A Different Version of The Same Story

Re: “Music Quandry (Reblogging for Nostalgia)”

electricpencils:

So, tonight, we can either go see Damien Jurado at SLU for free, or we can go down to Taste of St. Louis and see Everclear for free.

Tomorrow, Soul Asylum has a free show, or we can go see Counting Crows and Augustana.

Or we could just sit in the room and get drunk again.

I’m also very disappointed that I will not get to see Ben Folds. It’s already sold out.

I was looking in the little Entertainment paper, and find it odd that Jason Mraz’s show in Novemeber is sold out, but Ryan Adams and Death Cab for Cutie’s shows are not. They’re all at the same venue. I can’t believe that Mraz has more fans than either of those other artists.

yurztruly:

Well, more fans or better publicity.  One of the two.

I’d see Damien Jurado unless you’re just looking to get stupid with some noise as a backing soudtrack to your evening.  And who knew Soul Asylum was still around?  With half the band gone from Counting Crows, I suppose the next option would be a toss up.

Was I not supposed to re-blog this?

electricpencils:

 We ended up going to Jurado. This was like the end of September 2008. A local band called Theodore opened. We made friends with them over the course of several months when we visited St. Louis.

Musically, one of the best choices I ever made was going to that show.

——–

Haha. Wow. This does not seem like a year-and-a-half ago. 

…OR

Perhaps those aren’t quite the implications of that ‘Linux Versus E. coli’  project afterall, in which case, my mind will remain 'fucking unblown’.

Heh.

See quote:

Commenter of Discover Magazine’s 'Linux Versus E. coli’:

“Well, these ideas are certainly interesting and trendy (think about Davidson and Boulouri’s biotapestry). However, working myself in that field, I am not convinced at all that bacteria are more or less equivalent to computers or that biology eventually will be a sub field of engineering. I actually think the real “out of the box” thinking today is to envision in what way living things and designed things are different. Evolution has absolutely no reason to find the same solution as human engineers, it is not clear at all that incremental evolutionary process is comparable to anything like the more global optimization principle used by computer scientist, etc…
On the other hand, if you really believe this, you need to go a little bit further as you tell. If Linus is designed as Linux, you must conclude that evolution actually is rather constrained in the solutions it can find, therefore it means that evolution, as a theory, is much more predictable than what biologists usually think, and that we actually do not really understand much about it.”

On Feminism

This is an interesting response to Emily Gould's piece on marriage.

The decline of marriage is another example of how men have been the primary beneficiaries of feminism. The fact that little girls, not boys, play house and dream of weddings - before misanthropic, feminist spoilsports tell them their feelings are wrong, of course - is enormously telling.
We men are responsibility-shy, and the time and financial commitments of marriage to have never really suited us. We derive few emotional and only minor social benefits from being married and raising a family. Married men live longer, but we are generally happier to follow our instincts as risk takers and to worry little about the consequences of our actions. And perhaps the most masculine trait of all is the one that marriage is primarily designed to stifle: the urge to shag any and every pretty young thing that comes our way.
The schism between the sexes has allowed us to stop compromising our natures for the sake of our wives and for greater social acceptance. We have achieved men’s lib by default. Aside from the obvious losers, the other victims of the breakdown of marriage are the growing ranks of “fatherless” children. All evidence points to the fact that children from broken homes grow up less happy and go on to contribute less to society than children from stable families. Single-parent “families” have moved from the forgotten slums of cities and redneck backwaters into mainstream American society.
It may seem like I’m gloating about “men’s lib”, but the status quo frustrates me. I have a close relative who is a classic example of someone who couldn’t resist the allure the feminist honey trap. She divorced her alpha male husband (a fast-talking, sometimes-brash, big city lawyer, but a very good family man) and married a gentle, ineffectual deadbeat. Her emotionally-crippled adult son lives with them and contributes significantly less than nothing to the household, yet she can’t bring herself to kick him out. The step-father can’t be bothered to act as the disciplinarian and the poor woman is at her wits’ end from trying to act as everything to everyone. But at least she “had a choice”, right!?
What I find possibly most outrageous about the feminist argument is the belief that the indomitable human intellect can conquer human instinct (known as nature vs. nurture to the blissfully uninitiated). They also believe that human nature intrinsically favors men, and therefore reject it as being another propaganda tool of the Patriarchy. It is ironic that their excessively-emotional outlook and self-view as victims distorts their conception of reality so much. Denial is only be truly mastered by the female sex.
Women read and write articles like this one to convince themselves that they have made the right decisions about their place in the world, when the reverse is so plainly obvious. The vast majority of today’s women are not happy in their roles as pseudo-men, and an increasing number of you, born into a feminist society of your parents’ making, are realizing that you’ve been hoodwinked. Of course, most men like having no-strings sex with easy twentysomethings too much to bother pointing any of this out to you. I wouldn’t have but I’m stuck in a flight ban.

where on earth did we get this mixed up idea about ‘earning’ happiness?

littleorphanammo:

That’s not how it works.  You don’t earn it.  You can’t, in fact, earn it and perhaps that’s why no one ever finds it if they approach it this way. It is something that is available to everyone and anyone at any time at all.  There is no elbow grease involved.  It isn’t only for the industrious or the busy or the lucky or the ambitious or the rich.  It isn’t something that happens in the future to a more serene, self-aware, complete and perfect you.  It doesn’t happen after you get a better job or a spouse or after your debt is paid off.  It isn’t something that happens in a more harmonious world.  It isn’t what happens to people after they ‘fix’ themselves.  It’s WHY they ‘fix’ themselves and why we ‘fix’ the world.

Just thought I’d toss that out there into the universal mulch.

clientsfromhell:

Client: “I would like to have our home page come up with some information in a hockey puck that flies around the screen. I’d like the user to have to chase the puck with a hockey stick for a cursor and whack it to let them in the site.”

Me: “I’m going to do everything in my power to talk you out of doing that.”