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happy holidays
Dec. 5th, 2005 08:06 am
Thank you, Jeff.
Dec. 5th, 2005
Hey Nico...
Dec. 5th, 2005 09:11 amYour son apparently shares palm patterns with a ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
spacemummy.
This is awesome, because I bet Dasan would really like being a space mummy when he grows up.
spacemummy.This is awesome, because I bet Dasan would really like being a space mummy when he grows up.
- YOW! It's a live restaurant webcam from Germany. Your chance to find out if the Krauts have a "five second rule".
- No one goes to Burning Goat any more. It's just for frat boys and drunk farmers from Gavle.
- The bees, they know our faces.
- The dogs, they are laughing at us.
- No, actually this isn't the kind of suit that "makes people hate lawyers". It's the kind where you hope he gets drained of money and then fired from a cannon. Don't hype diet Phils, Dr. Pill.
- Stranger still, Diane Yuenger was told by someone in the program to meet a man in an In-N-Out Burger parking lot. She did, paying $600 for a plastic bag full of what she was told were her mother's remains. UC Irvine is finally paying up for their Burke & Hare days.
- Teen magazines are kind of blah. Catholic religious magazines are very, very blah. I now present to you the Teen Girl Catholic Magazine. You're welcome!
auto geek note: the Mini Engine
Dec. 5th, 2005 09:47 amMotoringfile has a nice update and analysis on the next gen engine for the Mini.
Harry and Edmund's excellent adventure
Dec. 5th, 2005 02:56 pmToday's blogtastic memesplosion is the anti Narnia piece in the Guardian. It's a crock of shit.
As a former Christian I have no brief to defend the faith. However, I loved the Narnia books growing up and I still enjoy them. They're in the great tradition of English children's books, presenting a group of kids separated from their parents and forced to deal with magic, evil, strange new worlds, death, and their own character. I grew up reading E. Nesbit's classics like The Railway Children and Five Children and It, and devoured the entirety of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series. All of these books were written within thirty years of the turn of the century, and depict a lily-white sheltered imperial England that is completely foreign to modern children. They are not tuned to modern sensibilities, and parts of them are inexplicable or offensive today. As it happens, E. Nesbit was a Fabian Socialist and Arthur Ransome was a Communist who ended his life in the Soviet Union. C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, was a red-faced beef-eating English conservative and Christian convert whose books are obvious Christian allegories.
You can't ignore Lewis's religious ideas. He's not a subtle guy. Creation and Fall, the betrayal and crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the challenge of Islam, and the Apocalypse are all covered in the Narnia books. As children of secular humanist liberal intellectual agnostics, my brother and I read the Narnia books as pure fantasy, and only later did we learn the allegorical meaning. Certainly I was prepared for the Christian story later in life at least in part because I'd been emotionally moved as a kid by Lewis's lion-Christ.
Polly Toynbee's clumsy hatchet job treats Lewis and the filmed interpretation of his book the way Bill O'Reilly treats Cindy Sheehan. She's helped by Disney's clumsy promotion of the film using churches and churchy music, no doubt a result of Mel Gibson's success with his emetic Passion S&M romp. They're movie promo idiots. And the movie may well be awful. But American 21st century evangelical culture is not Lewis's fault. The attempt to somehow make the Narnia books into a fundamentalist political statement is a failure whether it's the churchy types or the atheists doing so. They're children's fantasy books with the most vanilla Christian allegory imaginable behind them. There are far more heavy-handed and sectarian things dumped on kids in this country every day, starting with the entirety of Christmas entertainment. Our whole culture is immersed in Jesus Twee.
She doesn't like Christ as a lion and wants him as a lamb. He's both in the Narnia universe. He's a powerful and dangerous living God ("not a tame lion") and also a murder victim. Lewis's often frightening lion-God is a hint of adult spirituality for children who've been fed happy-Jesus in a world that clearly is more like coffee than like candy. It's a dangerous and flawed universe, and God is not your pet.
Eventually Toynbee loses her shit completely and starts blaming Lewis's story for Christianity itself. The best quote is Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls.. Um, that is Christianity. The rest is setup and explanation. Later, she says that ...Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism. Yes, again, that's Christianity. It's also adulthood, and it's not sadistic to present suffering and guilt in a fantasy novel intended for older children and young adults. Not to do so is to insult their intelligence and maturity.
The clearest descendent of Lewis's Narnia stories today is J.K. Rowling's wildly popular series of novels about the young magician Harry Potter. Like Lewis's children, Harry is fated from birth to do great things. Like them, he is taken out of the everyday world of English children into a magical one. And like them, he increasingly confronts a dark and puzzling world that has evil and sadness mixed in with the magic and joy. You don't have to believe in sorcery to bond with Harry and his friends; you just have to be a kid or remember what it was to be one, and follow him through that discovery of grown-up successes, failures, and emotions.
In the same way it's not necessary to believe in Jesus or in a magic world of talking animals and mythical creatures, ruled by a God-like lion, to enjoy the Narnia books. They're about childhood and testing your child's strength against an adult world. The religious marketers pushing Lewis's fiction and this new film in Christian bookstores will be forgotten fifty years from now but the books will remain.
Conservative religious types will attack Harry for his witchcraft and apparently anti-Christian activists need to bite Lewis as well. The kids know better in both cases.
As a former Christian I have no brief to defend the faith. However, I loved the Narnia books growing up and I still enjoy them. They're in the great tradition of English children's books, presenting a group of kids separated from their parents and forced to deal with magic, evil, strange new worlds, death, and their own character. I grew up reading E. Nesbit's classics like The Railway Children and Five Children and It, and devoured the entirety of Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons series. All of these books were written within thirty years of the turn of the century, and depict a lily-white sheltered imperial England that is completely foreign to modern children. They are not tuned to modern sensibilities, and parts of them are inexplicable or offensive today. As it happens, E. Nesbit was a Fabian Socialist and Arthur Ransome was a Communist who ended his life in the Soviet Union. C.S. Lewis, on the other hand, was a red-faced beef-eating English conservative and Christian convert whose books are obvious Christian allegories.
You can't ignore Lewis's religious ideas. He's not a subtle guy. Creation and Fall, the betrayal and crucifixion and resurrection of Christ, the challenge of Islam, and the Apocalypse are all covered in the Narnia books. As children of secular humanist liberal intellectual agnostics, my brother and I read the Narnia books as pure fantasy, and only later did we learn the allegorical meaning. Certainly I was prepared for the Christian story later in life at least in part because I'd been emotionally moved as a kid by Lewis's lion-Christ.
Polly Toynbee's clumsy hatchet job treats Lewis and the filmed interpretation of his book the way Bill O'Reilly treats Cindy Sheehan. She's helped by Disney's clumsy promotion of the film using churches and churchy music, no doubt a result of Mel Gibson's success with his emetic Passion S&M romp. They're movie promo idiots. And the movie may well be awful. But American 21st century evangelical culture is not Lewis's fault. The attempt to somehow make the Narnia books into a fundamentalist political statement is a failure whether it's the churchy types or the atheists doing so. They're children's fantasy books with the most vanilla Christian allegory imaginable behind them. There are far more heavy-handed and sectarian things dumped on kids in this country every day, starting with the entirety of Christmas entertainment. Our whole culture is immersed in Jesus Twee.
She doesn't like Christ as a lion and wants him as a lamb. He's both in the Narnia universe. He's a powerful and dangerous living God ("not a tame lion") and also a murder victim. Lewis's often frightening lion-God is a hint of adult spirituality for children who've been fed happy-Jesus in a world that clearly is more like coffee than like candy. It's a dangerous and flawed universe, and God is not your pet.
Eventually Toynbee loses her shit completely and starts blaming Lewis's story for Christianity itself. The best quote is Of all the elements of Christianity, the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls.. Um, that is Christianity. The rest is setup and explanation. Later, she says that ...Lewis weaves his dreams to invade children's minds with Christian iconography that is part fairytale wonder and joy - but heavily laden with guilt, blame, sacrifice and a suffering that is dark with emotional sadism. Yes, again, that's Christianity. It's also adulthood, and it's not sadistic to present suffering and guilt in a fantasy novel intended for older children and young adults. Not to do so is to insult their intelligence and maturity.
The clearest descendent of Lewis's Narnia stories today is J.K. Rowling's wildly popular series of novels about the young magician Harry Potter. Like Lewis's children, Harry is fated from birth to do great things. Like them, he is taken out of the everyday world of English children into a magical one. And like them, he increasingly confronts a dark and puzzling world that has evil and sadness mixed in with the magic and joy. You don't have to believe in sorcery to bond with Harry and his friends; you just have to be a kid or remember what it was to be one, and follow him through that discovery of grown-up successes, failures, and emotions.
In the same way it's not necessary to believe in Jesus or in a magic world of talking animals and mythical creatures, ruled by a God-like lion, to enjoy the Narnia books. They're about childhood and testing your child's strength against an adult world. The religious marketers pushing Lewis's fiction and this new film in Christian bookstores will be forgotten fifty years from now but the books will remain.
Conservative religious types will attack Harry for his witchcraft and apparently anti-Christian activists need to bite Lewis as well. The kids know better in both cases.
What's all this about a clam? Oh no...
Dec. 5th, 2005 11:19 pmAfter today's phrenology session I had an interesting talk with Brain Lady. I found myself explaining to her why she sounded like a postscientific wacko at first, before I learned more about her. Most of the problem is her language. She speaks Science and has been working at very technical jobs in the mental health field for 20 years, but when she's explaining things to a client she uses analogies and metaphors that have been totally ruined by New Age bubbleheads.
For example, she will say "I'm doing this site to push the energy back over to the other side of your brain". On further questioning, she explains that this is a thumbnail description for a poorly understood phenomenon in which treating one site causes the voltages to go down there and up in another part of the brain. She doesn't literally believe that she is pushing the energy around. She refers to treating multiple injuries as "like peeling off layers of an onion". This sounds like she believes in concentric spheres of some intangible substance, but again it's a simile. Her observations show her that multiple injuries often require multiple stages of treatment, but there isn't any proven one-to-one correspondence between the injuries and the stages of treatment. And when she's talking about electrical activity and mental acuity increasing after treatment, she calls it "waking up the brain"; another analogy. All of these things sound like something the local Crystal Anus Delver at the Metaphysical Bookhonk would say. In Brain Lady's case, she's working off many years of academic study and clinical experience in developmental disability, head injuries, special education, substance abuse treatment, and psychotherapy.
The other bad news I had for her is that her stuff sounds like Scientology. Wires on your head, healing old injuries, increased states of awareness, oh dear. You're expecting Tom Cruise to appear stage left and congratulate you for choosing the right path. Here's the hilarious part: she knows nothing about Scientology. As I was explaining how many parallels there are, her eyes got wider and wider. "Oh no, do people think this is like Scientology? That's just a dumb cult!" Poor thing, she's spent 20 years in the Science Hole and working with actual patients, and hasn't noticed some weird cultural trends.
She pointed out that she doesn't speak in Science much to clients because communicating the statistical links between voltage differentials and affective disorders to people with head injuries can be frustrating to both parties. I think I did manage to get across that she was using language and analogies that had been poisoned, though.
For my own part, I told her I had only really started trusting her judgment the day she went off on a rant about attribution errors and the importance of knowing your independent variables and not trusting your subjective observations, with several anecdotes of failed studies that hadn't taken these precautions.
For example, she will say "I'm doing this site to push the energy back over to the other side of your brain". On further questioning, she explains that this is a thumbnail description for a poorly understood phenomenon in which treating one site causes the voltages to go down there and up in another part of the brain. She doesn't literally believe that she is pushing the energy around. She refers to treating multiple injuries as "like peeling off layers of an onion". This sounds like she believes in concentric spheres of some intangible substance, but again it's a simile. Her observations show her that multiple injuries often require multiple stages of treatment, but there isn't any proven one-to-one correspondence between the injuries and the stages of treatment. And when she's talking about electrical activity and mental acuity increasing after treatment, she calls it "waking up the brain"; another analogy. All of these things sound like something the local Crystal Anus Delver at the Metaphysical Bookhonk would say. In Brain Lady's case, she's working off many years of academic study and clinical experience in developmental disability, head injuries, special education, substance abuse treatment, and psychotherapy.
The other bad news I had for her is that her stuff sounds like Scientology. Wires on your head, healing old injuries, increased states of awareness, oh dear. You're expecting Tom Cruise to appear stage left and congratulate you for choosing the right path. Here's the hilarious part: she knows nothing about Scientology. As I was explaining how many parallels there are, her eyes got wider and wider. "Oh no, do people think this is like Scientology? That's just a dumb cult!" Poor thing, she's spent 20 years in the Science Hole and working with actual patients, and hasn't noticed some weird cultural trends.
She pointed out that she doesn't speak in Science much to clients because communicating the statistical links between voltage differentials and affective disorders to people with head injuries can be frustrating to both parties. I think I did manage to get across that she was using language and analogies that had been poisoned, though.
For my own part, I told her I had only really started trusting her judgment the day she went off on a rant about attribution errors and the importance of knowing your independent variables and not trusting your subjective observations, with several anecdotes of failed studies that hadn't taken these precautions.