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Podcasting Is Fun. You Should Come And Listen. 9EST.

One of our best, ever.  Skip forward six minutes or so for the fun.

Streams will show up here at 9EST, that’s in around 30 minutes!  (and we typically pregame for five minutes, so it really starts up at 8:55PM)

Mrs The Mrs – YouTube

Funniest News On the ‘Net.

 

In this episode:

  • War and Stuff
  • No Jackass of the Week
  • Conversation Street
  • ThinkRealFast

About Last Week

“I’d better call my housekeeper.” – Independence Day

The Mafia just started a new online banking system:  PayUpPal®.

So, this will be just a general housekeeping sort of post, and it will be shorter than usual.  I do try to make these posts mainly not about “me”.  I’m fairly uninteresting, but if I have a funny thing that happened to me, well, I’ll share it.  Mostly, I like to write about ideas and their implications and how they combine to create and change the world we live in, so writing about me is far less interesting than that.

Monday, normal stuff will be back, with the Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.

First, thank you (sincerely!) for all the well wishing in the past week.

I almost fell down one at night – I couldn’t see that well.

Second, I’d like to stress that, in every sense, the last week that I took off from blogging was really one of the best weeks of my life – not the “not blogging” part, but the “finishing the project” part.  I really like writing the blog because it helps me work out questions that I have.  I sometimes return to the same topics as my understanding increases, or sometimes just because I think I’ve found a better way to get my point across.  The Mrs. says, “Just take off your hat and everyone will see your point,” but I still keep writing.

And to the point of “blogging or not” I only promised to keep writing (about four years ago, I think) until the end of March 2024.  I’m going to keep going.  I found that during the week-long hiatus, I was always thinking about how to fit something I read or heard or talked about with The Mrs. into a post.

The result was, when I got back to writing, that it felt like a hand going back into a well-worn baseball mitt, one that’s perfectly broken in that snaps shut around a fly ball, where your fingers fit into the nooks and crannies they made over the years.  It felt like I was doing what I needed to be doing.  In that, the vacation was instructive – the desire to write is still there and won’t be turned off casually.  I mean, unless there’s a lot of PEZ® and cigars.  I can be bribed.

I came in second place in a Fidel Castro lookalike competition.  Close, but no cigar.

That’s good, because putting out 3500 plus words a week on multiple topics with a minimum of 18 memes a week, well, that takes some time. Sometimes, the topic is easy and “closes” well, like Monday’s.  Sometimes, it’s harder, and I have to fight to get the paragraphs together in a good sequence.

Oddly, some of the ones that I thought were my best stuff got a “meh” reaction and some of the ones I thought, “well, at least it’s finished” have gotten the strongest positive reactions.  That actually doesn’t bother me, because the results are in your hands.  I mean, if the person who got the idea judged it, communism would have been rated top notch.

Just goes to prove what grandma always said, “If you’re having trouble writing a blog post, the secret is just to put a nearly naked hot chick in a bikini in a meme or make a fart joke.”

My first high school girlfriend was like a super spicy burrito.  It hurt when she left me.

That being said, writing takes time.  It takes less time as I work harder to get better, but it still takes time.  In the best-case week, it’s still more than a dozen hours.  Add in the other stuff I have to do, and I often skip sleep to finish a post.  But less so recently, since I’ve found a way to use some otherwise non-productive time to shift a large chunk of the writing to time I used to waste.  So, overall, less missed sleep most weeks in 2024.

Third, I’d love to tell you more about the project I finished!

But I can’t, at least not right now because I haven’t figured out how to write it up in the right way.  Again: it was all positive, and everyone is healthy, all relationships are intact and strong, and exactly zero bad things happened.

The things I learned, of course, will ultimately make it into the blog.

Do British people call monkeys who share an Amazon™ subscription “prime mates”?

Fourth, to be clear:  despite all of the gloomy stuff I write, I am exceedingly positive about the ultimate outcome.

Of everything.

I do not pretend to know that path that, ultimately, will lead to victory.  But I do know that the true, beautiful, and good are very, very powerful and rarely lose for long.  The true, beautiful, and good exist today.  They will exist tomorrow.

Horrible things will happen, have happened – things we don’t, can’t understand.  I wish I could explain them all.

I can’t.

That is above my ability and is in His hands.  But I promise everyone reading this that He does exist because I’ve seen too much in my own life to believe anything else.  Norman Vincent Peale, who I believe was the lead singer of Mötley Crüe, once said, when asked about the afterlife gave an amazing analogy:  imagine a child in the womb.  Unbothered.  Moisturized.  Happy.  In their lane.  Focused.  Flourishing.  Then the pain hits, the squeezing, and the light, so bright, the air – for the first time air hitting my lungs, and who let that cat in here?

This movie is why I’m married now.

I can scientifically show, six ways from Sunday, that there is no way that you are randomly here in this place and time.  None of this is an accident, and there is a purpose, a much deeper purpose.  I didn’t write your part of the script, so I don’t know your part, but I do know:

We all play a part in it.  Our part.  And I believe yours is probably more important than mine, so what are you going to do with it?

Me?  I’m just lucky I get to write for the greatest audience in the world.

You.  That way I get to take partial credit for the great stuff you’re going to do.

Okay, post about me is over.  No homework for the weekend, enjoy yourselves, kids.  Wait for the bell!

See you back here again on Monday.

Finishing A Project

Just in the final process of finishing up a project that’s been years in the making.

All is well.

I’ll be taking a vacation from posting this week, and won’t even be putting up lame reposts as I’ve been about 360 weeks with doing posts three times a week (yes, that includes lame reposts, but not podcast posts) and am taking a week off, see you next Monday.

We will be doing the podcast on Wednesday, which is the funniest thing that you’re not currently listening to.

TTFN.

Red Pill? Blue Pill? What About The Green Pill?

“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill – the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill – you stay in Wonderland and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes.” – The Matrix

What happens if they try to get a new actor to play John Wick?  Keanu leaves.

This is a repost – I’ve got family business (nothing bad, everything’s okay) that’s going to keep me away from the keyboard – I’ll be back Monday!

The movie The Matrix is a classic.  Too bad they never made a sequel or three.  I’m sure they would have been fantastic.  Imagine taking the adventures of Neo™ beyond that big battle with Mr. Smith®!

Regardless, The Matrix did include several ideas that have made their way into the main stream, and stayed there.  The biggest, perhaps, is the idea of The Red Pill and The Blue Pill.  In the movie, Neo© is given the choice of taking The Blue Pill, which will allow his version of reality, the things he knows, to remain, even though they are founded on pretty little lies.

I’ll admit, The Blue Pill is attractive.  It’s comfortable.  But it is, in the end, a lie.  I imagine that since you’re here, lies aren’t the thing that motivates you and more than they motivate me.

If Bill Cosby had played Morpheus, I think he would have pushed the blue pill.

The alternative is The Red Pill.  The Red Pill is the The Truth.  The problem with The Truth is that it’s ugly.  The world we want to believe in is in The Blue Pill, because those lies speak to us so clearly.  When I first took the Red Pill on a particular subject, I felt betrayed.  Here was an entire line of propaganda that I had been fed since I was a child – it was a part of my base programming.

That’s the problem with The Red Pill.  Once I took it, I began to question everything.  Like a potato chip, you can’t have just one.  And once I began looking, I found even more to question.  That was difficult, because I had to reevaluate where I was wrong.  And what ideas I had were built around those incorrect ideas.

The Red Pill is demoralizing.  It’s not pleasant to have to reevaluate basic beliefs, especially those that comforted me and that I now know are wrong.  In part, this website is about that.  It’s looking at the things I think I know, and trying to distill what is true.  On more than one occasion, a post was nearly complete when I found an inconvenient fact.

In algebra class, people always thought I was plotting something.

That meant I was wrong.  That meant my post was wrong.  In one sense it sucks because it kept me up later to write something else.  But it never upset me, because I had learned something new, and was a bit closer to The Truth.

A key to getting through The Red Pill is to embrace The Truth, and improve.  However much.  A little each day is enough.

I suppose you could call that The Green Pill.  Or, for weightlifters, The Iron Pill.

So, which one makes me The Hulk if I’m angry?

It’s the idea that instead of being upset that the world isn’t the way that I want it to be, I don’t focus on that, at all.  Instead, I try to focus on improving myself.  Not a lot, just a little each day.  Can this post be better?  Can I get stronger?  Can I get in better shape?  Can I learn another useful skill?

Life is nothing without difficulty.  There is no honor in fighting weak opponents.  I mean, I could spend my day boxing three-year-old kids.  But my arms would get tired.  Unless there weren’t that many, or if they were all especially weak three-year-olds.  Like vegan-weak.

No, for a victory to have meaning, the challenge must be sufficient.  It would have to at least be boxing six-year-olds.  Or, maybe helping the world, or even one person, see what they normally would never have seen.

I had a globe on my desk, and met the guy who made it.  It’s a small world.

I have to have a quest.  The grander, the better, and I even live with and am comfortable that I won’t live to see the ultimate impact that I have on the world.  That’s fine with me.  Small pushes, over time, change the world.

Never let The Red Pill get you down.  The real choice, even in a world gone mad, is to keep our virtue, and never to give up in making ourselves better, and to improving what we can, even if it’s only a little.

The Red Pill is difficult to swallow, but it is a gift, and victory in finding and spreading The Truth is the challenge that fuels me, and is way less tiring than fighting either endless streams of toddler or endless streams of Agent Smith.

Dang.  Sure wish they had made a sequel to The Matrix.