I’ve finally gotten around to posting some photos from a camping trip I took with friends several weeks ago.
Month: August 2003
Reconsidering The Ten Commandments
Cranky contrarian Christopher Hitchens takes a refreshing — if somewhat scattered — whack at the Ten Commandments.
The Commandments and immorality
msnbc.com
It’s obviously too much to expect that a Bronze Age demagogue should have remembered to condemn drug abuse, drunken driving, or offenses against gender equality, or to demand prayer in the schools. Still, to have left rape and child abuse and genocide and slavery out of the account is to have been negligent to some degree, even by the lax standards of the time. I wonder what would happen if secularists were now to insist that the verses of the Bible that actually recommend enslavement, mutilation, stoning, and mass murder of civilians be incised on the walls of, say, public libraries?
There are many more than 10 commandments in the Old Testament, and I live for the day when Americans are obliged to observe all of them, including the ox-goring and witch-burning ones. (Who is Judge Moore to pick and choose?) Too many editorialists have described the recent flap as a silly confrontation with exhibitionist fundamentalism, when the true problem is our failure to recognize that religion is not just incongruent with morality but in essential ways incompatible with it.
Grandpa On Fuji-San
While looking through some old photos, my father came across this one of my grandfather on Mt. Fuji. The caption on the back of the photo — in my grandmother’s handwriting — reads: “Paul V. Gerhard on the summit of Fuji San Jan. 1, 1934.” I’m not sure of the accuracy of that date, since in her memoirs my grandmother mentions that my grandfather climbed Fuji “with two friends on December 31, 1935.”
The weather on the mountain in this photo looks beautiful, though cold, of course. I could’ve used a jacket with that kind of hood on my hike last fall.
I’ve added this photo to my Four Generations On Fuji-San entry.
1910 Hokusai Calendar
When I was up in Alaska last week, my father showed me an old calendar that must have belonged to my great-grandparents. The calendar is a collection of prints by the Japanese artist, Hokusai. It’s from 1910, the year of my grandmother’s birth, and it has her birth date circled in August.
U.S. Wants More Weapons Of Mass Destruction
What better way for the American government to mark the 58th anniversary this week of the bombing of Hiroshima than to hold a secret meeting to plan for expansion of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.
To paraphrase the always-colorful, ever-diplomatic North Korean Foreign Ministry:
“We know that there are arrogant bastards within the present U.S. administration but have not yet found out such rude human scum as those who would so insensitively dismiss victims of U.S. weapons of mass destruction. This meeting is no more than rubbish which can be let loose only by beastly men bereft of reason.”
Sunday With The Family
When my sister, Tama, got married over a year ago, it was a small affair. There were six of us — the bride and groom, me and my other sister, Heather, and two of Tama and John’s friends, Kathy and Cheryl. Cheryl married the couple, and the other three of us were witnesses.
Last Sunday was the party, with baby Joni and a hundred or so other family and friends gathered together. In the shot above: Tama, John, and Aunt Heather kissing Joni’s feet.
The History Of Serendipity
My first exposure to the word serendipity must have been as a child, reading about the pink sea monster in the Stephen Cosgrove book.
I sat down just a bit ago to respond to an e-mail message from a stranger in Japan and ended up discovering the origin of the word, which is worth sharing. Serendipitous, indeed.
From Dictionary.com:
Word History: We are indebted to the English author Horace Walpole for the word serendipity, which he coined in one of the 3,000 or more letters on which his literary reputation primarily rests. In a letter of January 28, 1754, Walpole says that “this discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word.” Walpole formed the word on an old name for Sri Lanka, Serendip. He explained that this name was part of the title of “a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their highnesses traveled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of….”
That’s Entertainment
Cory Doctorrow posted the following passage at Boing Boing, and it’s worth reposting here. It’s from a book called “The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don’t Think for Themselves,” by Curtis White (an excerpt from the book is featured in the current issue of Harper’s).
This passage goes right to the heart of how modern, corporate media — including the properties still undeservedly called news or, even worse, journalism — have assisted in the death of responsive democracy in America.
The New Censorship does not work by keeping things secret. Are our leaders liars and criminals? Is the government run by wealthy corporations and political elites? Are we all being slowly poisoned? The answer is yes to all of the above, and there’s hardly a soul on these shores who doesn’t know it. The reign of George II practically revels in this perverse transparency. Oil policy created in backrooms with lobbyists from Enron and ExxonMobil. Naked pandering to the electricity industry in rolling back clean-air mandates. Accounting firms such as Arthur Andersen buying even “watchdog” liberal senators such as Christopher Dodd. Elections rigged with brother Jeb’s connivance in Florida. All of the details are utterly public, reported in newspapers, television newscasts and books, yet it’s perfectly safe for this stuff to be known. The genius of the New Censorship is that it works through the obscenity of absolute openness. Iraq-gate wasn’t a secret. The real secret is that it wasn’t a secret, and certainly wasn’t a scandal. It was business as usual. The betrayal of a public trust is a daily story manipulated by the media within the narrative confines of “scandal,” when in fact it’s all a part of the daily routine and everyone knows it. The media makes pornography out of the collective guilt of our politicians and business leaders. They make a yummy fetish of betrayed trust. We then consume it, mostly passively, because it is indistinguishable from our “entertainment” and because we suspect in some dim way that, bad as it surely is, it is working in our interests in the long run. What genius to have a system that allows you to behave badly, be exposed for it, and then have the sin recouped by the system as a resellable commodity! I mean, you have to admire the sheer, recuperative balls of it!