a little light reading with Mr Baum 1

I recently finished reading The Wizard of Oz (tWoO), but the text isn't finished with me yet. Like that turn of phrase? It only gets better or worse from here. Good to have all the bases covered, that way I can maintain an impenetrable fortress of you don't really know what I'm talking about, that's the fog of conversation. Unlike my intentionally obtuse style tWoO is perhaps the most straight forwardly written book in all of existence. I can't say either way for sure, but I certainly got that impression. It strangely reminded me of the mega super corporate icon (Lebrons and Tigers and Jordans, oh my) approach to public relations: They present such a vanilla image that you can read absolutely anything you want into their personalities (because it seems like they don't have any), thus broadening their appeal.

With that in mind, I found tWoO wonderfully profound in its simplicity (I probably projected my own prejudices onto the work, but hey everybody else is doing it right?). The Wizard of Oz -- the character not the book -- turned out to be a merchant of skulduggery, an air-balloonist, a native of Omaha and not a wizard at all. No surprise to anyone who's seen the movie, and who hasn't?

Sometimes I like to go all Rene Descartes on my beliefs, just to see how they hold up. Strip away, strip away, strip away and see what's left. Imagine your whole life you feel inherently flawed, there's a vital part of yourself missing, you're discontented, incomplete...TBC

work out

BP 90kgs*5,5,4,3

seated row 95/4*5

irresponsible consumerism

People protest outside a subway sandwich shop dressed in chicken suits. That's what comes to mind at this pivotal moment; That, and Jared's amazingly large pants. He lost a lot of weight eating subway. We should all be so lucky. If I lost any weight eating anything at all, than things would  be no different from what they are now.

I pick up a pack of half a dozen free range eggs, this has become the benchmark of the environmentally honourable among us. All those chickens stuffed into tiny cages, all those politically cognizant people stuffed into chicken suits. I can't allow their sacrifice to go in vain. I'll pay the extra 30 cents it costs for the chicken embryos that had uncaged mothers. I feel like a responsible citizen.

Cognitive dissonance sets in. Never a good thing. I pinch the Jordan cap I just bought from foot locker with my free hand; in all probability it was manufactured in the human equivalent of a chicken cage. It cost me $30, of which the person who produced it probably got 0.00252 cents. I call audible on the play and switch to the caged chicken variety. A small part of me dies, but at least I'm consistent. And I just saved 30 cents.

the closely examined life.

Tomorrow week, less nine days, we had our annual Christmas company pump up day. I was profoundly moved. I kid you not. You go to enough of these and you can come away with the feeling that nothing significant will ever happen. However, during this iteration an anomaly of noteworthy proportions occurred.

The devil is in the details, and often the boredom is too. I'll spare you the 'i' dotting and 't' crossing and instead bore you with the results. Actually, they're still under construction. Whenever I'm stuck for a solution, my first port of call is the internet. The internet knows pretty much everything. So there I am right, innocently surfing cyberspace (does anyone even call it that anymore, seriously) and I stumble across Daytum, a site where you can record in excruciating detail any compartmentalized life unit of your choosing. I felt this would be useful even before I needed it. Call it manly intuition or something. Then I go to this work do thing, and they tell me to write down my goals, like that's news or something. Except this time I do it on you guessed it: the internet (well not all of them, but if you're still reading this, that means you didn't click on the link, go have a look, the absurdity of the things you could record there are endless, and if your lucky you may even manage to extract some utility from your anal retentive stat keeping, I know I will).

My evolution from sloth to healthy contributing member of society is bound to be fraught with mighty perils, endless back sliding, and explosive diarrhea, of the mouth, of the mouth. Everyone take a deep breath. Ahh, was that the cheapest non-funny joke of all time? I can't even tell anymore. According to sources mastery of any skill takes 10,000 hours. That's a long time, but every journey starts with movement. The count down is on, very, very slowly, but it's on. Like a wise young Jordan once said "take one step at a time, there's no need to rush it's like learning to fly or falling in love." Another older Jordan, also had words of wisdom: "Desire makes the difference." *read in 80's struggling cartoon character voice* Steps increasing. Desire growing. Must. Soldier. On.

Kobe Bryant and the March of the Militant Atheists

This is not called Tenuous Connections for nothing.

Is raising your child in a religion a form of child abuse? (I guess it depends which one) Some people certainly think so. What is it about religion that bugs people so much? I mean besides all the wars, and rampant hypocrisy when you get down to it, religious life is all about improving yourself as a person. I guess there's also the metaphysics, which seem totally absurd in today's secular culture.

Speaking of modern culture, Kobe Bryant is arguably the greatest basketball player in the world, I don't think so, but many people do. Certainly he's right up the top though. But if we're talking greatest of all time, this is where the critics start spewing vitriol in Kobe's direction. You see there's a great divide between Kobe and the player of all players, Michael Jordan. Kobe unfortunately had the gall to fool us into to believing that he was just like Mike and the way he played during stretches reinforced the notion that maybe, just possibly, he was even better. Then the 2008 NBA finals happened. What a disappointment. Kobe was just a Jordan counterfeit, oh sure he looked, he played, he walked and talked like the real deal, but number 23 he was not (argh, Yoda speak alert).

Kobe may be a lie but science provides a provisional evolutionary march towards ever elusive Truth. It may never answer the Big Questions though, like is there a point to life? People look to God for that type of thing. It enrages scientists like Richard Dawkins that religion has such a firm grip on civilization partly because the answers it offers can't be tested objectively (and hating on it seems to sell a lot of books, which is probably as good a reason as any to make a fuss). For Atheists religion is like Kobe Bryant, a highly provocative entity that doesn't quiet live up to its promise, but because it's so tantalizing close to the real deal --for some people -- it generates anger because it's trying to fool us and our Mama never done raised no fools. We too smart for that crap, ya heard. Hey, it's a bit of a stretch, but Kobe's on the decline and Atheism's on the rise, if you look sideways enough there's a causal connection there somewhere.

Kobe ≠ Jordan = Religion ≠ Truth = (Atheism = Science) ≈ Truth = I'm a misunderstood genius