Toward a Unified Crap Theory

Most of you are, I take it, all too familiar with crap. I'm not talking about the crap you pick out of your navel or the crap on Fox News. What I mean is the crap from which memories are made--souvenirs, collectibles, kitsch; the crap of commerce, the detritus of dealings, the effects of experiece, the muck of modernity. Whether it's your complete set of NASCAR collector's plates, your Sports Illustrated football phone, or the scrap book containing all the ticket stubs and bills from your days following around the Dead: we've all got crap. How else would we remember anything we've ever done?

I've had occasion to reunite with most of mine recently. After cordoning off clothes and essentials for the trip back stateside, I packed my Oxford crap away for Christmas storage. No sooner had I recovered from my cavity search at Newark "Liberty" International Airport than did my mother present me with fresh piles and stacks of New Jersey crap and long-forgotten George Washington crap to be sorted and dealt with. The girfriend's house offered no respite--there's always girlfriend crap.

All this got me thinking about crap. "I'm a rudimentally trained philosopher and social scientist", says I. "For crap's sake, I ought to to be able to come up with some practical solution to this crappy problem." And that's when it hit me: Second-Order Crap. In meta-mathematics, second-order logics allow quantification over subsets or functions of a domain; in other words, they allow one to operate on complexes or classes of objects instead of nickel and diming them one at a time. In meta-ethics, "second-order desires" or volitions refer to desires about desires. For instance, if I have two first-order desires--one to take a crap and one to give a crap--my second-order volition would consist in my desire to make one of those two first-order desires my effective will, e.g. the desire that moves me to action.

So what does the concept of Second-Order Crap entail? Well, if first-order crap are material signifiers we use to remember, then we use Second-Order Crap to signify these signifiers and remember to remember. So far so good, in theory. But what of Second-Order Crap in practice? Well, unlike that hack Guillotine, I decided to put my money where my mouth is and test out my invention myself. So I gathered up all my crap, and parsed it into 'sentimental objects', 'souvenirs', 'trinkety gifts', 'assorted chachkes' and 'paperwork issued by bureaucratic agents who will be first against the wall when the revolution comes!' I then took 5 megapixel digital photos of each pile, labeled them accordingly and uploaded them to the harddrive of my laptop. Ergo, Second-Order Crap. Now, every time I want to remember to remember my deeds, friends, and creditors, I just let Microsoft take me on an electronic slideshow down memory lane.

What of the first-order crap? Well, let's just say that I'll be saving handsomely on firewood and kindling this holiday season. How could I be so cold and calculating about the coffee spoons I measured life with? All in the name of science, friends.

Foster 2.0

A Nobel for Peace of Mind

Until 4:45 AM this morning, I thought pure research was dead. Who cares about gluons and muons and waxons when we can just write computer programs to not care for us? I thought that it was just not worth investing in answering questions no one was asking.

But it is. Take this example of a useless question: "What is the optimal length between beeps of an electronic device such that they will occur often enough to make Dan Bentley want to shut it off, but rarely enough that when he goes into the living room he looks stupid waiting for the beep, then trying to turn off every device in the general direction?" You may think this isn't worth answering, but if you had, you could have made several millions of dollars off a consulting contract to the company that makes my roommate's cell phone.

At least, I think it was his cell phone. I unplugged the VCR, whacked my chess clock, turned over couch cushions galore. If we had had a cat, I would have attempted to power-cycle it, too. Sorry Mittens.

The Salad Bowl--a reply

Ha! The Leviathan gets to respond this time! And what better topic than the "BCS Mess."

I'd love to talk about the BCS, but I'm no sports writer, it woudn't be anything you haven't heard already, and frankly, it wouldn't live up to Pissing in the Wind's reputation for literary cock-fighting. But as an avid college football fan (and reader of the international section of many a newspaper, Herr Foster), I just can't resist a few bulletpoints. So here goes:

• The BCS blows. It blows, sucks, and swallows. All at once. Sure it's better than the old system, but so what? If I'm horny, and there are two fat chicks, one 300 lbs., and the other 287, I'm not going to want to have sex with either of them. And Ms. 287 is going to come up to me and say, "I may not be your dream woman, but look at my hideous friend." It's all relative people.
• Out of any other team, Cal got screwed the most. Royally screwed. I'm talking scepter up the ass screwed. They finish in the top 6 in the nation, and get rewarded by playing Texas Tech in the Assclown bowl. I'd say Auburn and Utah got screwed as well. Auburn because they're, in my book, one of the three teams tied for number one, and they don't even get to play the number 4, 5, or 6 team. Undefeated Utah is trying to show it can compete with the big boys and is truly bowl worthy, and who do they play? Pitt. Not even top 10.
• Unfortunately, I don't see this changing any time soon. The conferences just get too much money from these bowls, not to mention the loot pulled in by these sponsoring corporations. You can have the Tostidos Fiesta bowl, but not really the Nokia Playoffs, or Pepsi presents the NCAA college football finals.

But enough of this discussing of the topic. I should get back to the real task: taking a proverbial shit on Baron von Foster's posting.

I'll be the first to admit, the Ivy League is not exactly a bastion of athleticism (nor is it a bastion of attractiveness, social skills, or basic physical coordination). When it comes to football, basketball, and the other arena sports, we can't compete with the national powers. But Goddammit, we kick ass at the preppy, white kid sports.

Our squash team is consistently among the top two in the nation. Our sailing and crew team are always competing for a national title. Basically, if it's played at a country club or requires expensive equipment, we kick ass. Anything that's dominated by snooty white people of Mayflower heritage, or a suffix no less than XII, we rock.

Of course God does not give with both hands. Aside from football and basketball, we're not terribly good at, say, dancing, jumping, or tanning. Does this bother me? Not at all. You haven't experienced sports bliss until you've seen Charles Putnam Yorkshire the 57th hit a sticky wicket, as you clap politely along with the throngs of bare-chested fans in the student section. And the tailgating before the big Harvard-Yale equestrian match. Man! Kegs + horses + drunk co-eds = hilarity.

So while we may be a little unathletic, a little ugly, and a little socially awkward, I'll be damned if we couldn't beat, say, the Oxford dental team in a teeth contest. Or the GWU football team in...existing! Hahahahahahaha.

Before I sign off, I would like to take this opportunity to have some fun with the Dans in a purely non-personal, playful, yet sexual manner. I will now write the above sentence in Enfranchisedese:

E're my selves doth exuent--my existential and transcendal selves--I shall seize this like the great philosopher, Immanuel Kierkegaard von Hegel, seized the immaculate; HEREBY, I titilate the gelastic senses of the Dans, albeit in the metaphysical, impish, and lustful sense, methinks, ex post facto [sic].

HI-Larious!

Same post, different blog

Pissing Into The Wind, Round 2

Lots of news today. An attack on the American Consulate in Saudi Arabia. The BBC is cutting its staff by 10 percent, in a move sure to raise the stakes in its arms race with NPR to see who can be the shittier public information source in a world of media conglomerates.
Eliot Spitzer, the man Wall Street hates more than beggars, has thrown his hat into the race for governor of New York. So what to talk about in this second edition of Pissing Into The Wind? Obviously we will only tackle issues of firstmost importance and relevance.

The BCS.

That's right. Every other NCAA sport manages to have a sane play-off schedule, generating mania commensurate with its stature. Basketball has March Madness. Women's Volleyball has December Dulcitude. Men's Volleyball has Arbitrary Month Arbitrage. But when it comes to football, we just trip over ourselves.

First we say that it's too computer guided, so we emphasize human voting. Then the humans are lobbied heavily, and Cal manages to win a game when the lower ranked Texas isn't even playing, and they LOSE A SPOT IN THE ROSE BOWL. What kind of system is it when we take a Pac-10 team out of the Rose Bowl?

So, to you, my panelists, I put the question: how do we bring sanity to the system? Play-offs? Calling audibles on bowl games (like right now, let's just have a 2-3 play in game for Auburn and Smokelahoma)? Just giving USC the national championship and letting all the other teams play for second? Bring back Zombie Knute Rockne and let him coach the Fighting Irish?

A Brief Essay on Nihilism

In the town where I was born
Lived a man who sailed to sea
And he told us of his life
In the land of submarines

So we sailed up to the sun
Till we found the sea of green
And we lived beneath the waves
In our yellow submarine

We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

And our friends are all on board
Many more of them live next door
And the band begins to play
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine

As we live a life of ease
Everyone of us has all we need
Sky of blue and sea of green
In our yellow submarine.

We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,Y
ellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine
We all live in our yellow submarine,
Yellow submarine, yellow submarine






--Daniel R. Foster

The Problem With Pronouns, Pt. 1

"He fell in love the moment he saw her face." As an avowed cynic, I have to of course take issue with the content of that sentence. But what might surprise you is that I also find trouble in its form. It's so easy to say. But because it's so easy to say, that means that writing a homosexual love story is harder to write. That's like saying, "you're here, you're queer, but we're going to adjust your car so it gets 5 miles less to the gallon." It's not a deal breaker but why?

The sentence I introduced this post with, when moved to a same-sex couple, sounds no longer lovely but just narcissistic. But if the meek shall inherit the Earth, the porno kings will charge $7.95 a month until they do, and so it's them I feel sorry for. Cause when you're reading high-falutin' literature, you can think about staging. But when you're... That's a sentence better left unsaid.

Take a typical sentence of a love scene: "he kissed her knee." Change one of the players to female, and we get "she kissed her knee", which has at least four meanings. Even if you're lucky and get an unkissable location like "elbow" it's still unclear who is kissing and who is kissed.

Stay tuned to the Enfranchised this week for more hard-hitting investigative journalism and late-breaking stories about that most mammoth of Megacorps... The English Language.

-Dan