unscriptured

Life is hard.

Well, not my life, but other people’s. I’ve actually done a lot of things to streamline my life and keep it, for me, easy. Of course there’re little complications here and there, things that I could get rid of to make my life even easier, but somewhere in there you have to strike a balance between easy and interesting. I suppose, in that way, I try to keep my life at about the difficulty of a kid’s book, and well short of something for young adults.

For instance, Unscriptured itself is something I don’t really need, but having something that I’m supposed to produce for a weekly deadline is, I suppose, enriching. Enriching in the same way that hiding snacks around an animal’s enclosure at the zoo is enriching for them. So here I get to complain about all the little things that God and I notice in the world that make life hard, but I can’t complain too much, because, in reality I’ve got it pretty good. I’ve got a job that is interesting and pays well. I’ve got no boyfriend, but really that’s at least as much a blessing as a curse. And I’ve got good friends to spend time with.

So for me, what’s hardest about life is just that there’s not enough time for everything that I want to do. There’s piles of books unread, there’s piles of movies unseen, there’s tons of projects that I’ve only barely outlined and a few that are further along but still not there yet.

So this week I’d just like to take a moment and say this: Life is good, and when it comes down to it, that’s enough.

We all know the warning against painting ourselves into the corner. In simple terms it means don’t get yourself into a situation that you can’t get out of if you can avoid it, but more specifically it means to think about the consequences of what you’re doing and try to avoid the ones that are undesirable.

But when you’ve already laid down the paint, there’s nothing to do but try to find some way to get out of the corner without messing things up.

According to God, that’s what led to suicide being raised to the level of mortal sin in the Catholic teachings. They had done such a good job of telling people how wonderful Heaven was, how it was a paradise where your every whim was fulfilled beyond your expectations, that they began to fear their true believers would find ways to try and gain early admission. Now one thing that pretty much all religions have in common is that they’re always trying to increase their numbers. They want market share. And having their followers start to kill themselves is bad for that in two ways… First, when someone has killed themself, they may still technically be one of your followers, but they don’t contribute much. Second it makes it harder to get new members. I mean think about it, if you were considering changing religions (or getting one for the first time), would you look for one where people are killing themselves or would you look for one where they weren’t? I think the answer’s pretty clear.

I’m in the midst of a week of spending all of my non-working, waking hours, sitting in the dark. I’ve been attending Frameline, San Francisco’s International LGBT Film Festival. I’ve been steeping in documentaries about the struggles of queers the world over, in love stories of an alternative nature, and in meditations on what it means to be gay.

In that spirit I’ve got a message from God to everyone about the difference between natural rights and “special” rights.

Natural rights are those rights that support living in our natural state. “Special” rights are rights that support living with things we choose or which are chosen for us before we are able to choose.

God and I would just like to make this clear: Gay rights are not special, religious rights are special.

That’s why freedom of religion is mentioned in the constitution and freedom to love, even to love someone of the same sex, is not

I sometimes feel guilty at not having been an active participant in the great civil rights struggles from which I’ve clearly benefited. It’s why I wish I could believe that the Occupy Wall Street movement is something more than just an unorganized circus; so I could contribute in some way without feeling like I’m wasting my time.

God tells me I’m fooling myself, that I would still find some excuse to not take part. He says I’m too lazy and selfish, and I don’t really disagree.

And what are some of those benefits that I’ve accrued? Well, in the early twentieth century, workers were killed by government and business thugs as they fought for safe working conditions and a shorter work week, leading eventually to today’s standard forty hours. In the sixties, part of the struggle was just to not have to drown our inner selves in an ocean of conformist mediocrity, and that certainly made my life better. Another part of that mid-century civil rights movement was for the right of mixed race couples to marry, which helped pave the way for today’s struggle for gay marriage. It makes me feel almost guilty for not having a boyfriend, for not having someone who would make the gay marriage fight really my own, not just figuratively my own.

In 1969, when the hippies gave us the Summer of Love and Judy Garland gave us the Stonewall Riots, I was only nine. I was too young to take part, and now it feels like I’m too old for the fight for marriage. So what’s my point? I’m not sure I have one. And I suppose then that that’s the point. I’ve happily ridden along on the shoulders of giants, I’ve gone down roads that are wide and clearly marked, blazed no trails of my own, made no mark upon the world. Thousands of souls made it possible for me to live a comfortable, almost hedonistic life.

So to all of them, “Thanks.”

Humans are a cooperative species. That is the very essence and basis of society.

We’re not unique in this. In fact we’re not even the most extreme example. Take bees for instance; you never see a bee strike out on it’s own, off to live a solitary existence free to wander from flower to flower and never you mind about going back to the hive. But you do see people that live alone, interacting with society only enough to meet their physical needs. Sometimes people manage to do this even while living within a city.

According to God, one of the prime contributors to society is empathy. We have an inborn habit of imagining each other’s feelings, be it happiness or pain. We get a “contact high” from being around someone exuberant. We cry at sad movies.

I say ouch on behalf of inanimate objects.

It’s an involuntary thing. I’ll see a minor accident, or even just a particularly nastily crumbled fender and wince. I’ll be putting on an old shirt and the seam of the armpit will tear, and I’ll say ouch. It’s a little thing but it’s part of the glue that holds us together. It’s part of why we enjoy cartoons where “things” come alive, we already imagine them alive, so there’s a sort of “I knew it” aspect to watching these shows. So empathy is the basis of anthropomorphication. We even carry this up to the grandest of scales, we empathize with the entire universe and call that God, and instead of saying “ouch” we say that we sin.

So after God and I had discussed, as some physicists propose, the possibility that the universe we live in is a three-dimensional projection of a two-dimensional description, we decided to take this dimensional duality and use it to inform our take on another universal description. It didn’t originate with the movie The Matrix, but that film and its sequels did a lot to popularize the notion that the universe we live in is actually just a computer simulation.

Certainly computer sims have come a long way towards being able to portray the world around us, pathetically short of the reality mind you, but getting close enough to whet the imagination with the potential. I pointed out that for all the touting of 3D graphics, the actual display of them is 2D. Even 3D movies are merely two slightly different 2D images displayed in a way that engages our stereoscopic view of the world. We don’t get to change our focal depth the way we would with something that actually was presented to us in three dimensions. But my point was that a computer’s presentation of a 2D image, calculated from a description of three dimensions, matches fairly well to the notion of the universe as a holographic projection.

God then pointed out that the very language we use to effect our transfer into cyberspace, such as it currently is, confuses the interpretation of the space as being either 2D or 3D. She suggested that if the universe really were a 3D projection from a 2D description that maybe our subconscious knowledge of this would inform our choice of terms and lead to that very confusion. When we “log in” to a computer system, it suggests that the cyberspace we are entering is three-dimensional, that it is a space we enter into the inside of. When we “log on” however, we just admit to a surface. Cyberspace is then like that two-dimensional plane that holds the description of the holographic universe just at the edge of a black hole, just outside its event horizon.

So maybe Timothy Leary was anticipating what the physicists have enshrined as String Theory, when he told us to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” We might suppose the “tune in” part was like the tuning of a guitar; we tune the guitar to match the frequencies of our musical scale, but we tune ourselves to match the oscillating strings that make up the universe. Then maybe the new catch phrase could be “log in or log out” meaning that we can choose to join the universe-as-simulation or to separate ourselves from it and by making it a conscious choice, we make the universe our own.

And when it becomes our own, maybe it’s 2D when we log “on”, and maybe it’s 3D when we log “in.” Or maybe it’s just that English speakers like having more than one way to say things.

I was reading this week about a new view of the universe that some physicists are, oh, I don’t know, exploring? Debating? Imagining? Or maybe just using as a masturbation fantasy. But let me not be the first to cast stones here, lest God take me to task for any of my own private thoughts.

So this view comes from thinking too much about black holes and about the laws of the universe. One of those laws, and one that the physicists take very seriously, is that information can’t be destroyed. I’m not sure they mean the same thing by information that normal people do, but I’m not sure they don’t either. One of the other fundamentals of the universe is that nothing can come out of a black hole; after all, the inability of even light to come out is what gives black holes their name. So the thought then comes that if a thing falls into a black hole and can never come back out, is that not the same as that thing being destroyed? Thus a thing that falls into a black hole is truly destroyed, made to cease to exist, as opposed to being merely destroyed, where “mere” destruction really just changes the thing’s description. But that thing that was destroyed can be considered to consist in part of the information that describes it, but we “know” that information can’t be destroyed, so there must be some way that the thing can be destroyed but not its information, and that “way” is that some physicists now theorize that while the physical thing is destroyed, its information, its description, gets spread out upon the surface of the black hole.

And here again, let me caution that I’m not sure all of these terms are being used by the physicists in the usual way, and based on God’s pitiful efforts to try and help me understand this, I’m not sure that even he really knows what the terms mean to the physicists. So by “surface of the black hole” I think they mean the infinitely thin space just beyond the event horizon, the breaking point between what can be considered “inside” the event horizon and what can be considered “outside.” When they say “information” or “description” I think they mean “everything that is the thing except the thing itself,” but that’s far too close to the sound of one hand clapping for my tastes. Also let me caution that they didn’t actually use the term “infinitely thin” to describe this “surface,” that’s my somewhat poetic interpretation of what they did say; what they did say was that the surface is two dimensional.

At this point they’ve come up with the notion that anything in our three-dimensional reality can be described by two-dimensional information. Some of them then claim that from there it’s really not much of a leap to suggest that maybe the whole universe is really a hologram, by which they mean a three-dimensional projection of two-dimensional information. I think some of them are claiming only that it’s not that big of a leap to think that we’re living in a hologram, and that some of them are actually claiming that we really are living in a hologram.

At this point, even God agreed with me that serious recreational drugs were probably in order. I’m just not sure if the drugs are to help understand what the physicists are thinking or if they’re meant to help me forget the whole thing.

God says I have trust issues. She has a point, but I contend that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.

I was talking to her about some of my tribulations at work this week. I was working on a computer program that relies on an external program and on an internal library that manages communication with that external program. Everything worked great in the test environment but when I moved it out to the production environment, not so great. It was not only taking too long, it was intermittently returning the wrong results. Neither of these were things I could live with.

It’s been a common theme in my career that using other people’s code causes me more trouble than it’s worth. In this case for one function I’m relying on two completely different sets of other people’s code. And at least one of them is failing me, which kind of makes me look bad. And I’ve got enough of my ego wrapped up in my skill as a coder that I think, first, I shouldn’t ever look bad, and second, that I really don’t like it when it’s somebody else making me look bad.

So I don’t like to use other people’s code. Mind you, in modern programming you have to, you just can’t write everything yourself down to the bare metal any more than you can build your own toaster from raw ore, but for some things, you have to figure out if it will take more time to learn somebody’s library, and work your way around whatever it does wrong and whatever it does in a way that isn’t exactly what you need, than it will take you to write your own version that’s expressly tailored to the problem at hand, rather than some generalized case. I find that surprisingly often, writing my own is the quicker route.

Does that mean I don’t trust other coders? Well, yeah, but it’s like the old saying, just because you’re paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Somewhat reluctantly, I’ve joined the food truck revolution.

I don’t know how much it’s going on in the rest of the world, or even the rest of the country, but here in California, well in at least San Francisco and Los Angeles, the revolution is happening. The catering trucks of old, bringing convenience store wares and greasy spoon grills to businesses that are too far from the non-mobile versions for their workers to make it there and back during their measly meal breaks, have been supplanted or at least supplemented by designer foods on wheels. These new trucks, rather than cover the basics and show up at the same businesses everyday, specialize and shift. They’ll do one kind of food and concentrate on doing it well. They’ll have regular locations but they’ll be on a rotating schedule, waiting usually a week or more before returning to the same spot. It’s a different business model and one that seems to be working for them.

Okay, maybe revolution is a bit strong of a word, but it’ll do. Besides it goes good with the whole “wheels” thing that trucks have going for them.

Mind you, I’ve eaten off these trucks before. I’ve also eaten plenty off the old “roach coaches” of yore (a moniker that no one applies to this new breed of rollicking, rolling, restaurants). So what did I do different today? Well first let me tell you why. I mostly eat lunch alone. It’s my habit to break up the day, to not get stuck at my desk doing essentially the same thing for eight hours at a stretch. And God respects that. He respects that to the point that he almost never comes around at lunch time. So if I have an urge for curry-over-criss-cut-sweet-potatoes, like I did today, I can’t just ask God if the truck is nearby.

So I used the web to find out where the truck was.

I’m still tentative in this revolution, though. A real foot soldier would be subscribed to their Twitter feed, that’s how the real rebels do it. But I did bookmark the site. Sigh.

I’ve been doing some online shopping lately, and more often than you’d think, while I’m browsing the virtual aisles, God nudges me and points to the screen. Sometimes it’s good for a chuckle, sometimes it’s a little scary, but most of the time it’s just, “huh?”

What she’s pointing at is that most famous of online shopping tools, “customers who bought this also bought…”

I don’t have any really good examples to share with you, but if you ever want to see how widely tastes vary while still managing some overlap, just spend some time looking at that section of the page. Sure there’s plenty of common sense examples, if you buy a slow cooker it makes sense to buy a book of recipes, for instance. What surprises me most is how often the direct competition shows up on the list. I mean, does someone buying a beard trimmer really buy two different brands? Or is that just marketing masquerading as mass consumption?

But the fun ones are when products that don’t even come from the same family tree show up; then you get to make up little stories. Perhaps the buyers of toenail clippers also buy plastic freezer bags because they save their clippings and need to keep them fresh. Maybe the people that bought both Russian and Israeli gas masks think that each country tunes their masks for different mixes of chemical agents. Or maybe they’re like trading cards, and they just want to get the whole set.

It’s like having an everchanging set of those, “which of these things is not like the others” tests. Fun for the whole family.

One of my favorite bits of advice, one that I’ve cherished and passed on for decades, is to make your habits work for you. But a lesson that I’ve been slower to catch on to is that habits that were once good for you may not stay that way. They need to be periodically reevaluated and reexamined to see if they still meet your needs.

When I mentioned this to God, he told me that was one of the reasons we have seasons. We get used to doing the same things every day, but as summer rolls around the days get longer, so we look for more things to fill them. In the spring there’s new growth everywhere, so we remember to go to the botanical gardens, or the zoo, or the nearest National Park. When winter has us in its grip, we tend to curl up in our cocoons and pare our routines down to just what we need to get by.

Every turn of the seasons should serve to remind us that our lives go through different phases and that what works for us in one might not be best for the next. So when you’re passing by the park and see all the new growth going on, maybe you should take a moment to think what in your own life could use a little new growth.

Or you could just stop and smell the flowers. That would be nice too.

One of the things that I spend time wondering about is how the various trappings of religion came about. I mean if you were a priest or a shaman or some such and God didn’t talk to you, and you wanted to keep control of “your flock” and get them to do the right thing, why would you come up with the various things that make up your “beliefs.”

Along that line I was asking God the other day how it is that the notion of “soul” as separate from “person” came about. Was there really a need to come up with a separate term for a part of us that continues on past the death of our bodies?

She told me that it was partially invented as a way to keep us hating people and to help depersonalize interventions. If someone was doing something bad you could say that their soul was still pure to give you a reason to still value them. Then you could go to them and say things like “Look, we want to keep you from damaging your soul.” It’s a variation on when you do something bad and someone says “Hey, you’re better than that.” There’s a trick that some people do to fool themselves into accomplishing things that they think may be beyond them, they “pretend” that they can do the thing and then just go ahead and do it. Sort of fooling themselves into not having fooled themselves, or something like that. The soul gives us a personal, anthropomorphized ideal to live up to, to aspire to.

One of the downsides of this is that it allows us to keep both our love of people and our prejudices intact, without having to do much self-examination, without having to resolve the cognitive dissonance. You see that in such statements as “love the sinner but hate the sin” which is a cheap platitude that keeps many people from having to reevaluate the values that they’ve been taught, as opposed to those that they’ve been able to derive from first principles.

After all, why walk a mile in a man’s shoes if you can just say the problem isn’t with the man but with his shoes. And then maybe you’ll see that “soul” and “sole” have something in common.

I’ve never been to a Toastmasters meeting, though I’ve had the opportunity. I have talked to people that have, though, which is only a slight step up from playing an attendee on TV, but enough of one for my purposes here today.

What I remember from such talks is that one of the things that the Toastmasters spend a lot of effort at is getting people to embrace the silent pause, to not fill their moments of gathering thoughts with “ums” and “uhs,” let alone the dreaded “like.” It’s easy enough to understand why we use them, we use them because we don’t want to lose our moment of attention. We’re in the middle of saying something, but we need a moment to put together the rest of the sentence, the rest of the thought; if we don’t make some sound, utter some placeholder, there’s a very real chance that someone else in the group will take their shot, will jump in and divert attention to them, will steal our audience. Even God understands how valuable it is to have someone listen. Actually, God more than anyone probably understands that; how many millions of people have found comfort in just having God listen, not respond, not interrupt, just listen. What power there may be in prayer may just be in believing that someone is listening.

But before someone else jumps in, let me get back to the point I was about to make. I was engaged in a brief instant messaging conversation the other day and God was sitting there with me; he nudged me and pointed at the screen. He told me that what I was looking at was an “um” in the cyber age. It was that little notice that pops up and says the other person is typing. I don’t know if the programmers that put that in knew that that’s what they were doing, but there it was, a little signal that it wasn’t yet my turn to speak. It’s an elegant example of how some things that we barely notice in the real world are still so essential that as we transition part of our lives to the online realm, we still need to bring them along, not in the form we’ve grown up with maybe, but nonetheless there, disguised in plain sight.

Let me just take a moment to say to all those “modern” fast food franchises out there, “stop it.”

Stop trying to make me the chef.

I don’t know about other parts of the world, but here in the U.S. one of the growing trends in fast food is to make every meal personalized. You run into this at Togo’s and Chipotle’s and at Subway, the joint with the most locations in the country. You can’t just order number 12 or the pastrami sandwich or anything so simple. You have to specify each little thing you want. “Great, you want the pastrami! Would you like lettuce on that? How about onions? What condiments do you want?” It’s the worst at Chipotle. You not only have to specify every little thing, but they pass you down an assortment of stations, so you can’t even memorize an order and rattle it off, you have to talk to three different people even though you’re only traveling five feet.

I read an article this week that says that half of people are introverts and half are extroverts. I don’t know if that split is correct or not but I’m definitely one of the introverts. It taxes me to carry on this charade of a conversation. I don’t mind if the menu lets you “build your own burger,” that’s great for those high maintenance orderers out there, but it’s a pain to me, so don’t make it the only option on the menu. Give me something that I can order in as few syllables as possible and I’ll come back more often. That’s one of the reasons I go to fast food in the first place, no waiter or waitress coming around to check up on me.

I don’t need a lot of interaction. Somedays God and I just sit around on the couch and barely more than grunt at each other. They call it parallel play when toddlers do it, for adults it’s just “comfortable companionship.” And besides, isn’t it the chef’s job to figure out what should go on what? Stop trying to make me do your job.

One of the things that I do in my spare time is to come up with alternate descriptions of God, or alternate ways of looking at the universe that are at least somewhat religious in their nature. Most of these are still-born, of course, not worth the time that I gave them. I once read an interview in which Barry Manilow said that he sometimes wrote as many as two hundred new songs in a month. He went on to say that most of them were terrible. I don’t come up with anywhere near that number of musings, but still, most of them are terrible.

Out of the relatively small number of godly metaphors that I’ve developed, there have been two that have stuck with me. I’ve talked about them before. There’s the view of the universe as represented by computer memory where every bit is actually set to one but where our inaccuracy in reading them renders so many as zero that we read the universe as infinitely more interesting and varied than it actually is. That one’s a little hard to explain and even when I do, I’m not sure that I’ve ever really gotten across to someone else what it is that I see in my head The other one is Polytheistic Solipsism, the theory of Polytheistic Solipsism is that we are each of us Gods and that the universe we perceive is a shared creation, a consensus reality.

I’m sort of working on a new one at the moment, it probably won’t develop into anything, like I said most of these don’t, but I thought it might be fun to share it here.

One of the ideas that religious whack jobs here in the United States have been promoting in order to try and get their theology into public schools is the notion of irreducible complexity. This comes from their assumption that if they can’t figure something out then really it must be that nobody can figure it out. It’s one of their main attacks against the notion that we evolved through natural selection. Anyway, I could go off on tangents here for thousands of words in trying to understand why and how these people come up with things like Intelligent Design, but that’s not what I want to talk about right now.

The thing is these people seem to have no problem eschewing the complexity of the evolutionary process in favor of the idea that some higher being guided things, but then seem completely unable to grasp that this raises the notion that there must have been some way that the higher being, clearly more complex than anything else whose origin we have attempted to explain, had to have him or her self come to be, without having to then posit a higher-higher being and so on to infinity. Not that these people are capable of understanding infinity.

And somehow I crossed this in my mind with the rather common tale of a guitar teacher who is only a lesson or two ahead of their students. And also with the knowledge that we humans are on a path of creating ever more complexity both in our societies and in our possessions, in our apparent quest to be one of the premiere anti-entropic forces in the universe.

So what if God did design everything, but he’s doing it by only staying one step ahead of evolution? What if God is just one lesson ahead of us, is out there laying down the pavement on the next block just before we round the bend to see it? What if the idea is that there is a God but that he himself is a product of evolutionary processes? There’s something appealing about it, but there’s also a disturbing “pulling oneself up by one’s own bootstraps” sort of “that can’t really work” aspect to it. It’s like the universe is a trough of water in an M. C. Escher painting constantly flowing downhill but still coming back around to the top again. God is just like us, it’s just that he’s already gone around back to the top once.

Still, if anyone can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, it must be God, right. Or vice/versa-ly if one wanted to figure out whether or not they were God, the ability to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps could be considered a strong hint.

I’m afraid I have to apologize to The South.

So what am I about to apologize about? I was talking to God about the ongoing debacle that is the Republican primary to determine who their going to nominate to be President of the United States. I had been noticing how many states there are where Rick Santorum has come in first. I told God that I thought it was just another way for the southern states to push forward their petulance over having lost the Civil War, that they were willing to screw over themselves too if it they could mess up the “north” by doing so. God told me that I wasn’t making any sense.

He made me go look up a map of the election results.

It became pretty clear that I couldn’t blame Santorum’s victories on the confederacy. A good third of those states haven’t even voted yet, and most of the states where Santorum has won are actually in the north. They’re not on the coasts, but they are in the north.

So hey, all you redneck, confederate-dreaming states, I’m sorry. Apparently you aren’t the only ones that want to drag us down into the mud.

God and I were out walking in the rain this week. Well, I was huddled under my umbrella, so I was only sort of in the rain, and God tends to walk between the drops, so I’m not sure that that counts either. I asked God about that, asked her if she didn’t like getting wet, or what. She told me that she didn’t mind the wetness but she didn’t like getting hit by the rain drops. She said that thousands of little annoying projectiles hurtling her way reminded her too much of people praying, and while she can’t do anything about the prayers she can sidestep the raindrops.

One of the things you see when you go out in the rain is the normally timid and shy snails and worms wandering out all over the place. They’re right out there on the sidewalks brazenly braving the elements. So I asked God about that. She told me that the snails like it for the same reason that so many people like iceskating; they get to practically glide along, feeling the wind rushing past and going where the whims of the moment will them to, forgetting their cares, abandoning their woes.

But the worms? She has no idea what they’re up to.

Salt. Have you noticed what’s been happening with salt?

As a society we’ve adopted various social conventions and various mechanisms, both overt and oblique, to try and be all that we can be. We use a combination of laws, taboos, and social stratifications to try and coerce each other into doing what’s right and what’s best.

Of course we don’t always agree on what’s right and we don’t always know what’s best.

And God likes to point out, that sometimes what’s right for one person isn’t what’s right for another. We end up having to strike compromises, and having to agree to disagree, and having to live in a world where some people think that a blow job counts against your virginity and some people think that it doesn’t.

But I digress.

And while I like digressing, I realize it’s not for everybody.

So one of the things that God and I noticed is the changing place of salt in our society. Good old sodium chloride. We need a certain amount of it in our diet, and so we’ve evolved to rather like the taste of it. But we’ve discovered that it’s a major contributor to high blood pressure, and now that we’ve eradicated a lot of diseases, solidified our place at the top of the food chain, and generally learned how we can live our lives free from death by more and more unnatural causes, we’re getting around to being very concerned about things like high blood pressure. So we’ve put a lot of social pressure into suggesting we should maybe go a little easy on the salt.

Even foods that aren’t actually labeled as “low in sodium” have gotten on to the bandwagon and reduced, at least somewhat, the amount of salt they contain. We’ve learned to experiment with spices and also found other ways to enhance our cooking, without resorting to piling on the salt. All in all, we’ve made headway.

But we still have an industry that’s devoted to the production and distribution of food grade salt. So what are they to do? Well, they’ve actually figured that out. If salt isn’t wanted on our healthy foods, well, why not put it in dessert? And now we have “salted caramel” as one of the hot new candies, finding it’s way into our snack bowls and our ice cream flavors. And I don’t mind because it’s actually pretty good.

Just, please don’t tell the tobacco people. I really don’t want to see “salted caramel, now with nicotine” on my store shelves.

God and I were out walking today, enjoying a bit of nature, when he remarked to me that a tree is like a community. We played with the idea for a bit, noting among other things, that leaves are like the people in a town, each not much on their own but still providing a necessary contribution to the whole.

We discussed how different kinds of trees paralleled different types of human collectives. Trees which lose their leaves in the winter could be considered like our annual events which are communities in their own rights; things like renaissance fairs, or Burning Man, or science fiction conventions. We noted that some trees grow tall and thin and some spread wide, just as some cities keep themselves close and others sprawl across whatever land they can grab.

We went on like that for awhile, and then I decided to take the analogy to another scale. I pointed to the stars and declared that galaxies were, in their own ways, like trees, and therefore also like communities. For instance, in a spiral galaxy like the Milky Way, the arms are like branches and the stars are like leaves. Apart from galaxies are nebulae, and nebulae are like rural communities, they’re loose confederations seemingly just waiting for the population to become dense enough to incorporate.

God told me that if we looked around enough and were willing to be a little loose in our definitions we could find analogies in almost anything. If we’re willing to work a bit, we can see that just about anything is like just about anything, in at least some ways. So I guess the real lesson here goes to the very meaning of life itself, and what I’ve learned about life is that life… life is like an analogy.

Facebook is definitely a two-edged sword.

I’ve commented many times in my life that it takes a fair amount of time and effort to keep up friendships. And I was saying that long before Facebook made it obvious just how many people I know but am not really keeping up with.

I actually don’t spend much time on Facebook these days. I’d say that that’s because I prefer to maintain my friendships the old-fashioned way, but I get nervous about typing things like that when God is watching me type. He has a tendency to hit me on the head and make me fix things like that. It’s not that I don’t prefer keeping up in person, it’s that that isn’t why I don’t keep up with Facebook. The real reason is a mix of having many other things to do with my time and with the lack of degrees within Facebook.

Facebook claims to be able to present me with the best and most relevant posts from my “friends,” but I don’t trust them. I know whose an acquaintance, who’s family, who’s a friend, and who’s a close friend. Not to mention who’s an object of my lust. Facebook doesn’t. And even if they gave me a way to specify, I certainly don’t trust them well enough to actually tell them. I mean, I’ve had enough heartache in my life from telling my close friends who I think is cute or not, I certainly don’t want to give that information to some heartless corporation. And as for their algorithms figuring it out on their own? Well, the few times I’ve let them try they’ve done pretty badly. And I’m not surprised. I write software for a living and I keep up on what’s going on in the industry, and I really don’t think computers are going to figure out what’s interesting versus what’s drivel — to me — anytime soon.

But then, God tells me that that’s the Killer App of Social Networking just waiting to happen, a program that can tell not only that something is drivel, but that it’s drivel that I’d still like to read. Somehow, I think we’ll get the singularity first.

So yeah, Facebook is a two-edged sword. It’s full of drivel, but buried in all of that are nuggets that I really would like to read, really would like to know, but just can’t justify the time it takes to dig them out.

Sometimes I think that the reason we invented swords at all, is just so that we could have the metaphor of referring to things as two-edged swords.

So in my last post I was talking about how we humans, unlike Vulcans, find a change to be as good as a rest. Now this time I’m going to tell you that that’s only partially true.

I find that after a couple of weekends in a row of running out of town to go and have fun, what I really want to do on the next weekend is stay at home and just sort of veg out. Maybe I’ll play some games on some computing device, and maybe I’ll watch some movies, or do some reading, but generally I’ll just do stuff that isn’t particularly physical and that doesn’t involve any meaningful interaction with other people.

My inner introvert just starts to demand some alone time.

God says I’m just a wimp; she says people with kids can go for years without getting a weekend to just lay around and do nothing and they manage to survive.

It’s sometimes surprising what is and isn’t relaxing.

I was discussing this with God and she reminded me about an old Star Trek episode where Capt. Kirk and the usual suspects beam down to a planet for some rest and relaxation, and end up engaging in some fairly strenuous activities. Spock finds the whole thing confusing, since they are logically not resting at all. It was one of the first times in my life that I encountered the notion that a change is as good as a rest.

She then pointed out that the same thing is at work when we’re struggling with a problem and decide to “sleep on it,” then find when we come back to the problem that the solution is simple and often even fairly obvious. God credits our subconscious minds with finding the solution in these cases; she tells me that our subconscious is perhaps her greatest gift to us, while admitting that it’s also sometimes her worst gift as well, as anyone prone to nightmares can attest.

What brought on the conversation this time was two things that I noticed in my own life.

The first is that I often come home tired after a day at work. Not physically tired, I don’t do that kind of work, but mentally tired. So you’d think the last thing I’d want to do at that point would be anything mentally taxing. Nothing more trying than vegging out to some mindless sit-com. But since I don’t currently have a TV set up, that’s currently not an option. So what I often do is to pull out my iPad and launch a strategy game. After a few minutes I’m engaged and alert, sometimes even to the detriment of being able to get to sleep when it’s time. So by doing something different but still requiring mental effort, I find myself reenergized.

The second thing is sort of the opposite. I’ve begun repackaging my DVDs, taking them out of their cases and putting them into plastic sleeves that take up a lot less room. Going into this, I thought this would be a nice relaxing process. The kind of mindless work that lets me zone out and devote my mind to other things. It turns out that it isn’t that sort of work at all. There’s a fiddly-ness to the process that makes me keep focusing on what I’m doing. The outer cover tends to stick a little to the plastic it’s housed within. The inserts come in various sizes and have to be aligned right to slide into the new sleeves. And the packaging designers have come up with, it seems like, a dozen different variations on the little plastic hub that holds the discs in their cases, requiring me to engage and figure out, do I push this in the middle and wait for it to pop-up, or do I pull on the edge, or do I do both, or is this one of those horrid ones that have to be pulled up from the edge but which don’t have a cut out that lets you actually get hold of the edge?

So it’s not meditative at all.

And God just looks at me and asks why I’m complaining to her. She didn’t design the cases. Well, maybe she didn’t, but if you ask me, she sounded a little defensive when she said it.

Ah here it is, another Superbowl weekend. So for me, another trip to Disneyland. Though I started this annual pilgrimage when I was living near the Magic Kingdom, it’s been most valuable to me in the years that I’ve lived away.

Walt Disney said that Disneyland would never be finished. For him that was one of it’s big advantages over the making of movies, it was something that he could continue to tweak and improve, to constantly upgrade. As I explained to God, that more than anything else is how the Disney corporation has kept to the spirit of it’s founder. They really have kept it growing and improving. It’s like one of those animal enrichment programs at the zoo, where they hide food and treats around the animals enclosure, because hunting them out helps to keep it mentally sharp.

Now, with John Lasseter in charge, I expect them to be even better at it. Much like Walt, John really lets his inner child loose, lets it out and doesn’t hide it away like most adults. So far he’s been tackling Disney’s California Adventure, which I agree needed it the most. Last year I got to see the World of Color water and light show, and I’m afraid it was a little too much like the first number in Fantasia to hold my interest, it was very pretty but could really use a story. But that comparison does show the promise of John capturing the spirit of Walt.

This year I’ll get to see what his crew has done with producing a dark ride based on The Little Mermaid. And sadly, Cars Land is not yet ready. I may have to make at least one mid-year trip to check that out after it opens this summer.

Anyway, I’m excited and God’s excited right along with me. I’m not sure if that’s because he has insider knowledge or if he just likes seeing me happy.

What goes around comes around. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Fang’s Law: Those who do not learn from science fiction are doomed to repeat it. Those who do not know Unix will reinvent it — badly.

There’s a reason these cliches exist. Like most cliches they’re basically true. God points out that reducing these truths to pithy aphorisms doesn’t make them any more or less true but does increase their value. She says that a picture may be worth a thousand words but a witty truism is worth more than that.

But why are we talking about this now? Well, God and I have spent a little time looking at Apple’s latest initiative, their new revision of the iTunes U concept, with their interactive retake on textbooks. She reminded me that I worked on a primitive version of the concept way back in the 1970s. I went to a school that used Control Data Corporation’s PLATO system. That system allowed you to go through course work on computer terminals and included the ability to take tests along the way to make sure you were picking up the gist of what you were reading. It seemed like a big advance in education but never really seemed to catch on.

Now instead of having to head on down to the school’s computer lab and sit down at a hulking CRT that only knew the color amber, I can pull out my tablet computer anywhere I’m at and bring up full color interactive lessons manipulated by touch instead of keyboard. So sure, history repeats itself, but sometimes the great thing about it is that it’s like a writer penning a second draft, it’s better than it was the first time.

In my last post I was talking about how Apple, while not taking the crown in actual number of PCs produced and sold, has become something of a mindshare leader. There’s another aspect to that that God and I talked about and it has to do with the simplisticness of sophistication.

As I’ve looked around at fashion through the years, one of the things that has endured is the attitude that simply going black can be the ultimate in sophistication. From the classic “little black dress” to Steve Jobs trademark turtlenecks, to the usually wrong declarations that “X is the new black,” it seems like you can never go wrong with just going black. It even worked for Spinal Tap, when they wanted an album cover that could go to eleven.

But Apple bucked this trend. They were advertising that people should “Think Different” and in a form subtly reinforcing that message, instead of black, they went to the other extreme. The iPod stated it’s minimalistic elegance all in white, right down to the wires on the ear phones. For a few months, or maybe even a year or two, after the iPod took off and became the “it” girl of consumer products, there appeared periodic columns warning people that the simple white lines of those wires made them a target. They let snatch-and-grab thieves know that you had something valuable, something worth stealing.

And the copycats at company after company looked at those white wires appearing all over the place and said to themselves, “White! That’s why they’re selling! They’re white.” So they made their cheap knockoffs and flooded the market.

Those knockoffs may not have improved the audio quality of the average lossy-encoding listener, they may not have gained any of the brand reputation of the coattails they were trying to ride on, they may not have done anything other than sell a few more units than they otherwise might have, but they did do something, something of value. They made it so that those iconic lines of white, dangling from our ears to our pockets, no longer made us targets for muggers.

Or at least they got lazy journalists to stop writing articles telling us that they did.

The other day God told me that Apple is the Dr. Pepper of the personal computer industry.

When I was young Dr. Pepper ran the “Be a Pepper” advertising campaign. When the campaign started it implored people to “be original” playing on Dr. Pepper’s underdog status to the colas that were the big kids on the soft drink block. The commercial’s were very successful both in that they were popular enough to become a pop-culture touchstone and in that they got a lot of people to either renew or begin a love affair (or sorts) with the product. In fact, they were so successful that the lyrics morphed from being about being original to be about joining the crowd. They had always showcased that lot’s of different people drinking the soda, but the lyrics added “there seems to be a Dr. Pepper craze,” and it was more than just Madison Ave. hyperbole.

Much like how Dr. Pepper beat Coca-Cola to market, Apple was selling “personal” computers (and their attendant operating systems) before IBM (and Microsoft). But like with the “Be a Pepper” ads, Apple’s “Think Different” ads played on their underdog status. Today, much like Dr. Pepper versus Coke and Pepsi, Apple is not the leading PC maker but seems to have all the momentum and mindshare.

So if you look around these days, and seem to feel an iPad craze, well maybe you’d like to join me in raising a glass of Dr. Pepper, toasting Apple’s success, and taking a moment to “Drink Different.”

Well, here it is. Another year. 2012. And just like every other year it seems, it’s an election year here in the U.S.

Of course just because the election happens this year doesn’t mean that we haven’t already been in the throes of electioneering; we’ve had plenty of run up as one Republican hopeful after another has tried to push Mitt Romney out of the race.

God doesn’t like me to spend too much time worrying about, or talking about, our elections. After all, he points out, with the de facto two party system that our system unofficially forces it’s not like there’s much to choose between. The choices currently are bad and worse.

Speaking of “worse,” when I’m able to detach myself enough from the reality of it, it’s actually kind of fun to watch the Republican nominating race. The Republicans currently have a system of fielding two kinds of candidates: The insane. And those not actually insane but who know that they can’t get the nomination without somehow appealing to the significant faction of Republican voters that are. Yeah, the inmates may not be running the Republican Party, but the people that are running it know that they do so only by the suffrage of the inmates.

It’s almost New Year’s, so another battle is drawing to a close in the war on Christmas. There isn’t really a war on Christmas, but the American reactionaries seem to want there to be one so bad that I’ve decided that I may as well humor them.

With a little help from God, I figured out that the “war on Christmas” rhetoric has come about because Christmas itself started as part of a Christian “war on paganism.” Sure they won that war, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from watching how the Bible Belt has treated the Civil War, it’s that American Christian’s, or at least the southern ones, have a hard time admitting that a war is over. Sure they lost in the Civil War, but I can see where they’d have just as hard of a time giving up on a war that they won.

So they just figure that any deemphasis on the Christian mythos is a renewal of hostilities rather than a simple “growing up” of people that no longer need magical explanations for the simple facts of nature. Hey, if you’re not with them, you surely must be against them, right?

It’s almost Christmas. Santa’s no doubt gotten the oil changed on his reindeer and sharpened up their antlers. And an even surer bet is that I’ve been listening to a lot of Holiday music.

Holiday music covers a pretty diverse spectrum. Every genre of artist wants to get into the act, either because they love the holiday or because they see a chance to cash in. After all, you can even find Christmas albums by several prominently Jewish artists. And more than in most other types of music the novelty songs, the comedy songs, get a fair shake. The Chipmunks had their first success with a Christmas album. Everybody knows that Grandma got run over by a reindeer. And Christmas Rhapsody is one of the more amazing parodies that God and I have heard.

Even some “standards” are built around gimmicks. Consider “The Twelve Days of Christmas” and “The Little Drummer Boy.”

And that’s where I want to go off on a rant. I love “The Little Drummer Boy.” It’s an endearing little story with a fun approach and an approachable tune but I can’t say much for most versions of it. More than most Christmas songs, for some reason, performers like to bleed all the life out it. You’d think that groups with serious drummers would latch on to it and back up “pa rum pum pum pum” with some serious stick work. Instead what I keep running into is wimped out back up singers and pianos without punch, groups that seem to think that it’s amusingly ironic to do the song without a drum track at all.

Well it’s not. It’s pathetic. The Stylistics showed that you can do it with smooth vocals and still make it work, as long as you have a good drum track to back up the singers. But if you really want to hear the song done well, look up Bob Seger’s version. Now he showed that you can respect the source material but still make it live.

Hanukkah is just around the corner. Living in a predominantly Christian country, I’ll admit that the Jewish holidays have a tendency to sneak up on me. Sure they move around a bit, but so does Easter and I still manage to keep a handle on when that’s coming up.

Now this is going to go in the completely wrong direction, but I was talking to God about Hanukkah in particular, Jewish holidays in the less specific, and Jewish culture in general and he used the subject to teach me something about queer culture. One of the things that I’ve never quite been able to wrap my head around is the straight friends and acquaintances that I have that show a fair amount of interest in gay entertainment. This includes people that I’m about as sure as I can be that they aren’t just peering out from the depths of their closet, but who seem to have a more than passing enjoyment of movies and music and such that I’m into for their queer content.

God pointed out that I enjoy the Hanukkah songs that have accrued in my holiday collection. He pointed out what fun I have listening to Allan Sherman’s Jewish parody of My Fair Lady, and, as trite as it sounds, how I’ve enjoyed movies like Yentl and The Fiddler on the Roof.

So yeah, I get it now, I get why straight people watch queer entertainment. I suppose I should have gotten it just from seeing how I enjoy looking at alien cultures in science fiction.

But just for the record, Schindler’s List is still an overly pretentious pile of dung.

Candy canes. I get it, I really do. Peppermint has become the quasi-official flavor of Christmas and candy canes are really only partly to blame.

Sure there’s “egg nog” and some pumpkin spilling over from Thanksgiving, and a few other niche stalwarts like sugar plums, but really it’s come down to peppermint. I went grocery shopping this last weekend and I was kind of amazed. There were candy canes, of course. And peppermint ice cream, which I’ve come to expect. But there were also pretzels covered in mint flavored white chocolate, peppermint malted milk balls, chocolate covered mint marshmallows, peppermint chocolates, peppermint bark, and mint mocha frappuccinos.

Yeah, I bought my share of that stuff, so yeah, I’m encouraging the problem, but I also bought some egg nog almonds (which could just as easily have been named nutmeg almonds).

God tells me I shouldn’t be surprised at all this. He’s only surprised it took so long to catch on. Christmas, after all, is just the Christian version of the winter solstice celebration. And there’s a reason that all the gum maker’s like to refer to peppermint as “winter fresh.”