Varieties of Dancing Souls

2019 crop planning!

January 7, 2019

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I ran tonight, pulled a calf muscle. Something crossed my mind, I'm sore a lot, and I get hurt occasionally, but I never complain about it. That's something positive I'll say about myself. I tend to prefer to be in a little bit of pain.

January 7, 2023

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Gretel was watching the news with me and they played Trump telling those trying to overthrow our government, "I love you. You are very special." 

She said, "Why did he SAY that???"

I asked her what she thought and she said, "Maybe he never said the word 'love' before and he just wanted to say it."

January 7, 2021

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From Stephen Pinker's Better Angels of our Nature: "For every presidential IQ point, 13,440 fewer people die in battle, though it is more accurate to say that the three smartest postwar presidents, Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton, kept the country out of destructive wars.”

This is great, considering the news of Trump's IQ. I'm glad he told us, otherwise we might not ever have known. His stability then is just the icing on the cake. Wait, what are the odds that he's lying?

January 7, 2018

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Here's my patented Johnny Walker Black recipe.

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Hard at work in the button mines.

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From the 2020's looking back, which president will define the teens? Some people think Obama and others think Trump, but I think they are both wrong. In the 2020's we'll all be thinking the same thing, "Must kill for food!"

January 7, 2017

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I was just a second or two behind a car wreck on my way back from Philly...nobody was hurt but it was very nearly head-on. After checking out the scene to make sure everyone was OK, I got back in my car and drove for about a half hour in silence. I turned on my audiobook of Michael Shermer's Why Do People Believe Weird Things? and rewound it to where it left off just before the wreck. The last sentence I ever heard could have been- "Life is contingent and filled with uncertainties, the most frightening of which is the manner, time and place of our own demise."

January 7, 2015

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Erin Faunce-stoltzfus and Jen Cook, have no fear. My headache has mostly subsided. I will not be dead on Monday, so hugs will be possible- although since I'm not dying there'll be no reason to hug. Whew.

January 7, 2012

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Just realized I have nine open cheeses in my fridge- cheddar, sharp cheddar, extra sharp cheddar, crumbled bleu cheese, shredded taco cheese, dill, feta, provolone and cooper sharp.

January 7, 2010

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On this day in 1610, Galileo made his first observation of the four Galilean moons: Ganymede, Callisto, Io and Europa. Today anybody can see them with binoculars.

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Kentucky Air National Guard pilot Thomas Mantell crashed on this day in 1948, while in pursuit of a supposed UFO.

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Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge we're defeated on this day in 1979

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Islamic mass murderers executed 12 people at the offices of Charlie Hebdo in Paris on this day in 2015, grumpy about some cartoons.

They later ran this magazine cover:

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Charles Addams was born on this day in 1912. I have a poster of the Gashlycrumb Tinies. 

https://www.themarginalian.org/2011/01/19/edward-gorey-the-gashlycrumb-tinies/

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Jann Wenner, co-founder of Rolling Stone, was born on this day in 1946. He once gave Cameron Crowe a copy of Joan Didion's Slouching Toward Bethlehem and told him that's how you write.

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Nicolas Cage joined us on this day in 1964.

"Shoot him again, his soul is still dancing."

https://youtu.be/oVOTx4Lx3pY

A few of his favorite films:

Juliet of the Spirits

Citizen Kane

The 400 Blows

2001

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Another notable birthday- Millard Fillmore (1800)

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Nikola Tesla left us on this day in 1943.

"Anti-social behavior is a trait of intelligence in a world full of conformists."

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Emporer Hirohito proved his mortality to any who were still questioning it on this day in 1989.

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The legendary director of The Up Series, Michael Apted, left us on this day in 2021.

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Philly Phanatic foil, Tommy Lasorda, left us on the same day.

https://youtu.be/vX4L2LHGs98

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Edge question- What scientific concept would improve everybody's cognitive toolkit?

Neil Gershenfeld, Truth Is A Model: "The most common misunderstanding about science is that scientists seek and find truth. They don't — they make and test models. Kepler packing Platonic solids to explain the observed motion of planets made pretty good predictions, which were improved by his laws of planetary motion, which were improved by Newton's laws of motion, which were improved by Einstein's general relativity. Kepler didn't become wrong because of Newton being right, just as Newton didn't then become wrong because of Einstein being right; this succession of models differed in their assumptions, accuracy, and applicability, not their truth."

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10395

January 7, 2014

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Without those securing the ballots, the insurrectionists would have destroyed them, and all of a sudden guess what- Congress couldn't confirm them.

https://www.buzzfeed.com/hannahmarder/viral-photo-of-women-transporting-the-ballot-boxes

January 7, 2021

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This kid took her picture of himself everyday for 15 years. I love these things.

https://fb.watch/hVy0-Eky0L/?mibextid=NnVzG8

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A pilot casually restarting a stalled propeller mid-flight. Fuck me.

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Michelle Obama, on this day in 2021- "The work of putting America back together, of truly repairing what is broken, isn’t the work of any individual politician or political party. It’s up to each of us to do our part."

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Watts- "The meaning of life is just to be alive. It is so plain and so obvious and so simple. And yet, everybody rushes around in a great panic as if it were necessary to achieve something beyond themselves."

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Bertrand Russell- "The secret to happiness is to face the fact that the world is horrible."

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Shunryu Suzuki- "You exist as an idea in your mind."

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Miyazaki- "Life is a winking light in the darkness."

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Camus- "And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back."

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Vowell- "American history is a quagmire, and the more one knows, the quaggier the mire gets."

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Asimov- "Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent."

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David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day- "Amy adored both the new look and the new person it allowed her to be. Following the photo shoot, she wore her bruises to the dry cleaner and the grocery store. Most people nervously looked away, but on the rare occasions someone would ask what happened, my sister would smile as brightly as possible, saying, 'I'm in love. Can you believe it? I'm finally, totally in love, and I feel great."

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There was a young plumber of Leigh

Who was plumbing a girl by the sea. 

She said, "Stop your plumbing, 

There's somebody coming!" 

Said the plumber, still plumbing, "It's me."

Addendum 

Hitchens Bonus:

Let's say that the consensus is that our species, being the higher primates, Homo Sapiens, has been on the planet for at least 100,000 years, maybe more. Francis Collins says maybe 100,000. Richard Dawkins thinks maybe a quarter-of-a-million. I'll take 100,000. In order to be a Christian, you have to believe that for 98,000 years, our species suffered and died, most of its children dying in childbirth, most other people having a life expectancy of about 25 years, dying of their teeth. Famine, struggle, bitterness, war, suffering, misery, all of that for 98,000 years.

Heaven watches this with complete indifference. And then 2000 years ago, thinks 'That's enough of that. It's time to intervene,' and the best way to do this would be by condemning someone to a human sacrifice somewhere in the less literate parts of the Middle East. Don't lets appeal to the Chinese, for example, where people can read and study evidence and have a civilization. Let's go to the desert and have another revelation there. This is nonsense. It can't be believed by a thinking person.

Why am I glad this is the case? To get to the point of the wrongness of Christianity, because I think the teachings of Christianity are immoral. The central one is the most immoral of all, and that is the one of vicarious redemption. You can throw your sins onto somebody else, vulgarly known as scapegoating. In fact, originating as scapegoating in the same area, the same desert. I can pay your debt if I love you. I can serve your term in prison if I love you very much. I can volunteer to do that. I can't take your sins away, because I can't abolish your responsibility, and I shouldn't offer to do so. Your responsibility has to stay with you. There's no vicarious redemption. There very probably, in fact, is no redemption at all. It's just a part of wish-thinking, and I don't think wish-thinking is good for people either.

It even manages to pollute the central question, the word I just employed, the most important word of all: the word love, by making love compulsory, by saying you MUST love. You must love your neighbour as yourself, something you can't actually do. You'll always fall short, so you can always be found guilty. By saying you must love someone who you also must fear. That's to say a supreme being, an eternal father, someone of whom you must be afraid, but you must love him, too. If you fail in this duty, you're again a wretched sinner. This is not mentally or morally or intellectually healthy.

And that brings me to the final objection - I'll condense it, Dr. Orlafsky - which is, this is a totalitarian system. If there was a God who could do these things and demand these things of us, and he was eternal and unchanging, we'd be living under a dictatorship from which there is no appeal, and one that can never change and one that knows our thoughts and can convict us of thought crime, and condemn us to eternal punishment for actions that we are condemned in advance to be taking. All this in the round, and I could say more, it's an excellent thing that we have absolutely no reason to believe any of it to be true.