Category Archives: Arts & culture

Cynical? Who, me?

How to sell mass market consumer goods in the United States:– Ignore real consumer needs. Create a need that people didn’t know they had. Find a good-looking woman (or a man, but honestly women work better) to pose in videos and photos. Use overheated rhetoric to bring home your half-truths via mass media. Use dishonesty to overcome your competition.

How to sell presidential candidates win elections in the United States: Follow above steps.

The farcical democracy we endure in this country during presidential elections does not strive after goodness, nor does it aim to provide the best life for the populace. It is amoral;– it has no moral content. All that can be said of it is that at its best our democracy has entertainment value; at worst, it is cheap hucksterism trying to sell us a useless commodity.

And no, I don’t think this is a cynical post. I rewrote it several times so as to remove most of the cynicism.

Reasons to vote the Elder God Party in November

The Mainstream Media (MSM) had absolutely no coverage of the Elder God Party’s convention. Of course, it is possible that MSM sent reporters to the convention, but upon seeing C’thulhu in person they simply descended into slavering, gibbering madness. Or it may be a vast MSM conspiracy to prevent the message of the Elder God Party from reaching you, the voter.

Whether it’s due to incompetence or malice, if the MSM aren’t going to cover the Elder God Party, clearly it’s up to feisty independent bloggers like me to bring you the rest of the story about the presidential elections. In this post, I’m going to compare the Elder God Party candidates with their Democratic and Republican counterparts.

First, let’s compare the vice-presidential candidates.

They say that Sarah Palin is attractive, but let’s look at Shoggoth. With myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over its faintly luminous body, what’s not to like? And people say Palin is the perfect vice-presidential candidate because she is amorphous and can take on any shape she chooses from tundra populist to libertarian to right-wing gun nut, but the amoeba-like Shoggoth is far more amorphous than even Sarah Palin.

They say that Joe Biden has lots of experience, but Shoggoth says, “Experience, schmexperience.” Actually, Sarah Palin says that, but Shoggoth doesn’t say anything. When the star-headed Old Ones on this planet had synthesized their simple food forms and bred a good supply of Shoggoths, they allowed other cell groups to develop into other forms of animal and vegetable life for sundry purposes, but they will extirpate Joe Biden when his presence becomes troublesome. Then Shoggoth will bear down upon Joe Biden, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter….

Next, let’s compare the presidential candidates.

John McCain is making a virtue of his age, referring to himself as a “wrinkly old white-haired guy” in Paris Hilton’s campaign video. But C’thulhu is far, far older than McCain, and after vingtillions of years is loose again and ravening for delight. Bolder than the storied Cyclops, great Cthulhu will slide greasily towards McCain and pursue him with vast wave-raising strokes of cosmic potency, and McCain will look back and go mad, laughing shrilly as he keeps on laughing at intervals, wandering deliriously until he chooses Sarah Palin as a running mate. Oh wait, he already did that.

Then Barack Obama steps into the ring, pushing his way through the ropes. C’thulhu underestimates him, and goes for an immediate pin, but Obama manages to get his foot under the ropes for a rope break. The referee (it’s a guest referee named Diebold) pulls them apart, and C’thulhu circles warily, realizing that Obama might actually know something about wrestling. Obama feints left, grabs C’thulhu and turns the monster upside down, — yes, he’s doing a piledriver, driving C’thulhu’s head repeatedly into the mat! But C’thulhu enjoys this, then reaches out a tentacle and pulls Obama’s feet out from under him! Obama goes down, C’thulhu has him in a submission hold! It looks like it’s all over, but Obama manages to touch the rope again, and it’s another rope break. Suddenly Obama pins C’thulhu and wins, but no!! Deibold the referee isn’t looking, so it doesn’t count! So the referee arbitrarily decides gives the match to C’thulhu. C’thulhu wins! The world screams with fright and frenzy!

So be a good minion and just vote Elder God Party in November, because no matter who you vote for, they’re going to win.

H. P. Lovecraft quotes from here.

Boring Meeting Bingo

You probably already know about Boring Meeting Bingo, also known as Bull$#!t Bingo. First you make a bingo card with a grid five boxes wide by five boxes high. Into each of the twenty-five resulting boxes you write catchwords or catchphrases that are likely to be used during the meeting. When one of those words or phrases is used during the meeting, you put an “X” through it. When you get five “X”s in a row, either horizontally, vertically, or diagonally, you shout out “BINGO!”

You may also know that there are online random bingo card generators which use specific lists of catchwords and catchphrases to generate bingo cards for Education Bingo, Marketing Bingo, Software Bingo, etc.

Well, I want to play denominational-specific Unitarian Universalist Boring Meeting Bingo in the worst kind of way. But I haven’t been able come up with enough Unitarian Universalist catchwords and catchphrases. I have to attend several meetings a month where I want to play this game, and I’ll want to play against other people, so I’m going to need forty or more UU catchwords and catchphrases.

So I need your help. Below is my list of UU catchwords and catchphrases thus far. Please add your contributions to this list in the comments below! (I left out acronyms because they seem too easy, but maybe you can convince me otherwise.)

  1. anti-oppression
  2. fiscally responsible
  3. policy governance
  4. herding cats
  5. mission statement
  6. empowerment
  7. prioritize
  8. safe congregation
  9. win-win
  10. walk the talk
  11. lay leader
  12. interfaith
  13. stewardship
  14. inherent worth
  15. process observer
  16. check-in

Ideally, I’d like to come up with a ton of these bingo cards to bring to General Assembly (oo, add that phrase to the list), our annual denominational meeting. Imagine hundreds of people bending over their bingo cards during some terminally boring discussion — when suddenly at the back of the hall, someone stands up and shouts “BINGO!” — pandemonium ensues…. [Update: Niko tells me that Boring Meeting Bingo did take place at General Assembly back in 2005. Maybe someone can track down one of those bingo cards and give us the catchwords and catchphrases used on those cards?]

Singing

This afternoon, I drove to Providence to the monthly Sacred Harp singing. Sacred Harp is one branch of an American shape note singing tradition which dates back to the Boston composer William Billings in the late 18th C.; it is an indigenous polyphonic sacred choral music tradition that left New England in the 19th C., migrated to the Appalachians, survived into the 20th C. in the deep South, whence it migrated back to New England in the 1970s.

A dozen of us sat around singing our hearts out for three hours. In Sacred Harp singings, the people who are singing choose the songs to sing. It was time to end; what should the last song be? Someone suggested we sing number 183, “Greenwich”:

  Lord, what a thoughtless wretch was I,
  To mourn and murmur and repine,
  To see the wicked placed on high,
  In pride of honor shine.

  But oh, their end, their dreadful end,
  Thy sanctuary taught me so,
  On slipp’ry rocks I see them stand,
  And fiery billows roll below.

It’s a lovely song to sing, but one of the tenors said it should not be our last song. Smiling, I said, “You don’t want to be left with that last vivid image as you drive home?” and she replied, “Well, that’s what I believe in, but we really should sing a different song for a closing.” Still smiling, I decided that it was not a good time to reveal that theologically I am a post-Christian Universalist. Then someone suggested that we close with “Christian’s Farewell,” which is slow and easy to sing, and which has words that were altogether more appropriate for a closing song:

  Brethren, farewell, I do you tell,
  I’m sorry to leave, I love you so well.
  Now I must go, where I don’t know,
  Wherever Christ leads me,
  The trumpet to blow….

While singing this, it occurred to me that there are some Unitarian Universalists who would refuse to sing any of these Sacred Harp songs, because they would object to the theology. But that would be like refusing to go into Notre Dame in Paris, because it is a Papist abomination. I sang my heart out, and loved every minute of it, theology notwithstanding:

  Here I have worked, labored a while,
  But labor is sweet if Jesus doth smile.
  When I am done, I will go home,
  Where Jesus is smiling,
  And bids me to come.

Sometimes you do theology, and sometimes you just sing.

Summer reading

I’m reading Paul Theroux’s The Pillars of Hercules, his book in which he spends a year travelling around the Mediterranean.

He is in France now, derogating the French for banning all foreign words. You can almost hear him thinking: silly French people, banning all those foreign words, when they could be like those of us who speak English and who have a huge number of words available to us, most of which we stole from other languages. And then a few paragraphs later, he slips in a beautifully obscure word, as if to show those French how delightful it is to use words appropriated from other languages:

The dream of the Mediterranean is not the Albanian coast or the docks of Haifa or the drilling rigs at the edge of Libya. It is the dream of this part of France, the sweep of the Riviera as a brilliant sunlit lotophagous land….

lotophagous, a., rare Lotus-eating, resembling the Lotophagi. Hence lotophagously adv.
  1855 EMERSON in Corr. w. Carlyle II. 244. I have even fancied you did me a harm by the valued gift of Anthony Wood; which and the like of which I take a lotophagous pleasure in eating. 1882 PIDGEON Engineer’s Holiday I. 83. Thus lotophagously sailing, we landed one morning on a beautifully wooded point. [from the OED]

Well, maybe I do like Google Docs after all…

In spite of my initial skepticism, I’ve decided Google Docs can be very useful to a small church like ours.

This week, I’m doing lots of planning for the coming church year. And I decided to put our worship calendar on a Google Docs spreadsheet. I made this spreadsheet public, and made sure that all changes to the document are immediately published. Then I made our music director a “collaborator.” He went to the spreadsheet and entered the Sundays he will be off. Once we hire a new Director of Religious Education, I’ll make him/her a collaborator as well. Communication and collaboration among staff members is already easier.

Now that this our worship schedule is online, our church secretary will be no longer have to ask me each month for a paper copy of the most recent version of the schedule. The same is true for our worship associates (i.e., laypeople who do readings, etc., during the worship service) and other lay leaders. Everybody is now working from the same document, and all changes are immediately published.

Pretty cool, huh? (If you want to see what our worship schedule looks like, go here.)

Time to argue (again)

The tireless Shelby Meyerhoff of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) has just posted “Best Practices for UU Blogging.” Shelby contacted a dozen Unitarian Universalist bloggers, and asked them what they considered to be best blogging practices. She summarized the responses, put them in a PDF file, and now they’re online.

There’s lots to argue about in this report. Since the UUA Web site isn’t set up for discussion, you won’t be able to argue there. So argue here. And to start things off, here’s something from the report:

By 2012, it is projected that 80% of Internet bandwidth usage will be for online video. Unitarian Universalists are way behind the curve when it comes to online video…. I suspect that the audience for text-based blogs is mostly middle-aged and older folks these days.

Feel free to argue about this statement, or anything else from the report, in the comments section….

Finally…

We finally have DSL service again. Which means I will be posting regularly to this blog again. The next three paragraphs give the long saga of our problems with Verizon;– and the final paragraph offers some advice should you have to call Verizon’s support center.

Here’s what happened:– Our DSL service went out on July 31. We called Verizon the next day, and they sent a tech out on August 2 — he found that our service had been improperly grounded when originally installed by Verizon, and he fixed that problem. Still no DSL. We called Verizon again, talked to help desk people (with such poor English skills that they were obviously based in some call center overseas) who supposedly “tested the line.” At one point, the person I was talking to got offended when I told him he was going to have to repeat himself yet again because I simply couldn’t understand his accent. He claimed the problem would “be resolved.” Still no DSL by Wednesday, August 6, so we had to call Verizon yet again.

They sent a tech out, and then Verizon called back at 4:10 p.m. on the 6th saying the problem would be resolved within 24 hours. When we still didn’t have DSL by about 3 p.m. on Thursday, I called Verizon, who said that now the problem was in their office, and it would take five days for things to settle down (I think that’s what he said, again his English skills weren’t great). Still no DSL by Friday, August 15, so we had to call Verizon yet again.

They said they’d send someone out on Monday, August 18. Tom, the same tech we had the first time, showed up (Tom is great, by the way, one of the few Verizon employees I spoke with who seemed competent, intelligent, and courteous). Tom did some tests, and told me that our DSL modem had burned out, probably due to the problems and due to all the tests they had run on our line from the central office. So I called Verizon yet again, and after an hour got them to send us a free modem. Which arrived today, August 19. I tried to set it up, ran into problems, called Verizon yet again, yet again got someone who didn’t speak English well, and who couldn’t answer my question — she transferred my call to someone else, who promptly cut me off. During the 15 minutes I had to wait for him to call me back, I solved the problem on my own, and so didn’t bother to answer when the phone rang. By this time, the last thing I wanted to do was to explain to someone with poor English skills that I had solved the problem on my own — that’s not something that is on the scripts they read from, and I knew his response would be something like this: “[pause] OK, I understand. Now, please power down the modem and restart your computer….”

The following may be helpful to you if you have to deal with Verizon support:– (a) When you call Verizon’s 800 help number, press “0” (that’s a zero) at any time to be connected directly to an agent. (b) Be aware that their voice recognition software often cannot understand what you say, so whenever they give you the option of punching in information using your phone’s number pad, do so. (c) The menus on their phone system change from call to call, and making the same choice on one menu on two different calls will get you two completely different results — so be prepared to have your call forwarded to the wrong place. (d) Verizon help desk staff do not respond if you are polite or courteous, but they do respond if you speak loudly and use your authoritative voice of command. (e) If Verizon tells you something is going to cost you money, argue with them, tell them it is their fault, tell them you should not have to pay — worked every time for me. (f) Supposedly if you call their help line at night, you may get connected to their call center in Canada, which means you will probably talk with a native English speaker. (g) Remember:– Verizon is not in the business of providing good customer service. They’re the phone company, they don’t have to care. Your blood pressure may be lower if you can just keep that in mind.