Rufus F.

Mildly distracting notes on distraction

by Rufus F. on May 23, 2012

“Throw away your books; no longer distract yourself; it is not allowed…” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations II: 2 Continue reading this post…

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Friday Jukebox

by Rufus F. on May 4, 2012

Hopefully, nobody else wanted this honor. I haven’t done it in a while. Plus, the Reverend Horton Heat played at my favorite bar on Wednesday and I was the DJ for the night, spinning old rockabilly, blues, gospel, rock’n'roll, and garage rock records in between the bands. The Reverend sent his complements on the music, so I’m doing it again for their show tonight. My complements for the good Rev’s music too!

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Locke’s (somewhat Hobbesian) Second Treatise

by Rufus F. on May 1, 2012

[Note: No promises, but this post will likely make more sense if you first read my post on Hobbes's Leviathan. There will not be an exam.]

Okay, so previously, I said that the neat contrast that’s often drawn between Locke and Hobbes doesn’t really work so well because they’re not as far apart as one might think. Let’s not go too far with this though; there are some differences there, which are worth looking at in Locke’s Second Treatise on Government.

Today, most readers will skip the First Treatise because here Locke dismantles Sir Robert Filmer’s argument that the right to rule was inherited directly by certain men from Adam’s dominion over the earth via the male line; one can imagine how much esteem that argument is held in today, or even how many of us remember Sir Robert Filmer. But it does set up the Second Treatise: if political power wasn’t inherited from the first man, where does it come from? Where did people ever get the notion to set themselves above one another? Continue reading this post…

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Pay our hookers in bills, eh

by Rufus F. on March 30, 2012

Erik will be happy: Canada is getting rid of the penny. A loonie for your thoughts?

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We also lay on guard for thee

by Rufus F. on March 26, 2012

Don’t look now, but Ontario just legalized prostitution, sweeping aside the country’s anti-prostitution laws. No word yet about whether Canadian prostitutes take Canadian Tire money.

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Book notes: Sex at Dawn

by Rufus F. March 20, 2012

I suppose I’m the most likely culprit here to read and comment on the recent book Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What it Means for Modern Relationships by Christopher Ryan and Cacilda Jethá, but I feel a bit awkward doing so because I’m also probably the target audience for the book. Being in a marriage that’s a respectable 90% monogamous (depending on the season. I think the PC term is a “slutty marriage”) many of ...

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The Silence is Deafening, but not Illuminating

by Rufus F. March 19, 2012

Okay, don’t worry: this post is not about Rush Limbaugh or birth control pills. Alas! That stories so voluminously begun as the Chronicle of Limbaughpalooza 2012 (or Slutpocalypse Now) should come to so lame and impotent a conclusion. And yet, what kept popping up here in the course of that kerfuffle was an argument that strikes me as residing in the same rhetorical zoo as “when did you stop beating your wife?”- namely, the “silence is deafening” argument. So, let’s ...

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Retroactive Table of Contents: March 2 to March 9

by Rufus F. March 9, 2012

It was a somewhat tumultuous week here at the League of Ordinary Nerds. After this, let us never speak of it again. Story of the Week: Limbaughpalooza 2012 Tod was shocked by Limbaugh’s apology and promptly donated to the RNC. He mused some more on Limbaugh’s apology and the League wagon circling of late. He also noted the GOPs declining support among women. All hell broke loose. This led Patrick Calahan to muse on how trust is established in language.

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Note on Nana and femmes fatales

by Rufus F. February 14, 2012

In this entertaining episode of her web series, film writer Lianne Spiderbaby discusses the connection between film noirs, with their nefarious and inscrutable femmes fatales slinking about in the shadows, and shifting gender roles brought about by the Second World War. This got me thinking about Zola’s Nana, who we recently discussed, and whether that particular soft trap should be labelled (with a Skull and Crossbones) “Femme Fatale”. First, let’s try to define the “femme fatale”, in order to better understand her ...

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Playwriting Contest

by Rufus F. January 30, 2012

Hey folks! I’m getting back to play writing with a screwball comedy. It’s about a corrupt big city mayor who takes on some grand and insincere endeavor to improve his image. It has to be something fairly ridiculous. If you come up with a good enough idea to construct a flimsy plot around and hang jokes off it, I’ll list you as “scenarist”. Whaddya say?

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Note on Zola and heredity

by Rufus F. January 26, 2012

How should we read Zola today? Reading his Nana, I was struck by a scene in which the corrupt journalist Fauchery writes an article attacking the well-connected courtesan at the center of the novel, and the Second Empire culture by association: “Entitled The Golden Fly, it was the story of a girl descended from four or five generations of drunkards, her blood tainted by an accumulated inheritance of poverty and drink, which in her case had taken the form of a ...

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Note on the Old Man of the Mountain

by Rufus F. January 23, 2012

In his voyage account from the 13th century, Marco Polo tells of “the old man of the mountain” (Book I: Ch. 21), or Ala’u-‘d-Din Muhammad, one of the last rulers of the Nizari Ismailis, a heretical offshoot of Shiite Islam in lands stretching from modern Afghanistan to Syria: “In a beautiful valley, enclosed between two lofty mountains, he had formed a luxurious garden, stored with every delicious fruit and every fragrant shrub that could be procured. Palaces of various sizes and ...

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Note on “The Day After”

by Rufus F. January 9, 2012

In November, 1983, the ABC network aired the television movie The Day After, depicting the effects of a nuclear war on the Midwestern United States. Viewed by an estimated 100 million people, the film was considered deeply affecting, not to mention horrifying, and may have inspired President Reagan to sign the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty in Reykjavik three years later. Prior to the broadcast, ABC distributed half a million viewer’s guides and classrooms around the country worked to help traumatized ...

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Note on Surge: À la recherche du pop perdu

by Rufus F. January 6, 2012

Surge was a citrus-flavored soda pop launched in the US by the Coca Cola Company in 1996 as an American variant of the Norwegian Urge. It had an advantage over 7-Up and Mountain Dew in lacking a syrupy aftertaste, although, like them, it essentially tasted like what a kiwi fruit might urinate, if it could do so. What really killed Surge, though, was an insipid ad campaign, intended to evoke “extreme” sports, but instead bringing to mind rioting and a ...

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Note on Zola

by Rufus F. January 5, 2012

In his 1877 preface to, and defence of, his novel L’Assommoir, Émile Zola writes: “I wanted to depict the inexorable downfall of a working class family in the poisonous atmosphere of our industrial suburbs. Intoxication and idleness lead to a weakening of family ties, to the filth of promiscuity, to the progressive neglect of decent feelings, and ultimately to degradation and death. It is simply morality in action.” Zola’s two great themes are poverty and vice. With a near-clinical precision, he ...

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Let’s All Go Insane at the Movies!

by Rufus F. January 1, 2012

Over at the League sub-blog “Forbes”, E.D. shares Roger Ebert’s suggestions as to why movie theatregoing is declining. As avid cinephiles, one might expect me and the missus to go to the movies more frequently, and yet our attempts to do so this holiday season reminded us once again that, for adults, moviegoing is not all beer and skittles. Here follows a chronicle of our holiday moviegoing crusades: the first was a children’s movie we saw with our friend and ...

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Hobbes: Notes on Leviathan

by Rufus F. December 15, 2011

Karl Marx once said that he wouldn’t consider himself to be a “Marxist” and reading Leviathan I don’t find that Hobbes was quite as “Hobbesian” as he’s made out to be either. Often, he’s described as a po-faced authoritarian, pessimistic about human nature and the outcome of unrestricted freedom; this is contrasted with Locke, who is depicted as a proto-liberal founding his hypothetical society on innate rights and property. There’s certainly some truth to it, but the two aren’t as far apart ...

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The League in 2010- Round Two

by Rufus F. December 1, 2011

After the first batch of 2010 league posts was whittled down, there are 40 posts left. Any suggestions?

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Pushkin: Eugene Onegin (1833) The Russian Dissolution

by Rufus F. November 27, 2011

There is a superb scene in the third chapter of Alexander Pushkin’s novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin in which Tatiana, the landowner’s daughter character that Dostoevsky deemed a model of Russian womanhood, is sitting up all night at her desk, writing out her heart to Eugene Onegin, an aristocratic intellectual who has traded the grand monde of St. Petersburg for the petit monde of the countryside, and unwittingly won her girlish affections. She sits writing until, in Stanley Mitchell’s translation, dawn, “Streams ...

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The League in 2010

by Rufus F. November 17, 2011

If we’re going to pick our favorite posts from the last three years for this League Journal, we’re going to have to remember what was posted in that time. I’ve been making my way through 2010 and I can say that these were some of my favorite posts of 2010. Now, via the comments, we can start winnowing them down to about ten… or, at least, reminiscing about the good old days back when we whiled away the hours talking ...

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Ibsen’s “Ghosts” of long dead values

by Rufus F. November 8, 2011

Currently, the Soul Pepper Theatre in Toronto’s distillery district is staging Ibsen’s Ghosts; thus one can safely dissect the hypocrisies of the 19th century Norwegian bourgeoisie in the happy company of the 21st century Canadian equivalent. Since the characters in the play are moral hypocrites, it is safe to say that no one in the audience will experience the shock of recognition. None of our pretences are so Biblical. The play doesn’t work though and it’s only partly due to ...

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