June 2012
38 posts
i'm being a total assface, but that's from glassworks, not koyanisqaatsi. uggggh i'm sorry.
This is what happens when you verify your hunches using YouTube comments. Well, at least it was Philip Glass. You spelled Koyaanisqatsi wrong, though. BOOM!
“So, what should we scientistic folks do when overcome by Weltschertz…? Take two of whatever neuro-pharmacology prescribes. If you don’t feel better in the morning…or three weeks from now, switch to another one. Three weeks is often how long it takes serotonin reuptake suppression drugs like Prozac, Wellbutrin, Paxil, Zoloft, Celexa, or Luvox to kick in. And if one doesn’t work, another one probably will.”
—
Word-for-word how Alex Rosenberg suggests us humans should deal with the depressing fact that life has no meaning, in The Athiests Guide to Reality, which was reviewed in the latest Harper’s by Christopher Beha, who pulled the quote. Beha jokes that maybe Rosenberg, who is trying to make a case for atheism (or, scientism) as a religion of its own, is making a “Swiftian satire” of the whole enterprise in this paragraph, and other parts of the book — it’s so bleak!
I have all sorts of thoughts about this, all of which are pretty trite, so I’m just gonna leave this here. In good news, though: the reviews section of Harper’s was good for the first time in a LOOONG time.
Play
YOUR [sic] GONNA DIE TONIGHT
The New York Times’ story on George Zimmerman’s document dump from yesterday has been updated maybe five times since yesterday. Early versions of it quoted from Zimmerman’s (cursive) handwritten statement he gave to Sanford’s police department, including his claim that Trayvon Martin told him “Your gonna die tonight” (on page 3 of the statement). The NYT’s article had no [sic] for the painfully obvious grammatical error that Zimmerman made, which really bothered me, in part for personal reasons. The current version doesn’t have the quote.
But I had to wonder if it wasn’t the increasing shittiness of the way we use the English language that might have let it slip through the cracks.
“First and foremost my favorite skater is Rodney Mullen.”
—Lil Wayne, in The Skateboard Mag. What a dork! Via QS.
Things That Turned Out to Be Fake this Week
1. Berlin’s Forest Boy
2. The Glasgow, MT Drive-by Shooting
3. The Kuwait Mall Shark Picture
Just this week! All highly-shareable, sticky web content! It’s almost as if we’ve created an ecosystem that, by its very nature, rewards viral marketers, liars and scumbags, at the expense of anyone with a shred of decency.
I mean, can you imagine if people started just making stuff up about politicians, using the same media ecosystem that surfaced and made viral all three of these stories? We would be ungovernable! Thank god no one has thought of that, though.
