Face it, most people choose the religion they get from their parents.  And some people, naturally, try to find the exact opposite.  A few go adrift, then wander into some church led by friends or potential romance.  Nobody actually sits down and does comparison shopping, using analytic tools to ascertain the one true religion.  People who claim to have done so inevitably either decided on the church they were raised in, or the one with the prettiest girls.   Presumably God knows this is what would happen, so judging people on their failure to do this makes no sense.  Therefore, every religion that makes this claim is wrong, at least to that extent.

I also used to believe that religions had really fundamental differences.  Christianity was the “only” religion that allowed for salvation through mercy.  Islam had five pillars, including total service to God.  Buddhaism is the only religion that really understands the denial of the self.  Etc.  But now I think that any story about the relationship between God and man can be told within any religion.  The differences have more to do with temperment and culture.

Movie genres behave the same way.  You can tell a story about guilt and redemption as a romantic comedy (Wedding Crashers), an action movie (The Untouchables), a horror movie (The Exorcist), or as a Western (The Searchers).  Each genre has its own symbols, conventions, and appeals to a far different crowd, but central human themes are available in each.  And, naturally, there are some people who feel that one genre is the one, true means of expression.  Having said this, I reserve the right to bash the idea of Romantic Comedy at any point in the future.

But assuming that information is actually a good, I decided to post up not only what I was doing, but exactly what my meal consisted of.  Usually salad.  But then I began to realize that people would now know how boring my lunch really is.  Except that my salad is a little different each day, it’s still basically salad.

Still, the total lack of a sticky-note seems unfriendly.  Just a closed door.  So I’ve taken to putting a blank sticky-note on my door when I’m eating.  If anyone asks, I’ll say I originally planned to write “reject the narrow-minded constraints of textualism”, but then realized the note would be objecting to itself, and this was the closest I could come.

But nobody has asked.  Yet.

• Driving through a hail of bullets hoping the thin metal of your car will protect you.
• Finding conveniently placed explosive barrels to help cover your escape.
• Taking on a guy with a handgun using your super-duper fire extinguisher.
• Recognizing a voice you heard over an international line, based on two words.
• Shooting a middle-aged woman in the arm and saying “it’s just a flesh wound”.  Could be, could hit an artery.

But none of these things upset my friend.  He’s against the torture.  I went back and forth.  I’m also against torture, and also believe that it rarely gives reliable intelligence.  In fact, I don’t like the show, 24, in part because they constantly use torture to advance the plot in a way that seems to validate it as an intelligence gathering tool.

On the other hand, it’s just a movie.  We allow ourselves to enjoy movie protagonists who commit every kind of heinous act.  Torture doesn’t stand out over, say, murder, genocide, drug-dealing, or vampirism.  I thought people who got upset about the “torture quests” in WOTLK were idiots.  Still do.  So why shouldn’t this be the same?  I think that, had they really established the character they were shooting for, the father so blinded by rage and love for his daughter that he considers nothing else, it might have worked.  But in this case, Liam Neeson’s character never rises above a sort of everyman with talents.  So we don’t really separate his morals from our own.  So his choices are those of someone who we consider “moral”.

I do think my friend was being ridiculous, but I get just as ridiculous over other things, especially the off-screen hiding spot.  The hero walks into a room, looks around, and is suddenly jumped by a bad buy who was hiding off-camera.  It’s a good hiding place, because WE CAN’T SEE THEM.  The hero, though, shouldn’t be limited by the camera frame.  Liam Neeson does this once, walking out into a hall, apparently without noticing the bad guys, who then knock him out.  So they can hang him from a pipe.  This trope drives me crazy.  I haven’t walked out, yet, but then I’d have to explain and people would probably say “it’s just a movie.”

I did go down to Chinatown, made it as far as the security gates keeping people out of the parade route.  I took pictures, which are posted here.  I talked to vendors, and bought two Obama hats and a bottle of Obama hot sauce.  The hats will go to my sister, who wanted something that was there, at the inauguration.  The hats count.  Even though you could buy the same things from other places, on other days, she’s getting hats that have that ineffable been-there-ness.  Had I bought the same hats a day later, though, even though they might have been sitting there for the inauguration, they would not have that magic quality.

On 9/11, I was walking around Dupont Circle, talking to my sister on a cell-phone.  I assured her that nobody would attack Starbucks.  One plane hit the Pentagon, the other may have been coming for the Whitehouse or Congress.  I had friends who were closer, but that day was in the air everywhere.  We didn’t know what would happen next, there were rumors of car-bombs, and I didn’t dare get on the Metro.  So I was “there.”

In fact, if the security was the issue, the rules would change constantly.  Any static set of precautions can be planned around or bypassed.  But planning around rules that don’t stay the same is far more difficult.  But I suspect that even if we explained this to people over and over, most would still rather have predictable rules.  They would feel comforted.  Obviously, the true goal of the TSA is comforting our fears.

Still, everybody knew we were in a recession, and it was only a matter of time until that was announced.  So why did the stock market dump?  The stock market is supposed to aggregate information from the wisdom of crowds and use that correctly price stock.  But the only information that changed was that we went from “unofficial recession” to “official recession”.  I use quotes, against my better judgement, because the National Bureau of Economic Research is actually a private body.  If this was something that everyone knows, and an announcement that everyone know would come, how could it change the information available to this supposedly near-perfect pricing mechanism?

But Sarah Palin pardons her turkey while behind her, on camera, a bunch more get slaughtered.  It’s bad theater.

I’m kind of looking forward to it.  Not in a “gotcha” kind of way, but in the way I looked forward to Grand Jury duty.  I’ll get to see one more part of the American landscape.  Not a pleasant, pretty part of the picture, but something that is there, that is part of how we live, and something that I feel I should know more about.

This is either Sarah Palin or Debra Jean Palfrow.  This may be the same one, or the other one:

And this could be either:

That may not mean anything.

• Eating off the floor (5 seconds or not)
• Sticking Q-tips in our ears
• Spraying sunblock and bugspray out our faces, while holding our eyes closed
• Picking or scratching at sunburns and bug-bites
• Eating raw hotdogs