Do You Know The Way To San Jose?

Out the plane window, under the wing:

A river makes
its way like a snake.

Marauding Ape

You may not have followed the story about the pet chimp in Connecticut who mauled a woman.

The chimp got outdoors and wouldn't come in. The owner, a woman, called a friend, another woman, for assistance.

The chimp attacked the friend horribly. Her nose and eyes are gone.  Last I heard, she was still in critical condition.

The owner then stabbed the chimp with a knife.

The chimp then cornered a cop, who shot it. The chimp wandered off and died.

The owner is mourning the chimp:

He was my life. I raised him from 3-and-a-half weeks old... He slept with me every night, he combed my hair. Everything in the house is for him....

Chimpanzees are awful cute.

But when you've got one in hot pursuit
of you and yours -  it's time to shoot.

Lydia Diamond's "Stick Fly"

I just read Stick Fly by Lydia Diamond, a play about an elite African American family getting together at their summer home in Martha's Vineyard. She has an exquisite ear for dialogue. These lines are from a scene where they're talking about a young man's new girlfriend, who has not yet arrived:

Kent: Yeah, Flip's girl is a little melanin challenged.

Cheryl: Melanin challenged? ... [just getting it]  Oh, she white?

Kent and Flip: She's Italian.

The joke is that is that the olive-skinned are seen
as somehow in-between,
not black, but a bit off-white.

And the young men hope that will make it all right
with their mother
who will be upset if the girl is too... other. 

Blenderman Gets The Laughs

The Alleged Adventures of Blenderman had its first Chicago performance tonight, and the audience loved it. It was put on by the talented ensemble of Hobo Junction.

It was billed as a reading, but it was acted out, costumed, and - most importantly - sung.

Even when it's 10 minutes long,
you can't have a musical without song!

Stimulating Protest

There were protests in Denver today, where Obama ("I will go through the budget line by line") was signing the big bill.

I need a fork.
I smell pork.

Dead Man's Cell Phone

I read Sara Ruhl's play, Dead Man's Cell Phone, today. It's about a woman who picks up a dead man's cell phone and starts taking the guy's calls. It's very clever, and sometimes surreal. The heroine is pursuing connection.

I liked the title, and it's making me wonder if I should change the name of my play to Home From Mexico, or maybe Home From Mexican Jail, especially since imdb indicates the existence of a 2009 film named Ready Or Not although it's not clear to me whether that film is really coming out... or not. Probably I'm pointlessly second-guessing my title.

She picks up a dead man's phone,
and finds herself less alone.

Collisions

Nuclear subs - armed with nuclear weapons - collide!

It's a big ocean. How did this happen? Don't they have sonar on those things?

Of course, a few days ago, we had: satellites in orbit - collide!

Isn't orbital space bigger than the ocean? What is going on?

I'm keeping my eye on the moon.
I hope it doesn't drop on us soon.

Looking Up On 34th Street

There's a passage in She And I: A Fugue where the author describes standing on the sidewalk, looking up at Ayn Rand's window on 34th Street in Manhattan:

The doorman came out, asked if he could help - I asked, as if the most natural thing, if I was pointing to Mr O’Connor’s. He moved my finger a little. I walked across 34th to the bus kiosk, near Lexington, leaned against it.

I had stood in he same spot, for similar reasons, more than once. But I had been there a few years earlier.

Her writing inspired
a desire to see
the everyday life behind
her mind's giant leaps.

Neanderthal Park

A New York Times columnist is calling for a rebirth of Neanderthals:

Granted, it would be disorienting and lonely for the first few Neanderthals, but it would be pretty interesting for them as well as us. (What would a Neanderthal make of Disneyland, or of World of Warcraft?)

There's a Harvard researcher who says he can do it for just 30 million.

Bio-ethicists will be furious,
but aren't you a little curious?

Autopilot

The breaking news:

The plane that crashed into a house near Buffalo, killing 50 people, was on autopilot when it went down, a violation of airline policy, a federal aviation official said Sunday.

There's a bit of semantics involved in this, strangely enough:

Steve Chealander of the National Transportation Safety Board said Colgan Air recommends pilots fly manually in icy conditions. Pilots are required to do so in severe ice.

The pilot of the doomed plane reported "significant" ice on his wings and windshield just before crashing Thursday night.

So was he merely going counter to a "recommendation"? Or was he actually violating a "requirement"? 

He described "significant" ice, which doesn't quite sound as bad as "severe" ice.

But I guess, in fact, it was severe,
which is why all those people are no longer here.

Memory Trouble

That was fast:

State lawmakers are calling for a criminal investigation into whether U.S. Sen. Roland Burris committed perjury...

Why, you ask?

The development comes after the Chicago Democrat failed to initially disclose under oath to a House panel that he was hit up for campaign cash by former Gov. Rod Blagojevich's brother.

The good news is that he still says he didn't pay for the appointment to the Senate.

Burris' statement offers the third version of events he has given about his discussions concerning the Senate seat...

So, why change stories now? 

Did he just recall that the gov's bro 
asked for dough?

Or... and this is sheer speculation...
did he get wind that the Feds had already heard about that conversation?

UPDATE:

The affidavit, released Saturday by Burris' office after it was first reported by the Chicago Sun-Times, said Robert Blagojevich called him three times — once in October and twice after the November election — to seek his fundraising assistance.

Robert Blagojevich's attorney has said his client believes one of the conversations was recorded by the FBI.

"Common Sense" by Merlin Jetton

Merlin Jetton has an article at Rebirth of Reason on what Aristotle meant by "common sense" - which isn't what we usually mean by the term.

Nowadays common sense means something like - what normal people would agree on.

But for Aristotle, it had to do with integrated sensory processing. When we open a door, we typically feel, see, and hear the door. We naturally perceive all this info as coming from one source - even though it came from separate perceptual inputs. As Merlin writes:

Per Aristotle the senses are not integrated at the same level as thinking, but by what he calls the 'common sense'. He wrote very little about it, but held such integration to be perceptual. It could thus be attributed to nonhuman animals.

Merlin goes on to note that Ayn Rand's views are similar to Aristotle's:

"A percept is a group of sensations automatically retained and integrated by the brain of a living organism. It is in the form of percepts that man grasps the evidence of his senses and apprehends reality" (ITOE2, p. 5). That is about all -- various sensory data is automatically integrated into percepts. Her published works barely reach beyond that.

As Merlin writes, this level of cognition is shared by us with many animals. I think it's a hard level of cogniton to understand, because it all happens automatically, and you "just know" that the door is heavy and gray and squeaky. But with contemporary scientific tools, cognitive science is making a lot of progress on this stuff.

Wouldn't it be a chore
if you had to think about whether the door
was really the source of what you saw
and also what you felt with your paw?

"Not The Matrix, Pal" by Anja Hartleb-Parson

Anja Hartleb-Parson has a perceptive (and NOW online) review of Quee Nelson's The Slightest Philosophy in The New Individualist (Spring 2009). (My own review is here.)

Hartleb-Parson likes the book a lot:

Nelson has written one of the most entertaining and lucidly written epistemology books I have read in recent years.

But she is careful to let us know that Nelson's defense of naive realism is not the Objectivist approach:

Objectivism does not pose realism as the best explanation; rather, it recognizes existence as an axiom.

Which brings me to the infamous question - how do you know you're not in a cybernetic vat - being fed false sense impressons  - like in the Matrix?

Is the answer that "existence exists" or is the answer that "there's no evidence for that"?

I think that, at least technically, the vat scenario does not violate the "existence exists" axiom. In the world of the Matrix, existence is real, it's just not what most people think it is.

Some theories "explain a lot"
even though the balance of the evidence indicates that the theory is not
so hot.

Among The Petal Peddlers

I was in a flower shop yesterday evening, and the workers told me they hadn't been outside all day because they were insanely busy. I said, "I hear that Mother's Day is even worse." "Different crowd!" came the reply. I gave the shop a quiet scan. Every customer was a man.

Connotation Speculation

"Fairness" has an air
of everyone must share.

"Justice" carries a thrust
of earn it or go bust.

More Than Mindless Machines

Scientific researchers have been shocked to learn how smart animals are:

Speaking of crow intelligence, Alex Kacelnik, a professor of behavioral ecology at the University of Oxford in England, noted the "master tool user of the avian world," the New Caledonian crow.

These birds have been shown to not just use tools, but to make their own by twisting and bending pieces of wire to fish food from places they couldn't reach otherwise.

That belief that animals were mindless machines was an intellectual theory, descended from Descartes. Everyday people had always inclined to the opinion that animals possessed some form of awareness.

I'm not saying that Aristotle understood animals perfectly. But he understood them better than Descartes did.

Birds have no words,
but it's plain they have brains.

Fairness Revisited

They call it the Fairness Doctrine - 
but it wasn't on the square.

State control of indoctrination 
is always unfair.

Culture Clash

Many are suffering V-day anxiety this very minute, but consider the situation in India:

Young secular Indians are organising their own vigilante groups - some armed with Taekwondo moves, others with pepper spray - to protect unmarried couples from Hindu radicals looking to disrupt Valentine's Day celebrations.

Valentine's Day -
when you may need to say:

"I'll spray your face
with pepper and Mace
and kick your butts,
you religious nuts!"

Atlas Movie Trailer

My wife found this Atlas Shrugged Movie Trailer on youtube.

It's not the real producers. It's animated, but not anime.

Actually, does anyone know the name of this animation style? I know it's used in computer games. Is it so-called 3-D?

An animated version
would be a pleasant excursion.

Clock Watching

Isn't this a lovely clock?

I borrowed it from here, The Happiness Project, where Gretchen Rubin documents her attempt to test-drive "every principle, tip, theory, and scientific study I could find, whether from Aristotle or St. Therese or Martin Seligman or Oprah."

Which way do you see the spiral go -
an inward or outward flow?