Pancacophony

The review is done, but the posting is not.

I was ranting to Mike NTPB about a month ago about the lunacy of the elections and how we have no access to anything real or substantial, how everything is filtered and it's all turned into a game of idiocy. How we've devolved from thinkers into soundbiters, and that attempts at grasping the situation truthfully are doomed to fail because the subtlety and level of engagement necessary to *really get it* are so beyond the attention span of the average American consuer. (Did I say consumer? I meant voter. Whoops). Can you see the steam pouring from my ears? Mike patiently listened to the diatribe but at some point broke down and just said, "Dude, you're bound to be disappointed."

So color me disappointed, not just w/r/t the body-pile that is modern politics, but as to these quasi-intellectual debates. Dawkins book is award winning, and he's praised (get out your irony signs!) as a god in intellectual circles. But that book was OBVIOUSLY not scientific. In the slightest! I will give it up to the clearly more accomplished and "successful" man - it's "well-written," whatever that means, researched and put together coherently. But it's painfully biased. The cart is before the proverbial horse - he wants to present a certain argument, and so he does. He can make all of his claims to evidence and such, but ultimately, you are not writing that UN-dispassionately unless you've got some pretty irrational emotions motivating the enterprise.

But you can't even fault him for that, because that' show you have to write in order to sell the book. And then it sells, but who's buying? The intro was full of caveats of "I don't mean to offend," but how can you adopt that tone and think that you're going to persuade anyone? And he says that his writing "is no more rude that restaurant critiques." Well, restaurant reviewers are jerks then! Plus restaurant critiques are being written to a religious following of said restaurant. When you rant at the reliheads, you're talking to biggest fans of the diner! You don't dissuade me from going to iHOP by telling me that rationally, the pancakes suck. I'll just say: NO THEY DON'T. QED, Mr. Scientist man.

And that's not even the point of this post. You only have to read reviews of Dawkins book for five seconds to get the sinking feeling that there ain't gonna be no consensus. Fifty people praise, fifty people dissect. Flaws are found, rebuttals are made. I find this argument flawed. I don't. You're an idiot. No I'm not. Here's why. Etc. It's ridiculous and stupefying, and pulling it back to the politics, the grand measuring stick is the masses. Really? Really? He who votes on America's next top model also decides the next leader of the free world. Wait, what's that? And he's basing his choice on fabricated notions that have little to nothing to do with the actual job that person will do in office. BWWWWWAAAAA WHAT???!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

But wait, there's more. Look above. The intellectuals and the masses do the same thing. They yell and scream and argue and pretend to have access to real things, man, real feeling or consequences or evidence or truth, but they don't. So now even your top professors at top universities engage in this rhetorical garbage. The intellectuals are the intellectual masses, too! We're all masses! Plus I'm American, so I'm fat. Masses.

I'm all in favor of fighting the good fight, but this is stupid, really, really stupid. Everybody shouting. All with their own biases. The people pretending to be unbiased being biased, knowing it but failing to admit it because biased but unbiased sells better. So this is me, biasedly telling you about strawberry fields.

And now: bath time!

Using His Delusion I and II

So after a morning of rain-soaked and all too brief Ultimate on Sunday, the reality of six games and no sleep set in some time during the afternoon, and I collapsed on the couch with some basketball on in the background. It's telling that I don't even remember who was playing. I just drifted in and out. But I figured I might as well do something productive, so I grabbed my iPod and clicked Resume on The God Delusion, the audiobook I've been listening to for the past two or so weeks. Actually, that account isn't entirely accurate. First I selected "Fast Speed" on the audiobook settings, so the last 30 minutes of that painfully arrogant condescending Dawkins voice would go by in 20 (and sound funny with reverb). Thus begins the unbiased review.

There's an inherent problem with this book: Dawkins lays claims (and, given his career, rightfully so) to the height of scientific principles, those of rationality, empirical evidence, and objectivity. The third component of that holy triumverate presents Dawkins's first problem. Dispassionate objectivity is the claimed essence of "science" at large, but many people will tell you what a false claim this is, that science, being a human endeavor, is subject to the same cultural and emotional biases that all constructs operating within a social sphere feature. I agree with this claim and point out that Dawkins himself provides evidence here - the anti-religious sentiment that drives the writing of this book is clear, and he makes no effort to hide it. For something that is supposed to be an objective look into the possibility of the existence of God, this work contains a slew of derogatory commentary aimed towards theologians, religious leaders, and the general religious public. The text is riddled with ad hominem arguments and repeatedly engages in semantic games (labeling reli as "abuse" and "evolutionary misfirings," etc.) that attempt to put religion, outside of whatever rational or irrational bases it may have, in a negative light. This is not to say that Dawkins's motivation for such attacks is not well-intended. I do believe that on a fundamental level, he finds religion to be a threat to secular society and perceives these dangers as real and worthy of combat. But the pretense that he is Captain Rational-Objective come to save the day is just that, a pretense, and his claim to "pure science" is a dubious one.

I also found his attempts to bring religion into the secular sphere to be disingenuous in tone if not in actual content. The introduction of the book contains an extended riff of, essentially, "I don't understand why religion gets such a protected, exalted status within our culture. Everything else is subject to criticism; what makes religion so special?" I would never claim that religion should not be subject to criticism. I would also not, however, pretend that I don't understand why its defenders are so ardent in their efforts to keep it out of the realm of the questionable. "Religion" - and I have an entire other set of thoughts about the lunacy of reducing all of history's spiritual beliefs to this uberlump category - is, by nature, a set of statements about the end-all be all, the highest of human concerns and stuff of the utmost import. Its tenets are de facto a tautological statement on what it is to be holy. People's SOULS are at stake, for all of eternity. When such a construct is in place and believed - if one in fact considers the stakes to be at their highest imaginable value - AND you believe that human concepts such as rationality are by definition beneath these holy concepts - then it is not surprising at all that you do not want the highest of the high questioned by this lower endeavor. Again, not claiming that this is any way "right" or "rational," just that the reasoning behind it is clear: questioning the religion carries too high a price.

So when Dawkins frames the entire work with this "I don't get it" frame of incredulity as to why anyone would want to maintain a belief set that sits outside the realm of questioning, I have an extraordinarily hard time taking the following arguments seriously. Dawkins himself is making a sort of holy appeal to rationality and logical positivism / empiricism as the highest of highs. I would not equate this with "faith" of the same degree that most religions require, but it is an appeal to a system that ultimately cannot prove its own validity. And he is entitled to find this okay and admit that he is being pragmatic, that his scientific empirical system is the best predictor thus far discovered and that he chooses to adhere to this system not based on its access to big T truth but more based on its effective outcomes as a predictor. And that would be fine, but at no point does he do this; he repeatedly maintains a stance of "here I am sitting with access to Truth, and you continue to demand that your religion be beyond questioning; I don't get it." Roughly translated and reduced, Dawkins is saying he is rational and the religions are irrational, and then he is questioning why the irrational systems are not subject to his rational inquiry. I don't believe for a moment that Dawkins can't see this aspect to the debate, that he and the religious are operating in different modes. I think he is choosing to ignore this obvious circumstance in deference to a construction that frames it as "here I am being *smart* and there you are being *stupid*. As such, the entire argument becomes an attack, and not a "let's step back and consider what is occurring here" investigation.

If "irrational" did not have its "crazy" and "stupid" connotations, I feel that it would be okay to label religion as an irrational enterprise. Simply put, faith entails irrationality by its very "belief without evidence" requirement. So again, it's completely legitimate for Dawkins to question religion, but he should do so in a matter that recognizes the non-overlapping areas of the two systems of thought. Dawkins faults in his auto-claim that rational thought / empiricism should govern all. He is hard pressed and really makes no effort to support this claim. He even alludes to aspects of human life - sexuality, love, art, poetry - that clearly have huge irrational components and holds them up as worthy objects of pursuit in the place of religion. To me, that smacks of an incoherent rational system that claims one set of irrational beliefs and values is okay and worthy while another is not. What is the basis for the validity of art - why is art "real" and religion "a misfiring?" Is the value of everything reduced to its Darwinian attributes? I don't think Dawkins would claim this or the slippery nihilism path it would entail, but I do think he arbitrarily embraces some forms or irrationality while claiming the rational science pulpit. And I believe he is doing so knowingly, so I find it hard to read this as an honest assessment. He's arguing for a point, not seeking out pure objective evidence, and consequently, he's shading his arguments in a manner akin to the theologians he so clearly despises.

Dawkins defense, of course, works when he's on his home court. Where Dawkins should have focused the efforts of this book is on the fact that it is where religion tries to step into the empirical world that it is clearly flawed. If Dawkins had limited his commentary to "here is a rational / empirical account of why biblical claims to the way the universe operates are wrong," he would have been completely in his proper domain. These aspects of the book are compelling. Even if they are a rehashed account of what scientists have been saying for years, they are a very clear and concise account of scientific evidence for evolutionary theory as an explanation for the universe we see today. I will employ some Dawkinsian rhetoric here and say that it should be clear that using the bible as a pragmatic tool or as a literal, historical account of the real world is patently ludicrous - the earth is not only 6000 years old, Noah did not place two of every species in a boat, there was no Roman census where everyone had to travel back to the place of a 1000 years dead ancestor's birth. Those claims are just inaccurate and rather preposterous - I am not even delving into the questionability of miracles and virgin births and the like, I am just saying that rationally and historically, there are inaccuracies in the bible. Dawkins account of the material world, and his ability to explain the features of it using scientific theory, are not flawed in the slightest. RD's science is patently better at the physical explanation game. He also presents the usual bevy of classical "rational" arguments for the existence of God and dissects them accordingly. His presentation and subsequent refutation of the arguments are fairly rudimentary, but he effectively demonstrates that on the physical, rational level, the god traditionally purported by the major religions is not rationally acceptable.

And he should have stopped there, because really, if the point is to claim that reli has deleterious effects and it is clearly wrong, then "mission accomplished." He presents effective evidence for why the religions and the concept of god as traditionally understood could not really be literally correct. But Dawkins takes this victory, trades it in and goes for the "there is no god" kill. His central argument is something he calls the "Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit," which you can read over at Wikipedia if you like. Here is his central argument:

1. One of the greatest challenges to the human intellect, over the centuries, has been to explain how the complex, improbable appearance of design in the universe arises.
2. The natural temptation is to attribute the appearance of design to actual design itself. In the case of a man-made artefact such as a watch, the designer really was an intelligent engineer. It is tempting to apply the same logic to an eye or a wing, a spider or a person.
3. The temptation is a false one, because the designer hypothesis immediately raises the larger problem of who designed the designer. The whole problem we started out with was the problem of explaining statistical improbability. It is obviously no solution to postulate something even more improbable. We need a "crane" not a "skyhook," for only a crane can do the business of working up gradually and plausibly from simplicity to otherwise improbable complexity.
4. The most ingenious and powerful crane so far discovered is Darwinian evolution by natural selection. Darwin and his successors have shown how living creatures, with their spectacular statistical improbability and appearance of design, have evolved by slow, gradual degrees from simple beginnings. We can now safely say that the illusion of design in living creatures is just that – an illusion.
5. We don't yet have an equivalent crane for physics. Some kind of multiverse theory could in principle do for physics the same explanatory work as Darwinism does for biology. This kind of explanation is superficially less satisfying than the biological version of Darwinism, because it makes heavier demands on luck. But the anthropic principle entitles us to postulate far more luck than our limited human intuition is comfortable with.
6. We should not give up hope of a better crane arising in physics, something as powerful as Darwinism is for biology. But even in the absence of a strongly satisfying crane to match the biological one, the relatively weak cranes we have at present are, when abetted by the anthropic principle, self-evidently better than the self-defeating skyhook hypothesis of an intelligent designer.

Without delving into the specifics too much, the big flaw I find with this reasoning is hidden in step three. It is true that physically, we find that things created either have a complex designer or that have evolved up from simple beginnings. But the key word there is "physically." The concept of "God" is hardly limited to one of a physical being; if anything, one would be inclined
to call it a spiritual entity. So applying our rational, empirical observations we have made about the material world to an immaterial entity is something of a sleight of hand. The philosophy version of this complaint is that Dawkins is implicitly assuming that everything in the universe is physical - he is assuming materialism. But an assumption that everything is physical entails the assumption that spiritual things do not exist, and therefore God does not exist. So his Darwinian, probability based argument against the existence of God is a big fat philo 101 example of

BEGGING THE QUESTION!!!

And this time, it's the right application of that phrase, because the initial assumptions entail the very thing you are trying to prove. Dawkins has essentially only shown that God is not a mere physical entity, to which your average theologian would probably respond, "Duh."

Dawkins then goes on for several hours (or pages, in the traditional sense) acting as though his argument is QED unstoppable and ranting about the particular aspects of religion he dislikes, conveniently picking his examples and misinterpreting arguments at his leisure. He rather inhumanly dismisses sexual abuse in one section (weirdly telling how he was once fondled by a priest but "it was no big deal") and claims that the psychological abuse done by the church is far worse. (However true that thought is or that he thinks it may be, he really could have been more tasteful in the presentation of the idea). He gives an extended "PC language" type diatribe against calling children "a Christian child or a Jewish child," equating this with insensitive language about race. He thinks it's preposterous that a child is capable of formulating his own thoughts about the nature of the world so why should we label him thusly, again implicitly (and erroneously) assuming that the adoption of religion is a rational process and that these labels are something more than cultural markers - he says we would never call a child a "Marxist child" or the like. (Is he really ignorant of the cultural distinction here, that a religious label like Catholic child means "raised in a Catholic community/family" whereas Marxist, Marxism being a rational social theory, means "rationally believes in the tenets of Marxism?"Again, he is basely missing the point that religion is not a rational entity, so equating it with rational social theories is invalid). In another section, he argues against atheism as permissive of immoral acts by claiming that "no one has ever done anything evil in the name of atheism," seemingly missing point that it is not "in the name of atheism," that such acts would be committed, but in the amoral context that atheism allegedly promotes. As seems typical in my limited reading of Dawkins, he concludes by overstepping his bounds and conjecturing on the deeper meanings of what science has revealed to us. He makes the comments about art and poetry mentioned above without indicating their relationship to "rational thought," and even has the gall to wax poetic about how, on some level, we don't even realize what we are capable or incapable of imagining about the workings of the universe. Some have pointed out that this kind of contemplation, one would think, would RATIONALLY cause one to be cautious and fairly agnostic about the definitive nature of present scientific theories, like, hmmmm, maybe, absolute statements re: God's existence.

It should be clear that I did not enjoy this book and found it to be a failure on many levels. The opinionated writing and obvious slanted argument the author was trying to make lent itself to a very superficial account of the problem at hand. Dawkins dismisses the work of theologians and philosophers and social theorists - especially continental philosophers, grrrr - as though they were peons. (His one paragraph dismissal of semantic relativism - he essentially made the "at the end of the day, if you are accused of murder, you will use conventional meaning to explain your alibi" argument - was particularly egregious because it not only attempted to use humor as an illogical appeal, but it also missed the obvious point that his "at the end of the day" scenario is a particular social context, so of course you would use the appropriate meaning in that context). Mr. Dawkins, "Scientist," behaved nothing like one, only reinforcing notions that the objectivity of science is a smoke and mirrors operation. Rationality, whether he likes it or not, is a social construct subject to the same deconstruction as any social construct, and while he has some good things to say about his own jurisdiction of the physical and material world, his attempts to expand this into The World were flimsily executed. He successfully, as countless others have already done, presents reasons as to why religions are not rationally coherent systems of thought, but the arrogance and audacity with which he tries to extend this to a definitive statement about the nature of the universe is severely flawed and dishonest. If you want to claim the grandness of science - a system with its own flawed history and history of inflicting undue suffering, by the way - you should at least attempt to maintain the objectivity and even presentation that the discipline purports to require. Dawkins failed in that entirely.

Still... Got It?

I had already watched his silky lefty backhand huck go up a time or two in the game. So when I found myself in the middle of the open field with a lot of space and a one on one matchup, I had predicted the sequence ahead of time - big fake downfield, hoping to drag me with him, then coming back upfield to the disc so he could get it and be the guy to send it deep. So I knew that a little bit, and he was a reasonably quick guy, but not death-defying fast like some out here. So when he took off deep - all 6'3" of him - I ran while looking at his legs, waiting for the plant and come back. And it came, so I planted, too. He headed back toward the thrower, but I pursued about a yard behind him, in full bore sprint mode, guessing that the in-cut was his only option left. So the throw goes up, about shoulder high, and I put everything into it and catchup to him and lay out, full horizontal, four feat above the earth and bam right in front of his outstretched arms get the crazy horizontal flying-in-the-air layout D. WAHOO! The general response is "@#$%," and while he's staring at his hands or whatever, I get up off the ground and sprint toward the endzone. Someone picks it up, tosses it to another teammate, and then the deep flick goes up, and my guy is trying to catch up but his brief soliloquy and standing there has cost him, and I catch the score. Ya. Double happiness.

It's been a long while since I've legitimately beat a competitive, tournament player back to a disc for a layout D. So pardon the self-congratulatory tone of the above. But with the surgeries and injuries and such, it's nice, especially when entering one's 31st year, so remember what it feels like to do something relatively athletically sweet.

I played with a pickup team called "Immaculate Goat" at New Year's Fest in Tempe this weekend and had a spectacular time. A few of the guys were holdovers from the Velvet Jones team in December and some other guys whom I've played with in various pickup games around Phoenix. There are some good pics from Saturday afternoon here. We essentially held seed, coming in second in our pool and winning the crossover game to head to the quarter finals. The day started with a 13-0 game against a high school team who had essentially no idea what they were doing; I think we turned it over once. Yowsers. We scrimmaged with them afterwards and tried to point out some strategy type things; always good to pass it on. Our second game was against a traveling team from Mexico City; very high-spirited, and very aggressive and energetic. There are some big time cultural differences in sports behavior, the most glaring of which is that the Mexican team talks and shouts and cheers and curses (puta! cabron! pendejo! etc.) ALL GAME LONG. Sweet game which we won; really great bunch of dudes who hung out after the game despite language differences and all that. They ended up battling their way into the top bracket by beating ASU later int eh day, so that was cool.

We then ran into a masters team from Tucson who more or less handed it to us; just had some very, very flowy offense that we never got around to defending. Barf. So 2-1 in pool play, then we faced UCSD B in the crossover game and walked away with it easily. Our quarterfinals game (where the afore-detailed nyetian moment of glory occurred) was against a Notre Dame alumni team who practiced some very questionable Christian principles on foul calls w/r/t the whole "thou shalt not bear false witness" concept. Argh. This was our fifth game of the day, and just before half, when we were only down 7-5, suddenly our entire team cramped up, got injured, etc. The ND team had about 12 subs and eventually outran us to win something like 15-10. Oh, well.

(Quick interlude - we had birthday dinner with the D&C Saturday night. I had a very involved time getting to their house to shower before dinner - I got stuck on I10 behind Monster Truck Rally AND Disney on ice traffic (i mean, really, wow) and showed up to dinner about an hour late. Good italian food for supper, a lot of sitting around the restaurant and chatting; I was pretty out of it what with the several miles i had sprinted over the course of the day. Hung in there and went back to DC's house for a bit and SUCKED it UP at Guitar Hero - I was terrible on a Sex Pistols song, and only mildly redeemed myself on Welcome to the Jungle before getting annihilated by Muse's Knights of Cydonia. DC, it should be mentioned, have quite obviously been practicing A LOT. We headed home about 12, when I started my laundry because i needed my jersey for the Sunday games. And then I woke up at 6 to start the dryer so I could head out at 7:15 for the fields).

And on Sunday - no one was there. Our game was supposed to start at nine, but I was the first Goat to show up, and the other team had one guy. So we stood around waiting. Did I mention it was fifty degrees and POURING RAIN? Eventually everyone rolled in and we played a stupid game to eleven against a team from LA - we won, huzzah - but then our entire team crapped out. Turns out we would have been playing the team from Mexico again, so we just let the team from LA take our place. So then it was about 11 o'clock and I headed home.

It is, let me tell you, SO much fun to drive 45 minutes down to the fields, warm up just enough to get the ridiculous amounts of soreness out of your legs / arms / back /body, and then only play one game. So that sucked. But the tourney overall was fun, and we went 4-2 and got the sensation of winning our last game. Very fun bunch of dudes on the Immaculate Goat - check that above picture link for the sweet logo on the front of our jerseys - and I definitely look forward to playing more NYF's with them in the coming years.

Rock Back

In case you're not an ardent reader of the comments on this log on the web, or if you're not very observant re: the links on the right, I had a weird bit of confluence last week. I was goofing on the guitar while sitting on the couch and flipping channels between the Spurs game and a "ooh, racism" episode of Law & Order. Somewhere during the past month or so I was putting all of my album covers in iTunes, and when I came across the legendary Suckapunch LP "Young and Disturbed in America," I could not find the cover art via iTunes, the internet of otherwise. Directly behind me at this moment there is a five foot tall stack of cardboard boxes containing my real, physical CD collection, and the album is surely in there somewhere. But, being lazy, I googled classic friend Chris Alonzo and came up with his old website from a Brooklyn-based theatre company. And as a toss-off, I linked to it in this olde logge-otw.

Somewhere in the midst of watching a Spurs game, playing guitar, and occasionally grabbing glimpses of grimy NYC, I got a comment from the man himself! Seems he has some kind of ultra-paranoid image-protecting and/or ultra-self-involved (I kid, I kid) software that scans the internets for mentions of his name. Either this or he self-googles an awful lot. Regardless, this is AWESOME, because I got back in touch with the man-myth-legend, original friend from my upbringing on the Episcopal streets of San Antonio and esteemed member of the dated-Courtney Peese-triumverate, Chris!

Chris's impact on the nyetian epic is without measure. In fact, there is a high degree of danger that this could devolve into a remember-when diatribe of sentiment. So I'll try to dodge that angle. But Chris was the impetus for a lot, not the least of which is my guitar-attempts at rockstar wankery - he's the original dude, taught me the intro to "One" and nirvana riffs and all that other juicy alterna-clunkery to which the neighbors were treated many a concert. A self-taught, non-music-reading guitar virtuoso. An artist with a spirit-level connection to the emotional content of existence. In a way, Chris is raw punk emotion embodied, and you wouldn't hesitate to call him a predictor of emo were it not for the wussy gloss sheen that genre has assimilated. So, in the reductionist version of the tale, if Mike is the optimist and heartfelt life-venturer to balance out my inner skeptical misanthrope, Chris is the heart to balance my head.

So, it's awesome to hear from him again. Stupid how the connections get lost, eh? This may be overly-biased Scottsdale-oriented thinking, but the authentic soulsters are few and far between, I've found. And that may sound pessimistic, but it's sort of a little empirical finding I've made. Cccccccchris, though, is the original and authentically intact Chris. Not to say he hasn't changed or anything equally cliche, but just that it's good to hear a true source. Check his blog, or pics from his wedding. Buy his album. Rock out! And keep those that balance your particular worldview in at least your peripheral vision, lest you get sucked into the tunnel that is you.

The Quote of Sunday Night

"He who is tired of Weird Al is tired of life."

Homer Simpson

Stuck In My Head

Artist : Woodale
Title : Keep Driving
Album : Finish What You Start

We'll take the long roads
Off into the world where no one goes
We'll pick the right songs
Cause I believe these roads were meant for us

Keep driving till there's no where left to run
Can't help but think there's something there for us
Keep driving away
Keep driving away

We'll take the slow roads
Deep into the woods where no one goes
We'll pick the slow songs
Cause I believe these roads were made for us

Keep driving till there's no where left to run
Can't help but think there's something there for us
Keep driving away
Keep driving away

With a long way from
Where we first saw
There's too much here
The world can't say we're wrong
And even when the roads begin to disappear
We won't forget what brought us here, no
We'll still go

We'll take the long roads
Off until the world where no one knows
We'll pick the long songs
Cause I believe these roads were made for us

Keep driving till there's no where left to run
Can't help but think there's something there for us
Keep driving away

Cause i believe these roads were made for us
Keep driving till theres no where left to run
Can't help but think there's something there for us
Keep driving away
Keep driving away
Keep driving away
Keep driving away


Just remember, what we can do today is keep driving!!!

BlahblahblahLinkBlahBlah

An online Roland 909 Drum Machine. Sweet.
Videos of a guy playing classic rock classically. On a piano.
A pretty solid research-esque paper on internet phenomena.
I enjoyed this photoshop contest matching normal movies with sci-fi themes.
Cool example of an animation style called machinima where you use a video game engine to create art.
Another aging art project.
Some interesting Stan Lee comic book inspired art.
A fascinating little expose on the capitalist / commodity dynamics of the SNsite Facebook.
The Sports Guy's collection of youtube videos.
Speaking of SG, his breakdown of the Karate Kid Trilogy is solid.
A fun little internet game.
Video Break:

Dope! And this is a crazy video about three guys who filmed the opening sequence for Saving Private Ryan using only themselves, some rudimentary special effects, and some schwank editing equipment.
Try a fun little physics game.
Or a rubix kinda game.
Or an AWESOME mouse click game. The concept here is fantastic.
RS article on the death of HiFi.
Time's latest entry in the you have got to be kidding me sweepstakes.
My friend Ian is on the internets.
Whatever happened to the amazing Chris Alonzo?
Debunked medical myths.
Two months late, but here's an Advent Calendar of online games.

That's about it.

moar funny pictures

Or so you thought: San Diego, Pt. 7

Slide show time. The pups survive the trip back and looked their usual adorable selves in the back seat.

The bulk of the trip through CA was rainy and crappy, but at least it made for some uber spooky Roger Waters Windmills:

And cool clouds on the plains shots:

Eventually it cleared up:

Which gave us a nice view of our impenetrable border fence:

Yowsers. The rest of the trip consisted of the sort of landscape where Snoopy's brother Spike would've felt at home:

All in all, a fantastic weekend. Props to the Beck, as always. We pulled into the house about 7 or 8 and yelled to the cabbie "Yo homes, smell ya later." Just in time for an episode of the new Terminator series which stars River and is thereby inherently awesome.

(Just to avoid another post, we headed back to work on Tuesday, but I was fortunate enough to get invited to play in a scrimmage with Sprawl, the local Men's team, last night. We were a ragtag bunch of players from a bunch of different teams that will be playing in New Year's Fest this weekend - it was great to be back on the field after about a week and a half off; I even scored a couple of goals, played some defense, threw some, wahoo. Good times, and I am looking forward to a schwank weekend).

The Thrilling Conclusion: San Diego, Pt. 6

All good things must come to an end, but we weren't about to let San Diego go without grasping for at least one more culinary experience. We consulted our iPMM handbook for birthday celebration and noted that two weeks is the appropriate amount of time for celebration of birthdays divisible by two, three and five, so we decided to exit San Diego via a brunch spot up in the Pacific Beach / Mission Bay area. (By the way, hey San Diego: Ocean Beach? Pacific Beach? Who hit you guys with the clever stick?). The place was called "The Mission" and was pretty much an exact duplicate of Centre Street Cafe, west coast style, only a little bigger and you waited outside in balmy 55 degree weather instead of 25 degree weather. Nice! We left the pups in the car during breakfast, but we could see them from our table, so we figured that as long as we didn't see the Prius turn into one of those cartoon cat fight dust clouds we were okay. The dogs were fine, and Sparkle protected the Prius with her loudest, scariest barks; many a Californian now has all kinds of pathological enviro-friendly car / impish monster psychological associations. So it goes. We settled in and ordered coffee and french toast / pancake breakfasts. The place had a great vibe, and th ewalls were decorated with paintings by Grant Pecoff; I particularly liked this one. At some point, I decided that birthday breakfasts require milkshakes, so I ordered a Mocha Chip shake. Divine. Check it out:

I call that photo "Coveting." Unbelievably good, and Beck nailed it when she said it tasted like "Chocolate Satin with Cool Whip." Good times. And then our breakfast came, and it, too, was overwhelmingly good. If you go to San Diego, make The Mission a priority. Sooooo good, and we sadly left full of brunchy goodness. We got back to the car, and apparently Wrigley had called shotgun:

This cracked me up, so of course I tried to take another pic and instead ended up with another entry for "Coolest Pic Ever, Surrealist Genre:"

Take special note of the mocha chip to go shake in the bottom right of the frame. Seems someone's coveting turned to possession. As we started to say goodbye to San Diego, We realized that our timing was poor; if we left now, we would be hitting Phoenix at more or less exactly 5:30. And since Arizona apparently doesn't observe MLKJr. Day - ? - this would put us in the teeth of sprawly Phoenix rush hour, no good. So we decided to kill some time with more sightseeing up the beaches. We drove all around the twisty neighborhoods and eventually wound our way up to Torrey Pines State Beach near UC San Diego. Excellent - beautiful cliffside beaches without the annoying real estate. The cliffs were quite tall; here's shot straight down the side:

And here's a collection of ocean views on this rainy day:


If you look extraordinarily carefully at the bottom left picture, you can see the dorsal fin of a dolphin pretty much in the middle of the frame. We saw that guy leaping out of the water in the normal exuberant dolphin fashion. Pretty cool, even if view from half a mile away. The dogs eventually got tired of the misty rain, so we piled back in around 2 o'clock arizona time and prepared for the long trip home.

My blog has turned into a boring vacation slide show: San Diego, Pt. 5

So the bar experience was crazy. There were approximately two other Pats fans in attendance, and we all noted how much the Chargers fans were grasping at small accomplishments. The bar ERUPTED every time the Chargers completed a pass or the Pats didn't. It was nutty. A couple of snaps of the general atmosphere:

As you can see, we were lucky enough to sit behind Phillip Rivers, which is cool. (Actually, that was a VERY drunk Irish guy who, unsurprisingly and fitting the stereotype nicely, no one could understand). The Chargers kept it close, but the Pats, despite craptitude by Brady, ran away with it. Huzzah, Super Bowl. Beck and I snapped this celebratory photo-booth-esque series:

The last one is actually quite nice. Beck went to grab some food after the game; I ran back to the hotel room to take the dogs o-u-t. When I got there, Sparkle greeted me with her t-shirt in her mouth. Woah! She managed to take the shirt off somehow, lack of thumbs be damned. I was thoroughly impressed. After taking the dogs out for sweet relief, I met back up with beck on the beach for sushi and pizza. Que romantica! We had our lunch, then headed back to the room for more scrabble and the unfortunate loss by the Packers. Bwah.

After another sunset stroll with the pups, Beck and I walked to a local wineshop/bistro for a delicious dinner. The place had a cool concept - you pick out your own wine from their storehouse, and they serve it to you with dinner - you essentially get the wine at cost but get to have it served to you for a $5 uncorking fee. Yummy stuff. Our waiter was sent by John Connor from the future, though, so that was somewhat strange. Still, all in all another grand evening, and a solid birthday completed.

The next morning, Beck and I eschewed a morning jog on the beach (have you noticed a pattern here?) for a leisurely stroll with the dynamic dogs. The sky was threatening, but we had a nice time on the beach with the dogs anyhoo:


And now, with digital video clarity, visual proof that my dogs are scared of the ocean... and that they secretly want to soak Beck!

Notice Beck's dubious claim at the end: "I almost died." i feel I have been unfairly chastised in the past when using this exact phrase w/r/t falling off of Camelback Mountain. I humbly submit that if "almost got wet" equates with almost dying, then "almost tumbled off a cliff" should also qualify. Just saying.

We checked out around 10 and said goodbye to Ocean Beach. Beck had read about an excellent, Centre Street Cafe style diner called "The Mission" a little bit north of us, so we grabbed all of our canines and other possessions and headed up there. TBC.

Crazy Seal Yoga: San Diego, Pt. 4

As Beck and I left the restaurant, we saw all kinds of cool rock formations along the beach, like these:


And this particularly nice vertical shot:

Beck then pointed off in the distance at the mysteriously shaped rocks:

Those are the rocks, up in the upper left hand corner on that little beach. Only they are a sort of moving variety of rocks. Huh? We move up for a closer look:

They're not rocks! They're seals! Crazy. The seals are beaching after doing some deep-sea diving and fishing; the whole exercise strongly resembles some odd yoga. Here are a few pics:


There was some seriously weird inner peace being realized here, too. Check out this closeup of the lower right hand pic. Can you do this?

No, no you can't. After our fair share of seal-gawking, we got back in the car and drove back down to the cleverly named Ocean Beach to take in the game. We were in the heart of Charger country; the streets were lined with powder blue. Taking in another step of perfection in the seat of enemy territory: exciting. We parked the prius in the neighborhood and rambled over to a pretty nice sports bar...