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“Hell is only half full/Room for you and me,” Warren Zevon sang in “Monkey Wash, Donkey Rinse” on his album Mutineer. I have thought of these lines at odd intervals today, while reading about the people who believe the Rapture will happen tomorrow.

I’m not sure why I think of Zevon’s lyric, it’s not quite apropos–I understand that if the Rapture occurs, the Good are to go to Heaven, and the Bad are to stay here until further notice. Perhaps I’d better think of Steely Dan’s “Any man left on the Rio Grande/Is the King of the World, as far as I know.” from their post-apocalyptic “King of the World”.

Contra Tom Lehrer, it’s clear that the believers in this don’t think “We will all go together when we go.” But the world will supposedly take a geological turn for the worse, so it’s still to be more of a “bang than a whimper” and there seems to be a consensus it will be largely fire-based.

Forgive these allusions, dear Reader; but the subject of the end of the world is a popular one for poets and artists. And one can see why–it’s a haunting idea. I am sure that the dramatic possibilities are what has drawn so much interest in this little adventure in numerology.

I first heard about this project back in early 2010, and I was surprised to see it garner such attention in the press lately. I am fairly confident they are wrong, but if they are right, I suppose I’ll wish I had played less Fallout and more Left Behind: Eternal Forces for my post-apocalyptic game of choice.

But probably not.

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Back in my really committed Libertarian days, I routinely would find myself listening to opinions not all that different from this amusing piece in The Onion.

In fact, that’s part of the reason I became less of a Libertarian.

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As always, don’t do anything I wouldn’t do while I’m away.

Although I have no way of monitoring that… which reminds me, why does Brian Williams on the NBC Nightly News always sign off with “we hope to see you here again tomorrow”? He can’t see us….

Anyway… I’ll be back by Friday at the latest.

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I am always amused by conspiracy theories. Here’s a good one currently going around, as reported by The Daily Mail, that the strange on-air bouts of incoherence by various people on television are the result of secret experiments by the U.S. military.

It’s a fairly good conspiracy, but I dare any conspiracy-minded readers to peruse H.P. Lovecraft’s novel The Shadow Out of Time and not come away with an infinitely more terrifying, and slightly more plausible theory. Here is an excerpt:

“The collapse occurred about 10.20 A.M., while I was conducting a class in Political Economy VI – history and present tendencies of economics – for juniors and a few sophomores. I began to see strange shapes before my eyes, and to feel that I was in a grotesque room other than the classroom.

 My thoughts and speech wandered from my subject, and the students saw that something was gravely amiss. Then I slumped down, unconscious, in my chair, in a stupor from which no one could arouse me. “

I don’t want to give away too much. “Most merciful thing in the world” etc.

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The Left/Right political dichotomy is inarguably the most useful tool which we have for explaining the present-day political situation which confronts us. This taxonomy, which originated with the French National Assembly, and was based on those were for the monarch and those who were against the monarch, need not be seen as a not unwise reason for continuing its use in contemporary politics. Indeed, just the opposite.


The major advantage of this system is that it allows for political identification to be viewed as a kind of spectrum–though of course it does–but rather that it allows to be wholly binary. If the concept of a theoretical center admits too much room for potential dissidents, it may be viewed rather that each individual unit is composed of a certain percentage of “Right” ideas and of “Left” ideas and that the ratio of these two things establishes him firmly as either “Left” or “Right”. In the unlikely event he is exactly 50% of each, then he must choose randomly.


This absolutist system simplifies matters a great deal, but at some level there may always be those who will seek to rebel against its simplicity. These persons will insist that the system is too simple, and must needs include more complexities before it is accurate. This raises the specter of the spectral mode of political thinking, but herein the system’s innate flexibility is shown in its full color.


Because “Left” and “Right” may also appear on a continuum as well as a kind of binary it is possible to allow for a great deal of variation between them. To those who are inclined to do so, this enables the placing of persons definitively in relation to one another politically.


In this way, we simply conclude that anyone who holds any combination of political views, of which some are “Left” and some are “Right” is therefore to be placed in the center of the line. Therefore someone who believed in the social policies of the “Left” and the economic policies of the “Right” would be in the center. Likewise, someone who believed in the social policies of the “Right” and the economic policy of the “Left” would also be in the center.


This “center” system is of course only to be used as a handler of rare exceptions, for most people may be easily and totally described as being one of the two extremes. But rarely will someone dare to not be on either extreme, and here we find our centrists.


There is finally to be considered the question of whether there could be someone who did not like the entire spectrum, and who sought to build some altogether new philosophy that fit nowhere on the spectrum. It is doubtful such a person could exist, for it would mean that the system for determining whether the French wanted a King was not wholly suited for covering the entirety of political thought.

So, as you could probably tell, this post was a “tongue-in-cheek” piece I’ve been working on. It was supposed to be a “Modest Proposal“-esque sort of humor piece, though it comes off (in my opinion) as just glorified sarcasm, which isn’t terribly funny. I was trying to figure out a way to finish it up well, and I couldn’t. But I thought I’d post it anyway–and April Fools’ day seemed appropriate.

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Today the screws fell out of my office chair’s armrest cushion, causing it to fall off. You would think I could just pop the screws back in with a screwdriver easily enough. But alas! The screws are not simply ordinary screws, but they are specialized screws to be used only with an Allen wrench.

“Not to worry”, I say to myself: “I possess a vast collection of Allen wrenches in my toolbox. I shall wend my way thither, and avail myself of them.” (I don’t really talk to myself like that.)

I arrive at the toolbox. I look in the Allen wrench compartment. There are Allen wrenches of all kinds and sorts and sizes. Allen wrenches of all the colors of the spectrum visible to the human eye. An awesome vista of naught but many and varied Allen wrenches seems to extend out before my eyes.

But not the kind I need.

Well, in time, it came to light that the Allen wrench I needed I had kept in my office desk for just this sort of situation. So, I got the thing out of the drawer and prepared to put the cushion back on. But here again, I was thwarted, because it turns out you can’t without disassembling the entire chair! Everything is positioned just so to make this the case, and I have to suspect it was done deliberately.

So if my blogging seems irritable in the coming days, it’s because I’m kneeling on a hard floor as opposed to sitting comfortably.

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I try to post daily, and whenever I go away from the blog for longer than that, I feel like I ought to at least come back with some interesting story to post. But I didn’t. I was just busy with boring stuff.

By the way, today is the 2055th anniversary of the assassination of Julius Caesar. It’s also the 2nd anniversary of this blog.

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I read an interesting article by Matt Zoller Seitz, suggesting that the comedy television programs of today will not age well due to the volume of pop-culture references they rely on for their humor. As he puts it:

“‘Krusty Gets Kancelled’ is one of the greatest of all ‘Simpsons’ episodes, but if it were a poem, it would need to have nearly as many footnotes as ‘The Waste Land'”.

It’s a good article, and be sure to read the comments section, wherein a lively debate over what has and hasn’t aged well (and whether it matters) ensues.

My take on this: You can learn a lot about pop culture from old satires of it. Seitz touches on this briefly in the article, and I have to admit, (though I’m not proud of this) that I myself learned a lot about pop culture and politics from the 1960s by reading old MAD magazines from that era.

Besides, there is something of a paradox here in that really “timeless” humor would of necessity appear to be timely, or even topical, as well. With some thought, a humorist can make fun of a particular self-obsessed celebrity, and at the same time mock self-obsessed celebrities generally. And as there will probably always be self-obsessed celebrities, this will be understandable even to subsequent generations, even if they don’t know the particulars.

(Hat Tip to Andrew Sullivan)