I thought I’d excerpt a joke from an upcoming post — patience, flock — remembering a “Partnership for a Drug-Free America” TV agitprop spot from when I was in high school.  Over some hellish black-and-white scenes, the sad voice intones, “Nobody ever says, ‘I want to be a junkie when I grow up.’”

And my response was, “Well, I believe you just did.”

Please someone get the joke in the post title.  That’s even more important than telling me how many times you can say “agitprop spot” without getting tongue-tied (I’m at “one”.  At one with the that’s basically the joke in the title….)

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I hereby declare a new mcgees.org tradition.  It’s Tuesday night.  So, you’ve gone and had your cheap tacos, your cheap beer, your free Redbox new release, whatever discounted Tuesday thing you have going.  You come home to settle in at your email, your Twitter account, or this very site.  And I’ll post the lyrics to a song by Mr. Ed, or Eddie, or Edward, or “Jerome Turner” Vedder, very famous frontman of Pearl Jam.  It will be a song that you may have heard, but probably never understood the lyrics to, because the best rock lyricist since Dylan sounds like he’s singing underwater most of the time.

OK, so, how do I know what he’s saying?  Yeah, good question.  Once in a while we are graced with lyrics in liner notes.  Otherwise, aggregates of other peoples’ guesses help.  Wikia brings the collective power of wikitude to the task.  Lots of live recordings with him emphasizing different words helps.  But his lyrics change over time, sometimes have simultaneous variants, and, in one dramatic case, (probably) different lyrics every time, and (possibly) Ed himself doesn’t know what he’s saying (an attempt at that transcription will never show up on this program.)  Then there is what I want him to be saying.  So, sometimes I’ll be wrong, and, if this is a successful series, sometimes you will be right, and maybe we can get spirited exegetical discussions going (I refer you — vaguely — to a throwaway line in Infinite Jest involving parents, parsing, Pearl Jam, and R.E.M..  Help, Dave?)

Criterion for selection?  Probably “what’s been playing in my head”.  I’m not front-loading this series; it gets decidedly better than this.

You with me?  Here we go.

I Got Shit

My lips are shaking, my nails are bit off
Been a month since I’ve heard myself talk
All the advances this life’s got on me:
Picture a cup in the middle of the sea

And I fight back in my mind
Never lets me be right
I got memories, I got shit
So much it don’t show

I walked the line
When you held me in that night
I walked the line
When you held my hand that night

An empty shell seems so easy to crack
Got all these questions, don’t know who I could even ask
So I’ll just lie alone and wait for the dream
Where I’m not ugly and you’re looking at me

And I’ll stay in bed
Oh, [???]
If just once, I could feel loved!
Oh, stare back at me!

I walked the line
When you held me in that night
I walked the line
When you held my hand that night
I walked the line
When you held me close that night
I paid the price; never held you in real life

The [???] may have the words “could’ve seen” in it.  Maybe a “you” towards the beginning.  He may be wishing that the other had seen something.  But I’ll stop now, because discussion belongs inside.

(I’m fucking around with Roman numerals — I’m going to be changing the “I” in the title to Unicode after the new post alerts get propagated — and I would be very interested to hear how the “I” in the title looks to you.)

All Vedder Tuesday episodes

I had a rewarding email exchange with my brother about six months ago about charitable donations.  I quoted Benjamin Franklin, I cited specific numbers, I did other could-be-humble-but-could-be-self-aggrandizing things that I’m comfortable doing in private conversation with Dave.  He is, after all, both the most reflective person I know and the person most similar in thought to me (I believe the latter does not shade the former, although that may be hopelessly optimistic.)

So, parable about woman giving her farthings or whatever, I’m skipping the numbers and the hyperbole.  Basically — how do I divide my contributions?

Steven E. Landsburg wrote an article in Slate on this topic, wherein he argues that splitting your contribution is inherently flawed.  To his credit, he actually presents the calculus, and by “calculus” I don’t just mean “calculations”, I literally mean multivariate calculus.  Here is a link to the math page.  Go check it out.

That is one of the most ridiculous arguments I have ever read, but the reason why it’s ridiculous is (to be charitable to Landsburg) a bit subtle.  For his approximation to be valid, one has to imagine “good” to be a scalar; that is, everything else stripped away, a single number that can be compared to other single numbers.  But that’s not how charity works.  Charities define an n-space — a multidimensional mathematical world with very many dimensions — and we’re not trying to optimize a number, we’re trying to optimize a containing volume.  Follow?  If you think you glork from context, you probably do, regardless of the lingo.

So, that’s out the window.  And here enters the most frustrating thing about this argument, for me: this is a perfect AskMeFi question, and is precisely the single question I cannot ask there.  Google “metafilter givewell” and prepare to spend an arbitrarily large amount of time on the inner clockwork of a community you probably don’t care about.  It might be worth it, though, to add two useful terms to your vocabulary: astroturfing and sockpuppetry.

Dave provided CharityNavigator, which I know from the MeFi clusterfrak, and it is extremely useful for making fine-grained distinctions.  But I am interested — very, very interested, and I mean you — by your theories for optimal charitable giving.  Do you give it all to one charity?  One meta-charity?  Several charities?  Do you pay back all of the readers of your blog who’ve lent you money (another large number), and only worry about charity when you reach a zero balance (we’ll take that one as a given)?  I don’t care about your list (maybe I’ll do another post for that) — what I care about is your criteria and, generally, your theory.  If you’ve thought about it, I want to read about it.  And how do you donate?  My method of choice is an anonymous money order made out to the charity in an envelope with no return address.  I don’t want them to incur Visa charges; I don’t want them to send me free return address labels; in fact, I don’t want to waste a single penny — or a single sheet of paper — on an acknowledgment letter, no matter how nice it is or how much they mean it.  That’s the case even if they wouldn’t sell my address for other kinda-like-minded charities to use for mass mailings of expensive glossy press kits, and their likelihood of doing that, to their great shame, is essentially 100%.

Please comment.  I want this to be ultra-useful to people, especially if AskMeFi cannot.

Someone sent a follow-up to a spammy religious email (to which I had responded snarkily) explaining that he first “contact[ed] me by accident”.  He didn’t really, but never mind that.  The interesting line in the email was:

Not to get too personal but you mentioned on your site how you love spending time with your son.  You have to look at him and know that he and this whole world didn’t just happen for no reason, right?  [emphasis in original]

Usually I go on and on and on about this.  But maybe for the first time, I have something short and useful to show for it.  I responded:

The existence of the universe is an occasion for wonder and humility, no doubt.  It just isn’t evidence for a creator.  But awe is not the sole domain of religion: an atheist is able to look at the heavens and realize that, however they came into being, it wasn’t something I did.  This sort of humility in the face of the infinite (or near-infinite) I think is more flattering to atheists than to theists: Christians believe that the world was created specifically for them, their species, and their children, by a sometimes-jealous-and-sometimes-beneficent god.  Atheists have no illusions: the world is worth saving for the world’s sake, not my son’s sake.

As for “reason”?  I’m unsure whether you mean causal reason (i.e., what chain of events led to its creation) or some kind of “what it’s there for” reason.  I of course have an interest in the former, but I believe that the second is a non-question.  “Why did the whole world happen?”: just because you can phrase a proposition doesn’t mean it has an answer.  Dawkins’s great line is “Why are unicorns hollow?”  You have to unask the question to begin in a meaningful place: we can’t legitimately ask why unicorns are hollow because there are no unicorns; we cannot ask for the “meaning of the world” because there is no meaning.  We, as agents, have the ability — and, I believe, the imperative — to make meaning out of the void.

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It would only work for a 15-second bit, so Robot Chicken may be the only program that could do it, but I’d like to see a comedy sketch in which a critically-injured guy is raced on a gurney through an emergency room with ER-style jargon flying, as nurses cut his clothes off him.  Then everyone notices he’s not wearing clean underwear, can’t stop laughing, and he dies.

I made a New England-style clam chowder out of hokkigai.  Delicious.  I could claim it’s the exotic clams that make the dish, or the subtle thyme, but really it’s probably the heavy cream.

Second choice of titles: “Thyme’s on my side, but it’s not the heavy hitter”.

[mp3 link]

Velociraptor was the size of a turkey and weighed only 15 kilos.  It had a comically long tail which wouldn’t have flexed.  It didn’t hunt in packs, didn’t walk crouched, and, far from being smarter than a dolphin, was probably less intelligent than modern big cats.  It had long wing feathers and was covered in downy feathers elsewhere (for real — we’ve found fossils now).  Its center claw would likely not have been sharp enough to disembowel anything.  Our best guess is that it looked something like this:

Other than that, Crichton and Spielberg were completely right and they were horrible, terrifying beasts.

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Funny enough for a FPP, maybe:

I berated Ed Vedder for not using the subjunctive in the song Wishlist.  But every time I get self-righteous about the decline of the subjunctive mood, I consider these two sentences:

I see someone drowning and shout “He will die and no one shall save him!”

I am drowning and shout “I will die and no one shall save me!”

The former means “It is inevitable that he will die, and I am therefore distraught.”  The latter means “I insist that you allow me to die!”  And when you start to explain why the fuck that is, you start composing sentences like “Would and should are used in the same way as other preterite modal verbs in the apodosis clause when the conditional mood is being used”, and then it becomes a contest to see who should hit you with a brick, and who will.

The Enlightenment took aim not at reverence but at idolatry and superstition; it never believed that progress is necessary, only that it is possible. … Why turn to the Enlightenment? There is no better option. Rejections of the Enlightenment result in premodern nostalgia or postmodern suspicion; where Enlightenment is at issue, modernity is at stake.  A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation.  If you’re committed to Enlightenment, you are committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.  … Scepticism and tolerance will not take us very far; while it’s possible they may prevent harm, it’s unlikely that they can inspire anyone to do good.

Reclaiming the Enlightenment must entail reexamining other values that derive from it, and these must include at least four.  One of them is the idea that human beings have equal rights to happiness on earth.  A second Enlightenment value is the commitment to reason – not as opposed to passion, which was as riotous during the 18th century as at any other period, but as opposed to blind authority and superstition.  A third value is more surprising, but equally important: reverence for Creation is a form of gratitude, and a sign of humility: whatever you think made the world, you had better remember it wasn’t you. Hope, a fourth Enlightenment value, is what drives all the others, but it is not the same as optimism.  Hope is not a statement of fact but a foundation of action.

Read it.  Read it now.  Right now.  Don’t bookmark the link and not get around to reading it.  Now.  Seriously, four minutes.

You didn’t click, did you?  Kudos if you have, but most people haven’t.  If you do not read this article, you self-label as a relgionist or a conservative, and you have a milligram of intellectual honesty — a fucking picogram — you need to admit that you never bothered to even attempt to understand what liberalism and secularism are about, and need to just shut the fuck up and stop voting, advocating, protesting, shouting, preaching, hating, and dicking around until you bother to spend four minutes at it.  If you object, figure out why you object.  If you dismiss this, have a reason.  Not what your mommy and daddy told you, not that “values” taste like warm milk with vanilla and just a little bit of Splenda, not what you’re afraid of after you die, not that the world is a big scary place, not that it’s really really fun to have lots of money and to have it because you are better than everyone else.  Four minutes.  Starting now.  You can consider me a self-righteous literally-damned espresso-sipping Walden-reading Frenchy fag for insulting you in this paragraph, or whatever you feel you need to, but just go.  Please go.

There’s been a drought of proper hard rock / heavy metal radio in Los Angeles in recent decades, in the formats successful in both San Diego and Northern California.  There was KQLZ “Pirate Radio” which trying-very-hard-to-be-cool kids (at least one of which I’ve known very well) actually believed was an unlicensed radio station; there was KNAC, which, like the former, garnered some following outside of Los Angeles; but maybe it’s that the crashes-and-burns of both were much harder than their music that has made programmers very wary.

There is now KROQ, a “modern rock” station (and the source of such personalities as Dr. Drew Pinsky, Adam Carolla, Stryker, Carson Daly, and [to ape the shallow sarcasm of KROQ's peak era] so many others of whom we should be so proud.  We have KLOS, a “classic rock” station, which we can be less embarrassed about, as the only national vomit I know that began there are Mark & Brian.

But here’s an interesting thing.  KROQ is now spinning Metallica’s 1991 Black Album — even its hard tracks — which it never used to do; apparently Metallica used not to be “modern rock”, when they were modern, but are now, when they are old.  And KLOS is now considering Guns ‘n’ Roses’s 1991 Use Your Illusion albums to be “classic rock”.  These bands toured together at their zeniths, and neither are in the traditional veins of the respective stations.  It seems these two stations are osmotically filling the void, but very poorly, as one can hear neither, say, older stuff such as Iron Maiden nor newer stuff such as Atreyu.

(I think I need an iPod jack in my truck, if only to keep me from writing such pointless posts in the future.)

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