Author: James McNally

Can CC Crash Your Couch?

Attention CC readers from San Francisco/Northern California: After an apparent invitation and some discussion, plans are underway for the Consolation Champs California Couch Crash™. For 7-10 days, sometime after August 10, I might be sojourning in the area, and would be desirous of a flat, hopefully soft surface to sleep on, as well as some good company. Feasability studies are underway, but if you could help, please let me know. Dates are flexible, so let me know if anything interesting is going on (apart from the regular earthquakes and rolling blackouts, that is).

MetaCritic

My latest awesome discovery: Metacritic. It gathers reviews of films, DVD/video releases, music, and games into one place and assigns a composite score for each based on the reviews of the professional critics. Visitors can also submit their own ratings and comments. Despite its punworthy name (“I never met a critic I didn’t want to…), this one has happily joined my bookmarks.

CyberChurch

I got my first piece of church spam today. The “CyberChurchOnline” wants me to join their virtual congregation. Proudly proclaiming, “As Jesus did 2000 years ago, we’re here to break religious tradition,” they try to woo me with their appeal to my laziness and my misanthropy and self-righteousness (“We’re tired of the double standards and hypocrisy we see in traditional churches across the country. We’re tired of the backbiting and judgmental attitude that is so prevalent in the church today. We’re not here to judge each other but serve each other!”). That’s great. So if I can be a hypocrite by attending church on Sunday, I’ll be less of a hypocrite hiding behind an online persona. We all know what “chat” programs have done for people’s sense of honesty, don’t we? I’m sorry. As much as I love online communities, they will never replace real face to face relationships. Especially a relationship with God. Your thoughts?

Eighteenth Century Literature

I’m cleaning out some old papers today and found a bunch of stuff from my class in Eighteenth-Century literature, surely the most tedious ordeal of my academic career. There was good literature in the class, but the professor was a pompous fool, and literally two thirds of the students dropped it after the first class. The remaining dozen sort of banded together to fight off sleep or the occasional personal attacks of the professor. Here’s a gem of a sentence from his syllabus:

“If we were to see ‘Modesty’ in the illustration that Addison provides, simply as an instance of the cognitively unmediated way in which this faculty was supposed to work, despite Locke’s attack on the doctrine of ‘innate ideas,’ it is evident that the fascination with and slant on the concept of ‘sensibility’ that this and others of the Spectator papers reveal, are highly relevant to an understanding of the revolt against the rationalist and stoical values that the once-dominant school of the neoclassicists had sought to perpetuate.”

I don’t just want to throw this stuff out, I want to burn it, too.

There were some bright spots, the poetry of Christopher Smart being one of them. Smart was a poet who was committed to a mental hospital when he suddenly insisted on saying his prayers out loud and in public. He composed his masterpiece “Jubilate Agno” while confined, and it contains one of the most charming odes to a pet found anywhere:

For I will consider my cat Jeoffry.
For he is a servant of the Living God and daily serving him.
For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way.
For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness.

And so it continues for another 70 lines or so. Marvellous stuff.