CSotD: More Saturday Morning Cartoons
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No politics today. We’ve had two weeks of thinking about horrible things, and I’m taking a day off. But Existential Comics offers something equally unpleasant and I’ll spare a tear for poor Hercules.
I enjoyed reading philosophy, which was good, because we had a lot of it. Plato’s chatter about forms got a little esoteric, but he made up for it with the Republic. And Thomas Aquinas was a slog, but interesting enough to make the effort worthwhile.
But Aristotle was more than a slog. I got through the Poetics, but when we were reading De Anima I hit the wall and my paper on that was about how pointless it is to come up with theories if you can’t express them in ways people can understand. It wasn’t purely griping; I got some metaphysics in there along the lines of a tree falling in the forest.
I went to the rector of my hall for the final sentence, because he was a classicist and knew how to write “Aristotle is full of bad waste” in Greek.
IIRC, I got a B on the paper, but I’d rather clean out the Augean Stables with a teaspoon than read any more Aristotle.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Still on the topic of things I don’t want to read about or even think about, my plate is full enough that I have no room for the artificial intelligence wars.
I’m amused with LeLievre’s depiction of the new Chinese AI eating the American version, and particularly amused by the American developers complaining that it’s stealing their plagiarized material, though I can identify with the poor human shown as prey for them both.
But mostly I’m with Thompson and would just like it to go away, though I caught an explanation on Science Friday yesterday and I’m pleased the new stuff takes less computer resources and does less Earth-warming than the current stuff.
But I resent trying to find websites that have less AI than some other websites. Like the lady in the Monty Python piece, I don’t want any Artificial Intelligence.
It may well be that, as AI develops, it will stop writing such transparently asinine drivel as you find in on-line reviews and suchlike, but in the early days of my career, writing asinine drivel for cheesy clients was how I made a little money and built my resume.
AI is taking that lousy work away from young writers.
There exists only one copy each of my two attempts at novel writing, but like the fellow in Mr. Boffo, I did a little self-publishing with two of my historical fiction pieces for kids and was able to sell enough of them to pay for the folly.
Like a lot of freelance writers, I discovered how hard it is to be both a decent writer and a reasonably successful sales person. The combination generally shorts one or the other.
There was a point in my attempt to be Salinger that I came across a first novel that seemed very much like my own, and I was frustrated that it was published while mine kept getting turned down. Then I found out that the author’s father was head of a major publishing house and his mother was editor of a prestigious book review.
Which answered the common question of young writers, “Why did you publish his book that sucks but you won’t publish my book which also sucks?”
Makes me wonder who Aristotle’s parents were.
Diane de Ferran‘s New Yorker cartoon sends me back, because when I first met my wife, she had served two internships at the Colorado Springs Sun and, while she wasn’t there as a photographer, she’d picked up some skills. One of the first things we got with our wedding money was a Pentax Spotmatic.
I did learn how to use it, but she took more pictures than I did, so that, when we divorced, I ended up with more photos because, except in rare cases when we had duplicates, they got sorted by who was in them.
That was in the days of film, mind you. Today, you could just throw everything on a thumb drive for the departing spouse and, if they were smart, they’d wait a couple of years for the pain to subside before they started deleting things.
As Fitzgerald wrote:
After all, any given moment has its value; it can be questioned in the light of after-events, but the moment remains. The young prince in velvet gathered in lovely domesticity around the queen amid the hush of rich draperies may presently grow up to be Pedro the Cruel or Charles the Mad, but the moment of beauty was there.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I got a kick out of seeing two examples of God-inspired lightning strikes.
Kyle Bravo addresses the theological question of why, if we’re not supposed to put the Lord to the test, he seems so willing to do it to us. The Book of Job is one of the most thought-provoking philosophical sections of folklore in the Bible, but I don’t see how you could take it literally and come away thinking much of Him.
The Carpe Diem piece is less philosophical and reminds me of all the times I’ve wished I had James Bond’s Aston Martin, though I suppose the uses I would put it to wouldn’t exactly get me into heaven.
“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. See, this guy pulled out in front of me …”
More theological folklore, this from the Book of Monty.
I have very positive memories of Sesame Street, though when I was in TV advertising, Sesame Street barely showed up in the ratings. Four-year-olds couldn’t fill in ratings diaries and I guess their parents weren’t keeping track of what they watched.
My kids loved it when they were little and it was still trippy and hilarious, before the educational specialists toned things down, and before it turned into a merchandizing juggernaut.
Eldest son still puddles up when he talks about Mr. Hooper’s death, but a big, tough football player told him that it’s alright, on a different kids’ show, which you can watch here.
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