Re: a comment on The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	1-Nov-05/11:29 AM
Ooh, nice dig! No, wait - I DO want to be zodiac in heaven. I don't even want to be zodiac-that-God-makes-a-million-times-smarter in heaven. Of course, when I'm a million times smarter, I'll probably think this is a bunch of rot. My problem with annihilation of the self is a lot like my problem with reincarnation. Yeah, it's nice to think I'll get to come back to earth in infinite forms and such, but if I can't remember my previous lives, and if I'm not anything like them, how is it really zodiac being reincarnated, and not some completely new person? The fact that I don't actually believe in a soul that survives and somehow sublimates the self is probably a large part of why I don't get that.
Re: a comment on I don't rhyme enough, eh? by Niphredil	1-Nov-05/11:22 AM
Screw that. I already spent the last seven years becoming an expert in something EVERY SINGLE PERSON IN THE WORLD thinks he can do without experience or qualifications. If I had it to do again, I'd become a fireman.
Re: Letting go by daniella	1-Nov-05/11:18 AM
I thought a lot of this was good. The first two lines need to go, though. A total absence IS a void. That's what void means.
Re: Forgiveness is Underrated by Miggy	1-Nov-05/11:14 AM
I would like this poem more if more of it was in shizzle. For example: I shizzled many an egizzle Who flizzled as hizzle as bald eagizlles With trizzles so hizzle to digizzle That I could not lizzle at rizzle Hizzle in makizzling pizzle to pizzle Mentizzle pictizzles the izzles wizzle to izzle.
Re: a comment on Lunch with the Beast by D. $ Fontera	1-Nov-05/11:08 AM
Good for you for stopping at worldwide conspiracy of mere humans. So many of us have lost that ability.
Re: a comment on The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	1-Nov-05/10:53 AM
Don't apologize. I hear he's good.
Re: a comment on Racism by Dovina	1-Nov-05/10:31 AM
One of my specializations in English Lit grad school was African American Literature. Naturally, this required identifying certain writers as black. Still, I think I'll maintain that race is a social construct invented by groups who stand to benefit from it. My other specialization was feminist lit, though, where I learned that gender is a social construct too, so you're entitled to tell me to blow off and stop talking such craziness. Or how about this: If I accept that there are races, I still say the specifics of division are totally social. African Americans (ie, Dovina thinks they're a race) are as a whole much less purely genetically black/African than Arabs and Jews (Dovina thinks they're not a race) are purely genetically Arab or Jew. I'll give Dovina her distinction between the religious group Muslim (ie, mostly Pacifican and not Arab) and Arab, but can't give her Jew as a merely religious grouping. I'll also still say cockneys are a race, if only by the non-meathead standard "most people think they're a race."
Re: Lunch with the Beast by D. $ Fontera	1-Nov-05/4:29 AM
Is there any consensus about the psychology of alien abduction? Prior research has yielded a few insights, some of which are hardly surprising: People who believe they've been abducted tend to be fantasy-prone and eccentric, for one. On the other hand, they don't tend to be crazy. Most abductees are regular Joes, with decent jobs; though they have varying levels of education, they are predominantly white and middle class. In addition to an appetite for fantasy, researchers have identified several mental phenomena that often accompany a person's belief that she's been abducted: One is sleep paralysis, a relatively common experience during which the brain and the body desynchronize briefly before waking up. The body remains paralyzed (as it is during REM sleep) while the mind enters a state between sleeping and waking, in which some people hallucinate. The theory goes that a subset of the hallucinators, primed by popular culture to believe in visits from otherworldly kidnappers, interpret their experiences as abductions. The second contributing factor is the mind's capacity to create false memories, particularly under hypnosis—which is how many abduction "memories" have been retrieved. In fact, it was the study of false memory and trauma that led Clancy to the aliens. She started graduate school in the mid-'90s, as psychologists were duking it out over the validity of "recovered" memories, and signed on to assist two professors with a study of sexual-abuse victims. The professors gave subjects lists of words to memorize—"sugar," "candy," "sour," "bitter"—that were all related to another word, "sweet," that was not on the list. People who had allegedly recovered memories of sexual abuse while in therapy, it turned out, were more likely than a control group to remember "sweet" as having been on the list—that is, to produce false memories in the lab. Of course, this did nothing to prove whether the women's abuse memories were themselves false, and Clancy and her colleagues were roundly attacked by victims' advocates and other scientists. So, the researchers went looking for another set of subjects—people whose memories were assumed by most people to be false—and they wound up with alien abductees. Again, their work revealed that abductees were also more likely to misremember words than a control group. www.slate.com
Re: Stolen Innocence by TLRufener	1-Nov-05/3:44 AM
Innocence is overrated. And yet, if you think your life's ruined without it, you still have it.
Re: a comment on Racism by Dovina	1-Nov-05/3:39 AM
I'll say. As a race, cockneys are even thicker than mere coloureds. Check out this description of 18th-century Calcutta by eminent historian Stephen Taylor: "Behind the esplanade of the East India Company lay the great maidan, a grassy parade ground almost two miles long and a mile deep where the colony's furbelowed gentry, jodhpured regulars from the cantonment, and even the scantily-drawered Phowdar, the roy royan and Nawab of Bengal themselves, descended by carriage and palanquin for the nightly ritual known as 'the airings'." Tell me, where were the mass airings in London's parks and squares, when the vapours rising from an unbathed chimneysweep's woolens in Cheapside could could be smelt as far as Grosvenor Square? Why weren't they mandatory?
Re: a comment on Racism by Dovina	1-Nov-05/3:22 AM
Silly, silly. The point is there's no such real thing as race; the only qualification for being one is that racist people identify you as one (by any set of characteristics: color, creed, or piano-playing included) in order to persecute you. Other than that, by any meatheaded standard typically used to identify race (ie, skin color, phrenology, origin, language, creed, customs, geographical concentration, and genetic traits,) both Jews and Muslims are distinct races - even distinct from each other. To not think so is, in fact, racist against Negroes.
Re: a comment on Incommunicado blues (fixed, except for Dovina) by zodiac	1-Nov-05/3:15 AM
Unfortunately, I live in the Middle East. Even if there were girls in short plaid skirts and Hello! Kitty umbrellas here, I'd get my hands cut off for looking at them
Re: a comment on island nation by skaskowski	1-Nov-05/3:12 AM
I'm cancer. The best part is "should it is wes Anderson it is."
Re: a comment on The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	1-Nov-05/3:11 AM
PS-I don't imagine a heaven where my "problems with identity go away". I love my identity. I don't believe it has problems. Only fat people wish to not be themselves in heaven.
Re: a comment on The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	1-Nov-05/3:10 AM
You can somehow force yourself to not wonder what happens if your identity is annihilated, so you can bother. I imagine it takes something like forcing your entire brain through a drinking straw.
Re: The Gospel According to Zodiac by Dovina	1-Nov-05/3:09 AM
I live +7 hours from Eastern Time, +2 from Greenwich, which is the time on the comment-clock. I can honestly say I've never seen an episode of Spongebob in my life, so I'm rubber you're glue. I'm not even curious to hear how you figure this is relevant. -10-
Re: a comment on Racism by Dovina	31-Oct-05/2:24 AM
Please don't try to deracist -=Dark_Angel=-,P.I. When somebody says "I hate Negroes", do you reply "Well, you probably only hate crack dealers, the unemployed, and consumerist wanna-bes" or do you just kick them swiftly in the ear?
Re: a comment on brave new world still a bit timid by FreeFormFixation	31-Oct-05/2:19 AM
Feely isn't a quote, it's a coinage. If you had to quote-mark and reference coinages you'd never make it through a sentence. You're just bummed because everybody knew it and you didn't. Don't be. People who've read Brave New World are gay.
Re: a comment on I don't rhyme enough, eh? by Niphredil	31-Oct-05/2:11 AM
Genuine totally angle-less question: Do you believe the dress and behavior of transvestites reflects the reality of your womanhood or femininity? In other words, do you think transvestites are imitating you? If not, are they imitating any actual woman you know? If not, who do you think they're imitating? Angle version: If you answered yes to the above, are you or any of your friends a middle-aged trophy wife prone to wearing either sequins, cellophane, or both at the same time?
Re: a comment on I don't rhyme enough, eh? by Niphredil	31-Oct-05/2:06 AM
If I may make a suggestion: I don't usually have an 'angle' in mind whilst talking to you. If I ever do, I'm unable to stop myself from revealing it in a totally premature and obvious way. However, your worrying about what my angle is often makes you say ludicrous nonsensical things, which is why I usually make fun of you. You see? If I may make another suggestion: The answer to this conversation should be "I prefer a man who I THINK is smarter than me." Your constant failure to distinguish between your ideas about something and the reality of it (similar or not) is another of the reasons why I make fun of you, and the one thing I'd like to teach you before I die. I consider myself an astonishingly smart person, but I almost never make that mistake.