Bonus points to whoever knows what song I am quoting in the title, sans Google.

Well, another dull day here on Planet Earth. Had a little excitement of the not so wonderful kind earlier. Learned the hard way that cleaning up Zombie Finger is not as easy as it looks.

I got a little to close to the cuticle, tugged on something I really should not have in my quest to remove all the dead skin from the area, and instead gave myself a nasty owie that bled quite freely for a while.

So, lesson learned. Leave that area to heal on its own, even though it is all craggy and ugly and is pretty much the only eye-catchingly horrid area left on Zombie Finger at this point.

In fact, honestly, I think I will leave the whole area wrapped up in a Band-Aid just so I am not tempted to mess with it.

I have a lifelong problem with picking at things.

I am sure you all are really glad to know that.

Meet the Muppets

Here is a treasure from the past : a clip from the original pitch reel for the Muppet Show!

If I was a television executive, I would buy the hell out of that show. And not because I actually believed all that Leo there says, but because with just a talking puppet and some cheapo graphics, they demonstrated such wit, energy, and unstoppable charm that to me, they were obviously television gold.

Of course, I am a huge Muppets fan, so my impartiality might be questionable.

And here is the thing : practically everything Leo says came true. They probably thought they were exaggerating wildly, but they really did a lot of those thing. I am positive that they must have gotten that 40 share at the height of the popularity. The executives names did not exactly become household words, but I am sure it helped their careers big time. And money? Scads, darling. Absolute scads.

And the best part is, it also delivers all the businesslike show pitch info about demographics and pedigree and such at the same time it is being hilariously fresh and entertaining.

No wonder the whole franchise has such long legs. We recently got the latest Muppet Movie on DVD, and I just cannot wait to see it.

My dream is to some day, some how, make something that damn good.

Ethics and the Brain

Talk about a perfect article for me! This Psychology Today article presents a theory of ethical development based on brain science.

And ethics and brain science are two of my favorite subjects in the world!

And as theories go, it is not bad for something built from observation up. As a philosopher, I find it a little simplistic and ill formed, and lacking in rigor. But no doubt it was conceived by scientists, not philosophers or ethicists, and so I am willing to cut it a fair bit of slack.

And it dovetails neatly with a lot of my own moral thinking, which is always a plus.

For instance, this notion that early childhood problems can cause a tendency to favour Safety Ethics certainly fits with my observations. I have been pondering a fundamental life variable that describes how fundamentally safe you feel, and how that informs every single other aspect of your psyche. If you feel the world to be fundamentally unsafe or even hostile, you will tend to be psychologically conservative. This could easily lead to shyness, depression, anxiety, and so on in later life.

And if the trauma is severe enough and violent enough, then the oversensitive stress response will tend towards neither flight (anxiety) or hiding (withdrawal), but fight (aggression). The person will come to believe that the only safety lies in constant vigilant hyper-agression, making others too afraid of them to consider aggressing against them.

And that feeds into another recent line of thought of mine, that certain influences “counter-civilize” people, forcing them to adopt a more primitive, even savage point of view. This is as true of a violently abusive childhood as it is of soldiers returning home from war.

It is nice to know that modern brain science backs me up on all of this.

Canada Kicks Ass

I am a day late on this, but I still feel like I have to note it.

Yesterday was the 95th anniversary of the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge, the day when Canadians, no longer just the colonials serving under someone else’s flag, did what 100,000 other Allies had died trying to do and took Vimy Ridge in France away from the Germans.

And we did it by doing something that sounds clearly insane : by shelling the German machine gun nests which had taken so many Allied lives, and then moving in directly after the artillery strikes, when the German machine gunners were still too afraid of getting blown up by our artillery strikes to even think about leaving the deep trenches for the relative exposure of their machine gun nests.

It was called a “rolling barrage”, and it took a brilliant mind to think of it, and a hell of a lot of guts, determination, discipline, and faith in your fellow soldiers to pull it off.

And though it cost us nearly 3,600 men, we did it. We took Vimy Ridge when nobody else could. And that made the world sit up and take notice of funny old Canada, and won us the respect of the rest of the Allies and gave them something to remember us for besides maple syrup and coldness.

And in turn, this gave Canada a sense of pride and worth in itself, and formed a basis for that most precious of all things, Canadian identity.

It must have been a heck of a day to be Canadian, ninety five years ago today, the day after Vimy Ridge. We had put our mark on the world, and Canadians from East to West must have been bursting with pride.

I know that today, 95 years later, I sure am.