American Idolatry

Courtesy FOX

by blogSpotter
When Marilyn Monroe was at the peak of her stardom, the Russians declared her to be the 'opiate of the masses'. No higher honor can go to any type of entertainment. Anything which stops traffic in the streets and induces cultural hypnosis has to be worthy of at least a blog. The phenom of which I speak now is American Idol, Fox's answer to the 80's hit, Star Search. Idol is basically a talent contest, but one that offers recording contracts to the winners and a worldwide audience to all the contestants. It has the attention of royalty -- English Princes William and Harry enjoy the show. The final tally last night exceeded 64 million votes, more than has ever been cast in any presidential election.

My own take is that of a grouch, on his 'high horse'. I don't like reality shows; Idol isn't a reality show, but it's unscripted and in my mind, schmaltzy. The best moments for me come in the early episodes when truly bad singers lend humor to the situation. The personality feuds of the judges, Paula, Randy and the acerbic Simon are certainly fuel to the fire. The spritely Ryan Seacrest is an engaging emcee, and one cannot deny the odd sexual tension that exists between him and Simon. Their gay jokes and constant denials only help cement that impression. The 'tension' between Simon and Paula is just made-for-TV as far as I can tell; maybe I'm wrong.

I've never been overly fond of national talent contests, but I can think of at least two notables who came to prominence that way: Rosie O'Donnell and Britney Spears. Of the Idol winners in seasons past, the only one that comes quickly to mind is Clay Aiken, and only because he's the fodder of so many Conan O'Brien jokes. Kelly Clarkson is a 'fave rave' for some of my friends, but I'm not overwhelmed by her content, style or delivery.

Now, to enter 'Simon' mode. I thought Kathy McPhee was lovely to look at, but she dropped so many notes -- it was creating a clutter on the floor. Taylor Hicks has some 'Kenny Rogers' element to him that I can't quite pinpoint; he at least carried all his tunes, and so by default you have to give the 29 year old Birmingham native his dues. He has pretty good stage presence, and should pull in some of the Kenny Rogers market once he gets rolling. In sum, to quote what Princes William and Harry probably would say, "It was a jolly good show." But not a show that will make me change any of my Tivo settings; it's not my particular opiate.

Da Vinci Mode

Tempted Again


by KC
All of the recent press coverage and hype about The Da Vinci Code motion picture brings to mind another motion picture of the late 1980's -- The Last Temptation of Christ -- and all of its controversy. The Last Temptation of Christ started out as a book; it was a novel and a work of fiction, written in the 1950’s. It took about thirty years for it to make it to the silver screen, long after its author’s passing. The book was an honest attempt by a Greek man to explain the Orthodox Christian doctrine of the Two Natures (see discussion) in a way that people with a communistic, atheistic orientation could understand. The book was out there for thirty years, without any controversy. When the book was made into a movie, there was lots of controversy. Protestors objected to any depection of Jesus as a man with human weaknesses. Their emphasis on that was misplaced. As some reporters found, many of the protesters had neither read the book nor seen the movie.

On a personal note, the protesters lost credibility with me, because I knew from reading the book myself what the focus should have been -- the Two Natures. If they had actually seen the movie and disagreed with it on legitimate points, I would have had more respect for their points of view. It’s sad to me that so many people of faith felt their faith was simply too fragile to be tested or questioned. The saddest thing is that the actions of the protesters did more to hurt Christianity than help it. People going into the movie were met with intimidation on the way in, death threats, several physical assaults on movie goers by protesters, and numerous bomb threats, all by so called “Christians.” WWJD? On the bright side, the protests regarding The Da Vinci Code haven’t been nearly as prevalent or as violent.

The book first presenting the ideas behind The Da Vinci Code – “Holy Blood, Holy Grail” – has been out since the mid 1980’s, actually before the Last Temptation movie was out. Am not expecting people to read obscure religious tomes (like I do), but at least become informed about the matters at hand, and present a better argument to the public.

***
Many thanks to KC, our guest editorialist. KC has an advanced degree in Ancient Studies and is also a coworker of mine.

© 2006 blogSpotter. All rights reserved

Tattoo You

Body English

by blogSpotter
When I was 20, I was feeling my oats. I thought the whole world was wrong, and needed to be set right. My politics tilted far to the left, and I was expecting a revolution any day. That was the 1970's, and my way to express contempt for political elites was to wear long, messy hair, patched blue jeans and a slogan tee shirt. By the time I was 30, I was employed as a computer programmer and my politics was a little more subdued -- I was voting as a liberal Democrat, but not expecting any revolutions. By 40, I had learned the wisdom of choosing your battles, keeping your powder dry. One has to let pragmatism be a guide, or he will be out in the cold. I'm reminded of the Serenity Prayer:

God, Grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
Courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference

In my 40's, the last line has much resonance. I haven't abandoned all my idealism or hope, but realize that change is a process -- not an immediate, tumultuous event. If you've hobbled yourself by being unemployable or by getting a long rap sheet, you’re not much good to anyone's cause.

Now, I look at twenty-somethings with their tattoos. Tattoos can be innocent -- a panda bear on the ankle, a rose on the lower back. Even a barbed wire tattoo on the bicep is fairly tame. These are all ways to express your inner imp, but they can easily be covered with clothing. Not so cute are the tattoos I see with more frequency, that climb the arm and the neck like black flames. These tattoos express loudly one's "rage against the machine". The wearer isn't mainstream, he's not a suit -- we get it. Now, will he get it in 10 years, when he comes to his senses and realizes that tattoos cost $500/square inch to remove? One could pierce something, dye the hair blue or wear Goth clothing and accomplish the same. But irrevocability is probably the ultimate appeal.

For the time that you have your body art, you've pretty well limited your employment to Tower Records or Whole Foods Market. Do you really want to limit your future for a transient fashion statement? I look at photos from 20 years ago and cringe at how I looked; at least hair and clothing can be changed. A tattoo wearer can look forward to being part of the new "tattoo underclass". I know one young man who could be a GQ model, except for the tattoo flames that consume half his face. Another woman that I see frequently has a black and blue floral design all the way up her arm; the first time I saw her, I thought she'd been beaten. In closing, I think it's possible to voice an opinion, and possible to present a 'true' image of yourself without disfigurement -- just color me baffled.

© 2006 blogspotter

Hot Button Issues

Liquid gold

I'm intrigued by 'hot button issues.' These are issues that produce not merely opinions, but passionate speeches, tirades and the like. Hot button issues will take an ordinary man, cause him to be prone on the floor with spittle drooling from the edge of his mouth, pupils dilated -- all from ranting without breathing. Three such issues that I'm thinking of now are: abortion, immigration and gas prices. With abortion and immigration, I have middle-ground opinions that would horrify the morally high-minded black-and-white thinkers. I don't think abortion in the first trimester is equivalent to murder, nor do I think Mexican immigrants are evil space invaders. I'll save those topics for another blog. The subject is gas.

Bush has probably lost another 5% in popularity points, due to gas prices. As a 'damn liberal,' that delights me, but as a consumer it perplexes me. Much of the anger is coming from conservatives. They're up in arms -- not over Iraq, but over gas prices. "Something must be done," they say. The devil is always in the details, and nobody wants to let that devil out just now. As a shopper and a bill payer, I've noticed many prices go up and down. My water bill nearly doubled last month, and my property taxes went up a whopping 20%. New houses have gone way up. If you doubled the price of gas, it might add $120 to my monthly gasoline bill. That's not a huge percentage of my budget. Why aren't there villagers with torches coming after the Dallas Water Utility? Why aren't we having rebellion against Trammell Crow or the Dallas Appraisal Office? These guys are sticking it to us good. The Exxon executive retired with a hefty sum and oil companies are raking in profits -- isn't that capitalism? Are we suggesting, no perish the thought -- that there should be controls on wages, prices or profits? Lavish excess is the rule of the day in telecom and on Wall Street. What is it about gasoline that makes everybody's pot boil? Should the line be drawn by industry, or are there some other criteria to go by?

The energy 'crisis' is the most unnecessary crisis of all. There are no less than 75 credible solutions to gas shortages and oil dependency. What we have in America, is a situation where big fat porkers don't want to change their particular habits. "Drill in Alaska, dammit, I need my Chevy Yukon." The world over, industrial nations are addressing this issue responsibly, and their handling of it preceded the Iraq situation. Here are some ideas, some inspired by Europe and Japan ....

- Build and encourage the use of mass transit
- Build high speed bullet trains in to your infrastructure
- Sell and promote highly fuel efficient 'Smart Cars'
- Impose gasoline taxes; to make it so that poor people aren't disproportionately taxed, it might have to be based on total gallons consumed, or fuel efficiency of the tax payer's car.
- Develop alternative energy sources

The above ideas are a starting point. Of course, oil companies and an oil-loving president will not pursue these. Necessity will be the mother of invention. When at some point, the well has run dry, or a bucket drawn from that well is intolerably expensive, "something will be done". The devil will just be in the details.

Genius Infant

How does he do it?

You're a genius and you probably didn't even know it. Every human with basic language skills has performed a feat of genius-level magnitude, without any awareness of having done so. The feat is so humdrum, so commonplace and yet so awesome. The feat of which I speak is an infant's learning to speak, by passive observation.

If you have a child in a crib, you may dangle stuffed animals in front of him, or read him nursery rhymes. He'll gain from these experiences, but he has a more influential ‘teacher’. By just passively listening to adult conversations, or listening to a TV in the background, the child's brain will absorb incredible volumes of data that Mother Goose never imagined. Let us consider some speech concepts, from simple to difficult: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, preposition, verb tense, conditional phrasing, and function words. Nouns are easy, the ultimate in concreteness. You dangle a puppy over the crib and say, “doggie” – the child can make an easy connection. Not so easy is what’s overheard. The child overhears the father ask the mother, "Janice did you get a chance to take the car in for a brake inspection". The child's brain is parsing the sounds as the father speaks; it can tell “a” and “chance” are two different words. It sorts the words by part of speech at some point.

The mathematics and inference skills required for the above are amazing to me. If you placed the adult me in a crib in Beijing, and all I did was overhear adult conversations, I would be dumb and mute with regards to the Chinese language. I would still be dumb and mute after 10 years of doing that. A child learns fluent speech well before Kindergarten – the ‘wunderkind’ effect is not the result of teachers or nursery rhymes. It’s the result of sitting and listening – and long naps for processing. What I envision is that the brain stores every sentence in some type of giant matrix. The Mother of all multi-linear programs must scan the sentences for common use and for frequently used words. It may even do more incredible things – like storing a picture of the scenario with each stored sentence. For example, the brain will make note of these two vocalizations:
Honey, would you like some more eggs?
These eggs are runny.

The brain will correlate a small, white cooked food item with the word ‘egg’. But the four year old child also has some mastery of verb tense and function words. These are abstract concepts – a P.H.D. in linguistics might struggle explaining these things. A four year old of average intelligence has implicitly and yet passively grasped the concept with no instruction at all. My other guess about this universal precocity is that the brain is somehow pre-wired with some type of “proto” language, already built in – and it is still nonetheless amazing. You might say, “I’ve done nothing brilliant since infancy.” That may be, but embrace the fact that for a fleeting part of early childhood, you had skills of abstraction and correlation that rival Einstein’s. We are geniuses, all.

How Plant-Eating Dinosaurs Nearly Destroyed the Earth

Time to diet

I've always been an amateur naturalist, and always wondered (nerd that I am) what actually killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. An entire order of animals was wiped out, the world over -- not one species in any size or ecological category survived. That's incredible. Circa 1980, a scientist name Alvarez advanced the hypothesis that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs. An asteroid did strike the planet 65 million years ago, and iridium in the soil strata is consistent with that fact. The Alvarez theory became a 'darling' of the science establishment and has since been pretty well embraced. I never liked it because it didn't address some issues:

- Why did dinosaurs die, but other large, even cold-blooded creatures sailed thru with flying colors -- crocodiles, alligators, komodo dragons and sharks, to name a few
- Why did dinosaurs die completely, in every niche? seems like some smaller species could've squeaked by
- By 65 million years ago, there were only a handful of dinosaur species remaining; some process had already wiped out their numbers. An asteroid would merely have been the coup de grace. Why had they already dwindled so severely?

I did some research, and found that the Alvarez theory isn't universally accepted, there are many contrarians like me who disagree with it. Also, in my research I learned about an ecological disaster, created by highly evolved (for that time) animals that nearly threw the Earth's life cycle out of balance. Humans like to think that we are the worst thing that has ever happened. With pollution, strip mining, deforesting, hunting etc, we've caused immense destruction to the Earth. But nothing we've done compares to the damage of herbivorous dinosaurs. You see, in the Age of Dinosaurs, the land was covered with lush, fern forests. Angiosperm plants had not yet evolved. Dinosaurs would make a meal of the fern fronds, and all was good. Well, good except for the ferns. Ferns need their fronds to photosynthesize, and the leaves contain spores for plant reproduction. Dinosaurs would devour leaf, as well as stem, stripping the fern of its ability to grow or reproduce. A busy brontosaurus could probably strip a grove of trees in one day. With ferns getting depleted, it created starvation conditions for giant plant eaters. Furthermore, it threatened the entire planet by upsetting the exchange of gases between plants and animals. Fauna had become a serious threat to flora.

Natural Selection answered the dilemma in a couple of ingenious ways. The reader can decide for himself whether Natural Selection (NS) operates by intelligence or random selection, but suffice it to say NS did some brilliant things. (See my earlier blogs, God Talk and Amazing Blue Marble). Angiosperm plants developed rather suddenly. They offered fruits, berries and nuts to unobtrusive squirrels and newly evolved birds. Their leaves were tiny and inedible to ravening dinosaurs. This was a "win win" for nature. At the same time, nature developed T-Rex and velociraptors -- efficient killing machines, however unpleasant their demeanor. An ailing brontosaurus, trying to digest a meal of hackberry leaves, was no match for a vicious carnivore. Between starvation and predation, the herbivores vanished. One can only speculate that the small, nimble land animals surviving were inadequate food supply for T-Rex, and so it also starved.

Even in today's Cenozoic era, large animals are at risk for hunting, predation and starvation. Whales and elephants exist mostly at the mercy of, and as a curiosity to humans. But those species are very 'in check' -- they pose no ecological threat. Humans are indeed a threat to world ecological balance. It will be interesting to see how Natural Selection answers that call -- randomly or otherwise.

© 2006 blogspotter