3rd BGJ Blog Entry

Misc. Ramblings - February 14, 2005 - 07:45 AM.

I was looking at the Sunday Star yesterday, and noticed that they have joined the ranks of papers and magazines that present language the way it is spoken, without censorship or bias. The front page of the Ideas section of the paper had, in an oversized summation of the front page article, the word 'Bullshit,' capitalized as you see here. I, upon seeing this, felt my respect for the Star grow considerably. The reason, I feel, has to do with truth. As unfounded a belief as this is, I feel that with all the media manipulation going on in our time, a source of information that has the balls to say things in plain, simple, easy-to-understand language that reflects the way real people talk and discuss current affairs, is more respectable because of it. Some of you may know that I have a subscription to Entertainment Weekly, and it is another example, a magazine that, for the most part, isn't afraid to say what it means. Of course, entertainment magazines in particular do seem to have an easier time of being so upfront with their language; Rolling Stone and Premiere have been putting whatever language the quotes include into their publications for years now. EW isn't quite ready to do it all the time, but I've seen a few 'shit' and 'fuck' comments between it's pages. Good for them, I say, let's talk plainly, toss away the lies that are plaguing the world, and get down to reality.  Which brings me to reality television. I watch basically one reality show, 'Survivor.' I used to watch more of them; 'The Apprentice' comes to mind, as well as a few others that lasted just one season. I can't bear to look at some of them anymore, mainly due to the fact that reality basically sucks. Let's watch a show where already successful business women and men vie for a position that pays them even better than what their own profitable business does! Yahoo, a show about success greedy for more success! Or, even better, let's watch as a really attractive guy gets to choose a potential wife from a bevy of extremely attractive money-grubbing women, and even better, let's watch him neck and feel up all the women before he decides! Yeehaw, there's some good television! And so REAL! I bet there are tons of really attractive people out there who just will never be happy unless they are proposed to in front of a national audience, because we all know that attractive people just can't seem to get any dates without help.  And that, Dear Reader, brings me to Valentine's Day. Isn't it sweet, how men and women strive to find the perfect gift that says 'I love you,' hunt around for the perfect place to have dinner, and look forward to a night of unabashed fucking, all in the name of romance? Here is the real origin of Valentine's Day, as written in the book "Panati's Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things", Charles Panati, Harper & Row Publishers, New York, NY, 1987, pp 50-52:  The Catholic Church's attempt to paper over a popular pagan fertility rite with the clubbing death and decapitation of one of its own martyrs is the origin of this lovers' holiday.   As early as the fourth century B.C., the Romans engaged in an annual young man's rite of passage to the god Lupercus. The names of teenage women were placed in a box and drawn at random by adolescent men; thus, a man was assigned a woman companion, for their mutual entertainment and pleasure (often sexual), for the duration of a year, after which another lottery was staged. Determined to put an end to this eight-hundred-year-old practice, the early church fathers sought a "lovers" saint to replace the deity Lupercus. They found a likely candidate in Valentine, a bishop who had been martyred some two hundred years earlier.  In Rome in A.D. 270, Valentine had enraged the mad emperor Claudius II, who had issued an edict forbidding marriage. Claudius felt that married men made poor soldiers, because they were loath to leave their families for battle. The empire needed soldiers, so Claudius, never one to fear unpopularity, abolished marriage.  Valentine, bishop of Interamna, invited young lovers to come to him in secret, where he joined them in the sacrament of matrimony. Claudius learned of this "friend of lovers," and had the bishop brought to the palace. The emperor, impressed with the young priest's dignity and conviction, attempted to convert him to the Roman gods, to save him from otherwise certain execution. Valentine refused to renounce Christianity and imprudently attempted to convert the emperor. On February 24, 270, Valentine was clubbed, stoned, then beheaded.  History also claims that while Valentine was in prison awaiting execution, he fell in love with the blind daughter of the jailer, Asterius. Through his unswerving faith, he miraculously restored her sight. He signed a farewell message to her "From Your Valentine," a phrase that would live long after its author died.   From the Church's standpoint, Valentine seemed to be the ideal candidate to usurp the popularity of Lupercus. So in A.D. 496, a stern Pope Gelasius outlawed the mid-February Lupercian festival. But he was clever enough to retain the lottery, aware of Romans' love for games of chance. Now into the box that had once held the names of available and willing single women were placed the names of saints. Both men and women extracted slips of paper, and in the ensuing year they were expected to emulate the life of the saint whose name they had drawn. Admittedly, it was a different game, with different incentives; to expect a woman and draw a saint must have disappointed many a Roman male. The spiritual overseer of the entire affair was its patron saint, Valentine. With reluctance, and the passage of time, more and more Romans relinquished their pagan festival and replaced it with the Church's holy day.  Well, off you go people, get those cards out and sign them. You're either celebrating a murder or the willing sluttiness and sexual slavery of 4th century women. Can't see why you shouldn't honour the day at all! Happy Valentine's Day everyone! Make sure you get what you deserve!

Real Life Stuff

Okay, so I guess I should also use this blog to keep people informed of what is happening to me day-to-day, just in case anyone has a vested interest in what's actually up with my life and such.  Weirdos.  Well, let's see what's new in the life of the fat guy in Ajax (No, I'm not assuming that I'm the ONLY fat guy in Ajax, but I am the only fat guy in Ajax posting on this blog, so it works for me.  Bug off.).

Whitby ODSP insisted that I go and see my doctor, so I saw him yesterday.  Now, there may be a couple of you out there wondering why they would insist upon this.  I personally think it is ridiculous, but apparently they didn't like the fact that I have only left the house three times in the last 19 months, and hadn't seen my doctor since May of 2009.  Something about having a heart condition and not getting any treatment for it for over a year and a half got under their skin for some reason.  Well, knowing that my doc is in Scarberia, and also knowing the cab ride would cost quite a bit, I never gave it a thought as long as my scripts were still being faxed to the pharmacy whenever I needed a refill.  Not good enough, says my current worker in Whitby.  So, I got my doctor (and, as an aside, my new dentist - had an abscess that was driving me through the roof...something about not seeing a dentist since 2004) to fill out a form and send it in so that they would approve the transportation costs, which they did.  So, voila, I saw my doctor for the first time this year.  Not that not seeing him would necessarily have been a bad thing per se, but ODSP feels that I should maybe take some care of myself or some such nonsense.  It wasn't as if it was a condition of keeping myself on disability or anything, they just want me to maintain my (so-called) health.

I know, I know - a government agency wanting to help me live longer?  What Twilight Zone dimension did this happy horseshit come from?

Regardless, that was the big huge news that came out of yesterday.  I mean, aside from my daily tour of video games, television shows and movies both on disc and on Netflix.  People reading this should be careful, for it may come to the point that things involving these topics become a regular part of the posts that appear here, and if that's what it takes to keep folks up to date with how I'm doing, so be it.

Either way, I'm done with this post for now.  Hope everyone is enjoying the older posts I'm throwing up in here for posterity's sake.  There are twelve of those old posts in total, and I figure one of them a day will get put up for your perusal.

Oh, and don't worry about posting comments.  I'd love it if people did that, but when I wrote the original posts I'm pretty sure nobody read them either, so knowing that people are actually digesting what I type on this blog might make me, oh, I don't know, start writing even more articulately or something.  We wouldn't want that, now would we?

2nd BGJ Blog Entry

Philosophy And The Matrix - February 13, 2005 - 07:54 AM.

Lately, I've been watching the Matrix movies again. I only just got them back after selling them a few months ago, and the cost of the special set I purchased kept me from having them for a while. Hell, I still haven't picked up my copy of Return Of The King yet for the same reason. Anyway, I have been taking my time watching the movies and perusing the special features, and yesterday I started watching a documentary on one of the discs about the philosophical questions behind the three movies. After about a quarter of it, I stopped it in order to watch it with Scott at some point, but before I switched it off, I saw enough to get me thinking about the questions that draw people to the field of philosophy and what life must be like for them. The first thing that I came to realize is that philosophers as a group must be some of the most irritating fuckers on the planet. I mean, all they do is ask each other questions without answers, and then sit around amongst themselves pondering what the answers could be without ever having a definative result that can lay arguments to rest. Then you have the boredom issue, since philosophers can't really carry on a normal conversation with anyone who isn't a philosopher since discussions always end up leading to those unanswerable fucking questions, and anyone with a simplistic view of the world in which they live (read as 'most of us') gets the wonderful opportunity to feel like a real dumbass as a result. On top of that, just what kind of a job is 'philosopher?' I mean, aside from being overly pretentious and teaching in a college or university setting, how do these people make money? Now, that might be one of those unanswerable questions, because I don't see a lot of world-renowned philosophers doing the lecture circuit like Kevin Smith, and I don't think many of them can make a guitar sing, so that rules out concerts. Other than professorships, where is the money in it?  That's not the part that bugs me the most though. No, the part that really gets my nipples in a twist are those damn questions. Questions like, "Why are we here?" and, "How did we get here?" These are the real big questions, the whys and the hows. And most people don't have an answer that lends itself to very many other people. Sure, I have my own personal thoughts on the subjects, as do most others, but how many people can actually say that they 100% agree with anyone else's view?  And these are the basic questions, the ones that the entire field circles around, but there are other questions too, big ones, like, "Is it possible to make a mistake?" That's a party favourite, isn't it? Which leads to the next big one, "Is there such a thing as fate?" This question doesn't get invited to parties much, mainly due to the fact that it likes to skulk into a corner and throw cocktail weiners at anyone who passes by. The two main thoughts on this one are of course yes and no, yes being derived from the idea that we are controlled and can't choose our own path in life. Karma and the question of a soul that lies partly independently from the meatbag it is contained in enter the door at that point, grab all the liquor, and start making fun of the guy with a lampshade on his melon. After that, the party just sort of winds down, because who invited the damn philosophers anyway?  The Matrix films don't try to answer any of these questions, but instead pose them in interesting ways. Of course, if you watch the movies with anyone who has participated in discussing them online, such as myself, you'll either be bored by the many references to different beliefs and philosophies being pointed out to you, or simply stop watching the movie because the discussion gets loud enough that you can't hear Morpheus spouting even more questionable ideas over what you are currently discussing.  Either way, philosophy is the one subject that cuts through politics, religion, and economics, and really gets down to the important stuff (- insert laugh here -) and the Matrix movies at least make the ideas more entertaining, so you can enjoy a good action film whilst patiently waiting for your head to explode when the Galactic Overseer decides you've thought about whether you actually exist or not one too many times, and answers you by pressing the big red button.