Friday, April 28, 2006
(8:00 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Friday Afternoon Confessional: The morning after the revolution
I confess that I have developed strange compulsions about geography. For instance, when I am walking from place to place, I try to plan my route so that I cross only once at each intersection. (I have tried most of the possible combinations for getting from my house to Logan Square.) At the seminary, there are two main stairways, and if I need to go back and forth between places on different floors, I always plan my route so that it will be a circle, rather than simply retracing my steps. I'm also a little over-fascinated with Chicago's road-numbering system (for instance, Fullerton is 2400N, Diversey is 2800N, etc.). Right now I'm working on memorizing the places where the various diagonal streets intersect the major roads.I confess that I can be an over-enthusiastic participant in discussion listservs. Normally, the speed of my response is directly proportional to how big of an asshole I'm being, resulting in rapid-fire alienation of innocent bystanders.
I confes that I'm suffering from motivation deficit disorder, perhaps even verging on "burn-out." I confess that I'm glad my paper for the Augustine course only needs to be fifteen pages -- for me, twenty pages is kind of the Rubicon where a paper shifts from being a relatively straightforward project to being a big deal. I confess that I am also relieved by the relative ease of the take-home final in one of my other classes. I confess that I have been overly focused on trying to develop a schedule for finishing my work for this semester, partly because I want to grasp the whole process within my mind so as to be able to imagine it as completed.
I confess that I don't understand why this year-old post by John Emerson suddenly generated a huge amount of traffic yesterday.
I confess that I indulged in a misplaced triumphalism in this post. I confess that I am the Internet's second most prolific writer on the concept of "The Higher Eclecticism."
I confess that this video is pretty damn funny. (You may need to copy and paste the address manually.) Thanks to Greg Potts, a CTS colleague, for tracking this down after a conversation where Liz Jones mentioned having stumbled across it while channel-surfing.
I confess that at first glance this plan for a new train line looks interesting, at least (via Mike Schaefer).
UPDATE: The bathtub is fixed, at long last! To give an idea of how bad it had gotten, this morning I took a shower at 8:00, and it still hadn't fully drained at 9:30. It had been this way for a week and a half. Now we just have to deal with the landlord, who is claiming he shouldn't have to pay for the plumber because such a bad clog obviously represents "more than normal wear and tear." Because we're a family of apes who each take four showers a day, or something.
UPDATE (2): In Gaia and God, Ruether quotes a report on the effects of a 1-megaton bomb going off in New York City. Included is the following paragraph:
Miles beyond this last ring [beyond four miles from the epicenter], people suffer second-degree burns on all exposed skin and additional burns from flammable clothing and environmental materials. Retinal burns resulting from looking at the fireball may cause blindness.Imagine: the last thing you ever see is the nuclear blast.
The Weblog's Logan Square Headquarters is situated within the zone just described, assuming the terrorists (or the government, who knows) chose the obvious location of Madison and State for their epicenter. Thankfully, the future Lincoln Square headquarters is a little further out. (If I were at CTS the day it went off, I'd be totally fine -- just a matter of figuring out how to get home.) Second-degree burns are survivable, right? Plus, I've got health insurance.
I'd just have to remember to look away. I don't know if I could.
