Tuesday, April 22, 2008

Rode in again today. I can feel slight pain (heat) in my achilles tendon, so I'm thinking ice tonight and take tomorrow off.

I saw No Country For Old Men over the weekend. I had heard it was up for a bunch of awards, and really had no idea what it was about. I can tell you it wasn't anything like what I had in mind. After I found out it was by the Cohen Brothers, I thought I was in for something smooth and thought provoking. Smooth, it was not. The post production took it's toll on the ending, with some obvious hacking. I'd like to see a directors cut.
Tommy Lee Jones' character has a remarkable monologue at one point:

"You know Charlie Walser? Has the place east of Sanderson? Well you know how they used to slaughter beeves [cattle], hit 'em with a maul right here [points between his eyes] to stun 'em... and then string 'em up and slit their throats? Well here Charlie has one trussed up and all set to drain him and the beef comes to. It starts thrashing around, six hundred pounds of very pissed-off livestock if you'll pardon me... Charlie grabs his gun there to shoot the damn thing in the head but what with the swingin' and twistin' it's a glance-shot and ricochets around and comes back hits Charlie in the shoulder. You go see Charlie, he still can't reach up with his right hand for his hat... Point bein', even in the contest between man and steer the issue is not certain."

Nothing is certain, which is kind of the point of the movie.

Nothing is certain. It's been a while since I actually considered that phrase. Nothing in life is very certain - the possibilities are endless. Take, for example, the case of the Large Hadron Collider, a giant particle accelerator being brought on-line by CERN this year. There have been lawsuits filed to prevent its completion due to fears that an accelerator of this size could generate a micro black hole that could swallow the earth, or, produce Stranglets that would 'vaporize' the entire universe. While CERN admits these possibilities exist, they aren't likely enough to warrant concern. As the philosopher/scientist Stephen Gould once quipped "I suppose the possibility exists that the apples might rise back up to the trees, but the possibility doesn't warrant discussion in the classroom".

Nothing is certain. Many will argue there is one thing certain in this life - death. We all die, or do we? It's pretty certain that our current life functions will stop, though I expect sometime in the near future they'll have working versions of devices that can keep a severed head 'alive' indefinitely. But still, what happens when you die? Worm food, or transcendence? Are we all destined to become merely a meaningless blip in the evolutionary path of our species; "erased. over. out." Or will we as Jim Morrison rants 'break on through to the other side'?

I don't know.
You don't know.
No one does.
Because nothing is certain.

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