1. Useless Idea: Someone should open up an anti-health food chain called O.B. City. It would sell all high-fat, mega-carb foods, like oreos dipped in chocolate that have been deep-fried and dipped in chocolate again.
2. I had been teaching a lesson on Samuel Johnson (that's Johnson not Jackson) a few years back and one of my students said it reminded him of the Imaginationland Trilogy on South Park. I can't remember for the life of me what the relation was, but I remembered the student recommending that I watch it when I found the DVD in Five Below yesterday. I have a great ambivalence for South Park. I can't really recommend this video to anyone. It has one of the most obscene, vile, horrible subplots in any piece of entertainment I have ever witnessed. I don't even feel comfortable describing the subplot on the blog for fear of the traffic it will draw to the site. That being said, the subplot worked aesthetically for the main theme of the episode, and the overall moral of the Imaginationland episodes was a satirical point that needed to be raised--that the difference between a terrorist and a mad bomber is that terrorism intends to exploit our imaginative capabilities whereas a mad bomber just wants to blow stuff up. My assumption (or hope, perhaps) is that the crudeness and filth in South Park functions to draw on a Comedy Central demographic that needs to hear its satire but that would otherwise not be receptive to it. That being said, I might not be keeping the DVD in my collection for fear of what future generations might think of me if they found it in my possession. It would definitely be a blow to any attempt at canonization.
3. Dreams. So I woke up from this dream yesterday where my family's now-deceased dog escaped from our backyard and got run over by a truck. Keep in ming that this wasn't how he actually became deceased in real life, it's just something I was dreaming. Anyway, what I found particularly interesting about this dream was the sequence of the narrative. The dog got out of the yard, I became concerned he would get hit by a car, I saw the truck, and saw my dog get hit by the car. This is interesting to me because it would seem to imply that the dream was subconsciously scripted beforehand. I'm assuming that my brain isn't like some kind of 3D simulator where different characters or props are floating around a map and can accidentally bump into each other. It's not like an imaginary truck just happened to barrel down the driveway at the same time as my imaginary dog just happened to escape. The truck was there because I was having a dream about my dog getting hit by a car; my dog didn't get hit by a car because I imagined a truck coming down the road. So at what point was the dream scripted? And did it really unfold in my mind in a chronological sequence, or was it all one data-package that I merely perceived as a chronological sequence in my mind's eye?
4. Aliens. I had a thought today about the conference on astrobiology that the Vatican. It produced a kooky idea for a fundamentalist science fiction novel. What if the first "parents" weren't actually the first homo sapiens sapiens of our current iteration on our planet? What if an earlier generation of "human" were wiped out in some kind of planetary cataclysm, but that evolution ended up re-evolving them all over again--or maybe re-evolving "fallen" versions of the original model? What if we were something like God's Human 2.0? This would make either the exile from Paradise or the Flood some kind of allegory for life escaping the homeworld and seeding a new one. I'm talking speculative fiction here, folks, so don't cry heresy just yet. Now that I my idea typed out, I think I just managed to recreate Douglas Adams' script for the Dr. Who "City of Death" mini-series...so...uh...never mind.
"Someone should open up an anti-health food chain"
They already have; it's called the Cheesecake Factory :-)
Posted by: BaltoCath | November 16, 2009 at 05:28 PM