May 31 2008
Weekly Top 5
Chumbawamba - Tubthumper
Chumbawamba - Un
Max Richter - The Blue Notebooks
Thievery Corporation - The Cosmic Game
Infected Mushroom - Converting Vegetarians
Archive for May, 2008
May 31 2008
Dying
Everyone knows that they’re going to die eventually, but most of the time we try really hard not to think about it. When we do think about it, we do things like eat more cookies and go shopping. But disease often forces us to confront our mortality. In portraits of the dying, the artist spoke with hospice patients, people who knew they were going to die and photographed them before and shortly after their deaths (via 3QD). In the Guardian, Susan Sontag’s son describes her attitude towards death (also via 3QD)
But no amount of familiarity could lessen the degree to which the idea of death was unbearable to her. In her eyes, mortality seemed as unjust as murder. Subjectively, there was simply no way she could ever accept it. I do not think this was denial in the ‘psychobabble’, Kübler-Ross sense. My mother was not insane; she knew perfectly well that she was going to die. It was just that she could never reconcile herself to the thought.
This guy hopping rocks in the Grand Canyon seems pretty comfortable with his mortality, though (3QD again).
May 31 2008
Movies in the Square
Every Friday night in Flagstaff in the summer, they show a movie in the square. Beforehand there’s usually a small performance. Last night it was the dance troupe from the community college. They were not very good and asked the audience for money to go to a competition in Italy.
Even though Shrek the Third
- The adult to child ratio was something like 1:20. This is kind of terrifying outside of school when they’re tightly controlled.
- They only show kids movies, and not especially good ones. Luckily, I was in a really good mood and even thought Shrek the Third
- Flagstaff is not warm. Last week it snowed for this. This week the temperature just dropped into the 50s when the sun went down.
May 30 2008
What I’ve Noticed
Japan accidentally gives passenger 142g of cannabis.
Flagstaff has a wool festival. When I first saw fliers for this around, I thought it was a joke…
An incredible post on the infinite workload of an academic and trying to have a life via Sciencewomen.
If you don’t think cat-calling is a problem, read this.
How not to deal with illegal immigration.
The universe might be shaped like a doughnut. Via 3QD.
Thinspiration - eating disorder art.
The best poem I’ve read in a long time.
Think sexism doesn’t exist in the mainstream media?
Women “bored by science”, but continue to do well in it.
A very bad plan to pay for a mortgage bailout program.
Eurovision has very very bad songs.
I think the giant squirrel was a bit too much. Via Acephalous.
May 30 2008
Why postmodernism isn’t all bad
… here is a salute to the postmodernists. As today’s celebrants of corybantic Romanticism, they enrich culture. They say to the rest of us: Maybe, just maybe, you are wrong. Their ideas are like sparks from firework explosions that travel away in all directions, devoid of following energy, soon to wink out in the dimensionless dark. Yet a few will endure long enough to cast light on unexpected subjects. That is one reason to think well of postmodernism … Still another, the one that counts the most, is the unyielding critique of traditional scholarship it provides. We will always need postmodernists or their rebellious equivalents. For what better way to strengthen organized knowledge than continually to defend it from hostile forces? … And if somehow, against all the evidence, against all reason, the linchpin falls out and everything is reduced to epistemological confusion, we will find the courage to admit that the postmodernists were right, and in the best spirit of the Enlightenment, we will start over again. Because …. We must know, we will know.
May 30 2008
My New Favorite Cookies
May 29 2008
There’s no enlightenment here
I also continue to find absolutely no meaning in the pain itself. (I find the Headache to be as profound as a malfunctioning car alarm that just won’t shut off…)
From All in My Head
May 29 2008
The Purse-Seine
There is no reason for amazement: surely one always knew that cultures decay, and life’s end is death.
May 29 2008
AAAAAHHHHH!!!!
I stepped into a Payless the other day to get out of the wind while waiting for a ride. I was faced with this abomination.
I’m not really sure how long it’s going to take me to recover.
May 28 2008
Activists in pain
Trying to save the world, in your own particular way, is very important. But the world will not save you.
From All in My Head
