Today in Judge Parker…

WE ALL KNOW WHAT YOU DID TO SOPHIE!!! says Bunny. She is still hanging on to the car door, but it’s beginning to look more like a tire iron. Spencer’s mind is drifting… drifting…

WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?!! says Spencer, though she knows. Does she know? She thinks she knows. Oh god, please don’t hit me with the tire iron.

YOU WENT BALLISTIC AND BEAT HER UP FOR NO REASON!!! says Bunny, the larva in her ears quivering. All of a sudden she has no lower teeth and a dashing nose ring. Was the ring there before? wonders Spencer as she tries to make sense of what Bunny said. Spencer tries to reason but no, she keeps speaking. Must focus… cannot… focus…

SOPHIE’S A COOL KID, says Bunny. I DON’T LIKE PEOPLE WHO ABUSE HER!!!

The one-sided conversation is a mind-control tactic that Bunny picked up from her guerilla fighters in Central America. When they take prisoners they will talk to them incessantly, and slowly the captives begin to believe in the reality they speak. Speak gibberish and they believe in gibberish. Falsely accuse the prisoner enough and soon she herself will believe the accusations. Bunny is delaying Spencer from her needed therapy session, and given her already fractured mental state from the Little Sister Incident, Spencer is in no condition to resist mind games. She feels the leather serpent tighten around her neck. She needs air. Who is Sophie? Oh god, I can’t breathe. She will admit to anything if it means an escape from the PROBLEM IN THE SCHOOL PARKING LOT!!!

WHAT MAY HAPPEN TOMORROW YOU WONDER!! I WONDER TOO? EVERY DAY IS FULL OF WONDER IN THE WORLD OF JUDGE PARKER!!!!

Read today’s episode yourself.

The chicks in Judge Parker are hot. They’ve got this whole aloof snobbiness to them that is absolutely irresistible, not to mention a unique fashion style that rivals the homeless grab bag special at Salvation Army.

Today, Spencer is wearing a leather belt around her neck, which complements her sneering face and Star Trek uniform quite nicely. Her friend Bunny is wearing a Rambo bandanna and has caterpillars growing out of her ears. Bunny’s face makes her look like a cross-dressing pirate that got his nose broken in an acid-swilling tussle. Her lips are at risk of dripping off her face, but thankfully her bare midriff and tight pants makes up for the whole thing. Bunny would definitely be a two-bagger, but a bagger nevertheless.

But the visuals aren’t the only appeal of Judge Parker. Let us delve straight into this thick and bubbling goulash of a plot!

ON THE WAY TO HER COUNSELING SESSION, NEDDY RUNS INTO A PROBLEM IN THE SCHOOL PARKING LOT!!!!!!!!! (emphasis mine… mostly)

OH NO! I say. WHO IS THIS NEDDY THAT WILL RUN INTO A PROBLEM! WILL SHE STEP IN GUM! WILL SHE TRIP AND GET A FACE FULL OF GLASS! WILL THE SCHOOL BULLY MAKE HER EAT BUGS!

Let us assume that Neddy is Spencer the Star Trek girl. You see, Neddy is just the word ‘eddy’ with an ‘nnnnnnnn’ sound, which is the sound the pop machine makes when it gives you a diet cola, when it dispenses a diet cola, which rhymes with spence a diet cola, and when you kick the machine because you didn’t want a diet cola you wanted a sandwich it goes ‘RRRRRRRRRRRR’ and trudges off to fight with the pinball machine. So it becomes obvious through this clever delineation that Neddy = Spencer. You dig?

LET GO OF MY DOOR, BUNNY, says Spencer. I DON’T HAVE TIME TO CHAT!!!!

WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT, SPENCER!!!! says Face Melt Pirate Bunny.

Uh oh. As the plot progresses it appears that Bunny and Spencer aren’t friends at all!

YOU GONNA SEND ME TO THE HOS-PITAL LIKE YOU DID YOUR LITTLE SISTER?! says Rambo Bunny with her threatening cronies wearing cowboy hats lurking in the background. Bunny knows how to press Spencer’s buttons. She has needed weekly conseling ever since the Little Sister Incident two years ago. Little Sister is the gang Spencer runs around with, a close-knit team of drug addicts and philosophical geniuses. Spencer had a minor slip-up at their last bank job that landed most of the members of Little Sister in the hospital. She suffered second degree burns to her neck, which she conceals to this day under the leather belt.

YOU’VE BEEN SMOKING BA-NANA PEELS AGAIN, BUNNY… BACK OFF!!!!!! says Spencer. Bunny is the head of a cocaine smuggling operation that runs out of a loose affiliation of banana republics in Central America. In a fit of rage, Spencer has accidentally revealed her knowledge of Bunny’s involvement.

Look out, Spencer! Nasty hot-headed comments like that may get your fingers slammed in the car door… or worse!!! WHAT IS GOING TO HAPPENED? I AM SO EXCITED. STAY TUNED FOR TOMORROW, WHEN THE NEXT CHAPTER OF THIS EPIC STORY UNFOLDS!

Oh, here’s the comic.

Running a website is like having a peach. You hold the peach, make a little room for the ant to hide, squeeze the peach and dream about you… woman.

More specifically, you become the ant. You make a little virtual space on the good ol’ net, crawl inside and get cozy. You end up with the splendid experience of living in a peach, but few others can relate to it because they do not live in peaches. They live in houses or churches or under couches. They do not really care about peach-based living, beyond the novelty of the idea. The technicalities are a bit boring… what to do about the juice flowing down the walls, how to appropriately spackle to curb fruit rot, whether track-lighting is the best choice for illuminating the chambers… it asks too much of the audience that they be interested in every aspect of living in a peach.

So the author is presented with quite a dilemma. Does he write extensively about peaches, given his vast knowledge and experience of peaches? Or does he write about things that may be more appealing to his audience?

People like curios. People like to read about curios. Living in a peach is a curio. Sleeping in a toaster is a curio. Having liquid fire on tap in the bathroom is a curio. A vivid description on how one has completely lost his sense of time is a curio. A well-written exposition on the extended senses (sense of time, sense of rhyme, sense of rhythm, sense of the sexes, sense of love, making/not-making sense, confusion between sense and scents) would be a nice curio.

When the writer starts going into much more detail than the reader cares to know, the curio ceases to be a curio. It becomes tedious and uninteresting. …so then, does the writer serve his own desires and write about all the tedious details of living in a peach because he finds them interesting, or does he have a responsibility to serve the reader and find a more accessible topic?

In two words: Yes.

The Existential Complications of Cromlechism(.)(!)(?)(…)

Immediate conclusion: His (or her, but our language is so crippled by the lack of a non-gender possessive adjective… unfortunately using either word in substitute for the other can be a loaded statement, but using both with / is just plain ugly and such abusers of the language should be sent to the Hell of Asymmetrical Terminological Constructs) purpose

RESET. Immediate conclusion: His purpose is to write. Audience be damned. They’re along for the ride, whether they wanna be or not. To not allow the author to write would defy the teleology murmuring in his ear. The author may be crippled in trying to appeal to his audience (which, really, is a noble thing for him to do. He sacrifices a part of himself to communicate ideas to others in a way that is entertaining and sensical. It pulls him out of self-indulgent writing, which arguably serves no purpose but that of the actual writer, and grinds the thoughts on a millstone until they can be interpreted and loved by others) and

RESET: Immediate conclusion. His purpose is to write. Audience be damned. They’re along for the ride, whether they wanna be or not. To not allow the author to write would defy the teleology murmuring in his ear. The author may be crippled in trying to appeal to his audience, and while there are definite benefits in imposing that restriction, sometimes the damages can outweigh the benefits. (But who can be the authority in deciding whether “the damages outweigh the benefits” is true? We have no Judge Dredds of the writing community darting around on flying motorcycles, deciding absolute Truths when the question arises.

Do the damages really outweigh the benefits? Are my impressions accurate? If they aren’t completely accurate, are they accurate enough to generally decide the best path?

We will never know until we create a perfect copy of the universe, parallel to our own, and try out our hypotheses there. What would have happened if I went left? If I wrote about HTTP statistics instead of peaches? Well, just plug your event into the Second Universe and choose the path you could have taken. Accelerate time to the present, and see where each strand ends up. Oh, but there are so many complications with this model. If you went left you would never have ended up looking at the Second Universe, wondering if you should have gone left. Also, at that fork the two futures completely diverge from one another. Left would end up with its own set of left/right choices, and right as well. Would you not want to know where each one of those branches could have led as well? It quickly sprouts into a tree of an incomprehensible number of paths. A person could be driven insane at the helm of this machine. Neitzsche would say focus on the future, instead.

)

RESET: Immediate conclusion. His purpose is to write. Audience be damned. They’re along for the ride, whether they wanna be or not. To not allow the author to write would defy the teleology murmuring in his ear. The author may be crippled in trying to appeal to his audience, and while there are definite benefits in imposing that restriction, sometimes the damages can outweigh the benefits. If he has something he wants to say, nothing should be substituted in its place.

And this conclusion is riddled with problems. It was conceived before all the above points were made during its creation. It assumes the quality of the future (damages = worse future, benefits = better future) can be accurately determined by the writer. All I really wanted to say in this entry is this:

Cromlech is picking up 30 hits a day and the number appears to be increasing slowly. The Statesman website get 40 – 60 hits a day. Keep those hits coming people! We’ll beat out that dastardly newspaper yet. My next goal is to beat out the UMD online registration site. It got nearly 700 hits on Friday. We can do it. I know we can.

Or something silly to that effect. This entire expose happened because I wasn’t sure if I should write what I want or write what readers might want. I am very, very pleased with the result, regardless. If you don’t like it you can eat a bag of hell.

Do not put sewing needle in mouth and start coughing. VERY DANGEROUS. They should put warnings on these suckers.

This one’s going out, so please bear with.

Often times in techno-thriller movies they have a scene where the Big Suit busybodies are watching a blurry videotape. The guy in the mustache always squints closer to the screen, pats the techy-geek kid in a Hawaiian shirt on the shoulder. He jams his finger at a point on the screen, maybe representing a handpurse or monkey or whatever, and demands in a gruff voice, “Enlarge this section! I wanna see the fleas on the handpurse and read the brand name on the monkey!”

Techy-geek kid in Hawaiian shirt dazzles his finger across they keyboard and an enlarged shot appears on the screen. A few more keystrokes sharpen the details, and voila. Fleas.

And a cross-branded Klondike-Pennzoil Bar monkey.

Impossible. The original tape is as focused as you are going to get. The ‘sharpened details’ are not encoded onto the video, or else they would be represented as such during regular playback. You can’t get more detail from a less-detailed starting point.

Does the mind work in a similar manner? How can we forget things and remember them later? Let’s say you have a recollection of a history… say, a camping trip. Without outside resources (other people’s accounts, photographs, etc…) your memory of the trip is as detailed as it can get. But then, how do we remember things at later dates that we haven’t remembered before? The smell of pine boughs can suddenly transport you back to the experience more vividly than simply recalling the memory. The smell can actually trigger the feeling of the trip, not just your stored images of it. If you haven’t consciously called up that feeling since the trip, how come you are able to with a little nudge from the nose?

It appears there’s something more to the mind than just storage. …or, if the mind is just storage, it appears to store more than we can know. If it were just a videotape I could play my mind back, and be satisfied that everything the camera was able to capture appears on the screen. If it’s not on the screen, the camera did not capture it. The mustache can hound techy-geek Hawaiian shirt boy all day, he can squash out three packs of cigarettes in an overflowing ashtray, but he’s never going to extract more information from the tape than the tape captured. The limits are clearly defined.

But the mind seems to have different levels of detail; I am able to zoom in on a specific part of a memory and dissect it. This suggests that the mind is drawing from a much larger reservoir than I am conscious of. The potential levels of detail are not accounted for in a gloss recall of the event, and at times it seems the mind is only limited by the inability to concentrate on a memory long enough to see it to its end. It feels like I have infinite straws drawing from every soda fountain in the universe.

How much information is really stored in there? Thanks to solipsism we can never know. We can only know the memories that we recall; if we don’t recall it, we can’t know whether it’s there or not. Fortunately it is additive; you can keep recalling more memories but you can’t unrecall a memory. …but you can never know the limit of how many memories you can recall. That darned monkey of the mind is always grinding away, awash in colorful thoughts of Genghis Kahn and Tang and Dresden and other proper names that require capitalization. So long as new ideas are always being created you cannot claim to know the limits. It’s like the universe. It keeps expanding and creating itself at the four-dimensional edge. What’s the edge look like? What’s on the other side of the edge? We don’t know. We can’t know.

I think I see now why most philosophers can’t write a book that makes any damn sense.

As Rickrobot would say, “It’s all good.”