Easter is a strange holiday. If you think about it, it is actually two holidays on the same day. There is the Easter of the Easter bunny and colored eggs. Easter is the psychological first day of spring and all the cuddly bunnies and baby chicks and pastel colors seem an appropriate celebration of the season.
Easter is also, more so than Christmas, the defining holiday of the Christian religion. According to most, to be a Christian means that you believe that Jesus was literally the Son of God and that he died on the Cross for our sins. Did He? I don't know. That's what it means to be an agnostic; it means being honest enough to admit that you just don't know about some things. But I am also a Christian. "Born again Christians" will deny this. They will say that I can't be a Christian unless I believe what they do. I say that I am more of a Christian than they are. I believe that what Jesus taught is more important than whether or not he was the Son of God or whether his death saves us from our sins. We have to remember that he was speaking to a much more primitive and unsophisticated people and had to deliver his message to them in a way that they would understand and accept. I'm sure he was hoping that most of us would have grown up a little more in two thousand years.
That's about all I have to say. This is what He had to say. You'll find things there about loving your enemies and turning the other cheek - not easy things to do these days but, in my opinion, not necessarily incompatible with the task of ridding the world of terrorism. How do you define a smite upon the cheek? You'll also find things there about hypocrisy. Those who most loudly delcare their faith are not necessarily the true believers.
No more fun on the Web? They've got to be kidding!
In this NY Times article by Lisa Guernsey, Glenn Davis bemoans the lack of fun and bizarre sites on the Web and fondly recalls such sites as the Coffee Cam, the Fish Tank Cam and the Mr. Potato Head site. This was a huge shock to me because the Web is littered with this sort of thing. So Mr. Davis likes webcams. He should take a look at EarthCam where there are hundreds of webcams showing everything imaginable: ashtrays, litterboxes, the insides of closets and refrigerators, a chia pet, guinea pigs and various other small pets, fish tanks, ant farms, a cup full of pens sitting on a desktop, a trash can, a lava lamp plus dozens of personal cams. When I first discovered webcams I was fascinated with them for about half an hour before I got bored with them but if that's what you're into you can find more than enough of them to stay entertained.
There are a lot of other ways to waste time on the Web besides webcams. There's the Brunching Shuttlecock's Toys page, a long list of fun pastimes such as the Are You Smarter than Miss America test and various other tests, the Campaign Scandal Generator, The Sarcasterizer, the Alanis Morissette Lyrics Generator, and various quizes including my favorite, Christian Metal Band or Star Trek Episode?
Want more games? Try Joecartoon.com I thought this was where my own favorite guilty pleasure, a game called Alcohol and Ammo, was located but it's not there anymore. (sob) Like animals but hate cleaning up after them? Try Neopets. They have some games too. You can find all manner of bizarre stuff at Dick Grogan's Weird Fun - Ben & Jerry's Flavor Graveyard, two Barbie haters links, the Lunatic Fringe Award, the Bondage Files (I don't think I want to know) and more.
The Internet not fun anymore? Please! There's still lots of this stuff out there. Now pardon me while I get up on one of my favorite soapboxes. Perhaps the reason why Mr. Davis feels that there is less fun on the Internet nowdays is because this kind of shallow fun quickly becomes boring. At first you find something like this and think "Wow, cool!" but soon the cool wears thin and you go looking for something else. This is the way with most popular entertainment. That's why fads come and go - because they are only interesting when they're new. On the other hand, classic literature, classical music and art may be intimidating at first but give lasting satisfaction that never wears thin. I can spend hours at sites like Access the Great Books and Artcyclopedia and the Czech Music Information Centre. I am constantly amazed at exciting stuff that can be found on the Web. I made my find of the week last night. (You can even flip the pages. Is that cool or what!) Go to Arts & Letters Daily and look down the left hand column to find magazines about every imaginable subject. Wow! Is it any wonder that I am addicted to the Web? There are not enough hours in the day to devote to stuff like this!
I'm not knocking the silly stuff. Hey, how do you think I knew about all those sites? But if you're starting to find the Internet boring, maybe it's not the lack of fun things; maybe it's time to broaden your definition of "fun."
One of my two readers suggested that I comment on “the art moment” and address the question asked him by a co-worker, “Why in the world would anyone want to stare at a picture hanging on the wall?” I am not qualifed to comment on art. I enjoy looking at paintings but I know almost nothing about art history and can name no more than a dozen artists so my initial reaction was to try to think of a polite, face-saving way to decline. But then I happened to think of one particular “art moment” that I had a few months ago.
It was another online art discussion. (are you starting to get the feeling that I spend way too much time at online discussion forums?) I would post a link but that site no longer exists. Several of the participants in the discussion posted links to paintings, including two by Mark Rothko. The first one I looked at appeared to me ugly and oppressive, and the other one even worse, but I was determined not to be guilty of making snap judgements so I stared at each one for several minutes. I didn’t have much luck with the first one but to my surprise the second of these two paintings quickly began to interest me. My eyes were drawn into the the dark squares….holes? I started noticing the wisps of lighter color invading the darker areas. I didn’t try to figure out what it meant or what it was supposed to represent; I just looked and let the shapes work on me. I still think it’s an ugly painting but for some reason it makes me want to keep on looking.
By the way, while looking through nearly 200 “thumbnails,” little postage stamp sized pictures, to find those two paintings, something interesting happened – I decided that I could learn to like Rothko. I’m going to go back later and take a longer look at some of the other Rothko paintings and read the biography.
For me, one of the most exciting things about the Internet is the hundreds of paintings that can be seen online. Besides the fact that I would never be able to see most of these paintings in person there’s the added advantage of being able to look at them at my leisure, without the pressure to move on. But you miss a lot when you can’t look at the actual painting.
During the twelve years that I lived a half day’s drive away from Washington D.C. my family and I visited the Smithsonian at least twice a year. After four of five hours in the Air and Space Museum I usually had an hour or two to spend in one of the art galleries. My most memorable visit to the National Gallery of Art was when they had a special exhibit of paintings by William Harnett. One thing that surprised me on my first visit to a major art gallery was that extremely valuable paintings are displayed without so much as a velvet rope between them and the jostling crowds of people with their sticky fingered children. Usually there is a quiet, bored looking security guard but at the Harnett exhibit an unusually vigilant security guard paced the room repeating every few seconds, “Don’t touch the paintings,” and “Don’t point so close.” The reason for this was that you could stand with your nose six inches from the painting titled Mr. Hulting’s Rack Picture (for example) and you still would swear on all you hold sacred that those old letters, the strips holding them up, the tacks, everything, were real, not merely paint. Even paintings such as Job Lot Cheap, had a stunningly convincing three dimensional apperance. No one would ever have to ask “why stare at these paintings?” You simply can’t help yourself.
Harnett’s fool-the-eye paintings are a special case of course, but with many paintings if I just give them fifteen seconds of my time they will, for one reason or another, make me want to keep looking. So, why stare at a painting? I can’t answer that, but if you start looking at paintings – really looking at them – you’ll know.
No man is entitled to the blessings of freedom unless he be vigilant in its preservation. -- Douglas MacArthur posted by Lynn at 9:29 AM
Where do I sign up to join the revolution?
I want to make it clear from the outset that I am not one of those starry eyed, back to basics, anti-globalization, anti-corporation freaks. Big corporations provide millions of jobs and lots of seriously cool products that most of us would have a hard time living without. The giant corporations have their place – I just think it’s past time we put them back in it. They need to be forced to accept that the little guys have rights too. It’s also past time to forcefully remind our congressmen who they are supposed to be representing.
Here in America we supposedly have freedom of expression but for most of us that has only meant the freedom to express ourselves to an empty room. Real freedom of expression belongs to those who have the money to pay for it. This also affects your freedom of choice since you are not likely to choose something if you don’t even know it exists. The Internet has been changing this. Now for just a few dollars a month, or sometimes nothing at all, anyone can have their own website and publish or broadcast anything they want to the entire world. Unfortunately the big corporations are desperate to take this new-found freedom away from us. Internet Radio is now under attack from the recording industry – the same control-freak industry that also wants to put copy protection on all CDs.
We can control the control-freaks. Without customers they could not exist. The most obvious first step would be a massive boycott of the major labels, but that’s too easy for me to say. I listen to classical music and have many more choices than the fans of popular music. The independent labels have the best in classical music anyway so boycotting the major labels would be no sacrifice for me. At the same time, classical music only accounts for about two to three percent of sales for a label like Sony and most of that is crossovers – stuff that serious classical music fans wouldn’t even touch. Sony and the other major labels would probably be happy to be rid of people like me, and I wouldn’t miss their offerrings much either. However, every style of music has its underground so whatever you’re into check it out. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you find. Any way you look at it, in the long term you’ll be doing yourself and everyone else a big favor.
Another thing everyone can and should do is write to your congressman. Yes, they are owned by the corporations but a massive letter writing campaign might get some attention. (You might also try writing to some of your favorite artists) What would get even more attention would be a march on Washington – a Million Music Lovers March! Yeah. I’d really like to see that – classical fans, rock and roll fans, jazz fans and so forth all shoulder to shoudler demanding our rights. Whatever you do, do something. Go to the chat rooms and discussion boards and plan a strategy with other music lovers. We don’t have to take this!
Something to think about for straight American males
In the Independent Rowan Pelling says: The question to ask of an Englishman is not 'is he gay?' but 'how gay is he?'
In addtion to being amusing, this article is a real eye-opener. As far back as I can remember American women have had the hots for British men and American men have quipped that British men are all gay. (or "queer" or "sissy boys" or whatever) I always assumed that this was just sour grapes - natural American male envy of all the attention British chaps are getting from American women. But now I read in a British publication that there might be something to this belief after all.
Then there's the ubiquitous lament of all single women: "All the good men are either married or gay." It sort of makes you think. According to some researchers everything we humans do is all about attracting the opposite sex. Yet, strangely, everything that women are most attracted to in a man, and bemoan the lack of in most single men - emotional awareness and sensitivity, more highly developed aesthetic sense, etc. - are characteristics that are commonly associated with being gay. The message is clear - guys, if you really want to attract women you've got to be just a little more gay.
Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth, passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius, but never abandoned. -- William Butler Yeats
The other day I got into one of those "What is Art?" discussions that seem to pop up repeatedly on the message boards that I frequent. I put in my two cents' worth and then ran for the hills. I used to act like an evangelist for the Arts, always trying to make people see that not only are the Arts important, they are also far more exciting than any of the here-today-gone-tomorrow pop culture phenomena that attract so much attention. But I've gotten tired. People already have their minds made up that anyone who thinks Beethoven is better than Britney Spears is just an elitist snob. And they come to that conclusion without ever having heard more than a few notes of Beethoven or any other great composer. Out of thousands of hours of music they hear a half dozen or so 30 second snippets on TV commercials or perhaps one or two poorly performed, dumbed down crossover CDs and they are able to determine that all classical music sounds alike and is nothing but a tired old relic from the past. The "intellect" of these people is amazing!
The same goes for painting and literature. Classic literature is just something you suffer through in school and paintings are just something you hang up to keep the walls from looking too bare. Why should I care if the majority of the world is missing out? They are happily immersed in their pop culture, oblivious to the joy and excitement of more than a thousand years of real culture. I would like to think that they are simply afraid of something so emotional - afraid to be moved to tears by a painting - afraid to turn off the TV and experience the Dangerous Pleasure of Reading - but I can't fool myself like that. I know that most people simply aren't aware, and will not believe, that with time, attention and patience they can discover much more beneath the surface of what at first appears stuffy, academic and outdated.
So why should I care? Because I've been on both sides. I was not born an "elitist" nor did I become one in college. I had to become thoroughly bored with the ordinary before I started looking for something better. The joy of finding it is like nothing else I've experienced. I often spend entire days in a state of near euphoria as I continue to explore a millenium of the greatest creations of mankind. It would be unspeakably selfish not to at least try to share this feeling.
It takes infinitely greater courage to salvage a people or an epoch from conflict than to start or continue it. The outstanding figures of our time, among whom Nelson Mandela is the exemplar, are those who seek reconciliation, agreement, forgiveness - very milksop notions, no doubt, in the view of people who think it cleverer to let their guns do their thinking and talking.
Such folk would scarcely merit even our contempt if it were not that their way of solving problems does such fantastic harm, and if it were not that there is an organised means of supplying them the wherewithal. Those who oppose them not with returned gunfire but with offers of peace are as high above them morally as Everest is above a wormcast.
Very noble sentiments. Only a barbarian would disagree, right? Of course talking is better than killing people. There's just one problem: diplomacy only works if both sides are fully committed to making it work. If you have a genuine moral imperative to turn the other cheek, fine, but don't fool yourself into thinking that the other side will stop shooting just because you refuse to defend yourself.
I am a great believer in peace. I was a child during the Vietnam war and grew up seeing the casualty statistics every night on the evening news. For years after that war was over I thought the best thing that could be said of any president was, "At least he kept us out of war," but that came from a child's perspective on the world. There has been no peace. For the past ten years while we have been enjoying our "peace," terrorists have been making war on us - a fact which the media has been reporting as quietly as possible so as not to get everyone stirred up enough to shake the fragile foundations of all those nice Liberal notions about diplomacy and cultural sensitivity. It's very sad that it took something as horrendous as September 11 to make us grow up.
Grayling concludes:
Each of the world's current conflicts needs just two individuals, leaders on opposing sides, to stand up, meet, talk, keep clearly in view some image - a child blinded or limbless because of bombing, say; and to agree a fixed determination not to use large-scale murder as a way of managing differences. On that basis, real hope can enter the picture. This is of course an extremely hard thing to achieve; but it is why such individuals, if they were to appear, would be very great heroes indeed.
This is absolutely true. But until two such individuals appear the peaceful must make war. The choice is not ours; the other side made it for us.
Reading this BBC article about Google bombs I took special notice of this line near the end of the article: "Blogger David Gallagher has set out to use a bomb to become the most famous David Gallagher on the net." Curious because I know a David Gallagher, I went to Google and did a search on the name. It came up with 309,000 hits. The entire first page of results were all fan sites devoted to the young actor who is apparently another pop-culture phenomenon that I have been completely unaware of. Ho hum. (I won't bother to post a link to this David Gallagher since anyone interested in him will obviously have no trouble finding him without my help)
On the second page of results I found David F. Gallagher amoung lots more fans sites for the young actor. On the third page I found a David Gallagher who is in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Air Force Institute of Technology and another David Gallagher who talks about his vacation "out west" with his parents in 1999 and of course more fan sites for you know who. On the fifth page of search results there is a David Gallagher who played defensive tackle for the University of Michigan in the early 1970's.
I could probably go on but that's enough. That makes five and none of them are the David Gallagher I know, a professional musician who can be found almost daily on Amazon.com's Classical Music Discussion Board .
And the point of all this is? Probably just that I really need to get a life. I'm afraid to do a Google search for my name. I'm fairly certain that I'm the only one but I'm sort of worried about what I might find out about myself.
Thanks to Adil of Muslimpundit.com for the link to my blog and for the comments in response to my email. I only discovered weblogs a couple of weeks ago and Muslimpundit is one of the most interesting that I've found so far. Not only is Adil very well-informed on Muslim issues but he quite possibly knows more about Christianity than I do. That doesn't take a lot though, since I stopped paying attention in Sunday school class at a fairly young age.
The girl with the haunting green eyes from the National Geographic cover has been found. Her name is Sharbat Gula, which means "sweetwater flower girl" in the Pashtun language.
I was a little surprised at my own reaction to the news. I almost cried with relief - almost as if she were someone I know, such as a long lost friend or cousin, and judging by the media attention and some of the reactions I've been seeing I'm not the only one. It has started me thinking this morning. We Americans are frequently attacked by the rest of the world for being arrogant, self-involved, shallow, and so forth. I won't deny that we are often guilty of these accusations, but is anyone aware of our capacity to love? Perhaps I'm being self-congratulatory. We do waste a lot of love on pop culture icons, fashions, high tech gadgets and so forth, but beneath the surface there is something more, which even we ourselves are often unaware of. We also love ideas, such as freedom, justice and equality. And we love humanity, whether en masse or as represented by one extraordinarily compelling face.
My apologies. There is a problem in my last post; it's incomplete and I can neither edit nor delete it so here it is again, hopefully complete this time.:
I started out life as a conservative but discovered early that I was afflicted with a dangerous susceptibility to reason. Since believing in reason leads to the fires of Hell, good religious conservatives try not to associate with the evil purveyors of reason. However, I found that these unrepentant sinners were not only more fun and more interesting, they were also courteous, kind, generous, non-judgemental – in fact, nearly every quality Christians claim to value, is possessed in far greater measure by those whom they condemn than by conservative Christians themselves.
So what’s an intelligent conservative child to do? For many years of my life I tried to reconcile religious dogma with reason. I did this mainly by focusing on two points. First, the words from the Bible “judge not” and second by looking to nature as a guide to “what God really intended.” I managed to fool myself this way for a large portion of my life. But recently I passed what felt like the last hurdle.
The one belief that I managed to hold on to for the longest was that homosexuality is a sin. Surely “nature” showed that this was against God’s plan, or so I “reasoned.” As reality kept hacking away at this one last conservative belief, I kept finding ever more ridiculous rationalizations, ending with “It’s wrong but it’s none of my business. It’s not my place to judge.”
I had already come most of the way by the time I met someone last year who, just by being who he is, forced me to grow up a little more. I met this guy last year on a small music discussion forum. I was immediately attracted to his delightful personality, which came through clearly in his long and rambling, but fascinating and amusing posts. Still, I wouldn’t say we actually became friends until after September 11. Shortly after that horrible day I flew into a rage over the asinine, and now infamous, remarks of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. For a few days I was prepared to lead a crusade to wipe out fundamentalism in every form and was further enraged that no one seemed willing to follow me on this worthy crusade.
Okay, so I guess I was a little messed up for a while there. Weren’t we all? Anyway, my ranting got the attention of the friend mentioned in the paragraph above. He told me that he’s gay, something I had already guessed. For a while we ranted back and forth together and cried on each other’s cyber-shoulders. Now we trade articles, stories and crude, politically incorrect jokes. But, really, he’s a friend just like any other.
And that’s the whole point. When you get to know a member of a particular group you can no longer think of any members of that group as "them." When you see an individual as a whole person, sexual orientation no longer seems all that important. Think about it. When you meet someone whom you assume to be straight do you immediately picture that person having sex? That’s the whole problem isn’t it? It’s The Yuck Factor. The bias against homosexuality has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian religion and cannot be supported by the Bible. There is nothing in the New Testament against it and in the Old Testament it is mentioned in the same chapter (Leviticus Ch.20 ) and in the same context as a command to kill any child who curses his parents. If we no longer believe one why do we still believe the other?
I started out life as a conservative but discovered early that I was afflicted with a dangerous susceptibility to reason. Since believing in reason leads to the fires of Hell, good religious conservatives try not to associate with the evil purveyors of reason. However, I found that these unrepentant sinners were not only more fun and more interesting, they were also courteous, kind, generous, non-judgemental – in fact, nearly every quality Christians claim to value, is possessed in far greater measure by those whom they condemn than by conservative Christians themselves.
So what’s an intelligent conservative child to do? For many years of my life I tried to reconcile religious dogma with reason. I did this mainly by focusing on two points. First, the words from the Bible “judge not” and second by looking to nature as a guide to “what God really intended.” I managed to fool myself this way for a large portion of my life. But recently I passed what felt like the last hurdle.
The one belief that I managed to hold on to for the longest was that homosexuality is a sin. Surely “nature” showed that this was against God’s plan, or so I “reasoned.” As reality kept hacking away at this one last conservative belief, I kept finding ever more ridiculous rationalizations, ending with “It’s wrong but it’s none of my business. It’s not my place to judge.”
I had already come most of the way over by the time I met someone last year who, just by being who he is, forced me to grow up a little more. I met this guy last year on a small music discussion forum. I was immediately attracted to his delightful personality, which came through clearly in his long and rambling, but fascinating and amusing posts. Still, I wouldn’t say we actually became friends until after September 11. Shortly after that horrible day I flew into a rage over the asinine, and now infamous, remarks of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. For a few days I was prepared to lead a crusade to wipe out fundamentalism in every form and was further enraged that no one seemed willing to follow me on this worthy crusade.
Okay, so I guess I was a little messed up for a while there. Weren’t we all? Anyway, my ranting got the attention of the friend mentioned in the paragraph above. He told me that he’s gay, something I had already guessed. For a while we ranted back and forth together and cried on each other’s cyber-shoulders. Now we trade articles, stories and crude, politically incorrect jokes. But, really, he’s a friend just like any other.
And that’s the whole point. When you get to know a member of a particular group you can no longer think of any members of that group as them. When you see an individual as a whole person, sexual orientation no longer seems all that important. Think about it. When you meet someone whom you assume to be straight do you immediately picture that person having sex? That’s the whole problem isn’t it? It’s The Yuck Factor. The bias against homosexuality has absolutely nothing to do with the Christian religion and cannot be supported by the Bible. There is nothing in the New Testament against it and in the Old Testament it is mentioned in the same chapter
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I'm getting off to a somewhat shakey start here. I wanted to add a column of links and have no idea how to do that. I also don't know how to add a link to my email. And I couldn't even post a message on the discussion boards. If anyone is reading this, please keep checking back. I promise to make this a little less lame in the near future. I would be interested in getting emails for any reason. Cheers, jeers, tips, or just let me know you've seen my blog. I'm wondering if there's any way to tell how many people have viewed my page. lavenderrain2002@yahoo.com
I am quite used to getting looks that clearly say, even if no words are actually spoken, “What cave have you been living in all your life?” My philosophy has always been “If everybody else already knows about it it’s probably unspeakably boring and mundane.” Therefore, try not to be too shocked when I say I had never heard of blogs (what an ugly word!) until last week. I’m still not sure if this is the latest fad or some kind of obscure cult. I’m hoping it’s the later because I would really hate to think I have been drawn in by something popular.
I decided almost immediately that I had to have my own blog but actually getting started is a little scary. The main thing that makes it scary is blogger.com’s reasurances that it is “easy.” Look, I’m no kid. I’ve had enough experience to know that when someone tells you something is easy (or cheap) there’s usually something that they’re not telling you. And there are plenty of clues that maybe it’s not as easy as they say. In one place they say that you don’t even have to know HTML, then later they talk a lot about HTML and lots of other stuff that is incomprehensible to the computer illiterate, or even the semi-computer-literate, which I consider myself to be. So which is it, guys? Do I need to know HTML or not? And how do you learn that stuff anyway? All of the so-called “HTML for Beginners” sites actually seem to be designed for people who already know at least a little bit about it.
Well, anyway…. I guess I’m about to find out – the hard way as usual. I don’t know what this is going end up looking like. I’ll learn as I go along. Please take it easy on me until I figure out what I’m doing.
Another thing that I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about is whether to use my own name or a psuedonymn. I’m not bashful about making my opinions public and I want to have my real name on my writing. On the other hand, if I’m using my real name I might feel a little inhibited about saying certain things, for instance if I wanted to say something like: “Every time I read an article in which the writer expresses horror over Sept.11 merely as an introduction to more criticism of U.S. foreign policy I feel like hunting down that writer, slapping him several times across the face and saying ‘You ignorant, bigotted, medieval fascist son of a camel, grow up! Osama bin Laden and Al Qeada don’t give a shit about the Palestinians!’” (disclaimer for radical Muslims only: I have lived my entire life in a country that tolerates such unspeakable evils as freedom of speech and freedom of the press, therefore nothing I say is worthy of being taken seriously. Just ignore me. I’m not responsible. I’m only a woman anyway so who cares what I say?)
Hmmmm….. Maybe I should wait and see what kind of response those last remarks get. I’ll go ahead and use part of my real name though. It probably doesn’t matter anyway. Those who are already familiar with my other adventures on the Web would figure me out in no time no matter what I called myself.
Please check this blog regularly. I promise I’ll try to be interesting, or at least say something to get somebody pissed off (I seem to have a talent for that) which can sometimes be interesting.
