Archive for Keyser
Keyser’s Been Busy: Ottawa Edition
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Got back at midnight last night from a successful visit to Ottawa. Mrs. S. was on some committee at the National Association of Bullshit, so Keyser tagged along. Took 957 photos! Posted a bunch on Facebook today, which took forever, and the start of term is distressingly close (Wednesday, yikes!) plus we’re having a shindig tomorrow afternoon (with the new Dean invited!), and the “vacation” wasn’t exactly restful, the upshot of it all being that Keyser’s pretty busy. Try to get a post of some nice/odd images of Ottawa, but no promises of how soon…
Image of the Day: Off to Ottawa Edition
Posted by: | CommentsGonna be away for the next few days. Updates from the hotel possible but not promised!
Punctuation Mystery of the Day: M-Dash Edition
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Keyser’s been noticing this peculiarity of punctuation a lot recently, and just came across yet another example:
Press — whom I like personally (and who has previously appeared on my podcast), made what were (in my estimation) the most controversial comments of the day.
What the hell is going on with opening a logical intrusion into a sentence with an m-dash (that is, a large large the same size as the letter m–here represented by two regular dashes) but closing it with a comma? Perhaps Keyser was misinformed about correct punctuation when he first studied English back at Medio-Central Hungarian State (Debrecen)–it was, after all, just a distribution course in his double major of daemonology and taxidermy–but he was taught that you close an intrusion like that with a second m-dash (as Keyser just illustrated!).
After noticing a few instances and being struck by their wrongness, Keyser’s been finding this error all over the place. Did someone forget to send him the memo on this new practice?
So What Have You Been Up To Anyway?: Keyser Edition
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Yo, readers/viewers! Perhaps you’ve been wondering what Keyser’s been up to of late, since it obviously hasn’t been blogging. The main thing is that term is coming up in ten days, and there’s a book that Keyser wants to get as much done on as possible before then, so he’s been daemonologizing at quite the pace recently. (The keyboard’s even been known been to start emitting vapor, but that may be caused by something other than the celerity of typing…) Also, Mrs. S. has to go to some dopey meetings in Ottawa next week, and Keyser will tag along, which will put a crimp in both writing and blogging. Actually, Keyser went to a Lady Gaga concert on Thursday. He asked Mrs. S. if she thought he should take along his camera, and she said no. Keyser stupidly went along with the advice Totally wrong decision! Remember, you should always seek advice, but you have to go with your own instincts and bear in mind that you’ll have to live with the consequences. Her reasoning was in fact wrong, and there might have been cool photos to share. As it is, it seemed pointless to blog about the concert with no images. (It wasn’t bad, though the opening act was awful.)
Oh, and the housing market is completely collapsing and the swine Geithner pretty much admitted that the HAMP plan was knowingly constructed to fuck-over a large number of applicants because it’s intended purpose from the start was to help out Fannie Mae and the big banks. Could you imagine what would have been the reaction in the media to such a revelation under Bush? As it is, everyone’s all, “Oh, okay, so you screwed thousands of regular people to help out Goldman Sachs. Cool.” Christ, what a world…
Image of the Day
Posted by: | CommentsBusy day. Went and took for measurements for a medical survey about cancer (they’re tracking tons of people to find out variables for cancer rates, so it has nothing to do with whether Keyser has cancer), grabbed a quick dinner and then went to a bookstore for the filming of a demo to get the okay for the production of another documentary about witch hunting. (The main production company is headquartered in Ireland, but they have an affiliate right here in Iglooland, which was convenient for them. The demo is sort of like a commercial with sound bits from, in this instance, various daemonological talking heads. The shoot here seemed to go okay. We’ll see if this show flies…) On the move, on the move!
Image of the Day: Goddamned Cats Edition
Posted by: | CommentsSo, Keyser and Mrs. S. are out to dinner, and Mrs. S. has a glass of wine or two, and is feeling a bit “frisky,” shall we say, when we get home. So if you were a demanding and self-centered feline, what would you pick to do at a moment like that? Yeah, exactly – the lot of them. Goddamned cats!
Another One of Those Day’s Image of the Day
Posted by: | CommentsBeen one of those days. 1000 cals on the stationary bike ’cause the damned rain won’t stop, went to the farmer’s market to get some flavored honey and berries, made a batch of applesauce with the crappy eating apples from the tree your humble Pannonian planted ten years or so ago (damned thing was supposed to make great eating apples – hah! to that), went for a walk, annotated a text to use in daemonology next term, saw The Village by M. Night Shambadambalyn (about as stupid as it was made out to be, and perhaps a bit better made than The Happening from a technical POV but really dull)…
And to think that Keyser may or may not have something to say about the cultural vandalism of John Maynard Keynes…
Heart of Darkness: High School Chums Edition
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So last year, Keyser found on Facebook somebody that he he’d been friendly with back in high school. (It seems that one of FB’s main purposes is to find people from grade school and high school and see if you look better at this age than they do.) This friend was on vacation at the time and posted fairly frequently. Then at the end of last August he got back home and stopped posting. If you do much FB, you find that some people are on all the time, some have accounts but never post, and the last category are on rather sporadically.
Keyser didn’t think much about this disappearance and let it slide. Then the other day, an entirely unrelated matter about another school acquaintance put Keyser in mind of the person from last year, so he decided to check out the friend’s account. Hmm, that’s odd, he doesn’t seem to be in Keyser’s list of “friends” any more. Somewhat retardedly, FB alphabetizes by first name, so Keyser tried by “real” first name and nickname, but to no avail.
Well, okay, let’s try out Google. Keyser knew the name, obviously, and remembered the home state, so type type type, and let’s see what we get. The first few “hits” were doctors, but clearly not him. Then… “Oh, Keyser’s fucking God!” A notice that someone with this name was arrested on felony child molestation charges last August! Later searching reveals that the person is now about to go on trial, being accused of having molested a 12-year-old. Now, being accused and being guilty aren’t necessarily the same thing, so we’ll have to see how things turn out, but… not only is the age of the accused appropriate for Keyser’s high school buddy, but the arrest photo they stuck at the top of the article seemed pretty clearly to be the same person, with the wear and tear of three decades added on to Keyser’s memory. (And, boy, you should see the reactions in the comment section of the article. No doubt people are influenced by the circumstances, but do they ever take a dislike to that image!)
Jesus Christ. A 12-year-old? What in the fuck is the matter with people? Perhaps more importantly, how do you look at people and hang out with them, not knowing that in three decades they’d do something so appalling? Not sure why Keyser finds this news so disturbing… Perhaps the idea that you really can’t know what goes on in other people’s heads? Or that people you interacted with so non-chalantly turn out to have some sort of awful black pit in their heart?
Anyway, whatever the legal outcome, let’s hope the accusation isn’t true. For everybody’s sake…
[Post scriptum. Good God, it's worse than Keyser thought. Not wanting to know too much about this, he sort of skipped over the details. The inestimable Dr. Phibes, however, is a veritable student of human depravity, so he carefully perused the fine print and has brought it to Keyser's attention that he was being a bit lenient with the perp. Turns out the charge was sex with a minor under the age of 12, and that this person was also charged with coercing the minor into having sex and then filming and shipping the footage. So Keyser's old chum is not just a pedophile but a filmer and distributor of kiddie porn. While Keyser is, as always, grateful for corrections, in this instance he can't say that he feels better for being better informed. Perhaps Phibes' darker understanding of the human psyche is more accurate than Keyser's somewhat rosier view. In any event, you'll have to excuse Keyser while he goes to pour a bit of lye into his memory's eye...
Post post scriptum. You'd think it couldn't get worse, but oddly enough, it did. Keyser just checked the latest news story, and the victim was age four at the time of the crime, and it's said to be unclear whether the victim will be called to testify in the upcoming trial. Four? Keyser can't take much more of this.
Post post post scriptum. Among his many skills medical and otherwise, Dr. Phibes is an expert at forensic medicine and he created the following imagine of what the accused would have looked three decades ago.
Good God, that's him! Modern scientific procedures are truly astounding. Who would think that you could take a picture of a 48-year-old pervert and recreate the spitting image of a 17-year-old would-be pervert?
And for those who think that joke is in bad taste, that's probably true. But some things are so awful that all you can do is laugh (or at any rate, the alternative isn't very appealing). And it really does look like him now. The whole thing is just too much to think about.]
Are There Gods In Hitchens’ Foxhole?
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Here’s an interview in which Christopher Hitchens talks, inter alia, about his impeding death. As you may know, the inveterate spokesman for non-God has got esophagal cancer, so his prognosis basically is, “How soon do I die?” He’s asked if he prays, and the answer is no. Towards the end, he admits to the possibility that in the physical wreck that he may well wind up being at the end of the disease’s ravages, he might do the “pathetic thing” as he characterizes the death bed conversion of a previously committed atheist. He denies that he would ever do this in his lucid state, and tells people to discount any rumors they might here to this effect.
This comment raised memories of Keyser Sr. He had been sort of raised a Catholic, but he too was an off-hand atheist, generally referring to anything connected with religion as horseshit. Keyser Sr. died two thousand miles away from your humble Pannonian, who can’t exactly say that he has no knowledge of the old man’s demise. For some appalling reason, the nurse at his death bed insisted on calling Keyser and making him talk to the comatose and dying man. Supposedly, people can hear you even if they give no acknowledgement of it. In the first place, how the fuck does anybody know that, since ex hypothesi the person supposedly hearing the words will never be in a position to say so (and Keyser entirely disbelieves the testimony of people who supposedly “come back” from death experiences). Take Keyser’s word for it, that the absolute last thing you want to do is talk for five minutes saying things you don’t really believe to someone who’s dying, while somebody you don’t know from Adam is listening. Truth be told, Keyser doesn’t recall at all what he said, but under the circumstances, it seemed inadvisable (and pointless) to say the truth.
Anyway, the reason Keyser mentions this is that when he attended the memorial service a little while later, both the local priest (a homosexual episcopalian) and Keyser Sr.’s second wife both swore up and down that in his final days, the old man sought “religious comfort.” Well, on the surface of it, Keyser flat out doesn’t believe it. He knew that man for something like forty-two years, and if there was anybody who had no religious feeling at all it was Keyser Sr. (Keyser generally finds that there’s no such thing as an ex-Catholic – they always retain some Catholic sensibilities, whether they like it or not – but Keyser Sr. never exhibited the least sense of loyalty or anything to the One,Holy, Roman, Catholic and Apostolic Church.) Now, since Keyser wasn’t there, and it’s possible that the two were telling the truth, then the old man was the world’s biggest hypocrite or coward. Perhaps the two versions are not entirely incompatible, in that the wife might have badgered him and he then went along just to get her shut up (a form of cynicism that sounds a lot more like the Keyser Sr. that Keyser knew).
So it goes back to the old canard about there being no atheists in a foxhole. If so, that just means that there’s no Keyser in the foxhole, because you can rest assured that whatever Keyser Sr. and Christopher Hitchens may do on their death beds, Keyser certainly is not going to be wasting his time invoking some non-existent deity for a cheap form of consolation.
The virtuous man should rest content in a life well spent. As Hitchens would no doubt agree, in his lucid moments, at any rate.
Oy Image of the Day
Posted by: | CommentsTerrible day. Bunch of personal stuff no one would be interested in… God knows Keyser just wants to forget it.
