Dr_Evil_Mouse

- check this out. Ten Verses Never Preached On. You have to like no. 1:

I've been getting a kick out of this lately (especially with the extra material) -

Sweeeeet... audiophile heaven.

There was a good piece this morning on CBC with someone who'd written a one-character play from the perspective of Lepine. Long story short, it was pretty powerful stuff, and had been well received (even among family of those who'd been killed), but he made the point a couple of times that he couldn't put his finger on what ultimately made him snap, despite all the pretty exhaustive research he'd done on him. I'm still appalled in my classes by the number of students, women and men alike, who treat "feminism" as if it were a curse word. I'd like to hope the depth of thinking around it all would have evolved somewhat.

That game - and the whole subculture behind it - reminds me of the comment from Thomas Aquinas (and I wish I could remember where it was from) about how excited Christians would be one day to be sitting up in heaven looking down on the writhing of the infidels in the flames of hell.

All of those words together make a great band name.

I keep getting hit with books and movies that are chock-full of rich, allegorical, politically relevant material; it seems to happen often when I sit down to read or watch a flick with our elder daughter. She's liking this too; we have endless talks about it all (and I can't begin to say how happy this makes me). There's no way to adequately sum all of those discussions up. Dune was the last one - and it seems absurdly relevant: an unwitting messianic character (the Mahdi, a.k.a. Muad-dib, the desert mouse), who discovers the value of the spice that's produced by the planet his family has been sent to administer, the spice that allows all navigation to take place (ok, oil), and who also discovers the ecology behind it and the power to destroy it, but who tries to mesh Greek traditions (Atreides, from the house of Atreus) with ostensibly Arabic (from Arrakis - um, Iraq?) ones to find a consensual middle ground.... Add in themes of addiction, prophecy, and imperial intrigue.... Gulliver's Travels is the one tonight. Gulliver starts off lost, ends up first in a world of little, petty (petit) people hell-bent on destroying one another for the most absurd of reasons, who leaves for a world of giants, where his own (European) excuses for warfare fall short of reason, to end up then in a cloud-city of abstract, clever, but deluded wingnuts who can't tell top from bottom, and finally, to land among the horses (viz. horse-sense), next to whom humans are an embarrassment, but whose fundamental rationality grounds him in his final identity. Gulliver's trajectory seems in the end to be one of his growing into himself, into his responsibility, in a world gone whacked. I guess, all that said - anyone got any other bits of fiction that would fit nicely along these sorts of lines?

I saw our councillor Doug Thompson at the local pub a while ago. He drank beer. Ok, never mind.

Yes, and fwiw, Margaret Wente would fit in nicely in a fascist regime.

- I want one of those shirts!

- what he said. Very happy birthday to you!

Happy birthday! Hope to see you again soon!

I haven't checked it out yet, but is there a variety of international English spellings, or does it default to the US, like MS Word seems to always want to do? I've always gotten a kick out of the fact that the default spelling for "globalisation" is the American "globalization".

Wait - does all this mean there are... new albums?

Maybe it only disappears when threads are titled like this one?

Nice!

I berate myself still for having missed him last tour, but having had 5 on heavy rotation in the car for the last couple of weeks makes me feel a bit better . A friend pointed out that most of his tunes are written around travelling, getting high, and sex. And really, what more is there left to write about?

Some interesting figures here. From The Guardian today.

Wow, you must be getting old. Welcome to the geriatric league.

Happy birthday to you! Hope you're safely home by now, reprising that bender .

Phooie - I was going to say one could have been the concentration of media .

Poor Kofi. That's gotta be a tough gig.

I'm guessing the CPC conventions are fueled by oxycontin and SSRIs.

Glad to hear you got back intact . Can't wait to hear some inside scoops.

Thanks again, dd - always a treat . Btw - a propos...