Catholic Worker Blog Aggregator

One of the projects I’ve been meaning to work on during my “hiatus” is embedding a Yahoo! Pipe into a webpage.  I finally got around to it today, and am somewhat pleased with the results.  It takes a bunch of Catholic Worker Blogs, aggregates them together and puts them in one place.

Check it out here:  http://tinyurl.com/m95kac

It Must be Monday…

…’cause here’s some Soviet propaganda art

Hooray Red people!

On Reboots

There has been a lot of talk about, and lot of, “rebooting” classic science fiction and fantasy features in the past few years.  From the brilliant (for the first 55% at least) Battlestar Galactica, to the competent new Star Trek, to the abysmal Knight Rider that NBC tried to shove down viewer’s throats earlier this year.  That’s the spirit in which I received this recent post about rebooting Star Wars, a few weeks ago.

I’m mostly favorable to the idea of reboots, I realize that it is a fad, and that pretty soon only the successful ones will stick around, and no new ones will be forth coming, but I think there are some very good reasons to rewrite some of Star Wars basic rules that the article didn’t go into.

1. Star Wars was made before The Matrix: Like it or not, like the sequels or not, the Matrix changed everything, and afterwards the idea of spiritual warriors using nothing but swords and not moving like Neo, Trinity and Orpheus is laughable.  Sadly, this is something that the prequels never picked up on.  I’m not saying make a new Star Wars have effects just like The Matrix, but when Keanu Reeves makes you look like a sissy…well.
2. The Dark Side/Light Side of the Force thing needs a bunch more nuance, or at least the official, spelled out reasoning that force wielders use to explain it.
3. Give the Galaxy an actual “New Hope:” The longer you watch Star Wars and the more and more of the extended universe you get involved with you start to see that there have been no significant technological advances in the galaxy for thousands upon thousands of years.  The whole time Jedi and Sith are constantly warring, and innocents are always dieing.  There’s no real or apparent chance for peace, living in that world must be grueling and dismal.  Something I’ve always wondered about this, is that nobody else seems to blame The Force itself, and they ought to.  In fact, if I lived in that world, I would strap on a Ysalamir and hunt down as many Jedi and Sith both as I could.  In fact, I’ve often wondered how tough a jedi or sith would be without their super powers, yeah they would have their swords, but would they really be able to use them all that well.
4. Some of the technology is still really advanced and some of it was out of date in the ’90s.  Every time I look at a computer in Star Wars I sort of giggle
5. Make the violence more gory.  I don’t mean this because I think fans of the should indulge their bloodlust, but because there should be less confusion about what our Jedi heros are doing when they cut down an enemy army.  It would add some of that light side/dark side nuance I mentioned earlier.  Also, it would cut back on much fun everybody seems to have when they are running around shooting people.  How does Han Solo not have terrible nightmares and PTSD (PTSD is something only hinted at in Knights of the Old Republic 2, I think this is a sad state of affairs especially as our country fights two wars right now, neither of them pretty), for example?  It would also add a strong anti-war vibe to the franchise.

And finally, a new Star Wars could have dialogue that didn’t suck balls.

Duquesne and Pittsburgh City Government More Similar than I thought

Because both will fire you for not being 100% on board all of the time no matter what

My Recent Silence on Religion

I haven’t written much about religion on the blog for a while.  Its not for lack of thinking about religion, or a period of doubt on its behalf, but I have come to a crossroads of sorts.  Actually, that’s a bad analogy, its more like I have thought myself into a corner and don’t really see a way out.  My problem is that so much of what the postmodern thinkers claim has come to make sense to me.  Post-modernity claims that meaning is fractured, hopelessly fractured (it rests between the reader and text, cutting out the writer).  It always has been, and we can only come to another conclusion by distorting and suppressing the historical record.  A lot of this has come to make sense to me, but in augmented sense.  Even when the reader interprets the author correctly its still the reader’s interpretation, and while I don’t like that Derrida attacks context like he did, I think he is right on this point.  The problem I’m having with postmodernism has more to do with where the fracturing of meaning leads.  I feel that accepting a postmodernist outlook demands (1) an ostrification of metaphysics and (2) that the only two responsible responses to this condition are either nihilism (in the Nietzsche/Foucault sense) or romanticism.

I first came around on postmodernism after reading James KA Smith’s Who’s Afraid of Postmodernism:  Taking Derrida, Lyotard and Foucalt to Church.  Smith showed that using the postmodern thinkers can provide limited succinct solutions to particular problems.  I also got around to reading Discipline and Punish (which is fantastic, btw) and a comic book about postmodernity.  The latter first made me realize that I would be caught between nihilism and romanticism.  These responses issue a clear challenge to any sort of religious belief.  Religious belief always involves doctrine or dogma, even if the dogma is the invention or reflection of a single individual.  Even generally accepted principles like “don’t harm others,” its justification is usually some sort of wishy-washy “because its right, you don’t think its right?” (romanticism).  And yet, if I reject postmodernity, then what?  Christianity is one of those things that can’t stand on its own, from an intellectual point of view.  Its needs an Aristotle or Plato to help make sense of it.  But given what I have said above about meaning, I’m not sure how any of the alternatives can be anything other than arbitrary.

Let me end my post be adding that I am not experiencing any sort of religious doubt, I’m just stuck in an intellectual puzzle that I can’t seem to eek out.  In fact I’ve been thinking about religion more than ever.  Hopefully, something will crack through that will provide me some insight soon.

Kung Fu Panda

During the Pokémon craze about ten years ago I heard somebody say, “Its not even the violence so much, Pokémon is just dumb.  And sometimes that’s worse.”  I found myself revisiting that idea when I saw Kung Fu Panda last week.  Bearing in mind that criticism of children’s media usually gets a response of “its just kid stuff, get over it” to “this material is harmful to children,” I’d like to state that I usually fall in the camp of the former.  Kids usually only remember the stuff that they want, and it usually involves people getting hit in the nuts.  If you ask a child what the moral of a story is after he or she watches it and their explanation will probably have more to do with a funny moment, or action sequence, from the movie or something of the sort.

None of this obscures the fact that children’s movie are full of–however ineffective–ideology.  Large chunks of the culture war revolve around media as a political and ideological tool for indoctrination, and a lot of attention and discussion is given to movies (The Dark Knight is a perfect example).  I’d like two suggest two points in Kung Fu Panda worthy of attention.  The first is that the movie props reinforces the rare postmodern mix of nihilism and romanticism and presents it a cultural necessity.  This is represented by the combination of unquestioning faith in one’s “master” even in teh event of all evidence pointing to the congtrary, and that the dragon scroll–while empty–still held immense cultural significance.  I don’t feel that the meanings behind these points require much in the way of elucidation.

The second problem I had with the content of the movie isn’t really a problem with Kung Fu Panda at all, its much wider spread.  I first noticed it in the TV show’s Friends and Sex and the City (both of which I enjoyed, in spite of their objectionable content).  In both shows the protagonists–all white and middle-class–have both fabulous lives and oodles of free time.  They live in spacious apartments packed full of well decorated expensive decorations. They have tons of disposable income on top of all of this.  This was less evident in Kung Fu Panda, but it was still there.  A small boorish main character find himself living in a palace full of antiques and eccentric co-stars.  I wonder, if nothing else, whether this is more harmful than anything else in the film moving picture world.

The Big Sort

I had been meaning to read The Big Sort for quite a while.  The book made some rather large promises, promises that intrigued me.  It wanted to explain, for example, why explanations about one’s political motives were recieved with blank stares from the other side so often.  It claimed to explain how a land of such cultural richness had so little cultural mobility.  Most importantly, it promised–it seemed to me at least–to reveal the truth behind the dominant cultural narratives that I’ve suspected were patently false for quite some time now.

In these areas, the book is successful.  The Big Sort draws on the fact that confidence in all institutions, from political parties to Churches to bowling leagues, began to drop in 1965 and hasn’t stopped since then.  Bill Bishop, the book’s author, attributes this to a “postmaterialist” attitude:  As people’s material needs (food, clothing, etc) are comfortably provided they inherently begin to mistrust institutions.  Rather than participate in institutions, post materialists have began to sort themselves into like-minded clusters grouped around common beliefs.  This fact is argued persuasively, and Bishop’s exigesis on how this change has affected the American people is an important work anybody interested in politics should take the time to read.

The book itself is a bit uneven.  The first two chapter are a bit bland, but necessary to establish Bishop’s interpretation.  His chapters on advertising and lifestyle also leave something wanting, which is unfortunate because the lifestyle chapter is one of the longest in the book.  The rest of the book is captivating though, especially when Bishop recounts experiments preformed by social psychologists.

One problem I did have with the books is that, since the book claims a more hidden situation at work in modern America, it is unfitting that Bishop should apply so little scrutiny to his sources.  This is most evident in his appropriation of “postmaterialist.”  After pages of explanation of what exactly being a postmaterialist, and how it has been measured in the developed world, the reader is only given a short paragraph detailing some of the problems that have been pointed out in the research.  This caused me to question the reliability of the postmaterialist moniker and whether it was an accurate description.  A second issue I had is that Bishop is too indebted to the idea that America is “postindustrial.”  The United States is rather “supraindustrial,” and is just as dependent of the manufacturing of goods as it ever has been.  It merely produces these goods overseas.  I suspect that this has skewed some of his explanations a little bit.  Finally, Bishop spends too much time focusing on the clustering of middle class white Americans.  With other ethnicities combined now reaching over 50% of the US population, this is an unforgivable omission.

Just the same, I do recommend The Big Sort to readers of every stripe and background.

Prediction and Resolution Updates

I thought six months into the year would be an apropos time to revisit my resolutions for the year.  Let’s see how I did.

1. Work out five times a week.  This is the most unlikely of the bunch. I started after I left the University.  I haven’t quite hit the five times a week mark, and I’ve actually put on a little weight since starting.  But its defiantly more exercise than the zero I was doing before.  I’m worried that when I start up a new job it will fall by the wayside.
2. To figure out the bus routes to get to the Strip, the Southside, Shadyside, Oakland, and Squirrel Hill.  I think I have the last two already figured out though.
3. Grow more plants this year.  I’ve already sort of worked out how I’d like to approach this.  We had good success with Basil this last year, but the basil grew so large that it crowded my lavender.  So I think I’m going to grow a couple of different types of basil in their own box this year.  I might also branch out to tomatoes. See the previous post for more.
4. To replace at least three food/drinks I purchase at a store with made from scratch version.  This sort of goes along with my attempt to make cola in the previous entry.  Nope, nothing on this yet.
5. Read City of God, Confessions and De Trinitae in that order.  Haven’t even started.
6. Get good about going to Mass again.  Some success, not much.
7. Get to Dayton at least four or five times.  I have only made it there twice in the last year.  Doing better, but have only been there twice.

And I’m making the follow predictions.

1. My letters of recommendation won’t come through, meaning I won’t be admitted into DU’s theology program.  In spite of this I will remain an employee there until late Summer or early Fall. They definitely did not come:  prediction successful! A little off with the end date though.
2. We see color electronic ink start to be used in small scale products (watches, mp3 players, etc).  OLED TV’s and monitors become affordable.  MRAM shows up in embedded network devices (routers, etc).  Also, traditional hard drives will become a thing of the past, and will be replaced by Solid State Drives.  The solid state drives was probably a bit too optimistic, but OLED technology is heating up.  No word on MRAM
3. The economic situation will begin to improve in late Spring.  Nope
4. The tendency of the far left to feel betrayed by the Obama administration will be exacerbated. They have on some things, transparency wonks think he’s rolled back on a lot of thing, the abortion crowed is upset with his inactio of things, and there is some rumbling about his healthcare plan.
5. Obama’s approval rating will improve among conservatives as he establishes some centrist “street cred.”  Not sure, I’ll have to check the numbers
6. My wife will push for more flexibility in the workplace, and we’ll finally get to spend some more time together.  She got a new job with, hopefully, some better hours.
7. This will be an abysmal year for movies. Check!!!
8. We will discover that Bin Laden died of illness in late 2007.  No word yet

My “Garden”

Last year, when I decided to plant a few herbs in my backyard, I was a bit unsuccessful.  I had a basil plant that did well, but I had to pick the parsley in the first week because it had a fungus on it.  The lavender and rosemary neither grew nor died, they just stayed the same for months on end.  The rosemary wasn’t such a big deal because I could just pick some of its leaves whenever I needed them, but the lavender never flowered, rendering it useless.

Last year, I just had one container, and filled it with potting soil.  This time around I have another two containers.  In the one, I planted three basil plants.  My mutt ate two of them when I brought the containers in before it froze one night.  The other container has a rosemary, which is doing insanely well this year, and two onion that are probably not going to make it much longer.  The third box had three carrots, three parsley and a tomato plant.  All of which grew immensely.  The tomato plant, which I was too ignorant to know that you are supposed to stake, eventually grew to heavy and half of it broke off.  The half that still exists though has about 25 cherry sized tomatoes on it.  On a whim my wife and I picked the carrots last week.  It turns out that carrots can be a lot smaller than they look from above (see the picture below), and this early on they were still very tiny.  The lavender, again, is neither growing or dieing.

Here’s the thing about me and gardening, I find it insanely relaxing and rewarding, probably because I have so few plants and don’t really do anything but pour water on them every day.  But another reason I find the process comforting is that I genuninely don’t care about the outcome.  I’ve been a terrible gardener, and I absolutely refuse to do more than even the basic amount of research about gowing these plants.  I enjoy screwing up and learning that way far more than doing things absolutely right the first time, even if it means having an abysmal “crop” for the year.  Gardening makes me wonder if the buddhists are correct when they focus more on the journey than the goal.  Granted the goal of the buddhist “journey” is to realize that all experiences, even the ones you enjoy, cause suffering and your only hope is to detach from everything including your own existence while the Christian’s task is to find the sacred and cling to it even with your dieing breathe.  I can’t help but wonder if this a good example of both.

Processing Camera RAW files

After doing a tiny bit of research I have determined that this is the best order to process camera RAW files.  Most of the information I have found has focused exclusively, and unnecessarily lenghtfully, on the actual processing controls and not how to combine them to get the best results.  I offer this short list for people who already are familiar with the tools, and would like a basic first-framework to use when expiramenting (or just following the routine, whatevers):

1. Transfer RAW files to disk (making backups however one sees fit)
2. Convert RAW files to DNG (if you have a camera that shoots DNG’s natively ignore this step)
3. Import to processing tool
4. Correct white balance
5. Exposure correction with the curves tool
6. Tweak the saturation
7. Fix any dust or dead pixel spots
8. Sharpen and noise reduce
9. Correct any lens distortion