At 09:31 28/02/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi,
>
>From: Dave Pape <davepape@dial.pipex.com>
>>Hello everyone.
>
>Welcome back.
Cheers!
>I don't think I've ever seen you post here, although I
>have seen you praised here...
Head inflates until skin becomes disturbingly translucent. :)
>which means I must have joined shortly
>after you left.
Just before: you'd just started posting when I was winding down. Don't worry, I can't recall any embarrassing early posts of yours. Might have a look through the archives later.
Yeh, so I'm back. My problem is, I'm not that interested in starting churches but I'm not that serious intellectually that I fit in on JOM-EMIT. Some of their attitudes towards people in virus are fkn hilarious, dunno if you lot keep track of them, things like "I believe Mr Rhodes is allied yet to the cro-magnon Virus clan. I have some flint which would benefit from some crude knapping, but my fingertips are too soft- perhaps he would oblige?"
I've got this BIG obsession with tribalism at the moment, I kind of suspect that a major function of culture (not just sport, people) is to encode tribal fighting, settle seniority disputes remotely, so that if you walked down the street and saw Clinton and he had some really tasty extruded corn snacks, you'd know whether you could take them off him, or if you should offer him some of your sweets, without having a fight or even an argument, and never having met him before. I want to have a think about how memes fit in with that ill-formed musing. Not just because I get no other email, obviously.
>As to seniority... I'm not sure there is a pecking
>order, other than the trivial "level 3" versus "level 2" pecking
>order, where level 2 pecks on level 3 and then gets confused by the
>response...
D'you mean there's actually people claiming to have attained Brodie's Level 3? Nah, that can't be right. Nah, that's a joke, right?
>Unfortunatly, the level 3 membership ranks have swelled to at least
>three (Brodie, Reed and Tim), making all communication rather
>"flowery" around here.
Well even if I get above the status of tribal initiate, I never pass stroppy adolescent status, and as far as I'm concerned the Brodie levels are WRONG anyway. So there. Flag in the sand. Oh and there's STILL no such thing as free will. There's not even any such thing as self-consciousness any more.
>And of course, as usual, by the time you cut
>the crap away, you're generally so annoyed with the message than any
>real content it might of had gets intrepreted in the most unfriendly
>way...
Why not start a Virus Lite? We could even change our names so we stand a cat in hell's chance of graduating to JOM EMIT in x years' time.
>>La fiesta de los disputaciones de las tres planas etc
>
>A calender is a great idea! I believe we already are supposed to have
>some kind of winter solstice at Dec 21 (celebrating the returning of
>the light, in true Luciferian fashion), and it wouldn't be hard to
>come up with a few more events: when is the snake handlers retreat?
What's that, then? (my knowledge of history is shite)
>When (day of year) did Darwin publish the first edition of Origin?
Dunno, but I bet we could find out the day he was born, or when his DNA first replicated, or when he returned to the soil.
>When was the very first use of a printing press? When was The Selfish
>Gene first published?
Las fiesta de los disputaciones de las Dawkins A vs la Dawkins B interpetationes de los instantiationos de las memas.
>Can we come up with events for the other
>equinox's? Another good mailing list event would be the "Eternal
>Faith Wars" Day of High List Volume, which we could place on the
>*longest* day of the year...
Woo, maybe it's best I missed that one.
>Oh... we could have a day of mourning on the day that the Library in
>Alexandria was burned. (do historians even know the exact day?)
I like the idea of finding out the exact date of the worst day ever for written records. Someone should do that.