Mood:  irritated

Can you really argue with this policy?

Bloody, f***king yes!

Alright, look: people need organs all the time, and being an organ donor is terrific and if your religious beliefs don't interfere then I most certainly reccommend it (it'll knock a few years off purgatory, if nothing else...)

Seriously: donation is beautiful.

But you cannot have a policy of ASSUMING that a decedent wants to have their corpse butchered as such. I've got lots of problems with the whole organ-donation network as it is (including many on the list of recipients...) although in the final analysis I'm fine with venting my spleen (and everything else) for the Greater Good.

But, I don't have the 'donation option' down on my license either. My wishes are known by all my immediate family and friends, but it's not official, as such (something about being wheeled into an OR after a bad accident and having some pencil pusher eyeing that symbol on my card with frothing lips really puts me off...)

Part of this debate also touches upon the old European secularist ideal of the New World Man (and his body) being a cog in the gears instead of an individual unto themselves.

Tell me this: after a bad traffic accident, does the paramedic have the right to assume that a mangled corpse's watch is up for grabs? After a plane crash, does the airline assume that the passengers' luggage that went on ahead of them is ripe for their coffers?

Well: what if they sent the watch and luggage off to charity? Is that any different? 

These might be poor examples, but there's something else very troubling to consider...

Take your average government-based, rationed health care system... The UK ain't exactly happy to provide all its citizens with the care they often need because, quite simply, this would bankrupt the already expensive government-managed healthcare coffers.

Now imagine doctors debating expensive procedures for otherwise healthy elderly patients and other 'dregs' on their system, while at the same time knowing that, unless these people have OFFICIAL WRITTEN DENIAL (with a government-supplied form that takes eight to ten weeks to process, no doubt...) then their current survival is denying someone else the use of their bodies... how selfish of them!

...what to do, huh?... what to do?... 

 If the EU doesn't already have an opt-out system (and I'd assume, actually, that organ 'donation' is likely mandatory in that Brave New World...) then at least Mr Lazarescu would've been allowed to hang around an OR instead of being shuttled around from hospital to hospital in his movie (he could make small talk with the surgeon standing beside him, sharpening his knives in anticipation...)

I'm kinda nasty today, aren't I?  Whatever my ideology, I'll close by appealing to everyone out there to be a donor ('cause someday your heart might give someone a new start...)

But that's YOUR CHOICE, and no government or third party has the right to assume that you've no problem with being flayed apart like a side of beef. Donors are true heroes, worthy of praise and thanks, but unwitting providers are discardable cogs, used as little more than a mere means to an end.

As for Scientific Progress? It goes dumpster-diving for discarded pig entrails (they're almost as good, right...?  ;)

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 7:42 PM ADT

Updated: Saturday, 20 October 2007 7:57 PM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  spacey

...okay, so pi and euler's number walk into a bar, sit at the barstools and start hootin' and hollerin'. Pi buys a round of drinks, then e buys, and so on and so forth.

Eventually the bartender asks them both what exactly they're celebrating. Pi looks at the bartender with a shiteater grin and yells: "IT'S THURSDAY!!!" 

The bartender slowly backs away as the numbers get quashed, and when the manager comes along the bartender asks him what the hell is up with those two.

The manager looks at the inebreated digits, sighs and shakes his head:

"I dunno. I just don't know. They're always comin' in and partying for no reason at all. I guess I'll just never understand that kind of irrational exuberance..."

*Chirp, chirp, chirp, chirp*...

I'm here all week, by the way; try the veal.

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 4:15 PM ADT

Updated: Wednesday, 17 October 2007 4:38 PM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  bright

Inasmuch as I like to assign my writing projects a specific 'theme song' (and I do), I've come to find that the "Reign of Eden's" theme song is Fastball's 'The Way'.

I know you've all heard this one about a trillion times before... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 12:47 AM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  not sure

It's coming...

Let me say that I have EXTREMELY mixed feelings about this Pullman yarn; I read the books when I was younger (and have yet to even get to the third one, I confess... so I left off with the li'l male protagonist approached by Angels lookin' to kill their mean 'ol bastard of a God...)

But I did read the synopsis, so there.

So Philip Pullman, no surprise here, is a rabidly anti-Christian (and other religions I suppose, though the cross has a special place in his antipathic heart) and he sees himself as the children's version of atheist gadfly Christopher Hitchins. The mantra espoused in each of the 'His Dark Materials' books is simple: 'God's NOT in his heaven, and all is WRONG with the world' (for those that got my Tess of the d'Urbervilles reference, I thank you...)

Alright: simple enough. But there's also another problem: anti-religious, rabid and insipid hatred-spouter that he is (and he IS...) Philip Pullman is also an immensely talented writer and I count 'The Golden Compass' book as a fantastical and extremely satisfying adventure story despite the rank anti-Christian (and I'll say in particular anti-Catholic) spiel that is evident throughout. The man's prose FLOWS, for God's sake (and but for His sake...) and the story's absolutely gripping.

The whole 'daemon' thing? Lord, sheer brilliance...

'The Subtle Knife' was slightly less entertaining to me (enough so that I didn't go on, obviously) but I was rather affected by this storyline. So much so that, in fact, you can trace the name of my second TYPERS book, 'His Moral Antipathy', to a ripoff of his series title: 'His Dark Materials'.

They say that the anti-religious fervor will be toned down in the upcoming film, and I believe that. I'm not saying I'm in favor of the movie, and I'm not gonna picket it either. One problem some people note is that kiddies who see the flick will be tempted to start readin' the books and, thus, more li'l kids will be indoctrinated into the Church of the Anti-Christians.

Whatever. More salvation for me, I suppose. Pullman's anti-religious themes within the HDM books are actually most juvenile and weak: if C.S. Lewis made his readers think with some of the tropes in his 'Narnia' books then Pullman makes readers see how petty he really is as a debater: of COURSE God is a twitty prawn if you create a whole universe around the fact that he is and simply cast the opposing side as more evil and stupid twits (C.S. Lewis, you'll remember, at least had the Good Calormen soldier in 'The Last Battle'...)

The books're the cheapest of shots, and don't constitute satire as much as laughable parody. The subtext within them reads not as a clever analysis and critique of religion, but more as a window into the empty heart of one very, very, very talented man.

My Justin Storm is a religious, marginally, and that mirrors myself somewhat, but guess what? Instead of painting atheism and agnosticism as EVIL and DISGUSTING from the outset I'm bein' realistic: so far in my writing I've shown that religion is somewhat less than a healthy force in my main character's life at the moment. The fact that, ultimately, it becomes a MOST crucial plot point due to the fact that something theoretical is shown to probably exist isn't until later, and even then I'd never assault the opposing side so much as Pullman derisively chooses to do (my main female character is a rank atheist, for example, and I happen to adore her, so I've built myself a complicated platform from which I must proceed...)

However, some people don't seem to do well with 'complicated' arguments. It's all just black and white to them. Good and bad, smart and dumb...

Gods, and devils... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:31 AM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  caffeinated

Can we please make these twits at the energy drink companies admit that this whole "Taurine-infusion" crap is just a moronic conspiracy to make their products sound cool?

Taurine is an essential amino acid in animals like cat (in that they can't make it on their own) but humans are able to synthesize it just fine, thank you very much. Now, beverages like Red Bull (who's name is taken from Taurine's history and nomenclatural (that's a word, isn't it?...) association with bulls) contain upwards of 300 percent of your body's own daily allotment of the stuff.

So why would your body need to triple its available reserves of an AA that it is able to produce, but only makes sparingly?

It doesn't...

The energy drink twits need to come clean and admit that there's only ONE INGREDIENT in their beverages that's a meaningful contributor to mood elevation and fatigue reduction (I'd like to see Red Bull come out with a drink sporting 1000 mg caffeine in place of 1000 mg Taurine).

Now, they can come back at me and claim that Taurine plays a minor role in reducing muscle fatigue. That WOULD mean that someone involved in strenuous workout MIGHT benefit from the junk, but you wouldn't want to do that with these trash energy drinks anyway because the caffeine co-mingling (that's a word, isn't it?...) in the drinks is a diuretic and those energy drinks all make one pee like a racehorse. It doesn't matter HOW stimulated your muscles are if you're as dehydrated as a fish out of water.

This Taurine-infusion argument is as specious as the old wive's tale about carrots helping you to see better in the dark: sure, Beta-carotene is converted into Vitamin A by the liver, and Vitamin A is necessary for proper eye function, but the body makes no more of it than what it needs because EXCESS Vitamin A tends to shear one's liver apart at the seams (if you DO consume way too much Beta-carotene in your diet for a long time the unused molecule piles up in fatty tissue deposits, especially the skin, and something most wonderously strange begins to happen to you...)

...'Red Bull'... 'Monster'... 'Rockstar'... you can have 'em, for all I care (Rockstar should stick to cosponsoring all those trashy 'Girls Gone Wild' videos... at least those things are more honest about their content...)

As for me: there's really only one 'energy drink' I can't go without. I'm having one right now, matter of fact, and if a regular energy drink puts your average schmo in Seventh Heaven, then I'm in an even Seventher Heaven (that's a word, isn't it?...): 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 10:17 AM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  caffeinated

The old debate about modern man's pesky habit of surviving outside the Earth's means continues...

Hey, this much is true: the human population SHOULD be much lower than it is, but thanks to post-indistrial society we've got a nast habit of overextending our lifespans and reproducing at alarmingly successful rates (again, things like pesky neonatal wards and advanced medical care have put infant mortality numbers in the toilet throughout the civilized world.)

The short answer to the question at hand (in my honest opinion) is that humans are unique in that we can personally determine our own carrying capacity number: if we're total slobs that number should be a little under a billion, and if we become more 'self-actualized' as a species psychologically and environmentally the number's probably closer to several hundred billion (and I am not joking about that...)

The story caught my eye because it features quotes from the VHEMT whackos. Like PETA (who I denounced previously), these guys are your garden-variety secularist/anti-human wankers who find the idea of the human animal reprehensible, and an abomination in itself (don't wanna put words into their mouths, but it is true).

More tie ins with my current work-in-progress, coincidentally. One of the main villians in the book, a general named Asha Brie, leads up the sinister group Logo's most advanced military unit: Adamant Squad.

For one thing I really like the word 'Adamant' (if you've read my Typers drafts, you'd understand my cheeky wordplay, too...) but for another I include groups like VHEMT in my all-time haters list, and they're the kind of wankers I want to call out in this forthcoming book. 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 2:26 PM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  energetic

I'm no big fan of the Gundam series in general (what little I've seen of its incarnations seems slightly derivative...) but I always wondered why its Wikipedia page was always so laden with ridiculously in-depth factoids...

...and now I know. 

More evidence that Wikipedia may bring about the end of civilization. Of course, I'll be an addict myself until the last tower falls. 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 7:45 PM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  a-ok

We're comin' around to 'Oscar season' in the film industry which means (in a nutshell) that all the ultra-violent pics coming out for the rest of the year are gonna be drenched with artistic 'worthiness'.

Whatever. 

In any event, my personal verdict's in on Eastern Promises: I've gotta go with four-stars, actually.

This is the second pic combining Viggo Mortensen and director David Cronenberg, and I must say that some tension is evident in the production... 

Seriously, though, I gotta say that Cronenberg's approach in these pictures (the first of which was, naturally, A History of Violence) is friggin' brutal to the point of sickening. I believe that Cronenberg's film-techniques are something of a product of the success of 2004's Passion of the Christ, which raised the bar for violence in American cinema (something that would otherwise be hard-core torture porn was made almost completely justified by the unreproachable religious subjectmatter; less spiritually-inclined splatterfests that followed were ushered in simply because the floodgates were opened).

But let me say that I greatly admire Gibson's 'Passion', and while it may have provided Hollywood with a questionable legacy of allowing insane gore to dominate the screen even more than before it was a bridge that would've been crossed anyway. A film like 'The Passion' merely accelerated this process (Unfortunately, I predict this trend will contine to its logical conclusion, too...)

...I think that's the second time I've referenced that movie. Huh...

Anyway, Cronenberg's a veteran of the B-movie horror scene, where he first made his mark, and these days he's seen fit to splatter a few Stephen King-grade horror scenes into stories that are otherwise Oscar-calibur.

Well, not quite. If he did that then his movies would suck, and they don't. Eastern Promises takes a serious 'no flinch' approach to its gore. There are three bloody scenes (four, if you count a frozen corpse... and five if you count a fainting pregnant minor slipping and falling over her own 'bloody show'...) and these scenes are, indeed, incidental and instrumental to the drama surrounding them.

Yeah: guys having their throats slit with straight-razors is bloody stuff, and downright horrifying, but is showing the act from start to finish without stylizing it or cutting away really that vulgar?

Yes, it is. And that's kinda the point of the film. One of them, anyway. If you don't accept this as a valid part of the film's message then it's not going to work for you (and, conversely, if you're a young teenage boy who gets-off on as much carnage and gore as possible, you'd be even less happy with the other 97-percent of the film that lacks said atrocities). 

Roger Ebert's review alludes to the fact that the bathhouse fighting scene will set a new standard in the field of movie fights. He's probably right. I don't normally squirm in my seat during a movie, especially if I'm so engrossed in the flick as to be in that transient state of out-of-body bliss that is the weakening of the fourth wall. But during this scene I was snapped around like a rubber band: one minute entranced by the dramatic turns of the story, soaking up the characters' nebulous facial expressions, and the next I'm literally clutching at body parts in sudden, nearly psychosomatic pain and terror.

From granite-like mental immersion to terrified panic in under ten seconds?

And to still have the desire to 'wade back into the pool' afterwards? 

Yeah, that's a good film alright. 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 1:16 AM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

I'll keep this one brief, 'cause I'm half-trashed at the moment (not on Grolsch, mind you, but something else that I should've had the good sense not to imbibe of on an empty stomach...)

Got an interesting news item here. Now, you gotta admit: they were really asking for it, weren't they?

Gotta love that S&M stuff, though. I've always been interested in the psychology involved in something like bondage. As a matter of fact, it's gonna play something of a background role in TYPERS, too (though only on the periphery...) For one thing, Chenine Chovert's 'demon' form brought on by her Raiden's transformation is called the Bound Angel (which reflects her very conscious desire to overpower her own... well, 'personal deficits'...)

Two characters also hook up (quite soon, too...) and share this very kink together (though the relationship is distinctly F/M...)

I'm gonna stop talking about this 'cause it's creeping me out, but I think it's good for me to keep TYPERS on my mind like this, whatever the vein of discussion be...

...or how creepy it be... 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 12:56 AM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink

Mood:  rushed

Studies show that there's nothing more boring than listening to an aquarist prattle on about his tank.

The studies are duly noted. Now back to the regular-scheduled posting: 

 

...sheeeeeesh...

Well, I'm covered in algae again, and dead tired, but it looks like the mission to de-gunk my aquarium is coming to a close...

...kinda. One can tell from the panorama shot that it's sort of a work in progress...

Ugh. I've been battling a funky black algae colony in my saltwater tank. Most algae is transient and fleeting (and gets eaten up by the 200+ members of my in-tank cleaner crew, thank you very much...) But this new stuff is death incarnate: if the gunk gets onto my corals it's nearly impossible to get off, even when I use a toothbrush. The battle's been raging for a week, now, and I think things are on the mend (they'd better be, what with all the cash I've spent on water changes: saltwater doesn't just spring-up naturally in the ocean, you know...)

uh... well, wait...

Eh, nevermind. The scrubbing isn't done yet, by a long shot, but for now I've got some fairly happy li'l denizens...

Anyway, there's still about a two pounds of algae secreted about the tank, but for the mome nt I can focus on hunting for those pesky little tube worms for without this friggin' bubonic plague-like algae leering over my shoulder. Tube worms are a far easier problem to deal with, after all, and I can't see them giving me a run for my money...

...unless I leave my metal halides on all night and serious bump-up the tank's temperature. That could cause a problem, or two... 

Well, not really, but wouldn't that be cooler than the other side of the pillow? (or should I say, hotter than the foxtrot?) I think so, at least... 

 

In other news, I think I'm on the right track in my quest to make TYPERS a trilogy and keep the looming shadow of a fourth book out of the way. As it turns out, my main problem is finding an appropriate cut-off point between the books (the natural place to have a cut-off, wherein the pilots' worlds are turned to shit, Justin is left without a ride* and Antithesis' power reaches its zenith, seems to be too far away to use as a bridge between the books...)

If you want any more hints about plot points, all I can say is that I'm whistling a certain song as I type all this out. 

(*temporarily...) 

Posted by shanekentknolltrey at 3:51 PM ADT

Updated: Tuesday, 2 October 2007 4:38 PM ADT

Share This Post

Permalink