Where the Wild Things Are Study Questions and Thought Experiments

1. Describe the parenting philosophy demonstrated in the story.

2. Is Sendak giving an accurate portrayal of the imaginary life of a child, or is he giving a lesson on how to handle tantrums?

3. Have you ever been taking care of a child, and suddenly felt as though you were in charge of a feral beast? What triggered that feeling? How did you deal with it?
4. Is Max’s voyage objectively real, or is it all in his imagination? Give evidence from the text and pictures.
5. What lesson does Max learn?

Watchmen Study Questions and Thought Experiments

Watchmen Thought Experiments

(Drafted before seeing the film)

1. Do you believe the course of history is managed by secret cabals, shadow governments, or other conspiracies?

2. How are police officers distinct from government sanctioned costumed superheroes?

3. Of the liberties and freedoms you enjoy, which are preserved through your own vigilance?

4. Which are preserved and protected by forces outside yourself?

5. Does the human capacity for violence, hatred, and other horrors result because of childhood experiences?

Here is a coil

Because now is a question whose atom of an answer is continuously sheared across the diluted electronic landscape, when hundreds of people I know have their given names written in a magical box in my pocket, and somewhere in some other cloud of electrons is another list of chosen names revolving around the nearly 15,000 messages they and I have shared.  In this era of networked instantiation, my location is a long rope of places where I can be reached, all various distances from the swirl of electrical impulses that is my own very head.

Design notes for the “blogjam salon project”

I may have written online about this somewhere else. Like so many ideas in my head, like the camera in the shape of a gun and the uber-realistic streetfighting video game that uses real people like the Pope and that vagrant on Lakeshore, I’d be just as happy to see some one else make this happen, just to see it live in the world.

1. Come up with a snappier, more descriptive name
2. Once a month, people meet at a bar with a good happy hour, quiet background music, and free (or sponsored) wifi, and at this bar they spend an evening hashing out the details for a new website (favoring blogs) that ought to exist but doesn’t. They register a url, set up a wordpress/google-page/what-have-you, produce the first 5 to 20 pages of content, email all their friends to announce the launch, and print out business cards to pass out to everyone at the bar.

As of today, I’ve had more spam comments than page views.

I wonder if that’s changeable.  I’d like to choose a reasonable target date to have tripled my page views, and I’d like to make that choice by the time my page views are 1/3 of 10,000.  Along the way I might find out if the page views/spam comments ratio conforms to some variant of Zeno’s paradox.   Speaking of variants–

Justice and Orgasms!

That’s what religions provide, we agreed.  “Here is what is right, and here is what to do about what feels good!”

Jake Day, Five Years Ago…

May 23rd turns out not to be a day to which I arbitrarily assigned importance in adherance with the Erisian/Dicordian/illuminatus mythos; it’s actually an officially recognized holy-day among actual, official, recognizable Erisians/Discordians.  Wikipedia knows about it and everything.  Coincidentally (or not, if you yourself adhere to the illuminatus mythos and don’t believe in such things), that holy day is known as Jake Day.  One celebrates Jake Day by pulling a small joke (jake) that “embarrasses and causes loss of personal modesty,” in keeping with the goals of Operation Mindfuck.  Before I knew any of that, I pulled a nice Jake on myself, when I checked out two books from the UCSD Clics library on May 23, 2002, which I would not return until November 12th, 2006.  Yes, indeed, that’s 11+12=23, or 1+1+1+2=5, or 1+1+1+2+2+0+0+6=13.  Thirteen is not really that important of a number in the Erisian/Discordian mythos, but the illuminati mythos covers just about everything.  I had those two books for a total of 1634 days.  You can add the digits of that number yourself.  That’s two books for 233 weeks.  Two twos, and two threes.  Anyone remember the Jacob Two-Two books?  I digress.  The point is, I am looking forward to Jim Carrey’s movie, coming out in 17 days.

I am not a good citizen.

1. I don’t know my neighbors’ names.

2. I don’t know my landlords’ kid’s name.

3. I can’t tell you which district I’m in or which school board member is mine.

4. Never been to a neighborhood watch meeting.

5. Haven’t written to a politician in a year or so.

6. Don’t know when the League of Women Voters is having their next meeting.

7. Don’t know the names of my neighborhood beat cops.

8. Couldn’t tell you which community organizations serve my area.

9. Haven’t done a neighborhood clean-up.

10. I’m ruining the curve for car break-ins.

11. I’ve done nothing yet to offset my 7.6 tons of CO2.

12. I don’t go to free theater enough.

13. I don’t volunteer at my local school.

14. I don’t volunteer at my local library.

15. I don’t know where my neighborhood emergency plans are.

16. I don’t push my landlord to keep the apartment up to code.

17. I don’t know anything about tenant organizations.

18. I don’t have most of the insurance I ought.

19. I don’t know who my local homeless are.

20. I’m not contributing to the “spay feral cats” campaign.

21. I often forget to take my garbage out or bring the bins back.

22. I leave the dvd player on.

23. I don’t speak my mind or heart often enough.

“Everybody needs money! That’s why they call it money!”

That’s a David Mamet line, delivered by Danny Devito in the movie Heist.

Tell you what, how about you go into that McDonald’s bathroom and spend 3 hours cleaning it.  In exchange, I’ll give you a brand new CD from Tower Records.

Not interested?  But the market says these two things are about equivalent–they each sell for roughly 15$.

That’s the power of money–its action as an exchange medium allows us to compare values across the whole spectrum of our society.   The comparisons may be flawed, warped, crude, or otherwise shadowy forms lit up on the wall of the cave, but if it weren’t for money, we wouldn’t be able to have the conversation at all.

Would we?