Pigsflew.com

it says “HARVARD IS A SYNARCHIST WHOREHOUSE!”. Let me explain why this was the only picture i took on Harvard’s campus:

It’s very pretty, don’t get me wrong, but it’s designed to look like european cobbled streets, etc, and it has this sort of airy “we’re rich and brilliant, therefore we shall hoist our pinkies in the air” feel. Now, that’s not to say bad, it’s just boring. I loved England, and i love the way everything looks at Harvard, it’s so quaint, but it lacks the certain little elements that give the English streets charm, and they’ve hidden the certain elements that give Boston streets charm. It’s a very cutesy veneer under which a group of normal college students, perhaps a bit higher than average on the intellectual scale, but otherwise normal, are fighting to be able to shout “ANARCHY” only spelled without the -NARCHY and with a circle around the A.

The best part is, they can’t even express their rage against the high-class machine without a touch of class. There was a person who wrote on the door that, “Jesus was an angry, ludicrous Jewish zealot. Modern Christianity is an insipid fiction.” To which somebody disagreed, crossing out their hateful words and writing instead, “Jesus Is Christ.” Do you see my point? They can’t even do graffiti without getting into a theological argument over the moral justifications of modern religion and dogmatic belief.

It’s so telling. They’re normal people. They just don’t quite know it.

Yeah, that’s really all i’ve got. Good ending, huh?

Money = Eccentricity.

Last night Scott mentioned something about a natural disaster which killed about a million people, but a thousand of which were middle-eastern militants. Now, Josh couldn’t see how this was a silver lining, because let’s say that .2% of the world’s population is crazies. Now, you have a natural disaster of that magnitude but only kills .1% crazies, then you’ve now got a larger ratio of crazies to not-crazies in the world.

But here is the thing: a natural disaster which kills a crazy for every thousand innocents is far better than a natural disaster which kills, say, a crazy for every two thousand innocents, or .05%, because it leaves the ratio of crazies to not-crazies in the world a little closer to normal. Next point, I think everyone can agree that an Islamic militant camp, or, say, France, has a higher concentration of crazies than places with mostly sane populations, such as good old American Suburbia (insert tagline, flash of the teeth and thumbs up), or Canada. Try to follow me here:

• We know how many islamic militants were killed.
• This means that we know how many there were in that area before the earthquake.
• This means it was probably a camp of some kind which housed on the order of one thousand islamic militants.
• This means it probably housed crazies and just about nobody else.

All of this taken together points to the suggestion that less than .1% of the world’s population is crazies. I know what you’re thinking, “But what about all the others! That’s way too low!” But my definition for the term crazy is pretty much restricted in this line of argument to the militant ones, the ones that shoot first, praise Allah later, tell you to recognize Jesus Christ as your personal lord and savior or you die, follow a turkey into Islam and start killing people because obviously it’s God’s will, kill the Jews… for any of the reasons that people have persecuted and killed Jews, etc, etc, etc. People who kill other people and believe they are morally justified in doing so, before the other person has shot at you or any of your friends. (Nations which joined up and fought with the Allies after finding out that Hitler meant to take over all of Europe were practically justified in doing so. That is to say, justified in practice, not necessarily justified in any moral sense.)

This means that all this time people have been fighting and killing people… because .1% of our population or less told us so.

Now here’s my plan: Natural disasters just aren’t working fast enough. I say when a disaster breaks out, instead of sending tons and tons of completely sane people out there, I say we drop crazies into the disaster area and leave them to fend for themselves until one of them eventually emerges as their champion and breaks out of their hellish reality only to find people waiting with sticks, screaming “CRAZY, CRAZY!” but as soon as they attack the crazy, someone grabs them all and throws them on another disaster area.

Or we could gather them all into concentration camps and kill them one by one. Problem is as soon as our work was finished, we’d need to kill all the camp coordinators, everyone who’d participated, and myself for coming up with such a brilliantly evil plan. Or, we could… talk some more…

This is where I need to appologize: I spent a full two nights with Aniel, and all I got was a picture of his housemate’s TV. Honestly, I just sort of forgot to take pictures, what between seeing his offices and tons of firefly, and holy god Halo on that screen. It was just a lot of fun.

That being said: Halo. TV the size of a wall. You can’t look at another person’s screen, because you can turn your head all the way around and you’re still looking at your half of the TV. Plus, it’s High Definition, so it looks prettier than I’ve ever seen it look before. Quite amazing.

Also, Firefly–I bought the DVD set, but I really wish I was back at Aniel’s to watch it on his screen.

The City of Scholars is of course Boston. The true nature of the castle of insanity will be revealed tomorrow.