"It's An Optical Illusion!"

My memory is failing, but what does remain is that I keep a blog. My fluid intelligence is intact, so I can infer that people like to see it updated, more than they the blogster likes to play games with the readers.

There are many things I could write here, but I have regressed technologically and so I'm starting to "molskin" everything. The catalyst for this event was Melbourne's faux-bo-ho cycling collective outside the State Library, and I just had to draw all the people in dinosaur costumes.

This week I've watched Anchorman (hilarious), Grizzly Man (crazy), Envy (funny) and The Emperor's Club (feelgood). Right now I'm reading Female Chauvenist Pigs by Ariel Levy (Feminist), Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco (rich) and The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (Manifesto).

On friday I leave with the Melbourne CU people for Canberra. It's an 8 hour drive, so I may need to enlist your help to think of car games. There is of course the Tassie-roadtrip classic, the celebrity Letter game with its Scatagory-like variations. Luke (other, not brother) suggested inter-car pictionary, which sounds like fun (you could also play that with camera phones, if you were rich and bored (or Angus)).

"I just don't know...

...what to do with myself."

I know what I could do with myself. The little things, like reading novels and non-philosophical non-fiction or drawing or catching up with all the people I've been shirking for my essays and thesis. But I think we internalise some idea that we always ought to be doing something "big" like, school when we're young, uni when we're a bit older, and work after that. It almost seems incomplete to think, no, from now on, I'll "do whatever I wanna do, gosh!" I guess this is how it feels to have your social girders torn from beneath you.

I thought I was the kind of person impervious to such socially constructed angst.

I could go out and buy lots of material objects to fill the emptiness inside. But I think there might be better options...

The Sociology of the Philosophy of the History of Blogging

The history of philosophy is a well respected discipline. The history of anything is pretty much okay because you're just describing what happened. The philosophy of history is a little different. It still retains its academic credentials, I think, but it starts to question what is taken for granted, for example, how we "report" history. The sociology of history on the other hand, is pretty much a load of wank, if I may say so. Like the sociology of philosophy, the sociology of history attempts to be normative by providing social explanations for the causes of ideas. This of course is a catagory error.

Maybe the sociology of disciplines will take off. So it would be a good idea to counter it with a new discipline; the philosophy of the sociology of history. In this discipline you'd show how doing a sociology of history is making catagory mistake.

You could also have the sociology of the history of philosophy, where you might, for example, describe the climate in the Vatican in which Coppleston wrote his volumes.

There's 6 different combinations: 1 PoHoS 2 PoSoH 3 SoHoP 4 SoPoH 5 HoPoS 6 HoSoP. 1 would be a lot like PoH, except the difference in content of historical study may have some effect. 4 might say something about the origins of the Hindu myth of the many billion year cycles of the world. Perhaps 5 might describe how the Greeks where indifferent to moral diversity and practise. I think 6 would have a whole lot to say given that SoP hasn't been around for very long. But maybe not. Feel free to disagree, dear readers.

You could take this up to another level of complexity and add Science... Anyone want to have a go at describing that discipline?!

Goat Begetting

Here's a pet goat hate:

Anal retentiveness about unimportant matters which is the result of the other people's failure to be resourceful. Let me explain by way of example; People have in the past got annoyed at me for putting the tiolet roll/ hand towel roll on its dispenser the wrong way around. Now, people have a reason for doing so and that is so it is easier for them to get at said paper. If the roll was on the wrong way, they might have a bit of a struggle. They see this as a bit of a struggle because they want life to be made easier for them. They want the ease of life not to be the result of their own ingenuity, but by other people following their little persnickety rules. Instead, they ought to just deal with the roll being on the wrong way, figure out for themselves how to tear the paper off the roll and get over it, and don't complain to other people for not following the anal rules. {tiolet paper, anal...ahem}

Another instance of this is people trying to get the swipe card to work to get into the computer labs. They'll only try swiping once or twice and then they'll start swearing and asking other people to swipe for them.

Or when people can't find certain objects and then blame their own lack of looking-for-things skilz on other people not putting things in the "right" place.

I am Girder, please insert Bender.

Here's a meme that you can all have a crack at:

Favourite Futurama Character: Bender, baby!

How you would describe your current dress style: The bastard child of Supre and Retro.

TV series now on DVD that you've been getting into lately: Futurama!

Fashion genre that is silly: Retro-metro-sexual.

Something you wish you didn't know: Where the Scissor Sisters got their band name from.

Your general attitude to the world, out of Sober/Serious/Silly: Silly

Favourite Latin phrase/word: Esse est percipi.

The One Profound Thought I Had Today

I think Hume got it right when he denied the existence of the self. I was reading over my old blog entries and I felt like I was reading the words of a stranger. A surreal experience.

Guilty, But-Fully-Justified-to-Myself Pleasures

Merrick and Rosso: B-Team ("B-Team's gonna eat you")

Procrastinating

Cherry Bites from Union House Newsagency

Supre Clothes

Tabloids in the Stupor-market check-out line.

Stop all the clocks!

I've updated one of my other blogs. See if you can work out which.