There’s been a lot of hoopla these days on Xeni Jardin’s decision to remove several (if not all of the) posts referencing blogger Violet Blue on Boing Boing.

People have been raising a regular ruckus, especially considering BB’s long track record supporting free culture, and have been accusing BB of censorship, revising history, and in general being very hypocritical.

There’s been a veritable tornado, just check out the comments on That Violent Blue thing, you’ll see me down around number 1788 and 1790. As usual, I ended up writing long, post-worthy, comments. But technically I don’t have the time right now to do this, so I’ll just copy and paste my responses:

It’s sad that this has blown up so much.

BB has always been vocally supportive of open and free culture. Removing posts from BB itself doesn’t conflict with that, as it is their right as owners of the site to control what copies of their posts are available here.

Xeni’s example of her father burning his own paintings maps well onto this situation. From what I understand, he destroyed works that he had created but never released into society at large, and so there was no attack on culture. And in the case that those paintings had been published publicly, he still has the right to destroy his own personal copies.

The only “wrong thing” he could have done would be to publish his works into public consumption, thereby making them a part of our culture, then go out later and destroy every copy that existed. Without *all* of those circumstances, he’s in the clear, in my mind, from a “Free Culture” standpoint.

Now for this controversy, we have a collection of works (posts) that are published online at BB for the public at large, and have without question become a part of our culture. Now, if these works existed only on BB’s servers, and they deleted them, that would wrong as it would be destroying every copy that existed.

But if you actually read BB, you’ll know that the nature of the Internet doesn’t allow for things to disappear. Cory’s been chanting it for years: “There is no future in which bits become harder to copy.” There are copies of BB everywhere, in fact, it would be near impossible to do the “wrong thing” and destroy every copy to wipe it from our cultural log.

Hell, even traditional newspaper’s couldn’t easily “unpublish” something, unless they could recall every newspaper they printed. Arguing that they’re “the public record” is moot point, because they couldn’t unpublish even if they wanted to. The “public record” argument was more valid 200 years ago, when a publisher had a more reasonable chance of destroying every copy that existed of their work.

People are only confused (and then angry) because they can’t separate the BB server from the BB content. The BB server contains but one visible copy of each post, the original copy to be sure, but just one copy.

If someone destroyed the Declaration of Independence, it’d have no effect on future generations benefiting from its text. Sure, symbolically, it’d be a big loss, but it’s not like then all of the other copies would “unpublish”.
The only metrics that matter form a positive relationship: how many people are influenced by it and how many copies are available.

The more people that are influenced by a work, the more important that all of the copies aren’t destroyed. As the internet quickly and efficiently copies popular works everywhere, the less it matters that any one copy is destroyed.

BB could pull the plug on their site right now, and we’d still have copies of everything available.

And then, in response to comment 1789, which argues for stronger considerations to be made for original sources (over the multitude of copies):

As I said, if the original Declaration of Independence was destroyed, it’d be a symbolic loss, but it wouldn’t affect the availability of it’s cultural impact on future generations.

Sure, when the main source of a work destroys their original copy, it can make finding the work inconvenient, and can be very upsetting, but in this day and age, it’s really hard to get rid of something that’s popular.

I too, am upset that they’d remove their original copies, and I agree that they could have handled the disclosure much better.

I am also regularly neurotic with worry about the loss of culture. I’m native Hawaiian and fully mourn the loss of cultural information that occurred when the Missionaries came (both by the Missionaries and the Hawaiians themselves who had predicted the the coming of a “superior” culture and had gone about dismantling their own).

But the loss on the BB server did not destroy the BB works. A real “unpublishing” of something with a strong cultural/historical influence that is available online is nigh impossible.

The only real way, at this point, of removing something from wide circulation would be to destroy the infrastructure that supported that circulation.

To destroy the work completely would mean not only the network, but all of the mirrors, caches, hard copies, etc.

I think then that we’ve more to fear from those electronic munching crazy rasberry ants than from Xeni’s editorial decisions.

At this point, I don’t plan on following the thread on BB further, but I’ll gladly respond to comments here.

If you’ve spoken to me for more than 15 minutes, you’ll learn two things:

1. I was in the Peace Corps.
2. In about a year, I lost 105 lbs.

The abridged story (slightly longer at the link above) is that I followed the Hacker’s Diet, and by eating less and exercising more, and keeping track of it all in a spreadsheet, I went from humpback to humpable in record time.

A recent post on Zen Habits, Living Life Overweight: 10 Reasons Why You’re Not To Blame, however, has really got me going, as the intent of the article has been completely missed by 99% of the commenters.

Alex Shalman is not saying that society is completely to blame for a person’s weight, he’s merely listing some of the many, many factors, both physical and mental, that affect a person’s weight.

The main argument against the post is that a person’s weight is solely (or nearly so) determined by their willpower, or relative lack thereof. Nothing else matters. If you’re skinny, it’s because you have willpower, if you’re fat, it’s because you don’t.

I’ve been commenting back all day, so I thought I’d resummarize some of my thoughts here, in case ZH ever goes the way of the dodo:

The Big Misunderstanding:

The biggest misunderstanding, I think, is between the people who are naturally skinny, and have at most lost 10 lbs. in a short time frame for vanity purposes, and their belief that since it was easy for them, it must be from their amazing willpower, and that anyone who is severely overweight must be lazy.

Just because losing 10 lbs. in 2 weeks is easy, doesn’t mean that following the same regimen you’ll lose 100 lbs. in 20. It’s not a linear relationship, and it’s not ruled all by willpower.

Daily Water Variance:

First, everyone understands that at the most basic level, to lose weight all you have to do is burn more calories than you consume.

But you see, a person’s weight can vary by as much as 13 lbs. from day to day, due to the stuff that goes in and out of us: air, a pound or so of food, and pounds and pounds of water. We sweat away pounds as we sleep. Try drinking a glass of water before and after your next weigh-in, wow, you gained a pound right?

So for what I call “vanity weight loss”, where one loses 0-10 lbs. in less than 2 weeks, willpower has nothing really to do with it. I can starve myself for a couple days, and voila, I’m 10 lbs. lighter. Or, stretch it out and only “watch what I eat”, of take a dehydrating fad diet, and I’ll have magically lost that weight.

But it’s just water. Weight loss does not always mean fat loss.

Large Quantity Fat Loss:

But real, large quantity fat loss takes a long time. First, there’s a honeymoon stage, where the weight drops off fast (say 5 lbs./week), then there’s a long arduous burn (as little as 0.25 lbs./week), with lots of plateaus in between. By plateaus, I mean that our body as weights that it settles at naturally, and that unless we kick start our regimen, we can hang around certain weights almost indefinitely.

People Have Different Metabolisms:

It’s a simple fact that people have different metabolisms and different urges, so my numbers won’t match up with yours. Your honeymoon might be longer or shorter, your plateaus as well, but the point is that it’s not linear, and that vanity loss and real fat loss run on different schedules and aren’t easily related.

In addition, I’m against the arguments that make exceptions only for those with medical conditions that affect metabolism, like diabetes, etc. You don’t need a “medical condition” to qualify for a metabolism that justifies your weight. You can’t group people into two separate and all encompassing groups: one with a “standard” metabolism whose weight is a function of will, and the other with a “special” metabolism due to disease that overrides their will for weight-management.

Willpower Is The American Drug:

Personal responsibility, like individualism, is the American drug of choice.

No matter how complicated the circumstances truly are, we’ve got personal responsibility so wrapped up in us that we’re high on it, so convinced that everything in the universe comes down to the magical will of an individual.

No naturally skinny person with a high metabolism wants to admit that that’s the reason for their shape, it’s much sexier to say that their “will” is responsible. In a society that idealizes skinny, it’s far more impressive to say that your will keeps your body at the ideal, look how much willpower I have, aren’t I attractive, eh?

You’d get laughed out of a room for bragging that your strong will powers your height, but for some reason we take it as a perfectly valid reason for our weight.

Flipping Everything Topsy Turvy:

If our society favored fat, then the naturally fat people would be saying the same thing, that it’s because of their impressive will that they were fat. And the naturally skinny people would be mocked at for having less fat, and then obviously less will. I’ve lived in countries where fat was in, and being skinny was shameful.

But ask yourself, naturally skinny people, if it’s all about will power, could you pack on the pounds? Could you chow down twice what maintains you, every day, for the year it would take to gain 100 lbs. and be obese? To keep eating after your skinny-wanting body said you’d had enough? To override your lack of hunger, and just splurge, every day?

If you’re anorexic, could you muscle down more carbs than your body needed, every day for months on end until you were obese?

You could, if you made it a habit. Just like a fat person can make losing weight a habit, a skinny person can make gaining weight a habit.

Habitual Health:

The trick toward any weight regimen, is making it habitual. If you have to will yourself to do it, you won’t. The skill of weight management is a skilled unawareness. You have to make it second nature, or the manifold influences will punch you up and down. Because it takes so long, you have to make it routine, otherwise, you’ll be at it only at inopportune moments, which doesn’t really work. I never floss, but desperately try to make up for lost time before going to the dentist, which of course, never fools him.

The Many Factors:

What’s important to realize, is that every single person has their own set of factors, both internal and external, that affect their weight.

The multitude of factors that influence a person’s weight is so staggering, that we couldn’t list them all. And even if we could, how can we generalize which ones have the most/least pull for any given individual?

Just because I can think of ten things off the top of my head that I think most influenced my dramatic weight loss, doesn’t mean that I’m right, or that my list will work for everyone else. And how could I even begin to rank which ones were the most influential?

The best any of us can do is list off the things that we know of that influence weight (like Alex did in his post), and then let each individual use that list of ingredients to makes their own weight control recipe.

Claiming that any one list is definitive is a laugh, and claiming any one is the absolute most important (like willpower) is arrogant, because it presumes that you know all of the factors, that all people are influenced by them equally, and that you so well understand the relationship between them that you can clearly identify the single overriding factor.

My Weightloss Recipe:

For what it’s worth, here’s my recipe (with unknown proportions) off the top of my head, incomplete, yet unabridged, of what made me lose weight:

• Unhealthy, fattening diet, basically eggs, bread, steak and french fries (deep fried)
• But only two small meals a day, no snacks
• Lots and lots of water
• Statistics to filter out daily weight variation noise (spreadsheet)
• Writing down my weight every day (spreadsheet)
• Rode bike to work, no hills, 15 minutes each way
• Fear of the family history of heart attack, cancer, diabetes, obesity
• Frustrations with mobility issues (chaffing legs, out of breath, sweating constantly, B.O.)
• Shame for those above (B.O., sweating)
• Making my intentions public, to make myself accountable to others ie. bragging that I was going to do it, blogging my progress, then having to live up to my boasts
• Instinctual desire to look more “attractive” ie. get laid (or at least have an “axe” commercial moment)
• Living for an extended period in a place that favored being overweight, where people constantly point out your weight, even if it was meant as a compliment
• Outliving 10 childhood years of being “sickly”, on a constant supply of asthma meds just to keep me breathing, never want to be a “victim” of my health ever again
• Feeling empowered that as I lost weight, made me want to lose more
• My sexy willpower

I guess if you can group together living up to my boasts, following my instincts to attract women, being scared of inheriting my family’s health, being ashamed of my fat body and sickly past, and eating deliciously unhealthy food, and making all that a daily habit that festered in my subconscious for a year, as “just willpower”, and that makes you feel better about yourself, then go for it. You’ll have plenty of people to agree with you.

War Over Willpower:

One final note to address the commenters on that post who made the connection to “personal choice”, and compared the choice to lose weight to the choice to commit murder. Bad analogy.

Murder is a discrete act, whereas real weight loss takes habits and time. I can physically go right now and kill someone, just as easily as I could physically starve myself for a couple days to lose 10lbs. of vanity weight. The decision is a one shot deal, and the action takes place in a short period of time.

But fat loss takes way longer than any one discrete decision can handle.

Losing 100 lbs. is like fighting a war of attrition.

It’s not about having an iron will, it’s about making loss routine, and dragging it out until in your conscious life you all but forget that it’s happening. Real wars last for years when it’s only in the back of our minds, when we don’t confront it face to face every day.

If you make healthy living into a habit, then it runs on its own steam.

To sum up: it’s not entirely society’s fault, nor entirely your own, like everything else in this messy world, it’s a mix of both. Weight loss doesn’t come from one night of hard concentrating and willpower, but from being habitually, unconsciously healthy in your habits. Just as gaining the weight didn’t come from a one day binging of 50+ pounds of food, but from being habitually, unconsciously, unhealthy in your habits. Willpower may be a factor, but it’d be presumptuous to call it the sole one.

Walk the middle path and be happy!

Note: This post may seem haphazardly organized, because it’s mostly cuts and pastes from my comments on the original post, with some minor continuity editing, and because after hours at it, I got tired, and just posted it as-is.

In my last post, I started exploring the relationship between Taoist thought and the nature of human language.

The topic is huge and there’s so much material to reference, but the post was already too long, so I had to cut out several juicy quotes for later posts. Here’s a parable from Zhuangzi that further explores the issues of words and the expression of understanding:

Duke Huan was reading in the hall and a cartwright was making a wheel in the yard in front. Laying down his chisel, he went up and spoke to Duke Huan.

“May I ask what Your Royal Highness is reading?”

“I am reading the works of the sages,” was the reply.

“Are those sages living?”

“No, they died long ago.”

“Then what you are reading is merely the chaff left over by the ancients.”

“I am reading,” said the King. “What does a cartwright know about things like books? Explain yourself. If you can give a good account of your remark, I shall let you go, and if not, you shall die.”

“Let me take an example from my own profession,” replied the carpenter. “When I make the spokes too tight, they won’t fit the wheel, and when I make them too loose, they will not hold. I have to make them just right. I feel them with my hands and judge them with my heart. There is something about it which I cannot put down in words. I cannot teach that feeling to my own son, and my son cannot learn it from me. Therefore, at the age of seventy, I am good at making wheels. The ancients perished long ago and that something which they could not communicate perished with them. Therefore, what Your Majesty is reading is the chaff of the ancients.”

James Ford, in a recent post on his blog Monkey Mind, Words Spiritual and Religious, discusses the human capacity for language, and the recent relative differences between the meanings of the words “spiritual” and “religious”.

Concerning language James says:

An old and dear friend said of language and she mainly meant vocabulary is like play dough, it’s meant to be played with.

How does Taoism approach human language?

Taoism and language:

Up until now, I’ve tip-toed around the fact that Taoist thought is so throughly intertwined with the nature and role of human language, simply because I can’t envision a way of introducing it without explaining most of Taoism at once.

Previously, in discussing the Taoist approach to understanding reality, I’ve said: a Taoist favors experience over formal education, tries to decode hidden truths within human institutions, and eventually tries to stop learning and lose unessential knowledge.

Now that I have some Taoist posts under my belt, let me start the conversation on language by discussing the importance of learning the value of words, or perhaps more accurately, learning the limitations inherent in language. These limitations are most exquisitely summarized in this passage from the Zhuangzi:

There are some things that you can talk about, and some things that you appreciate with your heart. The more you talk, the further away you get from the meaning.

In another passage, the value of words is discussed:

When people think of learning the truth, they think of books. Books are only words and words, of course, have a value. But the value of words lies in the meaning behind them. This so-called meaning is but an effort to grasp at something and that something cannot really be expressed by words.

This is something that nearly every person on the planet understands deep down as true, though few belief systems say it. In fact, most religions prescribe more than just beliefs, but a set of rituals and human institutions, the value of which, like words, lies in the meaning behind them, not the actual institutions themselves.

Love and Tao:

Take “love” as an example. No matter how you try to define and describe it, no words can encompass it completely. A person understands love not through words, but by experiencing it. If you’ve never experienced love before, then no matter how detailed I am, no matter how wide my vocabulary, I’ll never be able to pass on my understanding of love to you.

Love is more than any combination of words can describe. In fact, “love” is an arbitrary label given to an indescribable thing, so that people who’ve both experienced that indescribable thing can discuss it.

Within Taoism, the Tao itself is another such label for something that can’t really be described with words. In fact, the very first lines of the Tao Te Ching state:

The Tao that can be told of
Is not the Absolute Tao;
The Names that can be given
Are not the Absolute Names.

I can say to you that the Tao is the underlying process of the universe, but even as I do I feel that I’m cheapening it, and I want to say more, even though I know that no matter how much I write, I won’t be able to transmit to anyone my understanding of the Tao. Zhuangzi recognized the difficulty:

It is easy to know Tao, and difficult not to talk about it. To know and not to talk about it is to follow nature; to know and to talk about it is to follow man.

“Spiritual” vs. “Religious”:

The running theme of Taoism is the recognition of a thing’s primary and secondary parts, and valuing the primary over the secondary. With language, the words are secondary, the meaning primary. Human institutions and societal rules are secondary to the primary truths that they represent.

The focus of Jame’s post is the debate between the meanings of the words “spiritual” and “religious” in a modern context:

In general use spiritual stands for something good, while religious stands for something bad. Usually the good spiritual is personal and the bad religious is institutional.

Through a Taoist lens, these definitions lead us to see “religious” as secondary, and “spiritual” as primary. This mapping is reinforced by the idea that actual understanding of a thing is personal, and therefore primary.

Though we may “religious” to secondary status, that doesn’t mean it’s useless. Despite their limitations, words can be used to point us in the right direction, as another passage from the Zhuangzi states:

A bait is used to catch fish. When you have gotten the fish, you can forget about the bait. A rabbit trap is used to catch rabbits. When a rabbit is caught, you can forget about the trap. Words are used to express meaning, when you understand the meaning, you can forget about the words.

The same goes for human institutions. Though many things cannot be explained completely with words, they can be at least partially encoded into our institutions. The problem is that since that knowledge can be only partially represented using words, relying on human institutions for passing on understanding carries risk.

That is why a Taoist favors experience over formal education, because our human institutions, despite their best efforts to pass on essential knowledge of this universe, are limited by the limitations of words, and so people risk mistaking the institution itself for its deeper meaning.

In her latest post, Day 30: The Watermaker is Dead. R.I.P., Pacific Ocean rowboat adventurer Roz Savage speaks of her strange sense of relief that her electric watermaker (that has been acting finicky for a week after a dunk underwater) has finally died:

Surprisingly, I am not too despondent now I have got used to the idea. It was becoming very wearing on the nerves, wondering each day if the watermaker was going to work or not. If it is really dead, it is almost a relief to know for sure how things are, rather than living with perpetual hope and frequent disappointment.

While I send my hope and sympathy to Roz, her situation immediately reminded me of one of my favorite passages from the Bushido text Hagakure:

Once a group of ten blind masseuses were traveling together in the mountains, and when they began to pass along the top of a precipice, they all became very cautious, their legs shook, and they were in general struck with terror. Just then the leading man stumbled and fell off the cliff. Those that were left all wailed, “Ahh, ahh! How piteous!”

But the masseuse who had fallen yelled up from below, “Don’t be afraid. Although I fell, it was nothing. I am now rather at ease. Before falling I kept thinking ‘What will I do if I fall?’ and there was no end to my anxiety. But now I’ve settled down. If the rest of you want to be at ease, fall quickly!”

Oftentimes, the fear and anxiety of misfortune can be worse than the misfortune itself.

Links to online transcriptions of the Hagakure can be found at del.icio.us/nilesgibbs/hagakure+text.

If you’re interested in following Roz’s adventure, subscribe to my Unofficial Roz Savage Feed, or check out her official blog: The Voyage: Roz Savage: Rower, Writer, Speaker.

For a long time, I had difficulties reconciling my own thirst for knowledge with the often anti-intellectual teachings of Taoism. I believe I’ve found a solution, and in true Taoist fashion, it seems quite backwards at first glance.

Skilled unawareness:

The goal of a Taoist is to live in harmony with the Tao, to “go with the flow“, which I’ve described as a state of “skilled unawareness“, where a person spontaneously reacts to all situations in the best way possible.

According to the Taoists, in order to achieve this state of skilled unawareness one must “lose their knowledge”, as the following from the 48th chapter of the Tao Te Ching states:

The student of knowledge (aims at) learning day by day;
The student of Tao (aims at) losing day by day.

How exactly then, does one go about “losing day by day”?

Learning more means knowing less:

Like I said in the beginning, the solution is quite backwards: One loses day by day by learning day by day.

Huh? Let’s let the 47th chapter of the Tao Te Ching point us in the right direction:

The farther one pursues knowledge,
The less one knows.

It’s a phenomenon that all intellectuals face: the more you learn about the world, the more you realize there is to learn, so overall, the percentage of what you know about the world goes down.

In elementary school, each year I was convinced that the math I had learned was all that could possibly exist. After addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, what more could the world need? However, by the time I reached college, I was convinced that no person would ever be able to learn absolutely everything about mathematics, that the possibilities didn’t end.

The pursuit of knowledge is fatal:

We find another argument against the pursuit of knowledge from the Taoist Zhuangzi:

Human life is limited, but knowledge is limitless. To drive the limited in pursuit of the limitless is fatal; and to presume that one really knows is fatal indeed!

So how can I claim that the solution is through more learning? Because Zhuangzi also says:

One who knows how to stop at where he cannot know has reached the limit of knowledge.

What man knows is very little. Although that knowledge is little, man must rather depend on what he does not know before he can know the meaning of God.

A person begins with little knowledge, but is confident that they know everything. Only through continual learning can they discover how much of the universe that they do not know, the goal being to know “how to stop”.

Knowing “how to stop” and skilled unawareness:

In order to achieve the state of “skilled unawareness” a student of Tao must learn to observe the universe directly. A Taoist must learn to recognize the difference between the primary and secondary things: the inward essence and its outward accouterments.

Let’s use marriage as an example. In a marriage, the primary thing, or inward essence, of the event is the love of the couple and the bringing together of two families. On the other hand, the secondary things, or outward accouterments, are the ceremony itself, the dancing, the rings and the cake.

A Taoist must first recognize that the accouterments are not the essence, only outward manifestations or representations thereof. Ultimately, the Taoist favors the essence as worth knowing, and discards the accouterments as “unessential knowledge”.

The accouterments are many, but the essences few:

Let us look at chapter 20 of the Tao Te Ching for further understanding:

Banish learning and vexations end.
Between “Ah!” and “Ough!”
How much difference is there?

Both “Ah!” and “Ough!” are utterances of disapproval (in the original Chinese). That is, both represent the disapproval, but are not the disapproval themselves, and once you know of the disapproval, what matters which word was chosen?

Once we can divide a given thing into its primary and secondary parts, we recognize that overall, there exists only a limited number of primary things in this universe, and that their secondary accouterments are many and unlimited.

In the marriage example, there exists an unlimited number of possible accoutrement combinations, given the wide variety of different cultural practices with respect to marriage and the personal tastes of the couple. Even given unlimited different types of weddings, the primary essence remains limited: the couple’s love, the bringing together of two families, etc.

The solution:

Now we have the solution. We strive to get better at separating the primary from the secondary things, to see the primary essence through the accouterments. Then, in our observations of the universe, though we may see many a new and fancy accoutrement, we see the same essences over and over again until we’ve seen all of the primary essences possible.

It is that point that we know when to stop, as the 48th chapter of Tao Te Ching continues:

The student of knowledge (aims a) learning day by day;
The student of Tao (aims at) losing day by day.
By continual losing
One reaches doing nothing (laissez-faire).

Once we’ve seen through to a primary essence, we no longer need the obscuring accoutrement and so that knowledge becomes unessential. Eventually, after having seen though enough unessential knowledge: we will know all of the existing primary essences and have discarded the ceremonies of society.

To the common man, whose knowledge favors the accouterments, the Taoist seems to do nothing, because the Taoist doesn’t participate in the institutions of society.

The past two weeks I’ve been eagerly following the seafaring adventures of Roz Savage, and decided to compile an Unofficial Roz Savage RSS feed mixed from her various feeds on other services.

For those of you who don’t know, Roz Savage is a British woman currently attempting a solo rowing journey across the Pacific Ocean, as part of a greater project to circumnavigate the globe using surface transport called The Voyage.

There are several ways online to monitor Roz’s journey, many with RSS feeds, so I decided to mix them together into just one.

Actually, my initial inspiration came from a bug in her official blog feed, the entries of which didn’t point to the proper blog posts, making the feed inconvenient to use.

Though they’ve addressed the bug, I still wanted to be able to follow everything that Roz says without signing up for every service she’s on or filling up my feed reader with a dozen of her feeds.

The Unofficial Roz Savage currently mixes feeds from the following sites:

• SailBlogs (blog): The Voyage: Roz Savage: Rower, Writer, Speaker
• YouTube (videos): TouTube - rozsavage’s Channel
• Twitter (messages): Twitter / rozsavage
• SmugMug (photos): rozsavage’s photos- powered by SmugMug
• TWIT.tvt (podcast): Roz Rows the Pacific

Subscribe to Unofficial Roz Savage via RSS or email.

Be sure to check out her official site or check out further Roz Savage links online.

Disclaimer: I did not create the content aggregated through this feed. I’m not trying to steal thunder from anyone, especially Roz. I’m merely a wide-eyed fan that thought others like me might want something like this. Be happy!

Update (07-JUL-08): The wonderful RSS aggregation service FEEDblendr went down, so I’ve migrated the list over to Feed Rinse. The URL is the same, but you may get some duplicate/out of order posts for a short time.

So I’ve been rather busy lately, and haven’t had the time to write. And when I did find the inspiration, I’d usually be deterred by the poor service of my webhost.

My previous webhost.

I finally decided to do what I should have done in the beginning: host on WordPress.com.

Really, the only reason why I held onto my old hosting was because I’d paid 3 years in advance: back when the service was reliable. But I’ve been having problems since February, and I’m tired of it.

Now I have to fiddle with the available themes, before deciding if it’s worth it to port my original “Vinegar Tasters” theme, which might mean paying for the “Custom CSS” upgrade.

After weeks of seeing promotions, I watched Comedy Central’s “Night of Too Many Stars” last night, and was severely disappointed.

First, let me clearly state that this post is in no way meant to down, belittle, or otherwise offend people affected by Autism, or the need for people to fund Autism research, and education.

But even if you changed the beneficiaries to some other worthy cause, last night’s show was a mess. In an ideal world, we wouldn’t need such charity drives in the first place. Why is it that almost half of our tax dollars fund an atrocious war, wasting billions if not trillions of dollars, but that every noble cause needs to beg and scrape with fundraisers and bake sales and charity events?

Our education system is being systematically flushed down the toilet, even though a tiny scrape off of the top of the defense budget could solve so many problems. Why shouldn’t our tax dollars go toward making our country better, instead of merely defending the empire as it crumbles from within? Why shouldn’t the defense budget be supported mostly by charity events?

But let’s drop that idealism for a moment, and assume that in the “real world”, we are supposed to funnel half our lives’ blood to the war, and that everything else is supposed to raise money through charity. Furthermore, let’s assume that most people won’t donate out of the “goodness of their hearts”, but need themselves to be bribed into charity, by having benefit concerts, shows, and “with your gift of $X you’ll receive” rewards.

If we accept that people need to be bribed into giving, that people want to be paid (in entertainment or rewards) in order to donate, then we can only expect that people will then only donate if the entertainment is actually entertaining, or that the rewards are actually rewarding.

By that measure, “A Night of Too Many Stars” failed on both accounts.

Charity shows have a simple pattern: show something worth watching, break to ask for money, repeat. I mean, PBS has been doing it for decades.

So what went wrong last night? They asked for money, but they never really showed anything worth watching, and the overall effect was boring, amateur, and did not in any way live up to it’s name. Sure, there were “too many stars”, but they didn’t really do anything.

Most of their acts looked like they were winged on stage, were in no way related to the body of work of the star, or just weren’t funny. It’s a comedy network: if they’re trying to raise money, it should be with comedy. I’m not saying they weren’t funny in a “I don’t appreciate their humor” kind of way, but more like, “Is it their first time on stage?” kind of way. Their problem wasn’t material, but execution.

One of the biggest complaints that I’ve read has been against Sarah Silverman’s performance. Sure it was vulgar, but that’s her thing, she does vulgar comedy. I think that her bit was probably one of the best on the show, not because it was funny (I in fact, don’t appreciate her humor at all) but because she was doing a professional comedy routine that she had planned out and practiced long in advance.

The same could be said of Will Ferrell’s performance, not that it was especially funny either, but it was professionally executed. The material wasn’t particularly new (Bush bashing), but it was funny enough and well executed enough to be entertaining.

Rosie admitted that she hadn’t done her act in years, so my question is: Then why didn’t you practice? Why didn’t you generate new material? Her act bored me to tears, and it seems the audience wasn’t too impressed either.

In fact, I think that the only part of the show that was both entertaining, original, and well executed comedy was the Chris Rock and Steve Wright bit. Too very different, well known comedians, with different career peaks, doing each other’s jokes was a great idea and well done. Even if the jokes were bad, they were entertaining because of the dichotomy of the two.

And it’s not as if there haven’t been well executed comedy charity events in the past. Comics Come Home anyone?

Another complaint from last night were the premiums or rewards for donating. For $50 you got an oven mitt, for $100 a ski mask. I think that it was a great idea and that most people missed the point: they were essentially making fun of the idea that people need rewards in order to donate.

It was a poorly executed tongue-in-cheek way of saying: donate money because it’s a good cause and you’re a good sport, not because you want a flashy prize.

What did go well (sort of) was the song that incorporated the names of people who donated large amounts. It was a novel idea, but in execution served even more to highlight what hoops they have to jump through just to get people to donate to a good cause.

Overall, I think the charity would better have been served by doing away with the live audience, showing practiced and pre-recorded comedy clips (whether from their archives or from new material by the appearing stars), and just having the stars at the phones in the background, telethon style.

For the past month or so my site has become increasingly unresponsive, with memory errors and so forth.

Now, I’ve just been informed from my host that the reason was a failing hard drive, which screwed up the RAID array. I am now being migrated to a completely new server.

This site is not dead, I just found myself pulled into other projects while my host worked out the server problems. Once the server migration is complete, I plan on resuming posting.