Some Thoughts Regarding Taxidermy

1.
I appreciate taxidermy as an art form. In addition to finding it pleasing on a purely aesthetic level, I consider it a welcome and all too rare invitation to contemplate mortality. I am less appreciative of the relatively rare practice of having one's deceased pet prepared for display by a taxidermist. At the risk of being judgmental, it seems strangely paradoxical to me.

I think it's fair to presume that in almost all cases, a pet owner who chooses to preserve his pet after its death would tell you that he "loved" his pet, which I think is a nice thought. Humans have the capacity to "love" any number of things, and I don't believe that you can tell a person that he does or does not love something; once one decides that he loves something, then he loves it. For example, I myself love many things, including both the Absolute Edition of DC Comic's Identity Crisis miniseries that I recently purchased on Amazon.com and my mother. Nobody will tell me otherwise.

What Sort of Person Would You Have Been If You Had Been Born in the Past? --OR-- Some Advice on How to Avoid Being Judged Harshly in the Future by Your Unborn Grandchildren

One of my favorite episodes of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is "The Gang Cracks the Liberty Bell," in which the show imagines what Dennis, Mac, Charlie, et al would've been like had they been alive just before the Revolutionary War. Since the characters are horrible, selfish people in present times, they behave horribly and selfishly in the past, attempting to curry the favor of a British officer by selling Dee to him. Besides the fact that this is hilarious, I like this episode because I enjoy imagining what I and all of the people I know would've been like had we lived in various significant historical times. It's a fun exercise and a useful way to examine morality.

You'll be glad to know that this blog post is not about what I, the people I know, or any particular class or type of person would've been like in the past. I don't really want to go down that road. Rather, the first part of the post is about a framework for how to think about the question, since lots of people seem to have been asking it this week. The second part of the post is about those times when we tweak the question slightly and ask what older people in the present actually were like when they were younger and how the Internet will make it easier for future young people to ask this question about us. If that sounds interesting, please proceed past the jump.

Got A Problem with Corporate Personhood? Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics May Be the Solution You're Looking For

Over the past few months, the droning rhythm of Occupy drumcircles has given way to the brittle crunch of drumsticks as Republican Presidential candidates dine at folksy fried chicken restaurants across the country in hopes that the grease dribbling down their chins will attract the Undecided Voter, for whom (as we all know), folksiness is the chief quality on which to evaluate potential leaders of the free world.

Due to their temporal proximity, it was inevitable that the Occupy Movement would rub up against the Republican primary, particularly in the case of Mitt Romney, who has taken some time off from swimming through massive underground vaults of gold coins to serve as the physical embodiment of everything that the Occupiers are not. Early in his candidacy, a few rabble rousers showed up at an event in Iowa to hoot and howl at everything Romney had to say. They suggested he raise taxes on corporations. He responded by saying that corporations were people. Much yelling ensued.

Romney is of course correct. Not just in the sense that  corporations are made up of human beings, but also that corporations enjoy certain rights and privileges previously enjoyed only by the individual. In fact, corporations are probably society's most significant and successful non-religious attempt to create an entirely artificial person. Understandably, this makes certain actual humans uncomfortable. I have a proposal that may assuage those feelings that I will outline for you after the jump.

Pitchfork's Review of Childish Gambino's Camp is a Textbook Example of Why People (Justifiably) Hate Pitchfork --OR-- It's Time We Give Pop-Rap a Break

Let me start off by stating that I do not count myself among the people referred to in the title of this blog post. I love Pitchfork. Read it everyday. I find its reviews to be generally evenhanded, if a little too English MFA-y in style. I like that it operates in a milieu slightly below the mainstream but well above the underground, which is where my own tastes lie. I find the regular columns (particularly Poptimist and Resonant Frequency) to be of uniformly outstanding quality.

But every once in a while, one of Pitchfork's reviewers writes a piece so misguided that it lends total credence to the leagues of Pitchfork detractors and makes me feel like a fool for defending the site as much as I do. Today's review of Childish Gambino's Camp was one such piece and speaks to a larger problem with music criticism in general. I'll explain why after the jump.

The "Socially Liberal / Fiscally Conservative" Code --OR-- Two Relatively Brief Political Diversions In a Blog Normally Unconcerned with Politics

It is not, generally speaking, my custom to write about politics in these pages. I once wrote a piece about my experience attending Barack Obama's inauguration, but that piece wasn't explicitly "political" in the sense that I did not write it to advocate a particular point of view. I'm not sure that this piece is political in that sense either, although I will be advocating certain points of view. I am writing this piece for two reasons:

1. To try to better understand why people identify themselves as "socially liberal but fiscally conservative," and 
2. To clear up a partially valid but embarrassingly delivered point I made in the context of a mortgage-crisis discussion I was having at a bar the other night with two (possibly three, my recollection is regrettably imperfect) new friends that I consider both highly intelligent and deserving of an explanation.

It is my hope that my discussion of the first topic will be interesting to a fair amount of people. I do not harbor such hopes for the second topic and suspect that it will be interesting to only that segment of the population that happened to be sitting at a certain table in a certain bar in downtown Athens around 1:00 in the morning two Fridays ago, and probably to only one specific member of the aforementioned population. Regardless, now you know what you're in for, so please click on the link below if you remain interested. If not, here is a link to a highly recommended YouTube video about cats.

A Short Piece of Fiction Inspired by an Allegedly Authentic Photo of an Infantile Hitler that I Found On the Internet

An argument for the immediate, persistent video surveillance of every interior and exterior physical location on the face of the Earth

My argument rests on two premises: 1) that the universe is infinite along all four dimensions experienced by human beings (three space and one time) and 2) that there is a chance, however incomprehensibly small, that travelling backwards through time is possible. Obviously, I cannot conclusively prove either of these premises, but if you are willing to accept both, then you must be willing to accept the necessity of immediate, persistent video surveillance of every interior and exterior physical location on the face of the Earth. There is no other option.

Why The Hills Was An Important Television Show

For much of tonight, the series finale of The Hills sputtered. Major plot points introduced in the penultimate episode were hurriedly rushed to a conclusion in the finale. Stephanie went from first date to exclusivity. Lo's relationship with the little-seen Scott became the most salient thing about her. Kristin put it all on the line with Brody and then decided to move to Europe.

Throughout, the girls talked much of transition. They seemed to share a sense that a chapter of their lives was ending. This is true, of course. After tonight, none of these people will be stars of a television show on MTV. But the cast members of The Hills aren't supposed to talk about the show on the show, right?