Archive
Procrastinating Timelord
If I could decide now to have done something earlier, then surely I would, for I’d be done with no more effort required. Maybe I should work on that.
And that concludes this Inane Friday Thought Experiment. Get back to whatever you weren’t doing…
Optimism
These election results are as good a reason as any to break blog silence — congratulations to our President-elect, Barack Obama! And while I’m sad about California’s current results on Prop 8, overall I feel much more optimistic about our immediate future.
Obama is not the messiah, and he doesn’t have a magic wand to solve all of our problems, but he has inspired me and so many others in a way I’ve not experienced before. I hope to see great things in the next four years…
Inconvenient world affairs
I finally watched An Inconvenient Truth this weekend, and it was definitely eye-opening. I was annoyed a little by Gore tooting his own horn — the election scandal was especially off-topic — but the message is still powerful. While I generally understood and believed already that global warming is an issue, I didn’t know the raw scale of it. So now that I’ve received the warning, I’ll start watching for ways that my own habits can be improved, and I encourage others to do the same.
On another side of humans deteriorating our own condition, we have Musharraf declaring emergency rule in Pakistan. I remember seeing him as a guest on The Daily Show, and he seemed like a genuinely nice guy. He has the charisma that makes for a powerful leader, which makes his current actions even more frightening. People will genuinely believe in him and his justifications for extreme actions, much more than the puppet show that our own administration puts on. I hope for Pakistanis that this can be resolved peacefully, but it’s hard to see how when he has already defied diplomatic efforts.
It’s funny — I’m still one of many young adults who get their primary news from Comedy Central, but I’m developing an interest in politics and world affairs that used to bore me. Maybe this is just part of getting older…
A loss to fantasy
One of my favorite authors, Robert Jordan, passed away yesterday. I don’t even know how to express this loss, except to say that I’m very sorry I never got the chance to meet him. May he rest in peace with the knowledge that he has touched many lives…
You might be a nerd
I love xkcd for the funny-because-it’s-true look at the way some people think. He might just be the nerdy-webcomic equivalent of Jeff Foxworthy.
I thought of my own quip the other day along those lines. I won’t attempt to make it into a comic — not even with stick figures — but here’s the gist of it:
When you’re out with your friends (say N people in the group) and someone proposes a toast, do you ever watch to see if there are N*(N-1)/2 unique glass clinks?
Ok, I’ve never actually counted as it happens, but I have wondered before…
Fantastically relevant
One of my favorite things about reading books is when I find something immediately worth quoting. I found this bit in The Fellowship of the Ring:
Indeed in nothing is the power of the Dark Lord more clearly shown than in the estrangement that divides all those who still oppose him.
J.R.R. Tolkien
I enjoy the fact that a passage from a fantasy novel, written over fifty years ago, can still have so much relevance. Just replace “the Dark Lord” with “terrorism”, and Tolkien might as well have been Nostradamus. He often said that he wasn’t trying to make any metaphors with reality, but I suppose things like this are just universal truths. It is what we do in fear that is dangerous to our way of life, more than any one person who would do us harm.
Josh Stone 