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I Answer 5 Random Questions

As I sometimes do when I can't think of a good topic for a blog post, I put out a call on Twitter, offering to answer the next five questions I got. Lame, but potentially amusing. Ready?

Question #1 comes from @daHob:

The obvious response is, "African or European?". This being Landless, however, I will instead note that the airspeed velocity of an unladen sparrow is equivalent to the velocipede aericity of an unswallowed ladle.

 Question #2 comes from John Hancock:

It's because people fail to understand that self-actualization is not a tension between the pressures of societal externalities and the innate yearnings of the internally co-created autochthon, but is instead a uncreated moving target. The self we are trying to appease doesn't exist, any more than the self we are trying to destroy. Whatever concept of self we think we understand, these are merely reflections in the mirror, signposts of the past which we have left behind. The self we should be working toward is the one yet to exist. Since it is within our power to create it or destroy it, it is the ultimate expression of our will, and is therefore the source of not only ultimate hope, but of ultimate fear. Fallible beings that we are, most people recoil from either, preferring familiar suffering to unfamiliar ecstasy. Or at least that's what your mom said!

Question #3 comes from Jim Breslin:

Ah, this one's much easier. On July 4, the day of the announcement, I wrote a blog post about the Higgs boson. It was hilarious. I had a nice little bump of visitors to my blog as people read it. So for me, the Higgs boson was worth a 700% uptick in daily visits.


Either they all agreed that it was a funny blog post about one of the great achievements of collaborative Big Science, or it was a national holiday in the U.S. and they had nothing better to do than read my blog.

Question #4 comes from Larry Kollar:

I see what you're doing there, Larry. You're trying to sneak a serious question into this dopey roundup. Well, I'm onto you, pal. You might ask a serious question, but I said I'd be as amusing as possible in my answers. Ha! Take that, smart guy! Why do we write? We write because writers get lots of oral sex and as much pepperoni pizza as they care to eat. We write because taking the time to craft words lets us be as funny, as wise and as attractive as we wish we were, but know we aren't. We write for immortality. We write to shove a pencil in the eye of parents who never loved us the way we needed to be loved. We write for the money. We write because we got tired of reading shitty books and thinking, "Damn, I could write better than this dreck." Finally, we write because we don't want to be left.

Question #5 comes from kaolin fire:

In order: OMNI, Scientific American, Penthouse Letters and the Journal of the American Society of Clinical Psychology.

Thanks for the questions, guys! Let's do it again sometime!


===== Feel free to comment on this or any other post.

6 comments:

  1. If it were possible, I am more confused while simultaneously intrigued by your answer. I know this was supposed to be humorous, yet, you hint at an interesting concept: the wars within ourselves are wars between the targets selves we either desire or fear, Those selves being meta constructs with no more tether to reality than PeeWee Herman's Playhouse.

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    Replies
    1. ... those selves being meta constructs...

      EXACTLY. Our sense of self is NOT an objective, external reality. It's a construct we make ourselves, either by setting the parameters or by accepting the parameters provided for us by others. The point is, we can choose to change that construct: how it's made, how it functions, what's in and what's out. Most people don't want to dig into it at all, preferring to leave well enough alone.

      That's why there's a tension between self-preservation and self-destruction. Where the self is substandard, preservation is bad and destruction is good. However, even thought the destruction of the existing self is intended as only a step in the process toward the reconstruction of a better self, destruction (regardless of the intended goal) is scary, risky and painful.

      We know we need to die in order to live anew, but who wants to die?

      Delete
  2. Oral sex? Don't I WISH. (Well, there is one particular scene in White Pickups.) Actually, I was trying to feed you a straight line to see where you ran with it. I was not disappointed. ;-)

    ReplyDelete
  3. While I find your answer highly acceptable, the proper response is here: http://style.org/unladenswallow/

    ReplyDelete

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