Jon Cogburn's Blog

more exam week haikus (with affirmation at end)

Did You Really Think

Did you really think
I could not use Google search
to find the paper?

You Were Never There.

You were never there.
How can you complain so much
When you weren't in class?

Determinism

Determinism.
A metaphysics topic.
The class was on art.

You Were Wrong To Cite

You were wrong to cite
Your friend as an expert source.
He doesn't know crap.

All Students Must Know

All students must know
Cogburn accepts late papers.
He is a coward.

Papers Are Lined Up

Papers are lined up.
I am laying on the couch,
Trapped with pen in hand.

Real Prisons Are Worse

Real prisons are worse
Than the metaphorical
Things they inspire.

Glad You Liked the Class

Glad you liked the class.
I like playing piano,
but I'm no damned good.

Don't Be Rude to Me

Don't be rude to me.
Your grade is not hamburger.
I'm not your waiter.

Somewhere, Somebody

Somewhere, somebody
Is not anxious, and also
Not victorious.

Mexican Wrestling

Mexican wrestling.
Barbacoa Burrito.
Si. ¡A El Paso! .

Exam Week Haikus

Ten Students Mailed Me

Ten students mailed me
About the paper topic
On the syllabus.

You Got the Tests Back

You got the tests back.
Why ask me what your grade is?
Can't you even add?

What do Students Learn?

What do students learn
Those four years spent in high school?
Not grammar. Not facts.

No I Do Not Know.

No I do not know
What your grade will be. Damn it.
The exam's today.

My Head Hurts Real Bad.

My head hurts real bad.
In graduate school I thought
I would enjoy this.

More Philosophy of Elvis - Plea for help

Maybe I just should go ahead and petition Open Court for permission to edit an Elvis and Philosophy volume? First there was the important realization of the logical structure of "Burning Love" (HERE). And now I am beginning to get deep insight into the (worldliness of the) world of the King. But while I know how to ask where the bathroom is and how much something costs in Heideggerese, I am nowhere near fluent. So if this were an Open Court anthology, I would assign this essay out. This is a plea for help:

(a) University of Memphis is a dominantly continental program. Memphis hosts the yearly Mid-South Philosophy Conference, wherein is presented a lot of good continental philosophy. Historically, Heidegger had the most to do with the analytic-continental split.¹

(b) Elvis resided in Memphis. Elvis was known to put the seemingly inane phrase "TCOB," all over the place, including his belt buckle and hats. "TCOB" stands for Taking Care Of Business. And when we Heideggerians go to Graceland and purchase souveniers of course we add hyphens. For example, my T-Shirt now reds "Elvis: Taking-Care-Of-Business."

(c) "Taking care of" is a pretty important Heideggerian notion (starting with the very nice discussion in Section 12 of Being and Time, "These ways of being-in have the kind of being of taking care of which we shall characterize in greater detail.") As is "business. " (e.g. in Section 14 in reference to enumerating the things in a world and then describing their appearences as an attempt to understand worldliness, Heidegger writes, "But that is obviously a pre-phenomenal "business" which cannot be be phenomenologically relevant at all. The description gets stuck in beings. It is ontic.") Then, tantalizingly we get discussions of "taking care of things." (e.g. in section 16, "In associating with the world taken care of, what is unhandy can be encountered not only in the sense of something unusable or completely unusable, but "gets in the way" of taking care of things. That to which taking care of things cannot turn, for which it has"no time," is something unhandy in the way of not belonging there, of not being complete.")

O.K. Someone at the Mid-South Conference has to, has to, has to do a phenomenological investigation of Elvis, along the lines of thematizing Taking-Care-Of-Business as an important neglected mode of Dasein.

If anyone reading this can write a believable abstract of such a paper, the gods will be pleased. If you can actually write the paper itself and present it in Memphis, then Angus Young will descend from the heavens and play a guitar solo in your bedroom, including the bit where he jumps up on your dresser and points to the heavens with his right hand, while his left hand does what guitarists refer to as "hammer ons" (the reference is meant zuhandenly not vorhandenly) like in the beginning of "Thunderstruck," and at the 47 second mark here.

[footnote 1: Philosophically- as a result of Heidegger's Southwestern School Neo-Kantian strains versus Carnap's Marburg School Neo-Kantian strains; and Politically- as a result of the some of the many philosophers persecuted by by the Nazis finding asylum in the United States, many of whom had a (philosophically irrelevant but entirely understandable given the amount of suffering involved) personal vilification of Heidegger for the brief period he spent in Syracuse, a vilification which caught on for a time.]

proposal for a new history of philosophy

I'd like to write a history of philosophy with the organizing thematic component being what philosophers have said about tables.

Russell's discussion about the table in his Cambridge office in The Problems of Philosophy contrasts beautifully with Heidegger's discussion about the table in his home in the lecture series: Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity (which then evolved in History of the Concept of Time and then into the canonical hammer discussion in Being and Time). This contrast alone handles the problem of the external world as well as a decent amount of Dreyfusiana philosophy of mind.

This would only work if Plato talked about tables. Did the ancient Greeks even have tables, or did they just eat off of their bellies like otters?

Philosophy in the News

Check out number 19.

Seriously, I just read Block's wikipedia page and found out he's married to Susan Carey. I've been a big fan of both of them for years now and am weirdly happy to find out that they've found happiness with one another (I have no idea how long they've been married; I assume they were married when I first discovered their work in graduate school). It's like finding out that Jack White (number 11 on the list!) was married to Holly Golightly after all. Pretty cool.

new movie idea

Two buddies encounter some sort of difficulty. They use automobiles (sometimes the same one at the same time) to get from place to place.

new book idea

Something horrible befalls the protagonist, who spends the novel rebuilding his life and learning valuable lessons.

In the end, it is all worth it.

Mustache Advocacy Network

Check out this great article by Caitlyn Scott here.

One of my greatest honors is being the faculty sponsor of the LSU chapter of the Mustache Advocacy Network. As an adviser I feel like I've been instrumental in pressing for a strong service/charitable component (in addition to our political advocacy). Prime examples include our wildly successful "Staches for Tots" program. No child in the United States of America should have to go without a mustache. Period. End of story.

In addition, I'm particularly proud of our research funding for development of a new generation of prosthetic mustaches. This is extremely important. Currently, the United States Federal Government (in particular, the Department of Defense) is plowing BILLIONS of dollars into designing better prosthetic legs and arms, but ZERO dollars for prosthetic mustaches. This makes no sense, but instead of just complaining about it MAN is stepping into the gap. I'm proud to be part of the solution here.

political concession speech

Good Afternoon.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I have called this press conference to announce the withdrawal of my candidacy from consideration for my Party's nomination to be the next President of the United States.

My whole life has been devoted to making this great country a safer and kinder place, securing our leadership position in the world while taking care of those least able to take care of themselves at home. Now, as I move into the next phase of my life I will find new challenges, and new ways to do this.

I would like to congradulate the other candidates. While this campaign has been rough and tumble at times, we are all in the same Party.

Before exiting this stage, I need to address some allegations made against my campaign, claims that we have been engaged in "the politics of the past," "mudslinging," and even "racial code words." This is simply not true. My whole life has been devoted to racial reconciliation and putting forward a new kind of politics.

First, when members of my campaign staff (some of whom, in the mail room specifically, happen to be African American) kept saying that my opponent is the kind of person a ninny would pick, nothing untoward was meant. Come on folks, just look up "pick" and "ninny" in the dictionary. Even though we apologized for other people misunderstanding what we were saying, the press would not let it rest. With a media like this, it's no wonder that racial issues are still so burning in this country.

And the commercials showcasing the threat to little blond girls if my opponent is elected were just that, commercials showing the threat to little blond girls if my opponent is elected. The use of 1970's funk music in the commercials was a bold outreach to the African American community. I should note here that none of my opponent's commercials utilize 1970's funk music.

This being said, some mistakes were made. My husband should not have dressed up in black-face and sang songs from "The Jazz Singer" during those South Carolina rallies. Howver, it seems to me that the source of the mistake was having him sing songs from Neil Diamond's movie of the same name rather than from the original movie with Al Jolson. Again, though, this had nothing to do with color, and was actually the fault of my campaign co-ordinator who I should note, we did fire.

I should not have said that my opponent was "pimping around in Chicago" while I was in Washington fighting for civil rights. But honestly, they use the term "pimping" themselves.

And when in the heat of debate I called my opponent "black bastard," I was specifically referring to the circumstances of his birth. Though technically true, I should not have said this, and again apologize for other people being oversenstive.

In closing, let me just say that I never asked to be born, and you jerks won't have me to kick around any longer.

Thank you, and goodnight.

I can tell you what they say in space

My rough drafts are usually twice as long as my final drafts. Just getting the ideas out requires letting my id run rampant, but then I do twenty or so rewrites. Here's a bit that was cut out on the first rewrite of Chapter 3 of Philosophy Through Video Games. The (yes, probably unethical) anti-Baby Boomer bias of a Generation Xer who has sweated blood on the academic job market is apparent in every word. You see, things went to crap on their watch. Yessir. Luckily my wife and co-writer (whose first drafts are much better) have saved the book from this kind of thing.
--------------
The latter third of the twentieth century was one series of let-downs after another. With very few exceptions, popular music never again achieved the combination of music hall melodic brilliance and sheer rockingness of the early 1970’s glam and proto-punk artists. Median incomes in inflation-adjusted dollars stagnated and decreased in much of the West after this period. Religious fanatics in the United States and post-colonial societies both used their countries’ oil wealth in an attempt to “poison everything.”

No elegy for the twentieth century is complete without remarking on the sad fate of modern science and technology. During the first two-thirds of this period, median life expectancy radically increased due to the development of vaccines, anti-biotic drugs, and a renewed appreciation of the importance of cleanliness. These developments of course kept people alive long enough to die of heart disease, car crashes, and cancer – none of which were cured during the final third of the century.

In the first two-thirds, we developed satellite communications and the ability to put people on the moon. Visionary science fiction promised a new world of space exploration much cooler than the original period of Western colonization. Star Trek even gave us the hope that (in virtue of the prime directive) this could be done without genocide. But unfortunately, in the latter third of the twentieth century humanity gave up.

In the first two-thirds of the twentieth century the chemical and neurological revolutions uncovered the physical basis of drugs such as marijuana, yage, peyote, and hallucinogenic mushrooms used widely in stone-age people’s religious ceremonies. This research actually led to the synthesis of new psycho-active drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide and methelenedioxymethamphetamine.  But, in spite of the fact that every great rock band (as well as the majority of the so-called “creative class” driving post-industrial economies) experimented with such mind altering drugs, a new era of prohibition descended on the West, one just as stupid as the previous war on alcohol. Thus, in the final part of the twentieth century, the pharmaceutical exploration of inner space was shut down just as the exploration of outer space ended. Therapeutic effects of any chemicals that make people feel good or are connected with creative activity and weirdness were henceforth not to be studied in private industry or our research universities. Henceforth, the only legal psycho-active drugs would be those that alleviated the anxiety of generations of twitchy television babies. And as of this writing, people are in prison the world over for smoking pot.

In the first two-thirds of the twentieth century, general relativity, special relativity, and quantum mechanics were discovered, tested, and used (along with the now defunct space program) to create cool new technology. In the final third of the twentieth century pure physics became bogged down in abstruse mathematical and quasi-metaphysical (possibly pseudo)  problems, the likes of which would make a medieval theologian blush. And nobody is even hinting at any cool new technology arising from these debates.

In this heady milieu of shattered dreams, crushed aspirations, and Prozac, just one truly cool thing transpired. Video games! But even here the sad fate of artificial intelligence is paradigmatic, in large part because the greatest hopes for A.I. crested just when the civilizational darkness began to descend upon us.

sad, but true

I am a degenerate failure.

No matter how I try, I can't get over my deep love for the music of Billy Joel, even (perhaps especially) including his maudlin yet irritatingly self-aggrandizing anthems like "Piano Man."

I have long envisioned a support group for people like me. It requires the following rungs (I find the metaphor of a ladder helpful in these things). We:

1. Admit that we are powerless over Billy Joel—that our lives have become unmanageable.
2. Come to believe that a Power greater than ourselves (the early Elvis) could restore us to sanity.
3. Make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of the Sun Records era Elvis as we understood Him.
4. Make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admit to the pre-RCA Elvis, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
6. Are entirely ready to have Elvis remove all these defects of character.
7. Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
8. Made a list of all persons we have harmed, and become willing to make amends to them all.
9. Make direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
10. Continue to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admit it.
11. Seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with Elvis as we understand Him, praying only for knowledge of His Will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Have had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to other Billy Joel fans, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

In my naivety I thought these twelve rungs would be helpful for people with all sorts of problems, not just Billy Joel fandom. For example, I thought that people who eat their food too fast or who eat the chips at Mexican restaurants too loudly would benefit enormously.

But what a damn hypocrite I turned out to be!  Here I am today lurking in my office just blasting "Big Shot," and "It's Still Rock and Roll To Me" into my ear phones while the C.D. case of the Sex Pistols' "Never Mind the Bollocks" is prominently displayed by my keyboard so as to fool my long suffering wife. The whole vicious cycle has started up again and these furtive Billy Joel purges will again become a shameful daily necessity.

There is only one thing to do. I'm going to start invoking the Vegas era Elvis in the twelve rungs. Fat Elvis knew karate and would have beat the crap out of his younger self for ever allowing the Jordanaires back up singers to ruin all his RCA stuff, and if his karate failed him, a couple of members of the Memphis mafia could have held down Mr. Skinny while the older Elvis forced him into one of those rhinestone jumpsuits. That would be totally cool.

making a bibliography sucks

First they came for our booze, then they came for our drugs, and now they come for our cigarettes and fatty foods.  It should by now be blindingly clear to every concerned citizen of this Republic that success is making the Puritanical jerks in charge more and more hubristic.  Soon they will begin to come for thought itself:

Sir, step out of the car. You've had too much to think.

I'm really starting to worry about you Jon, you shouldn't think alone. It's not healthy.

G********! You people are driving me to think!

If you plan on thinking, make sure and designate a non-thinking driver.

Some doctors argue that two thinks a day can have positive health effects.

Me and the boys in college used to think ourselves silly sometimes.

You have a thinking problem.

I'm cutting you off. You've had too much to think.

You laugh now, but just you wait until everyone you care about stages an "intervention," threatening to abandon you unless you throw away all those philosophy books and convert to Twelvestepism.  Just wait until your offspring report you to the school counselor and the War on Thought goons come kicking into your study, chopping up the now empty bookshelves to find your stash of printed matter.

This is not Ray Bradbury!  It's worse!  People still read, but in the not too distant future all of the upright and decent people will only read books with the official Chicken Soup for the Soul imprimatur. 

Soon we will find ourselves almost only ever discussing sports!  All wit and humor will degenerate into the playacting of joke sequences carefully culled from the latest situation comedies and commercials.  Entire conversations will consist of all the interlocutors just saying "Dude" to one another with various dumb inflections.

And any evidence that you do not in your soul accept the hunky-doryness of everything will be grounds for removal both from your job and polite society. 

Every form of sadistic evil and inequality will proliferate, but to the extent that we do not pretend it all away, it will be used to keep the rest of us in line, i.e. look what happens to people who try to "think." 

Every room will by law have a smiling, yet stern, picture of Oprah Winfrey in it, but by that point she will have changed her name to "Oprah!" and we will all be forced to convey through excitement the exclamation point every time we say her name. 

.

You fools.  You damn lemmings.  You let this happen.

I'm sorry; maybe this is nothing more than a cry for help.  I've hit rock bottom.  My thinking is out of control.
 

horrible moments in the history of philosophy

411 and 404 B.C.E.- Students of Socrates set about demonstrating their teacher's key claim that the study of philosophy makes one more ethical.  First, they destroy religious statues and help the Spartans defeat their own city state of Athens, and then they institute murderous reigns of blood upon the struggling democracy.  This is all topped off by establishing violently class-based dictatorships.  Sadly, both dictatorships were short-lived in Athens, and it would be over two millenniums before the philosopher king (and student of Plato and Rousseau) Pol Pot was able to finally achieve a lasting society based on Socratic principles.

330 B.C.E.- Aristotle goes to Syracuse, I mean Macedonia. His student, the not yet great Alexander, would go on to wipe up the floor with Socrates' and Plato's students.  While defeating the known world, Alexander funds Aristotle's Lyceum, the first philosophical school combining Platonistic a priori speculations with detailed empirical observations.  The new Aristotelian scientific methods yield fascinating new data for philosopher/scientists down through the ages to consider, such as Aristotle's discoveries that slaves and women lack souls, women have a different number of teeth than men, the primary function of the brain is to cool blood, and that mice spontaneously generate.

49-62 C.E.- Seneca the Younger pens several successful works of stoic philosophy demonstrating that happiness only arises as a result of a long regime of self-restraint, humility, discipline, and respect for others.  Throughout this period, the Young Emperor Nero is such an avid student that Seneca becomes his principle adviser, in the process transitioning from endoo- to enthusiastic ecto-morph, bedding countless married women, and amassing three hundred million sesterces in four years. 

525 C.E.- Boethius delivers his last words to Lady Philosophy, "You mean you can't help me out here?  Is that what you're saying?  After all we've been through, I'm actually on my own with this thing?  No. Come on. You really can't do anything?  I'm just trying to get clear on this one point, I mean. . .  OH JESUS, THAT HURTS!"  This passage is inexplicably missing from later editions of the Consolation.

1119 C.E.- Dude! That one guy Abelard? Like these other dudes totally chopped off his family jewels in a fight over this one totally hot chick.  Dude, I s*** you not, my man's all bleeding and limping around and he goes off to become a monk, but not the kung-fu kind.  They named some tuna after him?  Hey man, you want to go get high?

1626 C.E.- After an afternoon putting his empirical philosophy into action by seeing what happens when you stuff snow into a dead chicken's butt, Francis Bacon catches fatal pneumonia. As a result of his untimely death, the fortunes of radical empiricism enter a three hundred year period of decline, only to be revived by W.V.O. Quine's meticulous observation of the behavior of his two first-born in their new and improved Skinner box (the newer one not only had the floors wired for direct current, but also contained a bar they depressed with their nose for food pellets).

1784 C.E.- Immanuel Kant extracts brutal revenge upon the noisy church choir down the street by using their noon-day practice as an example of a violation of the categorical imperative.  In Kant's fevered imagination, this was to lead the choirmaster to say, "Uncle! Uncle!"  Alas, it is not to be.

1831 C.E.- Thesis: contaminated cantaloupes; Anti-Thesis: G.W.F. Hegel's digestive tract; Synthesis: heart stopping gastro-intestinal disorder.

1840 C.E.- Arthur Schopenhauer, the first great Wester philosopher to defend Hindu ideas concerning the renunciation of the will, closes his journal and smiles after penning the now immortal words, "Obit anus, abit onus."  Unlike the noisy choir that had tormented his philosophical hero Kant, Caroline Marquet never makes an appearance in Schopenhauer's philosophical writings.

1889 C.E.- Friedrich Nietzsche begins to hoard feces in a bedroom drawer.  His long suffering and devoted sister Elizabeth explains for the tenth time that he's supposed to be staring into the void, not doing this, this thing that he's doing.  But her protestations are to no avail.

1931 C.E.- In a whirlwind tour of Europe, W.V.O. Quine lunches with Rudolph Carnap, who from the Aufbau onwards explicitly argued that the unit of meaning was the language as a whole.  They discuss fellow "young turk" A.J. Ayer (who in Language, Truth, and Logic argued for a holistic form of verificationism that allowed one to hold true any proposition come what may). After returning to the United States Quine pens his revolutionary anti-positivist tract, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Philosophy is never the same!

1935 C.E.- After going bankrupt from running an ill-conceived boarding school with his now completely estranged second wife, Bertrand Russell recoups his losses by penning several best selling books telling other people how to live their lives.

1942 C.E.- After his heretofore beloved Granny refuses him a third helping of cookies and chocolate milk, Jerry Fodor vows dark revenge not just against her, but on a generation of readers as well.

1952 C.E.- After he had saved his home country and the entire free world by decrypting the German's Enigma Code and had also moved British science to the forefront of the world by developing the first digital computer, the government of Great Britain shows its gratitude by imprisoning Alan Turing for "acts of gross indecency" and then forcing him to take massive amounts of hormones to "cure" his homosexuality. 

Turing's treatment had the result not only of robbing the world of one of her greatest minds when he took his life, but also raised a lively debate in historical scholarship. How could a country ruled by such idiots possibly have managed to to keep an Empire that long?

1957 C.E.- In a public interview Martin Heidegger shamefully refuses to say that in retrospect “Arbeit Macht Frei” was a poor choice for the original opening epigraph of Sein Und Zeit.  Supporters and detractors continue to debate its appropriateness.

1962 C.E.- In between purging non-tenured linguists who disagree with the latest iteration of his theory and penning encomiums to fellow wannabe philosopher king Pol Pot, Noam Chomsky makes the bold case in an Austin, Texas ALA meeting that his opponents' pompadours are both grotesquely mistaken and at the same time merely trivial notational variants of his own pompadour.  Linguists and philosophers at the meeting initially found such arguments to be compelling.

1966 C.E.- It is the case that the automobile fast approaching down the streets of Blaricum hits L.E.J. Brouwer, or it is not the case that the automobile fast approaching down the streets of Blaricum hits L.E.J. Brouwer.

1994 C.E.- Insert (huh-huh-huh, he said "insert") joke involving Saul Kripke, rigid designation, and Princeton co-eds.  Maybe use the word "detumescent."  Oh man that's a funny adjective.

circa 1995 C.E.- Jet lag and low blood sugar from forgoing desert on the flight back from Australia combine with the aftereffects of childhood dyslexia to lead David Lewis to misread Hamlet's retort to Horatio as "There are more things dreamed of in your philosophy than in Heaven and Earth."  He drops his Shakespeare, leans over a tattered, much abused copy of "On the Plurality of Worlds," and can't quite bring himself to pick it up. [note: this entry plagiarizes Aidan McGlynn.]

2002 C.E.- All promotional material for Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman's film Derrida (about the eponymous "deconstructionist") contains the following tag line. "The world never got to watch great minds such as Plato and Socrates in action, but thanks to modern technology, this film captures one of the brilliant thinkers of the 20th century." The silence you hear now is the sound of a million T.V. babies failing to think, "but wait! I thought Plato and Socrates were against sophists. And they weren't a-hole prima donna American English Department celebrities who abused the non-sycophantic. And didn't they have more than fifteen minutes of fame?"

411 and 404 B.C.E.- Students of Socrates set about demonstrating their teacher's key claim that the study of philosophy makes one more ethical.  First, they destroy religious statues and help the Spartans defeat their own city state of Athens, and then they institute murderous reigns of blood upon the struggling democracy.  This is all topped off by establishing violently class-based dictatorships.  Sadly, both dictatorships were short-lived in Athens, and it would be over two millenniums before the philosopher king (and student of Plato and Rousseau) Pol Pot was able to finally achieve a lasting society based on Socratic principles.

330 B.C.E.- Aristotle goes to Syracuse, I mean Macedonia. His student, the not yet great Alexander, would go on to wipe up the floor with Socrates' and Plato's students.  While defeating the known world, Alexander funds Aristotle's Lyceum, the first philosophical school combining Platonistic a priori speculations with detailed empirical observations.  The new Aristotelian scientific methods yield fascinating new data for philosopher/scientists down through the ages to consider, such as Aristotle's discoveries that slaves and women lack souls, women have a different number of teeth than men, the primary function of the brain is to cool blood, and that mice spontaneously generate.

49-62 C.E.- Seneca the Younger pens several successful works of stoic philosophy demonstrating that happiness only arises as a result of a long regime of self-restraint, humility, discipline, and respect for others.  Throughout this period, the Young Emperor Nero is such an avid student that Seneca becomes his principle adviser, in the process transitioning from endoo- to enthusiastic ecto-morph, bedding countless married women, and amassing three hundred million sesterces in four years. 

525 C.E.- Boethius delivers his last words to Lady Philosophy, "You mean you can't help me out here?  Is that what you're saying?  After all we've been through, I'm actually on my own with this thing?  No. Come on. You really can't do anything?  I'm just trying to get clear on this one point, I mean. . .  OH JESUS, THAT HURTS!"  This passage is inexplicably missing from later editions of the Consolation.

1119 C.E.- Dude! That one guy Abelard? Like these other dudes totally chopped off his family jewels in a fight over this one totally hot chick.  Dude, I s*** you not, my man's all bleeding and limping around and he goes off to become a monk, but not the kung-fu kind.  They named some tuna after him?  Hey man, you want to go get high?

1626 C.E.- After an afternoon putting his empirical philosophy into action by seeing what happens when you stuff snow into a dead chicken's butt, Francis Bacon catches fatal pneumonia. As a result of his untimely death, the fortunes of radical empiricism enter a three hundred year period of decline, only to be revived by W.V.O. Quine's meticulous observation of the behavior of his two first-born in their new and improved Skinner box (the newer one not only had the floors wired for direct current, but also contained a bar they depressed with their nose for food pellets).

1784 C.E.- Immanuel Kant extracts brutal revenge upon the noisy church choir down the street by using their noon-day practice as an example of a violation of the categorical imperative.  In Kant's fevered imagination, this was to lead the choirmaster to say, "Uncle! Uncle!"  Alas, it is not to be.

1831 C.E.- Thesis: contaminated cantaloupes; Anti-Thesis: G.W.F. Hegel's digestive tract; Synthesis: heart stopping gastro-intestinal disorder.

1840 C.E.- Arthur Schopenhauer, the first great Wester philosopher to defend Hindu ideas concerning the renunciation of the will, closes his journal and smiles after penning the now immortal words, "Obit anus, abit onus."  Unlike the noisy choir that had tormented his philosophical hero Kant, Caroline Marquet never makes an appearance in Schopenhauer's philosophical writings.

1889 C.E.- Friedrich Nietzsche begins to hoard feces in a bedroom drawer.  His long suffering and devoted sister Elizabeth explains for the tenth time that he's supposed to be staring into the void, not doing this, this thing that he's doing.  But her protestations are to no avail.

1931 C.E.- In a whirlwind tour of Europe, W.V.O. Quine lunches with Rudolph Carnap, who from the Aufbau onwards explicitly argued that the unit of meaning was the language as a whole.  They discuss fellow "young turk" A.J. Ayer (who in Language, Truth, and Logic argued for a holistic form of verificationism that allowed one to hold true any proposition come what may). After returning to the United States Quine pens his revolutionary anti-positivist tract, “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Philosophy is never the same!

1935 C.E.- After going bankrupt from running an ill-conceived boarding school with his now completely estranged second wife, Bertrand Russell recoups his losses by penning several best selling books telling other people how to live their lives.

1942 C.E.- After his heretofore beloved Granny refuses him a third helping of cookies and chocolate milk, Jerry Fodor vows dark revenge not just against her, but on a generation of readers as well.

1952 C.E.- After he had saved his home country and the entire free world by decrypting the German's Enigma Code and had also moved British science to the forefront of the world by developing the first digital computer, the government of Great Britain shows its gratitude by imprisoning Alan Turing for "acts of gross indecency" and then forcing him to take massive amounts of hormones to "cure" his homosexuality. 

Turing's treatment had the result not only of robbing the world of one of her greatest minds when he took his life, but also raised a lively debate in historical scholarship. How could a country ruled by such idiots possibly have managed to to keep an Empire that long?

1957 C.E.- In a public interview Martin Heidegger shamefully refuses to say that in retrospect “Arbeit Macht Frei” was a poor choice for the original opening epigraph of Sein Und Zeit.  Supporters and detractors continue to debate its appropriateness.

1962 C.E.- In between purging non-tenured linguists who disagree with the latest iteration of his theory and penning encomiums to fellow wannabe philosopher king Pol Pot, Noam Chomsky makes the bold case in an Austin, Texas ALA meeting that his opponents' pompadours are both grotesquely mistaken and at the same time merely trivial notational variants of his own pompadour.  Linguists and philosophers at the meeting initially found such arguments to be compelling.

1966 C.E.- It is the case that the automobile fast approaching down the streets of Blaricum hits L.E.J. Brouwer, or it is not the case that the automobile fast approaching down the streets of Blaricum hits L.E.J. Brouwer.

1994 C.E.- Insert (huh-huh-huh, he said "insert") joke involving Saul Kripke, rigid designation, and Princeton co-eds.  Maybe use the word "detumescent."  Oh man that's a funny adjective.

circa 1995 C.E.- Jet lag and low blood sugar from forgoing desert on the flight back from Australia combine with the aftereffects of childhood dyslexia to lead David Lewis to misread Hamlet's retort to Horatio as "There are more things dreamed of in your philosophy than in Heaven and Earth."  He drops his Shakespeare, leans over a tattered, much abused copy of "On the Plurality of Worlds," and can't quite bring himself to pick it up. [note: this entry plagiarizes Aidan McGlynn.]

2002 C.E.- All promotional material for Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman's film Derrida (about the eponymous "deconstructionist") contains the following tag line. "The world never got to watch great minds such as Plato and Socrates in action, but thanks to modern technology, this film captures one of the brilliant thinkers of the 20th century." The silence you hear now is the sound of a million T.V. babies failing to think, "but wait! I thought Plato and Socrates were against sophists. And they weren't a-hole prima donna American English Department celebrities who abused the non-sycophantic. And didn't they have more than fifteen minutes of fame?"

movie screenplays I may never get the chance to pitch

(1) He's an accountant.  She's a personal assistant in the fast paced world of D-List Hollywood stars.  Can this marriage be saved?  At the end of the movie we find out they are both ghosts.

(2) A new plague destroys all biological life on earth.  In a couple of trillion years space aliens discover earth, and all that's left is a scratched 45 recording of the Ramone's "Beat the Brat."  Since the aliens only use advanced C.D. playing technology, they stare at the record (through the multi-sectioned "eyes" at the end of their hand-stalk appendages) uncomprehendingly.

(3) A tribe of herdsman violently conquer an agrarian society, but in the end are themselves assimilated.  Their religious books mythologize this takeover.  They discover technology and end up providing good quality and relatively painless dental care to everyone, even their pets.  But at the end of the movie we find out they are all ghosts.

(4)  In a clever remake of "Look Who's Coming to Dinner," a colony of staid (and relatively well-off) intestinal bacteria have to cope with the arrival of cryptosporidium.  The large intestine will never be the same!

(5)  Two dogs meet in a Sam's Warehouse and have lovable adventures at night.  One night there is a fire and the dogs give their lives trying to help the illegal immigrants cleaning the store escape.  Unfortunately, the manager of the Warehouse routinely violated fire-code and as a result everyone dies in a fiery inferno, but through the dogs' heroic actions, the store is saved.  At some point in the movie, the dogs will befriend a child.  At the very end of the film the store manager and the befriended lovable scamp go to a puppy mill and get two more dogs that can (with the new batch of illegals) have the run of the store at night.

(6)  Robot space-aliens invade earth.  In the end it turns out, they are all ghosts.

Dang it! G.O.P. does not stand for "Gay Old Party"

Look how unhappy all these prominent Republicans look.  In fact, I can't imagine more dour people than Roy Cohn, Mark Foley, Jim West, and Ed Schrock.  This is befitting modern conservatism, because we conservatives realize that this nation is at war and that liberal do-gooders fatally lack a sense of humanity's non-perfectibility.  Of course this tends to make us not very cheerful.  The times demand it.

Yet in today's edition of the liberal web page salon dot com keeps saying that these four (and also Republican party movers and shakers Marvin Liebman, Terry Dolan, Arthur Finkelstein, Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, and Glenn Murphy) are secretly really cheerful, happy guys (see the inexplicable article here).

I remember one of my childhood friends who used to hide in a closet while his parents argued.  It was really sad, and it kind of makes me think of all these poor Republicans crowded together in my friend's closet, reaching out to help one another get through all the sad times.  How do liberal groups like Salon think they are helping by dragging all of these Republicans out of this closet?  Jeez Louis, if a man claims he's unhappy why not take him at his word?

Senator proclaims self dour

I don't get all the hoopla.  I understand all the well-meaning people trying to say that he's basically a happy guy.  My friend Frankie even assured me that he had on good evidence that a whole set of positive adjectives apply to Craig, including alert, animate, animated, blithe, blithesome, bouncy, brash, carefree, cheerful, cheery, chipper*, chirpy, confident, convivial, devil-may-care*, festive, forward, frivolous, frolicsome, fun-loving, gamesome, glad, gleeful, hilarious, insouciant, jocund, jolly, jovial, joyful, joyous, keen, light-hearted, lively, merry, mirthful, playful, pleasure-seeking, presuming, pushy, rollicking, self-assertive, sparkling, spirited, sportive, sprightly, sunny, vivacious, wild, and zippy*.

But he just does not look that happy to me.  Why are people making a big deal of this?  Why can't we trust him when he tells us that he's sad?  It's not like G.O.P. stands for "Gay Old Party" or anything. 

Boeing unveils revolutionary new airline cabin design

(AP) In a wide-ranging and intense round-table conference call this morning with clients Delta, Northwest, United, American Airlines, and representatives of the Chinese government, Boeing Commercial Airplanes Executive Vice President Bertrand McSade unveiled the revolutionary new cabin design for the Boeing 787 Superliner.  Long heralded as the future of commercial aviation for its size and innovative fueling system,  the 787 is, in the words of McSade, "Building on prior successes of the 700 series to revolutionize the way the world flies."

"The idea is deceptively simple.  At Boeing we demand that our engineering team think 'outside of the box' and they deliver.  Simply put, in this case we determined that if we move from the 'sitting configuration' paradigm to what we like to call the 'lying down paradigm', we can fit twenty percent more passengers in the same amount of space, and, as a strong testament to Boeing's commitment to environmental sustainability, without additional fuel use.  This translates to a win-win-win for everybody: commercial airline shareholders, our government clients, passengers who get even more bang for their flying buck, and I might add, the planet that sustains all of us.  The icing on the cake here is that our research also shows that passengers lying down and chained to the cabin floor are much safer in the event of airline emergencies than passengers sitting with seatbelts. "

McSade went on to discuss the new cabin design in terms of the difficult security situation during the Global War on Terror.  "We're way ahead of Airbus on that one.  As you know, since the terrible events of September 11 Boeing has developed a partnership with the T.S.A. so that we can be at the forefront of security measures. In regards to our lying down cabin, T.S.A. directory Larry O'Tool confided in me that if, in addition to the shoe searches and lack of water allowed in planes, passengers had been chained to the floor, the horrible events of September 11 might not even have occurred.  So I think we can all chalk this up to another case of doing well by doing good."

McSade stated that Boeing was currently expanding their Dallas plant for cabin interior retrofitting of all planes in the 700 series.  "Since Boeing introduced the 700 series, transit has never been the same, and I submit that with our new revolutionary redesign it never will be the same." 

During the open-ended question and answer session, Chinese government representative Harold Wu asked McSade how this new design was predicted to impact customer comfort.   McSade responded, "In the United States, consumer comfort and customer satisfaction are the most important factors of our carrier partners such as Delta and American Airlines, and Boeing has always been at the forefront of this.  And I humbly submit that Boeing's new "laying down chained" paradigm represents an incredible advance here.  Did you know that London's Heathrow Airport is the only airport in the world to collect fatality statistics in the airport?  Last year alone seven travelers died in Heathrow from blood clots formed in their legs during transit then moving to their heart after they deplaned.  Given that Heathrow does not keep track of all of the passengers who died of this after leaving the airport, our researchers have determined that this kind of fatality negatively impacts tens of thousands of costumers annually.  In addition, researchers have shown chronic back dysfunction caused by current cabin conditions impacts the world economy to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars of lost work time annually.  I'm sure you all know that health care providers tell passengers they have to get up and walk around the cabin for five minutes every hour to prevent this.  But how to square this with customer demand for less leg-room and fuller cabins?  Given seat sizes, and how many passengers we must shove into our current 700 series, it is simply not possible for even a small minority of passengers to do this so-called "get up and walk around the cabin."  We at Boeing have squared this circle though.  With the "laying chained down" paradigm, passengers shorter than five feet tall will be able to fully extend their legs, and taller passengers can take turns fully extending their own legs.  Voila!  Problem solved. Win-Win-Win."

When further queried by Wu about the possibility of bacterial infection from passengers being chained in pools of each other's urine, feces, vomit, and blood, McSade noted that noxious bacterial levels on all surfaces in the cabins of today's airplanes far exceeds the amount of noxious bacteria in the average American toilet.  "Nobody even has statistics on work loss due to illness and fatalities due to that."  In addition, Boeing has patented a new device McSade called "the Boeing bilge pump" which will periodically spray high pressure blasts of sea water throughout the cabin.  McSade commented, "The  Boeing bilge pump is really just HEPA filtration taken to the next level."  McSade also noted that no commercial airline has been found libel for even one of the ten to hundreds of thousands of fatalities caused by current airline cabin conditions, and as a result, "Just say hypothetically, we lose one third of passengers in transit, that's still a win-win-win situation for everybody concerned."

McSade closed his presentation by noting that the new cabins will be on-line and in America's airports by the holiday season 2008.  He noted, "When you are out there stuck for eight hours on the tarmac, would you rather be sitting in your seat without water and being told you can't use the now broken toilet?  Or would you rather be reclining luxuriously on the cabin floor, waiting for that next refreshing spritzer of sea water, chained up with your family?  It's a no brainer.  Win-Win-Win."

[Diagrams and photographs for this story provided by Boeing Commercial Airplanes and reproduced with permission.]

strangest friend in the world

Probably the wackiest, down-right weirdest person I have ever had the blessings to know is my old friend Bill.  The fact that he is successfully walking the walk and talking the talk gives me great faith in humanity's acceptance of eccentricity.

Some bizarre, wacky, and eccentric things I've noticed about Bill:

(1)  He has a strong preference for sans serif fonts. 

On more than one occasion I've presented him with examples of the two kinds of fonts and asked his preference.  In a clear majority of cases, Bill picks the sans serif ones.  Pretty scary, right?  It's like he lives in a world composed entirely of ancient typescripts and modern newspaper headlines.  Jeez, Louis.  How does a guy like that manage to tie his own shoes in the morning?

Well, as weird as that is, you haven't heard anything yet.  Even stranger is the fact that:

(2)  Bill resolutely agrees with Aristotle that existential consequence is a valid inference! 

Have you ever heard of anything so willfully bizarre?  Just try explaining to him the way in which Grice's theory of implicature saves modern logic on this score.  I dare you.  At best Bill will waive his hand dismissively and say, "Feh, I'm trying to watch the game."  Wacky!  Wacky!  Wacky!  Wacky! 

O.K. so you don't think it can get any worse.  Well get a load of this

(3)  Bill's favorite color is yellow! 

Need I say more?  I know that some of you probably don't believe me and think I'd make something like that up.  I swear it's true.  Look, Bill's not a bad guy or anything, he just walks to the beat of a different drummer than you and me.  And besides, who was it that said, "Judge not lest ye be judged" ? 

Sorry to get heavy handed, but I needed to get that out there before I hit you with this astonishing factoid.

(4)  Bill has no concept of how important opposable digits are for primates like us. 

You can take him to the zoo (I have) and point out how much better the chimps, orangutans, and gorillas are than all the other animals without opposable digits.  You can take him out for sushi and dare him to try to hold the chopsticks without his thumb.  You can ask him how the hell he thinks those astronauts could hit that golf ball on the moon with opposable digits.  All Bill will do is kind of dismissively role his eyes and exhale quickly!  He just doesn't get it!   It's as if in Bill-world (a world where everything is yellow and there are no serif fonts) opposable digits confer no selective advantage to one's offspring.

Still not convinced?  O.K.  Point out to him that Opossums have toes on their hind feet that help them grip branches and climb. Get in his face about the fact that even the poor giant panda has a bony portion of his wrist bone that he uses like an opposable thumb to grasp bamboo when eating.  One would think that would bring him over, but one would be wrong.  Bill is not impressed by our poor cousin the Panda bear with it's tiny cubs and thumb like aperture.  And why not?  Because  Bill's wacky!  Didn't I already tell you?

And here is the absolute end, the coup de grace of Bill's wild kingdom of weird:

(5)  Once in college, Bill got so drunk that he threw up the next morning. 

Talk about wild and crazy! 

I know everyone has that one friend who is the wild and crazy, eccentric dude that entertains the rest of us with his wacky ways.  I'd put any of them up against Bill, for there is only one Bill, and I say the world (the real world, not the vomitty, yellow, sans serif, syllogistic world where we all use prehensile tails in lieu of thumbs) is a better place for his presence.  I mean, isn't it good to know that there are more things in the heavens and earth than we dream up in our philosophies?

Things Nobody Cares About

(1)  That weird ("oh my God you guys it was so real") dream you had.
(2)  Personal triumphs from high school or college.
(3)  Intimate details (of any nature).
(4)  Your views on politics, religion, sports, celebrities, automobiles, vegetarianism, or the weather we've been having.
(5)  Job related minutiae.
(6)  How members of your family get along with each other or you.
(7)  Supposedly wacky entailments of modern physics.
(8)  Whatever it was that caused you to say "F*** 'em if they can't take a joke" that one day.
(9)  How much better the last place in which you lived was than this place.
(10)  Why you dress like that.
(11)  The television shows and movies you watch.
(12)  The music you listen to.
(13)  All the misunderstanding.
(14)  Whose fault it really is.
(15)  What you really think.
(16)  The story behind why you can tell if the weather is going to change because of that strange feeling in your thumb.
(17)  Your hobbies.
(18)  Medical advances related to hypertension.
(19)  Your boring succession of hairstyles.
(20)  How much you need that first cup a joe in the morning.

Cogburn's guide to fine wines

The Associate Press recently announced that in 2006 for the very first time wine sales in these United States exceeded beer sales.  Clearly our culture is changing, becoming more "refined," if you will.  While this trend is on the whole to be applauded, sadly it sometimes causes needless anxiety among a lot of people. When buying a wine, people are often numbed by the vast array of choices, bizarre rituals, and strange vocabulary.

You don't have to worry any more.  Cogburn's Sophisticated Living, Six Rules of Wine(TM) has all of the information you need to become a wine expert in no time.  With this knowledge at your disposal you will get that difficult promotion, impress that unimpressed girl, and generally be the life of the wine drinking party.  So don't be anxious, just print these commandments and then fold them up and keep them in your wallet for quick perusal whenever wine is served, drunk, or even just talked about.  Before you know it you'll be quaffing with the big boys.

I. Thou shallt not buy old wine.
I'm going to start by letting you in on a little secret.  Bottles of wine are exactly like cars; they lose 30% of their value as soon as they are driven off the lot.  Unfortunately though, you cannot rebuild the engine on a bottle of wine!  Maybe, if you are not trying to impress, and the price is right, buy a one or two year old bottle, but don't let your friends, prospective spouse, or boss see you doing that!  If this is still a little unclear, just keep in mind that all of those old bottles are ones that the owners couldn't unload in the year they were made!  Unfortunately, unsophisticated rubes who don't know anything about wine allow this racket to go on year after year after year.  You don't have to be a rube, though!  And just imagine the look on the waiter's face when you say, "Save your list of old wine for people who don't know any better.  I'm a sophisticated man!  Bring me your newest bottle, pronto!"  Starting to feel the wine excitement?  I thought so.  Now we're ready for commandment number II, which actually concerns waiter/customer relations.

II. Thou shallt not take crap from waiters.
Often, snooty and condescending waiters will try to hand you the cork, trying to one-up you by getting you to do their job by putting the cork on the table.  Never accept it!  If you do, you are no better than a beta dog who, when seeing other bigger dogs, lies down on his back and urinates himself.  Remember, you are the alpha dog, not the waiter!  Even worse than them shirking work by "handing off the cork," bad waiters will actually sometimes pour you just a little tiny bit of wine and then stare at you smiling.  This is the equivalent of the waiter sniffing your butt and trying to mount you.  Don't let the waiter mount you!  I've found in my extensive experience of fine dining that the best thing to do here is to stare straight in the waiter's eye and say something like, "Boy, if this glass isn't filled to the brim by the time I count to ten I'm going to have a little sit-down with your boss."  Then I hold the glass out and start counting.  Sometimes he will stop halfway to the top.  Don't let him do this.  Stare him in the eye and say firmly, "Damn it, I said to the rim."

I realize these strange rituals are intimidating, but take it from me, the enjoyment one gets from fine wine is worth the effort!  The whole Jon Cogburn Sophisticated Living(TM) approach is predicated on the concept that you too can master the art of fine dining with wine.  If you are still nervous about this, just remember that if the waiter wasn't a beta dog, he wouldn't be a waiter.  The cork and pouring rituals are his way of testing the waters to make sure that the pack structure is intact. And in all my years of fine dining I have never had a waiter refuse to fill my glass to the brim when I tell him firmly.  Not once!

III.  Thou shallt (whenever possible) buy the wine that comes in a box.
If you have a hard time remembering this one, just remember that we learned from rule I. that newer is always better. And it is just a scientifc fact that as a technology, the cardboard box is scarcely one hundred years old. The bottle on the other hand, has been around for tens of thousands of years. We no longer transport packages in the mail like the ancient Egyptians (i.e. in glass bottles). So why are we still drinking wine out such an antiquated technology?  Jeez, Louis. Join the modern world already! We now have dental care, decent cosmetic surgery, and refreshing beverages in cardboard boxes. I for one do not want to return to the time before anti-biotics. If you do, they you are just a philistine and I can no longer help you on your quite clearly fruitless quest for sophistication.

IV.  Thou shallt always buy the wine with the nicest picture on the box or (if boxed wine is unavailable) bottle.
Think about it. This company went to all the trouble to have a nice photo of a peaceful hillside on the box. They also spent money making commercials taking place on that same hillside. Do you seriously think they’d put all that effort into marketing and not just as much effort into making a great wine? You will also find that such wines tend to be much newer than ugly bottles with French writing all over them.

V.  Thou shallt be very careful when buying Chablis, Burgundy, or Zinfandel.
The perfidious French have stolen the names “Chablis,” and “Burgundy” in a sadly successful attempt to get unsophisticated rubes to purchase their bad wines. Once I ordered a Chablis in a restaurant and it came out in a bottle with a bunch of French writing on it. I sent it back and told the waiter if he did not get me a nice real (i.e. American) Chablis I was going to walk out of the restaurant.  He was very embarrassed that I’d caught him out and just hemmed and hawed. At that point, we left. It gets worse though. Twice I have ordered Burgundy only to be brought a tiny bottle of white wine with no picture on the label! Remember, real Burgundy is red, comes in either a box or a gallon jug with a nice picture, and it tastes best refrigerated or over ice.  In both cases I had to lecture the ill-informed waiter. If this was not bad enough, other non-French countries, and indeed even our own friends the Californians (and yes California is still part of the United States), are aping this French strategy. You may not believe this, but three times I have ordered Zinfandel, only to be brought red wine!  Zinfandel should always be a healthy pink transparent color. If it is not, yell at the waiter and send it back. If they don’t bring you pink wine, leave the restaurant. This brings us to our sixth point.

VI. Thou shallt never drink French wines!
They are amateurs (there’s a French word for you) and don’t know what they are doing. They always either completely mess it up (e.g. see the above) or do a worse job as with so-called “French Champagne.” Real Champagne is made in California. It goes much better with food (especially hamburgers), and gets you drunk a lot faster than the French knockoffs. Also, French wine technology and labor laws are so far behind what we have here that their wine is always too expensive. I know, I know, if it was not for Lafayette we’d all be speaking English right now. But we have repaid the favor at this point, so we have no obligation to humor them about their bad wines.

Last note- Some people have asked me why I’m making these commands available free of charge on the web. I make this sacrifice, because those of us here at Jon Cogburn Living(TM) feel strongly that sophistication should not be hoarded by refined people such as myself. Yes, yes, The United States is the home of the best and most sophisticated dining establishments in the world (I'm thinking of such reknown culinary meccas as Red Lobster, The Olive Garden, The Outback Steakhouse, and P.F. Chang’s).  While all of this grandeur and sophistication is nice, we must also not forget that these United States are the home of democracy. And I think for this democracy to be a true beacon to the world, everyone in it should should have a chance at my level of sophistication. All I ask is that when you see me elegantly diving into a plate of Red Lobster Popcorn Shrimp(TM) (or perhaps the divine Ginormous Fried Onion(TM) at “The Outback,” or maybe my third helping of all you can eat bread and salad at “The Garden”) with my glass of White Zinfandel, don’t hesitate to come over and share stories of all of the great changes that Cogburn Sophisticated Living(TM) has made in your life.  If this were one of my infomercials, I would actually start crying a little bit right now because I'm so humbled to have helped so many people.  In fact, while I am typeing this very sentence a lone tear is falling off my cheeck and onto the keyboard.  It's very moving.