It’s taken a while, but I’m back.
I had tried to upgrade the WordPress software almost two years ago, but it didn’t quite work, and I thought that I had broken the blog, except the blog wasn’t broken. So, recently I saved out a copy of all my posts, and started from scratch and reinstalled the latest version of WordPress, and then had to spend several days redoing all the CSS to give it the presentation style that I wanted.
So, I’m back to writing, and scouring The Internets for the gobsmacked.
It appears that I might be completely devoid of morals.
From the Taboo quiz, which measures your morality.
My results:
Results
Your Moralising Quotient is: 0.08.
Your Interference Factor is: 0.00.
Your Universalising Factor is: 0.00.
How did you do compared to other people?
Taboo has been played 32264 times.
Your Moralising Quotient of 0.08 compares to an average Moralising Quotient of 0.24. This means that as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned you are more permissive than average.
Your Interference Factor of 0.00 compares to an average Interference Factor of 0.13. This means that as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned you are less likely to recommend societal interference in matters of moral wrongdoing, in the form of prevention or punishment, than average.
Your Universalising Factor of 0.00 compares to an average Universalising Factor of 0.36. This means you are less likely than average to see moral wrongdoing in universal terms – that is, without regard to prevailing cultural norms and social conventions (at least as far as the events depicted in the scenarios featured in this activity are concerned).
Are you thinking straight about morality?
You see very little wrong in the actions depicted in these scenarios. However, to the extent that you do, it is a moot point how you might justify it. You don’t think that an act can be morally wrong if it is entirely private and no one, not even the person doing the act, is harmed by it. Yet the actions described in these scenarios are private like this and it was specified as clearly as possible that they didn’t involve harm. Possibly an argument could be made that the people undertaking these actions are harmed in some way by them. But you don’t think that an act can be morally wrong solely for the reason that it harms the person undertaking it. So even this doesn’t seem to be enough to make the actions described in these scenarios wrong in terms of your moral outlook. It is a bit of a puzzle!
Rest easy, sleep well, my brothers.
Know the line has held, your job is done.
Rest easy, sleep well.
Others have taken up where you fell, the line has held.
Peace, peace, and farewell…
I just think this deserves a read. It’s about Army Special Forces Captain Jeffrey Toczylowski, and his plans for getting his friends together after his death: Rounds of sadness and joy
The secret to enjoying high-culture arts like operas and the ballet is to know the storyline before watching the performance.
We go to symphonies for the pure enjoyment of watching the conductor and the orchestra paint their tableau of music. There may be a backdrop of information behind the music, or more often than not, there is nothing but the music. But what if intead of just music, there is a storyline? The music by itself is not enough to convey the narrative. This is when the music and the musicians go into the background, and characters emerge to carry the narrative. On one end of this is a musical, with dialog and songs. Moving up the scale is the operetta where almost all of the dialog is rendered in song. At opera scales, the dialog itself becomes more stylized in the form of poetry. Topping out would be a ballet, where there is no dialog, and the narrative is danced as a strict discipline.
Most people start distancing themselves at the opera level, largely because the vocals weren’t quite comprehensible. When it comes to ballets, men flee, and women watch it for the beauty and elegance of the dancers, and not necessarily for the plot.
If you know the storyline to the opera or the ballet, then the audience gets to fill in the context for the artists expression of the story.
Without knowing the storyline, Swan Lake is a nice dance. With the storyline, it is a tale of love, betrayal, and redemption. Not knowing the plot, you lose the motivation for Odette: she is just a dancer moving here and there for no really good reason. Knowing the story of Swan Lake transforms her performance to one of sadness at being cursed to live as a Swan by day, and why even though an evil sorcerer cursed her thus, she still protected the sorcerer from being killed by the Prince because the curse could never be broken if the sorcerer was dead. It requires knowing the story of Swan Lake to understand that Odette and Odile are two very different people, even though in this production, both parts were danced by the same person.
Even without knowing the full backstory to Swan Lake, it was a beautiful perfomance by the dancers. The swans were especially graceful, using their bodies, arms, and legs to mimic the sway of swans.
Part of looking up the backstory of Swan Lake, I also discovered that over the years, there has been several different endings to the ballet, from the romantic to the tragic. The production in Pittsburgh is the version danced by the American Ballet Theater, which has a bittersweet ending in apotheosis after their deaths.
Rules to live by: Never make a “portable” when you can no longer taste the “diet” in the CrystalLight (or whatever that pixie stick of ice-tea mix was). And when you haven’t eaten all day. And you’ve been eating Jello shots like there was no tomorrow because you were hungry.
See the pale blue dot in the photo below? It’s the little pale dot a little past halfway down the image, in the rightmost lighter colored stripe of sunlight that is in the right quarter of the picture. That is Earth as viewed in 1990 by the Voyager I spacecraft when it was 4 billion miles away.
On October 13, 1994, the late Carl Sagan with this picture delivered a public lecture at Cornell, excepted here:
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
More information about this photo can be found in the wikipedia and space.com.
It’s the beginning of the ski patrol cycle again. Last Saturday was the pre-season refresher training for returning ski patrol instructors. The makeup for ski patrol training is that we cover the whole corpus of patrol training on a three year cycle. The focus this year was environmental and neurological emergencies.
Trauma being ski patrol’s bread and butter, neurologic topics always includes a healthy does of spinal column and spinal cord compromise. Everytime we cover spinal injuries, I always get drawn back to when I was training to be a paramedic, and we were required to do hospital rotations. One particular rotation was to the ICU, where a nurse recounted to me a recent patient who was a below waist paraplegic resulting from diving into a pool and hitting her head on the bottom of the pool, and suffered a complete spinal cord transection. One day, while still in the ICU, she asked, “I’m only fourteen; I haven’t even had sex yet. I guess I’ll never know what that feels like, will I?”
Into the breach again
Category: Sports
I don’t like running. I’ve heard that others get runner’s high, or an endorphin rush, and that’s what addicts them to running; that if they miss a day of running, they’ll feel guilty and grouchy all day. I get no such thing; a day without running is a relief for me.
Ironically though, I do run marathons. If you were to take a look at my running career, they are populated mostly by marathons; I have run a small handful of 10K runs, mostly as a result of factors other than just wanting to run a 10K. The first 10K run I did was because friends of mine had gotten married the day before, and decided to do wedding run, complete with an abbreviated bridal outfit and rented tux. I ran as a bridesmaid.
I run marathons simply because I can. Most people set what their idea of their limits far too low. There’s been events foisted into my life that’s taught me that our physical limits are much higher than what we believe we are capable of. I kind of enjoy that little bit of personal, solitary suffering that marathoning gives me, but that’s about all I get out of finishing a marathon. Since I detest running, I try to maximize my return on investment by training as little as I can, and getting as much a payoff as I can from the training. In the 2 out of 3 years that I previously ran marathons, I basically trained for one marathon, but ended up running multiple marathons without any more additional training. I capped off what I believed to be my final marathon in November 2003 by training for and participating in the Chicago marathon, and then running in the following consecutive weekends: Baltimore marathon, Marine Corp marathon in DC, and ending with the New York City marathon. The brutality of that was, what I felt, a fitting culmination to my marathon career.
Well, I’m back again! I got conned into running the Richmond, VA marathon this November 11. Conned in the sense that I have bunch of friends who talk about running marathons. Amy was one of those friends. She and I talked of marathons. Then one day, Amy sends me an email alerting me to the Richmond marathon being far enough in the calendar for us to start training, and relatively close enough to drive there. I replied the email saying it looked interesting. A couple of hours later, she forwards me her registration confirmation for the marathon, which kind of obligated me to respond in kind with my own registration confirmation.
So, I’m back into the running shoes and pounding out hundreds and hundreds of training miles in the next four and a half months.
My ass is so hurtiful now. A friend and I went down to Connellsville and biked the Great Allegheny Passage to Ohiopyle, had a picnic lunch there, and biked back to Connellsville. 34 mile round trip. Bike seats are not comfortable. I don’t know how those Tour de France riders do it.
And my karma is probably hosed now because of that magical vending machine… and I’ll leave it just at that.