messiestobjects

Awesome Game, Anyone? (Thanks Julie)

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You'll have better luck if you go play the game here, though. I can't get the game to fit exactly right on my page, so Alaska, Siberia, and Australia are cut off.

[EDIT] Warning! Highly addictive! Since I started playing this game, all I've thought about are maps, cities, and landmarks oh my! I have two large maps hanging in my apartment and one light-up globe, and they haunt me. I've even come close to obsessively destroying my beloved push-pin map which marks proudly the places I've been by removing said push-pins in a geographic frenzy to better read the small country which plagued me the last time I played.

Maybe they should make this a mandatory game in Elementary classrooms in the US. Make 'em learn through addiction.

You're So Vain, I Bet You Think This Post Is About You. Well, It Probably Is.

Morality. It's a sticky question. Take a favorite party ethics question: If you could go back in time and kill Hitler before he got his hands on any sort of power, would you? Yes yes we've all heard this one but bear with me. So, before Hitler got power, let's translate that. Would you choose to make his mother have an abortion? Kill him when he was a baby? A young boy? A student? A depressed beret-wearing drop-out from art school? (Ok I'm not sure he ever wore a beret, but Hitler as disaffected art student cracks me up.) Or do you wait until he's actually done something evil, so he knows why he's being murdered by time-travelling history buffs? You don't want to be likened to George Bush's bumbling pre-emptive personality, after all.

I think that most people would answer that question more or less the same. Wait until the famous Munich beer hall putsch, follow him home that night, drag him into an alley and club him. My only point with all the baby Hitler stuff was that you need to carefully assess the question before making a statement on who, when, and with what you'd consider actually killing a person, whatever his crime. But, the thing is, there are very few people who consider themselves moral that would actually decide to let him live. Well, not the type of people who would hang out at the kind of horrid party where such hackneyed questions were being asked, anyway. But you know, killing someone is pretty heavy stuff, especially when the question is asked of an individual. State-sponsored killing is much tidier, because it's harder for any one person to accept the blame if things get fouled up with death-row victims post-execution such as, say, new evidence leading to innocence. For the record, I am most certainly not suggesting Hitler was innocent.

Now take it a step further. Say an interstellar time traveler (which is actually redundant because due to the vast expanse of space and the Universal speed limit of light, all interstellar travellers are also by definition time travellers. But we're talking about one of 'em coming back to our time from the future, and from far far away, a much trickier proposition than bland 'ol interstellar forward time travel. Have I lost anyone to sleep and drool yet? Or merely lost cool points? If I haven't yet, I'm certainly about to...) shows up at your doorstep and tells you that the human race itself is sort of the Hitler of the Universal community. One day, far in the future, our ancestors take power from the Galactic government and send all of the dirty credit-hogging three-nosed Heebajaxers to concentration death planets, and then move on to the rest of the dirty job-stealing immigrant aliens. According to this interstellar whistle blower, you will be in a position in 5 years to start the nuclear war which will end the human race, thereby saving the future of the universe. (I'm assuming they can't find anyone else to do the job but another human. I don't know why, so don't ask. It's a stupid blog-party question anyway.) Would you do it?

It's essentially the same question as the Hitler question, but, you know, on a bigger, geekier scale. Instead of being asked to kill another human being and saving millions of human lives, you're being asked to kill billions of humans and save gagagooglegazillions of extraterrestrial lives. And you're a human with a moral code, so, do you side with the human race out of loyalty and wish your great-great-great grandchildren well in their galactic killing spree, or make the same decision that your moral Hitler-killing code told you to make? Maybe it's not really such a hard question, because you know, it's kind of silly, but it's a thought experiment. And before anyone asks, no, I am not on any pretty-colour hallucinogens, although I think something I ate at the Macungie diner earlier today might not be agreeing with me. These are the things I think about when sitting on the can and questioning my own moral code and decisions, that's all.

POST SCRIPT PIX: Gary posted a link to the below photo in the comments, and I have no choice, due to cosmic moral obligation, but to add it here. Because it's awesome.

A Treatise On The Origins Of Religion And Political Movements

About ten or fifteen years ago... I'm not sure exactly when, but my brother and sister were very young; maybe 8 and 6 respectively, or somewhere around there. Anyway, at the time I was sitting in our living room, probably reading, anti-social bookworm that I was in those days, and my sister Katie was sitting by the entryway playing with one of those mid-size inflatable beach balls. My brother Peter came around the corner through the entryway and inadvertently kicked the ball out of Katie's hands, sending it soaring down the hallway. They both went after it at the same time, and as they were running down the hallway it quite accidentally became a race and they began laughing hysterically because they both realized it had been an accident, and they'd reacted the same way to it... I don't remember who got to the ball first, or maybe I didn't see, but by the time they got there they were laughing so hard with the shared experience that it didn't seem to matter who "won". They had just invented the greatest game ever for the two of them to play together.
So the next step of course was to re-create it. Once they finished falling all over themselves laughing, they gleefully ran back to the main entryway where Katie sat down with the ball and Peter went back around the corner. He "stealthily" came back and "accidentally" kicked the ball down the hallway again, and they both ran after it laughing. By the third or fourth time they played this marvelous new game, they began taking more serious note of who got to the ball first, which of course led to rules about what position Katie would be in when the ball was kicked, so that they had an equal chance of reaching the ball on time. By the fifth time they were no longer laughing, but still having fun, and another rule was added about no pushing or tripping, and perhaps another stating that once the ball was kicked, they had to each count to 3 seconds before running, and then the ball had to be thrown rather than kicked to better control the distance and final destination of the ball as kicking it could unfairly send it closer to one participant's side than the other's, or worse yet, break a lamp and get Mom angry.
By the tenth time they did this, they were arguing about a questionable rule, and whether it had really even been broken, and it seemed that the fun had gone out of it, yet the competition to see who the ultimate beachball-chasing champion was drove them to keep playing. At some point around the fifteenth game, a real fight broke out as one participant had committed an illegal offsides and wouldn't admit it, at least according to one witness, but the ref had unfortunately had his head turned at that moment. When they realized they didn't actually have a referee, they asked me to settle their dispute, but I told them I was reading a very important treatise on 20th century literature and could not be bothered, although of course I was watching closely and was quite secretly amused.
By the twentieth game, it became not so much a game, or even competition, as a full-out ice hockey-style brawl in the middle of the living room floor, at which time Mom came out, did a little yelling of her own, and sent them to their respective rooms.
This is a true story, with little to no embellishment, and it is an event which has been stuck in my mind for most of my adult life. I don't mean to embarass my younger siblings, who were of course very young at the time and behaved in a manner identical to that of children all over the world... but it illustrates something about human nature which I've never forgotten.