this is what happened to me over the last ten minutes.
i was reading a note that was on my facebook notification thing (whatever screen it goes to when you press "home") and i noticed that dhruv had written a note about how scientists had synthesized a ribosome for the first time, so i sorta skimmed through what he had written. then i got to the bottom of the note, where a boy named daryl chang had commented. i noticed his profile picture: a stick figure. in fact, it was a stick figure that i had seen when i was searching for one to put as my profile picture. so, i wanted to see who this poser was (or, for jason, the "phony"). i didn't know who he was, but he liked classical music, so he's probably in orchestra. anyways, i looked at his groups and noticed one of them that just said "lupus". i had heard that term many times, and 85% of the time i could have told you what it was, but at that moment nothing was connecting. so, i clicked on it, and it was a disease, and about spreading its awareness. and i thought hmm, it's kind of weird that the group name would just be "lupus", not "spreading lupus awareness" or somthing. just the name by itself almost made me think it was making fun of it or something. which made me think of dysentery. i consider dysentery to be one of the funniest diseases, and i'm guessing part of it has to do with name and the other part has to do with the symptoms. but really kids, dysentery is no laughing matter, and i am extremely insensitive on my thoughts on dysentery, but hey, after you've been killed by it about 100 times on oregon trail, you become a little numb to it. anyways, so i decided to search "dysentery" on facebook to see if anyone else shared a fondness for the hilarity of the tragic, tragic disease. alas, there were none. but then i thought of the song "dysentery gary" by blink-182, which is probably my favorite song by them, so i looked more closely at the names of the results. one of them was a music group, called "nocturnal dysentery". it was under the subcategory "reggae", of which i am a fan, so clicked on the to check them out. it was in some random language, so i youtube searched them to check out what they sounded like. unfortunately, they were not reggae, but grunge metal (or something like that). so anyways, after that i was pretty disappointed, but one of my tabs was still on the nocturnal dysentery site, so i clicked on "reggae" to see what groups there were. i found one that was just "ska", so i clicked on it. it was just your avergae "we love (insert what you love here [i.e. ska])!" group, so i skimmed through most of it. until i came to this post, which was something like "my favorite ska albums". this guy listed his 5 favorite ska albums, and his top two were both albums by a band called "the hotknives". now, i have never heard of them, but if two of their albums were in his top 5, they have to be pretty good. so i youtube searched them, and came up with a song i think called "julie, julie". it was pretty good, but i wanted to listen to their most popular song to get an idea of what kind of taste this random person who put his top 5 albums on fb had in music. so, of course, wikipedia. but i type it in, and i don't get anything. so i click on the top search result which is "hot knives". which is a song by the band "bright eyes", and it wasn't really that interesting. then i saw the lead singer say some quote, and he was like "this song is about a woman wh finds out her whole life is a mess and she has o change the entire thing" (this is most likely not at all what it said, but it caught my attention, and that's its only relevance to this story.) the name "bright eyes" really rung a bell in my head; i was sure that i had heard some of their music before or someone had told me about them. anyways, i youtube searched them as well, and was going to click on the first song when i saw this one a few down called "the first day of my life" and the description was just "quite possible the sweetest video ever :)". being the ever happy boy that i am, i clicked on that one (i also assumed that if i heard a song from them it would have been this song, because people generally like showing other people happy songs [or more-depressing-then-usual songs, as iis the case today when i showed nikki lgfuad by motion city soundtrack]). so anyways, i start listening/ watching the video, and it's a really really cool song and i loved the video, and some comment said the video was made by the director having a party and letting his friends listen to the song alone and he captured their reactions on a camera. so, i had another band whose music i needed to get, so i put it on my list and went to itunes to check their other stuff out. i typed in "bright eyes" on the itunes search box, and clicked on the album with this song. suddenly, i knew why i felt like i had heard the name "bright eyes" before. i had looked at this band this summer, or earlier, when i was getting into the shins, headlights, arcade fire, etc. i had looked up the exact band i had found 6+ months ago by following links and procrastination (i have about 2 hours of chem left tonight). i had no idea where this was going to take me, and it caught me complete surprise when i read the album description and realized i had already read this a while before.
small world, huh.
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Thursday, March 5, 2009
War - What Is It Good For?
Well, definitely not what it used to be good for. Here are excerpts from two books that I recently read: 1984 by George Orwell and Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. It seems their reasons for war are two sides of the same coin.
1984
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limt the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling class against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war" therefore, has become misleading. It probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each involatile within its own boundaries. For in that caseeach would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This - although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense - is the inner meaning of the party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
Cat's Cradle
"When Bokonon and McCabe took over this miserable country years ago," said Julian Castle, "they threw out the priests. And then Bokonon, cynically and playfully, invented a new religion."
"I know." I said.
"Well, when it became evident that no government or economic reform was going to make people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies."
"How did he come to be an outlaw?"
"It was his own idea. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang. He wrote a little poem about it, incidentally."
Castle quoted this poem, which does not appear in The Books of Bokonon.
So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
The a really good religion
Is a form of treason.
"Bokonon suggested the hook, too, as the proper punishment for Bokononists," he said. "It was something he'd seen in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's." He winked ghoulishly. "That was for zest, too."
"Did many people die on the hook?"
"Not at first, not at first. At first it was all make-believe. Rumors were cunningly circulated about executions, but no one really knew anyone who had died that way. McCabe had a good old time making bloodthirsty threats against the Bokononists - which was everybody.
"And then Bokonon went into cozy hiding," Castle continued, "where he wrote and preached all day long and ate good things his disciples brought him. McCabe would organize the unemployed, which was practically everybody, into great Bokonon hunts. About every six months McCabe would announce triumphantly that Bokonon was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was remorselessly closing in. And then the leaders of the rermorseless ring would have to report to McCabe, full of chagrin and apoplexy, that Bokonon had done the impossible. He had escaped, had evaporated, had lived to preach another day. Miracle!"
"McCabe and Bokonon did not succeed in raising what is generally thought of as the standard of living," said Castle. "The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.
"But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud."
"So life became a work of art," I marveled.
"Yes. There was only one trouble with it."
"Oh?"
"The drama was very tough on the souls of the two main actors, McCabe and Bokonon. As young men, they had pretty much been alike, had both been half-angel, half-pirate. But the drama demanded the pirate half in Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe to wither away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible price in agony for the happiness of the people--McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for all practical purposes, insane."
Castle crooked his index finger of his left hand. "And then, people really did start dying on the hook."
"But Bokonon was never caught?" I asked.
"McCabe never went that crazy. He never made a really serious effort to catch Bokonon. It would have been easy to do."
"Why didn't he catch him?"
"McCabe was always sane enough to realize that without the holy man to war against, he himself would become meaningless."
It's amazing how similar utopias and dystopias are... and it appears that Cat's Cradle had doublethink as well, in response to the "play" thing. Anyways, have fun finding the interweaving points. The 1984 excerpt I wanted to put down was actually a lot longer, but I didn't think it would hold attention very well. Just go read it for yourself if you're interested.
1984
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limt the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling class against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war" therefore, has become misleading. It probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each involatile within its own boundaries. For in that caseeach would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This - although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense - is the inner meaning of the party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
Cat's Cradle
"When Bokonon and McCabe took over this miserable country years ago," said Julian Castle, "they threw out the priests. And then Bokonon, cynically and playfully, invented a new religion."
"I know." I said.
"Well, when it became evident that no government or economic reform was going to make people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies."
"How did he come to be an outlaw?"
"It was his own idea. He asked McCabe to outlaw him and his religion, too, in order to give the religious life of the people more zest, more tang. He wrote a little poem about it, incidentally."
Castle quoted this poem, which does not appear in The Books of Bokonon.
So I said good-bye to government,
And I gave my reason:
The a really good religion
Is a form of treason.
"Bokonon suggested the hook, too, as the proper punishment for Bokononists," he said. "It was something he'd seen in the Chamber of Horrors at Madame Tussaud's." He winked ghoulishly. "That was for zest, too."
"Did many people die on the hook?"
"Not at first, not at first. At first it was all make-believe. Rumors were cunningly circulated about executions, but no one really knew anyone who had died that way. McCabe had a good old time making bloodthirsty threats against the Bokononists - which was everybody.
"And then Bokonon went into cozy hiding," Castle continued, "where he wrote and preached all day long and ate good things his disciples brought him. McCabe would organize the unemployed, which was practically everybody, into great Bokonon hunts. About every six months McCabe would announce triumphantly that Bokonon was surrounded by a ring of steel, which was remorselessly closing in. And then the leaders of the rermorseless ring would have to report to McCabe, full of chagrin and apoplexy, that Bokonon had done the impossible. He had escaped, had evaporated, had lived to preach another day. Miracle!"
"McCabe and Bokonon did not succeed in raising what is generally thought of as the standard of living," said Castle. "The truth was that life was as short and brutish and mean as ever.
"But people didn't have to pay as much attention to the awful truth. As the living legend of the cruel tyrant in the city and the gentle holy man in the jungle grew, so, too, did the happiness of the people grow. They were all employed full time as actors in a play they understood, that any human being anywhere could understand and applaud."
"So life became a work of art," I marveled.
"Yes. There was only one trouble with it."
"Oh?"
"The drama was very tough on the souls of the two main actors, McCabe and Bokonon. As young men, they had pretty much been alike, had both been half-angel, half-pirate. But the drama demanded the pirate half in Bokonon and the angel half of McCabe to wither away. And McCabe and Bokonon paid a terrible price in agony for the happiness of the people--McCabe knowing the agony of the tyrant and Bokonon knowing the agony of the saint. They both became, for all practical purposes, insane."
Castle crooked his index finger of his left hand. "And then, people really did start dying on the hook."
"But Bokonon was never caught?" I asked.
"McCabe never went that crazy. He never made a really serious effort to catch Bokonon. It would have been easy to do."
"Why didn't he catch him?"
"McCabe was always sane enough to realize that without the holy man to war against, he himself would become meaningless."
It's amazing how similar utopias and dystopias are... and it appears that Cat's Cradle had doublethink as well, in response to the "play" thing. Anyways, have fun finding the interweaving points. The 1984 excerpt I wanted to put down was actually a lot longer, but I didn't think it would hold attention very well. Just go read it for yourself if you're interested.
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