Book-ramble, and some other stuff

Argh, Kingston's holding its St Pat's Day parade today, and the drumming is really getting on my nerves. St. Pat's is only fun for me when I'm drunk. When I'm not, it's obnoxious and pointless. (See George Carlin's take on Irish/ Whatevs Pride in It's Bad For Ya.)

Recently finished reading Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely, and Jeebus, but human beings are predictably irrational. Some of the experiments detailed in the book--why expensive medicine works better than modestly priced or even cheap medicine--come to conclusions I've drawn on my own. But it also made me think about other irrationalities humans are prone to: why people can enjoy a beer with balsamic vinegar in it . . . unless you tell them there's vinegar in it beforehand. Why the word "free" short circuits what passes for rational thought in many people, making us more likely to grab three of something crappy and free, at the expense of one that's better and with a price tag. Going bid-crazy on eBay.

More importantly, it raises serious questions about the use of placebos and the ethics of keeping patients in the dark about their use. About doctors doing things like prescribing anti-biotics for viral infections, or the medical establishment as a whole being unwilling to really find out if so many of the surgeries performed on patients are necessary, when so many show improvement just from thinking they've been operated on.

So, not only are most people susceptible to practical jokes of all sorts, but they're sometimes better for being deceived. (I'd mention how it reminds me exactly of what Ozymandias says near the end of Watchmen, but I think I've established my geek-cred beyond question, as it is.)

I suppose that this power of positive placebo is hardly surprising or mystifying. If psychosomatic symptoms can make people feel pain--if men can experience "sympathetic pregnancies"--then the reverse certainly ought to hold water. Which naturally makes one wonder (and if one doesn't wonder naturally, the book will helpfully prompt you to forward) if human so-called reasoning is even less reasonable than the pessimists among us imagine.

How marvelous and frightening is it that not only is the human brain immensely powerful and subtle, but that at the reins of this complex difference engine is a frightened, stupid, occasionally gibbering madman, prone to mood swings and susceptible to a mish-mash of hormones?

How humbling and steadying it is that we don't yet truly understand the feats our brains are capable of, let alone have the ability to use its resources fully.


Also finished David Sedaris's When You Are Engulfed In Flames. Touching, amusing, and insightful, as always. He makes me think that, if my life was more interesting, I could try my hand at being an essayist. And at learning to speak French and Japanese.

About to start Tom Paine, by John Keane, and I'm sooper siked (also wanna get his Vaclav Havel), and will likely reread The Stranger and The End of Faith.

Got a hair cut. I literally told the barber I wanted an "Obama", something short, neat and presidential. Bye-bye kooky, spiral-curly afro, hello blessed androgyny. The hair cut's caused so many double-takes, it's amazing. This one guy nearly broke his neck doing an unprecedented quadruple-take, trying to figure out if I was a dude or a chick. At least I assume that's what caused the look, as opposed to my ICP t-shirt or the armload of massively overdue library books.

Downside of the hair cut--I re-found that grey hair I first encountered back in August, and it almost totally resisted the clipper. It was still long and now way visible. Except to the barber who missed it. So I cut it myself. I'm now thirty percent more able pretend I'm not one step closer to my own personal underground sabbatical.

My Rorschach collectible figurine? Still in the unopened, original packaging. My will to power is heretofore unparalleled in human history. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair.

And now, I present Indian Thriller, and what it sounds like in English . . . just because I feel like it (by now, it hopefully goes without saying that nothing with a youtube logo is 'mine' in any sense of the word):





"No horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace." --HP Lovecraft

Dose o' Babble

On richarddawkins.net, I posted about wanting to help get the atheist bus campaign going in NYC. No response. Maybe I should just bug the Poohbah, himself?

:/

Finished Hitchens' book on Thomas Jefferson, just started his book on George Orwell--I can't get enough of the way he writes and talks. I'd read a laundry list if Hitchens wrote it.

Also reading "The Anvil of the World", by Kage Baker. Not as good as her Company novels, but still incredibly engaging. After that, the first three novels of Glen Cook's The Black Company series. An omnibus I'm tempted to steal, I love it so much.

Comfort reads, eh?

Stuck on a loop in my head? "This Is Hallowe'en", the revisited version by Marilyn Manson. Weird thing is, I don't particularly care for "The Nightmare Before Christmas". It's Tim Burton, but . . . meh. It's still my least favorite of his movies.

And just when I managed to get the revisited version of "What's This?" by Flyleaf out of my head. . . .

Also peeked into "Descartes ' Bones", by Russell Shorto. Read about thirty pages to see if I could get into it. I like it, so far.

Finally, finally, after a month and half of waiting, am getting my turn at "Doubt", as well as "Infidel", and "The God Who Wasn't There".

"Religulous" comes out on dvd next week, for which I'll do a dignified squee.

:squee:

I'll have to stop by Best Buy or just Amazon it.

"Friday the 13th" comes out tomorrow. I might see that with the movie group, or just get blisteringly drunk at a friend's Friday 13th party. Or maybe I'll just get blisteringly drunk and see the movie, thus killing the de-soberifying and embarrass-my-friends birds with one mighty, Jack Daniels-flavored stone.

I like to multi-task.

Writercon, in July! I'm such ashameless fangrrrl. To the tune of a grand, even. C'est la vie!

I'm gonna watch RoTK till I fall asleep. All hail Frodo!



"No horror can be more terrible than the daily torture of the commonplace." --HP Lovecraft

A Dose of learnin' and stuff . . . now mit pictures!!!!

Because I can, pictures of the plague of snow covering my small mountain town in Upstate NY. Sadly, we're still acres better off than Buffalo or Syracuse.




My most recent batch of library books were picked up from the library:


The Atheist Universe
God: The Failed Hypothesis
John Adams
Walt Whitman's America
Algebra Demystified
The Demon-Haunted World
The Little Book
The Pale Blue Dot
From The Dust Returned
Benjamin Franklin
Mistborn: The Final Empire (I know, shaddup)
Alfred Kinsey
Serenity: Those Left Behind
Firefly: The Official Companion, Vol 1
Fray . . . just to round out the trinity of Whedon--all hail!--who is the closest thing to a creator-god I will accept.

(Also picked up Deliver Us From Evil, The Who's Tommy, and Pink Floyd's The Wall, which I plan to watch entirely sober and entirely alone. No similarly drunk/stonedswhatever friends to hide behind during the scary parts, or sing along with during the sing-y parts. I'll be flying solomente on this mission.)

Only John Adams and Benjamin Franklin were initially on my hit-list. But in the process of getting the former, I ran into a semi-acquaintance that I tried to dodge, and was thence lost in the land of biography . . . which is a much pleasanter land than I once thought it was.

I got jumped by Whitman and Kinsey, and wound up cornered by the acquaintance, anyway. Thankfully, his Seinfeldian stench didn't linger in my coat for too long after.

There's a moratorium on new books for the next month. Till the list is at least halved.

In related news: how long has there been a fat, hot, wet mess o' Ann Coulter books at my library? How have I just noticed this, as often as I'm in that section? I'm not one to advocate the burning of books, but it's a good thing I'm not a smoker, or I'd have started a small pyre with her books alone. Seriously, there were, like, eight of them. It was horrifying, and nauseating seeing all that right-wing, bullshit propaganda and hate-speech in one place, in my beloved library. In the guise of a horse-faced, giraffe-necked, so-called "woman".

And on the heels of it, came the Seinfeldian stench. . . .

Harrowing stuff, these trips to the library.

But on a brighter note, my broken ass isn't quite as broken. Still a bit achy, but nothing I can't ignore.

And on the Rachel Maddow front . . . I need to a) make her mine, b) run away with her to a place where both gay marriage and polygamy are legal, and c) convince her Ana Marie Cox would make a necessary addition to our marriage. Which would all be contingent on getting both their current S.O.s "out of the picture", and preferably in some way that involves neither a woodchipper or jail-time.

Ah, if only I were as diabolical as I am covetous. . . .



"If wishes was horses, we'd all be eatin' steak."--Jayne Cobb