Thursday, July 21, 2005


Still not afraid!
(I just don't take the "T" because of the smell)
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Friday, July 15, 2005

Exactly My Point (see previous entry)


Found this on a search of buddha images on Google. Apparently, someone has created a mandala solely out of those little buddhas you can buy in any asian gift shep.
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Fight of the Millenium: Buddha vs. Darwin!!!



In the Red Corner, he weighs in at approximately 2000 pounds. He stands at 60 feet tall and he is 2700 years old. From India, by way of China, Ladies and Gentlemen....Siddartha Gautama Buddha!
And in the Blue Corner, weighing in at 180 pounds and with an impressive record of wins dating back to 1859, Ladies and Gentlemen, the author of "Origin of the Species", Charles Darwin!
This fight is scheduled for the rest of human civilization and your referree in charge tonight will be Ayn Rand.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, llllllllllllets get ready to rumbllllle!!"

I would probably spring for the $39.95 charge on PPV for this. And I think I would put my money on Buddha since the odds are so strong against him that the payoff would be huge.
This is the kind of entry that springs to mind after reading the latest issue of Fortune magazine (which has got to have one of the funniest covers I've ever seen on a financial monthly), and an article on Brazil's biggest mall in the on-line International Herald Tribune. Pretty much two facets of the same debate which rages in this first half of the 21st millenium. The world is rapidly changing and without the most advantages, it will be virtually impossible to keep up. This has many implications which can be tracked on a daily basis in the media: 1) The society with the best educated population and the highest standard of living for its inhabitants will continue to make the most advances. 2) Societies without access to the tools to achieve these advances will fall further and further behind. I think the symbolism indicated by pitting Buddha against Darwin is a good way to look at the forces which pull at both individuals and whole societies.
To take a look at it in a fractal way: One day you are walking to work and you see the same homeless man or woman you walk by every day. Today is different than no other, there they are holding out a dirty Dunkin' Donuts cup and repeating their mantra of "Sparechangeforthehomeless". If you are like me, a two-legged bundle of insecurities and neuroses, you might think "Why can't this person shape up and get a damn job?" quickly followed by "Where the hell is your sense of compassion? If you were a Buddha you'd be handing this person the keys to your apartment". Maybe you put some money into the cup and move on, or, you don't and tell yourself that it's probably even more compassionate not to enable another person's laziness.
So you continue on to your job and once you get there, you go on line and find out that there was a cataclysmic natural disaster in some far away country. Thousands of people are now either dead, orphaned, widowed and homeless. Immediately the sites and banner ads pop up for relief funds. You feel enormous sympathy for those affected and try to imagine what their lives must be like now, but your rent is due, the price of gas just jumped 30 cents and your electric bill just went up. How are you ever going to be able to afford a home and start building equity if this keeps up? Disasters happen. People die every day for a million different reasons, and a little tiny voice pipes up in the back of your mind; "isn't the planet over populated anyway?"
Is there really a difference in what is really going on and what you perceive is going on? To put it a different way, in the movie "Contact", Jodie Foster's character does not win a close vote to become the first human being to travel at the speed of light and possibly contact an alien civilization. She knows that it was probably her former mentor who cast the deciding vote. He tells her the bad news and attempts to comfort her with the words "That's the way the world is.", to which she replies; " I always thought that the world is what we make of it." That's where what some people call Social Darwinism get into a sticky, sticky morasse of morals.
The Buddha lived over 2500 years ago. When he was alive, there was no mass media, no RSS feed, and no credit card bills. There was only what people experienced with their senses and how they based their thoughts and assumptions on those perceptions. But still, he managed to become enlightened and spread his theory of the four noble truths to his disciples who then carried out his teachings through the millenia until the present, where they continue to be relevant.
Charles Darwin created his theory of evolution after careful, scientific observations during the voyage of the "Beagle". The closest thing (I guess) he came to mass media mid-nineteenth century was the occasional broadsheet or pulpy newspaper article. But the theory that nature itself is the constant competition of species to adapt to changes in their environments is easily observed anywhere one looks.
Perhaps the great irony of our age is the survival of a selfless religion in a climate of hyper-competition for survival.
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Thursday, July 14, 2005

Joe likes Neon


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Wednesday, July 13, 2005

Just when you think you're cool...

-along comes another developement to make you feel like a chimpazee trying to open a coconut. Now there's video blogging.
If anybody else is out there, please answer me this; do people actually watch the hours and hours of footage they seem to shoot? And on a related note, do people who upload their stuff to flickr.com actually look at their photos? I put up a photo album last night and then I got curious and did a search on Flickr for "black cat". Thousands of photos, thousands of out-of-focus shots of everyone's adorable black cats. I promise I will only put up 10 shots of Roy Jones Jr. Then I will only upload stuff that is actually interesting and technically acceptable.
Now I remember why I was always a technophobe in the first place. Once you start caring about the newest latest greatest, then before you know it, you are running around in circles, babbling words like "PDA" and "multi-tasking" and "I-Pod". I started out with a pager, after much resistance. (I couldn't stand the idea of having to scramble to find a phone every time the stupid thing buzzed out some digits.) Then, someone at my job gave me their Cellular One car phone, a trimline-sized thing that came with a heavy magnetized antenna that scratched up my car's roof. Once I was using it while parking my car on Boylston Street and some skate punk kids yelled "Yuppie!" when they saw me. Ahh sweet irony. I decided to turn it in and get an actual cell phone. The woman at the Cellular One office wanted to give my car phone to a museum, it looked so ancient to her. I had graduated to an actual flip up Nokia. Now I have a cell phone that's bright yellow, so I won't lose it, and held together with scotch tape. It plays "Take Me Out To The Ball Game" when it rings and I've even tried playing one of the games that came with it. But it doesn't shoot video, so I still feel like a chimp whacking a coconut with a rock when I use it.
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Tuesday, July 12, 2005

We are going to have some "splainin" to do

Here's a fun mental exercise to practice. When you scan through bbc.co.uk or cnn.com, find a story that almost strains their credibility as a news source and mentally verbalize how you will explain it to your sarcastic know-it-all 15 year-old in the future. Take for example this whole CIA leak story. This is going to be a tough one. "But mom, didn't Karl Rove get fired for outing the CIA Agent as revenge for her husband deflating the Bush administration's hot air balloon about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction?" "No dear, he was pardoned by President Schwartzenegger. Now finish your genetically engineered peas."
And might I add, thank you to Slate for their wonderful choice of words for a headline. Our office IT guy loved when he sat at my station to work on my new e-mail address and saw the words "turd blossom" on my task bar.
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My Dream Car


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Thursday, July 07, 2005

"Does this mean Ann Margaret won't be coming?" Joker in "Full Metal Jacket"

Woke up today with my first idea for an entry in several days. I lay there thinking of all the clever comparisons I was going to make between "War of the Worlds" and "Land of the Dead" but then I got up and checked out Boston.com and the whole idea seemed a little irrelevant considering that the real world is looking a lot more frightening at the moment. If you want to get the straight story check out the wikipedia page.
Rode to work with the predictable babble coming over the waves from talk radio. Two men called in the span of five minutes to say we should just round up all Muslims and kill them. All of this before anyone could say who had claimed responsibility. Which I know sounds really naive but there are lots of angry people running around the planet right now. Pointing at one group and yelling "C'mon let's kill all those guys!" doesn't really do much except make those that are looking for things to get angry about go absolutely berserk. It's people like this that make me wonder if Darwin really was right. Anyone dumb enough to advocate rounding up anyone who follows a certain idea or who looks a certain way and thinks that will take care of their problems should have difficulty remembering to draw breath. Anyone whose mind works at any level above the limbic system should be able to notice that threatening something or someone with extinction tends to make them fight back harder. Which, ironically, is kind of what "War of the Worlds" and "Land of the Dead" are about.
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