Live from Neorome

Give me my bread and circus. But first give me my circus. Have you gotten early to a movie lately? Have you seen the ads that theaters sell during that time? There is an incredible ad by Spike Lee that is like two minutes long for Verizon. He has that signature shot with the dolly or however he does that. The product itself is incredible. It is for a phone that lets you play games and watch video. Just in case you are ever waiting somewhere five minutes and your no attention span brain cannot bear to look at its emptiness anymore, instead you can pay to be entertained. No more having to think your own thoughts and come up with your own opinions. Just watch and let your whole life slip away.

I don't blame the theaters for this. They are just trying to capitalize on any revenue stream they can find. I'd say you'd have to that in this economy, but you actually do it in any economy. It is the free market in action. No, movies aren't the enemy. Even if you just watch the stupid ones, if you are watching them in the theater it can't take up that much of your time. And if it does, you probably have some serious issues anyway. The enemy is TV.

I'm not saying there is no art on television. I know there is. I've seen some of it. Some of it even tells you to stop watching. There is an episode of Futurama where Fry makes a comment about how you don't miss TV when you are on the road. This can slip past the censors, because almost no one will actually follow that advice. That may sum up television better than anything ever said.

The only way to consume a television show is like a book. Long marathons of one show. Without commercials. Learn to love it. Then throw it away. Don't be clamoring to bring it back or make a movie version of it. Make your own movie version of it. Live life like your in a television show if you like it that much. Or better yet write it because living it can be kind of hard. Unless you are doing it right, which you're probably not. I hate to break it to you, but Larry David is funny than you.

Fellow wage slaves of the world, unite! Throw down your remotes. Smash your plasma screens! Burn your DVDs!! You have nothing to lose but the ass-print on your sofa. If someone is using a TV show to sell you something, they are trying to brainwash you into wasting your money. If someone is giving you easy access to something that allows you to know a television character better then your own family, they are giving you an easy excuse to sleepwalk through life. Don't spend your life looking at the shadows in Plato's cave. Don't let your life become watching television shows. Read a book. Cook a meal. Have a conversation. Get outside. Fly a kite. Just do something. Anything but trying to empty your Netflix Queue or your TiVo.

Live from Not Berlin

John McCain and George Bush need to realize something. They may be short, but they are not Napoleon. Even if they were, why would we want Napoleon? Sure, the French got to worship a God for a few years, but look at all the trouble he got them into. We are surprisingly good at making up our own Gods here for a bunch of people who watch television all the time. We don't need a Sun King. We have Batman.

We do not want to be the French Empire. We want to be the Roman Empire. When I am not elected President, I will start making us act like the Roman Empire again. Think back to World War II. Half of Europe was ours. We had an atomic weapon. We were facing an enemy that was easy to hate. We could have tried to take over the world. But we didn't. Instead, we rebuilt Europe, gave Britain and France a seat on the UN Security Council so they could pretend they were relevant, and proceeded to plunder the rest of the world. This is how the Roman Empire acted. You bring the important people, or in this case countries, in with you and make them "equal" citizens. Then you steal from the less important people.

So, what is my plan? Why should you not make me Commander in Chief? Here is what I propose. Instead of invading countries with leaders that are hard to deal with, we play coup d'etat roulette. Sometimes you mess up and get an Iran. Sometimes you get lucky and get a Chile. We don't really know. But we do know what happens when we are too eager to get between groups of people who hate each other. They just end up hating us because we are in the way of their own personal struggles. Instead of trying to make democracy, we should just try to see that the repression isn't too horrible.

To this end, I will not train an army of James Bonds. You may think this army will be made up of extremely handsome men, but it won't. They stick out too much. Besides, who really is James Bond? Anyone can read lines, look cool with a gun, and make out with beautiful women. James Bond is really the stuntman. He does crazy things the actor would never do. So we will not recruit an army of stuntmen, not train them in the arts of seduction, and not set them loose in beautiful foreign locales. Because, my fellow Americans, life isn't a movie.

I am Not Barack Obama and I approve this message.

Paid for by Not Barack Obama for America

Life Scripts

In nearly all self-help literature there is a concept I find useful that I like to call a life script. Think Shakespeare: "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players". The idea boils down to trying to see yourself in a certain way so eventually you will act that way. There are different techniques such as changing your vocabulary or being grateful for your circumstances. Maybe the most famous technique of all comes from Jesus: "Love your neighbor as yourself"*.

I think the reason these techniques work, if indeed they do work, comes from injecting change in your life. If you are unhappy then just thinking new thoughts gives you something novel to work over in your mind. That's why I think the best of these (at least in my experience) come from sympathizing with other people. But other things can help as well. Lately when I've been at home I've been sitting on the floor instead of in a chair. This gives me a new way to use my muscles and offers a nice contrast to when I'm in public and have to use chairs. Cleaning my apartment and moving my furniture around had the same type of effect. It gave me a new environment to move around.

You need to be careful with this life script bullshit. At a certain point it becomes its own stupid addiction, and certain scripts can overwhelm the rest. There are so many techniques out there that if you are going to get anything out of them you have to stop thinking and start doing. Most teachers won't tell you this since they want to keep coming to their seminars and buying their books. Of course, the idea "stop thinking, start doing" is itself just another life script which has to be monitored to see if it is still useful for you. At least I think you need to monitor it since my Main Problem is actually doing the work. All this thinking about why you have certain thoughts and where they come from can also be described as a life script. To me, it has been an especially seductive one for a number of reasons. It allows you to have an excuse for not ever getting anything done. Let me quote that great sage Elaine Benes: "Well! I can't spend the rest of my life coming into this stinking apartment every ten minutes to pore over the, excruciating minutia, of every, single, daily event."

That quote comes from the Seinfeld episode "The Bizarro Jerry". What a great distillation of the concept of life scripts that episode is. Essentially, the three male leads have counterparts with similar personalities with slightly different assumptions that completely change to way they act. The whole show is also a great demonstration of the reason why thinking about why people do what we do is seductive. Most human rituals look ridiculous when analyzed enough. Here is a great one about lawns. Think about a wedding. Two people stand in front of their friends and pledge not to fuck anyone else for the rest of their lives. I'm loath to give examples I've used in real life since people get so defensive about it. Comedians get away with it because they are "just" telling jokes. The defensiveness can be fairly amusing when provoked in people, but I don't recommend doing it too often since it just makes people angry at you unless you are really careful with it. And just because something is stupid doesn't mean it can't be fun.

Here comes the therapy. I think I need a new life script. I question too many things. So here are my two axioms. 1) Life scripts exists. 2) They have consequences. So that means I need to pick the ones that the person I want to become would use. I don't think my personality allows me to buy into any one script too fully. Hopefully, as long as I realize what I'm doing I can use the scripts enough to get what I want out of life. First, I need to eliminate all the destructive scripts from my mind. I've been doing the same thing lately with my pastimes and possessions. It has been working in the sense that it has made me happier so maybe by doing the same thing with my life scripts I can get a similar improvement. Although I didn't use this language (I used the language of fears), I did do this a couple weeks ago with an extremely destructive script. I think if I hadn't done that I wouldn't even be able to write this. So its time for a spring cleaning of the mind. I need to look around the recesses of my mind and throw out anything I don't want. Time to get to work.

* Why is it that so many Christians seem to ignore this? Jesus proceeds this commandment by talking about loving God so maybe that's where it comes from. God gives a lot of crazy rules that no human being could possibly follow (which even He admits). Personally, I like the theory that hate is so much fun since it allows you to feel superior to someone else with absolutely no effort. We are all just monkeys flinging shit at each other.

Why does Gen. Robert H. McMahon hate America?

Incredible quote in this Washington Post article.

Explaining his instructions to subordinates, McMahon said he used the term world class "in just about everything I discuss. . . . That represents an attitude." He said he wanted to "create an environment that whoever was riding in that would be proud of," the government would be proud of and "the people of the United States" would be proud of.

So I guess becoming the worlds first modern democracy, freeing the world from Nazis, being a symbol of hope to oppressed people around the world, and fighting to give every citizen equal rights isn't enough for the General. He needs a fucking blue leather La-Z-Boy to feel proud of his country.

Deep Thought

When I started paying attention to TV, I stopped wanting to watch it.

Excerpts from "How Fast Can God's Computer Add?"

God made man in his image. Since Man is not great at doing math in its head (at least compared to a computer), it stands to reason that God needs a computer to do the really complicated problems. "I mean," God says, "I have all this hydrogen and oxygen, but I don't want to use it all if I don't have to." So he gets God's own computer, runs a doomsday scenario, knows just how much to mix, and saves a little for the next time he needs to destroy the Earth.* So God really needs a nice computer, although I guess he can wait if he needs to. Maybe he outsources it to another universe where they have grid computing. Either way, it is one really nice computer, and could host a huge Halo deathmatch.

* It stands to reason that it is much easier to store gasses then liquids in heaven. Which brings up the question, do angels drink steam instead of liquid water?

Politics as a Branch of Theology

What if Grover Norquist got his wish and the welfare state disappeared tomorrow? What would replace it? Since welfare is essentially public charity, it would have to be replaced with private charity. While there are great private secular organizations, for most people charitable giving means giving to a church. In a sense, God and the government are fulfilling the same need. And it's not just in welfare. People use government as a means of casting moral judgement on other people. Listen to the arguments against gay marriage. They are either fingers-in-the-ear arguments of definitions, something I was excellent at in the fourth grade, or they seem to come from wanting to cast moral judgement on gay people. They may not directly say that gay people are bad, they just imply that if there values spread through society we face some horrible disaster. Or read the arguments of priests and lawyers sometime. To me, an outsider to both groups, they look the same. Mostly arguments over definitions combined with a few crazy hypotheticals. Certainly nothing testable in a scientific environment.* As these arguments continue they seem to talk less about actual human beings on Earth, and more about fantasy people in a theoretical universe. Without keeping a firm foot in reality you can lose sight of what you are talking about really quickly with these two subjects.

This theory of politics and religion lends itself to a beautiful hypothesis about the shriveling away of religious belief. You can test how much the government impacts the daily life of its citizens. You couldn't just look at spending, because that would include all kinds of things people never see. You would have to measure how many people are on government payrolls, received a check from the government, or used a government service on a regular basis. Then you could try to correlate this level of government involvement in daily lives to religious beliefs. The hypothesis would state that as government involvement went up, religiosity went down. I wonder how I could test that?

* Incidentally, I felt the same way about physics for years. The most far out theories seem like they get tested and thrown away on paper rather than in an experiment. How do they know they are still talking about reality? But I'll give the physicists a pass, because they've discovered so many crazy things in the last 110 years that they deserve a few centuries to sort it out before we start asking them for more.

Counting the Things in my House

The college I went to has a group of distinctive logos that they put on everything. There are like 3 or 4 that anyone who went there will instantly recognize. But none of them appear on my diploma. Just some seal that could be anything. Without the name of the school, I wouldn't be able to pick the seal out of a lineup. Think about it, the diploma, the most important document that they give you, and they don't brand it with a logo. They brand just about everything else.

There are a lot of brands around my house. The fewest are in my bathroom, but that's probably just because I have less stuff sitting around in there. Of course, the sink has a brand I don't recognize. I can think of a few faucet commercials though, so these brands must be important to somebody. My toilette doesn't have any brand. I guess no one wants to think about toilette too much for it to matter. Although, toilette paper certainly gets branded, so what do I know. Then there are some brands on random cleaning products.

My bedroom doesn't have too many brands either. The clock is TimeX. I guess the "X" tells me it's futuristic. It doesn't work in this case because I grew up with TimeX. To me it just sounds like a cleaning product. Use TimeX to wipe away your free time! Built-in radio for when you get sick of staring at the numbers moving! There is The Ultimate Brand in the bedroom that I'm typing on right now. I have an excuse for being such a trend whore, though. The first computer I worked on was this brand! If it had been some other brand that's still around, I would probably be using one of those computers. My phone has two brands. One is for some asian electronics company, either Japanese or Korean. The other is for the German telephone company, and conjures images of a famous actress. It didn't when I first got the service. But now they also have commercials with basketball stars. How far we've come together. My college branded a few things in here. Then there are a few sports logos, plus a few logos on posters.

My kitchen has a few brands on appliances, some bought some built in, but nothing I care about. It's mostly just a collection of the cheapest products I could find. Half the bought ones were actually given to me. Then there are a couple food items and cleaning products. But I try to buy generic.

My living room fails me. Some of the posters have small logos, but I'm pretty okay there. One is an ad, but it's for a product I can't buy so I think it counts as irony. The real problem is the books. Tons of logos all over the spines. Plus some of the books from a certain author have a similarity of design that makes them apart of a kind of smaller brand. The same thing is the case with CD and DVDs. Then there is The Ultimate Brand in Politics on a sign. In my defense, it's not like I just started following this stuff. Other than that, you have just the electronics, a few magazines, and some magnets. The TV is from Sharp. That's such a good name for a TV. I've used an over the air TV quite a bit, so I definitely associate sharpness with quality TV. Of course, nothing about a Sharp TV makes it receive radio waves any better than another TV. It's just a name. But is that why I bought it? If I did that is doubly stupid because this particular TV has always been hooked up to cable. With digital TV coming, I wonder if Sharp will have to change the brand name?

Branding itself is brand. There is a brand of objects that is every branded object. I often buy from this brand at the grocery store. I mostly don't care about food, and try to buy the generic if I know it's just as good. I buy generic on quite a few things I eat a lot. But if it is something I don't eat much, I get a the most glitzed out corporate brand I can see. Just the presence of a large, faceless organization makes me feel better about the product. If I start to buy it a lot I might mess around with other brands. Then eventually, I'll start buying generic. This is totally crazy behavior, but that's what brands do to me.

My favorite trend is to unbranded products. It pushes the intellectual foundations for branding. It is an idea about branding, and since all branding is just an idea, it is an idea about an idea. An idea thinking about itself. It's von Neumann's Catastrophe in sales. These unbranded products also benefit from maybe the best branding of all. Rarely are the coolest people in movies seen with a logo on there clothing. You won't see Tom Hanks walking around in a Minnesota Twins 1987 AL West Champions t-shirt, or using a coffee cup with a huge corporate logo on it. TV shows are the same way. No logos unless they are paid for. So products with no brand on them draw on this type of branding.

So what is a brand? It's a message that tries to associate itself with certain things. It's an information channel. A brand on a product takes good feelings from another product, and puts them on the new product. It gives your life familiarity. It brings up associations from advertising. It gives you the company line. Brands are a fact of the modern economy so they would be hard to live without any objects that have them. But try to recognize them when you see them, and understand what they try to do to you.

Deep Thought

I would rather be ruled by lawyers than MBAs. Lawyers only torture logic.

Movie Theater Cuisine

Movie theaters offer a variety of over price industrial food-like products for your dining pleasure. From the minty refreshment of snow caps, to the masochistic pleasure of gummy bears (bite their heads off and hear their screams), the food is about as far removed from nature as it can get. However, that doesn't mean that there is no room fro creativity with your food preparation. The next time you are at the theater, don't just open the box and eat all the food during the previews. Try these delicious and interesting recipes.

Milk Duds and Popcorn
Ah, Milk Duds. What more needs to be said? Some sort of strange, flake-like chocolate surrounding a caramel center with the sticking power of industrial strength glue. How can you make this tooth destroying dish even better? Combine it with salt and butter! When you say salt and butter at a movie theater, you are really saying popcorn. Apparantly, popcorn was originally sold outside the theater by third-party vendors then brought inside by patrons. This is now, of course, a capital crime; so while you may be able to sneak in a box of Milk Duds, you are probably going to have to buy the popcorn yourself. Stick with the small, if you need more for God's sake eat a salad before you go. The recipe is fairly intuitive once you know the ingredients, but for our slower readers, you put a Milk Dud in your mouth, get a few piece of popcorn, then chew them into each other to activate all the primal cravings that any primate can enjoy, i.e. salt, fat, and sweet. Serves one really fat person.

Twizzlers and Sprite
Twizzlers are a great for when you haven't had the proper serving of fruit in the day. You wouldn't want to leave a hole in your personal food pyramid, so let's try and eat healthy for once. Plus, it doesn't have any fat, it says so right on the package! Why would anyone want to eat this bland alternative to Starbursts? Because it makes an excellent straw. By biting off the ends of a Twizzlers, you can stick it in a soft drink and sip. If your package is somewhat smashed, a real hazard in those candy displays, you may have to work the tube open a little bit. Now, at first you may be like, "This just tastes like Sprite. Why did I get this when I could have gotten some Mike and Ikes instead?" Have a little patience. As the Twizzler leaches its interior into the beverage stream, the flavors will mix. Before the Twizzler totally loses its structural integrity, pull it out of the drink. Then when you eat it, a wonderful burst of soft drink explodes into your mouth. While you could use any beverage for this concoction, I would recommend either Sprite or a sweet white wine, such as an expensive Riesling.

The next time you see a movie don't be afraid to experiment with your food. Just because it came from a complicated industrial process, that doesn't mean you can't be creative. And remember, stay away from licorice, that stuff is just disgusting.