Ellen Ladowsky: Pedophilia and Star Trek: “This does not mean that watching Star Trek makes you a pedophile. It does mean that if you’re a pedophile, odds are you’ve watched a lot of Star Trek.”

Full moon Friday came and went, and turned into a decent enough day. Met up with Andrew after work for some video golf — not one of my better outings, thanks to a terrible back nine. I went into the back half of the course at 6 under, which is about what I hoped for; it was all downhill from there, and I finished at 8 over.

Yes, even in the computer world, I’m about as athletic as my telephone.

Met up with Heather for drinks, first at Bailey’s, celebrating their anniversary (we split before it got too crowded, though it was fairly packed, even at 11), and then to the Quest to meet up with Andrew and Julie and friends. A few rounds of pool and a lot of alcohol later, the night came to a close. Very good company, indeed. A good portent of things to come, perhaps and hopefully…

And now today I’m at work, not terribly happy about it. Covering my ass for some bad communication — too many steps in the workflow means too many chances for assumptions and ball dropping.

Off to hang out with my folks’ dog and try to enjoy the rest of my Saturday. A few errands, a little Wal-Mart, and perhaps a car wash before I drop in on the guys in GCW tonight to say hi.

And I wish I had completed my post yesterday (Thursday was filled with much more than just Batman), but I’m kinda glad I didn’t; best, perhaps, to just let some things go and hope they don’t come back.

Saw my first movie of the summer.  Oh, sure, technically, SWIII: George Lucas Raped My Childhood was in the summer.  But I didn�t see that so much as sit through it to complete the nightmare.  No� last night was BATMAN BEGINS. The comic book junkie in me was VERY impressed: the story details and atmosphere found a nice groove somewhere between the Golden Age Batman and some of the more modern writing.  Nice nods here and there to little details from the Batman universe (mentions of Zsasz and Arkham Asylum, for instance).  Gary Oldman�s Jim Gordon is spot on perfect � amazing to see Oldman play someone not creepy.  Michael Caine is a great Alfred, Liam Neeson played a great tweener villain, and Christian Bale is amazing as Wayne/Batman (really, two characters by the end).

The score by Hans Zimmer was amazing � a nice return to Ziimer�s dark strengths.  The cinematography in Gotham was great � like a nightmare version of Chicago, but not at all Goth-y like Tim Burton�s version. And for the most part, Christopher Nolan really nailed the job; I think he�s the perfect director for Batman, as he�s not a cartoon superhero as much as a psychological symbol in light and shadow.  BUT� man, someone else needs to co-direct with Nolan next time, only on the fight sequences.  There was one moment that the chaotic mess was appropriate, but for the most part, the fights were an on-screen clusterfuck.  Not that I could have done better, especially given some of the scenes, but they really needed a more experienced touch.

I�m now hesitant to go see another movie � I think I�m just going to let the summer end on a good note.

New comic book goes to Hell – – MSNBC.com: “John Colone, who owns Screams Ice Cream and Hell Country Store and Spirits in the real Hell, plans to carry 200 copies of the monthly comic.”

Seriously — anyone who gets to write “the real Hell” in an article has topped Everest and will never do any better. It’s all jumping the shark from here on out.

“I’ve got your problem narrowed down to one of two things. On some level, you’re used to imbalanced women who are going to cause problems to a point where you have the supernatural power to just pick them out of a crowd. That, or you give off pheromones that attract them. Maybe you smell like a delicious drama Twinkie that they can’t wait to suck the creamy life out of.”

To all the girls who think I’m talking about you:

I am.

This is some by-and-large excellent writing. The midpoint has what felt like kind of a cop-out in plot (though, alternately, I love the idea), but the writing is great. And there’s some really good horror elements in here, too.

http://www.pointlesswasteoftime.com/jdate/intro.html

Read a little here, a little there — just treat it like an online novel.

They tell me you are better off
Where you are now
Well, I don’t care
They tell me that your pain is gone
Where you are now
Well, you left it here

One of the best things about this Interweb thing is the power for people to post, raw and unedited. If you’re looking for good writing — well, there’s a lot more shit to wade through to get to it. But for emotional memory, this is it. It’s like stumbling onto a gigantic meta-diary for the world.

When a blog writer dies, it’s a bit eerie. You can’t always tell if they’ve just grown bored with having a public diary, if they’ve taken an extended break… or if they’re gone. In some cases, you can follow other links from their pages to find notes from friends; in at least one case, the blog of a murder victim helped lead to his killer (if I could find the link in my giant list of archived things, I’d post it).

But reading things like this
are what really inspire me. Not death, or even an online obit from a close friend — but the raw emotion and pain that the medium allows. This is the sort of thing you rarely if ever find in print, edited and sanitized as print tends to be.

And it seems so much more real and pure to me. Perhaps the timeliness of the reading (today versus one or two months out); but more likely, the fact that the words and thoughts and tears are not filtered through editors.

And the whole thing reminds me of meeting Melissa just a few weeks before her grandmother died. I never met her (she had advanced stages of cancer, and so it just never was the right time, too early in the relationship). But I remember after she died, the stories I’d hear in the immediate afterwards — and it was a rough time to be in a new relationship with someone, but something I wouldn’t trade, because I think death brings such real and true emotion to the surface. Years later, you get a whitewashed version of the person, as most of the negative has been ignored or forgotten, but right away, the emotions are too strong to allow for conscious editing, and I think that you get the truest version of that person, as seen through the eyes of others.

In fact, I wrote a song about it. Wanna hear it? Here it go:

I did not know you, our lives never touched
‘Til the day they gathered, to bid you farewell
And they painted your picture and as I looked around
I felt I saw you in the words and the sound

Your talent came flowing, through the stories they tell
And through the faces of those who loved you so well
Your life gave them a treasure, a piece of themselves
Something they carry, and still serves them well

Just one life, just one life, just one life
That is born, and is, and is gone, just one life
And I’m so glad to know you, as I know you now

Perhaps inside you, you were messed up like me
But to them you were whole and strong and a friend in their need
And what you left behind you and what swept over me
Says that your life’s work rolls on and on, a piece of eternity

Just one life, just one life, just one life
That is born, and is, and is gone, just one life
Did you ever have a chance to find out
What life is all about

I did not know you, our lives never touched
‘Til the day we gathered, to say our farewell

Okay, fine. Brian May wrote that. But it’s beautiful anyway. So go look for the Back to the Light album, and snap it up.

And then spend ten minutes, quietly, remembering someone that you never knew.

And then get out and live. If not for yourself, for those who can’t.

It’s something that we all struggle with, at one point in time or another: the question of the meaning of life. Why are we here? Where did we come from, and where will we go after our bodies are wormfood or soot?

This is the source of religion, of philosophy, of a lot of science (entertainment for the weekend: toss a representative from each of those groups into a closet, and listen to the screams). And each group (and a bunch of sub-groups inside) have their own answers to the question(s): evolution, Big Bang, Genesis, Intelligent Design, brains in vats.

My problem with each of these answers is that they are stopgap — if there’s a god, who made him? If we are brains in vats, or someone else’s dream, who made them?

If you can imagine the boundaries of the universe, you’re a stronger person than I. What lies outside those boundaries? Nothing? What is nothing? It can’t be space — that’s not nothing. But then, neither is non-space….

The opposite of the intelligent design theory — does god worry about these questions when he gets bored, too? — is the happenstance theory. No intelligence at all behind it. But frighteningly easy to grasp — no worse than the infinite monkeys with infinite time and infinite typewriters idea. Sooner or later, given infinity, one of those monkeys is going to crank out ROMEO AND JULIET — that’s the beauty of infinity.

Take all probabilities, and each of them will happen at least once, eventually. Actually, they’ll all happen over and over and over, thanks ot inifinity… But so it goes.

The odds of life spontaneously generating, given primordial soup and chemical reactions and whatnot, is ridiculously small. The odds of an amoeba evolving into a cat — much less a human being — even smaller. The odds of all the factors in the universe being weighted just so to support reality as we know it — magnetic and gravitational fields, our bodies processing elements to support more processing, our ridiculously complex brains — is microscopic. Therefore, there MUST be a god, right?

Unless you’ve got infinity, infinite time, infinite space. More than plenty of chance for everything in possibility to happen once.

Of course no one wants to think about this. Sure, it’s an easy answer — and it answers a lot of smaller questions, about coincidences and confluence, and whatever. But goddamn, it’s a scary notion, because it utterly wipes out the idea of destiny, of fate, of kismet, of hope for some sort of meaning behind it all.

We’re all a cosmic accident, and we’re just here to putter around until another cosmic accident wipes us all out.

Human beings — and dogs, and horses, and finches, and beetles, for that matter — are a random cancer of the universe.

Fuck, that’s depressing. Not any moreso than ID, in my opinion — that road just leads to us being ants, instead of random chance mutations — but pretty depressing nonetheless.

I’m all for teaching DUH
in America’s schools!