Fernet Is Crap

what a fun weekend so far. kia and i were wondering what we were going to do friday night when we got a call from aly and dave inviting us out to sushi. steven anacker came along too since he was over, and aly and dave's friend adam joined us too. we waited outside in the cold for a *really* long time until a table for six freed up, but it was fine because they kept bringing us hot tea. ordered tons of sashimi, beer, and sake. i kept asking them to bring us out something really weird, rare, and exotic, but i just got a look like "hey, if it's not on the menu we don't have it." i want to eat something somebody has dredged up from a mile-deep trench, yeah, some kind of phosphorescent giant-toothed ugly-ass delicious trench dweller.

then ended up seeing the movie "closer" which i really liked the beginning and middle of ... the dialog felt incredibly raw and real ... and then really quickly it just disintegrated and the dialog started to sound absolutely ridiculous. i suspended my disbelief for as long as i possibly could but it didn't work. we recovered from the movie back at our place with some gibsons and some red wine (and i think some whiskey and tequila might have been consumed too ... but i stuck with the cocktail onions). around 1am i put in "the deep" episode of blue planet with the sound off, and hooked the laptop into the hi-fi and played some dntel for aly (thanks jax). come to think of it my choice of visuals might have been related to my exotic fish cravings.

last nite qoöl saturdays was esp. entertaining. all the tag-teams were great but hoj and jeffrey allen stole the limelight with what might have been their best set ever. the other room was empty ... everyone was packed onto the dance floor. i had more fun dancing than i had in awhile. ended up talking to dawn quite a bit, i confided in her re: a few things that have been on my mind lately, including an incident from 11/3 that kind of hilariously came full circle about an hour later.

philosophy talk

i'm having a really interesting ongoing philosophical dialog via email with my dad, something i initiated because i really wanted to get into some details with him re: our similar but not identical world-views, and also gleam some tidbits from his forty odd years of working on peace and justice issues in dozens of different countries. so far we've covered topics of sustainability and corporate reform, but lately we've been discussing simulations. he proposed the question of how to simulate a city in a way that its inhabitants would see how they could go from poor to well off over a period of time. it's not an easy question because you have to go much deeper into politics and economics than say, SimCity. so after thinking about it for a few hours i responded with a list of fifty seven variables you would have to take into consideration in terms of how human beings, bioregions, human settlements, and cultural interest systems would interact. a few thoughts i had while working on my response:

- some animals actively resist human occupation of their territory, like elephants (who steal and get drunk on homemade brew, trample, and riot), tigers (who eat livestock and occasionally people), and monkeys (who steal food) ... this wasn't that related to the question but i just hadn't thought about it much

- education is the enemy of warlords because it makes recruitment more difficult. conversely hopelessness, opiates, and cosmologies involving rewards in the afterlife are the friends of anyone wanting to build a private army of martyrs

- US counter-culture/postmodernism that arose in the 60's was in reaction primarily to the psychological alienation that goes hand in hand with secular capitalism and military expansionism. the psychedelic, free-love, less uptight meme that continues to this day is in direct contrast the Weberian* analysis of modern western life as a highly systematized, bureaucratized, depersonalized, economically-oriented rat-race.

*previously i had only thought about alienation in a Heideggerian sense, but apparently [according to a New Yorker article I just read] Max Weber was the first to trace the rise of secular capitalism to the protestant work ethic (yes, you can thank those Puritans and their whack philosophy of predestination for your long working hours, lack of leisure time, and long lines at the DMV)

miscellaneous

note to self: try not to get caught looking at pictures on the Ass-Lover tribe on tribe.net, at least not at work

question: why is fernet trendy right now? it tastes like crap. how long will the madness last?

question #2: what the hell is the deal with that crazy island on "lost"? it's driving me nuts. i hope the writers actually *know* what's going on, and they aren't just randomly making up weird shit which they can't really fully explain, like the writer of x-files obviously did, back in the day. fuck those fuckers and their five types of aliens and no logical explanation. i'm still pissed about that.