A Simple Tool

Well, not quite. I’m just giving up on this whole twittter thing. It sucks.

In other life news, my Bowdoin trip was fantastic. Much fun had by all and I managed to only wake up once with a penis drawn on my neck. Good times. Photos on flickr.

Holy shit this looks like the greatest movie ever.

I know, two posts in one day, four in three days. Zounds.

Ok read this.

Two points:

1. Vegans are fucking stupid. Not because of their life choices (although I don’t agree with them, everyone has a right to their own opinion and whatnot), but because of their proselytizing. I was actually shocked when someone, who I didn’t know, gave me shit for eating a cheeseburger. What the hell? That’s incredibly rude and not in the funny-rude way. Also, a strict vegan diet does not provide you with the proper nutrients to live a healthy life. Finally, back in undergrad days (all of 6 months ago) I heard some vegans bitching about how the college didn’t offer up enough vegan options. This is at a place where they regularly served veggie dogs, vegetarian lasagnas, vegan wowie cake, and all sorts of crap that didn’t taste as good as the normal versions. Vegans make up like 1% of the population. I’m sorry you’re <5% and it’s a choice? not a health constraint? You’re eating cereal, the rest of us are getting steak. These are the consequence of your actions and decisions. In conclusion, meat is delicious.

2. Vegans do not smell better than none vegans. Think about what vegans eat, tofu, beans, beans, beans, and beans. And what are beans? Why they’re the magical fruit! And we all know that the more you eat them the more you toot. Vegan farts make me want to die on the inside and on the outside.

So, yeah I sometimes just hate huge swathes of people.

OK, I’ve long been convinced that Beaver and Steve is the absolute sweetest webcomic in existence (on top of the Dr. McNinja, Qwantz, explosm shortlist).  In keeping with this, I ordered the second Beaver and Steve book a few days ago (in order to keep the first book company).  Unfortunately, when it arrived it was badly water damaged to the point where I couldn’t even read open half the pages.  Very bummed out, I wrote to James Turner, who writes the comic, basically expecting to be told that there was nothing he could do.  Instead I get a response (like 20 seconds after I sent the e-mail) where he promises to send me another book ASAP.  So on top of being a bad-ass and very funny comic-guy, Turner is apparently a pretty sweet dude in actual life.
Anyway my point is:  Read Beaver and Steve and buy stuff.  It’s both very cool and Turner seems to care about his readers or maybe just me.  In conclusion, read it.

So, I’m 16.5 pages into a 20 page paper, which is due tomorrow.

I just wanted to point out that picking out quotes from and quickly scanning the text of a >700 page book (Robert Brandom’s Making it Explicit) where this:

Third, it is denied that the notion of truth conditions can be appealed to in explaining (as opposed to expressing) the sort of propositional contents expressed by declarative sentences – and similarly that the notion of association with a referent can be appealed to in explaining the sort of semantic contribution the occurrence of a singular term makes to the contents of sentences in which it appears

or this

All our concepts are what they are in part because of their inferential links to others that have noninferential circumstances or consequences of application – concepts, that is, whose proper use is not specifiable apart from consideration of the facts and objects that responsively bring about or are brought about by their application.

represent some of the more clear passages is not easy. I mean Christ, who writes like that? It’s goddamn awful. I’ve read significant chunks of the book like 5 times and discussed it extensively in class and I still have no idea about what 90% of it means. It’s just so poorly written.

Luckily, when I’m done I will be officially 1/6 of the way done in my quest to become a master of religious studies. So that makes me pretty bad ass.

My latent film maker has been stirring around in my brain lately. So I might try to do this weird photo-thing that I’ve been thinking about lately on Saturday. We’ll see how tomorrow and the rest of this paper goes.

Also, I’m still not sold on Twitter. It’s a little too close (identical?) to facebook statuses for my taste.

Edit

So I read this in Jeff’s away message and I can’t not share it.  It basically sums up all of my academic life:

What I don’t understand is how a man who thought the sentence “Spirit is that which is for spirit” was a sufficiently clear definition of the subject of a 400 page book could be taken so seriously, and become so important, that even 200 years later unfortunate students are asked to write essays explaining, in clear, lucid language, the concepts he apparently thought were best expressed in complete gibberish. Thank you, Hegel.

On the other hand, I now only have a page and a half left to write.