Best segue ever

I’ve got iTunes running through my ripped CDs on random shuffle. It just segued from Johnny Cash’s “When The Man Comes Around” into “Mister Horrible” “Someone Keeps Moving My Chair” by They Might Be Giants.

Screwtape: sheer genius

I’m re-re-reading CS Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters. I’ve generally never found Lewis’s theology convincing, but his observations about human foibles, especially hypocrisy and the various ways we trick ourselves into doing the wrong things, are nothing less than brilliant. The beginning of Letter I contains an observation that sums up about three-quarters of what’s wrong with modern political discourse:

[...] It sounds as if you supposed that argument was the way to keep him out of the Enemy’s clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it. They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.

I don’t believe that for a moment, incidentally, but hang on, here comes the brilliant bit:

But with the advent of the weekly press and other such weapons, we have largely altered that. Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head. He doesn’t think about doctrines as primarily “true” or “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”, “outworn” or “contemporary”, “conventional” or “ruthless”. Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church. Don’t waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true! Make him think it is strong or stark or courageous — that it is the philosophy of the future. That’s the sort of thing he cares about.

Phil Agre has written at length [Google’s cached version if that link craps out] about what he calls “The New Jargon”, but Lewis summed it up decades before, much more elegantly.

Heavyhands, week 5.5, day 2

Sixteen more ounces of progress!

(  Heavyhands numbers  )

Exactitudes

Via Boing Boing, a fascinating site (seems to be associated with a book) showing photos of groups of a dozen people each from various subcultures (most seem to be Dutch or Chinese), all in the same pose. See, for example, these Dutch “Teknohippy” women (geek girls, we’d call ’em), or this set of “Ghoullies” (Goths), or Brazilian Surfistas, or Beijing students.

The purpose of the book is supposedly to draw attention to the contradiction between individuality and uniformity that subculture dress codes entail, but I find it much more interesting as a source of photo reference for drawing.

Five questions from Zoe Trope

Y’all know how this works by now, right? zoe_trope asked me five questions:

( Hebrew lessons, Old-skool computer geekery, and scatological references wait behind this cut tag. Consider yourself warned! )