My journey to the top of professional cuisine criticism has officially begun.  As a blooming young star in the tasting business, it is only natural that my talents would be pursued at such a young age.  And with no further delay I am pleased to announce my career as a food critic has begun at the very peak of high-class dining: Wendy's.

That's right, you are looking at (the weblog of) the newly hired and most promising taste-test correspondent in the Wendy's corporation.  One fine night last week they simply decided they couldn't wait any longer, and called me up to bring me in to privilege themselves to my opinions on their latest cheeseburger developments.

Well, technically, perhaps, it was only a one-time stint.  And maybe there were thirty other hired taste tasters in my shift alone, but hey, just wait until they read my comments on their super value double cheeseburger and they'll be offering contracts to each of my taste buds individually. 

It was quite the experience really.  They sat me down in an all white room at a desk that was enclosed like a voting booth.  After I clicked the "OK" button on the computer, the mini closet dividing my room from the kitchen opened suddenly and a latex-gloved hand quickly placed a Wendy's cheeseburger in front of me, and shot back and closed the mini closet after it.  About eight to ten bites and forty-three questions later, my opinions were safely locked in the Wendy's Innovation Center archives for review by Wendy's officials.

I hope they are not disappointed with my dismal review of their sandwich.  Honestly, I was glad to have eaten it, but I think that had something to do with the sandwich not only being free, but the fact I was being paid $25 to simply tell them their sandwich was only O.K.   But I did not simply exude inconfidence in the product, for as I explained, the melange of taste could be balanced to perfection by merely adding some bacon, easing the mustard some, and cooking the meet a trifle more.  I expect to see the sandwich with these revisions in Wendy's restaurants soon.

Truly it was a delightful experience, mostly because the room made me feel like I was in Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory.  But I'm sure the free grub and cash helped too.

Most of the time in our lives is spent in the immediate presence of only a few other people.  Even if you know a long list of people, it is still the case that you are probably only ever around a few of them at the same time.  If I am socializing with only a few other people, it is frequently the case that I count as one-tenth, one-fourth—or even sometimes, when I am with just my best friend—one-half of the people present. 

But this emphasis on me as an individual only comes from the relativity of my life's limited storyline.  In a crowd, I feel desperately small, and I seem an unoriginal and unknown replica of all other people to the majority of the pedestrians brusquely brushing past me.  Even the compression felt in a swarming airport is, when measured correctly, an injustice to the actual reality of my smallness.  For that airport crowd is only one of many airport crowds globally; and airport crowds are only one kind of crowd; and all the kinds of crowds now are still not all the crowds from the future and the past. 

To assemble all of humanity mentally is a process of gradual steps.  First, my family and I step out of our house to sojourn to the gathering.  My neighbors are also leaving from their houses.  We head to the main road, where my city of 50,000 is assembling a caravan of walking.  The main city is amassing quickly, and heading as a great herd outwards.   All of the people in my memories, from places I've been to, restaurants, parties, drivers around me on the roads, the people in shop windows, and at city council meetings, and football games, are all heading from their dwellings.  It is too broad a stroke to say the same is happening in every city; I must imagine them one by one.  The flow of people from each is dizzying in sight, and ceaseless in outpour.  All of the armies from wars I have read in history stop suddenly, and answer the beckon to participate in my thought experiment.  The farms in Asia and Europe I have always imagined show families leaving everything behind, to head for the summit.  Each shop owner from your town comes too, and the same over again for every town you have never known.  Every face you have accidentally seen comes as well.  Soon, the scenes of people traveling in my mind must flip between everything I can possibly imagine as a place to leave from; and from there, always, are masses of moving people.  I must not lose a single one of these thoughts, each one must remain with all the others as puzzle pieces to make the greater whole.  For five minutes I will try to imagine more people, more places, and the hordes of those I have already imagined combining to grow to sizes I have never known. 

Finally, I must try to view them all.  But I cannot compress them into one sight; I may turn around and see the crowd extend as far as my eyes can see in every direction, but I cannot see the edge of the crowd.  In my mind I hover over the people, flying, to try to find the end, but it never comes.  I am so very small.   

It does not work to say I am a drop in the ocean, or a speck of sand on the beach, because those are merely ways of saying what reality is like. To conceive of the actual position I hold, I must consciously place myself in a picture that contains every single human being that will ever be.  In this picture, what space do I occupy?  I tremble when I consider it.     

As I climb the mental ladder to reach reality's summit, to view how I look in the picture of everything, I lose myself in the thought of it all.       

Speaking, words, dialogue; these fill the moments in which humans mark up reality.  Whatever reality is is a long constant silence that continues indefinitely.  It is the universe the moment before a conscious human being was added to it.  In that blink of time when a human was added to all the matter and ontological realness that already existed, a mind came that could absorb and interpret what he was in, what everything was, so as to perhaps line up with reality's constant stare.  As one, I can profess that humans do not think in words or actual phrases constructed by letters next to one another.  In exploration of reality, the paradigm of which is represented by me being a human in the universe, I walk along the timeline of my life experiencing different things.  Because "I," as in my conscious, forethinking self, have been placed into this thing a "human body" I experience life first in the is sense of it, and second in the words sense of it.  The is sense of life is that I have a human nature that is inherent within me; as things happen in life I feel it revolting and stirring and moving inside of me.  It is what every human is as every one of us experiences life.  It is a vague, general notion that all receive as going through life.  Life, as is first known through my human nature, arrives in impressions and reactionary feelings inside my entire body.  What numbs me, makes me laugh, grieves me, angers me, mystifies me, is all under the category of the first impact of life, as is according to my nature as a human.  It is the initial form of "life" as we know it.  The subsequent phase is when humans begin to, as I said earlier, "mark up" reality.  At first, everything is.  Then, humans add words to what is.  Words are, physically, a combination of different shapes put compactly by one another.  If I want to write the word "one" I will write the shape "o" and then the shape "n" and the shape "e" and put them very tightly together.  Vaguely and generally, as a human progresses from childhood, when they did not know any words, each word begins to fill up with attached meaning.  Thus: letters are shapes, and next to each other letters form words, and words designate certain ideas.  Now we not only have a thing called "human nature" and "the universe" but now we have added a way to attempt to describe reality.  Using the fact that every word has a weight of meaning, the human creatures then use the words to try and say what reality is; in other words, they try to use words to describe the is.  Here we notice several things.  First, words do not change the is.  Also, because words come after the fact of reality, they may be only slightly helpful in describing reality to a human, since the method is having a word which signifies a meaning somehow then weigh and impress upon a human's mind that the words, or the meaning behind the words, somehow represent reality.  But how can reality be represented through words if reality itself is not words?  Beyond that, words may be completely and entirely inadequate to serve as a way to seize and capture reality.  Reality escapes words' reach.  And finally, words may not only fail to sufficiently represent reality, but actually hold the ability to be deceptive.  There cannot be a fundamental trust of words if they are only things we observe that have attached meanings that then weigh in on our minds to change our perception of reality, because that is putting our trust in a limited medium.  We must remember while examining them, words come after reality.  If you base your ideas about reality off of words, then your life will have simply been an avoidance of reality, since there was no direct relation to the is.  Your life was then only the predictable result of the weight of certain words in a certain order impressing upon your mind.  

Before a person attempts to put something into words, there must be a something to be put into words.  When we experience something, it impresses upon us a meaning.  Life is necessarily meaningful, because we use words at all.  Using words means that something happened to us that generated an internal reaction to it, and we then communicated that internal reaction of it to others using words.  The other humans did not also feel the meaning of the internal reaction directly, rather, only indirectly.  However, the person who had an internal reaction did know what he was trying to express.  Thus, personal reality is a first-hand experience.  We are not doomed because of the inadequacy of words.  If a person said something which seemed unclear, I might ask him what he means by what he said.  He will then repeat it with different words, hoping they will have the desired effect of having a meaning and weight of the words impress upon my mind.  However, if I don't understand him a second time, I will ask again what he meant.  Eventually, I simply keep asking and asking until there are no words, there is just the quiddity of the meaning existing inside of him, which he could not even describe.  Language ends at some point or another, in being useful and reliable, and our lives can only be known by ourselves individually.  This is why it is dangerous to change our minds because of words.  How can we know their roots, their truth, their relation to what is?  Only when it is coupled with an episode of internal conceptual confirmation can a person know the truth of something. 

An important idea to grasp is that logic, too, has been added to words.  Sometimes words can be arranged so that they are supposed to make logical sense.  Logic, however, is also an internal phenomenon involving the weight of a concept.  When something happens called an argument, people will present two opposing theories using logic, and each thinks that their own logic wins.  No one ever wins a debate objectively.  When two arguments are given, each observer will decide which one is better or right by putting each one on a logic scale in their mind that weighs which one wins, because both are obviously logical in some sense.  Neither side is completely illogical.  There is logic to their side, the question is, is it better logic?  Thus, besides humans improvising a description of reality using words, they also improvise an account of reality using logic.  This shows also to not instinctively trust logic, because how can we know if the logic conceived by a person lines up with reality, reality at its summit?  If comprehendible, reality at its summit just is, and logic becomes a faint memory of a voice clamoring in the past.   

All of this shows an intrinsic weakness in atheism: it does not even posit an ultimate reality to be reached.  It denies the theories of ultimate realities using words and logic, which I'm not sure can be trusted against a potential ultimate reality.  This also goes to show that life is inherently meaningful.  In my brain I experience concepts and reactions devoid of words; later, I will use words to attempt to describe it, but that is subsequent to the actual meaning.  Meaning occurs in life before words can account for it.  One cannot even judge another person's life if one simply knows words.  What do you know of another's life as it actually is?  Also, in terms of salvation, a person cannot know God through simply words. God is past all the words; he is a reality that can enter a person's life. 

Want an example of how words have meaning attached to them?  Look over words in a book without actually comprehending them.  Then go back and read it so that the concept of the words sinks into your mind.  Neat, eh? 

I have just used words and logic to show the limited use of words and logic.  This writing, too, is unneeded, superfluous, an addition to what already was before: whatever is, is.  

Dear Internet,

There is a problem that has troubled me for a great many years now, and which has completely confounded me every time I attempt to resolve it by thinking about it.  The answer has proved to be effectively out of the range of my speculative radar. 

Here is the apparent conundrum, which puzzles me so thoroughly: how is that people taste things differently?  What I mean by that is, when two people try the exact same food, how is that one is able to like the taste, while the other dislikes the taste?  Is it not the same taste? 

When you eat something, do you not assume that what you perceive to be the food's taste is also its normative taste?  Thus, if you find the food sapid, and another finds it foul, yet it is the same taste, where does the difference occur?  Rather, how can a difference occur?  There seems to be a variable missing that would allow for the taste to differ among tasters.

I truly fail to comprehend how, given a single taste, two people could taste the same taste, and one could enjoy it while the other detests it.  The taste ought to be the same to them!!

Your truly,

Confused in Ohio

I don't know what other Christians are talking about when they say they never find any opportunities to witness to other people.  People use "JESUS!" and "Jesus Christ!" as swear words all the time.

They really ought to put riddles on the ceiling at the dentist's office.  Looking at the manitee saying "Ahoy there, matey!" really didn't make the three hours in that chair pass by any more quickly.

I was born in Athens, Ohio.  By telling people that I was born in Athens, about half the people I have told this fact think I'm from Greece.

There is a type of people that love zombie movies so much that they always mindlessly flock to the theaters in troves to see them—much like zombies.  I can almost hear them saying, Must see zombie movie...

Soon enough, some person or other is going to realize their opportunity to cash in by suing the people who name hurricanes.  All they have to do is sue on the basis of discrimination.  After all, by associating a specific person's name with one of nature's most volatile and destructive forces, they are inculcating into people's mind a negative subconscious impression of that name.  Just muster up some sort of study that shows the happiness of people goes down dramatically the months after the hurricane by their name hit, and presto, big money.  I mean, how would you like it, Mr. World Meteorological Orginization, if someone named a hurricane after you.   Doesn't feel so good now, does it?!

This night is finite, so why not have a fine night?

Does it not seem like fights are the climax of stupidity?  Here, at least, is what would make it seem that way: whenever a palpable tension exists between two people who obviously want to fight, they begin asking the dumbest questions possible.  

First imagine a typical ruffian; enormous girth, rugged looking, with a low, gruff voice.  Now consider the standard pre-fight inquiries: 

"Who you lookin' at? You lookin' at me?!" 
"You talkin' to me?"  
"Hey buddy, you got a problem?" 
"You wanna go?!" 
"You think you can take me?!"

Judging from the intellectual value of such a slew of questions we can draw the conclusion that either the ruffian endorses a philosphical worldview of radical skepticism, or "strong wit" did not make it on to the day's priority list.  Regardless, it is quite clear that most five year olds could score a perfect on this impromptu streetfight quiz.  Every answer is a dubious, "Um, yes...?" 

Thus, while through their ingenious interrogations the two parties verify the nature of the situation ("Oh yeah? And what's your problem?" "You're my problem!" "YEAH?"), the pair of irritated thugs quickly and systematically empty the situation of any and all intellectual value, until suddenly, and finally, both their IQ's hit zero, and the fight begins. 

And with that we see that Yoda was wrong. 

[Yoda voice] Anger leads to stupidity.  Stupidity leads to suffering. [/Yoda voice]

Have a great night, everyone! 

Fear not, for I have pictures of the lightning in each of these videos for further enjoyment.  Here is the lightning from the first clip:

I could only get the thick bolt from the second clip (the one that flashes for like a whole second). There's a branched bolt that flashes before it, but I couldn't find the stillframe of it in the editing program I have because it would always skip over it.  Here's the thick bolt though:

And finally, the grand finale.  This one hit about thirty meters from me, right by the house across the street.  You can tell because it is obviously in front of that tree that appears behind it.   It doesn't look as cool in real-time, so I had no idea what had just hit after it did.  If I had known a thing like this had landed so close to me, I possibly might not have opted to go out into the storm later (see last post).  This shot was captured from my doorstep.  The following shot is a bolt that happened a millisecond or so afterwards.  The third picture is the skeleton bolt of this first picture.  In the third picture you can see the tree that is on my side of the street that obscures the view of where the awesome bolt hit the ground, which is too bad.

It's sort of like those people in the movie Twister that chase tornadoes, only it's lightning bolts instead.  Getting the actual bolts was the tricky thing, because the sky was flashing pretty consistently, you just had no idea where the bolt actually was.  The sky flashing is pretty cool, but the bolts are the "money shots," as it were.

Too bad I didn't get the lightning from my last post on tape.  If I had it on tape then the people I tell about it wouldn't think I'm insane.   People I tell in person are like, "I see, so it was really big, huh? Whatever you say, Phil."

Wake up, wake up! 

As terribly sorry as I am for disturbing your sleep at such an ignominious hour, I cannot help but also feel that it is entirely and completely justified.  Let me explain.

Not but ten minutes ago the most extraordinary and awe-inspiring moment of my life occurred. 

At about 3:30 A.M. I had finished reading what I wanted to of Sherlock Holmes (up to chapter five in the The Sign of Four) and was about to call it a night.  Suddenly, however, the light downpour that I had heard the sussuration of while reading had developed into a vivacious thunderstorm of extraordinarily close proximity.  I went to the front door and was only going to watch for a few moments, but that was before I realized the awesome nature of what was truly happening right on top of my local Ohio suburb.

Lightning was striking no less than every three seconds.  Arbitrarily, and in every direction, it was coming down as though it were atmospheric wac-a-mole with lightning bolts.  I marveled at it delightfully for a few minutes from my front doorstep before I ingeniously realized that such an event should not go unrecorded.  After a slightly extensive search for the camcorder and a usable tape, I set about recording the lightning that was occurring across from my house.   It was a slow process, due mainly to the fact that I believe my camera has A.D.D., as is indicated by its lack of ability to stay focused for more than thirty seconds at a time, but in the end proved highly profitable. 

I caught some dandies, but nothing particularly special.  Soon I decided I would have to venture out into the storm if I was going to document anything truly terrific.  Using a towel to keep the equipment dry, I travelled down my street and got some better angles of the area around my neighborhood where the storm was taking place.  It was not a heavy downpour, so I was in great situational luck.

After a bit I had run out of tape, so I stashed the camera inside the house and then came back out to enjoy the storm.  It was about 4:30 A.M., and my neighbors were obviously all still sleeping judging by the sullen and swarthy facades of their houses.  Naturally in such a singular and ideal set of circumstances, I enjoyed myself by dancing and singing all over my street's sidewalk and roadway.  The storm had mostly died down to the occasional lightning bolt every minute or so, which were sometimes not even visible for being somewhere far off beyond the horizon. 

But then, without so much as the slightest sign of imminence, and from seemingly absolutely nowhere, the heavens opened up, and the fury of Zeus was unleashed.  From directly above me in the sky a single bolt flashed strong and wide, and from it I saw others unravel from it in seemingly every single direction, as though it were building an electric cage around me.  A moment, a sheer milisecond before, I had been standing in the dim and fading light of a street lamp, but I was now a lowly worm, shriveling helplessly inside an ineffably brilliant and heavenly coruscating set of branches of all-encompassing lightning.   It broke the sky like a sculptor; and in power and majesty, for only but a brief second of the earth's long and tumultuous existence, and in only the limited region of my urban sprawl, it ruled the heavens.    

As testimony to its nature close at hand, not even before the tremendous flash had concluding did a roaring boom--no, explosion--blast along with it, sending its potent message right into me as though I was the ear of the earth.  Its crack! was so loud that it seemed as though a heavenly megaphone was sending the sound waves straight at me specifically.  Together with the panorama of lightning, the thunder produced an indescribable shock and frisson within my body like I have never known before.  In that moment, I felt the door of my existence lose a few of its hinges as it was shook silly like a small child by an adult.

At the picosecond of its arrival my consumed senses sent my body out of its listless stroll and straight up into the air like a cartoon.  When I landed, I completed watching its beauty and prodigiousness unfold, overwhelming my comparatively trivial being to its core.  Along with jumping, I began making a noise -- not a distinguishable one -- that was a combination of and changed between shrieking, cackling hysterically, wailing, gargling, and uttering gobbledegook.  I broke for the house -- fifty meters away -- in a mad dash on my tip-toes (I was barefooted) like a hysterical madman.  As a bumbling hobbledehoy I entered the house, and when I did so, I could not contain myself and was breathing heavy and hard, still making random laughing and squealing noises.  The paroxysm was beyond my control; the euphoria of my experience would definitely take time--and therapy--to remove.  A minute later, as I was subconsciously afraid, my dad appeared at the foot of the stairs, staring at me drenched, bare-foot, and with an ecstatic grin on my face at the front door. 

He told me I woke him up, so I galumphed over to him like an old, deranged, and inordinately jubilant man, to explain to him what had happened.  I explained in hushed and awed tones about the lightning, Zeus, the heavens, the apocalypse, everything!  After I finished my story he gazed at me through his half-sealed eyes, unimpressed, and told me again that I had woke him.  I apologized and after he had ascended the stairs once more, I went fumbling for the camcorder to record my impressions moments after my awesome encounter with nature. 

And to Xanga I have come next, to let the world know of a moment that vanished in an ungracious amount of time, the amount of time it takes to do activities as inconsequential as saying a few words, or walking a few steps, and yet was still able to be so qualitatively saturated, that it will live in my heart forever.  It happened in such a fast and dramatic fashion, it now seems it barely happened, and yet I know it did, because it has stained in my mind the indelible awe that I felt in the second I truly experienced awesomeness. 

Facebook is increasingly embracing the resolution to be as ridiculous as possible.  Right now I have:

1 friend request, 2 event invitations, 12 group invitations, 3 friend quiz invitations, 1 kudo request, 4 zombie invitations, 3 top friends friend requests, 2 cause invitations, 1 texas hold'em invitation, 2 rate me requests, 2 movie compatibility requests, 1 compare yuto invitation, 1 harry potter's magic invitation, 1 vampire invitation, 3 pirate invitations, 1 werewolf invitation, 1 pet invitation, 1 speed granting invitation, 3 my aquarium invitations, 1 pirate invitation, 1 vampire invitation, 4 my questions friend requests, 2 sticky note requests, 1 bathroom wall invitation, 19 new notifications.

...

If the argument has ever been made that online social networks are an attempt to escape from reality, I believe the evidence has just arrived.   The only thing I ever click on from this panel is the "friend requests" link, because, quite frankly, I'm a little less than ebullient when considering that apart from minesweeper and solitaire I now have the ability to waste time on the computer by creating a virtual aquarium on my facebook.   

I used to think facebook had gone too far simply because it heaves doses of pointless information on users everytime they sign in, but now they have exceeded what I thought to be the bounds of virtual superfluity.  Now that facebook is done with its attempt at completely reproducing the real world online, it has moved on to inventing its own imaginative virtual realities.  Facebook is no longer simply a cavernous labryinth of real information, but now unreal information, such as how many times I have been bitten by "werewolves" or what "Harry Potter spell" has most recently been cast on me.  

Spaceship Facebook had previously launched from Earth only with ambitions of settling and replicating Earth on another planet, but has now accidentally been sucked into a black hole of grotesque aberrations.  Just goes to show how it takes baby steps to get away from reality.

This avalanche of fribbles is not without consequence.  The more a social network offers, the more it will be seen as a possible recreation of actual life.  The last thing I want to happen is anything online to be considered a competitor with real life; unfortunately, the more aspects and features that are added to a social networking site, the more probable it will come to bear a semblance of being sufficient in fulfilling human needs that had previously been fulfilled through unelectronic means.  But in reality, any computerized ersatz is really drastically a qualitative inferior to the beauty of real life relationships. 

With Xanga's simplicity (everything basically revolves around posts, with a minor emphasis on blogrings) there is no mistaking it as a subsitute for real life.  These are obviously moderate journals for thoughts every now and then.   But when things like facebook seem to have a city-like hustle and bustle, with up-to-date news items and a seemingly virtual inhabitance to them, the differences between it and real life become gradually more subtle, until the point when spending time on it becomes as natural as not.  The only definitive result ushered in by a perpetual increase in features is quickening the American march towards isolationism.

For my original thoughts on MySpace go to: August 2nd, 2006. 
For my initial review of Facebook go to: April 9th, 2007.

Facebook is the ultimate misnomer.  You are neither viewing a real person's face, nor participating in the wonderful activity of reading a book, both things that I would judge to be vastly superior activities.   

Suppose you are in a nice sit-down restaurant where the tables are relatively close together.  If some people near you left, and they happened to leave a dish that for the most part was untouched on the table, would you eat it? 

On this subject, consider several sources of influence.  There is probably some stake on the quality of the dish; the consideration that the food is going to be thrown away; also how hungry you are.

Although, with the responses I've received so far in person, the better question might be whether you would even consider eating it.

Best to all of you!