a five o'clock morning

I guess we'll call this a five o'clock morning, though it's more like a four o'clock morning. I just gave up trying to sleep at five.

Sammy started crying at four, and I stepped out front to check on the weather, which looked good for the cats and I let them out. But I couldn't fall back asleep.

Incidentally, when I got up at about three for a bathroom run, I was going to check on the weather for the cats, but all the cats were so heavy in their slumbers, that I let it go. I wasn't going to force them out.

Aside from my broken sleep, I am only worried that I am encouraging Sammy to cry out in the small hours of the morning.

*******

I never tire of my Christie icon, with her in that little black bikini, swinging in the air. All that white skin.

a lot of images

Going through a lot of images, having all this extra time this morning, although I am greatly enjoying myself, now that I have reached the point where most of the pictures are from my favorite tumblrs, I am reminded that I really do need to find a few more non-porn tumblrs, as I think about what I can post publicly.

Though, I also have the thought that I could just forget about posting any Saturday night pictures.

The Cats and Bo

Through the kitchen window, I see Coco looking at me as she lies on the chaise lounge. I open the sliding door to offer her entrance, but she and the others are not interested this time.

Cats are like little children that you spoil. You just give them everything that is practical to give them. Since they are good about the litter box, it is not that difficult to oblige them.

I wish I had some of this experience with cats before we got Bo, so that I would have been more inclined to spoil him. It is just that dogs are so damn smart that you are given to control them more fully, to control them completely, so that one can end up as more of a harsh taskmaster than a loving companion.

Mind you, lest a reader get the wrong idea, I believe that Bo and I still had a special relationship; it's just that it could have been significantly better, and I sorely regret that I failed to make it so. I can be so small and mean.

The Girl Next Door

Maybe it's time to see this movie again and slap the disc in the machine. Another novel I should probably check out, too, though I already have two others lined up.

Hamlet (1,2) Seems, Madam!

After granting Laertes his heart’s contentment, Claudius has more stern business with his nephew/son, but then Hamlet is more than kin and less than kind; indeed, he is even competition. And Hamlet has only attitude and sarcasm for the king. Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude, steps in to try to make peace.

_ _ _

G:
Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off,
And let thine eye look like a friend on Denmark.
Do not for ever with thy vailed lids
Seek for thy noble father in the dust:
Thou know'st 'tis common; all that lives must die,
Passing through nature to eternity.

H:
Ay, madam, it is common.

G:
If it be,
Why seems it so particular with thee?

H:
Seems, madam! nay it is; I know not 'seems.'
'Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother,
Nor customary suits of solemn black,
Nor windy suspiration of forced breath,
No, nor the fruitful river in the eye,
Nor the dejected 'havior of the visage,
Together with all forms, moods, shapes of grief,
That can denote me truly: these indeed seem,
For they are actions that a man might play:
But I have that within which passeth show;
These but the trappings and the suits of woe.

_ _ _

Claudius reinforces Gertrude’s pleading and urges his doleful and bitter prince to cast away “this unprevailing woe”, at the same time that he denies Hamlet’s wish to leave for Wittenberg to study, as he obviously wants to be able to keep an eye on the unstable heir who is “most immediate” to the thrown, for Hamlet is loved by the distracted multitudes and could cause trouble, as Hamlet is obviously not feeling much love for his uncle, now his father and his king.

Gertrude wins Hamlet’s obeisance, and Claudius is most happy to secure this supposedly “unforced accord” and will rouse his triumph to the heavens, but we know he is premature in his satisfaction and that it might have been better for him to let Hamlet leave.

"Emmanuel Around the World"

Instead of Ketchum's "The Girl Next Door", I chose "Emmanuel Around the World", the triple-X rated European version, fast forwarding through much of it for the rape parts and the bestiality.

I remember when one could see a good part of that movie on CineMax or Showtime, when I first returned from school, but no more. With the Internet, the issue is quite moot, but before we got the Internet, and when I thought we were never going to get wired up, this was a sore point. Ah, to be above all that!

my legs

I'm a little worried about my legs. They seem to want to cut out from me. It hurts to walk; they don't want to bend. This is that much more worrisome now because I'm greenlighted for my library trip tomorrow. The pain seems to come and go, though, and it does not stay long, only a few minutes, as I force my way to go about my normal routine.

Recently, thanks to nostalgia weekend, I've been thinking about diabetes, and I cannot help thinking if this is the early stage of one of the harsh consequences of letting diabetes go undiagnosed and untreated.

My autumn

Another breezy, overcast day. Reflective. My kind of weather. My autumn. The only downside is that I cannot tell whether it is going to rain or not, which creates a little stress over whether we should have the cats inside.

Quote of the Day

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

-- Richard Dawkins

The Symbiotic Evolution of Religion and Atheism

Jonathan Rée gives us another good go-around on atheism and the need to appreciate the evolution of religious thought, so that atheism can evolve along with it. As I've said before, when it comes to this kind of argument about how secular in attitude believers tend to be today, I think he underestimates the role of magical thinking, notwithstanding the fundamentalists and literalists.

I agree that a lot of people who flirt with faith and religion are skeptical about particular precepts and stories, and that we may even tend to regard the stories as a sort of inspiring poetry, but I suspect that there is still a deep hope that there is more to life than what is dreamt under the sun and that the grave is not necessarily the end, and that life is more wondrous and beautiful than we can possibly know. To be sure, there is a profound skepticism over this, and even some embarrassment for entertaining the notion, but I think it is part of the general human nature to fancy such possibilities. If nothing else, at least our imaginations and hopes are infinite.

_ _ _

New atheism was born again at the beginning of the 21st century, and some people think it has dealt a final blow to religion in all its forms. The God hypothesis has been spelt out with perfect clarity, apparently, and anyone capable of following logical and scientific arguments can see that it has no merit at all. Religion must therefore be consigned – like the miasmic theory of disease or the phlogiston theory of combustion – to a museum of intellectual lost causes.

Some of us however – including many who regard ourselves as non-believers – suspect that the new new atheism forces the pace, distorts the issues, and underestimates the intelligence of its enemies. If the older versions of atheism – from Moses and Socrates to Shelley and Nietzsche – were less straightforward than they might have been, the reason may be the complexity of religious phenomena rather than the obtuseness of those who sought to describe them. The difficulty is that people may commit themselves to a religion without buying into any particular theory as to what does or does not exist: they are simply throwing in their lot with some historic community, identified not by doctrines but by rituals, stories and a shared sense of the sacred. Religion as it enters the lives of many believers will not be damaged by a demonstration that it is not much good as science, any more than poetry will be threatened by the collapse of literary theory, or capitalism by a refutation of neoclassical economics. We atheists should not assume that theory always gets the last laugh.

-- Jonathan Rée at New Humanist

Loose Ends

1. I cheated and had a coke with my turkey TV dinner.

2. Although I showered last night, since I'm going downtown tomorrow, I took another shower.