my GMail window saying "New! Gmail Autopilot" in the slot usually reserved for announcements from GMail labs about new features. When I clicked the link to check out the latest do-dad, it took me here: http://mail.google.com/mail/help/autopilot/index.html

OK, that's pretty funny. I especially liked the google auto pilot response to the Nigerian scam-spam mugu letter, then I realized a lot of new GMail users might not even know what a Nigerian scam-spam email was since GMail has become pretty efficient at filtering out this garbage. Still, a great April fool's effort.

Google wasn't done with me yet though. Next I checked my YouTube (a google owned company) account. For a second or two, everything looked normal--then suddenly the entire screen reversed. All the letters were backwards and in reverse order and the videos themselves were upside down!

Now THAT was impressive. You can't do it using regular HTML. They could only do it at all because most of YouTube is in shockwave which gives the author a lot more formatting choices.

Google has pulled April Fool's day pranks before but this year they really made an extra effort with different departments in the company offering different pranks. Besides Gmail and YouTube, Google had pranks hidden in their Analytics, gBall, Google Maps, Google Images, Blogger, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Code, Google Docs, Google Mobile and Knol services. I'm excited to see what they come up with next year.

White Flight Destroys Jackson

2009-04-04T13:26:00.000-07:00

Although there's not a lot of people willing to talk about it, the only real problem in Jackson is the same problem that hit New Orleans, Memphis, Birmingham, Atlanta and a number of other Southern cities and that's the white flight movement that began in the civil rights era.

Before the civil rights era, there were any number of immoral and now illegal mechanisms in place to keep black people out of the middle class and when they started to gain political but not economic power in the seventies, the almost all-white middle class decided they were no longer welcome in cities with a bi-racial power base, so they packed their bags and bought up little towns outside the city limits. Since they were the only people in town, the move gave them both the political and economic power they desired.

The move left cities like Jackson and Atlanta and New Orleans with a population overwhelmingly skewed to the poor and black who couldn't afford to relocate. Pretty soon, what black middle class there was began to move out of town as well making the problem even worse.

Cities work best when the middle and working classes are the largest and the poor and upper classes are the smallest. The white flight phenomenon, combined with the unnatural class distribution leaving most blacks either working class or poor, left cities with populations skewed to the poor and working classes.

The problem with this population model is that the poor and working classes require the most public services like police and public schools, but have the smallest tax base to fund it, leaving a real gap between the sources and needs of public funds. This gap between sources and needs materializes in the city with a spike in crime and school related issues like drop-out rates and low test scores.

At the moment, there's few constitutional ways of combating the problems of gentrification and white flight. I think you can legally and morally face the issue though, but first you have to be really honest about what the problem really is.

In the South, that means being willing to share power between white and black. Sharing isn't any easier when you're an adult than it was when you were in kindergarten, but it's still absolutely essential. More white faces among city officials in Jackson would go a long way toward slowing and reversing the white-flight trend. At the same time though, white residents have to be willing to accept black people in positions of power and not pack their bags for Madison when they see how black the city council is in Jackson.

This concept of a peaceful co-existence between races and cultures might be some sort of liberal pipe-dream of mine, but surely people realize the alternative can't last forever. Sooner or later, this pattern of black central cities ringed by white mini-cities is going to collapse in on itself.

Fighting Gorillas

2009-04-02T22:21:00.001-07:00

Last week I posted pictures of drunk gorillas. My friend Tracy responded that gorillas always scared her. Maybe this picture of two silverbacks fighting are why. The WWE got nothing on these guys.

Karl Marx Was An Asshole

2009-04-02T20:59:00.000-07:00

Recently I wrote about how conservatives in these troubled times are returning to their roots and re-reading Ayn Rand. In the interest of fairness, I'd like to also point out that liberals are showing a renewed interest in Karl Marx.

If you don't know, Marx was the evil genius behind communism and he was a real asshole. Despite his reputation as a humanitarian, the people who actually tried communism would tell you there wasn't much improvement between having the state own everything and the old system where the king owned everything.

Like Rand, Marx had no practical experience in any of the subjects he wrote about. He idolized Darwin but decided to forgo Darwin's extensive fieldwork and based his economic and political theories entirely on stuff he read in books.

It's not like people never gave Marxism a chance. Russia and China both tried Marxism, but the only way they could keep order was by killing tens of millions of people. Even hippies were barely able to eek out a medieval subsistence using Marxism, only made bearable by copious amounts of cannabis and lots of sex with hairy women. Marx called religion "the opiate of the people", never realizing how much actual narcotics his own system required.

Professional English asshole, Christopher Hitchens recently waxed nostalgic about Marx in his Atlantic Monthly article: The Revenge of Karl Marx. I could write a whole article on how Hitchens is an arrogant ass and pretty much wrong about everything.

To bring things full circle, I hear a lot of buzz among the republican zombies about how President Obama is trashing the constitution and ushering in an era of communism in America.

First off, Obama isn't trashing the constitution any more than any of his twenty predecessors. Compared to George W Bush, he's John Adams himself. The office of the president is far more powerful than the founding fathers ever intended, but that started some time before Lincoln and growing ever since.

Secondly, Obama isn't introducing communism. Communists take over successful, going companies to expand their power and install their social plans. Obama is taking over decidedly unsuccessful companies in what one could best describe as something of a super-power bankruptcy action for companies "too big to fail".

These companies could easily avoid any government aggression by simply getting their act together and not taking any government bailout money. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Obama's actions with these companies is an effort to calm people's concerns about the bailout process. People want to know this money is well spent so the government is getting involved to make sure these companies do fairly logical things like reducing salaries, which, by some twisted logic, they weren't doing on their own.

Most of these companies probably won't exist in ten years, no matter what the government does. The Obama administration is trying to engineer some sort of soft landing for the rest of the economy as these really big companies implode. Obama may be liberal, but he's no communist.

To be quite honest, incendiary political speech like this really chaps my ass. I realize it's people's preferred way to play the game these days, both on the left and the right, but it's simply not helpful in any way. You have to accurately describe what's going on before you can understand it and deal with it. Otherwise, you might as well just say George Bush is Godzilla and Obama is Gamera and cheer them on from the rubble like a Japanese school kid.

Revolving Jackson Police Chief

2009-04-01T10:42:00.000-07:00

Several news outlets speculated Police Chief Malcom McMillin would announce his retirement this morning, but he didn't.

Mayor Melton now says he accepted McMillin's resignation this morning and is ready to announce his replacement.

Since Melton has his replacement ready, we have to assume this was in the works for a while. Rumors say it all boils down to McMillin supporting somebody other than Melton in the upcoming mayoral election.

I wondered how long this unlikely match between McMillin and Melton would last. Instability in the chief position pre-dated Melton by several years, but it never got any better under Melton until the surprise appointment of McMillin.

I wonder if McMillin's resignation has anything to do with last week's controversy among the Mississippi Democratic Party or the controversy within the party about whether or not Melton can appear as a Democrat in the upcoming election.

In uncertain times, political stability means a lot to people, but there's little to be found in Jackson. It's possible Melton could overcome his past problems and be a strong mayor again, but one has to wonder how unlikely that might be.

A lot of people (including me) speculated Obama's election as president would usher in a new day among black politics and politicians, but that has yet to filter down to Jackson.

My Least Favorite Profane Phrase

2009-03-31T21:57:00.000-07:00

As you may know, I'm a huge fan of Penn from Penn & Teller. (I'm a huge fan of Teller too, but that guy, he just don't say nothin').

In today's entry in his Vlog, Penn Says, Penn talks about a flame war he had with some random guy who was a friend of a guy he didn't really like, but called a friend anyway. The politics of what he said wasn't really what struck me (although I agree with what he says). What struck me was his use of my least favorite profane phrase: "Fuck You In The Neck."

"Fuck You" is one thing, "Fuck You In The Neck" is something you'd see in a slasher film. For some reason it's the most violent, most visceral, most unpleasant thing I can imagine. Whenever I hear anyone use that phrase, it just gives me the heebie jeebies.

It reminds me of H.R. Geiger's Alien, with that mouth inside the mouth thing that punches through Veronica Cartwright's skull in the original film.

If you ever really want me to leave you alone, just say "Fuck You In The Neck" and I'm gone!

Link: YouTube

Melton Says He's Not A Pimp in Photos

2009-03-31T20:23:00.000-07:00

Some of you may remember these controversial photos of Jackson Mayor Frank Melton.

It turns out he has an explanation why he had his picture taken with these women. According to WLBT "

"That was very innocent. I was having lunch at Peaches Restaurant on Farish Street and they were shooting a film across the street and I was so excited to have someone on Farish Street shooting a commercial; so I came out; the young ladies; it was a commercial about antique cars and they asked me to take a picture with them and I accommodated them and that was the extent of it," said Melton.

Link WLBT

I would have felt better had WLBT tracked down the people shooting the commercial and confirmed the story with them, but we'll take Frank at his word for now.

Honestly, with everything that's gone on around Melton, the only way these pictures could be really shocking is if it turned out the women with him were actually some of the boys living in Franks house dressed in drag.

UPDATE
WAPT (link) reports they found the guy who took the picture. It's Daren Gray, of Atlanta, and he he was involved in a photo shoot for Spare Dime Magazine. Spare Dime has a website, (http://sparedime.com) but there's nothing on it. It looks like Spare Dime is some sort of car magazine from a black perspective. I did find the website for Daren Gray (link) and he seems to specialize in black women dressed like this in urban settings.

Hot New Ventrilloquist

2009-03-29T17:20:00.000-07:00

I have to confess, I'm a junkie for ventriloquism. When I was a kid, I saw Edgar Bergen in an old movie and it hooked me on ventriloquism for life.

Like bad singing, bad acting and bad painting, bad ventriloquism is almost unbearable, but good ventriloquism is fucking amazing. The performer becomes his own straight-man and some of their puppet performers become that most memorable comedians you ever saw.

Nina Conti
I'd like to introduce you to a fairly new ventriloquist act that you'll probably see a lot more of.

Her name is Nina Conti. She's from the UK and her dad is actor Tom Conti.

Conti's act is unusual for a number of reasons. She's a really striking woman to look at, and not at all afraid to be beautiful and sexy in her performance. Her act is perversely funny, but also intellectual and well-read. While most ventriloquists stick to their prepared material, Conti is an accomplished improv. Her improvisational skills were such that Christopher Guest included her in his film: For Your Consideration.

Bitch Got Skillz
One of the technical skills required in ventriloquism is what ventriloquists call the "near voice" and the rest of the world calls "throwing your voice." The skill is actually neither "near" nor "throwing" anything. It's the act of talking without moving your lips, giving the impression that you're not talking at all, but your puppet is.

Some sounds are very difficult to make using the near voice technique. Among them are the letters B, F, M, and P. Try it. It's almost impossible to make these sounds without bringing your lips together.

When they have to use them, there are substitute sounds ventriloquists use which, if done well, make it harder to notice you're not saying the word correctly. For instance: instead of the B sound you can use G or N instead of M. "Box" becomes "Gox" and "Moon" becomes "Noon".

Most vent artists combat this by writing their material using words with these sounds as rarely as possible. One of the things I like about Conti, she just says "screw it" and uses these sounds anyway. Her puppet is named "m"onkey and it lives in a "b"ag and so on. When the substitution comes out sounding funny, she'll make fun of it and challenge her puppet to say it properly.

Deconstruct My Monkey
The other illusion vital to ventriloquism is the concept that these funny voices come from puppets. Most ventriloquists make fun of the obvious deception here, but Conti takes it a step further and deconstructs the entire process before your eyes and closes her act transferring the voice of monkey from the puppet to herself with unexpected results.

Nina's Act on YouTube

Link: YouTube
Link: Nina Conti Home Page

A Perfect 9.999

2009-03-29T05:09:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid, Nadia Comaneci amazed the world when the judges gave her gymnastic performances seven perfect scores at the 1976 summer Olympics, introducing the phrase "perfect ten" into the English vernacular.

Even as a kid, I saw that, even though she did something really amazing, it still wasn't perfect. Thirty years later, I still haven't seen anything perfect. Perfection just isn't possible in anything human.

At the 1980 Olympics, there was a huge amount of pressure on the then seventeen year old Comaneci because of the "perfect" scores she received four years before. Although considerably stronger, her longer and heavier seventeen year old body just couldn't do what her thirteen year old body could, and even though she still won two gold and two silver medals she didn't get even one perfect so, before the eyes of the world, she was labeled a failure.

I'll never forget the look on her face when she failed to plant her landing on a tumbling run in the floor exercise. She knew the world wanted her perfect and she wanted it for herself, but in that moment she hit the impenetrable wall of human limitations and you could tell it really, really hurt her.

Sports is and should be an area where it's obvious perfection isn't possible, where there's always a way to do it a little better, yet you see the word "perfect" used a lot in sports from the "pefect pitch" in baseball to the "hat trick" in hockey. There's even a "perfect score" in bowling.

I think we cling to this idea of human perfection because it gives us a sense of security in an imperfect world. If we could just put our hands one something perfect, then it might give us a way to recalibrate all the imperfect things and put the world in a better order.

We might as well chase fairies though, because perfection simply can't exist. Ironically, sometimes the people who get the closest to this impossible goal suffer the most because nothing in their life seems to really amount to much after that.

After the 1980 Olympics, Comaneci defected from her native Romania. The press hounded her and reported everything from eating disorders to drug and sex addictions, none of which was true, but the human mob turned on her because she was no longer "perfect".

I think it's better if we accept and constantly remind ourselves that perfection is just a concept and although we should always reach for it, we can never actually grasp it, and that's OK because it was never attainable in the first place.

Probably my favorite quote about the human condition comes from Robert Browning:

"Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for?"

Hangin' With Pee Wee Herman On Facebook

2009-03-28T22:20:00.000-07:00

I just befriended Paul Reubens on Facebook. Facebook suggested him, which is kind of cool because usually Facebook suggests people I never heard of. I've never actually met Rubens, but I'm a big fan, so I clicked "why the fuck not" and now we're connected on Facebook.

Most of you remember him as Pee Wee Herman of movies and saturday morning TV fame. Some of you might remember him as the guy who was arrested at a gay adult movie theatre and then arrested again for having a child pornography collection that later turned out to be not actually children and not particularly pornographic. To be specific: they were muscle magazines from the 50's and 60's and the people who brought the charges got into a fair amount of trouble for it, but the damage was already done to Rubens' career. Apparently, people could handle his fuckin' weird TV personality, but not the fact that in real life he was shockingly gay.

Despite these issues, I'm still a huge Rubens fan and was even before his television show or movies. The first time I saw his character "Pee Wee" was a taped performance of the Pee Wee stage show for HBO. Ironically, it was basically the same format he would later use for his Saturday morning show, but with really funny and decidedly adult double entendre for everything.

After his fall from grace, I was thrilled to see Rubens working again as the Penguin's father in "Batman Returns" and later as Oscar Vibenius who could smell death on the perversely funny, but now sadly canceled "Pushing Daisies".

What shocked me about finding Rubens on facebook was his profile picture. Now that he's fifty-seven years old, Paul looks like you'd imagine Alfred E Newman if he grew up and became an accountant. He did a really funny bit on Jimmy Kimmel a few months ago so I know he's still the brilliant conceptual comedian he always was, but seeing Rubens as a real, live, middle age man was far more shocking than hearing he went to gay porno theaters when he was younger.

Rubens on Jimmy Kimmell Link: YouTube

Trying the Twitter Ticker Tape

2009-03-28T20:56:00.000-07:00

I've been experimenting with Twitter.

As best I can tell, the experience is similar to the old days when people watched ticker tape machines, only the data is about your friends' lives, rather than stock prices.

The process is similar. It starts with a symbol (user name) followed by a brief update (140 characters or less). It's somewhat interesting to watch any live data feed, but it doesn't take too long before you realize it's a fairly stupid waste of time.

Back when I was a kid, First National Bank (now Trustmark) had a ticker tape machine in their lobby. It was pretty interesting to watch the machine work, but even as a kid I noticed that most of the people watching it were old men who were probably retired and didn't have a lot else to do.

I suspect the benefit most people get from Twitter is not the reading of other posts, but whatever psychological boost they get from entering their own posts.

People are social animals. We spend our entire lives trying to create and maintain our desired position in society. Since Twitter only allows you to post short bursts of data, I suspected people might use it to try and broadcast their social status, and after watching it for a few weeks, that's exactly what I found.

Mary is a Mommy. Tom is a politician. Alecia is a struggling actress. Bob is a sports fan. I follow them on Twitter and when I read their posts, they're almost entirely devoted to broadcasting and maintaining these memes. Mary is picking up the boys at soccer. Tom is driving to Biloxi for a speech. Alecia is getting dressed for an audition. Bob is excited about the Yankee's new short-stop.

So great is this need to maintain the illusion of status, that we probably really do derive some benefit from broadcasting our status out into cyberspace, even if nobody ever reads it. If you ever do take the time to read the posts, it seems pretty natural because we've spent our whole lives receiving this exact type of information in a thousand different ways.

We create a kind of social map in our heads and we use this data to locate our friends and acquaintances on the map so we'll always know where they are in relation to us. It's particularly helpful for competitive types who use the map to determine their social position amongst the other people competing for similar spots.

Another interesting thing I discovered about Twitter is that nobody seems to know how they do now or how they plan on making money in the future. Since their site has no ads and it's a free service, they appear to have no income, and when bloggers and other writers speculate on how they might be making money, they're pretty quick to deny the speculation.

It may be that at this stage of the game, Twitter has no plan to make money. A common business model on the web seems to be coming up with a neat idea and building a large user base, then trying to figure out how to make money off it. That's exactly what Facebook and Google did.

That's how newspapers started too. In the beginning they didn't charge for the papers or take advertising. After people got used to reading newspapers and desiring more of them, the people printing the papers realized they had to make some money off them to continue so they began selling advertising space and charging subscription fees.

If you're thinking of trying Twitter, let me warn you about using it with your handheld devices. Most services charge a fee for data transfers and a lot of new Twitter users report some sticker shock when they get their first month's bill for using twitter on their Iphone or Crackberry. Twitter swears they're not getting a piece of that money, and they're probably telling the truth, but, boy, you gotta think Verision and Cingular and the other cellular services are loving twitter since the rates they charge for data transfers amounts to something like 5000% percent gross profit.

Gold Insanity

2009-03-27T03:08:00.000-07:00

I know a guy who's something of a conspiracy theory aficionado. One of his favorites is how the Illuminati and the Freemasons and the Jews conspired to take us off the gold standard to enslave us and how it's the true meaning behind "The Wizard of Oz".

The Gold Standard
There's actually a really good reason why we got off the gold standard: there simply wasn't enough of it to meet our needs. The industrial revolution increased the world's economic productivity exponentially as it spread from country to country. All this growth came with massive increases in capital needs, but there was a problem because currencies were locked into gold and there was a finite amount of gold in the world and only so much new gold we could get out of the ground.

When the need for currency outstrips the available supply, its value goes through the roof, not only limiting economic growth but also causing pretty serious deflation. Countries tried to combat the problem by adding metals to their currency system, first silver, then copper, but even that could only slow the pending disaster.

Eventually, people began to realize there were really few practical uses for gold or silver. They are only valuable because we think they are, so money really is just a concept and not based in anything tangible. One by one, countries began switching from gold based currencies to currency based on debt which allowed us to meet the needs of a still growing economy without deflation.

The Value Of Gold
Nobody really knows why people think gold is so valuable. It has a few practical applications in electronics, but since we can only find a fraction of the amount we'd need to meet those applications, it's essentially worthless. For thousands of years, our only real application for gold has been as useless ornamentation.

My guess is that people find gold valuable because everybody has a neighbor with more of it than they do. Envy is a powerful motivating factor. Other than that, it's gaudy, useless and structurally weak. Gold has few beneficial aspects. It's easily mailable and it has a relatively low melting point so it's a useful medium to make jewelry, and it doesn't oxidize so it virtually never corrodes. Steel is infinitely more valuable. We could easily run the modern world without gold, but without steel we'd be in real trouble.

More Craziness
Since our desire for gold doesn't make much sense, there are a lot of crazy theories about it out there. One of my favorites has extra-terrestrials needing gold to run the atmospheric machines that keep their dying planet going, so they came to earth millions of years ago and genetically engineered humans with a desire for gold so we would mine it for them and every couple thousand years, they'd return to earth and harvest the gold we unwittingly collected for them.

If you ever saw the internet movie "Zeitgeist" and thought it was kind of cool, keep in mind this theory about gold hungry aliens is the real philosophy behind the film. Even scientlogists think these people are crazy.

The Southpark Economy

2009-03-26T21:26:00.000-07:00

The Last Pizza Supper by Leonardo DaVinci

Is it any wonder I love South Park?

Episode 1303, Margaritaville riffs on just about every aspect of the current economic mire in their own unique way.

When the Southpark Bank loses Stan's birthday money from his grandma, Stan's Dad becomes the prophet of doom who convinces everyone to stop spending to show the economy how much we respect it, so the whole town gives up their cars for llamas and wearing bedsheets to save money on clothes and laundry.

Frustrated at having no money, Stan goes from town to town to New York to Washington to try and get money back for the stupid Margaritavillle frozen drink maker his dad bought on a payment plan.

Meanwhile, Kyle adopts the role of Jesus (since he's the only Jewish kid, I guess) with Butters as Thomas and Cartman as Judas (no surprise there).

Kyle sacrifices himself to save the town and Stan learns the awful truth about how the government decides to fix the economy. There's even a great cameo of Cartman as Quint from Jaws (Judas and Quint in the same episode. What an actor!).

There's so much great stuff you really have to watch it. The end result is the best reporting and commentary on the economic crisis I've seen yet.

Watch The Full Episode Online: Southpark Episode Player

The Sinking Democratic Party

2009-03-25T19:21:00.000-07:00

For a hundred years, the only real priority the Mississippi Democratic Party had was making sure black people never amassed any real power. Considering their tragic history, it's not hard to see why some black Mississippians today want to make sure white people have little if any power in the party, which is exactly what prompted Barbara Blackmon's palace coup last Saturday.

Blackmon and her supporters forget a very important thing though. Keeping the party all white was a really bad idea and it kept Mississippi down for many years, making the party all black now is just as bad an idea and can only work to weaken the state in the future. Allowing Ike Brown to remain in the party, let alone giving him any power, sends a powerful message about the party's real agenda.

If you sow bad seeds, you get bad fruit, and I suppose what's happening now is the fruit of a hundred years of bad seeds. It's pretty easy for somebody like me to say "this is a bad idea" or "you're headed in the wrong direction", but it probably won't do any good.

It's not a good idea to have one party of one race and another party of the other race, but that's where we are, and I really don't know how to change it. The Democrats may be on the rise nationally, but it'll be a while before anything changes in Mississippi. Since Blackmon and her lackey's decided to draw a line in the sand, it'll probably be even longer.

I've met her, I've seen her TV show (a very small audience), and I've watched her career for years and while she has a lot of energy and knows how to build a support base, but she's about as sharp as a bag of wet mice. Sadly, Mississippi has a long history of putting imbeciles in power who know only how to demagogue, but not how to lead.

The only solution is to change the seeds we sow. It's not enough to switch from sowing green poison apples to sowing red poison apples, we have to stop growing poison apples all together.

What Do Drunk Gorillas Look Like?

2009-03-24T20:36:00.000-07:00

Wildlife photographer Andy Rouse made a series of photographs showing Mountain Gorillas in Rwanda who had been eating the fermented sap from bamboo shoots.

"It was not exactly Gorillas In The Mist, more like gorillas who were pissed," said Rouse.

"Some were running round cackling to each other, others were going mad swinging through the trees, some were just lying on the ground in an inebriated state."

Gorillas eat bamboo all year and can tolerate a lot of it before getting intoxicated; usually they eat it with a handful of other greenery to water it down. Sometimes however they over-indulge, a habit they share with chimps and elephants.

"When I went back the next day," says Andy, "it was all very quiet, as if they were nursing gorilla-sized hangovers"

Link: Photo Set at Telegraph.co.uk

What is the Trinity

2009-03-21T14:08:00.000-07:00

Before the Roman move to unify Christianity, many followers saw the trinity not as father, son and holy ghost, but father, mother and child. Some say they re-labeled the elements of the trinity to make the church more masculine. Maybe they did. It doesn't really matter what you label the elements though, the concept remains the same.

Calling it Father, Mother and Child may help us to understand what the trinity is. The father and the mother combine and form the child which unifies the three. If you want to remove gender from the equation, it could be creator, universe and life.

With this model, you can perhaps see why God made Eve from Adam's rib in Genesis. God made the Universe from himself to be his companion and together they made man, just as Eve came from Adam's body and together they made mankind.

It's a mathematical progression. One form begets another and the two beget a third. They are all separate, yet since they each came from the other, they are all one. The cycle becomes complete when you consider whether or not God and the Universe would exist as they are now if there were no sentient forms like humans to experience them.

The first unit splits. It becomes Father and Mother, or Father and Holy Ghost, or Ying and Yang, Order and Chaos, Life and Death, Light and Dark, Night and Day, Good and Evil, High and Low, Front and Back, Left and Right, creator and created, it is all the duplicities we know and more.

There are philosophies satisfied with just the duality, but there is a third step, the reunion of the two, creating a third. Consider the process of evolution from asexual to sexual reproduction. The first generation splits creating not identical copies but opposites. Here reproduction ends unless the opposites, male and female, come together to create a third.

The trinity is not just an aspect of God but of us. Each of us had a mother and father and each of our children will have a mother and father. We are made in God's image so we mirror this trinity of creation.

If the universe were only chaos, nothing could come together and form life. If the universe were only order, nothing could come apart and form life. Without order, our bodies couldn't hold together or continue its functions so there could be no life, yet without chaos we would have no food to eat or air to breathe or water to drink and there could be no life. It's the balance of creation and destruction that allows life: hence the trinity.

Is There Free Will

2009-03-21T01:11:00.000-07:00

Christians argue over free will a lot. Some say free will is absolute because we make our own choices, but others say God already knows what choices we'll make in life so free will is really an illusion. The answer is a matter of perspective and time.

Free will exists in a universe ruled by linear time. We make a decision at point A, at point B, we act on that decision and at point C, we experience the consequences of the decision. Free will exists because these things must happen in their correct sequence. You can't have the consequences of a decision before you make the decision. There are divergent paths at each point A decision, and our free will is a matter of choosing which path we'll follow and God doesn't make the decision for us.

Suppose God doesn't experience time the way we do though. Suppose God exists beyond the restraints of linear time. This is logical if you believe God made the universe. Time is an element of space and it's part of the universe God made, therefore God is beyond time.

From God's perspective, he can see points A,B and C all at once. He doesn't have to experience A then B then C as we do. From our perspective, God sees our decisions and the consequences before we make them, but the concept of "before" and "after" only exist in our perspective, from God's perspective, outside of linear time, it's all the same.

So, yes, there is free will, but also, from our perspective, God already knows what we'll do before we do it.

What the Hell is a Sweet Potato Queen?

2009-03-21T00:34:00.000-07:00

It's March and it's sweet potato queen time again and I have to admit: I've never gotten it.

The ladies have given their all for over twenty years now and I've seen the parade and read the books and I'm really happy for them and their followers, but I look at it and it's just like "what the fuck...?"

Little girls start out with pig-tails and tea parties but when they turn forty it's fake boobs, wigs, fake eyelashes and fake bondage wear on parade in Jackson. They'll even fly from Guam and Australia and Puerto Rico to Jackson Mississippi to do all this. Why?

Part of it is a simple process of elimination I guess. In Rio, to get in the parade you have to look good in a rhinestone G-string and know how to mambo, In New Orleans you have to be a sixth generation resident and put up thousands of dollars to get in the parade, in Jackson, you just have to show up with a t-shirt and a wig and you're in. Yes, it's true, we get all the people in the world who couldn't get in the parade anywhere else.

I should be grateful I guess. When men write books on how to be an asshole, it becomes a full-time philosophy and they end up with a show on Fox News. For the sweet potato queens it's a once a year deal, and most of them carry out their assholery in Jackson so they spare the folks back home. Plus, it's the only really successful tourist event in the whole state so I probably shouldn't look a gift-horse in the mouth.

I worry that people think we're like this all the time though, sort of like the Japanese tourist who throws beads at women in New Orleans hoping they'll show their tits in November. For the record, this is not how we act all year. It's not even how the sweet potato queens themselves act all year. Most of them you'd never recognize out of costume.

I guess the answer is that men are from Mars, but some women are secretly from Uranus.

How Not to Saw a Woman In Half

2009-03-20T16:43:00.001-07:00

A 27 year old Maryland woman landed in the hospital after an experimental sex toy her husband made failed miserably.

Apparently his idea was to fit the blade of an electric saber saw inside a sex toy and use it on his wife. The couple realized this maybe wasn't such a great idea when the blade cut through the plastic sex toy and began cutting through the woman.

No word yet on whether or not the couple wore safety glasses as you always should when using a power tool.

Link: MSNBC

Image: That's not the woman from the story. I stole that image from a web page about a hippie building her own kayak to give people an idea of what a saber saw looks like. You'll notice she IS wearing safety glasses. Also, considering the topic of this story, I thought her perverse little smile would be really, really funny.

Atlas Shrugged, Then He Dropped the Ball Entirely

2009-03-18T13:21:00.000-07:00

People are funny, and sometimes stupid.

This past summer, two things became pretty clear: first, Obama would probably win the election and second, the economy was in trouble. I don't know if it was one or both of these factors that caused it, but sales of Ayn Rand's 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged went through the roof and it's spiked several times since then, usually in response to bailout or bad economic news.

Rand's Laissez-faire philosophy was closely associated with Ronald Reagan's trickle-down economic plan and has been closely associated with conservative politics ever since, and I suppose the current sales of Rand's book have to do with efforts to reinvent the republican party after two disastrous election cycles.

Several conservatives have come out saying the spike in sales of Atlas Shrugged shows how they were right all along and people believe Rand's philosophy is coming to life. The people who say that are idiots.

Considering the business news the last six months, I'm amazed more people aren't beginning to see how much bullshit Rand wrote into the philosophy of Atlas Shrugged. If John Galt were a real person, I have no doubt you'd see him before Congress begging for a billion dollar bailout made necessary by his own greedy philosophy.

For thirty years, Rand's objectivist philosophy held sway in conservative U.S. and World politics in an effort to save us from a producers' strike depicted in Atlas Shrugged, and for the second time now, it's lead to a huge stock-market bubble and corresponding crash. For years, we've followed a policy of removing the financial regulations that protected us and you see where it's gotten us. Galt's Gulch was on Wall Street, not some desert hide-away.

My most vivid memory of reading Atlas Shrugged the first time, over twenty years ago now, was how much I laughed when it struck me how John Galt's invention reminded me of all the bullshit perpetual motion machines huckster's had been pushing since the oil embargo in the 1970's. There was even a guy from Mississippi in the news at the time who claimed to have a motor that could run just on water, but could never get it to work when the press was around. For me Galt's Motor became a metaphor for the whole book: an interesting idea, but ultimately unworkable due to basic physics and how the people who tried to sell it anyway were liars and assholes.

I'm not sure what it's going to take to ultimately discredit Atlas Shrugged. It's an enormously difficult read, so I'm guessing many of the people who bought the book recently, either haven't finished it, haven't started or gave up on it already so they may never know whether they really agree with her or not. The language and length and redundancy of Galt's speech can mesmerize people and keep them from realizing how stupid it would be to try and apply it to the way people really behave. Her philosophy is an interesting mental exercise, but ultimately, it's not all that different from the philosophy found on pirate ships, only without the parrots and eye patches. To borrow from Gordon Gecko: Greed is not good.

Conservatives are going to have to come to grips with the fact that their philosophy failed us and quit trying to say we never really did what they wanted and the liberals are still really responsible for all the world's problems. If anything, they're the ones who can't reconcile their social and economic agendas. If they really wanted objectivism in America, then why did they fight so hard for a war on drugs or a ban on stem-cell research?

Sephen Baldwin Sort Of Debates Ron Paul About Drugs

2009-03-17T21:40:00.000-07:00

I'm all for legalizing drugs, but this is kind of bullshit. Joy Behar of ABC's The View sits in for Larry King and hosts a mini debate on the legalization of marijuana between Ron Paul and Stephen Baldwin.

Ron Paul is a great thinker and a great choice to debate the anti war on drugs position, but Stephen Baldwin? Really?

This happens a lot on television. They'll invite people to discuss some important issue, but the person they choose to represent one side of the argument is completely weak and ineffective. Why not have Ron Paul debate a trained seal?

I'm not blaming Behar here. I'm sure she showed up to fill in for Larry King and the producers had the whole show already set up, including the guests. The producers really did us no favors by having such a lop-sided debate.

Link: YouTube

Weird News Day in Jackson

2009-03-17T20:43:00.000-07:00

It's been a weird news day in Jackson

Dump Truck Bandit
A creative minded burglar stole a dump truck and used it to commit two robberies early this morning before the truck's owners even knew it was stolen.

Story :WLBT

The Mayor Doesn't Live In Jackson
The Jackson Democratic Municipal Executive Committee said today that Jackson Mayor Frank Melton wasn't qualified to run for a second term as a democrat because he filed his homestead exemption in Texas rather than Jackson. Melton says he'll challenge the ruling in court. You'd think he'd be tired of court by now.

Story: Clarion Ledger

Canton Police Officer Shoots Dog
Not surprisingly the pooch in question was a pit bull terrier that attacked the Canton Copper. The owner swears it would never hurt a fly.

Story: WLBT

Power is an Illusion

2009-03-16T01:31:00.000-07:00

We get so caught up in this idea of power: who has it, what they do with it, who wants it, where they're leading us... but, I came to know that power really is just an illusion.

I remember a time when someone kidnapped one of my dad's friend's wife. You wouldn't think this sort of thing happened very often in Mississippi, but this was actually the second time my dad went through it. About ten years before, someone kidnapped a teller at a bank he worked with. In both cases, the women involved died at the hands of their kidnapper. Both men were caught and tried and convicted of their crimes.

For about a day, this crime was a secret. The husband of the kidnapped woman was a powerful man. The FBI thought it was best to keep the story out of the press initially while they set up a search for her. When it was all over, we learned this man kidnapped her to punish her husband and try to get money from him, money lost in a business deal gone sour.

The husband's friends knew about the kidnapping and my dad was one of them. They were all powerful men. When terrible things happen, people come together, even if there's nothing they can do to help. My dad came home very late that night. Sometimes he talked to me about things he didn't talk with anyone else about. A lot of it, even now, I've never told anyone.

He told me about the kidnapping. He'd been meeting with men who were all friend's of the man whose wife was kidnapped. I knew the men he was talking about. They were among the most powerful people in the state. He told me how each of them could command five hundred people to go out and search for the missing woman, to help their friend they'd do it gladly, but they knew, as much power as they each had, there was nothing they could do to help, that she was probably already dead and she was.

As powerful as he was, there were many times I watched my dad completely helpless to prevent something terrible happening to something or someone he really cared about. I suppose it was never so clear as the day I watched him die on the floor of his office, powerless even to keep his own heart beating.

We all seek power. We hoard it like dragon's gold to give us the courage to face an uncertain world, but I can tell you, I've seen men much more powerful than my dad utterly humbled when they faced the reality that their power means nothing.

In these uncertain times, many of us have come to face the reality that power and wealth and ability are all illusions, and all we really have on our side is hope and faith and love. Power is an illusion, but love is real.

The Power of Prayer

2009-03-15T14:18:00.000-07:00

For those who still don't believe...

Consider this story of how God answered Salma Hayek's prayers.

Link: YouTube

Who Watches The Watchmen?

2009-03-15T13:26:00.001-07:00

Alan Moore's The Watchmen is a precautionary tale about the fallacy of heroes. It came out at a time when the United States was obsessed with the hero Ronald Reagan and Britain was obsessed with the hero Margaret Thatcher. By asking "Who Watches the Watchmen", Moore challenges us to consider whether our heroes really help us or not.

The series didn't have much impact on Reagan or Thatcher. At the time, its audience was pretty small and its readers were more concerned with what it said about Batman and Superman than any real world application. Since 1986 though, the audience for The Watchmen has expanded considerably. Time magazine included it as one of the one hundred most important books.

I've written before how people's reception of Barack Obama reminds me of the way people responded to Ronald Reagan. Without question, he is the first super man of the twenty-first century. It's Ironic how, not two months after Obama's inauguration, the first film adaptation of Moore's novel opens around the world, to a considerably larger audience than it had the first time.

Considering the state of the world, Moore's question: "Who Watches the Watchmen" is as important now as it ever was. I voted for Obama and I believe he'll be a good president. Watching the Watchmen isn't so much about our heroes as it is about how we respond to them, how we turn responsibility for our lives over to them rather than doing it ourselves, and that begs the question: "are we better off without them?"

I can't answer this. I've followed heroes my whole life and it's only now that I've learned to question it. Maybe this is how it's supposed to be. Maybe we can't function in life without heroes, but I open the question to you: "Who Watches the Watchmen?", not in a paranoid, conspiracy theory sort of way, but in a more fundamental way: can our heroes do for us what we won't do for ourselves?

When you see The Watchmen, consider this: who best serves the people of that world? Is it Rorschach, The Night Owl, or is it really Ozymandias?

Pop Stars Sing Puccini

2009-03-15T12:18:00.000-07:00

Turandot is the fairy tale of a princess who riddles her suitors and if they fail, she beheads them. Calaf uses the power of true love to answer her riddles, but Princess Turandot still rejects him so he offers her a second chance: if she can guess his name by dawn she may still behead him, but if she cannot then she must marry him.

While Calaf waits for Turandot to guess his name, he sings Nessun Dorma, which translates to "None shall sleep tonight" and it is one of the most famous tenor arias ever.

Nessun dorma! Nessun dorma! Tu pure, o Principessa, nella tua fredda stanza, guardi le stelle che tremano d'amore, e di speranza!
None shall sleep! None shall sleep! Even you, O Princess, in your cold bedroom, watch the stars that tremble with love and with hope!

Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me; il nome mio nessun saprà! No, No! Sulla tua bocca lo dirò quando la luce splenderà!
But my secret is hidden within me; none will know my name! No, no! On your mouth I will say it when the light shines!

Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio che ti fa mia!
And my kiss will dissolve the silence that makes you mine!

Dilegua, o notte! Tramontate, stelle! Tramontate, stelle! All'alba vincerò! Vincerò! Vincerò!
Vanish, o night! Set, stars! Set, stars! At daybreak I shall win! I shall win! I shall win!

Consider the following recordings of people singing Nessun Dorma. Some we know as opera singers, but others are more famous for other kinds of singing.

Mario Lanza

Link: YouTube

Luciano Pavarotti

Link: YouTube

Aretha Franklin

Link: YouTube

Michael Bolton

Link: YouTube

3 Redneck Tenors

Link: YouTube

Deep Purple (in English)

Link: YouTube

Manowar (Heavy Metal Band)

Link YouTube

Enrico Caruso

Link YouTube

The Bible Isn't Fiction

2009-03-14T16:54:00.000-07:00

Atheists often try to discredit faith and belittle the believers by calling the bible a work of fiction. They're wrong, of course. Fiction implies writers who know they're writing something false or inaccurate. In the bible, we see just the opposite. These are writers fully aware they're writing something fantastic, but also fully convinced their story is both true and accurate.

It's not just the writers either. If you look at the process and the people involved in compiling the New Testament, you'll see they too were deeply concerned with making sure the finished work was as credible as possible. They discarded as much work as they included for that very reason. Some of the work they discarded still exists and you can compare it to the work that made it into the New Testament to see why they might have rejected it.

I can't make any claim about the credibility and reliability of the finished bible, because there are parts which seem exaggerated or inaccurate, but it's pretty clear that the people involved were trying to get it as right as they possibly could.

Calling the bible "fiction" attempts to dismiss it, only you can't dismiss it that easily. There were too many people involved, over too long a period of time to just dismiss it. We don't always know what the bible is or means, but, clearly there's a lot more going on here than just fiction.

Amazing Things Done With Scissors

2009-03-13T16:30:00.000-07:00

Paper Forest reviews the work of artist Aoyama Hina who makes the most amazing things using only regular paper and a pair of scissors.

Link: Paper Forest

Penn And I Want To Legalize Drugs

2009-03-12T20:40:00.000-07:00

Although we disagree on religion, I usually find myself agreeing with Penn Jillette most of the time.

Penn says he never tried drugs. Considering the wide range of things he freely admits to, I see no reason he would lie about that. Despite never using drugs, he supports the legalization of all drugs, not just marijuana and I agree with him.

Unlike Penn, I did try several different recreational drugs. I never found them very recreational though so most of my experiments were very short lived. I stuck with alcohol for a while because it was such a part of my culture, but by the time I was thirty it was pretty much out of my repertoire. Tobacco I still stick with because it's the mildest of all stimulants except chocolate.

Penn's main reason for ending the prohibition on drugs is an issue of freedom. While I agree with him there, my main reason for wanting to end drug prohibition is that it's so grossly ineffective and is the main motivation for organized crime, not only in this country, but worldwide. If we ended the war on drugs, organized crime would all but dissapear in one generation or less.

Penn Says on YouTube

Link: You Tube

Barbie and the Death of Tattoos

2009-03-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

Every style and trend has a life span, and for some time now, I've been wondering what would signal the end of the tattoo trend in western cultures. This might be it.

Barbie, still the best selling girl's toy (now that they've eliminated those pesky Bratz dolls with fancy legal footwork) turns 50 this year and to celebrate Mattel introduces the Totally Stylin' Tattoos Barbie, which features both tattoo stickers and washable ink tattoos girls can apply to their dolls.

Most fashion trends last about a generation, then they're verboten for a while before they have a brief revival as "retro". It's been about 20 years for tattoos so they're probably headed for the Elysian fields with poodle skirts and flat-top hair cuts.

Nothing kills an edgy fashion statement like seeing it show up on a barbie doll.

More Amazing Elephant Info

2009-03-11T19:54:00.001-07:00

Asian and African Elephants (image source: wikipedia)

It's Not A Nose
An elephants trunk is really its upper lip. It's tusks are teeth. Scientist believe elephants are so amazingly intelligent because of the hundreds of muscles and thousands of nerves it takes to operate their trunk, all connected to parts of their really large brain.

Semi-Domestic
Although still wild animals, many scientist believe Asian elephants are really semi-domesticated since humans have trained them for work for thousands of years. The only thing that keeps them from being fully domesticated is the size and unpredictability of the males makes domestic breeding so difficult.

Horton Hears a What?
Using their remarkable large ears and low frequency vocal sounds, inaudible to humans, elephants communicate with each over many miles.

World Travelers
Although their range is now limited to small areas of Asia and Africa, elephants once lived all over Africa, Europe, Asia and North America and their yearly migration routes stretched from Greenland to Equatorial Africa.

Prehistoric man used to follow the elephant herds, much like Native Americans used to follow the buffalo herds, hunting them for food, skins and even using their bones and tusks to build their homes. Some scientists suggest following the elephant herds explains how humans migrated from Africa to Europe, Asia and North America.

Girl Power
Elephant herds are all females and juvenile males. The lead elephant is called the "matriarch" and the secondary elephants under her are called "aunties".

Adult male elephants live solitary lives and only seek out females when they enter their musth stage. The musth cycle begins when male elephants pick up the scent of ovulating females using their amazing trunks. The smell triggers a massive injection of testosterone into their blood stream, making them much, much more aggressive. A bull elephant in musth emits a thick, sticky, fluid from their temporal lobes leaving a dark stain.

No Good Reason to Kill an Elephant
Although poaching is still the leading cause of death among elephants, the only commercially viable parts of the elephant are their tusks (which are carved into useless decorative items) and the hairs on their tails (which are woven into bracelets and rings, said to bring good luck). The rest of the elephant's massive body is left to rot after poachers take the tusks and tail hairs.

More Information about Elephants at Wikipedia
More Information about Elephant Preservation at the World Wildlife Fund

Amazing Elephant and Dog Friendship

2009-03-11T15:01:00.000-07:00

This is one of the most remarkable stories I've seen in a while.

Link: You Tube

Tarra the elephant's page at the Elephant Sanctuary website.

Besides her unusual friendship with a dog, Tarra is also an accomplished painter

Read more about the relationship between Tarra and Bella: Link

I'm as Mad as Hell and I'm Not Going To Take This Anymore!

2009-03-10T21:09:00.000-07:00

This is one of my favorite performances in the history of cinema. If you've never seen Network, I encourage you to see it as soon as you can. I'm not kidding. Many people consider it the greatest film of that decade, better than the Godfather films.

Peter Finch won an oscar for this performance, probably for this very scene, and he deserved it.

Howard Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job.

The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV's while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be.

We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.

Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.

You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!

So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell: I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!'

Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!

You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!
Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:

I'M AS MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

Jon Stewart Vs CNBC

2009-03-10T20:33:00.000-07:00

Much has been made of the battle between the staff at CNBC and Jon Stewart over a bit Stewart did criticizing CNBC for their bullish comments before the bear market kicked in.

Business news makers, commentators and journalists are used to operating in their own little sphere, hardly noticed by the rest of the world, but when the economy became the biggest story in the world, they found themselves suddenly thrust into a much larger spotlight and they're not at all comfortable there.

These guys are just going to have to butch up about it though, because the market crash and the credit freeze and the housing bubble happened on their watch. It was their job to warn us about this disaster before it hit and most of them didn't.

There's going to be a lot more uncomfortable comments thrown their way in the days ahead, so they'd better get used to it.

Jon Stewart's initial Volly

Jim Cramer at CNBC Responds

Stewart responds to Cramer's Response

Oh yeah, by the way, Cramer's advice to sell everything at the bottom of a Bear Market? Not a good idea.

Google Knows I'm Bald

2009-03-09T20:46:00.000-07:00

As you've probably noticed, I've been experimenting with advertising on my blog.

It's not making much money, but that wasn't the point. I wanted to experiment and educate myself on this business of online advertising since I believe that's where the web and the world is headed.

The ads that interest me the most are the Google AdWords. The premise is that it reads your blog and then presents the most appropriate ads based on your content. That idea fascinates me. If I write a blog entry about two-headed zebras, then AdWords will pick ads for people who are interested in two-headed zebras (if there are any).

I've been monitoring the ads and so far it's been pretty cool. It's not always perfectly accurate though. Sometimes I might write an article about how the lawyers involved in the Dickie Scruggs scandal all suck, and AdWords will serve ads for people looking for cheap lawyers in Mississippi or I'll write about the president dealing with the economic crisis and it'll serve ads for schemes on how you can get in on all this stimulus money.

A couple of weeks ago, I started noticing AdWords serving more and more ads about hair loss and baldness cures. Now, I am bald, but I've never actually written about being bald. I looked over my old posts just to make sure.

Where were these ads coming from? At first it was a real mystery, then I started to look over the whole site and I noticed that, even though I've never written about being bald, on every page was my little profile picture that, sure enough, showed my shiny head in all its glory.

I can't find any confirmation that google is using images to gather information for their AdWords program, but it's the only way I can figure they would serve these ads. Google does have technology where computers can read images though. If you use google image search, it has a program that can look at pictures and filter out the ones that might be nude or depicting sex acts, so maybe they can read my picture and tell I'm bald.

It's a little intimidating to think computers might be that sophisticated, but it's pretty cool too. It's not artificial intelligence yet, but it gives you an idea of how people might use artificial intelligence in the future.

The MBA Generation

2009-03-07T13:35:00.000-08:00

In college I studied business, but I never did very well. After graduation, I started twice to get my MBA, but dropped out both times.

The problem was that it just always seemed like bullshit to me. The only way to make money was by making something else that was valuable. This business of trying to get rich off the margins or skimming money off the system and mechanics of making things, in my heart I felt like that was wrong. I always felt like an outsider among people who were really excited about making a place for themselves in this scheme and felt like a traitor for not having the confidence in the system they had.

This was the beginning of what I call my derailment. I never knew my true path, only that I wasn't on it, and the more I tried, the more I failed. There were really important parts of my life that wanted me to go down that path, they thought it was best for me and best for everyone, but I could never make it happen because I never believed in it.

If you read the business news, it's pretty clear that all these structures the MBA generation built are now collapsing in on themselves. Many millions of people trusted them and now they're really suffering and wondering, what's to become of us.

It would be easy for me to gloat because I felt the wrongness of what we were doing long before my contemporaries, but I don't have it in me because I never came up with a viable alternative. These people didn't betray us, they were just wrong in their assumptions.

What I do know is this: America is the greatest creative force on the history of the planet. If we can rebuild ourselves based on that, based on building things of real value, then we should not only survive, but prosper again. We can't make it by skimming dollars out of the system or betting on the margins. Maybe you can for a while, but that philosophy is always doomed to fail in the end.

James Randi and Anti-Religion

2009-03-06T20:31:00.000-08:00

Recently James Randi posted a video questioning the validity of some archaeological research currently going on in Nazareth with regards to sites mentioned in the bible. Randi uses this as a platform to call the whole bible into question. While I agree with him that a lot of this "archeology" into biblical sites is questionable, I can't agree with making the jump from that to a general dismissal of religion.

In the video, Randi demonstrates a pretty developed knowledge of the bible, a knowledge greater than what you see in most Christians, yet he strongly maintains he doesn't believe any of it, so much so, that the wants you not to believe it either.

What would motivate someone to learn so much about something they don't believe in? James Randi professes he has no religion, but I would suggest his religion is anti-religion. He is both priest and evangelist for anti-religion and that's what motivates him to learn so much about the bible.

People have such a strong desire for religion that they maintain it, even if their religion is anti-religion and whatever human trait motivates Christians to try and gain converts also motivates Randi to seek converts to his belief system.

This desire to convert people to our own point of view isn't limited to religion. You see it in sports, politics, art and pretty much every other aspect of human activity. It is ubiquitous. We say it doesn't matter if other people think the way we think, but clearly it does, even if it doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Historically, a great deal of suffering has gone into this idea of making people believe what we believe. We'll fight wars to push our beliefs and gladly torture those who disagree with us. Atheists like Randi claim to be enlightened and advanced, but really they're doing exactly the same thing they criticize believers for.

I worry that atheists like Randi are motivated by the belief that we know everything and what we don't know isn't worth believing in. The fallacy of that philosophy is actually much more evident than the fallacies they want to point out about religion, but they'll never see it.

If we can't trust the religious not to make unfounded archeological claims to support their beliefs, can we really be all that sure to trust the anti-religious won't do the same? If so, who can we trust for a genuinely objective opinion on these matters?

Video of Nadya Suleman, (Octomom) Giving Birth

2009-03-06T18:43:00.000-08:00

Video of Nadya Suleman, (Octomom) Giving Birth

Link: You Tube

Putting off Melton's Re-Trial

2009-03-06T13:06:00.000-08:00

It's probably not possible, but part of me would like federal authorities to put off Frank Melton's retrial until after we elect a new mayor.

The city's been through so much the past few years, it might help if we put off the turmoil of a new trial until a time when Melton's no longer mayor. Of course, that assumes he won't win re-election, and with a field of as many as fifteen candidates anything is possible.

A lot of people were upset when Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon to spare the country the damage of a presidential trial and conviction, but I've always thought his decision was wise. As much as I despise the crap Melton pulled while in office, a re-trial, conviction, and the turmoil of pulling him out of office leaving us with a gap of six months or more with no mayor or an acting mayor might be worse.

If possible, it might be better to see him somehow constrained from further illegal acts, but still in office until the natural end of his term, and once he's no longer mayor, I don't much care what happens to him.

The Next Mayor
So far I don't see a really outstanding choice among the contenders for Melton's seat. There's still time before the election for one of these guys to really distinguish himself though, so I'm holding out hope.

Whoever becomes our next mayor faces all the same challenges in place when Melton was elected, plus having to deal with the gang-like management structure Melton put in power. It's going to take some time and a lot of effort for the new mayor to clean that particular mess up and get some of these jokers out of power in the city's systems.

Jackson's next mayor will probably be black, but it could be a different experience than before. Electing a third black mayor is a very different from the first or second. For one thing, his race isn't nearly as big a deal as it once was and there won't be as many people who cast their vote or lend their support based just on the candidates race. There should be a feeling among the voters that getting the job done is now more important than race.

I'm holding out hope that the Obama presidency can provide a model to cities like Jackson of what a black-lead administration can be like. At the very least, a successful black president should give any newly-elected black mayor confidence none of his predecessors had.

There will still be conflicts over whether to spend money on the white side of town or the black side of town, but those definitions are changing to be more about class and income than race, and, although that's still not an ideal situation, it is improvement.

The nation is changing and Jackson is changing. I, for one, am hopeful, but we still have to shed ourselves of some of the mistakes of the past, and that's going to be difficult.

Amazing African Pole Dancers

2009-03-04T11:49:00.000-08:00

In America, strippers dance on poles to show off their acrobatic skills and their tramp-tattoos. I've seen some girls do pretty amazing things on poles, but these guys in Africa make American pole dancers look like sorority girls trying to do the solja boy dance after nine beers. For one thing, their poles aren't attached to anything! They never had an act like this at Danny's.

link: You Tube

How to Smoke a Cat

2009-03-04T11:17:00.000-08:00

For many years, scientists have argued whether or not marijuana smoking has any detrimental effects on the brain, particularly in the areas of logic and cognitive functions. Recently a story out of Nebraska provided evidence to support the argument that pot can really fuck up your mind.

Police sought Twenty-year-old Acea Schomaker of Lincoln Nebraska on marijuana charges. When they found him, he was smoking a home-made bong made of plexiglas and rubber tubing, with a six-month-old kitten duct-taped inside.

Schomaker said he put the kitten inside the bong because it was high-strung and needed the marijuana smoke to calm down. Police incarcerated Schomaker, seized the bong and took custody of the cat who was turned over to an animal shelter to be checked out by a vet to see if the experience damaged its health.

Schomaker said he had smoked the cat several times before. Police charged him with animal cruelty and possession of marijuana. So far, the kitten seems to be recovering.

Link: KETV Omaha Nebraska