Trivial Pursuits

"Shouting the poetic truths of high school journal keepers."

Sunday the Seventeenth of June, Two Thousand and Seven

Well, cross "Irish folk traditions" off the "totally useless knowledge" list.

What a remarkable day I have had. Full of life's weird poetry, and also French toast.

earnestly posted by Martin Marks at 10:58 in the evening // comment? by:

"Let's face it, comedy's a dead art form. Tragedy, now, that's funny."

Electra-thon '07! Sadly, one classic adaptation didn't make the cut for some reason, but Aeschylus's The Libation Bearers, Sophocles's Electra, and Euripides's Electra were all on the program. Two and a half hours of matricidal delights! It was actually a brilliant idea; seeing them right next to each other, performed by the same group of actors (switching roles), made it so much more obvious just how different the three were. Seeing Sophocles right after Aeschylus was particularly remarkable; it made me realize for the first time that comparisons between Sophocles and Shakespeare really aren't far off the mark at all. I mean, Sophocles had characters! I was also impressed with the way Euripides managed to make fun of poor Aeschie while simultaneously presenting a realistic and sympathetic vision of Clytemnestra. Plus the remorse shown by his Electra and Orestes was very human and believable. Aeschylus—I mean, the language was powerful, and he presented it all very well, but honestly I don't feel his drama was as real as what came after him. The audience vote at the end of the show pretty much agreed with my own impressions: 7 for Aeschylus, 18 for Euripides, 34 for Sophocles. I have no idea how I remembered those numbers. Damn.

I saw this little cavalcade of whimsy with the inimitable Miss Sumana, who was in town partly to see just this, as her friend was playing Sophocles's Orestes. It was the first time I'd ever met her in person, and I must say that anyone who can hang out with Sumana should hang out with Sumana. (I can't even begin to imagine what the combination of Sumana and Sarah would have been like.) She kept on laughing at the plays—hey, what's funnier than Greek tragedy?—which the director was absolutely thrilled by. She said after the show that Sumana was "like a child on Christmas Day". (She was a pretty adorable director, really.) Sumana also cracked up at my totally lame Euripides joke, though, so maybe her sense of humor isn't as sharp as all that. She's lucky I didn't subject her to my Orestes pun. (I also had an Electra joke I was working on, built around the question "So is Electra cute?", but couldn't see where I was going with it. Maybe Pylades could ask Orestes, and the latter could say "Shockingly so!" I might be pushing my luck there.)

(Now, of course, I am listening to the Mixmaster. Can't you see what's going on? Clytemnestra's a bitch of a mom.)

wantonly posted by Martin Marks at 12:22 at night // five comments by:

Saturday the Sixteenth of June, Two Thousand and Seven

Consumers for Christ!

I heard music from Brazil in two different commercials yesterday. Michael Moore's SiCKO used the "Central Services/The Office" theme, which made sense; no real problem there. Rather weirder, though, was Visa using what was clearly Geoff Muldaur's recording of "Brazil". Uh, what?

surreptitiously posted by Martin Marks at 1:59 in the afternoon // comment? by:

Friday the Fifteenth of June, Two Thousand and Seven

Oh man I hate when I have a mental blog entry backlog.

I had a long and pleasant couple of days involving all sorts of fun familial bonding, including relationship-redefining experiences with both my sister and my quarter-brother1, the former taking the form of a four-hour long conversation, the latter the form of a discussion on the elemental structure of matter, the fundamental oneness of the Universe, and also that infinitely varied formula that is Scooby-Doo. (Watching it with him made me realize that man, Shaggy and Scooby were such chumps. I mean, they had nothing at all in common with the others—and certainly didn't have any desire to go around unmasking monsters all the time. They were only kept around because they were so damn easy to manipulate. It's sad, really. Mind you, I didn't tell him that.) I also had some good chattings with my Non-Biological Grandmother Equivalent, which is always pleasant when I don't feel overwhelmingly guilty about not doing it more often.

The long conversation with M. was great for many reasons. For one, because it proved that we have more to say to each other than what we say on the phone. (It's amazing how long two people can spend going through the manifold perturbations of the classic "what's up with you?/not much, you?") But it was also just a really good conversation, the kind I don't get enough of with my peers, those washed-up old farts, let alone with not-quite-14-year-old girls2. To be fair, it did start out as a not-quite-14-year-old conversation, centered around the many various parts of Jessica Biel's body which M. considers to be fundamentally unfair, but by the end it had gone through more transformations than a Mighty Morphin' Power Ranger (or did they only have one each?) and somehow wound up being a theological discussion. Man, I really do love good theological discussions. (That's why I stopped reading Monadology.)

In the course of the discussion, M. managed to do something that nobody else has ever quite managed to do to me; she threw a monkey wrench into my belief that evolutionism and faith, far from being diametrically opposed, are in fact entirely complementary. I was proposing a concept of God as a Creator who set the first life into motion but did not guide its evolution. An analogy, which I didn't think of then but later, would be an apple seed; you expect it to grow into an apple tree, but you don't know how many branches it'll have. A similar situation could be imagined when God created the first few strands of DNA, though in that case one might say than an omniscient God would know how many branches there would be, but wouldn't meddle. M. seemed to be fine with this concept, and didn't object to the idea of accepting it as a combination of (but not compromise between) creation and evolution3—except for one sticking point. She essentially pointed out that if one believes that humanity is special (which we both do; I'd earlier claimed that there was something of the divine within every human life) and particularly if one believes that humanity was specially created by God (which she firmly does and I'm considering), a tear opens up in my theory: God can't have taken such a hands-off approach to evolution as the one I was proposing and still been able to create humanity. She therefore saw the big problem with evolution as being in the single step from ape to man. It was a damn good point, and it actually kept me up late that night. I mean, I don't doubt that there are plenty of creationists out there who would agree with her, but I've never had a single one of them tear me down so elegantly as this girl who's still 13 till the end of July. Obviously my own faith in evolution isn't shattered or anything, but now I have to make significant changes to my Grand Unification Theory of the origins of life4.

There was also some great stuff in there on the Garden of Eden and the humanity of Jesus and the nature of free will, which, M. claimed, is the single greatest proof of God's love for us5. She may not always sound all that erudite in my blog comments, but our Lulu, man, she ain't no slouch. You should have heard the lecture (which she kindly related for me) she gave a black classmate of hers with a tendency to see racism in everything, after he claimed something along the lines of "Africans were the only people to suffer through slavery". Aw, man, it was scathing. Apparently the kid never called anything "racist" while she was in earshot for the rest of the year.

Notes:

I've decided that rather than subtract and be left with a non-brother, I'd multiply to get a quarter-brother. It doesn't make much sense, I know, but this is my family, remember.
Although honestly there aren't many not-quite-14-year-old girls who I stay up talking with until two in the morning, for obvious reasons, so maybe they're all good conversationalists and they just hide it really really well.
I should be clear that the discussion was not really about which of the two is right exactly. We accepted both as possible explanations, if not equal ones. This was more an attempt to determine whether the scientific one (which has the advantage of parsimony) could be squared with the belief in an unobservable Creator without sacrificing either way.
Actually, theoretical physics is a good analogy to make; you have quantum physics, and that's true, and you have general relativity, and that's true, but you can't put them together to get a theory of everything that makes any sense. That's sort of how I feel trying to wrestle together my understanding of science with my concept of God; just because I can't doesn't mean either is wrong exactly.
Of course, it might not be all that surprising that a teenager sees the granting of total independence as an act of incredible love, but it's still an excellent point.

abstemiously posted by Martin Marks at 10:53 in the evening // one comment by:

the old feller

Thursday the Fourteenth of June, Two Thousand and Seven

Sometimes I forget and I just leave it spinning for hours...

Wow. I just totally lost the Google Earth game. Which is the lamest game ever. See, you zoom to about 20 kilometers eye height, set the imaginary globe to spinning, and then you go off and do something else for a while. Then you come back, and if it's over land, you stop it and try to figure out where you are. (I swear I don't do this often or anything, but whenever I open Google Earth for something else—which isn't very often, since it, like Celestia, is far more sexy than useful for me—I end up playing a few rounds. I bet you do lamer stuff, you just don't blog about it.)

Anyway, I totally thought Kenitra, Morocco was in Southern California. I am duly embarassed. They do both have the same basic climate and all, and I saw several large dams which made me think "First World" (and specifically the American West), but that's no excuse. I knew full well California doesn't go right up into the mountains in quite that way. And the coastline was clearly way too straight. I suck. That's why I'm trying again... grr, stupid ocean, nobody needs you... oh, crap, boring plains. This might take a while.

For a real challenge, turn off the compass so you don't even know which way is north. Now that's entertainment.

cryptically posted by Martin Marks at 1:13 at night // six comments by:

Wednesday the Thirteenth of June, Two Thousand and Seven

Aieee! Tab!

Delicious Firefox extension of the week: IE Tab. Just... just so brilliant. Fortunately no longer as necessary as it once was, but if Netflix Instant Watching works with it, I'm going to take special joy in deleting the Internet Explorer shortcut from my desktop.

literally posted by Martin Marks at 9:38 in the evening // one comment by:

Martin

I swear this is what he said.

Me: Now, is it two blocks this way, or...
Guy whizzing past on bicycle: Don't talk to yourself.

playfully posted by Martin Marks at 8:41 in the evening // comment? by:

"Not just sex for me" would have been the better choice, dude.

Geek love is a perilous thing. Also, a book about carnies!

I have been known to worry about widows and orphans in my blog entries and comments, despite the fact that I know full well that they'll look completely different for people using different monitors, browsers, and fonts than me. Moreover, I have continued doing this even after realizing that my Live Entry Preview isn't exactly the same width as my actual blog entries, meaning that not even I see the same thing when I look at my blog page as when I write the entries. In fact, because the actual entries are slightly narrower than the LEP, all the work I put into creating perfect blocks of text causes more orphaned words than you'd expect if I didn't worry about it all. See, right now, I can't finish this paragraph because "all" was on its own line.

precipitously posted by Martin Marks at 7:44 in the morning // five comments by:

Mundane dreams are disappointing in a special kind of way.

Wait—so I totally dreamed the new blog Moss added to BLT? But—his name was Jim! He was an old friend of Trixie's! He graduated from Fe! I remember his blog template! He asked me to email him links to the various BLTs, and I found myself tempted to move the beta BLT (which has yet to break) to the URL of honor and move BLT Classic to a subdirectory. I was torn between the desire to avoid an abrupt change and the feeling that it would be silly to send him a link to the "test" BLT when I'm pretty sure it's already become the default for most people. Was my subconscious really just telling me it's time to consider promoting the test BLT? How retarded a dream-message is that?

abstemiously posted by Martin Marks at 7:24 in the morning // six comments by:

It's never too late for the glad eye!

Scary Go Round isn't usually "funny" so much as "charmingly whimsical", but today's strip broke me utterly.

peevishly posted by Martin Marks at 12:23 at night // comment? by:

I like it when they apologize.

Sometimes comment spam is so weird. Why would they think anybody would be particularly interested in a halfheartedly spoofed page on the University of Connecticut's policy regarding cars on campus? Surely any actual students who were curious would look it up on the school website rather than waiting until they came across a link in comment spam on my blog? I realize I'm being willfully obtuse about the purpose of comment spam, which is more about fooling search engines than it is about tricking humans into clicking on things, but that's just because being willfully obtuse is funnier.

needlessly posted by Martin Marks at 12:06 at night // comment? by:

Monday the Eleventh of June, Two Thousand and Seven

Apparently, not my former housemate.

Oh, hey, so who wants a blue and black houndstooth-checked two foot tall inflatable squirrel?

defiantly posted by Martin Marks at 10:19 in the evening // eight comments by:

I am absolutely certain my father will chime in on this thread.

I was watching Elizabeth I this evening, and I came to the decision that what I need is a Mirrenthon. But while The Queen is apparently very good and I'll get it Thursday probably, I can't seem to find anything much on Netflix from the earlier part of her career. (You know the part of her career I mean.) Even The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover is available only to save—and that's famous! (Well, infamous.)

gruffly posted by Martin Marks at 10:14 in the evening // four comments by:

Yes... a stomach upset...

Damn, BBC News, way to insinuate. "Don't mind us, we're not trying to imply anything, we're just mentioning random unconnected facts..."

extraneously posted by Martin Marks at 3:30 in the afternoon // two comments by:

Neil
patrick

It's all about the air incorporation.

I'd been craving scrambled eggs for some time, so I was quite thrilled to realize my mother inexplicably had 29 eggs in her fridge. Well, now she has 25! Ha ha! And I have had eggs made just the way I like them.

chimerically posted by Martin Marks at 2:31 in the afternoon // one comment by: