Come for the Cardinals baseball… stay for the Lord’s Own Hockey.
(language alert!)
Category Archives: made of awesome
My 15 seconds of fame
So after last night’s Islanders win, I was rattling around on the Twitter, half-noticing the postgame show…
Yup, that was me. Shannon Hogan and Butch Goring briefly poked fun at the idea, and then it was gone.
Over at the Lighthouse Hockey online digs, such japes are par for the course. We kid! We kid, because we love! So I hope that Cal won’t mind it too much. Besides, yours truly wouldn’t rate an emergency call-up with this weak ‘stache game.
Hey guys, good game. How about a Dr Pepper?
Also, I’m fairly certain the Islanders clubhouse doesn’t have an unmade bed and a reading light.
Housekeeping
Lately there’s been a lot going on, so I’ve been confining myself to 140-character snippets. But you will have to concede that we’ve had a good reason.
Here. This is your new human. Good luck!
Grub is doing great in his first ten hours. Ladybug and I are thrilled, as you could guess, but getting ready has been an intense ride, one that we were forced to rush at the end – Grub’s a couple of weeks early.
Love you, little guy.
He’s doing comics and he’s still alive
So I wander over to XKCD – just for the kicks, you know – and also because I’ve had this comic of his open for almost a week. I’m not sure how he’s doing it, but it’s moving, though like the hour hand of a clock you never catch it doing so. It’s the world’s slowest-moving .gif, I guess, and it’s cool.
And then I hit the “random” button and this comes up.
Time, indeed.
I think I need a moment here.
A smile for your afternoon
Katie was lost… and then she was found.
(hat tip to Laura’s sidebar at FM²)
Snippets
§ Insty reports a new wine in town.
On May 24, 1976, the British wine merchant Steven Spurrier organized a blind tasting of French and Californian wines. … The results shocked the wine world. According to the judges, the best Cabernet at the tasting was a 1973 bottle from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars in Napa Valley. When the tasting was repeated a few years later—some judges insisted that the French wines had been drunk too young—Stag’s Leap was once again declared the winner, followed by three other California Cabernets. These blind tastings (now widely known as the Judgment of Paris) helped to legitimate Napa vineyards.
But now, in an even more surprising turn of events, another American wine region has performed far better than expected in a blind tasting against the finest French châteaus. Ready for the punch line? The wines were from New Jersey.
Bingley has been way ahead of the curve on this, apparently. Even I, who imbibeth but a little, have enjoyed the occasional winery tour-and-taste. Cream Ridge Winery is a good spot for that sort of thing if you’re visiting the Garden State.
A little gestalt over lunch
The “Blog Nobody Reads” had something of an uptick last week, when Morgan observed that in the Global Somethening game, there were two processes that seemed never in sync:
I characterized my problem as a “Clark Kent and Superman” problem … I see people applying the scientific method to figuring out what’s going on with the climate, and I’m seeing prognostications of doom. But the scientific method and the doomsaying are never in the same room at the same time.
The response to that, he detailed in a follow-up this week. The conclusion Morgan reached may be obvious to many readers, but in my mind, it’s often the thing we feel isn’t worth saying that gets most easily fogotten, so I’m glad he wrote this:
People do appreciate the need for this peace, but they’re making the mistake of defining it as absence of conflict. The mistake is a deadly one, since life itself entails conflict, and a dogmatic regimen of rejecting all conflict will eventually come to the point where it begins to reject life. … What point is there to life, if we’re only supposed to live it until there is conflict? There is none.
And this is reflected, I would argue, in the results. When people are bludgeoned into this living-of-life-to-avoid-conflict, sooner or later, you always see someone, somewhere, laboring under a commandment that they need to stop living life, or to live less life. So that someone else isn’t offended. Very often, the “someone else” doesn’t actually exist, and is thought about only as a hypothetical: “Take that American flag down, someone might find it offensive.”
Sooner or later, intolerance itself is tolerated, and ironically that is the exit point of tolerance from this avoid-all-conflict doctrine.
(In the interest of space, I ellipsed a religious observation of Morgan’s, that many of Jesus’ statements and parables stand in opposition to this sort of thinking. It’s a theme worth developing fully into a separate essay.)
Lo and behold, right after reading that, I pop over to the Bleat, and James Lileks is knocking the same exact meatball pitch out of the park:
If you can’t agree on something, then don’t talk about it – a perfect example of what happens when Consensus is enshrined above all else. I suppose that proves their point. “Well, wasn’t the lack of consensus what caused the unpleasantness in the first place?” I suppose; if everyone had agreed to be run by the Germans, there wouldn’t have been war. Peace is a value equivalent to Consensus; if they made statues today of allegorical figures, you wouldn’t have Truth and Justice, but Consensus and Peace. A continent run by Nazis would be technically peaceful, since the internal repression wouldn’t be regarded as a breach of peace. They could burn every untermensch from the Urals to the Portuguese shore, but as long as one government controlled everything, and wasn’t at war with another discrete political entity, there would be Peace.
My own poor observation? The whole dizzying affair at Morgan’s barely qualified as a conversation, because it never went anywhere. This fellow (s) Zachriel has, in fact, put himself into my mental dictionary as the picture illustrating GK Chesterton’s chapter on madmen in his tremedous book Orthodoxy. Chesterton observed that a closed circle, such as the mind of a madman, can be said to be infinitely small… a tiny ring constricting tighter and tighter until nothing is left.
Why would he or they or whomever do that? What would be the point of such a long pointless exchange?
I’ve puzzled ’til my puzzler was sore, and only one thing really makes sense: the very pointlessness of it all must be the point to Zachriel. There’s a dull commonality to how he approaches the topic and how he demands that all others approach it. For all the talk about saving the world, it involves no actual volition on the part of those who will actually do the nuts-and-bolts saving on a daily basis – they won’t choose, they’ll be herded. They in fact will be like Zachriel, or be Zachriel, who seems to be a group identity.
A living being, faced with something unlikeable or untenable, will make a choice about dealing with it. If a sudden flame pops up when I’m grilling, I jump back. The meat on the grill just sits and burns. So much simpler and easier. So much more peaceful. A group of people going someplace, such as a long line to get into a show or event, has to decide to keep moving, or else work their way off the line. A group of objects just gets sorted and swept. Any of them that hit the floor do so by pure accident.
Zachriel and others like them must really believe at core that we are units with no volition, and that any one of us that disagrees must do so in the same manner as the sock stuck in the lint trap, or the dime in the sofa cusions. When we insist that we’ve broken from the group by choice, they don’t seek to persuade our choice, they just assume that we need to be fished out. “Read it again,” they say, or “You must not understand.” In fact we have read and understood, and found the case lacking. In some cases, we may have even found the case compelling but still refuse because the persons making it are jerks or creeps. Even beyond that – some rebels do it just for the fun of it, because we can. These are all things that only the living do.
I’ll go one further and say that all the Consensus Takers and Zachriels and their ilk are the ones who do not understand. Socks don’t understand why they go in pairs, and steaks don’t understand why they’re sizzling. They are entirely acted on by external forces and have no say in the results. This is the madness: these are people who, while still drawing breath, have laid aside the ability to choose their path. They neither swim with nor against the tide – neither join nor jump the queue. That’s why their solution to disagreement is simply to abrogate it, and make the dissenter simply go along to get along. They can’t agree to disagree, because they aren’t truly capable of either of those mental activities. They can only check if the response matches that of units like themselves.
Loveliness
If you asked me on different days why I was a Christian, you would get different answers.
I’ve never had a problem with that. People are complicated. They have different reasons for doing things, some of which are paradoxical. The demand for a uniform rationality is not usually a sign of health, any more than a pure emotional reaction without any consideration. In fact, on some days when you ask why I’m a believer, this complexity will be the answer – I find that the faith accounts for the paradoxes of life and of humanity far more comprehensively than any alternative.
Today, though, if you ask – and I’m going to proceed as if you did – the answer is not about complexity, but imagination.
Sometimes I think that the everyday world is just a little too mundane to be the only thing we’re meant for. Whatever man touches, he adorns; where he finds beauty in nature or motion, he is quick to praise and admire. I grow convinced that this impulse of imagination and wonder is a key that opens a small window to greater things, and that someday a secret door, long suspected but rarely recognized, will be opened to us.
News you can use
Benson Everett Legg, a delightfully-classically-named US District Judge, has just issued a ruling on Maryland’s law limiting gun permits to those who had a good reason to have one. The key quote:
A citizen may not be required to offer a “good and substantial reason” why he should be permitted to exercise his rights. The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.
So, that’s a big fat UNCONSTITUTIONAL, and a happy day for the citizens of the state of Maryland. By extension, it will be a happy day for the rest of us if this thinking spreads throughout the world of jurisprudence. It’s why we have the U.S. Constitution in the first place. The law was made for us, not the other way around.
Ho-hum, now what?
When you’re 22, you do lots of adventurous things – like bungee jumping over the Zambezi River, for example.
And if your bungee snaps halfway down? Well, if you’re Australian, you just swim to shore and call it a typical Saturday.
…Australian backpacker Erin Langworthy, 22, plunged into the Zambezi River when her cord snapped during a jump at Victoria Falls, in Zambia.
Miraculously, the thrill-seeker from Perth survived the plunge into crocodile-infested waters and lived to tell how she managed to battle through the rapids and swim to the Zimbabwean side of the river with her feet still tied together.
The distance from the bridge to the water is roughly 360 feet, so the lass fell the length of an entire football field (end zones included) before hitting the water, and then keeping both her breath and her wits long enough to make it to land. Reports that the crocodiles swam over to ask for her autograph afterward are purely rumors.
Since she’s Australian, she probably had about 4700 marriage proposals waiting for her when she got home. Good luck, guys.
Blog of the Nightfly 
What’d they say?