Since when did the term fresh get so inexplicably and irrevocably linked with the mint? Why is it that to be fresh I must essentially be mint? Somewhere I imagine there must exist some desperate and seedy conclave of mint farmers who’s shadowy arms reach into the farthest reaches of the globe. Who’s unseen hand have been orchestrating world events for the past 30 years, growing more powerful and influential with each passing year.

And now they have complete control over the world of freshness. Or they did… until Febreeze stormed onto the scene and with its futuristic nano-spray technology has been eating at the very core of the mint farmers global empire.

And war is now looming on the horizon. A terrible war between those who wield sprigs of soft leafy green and a group of lab coat-clad men and women with a powerful spray that leeches chemicals out of the very air.

Perhaps I am being overly critical of the plight of chemists and farmers. Perhaps they are merely working their jobs and have no interest in controlling the world through insidious infusion of their products into every last aspect of our lives until we are unsure where the Febreeze ‘freshness’ ends and the minty ‘freshness’ picks up.

Am I the only one that notices that almost daily a new product contains either Febreeze or mint? Am I simply delusional in my observations of Febreeze commercials and their none to subtle way of pronouncing that their product, and their product alone has the power to rid the world of foul odor causing germs that have apparently been growing in power since the dawn of time and should by all means be the size of rats and should leap out of cupboards and off of counter tops, coalescing out of the surface like the T-1000 from Terminator 2, and leap full-force onto our faces and begin wedging their way into our olfactory glands where they sett up tenement housing and begin roving the streets of our senses looking for bordellos in which they can propagate their foul breed?

We are so very lucky that Febreeze has emerged from the brains of mankind to fight this terrible menace, because the day is nigh when the germs that cause odor will find ways to infiltrate our very brains and drive us like inefficient SUVs up and down the highways of our lives.

Where, however, does that leave the forces of mint? Long have they too fought the dragon of un-freshness with their three prong attack of spearmint, peppermint, and the awe-inspiring wintergreen. Certainly cinnamon could be counted in their ranks, but only has a second class warrior, fodder to be tossed off at suicide missions and shoved aside by the more commando-class spearmint whenever necessary.

The germs of our mouths, those terrible squiggly worm like emanations are powerless against mint. The very idea of the tiny green leaves cause them to shrivel into singularities and disappear, not just from our mouths but from the realm of time and space. The almost imperceptible pops of their fading beating out a rhythm of triumph for the mint forces and the honorable men and women who cultivate them.

How will the ensuing war be fought? Where are the weapons and whence the battlefield? The human world, the trappings of man are under attack by germs and these two forces of ‘freshness’ are about to get medieval on those various cocctuses and burculi.

The warning shots have been exchanged, but in their desperate grab for power we will see Febreeze Mouth (TM R copyright): spray into mouth and be amazed as the Febreeze chemical locks onto germs and rips them screaming from the material plane into the darkness beyond. Or Clorox with Mint (TM R copyright): Rub vigorously on any surface of the kitchen or bathroom, Clorox with Mint’s powerful mint ingredients will take germs out back and execute them with the swiftness and ‘freshness’ of Mint!

Humanity in general will fall into these diametrically opposed camps and tussle in the streets shouting about the cool clean flavor of the existence ending formula. Unmarked vans will plow the streets at night and supporters and opponents alike will disappear into the mint fields or the Febreeze mines, never to be hear of again.

Rise up now, while there is still time and throw out your mint and Febreeze. Fear not the ravages of the ever growing power of germs and be secure in your belief that maybe taking out the garbage or opening a window will suffice in the war on germy odor. And next time you brush your teeth, imagine what it would be like if you could just rub something gritty on their without the sinus burning effect of mint.

I’ll see you in the underground fellow warriors of the ‘freshness.’

Henry Rollins is a good friend of mine. Not that I have actually met the man, but I feel that we have a certain kinship in hopes, aspirations, attitude towards all of mankind. Especially in regards to hate. If you can’t find a reason to be angry, then you really are not paying attention. Rollins is the kind of guy who will spend an hour telling you why people need to be stopped and things need to be changed by all possible force before breaking down and letting you know that deep down, below the horror, he really respects and loves humanity.
But don’t tell him that I said that. If asked he’s a mean mofo and that’s the way we all like it.

I reference the man as a matter of segue into a terrible fear that seems to be popping up all over television commercials. I have already mentioned the dangerous quagmire that is intent and anti-tobacco advertising but I will drift down that long and dark road again. Because there is a certain darkness down that road, a seething duplicitous beast with pencils for fangs and radiators for eyes. And a gold chain around his throbbingly veined neck that reads ‘peer pressure.’

As a (shudder) child of the 80s, I have been exposed to roughly a thousand hours of peer pressure related advertisements. The radiation of which has scarred my lungs and left me with a twitch in my lower lip, a scowl of murderous proportions and drool inducing intensity. I couldn’t go a Saturday morning without being told a few hundred times to beware of the things that my peers wanted me to do, that doing something because others were doing it was demented foolishness that must be avoided at all costs.

I sometimes think I was the only one who paid any attention to that stuff. The persecution one faces from going their own path and doing their own thing is ludicrous in this country, especially in the smaller towns and also Texas. But the cracks in the ‘peer pressure’ stratagem were even then apparent.

You should never do something because other people are doing it until you are older. Then you should do exactly what everyone else does, keep your head under the radar, and vote like you are supposed to.

Or ELSE…

The particular duplicity of the concept is laughable enough, the indoctrination of individuality that is later beaten out of you by a system of homogeneous everything. But lately they’ve just convoluted the whole thing in an unacceptable and difficult to follow way.

Take a brief look at even a single block of advertising for an afternoon show and you will get more mixed messages in five minutes then in most of the New Testament.

A brightly colored animated girl tells me that a friend of hers wants her to try pot, saying that everyone is doing it, to which our pastel heroine responds, “If everyones doing it why doesn’t she do it with some one else?” From this we are to assume that a) nobody actually does pot, and b) doing something because other people allegedly do so is foolish. Which is not too far outside of the message that failed to grasp the attention of children in the 80’s and 90’s.

The next commercial is the kicker though, a strangely lighted scene of a plain looking teenage boy approaching a mirror. He struggles to check his too perfect too white teeth for what we assume are supposed to be chew stains (although you should maybe apply make-up to your actors/models if you want to convey certain types of things). He supposedly finds something that triggers his memory of five girls snickering at him and making allusions to his stained (except their not) teeth. Outside of the fact that there are five females sitting together and not one of them is attempting to back stab any of the others for the affection of the chew using bad-boy, and correct me if that seems statistically implausible, there is a dangerous point being made about not doing something because you need to SEEK the approval of the masses.

Does this not strike you as odd? Moments before I was being told to shun the approval of the masses who wanted me to do pot, and now I need to seek the approval of the masses by not doing chew?

How is any person supposed to operate when they are being asked to give completely opposite responses to the same stimulus? Where are our children to turn when they are at the same time supposed to do what they are told, not do what the collective expects of them, and also pay close attention to what the collective thinks of them?

Somehow I think that a lifetime of such irregular and implausible reinforcement would create a broken and jilted youth culture with no values, no mores, no tropes, no ability to make a stand for something, no ability to define a term, no ability to decide when something is right or wrong, everything would just lump into some dizzyingly grey blob that defied definition and sought anonymity from all sides, even gender, and especially accountability.

Oh….

WE interrupt your otherwise enthralling lecture about the meaning of life and its ability to hide under snails for a special word about religion. Not just any religion all of them. All at once, with no commercial interruptions or pauses for prayer and reflection. The master of all cosmos is even now beaming the message direct from the sky palace into my frontal lobe. I have no choice but to type, and type quickly for the message sears my brain tissues with its righteousness even as it passes through.

In my capacity as the vocal piece for the great and all powerful, all knowing, all seeing cosmic master I tell you that these words come from HE and only HE, not to be confused with any lesser, more lower case, Hes that you may come across in your cosmic journey from cradle to grave. For simplicity sake he will call him the Diagesis, and the Diagesis rules all.

Or so he says.

Personally I’m frightened by the concept of voices talking to and through me and the particulars of what they are saying. It can be troublesome to decide if what I am thinking is really my thought or the thought of The Treat One. How am I to know if Vincent or TGAP are speaking to me, perhaps this is all just a mild case of schizophrenia and that it will all fade away with some sleep or exercise.

I forget how that works with you people.

To curtail further head scratching and desperate mumblings and pointings, I will come right out with it; Diagetic studies are troubling. How am I to determine if things that are happening in my head are conscious actions or unconscious? Do I really have people in there that are separate or part of me? Did Caesar have a nasty problem with internal voices and seizures or was God (a god, not really a question of WHAT god) telling him things.

Is that music part of the ambiance or is it coming from that car radio? Is that a sultry, mood setting voice over or am I talking out loud? Some of these questions I could maybe answer, others I don’t suppose have much in the way of answers.

But they all have a common element – they all exist in a plane of meaning. A level. A floor with an elevator called meaning running between them.

There are probably simpler ways to explain the process of diagetic thought to you, but there aren’t many that get you thinking about it with as many headache-inducing side effects as asking you to question your belief in religious divination and prophecy versus mental fragility.

One man’s voice is another man’s divine savior made manifest. And one writers character is another writers subtextual commentary on the roles of Marxism in modern societies notion of feminist psychotherapy. And it really isn’t just a matter of perspective.

Although some things can masquerade or be mistaken for other things, there are many that cannot and should not be mistaken.

Its still confusing. Let’s try a different approach.

Two men walk into a bar, the third one ducks.

Bada-ching!

But the mental restructuring necessary for that ‘joke’ to function is no different then the reconstruction necessary to know what a diagetic level is.

Have you ever gone to a movie, or read a book where it seemed like there was something else going on there. Where it seemed like no one was saying anything about the struggle between the lower and lower-middle class but you can’t stop thinking about that time when you and your friend Lyle’s relationship was forever sundered when your parents wouldn’t let you speak to him simply because he lived in a mobile home across town? How can a movie about sky-diving gunmen make you suddenly think about Lyle, when it had been thirteen years since you last spoke? Could it be subtext, could it be a fluke, could it be Keanu’s lack of ability to spit out a line without sounding distant, confused, and a comatose?

We may never know.

But what I would recommend is that you pay a little attention to the next random thought that pops into your head when you are watching TV or reading. There might be something else going on there something between the lines, underneath the treacle and the paint.

Something with meaning. Something with intent. Something of the divine?

Like so many giants, gods, and ancient Chinese warriors, I too stand in front of a gate attempting to stop things from getting through. My struggle is much more ephemeral then some others, and with most of the previous examples being wholly mythological or fictitious that really is saying something, but my struggle is equally important and more prone to failure. Surely language should in some fashion be given a chance to stand tall under the withering lashes of a million fools!

I mentioned last time a brief overture of the study of language and its many convoluted tidbits. Today I would like to expound upon the death of those same bits. Not a glorious or purposeful death, like those found in Deconstruction, but the lame and coughing from the depths of the lungs horrible black gunk right before pitching headlong on the lawn death. The death of too many poorly made decisions and not enough time spent buttressing the internal fortitude of the body.

Binary opposition, to recap, is the idea that terms are defined, in part, by the contrasts they have with each other. We understand to what extent something is cold by understanding to what extent it is not hot.

Which would be much easier if both cool and hot were not co-opted for use in modern culture as terms with positive values. Someone who is paradoxically cool and hot is the epitome of young adult achievement. And if you think you intellectuals, who shun notions of ‘hotness’ are free from committing this crime I ask you, when was the last time you were attracted to someone who was very intelligent but also depressed? Bright and dark? Why yes, that would be you committing a linguistic assassination.

But these examples are more playful too me then they are devastating. As Saussure would say this is all part of the ‘play’ that words engage in that gives them some form of real physicality.

The phrases that I am here to wag my mental stick at and demand that the collective majority repair are far more grave, far more sinister, by far more brutal and diseased. Will you take up arms with me and stab your pike into the dark heart of confusion and disinformation?

I’m up for it! Are you down?

How? How? HOW!? How did we allow this to happen? In what way can I be up for an activity that you are down for? Where did we take a turn down a primitive back road and have we stopped since these warning signs popped up? If not, then I assume we are soon to hurtle off of a cliff and over a waterfall into simian grunts and crude hand gestures that will alert me to the presence of mammoth, over yon hill, where the ice meets the horizon and where Dave took that spill last week that still has him laying about the cave floor and honestly who is going to take care of his five kids if we don’t go over there and use these pointy sticks to carve out a reckoning of tusk and hair and bring back the meat? For Dave! For his children. For all those times when the mammoth laugh at us when we try to ride them.

You can actually glean a surprising amount of information out of some grunts and hand gestures if you apply a little indignation and a wild tale of a caveman named Dave. But I would not recommend it the next time you want your car repaired or are asking your boss for a few hours off to go see the dentist.

My ire for the use of ‘I’m up for it’ and ‘I’m down’ meaning the same thing is perhaps that outside of a lack of semiotic sense and breaking the principle of binary opposition, they are also prepositions. The lowest of all words, prepositions occupy the same evolutionary rung as the Yugo, the Brick (by which I mean those old cell phones that were larger then any home phone you are likely to have ever owned), and the pet rock. Certainly these objects are amusing and possibly even necessary for the invention of superior objects such as gerunds, the BMW, a slide phone, and a tamigachi, but they are in enough trouble as relics of a form of communication in which spatial relationships were of key importance to meaning without being bastardized into terms that demonstrate a sort of psychological or emotional spacial relevance to the attitude necessary to be involved in a task.

You see, that last sentence just falls apart as I struggle to find words that will fit around the particularly nasty and ever-growing carcass of this problem as if it were a highly unstable Japanese boy who went of his meds and decided to destroy chunks of Tokyo to overcome his crippling self-doubt from years of being under-appreciated and picked upon. This is not the sort of carcass you want to see growing on the horizon. Especially not at 3 am when all of your friends have fallen asleep and you are left to deal with this sight solo.

But perhaps that is more of a personal problem.

Some people spend a lot of time thinking about not just what a word or phrase means, but HOW it means. Most of these people are French. I’m not sure that we should take that as having any sort of profound meaning in and of itself, it just happens to be true.

I will give them some credit on the matter, French is the only language with a council active enough to succeed in protecting their language. French is little changed for the last 200 years, and though it grew out of Latin the same as Italian and Spanish, it has maintained a level of haughty snoot that I believe all languages should strive to find. It is a difficult language to learn mostly because its grammatical and verbal rules are arbitrary, which is no different from every other language, but if asked why it is so arbitrary you will be told “because we like it that way.” In America you are more likely to be told that it is that way because…. “I dunno, it just mutated, or something.”

Neither of these responses is particularly useful, but the French version shows some sort of gumption. A finely honed ability to own their mistakes as a form of intent. If you are going to do something wrong, at least do it on purpose rather by inaction. Then you can take some pride in the results.

Now, of the people who worked on the principles of meaning, how it is found, derived, formed, expressed, and evolves, the most important figure is Saussure. Often blamed by dancing people in ceremonial regalia - pant suit, tie, jacket, wildly teased and colored hair, bracelets on their wrists and their ankles – for harshing their buzz and banging on their mellow, Saussure laid down the concepts referred to by colorful linguistic rogues as the Semiotic Nightmare.

What with the haunting of dreams and all.

The Semiotic Nightmare is broken down into several components that work together to make the entirety of thought easily more convoluted and difficult then if you were simply scatter shot with the whole thing. I am going to abuse you by breaking it down, because I am not known for my kindness when it comes to berating people and or language. I am also not going to give them to you in an order that will assist in understanding the components, I’m just putting them down in the order in which I like them.

Binary oppositions express and define each other through contrast. Black and white are a primary example. You can really only tell how black or white something is by comparing it to how white or black it is not. This gets easily confused when you remember that the colors of white light, and the colors of paint white are completely reversed. And so the Nightmare descends into your consciousness with its own irreverent cultists.

Diagetics is more fun than horrible, but it has its own sensitive and implausible terror all the same. Diagetics, which has nothing to do with Dianetics, they just share a lot of the same letters, presents the notion that there are layered levels of meaning that intersect and bisect each other. The classic example is a song heard on the radio in a film is in the same diagesis as the characters in the film as opposed to the overture music that sets the mood or tone and is not heard by the characters but exists as part of the diagesis of the audience.

Finally, the corner stone of semiology if found in the brains creation of incredibly doomed and wholly faulty ties between the sign, signifier, and signified. A picture of a tree, the word tree, and an actual tree are only as similar as the individual interpreting all three. Everyone can picture a tree, but it will likely not be the same tree and in that we can see that language has no meaning.

Or does it simply have no meaning without context?

I would be a fool to let you off so easily at this moment, so I’ll throw in a final tidbit that should leave you gibbering in your soup the next time you happen to have soup and a few spare minutes to start thinking overly hard. At some point even the French decided that its all too much and that ultimately meaning is not something you can apply a strict structure too so an irascible man named Derrida began pulling the whole thing apart with the theory of Deconstruction.

And you can blame him for every pretentious person you meet with an overtly fatalistic attitude. For every youth who would rather not try, for every politician that talks for hours without mentioning a single fact about the topic they are supposed to be conversing on, for every boss that somehow can wield the word ’synergy’ without knowing what it is. That’s your guy. This Derrida person. He didn’t mean to do it, it just sort of happened that way.

Which does nothing to explain all of the things involving ducks and rows. Nothing at all.

Just when I thought it was safe to walk around the streets in the dead portion of the night mulling over ideas bred of self-imposed isolation and sugary coffee products, they had to create a new lifestyle fad that confused me and sent me back to the bunker to contemplate its existence and origins. Safely ensconced in the bunker I perused medium after medium (therefor media) and questioned my gaggle of associates for several months. I even risked the safety and sanity of my young ward to procure ‘insider’ information about this social blight, and now, after much work and tedious toiling I have some conclusions.

I am prepared to explain the origins and causes of Emo.

I pause briefly here to allow the impact of the statement to absorb into your cerebellum. The implications of the knowledge you are about to receive are tremendous and long lasting. Past this thin veil of information lies a reality stripped bare and laid out for awkward autopsy by men who claim to be doctors but have shown no credentials. And one of them has the hand shaking, arm scratching behaviors of a man coming down from some powerful street drug. One that must cannot be snorted or smoked. Some injectable substance of deep jungle origin that he may or may not have procured at a wharf meeting with a man named “Diggz” who gave him an ounce for $30 Canadian.

This. This is the world you are entering as you read this information. Be forewarned. Be forewarned.

Our journey to the center of Emo requires a steel gut and a precision crafted levelness of head. Like so many movements in society that result in cliques or groupings that are in turn referred to as sub-cultures and then counter-cultures and finally accepted as an unwholesome part of the whole, Emo was a reaction to something growing in the massive churning womb of the human condition.

Hippies were a reaction to the oppression of war and a buttoned down society. Punk was a reaction to materialism, Reagonomics, and the conception of the self-absorbed money-driven 80s. Grunge was a reaction to the MTV and Pop fluff nonsense of entertainment. Alternative a reaction to Pop. Goth a reaction to Pop. Jazz an action against oppression. Rap a product of urbanization and isolation. Disco a product of recreational use of cocaine without the commitment to the lifestyle that other drugs seemed to take. And Emo?

Emo is a reaction to poor education.

Emo is an embrace of and subsequent reviling of the conception that nothing is so right and wrong anymore. The inception of multiple 24 hour news networks, the Internet, the lowering of standards in public education, the adoption of all forms of commercial crap as the standard of greatness. All of these factors, insidious, unnoticed, apart they do only so much harm, together they only do so much harm. But in the gestalt, in the addition of these components like a potent chemical concoction or a vile alchemical brew they have more power through time and addition then can be calculated. Attrition.

Emo is a reaction to attrition. But attrition is not an active enemy. Attrition is not a cause that people are willing to fight against, to die for, to invest in the defeat of. Attrition is the most subtle and damaging of all foes. Attrition is the cause of and result of every decision that you make daily.

There are many enemies in the world that people will take up arms, intellectual and actual, to stop. Disease can be researched and combated, more so when you physically know someone that has that disease. Wars, no matter the level of justice in what they are being fought over, can be fought. Children in danger can be protected. Animals dying in the street can be nursed. Any problem that is brought to your attention or threatens you can be can fought. But there are threats out there that don’t lend themselves to this type of thought.

There are threshold threats, things that build slowly and imperceptibly in the background of life that crush you under their eventual massive girth. Weight gain is probably the easiest example to this. Your metabolism slows as you age, you spend more time sitting after or for work, you snack more and eat more of whatever you feel like as you have the money to pay for it. Add several years together and you are 50 pounds heavier and your heart explodes if you run up a few flights of stairs.

The only way to fight attrition is to have a plan set ahead of time that prevents the problem from growing. The only way to have a plan against attrition is to know that there is a danger in the smallest decision you make. The only way to be conscious of each decision you make is to be constantly watching for what could go wrong. The only way to survive when being constantly vigilant against an invisible threat is to be a neurotic loner (like me) or go Emo.

Could it be that being an apathetic, angst ridden, amoral, androgynous youth in overly tight jeans is to be a soldier in an invisible war against inclemently bad choice?

Maybe, but it is much more likely these people are simply the product of too many choices made with no plan at all. I’ll leave it to your discretion to make the call.

I just got back from an arts festival in my greater community area. Now, I have not been to many arts festivals, nor do I intend to make them a regular or sought out event. I also assume that arts festivals in areas outside of the southwest must differ greatly in form and content. But if you live in the southwest or attend anything in the southwest you will see several perplexing and awkward things mashed together and baked in the sun until they freckle.

The children trotted out to sing or dance or otherwise prance for the amusement of parents and grandparents is likely a common ingredient to this misshapen pie. The incredible amount of jewelry with local stones vaguely polished and then mashed into a faux silver setting is perhaps more specific to the southwest. Photos of rocks and sweeping vistas, oddly perplexing ‘tribal’ items made out of 21^st century polymers and alloys…. I could go on, but the picture wouldn’t be complete without the final ingredient, which has nothing to do with arts festivals at all.

The scrawny, geeky, uncoordinated kung fu master.

I have seen these types in other locations. I fear that there is no college campus or high school drama group without one of these blistering and troglodytic ubermenchen trotting about and kicking at roped-in volunteer hands. At one point I was sadly becoming one of these people. The desperate need to connect to and be recognized as an anime character and the assumption that when it came down to it you could kick ass and kill a guy with your bare hands.

At the time I thought this I had been in nearly 200 fist fights and spent my days wandering the countryside chopping up trees with sticks. Some of it is pathetic, some of it is how you go from silly youth to functional adult.

It’s a long intro, but stick with me, I have a point.

All of this is really pretext to a nasty problem that has gone from accosting our parents, to kicking us, to outright mugging our children. I’m not sure if any language has a more succinct word for it, but I refer to it as Standing on the Shoulders of Giants or sometimes just unearned knowledge. Years of television and interactive media have given too many people the foolish assumption that they know what the hell it is they are doing.

I have seen every episode of CSI, I can now solve a crime. I beat Street Fighter on one quarter I am a master of martial arts. I watch the Food Network constantly, therefor I am a fantastic cook. I can look up anything on Wikipedia so I am a learned expert/scholar.

You are none of those things. Thinking you are one of those things actually makes you shabbier at them then any random person who just wants to be left alone and isn’t sure why I’m demanding that they bake a soufflé that will assist in this murder trial I’ve been working on in which a man judo-chopped another man over the origin of light sabers.

There are levels to learning, it is true. When you are young you are shown the vast surface of many different things. Math, science, reading, writing, gym, history, psychology, social studies, band, drama, business, and plenty of recess in between. As you get older the classes get longer and the information gets more intense. That is pretty much how education works.

If you are interested in forensics because of CSI, that’s great. By all means go and start working on getting a degree and some actual expertise in the field. You love the kung fu? Then go train for 10+ years at it like you should. There are no short cuts to these goals and dreams. There is no level of wishing that will make it so, there is no djinn or genie that will make it so.

There is only you and your actual interest and hard work in becoming great at something.

I suppose I’m belaboring a point without adding much in the way of new information, and my lopsy angry humor seems to have fallen at the side, for this I apologize and in recompense I present you with this:

American Idol.

American Idol.

American Idol.

I think my point is made and my humor quota is met.

Read a book or something.

Like most adages, the inception and origins of Occam’s Razor lay convoluted and partially choked off by the Hentai-esque tentacles of history. While a quick burst of research will confirm the basics of how and why the idea came about, it does little to wrestle the true spirit and intent from the fore mentioned history fiend. But, what one can do is lay out the information for people, arming the populace with enough pitchforks and torches to quell the quivering mass of history.

I like the idea of armed populaces fighting horrid and ultimately squamous or tentacled beasts. And I dislike the ’science’ of history when it is not closely knit with an understanding of the interpretive nature inherent within. History is a science presented through interpretation and art (literature, tapestries, cave paintings, etc) and is therefor untrustworthy as Truth but good for information.

I suppose it would be simpler to state that “All other things being equal, the simplest solution is the best.” Which is, of course, the working phrasing of Occam’s Razor. And in the case of history you might imagine it can be stated thus: “Its much more likely that swords are pointy because that’s the way you might kill a guy, not because you have any portion of anatomy in mind when deciding how you want to build a tool to off something.”

Ockham was trying to get at something essential in life. Running around and searching for phantom monsters and ghosts may be activities that the idle and curious can engage in but it certainly isn’t the only way to explain why things in your house make noises or sometimes get turned on or off. Which is not to say that ghosts cannot or do not exist. But give yourself a little credit and consider if it might just be the wind.

The real problem with the application of this adage is that too many people can relate to the second part, the chunk about simple solutions, but not enough even remember there is a first part. And the first part, the one mentioning all other things being equal, is the section that holds the true value of the phrase.

History provides many excellent examples of this. In his book 1066, David Howarth has a paragraph in which he comments on the ‘weirdly realistic’ conversation that is reported by Snorri and Howarth tells us is ‘mistaken and distorts his account’. Now, I may not have been at the battle of Hastings, and from what I’m occasionally led to believe neither were Snorri or Howarth, but all things being the same I’m not going to let Howarth get away with insulting Snorri (a guy that I don’t particularly care for anyway) at the same time he is virtually making up details to prove his assertions about a story he’s telling from a tapestry. Last time I checked there wasn’t any dialog on tapestries.

Ockham would say that the thing to avoid above all else when attempting to put forth an argument in any field of science is to make up or invent the least amount of information. Which is more likely to be accurate about the events of that day? Snorri, a monk and scholar, living much closer to the time of the events he’s reporting on, or Howarth, a guy with an expertise in military and naval history who is from the 20^th century?

I don’t have an answer for that, but given that both figures have the same thing to gain from writing about these events I will assume that the simpler answer will suffice and that Howarth was taking that moment to settle a score (which I do not condone, but also don’t feel is unfair) with Snorri.

I suppose a much easier to follow example of this phenomenon is in modern trials with the conception of ‘he said, she said’ type trials. Ultimately you look to who gains something from their testimony and some portions of what is being said fall apart. Is it really more likely that people are constantly working to put one over on each other or is it perhaps simply that mistakes happened and emotions are not always understood or controlled?

Fundamentally every explanation of every event and theory and law comes down to not making it up as you go. Transmogrified meat takes a much larger leap of comprehension then flies laying eggs. Why woulds someone take all the time and effort to put a conspiracy together when simply executing a plan and then lying about it is so much simpler?

Why write 700+ words on an idea when you could just tell people, “Hey! Pay attention to what there is to be gained in a situation and if its not any different one way or the other, do it the easy way.”

“There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.” -Shakespeare

I’m not certain which play, if it is a play at all, that this quote comes from. And if you knew the man who taught me most of what I know about Shakespeare you would understand that this is not entirely my fault. If you knew this man, you would also know why I can’t separate Shakespeare from Hinduism and also why my own name, and the names of other people pop randomly in betwixt the quotes of Shakespeare and the Bhagavad Gita.

If only you knew this man. If only.

But that digression aside, the idea I present today is about how foolish we become when we are protecting that which we love or attacking that which we despise. Politics and religion aside, we are very apt to make up facts to support bad arguments for things we have an interest in or a likening to or believe ourselves some sort of experts on. Conversely we will dismiss well thought out and presented arguments that defend things we are against. I suppose there may very well be some type of brain chemistry involved in this process. Some primitive node that helped assure survival of the species against dangers both fantastic and mundane.

But at this point it has just gotten silly.

The Internet is to be blamed for some of this growing problem, public schools are a main culprit, and good old fashioned laze is the rest. While the proportions of each may vary from person to person and region to region I think any other factors are minimal at best. Lets take a peak at the horrors that each have wrought upon our world and how they have aided this issue.

The Internet, once the haven of geeks with enough ingenuity to sling together computers and phone lines to send text across the globe at the same rate that people now text each other with phones, is now operable by even the largest nitwit with phone line, cable jack, or wireless card. Forums spanning the width and length of human interest are created, exploited, destroyed, reborn, re-destroyed, slandered, re-reborn, and spammed upon every few minutes. The weight of the topic makes little difference to those nattering on about it. The length of a fictitious characters hair being hottly debated is only a few mouse and key strokes away from how much uranium qualifies as a nuclear research project.

In each of these places you will find sentences ranging from “The reason we cannot allow any nation access to fissionable materials is that no facility is impregnable and this material can and will, statistically, end up missing is reason enough to disarm unilaterally” to “shut up u n00b!”.

What being a n00b has to do with paramilitary use of fissionable materials is, as of this writing, unknown to me, but since it only took four(ish) words to dispatch the previous argument it must be an extremely insightful and cutting remark indeed.

Public schools have been beating into children for years that each and every one of them is special. And I completely agree, as long as you remind each child that they are special in their own way, not in the same way. Some children are gifted in one area, some others are gifted elsewhere. They are not all correct, or right, or morally justified, or even coherent. We teach our children that there are no wrong answers; only different viewpoints, and someday they cannot tell the difference between an action that benefits themselves and society from an action that ineptly corrupts thousands of years of progress.

I’m looking at you Disney’s Pocahontas and Harry Potter.

Finally good old fashioned laze. Ah, the crimes of laze. Let me count your starvations and decapitations and see how quickly I run out of numbers that I can express on my fingers and toes…. Yes, laze, the sultry seductress who tells you that its okay to let this one go, it isn’t all that important anyway and eventually you don’t leave the house and die from food poisoning because you’ve been eating off the same fork for three weeks, giving it the ol’ lick off and shirt rub as proficient substitutes for actual cleaning. Why should I type a full sentence to refute that persons point when the ol’ standby ‘n00b’ defense crushes them so throughly.

If we didn’t let things slide, if we were made to be accountable for the things we said, if we were forced to back up our claims with actual though, fact, and evidence. If only were educated in the ways of philosophy and logic. If only we cared to not be right because it feels good but because the truth is a blessed and sacred thing that everyone should want to add a piece too.

There is nothing that is right or wrong but the Internet that proclaims you a n000b.

Goodnight.

Every now and then it is best to let something go, but other times it is important to hold that thing tightly and close, particularly around the thorax. In fact, more tightly, less close if it does have a thorax. The horrible, but thorax-less, thing that I must soon make a decision on in this mode is that of cultural significance to oddity. There are things on this planet that people of other lands do, or possibly do, that fill me with wonder and dread.

But most of my evidence of these other cultures is derived from artifacts of those cultures and not direct or even indirect empirical evidence. Even though there are an enormous number of musicals made in India is no reason to assume that people there are often found dancing through the streets singing whats on their mind. And for other nations out there, not all of our young girls are stupid enough to dance topless while getting very drunk and Frenching with other equally depraved girls. That number is only like 30% or so. Nowhere near the 50% you might be imagining.

Now, I am, at times defined as a gamer. I play games of a variety of sorts with a variety of success and failure. I have not played every game on the planet, and it would be horrifically difficult to determine what percentage of games I have played. It would be equally difficult for you to determine what percentage of movies you have seen of all of those in the world by staring at the shelves in your local video rental shop. You have some idea of how many of how many you have seen, but no direct bearing on the sum total.

That said, I have run into enough games originally from Japan that feature dogs with knives in their mouths that I have begun to wonder if it might actually be a realistic threat that the swarthy Japanese must deal with.

How hard would it be to have a paper route knowing that on any given street or drive a dog might run at you, not barking with an intent to maybe bite, but armed with a stiletto. This fable uber mutt would charge your bike and deftly stick the knife between your spokes or slash your tire. And those are only the wounds you would receive if it was well trained by an odd master with a desperate dislike of bicycles.

I wonder how it is that these knives get into the mouths of these canines. Are there shops that sell dog knives? For the indiscriminate and somewhat foolhardy dog owner? Or do these dogs merely pick up knives they find on the street. Do the Japanese run about idly stabbing things and casting aside the spent knives to arm the strays of Tokyo?

And what of training? Is this simply a question of how much kung-fu action you can expose a pet too before it gains skills of its own? Or is the threat of martial-art-fueled-youth-prank-aggression so alarmingly high that a simple guard pet would never suffice unless it too had training in the deadly arts?

Are we to assume that dog nunchaku will make a comeback? That at some time we will see many more dogs with tonfa, sai, or even the formidable miniature dog kusari-gama? Part scythe, part chain, part terrier this is the ultimate in home defense and can be your for less money per day then insurance!

Perhaps we need to take a page from this presumed trend in dog weaponry and add it to our best friend in the animal kingdom.
Imagine if seeing-eye-dogs were upgraded to wield knives. No longer must the blind fear to walk into a random biker bar thinking it was a TGI Fridays! As the poor blind man hears a ’srunk’ of the bar stool moving across the dirty bar floor the gives the command, “Unsheathe!” to the beast. The dog, always protective by nature pulls a switchblade strapped to his foreleg and warily eyes the bikers as they surround him and his master.

As one biker leaps forward with a broken bottle the dog rushes forward in a zig zag pattern and deftly cuts the man’s hamstring. Turning quickly the dog sees a biker with a lead pipe about to harm his master and with an acrobatic leap he throws the knife with impossible accuracy into the bikers arm, stunning him. (And I do mean impossible, switchblades are in no way weighted properly to hit anything when thrown.) The dog cranes his neck and pulls the kukri from his back sheathe and gives the remaining bikers a look that says, “Oh yeah, we’re doing this thing.”

Perhaps some of this is more a fanciful dream in which dogs become our ultimate warriors in a world gone mad, or Japanese, or maybe just video-game. However it may occur, I’m glad that somewhere out there people are thinking of new implausible ideas that infect cultures and spread to be completely misunderstood by laymen and smart-asses the world around.