Rhinocrisy

Well, it seems once again the people who manage the Golden Gate Bridge are considering installing a suicide barrier (previously feted by hibiscus in this brilliant comment). The barrier would be a 12-foot tall fence, or possibly nets - yes, nets - to catch the jumpers, like so many fish flopping off the deck of a boat. Suicidal people wouldn’t be killing themselves, after all, if they didn’t have a bridge to jump off. I mean, it’s not like they can just swallow some pills, or something. Wait, can they? Oh, nuts! We should ban those - and maybe also rope, which could conceivably be used to form a noose, if they knew how to tie knots. Perhaps we should ban knots?

I am riding my newly-acquired bike through the Panhandle, the strip of greenway that leads into Golden Gate Park. It is midnight. A sprinkler guards against my forward progress with a parabolic fan of water. I slow my bike. A flat white light is strobing from behind me; another biker is pulling up. “Oh, shit,” he says, observing our dilemna.

“You’ve just gotta wait,” I say. “Just time it.”

“It’s all about the timing,” he agrees. I see a movement to my right - a third bicyclist is cutting through the grass, attempting to circumvent the gantlet of sprinklers.

“That’s an awfully long jet,” I remark, queasily. “Is it coming towards us? It is coming towards us!” We edge backwards. Then, “Fuck it!” I declare, and charge forward. The first spray is not so bad - I slip through the least of it. The second hits me full on, drenching my jeans. The wind immediately cuts into my wet hands, chilling them.

“Oh - that’s cold!” I hear from behind.

We are now officially headquartered in San Francisco.

graft@deneb:/usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15$ grep -r shit * | wc -l
103
graft@deneb:/usr/src/linux-source-2.6.15$ grep -r fuck * | wc -l
51

This song is from the ending credits of Valve’s stellar first-person-puzzler game Portal, as sung by the mad AI GLaDOS. I find the lyrics very poignant, especially:

I’m doing science and I’m still alive.

Hi, folks. I’m trying to get this wreck of a vessel sea-worthy again, so we’ll start off small:

During my illness I read a little bit about mononucleosis, which involved traversing a field littered with medical jargon. Jargon in general is odious and properly to be despised, but medical jargon seems especially useless, since it seems to add almost no specificity. For example, one of the symptoms of mononucleosis is “splenomegaly”. This is a fancy-pants term that means you have an enlarged spleen. What the Christ? In some instances you might have to have a “splenectomy”, also known as a spleen removal. The utility of creating and employing jargon of this sort is that it produces “macrocephaly” in doctors.

Since my sister brought it up, I suppose I might as well cover my “achaar as prasaad” theory in big, bold letters so everyone can read it.

The first obstacle in appreciating this theory will be unfamiliarity with its components. So, let me review, briefly.

“Achaar” is simply the Hindi word for “pickle”. You’ve probably consumed an Indian pickle before - they’re usually made with fruit of some sort and are heavily spiced, quite salty, usually tart and sometimes make your tongue burn with a righteous fire. I have been a fan of savory foods my whole life and enjoy eating achaar a great deal.

“Prasaad” is the Hindi word for “oblations”, and refers to a bit of food offered as a sort of sacrifice to God during prayer. There’s many problems with this arrangement, such as:

• Why does God need to eat?

• Even if God does need to eat, why can’t he/she/it take care of him/her/itself?
• Is there really any value in symbolically offering food to an omnipotent deity, especially when you’re going to eat it anyway right afterwards?

However, these are only problems for cantankerous individuals such as myself who just can’t wrap their heads around the idea of why God needs or wants to be worshipped in the first place.^* Anyway, that’s not the point: when in Rome, do as the Romans do, and when hanging around with normal, devoted Hindus, play along, even if you don’t find yourself quite believing in everything. Social utility is something I can appreciate.

Prasaad is usually something sweet. In fact, it is nearly always something sweet. Indians are quite fond of sweets and have managed to produce a dizzying number of variations on the theme of sugar, milkfat and flour. The appeal of sweets is quite clear: our biochemistry is based on the metabolism of simple sugars such as glucose or fructose. It’s sensible, therefore, that we’ve evolved a palette that appreciates and even relishes the taste of sugar. Most people love sweets and can gorge themselves endlessly on them.

Not I. I detest sweets. I suspect my palette is a little oversensitive to sugar. I usually react by having strange sugar rushes and mini-seizures when I try to eat something sweet. Un-pleasant!^†

Follow, then, my logic:
We’ve already established that anthropomorphic concepts of God are in order. I’m not prepared to accept this premise, but it seems to be the mode, and so we will take it as given. Wisdom suggests that presenting God with sweets is worthwhile because God, like us, would enjoy eating some sweets. Why? Who knows.^‡ But if hubris is the way we’re operating, why stop at an anthropomorphic God? Surely I should consider a God even more reflective of my ego - a Saurabh-o-morphic God, as it were.^§ I don’t like sweets, I like achaar. Maybe God wants achaar as prasaad, as well.

My theory has merit. There’s almost universal agreement that the world is, generally speaking, a shitty place to live. Most theories of religion blame this on an evil genius of some sort, but it’s at least as likely that the fault is that of endless millions of worshippers, who have for thousands of generations been forcing sweets onto an unhappy and possibly lactose-intolerant God. If we merely corrected our transgression, I predict that a rain of petals would be our reward.

^* I previously described my difficulties with worship here. I’m certainly a fan of awe and humility before the vast, beautiful and unpitying Universe, but I still don’t know how to jump from there to the idea of worship as useful.

^§ Such a god would presumably refuse to be worshipped, would respond to prayer only infrequently, would often leave His stereo blaring upbeat, danceable rhythms across the heavens, and would occasionally manifest in gargantuan, terrifying forms, knocking over buildings and eating random civilians, just to show you-all what’s what.

There’s nothing to shrink the concerns of the world like a near-death experience. Nature red in tooth and claw, facing down the angry beasts of the wood, prevailing over mortality and renewing, however briefly, one’s time in this world. I have returned from Yosemite. The quotidian concerns of homo sapien urbanis seem tiny. For I have done battle with the sooty grouse, and I have lived to tell.
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Just a heads-up. I assume by now that all of you have heard of and perused Conservapedia, the product of a group of uneducated troglodytes home-schooled conservative students which attempts to counter the pervasive liberal bias evident in Wikipedia (cf. Colbert’s observation that this bias may be attributed directly to reality). It’s only good for a chortle at the moment, since they seem to have locked out account creation and anonymous page edits. But you might check out their page of Debate topics, or the star in their crown, the Theory of Evolution (link fixed).

The Washington Post notes:

In June, government agencies were asked to provide data about contractors working for them in Iraq, including their nationality, a description of their work and locations where they were working. The information was provided by more than a dozen entities within the Pentagon and a dozen outside agencies, including the departments of State and Interior.

Iraq is now part of the interior of the U.S.? Or is this one of those, “it depends on what the definition of is is” types of things?

Only slightly late^*, here are some pictures of me dressed as Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, from “Journey to the West”. In these photos the makeup is somewhat messed up, since I wore it to capoeira before taking them, where someone kicked me in the face and fouled it all up. I have to say I was somewhat disappointed with the full production… but there’s always next year. My current plan is to be Dr. Zoidberg. Woop woop woop woop!

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