...
...
...
Don't say it.
I know I said this place was dead, and I stand by that... the crappy poll is all the proof anyone should need. Anyway, I'm posting... y'know, considering Tongs is sort of a deity he'd better address his flock... or space cadets? Do you prefer that?
So cadets... lately bitching about 'UNUSversity Syndrome'... yes, that is Latin humour, and I know, I've lost my edge, seems to be the direction these posts are going so I'm jumping on the bandwagon.
'Hi! I'm Matt! I really hate the way 'I'm' flows effortly into my first name, I also hate the monosyllabic abbreviation and the annoying alliteration between my first and last name my parents didn't think about. It's heavily indicative of a inclination towards self loathing... wha? You DON'T innaccurately psychoanalyse everyone you meet with your shameless self taught discredited knowledge?. This laughably uncharacteristic enthusiasm is causing my kidneys to rebel with all they've got, so the wincing is me having my own hyper acidic urine shot straight to my heart, not the fact that I don't want to be here. By the way, it's acidic because I eat bizarre stuff for attention!! I have a book, I write poems in said book like a homosexual infantryman. Did I mention my musical tastes span over half a millennium? Yeah, I don't shake hands like that... but thanks? Later do you want to get tea and I can throw the topic of my own suicide around like it's Freud's entire psychoanalytic theory! HAHAHAHA!! OK, awesome, wait, I feel morose and morbid... you realise you're wrong because you believe in things right? Yeah, it's better to play the nonchalant nihilist... by the way... I can hypnotize people... and I hallucinate... ALOT, if you see me looking at your feet it's me making sure they're rooted to the ground so it's safe to talk to you out loud. Oh it's your friends! This is hard enough as it is, so you're cool with me flatly ignoring them out of social ineptitude and not wanting to start another of these conversations? That's cool I feel like blogging anyway, it's this crazy thing where I just angst out hard beans of solid wisdom that people awkwardly stumble across and seek to leave the quickest way they can. Oh, these guys I know praise me wildly for it too, temporarily reversing the inferiority/superiority complex!'
Honesty is the worst policy imaginable. We are a bunch of filthy awesome liars.
Well if this proves anything apart from the fact that if this guy can even have people who'd consider themselves FACEBOOK 'friends' shows a world heading in the wrong direction, it's me desperately and weakly concealing the fact that I. CANNOT. MEET. PEOPLE. IN. REAL. LIFE. OK, some weird guy you end up stuck tolerating on MSN or something says he taught himself hypnotism, yeah that's messed up, but we'll run with it. But when he leans over the table and stares right into your eyes licking his lips saying he can inhibit a state of 'suggestibility' in you... your mind starts to come up with it's own conclusions... completely ignoring the fact that I only really use it to sleep, trip out while still being able to give a Lower Murray Livestock Award winning urine sample and lock my legs up for the associated and deeply subjective humour of developing a temporary subconscious barrier to movement...
Establishing people is difficult, eccentricities are the spice of life itself, to lose them would have me locked in a french kiss with a 12 gauge... Uuugh... But you know it's okay when you at least have someone who knows all that crazy junk you're gonna pull... and how to sedate you when the paranoia kicks in etc.
YEAH WELL I HAVE NEWS FOR YOU.
I only have those people who already avoid me for said eccentricities. I'm up there failing solo... and disturbingly beginning to like it. I'll be honest, I type more words than I actually say. Sad, but grossly true. I am becoming a uni loner and revelling in it. I might as well be taking a vow of silence, actually, I've always wondered whether if monks and stoners and overweight metal heads and stuff take vows of silence, does that replace chastity for 48 hours so they can basically go for whatever isn't secured with the gift of consent?... and from behind and in the dark for everything that is?... But I digress, the point is, I'm back to that annoying stage where I show up at a gathering and lose my voice in 20 minutes because I'm not getting the valuable vocal exercise McDonald's isn't endorsing? I think it's fantastic to see that fast food mega corporations are picking up the government's slack, it's harmony the only way we could realistically hope for... through mutual indifference towards everything that doesn't hold stock value...
I spend my breaks now in the park writing, in my zen garden watching people and subjecting them to my scathing, hypocritical mental criticisms or letting birds and stuff land on me. Seriously happened, I feel like the hispanic guy from Captain Planet... who NEVER really had any point where his power could solve something fire couldn't, he was the writer's cynical attack on Mexican laxness concerning automotive pollution. Yeah they're trying the best they can, AMERICA *HOO-RAH!* is fixing the problem with 9% of households fitted with energy saving lightglobes (WHICH ARE COOL, DON'T BELIEVE THE HATE. SERIOUSLY THEY'RE A TENTH AS BRIGHT AS NORMAL FAUNA SLAYING GLOBES, WHICH IS BRILLIANT FOR GLOOMY MOOD LIGHTING!!), Lots of bright posters and a dude who can just burn anyone who tries to preach global warming like the heretic's deceit it is. Hmm, so forced humour aside, I'm reaching the sad stage where it's eight weeks in and no demographic will give my scarred, barren pelvis a second look...
I've got to be really honest here though. I can't really say I care. I can do what I want, when I want and don't have to put up with someone bitching for the sake of it, then when presented with the outcome, eats half of it in finally excessive acknowledgement that wasted an hour and a half and in that disgusting inebriated way that can make even NACHO LASAGNE!!! *crosses self and bows to the west* look unappetizing... So yeah, it's cool with me, I don't see what you guys are all bitching about...
RIGHT! The exponential increase in the degrees of sanity separating us! Well, because this is 2010, and all roads lead back to facebook... the new update adds nicotine... look at your TRIPLE DIGIT list of friends... now let's be realistic, there're a few you just deal with by thinking of amazing self esteem raping retorts you could theoretically deliver. But seriously that's alot of people, look how many are online... click one... Start a GODDAMN conversation. For a bunch of people who sleep with phonebooks reaching for the 900 mark to complain about not having anyone is mighty annoying. There is a number, dial it. TALK. For the love of Pleroma, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. I can guarantee someone else in this solitary confinement the bastards in suits call polite society will have no problem with picking up.
Just leave the naively romantic, lone wolf style to the professionals is all I ask. *winks and bows*
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Friday, April 9, 2010
Can you be sure you're reading this?...
I'm back again, inspired by Damacus's feeble attempts to reignite the collective interest of our four readers, and my regular procrastination from the three vacuous white blobs of paper void of any visible attempts to begin writing the three 1000 word essays expected from me when i return to uni. *takes deep breath after reading that sentence aloud*... As we should all know by now, blogging is the quintessential medium for evading reality, whilst still being able to salvage some deluded sense of validity and connection with the outside world. With this in mind, i decided that i would do a little bit of soul searching in this blog and yes you can listen in. I know that half of you have nothing you would rather spend your time doing than satisfying your odd voyeuristic tendencies by reading my progression into perpetual confusion.
The thing is, i really can't expect you all to get where i'm coming from because really i can't be sure that you all exist. You're all possibly figments of my senses, perhaps you don't really inhere in, or belong to a physical world, but instead you're just effects of my mind... There are some people for whom i truly wish this was so, then maybe i could just drink a shitload of methylated spirits with orange juice..CLASSY! or inject a dose of horse tranquilizer and BAM i'd just forget who they were.
Maybe god gets me... hey maybe he's sitting up on his throne of diamonds (i really don't actually know how comfortable that would be to be honest but it does evoke a nice image doesn't it) thinking "you know i get this guy, all i needed in my omniscient existence is another kid who thinks he's a deep thinker but really he can just use a fuckload of adjectives to embellish a sentence so it resembles something close to a coherent stringing together of words." But alas, here we come to obstacle number two - the existence of God is about a fickle concept as they come. Now, we could traverse around the issue, or we could do a Hannibal of Carthage and say "fuck it, you know we're going to take these thousand elephants and cross the mountains - it'll be far more fun that way and everyone loves fun!" And we all know how that ended, Hannibal marched into Rome as fresh as a daisy, uzis blazing and raped the Romans for everything they had fathering 40,000 children and incurring a three century dynasty of little Hannibals until Napoleon Bonaparte stumbled on Rome in 574AD and told the Carthaginians they had little choice but to work for little to no pay under strict apartheid rule. And that ladies and gentlemen is the history of how black slavery came about in Modern Europe...a good blog post is never complete without a flagrant disregard for any legitimate referencing - who needs facts when we have wikipedia?
Mmmm I digress... so yeah I was discussing the whole "god thing" with a friend of mine the other day and "god" is one of those subjects that consistently spurs me into a raging, horned cynic. Frankly, i haven't really ascertained exactly what it is about the idea that irks me the most, but i think it's mostly the rabid hypocrisy that every modern church has and still does display in the history of monotheistic religion as we know it. I mean in all honesty, it only takes a modicum of reflective thought to realise that religion as we know it is about as flawed and ignorant as is possible within reason. I may be a bias, ignorant prick but i do recognise the distinction between faith and religion and yes religion is very separate from faith, but i think the idea of human centred religion is so outdated it has become redundant in a modern context.
The Scientologists are one of the few modern religious institutions with a system of beliefs that is not only ultimately relevant to existence as we perceive it, but also with a founder that has the credibility to truly understand and contemplate the enormous complexities of the universe and our place in it.
Anyway, i have to cut this short as i have to go out and buy a cask of goon so that hopefully by the end of it i'll have forgotten the existence of a few people....
Yours sincerely,
Frank-Lee, A. Musing.
The thing is, i really can't expect you all to get where i'm coming from because really i can't be sure that you all exist. You're all possibly figments of my senses, perhaps you don't really inhere in, or belong to a physical world, but instead you're just effects of my mind... There are some people for whom i truly wish this was so, then maybe i could just drink a shitload of methylated spirits with orange juice..CLASSY! or inject a dose of horse tranquilizer and BAM i'd just forget who they were.
Maybe god gets me... hey maybe he's sitting up on his throne of diamonds (i really don't actually know how comfortable that would be to be honest but it does evoke a nice image doesn't it) thinking "you know i get this guy, all i needed in my omniscient existence is another kid who thinks he's a deep thinker but really he can just use a fuckload of adjectives to embellish a sentence so it resembles something close to a coherent stringing together of words." But alas, here we come to obstacle number two - the existence of God is about a fickle concept as they come. Now, we could traverse around the issue, or we could do a Hannibal of Carthage and say "fuck it, you know we're going to take these thousand elephants and cross the mountains - it'll be far more fun that way and everyone loves fun!" And we all know how that ended, Hannibal marched into Rome as fresh as a daisy, uzis blazing and raped the Romans for everything they had fathering 40,000 children and incurring a three century dynasty of little Hannibals until Napoleon Bonaparte stumbled on Rome in 574AD and told the Carthaginians they had little choice but to work for little to no pay under strict apartheid rule. And that ladies and gentlemen is the history of how black slavery came about in Modern Europe...a good blog post is never complete without a flagrant disregard for any legitimate referencing - who needs facts when we have wikipedia?
Mmmm I digress... so yeah I was discussing the whole "god thing" with a friend of mine the other day and "god" is one of those subjects that consistently spurs me into a raging, horned cynic. Frankly, i haven't really ascertained exactly what it is about the idea that irks me the most, but i think it's mostly the rabid hypocrisy that every modern church has and still does display in the history of monotheistic religion as we know it. I mean in all honesty, it only takes a modicum of reflective thought to realise that religion as we know it is about as flawed and ignorant as is possible within reason. I may be a bias, ignorant prick but i do recognise the distinction between faith and religion and yes religion is very separate from faith, but i think the idea of human centred religion is so outdated it has become redundant in a modern context.
The Scientologists are one of the few modern religious institutions with a system of beliefs that is not only ultimately relevant to existence as we perceive it, but also with a founder that has the credibility to truly understand and contemplate the enormous complexities of the universe and our place in it.
Anyway, i have to cut this short as i have to go out and buy a cask of goon so that hopefully by the end of it i'll have forgotten the existence of a few people....
Yours sincerely,
Frank-Lee, A. Musing.
Lady Gaga: Whore of Babylon
Hey kids!
After his wife started getting bunches of flowers and hams of condolence in the mail, American author Mark Twain (one part Colonel Sanders, two parts Straight Oscar Wilde, no parts Shania) famously told a newspaper "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." When Alfred Nobel, French dynamite-inventor and arms-manufacturer, read his own prehumous obituary claiming that "The merchant of death is dead", he was so upset that he started the Nobel Prize, hoping to leave a legacy that made someone other than the Mythbusters happy. John Partridge, a shoemaker turned astrologer with half the style of John Edwards and all the credibility, had a prediction of his death published by satirist Jonathon Swift, followed by an obituary a few months later. When Partridge tried to convince everyone that he was actually still, you know, alive, nobody believed him. You'd think he would have seen it coming.
A little-known fact about Mark Twain is that his moustache outlived him by six years, becoming a vice-treasurer for the American Baseball Negro League until it's death at the battle of the Somme.
Similalalalalarly, I've heard some our morbid-minded blog family muttering that D.I.D a Mess is as dead as house-flattened witch, and that we should quickly take our ruby slippers and click our heels back to Facebook before some little bitch comes along, steals them and starts gallivanting about in technicolour glory. Well I say, NO! This blog is still extraordinarily healthy, my pretties, and I'll get you and your little dogs too if you say a word otherwise. What? You think I'm turning into some kind of ridiculous blog tyrant? Your lack of faith disturbs me. There is only power, and those too weak to seek it. The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between us, between Germans and Jews. ...Actually, ignore that last one.
(By the way Crucible Tongs, sorry, I'm joking, I'd never challenge your Freudian Floydian Blog dictatorship.)
Seriously though, this blog is still going strong. We had 9 posts last month, which is still heaps more than most blogs I know, and I think we're getting the variety right. I maintain that it won't be dead until no-one had posted for two months. But if there actually is anyone who does read this, we'd get all inspiredy if you dropped us a comment, even if it's just vicious abuse! What do you prefer? Pictures? Pithy? Profound? Informative? (ewww damacus, stop trying to vomit half-chewed wikipedia trivia into our collective lap.) Please disagree with us, or agree with us, or not care. WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO GET YOUR ATTENTION?! Dress up in nine foot avatar suits and start having tail-sex? Personally murder Ray Comfort and hide his banana-smeared cadaver under your bed? Stuff coke cans in our hair and whore ourselves to the music industry?
And so we come, as we inevitably must, to the tenuous segue.
I hate Lady Gaga.
I know this is a controversial topic, and I am very much in the minority. Just the other day I had a very inebriated argument about this that nearly came to blood. I can hear the sharpening of stakes as I type, and the stuffing of mop-headed me effigies all ready for burning. I wouldn't be surprised if some deranged Gaga fanatic is planning to blow up the Danish Embassy right now because of my blasphemy.
Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Germanotta, has become incredibly popular over the last year for her own personal brand of weirdly-dressed neo-Madonna pap. Even the normally cynical seem to have a soft spot for the self-proclaimed cultural icon. Gushing journalists and the blogotariat, desperate for something that even slightly resembles a generation-defining figure also seem to go ludicrously gaga over the lady. (Bet you haven't read that pun before!) They read a lot more into pseudo-postmodernism and vain posing than is really there, just because she looks a little bit different. For example, an online reporter claimed:
...Really? We're talking about the same woman who has said in interviews:
"I hail men".... If that's what passes for feminism in the 21st century, then Germaine Greer is audibly rolling in her grave. Yes, I know that line is a little bit dodgy – technically she sleeps in a crypt. But either way, Gaga's ridiculous persona is little more than burlesque attention-seeking coupled with a bloated sense self-importance; I remember seeing her on an interview on Rove where she was devoid of humour and acted like... an arrogant, standoffish 23 year old in a stupid dress. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to move into a self-indulgent tirade about What's Wrong With Modern Music.
Germanotta's shows and film clips, all of which can be seen on youtube, offer the same extravagant mega-budget over-choreographed ridiculousness of Britney Spears at her worst, coupled with the same vacuous glibness. What is it with these people and feeling that they can't go anywhere without being escorted by a dozen oiled up dancers wearing matching rhinestone codpieces? Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, J Lo, Ke(dollar sine)ha and so many others... why does being blond, connected, somewhat attractive and having a modicum of talent guarantee you a spot on the global charts as long as you have a big-league manager with enough computer equipment to make it sound as if you can sing? That's not to mention the thousands of ultra-repetitive, lyrically idiotic, musically cretinous, misogynistic mass-produced pieces of nightclub fodder (Damn! Your a sexy bitch) that litter our radio airwaves. How do the most agonisingly inane strands of MTV spawn often manage to proliferate so cancerously? How does that song that you hate on the radio contribute in any way to the culture, ideas, philanthropy, the environment, the economy, inspiration or the betterment of humankind? Every time you listen to a Gaga song, you're emptying a watermelon cruiser into the crystal well of human achievement.
That's just your personal taste, Damacus, stop being such a snob. Well a few points there. Firstly, though tastes are mostly personal, judgment isn't exclusively subjective: we can agree with a fair bit of certainty that Shakespeare is better than Stephanie Myer, and Van Gogh isn't just as artistically significant as a five year old's doodlings. A few drug-addled disco-fiends might love Xanadu, but that doesn't mean that's it good. But even if judging something on it's artistic or literary merits isn't entirely a personal thing, then surely entertainment value is? Well, kind of. If we had equal access to various music, then how much you enjoy dancing to it is perfectly valid. But when we are constantly blasted with a certain song through tv, radio, the internet and venues, a degree of pack mentality, and sheer exposure, means that more often and not we will be forced to warm to it and the song proliferates. Often we only enjoy certain songs because media and corporations have decided that they want us too, and we don't really have a choice. I've happily danced to Tik Tok enough times to know that that's well and truly the case.
Back to her so-called ladyship. I'll give her credit, at least for writing her own lyrics, but I'm not gonna give her credit for writing good lyrics. If you actually look at them, the words in Gaga's songs are trite, mega-repetitive (In a single song, there are 19 uses of the word 'telephone', and one use of the word *shudder* "burb") and full of truly awful innuendos.
...Muffin? Glue-Gun? It's like a crap porn script written by the cast of Better Homes & Gardens.
With that, I leave you. Toodles.
After his wife started getting bunches of flowers and hams of condolence in the mail, American author Mark Twain (one part Colonel Sanders, two parts Straight Oscar Wilde, no parts Shania) famously told a newspaper "The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." When Alfred Nobel, French dynamite-inventor and arms-manufacturer, read his own prehumous obituary claiming that "The merchant of death is dead", he was so upset that he started the Nobel Prize, hoping to leave a legacy that made someone other than the Mythbusters happy. John Partridge, a shoemaker turned astrologer with half the style of John Edwards and all the credibility, had a prediction of his death published by satirist Jonathon Swift, followed by an obituary a few months later. When Partridge tried to convince everyone that he was actually still, you know, alive, nobody believed him. You'd think he would have seen it coming.
A little-known fact about Mark Twain is that his moustache outlived him by six years, becoming a vice-treasurer for the American Baseball Negro League until it's death at the battle of the Somme.
Similalalalalarly, I've heard some our morbid-minded blog family muttering that D.I.D a Mess is as dead as house-flattened witch, and that we should quickly take our ruby slippers and click our heels back to Facebook before some little bitch comes along, steals them and starts gallivanting about in technicolour glory. Well I say, NO! This blog is still extraordinarily healthy, my pretties, and I'll get you and your little dogs too if you say a word otherwise. What? You think I'm turning into some kind of ridiculous blog tyrant? Your lack of faith disturbs me. There is only power, and those too weak to seek it. The struggle for world domination will be fought entirely between us, between Germans and Jews. ...Actually, ignore that last one.
(By the way Crucible Tongs, sorry, I'm joking, I'd never challenge your Freudian Floydian Blog dictatorship.)
Seriously though, this blog is still going strong. We had 9 posts last month, which is still heaps more than most blogs I know, and I think we're getting the variety right. I maintain that it won't be dead until no-one had posted for two months. But if there actually is anyone who does read this, we'd get all inspiredy if you dropped us a comment, even if it's just vicious abuse! What do you prefer? Pictures? Pithy? Profound? Informative? (ewww damacus, stop trying to vomit half-chewed wikipedia trivia into our collective lap.) Please disagree with us, or agree with us, or not care. WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO GET YOUR ATTENTION?! Dress up in nine foot avatar suits and start having tail-sex? Personally murder Ray Comfort and hide his banana-smeared cadaver under your bed? Stuff coke cans in our hair and whore ourselves to the music industry?
And so we come, as we inevitably must, to the tenuous segue.
I hate Lady Gaga.
I know this is a controversial topic, and I am very much in the minority. Just the other day I had a very inebriated argument about this that nearly came to blood. I can hear the sharpening of stakes as I type, and the stuffing of mop-headed me effigies all ready for burning. I wouldn't be surprised if some deranged Gaga fanatic is planning to blow up the Danish Embassy right now because of my blasphemy.
Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Germanotta, has become incredibly popular over the last year for her own personal brand of weirdly-dressed neo-Madonna pap. Even the normally cynical seem to have a soft spot for the self-proclaimed cultural icon. Gushing journalists and the blogotariat, desperate for something that even slightly resembles a generation-defining figure also seem to go ludicrously gaga over the lady. (Bet you haven't read that pun before!) They read a lot more into pseudo-postmodernism and vain posing than is really there, just because she looks a little bit different. For example, an online reporter claimed:
"Her lyrics were symbolic of both the feminine mystique and female empowerment."
...Really? We're talking about the same woman who has said in interviews:
''I think it's great to be a sexy, beautiful woman who can f--- her man after she makes him dinner. There's a stigma around feminism that's a little bit man-hating."
...and..."I'm not a feminist - I, I hail men, I love men."
"I hail men".... If that's what passes for feminism in the 21st century, then Germaine Greer is audibly rolling in her grave. Yes, I know that line is a little bit dodgy – technically she sleeps in a crypt. But either way, Gaga's ridiculous persona is little more than burlesque attention-seeking coupled with a bloated sense self-importance; I remember seeing her on an interview on Rove where she was devoid of humour and acted like... an arrogant, standoffish 23 year old in a stupid dress. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to move into a self-indulgent tirade about What's Wrong With Modern Music.
A 16th century Russian engraving of the Whore of Babylon
Germanotta's shows and film clips, all of which can be seen on youtube, offer the same extravagant mega-budget over-choreographed ridiculousness of Britney Spears at her worst, coupled with the same vacuous glibness. What is it with these people and feeling that they can't go anywhere without being escorted by a dozen oiled up dancers wearing matching rhinestone codpieces? Britney Spears, Jessica Simpson, J Lo, Ke(dollar sine)ha and so many others... why does being blond, connected, somewhat attractive and having a modicum of talent guarantee you a spot on the global charts as long as you have a big-league manager with enough computer equipment to make it sound as if you can sing? That's not to mention the thousands of ultra-repetitive, lyrically idiotic, musically cretinous, misogynistic mass-produced pieces of nightclub fodder (Damn! Your a sexy bitch) that litter our radio airwaves. How do the most agonisingly inane strands of MTV spawn often manage to proliferate so cancerously? How does that song that you hate on the radio contribute in any way to the culture, ideas, philanthropy, the environment, the economy, inspiration or the betterment of humankind? Every time you listen to a Gaga song, you're emptying a watermelon cruiser into the crystal well of human achievement.
That's just your personal taste, Damacus, stop being such a snob. Well a few points there. Firstly, though tastes are mostly personal, judgment isn't exclusively subjective: we can agree with a fair bit of certainty that Shakespeare is better than Stephanie Myer, and Van Gogh isn't just as artistically significant as a five year old's doodlings. A few drug-addled disco-fiends might love Xanadu, but that doesn't mean that's it good. But even if judging something on it's artistic or literary merits isn't entirely a personal thing, then surely entertainment value is? Well, kind of. If we had equal access to various music, then how much you enjoy dancing to it is perfectly valid. But when we are constantly blasted with a certain song through tv, radio, the internet and venues, a degree of pack mentality, and sheer exposure, means that more often and not we will be forced to warm to it and the song proliferates. Often we only enjoy certain songs because media and corporations have decided that they want us too, and we don't really have a choice. I've happily danced to Tik Tok enough times to know that that's well and truly the case.
Back to her so-called ladyship. I'll give her credit, at least for writing her own lyrics, but I'm not gonna give her credit for writing good lyrics. If you actually look at them, the words in Gaga's songs are trite, mega-repetitive (In a single song, there are 19 uses of the word 'telephone', and one use of the word *shudder* "burb") and full of truly awful innuendos.
"Cause I'm bluffin' with my muffin
I'm not lying I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunning"
...Muffin? Glue-Gun? It's like a crap porn script written by the cast of Better Homes & Gardens.
With that, I leave you. Toodles.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
Ques, Rain and Mouse Traps
So here I sit both absolutely furious and catastrophically spent. After three and bit months of twenty ten I have started to discover its pattern of periodically providing a glimpse of hope followed by an inevitable spitting in face. It’s that rude family member of my many years of life who won’t be forgotten due to their everlasting imprint on my psyche. So yes I apologize just as I do at the beginning of all my other blogs but this time not for poor writing and grammar that has now become a given; this time you will be enjoying slash ignoring a personal rant on my failing social interactions and quest for a somewhat true form of happiness.
This quite obviously is not a selection of spontaneous feelings so I shall tell you the little story that has sparked this collection of words. Tonight was a night spent in ques to get into pubs and clubs whilst standing in the pouring rain. It went for a whole three hours at the end of which I did not enter a single venue and just left in utter frustration. Most of this time was spent alone due to a decision to partially uphold a prior commitment... something I somewhat regret. Why was I not allowed to enjoy myself tonight? What is it that has decided I am no longer permitted to experience happiness?
I am quite aware that I have bountiful amounts of material wealth available to myself and should be quite happy with all I have got but material joy does not exist to me. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy all the things I have most of which I have slaved away for corporate giants just to afford and maintain their phony pleasure that they bring. It is just in the end I am not happy for them because for some reason it has been decided that I cannot find emotional happiness. I have friends but I guess in the end we all need that something more to supply the drug like feeling of lust and love something my current glass of scotch can’t even fix.
So it comes down to being lonely I guess. A void very difficult to fill and almost certainly not something we can count on happening on a weekly basis. When we cannot find someone or something to fill a gap we just end up counting too much on the dreams that we cannot make material wealth create our happiness and cure and loneliness. It now makes sense why I spend so much time working and am always trying to develop such grand plans for myself because it simply just is all to fill a void. A gap in my person and my identity and sadly this scotch is not going to fix it.
Wallowing in my own self pity is not helping but after so many knock backs and failures where do you start. If you failed this many times at doing anything else you would just give it up and move onto something else but this is life I am talking about here you just can’t look for a different kind. Where do you even find out what it is your doing wrong because there must be something I am not repulsed by myself so I cannot be that bad of a person?...
Another failed night passes and I once again sit in front of this brightly light screen burning the back of my retinas and most likely giving myself some form of cancer just by living. When will it end or will it ever? I think it is just time to join eHarmony to find my compatible soul mate and get it over and done with because I sure as hell am not having any success otherwise which I am sure is just the same as a lot of the rest of you.
This quite obviously is not a selection of spontaneous feelings so I shall tell you the little story that has sparked this collection of words. Tonight was a night spent in ques to get into pubs and clubs whilst standing in the pouring rain. It went for a whole three hours at the end of which I did not enter a single venue and just left in utter frustration. Most of this time was spent alone due to a decision to partially uphold a prior commitment... something I somewhat regret. Why was I not allowed to enjoy myself tonight? What is it that has decided I am no longer permitted to experience happiness?
I am quite aware that I have bountiful amounts of material wealth available to myself and should be quite happy with all I have got but material joy does not exist to me. Don’t get me wrong I enjoy all the things I have most of which I have slaved away for corporate giants just to afford and maintain their phony pleasure that they bring. It is just in the end I am not happy for them because for some reason it has been decided that I cannot find emotional happiness. I have friends but I guess in the end we all need that something more to supply the drug like feeling of lust and love something my current glass of scotch can’t even fix. So it comes down to being lonely I guess. A void very difficult to fill and almost certainly not something we can count on happening on a weekly basis. When we cannot find someone or something to fill a gap we just end up counting too much on the dreams that we cannot make material wealth create our happiness and cure and loneliness. It now makes sense why I spend so much time working and am always trying to develop such grand plans for myself because it simply just is all to fill a void. A gap in my person and my identity and sadly this scotch is not going to fix it.
Wallowing in my own self pity is not helping but after so many knock backs and failures where do you start. If you failed this many times at doing anything else you would just give it up and move onto something else but this is life I am talking about here you just can’t look for a different kind. Where do you even find out what it is your doing wrong because there must be something I am not repulsed by myself so I cannot be that bad of a person?...
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Damn This Freedom!
Sitting alone in a first year Biology lecture could never be fun; but today I feel an extra burst of boredom that is so familiar this year. Staring blankly at the projection of slides on the wall, listening to a woman speak about something that I learnt more than two years ago, and trying not to think about the recent 'freedom' that I have from couple life is not my idea of a fun day. As I sat and stared and tried not to fall asleep, I wondered if I could write a blog in the remaining 30 minutes of my lesson. "That's too hard" I said to myself, and so I decided to show that annoying me that I can do whatever I want. I decided that logging onto my blog would be slightly less counter productive than hanging around on Facebook for the rest of the lecture, and Damacus has long been harrassing me to post something new on this neglected blog. It is because of this that I am not drawing Punett squares on my lecture slides.
So, to begin my now 25 minute long blog, I should first say that I am running out of things to wear to uni. Almost every combination of clothes in my cupboard has been worn, I have been raiding the drawers of my sister, and both my parents, and it is only week 5. Oh the wonder of the free dress days that we so looked forward to once a term in high school has become the annoyance and curse of no uniform university. When will people stop trying and start wearing tracksuit pants every day? I long for the day when I can wear comfortable pants and not be looked at with judging eyes; that day will come, I hope, in Winter.
Not only do we have freedom of what we wear, but we have freedom in the classes that we attend and pay attention to. Last week the only class I attended was Medieval History. I was ill on Thursday so I missed my Lab sessions, I did not attend Criminology because the lecturer has the most boring voice of all time, I skipped Biology because, as I said, the course content to this point is the same as what my sister si learning in year 11 Biology, and I missed Chemistry because physical chem is not my topic of choice. That leaves History; the only subject that I chose for fun that has no effect on my career. This freedom to miss lectures without anyone noticing that you are gone may seem great for all of you year 12 students reading this, but trust me, I am not learning anything. As much as the lazy folk like me hated the fact that attendance at school was so strictly monitered, this 'come and go as you please' attitude is hard to get used to, and if I fail to adapt I will most likely fail all of my courses.
We have the freedom to drink between classes; we have a bar and on occasion some societies will give out free alcohol to its members. $1 pots at 1pm on a Thursday at Sir John's Bar, but I have a three hour Chemistry lab after it, what is stopping me from being completely intoxicated and playing with dangerous chemicals?
University brags about the new and undiscovered freedom for ex-high school sutdents that will jump at the chance to have a lazy year after the horror and stress that VCE thrust upon them, but how many of us will drown in this freedom, jump in too deep and be unable to save themselves even by using uni-survival backstroke? I think, or hope, that I have realised in time that I can no longer see the beach of responsibility, the land of my future, that I still know in which direction to swim-study to safety, and that the current of sleep-ins, parties, and televisons series on DVD that I have always wanted to watch will not drag me out to forever me lost in the vast ocean of lazyness and unemployment. Save yourselves; the floaties of high school and the boogey board of teachers can no longer help you get to shore. Learn to swim before it is to late, I hope that I do. I think that metaphor has now officialy been killed.
With only 5 minutes left (yes that last part took me a while but I was actually looking at the pictures on the slides; I like pedigrees, ok), all I have to say is that too much freedom can never be a good thing. I must now pack up and be disappointed with how short this was, but I did my best with the time given and that annoying noise in the background; yes I mean the lecturer. Thanks for reading.
-Renji
So, to begin my now 25 minute long blog, I should first say that I am running out of things to wear to uni. Almost every combination of clothes in my cupboard has been worn, I have been raiding the drawers of my sister, and both my parents, and it is only week 5. Oh the wonder of the free dress days that we so looked forward to once a term in high school has become the annoyance and curse of no uniform university. When will people stop trying and start wearing tracksuit pants every day? I long for the day when I can wear comfortable pants and not be looked at with judging eyes; that day will come, I hope, in Winter.
Not only do we have freedom of what we wear, but we have freedom in the classes that we attend and pay attention to. Last week the only class I attended was Medieval History. I was ill on Thursday so I missed my Lab sessions, I did not attend Criminology because the lecturer has the most boring voice of all time, I skipped Biology because, as I said, the course content to this point is the same as what my sister si learning in year 11 Biology, and I missed Chemistry because physical chem is not my topic of choice. That leaves History; the only subject that I chose for fun that has no effect on my career. This freedom to miss lectures without anyone noticing that you are gone may seem great for all of you year 12 students reading this, but trust me, I am not learning anything. As much as the lazy folk like me hated the fact that attendance at school was so strictly monitered, this 'come and go as you please' attitude is hard to get used to, and if I fail to adapt I will most likely fail all of my courses.
We have the freedom to drink between classes; we have a bar and on occasion some societies will give out free alcohol to its members. $1 pots at 1pm on a Thursday at Sir John's Bar, but I have a three hour Chemistry lab after it, what is stopping me from being completely intoxicated and playing with dangerous chemicals?
University brags about the new and undiscovered freedom for ex-high school sutdents that will jump at the chance to have a lazy year after the horror and stress that VCE thrust upon them, but how many of us will drown in this freedom, jump in too deep and be unable to save themselves even by using uni-survival backstroke? I think, or hope, that I have realised in time that I can no longer see the beach of responsibility, the land of my future, that I still know in which direction to swim-study to safety, and that the current of sleep-ins, parties, and televisons series on DVD that I have always wanted to watch will not drag me out to forever me lost in the vast ocean of lazyness and unemployment. Save yourselves; the floaties of high school and the boogey board of teachers can no longer help you get to shore. Learn to swim before it is to late, I hope that I do. I think that metaphor has now officialy been killed.
With only 5 minutes left (yes that last part took me a while but I was actually looking at the pictures on the slides; I like pedigrees, ok), all I have to say is that too much freedom can never be a good thing. I must now pack up and be disappointed with how short this was, but I did my best with the time given and that annoying noise in the background; yes I mean the lecturer. Thanks for reading.
-Renji
Friday, March 19, 2010
And the Weird Blogging Hack Came Back
Don't pretend you didn't miss me. Blogging as a medium decays in my absence. Crucible Tongs has come back, adorned in that trademark garb you've come to associate with worldly security. The gleaming diving helmet throbbing with neon lights and encapsulating the timeless German rave scene, the sharp tuxedo and white gloves, the snowy ruffle and obsidian briefcase of depth indeterminable... Yeah, I kind of fell in love with an alter ego in there somewhere, but affections for fictitious characters is like throbbing biological urges in priests, they're cool so long as you don't act on them... and you will, so enjoy dreading the absolute downfall of all your amassed credibility while you're at it...
*Ahem* I am so unbelievably glad I can blame that intro on my blogging slump of late. That way it can't be dredged up as evidence for the raging 'Crucible Tongs vs Bram Stoker's Estate'... of which claims of over 400 calls demanding to know where I should address mail to one M. Harker are completely unsubstantiated... *Ahem... because sometimes a paragraph's gotten so defamatory you've retched up some of the most grotesque 'Fishing Chips' (Which are NOT SUSTENANCE!!!) you'll definitely encounter next weekend when they're on the table waiting for you when you get home, and had to clear your throat once more*. I've got no idea where this is going and this line is often the harbinger of some of my more... 'eccentric' work on Musings Of Tong, check it out if you haven't, you'll probably NEVER be able to speak to me face to face again, but I like to gauge the reactions nonetheless. Nevertheless I'll keep it 'clean' and try to keep the name dropping to a minimum.
'Why haven't you been blogging, Mr Tongs?', I bet you're all asking, as my overflowing charisma has been known to require three successive greetings before one can truly consider themselves capable of comprehending my overwhelming personage. The answer is simple, it's called a cocktail of stress, anxiety, borderline nervous breakdown, Nirvana (The state of being AND the band!), hallucinations, illness, tragedy, large scale property damage, chronic isolation and a Typically Tongian Transcendence of today's value system... with Tiringly Terrible Tongian alliteration for good measure... However I'm getting quite sick of saying life's sucked for the last few weeks and so can't be screwed now. Instead I will detail my absence because this is blogging, you'll sit down and enjoy what I tell you to enjoy...
So strap yourself in reaaaaal tight... don't mind the wires and tape keeping your eyes ajar... because here's my 'Ode to (eventual temporary) Joy'...
The storm.
THE storm.
THA storm.
You know, the one that didn't reach it's full potential for media frenzy as measured by comparing my mother's level of indignation to that of the tabloids. As you all would have guessed with a startling degree of accuracy, no doubt, is that a 'deeply troubled' (sounds so much cooler than 'potentially dangerous' in conversations with women, trust me... because my conversations with women are the stuff of legend... almost to the point where I wish humanity could collectively forget them...) and, shamelessly overt, melancholic youth such as myself sees an intensely ferocious, yet empathetic poetic beauty to a well timed downpour. The heavens break for you, they cry the tears you couldn't shed like a best friend, they drown out the uncaring world in a constant perfect rhythm... and delivers a comforting yet commanding voice in thunder, as a fantastic Shakespearian precursor to unfathomable tragedy. King Lear, THIS MAY, GET HYPED, GET SNIDE AND PRETENTIOUS, GET TICKETS... then get wasted on red wine & cheap caviar and despair at the day your future daughters come and destroy your life with their grotesque, hereditary, karmic, ignorance...
Well THAT storm, which became ridiculously serious because it singlehandedly ruined Moomba, shocking all that a celebration for something as dead as the Yarra had to be buried by divine intervention... Well I was home, on the phone to a confused and threatened Mr Phistocoles, the greengrocer, about trading my permanent essence for the culinary skills to develop what later became the greatest vegetarian bolognaise sauce the world will ever see. To cut a long story short, the iceman indeed cometh in the form of a middle eastern mob evidently without sin. Here's where the heroics come in, if anybody still plays Brass instruments now would be a good time, or that lacking, the Indiana Jones theme will do just fine. I have a dog, my sister has a rabbit. The dog's a genius, he knows life's about food, sleep, poignant misery for attention, snappy outfits and sating those pesky male loins with anything you can squint enough to make appear female. The rabbit is vermin, it layers our backyard in it's 'leavings' (I love that word in that context, it's so classy) which adds that extra layer of disgusting challenge to an already distressing occupation of hanging out the washing... seriously, handling people's clothes is way too 'stalky' for anyone under 35 and engaged in... your mantra becomes, 'I'm just holding clothes, they're for wearing, not for ME to wear though! Oh lordy no, although they might fit your... *shakes head violently grits teeth and resumes the psychological torture*'. I digress from cool heroics, which will get their own paragraph for emphasis.
*Click, Click... Click, *curse* backspace* Excellent, well evidently I loathe my sister's rodent companion, as an ignorant, deadbeat, talent squandering young male willing to fake dedication for attention and overstaying my welcome, I dragged the dog inside. Hail explodes on garage roofs situated next to porches like shrapnel. It was the least I could do for the only company I had for the weekend... who I'd neglected to feed until one that morning thanks to stupid uni timetable and fear of abandonment from schoolyard chums. I had guilt on my mind so I saved him... by opening a door and shouting, but that's sort of all they do for avalanche survivors too. 'OH MY GOD!!! ARE YOU ALIVE?!?!?!' as the victims sudden blindness, deafness and unceremonious shovel wound to the forehead are inflicted and carried for the rest of their, admittedly lucky, lives. Well the dog was inside barking, which I often immaturely associate with canine cursing for cheap lulz and out of an intense shared hatred for morning birds. 'A mighty fine job Tongs', said my imaginary colonel or military horn player... I consider knowing nothing of military rank or weapon numbering one of my finest traits, the prospective engineers I spend my week with think otherwise... It also helped that i was wearing my awesome lazing around weekend cargo pants that I swear were designed for covert operations or something else a six year old openly considers cool before he thinly represses it for the rest of his inadequate, non maiden-rescuing/dragon-slaying/Nazi-trouncing manhood. I'm wearing them now actually... I think I took blogging to a new disturbing level... Yeah, I'm wearing my action pants right now... nice and loose, as I frantically wait for people who are out enjoying their Friday night to comment on my facebook status and put up with my dad's disturbingly audible sleep apnea from the other side of the house... yeah, this is why I'll need tertiary education to get by...
Okay, so my rescue is complete so I stand on the porch amid the shards of ice in the rain howling in victory like the barbaric and rugged 57kg beast of a omegamale I am... when I see my sister's goddamn rabbit. Lewis Carrol was onto something (Someone will point out the implications there, come on, there's a Disney tie-in, someone apart from Damacus owes it to themselves to get this, because I was sick of his adoration within a minute of meeting him...)... *hints shamelessly out of fear of not being acknowledged and draining any miserable immature humour this gag had left due to breach of brevity* No, not little girls, but why you should NEVER FOLLOW WHITE RABBITS... Me being the brilliantly heroic, yet stoic (Don't ever touch me...), but charming (...Eeeeeehh!!!!), combat hardened (seriously, never touch me...) and intensely dashing individual that I am, I threw caution to the wind, and offered a helping hand to my much maligned, myxomatosis proofed malefactor. I have a brain, he tells me to do some really bad things, in this case he reminded me he's in a prime position to take some serious damage right about now and he's in charge of my delicate balance between playful randomness and schizophrenic depravity so I listened, and put a battered washing basket over my head. Screaming like the only person I have the build to appear remotely like... Xena, I bolted for one of those ancient plastic clam shell paddle pools that lies in a pile of junk from an age when it was cool for toys to have 78% Lead concentration. It was the only way to break the bonds of trademarking and have the Ninja Turtles ACTUALLY fight Transformers and a trio of Batmen with Pokemon, complete with your own predetermined winner based on what you were more into at the time. Giggling and screaming hysterically, high on chemical-laden paints and Peyote loaded juice while wearing shorts for ridiculousness is probably why our generation is so fucked up... and by that I mean AWESOME! OK so I'm fumbling with a slab of plastic that's in a state of decay. Paddle pools must have become non-profitable ages ago thanks to child obesity... Well as I fumble I learned a great lesson from my cosmic-gnostic-mech-god/imaginary friend. The fusion of testosterone, dopamine and adrenaline's short lived effects are karmic punishment for inherent disappointing male sexual performance. It's about here where I start wetting myself with whatever fluids my body has to offer. It doesn't help that I get hit on the hand by a Yeti's tennis ball with a troposphere for Newtonian acceleration. Now the Xena scream is this messy amalgam curse... which from memory wasn't even cursing but more like vocabulary leakage. I run straight for the rabbit hutch as the thing springs about like it ate... or watched Flubber. The rabbit can smell my hatred, it panics and recoils as I run adorned with a washing basket, bleeding from mother nature's stigmata and holding a giant menacing blue shell while screaming 'Mothertrainfootgrasseyescakeloveelevensickcardcoldadverbnottrydonecouldwoodenstalepragmatistcolonialisedrakefortbedjuxtaposition!!!!'
Well I got there and I placed the shell over a cage which in hindsight was probably doing a good enough job protecting an animal too dumb to realise it's actually safe in the steel shelter box despite the roaring being ten times as loud. Not happy with the orientation (Terrible time for OCD to get you, I know) I shifted it around, the basket was nailed with what I now assume are flaming meteors. I yelp like a small girl spliced with a chipmunk and bolt for the safety of inside. Well that's my elaborate rescue in a coconut shell.
I'd wrap this up now, but my computer says 'Vampire Hunter D' won't be done downloading for another 2 hours and Damacus, despite saying so, knows his previous posts absurd length (aided by videos, crazy formatting and other cheap nonsense) was a crazy challenge to my kingly authority over this blog during my absence... Need I remind him it was MY crazy latenight MSN conversation idea initially to convert Dracula's (3rd nightwalker mention, because it ain't a D.I.D. post without vampires!!!) diary and letter format to that of weblogs and e-mail, for our own despicably pretentious and subversive sense of humour. Actually I don't mean to boast or anything, but those late night Crucible-Damacus Brainstorming sessions unfurl some of... no... THE GREATEST CONCEPTS THE WORLD WILL EVER SEE... admittedly he drops the ball most times, but my influence pulls him into line. Actually I think I'll check to see if I've got any saved to pass the time. Afterall, you've got another hour and a half of my story to wade through, you've deserved your catharsis... of basking in my detestable ego masturbation!!!
Well I can't find anything, sorry, I actually looked. You'll just have to believe that neither of us have anything better to do with our time than contemplate character scenarios brimming with references to things we're experts on thanks to wikipedia, then growing increasingly disturbing and angsty until we both realise we're writing ourselves into a subversive phantasmagorical dystopia as a weakly concealed allegory for the tragedies (note the plural) we've faced living unemployed in peaceful suburbia but are experts on because we know words like 'angst' and 'melancholy' and can recite the names of all the demons from 'The Lesser Key of Solomon' and personify them appropriately as institutions and corporations we keep coming crawling back to...
Well since I started this only one person liked one of my four facebook statuses churned out in the space of a minute. Which goddamn genius decided to develop another means to gain perceived acceptance? As if I needed somewhere else to make a fool of myself for the sake of sweet, sweet praise... Hmm, how about making a status about the fact that I'm typing up a blog post...2 minutes later I netted two comments for it. Fantastic, this is what I've worked all night for. Now to use anything that was said as a ridiculous counter. Girl Scout killings due to decreased levels of blindness in society will do nicely... Now to await the fish to take the bait. The bait has been taken, now to kick it up a notch. You know how in Western's the cliche villain ties the cliched broad to a cliched rail line, then the train that runs on cliches comes around the corner and the cliched hero shoots some cliches and saves her... only to have the hero die anyway in the cliche final stand in the ending. This WILL get a response. And a response it got... hmm... maybe some electricity... sleep deprivation... yeah, I've found my conversation for tonight, I don't need blogging anymore, so uh... bye!
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
*Ahem* I am so unbelievably glad I can blame that intro on my blogging slump of late. That way it can't be dredged up as evidence for the raging 'Crucible Tongs vs Bram Stoker's Estate'... of which claims of over 400 calls demanding to know where I should address mail to one M. Harker are completely unsubstantiated... *Ahem... because sometimes a paragraph's gotten so defamatory you've retched up some of the most grotesque 'Fishing Chips' (Which are NOT SUSTENANCE!!!) you'll definitely encounter next weekend when they're on the table waiting for you when you get home, and had to clear your throat once more*. I've got no idea where this is going and this line is often the harbinger of some of my more... 'eccentric' work on Musings Of Tong, check it out if you haven't, you'll probably NEVER be able to speak to me face to face again, but I like to gauge the reactions nonetheless. Nevertheless I'll keep it 'clean' and try to keep the name dropping to a minimum.
'Why haven't you been blogging, Mr Tongs?', I bet you're all asking, as my overflowing charisma has been known to require three successive greetings before one can truly consider themselves capable of comprehending my overwhelming personage. The answer is simple, it's called a cocktail of stress, anxiety, borderline nervous breakdown, Nirvana (The state of being AND the band!), hallucinations, illness, tragedy, large scale property damage, chronic isolation and a Typically Tongian Transcendence of today's value system... with Tiringly Terrible Tongian alliteration for good measure... However I'm getting quite sick of saying life's sucked for the last few weeks and so can't be screwed now. Instead I will detail my absence because this is blogging, you'll sit down and enjoy what I tell you to enjoy...
So strap yourself in reaaaaal tight... don't mind the wires and tape keeping your eyes ajar... because here's my 'Ode to (eventual temporary) Joy'...
The storm.
THE storm.
THA storm.
You know, the one that didn't reach it's full potential for media frenzy as measured by comparing my mother's level of indignation to that of the tabloids. As you all would have guessed with a startling degree of accuracy, no doubt, is that a 'deeply troubled' (sounds so much cooler than 'potentially dangerous' in conversations with women, trust me... because my conversations with women are the stuff of legend... almost to the point where I wish humanity could collectively forget them...) and, shamelessly overt, melancholic youth such as myself sees an intensely ferocious, yet empathetic poetic beauty to a well timed downpour. The heavens break for you, they cry the tears you couldn't shed like a best friend, they drown out the uncaring world in a constant perfect rhythm... and delivers a comforting yet commanding voice in thunder, as a fantastic Shakespearian precursor to unfathomable tragedy. King Lear, THIS MAY, GET HYPED, GET SNIDE AND PRETENTIOUS, GET TICKETS... then get wasted on red wine & cheap caviar and despair at the day your future daughters come and destroy your life with their grotesque, hereditary, karmic, ignorance...
Well THAT storm, which became ridiculously serious because it singlehandedly ruined Moomba, shocking all that a celebration for something as dead as the Yarra had to be buried by divine intervention... Well I was home, on the phone to a confused and threatened Mr Phistocoles, the greengrocer, about trading my permanent essence for the culinary skills to develop what later became the greatest vegetarian bolognaise sauce the world will ever see. To cut a long story short, the iceman indeed cometh in the form of a middle eastern mob evidently without sin. Here's where the heroics come in, if anybody still plays Brass instruments now would be a good time, or that lacking, the Indiana Jones theme will do just fine. I have a dog, my sister has a rabbit. The dog's a genius, he knows life's about food, sleep, poignant misery for attention, snappy outfits and sating those pesky male loins with anything you can squint enough to make appear female. The rabbit is vermin, it layers our backyard in it's 'leavings' (I love that word in that context, it's so classy) which adds that extra layer of disgusting challenge to an already distressing occupation of hanging out the washing... seriously, handling people's clothes is way too 'stalky' for anyone under 35 and engaged in... your mantra becomes, 'I'm just holding clothes, they're for wearing, not for ME to wear though! Oh lordy no, although they might fit your... *shakes head violently grits teeth and resumes the psychological torture*'. I digress from cool heroics, which will get their own paragraph for emphasis.
*Click, Click... Click, *curse* backspace* Excellent, well evidently I loathe my sister's rodent companion, as an ignorant, deadbeat, talent squandering young male willing to fake dedication for attention and overstaying my welcome, I dragged the dog inside. Hail explodes on garage roofs situated next to porches like shrapnel. It was the least I could do for the only company I had for the weekend... who I'd neglected to feed until one that morning thanks to stupid uni timetable and fear of abandonment from schoolyard chums. I had guilt on my mind so I saved him... by opening a door and shouting, but that's sort of all they do for avalanche survivors too. 'OH MY GOD!!! ARE YOU ALIVE?!?!?!' as the victims sudden blindness, deafness and unceremonious shovel wound to the forehead are inflicted and carried for the rest of their, admittedly lucky, lives. Well the dog was inside barking, which I often immaturely associate with canine cursing for cheap lulz and out of an intense shared hatred for morning birds. 'A mighty fine job Tongs', said my imaginary colonel or military horn player... I consider knowing nothing of military rank or weapon numbering one of my finest traits, the prospective engineers I spend my week with think otherwise... It also helped that i was wearing my awesome lazing around weekend cargo pants that I swear were designed for covert operations or something else a six year old openly considers cool before he thinly represses it for the rest of his inadequate, non maiden-rescuing/dragon-slaying/Nazi-trouncing manhood. I'm wearing them now actually... I think I took blogging to a new disturbing level... Yeah, I'm wearing my action pants right now... nice and loose, as I frantically wait for people who are out enjoying their Friday night to comment on my facebook status and put up with my dad's disturbingly audible sleep apnea from the other side of the house... yeah, this is why I'll need tertiary education to get by...
Okay, so my rescue is complete so I stand on the porch amid the shards of ice in the rain howling in victory like the barbaric and rugged 57kg beast of a omegamale I am... when I see my sister's goddamn rabbit. Lewis Carrol was onto something (Someone will point out the implications there, come on, there's a Disney tie-in, someone apart from Damacus owes it to themselves to get this, because I was sick of his adoration within a minute of meeting him...)... *hints shamelessly out of fear of not being acknowledged and draining any miserable immature humour this gag had left due to breach of brevity* No, not little girls, but why you should NEVER FOLLOW WHITE RABBITS... Me being the brilliantly heroic, yet stoic (Don't ever touch me...), but charming (...Eeeeeehh!!!!), combat hardened (seriously, never touch me...) and intensely dashing individual that I am, I threw caution to the wind, and offered a helping hand to my much maligned, myxomatosis proofed malefactor. I have a brain, he tells me to do some really bad things, in this case he reminded me he's in a prime position to take some serious damage right about now and he's in charge of my delicate balance between playful randomness and schizophrenic depravity so I listened, and put a battered washing basket over my head. Screaming like the only person I have the build to appear remotely like... Xena, I bolted for one of those ancient plastic clam shell paddle pools that lies in a pile of junk from an age when it was cool for toys to have 78% Lead concentration. It was the only way to break the bonds of trademarking and have the Ninja Turtles ACTUALLY fight Transformers and a trio of Batmen with Pokemon, complete with your own predetermined winner based on what you were more into at the time. Giggling and screaming hysterically, high on chemical-laden paints and Peyote loaded juice while wearing shorts for ridiculousness is probably why our generation is so fucked up... and by that I mean AWESOME! OK so I'm fumbling with a slab of plastic that's in a state of decay. Paddle pools must have become non-profitable ages ago thanks to child obesity... Well as I fumble I learned a great lesson from my cosmic-gnostic-mech-god/imaginary friend. The fusion of testosterone, dopamine and adrenaline's short lived effects are karmic punishment for inherent disappointing male sexual performance. It's about here where I start wetting myself with whatever fluids my body has to offer. It doesn't help that I get hit on the hand by a Yeti's tennis ball with a troposphere for Newtonian acceleration. Now the Xena scream is this messy amalgam curse... which from memory wasn't even cursing but more like vocabulary leakage. I run straight for the rabbit hutch as the thing springs about like it ate... or watched Flubber. The rabbit can smell my hatred, it panics and recoils as I run adorned with a washing basket, bleeding from mother nature's stigmata and holding a giant menacing blue shell while screaming 'Mothertrainfootgrasseyescakeloveelevensickcardcoldadverbnottrydonecouldwoodenstalepragmatistcolonialisedrakefortbedjuxtaposition!!!!'
Well I got there and I placed the shell over a cage which in hindsight was probably doing a good enough job protecting an animal too dumb to realise it's actually safe in the steel shelter box despite the roaring being ten times as loud. Not happy with the orientation (Terrible time for OCD to get you, I know) I shifted it around, the basket was nailed with what I now assume are flaming meteors. I yelp like a small girl spliced with a chipmunk and bolt for the safety of inside. Well that's my elaborate rescue in a coconut shell.
I'd wrap this up now, but my computer says 'Vampire Hunter D' won't be done downloading for another 2 hours and Damacus, despite saying so, knows his previous posts absurd length (aided by videos, crazy formatting and other cheap nonsense) was a crazy challenge to my kingly authority over this blog during my absence... Need I remind him it was MY crazy latenight MSN conversation idea initially to convert Dracula's (3rd nightwalker mention, because it ain't a D.I.D. post without vampires!!!) diary and letter format to that of weblogs and e-mail, for our own despicably pretentious and subversive sense of humour. Actually I don't mean to boast or anything, but those late night Crucible-Damacus Brainstorming sessions unfurl some of... no... THE GREATEST CONCEPTS THE WORLD WILL EVER SEE... admittedly he drops the ball most times, but my influence pulls him into line. Actually I think I'll check to see if I've got any saved to pass the time. Afterall, you've got another hour and a half of my story to wade through, you've deserved your catharsis... of basking in my detestable ego masturbation!!!
Well I can't find anything, sorry, I actually looked. You'll just have to believe that neither of us have anything better to do with our time than contemplate character scenarios brimming with references to things we're experts on thanks to wikipedia, then growing increasingly disturbing and angsty until we both realise we're writing ourselves into a subversive phantasmagorical dystopia as a weakly concealed allegory for the tragedies (note the plural) we've faced living unemployed in peaceful suburbia but are experts on because we know words like 'angst' and 'melancholy' and can recite the names of all the demons from 'The Lesser Key of Solomon' and personify them appropriately as institutions and corporations we keep coming crawling back to...
Well since I started this only one person liked one of my four facebook statuses churned out in the space of a minute. Which goddamn genius decided to develop another means to gain perceived acceptance? As if I needed somewhere else to make a fool of myself for the sake of sweet, sweet praise... Hmm, how about making a status about the fact that I'm typing up a blog post...2 minutes later I netted two comments for it. Fantastic, this is what I've worked all night for. Now to use anything that was said as a ridiculous counter. Girl Scout killings due to decreased levels of blindness in society will do nicely... Now to await the fish to take the bait. The bait has been taken, now to kick it up a notch. You know how in Western's the cliche villain ties the cliched broad to a cliched rail line, then the train that runs on cliches comes around the corner and the cliched hero shoots some cliches and saves her... only to have the hero die anyway in the cliche final stand in the ending. This WILL get a response. And a response it got... hmm... maybe some electricity... sleep deprivation... yeah, I've found my conversation for tonight, I don't need blogging anymore, so uh... bye!
5. Something that you feel will find its own form
Thursday, March 18, 2010
The Banana Man can — me vs Creationism
Well Howdy! Thought we needed a temporary visual change, I’m sorry that the banner's a bit bleak for what’s normally an entertaining and thought provoking blog. Kudos to Mr Pablo Picasso, painter of the above piece(though I screwed with the colours), who’s lawyers have already boarded a flight from Spain and are now licking their lips and flexing their post-cubist fingers.
To those of you wondering why haven’t Didled for a while (coined that just then, like?), I’ve spent the last week working on this behemoth. I’ve loosely split it into three parts with †††, if anyone would prefer I posted them separately I can. I’m sorry if this offends anyone, I’d love you to comment and discuss anything with me and would sincerely appreciate disagreement. Everyone has an opinion on these issues, it would be awesome if we could discuss them. Here goes.
Ray Comfort: The Atheist's Nightmare
I saw a creationist physically assault a student at uni.
Last Tuesday, outside Melbourne University on Swanston Street, in front of an old man trying to sell The Big Issue, a group of beaming 20-year-olds were handing out free copies of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species. The book, with it’s obscure 19th century scientific vocabulary (think Isaac Newton times Crucible Tongs, but rational) is all there. Well except for four chapters, but still. The cover is totally inconspicuous, even if the font of the text in side is miniscule. The blurb is a little unusual, but not sus:
“A wealth of scientific discoveries since 1971 give a resounding answer to whether Darwin’s theory has been proved”.
Perfectly normal copies of one of the most important books of modern science ever.
Oh, and these copies of Origin of Species also had a 50 page, large print “Special Introduction” by Evangelical Fundamentalist and Young Earth Creationist Reverend Ray Comfort.
His radical Christian ministry, “The Way of The Master Ministry” (unfortunately not Star Wars related), also happens to publish the edition, with the express purpose of spreading creationist propaganda to unwitting people curious about evolution. Before we get started, Young Earth Creationism is the belief that the Bible and Genesis are literally true, that evolution is not real, and that the earth is less 10,000 years old, and that cancer, earthquakes, tsunamis and suffering happens because the devil turned into a snake and told a woman made from a rib to give some fruit to her husband, which he took and ate.
A bit uncertain about that last bit? Well here’s Ray Comfort explaining why! From inside the matrix! And then on a box in the middle of the road!
That’s a very mild Comfort Clip but I thought I’d start nicely. Yes, he’s a sickly saccharine cross-breed between a deranged, extremist preacher and Murray from Flight of the Conchords.
A little bit of a digression for something that I thought I'd comment on. Some of you might have noticed that Professor Richard Dawkins has been in town lately, copping a lot of praise and criticism. I’ve read one of his books and seen him in quite a few interviews, and he’s nowhere near as arrogant as short clips suggest and nowhere near as vicious as media sound-bites make him sound. He’s generally eloquent, poignant and extremely convincing, and I recommend you check him out before passing judgement. Personally, I agree with what he has to say on God and the supernatural, even if I strongly disagree with his disapproval of fantasy and fairy tales. If you’re looking for a comprehensive and rational criticism on the existence of God, or want to justify your faith by honestly being able to say that you’ve considered the alternatives, look no further than “The God Delusion”. That said, he’s can still be a douchebag: I think he spends too much time amongst lunatic fundamentalists to see that moderate and personal religion or spirituality is often benign or benevolent. And the whole “atheism movement” thing makes me cringe a bit as well, I don’t consider atheism a belief but rather a lack of one.
Anyway, Dawkins dubbed our good friend Ray Comfort “The Bananaman”, due to this thoroughly convincing video, 'The Atheist's Nightmare':
If I was a cynic, I’d point out that the pineapple, which is just as tasty and nutritious is also covered with vicious spines, or that there are hundreds of just as easily accessible and appealing fruits that are fatally poisonous to humans. Or that people are the perfect size and shape to eat bananas and distribute their seeds, allowing them to reproduce, making humanity evidence for a Banana God that cares for it’s chosen yellow species. Or the fact that every one of those factors making bananas seemingly human-tailored are there because humans tailored them through millennia of selective breeding, and that the wild banana looks like this:
Or that this video is so hysterically laden with innuendo that even Thomas Aquinas would be smirking.
††††††††††††††
Let me take you back to last Tuesday.
I had an idea about this very dodgy publication because I’d read about it on the internet, but with my morbid love of being outraged, I took one anyway.
A flick through,some raging and a few minutes later I went back, annoyed, righteous and ready to argue. There were more than a dozen of them, with books in hand, terrifying youth-group grins on faces and regurgitated fundamentalist sound bites stockpiled inside their heads, safely insulated against reality. (… for the sake of my simile, not by Peter Garret. I think everyone’s being pretty harsh on him. He insulated those houses asbestos he could!)
They lurked around the main Swanston street entrance to the campus, close to the tram stop where a lot of students off at, trying to pick off stragglers like lions around a heard of zebras. A handful of the satchel-clad quadrupeds were cornered, eyes flicking desperately for escape as they were barraged with lines “Some people will go to any length to deny God, but blood of Jesus is flowing through your veins!” delivered with mega condescending smiles. A few of the god-botherers were filming the grizzly spectacle with professional camera gear, undoubtedly for some sordid youtube account or self-congratulatory cable channel.
Only a few idiots like me tried to challenge them, which they relish in: their responses are well practiced and loud, and they are totally impervious to reason. Unfortunately for my rage-duct but probably fortunately for me, I happened to chose a really nice one, and just kind of felt guilty the whole time I was talking to her. I wasn’t on good form, and I while I wanted a debate she wanted mild-mannered conversion. Still, by the end I’d just about managed to convince her to read some Richard Dawkins to ‘strengthen her faith’. When she said that she hopes she never changes her opinion I politely left. Regardless of what someone thinks or believes about anything, you can’t really reply to that sort of desperate stubbornness with anything except a sigh.
Rayman starts his picture-filled intro with a seven page history of Charles Darwin, the only moderately objective part of his sermon. That’s because Comfort didn’t write it, it was stolen almost verbatim from a professor called Ted Guffrey who’s now planning legal action. Yep, if this was a grade 4 assignment Ray would have already failed from copy-and-paste plagiarism. He then goes on to fail science, rudimentary common sense and life.
Ol' Charlie went on to offer effectively a whole chapter on to discuss this occurred, and since then, numerous gradations from a simple eye to a complex one have been thoroughly and repeatedly proven to exist.
Comfort goes there on page 26, and cherrypicks the website Understanding Evolution to say that mutations “did not occur because the organism was placed in a situation where the mutation would be useful.” he then writes:
Comfort includes some whimsical portraits of Darwin such as this, to subtly and intellectually demonstrate the hypothesis that he was a stupid godless monkey.
To those of you wondering why haven’t Didled for a while (coined that just then, like?), I’ve spent the last week working on this behemoth. I’ve loosely split it into three parts with †††, if anyone would prefer I posted them separately I can. I’m sorry if this offends anyone, I’d love you to comment and discuss anything with me and would sincerely appreciate disagreement. Everyone has an opinion on these issues, it would be awesome if we could discuss them. Here goes.
Ray Comfort: The Atheist's NightmareI saw a creationist physically assault a student at uni.
Last Tuesday, outside Melbourne University on Swanston Street, in front of an old man trying to sell The Big Issue, a group of beaming 20-year-olds were handing out free copies of Charles Darwin’s “The Origin of Species. The book, with it’s obscure 19th century scientific vocabulary (think Isaac Newton times Crucible Tongs, but rational) is all there. Well except for four chapters, but still. The cover is totally inconspicuous, even if the font of the text in side is miniscule. The blurb is a little unusual, but not sus:
“A wealth of scientific discoveries since 1971 give a resounding answer to whether Darwin’s theory has been proved”.
Perfectly normal copies of one of the most important books of modern science ever.
Oh, and these copies of Origin of Species also had a 50 page, large print “Special Introduction” by Evangelical Fundamentalist and Young Earth Creationist Reverend Ray Comfort.
His radical Christian ministry, “The Way of The Master Ministry” (unfortunately not Star Wars related), also happens to publish the edition, with the express purpose of spreading creationist propaganda to unwitting people curious about evolution. Before we get started, Young Earth Creationism is the belief that the Bible and Genesis are literally true, that evolution is not real, and that the earth is less 10,000 years old, and that cancer, earthquakes, tsunamis and suffering happens because the devil turned into a snake and told a woman made from a rib to give some fruit to her husband, which he took and ate.
A bit uncertain about that last bit? Well here’s Ray Comfort explaining why! From inside the matrix! And then on a box in the middle of the road!
That’s a very mild Comfort Clip but I thought I’d start nicely. Yes, he’s a sickly saccharine cross-breed between a deranged, extremist preacher and Murray from Flight of the Conchords.
A little bit of a digression for something that I thought I'd comment on. Some of you might have noticed that Professor Richard Dawkins has been in town lately, copping a lot of praise and criticism. I’ve read one of his books and seen him in quite a few interviews, and he’s nowhere near as arrogant as short clips suggest and nowhere near as vicious as media sound-bites make him sound. He’s generally eloquent, poignant and extremely convincing, and I recommend you check him out before passing judgement. Personally, I agree with what he has to say on God and the supernatural, even if I strongly disagree with his disapproval of fantasy and fairy tales. If you’re looking for a comprehensive and rational criticism on the existence of God, or want to justify your faith by honestly being able to say that you’ve considered the alternatives, look no further than “The God Delusion”. That said, he’s can still be a douchebag: I think he spends too much time amongst lunatic fundamentalists to see that moderate and personal religion or spirituality is often benign or benevolent. And the whole “atheism movement” thing makes me cringe a bit as well, I don’t consider atheism a belief but rather a lack of one.
Anyway, Dawkins dubbed our good friend Ray Comfort “The Bananaman”, due to this thoroughly convincing video, 'The Atheist's Nightmare':
If I was a cynic, I’d point out that the pineapple, which is just as tasty and nutritious is also covered with vicious spines, or that there are hundreds of just as easily accessible and appealing fruits that are fatally poisonous to humans. Or that people are the perfect size and shape to eat bananas and distribute their seeds, allowing them to reproduce, making humanity evidence for a Banana God that cares for it’s chosen yellow species. Or the fact that every one of those factors making bananas seemingly human-tailored are there because humans tailored them through millennia of selective breeding, and that the wild banana looks like this:
Or that this video is so hysterically laden with innuendo that even Thomas Aquinas would be smirking.††††††††††††††
Let me take you back to last Tuesday.
I had an idea about this very dodgy publication because I’d read about it on the internet, but with my morbid love of being outraged, I took one anyway.
A flick through,some raging and a few minutes later I went back, annoyed, righteous and ready to argue. There were more than a dozen of them, with books in hand, terrifying youth-group grins on faces and regurgitated fundamentalist sound bites stockpiled inside their heads, safely insulated against reality. (… for the sake of my simile, not by Peter Garret. I think everyone’s being pretty harsh on him. He insulated those houses asbestos he could!)
They lurked around the main Swanston street entrance to the campus, close to the tram stop where a lot of students off at, trying to pick off stragglers like lions around a heard of zebras. A handful of the satchel-clad quadrupeds were cornered, eyes flicking desperately for escape as they were barraged with lines “Some people will go to any length to deny God, but blood of Jesus is flowing through your veins!” delivered with mega condescending smiles. A few of the god-botherers were filming the grizzly spectacle with professional camera gear, undoubtedly for some sordid youtube account or self-congratulatory cable channel.
Only a few idiots like me tried to challenge them, which they relish in: their responses are well practiced and loud, and they are totally impervious to reason. Unfortunately for my rage-duct but probably fortunately for me, I happened to chose a really nice one, and just kind of felt guilty the whole time I was talking to her. I wasn’t on good form, and I while I wanted a debate she wanted mild-mannered conversion. Still, by the end I’d just about managed to convince her to read some Richard Dawkins to ‘strengthen her faith’. When she said that she hopes she never changes her opinion I politely left. Regardless of what someone thinks or believes about anything, you can’t really reply to that sort of desperate stubbornness with anything except a sigh.
I met up with a couple of new unifriends and started to leave. As we walked past, one kid, a first year, though he looked maybe 16, took one of the books, realised what it was and went to throw it in the bin. One of the creationists, a guy with a shaved head, taller than me and much bulkier, grabbed him and pushed him to the ground. He got up physically shaking. ‘He pushed me to the ground’, he repeated over and over again, ‘that’s fucked up man’.
The guy didn’t deny it, screaming, ‘You shouldn’t have put it in the bin! Take one, but don’t put it in the bin!”. The others creationists, rather than trying to calm down the situation, actually continued trying hand the first year copies of the book, to the point where at least four where surrounding them . The camera kept filming. I uncertainly tried to tell them to give him space, and one of them realised that it was serious, telling the kid that he should go see someone and asking me if I was his friend. The first year kept hovering uncertainly, had gone pale and had a look on his face of someone about to go into shock. I stupidly got scared that I’d get caught up in something serious and scampered of cowardly, and still regret it. Fortunately, I saw him walking a bit later, flanked by two friends, so he must have been alright in the end. For the rest of the day I was distracted by anger and disgust.
††††††††††††††††
Well for your own personal benefit, I read through Comfort’s 50 pages of drivel, and I’m going to debunk his arguments with my secondary education and access to the internet. Yes, I know this means I’m grossly overqualified. The forward starts subtly and develops; moving from “misleading” to “grossly inaccurate” to “ludicrous, barely-contained preaching” and ending with “hokey, delusional, woaaah this guy is a nutjob fires-of-hell hysteria”. Here’s a breakdown and some rebuttal.
The guy didn’t deny it, screaming, ‘You shouldn’t have put it in the bin! Take one, but don’t put it in the bin!”. The others creationists, rather than trying to calm down the situation, actually continued trying hand the first year copies of the book, to the point where at least four where surrounding them . The camera kept filming. I uncertainly tried to tell them to give him space, and one of them realised that it was serious, telling the kid that he should go see someone and asking me if I was his friend. The first year kept hovering uncertainly, had gone pale and had a look on his face of someone about to go into shock. I stupidly got scared that I’d get caught up in something serious and scampered of cowardly, and still regret it. Fortunately, I saw him walking a bit later, flanked by two friends, so he must have been alright in the end. For the rest of the day I was distracted by anger and disgust.
††††††††††††††††
Well for your own personal benefit, I read through Comfort’s 50 pages of drivel, and I’m going to debunk his arguments with my secondary education and access to the internet. Yes, I know this means I’m grossly overqualified. The forward starts subtly and develops; moving from “misleading” to “grossly inaccurate” to “ludicrous, barely-contained preaching” and ending with “hokey, delusional, woaaah this guy is a nutjob fires-of-hell hysteria”. Here’s a breakdown and some rebuttal.
Rayman starts his picture-filled intro with a seven page history of Charles Darwin, the only moderately objective part of his sermon. That’s because Comfort didn’t write it, it was stolen almost verbatim from a professor called Ted Guffrey who’s now planning legal action. Yep, if this was a grade 4 assignment Ray would have already failed from copy-and-paste plagiarism. He then goes on to fail science, rudimentary common sense and life.
Let’s have a look at his third paragraph:
“Aside from the immense volume of information that your DNA contains, consider the likelihood of all the intricate, interrelated parts of his “Book” coming together by sheer chance. Critics (ie. Ray Comfort) claim that would be comparable to believing this publication happened by accident”
Did you just feel an involuntary jerk in your neck? That’s the overwhelming urge to smash your head against the desk until it’s a bloody pulp , a phenomena which the almighty Ray Comfort definitely did create. He goes on with his “Books can’t appear from nowhere! That’s silly!” comparison for the next two pages, then confusedly starts talking about DNA, which he seems to believe in, and why just because we share 97% of our DNA with chimps doesn’t mean we’re related to them. To prove this he provides a totally out of context quote from biologist Steve Jones: “We also share 50% of our DNA with bananas and that doesn’t make us half bananas…” It’s at this bizarre point that we realise that Ray Comfort has a serious banana obsession. Personally, I think he can have whatever fetish he choses, though some of his religious buddies might insist that it’s an abomanananation.
Southern Comfort (that would be so much wittier if he was from Texas rather than New Zealand) then spends seven pages insisting that evolution doesn’t hold up because apparently, there aren’t any “transitional forms’ between species. This argument is a favourite of Bananaman’s padawan, former child star and current wacko Kirk Crocoduck Cameron:
…Oh my god is right. Every time I watch that, a little piece of me breaks off and plummets into the abyss. Did you spot Ray? He was the only other person in the room who didn’t look like they wanted to drink drain cleaner. Sorry, I’m doing a lot of cynicism but not much debunking. There are a plethora of transitional form discovered by modern science, and mentioning the occasional fossil that happened to be cheap fake 50 years ago doesn’t in any way discredit the thousands of others, from Australopithecus to Homo Erectus (stop sniggering) and everything else in between, that have been consistently and repeatedly proven to be real by a myriad of modern scientific technologies. I’m not going to into that in detail, but if you’re interested or doubtful I challenge you to have a thorough look here and for humans in particular, here.
I should probably mention that Ray constantly gives what almost looks like evidence with often misunderstood, largely out of context quotes from a variety of sources, both credible scientists and diploma-mill creationists. Darwin himself made it a little hard for himself in the very book comfort is introducing (and which I STRONGLY suspect neither me or him have read in full) by his writing style, which often involves dramatically saying what appears to be a hole in his theory, then carefully rebutting it. This allows creationists like Ray to use half- quotes such as:
"To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree…"
To argue that complex structures such as eyes could never have developed through gradual processes. But the rest of that same quote tells a different story:
“…When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei ["the voice of the people = the voice of God "], as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certain the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case; and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, should not be considered as subversive of the theory."
Ol' Charlie went on to offer effectively a whole chapter on to discuss this occurred, and since then, numerous gradations from a simple eye to a complex one have been thoroughly and repeatedly proven to exist.
“Again, mutations have been found to be completely random and not based on the environment. So with no evidence to show that mutations could cause creatures to evolve gradually over millions of years, what is the scientific basis for proposing that they could make very significant changes very rapidly?”
THAT’S A BINGO. Ray just made it excruciatingly clear is that he doesn’t actually understand the of modern concept of evolution. This subtle fallacy, I think, is in of almost every criticism of evolution I’ve read. Evolution doesn’t mean that a fish that needs to walk will concentrate really hard and suddenly grow legs, because it needs them in that environment. Mutations are always random. A tiny amount of these many random mutations will happen to be beneficial in a given situation, by total chance. But because of this benefit, the organism with this mutation will have a greater likelihood of surviving and reproducing, passing on the mutation. That part ISN’T chance. That’s… well that’s natural selection. Evolution is an enormous, 3 billion year exercise in trial and error, stuff that’s good at surviving survives and makes more of itself, and stuff that isn’t… doesn’t. Evolution doesn’t mean, as Ray suggests, that “everything came from nothing”. Rather, it suggests that everything came from a previous something. The only advocate of spontaneous generation here is Ray, who believes that god turned nothing into everything. Comfort’s knock out argument against evolution, and final even attempted argument on the subject is on page 31:
“Did you realize that if we could simply make one blade of grass without using existing materials, we could solve the world's hunger problem? If we could make a blade of grass, we could then create a lot more grass, feed the green material through a machine that does what the common cow does, and have pure white full cream milk, then smooth cream, delicious yogurt, tasty cheese, and smooth butter. But we can't make even one blade of grass from nothing, let alone giving it the ability to reproduce after its own kind, as regular grass does. We have no idea where to begin when it comes to creating. If that's true, how intellectually dishonest is it to say that this entire incredible creation in which we live, came into existence with no Intelligent Designer?”
…WTF?! Delicious Yoghurt?
All that proves, if anything, is the limits of intelligent design in every form that humanity has ever encountered it. I still don’t understand what he means here… is he suggesting that blades of grass do not appear from pre-existing materials, just conjured suddenly by god rather than growing from a seed that’s absorbed various nutrients and sunlight? Nothing currently existing in the world that wasn’t previously something else, as Comfort himself almost said when he wrongly accused evolution of stating that “everything came from nothing”. It’s called the Law of Conservation of Mass (and energy). Perhaps Ray is trying to suggest that there must have been an initial cause for all that mass, a bastardised version of the Cosmological Argument for the existence of God, which pretty much goes as follows: Everything is caused by something prior, so there must have been an original cause to start the chain, and this cause must be inherently self-explaining, and doesn’t need to have been created (like God) That’s interesting, and could be harped on extensively, but it’s effectively irrelevant to Bananaman’s Premise because of these major problems:
1. Even if there was a self-explaining initial cause for the universe, it does not necesarily follow that that cause was intelligent or in anyway deliberate designed anything. It is possibly that the big bang itself was a completely self-justifying cause. That sounds counterintuitive, but is actually less unlikely than an omniscient, physics transcending deity. To say that the fact that universe had an initial cause is evidence of a wrathful, anthropomorphic, non-catholic Christian God is a pretty huge leap.
2. Even if there was an initial cause that was intelligent, this does not in any way refute evolution, as things are known to have a chain of prior causes. For example, ‘delicious youghurt” was once grass, that grass came from a seed that came from another blade of grass, which came from a seed that came from another blade of grass, etc. Nothing suggests that there was no variation or evolution in that causal chain of blades of grass, in fact, all evidence ever gathered suggests that there was.
Wow, sorry, even lost me there. Back to Bananaman (BM). you might think I’ve been harsh, but I’ve actually portrayed his arguments reasonably generously by focusing on the ones I have. The other half of his introduction is despicable slander and emotional blackmail. BM moves into contemptibly low blow field with depressing ease. He talks about Darwin’s incidental racism (obviously despicable by todays standards, but it was a total must have for anyone in the 19th century, and BM even acknowledges that he was actually quite progressive for his time) as if Darwin’s personal views in any way has any bearing whatsoever on the scientific veracity of modern Evolutionary Theory.
Next is how Evolution=Hitler. I refuse to dignify this with a response.
And finally, when BM makes the shift between shonky disinformation to deranged preaching, he writes this:
“Perhaps the thought of going to Hell doesn’t scare you, because you don’t believe in it. That’s like standing in the open door of a plane 10,000 feet off the ground and saying, “I don’t believe there will be any consequences if I jump without a parachute.” To say that there will be no consequences for breaking God’s Law is to say that God is unjust, that He is evil. This is why.
On February 24, 2005, a nine-year-old girl was reported missing from her home in Homosassa, Florida. Three weeks later, police discovered that she had been kidnapped, brutally raped, and then buried alive. Little Jessica Lunsford
was found tied up, in a kneeling position, clutching a stuffed toy. How do you feel toward the man who murdered that helpless little girl in such an unspeakably cruel way? Are you angered? I hope so. I hope you are outraged. If you were completely indifferent to her fate, it would reveal something horrible about your character. Do you think that God is indifferent to such acts of evil? You can bet your precious soul He is not. He is outraged by them. The fury of Almighty God against evil is evidence of His goodness.”
No Ray. No. All this is evidence of is your reprehensible exploitation of a child’s murder. How you could use this example to suggest the goodness of an omnipotent God who could have stopped the act in the first place is also totally unfathomable.
People can personally believe what they chose. But when people like Comfort, and the horde of others like him, shamelessly lie, slander, guilt-monger, sew disinformation and emotionally blackmail people to advance superstitious agendas, a line has been well and truly crossed. This is line is crossed when a man would throw an eighteen year old to the ground for throwing out his propaganda. This line is crossed when creationists with a total contempt for science wrestle control of the education system in Texas. This line is crossed when religious institutions causes the oppression of minorities, the cleaving of families, the manipulation of the emotionally vulnerable and the destruction of countless lives. Yes, there is a line were faith becomes no-longer benign, when reason is vanadalised, morality sacrificed and where personal belief transforms into public lies that jeopordise the advancement of humanity. And Ray Comfort and his ilk have crossed that line a hundred of times.
Thankyou for actually getting through this...
And finally, some religious wisdom of the day from American pastor Marc Driscoll on why the movie Avatar is satanic propaganda:
Go in peace to love and serve the lord!
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