Ow. If you go too long without lacing ‘em up, your skates lose their shape. They are not pleasant to break in. But worth it.

Would you buy an animated flick about Jesus Christ and John the Baptist forming a gay criminal gang in ancient Judea and running around selling weed, buggering young boys and maybe offing the occasional Roman tribune to stay cool with the zealots?

Yes!

I popped into the GC diaries to see a course in progress. Until tonight, anyway. I usually take great interest in course diaries. Tonight, my response is: screw this. And I do mean the whole thing.

I took Smilla for a walk into the woods behind my house. It’s only about 20 yards or so to the creek which parallels the street, so there’s not a lot of walking potential there. But today I discovered that the creek freezes over. I have an ice rink in my back yard. It was quite good ice, too, for outdoors. In Palmer Lake the ice was really cruddy… the lake got windblown… not to mention there were plenty of rinks to skate at. Tomorrow I’ll have myself a real anaerobic workout.

Beyond that, there is a bike path on the other side of the creek that runs all the way to downtown. It’s not much compared to the variety in Colorado, but I’ll sure never take my bike on the main road to town. I’m thinking a rope bridge over the creek might be doable. I’ll need a machete, too. The creek side was nearly impenetrable when I got here in August. Not to mention the mosquitoes. I wonder if I can find a pre-fab bridge.

I’ll have to update my ‘where’ page here someday. Still in denial…

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) — The state’s school superintendent has proposed striking the word evolution from Georgia’s science curriculum and replacing it with the phrase “biological changes over time.”

When are people going to admit the Civil War was a mistake? Please, kick these idiots out of the union, and let them set up the Christian Taliban they so desperately want. Hopefully, they’ll stop believing in electricity and medicine as well, and we’ll never have to hear from them again.

(Gee, I wonder why I couldn’t get into Faulkner…)

OK, now it’s cold. Damn Cold, but not quite instant-nostril-mucus-freezing cold, a.k.a. PotsDamn Cold. Still, cold enough. And finally some snow on the ground.

I had a feeling I would regret even considering abandoning Don Quixote. There was quite a tedious stretch there- I last wrote only a few pages before the end of part I. Then I read a review of a new translation (off of AL Daily somewhere) that gave me the impression the real genius of it manifested in part II. It’s looking good so far.

The abrupt switch in part I from straightforward narrative to claiming the story was being relayed from another historian was very curious device, especially since it hardly showed up at all. It was mostly tacked on at the beginning and end, and I saw no purpose in it. In part II, however, the mechanism of telling the story is starting to take center stage. I want to call this a metanarrative, but it doesn’t fit the description of “a story employed to legitimate the mechanisms of social control”. Silly postmodernists.

I have to wonder to what extent this was the planned course for the work. Cervantes goes so far as to point out some inconsistencies in the first part as errors of the narrator. It seems it began as a rather straightforward satire and evolved into an exploration storytelling. The purpose of Ms. Panza’s fluid appelations is still lost on me.

On a separate note, I rather enjoyed the venomous criticism of… criticism. That could have been written yesterday. I will never understand how some people can make a living giving their opinions.

Meanwhile, Kant continues to drive me nuts. I’m starting to see the sublime pissant as straddling worlds between early idealist philosophy and cognitive science; he lacked the language to express his own ideas, which wouldn’t exist until The Origin of Species. I think the later German idealists took this desperation for vocabulary and made it an industry.

Man, I hate coding all day. And all night. And all weekend. Eye strain city. Not going to get any reading done for recreation until this project is out of the way. As much as I hate to go from one CRT to another, it’s easier on the eyes than text. what I should do is play guitar. Perhaps after a nap. Wrinkling your forehead at algorithms for hours on end kind of sucks the will out of your brain. I’ve squeezed in a little Allison, and will blog over at WKU quick, then call it a day.

Friday, presidential candidate Howard Dean renewed attacks on his democratic rivals, saying “Senator Kerry, I Crush Your Head! Crush crush! HaHaHaHaHa!

Now this is the sort of international emergency the armed forces should be used for. See, if we weren’t tied down in Iraq and Afganistan, we could help mitigate this humanitarian disaster:

MOSCOW (Reuters) - Russia has sent in the army to bolster a week-long struggle to rescue 10 tons of beer trapped under Siberian ice, Itar-Tass news agency said Tuesday. A lorry carrying the beer sank when trying to cross the frozen Irtysh river, and a rescue team of six divers, 10 workers and a modified T-72 tank from the emergencies ministry have so far failed to save the load.

Allright, I’ve got to pare down my reading list here… I’ve moving between so many books I’m not making much progress. The Touchstone of Life has been sitting on my desk quite a while… I really should finish it. Its composition is rather muddled, though- the author doesn’t seem to have much sense of his audience. I think it’s supposed to be a popular book, but there’s many passages he blows through where a non-scientist wouldn’t have a chance. Then other places he treats the reader like a grade-school drop out. I think I’ll make an effort to finish it, though, as it contains a lot of the lingo I’ll need to forge an association with the IU biocomplexity institute.

I also want to wrap up The Critique of Pure Reason in a timely manner. It has dragged on a little too long, and has got in the way of some other stuff I want to read. I recently picked up Allison’s Kant’s Transcendental Idealism to help this along.

I’m also about half way through Don Quixote. It’s been quite enjoyable, but it’s starting to get old. I’ll forge ahead and see if I can break through this rather boring section. Otherwise, it may fall away entirely.