"Unlimited freedom of thought and action is not a good stimulator of happiness. It's usually the opposite. Why else would organised religion be such a hit?" Peter Butler asks.
Butler, aka 'mrgrimm', was responding to a 'Spoilt for Choice' post at MetaFilter about a widely remarked book by Barry Schwartz, 'The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less' (HarperCollins, Jan 2004).
The appeal of organised religion for many people evidently isn't merely a matter of the regulations and constraints it imposes, but if one of Mel Gibson's intentions was to focus seasonal attention on at least one of these faiths, he's succeeded in that.
I lured Tony out to the Canteen with the promise of Sunday specials from the kitchen -- Sam certainly lived up to his word! -- and my friend finished by telling me that he's still keen to judge that film for himself.
Now that it's finally here, Gibson's 'Passion' has aroused as much controversy in the French press (Allociné media link) as it did in the blogosphere.
I'm less inclined to see it than ever, since people whose judgement I value have convinced me that I'd be wasting a couple of hours on a tasteless study in savagery. But I value Tony's opinions too and will let you know what he makes of it as a practicing Christian.
In the meantime, for Tony and anybody else who may be interested, Joel Sax has posted a highly readable essay on 'Christ and the Cross', in which he takes a look at the story as myth seen from different perspectives.
It's the latest article in a series Joel has been writing on 'Martyrdom' since late February, as part of an increasingly multi-faith study of 'Myths and Mysticism' he has embarked on in the beautifully presented 'Pax Nortona' blog.
For days I've blogged less than planned. The return of the Condition knocked me out.
Then the time spent studying Derrida induced a kind of writer's block while I reassessed certain deep-rooted notions I acquired when first introduced to his kind of work -- along with that of Roland Barthes -- in the 1980s.
This is so difficult to explain that I won't even try.
The thread to this entry lies in an "Inspect" folder I keep on my virtual desktop, full of items set aside for later perusal in depth. Going through this in-tray, I find it consists mostly of the work of "friends of friends" -- good links I've spotted in my daily look at what my blogrolled buddies are talking about and the circles they move in.
Some of this stuff I've kept simply because it looked amusing, given a cursory glance before rushing off to work. For instance, I liked 'Ssstudentses':
"Tricksy studentses. Hates them, precious, yesss, we hates them. Studentses, grubbing for gradeses, grubbing and ssscraping and ssneaking, and their heads sso empty -- ssssso empty, gollum, gollum. No brains. No scrumptiously crunchable brainses, no precious, jusst air and dussst. Dussst!" (more of thisss chez Ellen Fremedon).
 The cartoon is part of a funny, quirky 'Treadmill' set by Demian, which pretty much summed up one bunch of my own sentiments in March.
Dem's site -- Guild of Ghostwriters' -- is but one of many I might have pinched something from since stumbling on the Artist Blogs Webring.
Surprise, surprise: while I think I got to those people via 'ars|blog', our friends Nat and Augustine are among them.
I simply can't remember who to credit for most of the above, since I'm usually far too rushed in the morning to take notes while checking the newsreader.
Some items have been sitting in the "Inspect" folder since January.
One such is 'Quantum Muse,' a site where I occasionally drop in for "the best fantasy and science fiction literature and art we can obtain without spending most of our beer money".
In short, I despair of ever being anything but a disorganised mess, despite a week spent sorting out as many things as I could! But there's a bit of an insight into what's stuffed into one of my Mac's too many drawers.
Even thinking about the time it would take me to file it all properly gives me the same kind of slightly sick feeling I get from a surfeit of information...
That too -- the "constantly changing landscape" of news aggregation -- has been charted in an original and inter-active way: the 'Newsmap' put together by Marcos Weskamp.
You may already know of this extraordinary work using Google news sources, since now I've got around to mentioning it, many others have done so already.
No matter, because if you haven't yet pressed the "launch" button and marvelled at what you can do with the map and a few clicks, you really should.
At one fell swoop, it graphically charts some of what's best and worst in the news media, where I find the sense of priorities increasingly disturbing.
Marcos Weskamp's related projects page is an absorbing conundrum in its own right (slow to load, but worth the wait).
"My bandwidth usage is up in the stratosphere over my allowed quota -- I'm not really sure how I'm going to pay for all that -- and my log files are reaching 60MB (to give you an idea, that's just a textfile that usually was around 400k)," he wrote in his blog on Friday.
That's what comes of being inventive.
8:50:57 PM link 
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