Category Archives: Meanderings

Ever just let your mind wonder? Me too, and sometimes I get lost.

According to our pets. How we are stone

I don’t really understand religion.

Allow me to clarify. I understand, or at least I think I do, on some intellectual level, why it exists and why people believe in it. I don’t dislike it particularly, nor do I dislike religious people. I mean, there are plenty of religious people that I dislike, but those people would be assholes no matter what their belief system — their assholery just makes them put the religion out front and it’s what you encounter first. Even for them, I believe that I understand why they find it important.

But I still don’t get it. It simply doesn’t hit me at that gut level that I really think is required to actually be a religious person. I don’t feel that I am or ever will be able to really believe that there’s any kind of mystical unknown presence that controls the world. People tell me that I will someday have a kind of spiritual encounter, some kind of numinous visitation that will forever convince me as to the reality of the almighty and the correctness of whatever dogma they’re advocating to me. I just can’t even begin to imagine what form this epiphany could possibly take that would convince me of anything apart from my own delusional state.

I’ve thought about trying to pretend, about joining a church or synagogue and just going through the motions, but I really don’t think I would feel right doing something so insincere. It would be nice to have something to believe in, but it’s not the kind of thing you can just decide to do.

Oh well.

Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect

I realized something today. Two things actually. The first one made me happy:

American Gladiators was quite possibly one of the finest shows ever produced for television in any nation on any planet.

And the second one made me sad:

American Gladiators is now off the air and not available on DVD.

I will pay up to 100 American dollars for the first 3 seasons of American Gladiators on DVD.

It felt like the warning

Classical radio on the weekends continues to suck.

The other station I listen to is a ClearChannel station, of course. The run ads from time to time for a ClearChannel radio recruiting service — which I suppose is just an ad for letting them run employments ads for you on the radio. Seems like a good idea, I guess. Here’s the part that confuses me: They claim that advertising on the radio works better because people tend to listen to the radio while they’re at work — therefore you’ll be advertising to people who are working, not people who are looking for work.

Huh?

I am aware that the machination of those known as “Human Resources” and/or “Hiring” have never really made much sense to me, but I can’t imagine why it would be better to hire somebody who already has a job, rather than somebody who is looking for a job. Now I presume it’s better to hire somebody who is looking to leave their current job rather than somebody who was fired from their previous job, but to put want-ads in a medium simply because people who don’t work will be less likely to hear it — that just seems insane. Presumably people who are employed but looking for work will be looking in the same places as people who are unemployed and looking for works — newspapers, web sites, etc.. So the only people you’re going to have success with that the normal channels would have missed are people who have jobs, aren’t really looking for new work, but decide to work for you based on a radio spot. Not really the kind of person you’d want working for you.

Like I said, the idea of advertising for jobs on the radio seems like a reasonable one to me, but I am thoroughly baffled by the mentality behind basing this sales pitch. It’s either way beyond my meager intellect, or it’s mind-numbingly stupid. You decide.

Haunted me like a passion; the tall rock,

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~antoon/gadgets/555/555.html

Visit this URL. Nothing special, right? Just your average electronics webpage. Pretty well-written, nice diagrams, etc.

Ok.

View the page’s source. You might have to select “view source” from a titlebar menu in order to do it, or as a last resort, you ought to be able to visit this URL:

view-source:http://www.uoguelph.ca/~antoon/gadgets/555/555.html

Now, I’m solicing explanations. Why? For god’s sake, why?

Know further yet; whoever fair and chaste

So I’m watching this movie.

It’s called Zakhm. It’s from India. Bollywood to be precise. It’s… well, it’s pretty horrible. I have seen one other bollywood movie, called Mohabbatein, and it was actually not bad. I mean, a lot of the artistic choices are nearly diametrically opposed to what a western director would do, and in many places it’s amateurish even to the point of being childish, but it had great songs (it’s a musical), good energy, some funny stuff, etc. I enjoyed it. I bought the soundtrack. I thought I’d try some other indian films.

But Zakhm sucks. It looks like it’s pretending to have songs and dance sequences, but so far in the first hour, it’s only had 2 songs, and only one of them had dancing — the other one had sullen glares followed by a hug. The story is very somber, and is trying to be very serious and political, but the apparent amateurishness of the product and the complete lack of acting skill or production values really does not go well with the serious tone of the film. Add in the occasional schoolboy dancing on the top of a piano, and you get a pretty amazingly unpleasant viewing experience.

I actually wanted to talk about Zakhm because of the language in it. Of course, it’s mostly in Hindi — or some variant thereof, I suppose. But, about 10 or 15 percent of the spoken language is English. People will be rattling along in Hindi and suddenly there will be one phrase or sentence in English. Usually they’re short, idiomatic things — like answering the phone “Hello”, telling somebody “Please be careful”, “Goodbye”, “I love you” or “Happy birthday”. But in the scene I just watched, a doctor is talking our protagonist about his mother, who is sick. He’s speaking incredibly quickly in Hindi about how they’ve had to take in breathing apparatus, but she’ll be alright, etc etc. And in the middle of it, he says one sentence in English. They don’t have subtitles for the English, and since I was not really listening for comprehension, I missed it the first time around. I had to rewind, to hear him say “I think her lungs have collapsed.” Excuse me? Is there not a word in Hindi for “lungs” or something?

Can anybody explain to me why they sometimes speak in English and sometimes in Hindi?