Thought That Came Unbidden

If you live pretty much anywhere on the East Coast of the U.S. and you work a regular day-job the answer is: Monday.

At the start of what promises to be a rainy and kind of gross weekend, I noticed this little girl hopping around in the back yard.

The photo’s kind of grainy because it was taken from an upstairs window, with flash. And I say “little girl” because when I went downstairs and out on to the deck to try to get a better snapshot said bunny, who had been posing very prettily for about 15 minutes, decided to dart away and there was no flashing of tell-tale dangly bits.

She’s a couple of weeks early this year, though, as I didn’t see her last year until the first week in May. Side-effect of oddly warm weather I suppose, but a nice little gift from the universe nonetheless.

I think I’m going to have to develop a WTF? category. Tell me, the article below: real news or a story from The Onion? Answer after the article.

Death Camp Museum Drops ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’

WARSAW, April 20 — A former Nazi death camp has canceled plans to host a production of the rock opera “Jesus Christ Superstar,” the director of the site’s museum said Thursday.

Edward Balawejder, director of the State Museum at Majdanek, said he changed his mind about hosting a production of the musical after Polish newspapers reported Jewish leaders’ objections.

“It was not a good idea. It did not take into consideration the relations between Christianity and Judaism,” Balawejder told the [blanked for context clues]. “I decided that there will be no performance because we must stick to the message of the museum, which is truth, memory, reconciliation.”

Director Jacek Boniecki of the Lublin Musical Theater in eastern Poland said the intention of the July production had been to present universal issues with no religious context.

“The monument is site of many international concerts, of prayers of many religions, and it is a neutral place,” Boniecki said.

Piotr Kadlcik, leader of Poland’s Jewish community, said he was “very happy” that the performance would not take place.

Former Israeli ambassador to Poland Shewach Weiss said on TVN24 television that Balawejder’s mistake had “been set right now and we should move forward toward reconciliation and solidarity.”

Museum officials say 230,000 people, including about 100,000 Jews, were killed during World War II in Majdanek, one of a network of Nazi death camps in occupied Poland.

“Jesus Christ Superstar,” which debuted on Broadway in 1971, tells the story of the last days of Jesus. It was criticized by some Christians as sacrilegious, while some Jewish groups complained it was anti-Semitic and showed most villains as Jewish.

Boniecki said the performance will take place in another open-air site.

[Read more…] about Is it real news or is it The Onion?

The proper use of punctuation is an increasingly rare and embattled art in the shrinking global world. The Oxford comma stands as the most prevalent example of disagreements between U.S. English and UK English speakers. The comma itself, though, comes with baggage.

I once had a well-educated, UK-based friend inquire about why I placed commas between adjectives in series when the adjectives all modified the same noun. This lovely e-mail subject line, culled from my bulk folder at Yahoo!, is the perfect illustration:

Get A Huge Pornstar Penis

Now…I know they mean a huge penis but without the comma they’ve got me thinking about obese male pornstars. Not really fun thoughts for me either way.

Just because choices are available does not mean that any of them will be choices that you want to make.

Sometimes it’s just a big shit sandwich and no matter what you do you’re gonna have to take a bite.

I had to make a choice today that I didn’t really want to have to make. It wasn’t pretty.

They say Einstein got his best ideas in the bath. Maybe it’s something about the warm water, or the tile, or the fact that in a bath tub or a shower you’re just sort of letting your mind drift along, unfocused and that, sometimes, when your mind is drifting your subconscious opens its doors a little and gives the consciousness a peek. I got one of those peeks the other day and it both scared and comforted me.

Big events – death, changing jobs, even something happy like a new baby – always make me think about the meaning of life in that wrinkled bald guy in saffron robes meditating on a mountaintop sort of way. Given everything, I’ve been thinking about the meaning of life a lot lately. And I think I’ve got it figured out.

Life has no meaning except what you give it.

If you feel your life has a higher purpose, that you’ve been destined to do something, more power to you, but from a ground floor level the only possible explanation for the coexistence of the daily, senseless violence, the inexplicable rain of petty shit that seems to be modern life and the very fact that we are here is that it’s all an accident. There is no grand plan and everything is absolutely random. You want meaning, you have to make it. Life has a structure, though, and that structure, when you pare it down to basics, is choice.

Some choices people are given are high level choices; some are the most basic choice there is. High level choices are the province and luxury of people with a lot of security around the basic needs.

In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the basic needs include food, shelter, and security, things that many people around the world do not have. High level choices are things like which car to buy (the Mercedes or the Jaguar?) or where to go on vacation this year (a month in France or off to Tahiti?)

Mid-level choices like where to send your kid to college (a private school or the state university) are also the province of people with relative security around basic needs. Sure, choosing a private college causes a modicum of insecurity as satisfying the requirements of that choice of a private school may put some of those basic needs in jeopardy, but it’s still a choice to be made by someone who is pretty damn sure that there will be enough money to pay the light bill and buy groceries next week.

Low-level choices are ones that are close to the basic needs and affect them most greatly. They’re also the ones that, if made incorrectly, have the most potential to do damage.

In Freakonomics Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner examine the economics and ramifications of being a low level crack dealer in Chicago. Conventional wisdom dictates that taking the risk to be a dealer for a short period of time is the best way to get up and out of a bad economic situation. Data from the most comprehensively studied crack gang in Chicago revealed that the average foot soldier made $3.30 per hour, less than minimum wage¹. In reality, to get up and out, to improve their lots in life, most of those foot soldiers would have been better off holding minimum wage jobs, which most of them did anyway.

And then there is the most basic choice: to live or to die.

It’s a choice that many people around the world are faced with every single day. It’s a hard scrabble choice affected by the availability of food and water, and by the presence of angry men with guns. But here’s the thing: even when it looks like there is no choice but to die, when food and water are scarce or when some jumped up idiot shoves a gun in your face, there is still a choice.

You can choose how you die.

Do you go quietly, do what the guy with the gun wants and let him kill you inside his comfort zone on his terms or do you rush him, scare the shit out of him and make him kill you before he’s ready and before you’ve served whatever purpose he has in mind for you?

When food and water are so scarce that you know you’re going to perish do you stay with your friends and loved ones or do you go off by yourself? Will it comfort them if you stay or will it be more painful for them to watch you go? Would you rather be surrounded by people when you go or die alone in the quiet?

No matter what, there is always a choice. It may be a choice between two really shitty, unacceptable options, but there’s still a choice.

Some of those choices are do we pick a, b, or c type choices; some of those choices don’t really involve the details of the event or situation in front of us but how we choose to react to that situation.

When I look at it this way, life is a little less scary. Not more under my control necessarily, but definitely more manageable.

1. Levitt, Steven D. and Stephen J. Dubner, Freaknomics, pg 103.