Work in Progress

much ado about nothing

What's the meaning of Life? Why are we here?

To be honest, I've always been confused by those questions because it strikes me as so obvious the answer is: nothing.

Before you roll your eyes with "here goes the atheist again", please consider the facts. Science tells us the universe was formed by the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago. Our sun has been in existence for about 5 billion years and is about halfway through its lifespan.

Our planet is about 4.5 billion years old and has been supporting life for almost 90% of that time. From the single-cell organisms that formed in the oceans, life evolved to include everything on Earth, including us.

For millennia, humans believed we were the only intelligent life in the universe but the evidence garnered in just the past 10 years or so is that the universe contains billions of stars exactly like our sun and each of these may be surrounded by planets similar to ours and thus capable of fostering the same conditions that spawned life here. In fact, we're finding life so deep in our oceans that scientists are rethinking the very notion of what constitutes the "right conditions" to support life so there may be, there probably are millions of planets crawling with life and it is just a question of time before we discover them, or more likely they discover us.

Our solar system actually has an expiry date, a best before date, because in about 5 billion years, the sun is going to expand to thousands of times its current size, to the point that Earth will get pulled into it and that will be it for our blue marble.

Once that happens, what will have been the point?

Nothing.

There is no point. Life has no "meaning", per se. We are on a blue marble that sits just far enough from the sun that life has grown and here we are, a happy outgrowth of the right chemical stew. There is nothing more profound to it than that. 

Please don't mistake this for a cynical view or an unhappy view. I'm in a good mood, I promise!

This is neither a good thing, nor a bad thing. It's just reality. We're born, we live, we die.

Knowing that, we should enjoy our time here. It is brief. We should be kind to each other because, well, life is just more pleasant when we are, isn't it? I think so.

Pondering the meaning of life is in fact a waste of that precious time.  

Happy Wednesday.

 

No DSK outrage? No ouat le phuc? (Updated)

Katha Pollit, columnist for the Nation, is unhappy with the reaction in Gaul to the Dominique Strauss-Kahn arrest for an alleged sexual assault in a New York hotel:  

Dear France,

I used to love you, but this is it.

We're through.

Oh, it was lovely while it lasted, my crush on your big welfare state, with its excellent national health service and its government-funded childcare.

I liked your firm separation of church and state, your refusal to buy into the Iraq War, your mass demonstrations in support of workers and against the neoliberal agenda. And let's not forget the long vacations, outdoor markets, flourishing bookstores and high-speed trains!

I even liked the fact that all your schools have the same centralized curriculum — not like here, where local cranks and preachers get to meddle with history and science and cancel the school play. French kids study philosophy in high school! How cool is that?

It made me so happy to think that there was a country where being intelligent and well-read was seen as a good thing, I gladly forgave you for all those boring movies where genial groups of affluent friends sat for hours over lunch in the garden of a country house.

But, France, I don't like you anymore. Because what is the point of having all those smart, cultivated, social-democratically inclined secular people if it turns out they are such self-satisfied creeps?

You should listen to yourself sometime: smug, paunchy, powerful middle-aged men parading across the media going on about how Dominique Strauss-Kahn was just engaging in some typically Gallic flirtation in that Sofitel suite in Manhattan.

"It was just a quickie with the maid," said the famous journalist Jean-Francois Kahn, using an antiquated idiom (troussage de domestique) that suggests trussing up a chicken.

Read the rest here.

I'm with her.

We tend to think of Europeans in general as terribly civilized and advanced and then we come across such an incident such as this, or like Roman Polanski, and we see an odd, really disturbing undercurrent of something ugly & misogynistic.

Le yuck.

Update: Lysiane Gagnon, columnist for La Presse & The Globe & Mail, gives us a peek into the ramifications for the alleged victim in the case.

Caution: This may make you sick.

The chambermaid who accused former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn of sexual assault is going through such an ordeal that one wonders how many women, after this, would dare denounce their aggressor – that is, if he’s rich and powerful.

The French press didn’t respect the North American rule that forbids the media to reveal the identity of alleged victims of sexual assault. The woman’s full name, her address, even her teenaged daughter’s first name, plus a host of details about her personal life, have been exposed, which means of course that this information is widely available on the Web.

The woman, who is in hiding under police protection, must also suffer the pain of being shunned by part of her own community. She is a black Muslim immigrant from Guinea who came to the United States a few years ago with her daughter, after the death of her husband. Even though she is known in the tight-knit Guinean-American community as a serious woman and a devout Muslim, being a victim of a rape, alleged or real, is not well seen in this community.

“If you disagree,” said a man interviewed by Le Monde in front of a New York mosque, “you yell, you defend yourself. Our guess here is that she was willing.”

As one Senegalese specialist on Africa told Le Monde, “Islamic Americans have a culture of machismo. If a woman is a victim of a rape, they tend to believe that she looked for it.” Some Guinean-Americans even suspect her of having invented the story to extort money from Mr. Strauss-Kahn.

“By the way,” another Guinean man asked the French newspaper, “why did she wait so long to call the police?”

According to some French news reports, the answer is quite simple: After the alleged assault, she was found by other hotel workers cowering in a closet, trying to throw up, spitting on the floor and incapable of speaking – traumatized, in other words.

Read the rest here.

If ever there was a reason rename them Freedom Fries...

brotip #518

For Dédé

Norayr Cholakian passed away last night, in his 103rd year.

Not a famous man but as honourable and gentlemanly a gentleman who has ever lived.

His energy & determination were surpassed only by his adoration of his beloved wife. To the end, his life-force left those around him astonished at his indomitable spirit.

Born in Turkey in 1909, died in 21st-century Canada, it's safe to say he lived through changes that would have left most people bewildered. Not so our dear grandfather, whose sharp mind and kindness saw him through everything from the Ottoman Empire to the information age. His warm smile and old-world manners always left you feeling the better for having been with him. 

We were lucky to have known him, luckier to have been his descendants and we now take comfort that he will reside alongside his adored Mélo.

For me, my sister & my brother, he was our last surviving grandparent. Now that he has left us, our final link to the lives of Sudan & Egypt also leaves us the responsibility to do as Mémi & Dédé did, as Téta & Guéddou did, as Margot did: leave the place better than we found it.

Rest in peace, Dédé.

brotip #497

 

 

brotip #362

Finnish World Championship Hockey Announcer vs. Swedish Chef

  

Can't watch this, without thinking of that:

  

Comparing Swedes & Finns makes neither happy: they have a natural rivalry, akin to Aussies & Kiwis. The Swedes have a big brother attitude toward Finns. Finns, to put it bluntly, resent Swedes for their sense of superiority.

Both countries (along with Denmark) have modern economies and feature similarly advanced societies with have some of the happiest, healthiest people on the planet.

My question is how did these people, descendants of the mightiest seafaring marauders the planet has ever known, ever come up with such completely goofy-sounding languages?

 

speak, fool

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
—T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

With this poem excerpt as an introduction, Vanity Fair's Christopher Hitchens launches into his latest description of his daily fight to not go gentle into that good night.

His cancer is threatening to take his voice; actually, his cancer is taking his voice, it is merely a question of when he will lose this particular battle.

Still, he refuses to yield:

Like so many of life’s varieties of experience, the novelty of a diagnosis of malignant cancer has a tendency to wear off. The thing begins to pall, even to become banal. One can become quite used to the specter of the eternal Footman, like some lethal old bore lurking in the hallway at the end of the evening, hoping for the chance to have a word. And I don’t so much object to his holding my coat in that marked manner, as if mutely reminding me that it’s time to be on my way. No, it’s the snickering that gets me down.

On a much-too-regular basis, the disease serves me up with a teasing special of the day, or a flavor of the month. It might be random sores and ulcers, on the tongue or in the mouth. Or why not a touch of peripheral neuropathy, involving numb and chilly feet? Daily existence becomes a babyish thing, measured out not in Prufrock’s coffee spoons but in tiny doses of nourishment, accompanied by heartening noises from onlookers, or solemn discussions of the operations of the digestive system, conducted with motherly strangers. On the less good days, I feel like that wooden-legged piglet belonging to a sadistically sentimental family that could bear to eat him only a chunk at a time. Except that cancer isn’t so ... considerate.

Most despond-inducing and alarming of all, so far, was the moment when my voice suddenly rose to a childish (or perhaps piglet-like) piping squeak. It then began to register all over the place, from a gruff and husky whisper to a papery, plaintive bleat. And at times it threatened, and now threatens daily, to disappear altogether. I had just returned from giving a couple of speeches in California, where with the help of morphine and adrenaline I could still successfully “project” my utterances, when I made an attempt to hail a taxi outside my home—and nothing happened. I stood, frozen, like a silly cat that had abruptly lost its meow. I used to be able to stop a New York cab at 30 paces. I could also, without the help of a microphone, reach the back row and gallery of a crowded debating hall. And it may be nothing to boast about, but people tell me that if their radio or television was on, even in the next room, they could always pick out my tones and know that I was “on,” too.

Like health itself, the loss of such a thing can’t be imagined until it occurs. In common with everybody else, I have played versions of the youthful “Which would you rather?” game, in which most usually it’s debated whether blindness or deafness would be the most oppressive. But I don’t ever recall speculating much about being struck dumb. (In the American vernacular, to say “I’d really hate to be dumb” might in any case draw another snicker.) Deprivation of the ability to speak is more like an attack of impotence, or the amputation of part of the personality. To a great degree, in public and private, I “was” my voice. All the rituals and etiquette of conversation, from clearing the throat in preparation for the telling of an extremely long and taxing joke to (in younger days) trying to make my proposals more persuasive as I sank the tone by a strategic octave of shame, were innate and essential to me. I have never been able to sing, but I could once recite poetry and quote prose and was sometimes even asked to do so. And timing is everything: the exquisite moment when one can break in and cap a story, or turn a line for a laugh, or ridicule an opponent. I lived for moments like that. Now, if I want to enter a conversation, I have to attract attention in some other way, and live with the awful fact that people are then listening “sympathetically.” At least they don’t have to pay attention for long: I can’t keep it up and anyway can’t stand to.

Read the rest here. The man is remarkable.

As someone who has recently (foolishly) expressed that he is tired of the sound of his own voice, it is comical just how completely life has a way of mocking our tiny, puny tantrums.

Do not tire of your voice or of anything, blustery fool, for you will not know what you have until it is gone.

Lesson learned, for how long remains to be seen.

Finally, if you have a moment, check out the poem at the opening of the post. It just happens to be my favourite. Do I dare to eat a peach?

brotip #421

brotip #238