Author: Dale

Coloring books. Yes, coloring books.

Posted on by Dale

Here, go read this.  I’ll wait. [NOTE FROM 2025: That link does not work any longer.]

tl;dr: a very long, quite well-written piece by a Christian author warning us about mandala coloring books being spiritually dangerous.

Okay, woo alert.  Since I am an Existential Mystic, my tendency is not to grant woo an independent reality, so perhaps it’s a little unfair for me to pick apart the writings of a Spiritual.  But the far ends of any scale are fascinating, so let’s dive right in.

Sure, click here if you want to risk your IMMORTAL SOUL!!!

One of the issues I have with die-hard Spirituals is that their belief in the reality of their particular woo is so absolute that it extends to all the other woo as well.  In this case, we have a carefully reasoned blogpost that provides proof of the dangers of simply filling in random spaces on a piece of paper: if you color a mandala, it will automatically open the door to your soul/mind/body and let demonic forces in.

Evangelical believers, particularly, are prone to this kind of thing.  Their understanding of God is that of a “personal God,” which does not mean (as most of them think it does) a God who is “mine”; rather it means a God who is “a person,” i.e., independently existing as an individual outside our reality.  The same applies for the idea of a “personal Satan” or “personal demons.”

This belief, coupled with some vague biblical literalism,[1] leads them to the understanding that not only do God and Satan have a real existence, but so do witches and demons and all those “other gods” whom generally our evangelical friends ridicule as nonexistent “false gods” but who really exist not really yes really.

In the same vein, they understand transactional magick to be real and effective: that’s the basis of their belief in intercessory[3] prayer. They easily transfer that belief to pentagrams, Ouija boards, Dungeons & Dragons, yoga, and yes, mandala coloring books—just touching one of these things is enough to unleash the hounds of hell whether or not you believe they’re “real.”  Just joking around at a sleepover with “Bloody Mary” or taking a hot yoga class will press the On button on the remote control, and, well, you’ve seen enough horror movies to know what happens next.

Here’s the interesting part: the only proof they ever have is their own belief in the reality of belief systems that otherwise they will tell you are not real.  It never occurs to them to say, “Hm, those other people are trying make sense of the Infinite, too—I wonder how similar their approach is to mine.  Maybe I could get further in my own faith if I paid attention to theirs.”

Nope.  Instead, because their Tao is the only Tao—they can NAME IT AND EVERYTHING, KENNETH—all those other paths to the Infinite have to be wrong.  Demonic.

Coloring mandalas.  You may think there are 64 colors, but as we all know, there’s only one real Flesh.

Here endeth the lesson.

—————

[1] I say “vague” literalism, because no one reads the Bible literally literally.  No one.  They may believe it’s Adam & Eve[2,] not Adam & Steve, or that Noah took a gazillion pairs of animals on the ark (including diplodoci), but quiz them about owning slaves or sleeping with the maid or stoning a bride who everyone knows has been living with her new husband for two years, and their literal understanding rapidly evolves into something more metaphoric/historical/pragmatic.

[2] NSFW LINK!

[3] Or imprecatory.

Grrrr

Posted on by Dale

I wish to make a complaint. And a confession.

I freely admit that I have not been assiduous in my composing. Part of it is being busy riding infuriating theme park rides, part of it is laziness, but—and here’s the complaint—a very large part of it is my keyboard.

It’s an M-Audio eKeys-49, a little 49-key keyboard controller. That is, it cannot produce sound on its own; it merely sends data to some other device when you play it. In my case, it sends data to the music notation software Finale.1

The problem is that it has stopped sending data to Finale. Or to SimpleSynth, the nifty little piece of software that I can use if I’m just noodling around and need sound out of the thing. Or to the computer’s MIDI Audio Setup app, which allows me to hook up this kind of thing or to check why it’s not hooked up.

It started getting flaky last year when I was working on A Christmas Carol, so much so that after I was done with that I really really avoided getting back on track with composing. It was too frustrating: I could input about five or six notes before the keyboard just lost its connection.

Today, as I started to work on a new song for Mike Funt because he really thinks I’m going to get that finished soon when in fact I started today, the keyboard completely lost it. I could play one chord, and not only would it drop off the map it also produced a “hung note,” requiring me to get to the menu to “turn off all notes.”

Blergh, as we say in the business.

Sometimes, especially with updates to the operating system and/or to Finale, it’s an issue of the driver needing to be updated. (That’s a tiny snippet of software that the system uses to make the equipment in question go.)

A brief moment on the googles was enough to show that M-Audio no longer supports the eKeys-49. Not only that, but a simple USB-connected keyboard usually doesn’t even need a driver.

tl;dr: my keyboard is officially an ex-keyboard.

What to do? I thought I would stop by Musicology to see if those guys had any recommendations for a keyboard controller that was affordable, but they don’t open till noon. I emailed them.

In the meantime, I went to the FacePlace and asked the hive mind, and within ten minutes I had some guidance. I found and have ordered the Korg microKEY2, 49-key version.2

Free shipping, it will be here Thursday, and then I can get back to whining about how hard it is to write Mike’s song.3

——————

1 Finale has its own issues. Grrr.

2 Just so you know, there are buttons on a 49-key keyboard that allow you to play the lower or upper octaves.

3 I mean, what do I know from Dixieland/gospel?

In which I grouse

Posted on by Dale

You may have wondered, if you are of an inquiring mind, whether there is anything on the planet as vapid, obnoxious, irritating, and offensive as a Michael Bay movie.

I am now able to assure you there is: a theme park ride based on a Michael Bay movie.

To wit: the Transformers 3D ride at Universal Studios Resort in Orlando. Sweet Cthulhu, what an indictment of humanity!

It did not help that during the supposed 30-minute wait the ride experienced “technical difficulties,” and so we were stuck in one room for an eternity listening to the same loud sound effects and storyline video without air conditioning or indeed circulating air. Or that this took place in mid-afternoon when I had about had it with all the intense joy generated by theme parks in general.

But my lovely first wife is for some unknown reason a fan of Michael Bay’s oeuvre, if I’m allowed to use the term in connection with a man whose entire output seems deliberately designed to kill off humanity’s fascination with plot once and for all. What Jorge of Burgos accomplished in The Name of the Rose[1] with Aristotle’s missing treatise on comedy, Bay seems determined to do with the remainder of western civilization’s theory of drama.

And so I found myself dutifully accompanying my spouse into this disaster, knowing there was a possibility that I might not find it very enjoyable.

I did not find it enjoyable.

It may be that in the dim, dark future—and here I am thinking specifically of Idiocracy—Michael Bay will be hailed as a genius of filmic structure and this blog post will be included in one of those tidy anthologies of critical snipings that entertain us so today, e.g., the critic who called Beethoven’s Symphony No. 2 “a gross enormity, an immense wounded snake, unwilling to die, but writhing in its last agonies, and in the Finale bleeding to death.”

Permit me to doubt it.

Full disclosure: I have never watched an entire Michael Bay movie, yet somehow I do not feel disqualified in assessing his skills as a storyteller. If you’ve seen one Transformers preview, you’ve seen the whole series.

So what exactly do I think about Transformers 3D: The Ride? It was loud, splattered over enormous screens, and visually incoherent.[2] Perhaps aficionados of the genre could distinguish friend from foe, but I suspect that is beside the point. The visual field was simply filled with roiling bits and pieces, none of which ever stopped moving long enough to establish the who/what/when/where (and I understand that some consider this a feature not a bug.) Focus was always diffuse/split, and Bay seems to understand “pacing” to mean “sempre fortissimo e presto.” The whole thing was a brutal assault on both sense and sensibilities.

Lest you think that I did not enjoy this ride because I am an old fart, remember that I had waited even longer to ride Minion Mayhem earlier in the day, and it was essentially the same ride in terms of throughline and effects: swoops, jerks, reversals, zooms, bumps. But it was delightful: I laughed and giggled the entire ride. In Transformers 3D, I simply closed my eyes halfway through the ride to escape the boredom of the violence.

Likewise, even earlier in the day Harry Potter & the Escape from Gringott’s was a superb example of the exact same technology in service to a carefully crafted sequence of encounters.

So, yes, I am capable of enjoying a simulator/dark ride. Just not this one.

Here, for those who doubt me: https://youtu.be/4SQtBh_LCNs

And get off my lawn.

—————

[1] RIP, Humberto Eco

[2] In other words, a Michael Bay movie.

I come to praise Scalia, not to bury him.

Posted on by Dale

Because it is considered to be bad breeding to speak ill of the dead, I will now say something very nice indeed about Antonin Scalia, the dead jurist.

Without Scalia’s scathing and snarky dissents in Lawrence v. Texas and United States v. Windsor, we would not have gotten to marriage equality as quickly as we did than if he had just kept his mouth shut.

You can read real reporters’ commentary here and here, but I’ll lay out the basics for you.

In Lawrence v. Texas (2003), the Supreme Court struck down Texas’s sodomy law and in so doing struck down every state law criminalizing sodomy (as legally defined) in general and homosexual behavior in particular.  Scalia’s dissent essentially said, “Well, if you’re not going to rule on cases by going on what most people think is icky, you’re going to end up letting the homos marry, mark my words.  Get off my lawn.”[1]

In United States v. Windsor (2013), the SCOTUS struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act and its discrimination against same-sex marriages, which were already legal in several states.  Scalia whined, “My esteemed colleagues are poopy-heads for making me look like a bad guy for hating the queers, and now all the fags are going to sue and we’re not going to be able to stop them from marrying like normal people, believe you me.”[2]

His words came back to haunt him as circuit court judge after circuit court judge wryly used his dissents to underscore the basic fairness and justice of overturning marriage equality bans in the several states where, in fact, all the fags sued. The axe fell when the Sixth Circuit refused to overturn a couple of states’ anti-icky-homo-wedding laws—when the circuit courts disagree, the cases end up in front of the Supremes for a final decision.

And that, my children, is how we got Obergefell v. Hodges (2015).

I like to think of it all like a real-life version of the final episode of Boston Legal, in which Alan Shore (James Spader) and Denny Crane (William Shatner) argue before the Supremes that Denny be allowed to use an experimental drug to ameliorate his Alzheimer’s.  At the end of the episode, having stopped an injunction preventing them from marrying morganatically, they fly to their remote Maine resort to get married, only to find that they have no minister or justice of the peace.  Iudex ex machina, Tony (who had been grousing from the bench that he wanted Shore to stop talking so he could go on vacation) shows up, fishing reel in hand, and is prevailed upon to marry the two.  Which he does, albeit grumpily.

So here’s to the good a man does in his life—we all owe a debt of gratitude to Antonin Scalia for moving us into the 21st century.

——————

[1] I may have paraphrased a bit.

[2] Here too.

ULTIMATE SHAKESPEARE DEATH SMACKDOWN

Posted on by Dale

Oh, look, a not-rant!

Enjoy it while you can.

So, last month sometime, a bunch of Lichtenbergians were whooping it up in my living room, and I posited that we really ought to do something for the 400th anniversary of Bill Shakespeare’s death, since we missed the 450th anniversary of his birth two years ago, and now we have this to look forward to:

You find the rules/info at https://goo.gl/sVh9Uj, and the application form at http://goo.gl/forms/8N66OCs2WD.

Now to wrangle the Lichtenbergians into actually getting something prepared.

Interestingly, as I post this as a challenge to various people on the FacePlace, I find myself hesitating to enter into the spirit of the thing and talk smack.  (For example, the original title of this post was ULTIMATE SHAKESPEARE DEATH SMACKDOWN. [bitches], and I chickened out.)  So if nothing else, it will be an interesting acting exercise for me.

Mark your calendars.

Bless their hearts

Posted on by Dale

Georgia Legislature Passes ‘Pastor Protection Act”

Because of course they did.

It seems like just yesterday I wrote, “[Christianists are] really more comfortable believing they’re in the minority and are persecuted like Paul or Stephen. Lacking convenient ways to be crucified upside down or to be stoned by the community, they pretend someone is throwing rocks at them anyway.”

Okay, it was day before yesterday, but still…

What kind of CRAP is THIS? There oughta be a law!

These religious protection acts are identical in intent to the old racial purity laws of 100 years ago: to keep “those people” from gaining full access to what those of us on the inside enjoy.  No more, no less.

Oh, but Dale, if we don’t pass these laws, then the defenseless white women Christians will have to… do… something…

Listen, here’s the deal: every law like this presumes that what it “protects” is in fact the unvarying Way Things Are Supposed To Be—and it’s not.  I can not stress this enough.

Think of it this way.  How does your family make dressing/stuffing for Thanksgiving dinner?  Because that’s the Way Dressing Is Supposed To Be, right?  And “those people” who make, well, you know, that other kind of dressing… We should pass a law.

Despite what Ralston/McKoon/et al. believe, they’re legislating stuffing.

Oldie but goodie

Posted on by Dale

Again, on Facebook…

I’ve actually blogged about this before…

A snark (originally posted 04/27/2007)

This email arrived in my box at school this morning:

I wonder what would happen if we treated our Bible like we treat our cell phone?

  • What if we carried it around in our purses or pockets?
  • What if we flipped through it several times a day?
  • What if we turned back to go get it if we forgot it?
  • What if we used it to receive messages from the text?
  • What if we treated it like we couldn’t live without it?
  • What if we gave it to Kids as gifts?
  • What if we used it when we traveled?
  • What if we used it in case of emergency?
  • This is something to make you go …hmm….where is my Bible?

Oh , and one more thing. Unlike our cell phone, we don’t have to worry about our Bible being disconnected because Jesus already paid the bill.

Makes you stop and think “where are my priorities?

And no dropped calls!

I don’t know why this kind of thing gets on my nerves, because it’s perfectly sincere in its insecure way. But it does. If I had to be specific, I guess I’d have to say it’s the implied martyrdom that so many of our more conservative Christian friends like to assume. They’re really more comfortable believing they’re in the minority and are persecuted like Paul or Stephen. Lacking convenient ways to be crucified upside down or to be stoned by the community, they pretend someone is throwing rocks at them anyway.

Anyway, I couldn’t resist. I wrote, but did not send out to the whole school like the other person, “What if we treated our cell phones like Bibles?”

  • What if we thought that people who didn’t have cell phones were going to burn in hell?
  • What if we killed people over which cell phone company was the best one?
  • What if most people thought that those new-fangled cell phones that took pictures and did email weren’t “the real cell phone”?
  • What if we decided that we should live our lives only after checking for messages on the cell phone?
  • What if we all heard different messages when we checked?
  • What if we called those who acted on those different messages “godless” or “neanderthals” or any other derogatory term?
  • What if we wanted to make everyone else turn off their cell phones and use only ours?

That’s all I’ve got so far. Any suggestions?

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, beeyotches.

Magickal Thinking

Posted on by Dale

***A MUST SHARE***

A young man working in the army was constantly humiliated because he believed in God. One day the captain wanted to humiliate him before the troops. He called the young man and said: – Young man come here, take the key and go and park the Jeep in front. the young man replied: – I cannot drive! The captain said: – Well then ask for assistance of your God! Show us that He exist! The young man takes the key and walked to the vehicle and begins to pray…… …He parks the jeep at the place PERFECTLY well as the captain wanted. The young man came out of the jeep and saw them all crying. They all said together: – We want to serve your God! The young soldier was astonished, and asked what was going on? The CAPTAIN crying opened the hood of the jeep by showing the young man that the car had no engine. Then the boy said: See? This is the God I serve, THE GOD OF IMPOSSIBLE, the God who gives life to what does not exist. You may think there are things still impossible BUT WITH GOD EVERYTHING IS POSSIBLE. To the person reading this, I pray the Lord work A SUPER MIRACLE in your life today In Jesus Name I Pray.. Write ‘Amen’ to claim this prayer

This was posted, with a photo of a soldier crying, on Facebook by someone I would have thought to be a little more sophisticated in their faith.

First of all, why can’t these people write in English?  I know, I know, they probably aren’t native speakers, but even so—why would an educated person repost it?  If your goal is to witness to the heathen, why would you undermine the message with ignorant delivery?

Secondly, I am always amused at the straw men cum aggressive persecution complex these people have.  If this is from somewhere out there in the world and not the U.S., then perhaps captains make a habit of singling out Christian soldiers, but in our army, quite the reverse is true. Again, why would you post something that flies in the face of documented reality?

Finally, speaking of reality, really??  This author breaks the Spiritual Mystic end of the REMS Scale, just busts right on past the boundaries of the behavior the scale is meant to assess.  We have to assume that the author (at least the original source) created a parable and was not reporting on an actual event, i.e., that they knew and understood that the event could never have happened[1,] but the bottom line is that the story is put out there for people to believe that it could have happened, such is the magickal power of THE GOD OF IMPOSSIBLE.

Feh. I’m all for woo, but sweet Cthulhu I like mine on the sane side.  If I ever decided to evangelize for my particular Misunderstanding,[2] I would not use what amounts to the text of scam emails to convince people to join me in my compound. It might make my claims seem… incredible.

—————

[1] “How you know? You weren’t there!”  Honey, please.

[2]  My standard response to any religious discussion is, “I completely misunderstand God differently than you completely misunderstand God.”  Clearly, in this case, I really don’t misunderstand God anywhere in the neighborhood of either the original author or those who repost it on Facebook.

Yes, another rant. Sorry.

Posted on by Dale

Oh dear.

Franklin Graham, a Bible grifter not known for his nuance or understanding, took to Fox Business News yesterday to warn of an impending cliff  a fork in the road: voting for Democrats will doom us because they’re going to turn us into socialism, and “socialism is godless.”

He also claimed that we’ve never had a secular government before, even though “we’ve chosen it,” and besides that, “secularism is the same as communism.”

Mercy.

This is pure gobbledygook. I hardly know where to start—it all goes in circles and there’s no good place to start to unravel it.

Let’s start with that epithet, “godless.”  Graham uses it to be synonymous with “evil,” but that ain’t necessarily so.  Is it possible to have a government without a god?  Yes—in fact, it’s preferable.  Is it possible to be a good human being without a god?  Absolutely, and the converse is true as well: you can be a total godbotherer and a complete shit—just look at Franklin Graham.[1]

We’ve never had a “secular government before”?  Sweet Cthulhu, that’s all we’ve ever had.  Why does he say stuff like this?  Why does he ignore the fact that the Constitution itself prohibits a religious test for office, and the First Amendment prohibits the government from establishing a religion?  Is he deluded, or lying?

Secularism = communism?  What?  For those of us to whom words mean real things, this makes about as much sense as saying “groundhogs are the same as the chair.”  I mean, it’s a perfectly cromulent sentence if you’re teaching Chomskian structural grammar (“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”) but actual English?  No.  Secularism is not the same as communism.

Beside which, I’m pretty sure he’s using “communism” to mean “oppressive totalitarian dictatorship,” which to be sure is our planet’s only real experience with the theory,[2] but that’s not really its meaning.

So Franklin Graham’s theory is something like this:

Democratic Party = socialism = godless = secularism = communism

He wants you to think it means

liberal political party = communism = evil = demonic anti-religious forces = oppressive totalitarian dictatorship

but for those of us who use English as a real language, it means

liberal political party = economic theory promoting social welfare = without religious entanglements = the idea that we run our government and our society at large without reference to Franklin Graham’s version of the Bible = economic theory advocating the abolition of private property

and of course one those things is not like the others, is it?  (Hint: it’s “communism.”)

All of this code-speak is meant to tickle the fearful brains of the faithful, and if we wanted to boil it down to a sentence in plain English, it would be

If you vote for the Democratic Party, you are voting for Satan.

In other words, Franklin Graham is campaigning for the party that thinks that promoting our social welfare is the same thing as Joseph Stalin’s oppressive totalitarian regime.  (You should hear them try to conflate the socialists with the Nazis.)

I offer no solution, because there is none.  Franklin Graham is talking in code to people whose brains are wired to fear the world.  We cannot show them the way out, because they don’t want to go.

—————

[1] Or worse, Ted Cruz.

[2] If we ignore the Christians.   Which apparently Franklin Graham does, with every breath he takes.