Prose Justice

SpinTunes: An Epilogue

2010-08-22T09:57:00.000-07:00

I won.

I...

....WON?!?!

In what bizarre universe do I find myself, where I'm able to get involved with this great group of people, all of whom are imposing talents in their own right, and stand toe-to-toe with them? What is this ridiculous sense of validation and pride I'm feeling? What the hell, man?!

It's taken me a bit too long to sit down and start writing this; I've had an unexpectedly busy week and I also needed a little time to get used to the idea that SpinTunes has concluded, and that somehow I managed to come out on top...

I've already gone into great detail about the songs I wrote, most recently with a bookend post over at the Artifiction forums, so this is just going to be a bit of a"closing thoughts and heaps of thanksgiving" post.

First and foremost, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Sid Brown, my dear friend and collaborator on "My Daughter" and "Lovers, Fighters, Survivors". Without your contribution, my entries would have lacked their most important essences. Thanks, buddy.

I want to say something to all of you who were involved in one way or another. I toyed with the idea of making youtube videos for each of you, but not everybody has an account; I might still do it for those who do, but for now I'm just going to say everything to everyone here.

To my competitors:

I'm honored just to be among you. I know this contest doesn't have the exposure that Song Fu had, and that it's just in its fledgling stages, but in a way that makes this even more meaningful to me that we all had a part in it. This feels like the beginning of something that will continue to grow and inspire musicians and songwriters for a long time. I really hope it becomes something magnificent.

The following notes appear in the order our profiles are listed over at the Spintunes blog...

Edric Haleen: You, sir, are the Unstoppable Force and the Immovable Object. Dave Leigh once said that you never got the recognition you deserved in Song Fu because of the young trending age of the voters; people wanted nerdy pop songs and didn't recognize the raw talent you possess. I'm glad to see that this contest was able to acknowledge what a damn powerful songwriter you are. Not to mention your unrelenting positivism and ability to motivate and entertain everyone around you. Thanks for setting the bar so high.

Kevin Savino-Riker: um, hi!

Denise Hudson: Denise, Denise, Denise. You were my secret partner and, to borrow a term from Native American culture, my spirit guide. I was a little nervous about entering the contest, and might have only stuck around to do shadow entries had you not been there to be my training wheels and my sounding board. Thanks so much for helping get it through my thick skull that I could do this stuff too. Also, this paragraph would be naked without a mention of the absolutely delicious music you've penned. I'm proud to say I know a writer and performer as good as you.

Ross Durand: We've exchanged correspondence recently since making it to the final challenge together, but I don't think I ever quite told you that I was scared of having you as a final opponent. Your songwriting, playing, and vocal stylings are all things I envy and strive toward achieving in my own music. Thanks for writing great songs the whole way through, especially at the end. I hope to hear a lot more from you.

Sara Parsons: I think you might be the most established YouTuber out of everyone who took part in this contest. I'd heard of you and listened to your songs long before I even joined up at TMA. Because you were in here, I felt like I was up against a bonafide celebrity of the new independent music scene. I cannot get enough of your music, and it's still a novelty to me when I think about how we're now acquaintances... that I can just hit you up on Twitter and you write me back, knowing who I am. I still want to write that "I got killed by a werewolf" song with you.

Mick Bordet: I only recently discovered that you got a shadow in for round #1, so I'm sorry that I haven't had more time to get to know you and your music, but for what it's worth, I like what I heard and have to compliment you on managing a unique approach to the Superhero topic. I hope you'll be back for the next SpinTunes!

Gödz Pöödles: Russ, Rhod... you two are famous, infamous, notorious, and a handful of other -ouses, all of which are crucial to being the songwriting contest superstars you are. You guys are among the most conditioned and professional acts I've ever heard and you've always encouraged me. It means a lot to be a newcomer here, and be taken seriously by seasoned veterans such as yourselves. It's always a pleasure chatting with and listening to you!

Emperor Gum: Graham, you got a bit of the short end of the stick during this contest, but I've always been impressed by your ability to take a clarinet and turn it into a rock n' roll instrument. Nobody can touch the uniqueness of your songs, and while they're not always crowd-pleasers, I've taken special care to pay very close attention to your music - you're always up to something devious, it seems. That's a trait I enjoy quite a bit.

Bryce Jensen: Dude. Your shadow blew me away. You're another guy that I knew nothing about as this contest was beginning, but I'm looking forward to hearing your future works. You have a way of harnessing your voice that impresses and humbles me. You should submit covers for all the other challenges from this contest. I really wanna hear what you have to come up with.

Ryan Welton: You were a surprise to me; when I heard "Underdog Blues" I thought to myself, "wow, a lot of people here just met their match". Your song didn't get the reception it deserved, and I'm bummed that we didn't hear back from you after round #1. Regardless, the song you did share with us was entertaining, funny, and it sounded fantastic. Please come back for Spintunes #2.

Governing Dynamics: Travis, I'm glad we became friends between all the challenges and among all the tweets flurrying about; you're the songwriter I had the easiest time relating to, and as such it was especially hard for me to hear you absolutely nailing these challenges in ways that I couldn't manage. Please understand I mean that to say that you're the songwriter I strive to be when I'm putting my mind to full arrangements. I think I can learn a lot from you. I hope you won't mind when I start poking around asking for input...

Jenny Katz: Where do I begin? You are the most delightful surprise. You wrote my favorite songs in both the rounds in which you participated. You are still in heavy rotation in my ipod, and I find myself singing your songs all the time. You music is so good, I think I have a crush on you because of it. We were deprived of your work far too soon. Seriously, I love your music. I love your voice. The harmony in "Miss You" brings me to tears. I can't give a higher compliment.

JoAnn Abbot: JoAnn, it's the same compliment you've gotten everywhere, from everyone, but it's amazing that you walked into this with empty hands and produced the songs you did. You have a soft but powerful soul in your voice, and you found a way to make music out of scarcity. Unbelievable. Thanks also for being so fun in your interactions with everybody! You're a treasure to have here.

Bram Tant: Bram, you left a bigger mark on Spintunes than anyone else, and you did it with one absolutely hilarious and inventive song (and a couple butt-cheeks). You're fearless, and I can't wait to see what you apply that fearlessness to next. Don't ever stop.

Boffo Yux Dudes: Tom, I think people often get to distracted by the humor to ever pay attention to the fact that you and Allan are two of the most versatile songwriters I've encountered here. You consistently (all the way back to Song Fu's past that I've listened to) come up with songs that each have their own identity and uniqueness, while maintaining a certain quality that could only come from you. Every song of yours I listen to gives me the strange paradoxical feeling of "who the hell wrote this?/Boffo Yux Dudes totally wrote this..." Thanks also for getting my sense of humor when most others miss it.

"BucketHat" Bobby: Bobby. Mr. Matheson. Dude. You were someone I was thrilled to befriend back when I joined TMA. You have mastered a genre of your own; that's in many ways the greatest achievement a songwriter can strive toward. I have always held you in the highest respect, and am still caught off guard that you told me my opinion and praise meant a lot to you. Dude! It's the other way around! I'm the one who's supposed to be incredibly flattered to be complimented by you!

Heather Miller: You're another one whose songs work their way into my head. I cannot tell you how many times I've walked into a bar since round #2, and my head kicked off with, "...right on target, right on cue..." You've gotten under my skin in a good way. It's also been especially delightful reading your song bios; you're a great writer - prose and music. I think I need to start listening to your radio program; I suspect I'll enjoy it quite a lot :)

Gorbzilla: Another Song Fu veteran whose music I always liked. You've got a great rock n' roll voice and it's supported perfectly by your guitar work. I need to give you a special shout-out for "Superhero Song" - it was one that I was fascinated by, even before I knew anything about the character you chose to pay tribute to. I really appreciate it when a person can convey enough through a song that it piques my interest and inspires me to investigate it further. That song was a great achievement.

The Offhand Band: Mark, even before I started reading your song biographies, I could tell that you put more effort than anyone into the science of songwriting. Every single nuance, every note you compose is given meaning by the notes that surround it... I can't really articulate exactly what I'm trying to say, but I hope you get it from my fumbling around the point I'm trying to make. Your songs are chock-full of thought. Lots of people can 'design' songs, but the design tends to stick out more than the song itself once all is said and done. You're good enough at design that even though that design is doing its job the whole way through, the *song* is what stands out. I was especially impressed with your instrumental outro in "Another Universe", and I'll echo the sentiments of others when I say that "Ballroom Dance" was the best song of Round 4.

Steve Durand: Steve, I feel bad not having something more original to say here, but I'm going to have to reiterate something I think Travis already said about your music: I can't help but feel cool listening to it. You have a sound unlike anyone else and you do things with those horns that put most of us to shame. You've achieved a style that has so much vibe and substance - those undefinable qualities that can't be named themselves, but can only be hinted at. Your songs are just dripping with (good adjective).

Charlie McCarron: You're another composer I was very, very afraid of when this contest began. I knew about 'Grey Matters' before Spintunes came to be, and I was just awestruck by the sheer magnitude of your creative mind. And despite that, your entries in this contest had an unexpected tenderness and delicacy to them; the best way I can describe it is to say, it takes a lot of muscle to have such a gentle touch. Your music is brilliant and haunting. I need to hear more from you.

Caleb Hines: You're possibly the most creative musician and songwriter I've ever become acquainted with. You possess an unparalleled dynamic range in your songwriting, and can deftly weave incompatible influences into a coherent and above all, enjoyable art form. I sincerely believe that I'm addressing a pioneer in the next generation of the Jonathan Coultons and They Might Be Giantses of geek music stardom.

Jon Eric: Yet again, I'm saddened that we didn't hear back from you after round 1; "Superman Sneezed" earned my vote because amongst all the other competition, yours had a surprising emotional impact. Your chorus was deceptive in its simplicity, and it hit me hard. I think you'd have done something really noteworthy in round #3, and I'd love to convince you to give it a shot.

Danny Blackwell and Brian Gray: Sorry for lumping two together here, but I have the exact same thing to say to you both: you guys wrote from a pathologically twisted state of mind in your respective songs, and they were both guilty pleasures because of it! I'd really like to see you join the competition next time around - I think contests like this could benefit from your flavors of off-kilter creativity.

Dr. Lindyke: Dave (and William, who I secretly suspect is a repressed alternate personality trapped in Dave's mind... why else do you hide him from us?), my gratitude goes to you twofold. Not only were you more dedicated to this contest than anyone as far as I can tell despite not being officially entered into the competition, you were also a significant motivating influence to me. You kicked me in the pants when I was hemming and hawwing about joinging Song Fu 7 before it met its demise, and that momentum stayed with me as Spintunes came about. You have always 'gotten' me as a songwriter, and your consistently kind words were more supportive than you know. You and Denise both convinced me to write my own way, as opposed to falling into the trap of aiming for what I think others want. Your prolific songwriting is an inspiration. You write so often and so consistently well... I harbor an affectionate jealousy for the works you produce. Thanks again.

To Travis and the judges:

We wouldn't have Spintunes without your commitment and passion toward music. I'm sure I'm speaking for everybody when I say, thanks for giving us a place to push ourselves.

Travis Langworthy: You're the big boss. The man with the plan. Thanks for standing up and building something for TMA out of the rubble of Song Fu. You took on a task that was going to demand a lot of your energy and patience, and you did it remarkably well. I owe you for presenting me with such an invigorating and infuriating way to occupy all my personal time these past two months.

Heather Zink: You made a great scapegoat :-p Your reviews best tapped into the perspective of the listening public - the people who come to enjoy what we're putting out there. Thanks for getting me in touch with that.

Julia Sherred: Jules, your reviews and rankings came as the product of so much consideration - you managed to nail the logistics of impartial review and you provided more constructive information than I could ever ask for. Thanks also for your making the listening parties something to look forward to!

Joe "Covenant" Lamb: You're the senior songwriter of this community (not an age joke, I swear), and your talent and experience brought a great value to the contest. I have to thank you especially for representing a viewpoint of songs as sound and feeling, not just poetry and theory.

Sammy KABLAM!: If there's one thing everybody loves about you, it's that you shoot from the hip and rarely miss the mark. Your input always went straight to the issue, and you were never afraid to tell us where we needed to expend a little effort. I can personally attest to this improving my songs as the rounds progressed.

Niveous: You were, and still are, a bit of a mystery to me, but your Nur Ein pedigree was evident in your judging. You had an acute sense of what worked and what didn't in everyone's entries to the extent that I cannot disagree with anything you had to say, positive or negative, in any of your reviews of anyone's songs. You have a keen ear; thanks for letting us borrow it.

In Conclusion:

That was a whole lot of words. But I felt that I owe those and more to you all, so I'll beg your pardon and get this thing over with.

I know this contest isn't "big" in comparison to what else is out there, but it means more to me than I know how to convey. I have never had a better education in songwriting than what I received from running this gauntlet. You guys have all helped me reach the next level in my music, and for that, I'm indebted to you all. I'll be riding this high for a long time.

SpinTunes #2 - Scoring Considerations

2010-08-18T09:23:00.000-07:00

I know, I know, I'm supposed to be writing a grand epilogue to my SpinTunes #1 experience. It's coming, but I wanted to get this out beforehand, since it's a time-sensitive issue.

I want to speak out in favor of fresh-start scoring for each round of the contest. Given the other aspects of the contest that are likely staying the same, this makes sense and bears further presentation.

(Copied from comments over at the planning post at the SpinTunes blog)

Since the votes are going up for the SpinTunes #2 format in the newer post, I'll make another argument in support of my preference to keep the "start fresh" method for each round.

Edric already made a compelling case against cumulative scoring, considering that competitors can be logically eliminated from the finals an entire round early.

I just wanted to go further into depth on this for those who may have missed it the first time around. I think this contest has a superior format by not relying on a popular vote... I don't want to see the judges' panel get compromised. And it's precisely *because* we don't have a popular vote that Edric's argument holds water.

There is a fixed number of points available to be distributed amongst the competitors. Furthermore, those points are earned under different circumstances each round because the challenge is different every time. Cumulative scoring under a contest like this is effectively double-counting points earned elsewhere under circumstances that no longer apply to the challenge at hand.

I think people are trying to get a handle on the scoring system by comparing it to other contests/activities, but some of the other things it's being compared to aren't quite accurate. Remember, Travis is a sports guy.

Let's imagine a football game between the Bills and the Patriots. The Bills kick the Pats' asses, winning by 28 points. Meanwhile, the Dolphins play the Cowboys and win by 7 points.

Next week, the Bills play the Dolphins. Should the game start Bills 21, Dolphins 0? Of course not. It's a new game. You can't reward the Bills points for being better than the Patriots when they're competing against the Dolphins.

The analogy isn't exactly perfect, but it illustrates why it doesn't make sense to keep counting the points earned in previous rounds of the contest. The challenge is new every time, so the score needs to reset every time.

Since there's as much weight as there is being placed on the diversity of the tasks to be completed in each round, then a competitor's talent at one particular challenge should only help or hinder them within the scope of that challenge. Especially since it's possible that a challenge can favor one competitor's style. We shouldn't compound that across multiple rounds.

Biography of a Song - "Lovers, Fighters, Survivors"

2010-08-10T09:48:00.000-07:00

Well this is it, kids.

I've made it all the way to the finals of SpinTunes #1. I'm not gonna lie, Marge: I feel like this is my weakest submission thus far. I don't think it's a bad song, but I feel like I owe the contest better than what I ended up with. Then again, according to what I hear from the others who decided to tackle the round #4 challenge, this task beat up on the lot of us.

I spent the vast majority of the songwriting period dwelling on how demanding and obtuse the "three distinct ethnic styles" challenge was. Don't get me wrong; I think the judges came up with a fantastic challenge - if this were the final boss of your typical videogame, it'd be a giant radioactive grizzly bear who shoots tornadoes out his nostrils and can only take damage under his left foot - but, there's seemingly no way to write a song that jumps genres while maintaining internal coherency, that would also stand alone as a decent song outside the scope of this challenge. I suspect nobody in their right mind would write a song like this without being told to.

But anyway, I came up with a solution, and I went back to my old habits from rounds #1 and #2 - I did something risky. Instead of trying to sing three verses in completely different potentially incompatible styles, I decided to treat each ethnic segment as a vignette featuring a spoken narrative. I spend most of this song not singing. On one hand, I'm worried people will consider this a cop-out, but on the other hand, I think I solved the problem of "why the hell would someone repeatedly change the song type so drastically?"

This is a song written entirely in my American acoustic pop music style, but it's a song about flipping through a photo album and looking at old pictures of my parents and grandparents. I take the time to tell a brief story about each of them, and in the background the proper style of music swells in to harken back to their lineages. After I finish telling my little anecdotes, I resume in my style to conclude the story. In effect, I've done everything I could to buy pardon for the fact that the song is so disjointed, and I think my particular solution did so in the least distracting way possible.

The only thing left to worry about is, after it's all said and done, is it still enjoyable and listenable? I think it is. It wouldn't get heavy play in my ipod, but I wouldn't skip past it either.

All that's left now is the excitement to hear how the other contenders attacked this same problem. While I'm sure I exhausted every potential idea and proceeded with the best one I could think of, I expect that the other entrants will have come up against these roadblocks differently, or may have come up against different roadblocks altogether. What may have been my biggest challenge may have been the easiest thing for Caleb or Dave to address, and vice versa. So, I'm eagerly awaiting tomorrow's listening party.

I find myself compelled to write something as a bit of an epilogue to my entire time in this contest, but it probably deserves its own post. I'm excited to say that I'm proud of myself for meeting each challenge with versatility; I had a personal goal that each of my submissions would sound distinct from one another, and I ended up exceeding my own expectations of my ability to do so. I surprised myself a handful of times, and it makes me curious to see what I do next with songwriting, because I honestly can't guess what'll happen. Being in this challenge has made me much better at what I do.

If you were on the fence about signing up this time, do not hesitate to sign up for the next one. It's one of those rare things in the world that is fun and good for you.

Thoughts Upon Reflections Reflecting Upon SpinTunes #1 and SpinTunes #2

2010-08-02T15:42:00.000-07:00

Alright, here's my take on the topics at hand:

Possible Major Changes:

- Popular Vote: I agree with Travis that popular vote is a tricky thing, and needs to be weighed as a minority judge at best (note: each judge in SpinTunes #1 was a minority judge, as no individual had enough sway to affect an outcome against the collective will of the other judges). Something that just occurred to me, though, is that the vote activity in SpinTunes is about an order of magnitude smaller than that of Song Fu; basically, everyone in the contest voted, and maybe a couple friends of people in the contest... but all in all there was a negligible amount of outside voting. What if the 7th judge were a "competitors' vote"? Each competitor gets their same three votes, and let's assume everyone votes for themselves... leaving two additional votes from which a crowd favorite can emerge. Then again, I think it's a special thing to have the competitors' vote come in for the final round. I don't have strong feelings one way or another here...

- Scoring: I was a little uncomfortable with the idea of resetting scoring, as it can lead to outcomes that some could argue are unfair. For example, I think everyone here would agree that Edric performed consistently better than I did across the span of the contest. He came in 1st place twice; I came in 1st place once... but by a stroke of luck, the challenge I won was the round that led to the finals. If the contest and submissions remained identical, except that the round #3 challenge happened first, and the 1st round challenge happened in round #3, then Edric would be in the finals, not me.

On the other hand, Edric made a compelling argument for resetting the scoring; it's the better option just for the fact that nobody is discouraged from continuing as soon as it's mathematically impossible for them to win (this wasn't a problem in Song Fu when there was not a fixed "point pool"; someone could always scare up 400 popular votes and make up a big deficit).

So then, in my mind the way to reconcile my doubts about the fairness of resetting scoring is this: the challenges themselves have to occur in order of increasing difficulty. I don't think it was ever stated explicitly, but I believe that each challenge thus far has been more difficult than the previous one. Since this is the case, I can begrudgingly accept the idea that my winning in round #3 carries more weight than the scores of people who placed higher than me in both previous rounds.

- TRAVIS HAS THE POWER: Challenges are one of the few things that *are* better when designed by committee. I like it the way it is.

Possible Minor Changes:

- Molly Lewis Rule: I feel like a little bit of a moron, but I don't know what this is. Did Molly win uncontested? I thought she beat Paul & Storm? Whatever the Molly Lewis Rule is, I can't comment on it until I have enough info to form an opinion.

- Judges Term Length: I have no preference one way or another. If a judge likes being a judge, I don't see the value of ousting them, other than to keep the competitors on their toes. None of us knew what the respective judges' biases and preferences would be until after the first challenge was done. That one little bit of uncertainty for the next round of competitors seems to be the only reason to swap judges out every time. Is that little difference worth the trouble? I can't say it is...

- Schedule: A lot of you out there couldn't believe that people were still having trouble getting their entries in on time despite having upwards of two weeks to complete a task. I suspect that those of you who said so are retired, are students, are homemakers, or are otherwise not busy during the week. I work full time Monday to Friday; I have a second part time job, and a weekly gig and band practices that fill my weeknights. Whether I had 9 days or twelve days to think about these challenges, in actuality I've had two days to complete them: Saturday and Sunday. I think on the round 2 challenge I had a leading weekend... so you could argue that one time I had four days at a maximum to work on a song. My point is, for me to be able to do these in the future, the 'working period' HAS to be over a weekend, preferably in the latter half of said period. In fact, you could shorten the allotted time to three days, as long as the last two days were on a weekend, but to be fair to everyone who may not have the same kind of regular schedule that I have, the only fair option is for the working window to be at least 8 days, thereby guaranteeing at least two 'weekend' days (whatever days upon which they happen to fall) for those of us who work full time.

- E-Mail Reminders: No need for this, really. It would be cool to have received an email from you that we could just reply to with our submissions (since your email address was a pain in the butt typing it in the first time), but once we've added you to our contact lists, that point becomes... pointless.

- Widget: Lose it. Maybe replace it with a more prominent link to the bandcamp page.

- Shadow CD: Just call shadows shadows. Since you're not guaranteed to receive an album's worth of them, keeping them with the regular submissions makes more sense.

- Judging Guidelines: Maybe. Or maybe a statement just needs to be published for the competitors' benefit. Mark from Offhand Band made a high priority of stating that he wanted his songs to be judged on his writing only; Joe Covenant made a high priority of judging entries based upon how they sounded to him. Clearly there was a disconnect between what each of them thought a "Songwriter's Competition" was. In my mind, one of them viewed this as a Composition contest, and the other viewed it like a Battle of the Bands. In my mind, a Songwriter's Competition requires both of these to be complementary sides of the same coin. It's not just poetry. It's not just music. Both need to add measurable value to the submission, and therefore both need to be judgable criteria.

The only restriction to this is the one that was already in place; production value shouldn't work against a competitor in any but the most extreme scenarios. I'd like to think that if my songs were delivered lo-fi, I'd still have scored similarly. Thing is, if I recorded lo-fi, the judges might likely have missed some of what I put into the song.

Call this unfair if you want, but I have to add this little bit of food for thought: I have no problem with good production helping a competitor. I spend as much time, if not more time, working on mixing and EQ and other postproduction than I do on recording the tracks themselves. I'm still learning how to do it well, but the point is, the sounds that go into my computer are not the same as the sounds that come out. To that end, I consider my mixing and mastering to be just one more instrument I play... one more layer to the work I'm putting into a song. If I can extract value out of it, I believe it's earned value. Keep in mind also, the production quality exemption is there to keep people from playing on an uneven financial field. If I always sound better than someone else because I have a $5,000 recording setup (not actually the case, by the way) that no one else can afford, I shouldn't get more points. But if I spend ten more hours tweaking a song to get it to sound better... ten hours another competitor could've spent, but didn't, then I have no problem earning a few more points for that.

- SUGGESTIONS: Maybe change the way peoples' entries are displayed on their profile pages... it's just a formatting suggestion. People are listed as voted out, but their subsequent entries are not consistently listed as shadows. There's a way to make it more clear how far people made it into the competition, and how much they continued to do after being eliminated. Other than that, I can't think of anything better than all the topics presented above. Cheers!

Biography of a Song - "My Daughter"

2010-07-28T08:32:00.001-07:00

Okay. If you're here you most likely know me, and at least have some vague idea, thanks to a relentless barrage of twitter and facebook messages, that: 1. I'm in a songwriting contest, and 2. I use twitter and facebook messages way too much for your taste.

Oh, holy poop. This one was a doozie. Another round of SpinTunes is behind me, so it's time for another song bio. The song, if you haven't heard it, is available for listening here: http://spintown.bandcamp.com/track/my-daughter

Also, people should go to http://spintunes.blogspot.com and vote for their three favorite songs. The votes are incredibly important this round; only 2 people are left competing as this round closes, but alternates may need to be chosen for the final battle, and who is selected depends on popular vote.

The Round #3 Challenge

"Happy to Sad in 4 Seconds". They fucking meant it. We were to write a song about birth, normally a joyous occasion... but we were to make it a real tear-jerker. Now, I'm a generally positive guy. I'm pretty damn upbeat. I don't write sad songs. When I try to write sad songs, they end up being paradoxically happy-sounding. But... once I got over the initial "Hrrg. How am I gonna write a sad sad song?"...I realized my incredible good fortune and got right to work.

First off, I loved the specificity of this topic; the fastest route to writer's block is a wide-open road. Being tightly focused meant I could design the song from the get-go and not waste any time thinking about what the hell I was gonna write. In fact, quite the opposite to the last song, my hook and melody were in my head as I was driving home from the wine bar, again,* and music would be applied later. The song was formed and the story laid out and I rested easy for the week.

Second, I mentioned incredible good fortune earlier. Lemme e'splain...

...no, will take too long; lemme sum up**:

A lot of you involved in the contest are hearing my music for the first time, and so far, you've only been exposed to schizophrenic prog-rock. This is a style of music that only started coming out of me recently. I have a much longer history with other very different styles. I used to play in a bar band. We used to play in an Irish Pub, owned by real actual Irish people. I'm a good part Irish. Irish folk music is in my blood, man. Some of my favorite music to play. I've secretly wanted to do an Irish folk song since the beginning of SpinTunes, but the challenges as I envisioned them just didn't lend themselves to the genre.

BUT.

Whose music is incredibly well suited to long-form storytelling? Whose music has the capacity for soul-rending heartache? Whose music is not laced with twang and pickup trucks***?

The fucking Irish, that's who.

Round 3 was a gift. I finally got to change gears, and you'll notice I did *everything* differently this time.

The Song Bio

In Rounds #1 and #2, I took chances topically and musically in an effort to be seen as a creative, out-of-the-box thinker. I thought that would give me a leg up against so many competitors that were more experienced than me. It seemed to work on half the judges, and work poorly on the other half, thereby leaving me comfortably, but not impressively, in the middle of the pack. So I knew that if I wanted a chance to get anywhere near the upper half, I would have to hit this topic head-on; besides, if you're going for full-frontal saddity, you don't want to distract from the sadness with cleverness. it would... you know, distract from the sadness...

One thing that adds to sadness, I've learned, is doubt. Negatives have an ironic tendency to feed back positively upon each other, so I knew this song would need a good bit of ambiguity in its lyrics. Since my hook gave away the fact that the daughter was indeed born, I needed to introduce doubt as to whether the sadness was going to come from a tragic loss of another, or from his own failure to be a father or to want to assume the task of fatherhood at all.

The lines she was far more ready than I and would she read blame in my eye were there to force the listener to be a little unsure of who he really cared about. I think he wanted his wife that he already knew and loved, just a little more than he wanted to have a child. Especially regarding the 'blame' lyric.

I struggled with this in particular, because I knew it needed to be included, but I didn't want to detach the listener from the father. This song thrives on empathy, and any concept that breaks your feelings for the character would take you right out of it. But in itself, the idea of blame is a very strong one. We know it's possible that the daughter could apply blame to herself once she understands the circumstances of her birth. So with a positive spin, that lyric about her reading blame in her father's eye could be seen as him worrying that she'll read too much into his eyes, and he can't bear to think of the pain it would cause her to blame herself for her mother's death.

The negative spin, of course, is that human minds are nasty things, and I promise that everyone who goes through something like this will be shocked and disgusted to have at least one thought that they would hate themselves for having. A brain cannot simply shut down its recognition engines when approaching a sensitive subject, and therefore it's inevitable that at some point, a father in the circumstances of the song will recognize that his child's birth was responsible for the loss of his wife. As distasteful as it is to say, and I think this adds to the sadness of the situation, is that the father can obviously love his daughter with all his heart, but on some level recognize that a small part of him does blame her for his loss. He hopes he will be able to hide it, so she doesn't read it in his eyes when the talk finally happens.

My closing lines were included out of necessity in my mind; in the song, I made a choice that some people might find odd: I skipped over the actual death of the mother. You'd think this would be the best place to draw out the tears, and I had indeed written lyrics that covered this part of the story... but my song was already approaching seven minutes in length and I knew I couldn't cut any other parts without seriously reducing the integrity and coherency of the song. So I included the last part as a little epilogue, to allow the listener to go back and fill-in the details: the mother survived the birth itself, and got to meet her daughter before the complications took her life. They had, for a heart-breakingly temporary moment, been a family.

Way to twist the fucking knife, Kev.

The Music

There's not nearly as much to say in this section, as the song is very uncomplicated. I love layering sounds and I love harmonies, but none of that seemed appropriate for a song that's designed to convey the loneliness of loss, so I made an early decision not to harmonize at all, and use a bare minimum of instruments. I actually had a cheap bodhran in my bedroom, a leftover from the bar band days; the skin was coming loose from one side and it was a little floppy, but it was close enough to functional to do the job I needed. But, despite being a far simpler song than my previous efforts, this was the first one that required me to place a call for outside help. There was one instrument I really needed to seal the deal.

Sidney Robert Brown is one of my best friends****, and is a former bandmate from the bar band days I spoke of above. He played darts at the bar when I was just playing music there with a couple friends, but our band started expanding as we focused our intentions a little more. He was introduced to me just as 'Rob'. It came up that he was a bit of a fiddle player. With that, we incorporated him into the band.

Before we all really got to know him personally, we always just referred to him as "fiddlin' Rob", and... true story - To this day, even though we've been great pals for years and his name is Sid Brown, he's still listed in my phone as "Rob Fidlin".

Anyway, as soon as I got the challenge I called Sid up and told him I was going to use him in my song. He was excited, I was excited, and we banged out the entire thing on the Saturday before the deadline. It was really fun to collaborate on a project, and that was the one thing that kept me going through the process, because, if I didn't mention it before... this song really fucked me up. It was hard to write, it was hard to record... not logistically, but emotionally. I cursed myself for coming up with distasteful ideas. I cried thinking about what I was writing. I still cry when I hear the song. But working with Sid was fun and immensely enjoyable. It allowed me to finish.

If I manage to make the cut and get into the finals here, I owe a lot to Sid. Thanks, buddy. May the Force be with you.*****

* - Just because I'm at the wine bar EVERY TIME a challenge is revealed does not mean I'm a lush.
** - HALLO!!! (yadda yadda yadda) Prepare to die.
*** - Damn, Country... you were thiiiiiiis close...
**** - and in another recent matter of convergence, he's also a co-founder of www.starwarsvsstartrek.com
***** - see previous footnote.

Biography of a Song - "Here At The Door"

2010-07-14T08:19:00.000-07:00

Okay. If you're here you most likely know me, and at least have some vague idea, thanks to a relentless barrage of twitter and facebook messages, that: 1. I'm in a songwriting contest, and 2. I use twitter and facebook messages way too much for your taste.

That aside, the SpinTunes #1 Round #2 listening party took place last night, which means it's time for a little blurb on my song. But before I get into my own song's nuts and bolts, I have to tell a short story, not of what my song is about, but why it exists in the first place and for whom it's written. To skip to the bio, look for the red text below that says something to the effect of, "This is the bio".

The Back Story

The Round #2 challenge was titled, "John Hancock Time", which is a delightfully punny way of telling us that we'd be playing with time signatures. As soon as I heard this I knew I was going to write my overdue gratitude / tribute song to Katy Perry.

Let me repeat that, because it's not what you were expecting and you might've missed it.

Disregarding lyrical content for the moment, my song is one big 'thank you' hug to the oft-maligned pop oddity of 'I Kissed a Girl' fame. Without her, and without that song in particular, The Lightbulb Mouth Radio Hour would not have a house band, or at least, the Write Bloody House Party 2 Band would not exist in any form. In the spirit of the Superhero-themed SpinTunes challenge not far behind us, I give you our origin story:

In November 2009, the Write Bloody House Party 2 Band began like all great bands do: out of a lie told to a hot chick at a party. My friend Alex met a gorgeous woman who told him her own fascinating story about how her kids and all her friends' kids formed bands recently; she and those intrepid friends of hers saw how much fun their children were having and decided to form their own 'mom band'. They all chose instruments, learned to play them together, and now gig regularly in the OC. This is what the real real housewives of Orange County do.

So naturally, Alex, wanting to keep the conversation going, told her, "Oh, yeah? That's awesome," and then the bastard looked at me with eyes pleading for a Hail Mary wingman pass and continued, "...we're in a band too!" Obliging my friend's innocent ploy I gave a rather unconfident, "...why... YES. Yes we are! In... a band... yeah. We are that."

Best mistake of my life.

Raundi, that darling little OC housewife minx I described above, immediately said, "Oh really? We have a big show coming up in January. You guys are gonna open up for us!". By this point I was getting quite accustomed to the taste of 'foot', so before Alex and I really had a chance to think about what we were doing, we said, "Absolutely."

Second best mistake of my life.

We excused ourselves and found Shelby to discuss what just happened. We weren't a band, but we were all musicians. No reason not to make good on the promise, after all. Shelby loved the sheer ridiculousness of having a gig booked before the three of us ever sat in a room to play together, and was happy to round out the power trio. We exchanged contact info with Raundi, told her that we were a relatively new band, and offered in lieu of an entire opening set to instead play one song as a 'special guest band'. She accepted and we went to work.

We decided immediately that we'd what talent and coherency we lacked we'd make up for in humor, so the idea sprung almost out of itself that we'd play one cover song, preferably as ironic a choice as possible, and beat the life out of the damn thing. Having a 20-something dude singing 'I Kissed a Girl' to a bar full of homemakers and preteens seemed an obvious choice.

We wanted to give it our own special touch, of course... change the style up completely, and groove on it in a way that came more naturally to us. We were shocked to discover that Katy had beaten us to that particular punch:

We loved this version of the song, and decided we'd perform this cover exactly as she did in Unplugged. This song starts with a delicious jazzy 5/8 intro, then transitions into a sultry 6/8 for the first verse and chorus, then snaps out to 4/4 for a rockin' finish.

The day came that we showed up to the gig, walked onstage, and blew the damn roof off the place. Everyone fell in love with the song; they laughed, they sang along with us... we all reveled in every minute of it. The jam morphed into a rock epic; I popped off the ragingest guitar solo of my career, and the universe smiled on us.

From that point forward, our band snowballed through one accidental good fortune to another until we got hooked up with the people behind Lightbulb Mouth. Katy Perry, in the time since, has grown from original inspiration to a veritable component of our band's identity. She became a verb at rehersal: "Ooh, we need to come up with a new piece for the 'Radio commercial 2' skit; let's take this riff and Katy Perry it." She will always be synonymous in my mind with "taking something and making it dirty-sexy and reeking of awesomeness." Thanks, Katy. This one's for you.

This is the bio

Instruments
'Here At The Door' began with its time signatures. Thanks to 'I Kissed a Girl', I love the way 5/8 and 6/8 interact with each other. 4/4 is rock n' roll bread and butter; 'nuff said. I follow an un-rule from Tool's playbook, which basically states, "There is no goddamn reason why a song has to sound at the end like it did at the beginning".

I really like composing songs in movements, where there's a tone set in the beginning that gets dashed against the rocks by the ending. I like them to feel like a progression from one place to another, rather than a closed loop that finishes right back where it started. That's not to say that songs that end that way are at all inferior; it's just one stylistic trait versus another; I write plenty of songs that go both ways. So, following my Katy Perry roadmap, part 1 was going to alternate between 5/8 and 6/8, and I'd bring it all home with some 4/4 in part 2.

The guitar came next. Much like comic artists (or anyone who produces serialized content, really) who build a 'buffer' of advance material, I keep a collection of 'prototype' riffs in a dusty corner of my mind. With the exception of the chorus (which contains a pretty direct homage / ripoff of the tasty 'I Kissed a Girl' "ba-dum-DUM--dum, bada-dum-DUM--dum" bass intro), the entire song was fleshed out from little guitar riffs I've come up with over the years that I never managed to make complete songs out of. And, as often happens, I find that two bits of song that I've written years apart from each other, with no intentional association, fit quite nicely.

I decided not to record this song with a click-track. By which, I mean "I'm not a good enough timekeeper with any instrument to be able to manage this many changes without a little trouble." A song as convoluted as I decided this one was gonna be, I was fine with it breathing a little. I set the pace and length of the song by recording guitar first. A few fingering mistakes into it, I accidentally wrote a nice bridge. This happens to me all the time and I am grateful for my luck. The clean electric guitar was recorded on one track, and the distorted electric on another; I wanted a slight overlap between the two as part of my part 1/ part 2 transition.

A note on the part 2 guitar: I wanted to play a little trick here. The guitar riff consists of five 16th note triplets, but with one leading 16th note in order to fill out the measure. So, it's a 4/4 riff, but it 's disguised as a fast 3/4 and really sounds like one if you're not counting notes.

Drums were up next, and were an absolute pain to record, not because of the time changes, but because of the sound of them. I have to record the entire kit with a single mic, and I couldn't manage to get them reproduced in a way that didn't clash terribly when played back. Eventually I settled on disengaging my snare drum and playing it like as a tom tom. This really warmed up the tone and salvaged what felt like a complete disaster up to that point. The polyrhythms that show up in the song are all played on the crown of my favorite ride cymbal, and I have to admit - I cheated here. I can play polyrhythms, but to do so I need to write them down and practice them over and over before they're ready to record. I saved a lot of time by recording the ride on a second track; this also allowed me to fade it out independently from the rest of the drums at the close of the song.

Bass guitar parts tend to write themselves for me. I like intervals to exist as often as possible between guitar and bass, as this fills the sound out quite a lot. In fact, with the exception of the ride cymbal polyrhythm I mentioned above, the entire instrumental component of this song consists of one guitar, one bass, and one drum track; no overdubs anywhere. So, the bass kinda walks around the same notes the guitar is playing, but rarely at the same time the guitar is at that note. It ends up making a nice meandering "wave-interference" kind of sound, except during part 2 where I have guitar and bass playing largely in unison to really drive the ending home.

Vocals
I love to harmonize. But there's nothing I can say about how I do it; I'm kind of an idiot-savant when it comes to singing them. As long as I know the melody, I just sing something over it and the notes that come out, fit. I don't know what they're gonna be 'til they come out. This song features a few 3-part harmonies, though there's one section that has four vocal tracks, with a low octave mirroring the high harmony.

Lyrics
As I was approaching the weekend I was devoting to this project, I knew that the ideas I had planned were going to make for a song that shifted gears a lot. It was going to be hopeless trying to write lyrics to something that I didn't know exactly how it was going to sound, so I had to wait until the music was fully in place before I could even think about words or a melody. I had a couple phrases in my head (the 'please please please' that shows up in parts 1 and 2, for example), but no topic, no story, nothing.

Saturday was for writing and recording the song's tracks, and Sunday was for writing the vocals and melody, and adding them to the song. I panicked a bit at around 2pm and started visiting random wikipedia pages, in hope that an article would pop up that I knew something about or was interested enough in to write about... but that yielded poor results. Later, my friend Caitlin, who had offered up her apartment as a quiet place to get to work, had mentioned an incident while driving back from her errands for the day, about a person a large SUV who was encroaching on her lane. For whatever reason, that idea stuck with me and I got right to work.

As Dave Leigh pointed out in his flattering review over at Dr. Lindyke's music blog, the lyrics I wrote were ambiguous, and that was by design. Cait's story just got me thinking about things I've gone through in life, and stories I've heard about enthusiastic and interested people that were members of a disregarded minority, but desperately wanted to join whatever public discourse was relevant to their interests.

I wrote a single metaphor of someone wanting to come inside and sit at the grown-ups' table where all the action is... because it's a template for many social scenarios. Examples that came to mind were, "young people interested in politics", "3rd world communities trying to emerge in global commerce", "individuals overcoming racism /sexism /gender-identity prejudice", etc. Dave's suggestion that it could be about illegal immigration never even occurred to me... but that illustrates the idea that I wrote the part to fit whatever issue the listener was aware of, even if I wasn't aware of it myself. It's a common sentiment, even if the particulars are disparate.

In my particular case, it's more closely tied to my personal belief structure. I'm a rational skeptic, which is a nontheistic, anti-supernatural stance by default. In the United States today, being an atheist is largely seen as worse than being a member of the wrong religion... it's an erroneous belief, but it's widely held. But, that's only what it means to me...

And it's really not "my" song in that regard... not at all.

...It's Katy Perry's. Whatever she says, goes.

Biography of a song - "ToughJobs vs. IronGates"

2010-07-03T15:55:00.000-07:00

What follows is not so much a song bio, but instead something like a DVD special-features bonus material for the song; it’s a list of all the computer or comic references I included in the song’s lyrics. There’s a clue to the presence of each of them in the official lyric sheet; any time I incorporate conspicuous mid-sentence capitalization, etc., it’s a hint that I’m trying to be clever. Some of them are easy to notice, some are pretty hard. Let me know if you got all of them!

For those of you who want the torturously long song bio, it appears below the easter egg list. I highly suggest you do not read it.

THE EASTER EGGS OF “TOUGHJOBS vs. IRONGATES”

Not so much an easter egg, but an explanation. The opening voiceover is from a video Steve Jobs recorded in the 80s describing a study that compared how humans fared against all other animals in terms of energy efficiency while traveling a distance of 1 kilometer. The condor was the most efficient, while a human walking was rather unremarkable. But, Steve explains, one of the people doing the study had the insight to recalculate the human’s performance after putting him on a bicycle. The human was still traveling under his own power, but it accounted for our ingenuity and ability to invent tools that scale our capabilities. Of course, the human on the bicycle calculated way off the charts, easily surpassing the condor’s score. So, in the voiceover, we hear Steve explain how he equates computers to being ‘bicycles for our minds’. Very cool.
Bill refers to a ‘basic passion’ in his opening stanza; BASIC was the computer language he first learned, which inspired him to pursue software and form Microsoft.
Bill refers to ‘opening windows’; Windows is the name of Microsoft’s operating system.
Steve’s second stanza includes the constructed words, ‘iDo’, ‘iWant’, and ‘iKnow’, all references to Apple’s popular product naming convention: iMac, iPod, iPhone, etc.
Bill says “I’m trying to get our world in sync”; SYNC is the name of the Microsoft-engineered computer interface featured in new Ford vehicles.
This one was hidden across two stanzas: Steve says “I’m trying to change the way we all think”. The next lyric in the song starts with “Different means...” When sung together, you hear, “Think Different”, which was a marketing slogan for Apple for several years.
Steve sings about Bill’s ‘Blue Screen of Death’; this is the popular nickname for a screen that is displayed when Windows suffers a fatal system crash.
The first comic book reference: Bill has more money than “a dozen Bruce Waynes”, referencing Batman.
Steve “shines a green lantern on manufacturing process”, thereby referencing the superhero Green Lantern by name.
Bill mentions “not waiting for Superman”, Waiting for Superman was the name of a documentary about inadequacy in childrens’ education; Bill Gates made a prominent appearance in the film. In real life, he runs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which focuses on addressing health and education inadequacies in the 3rd world.
Bill refers to his “Uncanny X-Box”. This one was a dual reference to the Microsoft gaming console, and also to the ‘Uncanny X-Men”, as the X-Men franchise was named for several issues.
Just a neat factoid: The deep boom that comes in during the outro is actually a five-gallon Arrowhead water cooler jug. I always wanted to record that sound after first hearing it; I was just expecting to use it as a low percussion sound. but as I was recording it I delightedly discovered that the jug resonated at a perfect D; it was a complete coincidence that it matched the key of the song!

THE BIOGRAPHY OF “IRONJOBS vs. TOUGHGATES”

This is going to be a bit of a schizophrenic post. I hope to achieve two loosely-related goals in the space of one essay, and I'm going to try my best to thread them into each other. The first major topic is a deconstruction of the most recent song I wrote, and the second is an investigation of my songwriting style and how SpinTunes has affected it.

THE INTRODUCTION

SpinTunes #1 began with 31 contestants, and the Round #1 challenge was titled, "'I'm a Marvel, and I'm a DC' - Write a song from the perspective of a superhero or supervillain." However, this past Valentine's Day my band played a gig at a benefit show that took place in a comic book store. Since we always like to write at least one song specifically for each gig we play, and given the event's date and location, I decided to write a 'superhero love song'. I was quite proud of it, and so I couldn't help but feel some frustration upon receiving this first SpinTunes challenge. I had already written a song perfectly compatible with this round, but I couldn't use it. Furthermore, I've only read one comic in my life (Watchmen, upon which my song 'Crimefighter' was based), so I'd already felt like I'd exhausted my comic-song fodder. Add the fact that SpinTunes required me to write another song in relatively no time at all (I developed the guitar part for 'Crimefighter' over a period of years), I was a tad bit flustered.

THE SONG IDEA

Fortunately, what I lack in geeky comic knowledge I make up for in geeky computer knowledge. I couldn't help but notice the challenge title was an allusion to the Apple TV commercial series, "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC". As soon as I became aware of this intersection, I knew exactly how I was going to tackle the challenge and there was only one direction I could take it. The entire roadmap was laid out before me; it was time to just shade in the detail.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (the current and former CEOs of Apple Computer and Microsoft, respectively) are both pioneers and living legends in their industry, and have actually been referred to as members of a class of 'superhero CEOs' in newspaper and magazine articles over the last few decades. It's not so much a stretch to envision these two seeing themselves as literal superheroes. Both of them are responsible for shaping the entire computer industry, and by extension and in more than one way, the quality of life in today's world.

So I have two main characters based on people in the real world, but exaggerated. They are of equal stature and they both believe in bringing positive change within their respective fields of expertise. They should be, and have been (albeit in the past and tenuously at best), partners. But as business competitors, they're antagonists to each other... and each has been responsible for enough failures and faults to justify being vilified in the mind of the other. The public at large is equally polarized in their opinions on the true nature of these men as well.

Bill and Steve have very defined personalities, and so do the companies they created. Since each hero's philosophy is revealed explicitly in the song's lyrics, I decided to use the music behind each of them as 'virtual characters' to implicitly identify their respective companies... which in turn represent the heroes’ respective superpowers.

Bill and Microsoft are a classic monopoly: large, powerful, traditional, very structured, but both borne of a rebellious attitude. This lends itself well to my typical percussive folky acoustic guitar style. In this role, it's intricate yet predictable, a little peppy but generally pleasant to listen to, and composed entirely of major chord voicings. The acoustic bass plays a pretty and simple melodic line underneath. Single bass notes only. Traditional.

Steve and Apple, on the other hand, are the insistent, arrogant young punks... despite having been around just as long. He's a know-it-all, he’s edgy, blunt and brilliant, and his company is hip and popular yet counterculture at the same time. They're dynamic and nimble. Wild cards. Steve is straight up dirty rock and roll. I telephone Steve’s voice, pull out the stratocaster, and to give it the dirtiest sound I can... I plug it into an overdrive pedal with an almost-dead battery, and play through a bass amp. Steve's entire accompaniment consists of a raunchy, unstructured, minor pentatonic guitar solo. At points it even strays from those bounds, breaking scale regularly and throwing in nonsense notes and slides/bends. The bass guitar shifts to a driving 16th-note D chord; it's a persistent rumbling noise below the guitar lead.

The song begins as a back-and-forth between Bill and Steve in the theatrical spirit of "Anything you can do, I can do better", but modernized a bit to avoid sounding too ‘Broadwayish’; there are others much better equipped to pull that sound off.

When we get to what most would probably call the 'bridge' of the song (Side Note: I'd call it a preemptive interlude; I rarely follow the rules of 'verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus' song progressions very tightly. I've written a song where each verse is identical and repeated throughout the song, while the chorus changes its lyrics each time. At that point, are those parts actually what I'm calling them? That's a question for a music theorist, not me), however, both characters are finally singing together, and the tone of the song changes the same way the ambiance would change if you put them in a crowded room together. Things get tense, a little dark, and almost-but-not-quite dissonant.

While everything is progressing more or less cohesively, there's no consistent interval between either vocal progression or between the guitar and bass lines. Since the guitar and bass are playing single note progressions, complex ‘virtual chords’ emerge between bass note, guitar note, melody vocal note, and harmony vocal note. I’d love to tell you what they are, but I have no idea. Maybe I can get someone to transcribe them for me.

What I do know is that the entire song hangs out around the D chord; I wish I had a particular reason to explain this, but the fact is, I have practically no knowledge of music theory, and my songs will always start with an experiment on a guitar fretboard. When I started writing the song, I just grabbed the guitar and aimed for a random fret, then searched for a second note after that. When I heard something I didn't mind, I just rambled away at it. It turned out to be in the key of D.

When we hit the actual chorus, I wanted to give each character’s tone equal presence, so the melody progression is major part of the time, and minor the other part. That they both end up singing in D major and D minor together suggests that they’re more similar than they think, despite the upcoming distinctions they’re about to attempt to make in the second verse.
The first verse served as an introduction to each character; they didn’t speak to each other at all. In the second verse, they finally address each other and get into the argument. This verse runs longer since I needed to bring the argument in and resolve it without requiring a third verse (the song doesn’t feel long in my opinion, but it was flirting with the 5:00 mark so I figured I’d condense a little). One more extended chorus and we arrive at the outro, which is a slight modification from the guitar progression in the chorus, tweaked to give the same tense ‘weighty’ feel of the prechorus. The music swells behind voiceovers from Steve and Bill; they’re paying each other compliments, but the tension in the music reminds the listener that while they’re cordial, they’re not exactly comfortable pretending to get along.

THE WIND-DOWN

Because of the time constraints and near constant perspective shifting, recording this song would have been incredibly difficult for me without changing the way I go about it. Rather than recording each instrument’s part for the whole song, I recorded the song piece by piece arranged according to character parts. Rather than trying to change beats over and over without screwing up, I recorded all of Bill’s drums on one track, going silent for the duration of Steve’s parts. Then I’d go back and fill in the gaps, recording Steve’s drums on another track. The acoustic guitar I just played as much as I could ‘till I screwed up, then stopped. I’d set up a new track and punch in after the last fully successful measure and go again as long as I could. The result is that the continuous acoustic guitar part is actually distributed over about six tracks in the song. Electric guitar was done in two tracks, and the bass was done in one. By patchworking the song together the way I did, it saved a ton of time. If I didn’t have the deadline, I don’t think I’d choose to record this way, but it was a hell of an exercise and it’s certainly making me step up my game. I couldn’t be happier with the way the song turned out, and I couldn’t possibly enjoy participating in the contest any more than I do. This is magic.

BLASPHEMY - DISSEMINATION

2010-04-09T08:47:00.000-07:00

A link to a great great article. Written by a great great Christian. Shocker that I'm posting this, I know:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-d-mclaren/why-do-evangelicals-disli_b_517094.html

No original content from me right now. I still love you and miss you, Prose Justice, but I have been devoting my creative efforts elsewhere and will continue to do so for awhile. Still here, still don't believe in God.

BLASPHEMY - APPROBATION

2009-07-10T14:53:00.000-07:00

I hate the fact that I'm publishing so little original content lately, though I assure you I'm still generating it (mostly on post-it notes) regularly enough. Some day, I'll kick out another SATIETY, just... not in the foreseeable future. I worked for about 30 consecutive days last month, which makes a handy excuse for why I'm not blogging much.

The biggest contributor to my delinquency, however, is my recent decision to sign up for a Twitter account.

Keeping true to my past tendencies, I was plenty late to this latest incarnation of the social networking game... but once I tried it on for size, I found it to be a wonderous utility. Much like how I praised this very blog for encouraging me to improve my own creative writing, Twitter has reinvigorated this languishing hobby of mine. And it does so in a more accessible way. The problem with blogging is that it requires a pretty significant chunk of my time to write up an essay or article that I'm willing to unleash upon the public. It requires a good bit of revision and an even better bit of staring at my monitor like an idiot while I wait for yet-unspoken sentence fragments to clink into place.

Twitter, microblogging in essence, at once minimizes this time requirement and also introduces a new challenge by imposing its 140-character limit. It is much easier to write a 140-character tweet than a 500 word post, and yet it is much harder to get something entertaining and worth reading to fit into 140 characters than it is to barf out 500 words, hoping a few stick in the mind of the casual reader.

Twitter has made blogging fun again. It's encouraged me to share more of the dozens of interesting and weird things I encounter every day, and coupled with the raw communicative capabilities of my new jesusPhone 3GS, it's never been easier to share those experiences with a sentence, a picture, or a sound bite.

Follow me at @RITmusic2k Wink.

To take a more blasphemous turn, I just wanted to give a shout out to the wonderful Evolution 101 podcast, by Dr. Zack Moore. Newly liberated by my jesusPhone 3GS, I've taken to listening to music and podcasts at work, and I'm making my way through the archives of Evolution 101 again; I never forgot how informative and accessible the material was, but I knew that I'd forgotten much of the material itself, so it was a good time to listen to them once more.

It's easily found on iTunes, and also has a presence on the web:

Evolution 101

If you want to learn more about evolution and molecular biology than you ever thought you'd enjoy learning, try Dr. Zack on for size and thank me later for the recommendation. You'll find me over at #robotpickuplines.

BLASPHEMY - PARTIALITY

2009-05-26T16:14:00.000-07:00

Gay civil marriages ruin the sanctity of religious marriage to the same extent that gays eating crackers ruins the sanctity of communion. That is to say, inside the religious congregation it has no effect, and outside the religious congregation it has absolutely no effect.

While California is temporarily shading its eyes from the Enlightenment that has proven no trouble for the likes of Massachusetts, Connecticut and Iowa, I believe it won't be long before the California State constitution gets reamended* and every person previously denied the privilege will be able to wed the person they love.

There is a certain tack I'd like to see the state take in doing this. One of the biggest talking points of the Prop 8 scum** was that their churches would be obligated to recognize and marry gay couples if gay marriage were legalized. Nevermind the fact that this isn't remotely close to the truth, let's make sure that when we finally and permanently legalize gay marriage in California, we explicitly state the difference between civil marriage and religious marriage. Let's emphasize that churches will retain the right to refuse service to anyone not wearing a shirt, shoes, or who prefers genitalia that match their own.

We need to encourage them to disallow same-sex relationships within their congregations, and this is why:

Make them wear their bigotry on their sleeves. The more publicly their distasteful behaviors are presented, the sooner society will choke them off.

Let's hope that brave gay couples who want a religious wedding can stand up for themselves and leave congregations that won't support them, and move to more progressive and forward-thinking churches, or better yet, away from churches in general. Politically active religious groups feed on people, and need to be starved into submission and out of relevance.

* - unamended? remended? remedied? repealed? remodeled? role-modeled? Something like that.

** - a kinder word than I really wanted to type.

SARDONIC

2009-05-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

This one tripped off my irony meter.

Sham acupuncture works as well as real* acupuncture:

http://www.usnews.com/articles/science/2009/05/12/toothpicks-match-needles-for-acupuncture.html

* - as in, sham.

BLASPHEMY - IMPOSTURE

2009-05-04T15:22:00.000-07:00

I'm making my way through another blog out there, entitled 'The Everything Else Atheist'. I was intrigued by her series of posts about the use of placebo, and had a thing or two to say in response to a couple comments left on her thread.

The original articles:

I Believe in Placebos, Part 1

I Believe in Placebos, Part 2

You may want to read the comments over at T.E.E.A. before proceeding. Or, you can just take my word for it that what follows is my brilliantly-concocted and unassailable argument* against a commenter who disagrees with the use of placebo in modern medicine:

I'm going to chime in as a proponent of the use of placebo here. For one thing, treatment should not be judged or valued solely on chemical efficacy. Determine its validity by its results, not by its ingredients...

Otherwise, what do you suggest we do about all the therapists out there alleviating peoples' emotional (and in some cases physiological) problems just by *talking to them*? Both work by closely-related mechanisms, where the patient's own mentality is the primary vehicle behind their recovery. In one case it's a controlled activity: developing a trusting bond based in conversation with a trained professional, whose coaxing can yield significant results. In the other case, it's a trained professional engaging in the controlled activity of administering a physical remedy that takes advantage of the well-documented power of placebo.

I don't see a downside here, since at the absolute worst, it will provide no benefit. And it might cost some money. But if the idea of paying for sugar pills is what's so unappetizing, then the costs of their administration can be bundled with some form of therapeutic treatment, much in line with the author's suggestions above. You pay for treatment and it gets you sessions with your doctor and a pill, both of which work in concert.

The way I see it, the placebo effect is one of a thousand quirky evolutionary byproducts we've gathered up over time, in rank and file right along with such hits as the female orgasm... if it's a good thing, and it's ours, why deny ourselves of it?

The refusal to wield a useful and beneficial tool over thin moralistic quibbles is just one of the reasons we all rail against organized religion, after all. Let's not fall prey to the same tendencies.

* - I mean, I drew a link between medicine and orgasms, for Christ's sake... how can you argue against that?

BLASPHEMY - REBUKE

2009-04-28T11:49:00.001-07:00

Aaaaaaaaand another post!

There's sort of a trend here... while my blog post scratch pad still exists (call it a rough idea repository, perhaps), I'm not drawing from it lately. To do so requires a concerted effort and time commitment to Write A Blog Post. I'm generally busier than what would allow this on a regular basis.

But, I do still take time to read other blogs on related topics, and often enough I find a post or comment that gets my gears turning, and before I realize it I've penned an elaborate response. A few seconds after I realize I've done it again, I say to myself, "Self, this belongs on Prose Justice."

The original thread was over at Homosecular Gaytheist.

And so it gets pasted here. Oh well. It's not mine from scratch, but it's CADAVER.

Here's the comment:

Some helpful clarification in the discussion:
1. Generally, Christians differentiate between Creator and creation. The latter would necessarily have a Creator, while the same would not be said for the former. This would explain why atheists who don’t accept this argument tend to cite the same argument ad nauseum (”Your creator must have been created too! PWN’D!) and why a lot of Christians, rather than showing a little forethought and knowledge of their argument, sit slack-jawed wondering what just happened.
The argument is not stuff comes from other stuff, until you get to the biggest stuffer ever. That is dumb. The argument is simply to highlight the distinction between creation and creator and show that creation highly implies a creator.
2. The second objection is actually one of the most honest objections that I find atheists make in various forms to religion and to God, which is just that in their eyes God is cruel, so why serve him. Christopher Hitchens was never more honest than when he said in his most recent book, that even if God existed, Hitchens would be a part of the devil’s party. And looking at the world and seeing that as how things were designed by God, I can’t say that I disagree with that conclusion, except for one little thing…
My religion, Christianity, teaches that the world is not as it is supposed to be. It is screwed up. People are screwed up. Relationships are screwed up. That is pretty much conceded, though there is some disagreement to the degree that sin has affected the world and not just people. The two views being either we (people) are the problem and the world would be “perfect” without us in the equation, and the view that we are the biggest problem, but sin has affected everything in creation as well (I would put myself in the second camp, by the way). So, the good news is that both atheists and Christians should find some agreement in saying, “Something ain’t right!”
That leads to the second issue in that objection, which is that God is therefore culpable for the misery that is in the world. The good news for believers is that the Bible does have an answer. The bad news is that it really is sin is our fault and not God’s, even though he is all-powerful. If you read the Bible, that is actually what it teaches - man is responsible, God is sovereign. Believe me when I say, Mr. Atheist, I feel your pain. That is a tough pill to swallow, and any sincere Christian should be the first to admit that that is a difficult teaching. It has actually led some to fashion an understanding of God that he is not all-powerful or that man is not a responsible agent, but ultimately the Bible teaches both.
So Christianity is not without its difficulties, but let me say this final thing: taking God out of the equation doesn’t make the situation any better. You still have a screwed up world, you still have evil and violence, but now there is no real solution. That is just the way the world is. At least with God, you have some hope that things will be fixed one day, while without him, you really have no reason to expect things to be any different or better ever. Why should you? Plus, it makes the idea of “better” a moving target, which is a problem in and of itself.
I am not even toying with the idea that this will satisfy everyone, but I do hope it at least allows people on both sides to understand the other a little better.

And here's my reply:

Trey, I'd like to address a couple points you brought up: "The argument is not stuff comes from other stuff, until you get to the biggest stuffer ever. That is dumb. The argument is simply to highlight the distinction between creation and creator and show that creation highly implies a creator." You've probably heard atheists disregard the 'creation requires a creator' argument as tautological and/or circular, but even besides that is the greater issue that when an atheist looks at your analogy and at the world, they conclude that what you call 'creation' most definitely does *not* imply a conscious creator. We can all see the fingerprint of a house's maker in a house because we all have great knowledge of houses, and we can see them being built by people. One can appreciate that houses are logically planned out. When you look at a planet, however, or a body, all the mechanisms at work that yield those end products are documented and understandable, and they show no real signs of intelligent planning. I wear glasses because my eyes are not perfect. People get cancer because their bodies are not perfect. Almost all planets are uninhabitable because their orbits are not perfect. So on and so forth. There's a very clear trail of evidence that explains this... basically everything about us, everything about our solar system is cobbled together by mechanisms that worked just well enough to persist... exactly as science verifies, and exactly not what a perfect creator being would have created. Your answer to this, is sin. But if this entire universe was created by your god, then sin is either a direct manifestation of his, or a creation of one of his creations. I can envision a more perfect god than yours: one that did not allow for imperfection in his creation. Your god is either unable or unwilling. If man is responsible for sin, then God is responsible for creating man with the ability to ruin all God created. That's a pretty complicated and convoluted explanation for the imperfection we all acknowledge as existing in the world. Science does a better job explaining it in far fewer steps, and without requiring any mental acrobatics. In response to your last point, "taking God out of the equation doesn’t make the situation any better. You still have a screwed up world, you still have evil and violence, but now there is no real solution. That is just the way the world is. At least with God, you have some hope that things will be fixed one day" We think it does make things better, because it removes the sense of complacency people have with suffering. Christians may sit around waiting for someone else to fix the problem, or they convince themselves that the problem is unfixable, and simply wait for their heavenly reward where nothing is ever going to go wrong. We atheists realize that there's nobody out there to take care of our problems for us, so it is up to us to do it. We have no overbearing force telling us not to bother. It's only up to us to learn enough about our problems that we can in turn solve them. Rational inquiry, not faith, is the mechanism responsible for every advancement of our society. It gets us 100 year lifespans and air travel and the ability to communicate instantly with anyone, anywhere. It operates far better on far simpler rules. Perhaps most importantly, it makes no such atrocious claim that there is something inherently wrong with being human. We don't waste any time or energy apologizing for ourselves, which leaves us able to spend that time and energy improving the lives of real people all around us, people who just would not survive on faith alone.

BLASPHEMY - COGNITION II

2009-04-23T12:44:00.000-07:00

When it rains, it pours. Or in my case, drizzles... but it's a drizzle in a drought, so don't complain :)

I just read Jerry Coyne's latest article lambasting the National Academy of Sciences and the National Centers for Science Education for their accomodationist standpoints with regard to the harmony of evolutionary theory and religious faith (he must've gotten the idea from me), and I gave myself another opportunity to think about the issue. Here was my reponse:

I tend to see the posturing of the NAS and the NCSE as more of a logistical matter than anything else; these organizations need money to function, and they have to be sure not to alienate potential sources of funding. But then there's a side issue: they don't need to pander to us as naturalists/rationalists/atheists, because we're already on the same side of the fence. The people for whom those statements were written are those who might be *on* the fence. And the surest way to knock them back to their side is to require them to abandon a component of their belief system before we grant them admission. If a theist comes to the NCSE or NAS website, they're looking for encouraging words, not challenging ones. We should give them to them and let the merits of the science itself argue its cause. The NCSE and NAS have a tough enough job just promoting evolution in this religiously saturated country. But if you want them to take a hard line stance, then you're effectively asking them to incorporate the inordinately larger task of debunking religion. In our non-ideal world, they have to pick their battles. It might offend me that they have to speak disingenuously to do so, but I'm going to have to live with that.

So, I don't like it any more than I disliked it before*... but I acknowledge the rock to their left and the hard place to their right, and will let them play at this mild little version of fighting dirty** to gain a little ground on our tiring uphill battle.

* - I think that's a valid sentence

** - I mean, they're totally lying to their audience. It's a classic bait-and-switch.

Silly Popes and Slippery Slopes

2009-04-22T12:49:00.000-07:00

The last two months have seen me get a year older, get even busier at work, move into a new house, and spend even more time on the car. Hence, the 'not blogging' thing I've been trying out. I just wanted to post this link in case it hasn't been seen yet...

http://uk.reuters.com/article/scienceNewsMolt/idUKTRE53L5QM20090422

If I afford myself some time between projects at the new place, I'll follow up with a critique.

Thanks for your patience!

And, I feel like I owe an apology for not making a 'BLASPHEMY - BIG WORD' title for this post. It had to happen sooner or later.

BLASPHEMY - RENDERING

2009-02-27T11:17:00.000-08:00

My contribution from the bus slogan generator webpage:

That is all.

EDIT: Dude! I just realized that there's a real synergy between the contents of the bottom line and the colors used to render them - 'turn off that red light' is written in red, and 'kneel before superman' is rendered in yellow... like the light of the strength-enhancing YELLOW SUN? Oh yeah.

BLASPHEMY - EDICT

2009-02-24T13:47:00.000-08:00

A moderate Christian named Lyn posted a comment on a blog post at irrelgion.org earlier today, and the reply I gave deserves a space at Prose Justice, so I'm reproducing it here. The original post features a youtube clip of President Obama being particularly level-headed* regarding the role of religious thinking in public policy. It's worth a quick view.

So, without further ado:

Lyn Says:

February 24th, 2009 at 10:51am
I have a question, why do athiest need to form groups and organizations just so they can say they don’t believe in something? If in your opinion God doesn’t exist, then why this site? Why spend so much time fighting something you don’t believe in? Why fight a God and his followers if he is nothing more than a figment of believers imaginations? I know if I don’t believe in something I am not going to waste time fighting it. I myself believe in God and I saw on this site a little sketch about the earth being only 6,000 years old and we all know that can not be true. There is nothing in the Bible that confirms that. In fact it reveals quite the opposite in Genesis. But people, epecially ‘Bible Beating’ Christians never take the time to see what is actually being said and they also fail to understand that the Bible was translated from greek to english. This means that the meanings they have for word and phrases are different. For example, in the greek ’serpent’ meant ‘Shining One’ not snake as it means in english. Who is referred to in the Bible as the ‘Shining One’, Satan. Another thing that I saw was a comment on the Sabbath Day. The Sabbath day can be any day of the week. I usually take mine on a Friday because I am free all day, no school or work for me. When people continually work everyday, all day they become shell of human beings. No one can function correctly unless they take a break. People will actually work themselves to death. They sentence themselves to death, just like drug addicts, alcoholics, etc. Is God doing this or are people doing it to themselves? I tend to go with the latter. As far as the war that is going on in the middle east, that itself can be traced back to the Bible. Ishmael and Isaac are still fighting til this day over their fathers land. They are feuding brothers who most likely will never be at peace. Like yourselves I am also irritated with some ‘Christians’. Irritated because they don’t take the time to actually examine the Bible and research it before they shoot their mouths off and say something that is not accurate. Feel free to hit me back with a response.

And my reply:

Lyn,

As you surmised yourself, we aren't spending any time attacking a deity we don't believe in.

But when a majority population of Americans behaves as if a deity exists and has prescribed a particular standard of living, their actions and beliefs have a real and significant effect on all of us. That's what we're spending all this effort fighting. When the legal system and social architecture that govern over all of us is subjected to the massive influence of the religiously-minded majority, much of it succumbs and becomes compliant with (or at least tolerant of) religious dogma, and that scares the hell out of us.

The words attributed to your particular deity have been successfully used to justify atrocious prejudices and to glorify willful ignorance in a time when it is very dangerous to do so.

This is no longer a world in which a small tribe may only have to worry about a land quarrel against another almost indistinguishable small tribe around the corner. It is instead a world in which one high-ranking government official can make a single decision that ultimately results in the destruction of the entire surface of the planet in a matter of minutes.

This society won't do well to live according to outdated and rudimentary ethical codes when thousands of years' refinement have given us much more effective and informative tools. We have to live with a level of responsibility, rationality and maturity that no ethical theistic religion can provide. We're fighting for our wellbeing on the personal scale, and for all our lives on a global scale.

Religion's public influence is an impediment to that goal.

As I reread Lyn's statement, I realize that I just latched onto the first few sentences of it, and that's squarely where I aimed my entire reply. I think I should go back there and address the remaining content; if anything, I'll have to thank her for her honest inquiry and clearly good-intentioned followup.

* - That's not to say that this level-headedness is atypical of President Obama. Just atypical of a president.

DISCOMFITURE II

2009-02-12T11:53:00.000-08:00

Heh... this pleasant article on Darwin's birthday came from FOX News, of all places...

I guess they're not all bad after all. Good for you, FOX News :)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,491584,00.html

BLASPHEMY - REPARTEE

2009-01-19T09:54:00.000-08:00

Hmm.

This place seems familiar. Like I've been here before... long ago.

I need to get this out of the way first:

Happy New Year, readers!*

...and also...

I'm sorry I don't blog much anymore!**

There is a medley of reasons why I'm not posting frequently these days. A promotion at work bestowed upon me a whole new set of responsibilities, and I'm left with much less time at work to type as I ponder the greater mysteries and ideas.

I got another new car, this time an even more special one to me, and I'm spending much of my free time scouring the enthusiast forums and other associated corners of the web for information I can use to keep her at her absolutely thrilling best. Saab 9-3 Viggen, by the way. Still gushing over it, so please pardon the enthusiasm.

But that's not why I'm here today. I'm here to give you guys some CADAVER.

Believe it or not, I didn't stop posting because I ran out of ideas. I actually still have a cache of essay stubs ready to turn into posts, and I've been jotting notes down feverishly in odd spurts; I have a pile of stuck-together post-it notes waiting to be rendered coherent. It'll happen eventually. I just ask, again and with a little shame, for your patience.

While I do have a handful of pieces of timeless VAP and vibrant atheist insight kicking around in the ol' noggin, I was inspired to post today by something that just happened to me.

I'm a facebooker, and a former Catholic. That combination got me involved in a survey for present and former Catholics... probably for some college student's sociology class or something. The questionaire asked a handful of questions about my opinions of the church, how much of my life is still influenced by it, and so on. At the end I had the opportunity to write a statement in the 'comments' form, and as I filled it out, I realized it'd be a nice thing to share here. So, reproduced from the survey, here's my closing statement. Much of it is similar to things I've already written here, though it may be cast in a new light. Check it, yo:

As a child of a family closely involved in and even employed by my parish, the church significantly influenced me during my formative years.

Unfortunately, I have to regard it as a trial by fire, rather than as an upbringing. Discrimination against my mother by our pastor and other parish faculty resulted in a quite literal excommunication of both of us. While the church as an intangible entity has always been good-intentioned in my mind, the engine driving the people who wield it as a tool has always been flawed. I learned this after my experiences prompted me to take a more honest and critical look at Catholicism and competing spiritualities of all flavors.

After years of inspection and introspection, I resolved upon the understanding that all the good times, all the learning experiences, all the camaraderie and education, and all the moral qualities I assimilated came at the hands of good people, not of church doctrine. The people responsible for the positive aspects of my catholic upbringing would have been equally valuable to me without catholicism guiding them, and in fact the only times that people around me failed in their basic goodness was when a misunderstood or outdated christian ideal nudged them away from their natural compassion, in order to conform to obscure ethical confinements, and in some cases pardoning them for unfortunate biases.

This awareness, bolstered by a hard-earned scientific understanding of the mechanisms of this remarkable universe, affords me the ability to revere and respect humankind and all life on this planet without appealing to the double-edged sword of a deity who both created us and constantly hinders our ability to grow into a mature global family.

At the end of the day, I find that the church is simply a bad means of being good; one that gets in the way of its goals, and one that our species would be bettered by casting off its vestigial traditions and confinements. Only after we grow out of religion can we achieve our true potential.

So yeah. I think there were a couple sentences in there that hit points I've missed in the past. And this little bit of sharing has stoked the fires a bit... I can't say that I'm gonna make it back to weekly blogging, but I'm still here. Still don't believe in God.

* - All three of you know who you are.

** - though the reasons I'm not blogging much are that I'm very busy enjoying some very fine times in my life. So I'm not that sorry.

BLASPHEMY - REJOINDER II

2008-12-16T09:35:00.000-08:00

Hemant Mehta asks:

How serious do you take your atheism?
Let’s find out.
Copy and paste the list below on your own site, boldfacing the things you’ve done. (Feel free to add your own elaboration and commentary to each item!)

My comments are in that burnt-orange color that's such a favorite of mine.

Participated in the Blasphemy Challenge.
Met at least one of the “Four Horsemen” (Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris) in person.
Created an atheist blog. Duh.
Used the Flying Spaghetti Monster in a religious debate with someone.
Gotten offended when someone called you an agnostic. Not offended, per se, but I corrected them.
Been unable to watch Growing Pains reruns because of Kirk Cameron.
Own more Bibles than most Christians you know.
Have at least one Bible with your personal annotations regarding contradictions, disturbing parts, etc. I don't have a hard copy, simply because I use the skeptic's annotated bible.
Have come out as an atheist to your family.
Attended a campus or off-campus atheist gathering.
Are a member of an organized atheist/Humanist/etc. organization.
Had a Humanist wedding ceremony.
Donated money to an atheist organization.
Have a bookshelf dedicated solely to Richard Dawkins. Not solely to Dawkins. There's room for Sam and Chris (haven't gotten around to buying Dennet yet).
Lost the friendship of someone you know because of your non-theism.
Tried to argue or have a discussion with someone who stopped you on the street to proselytize.
Hid your atheist beliefs on a first date because you didn’t want to scare him/her away.
Own a stockpile of atheist paraphernalia (bumper stickers, buttons, shirts, etc).
Attended a protest that involved religion.
Attended an atheist conference.
Subscribe to Pat Condell’s YouTube channel.
Started an atheist group in your area or school.
Successfully “de-converted” someone to atheism.
Have already made plans to donate your body to science after you die.
Told someone you’re an atheist only because you wanted to see the person’s reaction.
Had to think twice before screaming “Oh God!” during sex. Or you said something else in its place.
Lost a job because of your atheism.
Formed a bond with someone specifically because of your mutual atheism (meeting this person at a local gathering or conference doesn’t count).
Have crossed “In God We Trust” off of — or put a pro-church-state-separation stamp on — dollar bills.
Refused to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
Said “Gesundheit!” (or nothing at all) after someone sneezed because you didn’t want to say “Bless you!”
Have ever chosen not to clasp your hands together out of fear someone might think you’re praying.
Have turned on Christian TV because you need something entertaining to watch.
Are a 2^nd or 3^rd (or more) generation atheist.
Have “atheism” listed on your Facebook or dating profile — and not a euphemistic variant.
Attended an atheist’s funeral (i.e. a non-religious service).
Subscribe to an freethought magazine (e.g. Free Inquiry, Skeptic)
Have been interviewed by a reporter because of your atheism.
Written a letter-to-the-editor about an issue related to your non-belief in God.
Gave a friend or acquaintance a New Atheist book as a gift.
Wear pro-atheist clothing in public.
Have invited Mormons/Jehovah’s Witnesses into your house specifically becauseyou wanted to argue with them.
Have been physically threatened (or beaten up) because you didn’t believe in God.
Receive Google Alerts on “atheism” (or variants).
Received fewer Christmas presents than expected because people assumed you didn’t celebrate it.
Visited The Creation Museum or saw Ben Stein’s Expelled just so you could keep tabs on the “enemy.”
Refuse to tell anyone what your “sign” is… because it doesn’t matter at all.
Are on a mailing list for a Christian organization just so you can see what they’re up to…
Have kept your eyes open while you watched others around you pray.
Avoid even Unitarian churches because they’re too close to religion for you.

So I'm a solid 22. There are more that were kinda... 'close to target' but not quite, so I left them off. Some items I left off, and having done so could be considered more hardcore atheist than doing the thing listed. Anyway, it's all good in the 'hood.

Catch you guys again next month!

BLASPHEMY - GELASTIC

2008-11-20T08:10:00.000-08:00

Um....

BWAHAHAHHAHAHAAAHAHHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHH!!!

BLASPHEMY - EXECRABLE

2008-10-07T08:43:00.001-07:00

I saw this on the news last night. It's all over the internet today.

To most it's a tragic tale about the economy.

But I can't help thinking it's a tragic tale about religion.

Father kills family and himself, despondent over financial losses

Karthik Rajaram murdered his entire family because he ran out of money. This was not a knee-jerk emotional reaction to shocking news, either. He indicated in one of his several suicide notes that he'd been planning the atrocity for months. He, and I am paraphrasing here, went back and forth between the options of just killing himself or killing himself and his family. In the end he decided that killing the whole family was the more honorable thing to do.

I try to step into the mind of the person I'm reading about; I really try hard. But I cannot do it in this case. I simply cannot make any kind of sense or detect any kind of rationality in this persons apparent thought process... until I insert religion.

I'm not a parent. But I've known a few in my day; the only thing he could have been motivated by was the desire to spare his family the misery of living poor. So if I were he, my options would be:

(1) deal with living poor.

(2) kill myself and leave my family to deal with the pain of losing their father/husband, but maybe they get to cash in on my life insurance policy.

(3) kill everyone. Inflict upon all of us a brief but unimaginably horrible physical and psychological pain followed by nonexistence.

Obviously the only rational choice is #1. Who knows, after all, what opportunities might come down the road? Why deny yourself the chance to recover? Unless, of course, #3 is reworded to "Inflict upon all of us a brief but unimaginably horrible physical and psychological pain... followed by the next life and a chance to start over."

You see, Mr. Rajaram and his family were Hindu. His children were named after Hindu gods and mythical warriors. It is a safe bet to assume that at least he, if not his entire family, believed in reincarnation. With that belief thrown into the mix, it is finally possible to comprehend how the treacherous idea of murdering six people can be seen as not just tolerable, but downright noble.

And it makes me physically sick to realize it. I don't need to punctuate the story with a somber note about how irrationality needs to be purged from our global family; the article states it clearly enough to those who are paying attention.

And the hits just keep on coming, though this one has no ostensible religious or economic motivation:

Cops: Ky. Woman killed daughters, self

Sorry to leave things on such a sour note. Watch the debate tonight, everyone. It's really important.

BLASPHEMY - ASSEVERATION

2008-10-01T13:28:00.000-07:00

Still here.

Still don't believe in God.

Just been incredibly busy at work, which is the only time I blog. Incredibly busier outside of work.

But I'm not done writing, and I'm certainly not done philosophizing my way across the vast landscape of modern American atheism.

Still here...

BLASPHEMY - CREDULITY

2008-08-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

For the last couple weeks, I've been concurrently writing a loose collection of thoughts and reading through the series of threads and comments on Stephen Law's blog involving the notorious Sye Tenb of Sinner Ministries' "Proof of the existence of God" website. The latter, by the way, is a tedious yet fascinating deconstruction of the presuppositionalist mind. If you have an interest in learning the basic language and processes of philosophy and have a few hours to kill,* I can't recommend strongly enough that you go over and read it yourself. After you read my entire archive of brilliance, of course**.

Anyway, I wanted to make mention of the Stephen Law bit before I tried to assemble the aforementioned thoughts of mine into a more coherent piece of Vicious Atheist Propaganda***. I'll probably be back to talk about Sye after I'm done trudging through the last couple entries. Which might still take a couple days.

Regardless, here's the latest outpouring. It takes the form of a letter to a believer. The filter is off; if I can't find a good place to insert a tidbit, I'll just stick it at the end on its own. I don't want to mold this one too much:

The Latest Outpouring

I say "According to what I've studied, and based upon the information available to me, the world works in such a way that indicates there is no god, instead of a god or gods," to which you may say, "Well, explain it to me, then." And alas, I basically can't.

I can't explain it to you for the same reason a high school student can't ask his teacher to explain how her education enabled her to get a job teaching, and then turn around and get hired himself... I cannot do your learning for you; if we could, basic education would not take as long as it does.

The best I can do is show you the high standard (and rigor) against which my beliefs are tested, and tell you that the information that convinced me is indeed available to you. In essence, and not without irony, I want you to take it on faith. Not my conclusion, mind you... just the fact that the information that formed my conclusion is there. If you truly want to put your beliefs to the test, even in an effort to strengthen your own conclusions, I'll show you how, and I'll go a step further and point out a few places to start you along your search.

But if you actively refuse the information, you must know that you are denying yourself, and are therefore lying to yourself for the comfort of maintaining a framework that goes unchallenged, which is not a victory in any context. It is a forfeit. And if you do make the effort, you may still conclude that you were not wrong. Furthermore, you will have that much more confidence in your own position... which I can respect even if I believe you should've been convinced otherwise.

I know that for many, it is painful and difficult to be informed that they're wrong, especially regarding their highest beliefs, and even moreso the longer those beliefs have been held. My own first and greatest challenge along this learning path, and now one of my greatest strengths, was divorcing myself from that reactionary tendency. That I can not only accept, but indeed look forward to, being proven wrong only sharpens my own ability to reflect upon and challenge and refine the conclusions I do maintain, such that the opportunity for others to prove me wrong is diminished; for I have done much of their work myself.

And yet I surprisingly find that those who cannot bear to have their beliefs challenged are so often the same who adopt new beliefs so easily, without hesitation or scrutiny of any kind. Why would people give themselves so eagerly to beliefs that would utterly crush them to discover were wrong? Do people know themselves that poorly? The asymmetry of their overcredulous nature is fascinating, but is also disheartening.

The magnitude of their credulity is matched only by their incredulity toward arguments made against their positions once they adopt them. Where was that spirit of disbelief in the first place? It seems to me that their willingness to believe scales rather directly with their emotional investment into those ideas. They walk in easily with no attachments, then attach themselves firecely. When refuting evidence comes into the picture, the quality of that evidence is secondary to their own lack of attachment to that evidence, and thus it doesn't sway them.

So maybe the issue is that they throw themselves to passionately and fully into an idea once they believe it. We skeptics will not hesitate to throw an idea to the curb once a better one comes along.

A believer's beliefs are a marriage, 'till death do they part. A skeptic's are a one-night-stand. No wonder we're having more fun.

* - and you're a glutton for punishment
** - Made you look!
*** - Do I feel another acronym coming on? Oh yeah, baby.

BLASPHEMY - SPECIFICITY

2008-07-22T09:54:00.000-07:00

I'm constantly bothered by the incorrect juxtaposition of atheism and nihilism that I see all over the internet. Had to blurt this out.

***Preemptive Disambiguation***

'believe' (I believe that...): "I have good reason to think that..."
'believe in' (I believe in ____ ): "I support or subscribe to _____ as an idea or as an ideal."
'faith' (I have faith that... / I have faith in... ): "I am hopeful that... / I trust that..."
'atheism': absence of belief in a god or gods. More universally, 'naturalism' - absence of belief in any form of the supernatural.
'nihilism': belief that there is no purpose or point to anything; extrapolated: nothing is worth believing in and nothing means anything. Nothing has value.

***Post-Emptive Missive***

Atheism is not nihilism. ATHEISM IS NOT NIHILISM. I believe in many things, many ideals. And there is a difference between the abstract/intangible and the supernatural. I can believe in human decency, in democracy, in my local baseball team, in the scientific method, and in vanilla ice cream, among other things. I can have faith that my true love is out there somewhere*. None of these things require an appeal to something outside of nature to gain validity. One behavior that may be uniquely human is our remarkable ability to reason abstractly and think symbolically. We can wrap our heads quite comfortably around things that are not physically presentable 'things'. We can understand honor though we cannot touch or taste it.

When it comes to experiencing matters of the abstract, of passion and of emotion, we're just as allowed as the next person. So stop telling us we aren't, and STOP TELLING US WE SHOULDN'T HAVE A REASON TO CARE THAT YOU'RE DOING THINGS THAT OFFEND US IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR.

Okay, I feel a little better now.

* - This is not to imply that I haven't found her; it was just an example. At present, she's sleeping in on her day off. Lucky bitch.

ERSATZ

2008-07-10T10:44:00.000-07:00

Google is kinda my new religion, in a Church of Google sort of way.

Anything they do, I'm all over. The recently unrolled Lively, which is sort of a mashup of Instant Messenger and Second Life.

If you want to make a chatroom, you literally create a room which avatars can then populate. They perform animations, and do all your 'talking' for you in the form of cartoonish speech bubbles.

This post is little more* than a test to see if I can embed my room into a webpage.

* - because it's kind of also to tell you guys about it.

BLASPHEMY - COADJUVANCY

2008-06-23T14:54:00.000-07:00

My junior-hero* Sam Harris is involved in a new study about religiosity and, well... I don't know what exactly**, but he needs responses from two specific categories: devout Christians, and atheists. It just so happens that I know of a few places to round some of those up***.

Take a minute or thirty to visit his website and complete as much of the survey as you can!

* - for an explanation, see BLASPHEMY-ANTIPHON and its associated footnotes.
** - but it's gotta be good.
*** - You're reading one of them.

BLASPHEMY - ONUS

2008-06-17T09:32:00.000-07:00

I consider myself a privileged individual for many reasons, not the least of which being the fact that I get to live in Southern California.

A small part of that privilege is having access to some excellent radio stations. I am a daily listener to 95.5 KLOS, the classic rock station in these parts,* and I am a rabid fan of the Mark and Brian show, their daily morning talk/variety show. These guys are smart and funny, and responsible for some wonderful events and charities in these parts.**

This morning, the hot topic was the recent court ruling in favor of gay marriage. The call-in response was largely in support of the movement (it is a liberal-leaning show and listenership, after all), but in the midst of it one obviously Christian lady called in and presented the idiotic 'slippery-slope' argument: "Well if a man can choose to marry another man today, what will he be allowed to choose tomorrow? What if he chooses to marry a little boy tomorrow?"

I'm not going to spend any time refuting Pedophile Lady's argument; my issue is with the way her comment was handled. Brian (1/2 of the show's namesake) quite appropriately dispatched her with a rebuttal and an "I'm ashamed and disappointed that this is your opinion", but he qualified it first with, "this is your opinion and I cannot tell you to change it."

...pardon me while I wrestle this soapbox into position...

Okay. Well, I have an opinion about this, and I most definitely wish I could change his.

Right after I heard the exchange, I sent the show a quick TXT message (a great feature, by the way), something to the effect of, "Brian, maybe some of these people SHOULDN'T be entitled to their opinion when it's based on bad/damaging information."

Well, the coolest thing happened shortly afterward: during a commercial break, Brian called me to talk about my message!*** He was really curious and wanted me to elaborate on my message, so he could get a better feel for the point I was trying to make. He admitted that he personally agrees with me (Another atheist! WOOHOO!), but insisted that he couldn't tell her she was wrong because it would make him a hypocrite. I tried to give an argument against that, but didn't have my thinking cap on (read: coffee in my stomach) and didn't give him the most effective one.

So... he had to get back to the show; we exchanged our gratitudes and compliments, and hung up.

But right after we concluded our session, the brilliance started pouring out. Of course. I went to the show's website to take advantage of the extended format of an e-mail response, and penned this follow-up, which I'd like to share with you all:

This is a follow-up to a TXT message I sent earlier today; Brian called me back and we talked briefly about my statement that some peoples' opinions shouldn't be honored if they're based on bad information:

Brian, I (of course) couldn't think of the best language to convey my point right away when you asked me to clarify... but I want to take another stab at it.

My point is that you are *not* automatically a hypocrite when you present a firm opposition to someone else's opinion... because in some cases their opinion can be objectively incorrect.

To object to an uninformed opinion with an equally uninformed counter-opinion would be hypocritical, sure... but just because an idea is wrapped up in the context of 'Opinion' doesn't mean it should be afforded automatic protection from scrutiny.

It is possible to objectively measure the quality or validity of an opinion - It could be my opinion that Mark is a moron (sorry, Mark), and all you'd have to do is show me the results of his IQ test to prove that my opinion is completely incorrect. I appreciate your compassion if you don't want to offend me by pointing out that I'm wrong (and I think that's a big part of your stance - I won't argue with your being courteous to callers), but this is a relatively harmless example.

But what if there were such a thing as a harmful example? Pedophile Lady makes a claim that is founded by what she believes to be an irrefutable and perfectly correct source - her church, clergy and bible. When the bible was written, it was correct according to the best info we had at the time. But today, we know objectively that there are physiological explanations for the occurrence of homosexuality. We actually know better, now, than to think that homosexuality is a choice. It has been confirmed time and again with the same scientific rigor that has successfully given us 80-year life expectancies, air travel, radio talk shows, and every other miraculous achievement of modern society.

But, Pedophile Lady's opinion is incredibly prevalent right now...

...and simply because these incorrect ideas about homosexuality are encapsulated in the Protection of Opinion, we're allowing countless real people to suffer lives of forced compliance, and relegating them to a form of second-class restricted citizenship.

All for the sake of politeness.

At some point we need to see that we're allowing a greater evil to thrive, because we're unwilling to perpetrate the evil of telling people when they're wrong.

~Kevin

It's about civic duty. We should be able and willing to stamp out harmful ideas and the acts they promote, especially when the cost of doing so (offending christians) is so feeble compared to the cost of doing nothing. It's time to bring a little obligatory rudeness into our arsenal.

* - I'm not going to tell you, but here's a hint: KLOS is named for Los (something).
** - See footnote above.
*** - This dude is a bonafide CELEBRITY. Of course I'm excited.

BLASPHEMY - AVARICE

2008-06-06T08:52:00.000-07:00

WHAT THE F%$#?*

Website emails your personal message to unbelieving friends after you're swept up in the rapture!

(Not a direct link - I always link through geekologie when they're my source)

Am I the only one that thinks that the people running this service are handily exempting themselves from the celestial self-checkout line by charging their customers $40 a year? Sure, it's not as much as an xbox live membership**... but they're essentially saying, "We're not getting into paradise anytime soon; we might as well get comfy while we wait".

Greed is one of those killer sins, after all.

And let's face it, most of those letters are going to be a variation on the "I fucking told you so" riff. ***

Also, I think they cribbed their delivery mechanism from Lost.

* - FUCK
** - but it's also slightly less fulfilling, unless the peace of mind of having the last word is THAT important to you.
*** - Hell, they already made it through the gate, what's the harm in a little harsh language... especially when it's directed a heathens aplenty?

IDIOSYNCRATIC III

2008-05-30T11:16:00.000-07:00

Oh yeah, I never followed up on my most recent jury duty experience!

I have revised my conclusions. Jury duty is not actually answering machine practice,* it's Government-mandated Surfing On The Internet Via Government-Provided Wireless Access.

I sat in a large lobby known as the Jury Assembly Room,** and spent five hours of an unpaid workday reading web pages. Go Justice!

In other news, I got a new car. I'm in love with it. 2001 Saab 9-3. Five doors, five gears, black on black:

Her name's Carla. There's a story behind that... maybe later.

* - sometimes it still is.
** - that was remarkably similar to an airline terminal, but with way less security, and way cheaper snacks.

BLASPHEMY - VEXATION

2008-05-30T07:18:00.000-07:00

I took part in the hardest debate I've had in ages yesterday evening. The funny thing about it is, it was not a debate with a believer, it was with an atheistic agnostic.

This opponent of mine is a good buddy; he's just really tough to argue with. He spends so much time aggressively nitpicking semantics and other details that the person speaking to him never gets to present a coherent statement.

It's like door-to-door salesmen trying to sell their respective encyclopedias and vacuum cleaners to each other, only the vacuum cleaner salesman's pitch consists of knocking his opponent's encyclopedias out of his hands.

Anyway, the primary point of contention boiled down to this: I'm a naturalist, and he's a scientifically-minded nonbeliever who insists on reserving space for the supernatural.

Here's the argument that came to me in the shower this morning.*

Everything that has ever been believed to be supernatural, has remained supernatural right up to the point at which it became scientifically understood. Sounds almost too simple to need to be put into words. The point is, we've never once found anything in nature that, once we learned a certain amount about it, determined that it was actually a supernatural phenomenon. It just doesn't work that way. The progression, for every phenomenon in recorded human history, has been from supernatural to natural... never the other way. So, why is it reasonable to keep insisting that something truly supernatural must still be out there? Isn't it more likely that it's all 'apparently supernatural' phenomena that just haven't been understood yet?

If the 'supernatural' set has been diminishing since its inception, and nothing has ever transitioned into it, don't you just take a step back and say, "Okay, this isn't a sound hypothesis after all."?

I see a string of zeros trillions long, and I make the presumably safe assumption that it's probably more zeros to come. He looks at it and says, "well there's gotta be a 1 at some point..."

He says that looking at the information out there and defaulting toward the negative "there's nothing supernatural" is equally as ignorant as any believer of any specific faith arguing for the existence of their god.

But when the score is Natural: Countless to Supernatural: 0, how much more evidence does one need before a natural assumption is seen as the more appropriate conclusion?

* - Just in time to be a day late... nice work there, Kev.

BLASPHEMY - FELICITOUS

2008-05-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

While not explicitly atheist in nature, it's a topic that runs in a similar vein; something worth rejoicing over in the net news today -

http://www.physorg.com/news129616516.html

An accomplished physicist is making a career change; he's running for public office. His motivation is to be part of a movement to restore evidence-based decision making to the political system.

I've been a fan of the idea of technocracy for some time now, but I never thought I'd hear about the apparently active and healthy political movement advocating it. As a scientist might say, "Cool beans!"*

* - not an instruction to reduce the kinetic energy of a legume sample.

IDIOSYNCRATIC II

2008-05-12T08:31:00.000-07:00

I talked about jury duty before. Here. I didn't have many kind things to say at the time, mainly because my service consisted of listening to answering machine messages for a few weeks, then being thanked for my service.

Well, It's a couple years later, and I'm typing this from the Jury Assembly Room in the Orange County West Courthouse. Maybe now I'll have something to type about.

It occurred to me in the shower* this morning that our only two civic responsibilities as U.S. citizens consist of selecting people from the middle masses and relegating them to opposite ends of the demographical spectrum... voting leaders to one side and criminals to the other**.

Of course, it helps to be close to one of those ends in the first place. Either way, I'm finally*** going to perform the second sacred duty of citizenship, and maybe I'll have something exciting to report once I'm looking back from the other side.

I wonder if they're going to try to make me put my hand on a bible?

* - as it almost always does.
** - maybe we're all criminals, and we're deciding which ones get carte blanche and the task of figuring out how to pay for everything, and which get a cinderblock studio apartment with everything paid for.
*** - well, maybe not.

BLASPHEMY - COGNITION

2008-03-11T10:32:00.000-07:00

"As Science, Evolution, and Creationism makes clear, the evidence for evolution can be fully compatible with religious faith. Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world. Needlessly placing them in opposition reduces the potential of each to contribute to a better future."
-Science, Evolution, and Creationism (2008), National Academy of Sciences (NAS)

I'm reading this study, a page at a time, between bouts of doing my actual job today. This excerpt is from the preface to the report, and I had to shake my head a little after reading it. It's that middle sentence: "Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world."

That sentence jarred me.

Now, I know the authors (who represent the entire NAS) have to perform a little political soft-shoe in their introduction, since there is unfortunately a real and significant deference to faith among our political representatives who would eventually be reading it... but that sentence was dishonest.

Let me be clear about this:

Science and religion are different ways of understanding the world like German and burping are different ways of speaking to Germans.

Science and religion are certainly different ways of thinking about the world. But religion does not help us understand anything.* In fact, religion actively hinders our understanding.

That said, I don't expect to read any more politically cautious statements in the remainer of the report; its purpose, after all, is to politely dispatch any and all faith-based concepts that might try to find their way into a public classroom. I'll write commentary on the report after I finish reading it.

Meanwhile, why don't you take some time to read my archived BLASPHEMY posts... I'm totally awesome at atheism.**

* - Well, it does help us understand one of the ways that people are susceptible to dramatic alterations of their personality and of their means of processing information ... but that's only after the application of science. Okay, fine... so I should've said 'religion helps us understand the effects of religion on the human mind.'
** - Does it come across as false modesty when I make a disclaimer about my use of false hubris?

BLASPHEMY - BLASPHEMY

2008-02-28T10:02:00.001-08:00

I can't believe it took me this long to think of posting an article with this title.*

No original content from me today; instead I'm going to showcase some of the other goodies out there. Without much more ado, here's a collection of some of my favorite blasphemies on the web, unimaginatively titled, 'My Favorite Blasphemies on the Web':

My Favorite Blasphemies on the Web

Reserve a Spot in Heaven
The reason I didn't link the site directly is because (A.) They are where I discovered the site originally, and (B.) Geekologie is a tremendously funny blog, the writing staff of which deserve mad props**.

xkcd - The Drake Equation
While not specifically an anti-theistic message (which he does make from time to time), this is a reminder of why it's important to think rationally and require evidence before lending any credence to mere speculation. Be sure to read the alt text over the comic image. His entire archive is like this, and usually adds an extra dimension of funny. Warning - you need to know a lot of mathematics, computer science, and general geeklore to appreciate many of this guy's cartoons. Having said that, enjoy!

Cectic - Mostly Cannot Know
One of many greats. Cectic fires most of his rounds toward generic human gullibility, but that makes for some great antireligious humor.

Russell's Teapot - Irreducible Complexity
The Crown Jewel of atheist webcomics, Russell's teapot is a deliciously funny (while sharp and insightful) look at christianity. The protagonist is a six-year-old named Russell. Read from the beginning and don't leave your computer 'till you're caught up.

Shortpacked! - Bus Stop
This comic is about a toy store and the geeks who work there, but occasionally a movie comes along that grabs the artist's attention. This one was fun. On a related note, I have no idea how The Golden Compass stands up as a movie, but I just finished the book last night and thought it was phenomenal. I'm making my way through the rest of the trilogy now.

* - Really, that's the sort of thing I find tremendously funny. I need to get out more.
* - No, not angry propellers... and not mentally unstable support beams either. The latter of which would be tragic in all its oxymoronic being.

BLASPHEMY - CORROBORATION

2008-02-14T13:41:00.001-08:00

OOPS!

I don't know what happened; I started writing a post, meant to save it for later, and apparently botched the whole thing, leaving "~Riker" in the space where the article had originally appeared.

Oh well, not too late to fix this. Here is the item I meant to post:

(Let's assume that) Intelligent Design is behind the diversity of life in our universe!*

Let's face it. Intelligent Design might be true. Any scientist can admit the preceding, so long as you attach the following caveat: if it is true, we're nowhere near knowing it yet.

What in God's name am I rambling about?

The theory of Intelligent Design might actually ever-so-slightly possibly be right**. But if that's the case, it will be discovered to be so scientifically.

Assume in the early 22nd century we discover conclusively and indisputably that our entire universe was created by the anthropomorphic God of ethical monotheism***. We learn this to be an absolute fact. If there are any IDers left, they might cheer, "See? we were right all along!"

But were they? Do they deserve the credit for holding a true belief? No.

Let me repeat that. No.

They didn't arrive at their conclusions scientifically, and they happened, by a depressing accident of chance, to hold beliefs that match the objective truth of the situation. What's the distinction? Imagine in Newton's time, that some crackpot awoke from a dream and announced to him that the universe was made of a curved space-time matrix and how that fact would modify gravitational theory. Not only would Newton not believe it in the first place, Newton would be unable to harness the theory for its predictive power because he'd lack the requisite tools and knowledge to do so. He wouldn't have access to the computers needed to calculate or model the theory, or the instruments that would allow him to observe the accuracy the of the theory's predictions.

It would, in essence, be an unscientific understanding on his part... a personal revelation to him that lacked the confirmability so critical to science. It may have been closer to the truth, but it wouldn't get him anywhere. Starting with Newtonian physics as a baseline and advancing our undersatanding scientifically would be the only means by which humanity could advance to the point at which it has arrived in modern times where we can finally confirm the validity of the curved space-time theory.

An IDer today, practicing ID 'science', will never be able to prove intelligent design in the future; he will simply coast forward in time in all his ignorance, all the way to the day when it is proved true by a scientist using the scientific method.

And only one of the two will be able to make any use of that knowledge.

* - Just for the sake of ease in portraying the following assertion; trust me, it reads better this way.
** - Much in the same way that a marble statue's hand could spontaneously wave; the odds are nonzero... but looking at zero you can definitely see the family resemblance.
*** - or is actually a massive simulation running on an alien supercomputer. Equally likely.

BLASPHEMY - FOIBLE

2008-01-10T14:02:00.000-08:00

It's 2008! And I present you with: More of The Same Stuff!!!

To the atheist, the fundamental problem with prayer is that even at its most noble (praying for the benefit of another, as opposed to praying for direct personal reward), it still only gives an individual the undeserved satisfaction of helping when they haven't lifted a finger.*

But even for the theist, there is a fundamental problem with prayer.

(In the following section, I intend the word 'answer' to mean "an answer of 'yes'".)

An answered prayer cannot ever be in contrast to God's will... so, either he will answer the prayer and perform the task, or he will not. And if he will, is he really waiting for the prayer to happen first before he does it? He already knows whether the person in question will end up praying, and he already knows what he is going to do about it... so what purpose does the prayer serve? And to those who might counter that an answer of 'no' is just as valid an answer... you have come up against what is the actual fundamental flaw of prayer: The best reason I've ever heard for justification of unanswered prayers is that they serve a greater purpose in God's plan, perhaps to teach a lesson and build character in the person praying, so he will learn to take disappointment in stride and be strong enough to remain stable in the face of denial of his desires.

FUNDAMENTALLY WRONG.

...See, only in an imperfect world would we ever be denied something we want. Perhaps more ominously, only in an imperfect world would it be in our nature to want things that we cannot have.

Such a scenario can only make sense outside of the framework of a universe designed by an omnipotent and omnibenevolent deity. And that's the god's honest truth.

* - Except for the ten they point toward God while praying, of course.

BLASPHEMY - HESITANCE

2007-12-24T09:50:00.000-08:00

Here I am, blogging on a warm and sunny Southern California Christmas eve... I'm definitely missing my wintery upstate NY hometown. But alas, I have vestigial traditions to attend to! The holiday spirit is alive and well within this vessel :)

Taking a cue from some historically chill religious figures, for this Christmas eve post I'm going to tone my essay down and address an issue that should give proactive "evangelical" atheists pause...

One of the toughest challenges we will face as evangelical atheists will come as we attempt to inoculate the religious against the sunk-cost fallacy. Can anyone imagine deconverting a grandmother who spent her entire life going to mass and praying nightly, deriving comfort and guidance from her rosary beads?

To shake the very foundations of one's upbringing, to be told that all he's been taught is incorrect, would be so difficult and painful to wrestle with. The desire to stick with his old beliefs would be incredible for two reasons: first, it's not likely that he would even accept the new information as valid, and second, if he does recognize it as valid, then it follows that he would have to acknowledge that all the time, resources, and effort* he spent on his religiosity was for naught.

Have you ever picked a bad line at the grocery store, waiting and waiting while the other lines move briskly along? Notice how you hit a point of no return... "I've waited this long, I'd better get my time's worth. I'm staying." This is a strong compulsion.

And it's completely wrong.

The correct choice is to move into one of the faster lines as soon as you recognize the delay in your own. But you feel attached to the time and effort you spent by choosing it, so you stick with the bad choice. I've felt this compulsion strongly enough in a checkout line. Imagine feeling it about sixty or more years of personality-molding belief structures. It must be shattering to go through.

Considering this, we have to decide if it is still worth the attempt, or if there should be a cutoff point limiting our efforts to a population less likely to be so difficult to reach. It was said that we should expect to 'lose a generation' if the country were to convert to the metric system. Should we plan to lose a generation on the march toward secularism? While the English/metric conversion would yield inconvenience and confusion for the 'lost', with religion/secularism it's a moral dilemma. How can I in clear conscience let someone continue to waste the remainder of their days putting energy into a system that will not pay back? And yet, how can I be so cruel as to pull the rug out from under them and show them what will appear to be a very harsh enlightenment?

The line might be there. On one side, truth. On the other, bliss. Who's prepared to draw it?

* -I think I'm going to acronymize this into 'TRE'... I feel like I'll be using this term a lot in the future.

EXHORTATION

2007-12-21T10:23:00.001-08:00

For a long time, I was a global warming skeptic.

I blame it entirely on Michael Crichton, when he forced me to read 'State of Fear' by being one of my favorite authors (The Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain, Eaters of the Dead, Sphere, The Great Train Robbery, Jurassic Park, The Lost World, The 13th Warrior, and Timeline, for chrissake). Honestly, I should've seen it coming with 'Prey'. He was losing his touch.

State of Fear is essentially an anti-global-warming-opus, and it turns out to be based upon some, *ahem*, flawed information.

Do yourself a favor. Reserve ten minutes to watch this film. Agree or not (as I disagreed once), give it an honest listen, and then share it. Really.

BLASPHEMY - STOCHASTIC

2007-12-20T16:26:00.000-08:00

I was gonna save this for much later, but reading a recent series of posts and commentary on Possummomma's blog, I had to sound off on it...

I've read through dozens of debates between theists and atheists over the last year or two, and over the course of doing so, I noticed a recurring phenomenon that seems to be the single most common reason why these debates often end in a flaming wreck.

The Christians who fight tooth and nail against the most solid reasoning, the ones who unfailingly and effortlessly have a response and excuse for every monumental counterpoint, the ones who inevitably turn into violent and aggressive animals once their best attacks are parried, all seem to inhabit the same trait: they can't "turn off" the existence of God.

In other words...

A lot of these Christians seem unable to take the cognitive leap into someone else's perspective. They try to wade through all our arguments under the pretense that God still exists, instead of looking at it under the assumption that he does not.

It is the ability to do this very thing that allows us atheists to be so solid in our conclusions about the world... when weighing the theistic arguments, we can and do look at things under the pretense that God exists.

And when we do that, what we observe simply doesn't jibe with that presumption.

There will always be the problem of theistic blindness to the reality that the world does not behave as it undoubtedly would if God existed. Christian gamblers have their prayers answered exactly as often as non-Christians who don't pray and end up winning. God only heals those who have the exact conditions that we as humans know how to cure with our own learned scientific skills. God might actually exist and be doing these things.

Well if that's the case, then God's trying awfully hard to remain indistinguishable from 'nothing at all'. And in that case, then... what in the world is the difference?

OPPROBRIATION

2007-12-07T11:54:00.000-08:00

Alright, now that I'm no longer a member of Blogrush, it's time for some hate-speech!!

(NOTE: At present, Ann Coulter is the only person who's made the ranks of my hate-speech list, so expect it to be about her whenever I use the term)

Ann Coulter, who hasn't changed her tampon in years, wrote an article for Vanity Fair* (in the same issue as the Tom "I'm bat-shit insane" Cruise, Katie Holmes and Suri cover story, in case you want to see for yourself) in which, among other unbelievably dense rantings, let slip that not only is she a young-earth creationist, she is a flat-earth creationist.

Whether the bitch has any explanation for the photos taken from space is at present unknown to me.

Regardless, she then hammers her point home making allegations against the vast liberal conspiracy that's planting globes in all the classrooms and explaining why the people on the other side don't fall off because of this cockamamie theory of gravity. She reminds us that gravity is only a theory, and that people like Pol Pot and Stalin also believed in gravity... authoritatively linking the roundness of the earth with pure evil.**

If I may, I'd like to try my hand at using this remarkable logic in an argument. What follows is a hypothetical conversation I'd have with Ann Coulter, assuming I'm out after the sun has set and she's not already out sucking on the necks of the homeless when I stop by to chat:

Me: "Ann, do you believe that two plus two equals four?" Ann: "Nowhere in the bible does it bother to say that, so it must not be important. Next question."***
Me: "Ann, all snarky avoidance techniques aside, if you were in math class and your teacher asked you what two plus two equals, what would your answer be?"" Ann: (sighs frustratedly) "Four."
Me: "Hmm, that's very disturbing. Jeffrey Dahmer also believed two plus two equals four. I had no idea you were a mass-murdering cannibal."****

In my amateur opinion, this woman is an intellectual parasite who robs listeners of their sanity... and then consumes it en masse, metabolizes it, and expels it as what I can only assume would be legendarily pungent flatus.

Ann, you're the worst kind of person.

* - I was at a coffee shop waiting for my order, and I was bored. Don't judge me.

** - I'm separating this one for the distinction it deserves. There is a slight possibility that she was using sarcasm here when she said this. If so, Ann Coulter has grasp of neither the purpose nor the application thereof. She's being sarcastic about the things someone arguing against her would be sarcastic about. Unless... what if she is using some ultra-subtle double-sarcasm where she's invoking her opposition's sarcasm for them??

*** - She used this in her article, so... I'm not taking liberties you might think I'm taking.
**** - Okay, I did kind of suspect it, but I was trying to be polite.

BLASPHEMY - DUBIETY

2007-11-28T10:27:00.000-08:00

Greetings all!

I humbly apologize for my absence over the past month; I do a lot of my blogging at work* and a recent promotion is keeping me in the field much more frequently than before. I'll try to sneak a few in there from time to time while I can, but mostly I have to learn to blog on my own time... which is gonna be tough because I'm addicted to Halo 3.

I'm going to attempt to create a sub-series of posts highlighting questions aimed at Christians. Obviously these will be rhetorical questions constructed to poke at the flaws and contradictions that come with religious belief. I'm not doing this to make fun of the religious, I'm doing it to prompt them to take a harder look at what they really think is going on in their faith. I think the ultimate goal of these queries is that they apply a prybar to the religious framework one might find himself boxed within.

If you're a person of faith, I think you should be asking yourself the tough questions anyway, even if it's to strengthen your faith. I cannot change your conclusions, but I respect how you came to them, even if our conclusions are polar opposites of one another.

While I have every intention to release a series of these questions, I have no idea how frequently the requisite ideas will pop into my head; it might be another year before you see the next one of these. Without further delay, I now present the first of many questions for Christians, in my half-heartedly named sub-series, 'Questions for Christians':

Questions for Christians

1a. Why isn't there a bible for today? When's the last time any of you had direct contact with a goat or a patch of desert in the middle east or a slave, or had to perform a wave offering? Why didn't God say "Come back to the top of my favorite mountain and get the new edition every 100th Christmas**"?

1b. If there's a reason explaining why not, then it only raises the question, "Why is so much of the bible irrelevant in today's world? If he only got one chance to write the user's manual for all*** humanity, why did it ever stop being the most amazing knowledge-filled piece of literature ever created? Why did we have to invent math and science on our own... shouldn't all of that information have been readily available in the bible? Why did he fail so miserably to create a timeless and definitive guide to living? Didn't he know we were going to be tinkering with stem cells and arguing over digital copyright law and ABOLISHING SLAVERY?

1c. Why did God stop talking to us? If he loves us as much as he loved his Abrahamic tribes 3000 years ago, why did he leave it up to them to deliver the Good Word to future generations? It's a several millenia-long game of telephone that started in an age when communication was, to put it politely, 'paralyzingly stifled'. How well does the telephone game work with one sentence within a single kindergarten class today? And God wanted us to do it with tens of thousands of passages and CHANGING LANGUAGES EVERY COUPLE CENTURIES?

1d. Why do we think God stopped talking to us? People all over the world today claim that God speaks to them, and we pay them no attention. Why, when we're so much closer to the actual source of the claims, are we so quick to dismiss them, when we take the same claims so seriously when they were made by primitive people who would interpret anything they didn't understand as a supernatural message?

I want to know what answers the faithful would come up with. And again, this isn't a snotty challenge to them, it's honest curiosity. I think whether you're a religious person or not, questions like these should be very important to you.

* - Don't judge. You're reading this at work. I have proof.
** - "The New FS&H Yellow Pages with more complete listings and up-to-date information"
*** - present and future

BLASPHEMY - EXPLICATION

2007-10-30T15:43:00.000-07:00

The truth value of a scientific principle is nothing more than the measure of its predictability. If you test it, you get a result. Next time you test it, how likely will it be that you get the same result? The more precise the results, the 'truer' the principle.

Imagine you've never seen a calculator before. Someone shows you how to use it. You type in 2+2. It provides an answer: 4. You try it again. It answers 4 again. You try other equations, and they all return correct answers. After enough repeated attempts you become comfortable with the expectation that the calculator will return a correct answer, ergo, "the calculator knows math." This is your principle, which has been experimentally proven true.

Note that this is not axiomatically true; all calculators have a known bit-error-rate. Let's say, one in ten million calculations, you can type in 2 + 2 and it will answer, I dunno... twelve. Does this make the principle invalid? NO. It just makes it imperfect and still remarkably useful.

If you want to investigate why the calculator works, you might start with the hypothesis, "math elves live inside the calculator, awaiting your instructions. They then construct the answer and display it on the screen." Repeatedly using the calculator suggests that the elves do in fact come up with correct answers. But if you investigate further and take the cover off the calculator, it becomes apparent that there are no elves inside it. All you find is plastic and metal. You throw out the math elf hypothesis and form a new one regarding the materials you did observe. Let's say you eventually discover that the circuit board operates on the manipulation of electricity and the individual components behave consistently when voltage is applied to certain contacts.

The scientific method has a failure rate of zero. Not very small, not miniscule... ZERO.

How can I claim this when history documents all sorts of naive and incorrect scientific theories (i.e., phlogiston, ether, Lamarckian evolution)? Because the scientific method has nothing to do with identifying absolute truths.

It's about obtaining the most accurate model possible.

Functionally true according to the best information available at the time.

I can say the scientific method has a failure rate of zero simply because no scientific theory has ever been replaced by a competing theory that didn't fit the data as well.

Now imagine somebody comes up to you and proposes that it's not electrical interaction between the calculator's components, but that the calculator is actually a container that holds the mathematical spirit of the universe. All your electrical experiments still work. Is there any reason at all to throw those away in favor of a generic and vague explanation that ignores your data and has no explanatory power of its own?

Food for thought.

EFFLORESCENT

2007-10-26T09:20:00.000-07:00

The exterminator over at No More Hornets wrote a post earlier this year, in which he claims to have pioneered a new creative art form: Google-oetry.

A Googl-oem is simply a poem constructed solely from the keywords people type into google that end up sending them to your website. You are allowed to add punctuation, but not to add or change words.

What follows is my first Googl-oem, entitled 'Verse Justice'. Each line appears in the order it did in my keyword log. Some punctuation has been added... no other changes.

Verse Justice

There are one hundred students who open lockers,
Perfect squares... odd number of factors.
Technology and prose:
Perfect square, odd number of factors.

Metanoia.
Metanoia.

Huntington harbour boat-parade 2007,
Insomnia film post production?
www.cdgirls.com.

Debate formats: rebuttal and re-rebuttal;
The only real justice is the justice you take.

Novels which incorporate back story...
Average bed time of a highschooler...
Remaining humble when becoming education.

Why do perfect squares have an odd number of factors?

Ear tampons.

24 hour insomniac film contest;
Exploding crap,
Shit, jury summons,
Gas leak! Front yard!!

Another word for prose?
Ratiocinative?
Black prose?
Supernatural justice?

Justice pro-se.

It's friday... say a prayer to freyja.

...prayer to freyja.
...prayer to freyja.
...prayer to freyja.

Operose.

- kevin savino-riker

Now, I didn't write my name at the end of the poem... the last search keyword in my log was actually my name, which was remarkably convenient.

BLASPHEMY - INEQUITY

2007-10-22T08:47:00.000-07:00

I learned today that I do not like being discriminated against.

After hearing some good words about Blogrush, a relatively new traffic-generating widget, I signed myself up in an attempt to generate traffic*. It worked remarkably well, to an extent**. I did get a few new readers (which brought my total readership up to 'a few'), a couple of whom left positive commentary on my work; I was indeed performing up to Blogrush's standards by actively contributing materials deemed valuable to the service's readership.

This morning, however, I received an email from the Blogrush staff indicating that my blog has been removed from rotation. The full text of the email appears here, but the critical elements are replicated below:

We regret to inform you that your BlogRush Account has been made INACTIVE because your blog did not pass our Quality Review criteria. You will find instructions below for making your account active again.

...

We determined that your blog did not meet our strict quality guidelines. Please do not take this personally but realize that we must abide by a very strict set of quality guidelines. (They are listed below.)

...

The primary reason(s) your blog(s) did not meet our guidelines: Inappropriate Content Or Advertising: Hate Speech or Anti-Racial (emphasis mine)

Hate Speech or Anti-Racial*** content...

...wow.

I guarantee you will not find one racist idea in all of the 127 posts that appear on this blog, for the same reason you wouldn't expect someone blind since birth to speak of a mental image; thoughts of that nature simply don't occur to me. So it must be hate speech they found.

Have I perpetrated an act of hate speech on any of these pages? I certainly don't think I have, but maybe 'hate speech' has swelled into such a broadly-defined word that 'criticism' falls within its blanket definition.

I have no illusions about this blog's critical views on organized religion, but I don't believe there is anything truly hateful spoken about any person or group of people, with the exception of Ann Coulter****, of course. To be clear, I passionately detest organized religion due its direct cause of so many personal and societal ills. I do indeed hate all the bad things religion causes, and I hate their cause equally. It is not wrong for people to have hated Hitler and Nazism; he caused tremendous undue human suffering. We should hate things that actively harm people.

Most importantly, though, is that when I speak out against religion I am not perpetrating hate speech. True hate speech is directed toward a person or group of people, not toward an institution. If you scour the pages of Prose Justice, the worst you will find... the thoughts that are as close to hateful as can be found here, will all be directed toward institutions, not toward people. It is not hate speech; it is just editorial opinion and information.

Just for fun, I myself looked for instances of hate speech. Using the search bar at the top of Prose Justice, keyword 'hate', Here's what I found:

"I love the English language for being so flexible and organic, but I hate when those attributes are exploited to supplement the argument being presented." - BLASPHEMY - EXACTITUDE

"Phones are as natural to gens X and Y as are toilets, and toilets are as natural as butts in this part of the world. We understand phones already. We understand their associated technologies as easily. Even the complicated ones like automated customer service. We hate that one, but we certainly understand it." - IDIOSYNCRATIC

"My roommate Tom's mugging - Tom was attacked by a handful of kids as he was riding home on a bicycle. They ran off the porch and chased him down, attacking him and taking the ten dollars he had on his person. I hate Brooks Ave...

...the massive standoff in my neighborhood, complete with lunatics holed up in a house with shotguns, and thirty-odd cops on the scene throwing around terms like 'kill zone'. I hate Brooks Ave." - PERTURBATION

"You may like foreign cars. You may like small cars. You may hate either, as a matter of fact, but with complete disregard to the preceding, you will love this commercial for this small foreign car. The Citroen C4. That is all...

...It's kinda like a gentlemen's club, really: Those who know about it love it, and everyone else hates them for being involved with it." - JOCOSE

"I HATE seeing great musicians wasting their talent playing other peoples' music." - INTERREGNUM

"I HATE the word 'holla' but will knowingly and willingly use it in jest to promote the disrespect of the word. I suggest you all do the same." - ORATORY 1

Any hate speech in there? Didn't think so.

But to be fair, let's try to look for instances where I actually have a chance to slip into hate speech. First we're going to use the term 'Christian', then we're going to use my frequent catch-all phrase, 'the religious'. If I'm going to say anything hateful about a person or group, those words will be there. So here we go:

"An example of this phenomenon is that Muslims are less likely than Christians to be killed in automobile accidents. When worded this way, it implies that Islam makes one a better driver than does Christianity. But it's much more likely that since Muslims generally don't drink, Muslims drive drunk far less frequently than Christians do, resulting in fewer enough drunk-driving fatalities to skew the results" - BLASPHEMY - ESPIAL

"This one goes out to all the good Christian people out there who mistakenly believe atheism is nihilism...

...I know that you're expecting to be tricked, but honestly pretending that you weren't... would you have been compelled to say 'Christian'? Well, the fact is, I left one item off the bottom of that list. If that last item was "Believing that the character of Jesus Christ was the son of God and died for our sins," then and only then would you be correct in describing him as Christian." - BLASPHEMY - ALTERITY

"And in case there was any misunderstanding about the context of Mark 3:29, let me unambiguously state that the acts performed by Christians to spread Christianity represents the absolute worst of human nature. If any of our human behaviors deserve to be called demonic, it's the fear-mongering critical to successful religious indoctrination.
" - BLASPHEMY - COVENANT

"The 'Family Values' ticket, which you can find on your garden variety voters' ballot, really means 'Undercover Christian'." - EPHEMERAL

"Any sufficiently radical scientific study engenders passionate outcries from the religious: 'We must stop playing God before it's too late!' 'Playing God' to them is inherently bad; my guess is because of its violation of some deadly sin or another. Pride, vanity, hubris. Whatever it is... we can't puff ourselves up and presume to know what we're doing. We can't take God's place. We're violating natural order...

...It wasn't until our technology began yielding godlike capabilities that the religious got squeamish about it all." - BLASPHEMY - DESIDERATUM

"Blind faith removes the verification process something has to endure before you can have faith in it. This is the kind of faith the religious have; the problem is that they mistakenly believe that their faith is the unblind kind." - BLASPHEMY - EXACTITUDE

"We've been labeled that way by the religious for so long that we've gotten used to it. It's probably our own fault that we haven't done so much to correct the misinterpretations of what it means to be atheist." - BLASPHEMY - ATTESTATION

"Interestingly, the fact that the universe exists is a source of unspeakable awe and 'reverence' to me. It drives me to never stop learning. This is the kind of awe the religious could only dream of experiencing." - BLASPHEMY - REJOINDER

"The religious and the agnostics draw a circle, within which is the natural and explainable, outside of which lies the supernatural. The religious populate this external region with God...

...Because if it was worth it to you to ask about the universe's complexity, wouldn't it be more worth it to ask about God's greater complexity? That's only a rhetorical question because the religious would never dare to ask that...

...The pyramids were, with the obvious exception of their geometry, pointless. How many hours, how much raw material, how many lives were consumed in the building of these religious monuments? They serve well as a poignant example of the resource-sapping by the religious that occurs even today, though to a thankfully less drastic extent." - BLASPHEMY - SATIETY

"When the religious organizations lobby for teaching of intelligent design in schools, they often accompany this with a statement encouraging students to be cautionary in their thoughts toward evolution...

...If the proponents of ID want to be skeptical about evolution because it is just a 'theory', they should be raising as much opposition to relativity as well. But the religious community has no quarrel with relativity, because they do not believe support of relativity is equal to a renunciation of God." - BLASPHEMY - MODICUM

I left out instances in which the search term yielded hits for phrases like 'Christian organization' or 'the religious organization', again because regardless of what I say afterward, it is not true hate speech. If you want to look for them yourself, you'll see that what I say falls far short of hateful anyway.

Looking through all that, there is only one passage that comes close to denigrating Christian people, and even then I explicitly aim my attack at the specific practice of fear-mongering for the purpose of indoctrination. Everything else there is statement of fact or constructive critiquing. Nowhere else will you see even a hint of bile or spite or flat-out insult*****.

After spending only a short while following links via the blogrush widget, I came across several websites with far more caustic language and direct attacks on groups and individuals, from atheistic blogs, from religious blogs, and from blogs that have no theological slant whatsoever.

So I guess this post is both a cry for help from my fellow atheist bloggers, and also a caution to my fellow atheist bloggers who use Blogrush. Their website indicates that they manually inspect every blog that signs up... I'd really like to know if this has happened to anybody else.

I realize this is a very modest instance of discrimination; nothing has happened to me, only to one avenue of distribution of my digital presence. But it's validation just the same that a blog about positive atheism and about religious criticism is viewed as hate speech, at least in the eyes of the constituents of Blogrush. Thank you, Blogrush, for proving to me that we atheists still have work to do.

* - and to win the lottery; well, one out of two ain't bad...
** - See footnote #1.
*** - which I think, etymologically speaking, means 'against differentiation by race'... so maybe all those people using the term 'anti-racial' should use a correct and unambiguous word like 'racist' instead. Because I'd like to be able to use the term 'anti-racial' for what it really means without having to stop and explain myself like I did here.
**** - about whom I didn't even speak hatefully... only critically, and I did so within the framework of stand-up comedy (which is ALL ABOUT exaggeration), which wasn't even that funny. OK, fine, you want to drag it out of me? I HATE ANN COULTER BECAUSE SHE IS A HATEWORTHY PERSON, WHO LIVES QUITE WELL OFF PROFITS THAT COME DIRECTLY FROM THE PROPAGATION OF HATE SPEECH. YOU LISTENING, BLOGRUSH? READ ONE OF ANN COULTER'S BOOKS, TAKE NOTES, AND THEN COME BACK TO ME AND TELL ME THAT MY BLOG CONTAINS HATE SPEECH. I fucking dare you.
***** - See footnote #4

BLASPHEMY - DESIDERATUM II

2007-10-15T14:29:00.001-07:00

What if we were all secular humanists?

Imagine a world where every human being understood that there is no afterlife. Every single one of the six-billion-plus of us realized that this life is the only one we get. And moreso, we also realize that there are people suffering. There are the unfortunate who are still lacking the comforts and givens of the developed world.

Assuming a comparable* number of good-willed and proactive people populating this imaginary world, they would all be involved in a universal and dedicated effort to improve the quality of life for as many of the world's neediest people as possible; there would be no nobler cause to support. We would all work as hard as we could to help. Imagine how much we could accomplish if after taking care of our personal needs, we all labored cooperatively toward creating a greater world for humanity.

There is no need to fear the old-fashioned bogeyman of communism, in which I know many will detect a similarity to my scenario. Notice I said 'after taking care of our personal needs'. By 'personal needs' I mean every last thing that we choose to make important, whether it be feeding and clothing ourselves and our dependents, or if it's planning an expensive vacation to Hawaii. We can still be as capitalist and self-serving as we want to be. But many of us will have resources leftover after taking care of our personal interests.

So all I'm saying is: with the time and resources that the fortunate have leftover, what if they all applied them toward providing basic needs to the most needy of our global family? Eventually clean water, adequate shelter and sufficient food would be provided to everyone on the planet who lacked it before.

And then a remarkable thing happens: the most needy people on the planet will no longer be defined in terms of the hardships of starvation and general poverty; instead they will be defined by a lesser need. Perhaps lack of educational infrastructure. So, what if the fortunate peoples of the world didn't stop giving? Eventually everyone in the world would have a reliable education at their fingertips.

As the progression continues, the needs of the neediest will one by one be eliminated according to their severity, until those remaining needs slowly come to resemble the desires of the average. Allow the trend to continue long enough, and we approach the goal that more and more of our needs are accommodated for, and more and more of us can spend more time striving toward experiencing the luxuries of life. As more people ascend to lifestyles that allow them to yield their own surplus, the resource-base for charity expands exponentially. Needs eventually become extinct and the worldwide population comes as close we ever have to experiencing heaven on earth. A real paradise the human family can experience together.

Now, imagine that one-tenth of the people in this scenario had an additional drain on their resources. Something that took a significant portion of their time and money, and wasted it on an empty promise of a better life than could ever be experienced on this world.

This has a twofold effect: 10% of the population automatically has less time and money available to contribute to bettering the world, and that same 10% come to develop a complacency toward wanting to better the world. "Why bother working on this one when the REAL prize is in the world to come?" Those 10% are no longer working as hard as they can toward bettering the world. Now, all of the sudden it takes 10% longer to achieve paradise on the planet.

In our world, it is not one-tenth of the population afflicted by this misconception. In our world, most of us... in fact enough to be able to say almost all of us... behave like the 10% in my scenario above. Most of the people on the planet are complacent about suffering on earth... to some degree their own suffering, and to a much greater degree that of others far removed from them. Most people don't give a damn and don't give a dime to make the world better because they're not too worried about it; there's heaven to prepare for.

So in our world, how long will it take, how many lifetimes when it's only 10 percent fighting the unrelenting tide of majority? How many generations will continue to suffer while the dismal minority are the only ones left trying our hardest to move toward heaven on earth?

And on a totally unrelated note - It bothers the hell out of me that 'sub-par' and 'under par' have opposite meanings.

* - to this world

BLASPHEMY - ESPIAL

2007-10-10T15:14:00.000-07:00

Found on the Blogroll*:

Matt McCormick, author of Atheism: Proving the Negative, has written some really nice articles addressing, among other things, some of the difficulties of atheism we don't often think about, what with all the 'disproving Christianity' that keeps us busy.

This particular article of his caught my attention. It stopped me dead in my tracks, since at the time, the idea he presented had never once crossed my mind.

The idea came from recent studies that suggested religious people were generally happier and healthier than their nonreligious counterparts, and really amounts to "Okay, we know religion is not true... but if it turns out that being religious really is good for us, then what do we atheists DO with that information?"

After some vigorous pondering, here's what I came up with:

The first thing we have to do is analyze the merits of the statement above. As Mr. McCormick noted, most atheists would jump to the conclusion that the studies were not properly constructed or were otherwise compromised so as to provide some degree of bias in their results. Off the cuff, I think that's true.

But I'd like to frame my response without having to invoke a flaw in these studies themselves**, and instead appeal to general knowledge about studies of this nature, and what we can infer when we think critically about them:

Studies like this often fall victim to 'tunnel vision' wherein the item they're focusing on (in this case, religiosity) is inadvertently credited for all deviations and contrasts between the subjects of the study, when other influential factors are undoubtedly present. Religiosity is often accompanied by complimentary*** behaviors and/or belief structures that may be nonreligious in and of themselves, and which may influence the subject just as strongly.

An example of this phenomenon is that Muslims are less likely than Christians to be killed in automobile accidents****. When worded this way, it implies that Islam makes one a better driver than does Christianity. But it's much more likely that since Muslims generally don't drink, Muslims drive drunk far less frequently than Christians do, resulting in fewer enough drunk-driving fatalities to skew the results.

As it pertains to the studies above, I'd be shocked not to discover the same kind of effect taking place.

But... that's not the only mitigating factor in my assessment. If we disregard my argument above and assume that the studies were constructed to eliminate those external factors, and that they accurately measured a difference in wellbeing based solely on religiosity, there is this to consider:

These studies are essentially positing religion as a giant placebo. This is actually a great explanation of religion - A placebo is an inert substance/operation that has a positive physical effect on the subject; it literally 'hacks' the brain into generating relief because the subject believes he has received a genuine***** treatment. As you might expect, placebo can be effective... but genuine medicine is usually much more effective. Similarly, there are probably many other things in life that can be more beneficial than religion. Real things. It is naïve to think that religion's placebo effect is singular among all we can experience. Remove religion from a population and replace it with something rational and real (like higher education, for example) and what benefits were lost in removing religiosity may be replaced or restored.

Of course, there is probably a cumulative effect of these benefits, and it's fair to say, in following my example, "Well, if we have higher education and religion, then we'll be even happier!" I admit I do not have an argument against this. I will say though, that there are probably dozens if not hundreds of distinct rational alternatives that many of us to not yet employ in our lives****** that hold similar potential benefit without all the negatives that inherently accompany religion*******. All we have to do is pick one. That shouldn't be too hard.

But wait!! There's more!

Finally, there's the dilemma of disbelief itself. Again, we'll disregard my arguments above, and now assume that the studies are definitely correct. Religious people are better off than nonreligious people. Okay. But we still run into an issue.

Like the placebo I mentioned before, religion only has its assuaging powers when people believe in them. Atheists cannot will themselves to benefit from religion when they are aware that it is not true. Thus, you can only cross the line from belief into disbelief. Atheism is a one-way ticket; once we know better, we are no longer capable of experiencing the benefits of religiosity.

With this in mind, the question at hand no longer applies to atheists. Now it applies exclusively to atheists' behavior toward believers.

And the question is not whether we should keep dragging people across the line from belief into disbelief... it's whether we are obligated to keeping others from crossing on their own.

Thinking rationally about such a dilemma, it becomes a matter of Ignorance versus Bliss. I believe the conclusion we'd inevitably come to is that the benefit of removing that bit of ignorance would not outweigh the benefit of leaving said ignorance intact. Would we ever have a reason to tell a patient that the medicine we gave him shouldn't have worked??

The least course of action that would be morally acceptable would be to swear one's self to secrecy. To actively promote the greater good, atheists would actually have to shoulder the burden of maintaining belief in the masses.

Think about that. We would literally become the shepherds to the flock. Ergo, atheists would be destined to become the new clergy.

How wild is that?********

* - (Atheist)
** - especially since I'm not privy to the details of how the studies were done. No unsubstantiated allegations coming from this mouth.
*** - as in, 'complementing each other,' not 'free of charge.' Because the latter wouldn't make any sense.
**** - This is a fabricated assertion. I have no idea whether it's true or not, but it is a great model for what I'm trying to explain.
***** - In this sense, I mean 'genuine' to indicate an active medicine rather than an inert one. Many doctors will attest that placebo are a genuine treatment, since they do provide a measurable benefit when properly implemented.
****** - Yoga comes to mind for some reason. I offer no explanation.
******* - I guess I do have an argument against it, then, don't I?
******** - This post definitely holds my personal record for most footnotes.

BLASPHEMY - ALTERITY

2007-10-01T12:28:00.000-07:00

This one goes out to all the good Christian people out there who mistakenly believe atheism is nihilism.

It's not just a rhetorical question I'm about to ask you, it's an entire rhetorical quiz*.

The Rhetorical Quiz

1. What is the first word that would come to mind if you were asked to describe someone who believes in the following?

Helping others in need

Treating others as he would wish to be treated

Making personal sacrifices for the benefit of others

Honoring and respecting elders

Believing in the 'good' in people

Remaining humble

Practicing honesty

Loving unconditionally

Championing against the immoral and oppressive

I know that you're expecting to be tricked, but honestly pretending that you weren't... would you have been compelled to say 'Christian'?

Well, the fact is, I left one item off the bottom of that list. If that last item was "Believing that the character of Jesus Christ was the son of God and died for our sins," then and only then would you be correct in describing him as Christian.

Well, the fact of the matter is, I was describing myself. The last item that I left off the list was "Does not believe in the existence of the supernatural."

Lo and behold, I do not believe in the existence of any gods, and I still try my best to be a good person.

I brought this all up for two reasons: first, to disambiguate the term 'atheist' (or at least differentiate it from the word 'nihilist'), and second, to address the concept of 'Christian virtues.'

Every time I hear someone refer to certain qualities as Christian virtues, it gets my dander up. If you don't understand why, I suggest you find a rock n' roll aficionado and tell them that 'All Along the Watchtower' was the best song Jimi Hendrix ever wrote. Watch their reaction.

You see, 'Christian virtues' is a misnomer. Christianity did not author those concepts. They are not Christian virtues... they are virtues. Every moral** instruction espoused by Christianity preexisted in prebiblical culture. Not only that; people of all backgrounds can accept them. Even people that don't believe in any gods.

The items on that list are all things I believe in. And yet if I add to the bottom of that list "Does not believe in the existence of the supernatural," all I'm viewed as is "atheist!" It's a perfect example of the prejudice that this society is laced with that it bothers you to hear the idea that 'atheist' and 'virtuous person of high moral character' are not mutually exclusive.

* - Okay, so it was still just one question, but didn't it feel big enough to constitute being called a quiz?
** - I don't mean every instruction that's identified as moral... I mean every instruction that actually IS moral. There aren't that many.

BLASPHEMY - BALLYHOO

2007-09-28T13:14:00.000-07:00

No CADAVER here... this is just to help a friend.

BLASPHEMY - ANTIPHON

2007-09-25T12:48:00.001-07:00

Andrew Sullivan (one of the more intelligent and sensible believers I've stumbled upon during my daily internet-scouring) had some interesting things to say during his online debate with my junior-hero*, Sam Harris. The full text of their back-and-forth has been posted all over the atheist corner of the internet, and I highly recommend you take the time to read it. Here it is:

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan Debate

As I was making my way through the piece, all doe-eyed with my man-crush on Sam Harris and his elegant prose, I got caught up in a game of "how would I respond to some of these things?" What follows is one example.

Andrew wrote:

"Is this sense of an after-life an illusion? We cannot know for sure. But death isn't an illusion. And when death is nearest, faith emerges most strongly. You can either see this as a reason to pity people of faith - they're too weak to look mortality in the face and deal with it. Or you can see this as part of the wisdom of people of faith: we know what we are, and we have reached a way of dealing with it as humans, full humans, not just arguments without minds and bodies. Remember, man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.

But I believe this position misses the point. He seems to think atheism only comes into play at the moment before death**. It implies that his understanding amounts to, "atheists think believers aren't brave enough to admit that when you die, you cease."

But... no! That's not what we're saying!

We're not saying, "if you're a brave and smart atheist like me, you can deal with death being the end." In point of fact, we're saying, "It looks very likely that death is the end, so RIGHT NOW and the remainder of our lives until death are the most cherishable, and the most perishable things we have. They ought not be wasted. All opportunity costs must be considered. Spending even an ounce of effort on plans for yourself after death takes at least an equal (and likely larger) amount away from the only life you are guaranteed to have.

That is why it's such an important goal to fight the desire of the eternal***.

* - I know what you're thinking... and the answer of course is Dawkins.
** - maybe because that's the moment that the majority of the believer's life is spent looking forward to?
*** - At least, we should try to fight it on the spiritual plane. I'm all for promoting the desire of the eternal through technological innovation.

BLASPHEMY - DESIDERATUM

2007-09-18T14:05:00.000-07:00

It's time to start 'playing God'.

Any sufficiently radical scientific study engenders passionate outcries from the religious: "We must stop playing God before it's too late!" 'Playing God' to them is inherently bad; my guess is because of its violation of some deadly sin or another. Pride, vanity, hubris. Whatever it is... we can't puff ourselves up and presume to know what we're doing. We can't take God's place. We're violating natural order.

Nevermind that all technology 'violates natural order' once we separate 'the advent of technology' from 'that which occurs naturally'*. By this rationale, every time a monkey picks up a stick to scratch his back, he's playing god. If you don't subscribe to the aforementioned line of reasoning, perhaps you might consider that advancing our technology is simply a byproduct of our intelligent nature?

It wasn't until our technology began yielding godlike capabilities that the religious got squeamish about it all. The displacement between humanity and deity has been reduced to a stone's throw. In some aspects, we've exceeded him. God needed 40 days of rain to wipe out the population of the earth. We could do it in a drastically more populated world with a few 40 megaton blasts... in a few minutes, no less. I'm not proud of that fact, but it's a relevant point to make.

Removing all religious stigma from the term, scientists 'playing god' is no less benign than children 'playing house'. Nobody accuses the child of tempting wrath and parental retribution. If anything, it shows a desire on the child's part to want to grow up, to be as mature as his parents; it is a better endeavor than playing 'bank robbers'.

'Playing God' should be an aspiration of ours, not a warning to us. We, like the children playing house, are practicing and preparing ourselves for a future when we will be in charge. With godlike capabilities, we can practice benevolence on a global scale. We can take responsibility for those who need our care. We can make the world a better place.

We've finally reached the level of scientific maturity that we can start doing something about it.

We're finally ready to start playing god.

* - And my whole point here is that the advent of technology should be thought of as something that occurs naturally.

BLASPHEMY - EXACTITUDE

2007-09-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

Two separate concepts popped into my head the other day. New ways to articulate how I feel about a couple key topics in the faith vs. reason debate.

Number 1 -

Faith and Blind Faith (or, faith and Faith, truth and Truth, what have you).

Most of the argumentative types I come across could really use a heavy dose of linguistic precision. I love the English language for being so flexible and organic, but I hate when those attributes are exploited to supplement the argument being presented. "It takes just as much faith to be an atheist/believe in evolution/fill-in-the-blank." You know what? I'll admit it. That's all true.

That's true because it takes faith to do or believe anything. It takes faith to believe your calculus teacher; otherwise, you'd be left to reinvent it for yourself. It takes faith in spades to fly in a commercial jetliner; there are hundreds of engineers who better have been right when they designed the plane, and thousands of their predecessors who developed the aviation industry based on the works of Glenn H. Curtiss and the Wright brothers, who had to place a lot of faith into a lot of things to accomplish their achievements.

Faith is not a bad thing. Faith is another word for trust. Trust is based on evidence. Faith is functionally useful; in fact, it is a sleight to faith to leave it at that... faith is crucial to survival. Faith gives us a means to use all the tools we have not invented ourselves. Scientific advancement would not have gotten us to where we are so quickly if scientists couldn't rely on information outside of their own experience. It is what enables us to stand on the shoulders of giants. Faith is not a bad thing.

Blind faith is a terrible thing. Blind faith removes the verification process something has to endure before you can have faith in it. This is the kind of faith the religious have; the problem is that they mistakenly believe that their faith is the unblind kind. They have been misled into thinking that their faith is supported by evidence when, for example, they see prayer 'work' for the people around them. That is why they cannot distinguish between the faith it takes to be religious and the faith it takes to be rational. That is why they so easily say "it takes just as much faith to be an atheist." The truth is, it takes no blind faith to be an atheist, and the faithful can't tell the difference.

Number 2 -

'Supernatural' is still a useless word.

I figured out another analogy to make my concept of the supernatural more palatable to mystical types. The concept of the supernatural is like thinking of a color called superblack*. It is conceivable to think of a shade of black that's blacker than any shade you've ever seen before. You can imagine what it would be like to see something superblack. But the problem is, true black is defined as the absence of light. To go further than that is by definition immeasurable. Black is simply as black as you can get**. You can think of superblack, but it won't get you anywhere that black can't.

Here's another one. Temperature. The coldest temperature theoretically achievable is absolute zero, which is -273 degrees celsius. It is at this temperature that all molecular activity ceases***. Heat is simply a way to measure the kinetic activity of particles. Absolute zero is literally the absence of heat. But it'd be very easy to imagine extending the temperature scale to -274 degrees. It doesn't matter that in this universe nobody is ever going to measure absolute -1... we can still think of it. But again, it won't get us anywhere.

* - Not to be confused with the glorious summer comedy 'Superbad'.
** - Okay, this is not true in the world of NTSC television, but that doesn't count anyway.
*** - Back off, buddy. I'm not going to discuss zero-point energy if I don't have to.

BLASPHEMY - ATTESTATION

2007-08-23T13:31:00.000-07:00

"I am atheist."

"I am an atheist."

As I've posted previously, I prefer the former. But why exactly?

Used the first way, 'atheist' is an adjective. Used the second way, it becomes a noun. Grammar is a subtlely powerful device, and that small change makes all the difference in the world. For example:

"A fat, happy, playful dog." Adjective, Adjective, Adjective, Noun. The first three are its component attributes, the fourth is simply 'it'.

When identifying ourselves , Most of us put 'atheist' in that last place, and it overshadows all the good adjectives that might come before it. All the adjectives characterize the atheist, instead of 'atheist' being among words characterizing the person. I think this is a misstep, especially in a time where the term 'atheist' is so widely misrepresented.

For one thing, to anyone outside the category it de-personifies us. For another, it defines us in purely adversarial terms against anyone who might be described as religious. And we don't always want to be that... or at least, not always so blatantly so.

We've been labeled that way by the religious for so long that we've gotten used to it. It's probably our own fault that we haven't done so much to correct the misinterpretations of what it means to be atheist. This is my point from above: Most people who hear the word think that 'atheist' is all we are, or all that matters when it comes to judging our character. Collectively, we do tend to say "I'm an atheist," the way we'd say "I'm a realtor." That makes it an all-encompassing descriptor; it's what you spend the majority of your time doing. But if you just say "I'm atheist", it's like saying "I'm superstitious". It describes an aspect of you, not YOU. Nobody says they're superstitionists.

When somebody finds out I'm atheist and reacts in shock with a phrase like, "But you're such a good person!", I use a little analogy to help them understand that their notion of 'atheist' is dramatically exaggerated. It goes like this:

"Do you eat hamburgers*? Yes? So you're a hamburgerist? Should I assume that all you ever eat is hamburgers, all you ever think of are hamburgers, and that you believe hamburgers are better than the food other people eat?"

Yes, it's designed to be a little preposterous, but it drives the point home. I should mention that I don't just reply with this canned phrase. That would be too rude and condescending for all but the most infuriating debators. I introduce it as an analogy first.

Anyway, I thought these thoughts were pretty good and worth worth sharing...

...not that I'm proclaiming myself an intelligentist, or anything.

* - I originally wanted to use 'vegetables' in place of 'hamburgers', but there really is such a thing as a vegetarian... and 'hamburgerist' is too funny a word to pass up.

BLASPHEMY - REJOINDER

2007-08-15T10:07:00.000-07:00

My responses to the FriendlyAtheist short-answer project:

Why do you not believe in God?

The 'supernatural' is undefined... kinda like 'divide by zero'; it's a concept we can label, but there's nothing we can actually put into that category. The entire universe is natural, and within it there's only the already-known and the unknown.

Where do your morals come from?

I am comfortable with certain things happening to me (good) and uncomfortable with other things happening to me (bad). I recognize that all other living things behave similarly to me, so it's easy enough to assume that if I don't like it, you probably won't either.

What is the meaning of life?

'Life' is a word that describes "the behavior living things exhibit before they die". Oh, what is the purpose of life? I don't think there is a single pre-intended purpose of life that we can identify... but I highly respect people who choose to apply a purpose to their lives, especially if the purpose is a positive one.

Is atheism a religion?

Only as much as total darkness is a color.

If you don’t pray, what do you do during troubling times?

I do my best to find a way to gain strength from the ordeal so I can better face it the next time I endure it. If it's too much to bear on my own, then I draw strength from the support of my friends and loved ones who are there for me during troubling times. If it's someone close to me enduring troubling times, then I do everything in my power to help them through it.

Should atheists be trying to convince others to stop believing in God?

I believe so; I think humans should have an interest in helping humanity as a whole. If you're spending any time at all worshiping a deity, then you're not helping humanity as much as you could be.

Weren’t some of the worst atrocities in the 20th century committed by atheists?

That's an irrelevant statistic. Some of the worst atrocities of the 20th century were committed by people who had dark hair, but we don't campaign against that. A more appropriate statistic would be the ratio of atheism-motivated vs. religiously-motivated perpetration of atrocities in all of recorded history. The number would be small enough to illustrate that this is an absolutely stupid argument against atheism.

How could billions of people be wrong when it comes to belief in God?

There was definitely a value in believing in a higher power when primitive humans were fighting each other for survival. This religious tendency is a residual trait that was never extinguished, since up until the last century or two we didn't have the capability to answer the biggest questions we were able to ask. Now our eyes are opened wider.

Why does the universe exist?

I don't believe that is an answerable question. I also don't believe it needs to be answered. Interestingly, the fact that the universe exists is a source of unspeakable awe and 'reverence' to me. It drives me to never stop learning. This is the kind of awe the religious could only dream of experiencing.

How did life originate?

I personally don't know. But some of the best minds out there are working on further refining the very solid theories that we have. Once we find out for sure, it will promote a whole new category of capabilities that we will be able to use to vastly improve the state of humanity and of the world as a whole.

Is all religion harmful?

No, assuming we apply a broad definition of 'religion'. The Eastern spiritualities do nothing to stifle our inherent benevolence. In some cases they actually promote it. The harmful religions are those of ethical theism; the ones that have codes dictating behavior.

What’s so bad about religious moderates?

They're not bad in and of themselves. But their existence enables fundamentalism to thrive. They make a case for being complacent about religion, which is actually a very dangerous thing.

Is there anything redeeming about religion?

Good things can come out of religious motivation... but to be redeeming I'd have to find an instance of something that religion provides more effectively than does rationalism (which is naturalistic in nature). For every good thing religion does well, there is a natural and rational thing that does it better.

What if you’re wrong about God (and He does exist)?

Then everyone who did believe in and everyone who didn't believe in the particular god that does exist (and it's not necessarily Yahweh) will be subject to the rules (if there are any) established by that god. If it ends up that Yahweh exists, then I will be undeservedly punished for eternity. If the actual god is one that values rationality and abhors blind faith, then I'll be handsomely rewarded for passing the test of religion. The god that does exist might not care at all what I did while alive, and he might not even have made us for everlasting life. We might still just die.

Shouldn’t all religious beliefs be respected?

Only the ones worthy of respect... but chances are, the aspects of those beliefs that deserve the respect predate and are independent of the religion itself ("Do unto others as you would have done unto you," et cetera). Rather: whether a belief is to be respected has nothing to do with the fact that it's religious.

Are atheists smarter than theists?

Not on account of their atheism, no. But smarter people are more likely to be atheist than theist.

How do you deal with the historical Jesus if you don’t believe in his divinity?

I assume you're talking about Yeshua ben Joseph, a man who was a small political/spiritual leadership candidate (and thus given the title 'Jesus', as such candidates were all given) of a growing sect of a monastic society in the middle east a few thousand years ago. With my understanding of the vernacular and the culture of the people who wrote what surviving historical documents we have, he never said he was divine. Other people did, much later. People all throughout history have been calling themselves and other people divine, and as far as I can tell they've all been wrong.

Would the world be better off without any religion?

I believe so, and I'm doing everything I can so that someday we can find out for sure.

What happens when we die?

We permanently lose consciousness; it is not unlike before we were born. Of course, there is the possibility of developing technology that will allow a person to live indefinitely; but that's a whole other can of worms.

BLASPHEMY - PERSIFLAGE

2007-08-10T17:51:00.000-07:00

Atheist Stand-Up Comedy.

Two critical aspects of stand-up are the delivery and the physical component of the presentation... but it's still funny to read the punchlines, so here's a little joke that I thought up on the way home from work. I need lots more material to add to this, but it's a start:

I wanted to do a caricature of Ann Coulter, but I realized it would be impossible because she already is one...

...You just can't exaggerate Ann Coulter's rage! I tried! In the real world, that woman hasn't changed her tampon in years.

Creationists want us to produce fossil evidence of transitional species? Fine. BURY ANN COULTER. We'll dig her up in a year and say, "She walked upright, but completely lacked higher brain function. Also note the pronounced claws."*

Yeah, so, don't worry, I didn't quit my day job. But I will try to come up with some more to add later.

* - If you didn't find this passage funny, it's not because I'm not funny. It's just because you missed my delivery and physical presentation.

BLASPHEMY - COVENANT

2007-08-10T11:23:00.000-07:00

Most internet-savvy atheists know about the Rational Response Squad. If you don't, feel free to check in on them at their site linked above, and at the Blasphemy Challenge, which is what I want to talk about today.

If you're unfamiliar with what the Blasphemy Challenge is, take a moment to familiarize yourself, then read on with abandon :) The link is above.

I'm planning on making a contribution to The Blasphemy Challenge, but I don't have convenient
access to a camera that will take more than 15 seconds of footage at a time... so, being the verbose motherfucker that I am, things are not so much with the "filmed" part yet.

But I have scripted my statement, and I might as well publish it here. Hope you like what I've come up with. And if you have any critiques, feel free to leave me a comment.

Okay, enough introduction.

Hello, Rational Responders!

I'd like to help out by contributing to the Blasphemy Challenge...

But I'm not sure I can deny the holy spirit... since in my mind, actively denying something implies that it is a thing that exists that you're interacting with. It calls to mind dealing with an unruly youngster... like, "No! Bad holy spirit! You cannot have the cookie!"; this particular cookie being, of course, my soul (which, by the way, I also cannot even relinquish, since I don't think I have one of those either). In short, not only can I not deny something due to its nonexistence, I can't do so because I have nothing to withhold from it. It's like trying to bluff during a hand of poker when you're not playing with real money: you have chips on the table and you've assigned arbitrary values to them, but no matter how many chips you're betting, whether it be none, one, or many... it's all the exact same real value: zero. In the end nobody has won or lost anything. I don't think we even have cards.

And in case there was any misunderstanding about the context of Mark 3:29, let me unambiguously state that the acts performed by Christians to spread Christianity represents the absolute worst of human nature. If any of our human behaviors deserve to be called demonic, it's the fear-mongering critical to successful religious indoctrination.

Pretend for a minute that this supernatural contest for souls between God and the devil is actually going on. If I were the devil, I tell you what I'd do. I'd prey on the weakest minds I could find. Minds that would believe anything. And I'd do my best to convince them that I was God. I'd even present the idea of an evil devil for them all to rally against. I'd make them as afraid as possible of abandoning me, and I'd sweeten the deal by promising them eternal rewards for choosing what would appear to be the only right choice. In other words, I'd make it sound too good to be true, and then watch the volunteers pour in.

It's not a devil you should be afraid of. It's a silver-tongued Satan pretending to be God.

Okay, there you go. And just in case all that didn't do the trick, Let me make clear that I intend to commit an unpardonable sin. I'm hoping this follows along the same line as "whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart." Even if I haven't performed all this correctly due to a technicality, I've already committed the unpardonable sin in my heart.

In conclusion, I will pledge this with my full name as a baptized and confirmed Roman Catholic: I am Kevin James Christopher Savino-Riker, and I completely and wholly deny the holy spirit.

I'll post the video here once I make it. Meanwhile, more text-based creative compositions to follow.

It's Friday, so say a prayer to Freyja!

BLASPHEMY - SODALITY

2007-08-09T21:23:00.000-07:00

And the hits just keep on comin'!

Prose Justice has just been added to the Atheist Blogroll. This is a big step for me, since, well... other people will be visiting this page. That hasn't happened for a long time.

In preparation for the potential influx of readers, I've done a little upkeep here to make the site more manageable for people that are here to read what interests them. This site will still be my personal journal, and my archives consist of the better part of a hundred posts that have nothing to do with atheism, and due to my inconvenient post-titling scheme it'd be tough to discern which of my posts have anything interesting to say at all... so if you want the good stuff about my new favorite A-word, click the link at the top of the page.

That's all for now. I'll finish with a link to post-previous, the one that represents the bulk of my creative outpourings of the last eight months, and the post that got me on the blogroll in the first place.

Okay, really finishing this time. Thanks to Mojoey for creating the blogroll. You're putting your money where your mouth is. Thanks for setting the example and providing a platform for the rest of us to follow suit!

BLASPHEMY - SATIETY

2007-08-08T23:23:00.000-07:00

Started 11/3/06, completed 8/8/07

SATIETY

I read an interesting theory about life, in which it is hypothetically supposed that humans are not so much a lifeform, but a byproduct of a lifeform... that DNA itself is the real animal, the defined living being. The means by which it found the solution to its survival is clumping together in a massive swarm that spends a period of time advancing through stages which ultimately allow it to combine with another swarm of DNA which will allow the new generation to propagate...

Life itself is, when conceptually condensed for the sake of the argument, simply the persistence of information: the significant pattern arranged in a (relatively or even arbitrarily) meaningful way. In the case of humans, it is their DNA and all its associated emergent attributes.

When viewing a homologous sample population of a particular sect of any organized religion, the same type of pattern is identifiable in the higher-order philosophical arguments and belief systems... to that end, some have called religion a 'virus of the mind'.

In recent years, I found myself coming to that realization on my own. Seeing religion itself as a 3rd order sociological lifeform: Self-sustaining, reproducing, and adaptive; whereas humans are constructed in a tangible medium of molecules... religion is a swarm entity literally made of the intangible stuff of mob mentality, cemented together by vestigial fight-or-flight instincts. Fear. Anger. What's especially interesting to me is that this 3rd order lifeform exhibits evolutionary footprints itself. It conforms to the broad definition of life, and even follows rules out of the same playbook we do. A virus of the mind. There is a pointedness to that description... not many viruses are known to benefit their hosts.

A Roman Catholic born and raised, I believed in what I was taught from the beginning. I didn't always have the presence of mind, however, to be aware that I never felt the presence of God. Eventually, I grew more self-aware, and noticed at least in the background, that I never felt this thing I believed in. But time passes, and experience hones the ability to process data like these. Inevitably my Catholicism fell by the wayside. If you asked me about religion, I'd likely reply, "I'm not into organized religion, but I'm one of the most spiritual people you'll ever meet." And yet, I wasn't done with organized religion. I was compelled to study it. Not just Christianity, either. I had developed a ravenous appetite for theological materials. I would study it and get into deep conversations about it. Something in me wouldn't let me leave religion alone.

For a long time, I studied it. For a long time, I exhausted myself trying to define my place along the spectrum of faith. For a long time I firmly planted myself within the boundary of agnosticism, but something still wasn't right. Agnostic. It really worked well publicly, but it didn't describe me. There was something truer than that, but it was a scary word indeed. It was another A-word. Luckily, a matter of semantics reconcile an inadequacy of a definition...

The religious and the agnostics draw a circle, within which is the natural and explainable, outside of which lies the supernatural. The religious populate this external region with God. The agnostics don't populate it with anything, but they make sure the space is reserved in case anything does occupy it. The problem with this is that they've fixed the proportions. I draw my circle, and if something comes into my experience that falls outside that circle, I have the liberty of drawing a larger circle to accommodate it. The religious drew their circle and it has a fixed area. More accurately, someone drew the circle for them, in a time when there was not much known about the universe. The circle was very small indeed. They managed to cram most of our modern knowledge into that fixed space, which only makes it easier for them to imagine the 'rest of it/the undiscovered' in the supernatural space outside the circle. The circle to them is a point-of-no-further-investigation. But I can just keep drawing my circle bigger and bigger. There is no limit to the canvas of a scientific mind.

Something new became apparent to me here. Not only am I not religious, I am not agnostic. The larger and larger my circle gets, the more magnificent the entire universe becomes to me. The larger circle has no stigma attached, no dogma applied, no means to induce fear or doubt. The larger circle is that of an atheist. My current assessment then, is that the term 'atheism' accounts for this sense of wonderment quite adequately.

More concisely: if something is proven/explained that was previously regarded in terms of the supernatural, then by the fact of its discovery it is obviously a part of this universe, and is therefore part of nature. This is consistent through all of recorded history. Thus, something as of yet unexplained is likely to be a part of nature that we haven't yet mastered... but a part of nature nonetheless.

I'd take this perspective so far as to say if the anthropomorphic God of ethical monotheism walked out of a cloud and announced his existence irrefutably to the world, then the only logical conclusion I could make is that there is this 'god aspect' of nature heretofore undiscovered, with its own fundamental properties. There'd be a whole new category of physics to learn about: God physics. How he reads minds and can be everywhere at once and how he exists on his (or apart from all) timescales. Those would be exciting times for scientists!

Going back to my 'circle' analogy, it seems rather arbitrary and unnecessary to draw the circle once we realize that there are things yet to be discovered in the natural universe. Why then do we feel that we need to draw a line that separates the unknown of the natural universe and the 'supernatural'? What value is a border if the things on either side of it are identical? That's all we're doing: going into the already unknown (which is obviously the worst place to start concocting firm assertations) and draw a line, saying, "...and past this line is the more unknown." If it's even more unknown than the unknown, how can we possibly know enough about it to conclude that it is definitely unknowable? In truth, the only responsible position is to avail oneself to the idea that time is a powerful tool and say, "it is not yet understood." No deadlines, no goals. Just the humility to admit that we cannot understand it, but someday, somebody better might come along.

It's a paradox, or perhaps is ironic, to consider that the hardiest argument for god is the "incalculable complexity" of the world we live in. They look at what science has presented and call it too cumbersome to be taken seriously. They say that it's foolish to try to explain it with intricate theories. They say the simplest answer is usually the correct answer. In that statement, I agree with them completely. To shake a leaf out of their own tree for a moment: You know what's the most complex thing in the universe? God. Their 'simple answer', by their own definition, is in fact something so complex as to be considered unknowable.

Whereas evolution is about simple beginnings that lead to more developed ends, looking back from the religious perspective means you end up looking at something more complicated than what you're struggling to justify here and now. What makes more logical sense: tracing back from today's complexity to ever simpler iterations the further back you go, or tracing back to something that gets more complicated the further back you look, all the way to the conceptual limits of an infinitely complex god who's been around an infinitely long time? And let's say that the latter strikes you, for some reason, as the more logical of the two. Then I shall ask a better question. Which of those two scenarios does a better job of addressing the actual question: how do I explain the complexity around us now? If your answer is "it was more complex in the past", then you've shot yourself in the foot with a rather large bullet. Because if it was worth it to you to ask about the universe's complexity, wouldn't it be more worth it to ask about God's greater complexity? That's only a rhetorical question because the religious would never dare to ask that. In the meantime, Remember that simple beginnings are easy to explain. Unfathomable complexity, on the other hand, should have no part in any sentence with the word 'answer' in it. The complexity of the world around us was slightly simpler yesterday. It was simpler still the day before. And you know what? There are enough yesterdays to follow that progression back to the very beginning. And a trillion or so to spare.

But the faithful want to save me. They say, "All you have to do is obey God's rules and you will be rewarded with entrance into heaven." So, you want me to take part in an experiment that will occupy me for the REST OF MY LIFE, and it turns out that I'm right, I won't know until I'm dead, which is another way of saying I'll never get to know. Those are awfully high stakes to play with. Awfully high stakes for a pretty peculiar reward: my sincere difficulty with this is that their intentions are based upon the notion that there is the magnificent gift of heaven ahead of us all. But that argument would only seem to hold water if there wasn't this massively rewarding life I'm living right here and now. Even to tally up all the joy I've experienced in my relatively short 26 years of life is a tremendous amount of evidence for this life being rewarding enough - that they fail to notice this is what astounds me. Their tunnel vision is incomparable; it's something akin to using a microscope to view the room you're sitting in.

This also brings about stunning implications: I spoke of the apparent invalidity of the heavenly-reward concept as evidenced by how rewarding life on earth was. That sentence may have sounded to you as subjective and terribly shortsighted. I could have worded my statement more precisely, instead saying that there were examples of how rewarding life on earth could be. I admit that I have had a fortunate life, and I therefore represent a painfully small fraction of the human population. There are hundreds of millions (and I sadly suspect more than a billion) of people alive today who will not be alive for long. Their short lives will have consisted of only hardship, suffering, and despair. While I was, in a way, 'for' the end of religion as we know it, I had previously decided that I would not be militantly so. I understood that there are people out there (like those I described above), a great many, in fact, for whom religious belief is a wholly positive influence on their lives; a refuge from a life of physical and emotional starvation. But it's simply not good enough to let them have their faith at the cost of letting them die tragic deaths for lack of intervention. As such I now realize that I am militantly 'for' the end of organized religion. I say so without remorse because I acknowledge a very real problem that invalidates the "But what about all the good things the Church does for people?" argument. No church spends all their money for good works. They may spend a large portion, but there is ALWAYS a portion that is spent on sustaining itself and on gaining new members. That money spent harvesting believers represents a significant opportunity cost. With equal funding, a nonreligious organization will always have the capacity to care for and to improve the lives of more people than the religious one whose true intent is to make people religious before making them well. If we reach the understanding that this life is indeed the only one we are privileged enough to experience, and we also see that not all of us (and in fact most of us) desperately need more help than even the most dedicated and capable can provide, then there is only one conclusion: it is in our hands; we must decide to make this Earth into our collective heaven or let it be hell for them. We have to stop wasting money on organizations that cannibalize our good will.

Consider that. The pyramids were, with the obvious exception of their geometry, pointless. How many hours, how much raw material, how many lives were consumed in the building of these religious monuments? They serve well as a poignant example of the resource-sapping by the religious that occurs even today, though to a thankfully less drastic extent.

For the record, I used the term 'militantly' tongue-in-cheek. I don't want to firebomb a church or support the violent overthrow of any religious organization. I could never advocate sacrificing them for the benefit of the rest of mankind, even if there would be a morbid symmetry to the whole thing. I suppose the more accurate term would be 'vigorously'. That's it.

I am vigorously advocating the end of organized religion as we know it.

So that leaves me with few options. The best one I can fathom is to be a part of the grassroots effort to show a public and unafraid face to the world. There are more atheists out there than have been counted, and the best thing for them to see is that it's getting easier to admit it. The only way to topple the tower is to weaken the foundation, and that means that we have to spread the word bottom-up. Don't think that I don't realize that I'm describing a Mission. It pains me that we have to play that same game with the same people. Spiritual ping pong. But it's the only tool we have and if we're serious about wanting to change the world for the better, it's a tool we must use.

Why am I so confident that theism is incorrect? Because I can satisfactorily explain why 95% of the world's population can be wrong about their belief.

Yahweh, for example, was a small and petty tribal god. In his ten commandments (of which there are more like 20-30, most of which are grotesque, unethical, or just plain obtuse), he identifies himself as 'the one true god', which is not to say that he is the only supernatural being in the universe. Rather, it serves to validate the idea that other gods did exist, but Yahweh's own people would get into some serious trouble if they were to take any time to worship them. He says, 'do not honor other gods than me'... now why would he say that unless there were other gods vying for their reverence? He should've said 'there are no other gods than me'.

...but I digress.

So what was the value in a tribe believing in their tribal god? Survival value. Small tribes get into wars with other small tribes. Survival then was a luxury, not a right as it is becoming in present times. You'd better believe there was a value to a tribal warrior about to go into battle, knowing that there was a power greater than his own who was going into battle with him. Who is the more effective warrior, the one who knows only of his own muscle and agility, or the one who has a divine protection? Which one is more aggressive? Which one, statistically speaking, is more likely to deal a crippling blow to an adversary? Which of the two, at the end of the day, is more likely not just to have survived, but to have survived as a member of the victorious tribe, the one to whom all the land is now bestowed? Those who found a resourcefulness in supernatural belief survived and populated the planet.

One thing I want to address: I've been reading some books lately by Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, and have been scouring countless atheist web pages... but nobody "taught" me atheism. It was a conclusion I came to along the way while growing up. But that is not to say that there was a defining moment in which a switch was flipped and I said, "okay, I'm atheist now." It's a description that I gradually came closer and closer to resembling as I matured and resolved my ideologies with greater and greater precision. The closest I could come to pointing out the defining moment was the reconciled definition I spoke of earlier in this essay. Not a single thing about who I was or what I believed changed in the slightest. Only the language I used to describe it was eschewed in lieu of something more accurate, and if I may go so far as to say, more 'confident'.

People claim to use the god concept to answer fundamental questions. But there is a difference between answers and excuses. Especially considering that it's always only one excuse. "This thing we don't understand? Well, it's because of God." Pardon me for preferring answers. I don't need to know everything right now. Is that the only reason we need a be-all-end-all answer? Because we're not comfy unless we can account for everything? Is that why people need God so much? To be a shortcut to the comfort of having everything accounted for? I promise that I will get to know much, much more, by pacing myself... by accepting that I don't need to have an answer for everything right now... the answers will come as soon as we become 'enough' to be capable of understanding them. Meanwhile, I'm not sweating. I'm just busy learning more. And I could not be more fulfilled.

This essay is my public affirmation of rationality. I am atheist. Society isn't content to let that go by so quietly the way they would if I were to say "I am left-handed". They want it to be my title, like it defines me as opposed to defining one of my attributes. They label me an atheist.

Fine. If you give me a badge, then I'm going to wear it. I am an atheist. I'm joining the ranks of those who will speak out in defense of those who are misunderstood and persecuted for their lack of religious beliefs. I am just about finished with the word 'supernatural'.

For me, from now on, the word supernatural will only have one purpose. It will define an empty-set. It is a reminder to me that, according to my rules, nothing shall ever occupy that space. It's a rather dualistic thing in itself, really. It is the hard-line boundary I have set to the universe, and it is by being so, the thing that enables the borders of the 'natural' to expand indefinitely so long as we find new things to put there. It reminds me that there is not a single shred of evidence uncovered in the collective history of mankind that would suggest that we cannot eventually understand a mysterious thing we've encountered. There is no reason to think any less of ourselves.

---------------------------------------------
Thanks for bearing with me on that; I know that was a long read.

And, thus begins the new incarnation of Prose Justice. While there will still appear the occasional 'personal journal' entry, the primary purpose of this blog will be to share my thoughts on the atheists' uphill battle to carve out a safe space to exist in the United States and on the internet. My dream is to help make that place a place from which we may concert our efforts toward making the world a safer and better place for all humankind. There is a lot more to come.

**
This essay was, believe it or not, much longer at one point. A byproduct of the fact that I spent eight months writing it was that the piece jumped around from topic to topic. Before publishing it, I pruned it down until it focused mainly on my deconversion and my justification of atheism. The rest of the chunks have been kept as individually-packaged snippets, and will be published here at a rate of one every couple days or so. At present there are about thirty of these posts waiting in the wings. I am continuing to write new ones on a pretty regular basis as well. So, this blog will become much more active than it has ever been.
**
I will also point out, tongue in cheek, that I made good on my promise to stop using a one-word post-titling scheme in order to make it easier for readers to find articles of interest to them. I am now using (for all atheism-related posts) a two-word titling scheme, the first word always being 'BLASPHEMY'.

I crack myself up.

EVOLUTION

2007-07-31T08:57:00.000-07:00

It had to happen eventually.

I've been blogging to myself ever since I brought this page out of hibernation; my readership has dwindled to, well... me, and I have had trouble finding things I could write passionately about.

That is, with one exception. I've mentioned a couple times now that I've been working on an essay that was very important to me. I couldn't blog, but I could add to the essay. The overwhelming majority of my creative energies have been directed into it. It's been eight months now that I've been revising and editing the piece. The time has just about arrived for me to reveal it. With the posting of this document, there are bound to be changes to the blog itself. That's what this post is announcing.

I'm going to start with my essay, then continue expounding on the ideas essential to its theme. I'm expecting to observe a general drift toward relevance in the blogosphere as I make my presence more accessible.

It had to happen eventually: I finally figured out what this blog, what blogging, is for.

I'll add that this is a very precisely named post. It's not only a description of the changes happening at Prose Justice, but it also alludes to a good chunk of the content that's coming in the days ahead. Incidentally, due to the changes occurring, it will be the last post (for a long time, at least) to follow my 'single million-dollar-word' naming scheme.

There will be interesting times ahead, my friends.

ETYMOLOGY

2007-07-19T14:05:00.001-07:00

We're on a roll here. New word for the day:

Rejectile.

re·jec·tile [ri-jek-til, -tahyl] –noun- Human subject, usually male, who upon attempting to court a member of the opposite sex, is turned away so forcefully that he is seen to fly backward from the encounter.

Usage: "Dude, she turned him into a freaking rejectile."

I haven't had my coffee yet.

DENOTATION

2007-06-20T17:52:00.000-07:00

Today is Wednesday, June 20th, 2007.

It is on this day that I coined the term bossolalia.

This entry is nothing more than my own poor-man's-copyright. As verified by the collective wisdoms of google, urbandictionary, and wikipedia, this word did not yet exist before I typed it here.

bos·so·la·li·a [bos-uh-ley-lee-uh, baw-suh-] –noun- incomprehensible speech in an imaginary language, sometimes occurring in a trance state, especially spoken by an employer, manager, or other supervisor in an attempt to convey ideas outside his area of expertise.

Thank you. Use it frequently and indiscriminately!

NOTE: This is only funny or meaningful if you know the definition of glossolalia. Look it up.

ANTECEDENT

2007-04-18T09:36:00.000-07:00

Wow, never has my behavior on this blog been so counter to typical. Usually I promise to keep writing regularly, then fall off the horse*. This time, I excuse myself from writing, and end up posting prolifically. I should learn my lesson and stop trying to predict my future contributory habits.

So, what was I going to talk about?

Oh yeah. PhysOrg. This is a great website that harvests online news items of a generally scientific nature and herds them into categories like space/earth science, technology, health/medicine, doomsday devices, and physics**.

Anyway, there was one article that was pretty interesting in and of itself: In a nutshell, it strives to explain how ancient humans, despite lacking massive muscles and fangs/claws, began to add meat to their diets long before the advent of hunting weapons. Essentially, it states that while humans aren't commonly thought of as athletic in the animal world, as compared to powerful gorillas or fast cheetas, for example, we are the best endurance runners on the planet. No other animal willfully runs extended distances like we do for sport or for exercise. While other animals can run much faster, they can only do so over short distances. Humans, however, have developed springy tendons to store rebound energy and also the ability to dump the massive amounts of heat generated during running by being relatively hairless, sweating profusely, and breathing through the mouth. We could run animals to the point of exhaustion/hyperthermia, and dispatch them easily after they collapsed.

Like I said, this was interesting in and of itself, but it's not why I wanted to share it today. This article also contained one of the most unabashedly boneheaded 'smart quotes' I've ever read:

"Humans are terrible athletes in terms of power and speed, but we’re phenomenal at slow and steady. We’re the tortoises of the animal kingdom," Lieberman said.

Ahem....

THEN WHAT THE FUCK ARE THE TORTOISES?

Maybe they're the leprechauns of the plant kingdom. That'd make a comparable amount of sense.

Few things are more entertaining to me than the intelligent person who gets distracted by elevated concepts to the point that he flies right over the basic ones (like context and literality; common sense fits in there too). Of course, I am as guilty as anyone, and I'm probably not that intelligent***.

(For the full text of the article: http://www.physorg.com/news95954919.html )

* - So this scriptwriting hiatus isn't exactly falling off the horse... but it's putting crisco on the saddle.
** - Chalk it up to faulty memory.
*** - but I sure keep myself entertained.

EFFABLE

2007-04-12T10:55:00.000-07:00

I know, I said I wasn't going to do this while I'm in the middle of scriptwriting, but I had to get this out on electron-excited phosphors*.

Time again for Semantical Paradoxy with Riker:

"Ineffable."

There's a word we needed, right up until it existed.

Yes, it is completely logical and expected over the course of the development of a language to come up with a word that means 'incapable of being expressed in words'. It's just that once that word exists, nothing is ineffable. All you have to do is call it ineffable and you're done. It's weird, because the word is simultaneously necessary and meaningless. If you don't have a word for indescribable things, then they remain indescribable. Once you have a word for them, they no longer exist within the category of indescribable, so what good is the word?

It's a word that has validity purely by needing to be defined in the first place, yet at the same time its validity renders it logically false. It is both valid, and invalid by the sake of its validity. WHAT????

As an afterthought, This is why I believe the English language is the best suited to writing poetry. Opera can keep Italian for its phonetically pleasing aspects and Asian languages can keep their discrete-symbol-for-every-little-thing precision, but the fact of the matter is that English just has so many words, and I'm pretty sure it's the only language that has more exceptions to its rules than it has rules. This leaves a tremendous amount of leeway to be clever with the palette of words available.

Let's say something is ineffable due to its rarity or its beauty. The best way to describe such a thing is to use a novel and insightful combination of words and language techniques which, when taken as a whole, are as beautiful and/or as rare themselves as the thing being described. It is obviously easier to achieve this when you have an unending supply of obscure, interesting, and confounding elements**.

* - or LCDs. My monitor at work happens to be a CRT. Plus 'electron-excited phosphors' sounds WAY cooler.
** - Admit it, that's English in a nutshell.

ABEYANCE

2007-04-09T09:44:00.000-07:00

Hello hello!

I've made mention a couple times now of this essay I'm writing. I'm very proud of it. But it's not coming yet.

You see, I've been tapped by a good buddy and aspiring filmmaker to write a screenplay for a short film about espionage.

Seriously, who doesn't like spy movies? AND I GET TO MAKE ONE?? Sign me up twice! What this means is, however, that all my creative energies have to go into this script. So no more work on the essay for a while.

Rest assured, I'll certainly be posting the script once it's finished.

So, yeah... I felt the need to announce the justification for not writing here for a little bit... which is weird, since in the past I've had no compunction with just leaving for months at a time without the slightest hint or excuse. Oh well, new leaf.

DUTY

2007-03-24T10:40:00.000-07:00

I believe in our system.

By 'our' I'm referring to the citizens of the United States. By 'system' I mean our government as a whole. By 'believe in', I mean that there was once a pure and honest intention central to that government, which was the source of our greatest ideals as a nation; I believe that if we dig (or poke, if need be) deeply enough, we will discover that it is still there, and with concerted effort we can motivate it to bring about a positive change for the future. It happened with emancipation. It happened with womens' suffrage.

It needs to happen to the I.R.S.

My responsibility as a citizen is to make my voice heard if I have a strong and politically relevant opinion on a matter. It's not a huge responsibility, but it's one I've been given and I intend to use it. Every time I need to.

What follows is a letter I wrote to my Senators and my state Representative - an indulgent expansion of a form letter sourced from the 'Americans for Fair Taxation' organization, of which I am a fervent supporter:

Dear [Rep. Sanchez / Sen. Boxer / Sen. Feinstein],

Every April, American taxpayers dread the federal income tax filing
process; the endless forms and paperwork, the cumbersome rules and
byzantine changes. It's time to say, "Enough already!"

As a voting constituent of yours, I support a viable and smart
alternative, the FairTax, and would suggest you consider this proposal
as well. The FairTax is better for everyone: Citizens, businesses, and
most of all our economy, which would be unshackled from the endless
volumes of regulations and rules that comprise our federal tax code
today.

In the time I have had to study the FairTax debate from both sides, I
have seen overwhelming evidence that it is a far superior taxation
scheme than the runaway train our current system has become. I have
determined that this is a far more advantageous plan not just for
selfish or personal reasons, but for the greater good of the nation we
live in.

A truly progressive tax like the one FairTax implements would improve
not only the financial standing of a great majority that are currently
unable to climb out of the hole of debt and financial dependence, but
would also improve the government's efficiency in keeping track of its
due revenue. I will point out, in case you are not aware, that the
FairTax in no way attempts to reduce the amount of money the
government receives; instead it is designed to redistribute the tax
burden in a manner that is logically fair, and mutually beneficial to
all taxpayers.

If you have heard of the FairTax but are skeptical of the claims I'm
making in this statement, I strongly encourage you to obtain a copy of
'The FairTax Book' by Neal Boortz and John Linder. Read it cover to
cover. I wouldn't doubt there's a copy floating around nearby
already... but if there is not, it is an inexpensive book, is a quick
read, and is widely available.

In all honesty, the only opposition to this plan will come from (1)
the great many people who have been misled to believe that the FairTax
is something entirely different and (2) those in government who source
their power and influence from the endless intricacies and loopholes
in the current tax code.

Our current taxation system is one that has grown into a
self-sustaining, cannibalistic entity that is depriving all of us from
a simpler and more prosperous life. It is time to recognize this and
bravely look inward and realize there is much, much room for
improvement.

There is a greater good in the FairTax; and I am one of a consistently
growing body who realizes it. We won't be able to be ignored for
long.

I strongly urge those in whose hands the decision rests to take a
critical look at the elements of HR 25. Any person looking
objectively *will* discover the significant merits of the FairTax
plan.

It will take maturity and courage to voluntarily subject the machine
of government, of which he is a part, to the scrutiny provided by this
bill. If passed, this will be a show of good faith on the part of the
governing body that will do much to restore the faith of the voting
population

A paradigm shift is ahead of you. There will be those who wish to
cling to the familiar despite the obvious damage that course of action
has taken. But there will also be those who have the spirit to
carefully but confidently move forward into territories ripe with
opportunity. I sincerely hope you will count yourself among the
latter.

As April 17th draws near, I urge you to consider a tax change for the
better of all Americans: The FairTax. This tax reform plan is embodied
in H.R. 25 and already has 57 co-sponsors. The taxpaying public -
individuals, farmers, schoolteachers, seniors, small business owners,
and others - will thank you for it.

Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

Mr. Kevin Savino-Riker

...

If you read this and are at all curious about the FairTax, please visit Americans for Fair Taxation, and consider purchasing The FairTax Book.

To take part in the "100,000 Faxes" campaign and send a letter to your representatives like I did mine, Get Started! No fax machine required!

Let's see if grassroots movements 'still got it.'

BLASPHEMY - MODICUM

2007-03-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

Ahem...

In reference to post-previous, I'm working on an essay that is quickly growing into an exposition of my personal belief structure... an affirmation, more accurately. So, I've been in a philosophical mindset lately. The essay is far from complete, but I still have an urge to put something out there. I remembered writing an e-mail to myself (as I often do when I don't want to forget something; let Google sort 'em out) on a topic that is loosely related to the single thing that's been occupying my creative time over the last few months... not counting the band, of course*.

Anyway, I figured I'd post it here, as sort of a small sample of what I'm preparing. Like I said, it's not the same topic, but it's somewhat related; it's to whet the appetites of anyone curious to see what I'm concocting behind the scenes. Enjoy!

An Email To Myself

When the religious organizations lobby for teaching of intelligent design in schools, they often accompany this with a statement encouraging students to be cautionary in their thoughts toward evolution. They remind us that evolution is 'just a theory', and science should be approached with an open mind, leaving room for alternate theories**.

They're masking their weighted statements under the guise of skepticism, so as to appear more scientific. The truth is, however, that they are requesting a one-sided skepticism. To be truly scientific, they should request equal skepticism for both arguments. But they do not. They request skepticism on evolution's part, and implicitly request faith in intelligent design's merit to stand against evolution. It's asking for a fight, and asking evolution to tie one hand behind its back first.

This statement of theirs plays another trick as well: they request that the student approach evolution skeptically, as if to imply to the student that evolution has not yet been subject to such scrutiny. Their use of words would suggest to the reader that evolution hasn't been standing up to scrutiny and skepticism for over a hundred years. They are singlehandedly taking out of mind the fact that evolution was met with the fiercest of opposition in the scientific community upon its unveiling, and has withstood the tests of time and scrutiny by virtue of the mountain of evidence gathered in its support. Evolution has been subject to testing and skepticism for long enough, and has emerged in well enough condition, that for now, we are confident in the solidity of its foundations. It is by this series of trials over such a long period that it has earned the status of scientific theory, a weighty title indeed. Intelligent Design has passed none of these tests. It is treated so casually by the scientific community because it fails immediately under the most gentle questioning, and is therefore dismissed with relative ease.

* - Shelby Three and the Harmony are playing from 4pm to 8pm tomorrow, St. Patrick's Day at the Irish Mist. BE THERE!

** - equivocation at it's most blatant. They are banking on the fact that the general public may not be aware that there is a difference between the common-usage definition of the word 'theory' and the scientific definition. They want you to believe then, that when scientists refer to evolution as a theory, they do so because they are not yet sure of its validity. They want you to think 'theory' means 'unsubstantiated guess'. 'Hypothesis'. This is the colloquial definition of theory: "I lose my keys every Sunday; my theory is that I'm doing something different on Sunday that causes me to lose my keys."

In truth, the word 'theory' in the scientific community is a very powerful one, and the fact that evolution is considered a theory is a *very* strong argument in its support. A scientific theory is one step removed from scientific law: fundamental forces, gravity, magnetism, etc., are examples of ideas that have more support than evolution. They are universally observed, and for all intents and purposes, there is no deviation between observation whenever or wherever that observation takes place. Evolution is a theory because there is a massive amount of evidence gathered for it, to the extent that the scientific community regards it as fact that evolution has occurred; it is not a law, however, because there is still an incomplete understanding of the mechanisms behind the fact of evolution. In science, this room is left because of the revisionist and skeptical nature of science as a practice. We know that we do not know everything about evolution yet, therefore it is not a law. It is 'only a theory'. But not knowing 'everything about a subject' is far from enough to claim that one knows nothing about it. Not knowing everything does not exclude knowing a great deal. Evolution is on the same level of verification and refinement as is Einstein's theory of general relativity. If the proponents of ID want to be skeptical about evolution because it is just a 'theory', they should be raising as much opposition to relativity as well. But the religious community has no quarrel with relativity, because they do not believe support of relativity is equal to a renunciation of God.

AVERMENT

2007-03-15T22:17:00.000-07:00

Shamefully, I show my face again, after a three-month hiatus from posting.

But I promise that I have been writing a lot in the meantime. I just haven't posted any of it.

The explanation is simple: I've spent the last few months rounding out some writings which began as typical blog fodder (random thoughts collected into some pseudo-coherent musing), but quickly evolved beyond into a full-fledged thesis. The punchline is that I've taken what started as a little blurb and expounded upon it until it's become something between an essay and, due to its nature, a manifesto of sorts.

Those of you who know me know that I have an underground passion for philosophizing. I'll just say that the essay I'm working on is a real doozie, and I'll be laying it out for all to read as soon as I get some time to finish arranging all the little paragraphs in an easier-to-follow order.

Meanwhile, I hope I can muster the gumption to multi-task enough to keep filling archive pages even while I polish off my masterpiece.

~Riker

P.S. I just found out that I love flautas.

REVIVISCENCE

2007-01-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

Hey kids! I seem to have skipped the month of December completely, as did I fail to recognize the significant event of January 1st, 2007, in which we all made it another year away from Jesus.

Mea culpa.

I've been tending to my own affairs over this period (read: indulged heavily in celebratory tasks that accompany the season); highlights include:

Getting an HD DVD player.
Making it back to Rochester and Elmira (both New York) to see friends and family.
Getting laid by a hot flight attendant*, who happens to be my girlfriend.
Revisiting the Green Field Churrascaria (imagine dying of meat-poisoning, but in a happy way).
Taking my first California winery tour.
Miles sold a boat and bought a four-wheeler (which we're taking to the dunes, along with some dirt bikes, in about 8 hours).
Did I mention I HAVE A GIRLFRIEND?

Yeah, all's great right now. And on top of that, ING Direct bank finally offers checking accounts! Like normal checking, but all ING'd up! It's called 'Electric Orange' and you need it. Stop reading. GO.

Still here, huh? Perhaps you'll be as amused as I was that wikipedia has a very detailed and (the part that really surprises me) straight-faced article about Rock Paper Scissors. For reals. Don't believe me? Click here for your punishment.

Oh, we had a Christmas party over at Jay Brian and Tony's place in Huntington Harbor. It was a very nice dinner party held on the night of the Christmas boat parade. And it was Dr. Seuss-themed. I personally spent 30 hours of my evenings the week before the party fabricating a cardboard overlay that turned their TV into a Seussian cottage. Don't believe me? Click here for your punishment. Among the rest of the venue's extensive decorations was a 14-foot-tall Grinch Mountain that dispensed a delicious microbrew. Don't believe me? You know what to do.

There'll surely be more to talk about after this weekend, so I'll be back on pace for regular blogging, so long as the boss doesn't catch me doing all this typing when work is so busy this time of year.

* - no, not while flying... but one can dream.

SOLEMNIZATION

2006-11-20T10:22:00.000-08:00

I've been brushing up against the century mark a lot lately...

My post count at a favorite automobile enthusiast bulletin board just rolled into the triple digits a couple days ago, and I've been doing a lot aggressive driving in said favorite automobile at over 100mph*.

And now, I'm penning my 100th post to Prose Justice. While I'd typically devote this entry to that alone, I'd rather get into detail on a new fixation.

Ever hear of Woot!?

Interesting online marketplace. Run by cool people with funny personalities. There is a bulletin board on the woot website, and each week they hold a photoshop contest, somewhat related to a product they sell, with an arbitrary goal.

This particular week was a double-pronged challenge. We, the contestants, had to select a product they offered, create an anagram of that product, and use the anagram as the title of a novel. Then we were told to design a cover for the novel and incorporate the product somehow. It's a bit much to bite off, especially being my first attempt at this (the contest has already been judged and I didn't win jack squat, but that's beside the point).

Regardless, here was the product I selected:

The Jepson Winery Mendocino Mix.

I took 'jepson winery mendocino' and found that it anagrammed to 'speedy minnow conjoiner'.

What in the world to do with this? Obviously I needed to turn to the most famous minnow in history, the S.S. Minnow of Gilligan's Island fame. From there, I found a suitable picture of a man, who, in my opinon, could potentially have fixed the Minnow and rescued those poor castaways, if only he had some inspiration to guide him**:

I gave it a little more thought, discovered some other anagrams for bonus points ('Jepson Winery Mendocino Mix' = 'Epoxy Rejoins Minced Minnow'; useful indeed... and 'Kevin James Savino-Riker' = 'An Invasive, Irksome Jerk'***), and came up with the following:

Click for a slightly larger version.

So, I said this was going to be a repository of sorts for creative media... I guess I'm living the dream. Hopefully there will be more to come. Hopefully all other anagrams of my name are less unflattering. Here's a start: 'Kevin Savino-Riker' = 'Ninja-Reviver Kiosk'. Even uses the hyphen. I'll have to draw a picture of that someday...

* - I know it's illegal, but I wouldn't do it if I wasn't doing it safely.
** - NOT Gilligan.
** - It breaks my heart, but I should've seen it coming.

ADUMBRATION

2006-11-17T10:24:00.000-08:00

As promised here and here, I'm delivering the goods:

This is our finished submission to the Insomniac Film Festival: "Give us a fighting chance..."

Unfortunately, I'm not just asking you to watch this film for your own entertainment... what I'd really appreciate is your vote.

If you already have an apple account, you can rate our video and help us move up the ranks. If you don't have one, it's free and quick to sign up, and having one will not affect you or your e-mail inbox in any way that you don't want it to.

While I personally appreciate honest feedback (which you can feel free to leave me directly in the comments section of this post), if you have anything less than stellar to say when rating the video, I strongly encourage you to lie. We're in the running for some great software and a handful of ipods, and most importantly I'd do it for you if you asked me to help you win a contest.

While I don't yet have access to our original garbage submission mentioned in one of the earlier posts linked above, I will have it soon, and will display it in all it's embarrassingly funny splendor.

Meanwhile, you've got some voting to do.

NOTE: Some people are reporting to me that their browsers aren't able to play the embedded quicktime clip on the voting page. In that case, you should just go ahead and give us an 'excellent' rating while you're there. If you still want to see the video, you can try your luck watching it off our local server. You still need quicktime. But hey, it's not like I'm asking you to download RealPlayer...

RATIOCINATIVE

2006-11-14T10:41:00.000-08:00

Testing Testing...

...

Yep. Works like a charm.

Like there was ever a doubt.

So Google, as you know, is expected to take over the world sometime between 2009 and late 2009. And despite their constant march toward global domination, which would fully exhaust the resources of just about any motivated corporate body, they still make time to interconnect all their little utilities and services, expanding their feature sets and generally improving the interface between the end user (that's you) and increasingly numerous elements of the internet.

Take this blog entry, for example. Google recently acquired and further developed a program called Writely, a web-based word processor with collaborative functionality and tons of other goodies, including a spreadsheet companion. They're aiming to make Microsoft Office obsolete. They're on their way to achieving it. Regardless, I'm bringing this up because I'm writing this blog entry in the new Google Docs & Spreadsheets interface. And I can publish it directly to the blog, right from within the document editor.

So, that raises the total number of unique means by which one can submit content to a blogger account to a healthy 37.

Go, Google, go. Wait.... lemme buy some stock first. Then go.

DISCOMFITURE

2006-11-13T14:57:00.000-08:00

Wow.

As mentioned in post-previous, I took part in a filmmaking contest this past weekend, and promised to blog again upon completion of the project.

It didn't go so well.

A quick recap - Apple Computer revealed a set of criteria that each participating five-member team must incorporate into a three-minute short film that was to be submitted within 24 hours of said criteria being revealed. The obvious goal (and just in case it wasn't obvious enough, they named it the 'Insomnia Film Festival') was to get teams to stay up all night producing the film.

It didn't go so well.

The problem is that we got too ambitious with the direction of the project. We had narrowed our path down to two potential concepts: one which was pretty basic with potential for humor (if done correctly), and one that was unique and novel, and had the potential for a hysterically funny climax, but was also complicated and would be very demanding to film. We chose to attempt the latter. I'm proud of this because the latter idea was of my own devising, but I am disappointed, because choosing to film it ultimately led to the team's demise.

The synopsis of the storyline is as follows:

A girl receives three different singing telegrams from three different people for three different reasons, all of whom arrive at her house at the same time.

The contest criteria we'd chosen to include were numerous... all you need to know is that one of them included a sidekick monkey.

To pull this off, we needed to film four sets of backstory footage for the characters, each in different settings. Plot elements critical to the story involved indoor and outdoor scenes in daylight and at night - which meant we had to plan our shooting schedule very carefully to work with the timeframe we were given. On top of all this, our film was going to be narrated and needed to feature a soundtrack. I'll remind you that it's illegal to include copyrighted material in our production; we had to compose and record the music ourselves. We needed to put together a wardrobe that included several garage mechanics, a tuxedo, and a gorilla suit.

Things kept stacking up.

The critical shot of the film is when the three singing telegrams arrive at the girls house, and, seeing the competition, engage in a full-on brawl in her front yard as each tries to be the first one to get to the door. By the time we finished shooting, we only had two hours left to edit the footage and to record the narrations/overdubs.

Where we really shot ourselves in the foot was forgetting that the raw footage had to upload into the editor in realtime, which meant we had to wait an hour before we could even start working on putting the film together.

Loren, the director/editor, started out methodically, selecting the best takes for each scene and started building the story as it was originally written... but as the deadline drew closer, we realized that we were not going to finish in time. Rather than finish the film as planned and be unable to submit it for judging, Loren instead chose to lose his goddamn mind and just started grabbing footage at random and throwing it in in awkward chunks. He threw in narration, again at random, and never over the appropriate scene. Almost half the scenes we shot were left completely out of the film. Still others appeared three or more times each.

What came out of the frenzy was three minutes of garbage. There was no story to follow, the narration appeared out of order and would only serve to further confuse the viewer, and we'd omitted the requisite title page entirely. But we got that fucker in on time.

At this point, our only hope is that some Hollywood hipster on the judging panel sees our work as an avant-garde visionary masterpiece and grants us the grand prize on the spot. It could happen...

Meanwhile, the five of us who got together for the project still want to see what we would have come up with. We know that if we'd managed to submit the film we wanted to, we'd have had gold on our hands. So, we're going to finish post-production, even though we cannot enter it into the contest. Once that is up, I will post a link here. And afterward, I'll post a link to the film we ended up submitting to Apple.

What's ironic, is that when we watched the garbage submission, we all thought it was funnier than the actual story we'd written - it came together in that haphazard way that was too absurd to be intentional, and therefore was hilarious. Of course, the problem is, it can only be that funny when you knew what it was supposed to be in the first place. Soon enough I'll have links to both versions up here, and I'll let you decide for yourselves.

Meanwhile, I'll be spending my time online, looking for contests with later deadlines.

ACCESSION

2006-11-10T14:18:00.000-08:00

Let the record show that I promised to post pictures of our recent Halloween party. Even though I want to talk about something else in this entry, I must yield those pictures for fear of losing my capacity for follow-through. I will not, however expend any more effort in hosting and presenting the pictures myself; others have already done so, and I'm more than ready to change topics. In light of that, I present:

Halloween pics, via Tony Lau

Halloween pics, via Darren Miles

Okay. Had enough? Me too*.

Some of you know that I was one of a group of six friends/roommates/co-workers who entered a Microsoft-sponsored contest last fall and won a massive-prize package consisting of pre-public-release Xbox 360's and VIP tickets to the Xbox 360 'Zero Hour' release party. We won with this video submission**.

Since that time, we've all had an itch to enter another video project (working on the last one was sooo fun), and the added allure of another prize package augmented our desires. Loren Prendergast, the filmmaker extraordinaire*** who discovered the xbox contest last year, has finally found another contest worthy of entering: The Insomnia Film Festival, by Apple Computer.

The rough idea is as follows: They announce the required submission elements, and the participant filmmaking teams have one day to submit a three-minute video conforming to the guidelines.

This means we have to pick our artistic direction (we are allowed to choose any three of the twelve or so required elements to incorporate into our entry), write a compatible script, cast and film the entire sequence, then complete all editing and post-production in less than 24 hours.

That may sound less-than-challenging, but only if you have no idea what goes into making a professional-quality video. To provide a frame of reference, the xbox video linked above is 30 seconds long. To make that film, we shot ten minutes of raw footage, which took fourteen hours alone. Creating a soundtrack took another day, and Loren spent at least a day in post-production, combining all the elements we created and editing the entire piece to run in the time allotted.

Now we have to create something six times as long, in one third of the time. Oh, and did I mention the clock is already ticking? They released the details at 2pm today. As I write this sentence it is 3:05. Five percent of our time has already elapsed.

......

It's now 3:17. The team has gathered, so we're gonna ditch on the rest of the work day and get cracking. Here's the list of criteria for the video.... we have selections to make. Wish us luck!

Required character name: Alex Kona
Required dialog line: "No, you don't understand what it's like growing up here."
Required costume: leather jacket and dark sunglasses
Required prop: ice
Required side kick: pet monkey
Required setting: abandoned building
Required shot: clock with 4:11 on face
Required makeup: fake eyelashes and blue eye shadow
Required genre: sci-fi/fantasy
Required camera effect: crane or boom shot
Required editing device: musical montage

Once we have our submission created, I'll post a link for your critiquing pleasure :)

* - Implicitly introduces new topic. I'm not in an explicit kind of mood.
** - which makes absolutely no sense to you unless you know the back story of the contest and its associated submission criteria. Rest assured that our video was an awesome representation of what they asked for.
*** - guy who owns the camera

SANGUINE

2006-10-30T12:01:00.000-08:00

Blogger's new beta is slowly emerging from its shroud of secrecy as of late, and this blog's author is succumbing to the allure of a new interface. Though it's self-admittedly incomplete and potentially buggy, I am confident enough in Blogger's (via Google's) expertise that any remaining problems will be eliminated promptly. So I went ahead and transitioned everything into the new format.

What does that mean to you? For starters, it means that Prose Justice is looking a little greyer, a little wider, and left-handed. Just like me; that is, the left handed part... and maybe the wider part, but not the greyer part. Oh, the updated archived post navigation methodology is worth the price of admission alone*.

I'm anticipating the influx of photo galleries from those who took pictures at the Halloween Haunting II at The Lodge this past Saturday. Once those are in my possession, I'll drop back and write about the party. Meanwhile, enjoy the following:

Drink to your health!

* - Yeah, the price of admission is free, but don't let that technicality take anything away from the compliment.

ARRAYAL

2006-10-07T21:10:00.000-07:00

Just hosting a couple images here. It's graphic design time again... there's an enthusiast forum for a particularly awesome car (with a very gay acronym for its model designation, but that's secondary), and I'm an active member. They're taking submissions for a new t-shirt design and I figured I'd throw a quickie together. Needed a place to host it. Now back to your regularly scheduled programming.

METANOIA

2006-10-03T11:15:00.000-07:00

When a band gains popularity, change is inevitable. The list of venues expands, the groupies get hotter, the tips fill bigger jars, the beer gets colder, and most importantly, the band gets new equipment.

Shelby Three and The Harmony*, however, is more efficient than your typical band. We skipped all those steps of getting popular and such, and went straight for the new gear.

Of course, we justified it. "We're going to be getting bigger, playing all these new gigs, making all this good money. Well, to do that we've got to be prepared." We got the stuff before we needed it, because we knew that someday... we would. Might as well take all this time to get familiar with it. And on Tuesday I'm getting fitted for my tux. You know, for Grammy night.

The biggest change is definitely the IEM setup. IEMs (or In-Ear-Monitors for short) take the place of those angled cabinet speakers** that sit on the ground facing the band members. When a band plays a gig, typically their loudspeakers are positioned in front of them, which is great for the sound in the listening area, but wretched for the sound on stage itself. Monitors allow you to "monitor" your own sound clearly while performing. I just don't know why they call them that.

Since our band skipped the 'get popular' process, we don't have roadies. Rather than spend the money on big heavy floor cabinet monitors that we don't have room for anyways, we decided to go with a personal monitor system. Easy fix, right? borrow your fashionable white iPod ear buds, get an extension cord, and plug in!

Unfortunately, that ain't the ticket. Stages are loud. iPod earbuds have to be cranked up dangerously loud just so you can hear their output over the rest of the noise around you. IEMs, on the other hand, have a dual functionality. They are designed for safety first, acting as protective earplugs that isolate the performer from loud and distracting sounds, thereby preventing hearing loss and embarrassing mistakes. They also have small accurately tuned speakers embedded within, but they don't have to be turned up nearly as loud because of all the sound isolation.

Just so we're on the same page here, the IEM industry uses the above paragraph the way you or I would use the words "stupidly expensive."

But really now, can I put a price on saving my hearing and improving my performance on stage? Well, yes, but that's beside the point.

The point, for those of you keeping tabs, is that wearing IEMs is a strange and wonderful experience. This is what my monitors look like:

They go deep inside your ear canal... so deep that they actually touch each other right behind your eyes; when you wear them, you lose auditory contact with the outside world. connect them to an audio source and the sound seems to be piped directly into your brain. It's amazing. But, as you might imagine, those silicone umbrellas are not the most comfortable thing to jam into any orifice. But, there is a solution, which is actually what prompted me to write today: custom-fit earmolds***. When custom sleeves are used, they look like this:

Now, in order for the manufacturer to know what shape to make these things, they need to know what shape your ear is. Which means you (well, I actually mean "I", don't I?) have to visit an audiologist and they have to take 'full-shell ear impressions'. What follows is my account of the process.

Joe Farnsworth (who is also getting this procedure done for his IEMs) and I sat down in the examination room. The audiologist placed what I can best describe as ear-tampons, these little sponges on a string, up against our eardrums, then she brought out a little caulk-gun of a device with two tubes of hot pink silicone gel. She attached a long nozzle and injected the cold, gummy sludge into our ears. Immediately the world got quiet and disgusting. She worked her way around the helix of my ear like a cake decorator might apply frosting to, well, an ear. While the procedure was completely painless, it was uncomfortably awkward. In order for the impressions to be taken correctly, I had to move my jaw the way I would when using the earmolds. Simply put, I had to sit in the chair and sing for five minutes without being able to hear myself. After the material set, she grabbed the tampon string and pulled, twisting the solidified material in order to ease its passage out of my body. I will never come closer to understanding what it's like to be an uncorked bottle of wine. It was... wierd.

The whole appointment was over in twenty minutes, and when Joe and I walked out that door to the car, we walked in silence, wearing on our faces the expression you'd wear if you and your friend just saw each other get head-raped. But while we felt confused and addled, we were also happy, because they didn't charge us for the impressions and in about three weeks we're going to have a really nice add-on to our gear that will simultaneously improve their performance and make them much more comfortable to wear for extended periods. Which is why we also stole a handful of ear-tampons.

* - Joe Farnsworth performing solo: 'Joe Unglued'.
Add Kevin Savino-Riker on guitar/vocals: still 'Joe Unglued'.
Add Brian Douglas on guitar: 'Veneer'
Add Shelby Prendergast on percussion, Chris Newbold on bass guitar, and swap Brian's guitar for a keyboard: 'Shelby Three and The Harmony'

** - Out-Ear-Monitors, I guess you could call them. If you really wanted to.

*** - Not like a spore colony growing due to lack of hygeine, but like a cast. Ask an artist.

ACQUIESCENT

2006-09-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

Ahem...

I've always been a late-adopter when it comes to joining social networks that have anything to do with the words cyber, virtual, online, or face.

Whether it was signing up for Instant Messenger, joining Hot-or-Not, or creating this blog, I went through the exact same process every time - feeling like in doing so I would lose my soul, downgrading 'soul' to 'dignity', downgrading 'dignity' to 'pocket change', then finally accepting that *probably* nothing bad will come from it.

Well, I've given in once again. I've accepted my social responsibility to everyone in the world that I've ever met, and joined up with Facebook. Emma Kiele Fry is to blame.

Until she invited me yesterday, I had a good thing going - I didn't want to be a part of Facebook when I was in college, and then after I left school it was out of my hands. I couldn't join if I wanted to, since I no longer had a valid RIT e-mail address. The blame rested squarely on Facebook's own digital shoulders for catering exclusively to students. But then in a surprise move, they opened the gates to the entire internet population. I was no longer safe, and I forgot to look for cover. Emma's e-mail looked innocent enough. And besides, I was tired of running from the inevitable.

So here I am. The reason I'm blogging about this is because I have chosen to link Prose Justice's RSS feed into the 'Notes' section of my facebook profile. As evidenced by a flurry of friend activity in my first 24 hours as a member, I'm expecting that a bunch of people are going to poke around a little bit and eventually find the blog. People might actually start reading this damn thing again. I'd better be ready.

Which means greetings are due again.

So, I've gone on long enough explaining this post. Now let me get to what I intended to do:

To all you out there who found this blog via my Facebook profile, Welcome to Prose Justice!

This blog is a hybrid personal journal/creative media repository that I started just over two years ago, left completely unattended for the last year, and very recently broke back into and began contributing to again. There are something on the order of 90 posts in the body of this collection, some of which are a worthwhile read, some of which are not.

I do not encourage you to read through my old posts unless you are a stalker. I believe there are a couple really good entries in there, but since I adopted a post-titling scheme of summing the entire entry up with one million-dollar word, it's almost useless to search through my archives for an entry that stands out as significant; they all sound like they'd be important, even if they're one sentence explaining that I don't have anything to say.

Having said that, I highly encourage you to read through all my old posts, as I often refer to topics from previous posts and use certain acronyms that won't make sense unless you see the posts in which they originated. I use asterisks* often to annotate my thoughts. I find them to be a fun way to draw a reader around a page. Annotations appear at the bottom of the entry in smaller italicized text.

Oh, and another thing for you 'bookers - It seems that imported blog entries do not transfer embedded pictures. If you find yourself reading a note of mine and it sounds like I'm referring to a photo of something, click the 'View original post' link at the bottom to be redirected to the original page at Prose Justice. The pictures will be there.

9/28/06 - EDIT: The above paragraph is apparently false... embedded pictures just started showing up in my facebook notes. But text formatting doesn't seem to translate at all. Until tomorrow, maybe.

Okay, I think that's a good crash course and set of guidelines for the budding Prose Justice reader. I'm not going to be so arrogant as to believe that I'm going to start seeing a ton of traffic here, but I'm the kind of guy who likes to plan for every contingency. With any luck, this post didn't just scare off any of the potential new readers who had the courage to make it this far.

'Till next time, POFN**

~Riker

*This is an example of me using asterisks to annotate my thoughts.
**Peace Out For Now

OFFICIOUSNESS

2006-09-01T09:11:00.000-07:00

Here's something that started bothering me this morning, for no apparent reason:

Dictionaries have entries for the word 'dictionary'. Now, this in and of itself does not bother me. It's obvious that the word does not need to be there*, as the person reading the dictionary clearly already understands its function; it would be a poor choice, however, to selectively omit entries based on recursive/redundant representation. That would just provoke some idiot to come along and prove that it did need to be there. And I don't want to endure the shame of being proven wrong by an idiot.

Here is where my problem lies - Assume that a person unfamiliar with the word 'dictionary' encounters it for the first time. How can he learn, without assistance, what it means? For all intents and purposes, a dictionary has no practical ability to define itself. The person in question needs an a priori understanding of a dictionary in order to know where to look it up. That right there, is a real-world paradox. No time travel and patricide required. Thank you very much.

Here's another quickie; it's not a bothersome one, I just want to know the answer:

If you were to fill the passenger compartment of a Boeing 747 with pennies, would it be enough money to buy said airplane? My gut (which is very well ~~fed~~ read) tells me that it would be enough to buy several. It also reminds me that if you had the means to perform such an experiment, you can probably afford all the airplanes you want... and would probably just pay by check.

*I realize the benefit of a dictionary entry extends beyond defining a word. For example, someone may not know the spelling of the word 'dictionary'. But in counterpoint, I'll remark that opening up a dictionary and searching for it in an alphabetical list is far less efficient than, for example, reading it off the fucking cover.

EXTOLMENT

2006-08-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

The ever-accelerating pace of everything.

While I usually use the term 'ever-accelerating' directly in reference to emerging computer technologies, and in some cases to spirited highway jaunts in the SHO, this time I'm applying it in a broader sense to the general access to technology by anyone living above the poverty line in the United States, and its effect on the entertainment industry.

National renown was once the playground of Hollywood's elite and radio's darlings. A-list celebrities*. Movie stars and rock stars. Then a host of heiresses, heirs, self-made billionaires, and other rich bastards joined the ranks. B-list celebrities**. Fame based upon purchasing power, fueled by tabloids looking for new targets after what I can only assume was a drought in royal-family melodrama. They made it into the domain of water-cooler talk and dinner conversation in households across America.

Simultaneously, a phenomenon caught on in television that spurred the growth of yet another breed of celebrity: the reality-show participant. They took the lowly game-show contestant and found a way to inflate his image beyond sub-culture recognition and into a whole new territory. The recipe: Take ten average people, throw them into an oddball competitive scenario, film it from thirty angles and find a past-his-prime Hollywoodster to provide voiceovers and perform general hosting duties (thus seeding the whole operation with a *little* popularity), then hyper-edit the whole thing and run it through a few spin cycles of the entertainment industry corporate dryer. Throw in a once-in-a-lifetime prize package at the end, and what do you have? A planned and engineered card-carrying celebrity superstar. Made of the same stuff you and I are made of. But they get all the in-the-clique perks plus free towing within a hundred miles.

Now, unless you've been living under a rock that doesn't have digital cable, none of this is news to you. Maybe the next topic isn't either, but its significance has only recently reached my awareness, and I am compelled to speak on it. There is a new paradigm shift in the works.

Internet celebrities.

Well-known services like Google Video and YouTube, and some lesser-known-but-I'm-compelled-to-mention-them-because-I'm-friends-with-the-guy-who-runs-them websites like Vimeo allow free subscribers to post video clips of anything they want, viewable by anyone with an internet. What's remarkable is how quickly this has taken off.

All it takes is a bit of luck, a bit of stage presence, the ability to discern the fickle tastes and desires of the internet population, and a webcam, and you can lip-synch to T.A.T.U. in your bedroom to an innumerable audience. Seriously, this phenomenon has spawned an entire demographic of E-List celebrities*** who are, as we speak, on the cusp of becoming household names.

They have the potential to be as big as the Kelly Clarksons and Richard Hatches of yester-season. But here is the critical difference: everyone before this point had the help of some powerful, largely funded enterprise pushing them into the limelight. But from here on out, Jane and Joe Schmo, with the help of the internet, can reach an audience of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, by themselves.

Some notable internet celebrities:

(1) The sheltered hottie, and YouTube's heroine (though almost certainly a fake... a corporate-sponsored ploy getting ready to spring some kind of viral marketing wave; honestly the best counter-argument to the argument I'm presenting in this post), Bree, better known as lonelygirl15.

(2) The elusive ninja known only as 'the ninja', from Ask a Ninja.

Well, really, that's all.

Still, it's a start.

Granted, the viewing audience at present consists primarily of preadolescent boys with no social skills... but consider this: that's who used to dominate all the internet dating sites in the late '90s, and today everyone's doing it, ugly, beautiful, shy, popular, young, old. Everyone is doing today what only the nerds were doing yesterday. The same thing's going to happen with the YouTube revolution. In five years, every single one of the collective you reading this blog will have your own free internet TV show, for lack of a better term. As will I have mine. The difference is, people will be watching yours. Such is the way of the ever-accelerating pace of the entertainment industry.

Now, if only I could manage the ever-accelerating pace of blogging in the meantime...

*You know... A, for 'actual'.
**You know... B, for 'billionaire'.
***You know... E, for 'internet'.

ENERVATION

2006-08-24T16:18:00.000-07:00

My eyes are burning.

Usually that happens on golf day, where I opt for contact lenses in lieu of glasses. Because it's sunny here in southern California, and sunglasses are hard to wear over glasses glasses.

But today, it's from an upwards of seven hours of staring at a CRT. There's almost no work that can be done at the shop today, so I'm stuck passing the time tete-a-tete with the internet. Google SketchUp is a wicked awesome thing, let me tell you. It's the way Google does CAD. Yeah, I didn't see that one coming either, but I'm still holding out for Google InsuranceFraud (beta).

Now the flash games are playing inside my head when I close my burning eyes.

It's been a good day.

DALLIANCE

2006-08-18T16:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, okay, I know.

Burst of activity followed by a month-and-a-half hiatus. Like every time I get back into working out. At least I'm still eating right.

This post be naught but a queueing up of ideas for future blog entries. I shall elaborate in the future:

BUMP KEYS

THE FAIRTAX

SHELBY THREE AND THE HARMONY

YOUTUBE

NEW BLOGGER INTERFACE/FORMAT

To the zero of you who know that I'm blogging again, Stay tuned...

SUBSTANTIATION

2006-06-30T22:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I spent a little time describing a few t-shirt ideas in a recent post of mine. As a picture is worth way more words than however many words I used to describe it, I made up an illustration for my favorite, Idea #2.

Wanna see it?

Well, too bad, here it is anyway:

Now come on, that's some funny shit.

I'll make up images for the others after I return from New York. Piece!

P.S. The above graphic is Copyright 2006 by Kevin Savino-Riker. Go ahead, give me a reason to sue you... commie bastard.

EXULTANT

2006-06-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

Wow, that didn't take long.

The homophone has done it again - I have now successfully merged my new Shaw Electric business cellphone number with my personal number, which makes my "The V" two distinct phones in one physical package.

So, the running tally of features is now:

Cellphone
All the standard cellphone auxiliary functions - Scheduler/Dayplanner, Calculator, Text Notepad, Audio Note Recorder, etc.
Digital Still Camera
Digital Movie Camera
MP3 Player
Portable Movie Player
Spanish/English Translator and Dictionary
Gaming Platform
GPS Navigation System
Another Cellphone

I tell you what burns me though. LG is about to release the VX9900, which will be a smaller and probably more capable version of this phone. It's like they knew they had something gay on their hands, and as soon as I bought one, they decided to correct the problem. Now watch Ray buy one this fall, just to spite me. He doesn't even have Verizon. Bastard. How could you?

DROLL II

2006-06-30T08:03:00.000-07:00

So, I have a pal from college who is (1) Hysterical Or Maybe Insane, (2) Creative, (3) Entrepreneurial. One of the companies he and his partners run is BustedTees, a website which apparently sells t-shirts that are broken. Luckily (or is it peculiarly), every BustedTees shirt I've bought or received as a gift has been fully-functional. I guess they have a slacker in charge of quality control.

Anyway, the t-shirts invariably feature humorous graphics and captions, typically 'retro' and understatedly ironic. All of them are hilarious. Even cooler than that is that they accept suggestions from the populace for new shirt ideas, and it is on this note that I'd like to comment today.

I've had a few ideas rolling around in my head for a while for what I believe would be funny t-shirt ideas, even if they aren't busted. Since Prose Justice is back in business, and since I long ago pledged to make this place an additional repository for my creative gushings, I figure I'll put the ideas out in the open, see what people think, and when I get the chance, make a few illustrations to show a rough draft of what I think the shirts could look like.

The following are presented chronologically from date of conception.

Idea #1

A silhouette of a person tilting his head back, raising a bottle of liquor to pour it into his mouth.
Caption is something to the effect of "Drinking - lifts your spirits". I was going for the pun here, since while drinking alcohol can indeed elevate ones mood, the action of raising a liquor bottle over your head is quite literally lifting spirits. Not too funny, I know. I'm willing to put all ideas up here, not just the ones I think will get good reactions.

Idea #2

Posterized image of Castro, wearing a pair of old-school DJ-style headphones.
Caption is "Hi Fidelity". I feel this is funny because if we assume the headphones are of sufficiently high fidelity, then their being worn by a man named Fidel is an example of what is potentially the highest fidelity observable in the natural universe.

Idea #3

Communist Russian propaganda-poster styling, perhaps showing a statue, or at least a strong figure, holding a fork. Caption, written in a very Soviet-esque font, "Cannibalism - For the People". Play on words, self-explanitory. Oh, fine. It's a common sentiment that Communism is For the People. Cannibalism, which sounds (phonetically, not ideologically) an awful lot like Communism, is also, in fact, for the people.

The fact that both ideas #2 and #3 were rooted in, um, alternative governmental models, is entirely coincidental. I am as capitalist as they come; it's just hard to recognize me without all the money.

So, in self-critique, I think #2 is the best candidate for BustedTees, as its particular brand of humor is analogous to what is typically featured on the website, and in my opinion is the funniest of the three. #1 needs a little work. Okay, a lot of work. #3 Would maybe be better destined for a site like T-ShirtHell, but would need to be made even more tasteless (<--Unintentional Pun #1)*. All in all, it's a good exercise to try and be creative outside the scope of what you are used to. If anyone's reading this, let me know how I've done!

*I'm going to start keeping track of the unintended puns that appear in my writing. That is to say, I have to recognize that it's a pun only after I've written it. Oh, in the case of this one, the pun isn't in the sentence, it's because it's in reference to the shirt about eating people, which is in rather bad taste. P.S. That was the same pun right there.

WHEREWITHAL

2006-06-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

Okay, two posts in one day... so it's a really slow day at work.

Actually, that's not at all true; I have a lot to do, in fact. I am, however, in a slump where I cannot continue my efforts until the battery recharges in my bomb-ass wire labeler. How better to pass the time than resume posting at the prolific pace I've set for myself since waking up this sleeping beast?

This post is a showcase for my cellphone, the LG VX9800. I'd take a picture of it, but my only accessible camera is on the phone itself. My reasoning behind this unabashed exhibition of material excess? Well, mainly it's a "screw you" to the people who make fun of the fact that the phone is quite a bit larger than they think it needs to be. I'm talking to Ray Ward, Darren Miles, and Joe Farnsworth here. Others may talk too, but I live with these three, so I get it on a regular basis primarily from them.

While my last few phones were sleek and streamlined, the "The V", as those cool cats from Verizon call it, is a little larger. See for yourself:

This thing is, according to my friends, so large as to exude a certain gayness, which lends it to being referred to as the Homophone.

Well, I'm going to come right out and say it: I'm rather proud of my homophone and I fully support its lifestyle. In a form of rebuttal to my gay-bashing hatemonger housemates, I will use Prose Justice to keep people updated on the growing capabilities of this remarkable piece of fruity hardware.

As of two days ago, my "The V" played the roles of:

Cellphone
All the standard cellphone auxiliary functions - Scheduler/Dayplanner, Calculator, Text Notepad, Audio Note Recorder, etc.
Digital Still Camera
Digital Movie Camera
MP3 Player
Portable Movie Player
Spanish/English Translator and Dictionary
Gaming Platform

As of yesterday, it gained the ability to become a:

GPS Navigation System

And not just any, mind you. This thing will let me ask it to find the ten nearest titty bars to my present location, and it will list their addresses and phone numbers, then give me graphical and voice-prompt turn-by-turn directions with estimated ETAs that recalculate as I approach. It recalculates routes on the fly if I miss a turn or have to avoid construction.

So, the key question is this: Considering the vastly flexible and, well, vast capabilities of this device, is my homophone's larger size justified? In my case, totally. I'd much rather have all that functionality in a queerly large package than have to decide which of seven or so separate devices I'd want to have on my person in any given situation.

I plan to keep a running tally going on the blog as I download new apps to the homophone. With each new ability I will further evidence the coolness that is my "the V". Note that in technological paradigms I equate usefulness to coolness.

Of course, Ray and co. will quickly point out that coolness and gayness are not mutually exclusive, thus adding 'cool' to my phone will not subtract any homosexual attributes from it.

They will also agree that writing this post is the gayest thing I've ever done.

IDIOSYNCRATIC

2006-06-29T07:01:00.000-07:00

Content Warning:

Okay, so I know I said I wasn't going to contribute anything worthwhile to the blog for some time now because I had all this rebuilding to do. I am not yet done with said rebuilding, yet here I am, ready to impart information. And dare I say it will be 'Content of Any DiscernAble Value to thE Reader' (first referred to in Post-Previous and with some creative capitalization and incorrect spelling, hereafter acronymized down to CADAVER). I'll just jump right in. Don't judge*.

JURY DUTY.

While oft-noted as a bane to we, the Busier Than Anyone Else of modern society, jury duty is a vital aspect of our legal system that has always fascinated me. I secretly longed for the day that I would receive my summons and be called upon to take active part in determining the legal fate of another.

Now, this romantic desire of mine was based upon what I now feel was an outdated and naive impression of what jury duty was, namely: being in a jury. How wrong I was.

You see, I finally got my summons and I have been entered into the system. The emerald curtain has been drawn and I have seen the mechanisms at work in this legal hodgepodge. That I have survived it yields a new desire to spread the truth to all you who don't know. If you don't want to know the truth, DO NOT read the following line, for it will tell you exactly what jury duty has become -

Answering Machine Practice.

"Jury duty" entails the folowing:

Receive a document in the mail with the words 'JURY SUMMONS' in large print and a phone number buried in a sea of small print.
Call the number on the instructed date (weeks after you receive the summons).
Listen to the "entire message" - this was explicitly commanded at the beginning of the message.
The "entire message" is a very long way of saying, "If you've called today, please call back tomorrow after 5pm."
I'll let you get away with thinking this will only happen once; I did.
Call back the next day after 5pm. Listen to the new message.
The "new message" is the same as the last message, with the distinct difference that it now tells you to call back the next day.
After my second callback I came to the insight that this was answering machine practice.
After my fifth callback I realized, "You don't even get to leave a message! It's just Listening to Answering Machine Practice!"

I'd go on, but such recursion has no place in this blog. I'm here to warn you, not beat you to death with it.

That there are people out there who think we need answering machine practice, and that they are the same people who filter the innocent from the guilty, almost hurts my brain to think about.

I've used phones longer than I've had mastery of (or even an introduction to) the english language. Who hasn't been on the phone with a proud mother who loves to put her naturally incoherent infant on the line to share the babbling? We've all heard it. We at that age were likely to have been forced to do it by our parents. Some of us have done it with our (read: their) own children (implies: to me, grr.). What's my point? Phones are as natural to gens X and Y as are toilets, and toilets are as natural as butts in this part of the world. We understand phones already. We understand their associated technologies as easily. Even the complicated ones like automated customer service. We hate that one, but we certainly understand it.

I don't know how long Orange County is going to need my valuable services, and I don't know how they intend to compensate me. I just hope the poor guy, guilty or otherwise, got through this quirky little system and got what he deserves. And in the end, I'm glad I could be of help.

*If you found a cadaver in your house... go ahead, tell me you wouldn't show it to anyone.

REQUISITE

2006-06-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

Well, I know I'm "blogging", as long as you care to define "blogging" as "making noticeable changes to the blog" and not as "adding content with any discernable value to the reader". I just don't feel like I'm "blogging" right now, because I need to use the second definition. Unfortunately, it will still be a little while before I can do anything of value. Right now I'm in Phase: Dusting Off Occluded Internals.

Buffing out the wear marks of dormancy takes a little more work than I thought it would have. Turns out lots of image links are invalid; I have to figure out the new urls for files on the server out here in Cali. I also have a few new blog features to which I need to get accustomed.

What it amounts to, is that this entry is actually one more piece of filler, necessary because I need to post a picture into the entry. This will determine the location of my new profile photo. I could just put it up temporarily and remove the pic after I find out where Blogger hosted it, but why bother? There's nothing wrong with a little redundant representation.

Regardless, here's the pic, the new poster-child face of Prose Justice. This picture really sums up how I feel right now.

Really, I promise I'm almost done returning the blog to seaworthiness. Just a little more tweaking and I'll be ready to jump in head first. Maybe typing-fingers first.

BEGUILING

2006-06-27T15:31:00.000-07:00

It seems that blogger now supports full sensory immersion, with the addition of pix blogging from mobile devices. This of course ignores the senses of smell, taste, touch, and psychokinesis. Nerd. Oh well, here's a snippet of what's keeping me occupied at work.

ORATORY 6

2006-06-27T10:47:00.000-07:00

Mediocrity Warning:
The following link plays an audio clip which is in no way entertaining. I just needed to make sure AudioBlogger was still a viable means of dumping cerebral payload upon request.

REVELATION

2006-06-26T11:26:00.000-07:00

Apparently I didn't give a shit.

In fact, I seem to have not given a shit WAY harder than I ever gave a shit during the active life of the blog. My last post was to celebrate Prose Justice's 1st birthday, one year and sixteen days ago. Over half my blog's life, spent in hibernation. Since I last posted, I've moved to southern California and gotten a new job, a new car, and a wicked tan.

Well, work has been slow enough lately to indicate an upcoming trend that might just allow me to instill some new zest into this dormant beast. What was once a budding berth of infant literary genius has become a comatose and malnurished toddler, which may now become a once-upon-a-time-budding-berth-of-infant-literary-genius-has-become-a-comatose-and-malnurished toddler-with-the-will-to-overcome-its-past.*

On an absolutely-unrelated note,

Here's to the good intentions of today: May they flourish and grow into the good of tommorow.

See you next year!**

*Because, I'll be writing posts again. Now that I think about it, that's an awfully long description. Sorry, little rusty.
**Not to say I won't see you before then. Just covering my bases.