Wednesday 12/18/24
Twenty-five films were added to the National Film Registry for preservation, including 1953's Invaders from Mars, which I recently wrote about. An important film for those who saw it upon its release--many of whom would continue to speak about that experience years after the fact--and an influential one on films to come. Set a tone for 1950s science fiction cinema. A cool mark of recognition for a cool film.
No one who describes themselves as a creative has ever actually been creative.
The Bruins came back to defeat Calgary last night despite the efforts of Jeremy "The Sieve" Swayman and his 87% save percentage to ensure another loss.
People speak so often at this time of the year what they're going to do next year. Are you? Or do you just say such things around now and never learn a lesson?
Here's a lesson: Nothing resets or restarts when the calendar goes from December 31 to January 1. Do it now. That's as good a time as any. It's as if people count on the calendar to do the work. All the calendar does, though, is change. It doesn't change things for you.
Despite Robert Kraft not having much of a clue, if I had to make a prediction, I would say, yes, Jerod Mayo will be fired as head coach of the New England Patriots after this season. Sounds like Mike Vrabel is going to the Bears.
It's a week until Christmas. I'm going to try and be productive across the board over this week and fit in a lot and make like the 1959 White Sox and go, go, go.
3000 stairs yesterday at City Hall. Was warm. Usually when it's that warm--fifties--in December, it rains, but not yesterday.
Three pieces came back to me for edits as such. There were no edits, just copy edits, and request for confirmation that I had made a typo (I did). There are never any edits. Or virtually never. If someone is editing me in an active change things sense, they are failing in their job because they are making something worse and they're just not going to know better than I do.
If you want to see incompetence, I'll put up some of the proposed edits by arrogant gasbag James Taranto of The Wall Street Journal sometime. I'd show them to people, and they thought it was a joke. They couldn't believe what they were seeing. Those people were so incompetent that you had to make it look like you were making changes while really silently correctly all of mistakes they inserted so that the finished product wouldn't be laughed at, all while trying to avoid verbal abuse.
There are all of these commercials on TV for weight loss and a big part of the pitch is that you don't even have to exercise. Is it really that bad? Exercise isn't just about physical fitness. It may not even be most about physical fitness. maybe half physical, half mental. But even mental isn't just mental.
Taking a glance at the DI college hockey rankings going into the break, I see that there are no less than five Hockey East teams in the top thirteen: BC (2), Maine (4), Providence (7), UMass Lowell (10), BU (13).
I'll see all of these people declare what they believe the point of life is, and most of them say the same thing: To be happy. Which I think is wrong. You want to be happy and foster happiness for others. Help them find happiness. But happiness isn't the ultimate goal. And by ultimate goal, I mean what you can also be doing each day. Trying to do. Moving towards.
I never see anyone say what I believe the point is, except Emerson, who came pretty close. He said that the purpose of life isn't to be happy, but rather "to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well."
Imagine someone now saying anything like that? You'd never see it. Do you know anyone who thinks like that? Do you know anyone who lives like that?
People respond to triteness and cliche, little else, because more than that alarms them and also makes them feel like they're on the spot, under the microscope, put it how you will. I'm looking right now at a post from a woman that says this: "Everything comes to you at the right time. Be patient and trust the process."
Vapid. Idiotic. Wrong. Everything comes to you at the right moment. Huh. Do you not have any idea how life works? And trust what process? The process of favorable Calvinism? That the universe will just give you what you need when you need it?
This is moronic. But because it's moronic, people respond favorably in droves. But if the moron stopped being a moron and said something incisive, intelligent, insightful, and impactful, there'd be no response, no plethora of those "likes," because it was real and substantive. Can't have that. (Plus, it's achievable, so there's no threat there. No one has to feel like someone is better than them.) Can't not be dealing in lies and enabling. Must have ignorance.
Right? That's how it works. That's how everything works now. And all it does to anyone is harm. It certainly doesn't help them. Telling people what they want to hear often stops them from doing what they need to do. Lying doesn't help anyone. It doesn't help the individual, it doesn't help the whole.
"The process."
What process? Who's to say that the person reading has a process? How many people have any kind of committed process for anything?
Look at all of these horrible writers. What do you think their process is? Hardly ever write, suck at writing, hopefully get handed shit. I guess your Laura van den Bergs and Paul Yoons of the world trust that process, because it's always worked for them. But even that is less a process and more of a country club townie mentality befitting a system of incestuous evil.
People don't just like to shirk responsibility, they rarely seek to take it. And as much as they do the former, the do the latter even more, to the point of never taking it. In the first case, you're sometimes just on the hook for something. Stuff has worked out that way. But people often want nothing to do with what they're responsible for. And to rise up and say, "Yep, I'll do this, it's on me" or "I can do better, I will do better, back in a bit," is virtually nonexistent.
The messages from myself and the Little Ghost Girl were delivered to my buddy.
I'm finding many people who say that Sticky Fingers is the Rolling Stones' best album, but it has a hodgepodge quality--sort of like the US version of Out of Our Heads (both this and it's UK counterpart are quite underrated). No Rolling Stones album coheres better than Beggars Banquet. I'm not saying it's their best album, but it's easily their most cohesive.
What's the most cohesive Beatles album? A few contenders--Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road. The Grateful Dead had two brilliantly cohesive albums in Workingman's Dead and American Beauty and I bet a lot of people would have thought they were incapable of that. For Dylan, Blonde on Blonde is a very cohesive LP and it's a double album. Mood-wise, the most cohesive Beatles album is Sgt. Pepper. That record is no longer regarded as it ought to be. It's come down in the world, after a fashion, which was perhaps inevitable given what it was held up as. But it's closer to how it was once regarded than how it is regarded now. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Each of Nick Drake's three albums coheres beautifully.
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