aldenswan.com

A few of your (and I mean a few) will have noticed that I haven’t been blogging much lately. In fact, a week or two can go by without so much as a youtube link. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say or haven’t been thinking important thoughts. I’ve actually been doing a lot of thinking, about important issues like epistemology (how we know what we think is ture), politics (how we know what we know is not true) and the price of wheat. But, I have a list of valid reasons why I haven’t been blogging:

10. I’ve been working a lot lately in the evenings. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just the way it is.

9. Blogging doesn’t pay well.

8: My dog ate it. (I don’t think that worked in elementary school, either.)

7. My computer dies repeatedly.

6. My computer’s also gone senile. Truly, it has. It tends to restart whenever it darn well feels like it, and it’s usually not at a convenient time. To make matters worse, the switch broke, so I have to actually hot-wire it to get it started.

5. It’s been way too cloudy. This is actually a valid excuse. Besides making me depressed, it’s chased me out of my north-facing office where the sun cannot find me.

4. I’ve so many things to say, I can’t decide what to say first.

3. I have adult-onset ADD.

2. I actually have a real life that exists outside of cyberspace. Seriously.

1. I’m trying to build the suspense.

I never said it would be a funny list, just valid.

I really have been thinking considerably about epistemology, and will start blogging on that sometime soon. However, I keep reading new things and changing my opinions, so it’s probably best that I’ve waited. And, I just purchased a new, high-powered laptop so I don’t have to be stuck back in my north-facing office. It’s fast, it’s got mega-memory, it’s got Vista - well, 2 out of 3 isn’t bad. Actually, I haven’t minded Vista, yet.

So, bear with me and don’t cancel your rss feeds, there’ll be more great posts coming. Trust me.

For whatever reason, last weekend I had this compelling urge to watch The DaVinci Code again, even though the book was awful and the movie was worse. So, I stopped in at Blockbuster and picked it up. Sure enough, the movie was still terrible. Even with the assumption that it was a work of fiction, and suspending all knowledge of the facts they butchered, the movie is a mess. Tom Hanks is still wooden, the plot is disjointed, and the ending is, well, boring.

But, either some people believe this crap, or they assume that if people will believe anything they see in a documentary (it apparently worked for Al Gore, but that’s another story). A couple of days after watching Code, I came across an interesting article about a new documentary, Bloodline, which is apparently a documentary asserting the myth that Jesus and Mary were married, and had a child named Sara.

Apparently the “guts” of the story is that in the late 19th Century, Berenger Sauniere became a priest in the small French village Rennes le Chateau. Suddenly, he started spending lots of money, even though he was known to be quite poor. Obviously, he must have known of some mysterious secret and was blackmailing the Pope. Obviously. And, since Rennes le Chateau’s history includes the Templars, we obviously know what that secret was.

It’s obvious.

The real truth, while interesting in its own right, isn’t the stuff of dime novels or badly done movies. While Sauniere apparently had some wealthy supporters, he was also tried for charging for masses, as a fund-raiser to pay for the church and community building projects. His sin, apparently, was that he was a capitalist. One hundred years later, he could have had his own TV show. But, alas, timing is everything.

Now, some 50 years later, an enterprising fellow named Noel Corbu purchased Sauniere’s home and opened a restaurant. Hoping to attract some free advertising, he began suggesting that there were mysteries surrounding the poor dead priest. The story from here on out is much more interesting than anything Bloodline probably comes up with, involving conspiracy theorists, fraudulent documents and some very poor researchers who didn’t realize they were relying on complete fiction. It’s more like Pink Panther than Da Vinci Code.

While I’m sure Bloodline will attract an audience, the bloodline and holy grail myths, I’m afraid, are as flaky as French pastry.

Tom Gilson asks:

Is Jabberwocky the best nonsense poem in the English language? If not, then in what language is it the best nonsense?

It’s a brilliant question, and got me wondering if Jabberwocky could even be translated into any other language and still make sense - or nonsense?