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KingJoe

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Posts posted by KingJoe

  5. Posted

    Oscar Wilde didn't mean half the things he said, and if he meant this, then it's quite obvious that he thought of his life and profession as useless. I presume he's referring to more than just drawing/ visual arts when he said "all art." Art is the sole reason I still exist, if human life was just progression and science for the sake of science, I would have jumped off a cliff a long time ago.

     

    I think the point he was making was that if something has a use, it exists for that function and cannot be seen as art. If something is beautiful and useful, it is well crafted, but not art. I might have a lovely cup, but it isn't art because I can drink out of it. The sentence I was referring to follows "The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely". I like a bit of art myself, it seems to enlighten and confuse at the same time, bypassing reason and speaking directly to the core of awareness. An appreciation for the aesthetic is instant, and clear.

    I'm a mathematician who fucked about something rotten in Art GCSE, but I would happily spend a day wandering around the Tate modern. Art can exist in many things and the feeling it provokes can be found in many places (including Maths, where a visual imagination is certainly useful in geometry (shapes on a page, anyone?) and topology (where there isn't even a page, and most 'shapes' are the same thing). Beauty doesn't have to be useless, but for something to be 'art' it must be 'art' to it's core- and nothing else. A soul that cannot appreciate art in some form or another is a poor soul, but, again, I'm sticking by Wildey with this one, "All art is quite useless".

  11. Posted

    "Lady Cavendish stood up and gathered her thoughts. ‘Indeed, the uses of had had and that that have to be strictly controlled; they can interrupt the imaginotransference quite dramatically, causing readers to go back over the sentence in confusion, something we try to avoid.’

     

    ‘Go on.’

     

    ‘It’s mostly an unlicensed-usage problem. At the last count David Copperfield alone had had had had sixty-three times, all but ten unapproved. Pilgrim’s Progress may also be a problem due to its had had/that that ratio.’

     

    ‘So what’s the problem in Progress?’

     

    ‘That that had that that ten times but had had had had only thrice. Increased had had usage had had to be overlooked, but not if the number exceeds that that that usage.’

     

    ‘Hmm,’ said the Bellman, ‘I thought had had had had TGC’s approval for use in Dickens? What’s the problem?’

     

    ‘Take the first had had and that that in the book by way of example,’ explained Lady Cavendish. ‘You would have thought that that first had had had had good occasion to be seen as had, had you not? Had had had approval but had had had not; equally it is true to say that that that that had had approval but that that other that that had not.’

     

    ‘So the problem with that other that that was that . . . ?’

     

    ‘That that other-other that that had had approval.’

     

    ‘Okay,’ said the Bellman, whose head was in danger of falling apart like a chocolate orange, ‘let me get this straight: David Copperfield, unlike Pilgrim’s Progress, had had had, had had had had. Had had had had TGC’s approval?’"

    Bit of Thursday Next there?

    Jasper Fforde is awesome.

     

    Really enyoing the thread! The example above is about as confusing as any degree level maths book. There's an example similar to the buffalo one with badgers.

    Magic!

  12. Posted

    yeah, I think a mandatory hysterectomy is in order. Get that shit out of the gene pool.

     

    What the fuck is she saying about 15 seconds in to that clip "If it has to temp out he posi-train of my body, then SO BE IT" ? really haven't got a clue what she it saying

  19. Posted

    Jasper, what I understand from your post is that because human beings are the only animals which have culture, concepts like intelligence, etc, then they are the pinnacle of evolution? I see what you are getting at. They are the pinnacle of HUMAN evolution.

    Wolves probably think the entire point of evolution is to develop a good sense of smell and a pack mentality. Giraffes probably think the point of evolution is to develop a particularly long neck. You see where I'm coming from?

     

    If noah's boat had 2 of every species, it'd be full of beetles.

    Theres fucking millions of beetle species.

  22. Posted

    Maybe one day other species will catch up with us though, providing we don't eradicate their 'threat'. I can see dolphins and other primates catching up in a matter of a few million years.

     

    There is no catching up to be done. A dolphin is just as evolved as a human.

    More so, if you are in the sea.

    Evolution isn't about becoming more intelligent. It's about progressive adaptation brought about my random mutations and the survival to reproduce by the most able members of a species. Everything has been evolving for pretty much the same amount of time (how could it not be?).

    Humans didn't evolve from modern-day apes. Humans evolved from ape-like creatures in the past. As did modern day apes.

  25. Posted

    I haven't killed an animal to eat.

    But I think I should be able to, because I do eat meat.

    One lent (by which time I was already a heavily lapsed Catholic, I did it for the challenge rather than the 'penance'!) gave up meat for 6 weeks, it was hard- AND I allowed myself fish too. Meat fest at easter. It proved to me that I love meat and couldn't really go without it.

    My mate works at a nature-reserve thing (basically, his job is to look after the woods) and he has killed animals to eat before (if I didn't have so much work to do last Sunday, I would have been chowing down on a bit of rabbit stew, he'd killed the rabbit earlier) and I'm hoping to go up there and kill and eat something wild. It WILL be hard work for me, but I think it's something I have to do, almost to justify eating meat, or a rite of passage sort of thing.

     

    The main point I am (rather amateurishly) making is that if you eat meat i think that you should be prepared to kill an animal and eat it. Earn your meat-stripes.

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