Things I Learned During The Week of February 5-12

(this post was written by Kyle on February 14, 2006, and it concerns & & & & & & & & & & & & & & & )

Sorry about being a few days late. I usually write it up on Friday afternoons, but I started recording a college radio show last Friday (with editing continuing all through the weekend), and so Gobbledygook had to go on the back burner for a little bit. But now I’m relatively caught up. Well, to where I should have been on Friday anyway.

Enough excuses. On to the things I learned this week…

    …from movies:
    • That the story of life, when told from its , is perhaps the most naturally spiritual story in the history of the world. When an African storyteller shares, through language of myth, his version of how the universe, the world, and life were created, and when he does it with such humor and goodwill, it’s difficult not to be moved. In a movie that focuses exclusively on frogs, spiders, salamanders, sea-horses, and various other creatures, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou combine the power of myth with the explanations provided by science and philosophy to tell the story of us all.
    • That any movie will speak directly to you if you listen hard enough.
  1. …from books:
    • That the concept of Being, so important to metaphysics, is a nothing concept, by which I mean, it should hold very little interest to us. It’s not Being that should interest us, but life. As Levinas writes in :
      Life is not the naked will to be…Life’s relation with the very conditions of its life becomes the nourishment and content of that life. Life is love of life, a relation with contents that are not my being but more dear than being: thinking, eating, sleeping, reading, working, warming oneself in the sun. Distinct from my substance but constituting it, these contents make up the worth of my life. When reduced to pure and naked existence, like the existence of the shades Ulysses visits in Hades, life dissolves into shadow. Life is an existence that does not precede its essence. Its essence makes up its worth: and here value constitutes being. The reality of life is already on the level of happiness, and in this sense, beyond ontology. Happiness is not an accident of being, since being is risked for happiness…The independence of happiness is…to be distinguished from the independence that, for philosophers, substances possess. It as though the existent could aspire to a new triumph above and beyond the plenitude of being. (pp. 112-113)

      I love that last part. Life is not being. It is above and beyond being. That’s a great move in the game of metaphysics. It makes me want to cheer.

  2. …from the web:
    • That hippies have become hipsters. This was a rising suspicion, but the fact that Radiohead is playing at confirmed it.
    • That , the lead singer for the Talking Heads and one of the most intriguing musicians of the last 25 years, enjoys Kanye West, who ain’t calling her a Gold Digger, but wants to point out that she ain’t with no broke nigga.
    • That the roots of fellatio (the Latin fellatus:to suck) are shared by feminine (the Latin femina: she who suckles). And on the other side of the same token, that cunnilingus is a compound word that means “to lick vulva” — the M. Latin cunnus (vulva) + lingere (to lick).
    • That a lot of civilians died during , and doesn’t make for a pretty picture.
    • That a is not what I was hoping it would be. I’m a big believer that the Macintosh Finder, which, for all intents and purposes, is the Macintosh (see “,” John Siracusa’s great article on Ars Technica for more information), needs to be totally re-conceptualized. What we had prior to Mac OS X was great, and what we have in Mac OS X is a step backwards. I think that there’s got to be a better way. I imagined that a 3-D system would be that better way. But if it’s gonna act like MarcMoini’s 3D-Space VFS, then my imagination may have been wrong. On the other hand, it may just be that implementation of it. I sure hope so. Because 3-D is cool.
    • That NetFlix is not as automated as I thought it was. Turns out that someone’s grubby little hands are all over the ubiquitous red envelope.
    • That vegans shouldn’t hang around outside a honey-baked ham store unless they want Homeland Security Officials to arrest them. And that Homeland Security Officials shouldn’t wrongfully arrest vegans unless they miss chatting with the ACLU.
    • That can be kind of fun.
    • That the town I grew up in is in the middle of a crime spree, but not really, since it’s been going on for three years.
    • That even a kickass won’t impress a bunch of fuckers who don’t know soup.
  3. …from life:
    • That taking a sick day can really screw up the rest of your week.
    • That having a huge zit next to your nose can sometimes blind you in one eye, and embarrass you just enough to make you want take a bunch of razor blades, glue them to the edges of an Oxy pad, and whip them at anyone who looks at you.
    • That global warming is some fucked-up shit.
    • That anger isn’t an essential ingredient of cultural criticism.
    • That people still retain concepts of the sacred.
    • That recording with whiskey in the room does not make for a good pod-cast.
    • That Apple’s built-in spell check includes “pod-cast.”
    • That Team Super Smash Bros. Melee may be more fun than regular Super Smash Bros. Melee.
    • That it’s difficult to know how to take the following statement when you’re a twenty-eight-year-old man, sitting in a college dorm room, drinking next to a nineteen-year-old girl who says, “This is so much fun! I never hang out with people as mature as you.”

And that’s it for this week. Hopefully, I’ll be back on my game by Friday, but there’s also a chance that I’ll start doing Gobbledygook on Mondays, depending on what goes on with the radio show schedule. Either way, thanks for hanging around in my Gobbledygook.