April 2007 Archives

Excerpts from Christopher Hitchens' book God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything are available on Slate. I haven't read it yet, but the excerpts indicate that Hitchens is less loopy than Richard Dawkins while being similarly unapologetic about atheism and equally irreverent towards faith. I especially like his nuanced answer to the argument that atheism is itself a type of religion:

Our belief is not a belief. Our principles are not a faith. We do not rely solely upon science and reason, because these are necessary rather than sufficient factors, but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. We may differ on many things, but what we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake.

As anyone who has ever spent time with my three-year-old son Ray knows, his raison d'être is waste management. I've written before about his love of garbage trucks, but he is surprisingly well-versed in the recyclability of various materials, and he is quick (and loud) to chide you should you carelessly toss a scrap of paper into the garbage. We recently received a mailer from the Seattle Public Utilities that explained what can be recycled and what can't and which had pictorial representations of the various materials. We couldn't tear him away from it.

Lately, he's been studying the numerical codes that identify the type of plastics objects are made from, and he can tell you with reasonable accuracy whether or not an object can be recycled. He can't (yet) tell you if something is polyethylene terephthalate or polyvinyl chloride, but I'm sure it's just a matter of time.

The other day, he saw a recycling symbol on a cardboard box, and after a short pause he asked me: "Why do they put recycling symbols on cardboard when all cardboard can be recycled."

I'm not positive if it's true that you can recycle all cardboard; nevertheless, I found his level of logic pretty astonishing.

I told him it was just to remind people to recycle cardboard, and he seemed satisfied with that.

At this rate, he's going to be smarter than me when he turns five.

On the heels of my last post about Sherlock Holmes, I'd like to share another passage I enjoyed. This one is from "The Bruce-Partington Plans," and essentially describes what I consider to be the perfect job for me!

The modest bookshelves of my childhood home supported various copies of every Sherlock Holmes publication my father could lay his hands on. He developed an encyclopedic knowledge of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Holmes oeuvre, and continued for many years to insist (ironically) that the detective not only had lived but was alive and well (if ancient) in Dover, England, keeping bees.

Despite that almost constant exposure to Holmes-related literature and memorabilia, I never read many of the stories myself. I primarily became familiar with the character through TV and by listening to my father's recording of the old radio programs. Recently, while deciding what books to take on our brief excursion to Orcas Island, I grabbed The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes from the shelf of our local library.

My experience reading all 40 or so stories in the collection over the span of a few days was not unlike how I felt after watching a marathon session of The Sopranos on DVD: I was exhausted and concluded that the episodes are clearly meant to be consumed with a significant break in between.

That is not to say that I didn't enjoy them, but only that the formula became rather tiresomely repetitive when taken altogether, and I found myself skimming. It would have been a different experience if I were a Victorian-era gentleman who had to wait a month for the next issue of The Strand in order to get more Holmes action, and I'm sure that Conan Doyle was mindful of that when he wrote the stories.

One significant trope jumped out at me, however, that I was unprepared for and that I might not have picked up on had I not read them all in such a short period of time.

Alyssa Milano has never been very high on my celebrity crush list, but when I learned that she has a blog devoted to her love of baseball, I have to admit that she moved up a few notches.

I can even forgive her inexplicable love of the Dodgers for this statement:

You may think the Cardinals won The World Series while I think the Tigers lost The World Series.

The recent reports of the Virginia Tech shooter's disturbing creative writing efforts reminded me of my tenure as the editor of the my high school's literary magazine, The Quill. The experience exposed me and my editorial staff to an array of alarming material, not to mention simply dreadful adolescent prose and poetry. Everyone, it seemed, was seriously misunderstood and underappreciated by their parents, teachers, or boy/girlfriends. Except, that is, those lucky few who believed in -- and wrote incessantly about -- unicorns. All in all, I'm sure it was fairly common teenage stuff.

About ten per cent of materials submitted to us ended up in the magazine; the remainder wound up in a large portfolio we termed "The 'No' File." The most prolific contributer to our reject pile was a fellow I'll call JT.

I guess my Craigslist prankster could have made it worse for me.

Tacoma woman's house emptied after craigslist hoax

A couple days ago, I referred to a curious joke being played on me involving my car being listed for sale on Craigslist.

The sale posting remained on the site throughout the day on Monday. I got six phone calls and about eight emails inquiring about it.

Since the listed vehicle was, indeed, the make and model of the one I own (even though the year, color, and mileage was wrong) I figured it had to be someone who has seen me in my car, which limits the universe significantly since I don't drive all that often. The ad also referred to my having to "move back to Wisconsin," meaning that the culprit needed to know I used to live there.

Despite these clues, I was (and remain) stumped as to his/her identity.

Yesterday, however, there was a bit of a break

Blue Jays 4; Tigers 3 (Sad)

Mariners 4; A's 0 (Happy!)

Kenny Rogers: blood clot in shoulder, out for three months (Sad)

Felix Hernandez: 12 strikeouts, complete game shutout (Happy!)

A woman on campus was killed today by her psycho ex-boyfriend who then shot himself.

I got a call from Amy about it as I walked across Red Square. She didn't know any details other than "a gunman was on the loose." She asked me where I was and shrieked "That's not a very good place to be!" after I told her. I immediately pictured a clone of Charles Whitman atop one of the towers on the Square and felt the crosshairs of a sniper rifle zero in on my head. I doubled my pace to get out of the open. I noticed, however, that no one else around me showed any signs of panic. I briefly considered shouting out a warning but felt concerned about starting a general panic.

I reached the Paul Allen Center and made my way to the building manager's office just as he got a phone call about the situation. He raced into action to get the building locked down and I dashed over to the Computer Science office to relay the news. I waited nervously in the lobby as the guy at the front desk struggled to remember how to use the program that controls the exterior door locks. It would be fitting, I thought, if I were murdered due to poor software interface design.

I enjoy perpetrating a good April Fool's joke. But this year, the joke is on me. Or rather, the jokes are on me.

First, upon entering my office this AM, I discovered that my tom-foolery-loving student assistants had encased my computer's mouse in jello.

That would be funny enough. But then I discovered that someone (as of yet unknown) posted my car for sale on Craiglist. I've been getting calls and emails all day.

This means war!