160 posts tagged “qotd”

What's the closest thing you have to a time machine?
Submitted by Verisimilitude.

I'm not sure if I understand the question correctly, but I guess my son, since he has reintroduced me to the wonders the world holds when your mind has youthful curiosity.  I mean, to take an example, I learned why the sky is blue way back in elementary school, right?  And at the time, I found it wonderful, that little molecules could conspire so to produce something that we can see and call beautiful--not just the blue, but also the rainbows and the sunsets and clouds and all of it.  Somewhere along the way, though, I started taking it for granted.  I guess I can only marvel at molecules for so long.

Now, I get to teach him about it, and I am once again finding myself smitten with awe and wonder at the careless, incessant beauty of the world.  I say "careless" because it's not as if the molecules of the world have really set out to make beauty, though perhaps we are made in some way to see the things they make as beautiful.

Seeing things with him again and watching him thrill at the deliciousness of the world especially as he comes to understand reminds me of a time when I had just explained--oh, I don't know, let's say I had just explained why the sky is blue to a friend.  And she asked if it didn't seem less beautiful and romantic or something once you understood.  I told her I thought it was more gorgeous because it wasn't intentional.  If we assume a god to be omnipotent and intentional, then it's not a miracle that beauty exists; it would be simple enough to just make a rainbow if you were God.  If, on the other hand, it's just a fortuitous alignment of raindrops and sunlight that are acting with no intent to create something at all, that's a fucking miracle.  That's something worth celebrating.

And, thanks to my son, I'm remembering how much I loved it all the first time around.  I can't wait to build a mock volcano with, like, dry ice and shit.  Woo!

What is the big news story in your area today and how does this news impact your life?

Not a lot of news happens around here.  There is the weather, an eternal source of wonderment and consternation.  The big story is that it's dry--DAMN dry--and warm-to-hot.  This leads to the related story that the Forest Service is about two steps away from closing the forests.  You know why they have to close the forests when it's this dry?  Because idiots go to dry forests and start fires, fires that can rage on for days or even weeks, consuming thousands and thousands of acres.  Sure, fire is a natural and rejuvenating phenomenon for the forest.  And when the fire mows down people's homes, the Forest Service could just sit back and let the "natural" fire started by some dickweed with a can of Sterno burn, baby, burn.  Except that then they would get sued.  Because this is America.  In consequence, everyone is now racing to get in their winter's supply of firewood.  This flurry of wood-cutting could actually be helpful if a fire should start, because you take the dead wood that's lying around as firewood, not the living trees.  Dead wood is just fuel for those fires, although in this kind of dryness, the living trees won't fare much better. 

Anyway, getting extremely local, the big news is that this community is finally starting its own farmer's market and community store (separate entities, but related).  Woo!  The Economic Development Committee has shown some progress at last! 

And, um.  That's about all the news around here.  It's either boring or great, depending on how you look at it.

Oh, but a while back we did have a big story.  A letter went out to everyone in town claiming that one of the county commissioners had done things the cemetery that would shock us!  Naturally, my curiosity was piqued.  I thought for sure we had caught a necrophiliac, or at the very least a graverobber, in our midst.  No.  It was all very anticlimactic:  He was putting gravel in the graves instead of soil or some damn fool thing.  So, like grass and flowers wouldn't grow on the graves.  Still, while we were all less than shocked, at least it gave us something to make chit-chat about.

Must...keep...making...chit-chat.

Show us a music video that tells a great story.
Submitted by notreallylois.

 

Well, this one is the nouveau classique:

This one amuses me:

Blake does a lot of these, some of which are arguably better songs.  Fer instance:

Or this one, a song I like a lot (though I find the video mediocre):

Then again, country music is kind of full of story songs, and it makes sense that a lot of the videos are also stories. 

If you could leave notes for the future, what message would you have left in the past for today?
Submitted by Nameless.

Right now, you have a fun and active social life.  Right now, you think nothing of spending 10,000 yen on a night at your favorite izakaya or flying off to Malaysia.  Right now, you have no responsbilities or real worries.  Back here in the past, you are having a lot of fun and living big. 

And the future/present me would write back:  Yep, I remember.  And I still wouldn't go back to that if it meant losing this.

What is the most annoying stereotype people say about the country or place where you're from?

About New Mexico:  "Oh, do you need a passport to come to the U.S., then?  Wow, you speak really good English!"  And so forth.  One of my friends from NM went to Chicago and someone actually asked her if her family followed the buffalo.  She was only in 4th grade at the time, and she was totally confused.  We don't even have buffalo in NM, let alone follow them.  We actually shop at supermarkets there, like most Americans.  Because we are Americans.  It gets so bad at times that one of NM's senators had the US Congress pass some resolution to make a special "New Mexico is a State!" Day.  I think it's in June.  We celebrate it by kicking up our feet with a nice cold margarita and arguing the finer points of living in teepees.  (Just as an aside, the native people of New Mexico do not and never did live in teepees.  Just so we're clear.)

About Arkansas:  Oh, all the ones about the South.  Yes, we're all members of the KKK.  We all used to own slaves and wish we still did.  We all marry our siblings when we're still teenagers.  Etc.  Pick your stereotype.  At least the stereotypes about New Mexico are stupid but essentially harmless.  The stereotypes that let all non-Southerners dismiss people on intellectual, emotional, and moral levels--those are harmful stereotypes.  My dad used to pick up on it when someone had the idea that anyone with a Southern accent was a half-wit bigot and play up his accent, making it thicker and thicker, until the crucial moment when he would demonstrate that he was actually smarter than they were (and not a bigot, btw). 

About rural America:  These are quite similar to the ones about the South.  Yeah, none of us out here care about the environment the way you incredibly superior urbanites do.  We are also bigots.  We blindly follow the words of our church leaders, because we are very stupid.  We vote exclusively Republican, for the same reason.  We carry guns and drive trucks because we either have penis envy (women) or are concerned that we have small penises (men), and not because they are useful tools at all.  We are hateful and spiteful and all up in your business all the time about every little thing.  Also, apparently urbanites don't gossip, because I hear that a lot, that small-town people gossip.  OK.  You get the idea.  It's all ridiculous and stupid and can be harmful, because, again, it allows urban people to totally dismiss rural people on intellectual, emotional, and moral levels.  Don't think that's true?  Oh, well, go read "Urban Archipelago" and see what I mean.  Yeah, rural people can read, actually. 

About America, in general:  I think we all know these ones, too.  I used to make my ESL students, at the end of their second semester in American university, write an essay that gave some of the stereotypes that they had of America and whether or not they had found those to be true during their stay here.  Those essays were quite illuminating.  Of course, many of them were along the lines of, "I thought all the women would look like [pick a movie star--Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan came up the most often], but actually some American women are really ugly."  And the Russians all seem to have come to the US with the impression that Americans are fat and lazy and then found out that, actually, people here are very "sportif."  Heee.  Apparently some of my Russian students speak French (also, most of the Russians had very definite opinions about American drinking--we either drank too much or not enough or just in the wrong way, but our alcohol habits came up a lot in the Russian papers). 

But a lot of them were along the lines of "Americans don't really care about anything" or "In America, everyone is equal" or "In America, there is no rigid hierarchy" and overall they found all of those to be untrue.  My Japanese students in particular didn't know how to handle the fact that the US has a surface equality--we call professors by their first names, for example--but it's only on the surface.  Japanese students tended to either keep Japanese-ish formality in their interactions with others, which made it hard for them to make friends and made their professors uncomfortable, or they went way too far and took the surface equalities for fact.  One thing no student ever wrote but that I basically inferred from the sum of their papers is that they think that American culture either does not exist or exists only on the surface.  Europeans and Asians alike are guilty of this.  They all think that since America is "young" compared to their cultures and also has a very superficial superficiality to it, that there is nothing behind it, no substance or depth.  It's an attitude that I've ridiculed before, but it's one that even some Americans unthinkingly hold, especially ones who are critical of the nation of their birth.  But it's patently incorrect.  American culture certainly has roots in Europe, especially the Enlightenment, but it's wrong to think that the US is merely offering a superficial take on what is essentially European culture.  The things we care about are thus not the same things that people in other cultures care about, but it's false to say that Americans don't care about anything. 

The thing is that these stereotypes about America don't harm me particularly; for the most part, I don't give a fig what people in other countries think of us.  Holding these stereotypes did greatly affect my students' abilities to interact appropriately with Americans, though, and colored their time here.  I don't especially care, on a day-to-day basis, what urbanites think of me, or Northerners, or whatever.  Stereotypes prevent real interaction and real learning, though.  And that's kind of sad, especially when (just as an example) Democrats need some votes from the South and/or the rural West, people they have nothing but contempt for, contempt so complete that they think we can't or don't even read the insults they hurl at us.  But here's a tip:  If you want someone to vote for your party or your agenda, you might not ought to call them bigots and treat them like they're just too stupid to even talk to.  At the very least, recognize that this behavior makes you a bigot.  Mmmmm-kay?

What are the key ingredients for a successful party?

I think this says it all:

03 Sangria Wine

Jerry Jeff Walker

1 comment

Have you ever voted outside your own party? Why or why not?
Submitted by Soup.

Well, yes, I suppose I have.  I believe I am registered "Democrat" because I think you have to be registered either D or R.  But the last time I voted for a Democrat for president, it was for Bill Clinton in 1992, and I was 18 (I've voted for Nader every other time, I think.  And I lived in Montana when Gore lost to Bush, and even if every Nader vote had gone to Gore, it still would not have given Gore the state, so bugger off about it). 

I think of myself as a libertarian, but I usually find the libertarian candidates to be Republicans in disguise, so I don't vote for them. 

Basically I dislike voting for either of the major parties because both of them are way too status quo for my taste.  Yes, on various issues, they have differences.  But at a deeper level, on the more fundamental questions of how the government ought to be run and what the Constitution means now and the economy and what America's role in the world ought to be--the big questions, really--they are much the same.  Since I find the American economy and lifestyle to be inherently exploitative and more or less morally bankrupt, it's at this fundamental and theoretical level that I differ in almost every respect from either of the two major parties since I am both a socialist and a libertarian.  There is no contradiction there, provided that you are not a proponent of state socialism, and I am not. 

I have realized lately, though, and this should have occurred to me long ago, that libertarianism is sort of the ultimate idealism.  This came to me when I heard the other day that the city of Idaho Falls has banned the tossing of candy to children from parade floats.  I don't know the actual rationale behind the ban, but it seems to have something to do with the litter issue.  My son doesn't get to eat a lot of candy, but I was still upset by the new law, because I am always upset when something is made illegal just because some (OK, most) jackasses are too irresponsible and lazy to function civilly.  Just pick up your damn litter, assholes.  Really?  Is it so hard?  Are you really such a lot of incompetents that we need a police state just to keep you in line?

Libertarianism as I understand it takes as its basis that humans are capable, when given information, of making reasonable decisions and being responsible and making effort and even originating moral law.  Because we are animals who can make our own decisions, the theory goes, we ought to make our own decisions, because that is much of what it means to be fully human.  The libertarian vision of freedom is not the way most people seem to think of freedom; it is very much a freedom encumbered by responsibility and individual moral culpability.  I think of Kant and his idea that humans generate their own moral law through the exercise of reason and, to a lesser extent, compassion and then we follow that law.  Once we are adults, we shouldn't need to be told what to do by a bossy-parent state.  We should know what to do and do it because it is the law by which we govern ourselves, completely without bureaucratic intervention. 

This is also why, in terms of moral philosophy, I do not fit squarely into either the relativist camp or the universalist camp.  But that's neither here nor there for this discussion, is it?

Anyway, instead, people are stupid fucking lazy incompetents who need the government to tell them when to use the toilet, so that's what we get.  A government of, by, and for 3-year-olds, an insult to human intelligence and potential. 

I need to shutup now, because I'm starting to sound like Ayn Rand. 

To summarize:  I don't really have a party, so I either do or do not vote outside my party, depending on how you look at it.  I usually end up in some kind of bizarre compromise position of voting for whomever is the least likely candidate on the ticket, even if it's Jerry Garcia.  Or John Galt.

Whoa, look at the initials.  Maybe Jerry Garcia was John Galt.  Heavy.  Now if Ben&Jerry would just make a John Galt ice cream...until then I guess we're stuck alternating between hippie jam bands and the Americone Dream.  What a profound metaphor for American politics.

What's your favorite song with "America" or "USA" in the title? Bonus points if you share it with us.

I don't know if this is my absolute favorite, but what the hell?  It has all the qualities you could want in a great 4th of July ditty:  Love, violence, rhymes, defense of the purity of our native wimminz.  All of it.

I was going to post an mp3, but this page is way too awesome not to link to.  Enjoy!  You have to, like, click there to find the actual answer to the QotW, mmmkay?

What does it mean to you to be patriotic?

Ummmmmmmm........getting drunk and then lighting a dead tree out in the yard on fire by shooting bottle rockets off.  Sweet!

Also, buying my son a $0.69 miniature American (made-in-China) flag while we were shopping because he is under the mistaken impression that it's a colorful fan, and he was hot, I guess.  Actually he knows it's a flag, but he thought it was a flag-fan.

I don't know, man.  I don't really know what it means to "love America."  I like living here, at least in the part of America where I live.  If I didn't like it well enough, I suppose I wouldn't have come back.  I like American music, from jazz to bluegrass to rock.  I like American music best, baby, and certainly more than that sissy British stuff.  I think the ideals that America was founded on are good ones, and it upsets me when we deviate too much from them.  I find the color combination of heroic red, pure white, and navy blue to be aesthetically pleasing, and bald eagles are some cool muthafekkin birds. 

I would go so far as to say that I love American music.  I would say that I love American literature.  I love the Rocky Mountains.  Certainly, especially since returning from Concrete Nation (aka Japan), I love the vast tracts of public forest and grasslands and the rivers that are more or less natural and public and available for fine, fine swimming and fishing.  I love the backyard BBQ party, and I love road trips, the kind of road trips I think you can only really have in America (maybe Canada, if you can make it past Roosville).  I love Southern food and the old ladies who cook the most amazing pie you ever tasted or could imagine.  For that matter, I love fried pie.  Fried pie...it even sounds delightful, doesn't it?  I even love Frito pie, though only on a hot day after swimming, eating it while driving down the road with my hair still damp and uncombed, hanging my bare feet out the truck window while listening to Johnny Cash. 

In the end, the country you grow up in is the one tied up in all your memories, isn't it? 

I'm not sure that any of this amounts to patriotism, because I have no real idea of what it would mean to love "America."  The idea of America?  The government?  The culture?  America's citizens?  Obviously there are many things about our government that I find stupid, irritating, vexing, and outright enraging--same with our culture and our citizenry. 

Well, at any rate it is clear that I do not love my country the way Stephen Colbert does, so I think I'm going to have to answer no.

Also, I sometimes eat Vegemite, seditious wench that I am. 

Yesterday was the summer solstice for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. How did you celebrate the arrival of summer and the longest day of the year?

By shaking my fist at the heavens.  This is some fucked-up weather we're having.  Spring, very cold this year and extraordinarily damp (not that we're complaining about the rain, but really?  50 degrees in June?  That's the best you can do, sun?), lingered on and on...until, suddenly, about two weeks ago, the temperature climbed 30 degrees and went completely dry.  We went from rain every day to 23% humidity. 

My garden is in shock.  The few things that were really enjoying the cold damp spring (spinach, mustard greens, peas though they would really rather be a bit warmer) suddenly--oh, and I do mean suddenly--started suffering heat stroke.  The sweet peppers almost all dried out and died.  The eggplants nearly all suffered frostbite in those last cold days when we had unexpected hail, snow, and frost (in early June), but they're making a good recovery now.  The peas and their lovely purple and white blossoms are drooping and wheezing.

We're in despair.  There are only three things so far that are doing unquestionably well:  cilantro, dill, and sunflowers.  Sigh.  The cilantro and dill are totally taking over the garden, they're doing so well.  Actually, the nasturtiums are doing very well, too, so it's nice that they're edible.  We're going to have to take what we can get this year. 

Also, for the solstice that we actually forgot about and do not celebrate in any way, we went to Jackson and ate okonomiyaki. 

But, hey, we did the coolest thing today.  We put in a new window in the kitchen.  Mostly my husband and stepdad did it, and I just popped in to make concerned noises from time to time.  It's a supersweet window.  Low-e, tinted to keep out the hot afternoon glare, very nice--and it opens, which the former kitchen window did not do.  It makes me feel like a real homeowner, like a real adult, to have gone to the Home Depot and ordered a window and brought it home and installed it.  I don't know why it should make me feel that way, but it's like the final goodbye to the way I used to live.  And that's fine with me.