Stuff From 2006 That Didn't Especially Suck

The most depressing trend in my musical taste last year was an overarching wimpiness. Good lord, i occasionally even found myself listening to The Fray. It got so bad that at one point in the year i facetiously made a "Music Most Likely to be Featured on Grey's Anatomy" play list. Whatever. It's not like i'm listening to Ray Conniff or Barbara Streisand or something, but i developed a taste for more folky, indie-rock, poppy stuff. In a word, wimpy. So here's the music that i listened to this year that i enjoyed, though note that not all of it was released this year.

• Richard Buckner - Meadow: Buckner has a distinctive voice and an amazing sense of melody.
• Tool - 10000 Days - I like Tool. Get over it.
• The Decemberists - Crane Wife - The Decemberists are the most improbable rock band in recent memory, and this is the most compulsively listenable concept album ever made on the basis of a Japanese folk tail.
• Rise Against - The Sufferer and the Witness - As a rule pop punk sucks, but this one had a bit of an edge. You know when you're in your car and you want to crank it up and sing along that it's good stuff.
• Greg Laswell - Through Toledo - Laswell's a San Diego home-boy with an amazing voice and some catchy tunes. One of those albums that makes you feel good about being melancholy.
• The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow - From 2004, but this is my favorite album that i discovered this year. I'm really looking forward to the Shins new album later this month.
• Snow Patrol - Eyes Open - I told you: wimpy. Chasing Cars was abso-freakin'-lutely everywhere this year, but i still liked this album. Snow Patrol owns the anthemic love-song like no band ever.
• Pete Yorn - Nightcrawler - Not as good as Music for the Morning After, but i still spent a lot of time listening to it.
• Mike Park - North Hangook Falling - From 2005. One of the best albums with an overtly political message that i've heard in ages.

I read far fewer books this year than normal, in part because i was sucked into George R.R. Martin's fantasy world, which accounted for 4 books and maybe 3000 pages. Read it, you'll like it even if you don't care for fantasy fiction.

The most memorable non-fiction i read this year was probably Eric Blehm's book The Last Season, about the search for missing back country ranger Randy Morgenson. I think the book would have been interesting had it only documented the search and rescue process, but the parallel story of Morgenson's life made the book an almost philosophical study about self discovery.

My favorite novel that i read this year was Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. It was written in the 1920s and 30s, but still holds up well, especially if you had any experience with Soviet Russia. It's a comical, farcical novel, with a very modern style and structure that basically turns Faust on its head.

Movies? I saw none of the supposedly good films this year, not even Borat. By default, my favorite film of the year is probably Talladega Nights, because it was funny and wasn't animated.

My favorite things on the Intarwebs this year were mostly web comics. None of that Web 2.0 bullshit impressed me much, except for the preposterous amount of unwarranted hype it generates. But i'm totally addicted to Diesel Sweeties and Scary Go Round and Mouse Wax, none of which require me to have a profile or contact anyone or write a blog.

2B

Last Friday was my 43rd birthday (0x2B). I did the usual stuff: went on a long bike ride, hung out with my friends Cathy and Tom, and ate and drank too much. Anything i could say about this year would probably just depress us both, so i'll refrain.

Winning Still Fun

My son's All-Star soccer team won their 3rd and final tournament last weekend over a field of 20 teams. They had a bit of a scare in the semi-final game, in which they scored a goal to tie the game with less than a minute left. They then won the game in a shootout (Henry made the winning penalty shot), and they won the championship game 4-0. They even got their picture in the local paper (Henry is the one right behind the trophy).

Unbelievable

A friend of mine lent me his copies of Dawkins's The God Delusion and Sam Harris's Letter to a Christian Nation and The End of Faith, mostly because he knows that i am a fellow heathen. I finally managed to get through Letter, and i'll probably finish Dawkins eventually just because i think he's an excellent writer. But i have to admit i have little enthusiasm for the arguments against religion. It's not that i don't agree with the authors -- if they are the preachers, i am the choir-- but i know that they will have no effect on the people who need to read them.

Very few believers will read the books to begin with, though many will condemn them. But of the small percentage who do read them, the arguments therein will not only fail to convince, they will probably strengthen the resolve of most. Belief in God, especially in specific variations like Christianity and Islam, is not a subtle misinterpretation of evidence or a trick of the senses. It is the willful acceptance of the obviously absurd. I don't say this as a sarcastic jibe. I know exactly what it feels like. I went to a Lutheran parochial grade school, and i came very near to choosing a Lutheran high school as a prelude to the Lutheran seminary when i was about 13. The sense of being a part of that religious community was one of the most powerful emotional experiences of my life. Even though you know intellectually that virgin birth and the resurrection of the dead and the Biblical version of creation are not reasonable, there is a sense of exhilaration at accepting them as real despite what your brain tells you.

For me, it took a process of self-discovery to go from true believer to non-believer. It took being away from the influences of that community and being able (even required) to think about things for myself. When i was 14 or so, no amount of criticism or rebuttal would have swayed me from my religious beliefs. When i finally came to think that there is no God, the shift from certainty to doubt made me reluctant to ever profess any conviction too vociferously.

While i don't the buy the hogwash that atheism is just another belief system, i do think of it as a sort of advocacy. In other words, atheism isn't just the lack of belief in God, it is the viewpoint that non-belief is a superior way to treat with the world around you. My personal viewpoint is that there is no God, but also that there are many unknowable things in the universe. Not unknown, but unknowable. We cannot see to the ends of the universe, we can't conduct experiments that span vast spaces and times, we can't observe without altering. Not now, not ever. To me, that's a sufficient basis for agnosticism, though i think i'm what Dawkins calls a de-facto atheist, in the sense that i think it's far more likely that there is no God even if i think the question is ultimately unanswerable.

For me atheism or agnosticism comes along with skepticism, rationalism, materialism, etc.; but i don't think of myself as being entirely nonspiritual. I'm not sure how i would describe my version of being spiritual, but it encompasses my desire to undergo slightly crazy physical trials and to put myself in situations that provoke my sense of wonder (the night sky in the middle of nowhere is profoundly spiritual). It is connected to the completely irrational love that i feel for my children, and the inexplicable bliss i can feel on a Saturday morning with my arms wrapped around my wife. It's in the pain and distress i can feel about things that are not, in any reasonable sense, painful. For me, the soul consists of all those parts of my brain that make me something more than an animal.

Winning Is Fun

My younger son's all-star soccer team won their second consecutive tournament yesterday. They won the championship game 3-0 so there were no shootout heroics. He did make one beautiful save. The other team hit a perfect cross from the right side and he jumped up to get his hands on it, which deflected the ball to the left. As another player from the other team came in from the left to hit the deflection, Henry darted to his right and kicked the ball out of bounds. Even Henry was impressed by it. The team was in overdrive for this whole tournament though, outscoring their opponents 24-2, with both goals-against coming on penalty kicks.

Blogs I Still Read

I'm not sure if blogging has become so mainstream that nobody talks about it anymore, or if it's a fad that has passed its peak. Personally, i read very few blogs regularly now, and a good percentage of those are work-related. Among the hand-full that i still visit almost daily are:

• WarrenEllis.com - Warren is (unbeknownst to him) sort of my Beatrice, in the sense that he is my guide to a kind of underworld. Plus, there are often pictures of persons unclothed.
• Postmodern Sass - Still fun to read, still sui generis, not still in Canada.
• Global Guerrillas - Because it scares me.
• BoingBoing - More of a metablog, but in a good way. Basically the Slashdot of oddness.
  

I think there are two main reasons why my blog enthusiasm has waned. The first is that i just can't stomach reading political opinion anymore, even if (maybe especially if) i agree with it. The other is that anything that's interesting on the web will be forwarded to me within 15 minutes by my virtual network of acquaintances. For example, the Peanut Butter Manifesto, about the problems of my beloved employer, was IM'd to me by three people.

Highlights of November

Some stuff that happenened this month:

• I ran a 1:23.52 half marathon at the Silver Strand Half Marathon, my personal best and a good sign that i'm on track to run sub-3 for my next marathon.
• Henry is playing goalie for his league's soccer All-Star team. They just won their first tournament and he was the hero of the championship game, saving the first two goals when the game had to be decided by penalty kicks after a 1-1 tie.
• Nathan played the cello for his school's advanced orchestra in a public concert at the local performing arts center. He also played with the younger middle-school orchestra because they didn't have a sufficiently advanced cellist yet.

Henry's at the bottom of this pile:

Voter Apathy

This seems like it should be a good time for one of those long, philosophical posts on my view of the world. I'm pleased with the results of Tuesday's election, i'm elated that Rumsfeld is gone, and i'm relieved that Bush won't be able to use his last two years to screw things up even worse. But the only thing remarkable enough to capture my notice is how little i really care. At least we get to have a little fun at the expense of the right for a while.

Sex and Candy

Halloween again. All holidays should be based around the idea of candy as currency. My sons chose the following for their costume themes this year: Nathan is a skateboarder from the Dogtown era; Henry is, for the third straight year, the grim reaper. There was a report on TV about how costumes for women (and girls) are now less about being scary and more about being sexy. I guess the theory is that ghosts and vampires are pretty tame compared to all of the crap out in the real world that can scare the hell out of us. So if a teenage girl wants to scare somebody, she can at least scare her parents.

Mid-Life Crisis Car

Should this be my mid-life crisis car:

http://www.porsche.com/all/caymansem/product/