Yeah, we watched it. We thought it was good, but we're not mainstream types, and we tend to like oddball things. We both like Harrison Ford, after all, he invented the motor car. We both like Phoebe Walls and Bridges, just because. So we had fun. As I have mentioned elsewhere, the endless chases are boring, and the caves and booby traps are all getting to look the same. But in spite of all that, it was a fun movie!
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Monday, July 10, 2023
Indiana Jones and The Dial
Saturday, July 1, 2023
The Greatest Composer of All Time!!!
There's no such person. Let me explain.
Suppose we have a collection of points on a line, and we had a direction on that line that corresponded to "better", and the opposite direction corresponded to "worse". Then it's possible that one of the points might be The Best point of all.
But composers can't be put on a line that way. It is impossible to compare two composers and say, this composer is better than that composer. It is just not possible. We say that the set of composers is not linearly ordered. The subject that we're getting into is topology. Given two points on the XY plane, can we say which point is more? Given two books, can we say which book is better? There is usually a matter of judgement involved; any comparison involving a matter of judgement cannot yield a 'best' that cannot be questioned.
I don't mind confessing that, in my personal view, Bach is the best musician. But there are really great pieces that Haydn wrote, pieces that Mozart wrote, Beethoven wrote, Mendelssohn wrote, Brahms wrote, Schumann wrote, Wagner wrote, and so on, which Bach may not have been capable of writing!
Even beauty pageants, in which they compare the beauty of women, really make no sense; women can't be ordered linearly either. Deciding a "greatest" in these sorts of cases is always arbitrary. There is a lot of 'celebrating the best' in American society, but in my humble opinion, it is not the best feature of it.
There's always some joker who wants to establish that Paul McCartney was the greatest bass player in history, or that the Beatles were the greatest group, or that Barack Obama was the greatest president. We must just smile, and think to ourselves that the fellows who set up these rankings are idiots.
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The great pizza conflict - (Sherman’s Lagoon) It used to be the case that people had very strong opinions for and against anchovies on pizza. But as the range of pizza toppings has g...21 hours ago
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Authentic Korngold to raise the Proms roof - Last Saturday night, I left the Royal Albert Hall after the debut Prom of the Sinfonia of London and started down the slippery slope to South Kensington ...3 years ago
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Apartment Life - Ah, apartment life! Who could ask for anything more? Who would ever want to live in a spacious house when you can have a cramped, overpriced, domicile wedg...10 years ago
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A shady, pathetic return. - This blog started as a summer project about the natural gas industry and related issues because I had taken a class and was interested in diving a bit deep...12 years ago