Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Keyboard Cat, Hensel Twins, Neutral Milk Hotel, and God

•I am no animal welfare radical, but I have to say Keyboard Cat never looked very happy or gently-handled to me.  However, the song itself, I think, is funny – as is this (presumably consenting) human reenacting the famed clip and this still a bit violent-looking – but cuter – dog doing it.

•Also cute in a weird way: the astonishing so-called “two-headed girl,” actually the independent-minded but necessarily highly cooperative Hensel twins.

•They are not to be confused with Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 song “Two-Headed Boy,” which strikes me as being the sort of song that the stiffer Guided by Voices should have been doing but wasn’t quite.  More important, it strikes me in hindsight that the song is a pretty good choice for the position of “missing link between 90s grunge-type-stuff and 00s affected-folk-indie stuff,” though it’s a bit scarier than either.

•Conjoined Christian twins plus an organ-playing cat naturally remind me of this point:

When some say the media are too secular, I take it they don’t have in mind things like the Times piece about the (currently #1 bestselling!) book Heaven Is Real, a piece that features not one skeptical question about a child’s claims that while unconscious he visited Heaven (awww!)...a story it took the child years after the “fact” to fully formulate...years of having a preacher for a father, oddly enough.  Nope, the Times just uncritically repeats the family’s claims that it's a mystery where the kid could have gotten his notions about Heaven at so young an age.  So, gosh, they must be true.  America, you are a nation of imbeciles.

Intellectual maturity means being able to contemplate complexity (and doubt) without anxiety, and that means combining skepticism with the realization that neither biology nor the economy requires a central planner.  Anarchism and atheism should be as widespread as common sense – which ought to be common. 

P.S. If I offend anyone with that comment, he cannot become the first person to unfriend me on Facebook – I think someone beat you to it yesterday, and there is no built-in way to know who (though there is non-retroactive ’ware out there).  Believe it or not, I honestly can’t think of anyone I’ve offended lately.  (Maybe I’d better take things up a notch.  I trust the fledgling list will continue to grow.)

1 comment:

Gerard said...

The only method is searching, through Facebook, for the name of the person you suspect might have defriended you. Although, if you already have an inkling of who it might be, the task is probably a superfluous one.