Welcome to mistersite.net, home of... well, something unique, I hope. Be sure to check out all those lovely links to the left to see who I am, what I do, and what I like. Read my blog too... it's right under this paragraph. And leave a comment, so I know you've visited.
I ran across the text of this speech again today, and I thought I'd share it with you all. These words are good to remember in these divisive times.
"We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light.
Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
88° today, 88° tomorrow, 88° Tuesday. When I moved from LA to DC, I was promised seasons, not 90° with 100% humidity in October.
posted by jimmy at 16:34 -
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9.26.2007
I just noticed...
...how eerily similar Simon looks to Socks, the Clintons' cat. The only thing Simon's missing is the goatee to go with his Hitler 'stache.
posted by jimmy at 21:33 -
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9.15.2007
This picture made me laugh.
Yeah, that's right. I'm a mature, adult doctoral student. What's it to you?
posted by jimmy at 17:56 -
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9.01.2007
Even if you're not a fan of Sigur Ros...
...you have to admit that this film looks absolutely beautiful. If I ever come into some money (ha!) I'm definitely going to look into a trip to Iceland.
posted by jimmy at 11:57 -
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8.20.2007
Breaking: Vehicular assault! Barack Obama caught in the act!
As virtually everyone in America who isn't currently residing in a cave knows, Barry Bonds hit number 756 the other night (and 757 last night). He's been accused from every direction of using steroids, and people suggest that his record should carry an asterisk or be discounted altogether because of this. As a baseball fan and a student of baseball's history, this is a perplexing situation to me.
On the one hand, we can't really deny the evidence, which pretty strongly suggests that he took steroids to add power and speed to his swing and keep him healthy for longer (look at Moises Alou to see what happens to the body of a "natural" outfielder Barry's age). Anyone who honestly and categorically denies that he was juicing is a liar. He cheated, plain and simple.
On the other hand, let's not pretend that we can compare any record in baseball to any other. Cy Young's untouchable record of 512 wins came in an era where he was part of a 2-man rotation throwing a much less tightly-wound baseball. Babe Ruth's 714 were hit using, again, a much less tightly-wound baseball (one commentator likened it to hitting a balled-up sock), but on the other hand he played in a segregated era and never had to face the best black pitchers in the game, not to mention that Yankee Stadium's short right-field porch was practically custom-made for Ruth's swing. Hank Aaron broke Ruth's record playing home games in Fulton County Stadium, whose climate and build made it a home-run heaven known as the "Launching Pad." Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio in their prime played at the same time as Satchel Paige in his prime, and they never had to face one another because of the color of Paige's skin.
In other words, if we're going to put an asterisk after 756 (or whatever number Bonds reaches), there's scarcely a record we can't find a reason to put an asterisk after. We shouldn't forget that while Bonds was taking steroids, he was also hitting against pitchers who were more than likely juicing as well. There's no part of the game that hasn't been tainted by steroids (including the McGwire/Sosa race of '98), and to single Bonds out as a juicer while ignoring the other people who juiced is a troubling notion.
The thing is, if Barry Bonds had retired from baseball the day before he took his first steroid, he'd not only be a first-ballot Hall of Famer but also would have had his name said in the same breath as his godfather Willie Mays and the other great players in baseball's history. He was one of the best natural athletes ever to play the game, and his swing was (and is) a thing of beauty.
So I don't know what to do about this. There's very little question he cheated, but it's also hard to discount the fact that you can't really compare what players did throughout baseball's history. If nothing else, it's a comfort to me that there are at least two players in the Majors right now (A-Rod and Pujols) who have a hell of a shot at breaking Bonds's record in the next fifteen years, and there haven't been any allegations about either of them (though as a baseball fan and a Cubs fan, rooting for a Yankee and a Cardinal is very much against my nature).
posted by jimmy at 10:56 -
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8.09.2007
My stuff is in a cube.
My intrepid crew
With the help of several friends, I took all of my earthly possessions (with the exception of a few things I'm selling, bequeathing to others, or taking in the car for the long road trip) over to scenic Pico Rivera (motto: Why the hell would anyone want to live here?) and loaded them into a 6'x7'x8' cube. Sometime tonight or tomorrow, ABF is going to lift that cube up on a forklift and start driving it toward Maryland, where it will arrive with all my stuff intact.
That also means that my room is almost completely empty. This confuses Simon, even more so than his whole world being systematically disassembled and packed in boxen over the past two weeks. All his familiar places - my bed, my desk chair, his perch - are all completely gone. He's receiving wet food instead of his usual cat rocks as a reward/peace offering for his perseverance, but he's still not a happy camper. (Imagine how he'll feel spending four days in a car.)
Things are almost ready to go... just one more bin to pack, final preparations to make, and a crazy goodbye party to attend, and I'm out the door. My last day of work is tomorrow; my dad gets into Burbank on Sunday, and we start driving east on Monday morning. I've got a lot to do. I'm anxious to get going.
There really wasn't much of a point to this post, was there.
posted by jimmy at 15:39 -
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I've started packing for the big move back east... today I managed to get all my books packed away.
(For those who don't know, I'm starting a Ph.D. in communication at the University of Maryland this coming fall, so I'm moving to DC.)
posted by jimmy at 17:23 -
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