Having one of those "what the hell am I doing with my life" moments

I never wanted to get into a situation in life in which I know without looking how to spell the surname of the current governor of California.

Update:

I also seem to know, without looking it up, the capital of Latvia.

What the hell kind of person knows the capital of Latvia without having to peek at Wikipedia? I mean really!

(Apart from Latvians, I guess)

Techno-count

As of five 15 pm, Rome time, today I have communicated with people from two continents by:

Facebook message - South Dakota
Facebook text chat - South Dakota, Vancouver
Skype phone calls - London
Skype text message - Rhode Island
Email - Michigan, Toronto, London and Tallinn, Estonia
Cell phone text message - Rome
MSN Messenger - Virginia, Ontario (two locations)
and internet conference calling - all over...

I'm communicated-out. I can't stands no more!

And the landline on my desk gathers dust.

The world has become too weird for me.



~

Ruskin's wit

On the existence of beauty...

"The world does indeed succeed - oftener than is perhaps altogether well for the world - in making Yes mean No, and No mean Yes. But the world has never succeeded, nor ever will, in making itself delight in black clouds more than in blue sky, or love the dark earth better than the rose that grows in it."

On the laws of rational thought...

"Next to imagination, the power of perceiving logical relation is one of the rarest among men; certainly of those with whom I have conversed, I have found always ten who had deep feeling, quick wit, or extended knowledge for one who could set down a syllogism without a flaw. And for ten who could set down a syllogism, only one who could entirely understand that a square has four sides."

Asking what makes "great art"...

"To follow art for the sake of being a great man, and therefore to cast about continually for some means of achieving position or attracting admiration, is the surest way of ending in total extinction."

~

Well, that will be something to look forward to then...

Robert Pattinson didn't find anything sexy about Uma Thurman in their new movie, "Bel Ami." "The sex scenes with [her] are kind of disturbing," the "Twilight" star reveals. But he can't blame Uma for the lack of steam. Explains Pattinson: "Her character, Madeleine, kind of uses sex as a sort of weapon, and my character thinks like an animal."

Can't wait.

A while ago, I had a discussion with someone about the entertainment business and how or whether it should be taken back a few stages to consider the moral impact of its products on society. I'm really not one to advocate making only the Sound of Music and the Song of Bernadette over and over again. My favourite film - in my opinion the greatest film ever made - is the Godfather. Gangster films are my favourite genre.

I don't think that entertainment, art, should be all sweetness and light. I don't think the approach of, say, EWTN and its endless soft-focus videos of flowers and bunnies and perpetual rosaries is really the answer. Entertainment, as we have come to use the word over the last 500 years or so, is supposed to reflect, and help us reflect on, real life. Macbeth is still a better play that R&J and at the end of the play that most people regard as the greatest in dramatic history since the Trojan Women, everyone dies, most of them violently.

I will quite cheefully sit through, say, John Carpenter's The Thing (but prefer the original), or any of the Aliens films, or any number of apocalyptic/monster/zombie explosion films (though I never saw the point of the teenage slasher flicks). WWII, Viet Nam, heck, anything involving soldiers (I admit that I even liked Troy). I am always up for some gratuitous violence, car chases, fight scenes, shoot-em-ups. My favourite director is still John Woo.

I like the stuff that explores the darker end of the human soul and the chronic idiocies of our modern civilisation. (Which is why Fight Club might be my runner-up after the Godfather). I have even identified myself as a conscious and systematic student of human evil...another word for a journalist. This stuff is worth making movies and TV shows about.

But I am not the only person who prefers all sorts of blood and guts to a hideous thing like The Talented Mr. Ripley, a film that you could not pay me to sit through again. A film that even mentioning gives me the willies.

It might be difficult to find anyone who, when cornered, would honestly say that the nihilism and despair of the post-modern entertainment world has had a positive effect on people.

Can this trend be stopped? Should it be stopped?

Most people in the theatre seats aren't nihilists. Don't want to see films in which awful people do awful things in an awful world where nothing has any meaning. Indeed, in many countries, most of the people in the theatre seats are at least nominal or cultural Christians and get kind of down when the Judeo-Christian moral code is mocked or denied. Even if subconsciously.

But the entertainment industry seems to be in a little world all its own. I always thought that the bottom line was really, you know, the bottom line in these multi-gajillion dollar businesses. But I guess when you're that rich already, you start to have other priorities, agendas. To think of other things.

And they all seem to be bad things.

Should we just be letting this whole generation of sex/death maniacs finish up while we ignore them and keep downloading old black and white films until the regime change? Is there going to be a regime change?

Do we have the power to shift the focus?

Where should it be shifted to?

Is it the job of entertainment to fix society? Is it not, perhaps, a case of getting what we deserve? That we have so corrupted our society that our entertainment industry is simply showing us ourselves? Is it merely a kind of mirror in which we don't like what we see?

I'm really asking.



~

Failure on a civilisational scale

~

Just reading a thing about permanently unfinished municipal projects in Italy.

There are a lot of them.

They do these things differently in Italy. Or rather, fail to do them. Failure on the epic scale is an everyday Italian experience. It's as if they were in competition with the ancients, bent on creating instant ruins to rank alongside the Colosseum and the Roman Forum. Motorways, viaducts, stadiums, swimming pools, museums, multi-storey car parks, theatres, railway stations... there is almost no type of public building that, in the past half century, the Italians have not given up on halfway.

A new survey of Italy's unfinished building works found 360 scattered around the country, with 160 in Sicily alone.

...

A couple of kilometres up the road, a municipal swimming pool and a so-called "polyfunctional centre" containing an open-air theatre, both of them sink holes for investments of tens of billions of lire and many years of work, stand unfinished, vacant and half-wrecked. A multi-storey car park in the town, under construction for a generation, was completed only a couple of months back. So was the town's hospital, after 40 years on the stocks, but as one local man told me, "It was born old. And although it's been opened, now they are closing it down again, as part of the rationalisation of Sicily's health service." Meanwhile, the town's theatre, begun nearly 60 years ago, and a children's play centre (intended 20 years ago to be the main attraction of a local park) have yet to be completed.

Local people offer explanations for these failures, but it is hard to know whether or not to take them seriously. In the case of the polo stadium, I was told that the architects had made a mistake in their calculations and given the stands too steep a rake, breaking the legal norms. Meanwhile, the technicians involved in building the swimming pool supposedly made it 49 metres long instead of the regulation 50 metres.

Can such idiocy be credited?

...I might add that when the Italians do finish something, they do such a colossally bad job of it, the thing they build has to be torn down in ten years as a public safety hazard.

...and then isn't.



A friend of mine posits that Italy is a country in retirement. It has pretty much done everything it set out to do:

Conquered the world. Check.
Become the cradle of post-Imperial Christian civilisation. Check.
Rediscovered the writing of the ancient Greeks and started the Renaissance. Check.
Invented banking and money. Check.
Produced the greatest painters and sculptors the world has ever seen. Check.

And now, as the American bumper stickers say, it's spending its kids' inheritance as fast as it can.

Except that there aren't any kids.



~

This is your career on drugs

Architects beware. This is what a lifetime of pot can do to your work.


(Actually, I think it's kind of neat...)

An important rule about cats

From the time I was born, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents at their beautiful cliff-side house up island. They had an orange cat named Timoshenko (no, I never found out why they named a perfectly ordinary long-haired ginger cat after a famous Russian general, but grandpa was a bit of a leftie), with whom I was immediately enamoured. By the time I had learned to walk, I would go into a kind of ecstasy and chase Timmo around the house yelling "pussypussypussypussy..."

No matter how many times Grandma would say the cat didn't like it, I simply could not stop myself. Timmo never scratched me though, that I can recall.

But that cat didn't die until I was in my early 20s and it never, ever came near me.

The Real Thing

I wrote something recently about the coming state persecution. It always does the Church good.


One man here says that the Church is Christ's and He will not allow it to disappear. But I think this is only partially true. I think He will allow it to disappear in some places. This is a reality we must face.



~

Things I don't miss at all aboot Canada

I never lived in N. Ontario, but I lived in the NWT.

Fat Man and Little Boy

~

Remember when we were kids and in school they told us all about how the Bomb was going to kill us all, in fact, wipe out all life on planet earth down to the microbial level?

Remember when "If you love this planet" was sent round to all the high schools and we would go on ban the bomb rallies as part of our civics classes?

When "every fifteen minute period could be your last"?

They told us that the worst thing that could possibly happen was the Bomb. The end of the world, and all that.

We were told that atom bombs were "radioactive" (though I note that no one ever actually bothered to define it...we thought microwave ovens were radioactive too) and where they fell, no one and nothing could live for twenty or thirty or fifty thousand years after...

The early bombs were pretty "dirty" it is true. They caused a lot of long-term medical problems in the people who were in the vicinity and survived the first blast.
So,

how many people live in Hiroshima today?

Just askin...


Wiki: "By 1955, the city's population had returned to pre-war levels."



~