Okay, after a couple of months of thinking this over, I’ve concluded this is an urge I can’t deny:
I’m going to do a second, golf-themed blog.
I’ll be putting it online in about a month. It’s going to have a combination personal posts, interviews, book & product reviews, and lots of other golf-related stuff.
And I’m going to put ads on it — because this isn’t just about golf, it’s also about finding an outlet for my Inner Capitalist ;-)
Wish me luck!
That would be science v. religion >:-)
Courtesy of Curtis Brainard and CJR Daily, we have this nice round-up of the media coverage of Richard Dawkins’ book The God Delusion [Update, link no longer good, sorry]:
[U]nfavorable reviews of The God Delusion have branded Dawkins’ promotion of science as “fundamentalist” and “evangelical.” It gave pause when proponents of intelligent design began to argue like scientists, and it is equally so when the opposite happens, and scientists begin to argue like preachers.
You don’t say!
lol
The need for mythic statements is satisfied when we frame a view of the world which adequately explains the meaning of human existence in the cosmos, a view which springs from our psychic wholeness, from the co-operation between the conscious and unconscious. Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable — perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science.
What evangelical atheists fail to appreciate is that they, too, are in the thrall of myth. More Jung:
The real facts do not change, whatever names we give them. Only we ourselves are affected. If one were to conceive of “God” as “pure Nothingness,” that has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact of a superordinate principle. We are just as much possessed as before; the change of name has removed nothing at all from reality. At most we have taken a false attitude toward reality if the new name implies a denial.
;-)
The Neanderthals — not Homo Sapiens — may have been the true “apex of the family tree.”
As postulated by Erik Trinkaus, paleontologist and Neanderthal expert at Washington University in St. Louis. He’s just published a paper on the subject. The link above is to an interview with him that’s posted on the website of the Archaeological Institute of America. Here’s an excerpt:
If you look at the literature in human paleontology over the last five years, there are numerous articles that are trying to explain why Neanderthals are different. They’re trying to analyze features of the Neanderthals that appear different or weird, in some cases to understand them biologically, in some cases simply to document that they’re different. There is virtually nothing in that same literature that tries to document why it is that modern humans are different from the previous 2 million years of human evolution. In other words, the question people are asking is not, “Why did modern humans evolve the anatomy we have?” What people are asking is, “Why do we have this weird group of humans who lived in Europe and the Near East that we call Neanderthals?”
If he’s right, modern man is actually an offshoot that managed to prevail — as, meanwhile, the main trunk of our evolutionary lineage failed.
Bizarre. And yet — not.
(Trinkaus has been assembling evidence to support this idea for three decades btw. Phew.)
Here’s a thought for a Monday morning (UPDATE: Spiked Online, link no longer good):
[A]ccording to Angela Patmore, author of Truth About Stress, the ubiquitous term “stress” is “bogus and illogical”. . .
Patmore started researching the concept of stress in the 1990s, while working at the University of East Anglia with a team of World Health Organisation scientists. A meta-analysis of the clinical literature on stress showed that there were “literally hundreds of different definitions [of stress], some of them opposites, some of them irreconcilable and all of them felt to be ‘the correct one’ by somebody or other.”
Patmore’s real beef is with the “stress management industry;” she says the number of “stress councillors” in the U.K. ballooned by 804 percent between 1991 and 2003, becoming “a multi-million-pound industry . . . that is entirely unregulated.”
And it’s not having any positive effect on peoples’ well-being. In fact, the British are worse off than ever: stress has “overtaken back pain as the single biggest cause of long-term sickness absence.”
No word on whether the incidence of back pain in the U.K. has decreased :-D
But back to the concept of stress itself. So, okay, it’s not a pinned-down, clinically understood condition. Then what is it? In the eye of the beholder? Is it any sort of physical or emotional discomfort?
I’m guessing that the roots of the whole stress meme can be traced to the 1950s-era classification of personality types, and the corollary (which appears to be standing up sixty years later) that so-called Type A individuals are more prone to heart attacks.
Friedman’s discovery caught our imaginations because it validated something we tend to believe is true, anyway: that our state of mind affects our bodies.
So the stress management movement is our crude and fumbling attempt to dampen down our Type A tendencies. We want to be laid back, let life roll off our feathers. We’ll live longer if we do, we tell ourselves.
Yet I agree with Patmore that there’s something pitiable about all the stress-related hand-wringing. We really can take it too far, can’t we. And, after all, dealing with discomfort (I’ll use that word!) isn’t that hard. If something bothers you, set aside some time to feel it fully — don’t stuff it. Otherwise, just take a couple of deep breaths and relax.
Oh, and if the bothersome-ness is a signal that you need to change your life, then you’d better change your life. But that’s between you and your soul/God/unconscious — not your stress management councillor — isn’t it.
Here’s Monroe county exec Maggie Brooks at the unveiling of the design for the performing arts center piece of Rochester’s proposed Renaissance square:
Other questions weren’t answered so completely. One suggested that there may be a $2 million annual operating loss for the performing arts center and a $3 million loss for the bus station. County Executive Maggie Brooks rejected the question’s premise. “Those figures aren’t accurate,” she said.
Brooks admitted, though, that the project might not be self-sustaining.
“I think it would be disingenuous to say there won’t be any subsidy at all,” Brooks said. “There is a certain level of subsidy that the community will accept.”
To minimize that subsidy, Brooks said, the project’s principals have adhered to a guideline of “What is affordable, what is sustainable.”
“We want to live up to that,” she said.
Also unknown is how the performing arts center will be operated.
“These are conversations that will continue,” said Brooks.
Okay. So we aren’t going to be sinking $5 million annually into this . . . thing. But it is going to be an ongoing drain. Of an unknown magnitude. Over & above the public money already appropriated for it. No matter, open your checkbook cuz the pols say so. Open your checkbook, because hey, you’re fine with “a certain level of subsidy.”
Think we’re fooled? We’re not. Poll results from 13WHAM: only 22 percent of us think this is a “good” or “great” idea. Half think it’s a bad idea.
I’ve blogged about this topic here and here. Not just grousing, either, I’m honestly trying to figure out what would work for this city. See also this post & comment thread on the subject at 2Blowhards for a breath of intelligent perspective on our little project.
Barnie Fife, speaking from the Great Beyond (or on a breather between reruns?) left a comment on my next to the last post. Apparently my living in Rochester, New York fills him with wonder.
I never planned to move here. I moved here originally to attend a nearby college. Long story short, I fell in fascination with yet another complex but self-destructive individual (a tendency I’ve curbed at last now by adhering to a policy of social isolation, *sob*). Ended up married because I once again failed to acknowledge the taint of doom tickling my nostrils. (I guess that makes it mutually assured self-destruction? LOL) Now I have a wonderful kid. We’re in a great school district, her dad is here, and yeah, I chafe sometimes in the reins but I’m a big girl now.
That said, Rochester is also a great city in a lot of ways. The traffic is manageable — for example you can live in a rural bedroom community, the sort of place where you can keep horses if you want, and your commute into downtown will still be only a half hour or so. My neighborhood in particular is a little corner of paradise, aesthetically and small-c culturally — and I don’t have to be a zillionaire to live here, in a spacious circa 1920s home with hardwood floors and a fireplace. While our museums and sports teams are officially second tier, because we don’t have the demographics to support first tier, they’re high enough caliber to give kids a taste of what’s out there — i.e., the city is a suitable jumping-off spot for a kid with aspirations to make the world his home, if he has the inclination & chops.
And if you hanker for big city culture, the plane ride to NYC is only 45 minutes and thanks to JetBlue tickets can be had for under $100. Toronto is a three-hour drive.
We have great public parks. Mendon Ponds Park, for instance, has 30 miles of self-guided nature trails. You can be there from just about any place in the greater Rochester area within minutes. We’ve got the Erie Canal, great place to bike, jog, walk your dog. Since we’re in a temperate climate, you can mix up your outdoor activities seasonally (if you can’t fight it, have fun with it!)
We’ve got great healthcare, including a first-rate research hospital.
Our crime rates are well above the national average but not out of line with other Upstate New York cities.
We don’t have to worry about hurricanes or earthquakes, just snow and the occasional ice storm, but it’s like anywhere in that regard. Be smart and prepare yourself for self-dependence for a few days. At least your house won’t be smushed into a pile of sticks when it’s over.
The biggest downside is that because this is New York State, our taxes are ridiculous and our politicians are worse. At the local level, their moribund thinking has cost us the embarrassment of the so-called Fast Ferry; shamelessly, they’ve put that behind them (despite the fact that the damn thing is still in dry dock here, apparently unsaleable) to push the so-called Renaissance Square down our throats (new post coming up on that shortly).
I’m sure there’s more that’s good about this city but this gives a taste. Despite its flaws, if I were a young married couple planning a family, Rochester would top my list of places to live.
That said, me personally? I don’t know where I’ll end up once my kid has flown the nest. I can work from anywhere, so I’m not tied to any location for income. I’d like to be in a relationship again someday, that will probably influence my choice. I’d like to be able to golf year-round. I ache sometimes to smell the ocean. But I also love the flora/fauna of the Northeast — the hardwood forest, and the geography, the hills. I’d like to stay close enough to a world-class city to jump in regularly for a visit but I also need a base somewhere with space and trees & a bit of privacy.
So who knows? But I guess not knowing is part of the fun of it . . .
Yeah, I’ve been playing some. Met my parents and played this course in Cortland, NY today as a matter of fact. I didn’t play particularly well, partly because it’s the first time I’d played this course but mostly because I haven’t been able to get out very often — very busy with my job, plus the weather hasn’t been particularly cooperative . . . I had gotten to the point where I could count on at least one par every nine holes but haven’t hit that lately. Sigh.
A lot has been said about writing as an act of creation, so much so that we’ve probably become more jaded than we realize. Articulating experience via language is, after all, so simple a child can do it. And self-proclaimed Writers are ubiquitous. You’ve probably heard, as I have, that some 80 percent of Americans think they’ve got what it takes to be a writer. Those of us who take writing a bit more seriously are easily creeped out by such suggestions. “Keep it to yourself,” we mutter under our breath. “You’re turning my stomach. As is your prose.”
Yet even bad writing thrills the writer as it erupts. Why? Why? Why do so many of us feel a compulsion to articulate experience?
Perhaps because it represents an even more fundamental compulsion. Here’s from Jung’s memoir, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections — something he wrote after watching massive herds of animals grazing on a savanna in Africa:
. . . the cosmic meaning of consciousness became overwhelmingly clear to me. “What nature leaves imperfect, the art perfects,” say the alchemists. Man, I, in an invisible act of creation put the stamp of perfection on the world by giving it objective existence. This act we usually ascribe to the Creator alone, without considering that in so doing we view life as a machine calculated down to the last detail, which, along with the human psyche, runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules. In such a cheerless clockwork fantasy there is no drama of man, world, and God; there is no “new day” leading to “new shores,” but only the dreariness of calculated processes . . . man is indispensable for the completion of creation . . . in fact, he himself is the second creator of the world, who alone has given to the world its objective existence — without which, unheard, unseen, silently eating, giving birth, dying, heads nodding through hundreds of millions of years, it would have gone on in the profoundest night of non-being down to its unknown end. Human consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable place in the great process of being.
Writing, as an act, embodies the act of secondary creation. It objectifies existence, literally: all at once that which we know to have created is visible in three dimensions.
It doesn’t matter what kind of writing it is, whether it’s a blog post, or a novel, or an email to a friend, or a weepy entry in a private journal. It is a relief to do it. No matter how nonsensical the act itself make sense of our experience.
The mystery of words is that they are also, however, unruly creatures. You may think they are tools at your command, but they are also messengers. They dwell on the cusp between objective and unconscious reality; this is why they can have double meanings, or express sometimes things that we claim we didn’t intend them to express.
That same quality also makes them a delight, of course, which is why gaining a bit of skill as a writer makes the act even more pleasurable — the act of secondary creation, performed with some inkling of awareness, or rendered artfully enough that in partaking of it we begin to waken, even slightly — it’s a heady thing — it is why we recognize that some writing as Art.
Take love, for instance, plenty of examples here. A mystic will tell you that if you reach the leafy crown of the magical beanstalk ;-) you’ll discover all love is really The One Love. But down here in the world of foolishness and poverty and dirt and beans we have, instead, this sort of love and that sort of love. Then come along the secondary creators who play with the word. Ray Charles secularizes the gospel song “Jesus is All the World to Me” as “I Got A Woman,” and in so doing casts words of Christian love into the service of Romantic love. Sixty years later, Alison Krauss goes back the other way, recording a song about Christian love, only the object of her love is hidden, slyly, within the vernacular of romantic pop:
Am I a fool for hanging on?
Would I be a fool to be long gone?
When is daylight going to dawn
On my crazy faith?The questions will not let me sleep
Answers buried way too deep
At the bottom of a lover’s leap
Made by crazy faith.
Lowell George’s fat man in the bathtub isn’t suffering (from Little Feat’s Dixie Chicken) unrequited love. He’s having trouble scoring drugs. That said, it’s no coincidence that being “in love” is a dopamine high — and ho ho ho, cocaine also happens to elevate the brain’s dopamine levels: even down here in the world of dirt and beans it’s easy to find overlaps, universality is also biological, the language overlaps, the poignancy of this sort of love overlaps the poignancy of that sort of love.
Spotcheck Billy got down on his hands and knees
He said “Hey momma, hey let me check your oil all right?”
She said “No, no honey, not tonight
Come back Monday, come back Tuesday, then I might.”I said Juanita, my sweet Jaunita, what are you up to?
My Juanita
I said Jaunita, my sweet taquita, what are you up to?
My Juanita
An unanswerable question, of course. But there’s some relief to be had by putting it down on paper.
We are led to Believe a Lie
When we see not Thro’ the Eye,
Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night,
when the Soul Slept in Beams of Light.
God Appears, and God is Light,
To those poor souls who dwell in Night;
But does a Human Form Display
To those who Dwell in Realms of Day.
(William Blake)
From the New Scientist: researchers studied the facial expressions of 21 people who were born blind, and found they were “significantly more likely to make angry, sad and pensive facial expressions that resembled those of their relatives than of strangers.”
I guess it can be attributed to similarities in the musculature of the face. OTOH for three of the facial expressions studied, “joy, surprise and disgust” “the resemblance to relatives and strangers was not significantly different.”
One of the researchers speculates that this “might be because these emotions are for some reason more universally similar and not as prone to genetic variations.”
