Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Observations

Things that I like:
For my final exam in introduction to philosophy last fall, a student wrote on her blue book exam under Instructor: “The Best One”

Churches I will Not Attend (Okay, it's true that I avoid all churches, but really. . .)

Free Will Baptist Megachurch:
Wednesday Night Word Explosion
I don’t know what a Word Explosion is, but I try to avoid explosions of any kind.

Eternal Word Ministries:
The sermons at this place are interminable.

Strip mall church:
Advertisement: Practice Resurrection!
I was under the impression one only got one shot at this. I would prefer to put it off as long as possible.

Name Nazi:
It sometimes bothers me that Dwyane Wade’s name is misspelled. Am I the only one who notices this? Of course, in a way, the idea that one’s name could be misspelled is absurd. Names are purely conventional; any string of symbols that one’s society agrees to treat as referring directly to that person count as the name for that person. There are limits, however to what you can get away with.

Still, I sometimes have doubts about wisdom of some names (I say as the parent of a child with a decidedly unusual name). I recently saw a woman with her children in a Burger King play area. The boy was named “Massiah”. Obviously, you can name your children anything you want, but they are the ones who have to live with it. And isn’t "Massiah" a little optimistic? It would certainly put a lot of pressure on the kid. Maybe it would be kinder to go with “Superman” or "Samuel L. Jackson".

Overheard conversations:
I saw a woman on the train the other day who told her four-year old daughter, “Shut up. You just talk too much.” When another woman gave her an indulgent, rather than scandalized, smile, the mother expounded at length, in detail, for the rest of the trip about how the child never stopped talking, and how she got her loquacity from her grandmother, how she asked questions with obvious answers and was otherwise unbearably talkative. I thought, “Lady, she did not get it from her grandmother.”

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