Happy Halloween, mother fuckers. A scant 200 or so years ago, this holiday was illegal - if it actually existed in its current form - so we should all rejoice at the opportunity to take a formerly solemn time with an almost religious significance and turn it into one of the biggest commercial successes of the modern fiscal year.**
This was going to turn into a slightly bitter discussion of recent events (well, events that lead to recent events to be more accurate) that involved a metaphor comparing myself and others to publicly-traded corporations, but just before passing out candy probably isn't the best time to talk about
poison pills.
In other news, November is just around the corner. Being near one of my favorite months of the year (September), November holds a unique position in my Months of the Year ranking, which varies widely from year to year. November 2004 was particularly shitty,**** for instance. After an additional two agonizing years of national mismanagement, November 2006 finally offers some glimmer of hope, a light at the end of the tunnel that may not be a train this time. That's right, November is the month that Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii debut.***** Oh, and something about an election.
*It would have been outlawed by the Puritans. Then again, they were so strict they banned all holidays, including the celebration of Christmas (life isn't to be celebrated, after all, it's just a horrible condition between pre-life and death...Life must have been relatively shitty back then). They said that it was too focused on the material world and material things. It's a good thing they don't hold any power or exist now. Not for their sake, we just don't want them raining on our parade!***
**Not that I'm against that. Capitalist all the way right here.
***Not sure if this is the
royal "we" or a manifestation of multiple personality "disorder". (Can't it be both?)
****For what should be obvious reasons. In addition, this line gets my "use of the word 'shitty'" quota out of the way for a while.
*****Wii is the first system I've been excited about since 1995, when the PS1 came out. I don't care too much if I don't get one on launch day, because the only game I really want for it (Super Smash Brothers Brawl) won't be out until next year anyway. Once it is out, though, I'll probably spend most of my waking moments (and more of the sleeping moments) playing with my Wii. (That joke isn't tired yet, is it?)
I've started this post - well, a post* - about three times, so this time I'm going to issue a short-term resolution barring myself from getting up until I hit the Publish button, and if anyone knows me, they know I take my rashly-sworn oaths very seriously.
In the process of writing the asterisk part below, I've forgotten what, if anything, I was actually going to talk about when I started this post. Actually, much of it is contained in the part below. In case you couldn't tell when reading it, the spinach growers aren't actually responsible because spinach, being a plant, is unable to shit all over itself (shit being the, er, shit, that causes E. coli probrems). If that confuses you, I should let you know you were supposed to read the asterisk when it first came up, not at the end like a logical, chronologically ordered post would demand. Or you could just read it however you want. I don't give a damn.
I think I need a nap.
*This tangential thought in my head led me to think of the old
Ship of Theseus thought experiment. Or "paradox". Or whatever you want to call it.
If I began the post, saved it as a draft, and finished writing it later, it could be considered the same post, simply at different stages of completion. However, the subject matter of the posts I've started to write has varied widely (it started out about an episode of Jeopardy with a logical leap to the role of modern-day religion in attitudes toward death, then it became a satirical piece about how the E. coli scare was the fault of all those spinach growers for letting the spinach shit all over itself). Given that, it isn't really the same post that it was before, because it is serving an entirely different function.
The Ship of Theseus as it is usually presented has never seemed like a paradox to me at all. If the planks were taken off the ship, stored in a warehouse, and replaced with new planks, the removed planks lose their designation as part of the ship and the new planks gain that designation. If you build a ship with all the planks after every individual plank has been replaced at least once (actually, only once, for the sake of argument; if they were replaced more than once you would have leftover planks, and that seems like an unnecessary complication) it still wouldn't be the same ship. This holds true even if the planks were in perfect condition, resulting in a perfect replica of the ship, though its status would make me wonder why the planks were replaced in the first place...maybe just for obfuscation? For the hell of it? To provide something impractical for people to think about? As part of a
ship laundering scheme?
I don't know, and I'm not sure I want to know. I have (marginally) more important things to wonder about.
