Happy Bastille Day

Drink, eat, and wear lots of perfume



Basically, perfect happiness can be defined by Kellogg's S'Mores Pop-Tarts coming in packages of 8 rather than 6. I live for the simple pleasures.

There is nothing to watch on TV today. On any channel. I can't wait for the 500 channel universe -- it will take me that much longer to become disgusted before turning off the TV and throwing the remote control away.

I actually had the A's/Rangers game on for background noise while I read Elementary, a spec screenplay by Brian Helgeland. It's a pretty good Sherlock Holmes story that features Jack the Ripper. Evidently this screenplay sold for big bucks a while back, and I can see why -- it's a pretty compelling read. But now the game's over and TV's off and I'm thinking about moseying out to get some coffee. Or go back to the bedroom and take a nap; it's kind of a toss-up.

It's four in the afternoon and Darin hasn't even dressed yet. He's in his robe, curled up on the chair in the living room, reading The Demon-Haunted World by Carl Sagan, which is a great book. I read it while we were down in San Diego. The book is a defense of the need for more science, more skepticism, more curiosity and wonder, and less of the stupid magical-thinking that seems to be pervading our world.

Don't send me letters about how science is just another religion -- funny how the light by my bedside turns on whether or not I believe in electricity. If you want to read a bit about a world where homeopathy held sway over "Western medicine", check out The Forgotten Plague: how the war against tuberculosis was won...and lost. (Sorry, I can't remember the author's name.)

Winter quarter I took a class called "Critical Thinking" at De Anza, which was an introduction to logical fallacies and how they apply to everyday situations. In one of the early classes the professor gave a very cursory explanation of why astrology is bunk. A student in the front row raised her hand and said, "What sign are you?" The professor, sadly, answered, and the student continued, "Oh, you see that means that you're..." In fact, of course, the student was wrong; according to the birth chart we don't have just one sign, we have lots and lots of signs, which is one way that astrology gives the astrologer and believer lots of room to get any meaning they want to out of the horoscope. Which is why "sun-sign astrology" is sneered at by "real astrologers." Who don't seem to clamor to get those "sun-sign" astrology columns out of newspapers.

(By the way, if you'd like to begin a thorough, serious debate on the merits of astrology with me or with anyone on the newsgroup sci.skeptic, all you have to do is the following: announce precisely what it is that astrology accomplishes and why the astrologer needs the details of time and place of birth.)

Anyhow, The Demon-Haunted World is a good book, and it's nice to see a counterpoint to such bestsellers as Communion and Fingerprints of the Gods out there on the bookshelves, even if Sagan's won't last as long as James "Warm and fuzzies" Redfield's Celestine Prophecy has.

Another good book logic and how to analyze what we hear and read about in every day life that I highly recommend is How To Think About Weird Things: Critical Thinking for a New Age, by Theodore Schick, Jr., and Lewis Vaughn. It's a nice, easy, well-explained introduction to critical thinking and why certain things just ain't so. (If you want to see the phrase "That may be true for you but not for me" be torn apart, this is the book.)


previous entry go to main page index of people glossary of terms used next entry

Last Updated: 14-Jul-96
©1996 Diane Patterson