Slow time

Memorial Day weekend: time slows down. There’s time for reading, for gardening, for catching up on Lost; time for the college graduation fireworks and the small-town band.

On these three days we have world enough, and time.

Facebook arithmetic

I learned from the Times this morning that you can’t have more than 5,000 friends on Facebook.

That’s a relief. That means I only have 4,997 more friends to find.

I had to join to view my son’s photos, and then I decided it was okay to be friends with my daughter and her college roommate, and then I forgot about it for awhile. Every so often someone plaintively asks to be my friend, like my brother or Chip’s best friend from high school or a really cool female ob/gyn we met on vacation in Dominica; and then Yahoo periodically reminds me I’ve left all these people hanging; but every time I test it out, by looking at my three friends’ pages, I emerge half an hour later wondering who and where I am.

So let’s see: if I added three people, it would be another half hour; if I found 4,994 more people, I could spend 832 hours immersed in their lives, which would take a little over a month if I never slept.

If you look at my Facebook page, which you won’t be able to because you’re not my friend, you’ll see two pathetic little comments on my wall (I’m still not really sure what my wall is) from my daughter’s college roommate, wishing me a happy birthday and, one year later, another happy birthday, commenting that no one else had written anything on my wall in between.

But I think, with apologies to my brother and Curtis and Carol, I’ll just keep it that way.

Memorial Day Weekend: Grass, sun and shadows

I would make up games for our little gang of neighborhood kids; one was called fox and rabbits. You’d think the point of it would be for the fox to catch the rabbits, but all I remember about it is sitting in a shade patch under the maple tree pulling up grass, and being very disappointed when my father, in his quiet friendly way, asked us please to stop.

And so I always think of him when I see grass that looks like emerald carpets. He put in all our lawns himself, grading, spreading the seed, and then – my favorite part – rolling it with a big metal roller filled with water.

And I always think of him on holiday weekends, especially this one, when the summer stretches ahead and the days are long.

I inherited his two favorite pastimes, working outside and then reading inside, but not his lawn technique. My emerald carpet, after years of struggle by me, finally got laid by a professional. My rabbit heritage, I guess, gave me that black lawn thumb.

Family values in South Carolina

First, the players. There’s Marc Sanford, the outgoing governor, who met his soulmate in Brazil. He has only a bit part, but at the teary press conference that made a hiking trail famous we caught a glimpse of our main character, his former press secretary.

Will Folks was the shaved bullet-headed guy wandering around in back. He resigned a few days later, presumably because he didn’t approve of the governor’s affair and didn’t enjoy lying.

Then there’s Nikki Haley, a Republican candidate in the S.C. gubernatorial primary who’s been leading in the polls ever since Sarah Palin endorsed her.

Now the story. Folks is now claiming he’s been doing some hiking of his own. Here’s how he put it on his blog a few days ago:

…on a very personal level I have become the primary target of a group that will apparently stop at nothing to destroy the one S.C. gubernatorial candidate who, in my opinion, would most consistently advance the ideals I believe in.
…within the last forty-eight hours several pieces of information which purportedly document a prior physical relationship between myself and Rep. Haley have begun to be leaked slowly, piece by piece, to members of the mainstream media. I am told that at least one story based upon this information will be published this week. Watching all of this unfold, I have become convinced that the gradual release of this information is deliberately designed to advance this story in the press while simultaneously forcing either evasive answers or denials on my part or on Nikki’s part.
I refuse to play that game. I refuse to have someone hold the political equivalent of a switch-blade in front of my face and just sit there and watch as they cut me to pieces.
The truth in this case is what it is. Several years ago, prior to my marriage, I had an inappropriate physical relationship with Nikki.

She, on the other hand, vigorously denies this. So now he’s releasing evidence, day by day, drip by drip. Like text messages from her campaign manager; like someone seeing his car parked at her house a lot; like phone logs showing hundreds of calls.

Except that he worked for her at the time.

And does what he’s doing make any sense? How does pre-emptively disclosing this possibly help his “ideal” candidate?

Now all the conservative bloggers are jumping all over each other accusing him of being paid by her opposition.

I don’t think he’s being paid, and I don’t think he had the affair. This same guy pled guilty to domestic violence five years ago, but claimed at the same time he was innocent (now he’s married to the poor girl).

He needs help.

Maybe he should check back in with Marc Sanford, who seems quite happy these days.

Bad memes

The pundits (mostly Republican, I hope) are trying out the meme that the Gulf oil spill is Obama’s Katrina. If I hated him the way I hated Bush, I’m sure I’d latch on to this.

But Bush and Brownie could have done something about all those people in the stadium and on rooftops. It’s hard to see what more the federal government could do now. And wait. I thought the federal government was a bad thing.

And then there’s Joe Sestak’s supposed job offer bribe. Poor Joe – trying to boost himself up a little bit, back when no one had ever heard of him (look at me, I’m more important than you think, the White House is so scared I’ll beat Arlen they offered me a job, but no, I can’t talk about it anymore and yikes I guess I probably shouldn’t have said anything in the first place); and now he’s taking the fall for whoever said whatever to him way back when.

Unfortunately, it all seems to be working a little better than the birther meme.

Messy men

The head of the FDIC, the head of the TARP Oversight Panel, the head of the SEC. What do they have in common?

They’re all women (in charge of cleaning up the messes, of course). And they’ve all been put down by men.

Here’s what the men had to say (from an article in Time written, notably, by a man):

About Sheila Bair, FDIC chair: “I cannot believe the continuing audacity of that woman.” (She had the audacity to warn Washington Mutual, a bank that subsequently collapsed, about its problems.)

About Elizabeth Warren, TARP Oversight Chair: “That’s not what reports are supposed to look like.” (From some Capitol Hill official.)

“Why not?” she asked.

“The language is far too direct.”

About Mary Shapiro, SEC Chair: “[I won’t be] intimidated by some blond, 5-ft. 2-in. girl.” (From the head of the Chicago Board of Trade, after Shapiro refused the traders’ request to be exempt from federal regulations.)

Her response? “I’m 5-ft. 5.”

You have to feel sorry for these poor marginalized chest-thumping white guys.

Or maybe not. They’ve done enough damage.

Baby belief

My rigorous true-atheist friend asks whether I think Vivaldi would not have written sublime music if he didn’t believe in the sublime.

I think he would have written sublime music, but not that music. I believe Vivaldi and Brahms and Mozart and all the others composed sacred choral music to pay homage to their conception of God.

She says (non-orthogonalicity notwithstanding), “Why not show a photo of a baby as a reason to be an agnostic rather than an atheist?”

They did, and do, seem like miracles.

We can believe, but we can’t know

You do realize that atheism and agnosticism are orthogonal, right?
That is, agnosticism is about what is knowable. The agnostic thinks that it is not knowable whether any gods exist.
Atheism is about what is not believed. The atheist does not believe any gods exist.
It is possibly (and extremely common) for people to be agnostic atheists — thinking that it is not possible to know if any gods exist while lacking belief in any gods.
Likewise, it’s possible and common to be an agnostic theist, thinking it is not possible to know if any gods exist, yet believing in the existence of one or more gods.
So, to try to explain why you’re agnostic instead of atheist betrays a misunderstanding on your part of what these words actually mean.

Since I believe people’s comments get lost on this blog, and since this one really made me think, I’m responding to it here. It’s from someone who calls himself scaryreasoner, and I admit he scared me a bit when I realized I didn’t really understand what “orthogonal” meant, apart from those wonderful geometry diagrams Tina and I used to draw.

But at least I’m in good company! Here’s a bit of transcript from a recent oral argument before the Supreme Court:

MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging -
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I’m sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh.
JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I liked that.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Orthogonal.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal, ooh.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented us a problem.
(Laughter.)

If you look it up in a dead-tree dictionary, you won’t find a definition that applies, because, I believe, it’s a word that’s been adopted by programmers. Related, but separate, you could think of it as meaning.

I believe the point Mr. Scaryreasoner is making (I think) is that knowledge and belief are separate. As I wrote yesterday, “Thinking and believing are two separate spheres. You can’t think your way into God.”

My problem with his reasoning, though, is that I believe, to quote Scaryreasoner, “that it is not knowable whether any gods exist.” I don’t just think it; I believe it, as strongly as a theist believes in God. An atheist (forgive the triple negatives here) not only “does not believe any gods exist,” to quote Scaryreasoner, but (from the Random House dead-tree unabridged dictionary) believes “that there is no god.” I believe you cannot know this.

I’ve probably lost everybody here, but if Mr. Scaryreasoner is still reading, I hope he will reply.

And, coming soon, a reply to one of my most loyal readers about the symbol for atheism.

I need to touch the wounds

Andrew Sullivan is an intelligent writer who is also a devout Christian. I have to admit I have a hard time putting those two characteristics together – my automatic prejudice is that if someone believes Jesus was actually God, they just haven’t thought about it enough.

This in itself is stupid, I realize. Thinking and believing are two separate spheres. You can’t think your way into God.

Anyway, lately on his site he’s been hosting a debate between atheists and theists that’s fascinating; about what everybody thinks happens after we die. The atheists tend to be a bit arrogant, postulating, for example, that people who believe in an afterlife do so because they’re cowards, afraid to face their own death. But they’re also quite compelling, writing about how their belief in their own dissolution makes them more able to appreciate the lives they have; more eager to live good lives because they will only live on in memory.

Sullivan himself writes:

I have two intuitions about what happens when I die. The first is that I cannot know in any way for sure; and I surely know that whatever heaven is, it is so beyond our human understanding that it is perhaps better not to try an answer. The second is that I will continue to exist in my essence but more firmly and completely enveloped in the love and expanse of God, as revealed primarily in the life of Jesus.

I agree with his first intuition, except for the part about heaven, unless he means that heaven has something to do with how everything got started, the one mystery that atheism has no capability to explain. As for the second, if Jesus popped into my room right now, I’d have to agree. But I just can’t get there from here. My room is empty.

Today, use Bing

I’m so out of it I’d forgotten all about Pac Man, and when I clicked on the Google Doodle to find out what it was nothing happened; and then I noticed the little “insert coin” box, so I inserted a coin and the little Pac Men started running around, but I couldn’t remember how to play, if indeed I ever did know; and so apparently I was still in the middle of the game when I tried typing May 22 into the little search box, but the letter “a” didn’t work, and lots of other letters didn’t work, and then some sort of siren started and I was afraid the Google, of all things, had infected my computer; but then it said “Game Over,” and took me to a page of results about how it’s the 30th anniversary of Pac Man.

So then I tried it again, and found I could move the little jaw icons on the bottom, but I wasn’t sure whether they or the cute little Pac Men were the good guys.

That’s what happens when you’re old enough to have forgotten how to play something that you don’t even remember whether you knew how to play it or not, 30 years ago.