Morning!

[hummingwolf]

First thing when I got online yesterday morning, I saw an e-mail from LJ saying that I had been gifted with paid account left-overs by zaecus. What a great thing to wake up to! Very nice gift from someone I only know through comments in other people's journals.

Spent yesterday resting in the heat. Now I'm still hot and lethargic, but also restless. Need to do stuff! Not sure how I'm actually going to get myself to do stuff, but it still needs to be done.

For a change, and since I'm not feeling terribly interesting at the moment, I post a quiz result:

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. </td> Postmodernist 63% Cultural Creative 63% Existentialist 50% Idealist 44% Fundamentalist 44% Modernist 31% Materialist 25% Romanticist 19% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

I think blame for the relatively high Postmodern score should go to MegaHAL. It's amazing how much of an influence that artificial unintelligence has been on my world view, really. [Edit: Though the spiritual-but-not-religious thing annoys me. Frankly, I'm both.]

Mention of MegaHAL naturally leads to the subject of poetry, so here's a poem from a book borrowed from the children's section of the public library which I was compelled to type up yesterday when someone's children's story was criticized for being too violent:

"Don't Cry, Darling, It's Blood All Right" by Ogden Nash

Whenever poets want to give you the idea that something is particularly meek and mild,
They compare it to a child,
Thereby proving that though poets with poetry may be rife
They don't know the facts of life.
If of compassion you desire either a tittle or a jot,
Don't try to get it from a tot.
Hard-boiled, sophisticated adults like me and you
May enjoy ourselves thoroughly with Little Women and Winnie-the-Pooh,
But innocent infants these titles from their reading course eliminate
As soon as they discover that it was honey and nuts and mashed potatoes instead of human flesh that Winnie-the-Pooh and Little Women ate.
Innocent children have no use for fables about rabbits or donkeys or tortoises or porpoises,
What they want is something with plenty of well-mutilated corpoises.
Not on legends of how the rose came to be a rose instead of a petunia is their fancy fed,
But on the inside story of how somebody's bones got ground up to make somebody else's bread.
They'll go to sleep listening to the story of the little beggarmaid who got to be queen by being kind to the bees and the birds,
But they're all eyes and ears the minute they suspect a wolf or a giant is going to tear some poor woodcutter into quarters or thirds.
It doesn't take much to fill their cup;
All they want is for somebody to be eaten up.
Therefore I say unto you, all you poets who are so crazy about meek and mild little children and their angelic air,
If you are sincere and really want to please them, why not just go out and get yourselves devoured by a bear.



I retain many childlike qualities. Take that as you will.

Comments

[coffeegrace.livejournal.com]

Hey I scored as the same thing! Except I had a ninety something and was lower in the postmodernist. And I consider myself both spiritual and religious too :-)

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

90-something? You must be very creative, then! :-)

[coffeegrace.livejournal.com]

Lol, well I like to think so. I redid it just to make sure I was remembering right. This actually seems to fit me pretty well except for the not religious part. You know what they say... "Great minds think alike..." Hmm... wonder if strange minds think alike too then... :-P

You scored as Cultural Creative. Cultural Creatives are probably the newest group to enter this realm. You are a modern thinker who tends to shy away from organized religion but still feels as if there is something greater than ourselves. You are very spiritual, even if you are not religious. Life has a meaning outside of the rational. </td> Cultural Creative 94% Romanticist 75% Idealist 63% Fundamentalist 50% Existentialist 50% Modernist 44% Postmodernist 38% Materialist 6% What is Your World View? (updated) created with QuizFarm.com

[allisburning.livejournal.com]

"I think blame for the relatively high Postmodern score should go to MegaHAL. It's amazing how much of an influence that artificial unintelligence has been on my world view, really."

Interesting. Can you please tell us a little more about this?

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Hmm... That was actually a throwaway line, but I might make a post out of it this weekend.

[pnksaph.livejournal.com]

Children do love the gory parts of stories. The wicked witches who bake children in ovens, the ogres and ghoulies that hide in the woods. Children now-a-days see so much *real* violence. Storybook violence is somewhat a reprieve.

[hummingwolf.livejournal.com]

Not sure how old that poem is, but I suspect it's at least half a century since it was written. I wonder if we could go back in time, would we find that the kids then enjoyed storybook violence more or less?

[allisburning.livejournal.com]

"Children now-a-days see so much *real* violence."

Gotta wonder about your comparison here.

Kids in the old days used to see their friends, siblings, and parents dying right and left of things like measles and smallpox; used to see animals slaughtered in front of their eyes; used to hear about, if not see, men getting into knife fights or beating their wives; used to see the results of the government chopping off people's hands and noses and whatnot, or hanging them in the town square; used to suffer, along with the rest of the population, the invasion of the Huns or Prussians or Ruritanians or whoever was on the warpath that year.

So, yes, kids nowadays do "see" a lot of violence, but for many it mostly stays inside the box and rarely comes out and gets their family or friends.

.