Last month I read Stephen King’s Cell. I had been looking forward to its release since reading an excerpt on Amazon in September. I quite enjoyed the book despite its derivative nature (think a less-grandiose hybrid of The Stand and Romero’s Dead movies). Of course, I’ve always been a sucker for apocalyptic plots.

King was obviously aware of the danger of rehashing old material, so he keeps the scope tightly centered on the experiences of a father trying to reunite with his son. It keeps the book distinct from its superior conceptual heritage. While this approach was certainly the best, I wouldn’t have minded if he had digressed a bit–all the more fuel for my apocalyptic King fetish. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the characters terribly compelling either–the featured father/son theme was reminiscent of Pet Semetary. The themes addressed in Cell (dangers of technology, the nature of father/son relationships, a parent’s fear of failure) have been explored in more depth by King in previous work and Cell adds nothing new to the mix.

I thoroughly enjoyed the story, but was disappointed that King didn’t have anything new to say here.

I had a bit of an epiphany recently regarding the Genesis account of creation and its commonly-held view of man’s “special creation” by God. In discussions with evolution-haters (i.e., Christians who believe in a Genesis-esque creation), their biggest problem with evolution seems to be that it invalidates the Bible’s claim that man was specially created by God. It is a nice argument, but one must look at this from a new perspective–is Genesis consistent with the idea that man was created ‘special.’ I purport that this is not necessarily so.

First, the common view among evolution unbelievers is that man was made perfect before the fall. If this is meant to be literally so, then please answer this question: If God created man perfect, he would have been perfectly made prior to Eve’s creation, and yet Adam was created with male sex organs. Is it not ridiculous for God to create a single being with sex organs to procreate with the opposite sex which was not intended to be created in the first place! Recall, Eve was created because Adam was ‘lonely,’ it stands to reason that if Adam was not lonely then Eve would not have been created. If Eve was not created, then Adam’s testes were created without purpose.

Second, Cain was banished to a place called Nod, was scared that someone out there would kill him, and later had a wife. These suggest that other people existed in other places. If people existed in other places, then they were created by God, but not ‘specially’ as they are not descendants of Adam. It seems to me that the ‘special’ creation dogma makes more sense as a precursor to the ideology of Jews being God’s chosen people–a common theme throughout the Old Testament.

I could go on and on with inherent problems with a literalistic view of Genesis and the fundamentalist responses to each one, but my ultimate point is this: why must Genesis be literal when taking it so necessitates a host of complicated justifications when looking at the book figuratively does not have these problems.

I had an interesting conversation with some friends from my statistics class. CCSU campus had a large circular garden area in the middle of the courtyard which annoyingly hinders direct traffic between the student center and most of the buildings. It has a meandering path through it, but I generally walk straight across it, ignoring the path. When they questioned me about it I said that it is designed to assert dominance over the students by subconsciously modifying their behavior. In other words, the courtyard is a symbol of administration’s power over the student. For this reason, I ignore the path. Dan then quipped that I should then walk instead on the highest part of the garden, but I rebuffed him on the grounds that doing so would take me out of my way and I prefer to put utility above social commentary. In fact, the utility is my social commentary.

In Stephen King’s Entertainment Weekly column, The Pop of King, he discusses Land of the Dead.

[I]n spite of the strangled budgets (maybe even because of them), there are strangely beautiful images in Land of the Dead. I’m thinking of one in particular, where thousands of zombie heads rise from the moon-drenched river surrounding Dennis Hopper’s citadel city.

What I admire most is that this phase of the series is ending almost 40 years later with Romero’s original creative vision intact. In each succeeding film the arena is larger, but the grim bottom line is the same.

Word up, Steve!

What I love best about Romero’s Dead films (yes, they are films, not movies) is the realism of the storylines (once you accept the initial assumption that the dead can come back, of course). The movies are character-driven, not brainless run-for-your-life crap as the horror genre is so often pigeonholed. The plots are compelling and not simply excuses to spill blood.

Also, Romero makes almost no attempt to explain what has caused this phenomenon, which I love because it is not important. The characters have more pressing matters to think about than why.

The over-explanation mistake is made so frequently in movies. Take Independence Day: remember the scene when the president reads the mind of the captive alien through it’s telepathic ability and learns their ultimate plan for Earth? This cheapened the movie a lot. For starters, as a viewer I have already accepted the fact that aliens have attacked Earth, why must I need a reason? Will having one make the alien invasion seem more realistic? No. Instead, I now have to believe in aliens and their conveniently pointless telepathic abilities.

In short, if you’re not down with the Dead and don’t consider yourself squimish, you have an obligation to yourself to watch them–as if you were watching films, not a movies.

Since Curt started reading Atlas Shrugged, we’ve had several interesting conversations on objectivism and existentialism. As I ponder, my mind keeps coming back to the application of objectivist philosophy. In particular, computability theory and Gödel’s incompleteness theorems.

First, humans are bounded by space and time in their thinking process just like a computer. Deriving a sound, rational reason for every action taken is physically impossible. Though it is a rational action to recognize such and employ the use of heuristics in making decisions, this has important implications in a philosophy based on objective reality. If I fail to search the entire solution space for the correct, objective action, I cannot be sure I am making the rational decision. Further, how can I rationally choose a suitable heuristic? Sticking to a pre-learned moral code would be an obvious choice, but this does not jive with Objectivism. Rand offers the fall-back heuristic of rational self-interest, but I’m still not clear exactly how this idea follows from her axioms.

If all that wasn’t difficult enough, Gödel showed that any sufficiently broad mathematical system (which rational logic certainly is) must necessarily have unknowable truths. That is, there are situations when an objective, rational truth may exist, but there is no way to discover it. In Objectivism there must necessarily be instances where we are incapable of knowing the rational truth; it is impossible to be completely objective.