The Total Perspective Vortex

The "Total Perspective Vortex" is the creation of Douglas Adams, author of "The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

Here's how it works: you're placed inside of this machine (called the "Total Perspective Vortex"), which forces upon you a complete and total perspective of the entire universe. It is designed as a punishment for the arrogant because they realize in a traumatic way how insignificant they are in relation to the entire universe. Everyone who enters the Total Perspective Vortex goes completely bonkers.

Here's a sample of what one small part of the Total Perspective Vortex might look like:



The rest can be found here: The Scale of the Universe.

Influence and Mind Control

Damn. It's been almost a week since my last post.

Not much has changed in the last week. Still trying to get these brass band auditions together, and hoping we get a good turnout.

Other than that, I started reading Robert Cialdini's classic book "Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion." Fascinating stuff. I've been particularly interested in influence and persuasion lately. I'll give a report later.

In the meantime, check out this clip from Darren Brown. He has a show on the Sci-Fi Channel. This guy is an expert at reading people and using subliminal messages to subconsciously communicate with, control, or fool people. Fascinating. In some cases, I can see what he's doing. In others...just bazaar (like the phantom limb experiments where the person closes their eyes and can actually "feel" and correctly guess objects placed in the phantom hand.)

Can you see what he's doing here?

Building a Brass Band

Putting a brass band together is a HELL of a lot of work! What was I thinking? What did I think I was getting myself into?

It's like a regular part-time job. Getting 30 members together is only a small fraction of the work involved. And fortunately, I have people to help with that.

But still, it's up to me to organize the auditions, promote them online (I have people spreading the word in all the area university music departments), schedule audition times, post the information on the website, etc., etc.

I'm the webmaster, the President, the marketer and promoter, the encourager, the man with the whip when things don't get done (not that I'm heavy-handed, but I like to keep things moving.)

I'm having to find and secure the facilities for rehearsals and performances, and we're still not done. We may have to find a new facility for the Christmas concert. We'll definitely need a new rehearsal facility soon, because we need access to decent percussion equipment, and that's sadly lacking at the Torrance Salvation Army corps.

I need to find a place for percussion auditions and successfully recruit at least three percussionists to the band, which is difficult to do because percussionists whine more than anyone about wanting to get paid. Don't blame them, but still...

Our budget is roughly equivalent to a 10-year-old's piggy bank. I supplement whatever I can, but I don't make a lot of money. This is a bootstrap operation, so we have to be careful about how money gets spent. That means all marketing and promotion has to be done for free, or some other arrangement worked out.

Speaking of marketing and promotion, it's now on my shoulders to fill up a 1,481 seat hall with as many asses as will fit in there...And hopefully there are wallets with cash between those asses and the 1,481 seats. That remains to be seen.

Not that it's hopeless. Just a hell of a lot of work. And it's work that will never pay me a dime. So sometimes I ask myself why the hell am I spending all this time and effort for this?

I can only say for the sheer love of brass bands. I want to see a regular kick-ass brass band here in the L.A. area if I have to be the one to see to it. If it's me that has to be relentlessly recruiting, promoting, marketing, spieling, whatever...then so be it. There WILL be a kick-ass brass band here in the L.A. area, and it WILL be a permanent fixture here.

People will speak of the L.A. Phil, the Long Beach Municipal Band (a professional kick-ass wind ensemble), and the L.A. Metropolitan Brass Band all in the same breath.

I told myself I wouldn't get involved in any "volunteer" work until I made my fortune. But I just can't help myself. I just love music too much, and this particular dream is too dear to just let it fade away.

There are glory days ahead for the L.A. Metro Brass!

The Stan

Look What I Found!

Snagged this off an old post from Matt & Shelley's Blog. Shelley game nights used to be so much fun!
I'll never forget some of those hilarious Balderdash moments. None of us cared about points. All we wanted was to hear the next ridiculous movie plot...or people's suggestions at what certain acronyms stood for...or "interesting" definitions of unusual words.

But Shelley game nights aren't the same without Shell C. and Matt B. And most of the rest of the gang have moved out of town, too. All except me and Michelle and Mateo.

From left to right starting with Shelley in yellow: Shelley, Myev, Michelle & Mateo, Heidi, Your's Truly, and Geoff and Emily (who have been very negligent in updating their blog).

Maybe I should renew the tradition with a new generation of Balderdash nights! That would be a hell of a lot of fun!

Relating to an Invisible God, Part II

I've been thinking about this issue of relating to an invisible God for the last week or so. This whole thought process was spawned a week ago yesterday, as I sat at a round table in a meeting to discuss forming small groups at church.

I'm mildly interested in participating in a small church group of other people around my age, but I was mostly there for the pizza. At one point, we had an "exercise" with the other people at the table, and one of the questions was "How has your relationship with God grown over the years."

Well, I couldn't answer that question. I can't say it's "grown" at all. I'm still confused about how this is supposed to be a "relationship" as I understand the term. I'm honest in my reply. I've got nothing to hide.

As I think about this issue more, it occurs to me that I may have missed something here. (Stay with me as I work this out.)

Because God is infinite, he is not bound by a physical form...he's entirely "not physical." I'm avoiding the use of the word "spiritual" here, because my mind can't wrap itself around what exactly that means. The word "spiritual" has taken on many connotations. Maybe "not physical" is the simplest and best definition of the word "spiritual" and we should just leave it at that.

So because God is not in physical form, then if we were to have a relationship with Him, it would have to be fundamentally different from the kind of relationships we're used to having with physical people.

There would be no audible voice. No physical manifestation. It would be entirely "not physical."

I'm not saying God is not capable of producing an audible voice, or some kind of avatar, but it would certainly be out of the norm, as our experiences tell us--although the Bible does relate certain instances where this happened. But if I were to hear of a particular occurrence, I would be extremely skeptical...

Ockham's razor: a simpler explanation is that someone is making it up, imagining it, is mentally ill, or suffering a hallucination or wishful thinking. All such reports would have to be taken with a grain of salt because they are unprovable and unverifiable.

Therefore, I must immediately reject any claim of "God spoke to me, and...blah, blah, blah," unless the statement contained information that the speaker could not possibly know and that information was verifiable.

So...without an audible voice, or a physical manifestation, how would you know if God were trying to speak to you? (Does God even need to speak to us? Do we necessarily need God to speak to us--other than what's already in the Bible?)

So accepting that a relationship with God would be fundamentally different from anything we've known based on our physical experience, then I imagine it would be a pretty difficult and nebulous thing to define what exactly that relationship would be like.

Our experience is purely physical. God is "not physical." What does "not physical" mean? How can I relate to someone that is "not physical," since I am a physical being and all of my experiences are in the physical world?"

So again, I've circled back to the original problem: how do you relate to a "not physical" God? Certainly God would not be God if he were bound by a physical form. Yet because he is God, there is an immense gap between our experiences and His...between what we know and what He knows...between our senses and His.

In fact, in order to communicate with a "not physical" being, we would need an extra sense. Our five senses are tuned into the physical world. We would need a "sixth sense" that is tuned to a "not physical" world.

Even if God were to attempt to speak to us using the physical world, I would imagine that we would still need the "sixth sense" to recognize that it is, in fact, God trying to speak to us. Otherwise, we may not even recognize it--or we may attribute it to something else.

In any case, I've been reminded that prayer is certainly biblical. Jesus even gave us a blueprint for it in the form of the Lord's prayer. So that means we should pray, even if there is no "return message."

You Gotta Love Cats!

I'm a dog person, but cats do have their uses from time to time...

Jehovah's Witnesses Come A Callin'

I was lying on the couch this morning, about to have my neck cracked by Alba (which feels awesome, by the way), when I heard a knock on the screen door. I thought it was my next door neighbor, Jenny, but when I turned to look toward the door, there was no one there.

Whoever it was, I was sure they didn't know us, because instead of peaking through the screen door like Jenny would have done, or remaining conspicuously in front of it, they stood off to the side so I couldn't see who was there.

Annoyed, I got up to answer the door and two men were standing there, impeccably dressed and groomed like a couple of young congressional interns.

"Does anyone here speak Spanish?" one of them asked.

Yep...they're promoting some political agenda, I thought.

"Well...Alba does--" and I turn around hoping to pawn them off on Alba so I wouldn't have to be the rude one and shoo them away.

But Alba was quick on the uptake: "I'll be in the shower," she said, and hurried to the bathroom.

Unfazed, the man on the left continued: "Well, we're here with the Jehovah's Witnesses...." and he continued into his spiel about cars and engineers and how engineers are the best people to tell you about the cars, and blah, blah, blah.

Dammit, I should have known. Their blue shirts fooled me. They were in disguise. Not the usual arm-length, button-up white shirts and ties. These were blue. I could see now the black Bibles in their left hands, and a few tracts sticking out of one of the outside pockets.

For a moment, I was worried he would pull one out and start talking about a cartoon drawing with lions laying in fields and people building a house in the background, while others were harvesting a crop. "Doesn't that look idealic?" he would say. And "Wouldn't you like to live like this?"

Then I would be forced to say "Hell, no! That looks like too much work to me! Who wants to spend eternity tilling the fields and building log cabins?" But he didn't pull out a tract. He went on talking about how if God was the engineer of us, then wouldn't he be the best person to tell us everything we need to know about ourselves?

Meanwhile, I'm holding the screen door open, and several flies were taking full advantage of the situation and making a bee line for the kitchen counter and the remains of my breakfast salad, and the only thing I can think of is how the hell can I get rid of these guys without being overly rude?

Why am I so damn polite? They interrupted my day, not the other way around!

Well, I couldn't let this go on long, and by this time, the guy was trying to indoctrinate me about how God told us we would live forever right here on this earth. Don't know how that would happen, but the last thing I wanted to do was have a philosophical argument with an indoctrinated Jehovah's Witness.

So I simply said, "Well, I've read the Bible and I know what it says, and I'm not really interested in anything you have to offer."

They were polite. One was the talker, the other the listener. Maybe he was a trainee, and the talker was showing him the ropes. But they left and proceeded to try and convert Jenny next door.

When Alba got out of the shower, she told me the story of Adriana upstairs, who's from Columbia and bi-lingual. When the Jehovah's Witnesses knocked on her door one time, she tried to fake them out:

"Lo siento, pero no hablo Engles! Yo no hablo Engles!"

Well, the Jehovah's Gringo was prepared: "Oh, okay. Soy de Jehovah's Witness y...."

Man, they're prepared for everything these days. Maybe I'll make up some language next time to fool them:

"Blo hopper be dop dang row. Be bop yo bam. He-n-do-bop." And I'll just keep talking in scat, looking confused, until they give up and walk away!