tedious loaf of sanctimony Saturday, March 31 2012
It was a bit of a surprise to wake up this morning and see an inch of snow on the ground, covering all the bright green grass, daffodils, and other premature evidence of spring. When I took the dogs for a walk this morning, I wasn't broadcasting anything from my FM transmitter, so I found myself listening to low-frequency FM instead. In our area, these frequencies are taken up by college radio, public radio, or Christian radio. In hopes, yet again, of trying to get my mind around the wasted brain potential of Christianity, I listened to the latter. The station I was listening to programs much of its airtime with "contemporary Christian rock," which to my ear sounds like light grunge-pop circa 1996. All of the music sounds like it passed through the same recording studio with the same producer, and the result is dense with grunge-pop clichés. I could actually predict when precisely a vocal was about to be echoed as if through a telephone receiver. Though the music was trying hard to sound hip and modern so as to put a bare-bones Christian message in the ears of the youth, the oppressiveness of its restraint and deliberate unoriginality was suffocating. Just one hip hop reference, a sequence of notes from a non-western scale, or, hell, just a folksy vocal styling could have greatly leavened this tedious loaf of sanctimony. There was a time when Christianity pushed art forward, but the art coming out of Christianity today is being dragged along by secular culture at the end of a very long rope.
This afternoon, in hopes of getting some shit done, I took a semi-recreational dose of pseudoephedrine. The last batch I got of that came in 120mg time-release tablets. To take it recreationally, I have to break off about 90mg from one of the tablets and then grind that up using a mortar and pestal. Since pseudoephedrine is cloyingly bitter and unpleasant, I find the best way to get it down is to wrap it up in a half of a square of toilet paper, which produces a wad that is easy to swallow in a single gulp.
Julius (aka "Stripey") and the Makerbot today in the laboratory.
