“Strange things man, strange things” This was originally said by a boy who crashed a car into a pole after robbing a gas station. This boy was known by my friend, and college roommate, Matt. So last Wednesday morning I woke up in the middle of the night (as seems to be happing a bit too often lately, I’m going to take some melatonin and even it out) with this intense feeling of pressure in front of my face. You know like someone put a fist riiiiiiight at the tip of your nose but didn’t touch it. And, uhm, well, I’m face to face with the ceiling.

Snow Crash was a great book! It’s one of those gold plated volumes of the cyberpunk fiction canon and rightly so. It features all of the standard conventions: cyberspace, rogue-ishly sexy mercenary girls, and a wily hacker with swords. The part I found most interesting was the discussion of ancient Sumerian myth and “deep neurolinguistic structures”. The idea being that if you could master the fundamental linguistic atoms that humans use to perceive the world you could re-program them. Think a second. Can you think without using words? No really. Try. Nope? Something changed in how you think when you started realizing you wanted to say something and the big people who bring you food and fresh diapers respond, curiously enough, to sounds associated with those ideas.

He was referring to the fact that ethical birth-control pills, the only legal form of birth control, made people numb from the waist down. Most men said their bottom halves felt like cold iron or balsawood. Most women said their bottom halves felt like wet cotton or stale ginger ale. The pills were so effective that you could blindfold a man who had taken one, tell him to recite the Gettysburg Address, kick him in the balls while he was doing it, and he wouldn’t miss a syllable. … The pills were ethical because they didn’t interfere with a person’s ability to reproduce, which would have been unnatural and immoral.

Nicky Hilton asked the following outrageous question: “I just want to say to these writers, ‘I’m 21 years old, I run two multi-million-dollar companies, I work my ass off. Like, what were you doing that was so fucking important at that age?’ I feel very accomplished for my age.” To which was replied: Nicky Hilton asked, “I’m 21 years old, I run two multi-million-dollar companies, I work my ass off. Like, what were you doing that was so fucking important at that age?” I would like to repond to that. When I was 21, I was busy working toward my Ph.

Vietnam: The VC believe in re-incarnation, Joe doesn’t. Who has more to lose? Iraq: The fundamentalists believe in martyrdom providing bliss, Joe doesn’t. Who has more to lose? To this, I ask, should we not be a bit worried about an apocalyptic evangelical leading war in the mid-east and trying to force God’s timetable (apparently God doesn’t believe in setting timetables, like the Pentagon, evidently)? With these questions rattling around in my head, Arianna Huffington wrote the following piece: It came during the Q & A session following his speech on Iraq. The first question came from a woman who asked: “[Author Kevin Phillips] makes the point that members of your administration have reached out to prophetic Christians who see the war in Iraq and the rise of terrorism as signs of the apocalypse.

I dreamt that I was attending a wedding, and in the white dress was my friend who was murdered years ago. She was breathtaking, radiant, and tan. She was the way I remembered her, but with that elusive red tint she tried to get in her hair working exactly the way I knew she always wanted it to be. I dreamt that the cathedral was large and wooden, clearly Catholic but minus a lot of the kneeling it seemed. Along the exposed ship’s ribs of the supports of the vault there were pennants, standards, and flags. There was a large organ in the far right corner, with long pipes that bellowed the inevitable Mendelsshon’s ‘Wedding March’.

One of the hoariest tropes in horror and suspense tales is when the Dana Scully-type man of reason finds himself, inexplicably, having a Tarot reading session for either himself or the dead. The (usually sensual-) card reader flips the final card and it’s old number XIII, Death, La Mort. The audience reels back in horror and stares at the cranial portrait lain upon the tableau. But we should be mindful that Death in the Tarot is not catastrophic ( The Tower is that one ), rather it’s the natural mowing under, the breaking apart of that which was before, in short it is the power which breaks the old so that the new can come.

I just finished Daniel Everett’s “Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes.” This work records his years spent living among the Pirahã, a small indigenous tribe of living along the Amazon in Brazil. Everett was initially sent among them to convert them to Christianity. The modus operandi of his support organization was to study the target civilization and then give them the New Testament in their native language. Therefore, Everett’s background as a linguist made him an ideal missionary. In the end, however, it was the Pirahã who converted him to atheism. This reminded me of a story told to me by my AP English IV teacher in high school about a peer student who, the day before graduation, renounced his learning, renounced his faith, and left the seminary of Houston Baptist University.