If I Waste A Day, I'll Waste Away
AKMA posts a little rant on poor sermons. He's the first Reverend that makes me wish I were a spiritual person.#
Sermons that feel obliged to pick up certified pop-culture themes (I heard a buncha sermons on The Lion King) frequently fall into a bunch of traps. Sometimes they over-summarize the plot, on behalf of the congregants who haven't seen the movie (or read the book or whatever), taking up sermon-time with superficial-overview narration; if the book or movie can't safely be assumed to have been seen by everyone listening, think twice about preaching on it. Second, it risks eclipsing the Bible readings: if what you really want to talk about is The Lion King or Everything I Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, why bother with the pretense that you're preaching on the gospel? Again, save us the time of readings to which the sermon will not pertain. The strain that a preacher goes through to wring some connection to a Bible that's diffidently silent on issues of leonine orphans or the sufficiency of elementary education doesn't enhance any congregational sense of the relevance of Scripture, or the skill of the preacher.
Matt Moore reviews Kill Bill.#
I saw Quentin Tarantino's fourth film (he lets you know it's his fourth in the credits) last night. I could have seen it on the IMAX screen, but their website didn't detail which screenings were playing where, so we went to the earlier one. Like Gregg Easterbrook I thought this movie was disgusting, but, unlike the TMQ, I didn't think it was morally disgusting, just visually and auditorily (a word?). Every wound seemed to be an amputation or a disembowlement, and every one of those was a firehose of blood either forced through a mister or just gushing all over the floor. One woman lost an arm, spun around spraying blood in a six foot radius, rolled around on the floor for twenty minutes, and lived.
Anybody know of a balm for an atrophied heart? Female attention is not something that's easily accomplished by trying. (Women, I propose, can smell trying, because it smells distinctly like fear.) Nor has not trying worked in achieving female attention. So I've been trying the third option: trying to not get female attention. So far it's been working, in that I've received very little female attention. Yes, I know, I don't need to put effort into such a thing, but it gives me a sense of accomplishment, so slag off. The only balm that seems to really work for an atrophied heart (at least mine) is reading books. Dear, sweet books, at least you don't judge me or tell me about your sex lives.
He linked to the beautiful girl from yesterday,
We lingered over lunch. We talked about love and self and writing and depression. We talked about boys - how infuriating, how maddening, how charming they are, how much we love them even while we despair over ever understanding or getting along with them. Lately I have come to appreciate simple female conversation more than ever. The sun's rays slanted deep gold into the afternoon.
Richard has an interesting idea for meaningful movie statistics.#
What the movies take in each weekend is meaningless to me, because while the numbers look big, they don't factor in ticket price (raise ticket prices but keep the same amount of people, then obviously your gross will be bigger). I'm more interested in say, the percentage of all movie-goers that went to see Kill Bill: Volume 1. Or maybe the number of people who went to see Kill Bill: Volume 1 as a percentage of the people who enjoy movies in general, the latter number being necessarily larger than the number of people who went to see a movie this weekend, because obviously people have differing priorities from weekend to weekend. That obviously means polling to guage how much people like movies and then asking them which movie they saw recently, but still, it would be interesting to see how many people passed up the latest blockbuster to stay home and snuggle with their honey and watch a video.
Jordan Katz writes about his ILC 2003 experience. I enjoyed his talk and agree with him that the general talks were great.#
Mark Frauenfelder at Boing Boing posts something about Stephen Hawking.#
Finally, Prof. Hawking was wheeled in on his wheelchair down the center aisle: a truly extraordinary figure.
One of the most brilliant minds alive on the planet today, he is cruelly trapped within a useless body, which slumps like an understuffed and oversized rag doll in his large and gadget-filled wheelchair.
In a smart grey suit and white shirt with fine blue stripes unbuttoned at the collar, he was smartly dressed, with a mop top-type short haircut that made him look like an escapee from Quadraphenia.
Yet his movement is minimal. He blinks his eyes, his right knee vibrates up and down with an involuntary tremor, and only the slow rise and fall of his stomach indicates that he is still alive.
Peter Lindberg in "What is Semiotics - 2" talks about signs.#
What confused me about the statement that semiotics is concerned with how signs mean, was that I only kind of understood what was meant by a sign. Naturally, I thought of visual signs (traffic signs, etc.), but I realized that the term was more generic than that, but I couldn't figure out in what way.
As I said in my previous post, all things can convey information, and therefore they can be signs in semiotic systems.
[...]
Dog-ears are signs—conventional signs; meaning that the relationship between the sign and its object is something that is agreed upon, a social construction, part of culture. As for the lower corner and double dog-ears, I would have to tell you what they mean in my context, and perhaps it would be meaningful for you to adopt them a habit, or you could use them to signify something else.
For a figurative sign, on the other hand, the relationship to its object would theoretically be obvious the first time you saw it.
Michael Feldman reports that David Blaine came out of the box.#
"I learnt how strong we all are as human beings," Blaine said after leaving the box which had been his home since September 5.
"Most importantly I learnt to appreciate all the simple things in life such as the smile from a stranger, and the sunshine and the sunset."
Oliver Willis describes the impending fall of Britney.#
Why do I say that? Because she just cannot keep her clothes on. Sure, it's fun to see and it sells a couple of magazines but there's only so much bare flesh you can take before you've seen it all. Tied into the PR machine for her new album, she's stripped for W Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. Last I heard Field and Stream was in the running. Yes, Britney is beyond overexposed - but I think this cavalcade of nudity is killing what was once a reliable thing. We never really believed the "virgin" stories (even though the thought of the utterly femme Justin Timberlake taking a ride aboard the BritTrain is a bit much), but she always had that Lolita thing going (people like Christina Ricci and Mena Suvari have built entire careers out of nothing more than that). Britney jumped the shark. I think it happened during her lesbian lip-lock with Madonna, not because lesbianism among celebrities is so early-90s, but because she chose to lock lips with Madonna.