Slightly Less Naked and Even More Buttery

After months of having little motivation to write, and not really having any idea where I wanted to take this blog, I’ve finally been inspired.  I’m setting up a new mp3 blog here.  The concept is simple:  at least once a day, I’ll load a random playlist in amaroK, pick a track, and write about it.  Or about whatever track interests me.  Or maybe about other stuff.  At any rate, I’ve amassed quite a music collection over the years, so I shouldn’t have any shortage of material.  I probably won’t be updating this blog anymore, so you can update your bookmarks and feed readers to point to the new blog.

I just realized that most of the new bands I’ve discovered in the last few years I found through TV commercials.  Coca-Cola brought me Lyrics Born’s “Callin’ Out,”  Rhapsody acquainted me with Sarah Bareilles’  “Love Song,” and the Macbook AIr introduced me to Yael Naim’s “New Soul.”  Now I’ve found out about the insanely catchy “Silly Boy” by Scandinavian retro-rockers The Blue Van.  Once upon a time you were a sell-out if you did a commercial;  now, with MTV out of the music video business and Clear Channel busy killing off radio, commercials are pretty much the only way to get recognized.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to buy that “I am green today” song from the Dell commercial they won’t stop playing.

I’ll admit, despite having loads of time on my hands at the moment, I hardly ever post to this thing anymore.  I just don’t feel motivated to write long texty posts much.  So I’ve decided to experiment with a tumblelog, and set up an account on Tumblr.  You can see the fruits, such as they are, on the sidebar, under "disguised nonsense".

Anyone who’s paid any attention at all to the McCain presidential campaign can’t help but harbor the suspicion that he’s deliberately playing to lose.  From his Beach Boys impression to his choice of Mayor McCheese as running mate, it seems that every move he’s made has been expressly calculated to cause him to lose, and lose big.

Well, I’ve finally figured it out.  That’s exactly what he wants to do.

You see, back in 2000, McCain ran as the kinder, gentler alternative to George Bush’s neoconservatism.  He wanted to clean up politics, reform campaign finance rules, and make everybody play nice.  Unfortunately for him, the Bush campaign had no such moral reservations.  Under the directorship of Karl Rove they pulled a number of underhanded tricks, such as push polls insinuating that McCain had an illegitimate black child.  The result?  Bush got the nomination, and then the presidency.  McCain not only lost, he was made to look like a fool, and the idea that someone could win an election by playing nice was soundly trounced.

At that point, McCain made a decision:  He would not stop until he had his revenge against the neocons who cost him the election.  In 2008, he would fight hard to get the Republican nomination.  He would move far to the right on every issue, essentially becoming the neoconservative he had once campaigned against.  Then he would do everything in his power to make that position look ridiculous, dangerous, and un-electable.  He would make the Republican ticket, and in particular the neocon movement, look so horrible that even prominent conservatives would rush to endorse his Democratic opponent.  He would lose the election in a landslide, and the Republican party would be forced to redefine itself, preferably in a way that doesn’t involve imperialist foreign policy, fiscal irresponsibility, or Karl Rove.  Then he would stand over the smoldering ruins of the neoconservative movement and laugh like Bernie Goetz.

Hey, you have to admit, it makes at least as much sense as any of the "9/11 Truth" websites.

Assuming anybody still reads this thing, you’re probably wondering where I’ve been the past couple of months, and why I haven’t been posting long rants about grad school.  The answer is that I haven’t been going to grad school.  It turned out to be seriously detrimental to my health.

You remember that mystery ailment I had back in May?  The doctors in Florida told me it was some sort of infection, though they couldn’t seem to agree on which kind.  Then they applied some leeches to my forehead to try to bring my black and yellow bile back into equilibrium.  Along the way they did an endoscopy and told me that I have a rare congenital heart defect, but that it was nothing to worry about.  Then they spent all their time trying to convince me that I needed costly treatment for the ache in my left shoulder.

Well, the mystery infection combined with the mostly harmless heart defect to produce a situation called endocarditis, which they utterly failed to notice.  I myself was not aware of the situation until I started walking to class every morning, which here in north Georgia involves some very steep hills.  By the time I got to class, I would be gasping for breath and clutching at my chest.

After visiting the health center, and being referred to a local hospital, I was told that my heart defect had gone from "nothing to worry about" to "must be operated on now or your heart will explode out of your chest like the monster from the movie Alien."  So after much slicing and sawing, I wound up with a seven-inch scar on my chest and a brand new mechanical heart valve.  It actually makes a ticking noise whenever my heart beats, and when the room is quiet other people can hear it too.  I find this equally reassuring and unnerving.

Between the month or so I spent in the hospital and the three weeks afterwards during which I had to undergo daily IV treatments, I missed a lot of classes.  My department decided it would be best if I got a medical withdrawal from class this semester and simply came back next semester.  Fortunately, I did not lose my assistantship, which happens to be a research assistantship I can do from home.

Speaking of grad school, this recent ordeal has me questioning the wisdom of pursuing this already questionable career path.  My doctor explained to me that from now on, the costs of insuring me are going to be very high.  I’ll probably be on medication for the rest of my life, I’ll need at least monthly checkups and lab work, and in fifteen to twenty years I’ll need my mechanical valve replaced again.  All of this will of course be considered a pre-existing condition.  My doctor’s advice was to make sure I only work for large, wealthy employers who can afford to insure me.  Universities obviously qualify.  However, it seems that while I was in the hospital, the economy went all third world on me.  The job market for academic philosophers wasn’t good to begin with, and I doubt things will get any better anytime soon.  I need a real career, and soon.  I’m not sure my present course of action is likely to get me there.

Fortunately, not all my news is bad.  Becky and I got engaged!  I was going to make a sappy pun on the word "heart" here, but I think I’m above that, don’t you?

Poor ol’ John Stuart Mill.

Censorship is a funny thing.  I’m constantly amazed by the fact that people can be offended by seeing the word "fuck" in print, but seemingly have no problem with "f*ck", even though they all know what the asterisk is supposed to cover up.  Well, most of them, anyway. 

TV censorship is even weirder.  When I was a kid, my sensitive ears were protected from the irreparably harmful effects of naughty television language by the ever-present loud beep.  I suppose that must have gotten annoying, because as time went on, the beep was replaced by a number of less harsh-sounding measures, from simple silence to MTV’s creative method of playing the offending words backwards.  I can still remember that Tom Petty video where he sings about rolling another "tnioj".  But the most hilarious offenders are the movies that are "edited for television":  someone actually goes through every line of dialogue in the movie and replaces potentially offensive words with a supposedly equivalent, family-safe alternative.  I recently started to watch Pulp Fiction on network TV, and had to stop because it was just too painful to listen to the station’s attempts to make sure it wouldn’t offend any Mormon missionaries who happened to be watching.  Then there was the hilarious moment I had long heard rumors of, and finally got to watch today:  a sanitized version of The Usual Suspects in which the phrase used in the lineup was changed from "Hand me the keys, you fucking cocksucker!" to "Hand me the keys, you fairy godmother!"  Fairy godmother?  Some kid is going to watch this film and wind up far more scarred by the mental images of a bunch of hardened criminals (and Stephen Baldwin) wearing big pink hoop skirts and turning pumpkins into carriages while singing "Bibbity, bobbity, boo" than they ever would be by a simple fellatio reference.

Still, that’s not the silliest example of censorship I found today.  I was shopping for some Pogues albums on iTunes today, and found that their sophomore album Rum, Sodomy & the Lash was rendered there as Rum, S****y & the Lash.  That’s right, they censored the word "sodomy," a word which appears, more or less, in a book that I hear can be found in even the most conservative Southern Baptist congregations.  What really gets me is that, while the title may be censored, the actual album is not.  Are we to believe that some sensitive iTunes shopper who can’t bear to see the word "sodomy" on their screen will be content with hearing lyrics like "Frank Ryan bought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid, and you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids"?  That’s just f**ked up.

I’ll admit it.  I’m quite convinced I don’t want a career as a philosophy professor, ever.  That’s the main reason why I’m going to pursue the MS in Artificial Intelligence alongside my philosophy PhD.  In fact, I originally planned to pursue it instead of a philosophy PhD, but one of my professors talked me into finishing the doctorate.  Fortunately, getting a philosophy PhD doesn’t condemn a person to an academic life as much as you might think.  There’s a whole blog called Leaving Academia that’s devoted to PhDs and ABDs who have decided not to waste their lives in the company of students (or worse, other professors).  Some of them even come from disciplines more useless than philosophy, like literary criticism.

Just today I came across a place that could wind up being either my dream workplace, or a den of raving loonies.  Probably  both.  It’s called The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and it’s made up of people who are devoted to the task of "general AI".  That is, they’re not content to make wimpy little programs for playing chess or detecting counterfeit money; they want to make full-on, self-aware, I’m-sorry-Dave-I’m-afraid-I-can’t-do-that artificial intelligences.  What’s more, they seem to believe that the development of just such an AI is inevitable, and so their job as responsible scientists is to make sure the AIs that eventually emerge are the good kind, like Holly from Red Dwarf, and not the evil kind bent on destroying humanity like the Cylons or Terminators.  As their ad for a research fellow states, "no one cares if you wear a clown suit; you get to save the world."

There’s no way people like this could possibly look down on me just because I have a philosophy degree.

We’re more or less settled into our new home in Athens, if by "settled" you mean "living out of piles of boxes".  Still, it’s very, very good to be out of that hellhole we lived in.  Shortly before we left, a horrid-looking woman with rotten teeth and what looked like scars from multiple stab wounds came to see about renting our house.  She decided it just wasn’t up to her standards and that she could find a better place for the price.  That should tell you what kind of place we just left.

Of course, my life wouldn’t be complete without a bureaucratic nightmare of some sort, and the universities of Georgia and South Florida are only too happy to oblige.  As with most public universities, the University of Georgia won’t even let you sign up for coursework until you provide them with proof of immunization from a number of horrifying, life-threatening diseases like measles.  I’ve had to provide said proof of immunization at every university I’ve attended, so the mere fact that I’ve attended three public universities with the same requirements should be pretty damn conclusive proof that I’ve already been immunized.  So of course it does me absolutely no good.

I contacted the health center at the school I just fled, the University of South Florida, over a week ago.  They claimed my immunization records had been sent.  A week later, I still couldn’t register for classes.  I called the health center at UGA.  They said they hadn’t received my immunization records.  I contacted USF.  They said that yes indeed they very much had sent my records, however if I wanted to I could print them out myself from their web page.  I said that I wasn’t entirely sure that a stupid printout from a web page would qualify as an official document.  They said yes it would, because it had the USF logo and the words "Certified Copy" in the upper left corner, and the fact that any reasonably bright twelve-year-old with the bare minimum of web design skills could fake such a web page didn’t matter in the least.  It turns out that this web printout, which is about as official-looking and effective as a crayon-scrawled note that says "I AINT GOT NO DUZEEZES,"  was all the USF health center had sent out.  UGA probably took one look at this piece of crap and threw it away.

Further investigation revealed that UGA will not accept any immunization records that do not bear an actual physician’s signature, even if they do have "Certified Copy" written in bold Courier font across the top.    I never had the misfortune of visiting USF’s health center when I was a student there, but it’s entirely possible that their staff consists entirely of amateur aromatherapists and certified Scientology auditors, and that their reluctance to send a physician-signed document stems from the fact that there are no actual licensed physicians on their staff.   Who knows.  All I know is that I’m sick of dealing with the slack-jawed losers in Tampa.  Maybe MSU or LSU have a spare doctor lying around who can sign me off. 

Update:  Magnifique!  LSU sent my records out this morning.

I haven’t blogged in almost two months, partly because I’ve been moving, but mostly because I almost died.  I’ll fill you in on the ghastly details.

Just before Memorial Day weekend, I woke up in the middle of the night, freezing cold and shivering uncontrollably.  This was in late May in central Florida, in a house that was assembled from a Sears catalog in the 1920s and scarcely renovated since then; the roof is made of tin, the insulation is nonexistent, the electrics were installed back when electricity was popularly viewed as a passing fad, and the three window unit air conditioners saw their heyday about the same time as Peter Frampton and Spiro T. Agnew.  "Cold" is not something I should reasonably have been feeling at this time.

Eventually, my cold spell passed, and by the next day I was feeling more like the guest of honor at a Maori barbecue.  I took my temperature and found that I now had a 103-degree fever.  Some Tylenol brought the fever down some, but eventually it came back, and over the next couple of days I alternated between high fever and almost-normal body temperature.  To make matters worse, I was overcome by nausea, such that any food I tried to eat, no matter how bland, prompted violent vomiting.  At this point I still thought all I had was just a particularly bad case of the flu.

The fact that I hadn’t gotten any better after three days led me to try going to the local walk-in clinic to see if there was some wonder drug they could give me that would help bring down the fever and alleviate my nausea.  Imagine my dismay when I found that the clinic was closed for Memorial Day weekend.  Becky suggested taking me to the emergency room, but I didn’t think the flu, even an especially worrisome case of it, was worth bothering the emergency room staff over.  (I’ve since learned that people bring trivial cases to the emergency room all the time, and that they don’t really mind; if it’s not something they need to deal with, they’ll send you somewhere else, so it’s better to err on the side of emergency.) 

On Tuesday the clinic finally opened back up, and Becky drove me down there.  My account of what happens over the next couple of days is based mostly on what she and other people have told me, because by this time my fever was dangerously high and, unbeknownst to me, there was bleeding in my brain, so I had absolutely no clue what was going on.  Becky tells me that when the clinic doctor examined me, my vital signs were so irregular and I was acting so crazy his first question was, "What kind of drugs is he on?"  Somehow it was established that I wasn’t a garden-variety crackhead and that I was actually seriously ill, and so I was herded into an ambulance and taken to the hospital.  In one of life’s amusing little coincidences, this was the same hospital in which, thirty-two years previously, I had been born.

Once I was admitted, a flurry of tests were performed to find out just what malaise was afflicting me.  At first I was kept under quarantine, in case I was harboring some exotic communicable disease.  One early theory that fortunately didn’t pan out was that I was suffering from spinal meningitis.  It was also theorized that I was suffering from some sort of tick-born illness, such as Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.  (I favored this theory because I like saying the name.)  Yet another doctor in the revolving cast of characters who examined me was sure I had a staph infection (or a strep infection — I’ll swear he used the two terms interchangeably).  To this day I have never gotten a straight answer as to what made me so sick to begin with.  But one thing is certain:  by the time I was admitted to the emergency room, I had an advanced case of sepsis, and various bodily organs had begun shutting down.  The bleeding in my brain was causing all sorts of interesting hallucinations, including a memorable one where I was trapped in a room full of midgets.  (Mercifully, none of them talked backwards or asked me to wear oven mitts.)  My liver and kidneys also weren’t functioning properly, and I had random aches and pains all over my body, including a severe pain in my left arm, which I now found I couldn’t move more than a few inches.  In other words, I made it to the hospital just in time.

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