With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
2002-09-15 - 11:15 p.m.
I did a lot of vegetating this weekend. I’ve finally caught up a bit on my sleep. I did get some things accomplished though. On Friday night I spoke to Stacey on the phone. She does an excellent British accent. So does Carey. She is such a GIT (Goovie in training).
Saturday night I went out dining and dancing with Lisa. I know that doesn’t sound like me so I’ll add that we ate at Jekyll and Hyde and went contra dancing. That does sound like me. It was so much fun and an incredible workout. They didn’t have air-conditioning, which made things a bit rough. Next time I’m going to wear shorts no matter how cool it is outside.
Contra dancing is so much fun and very social. You keep changing partners all night; sometimes you change partners all through one dance. I danced two dances with Lisa and the rest with women I met there. There was a break in the middle and they served delicious cookies and brownies. I think I burned off enough calories that I don’t have to worry about that.
We got coupons for free admission the next time we go. There will be a next time. We are talking about becoming members so we can get a discount in admissions. If you live in the area you should check it out. They have workshops 45 minutes before the dance where they teach you some of the basics. We’ll still be doing that for a while.
I finished reading Truth by Terry Pratchett. I can’t believe I didn’t get one joke till halfway through the book. There is a dwarf who made the first commercial movable type printing press in Discworld. His name was Goodmountain. If you translate that into German you get Guttenberg. That is exactly my sense of humor. How can I miss that? I wrote a story in which I based a character on my friend Aubrey. Aubrey means elf king so I called the character Erl Konig, that’s elf king in German. I’ve never been sure if this was deliberate or not but perhaps Arthur C. Clarke made a similar joke in 2001. The key to the story was the Monolith, Greek for one stone. If you translate that into German you get Einstein. Actually you get eine stein but I’m guessing that is still the meaning of the name. What is weird is that I don’t really know German. Pretty much every word I know is used in of those jokes.
Pratchett is one of those writers I really identify with. He sees the same truths in the world that I do. I was thinking about other writers and artists like that:
You’ll notice that lots of them specialize in humor. That’s not a coincidence. One of my basic beliefs is that the universe is a comic if you can distance yourself enough from it. That isn’t to say that there isn’t plenty of tragedy in the world. It is just that there always seems to be an element of the ridiculous involved. When people are being cruel to each other it usually involves lots of stupidity too. One of the great ironies is that the inanimate world acts rationally and the only intelligent species we know acts irrationally.Jonathan Swift
Lewis Carroll
Oscar Wilde
James Branch Cabell
M.C. Escher
Tom Lehrer
Tom Stoppard
You might also notice that most of my favorite writers are not on the list, not Tolkien, Lovecraft, Dickens, or Doestoyevsky. (Give me money; spell check says I spelled Doestoyevsky right). I love them but they don’t see the universe the way that I do.
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile 2002-09-15
