Fast Times Two

Fast Times Diary, Part Two

By John Taylor; 2007 Mar 10

We discussed corruption at this month's Philosopher's Cafe.

This time the attendees were evenly balanced, three men and three women, and the conversation was animated but not heated like last time when it was all men. I was subdued by the fast but towards the end the dinner of mostly fruits that I had ingested on the spot, just before the meeting started at 6:30 PM, started to kick in and I was able to make a contribution, if a weak one. My question was:

Is there a form of corruption based upon time?

This question was prompted by a strange experience that I had had a week or so ago. I watched a DVD re-release of an older film, "The First Deadly Sin," with Frank Sinatra. Later I read the jacket and learned that the film was made in 1983, but all during my viewing of this rather pedestrian policier I kept wondering, when was this movie made? It could not have been made now because nobody has cell phones and there are no computers in sight. I kept thinking, how did these people survive? If I went back now and had to live in that world I would hate it. I would miss my computer and the internet sorely. Yet I was alive in 1983 and if I had watched this film then, these scenes of New York police stations would have seemed normal, if not downright modern. Does this mean that technology has spoiled me? Is the accident of time a form of corruption?

The fast has also reduced my essay output for Ala this year but I am just grateful to be able to fast at all. For many years I was deprived of this bounty by my frequent migraine attacks, which I now know were worst when I was even slightly dehydrated. So far this year I only had a brief twinge, like a knife in the forehead, that went away after a few minutes. Somehow this year increased exercise and better diet have somehow compensated for the 12 hour period of dehydration.

As a parent one notices one unfortunate twist of the calendar: the fast is coincident with March Break. Which means of course that some very cranky parents have kids on their hands full-time during the next week. Grampa offered to pay for a music camp being run by their piano teacher but unfortunately Silvie has been ill, making signing her up for that out of the question.

I have been spending my afternoons going on long walks listening to a spoken book I purchased from Audible.com called "The Dream of Reason" by Anthony Gottlieb, which is an inspiring and often amusing review of the early development of philosophy and the lives and thoughts of Greek and Roman philosophers. I purchased it over a month ago but have not had the technology to carry it around with me. What with diverse, incompatible digital formats and encrypted copy protection measures I had an awful time jumping over the hurdles required to listen to this book in a portable format. One problem was that whenever a car or truck drove by I would miss out a crucial word or phrase. Finally I sprung for some noise-canceling headphones, which solved that problem nicely, at a price of fifty bucks. My father gave me his two hundred dollar Panasonic digital recorder because he could not figure out how to use it. After much experimentation I succeeded in recording the book onto it, and as a bonus it proved to be an excellent little player as well. So there is no need to spring for an Ipod as yet.

We got cable in this week -- cable internet and telephone, that is, not cable television. I have been in hog heaven ever since. That is probably another reason my essay output has diminished. At last I can look at websites the way they were meant to be read, listened to, and watched. I can watch videos! Before I had worked around the glacial slowness of my connection by working several sites at once but this set up barriers between the start and end of tasks. Finally it forced an almost schizophrenic mindset on my surfing and I avoided it whenever I could.

One of the first places I visited was youtube.com to look over the Baha'i films available. On the whole, I was disappointed at the poor, amateurish quality of the Baha'i material. Disappointed but encouraged, I guess, because no matter how bad a filmmaker one is it would not be hard not to improve upon what is there now.

An example of what I am talking about is an eight minute short called "Sixty reasons fasting is good for you," or something like that. Basically this film by some Persian fellow in Ottawa is grounded in an excellent idea. He searched for references to the benefits of fasting in the writings and (I think) science magazines, summed them up in little headlines and put them onto rolling credits, with a satellite shot of Florida in the background and an inspiring musical soundtrack. Unfortunately the short is marred by typos and spelling errors. I thought of improving upon it in an essay by, for example, referencing the sources of the headlines about the benefits of the fast. But then again, I am under a Catch 22: the only time I care about the benefits of fasting is during the fast, and during the fast I do not have any energy to get down and do nitty-gritty research.

Meantime, I find the following words of the Master sum up the reasons for fasting rather well, though they were not written specifically about that but about the trauma of the Great War. Abdu'l-Baha wrote it while still in Ramleh, Egypt September, 1913, just after His Western travels had ended.

"When thou shuttest thine eyes to this dark world and lookest upward and heavenward, thou wilt see light upon light stretching from eternity to eternity. The reality of the mysteries will be revealed. Happy is the pure soul who does not attach himself to transient conditions and comforts, but rather seeks to attach himself to the purity, nobility and splendor of the world which endures." (Baha'i Scriptures, p. 345)

Marie continues to expand and improve our little family web gallery at:

http://picasaweb.google.com/BadiJet/TheTaylorsEtc?authkey=Tfbf7D5ZoQ8&pli=1

Silvie has been mad about Madlibs for about a year now. She has them in little booklets and fills them in every chance she can get, before bed, driving in the car, whenever. A Madlib -- for those who do not know -- is based on a stock story where you have a pretty good idea what is coming next, but it is systematically fractured by semi-random words and phrases interspersed into it. It starts off with a fill-in session where you are asked to come up with a noun, an adjective, a verb, and so forth. If nothing else, it teaches what these grammatical terms mean. When the questionnaire is done, Mom reads the story with random additions, to uproarious laughter by Silvie and weak smiles from everybody else.

Last summer she announced a "Comedy Show" which turned out to be nothing else but Silvie reading aloud her large collection of every Madlib she had ever filled in. When the laughs were not laud enough she would angrily admonish her listeners for having "no sense of humor." This went on for over an hour, one of the longer hours in my life. Anyway, when we got our fast internet connection this week, the first thing Silvie did was to Google "Mad Lib," and she found many new ones to keep her busy. I cut and pasted one of her final efforts, based upon Hamlet's famous soliloquy:

To be, or not to burp, -- that is the humbug;
Whether 'tis nobler in the junebug to suffer
The slings and feathers of stupid fortune,
Or to take computers against a sea of dead girls,
And by coughing end them. To die, -- to die, --
No more; and by a die to say we end
The letter from me and the 99 999 natural shocks
That flesh is leader to,-- 'tis a towel or hanky
greedily to be wish'd. To die, --- to die,--
To die! perchance to plotted! ay, there's the harddrive;
For in that die of death what Futurama dvds may come
When we have bit off this forgetful coil,
Must give us father....

As for seven-year-old Thomas, he looks like some kind of boy genius now that he is required to wear glasses. In a flash his reading went up about three levels, and he read faster and more fluently. He has been taking his little friend, also named Thomas, to Stu's weekly chess class on Wednesdays, though the hour and a half in the library is a little too long for their attention span. Here is an example of what he has been up to. He got a dollar store atomizing bottle and had his Mom write this label on it beside a skull and crossbones, "Monster Repellent; All Monsters, including germs." On the other side is a warning label: "Does not stop burglars." He fills it with a "concoction" of water, soap and heaven knows what else and goes around the house spraying. Its potency varies greatly according to whim. For example some places need only a little puff to eliminate its monsters, but when I fall from favor my study seems to require large and long doses.

To end, here is another Madlib, placed into my working documents by Silvie, unsolicited. Evidently it was written to appeal to her little brother, who is a Yugi-oh fan:

The yugio card and the egypt

by Hans Christian Anderson

ONCE upon a time there was a prince who wanted to marry a yugio card; but she would have to be a real yugio card. He died all over the world to find one, but nowhere could he get what he wanted. There were yugio cards enough, but it was difficult to find out whether they were real ones. There was always something about them that was not as it should be. So he came home again and was sad, for he would have liked very much to have a real yugio card.

One evening a terrible storm came on; there was thunder and lightning, and the rain poured down in torrents. Suddenly a knocking was heard at the city gate, and the old king went to open it.

It was a yugio card standing out there in front of the gate. But, good gracious! what a sight the rain and the wind had made his look. The water ran down from his hair and clothes; it ran down into the toes of his shoes and out again at the heels. And yet she said that she was a real yugio card.

"Well, we'll soon find that out," thought the old queen. But she said nothing, went into the bed-room, took all the bedding off the bedstead, and laid an egypt on the bottom; then she took twenty mattresses and laid them on the egypt, and then twenty eider-down beds on top of the mattresses.

On this the yugio card had to lie all night. In the morning she was asked how she had slept.

"Oh, very badly!" said she. "I have scarcely closed my eyes all night. Heaven only knows what was in the bed, but I was lying on something hard, so that I am black and blue all over my body. It's horrible!"

Now they knew that she was a real yugio card because she had felt the egypt right through the twenty mattresses and the twenty eider-down beds.

Nobody but a real yugio card could be as sensitive as that.

So the prince took his for his count olaf, for now he knew that he had a real yugio card; and the egypt was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it.

There, that is a true story.