the littlest meap

I support your art but that does not mean that I must support your revolution.

Playing Backgammon as the World Burns November 24, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 12:16 am
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‘I dine, I play a game of backgammon, I converse, and am merry with my friends; and when after three or four hours’ amusement, I would return to these speculations, they appear so cold, and strained, and ridiculous, that I cannot find in my heart to enter into them any farther.’

Hume Treatise Book I Section VII

So, I have this somewhat long-standing suspicion that money is a convenient fantasy that we all carry around in our heads. Scratch that. I know for a fact that money is a convenient fantasy that we all carry around in our heads. I have this long standing suspicion that any day now, the world is going to wake up, realize that it is all a wacky lie, and the entire global economy is going to collapse when people realize that money does not really exist.

You’ve got the barter system, right? That makes sense. And then you start using metal as an intermediary, and that makes sense and makes everything a lot more convenient. And then you deal with the problem of people scraping off the edges of their coins and making new money by putting all the metal in a big repository and giving people bits of paper that say, “you can trade me for some bits of gold” and people exchange those, and that works. And then you have the eighteenth century and lots of arguing about the silver standard that never seems to have come to anything.

And then you’ve got the decision in the seventies to just say, fuck that, let’s just use the scraps of paper and say that they have inherent meaning and just go along with it, ok? And people GO ALONG WITH IT. And then you’ve got the whole matter of credit cards and the stock market and really you don’t even have scraps of paper any more.

All you have is a list of numbers telling you how much money you have, and it goes up and down on the whim of the market. And people JUST GO ALONG WITH IT. Why? We all solemnly agree now that selling mortgages to people who couldn’t afford them, and then rebundling bits and pieces of bad mortgages as triple-A bonds was a bad idea and we shouldn’t have done it.

But really now. It’s just another fake piece of an entirely fake system. We look hard at that part of it, but we don’t acknowledge that maybe letting money float off into the world free of all material restrictions was possibly a bad idea?

In September or October sometime, when commercial paper was all frozen up, I grew increasingly convinced that we weren’t just going to have a recession; the entire idea of money was going to collapse and we’d go back to the barter system. Or at least the gold standard. And as much as this idea freaked me out (my entire current value being entirely theoretical with the exception of $20 in paper in my wallet and the furniture and books in my apartment) something about this excited me too.

You see, back in Modern Philosophy I never quite followed Kant’s Copernican Turn, and so, bereft of his eloquent yet obtuse explanation for why the real world exists, I turned into a Humean skeptic, never quite confident that the world as I knew it actually existed in reality, outside of my perception of it. And to a very small degree, I live in constant hope of getting some piece of evidence of this–the universe not following the natural laws that I’ve observed. The universe keeps following those laws though. Even when it comes to even more arbitrary things that don’t even have the strength of evidence to prove their existance.

If I don’t get to see water light on fire, then at least I want to see this system go up in flames. It would be so self-validating!

Things have settled a bit since September, and while more sectors of the economy are being dragged under by the mortgage collapse and resulting tightening of credit, there no longer seems a risk of anyone but me losing faith in currency as a concept.

I make these grandiose claims, but even I’m still buying into money. Damnit, I’m still bought into the whole house of cards. WaMu has collapsed, and I still have checking and savings accounts (albiet, now with Chase constantly telling me how they are staying friendly like WaMu but are now butch). CityBank looks likely to collapse, and they are still my stock brokers. I ::upgraded my credit card last week::. But I have made one concession to my convictions.

I bought a backgammon board.

 

Countdown November 3, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 9:43 pm
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As the hours tick down to Election Day, I am getting increasingly nervous. I am considering avoiding my Google Reader account for the entire day; I suspect that instead I will check it compulsively.

This is my last chance to remind all those of you who live in CA to VOTE NO ON PROPS 4 AND 8, the centerpieces of my fear.

To calm myself down, I am thinking of less scary things that will happen later in the week. For example, on Wednesday Inga and I are going to go see Repo! The Genetic Opera. Anthony Stewart Head repossessing people’s livers while Sarah Brightman sings and Paris Hilton wanders around the set is ::much less frightening:: than a world without gay marriage but with Sarah Palin as Vice President.

Have a good election day, ya’ll. May your lines be short and your decisions easy, and may the people of your state and this country agree with you.

Ok, I really only want them to agree with me, but it was a nice thought, right?

 

Jacobean, Post-Apocalyptic, and Liverpudlian November 1, 2008

Filed under: Uncategorized — meaplet @ 10:11 pm
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Last night I had the best of intentions to go out to one or more Halloween parties. However, it was a long week, and so I went home and slept instead. To make up for it, tonight I did what all the cool Mission-dwellers do on a Saturday night:

I baked Theresa Nielsen Hayden’s Sausage, Leek and Apple Pie and watched the Alex Cox Revengers Tragedy. Then I followed it up by cleaning my kitchen.

Notes:

I used one of the fancy vegetarian ground soy substances instead of sausage, but it was still a bit meaty for my taste–anything with ground stuff in tends to raise my hackles even if I’ve put the soy substance in myself. It was still tasty though. Tomorrow I will try the leftovers on meat-eaters and see what their reaction to the ground soy stuff is.

Following Theresa’s proportions, I wound up with enough filling for two pies. Maybe her 9-inch pie was a lot deeper than mine–I wound up purchasing a pre-made piecrust, and it was definitely on the shallow side, but very tasty–I will definitely buy the brand again the next time I make pie. I’ll have to be careful to remove the top crust from its pan before it thaws–I wound up with a glop of crust on the top of my pie since I have neither a rolling pin nor a good rolling surface. I also have a couple of pie shell recipes I want to try out soon, so I may have to bring my pie-cooking to another household the next time.

If you have whole pepper and no pepper grinder, a coffee grinder works admirably for the task. (We shall see if I cleaned it out well enough that my next cup of coffee doesn’t taste peppery.)

I made the following substitutions:

For the full celery-root, half a celery root and half a turnip. I think that next time I do this, I’ll leave out the Smart Ground and just do a general sliced root vegetable pie, with parsnips and beets added for good measure. This was the first time I’d cooked with celery root, and it was really yummy–it will defintely make it into my future root vegetable creations.

For the saffron, I asafoetida, with a bit of curry thrown in for good measure. It still wasn’t quite as flavorful as I would have liked–I ended up sprinkling more curry on top of my pie before I ate it. Mmmm, curry. (It has become obvious that I can’t cook English food without adding a lot of curry to it. Clearly India was the best thing that ever happened to the British Empire. The sun still hasn’t set on India.)

I also picked up a sharp cheddar cheese, which I totally forgot about when I was done baking the pie. I think I’ll try some of that with the pie tomorrow.

The Cox Revengers Tragedy is excellent. Fantastic, even. I would definitely recomend it to anyone who likes either the post-apocalyptic or the Jacobean, as it does both well at once. Chris Eccleston was costumed weirdly like his incarnation of the Doctor as Vindici, which was a bit distracting, but I can sort of imagine Nine running around killing people and being a ventriloquist with skulls so it was totally ok?

It also had Eddie Izzard as Lussurioso and Derek Jacobi as the Duke, and a soundtrack by Chumba Wumba, and basically the fact that it actually got made is kind of a mystery to me. But the best kind of mystery, where the universe hands you a really excellent film to watch. PS Alex Cox also directed Repo Man, which makes it ::even more mysterious::.

The special features were also a welcome surprise, primarily watching Eddie Izzard explain earnestly that the period of drama should have been called “Jamesian” and not “Jacobian.” And learning that the producer (Tod Davies) was Marjorie’s mannerisms doppelgänger! (Really Marjorie, you are required to see it all for the 5 seconds in which she describes Eccleston as “intense,” and then waves her hands, makes big eyes, and follows it up with  “like that.”)