Blog — September, 2007

From Ken Wilber's blog of April 30:

We are also in the process of creating our Board of Directors [at Integral Institute]. Individuals that I have asked to join us so far, and who have agreed, include Michael Crichton, Tony Robbins, Larry Wachowski, and (unofficially right now) John Mackey.

Michael Crichton: "In Crichton's fictional universe ... global warming concerns are all made up. Therefore, environmentalists must transform into outright evildoers" (CSICOP). "[F]lawed or misleading presentations of Global Warming science exist in the book [State of Fear], including those on Arctic sea ice thinning, correction of land-based temperature measurements for the urban heat island effect, and satellite vs. ground-based measurements of Earth's warming" (Wikipedia).

Tony Robbins: In May of 1995, Robbins and his company, RRI (Robbins Research International), agreed to settle Federal Trade Commission charges that they misrepresented the potential earnings of their motivational seminar customers, agreeing to refund $221,260 (USD) in redress. Financial seminar guru Wade Cook also sued Robbins for copyright infringement, claiming that Robbins lifted concepts and terms from his seminars and his book, Wall Street Money Machine, during the creation of a competing financial course. In 1998, a Tacoma, Washington jury ordered Robbins to pay Cook over $650,000 in damages.... Skeptic James Randi is a notable critic of Tony Robbins, calling Robbins' "applied kinesiology" a "scam" (Wikipedia).

Larry Wachowski: "Shortly after the release of Matrix Reloaded, it was rumored that Larry Wachowski began to make small public appearances dressed as a woman and going by Lana Wachowski. In his column, published May 30, 2003, David Poland said 'Every indication I have says that Larry Wachowski is now in the process of changing his sex. Dressing in public like a woman, taking female hormones and yes, having a sex change operation'" (Wikipedia).

John Mackey: Chairman of Whole Foods Market, "the world's largest natural foods retail chain." What do you want to bet their "medicinal" aisle includes not merely natural-source vitamins but homeopathic remedies as well? Oh, and this: "On July 20, 2007, The Wall Street Journal revealed that Mackey was, for at least seven years, using the pseudonym 'Rahodeb' (an anagram of his wife's name, Deborah) to post to Yahoo Finance forums referring to himself in the third person and criticizing rival supermarket chain Wild Oats Market. The Federal Trade Commission approved a complaint challenging Whole Foods Market's approximately $670 million acquisition of its chief rival, Wild Oats Markets, Inc., and authorized the FTC staff to seek a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction in federal district court to halt the deal pending an administrative trial on the merits."

Many of the wiser rats have already deserted the sinking Integral (Institute) Ship; all that's left are the global warming-deniers, the firewalking Q-Link believers, the women trapped in men's bodies, and the anonymously-posting-against-their-rivals businessmen who (presumably) think that medicines-that-aren't-really-there can actually work. All of them being led to their ruin by a Bald Piper.

From Ted Dace's The False Dilemma between Neo-Darwinism and Intelligent Design:

The Hyacinth macaw can crack a nut with its beak that you or I would need a sledgehammer to open. Is all that colossal strength nothing more than a side-effect of a chance mutation in the macaw’s genetic toolkit? How many millions of such coding mistakes had to come and go before the right one announced itself, and at last the bird got its meal?

So stupendously unlikely is the perfect mutation at the perfect time that calculating the odds against it taking place even once exceeds our imaginative capacity. It is, in fact, a miracle.

And yet, from Steven Pinker's How the Mind Works (p. 162-3):

Darwin was inspired to the theory of natural selection in part by the thirteen species of finches on the Galapagos islands. They clearly were related to a species on the South American mainland, but differed from them and from one another. In particular, their beaks resembled different kinds of pliers: heavy-duty lineman's pliers, high-leverage diagonal pliers, straight needle-nose pliers, curved needle-nose pliers, and so on. Darwin eventually reasoned that one kind of bird was blown to the islands and then differentiated into the thirteen species because of the demands of different ways of life on different parts of the islands, such as stripping bark from trees to get at insects, probing cactus flowers, or cracking tough seeds. But he despaired of ever seeing natural selection happen in real time: "We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages." [Peter and Rosemary Grant] painstakingly measured the size and toughness of the seeds in different parts of the Galapagos at different times of the year, the length of the finches' beaks, the time they took to crack the seeds, the numbers and ages of the finches in different parts of the islands, and so on—every variable relevant to natural selection. Their measurements showed the beaks evolving to track changes in the availability of different kinds of seeds, a frame-by-frame analysis of the movie that Darwin could only imagine.

And from page 164, regarding the evolution of (half-) eyes:

The computer scientists Dan Nilsson and Susanne Pelger simulated a three-layer slab of virtual skin resembling a light-sensitive spot on a primitive organism. It was a simple sandwich made up of a layer of pigmented cells on the bottom, a layer of light-sensitive cells above it, and a layer of translucent cells forming a protective cover. The translucent cells could undergo random mutations of their refractive index: their ability to bend light, which in real life often corresponds to density. All the cells could undergo small mutations affecting their size and thickness. In the simulation, the cells in the slab were allowed to mutate randomly, and after each round of mutation the program calculated the spatial resolution of an image projected onto the slab by a nearby object. If a bout of mutations improved the resolution, the mutations were retained as the starting point for the next bout, as if the slab belonged to a lineage of organisms whose survival depended on reacting to looming predators. As in real evolution, there was no master plan or project scheduling. The organism could not put up with a less effective detector in the short run even if its patience would have been rewarded by the best conceivable detector in the long run. Every change it retained had to be an improvement.

Satisfyingly, the model evolved into a complex eye right on the computer screen. The slab indented and then deepened into a cup; the transparent layer thickened to a fill the cup and bulged out to form a cornea. Inside the clear filling, a spherical lens with a higher refractive index emerged in just the right place, resembling in many subtle details the excellent optical design of a fish's eye. To estimate how long it would take in real time, rather than in computer time, for an eye to unfold, Nilsson and Pelger built in pessimistic assumptions about heritability, variation in the population, and the size of the selective advantage, and even forced the mutations to take place in only one part of the "eye" each generation. Nonetheless, the entire sequence in which flat skin became a complex eye took only four hundred thousand generations, a geological instant.

From Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained (p. 290):

Sidanius and Pratto marshal an impressive amount of evidence to suggest that there is more to dominance [hierarchies] than stereotyping, and that the latter is a consequence rather than a cause. In fact, they demonstrate that many dominant group behaviors not only represent a desire to stay with one's group, to favor one's clan, but also to favor one's group in an insidious way that maintains the other group's lower status. Racial stereotypes are among the representations that people create to interpret their own intuition that members of other groups represent a real danger and threaten their own coalitional advantages. Obviously, one possible reason for this blindness to coalitional structures is that they often conflict with our moral standards. This may well explain why many people prefer to consider racism [and "hair-ism"] a consequence of sadly misguided concepts rather than a consequence of highly efficient economic [i.e., implicit/evolutionary cost-benefit analysis of group membership] strategies.

I was re-reading some of the pieces on Steven Dutch's skeptical website, and came across this:

If you cannot get worldly factual issues straight, things that can be weighed and measured and touched, things that can be double checked and re-examined if there's any doubt about their validity, you cannot have anything useful to say on spiritual matters. If you can't be trusted in the small things of this world, how can you possibly hope to have anything to say worth hearing about really important matters?

You know who that made me think of, don't you?

This, from The Secret Policeman's Ball (2006), is just a whole new perspective on Natalie Imbruglia.

Just discovered this refutation of Michael Behe's ideas:

The Case of the Tell-Tale Traces: A Mystery Solved; a Skyhook Grounded

It's by Daniel Dennett. From 1997, i.e., a full decade ago. You know, the kind of thing that's been around for so long that anyone who could believably claim to keep up with the field "religiously" (as Ken Wilber has claimed to do; I have made no such claim for myself) would have already known about.

Ah, and a narrated video by Karl Sims (probably the one to which Dennett refers):

This narrated computer animation shows results from a research project involving simulated Darwinian evolutions of virtual block creatures. A population of several hundred creatures is created within a supercomputer, and each creature is tested for their ability to perform a given task, such the ability to swim in a simulated water environment. The successful survive, and their virtual genes containing coded instructions for their growth, are copied, combined, and mutated to make offspring for a new population. The new creatures are again tested, and some may be improvements on their parents. As this cycle of variation and selection continues, creatures with more and more successful behaviors can emerge.

The creatures shown are results the final products from many independent simulations in which they were selected for swimming, walking, jumping, following, and competing for control of a green cube.

Regarding the supposed Hundredth Monkey Effect beloved of Ken Wilber's morphogenic friend, Rupert Sheldrake:

Sheldrake has cited the "Hundredth Monkey Effect" as evidence of morphogenetic fields bringing about non-local effects in consciousness and learning.

In 1985, Elaine Myers re-examined the original published research in "The Hundredth Monkey Revisited" in the journal In Context. In her review she found that the original research reports by the Japan Monkey Center in vol. 2, 5 and 6 of the journal Primates differs from [Lyall] Watson's story in significant ways. In short, it contains no evidence that the "Hundredth Monkey" phenomenon exists; the published articles only describe how the sweet potato washing behavior gradually spread through the monkey troop and became part of the set of learned behaviors of young monkeys. There is no evidence at all of a critical number at which the idea suddenly spread to other islands, and none of the original researchers ever made such a claim.

And further, via a 1985 article in Skeptical Inquirer:

Unsubstantiated claims that there was a sudden and remarkable increase in the proportion of washers in the first population were exaggerations of a much slower, more mundane effect. Rather than all monkeys mysteriously learning the skill it was noted that it was predominantly younger monkeys that learned the skill from the older monkeys through the usual means of imitation; older monkeys who did not know how to wash tended not to learn. As the older monkeys died and younger monkeys were born the proportion of washers naturally increased. The time span between observations were in the order of years.

Claims that it spread suddenly to other isolated populations of monkeys ignore the fact at least one washing monkey swam to another population and spent about four years there. It is also to be noted that the sweet potato was not available to the monkeys prior to human intervention: it is not at all surprising that isolated populations of monkeys started to wash potatoes in the a similar time frame once they were made available.

Michael Shermer explains further, in Why People Believe Weird Things (p. 17-8):

In 1952, primatologists began providing Japanese macaques with sweet potatoes to keep the monkeys from raiding local farms. One monkey did learn to wash dirt off the sweet potatoes in a stream or the ocean, and other monkeys did learn to imitate the behavior. Now let's examine Watson's book more carefully. He admits that "one has to gather the rest of the story from personal anecdotes and bits of folklore among primate researchers, because most of them are still not quite sure what happened. So I am forced to improvise the details." Watson then speculates that "an unspecified number of monkeys on Koshima were washing sweet potatoes in the sea"—hardly the level of precision one expects. He then makes this statement: "Let us say, for argument's sake, that the number was ninety-nine and that at 11:00 a.m. on a Tuesday, one further convert was added to the fold in the usual way. But the addition of the hundredth monkey apparently carried the number across some sort of threshold, pushing it through a kind of critical mass." At this point, says Watson, the habit "seems to have jumped natural barriers and to have appeared spontaneously on other islands.

Let's stop right there. Scientists do not "improvise" details or make wild guesses from "anecdotes" and "bits of folklore." In fact, some scientists did record exactly what happened.... The research began with a troop of twenty monkeys in 1952, and every monkey on the island was carefully observed. By 1962, the troop had increased to fifty-nine monkeys and exactly thirty-six of the fifty-nine monkeys were washing their sweet potatoes. The "sudden" acquisition of the behavior actually took ten years, and the "hundred monkeys" were actually only thirty-six in 1962. Furthermore, we can speculate endlessly about what the monkeys knew, but the fact remains that not all of the monkeys in the troop were exhibiting the washing behavior. The thirty-six monkeys were not a critical mass even at home. And while there are some reports of similar behavior on other islands, the observations were made between 1953 and 1967. It was not sudden, nor was it necessarily connected to Koshima. The monkeys on other islands could have discovered this simple skill themselves, for example, or inhabitants on other islands might have taught them. In any case, not only is there no evidence to support this extraordinary claim, there is not even a real phenomenon to explain.

And that surprises you?

From Jerome Barkow's Darwin, Sex, and Status (p. 188):

[I]f sexual selection means that females should find a given trait preferable, so too should their male kin. Both men and women should find it easy to like, admire, and defer to those who demonstrate greater ability to control resources.

This scenario does appear to be what we find, even when the deference and liking are definitely not in our fitness interests and have no social legitimacy. Thus, hostages often speak well of their kidnappers, victims of airline hijackings well of their captors. Horribly, concentration-camp inmates were reported to ape their guards in manner and dress, and Solzhenitsyn makes the same observation for the inmates of the Siberian gulag.... We quite automatically tend to admire and imitate those who have power over us, a phenomenon Anna Freud terms "turning against the self."

And all of that, you know, even without any deliberate "coercive persuasion" or other techniques of "brainwashing" (at least in the case of kidnappings and [short-term] hijackings).

Page 377:

We automatically fall into in-groups and out-groups, their size ranging from "we Africans" to "we members of a high-school clique who do (or do not) wear designer jeans." Ethnocentric-like behavior encompasses many "isms"—nationalism, racism, sectarianism, factionalism, and the various forms of chauvinism.

Yes, and "hair-ism," too: as I had already concluded, quite independently, the psychological dynamics are the same even if the criteria for exclusion may differ.

Page 149:

LeVine and Campbell ... provide some twenty-three defining features of ethnocentrism. These include the tendency for in-group members to see themselves as superior and virtuous, and to perceive their "own standards of value as universal, intrinsically true." In-group members are co-operative towards one another and there are negative sanctions for theft and murder if the victim is a fellow in-group member. In-group members are also willing "to fight and die" for the in-group. In contrast, the out-group tends to be hated, there are no sanctions for theft and murder if the victim is an out-group member, it is virtuous to kill out-group members in warfare, out-group members are often distrusted and feared and blamed for the in-group's troubles.

The page at How Stuff Works, concerning the supernatural.

In plenty of time for Halloween, too.

This video has some great comments by Sam Harris at the 2006 Beyond Belief conference, on the morality of stem-cell research.

From John Horgan's The Undiscovered Mind, p. 267:

Ketamine was the drug that had enabled the neuroscientist John Lilly—pioneer of dolphin research and sensory-deprivation methods—to discover the extraterrestrial Beings who control our reality. Lilly described the Beings as solid-state machines who inhabit a dimensionless hyperspace consisting of pure consciousness and are concerned about humanity's maltreatment of dolphins and other animals.

Well, it's probably as real as any other "religious vision" that's ever been seen/imagined.

From John Horgan's The Undiscovered Mind, p. 82-3, 89:

One of the lengthiest trials [of psychotherapies] was the Cambridge-Somerville Delinquency Prevention Project. Begin in 1937, the study tracked the progress of more than six hundred Boston-area boys whose average initial age was ten years old and who were thought to be at risk of delinquency. One group of boys was counseled twice a month for an average of five and a half years by social workers trained in psychoanalysis or in a then-popular "humanistic-experiential" treatment invented by the American psychological Carl Rogers. Another group of boys received no treatment.

By 1948, there was no difference in the criminal records of the two groups. The same was true in the 1950s and in 1975. But by then some interesting differences between the two groups had emerged. Those who had been treated and had subsequently become criminals were more likely to have committed more than one crime. Researchers also found a positive correlation between the length of treatment and the degree of criminal activity. The study seemed to suggest that therapy, far from helping youths avoid a life of crime, actually increased the risk. "'More' was 'worse,'" a researcher grimly concluded.

Discouraging results also emerged from research by Hans Eysenck, a German-born psychologist who spent most of his career at London University's Institute of Psychiatry. In 1952, Eysenck reported on a study of psychoanalysis and other "eclectic" psychotherapies. He stated that 44 percent of those undergoing psychoanalysis improved, compared to 64 percent of those receiving other therapies. But two-thirds of a group of neurotic patients showed improvement after a two-year period during which they received no treatment at all. Eysenck concluded that psychotherapy at best had no effect; in the case of psychoanalysis, it had an adverse effect....

[Jerome] Frank reluctantly reached [the conclusion that the positive effects of psychotherapy are just placebo effects] as a result of his own research. In the late 1950s, he and his colleagues provided depressed patients with one of three forms of therapy: weekly individual therapy, weekly group therapy, and minimal individual therapy, which consisted of just one half-hour session every two weeks. "To our astonishment and chagrin, patients in all three conditions showed the same average relief of symptoms," Frank recalled.

In another study, performed by Mary Smith and Gene Glass (p. 92-3),

[T]here was no correlation between the amount of time spent in therapy and the benefits it conferred. Second, there was no correlation between the effectiveness of the therapists and their credentials or experience. In other words, psychiatrists, who have graduated from medical school; psychologists, who have a Ph.D.; and social workers, who have a master's degree, are all equally effective, or ineffective. Nor does the ability of therapists to help patients improve with experience.

Other investigators tried to refute the findings of Smith and Glass, in vain. In one experiment, patients complaining of such ailments as anxiety and depression were randomly assigned to two different groups of "therapists"; one group consisted of genuine, professional psychologists and the other of university professors with no background in psychology. The patients responded as well to the pseudotherapists as to the real ones....

And the kicker (p. 73):

"By the way, 95 percent—you can quote me on this—95 percent of psychologists" are not deeply intuitive about others, [Howard] Gardner added. "They come to psychology out of chemistry, because they weren't good enough in chemistry."

Fat Alberts is the oldest open (music) stage in Canada. It's been going for the past forty years—since the Leafs last won the Stanley Cup.

I did a half-hour feature there on Wednesday night, which went over quite well. The best part being that I got a bunch of compliments on my songwriting from a woman who used to write songs for Canadian Sesame Street. (She was especially impressed by the last song I played—lyrics below—which she said "had a lot of great lines.") Her music has also been included on compilation CDs featuring songs from Loreena McKennitt, Amy Sky, Bruce Springsteen, Aimee Mann and Grace Slick.

Of course, no good deed goes unpunished: I was walking down College Street after midnight, just enjoying the warm night air. "No deeds to do, no promises to keep," etc. Stopping (literally) to smell the roses (metaphorically) on the sidewalk, as it were.

And some little piss-proud eighteen-year-old jerk walks up briskly from behind me, and says, right out of the blue, clearly annoyed with me:

"What is your problem? Don't you know where you're going?"

With just a trace of a Middle-Eastern accent (meaning that he probably wasn't even born here).

I guess it's true what they say: Canada is a safe haven for terrorists.

To which the appropriate response is, I believe, to paraphrase South Park: Fuck Mohammed. Fuck Mohammed and his seventy-two virgins right up the ass. (If anyone needs me, I'll be hiding out with Salman Rushdie.)

Of course, if I ever get annoyed with our world full of dumb-fucks for getting in my way, I explicitly get told to "relax." (Happened most recently just a week ago: I was walking down the sidewalk through the club district after dark, just about to cross a side-street. Some idiot darts out from around the corner, limping and cursing, heading straight for me. I warily take a step away from him. He explains that he wasn't planning on attacking me, he had just fallen down and injured himself moments before. I accept that, say "Take it easy," and continue walking. And he says, after me: "Relax, man. Smoke some weed." Like only someone who was way too uptight would recoil from an idiot who comes stumbling toward him out of the dark, swearing a blue streak!) But, when I do relax, I get told by rednecks and other assorted idiots (terrorists, etc.) to move my ass. Nice little double-bind there, eh?

Ah well, here's the song:

POCKETS

Saw you in Central Park
Feeding ducks and drakes, and I was lost
In the dying rays of Indian Summer
Forecast of a killing frost

I wandered evenings through the woods
To your door and prayers unlocked it
And while I had my hand upon your breast
You stuffed my heart into your pocket

Deep in the pocket of your tight blue jeans
I was tumbling
With your lotto picks and car keys

I starved an August fever
Swallowed medicine and hailstones
Felt the brace of your cold shoulder
The hoarfrost on your collarbone

Felt the blood drain from my cheeks
Saw my face turn ashen gray
And from the way you shook your head
It's obvious it was my fault anyway

Deep in the pocket of a clean white coat
I'm a stethoscope
I can hear what you don't say

I see you're bored again
High heels and craving spontaneity
And I'm so predictable
Seems I'll always love you so predictably

And bend whichever way you please
Just toss me on the coffee table
With your ticket stubs and car keys

Felt something in my chest
Way it used to beat reminded me of you
And there was something in my head
Craziness all tangled up in blue

Felt you stir in the morning light
Pulled my tired eyes from their sockets
Grabbed my overcoat and keys
Stuffed some memories in my pocket

Words are treacherous and deep
And I have promises I will not keep
The silent flight of ducks and drakes
And I have miles to go before you wake
Before you wake

See? Told you I could write....

In more than 40 communications, many of which have never before been published, she bemoans the "dryness," "darkness," "loneliness" and "torture" she is undergoing. She compares the experience to hell and at one point says it has driven her to doubt the existence of heaven and even of God. (more)

Whither Ken Wilber? Musings on evolutionism, reductionism and religious honesty.

The "low-grade intellectual poodling of pseudo-philosophical poseurs" (Michael Ruse's words, on cultural studies)? Heck, wish I had thought of that description ... for Wilber's academically incompetent work, I mean.

On a lighter note:

A Belgian prosecutor on Tuesday recommended that the U.S.-based Church of Scientology stand trial for fraud and extortion, following a 10-year investigation that concluded the group should be labeled a criminal organization. (more)

For all the cult critics (religion addicts, and others) who foolishly (and self-servingly) imagine that a primary difference between established religions and cults is that one can renounce the former much more easily than one can leave the latter—

From Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (p. 321-2):

Jill Mytton herself had been brought up to be terrified of hell, had escaped from Christianity as an adult, and now counsels and helps others similarly traumatized in childhood: "If I think back to my childhood, it's one dominated by fear. And it was the fear of disapproval while in the present, but also of eternal damnation. And for a child, images of hell-fire and gnashing of teeth are actually very real. They are not metaphorical at all." I then asked her to spell out what she had actually been told about hell, as a child, and her eventual reply was as moving as her expressive face during the long hesitation before she answered: "It's strange, isn't it? After all this time it still has the power to ... affect me ... when you ... when you ask me that question. Hell is a fearful place. It's complete rejection by God. It's complete judgment, there is real fire, there is real torment, real torture, and it goes on for ever so there is no respite from it."

She went on to tell me of the support group she runs for escapees from a childhood similar to her own, and she dwelt on how difficult it is for many of them to leave: "The process of leaving is extraordinarily difficult. Ah, you are leaving behind a whole social network, a whole system that you've practically been brought up in, you are leaving behind a belief-system that you have held for years. Very often you leave families and friends ... You don't really exist any more for them."

[Katie Melua's producer, Mike] Batt was sued for copyright infringement over the track "A One Minute Silence," which consisted of one minute of silence and was credited to "Batt/Cage." The publishers of John Cage's music alleged that the credit invoked Cage's famous "silent" piece 4'33", and that the trust was entitled to receive royalties. An out of court settlement was reached, with Batt paying a six-figure sum to the John Cage Trust. (Wikipedia)

Holy Christ, already. Since when can you copyright silence?

Next thing you know they'll be charging for the Air (Supply) too!

Wish I had thought of that particular piece of "Zen" art, though. ("Cage chose the length of the famous premiere performance by chance methods using I Ching models.") There's money to be made there, for sure!

Batt initially vowed to fight the suit, even going so far as to claim that his piece is "a much better silent piece. I have been able to say in one minute what Cage could only say in four minutes and 33 seconds." Batt told the London Independent that "My silence is original silence, not a quotation from his silence." (Wikipedia)

I really hope he was saying that tongue-in-cheek and/or as "legal B.S.," as I'm a huge fan of Katie Melua. And her music. :)

If not, I believe the appropriate response is: How can you say it's not a "quotation"? The chord progressions are identical, down to the very note!

Cage was not the first composer to conceive of a piece consisting solely of silence. One precedent is "In futurum," a movement from the Fünf Pittoresken for piano by Czech composer Erwin Schulhoff. Written in 1919, Schulhoff's meticulously notated composition is made up entirely of rests.

A pity that Batt generously credited Cage rather than Schulhoff as co-composer, then. The latter's silence, at least, is in the public domain!

Though first performed on the piano, [Cage's] piece was composed for any instrument or instruments and is structured in three movements.

Hell, why stop with a piano, then? Book a whole symphony orchestra to perform it! But, how would you tell the difference?

The premiere of the three-movement 4'33" was given by David Tudor on August 29, 1952, at Woodstock, New York as part of a recital of contemporary piano music. The audience saw him sit at the piano and, to mark the beginning of the piece, close the keyboard lid. Some time later he opened it briefly, to mark the end of the first movement. This process was repeated for the second and third movements. The piece had passed without a note being played—in fact without Tudor (or anyone else) having made any deliberate sound as part of the piece. Tudor timed the three movements with a stopwatch while turning the pages of the score.

Monty Python could really have had a field day with the whole concept: Picture Eric Idle as a BBC commentator with a radio mic in a non-soundproofed, open booth in a concert hall, first missing the point of the piece entirely—"I'm expecting it will start any minute now, in the meantime, later tonight on BBC1: "Sex and Darwin." Was he getting any, and if so, with whom?"—and then slowly ... enthusiastically ... endlessly blathering on about the meaningfulness and artistic profundity of absolutely-postmodern-nothing. Being "Shhh'd!" with increasing frequency by cross audience members as he drones on and on about the "brilliant theory" underlying it all.

Audience members rise to leave, glaring daggers at the excited, pedantic Eric as they pass.

With the hall half-empty, the pianist abandons the effort, lifts the keyboard lid, and SLAMS it down in anger, stalking offstage as the piano strings resonate.

All of that, of course, is itself a profound, meaning-filled part of the piece.

With the concert hall now empty, Eric completes his rapturous-epiphany monologue:

Eric: "Yes, what Cage is clearly saying here in this final, quite unexpected movement, and shouldn't we always expect the unexpected from such an avant-garde artist, is that even this pristine, empty, desolately quiet hall, and I'm not exaggerating, you could hear a pin drop, is that even this—

Male Audience Member: Would you SHUT UP!!

And the exit door SLAMS behind him.

It would have been classic.

In 1962, Cage wrote 0'00", which is also referred to as 4'33" No. 2. The directions originally consisted of one sentence: "In a situation provided with maximum amplification, perform a disciplined action." The first performance had Cage write that sentence.

I'm kidding, of course: A piece of "music" like that would just be silly!

No, gotcha! John "Zen for Brains" Cage really did write that second piece! Ha!!

Cage of course taught at Trungpa's Naropa Institute. Surprised? Don't be.

Anyway, did you ever notice that if you sync up Cage's 4'33" with The Wizard Of Oz, all of the moments of silence in the movie match up exactly with moments of silence in Cage's piece?

Coincidence? Or another indication of the essential role of Eros in the Kosmos?

If you're looking to have business cards printed up, look no further than vistaprint.com.

Register before submitting your first order, and you can get 250 Premium cards for 75% off the regular price, plus the cost of shipping.

When they say that the slow shipping method will take 21 days, though, they're not kidding—they don't even print up the cards (and send you the invoice) until near the end of that period. So, just mailing them from Windsor (at the U.S. border) to Toronto took the full three weeks.

Oh, and don't get suckered into claiming the "free prize" or whatever at the end of the checkout process. It signs you up for a Privacy Protection thing for $12.95 per month (first 30 days free), which you then have to make a 5-minute phone call to cancel.

Overall, a way better deal than Kinko's. Before finding VistaPrint, I tried to get a simple card, with just three lines of information on it (name, profession, and a URL) in sans serif font, done by those offline idiots. When I went in to proof their "design," they had done it all in a serif font, with the bottom of the three lines being way too low on the card. I told the second idiot that the URL was too low; in response, he said that the middle line (i.e., the profession) was usually vertically centered on the card, as it was on the proof they had done. (I didn't figure out until after I left the store that he obviously didn't know what a URL is!) Then he told me I should have specified which font exactly I wanted. (Never mind that I wrote "All sans serif fonts" on the handwritten mockup, with the "design"—1/4 hour of work, at $90/hour—being done by the same person to whom I had talked when submitting that mockup.)

I walked out of there determined to avoid Kinko's whenever possible in the future.

L'esprit de l'escalier.

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