WhimsyLand

I was sweeping out my garage and the UPS guy showed up and asked me if I was 21.  That means wine.  But, I haven't bought any wine online for a while.  Still, there it was, 6 bottles of California Cabernet Sauvignon.  I never order 6 of anything.  Maybe it's a birthday present.  Nah, nobody likes me that much.  Maybe it's an order screw-up, since I think I've gotten wine from this firm before.  Maybe it's like winning the lottery in a diminutive sense. 

I googled "Cain's Wife" on a whim and found something like 13,000 hits.  It turns out that that (don't you love it when two words juxtapose like that legitimately?)  radical liberal ACLU-sponsored spawn of Satan, Clarence Darrow, also used the Cain's wife argument to cast doubt on the literal interpretation of the Bible.  I mean, if Seth was Adam and Eve's third child, and he arrived 130 years into Mankind's Reign on Earth, and Cain was wed B4 he murdered his brother, and the residents of the Land of Nod had to have been children of Adam who wandered off much later, and ...  Oh, I don't know, it's like trying to create a chronology on CSI: Somewhere.  In any event, that doesn't prevent thousands of Christian conservative sites from Dealing With The Whole Cain's Wife Issue by hypothesizing who left for Nod when, and explaining how the incest prohibitions didn't come into play until Leviticus, and BTW, Adam and Eve's genetic structure was pristine, so this whole brother-sister consummation thing is OK, nobody was going to have a baby with six fingers.  Sometimes religion hits me and I just don't know what to do with it.  I don't mean The Troubles or the War of the Roses or the Hindu-Islamic contentions in India, most of which I figure is variant of the Jets and the Sharks, although they do tend to end up with large number of dead bodies.  But it always seems like a Clash of Cultures, much like the problems that arise when somebody dances to his iPod while holding a subway strap while somebody else is trying to read Proust in her seat.  Or worse, when somebody says they've been dissed in the ghetto, or perhaps on an NFL gridiron.  At what point did we get so fucking touchy?  I totally understand when there is a shortage of resources and your crops just failed and your child is dying and, in general, life isn't about worrying how Lindsay Lohan is going make it in rehab.  It's just that I don't understand in theory, why people kill each other for stupid reasons. The problem is that I'm old enough to know that that's not why people get killed.  It's a conflict among world-views, more precisely a clash of comfort zones, a pressing desire to preserve exactly the screwed-up mythologies that you grew up with, otherwise how could life be worth living? 

I watched the same Prairie Home Companion movie that Ange reviewed recently.  I like PHC in general, and listen to it about as often as The Car Guys, which is once a month maybe.  I like Guy Noir and love when Sue Scott and Tim Russell do vignettes.  Also the Sound Guy, who used to be somebody and is now somebody else.  In the movie were some of my favorite actors, including Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin.  Anyway, the problems with the movie:  Kevin Kline played Kevin Kline in his role as Guy Noir, as if this were a remake of the Pink Panther.  The whole shtick where everybody reminisces too much got old after 5 minutes.  Woody Harrelson and John C. (Mr. Cellophane) Reilly were bad choices as the cowboys.  Lindsay Lohan was a distraction.  Tommy Lee Jones played in character, but was too late to offer up any kind of redemption.  Everybody else was great, including Scott and Russell as backstage do-bees.  Here was the chance for GK to interpret the authenticity of PRC to something understandable by Coastal Folk, and he chose the easy, schmaltzy way out.

I had a very good and earnest mathematician speak to me in squigglies for almost two hours today.  Somewhere in there were thetas and Laplace equations of order N and rotations in polar coordinates and dot products and imaginary numbers and irrational numbers.  All of these led up to a practical need to do something which I will be doing, but I didn't actually have to know the details to do it.  What is that like?  Maybe like proving that you're the same tribe as your benefactors, like being to able to conduct the mass in Latin.

Yeah, it's still cold.  No, we haven't gotten rid of the piles of snow yet.  I might as well live in North Dakota.