Author Archives: biguglyjim

About biguglyjim

Big Ugly Jim is a computer nerd and a musician in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. His turn-ons include biology, evolution, and skeptically examining the world around him. His turn-offs are girls who think astrology is real, new country, and religion.

The Monarchy

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kingI’ve been reading Spawn comics lately. Started at the beginning, and I’m a ways in to the series. Spawn is one of those titles that I’ve always wanted to read but never actually did, and now that I’m doing it, I’m enjoying it ridiculously. It’s not as good as when I read The Goon or Frank Miller’s Batman work, but it’s still hella-good. What on earth does this have to do with the monarchy? Almost nothing. But in one of the books, I remember seeing a news broadcast referencing a new monarchist movement in Spawn’s fictional France, and it made me giggle.

Who in the blue hell would want a monarchy?

Okay, aside from whoever it was that was going to be monarch. Seriously, the notion is just so laughable, I have no idea how we ever instituted a monarchy in the first place. So some great hero unites the clans, I can see the clans saying, “Hey, that person rules, we should totally let them be the Big Boss for us!” And maybe that person has an awesome child, and the people are all, “OMG, the kid’s just as good as the parent! Three cheers for staying with the status quo!”

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Dealing With Crap (For Atheists)

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stressOne of the things I was most worried about when I lost my faith was how I would handle those times when life decides to let a little rain fall on you (while holding you face first in a vat of human excrement and stabbing your kidneys with a filthy needle containing nuclear waste). As a Christian, I had always been really good at giving these things over to God, but as I lost my faith, I realized what I was really doing with them.

I was procrastinating.

See, if you want long enough to make a decision on anything, the decision usually winds up getting made for you. That’s not because God shows you the right path, it’s because you pass the point of no return. And frankly, that’s just not a good way to do things.

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Someone’s Ignorance Made Me Think Of Grandpa!

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immigrantsMy grandfather was awesome. He was a self-taught engineer (though never officially given the title) who was a part of some very important engineering projects like the Veterans Land Act and the Manitoba Good Roads program, both of which essentially plucked much of Manitoba from the sloughs and created homes and roads for people. He led a wonderful life, was in his own apartment with his wife well into his 90s, suffered a stroke, and died at 99.

Also, he was bloody funny. I used to take a weekend whenever I could to go to stay with them in Penticton. He would tell me the stories of his life, and I found it beyond enjoyable to connect with that living history. One of the things I would like to do one day is write a novel based very loosely on those stories.

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Set Replicators To Pizza

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yumGlimpses of a brighter future ahead are just plain cool. They’re way better than those glimpses of the future that include a lack of solid ground or people rallying around Kevin Costner tend to be crappy by comparison. It’s one of the many reasons that people love Star Trek, we get to see an idealistic view of the future where things are better. The replicator is one of the innovations on Star Trek that I have always thought was ridiculously awesome.

Imagine having the capacity to just generate whatever you need. It’s an amazing concept that would no doubt destroy many economies and mark an end to the manufacturing and agriculture sectors, assuming it was actually an all-powerful tool that could do the things we imagine. All you would need to do is say I CAN HAZE CHEEZBURGER, and presto, you got yourself a cheeseburger. But there are clearly limitations, or the crew would never need to worry about dilithium crystals. But I’m going way off on a tangent here.

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An Excellent Post On Individuals And Groups

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pluto_animated_talking_phoneI’ve always hated about myself that I have certain pre-conceived notions that I have to fight my way through. I’ll be the first to admit that if I see, for example, a native guy in dirty clothes stumbling, I don’t immediately think, “Gosh, I wonder if that guy is having a stroke!” I get that our brains utilize these sorts of mental shortcuts as a holdover from our more primal past when assigning reactions to stimulii may have been the thing that saves our lives (“That bush is moving, and I know that there’s a big ass bear in the woods around here, so I’m just gonna walk away from there even if it is just a delicious bunny, I’m not willing to take the risk”), but it’s something that annoys me about myself. I am happy to look past my generalizations, but those generalizations exist within me. Frustrating.

But to be fair, I think we all do that, at least to some degree. I remember reading a post on The Crommunist Manifesto about people’s reactions when presented with two candidates for a job, both with pictures, both black, but one darker skinned. No matter how the resumes were associated with the pictures (both resumes were, I believe, similar with one being the obvious stand-out), the lighter skinned guy was the resume the HR people would pick a significantly higher percentage of the time. Even though we believe ourselves to be fair, we have things in our heads that hold us back from that.
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Quick Thoughts On Empathy, And A Link

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200221760-001I will be the first to admit that I don’t have a normal emotional spectrum. It’s actually one of the things that freaked me out while reading The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson. I have a shallow emotional spectrum, but that really is only one of many conditions that make a person a psychopath, and I’m free and clear on quite a few of them. Empathy is one of the things I find most interesting in this regard; I am far more empathic than I am emotional. When other people are sad, I can genuinely feel that for them, but it’s a hell of a lot harder for me to feel it for myself. I don’t know why. Kinda weird, I know.

Empathy is one of those higher functions that I suppose is part of the overall Social Animal thing. That’s not to say that all social animals experience empathy; I don’t want to imagine an ant listening to his buddy and saying, “Yeah, man, I get how awful that must have felt to watch your best friend get stepped on…” But I believe that empathy ties us together socially and helps make societies work.

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Chilling Memoirs From Guantanamo

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slahiMost people think of me as a fairly Liberal guy, but that’s only partly true. There are certain issues legally, economically, and socially where I am much more Conservative than people give me credit. I do, for example, support the death penalty under the right circumstances, and I do believe in a much more frequent use of the Dangerous Offender status to ensure that dangerous criminals with high recidivism simply don’t get the opportunity to re-offend. But I gotta say, everything we’ve heard about Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and all the other US “technicality prisons” (as I like to call them) makes me utterly disgusted. My patience for dangerous monsters convicted of horrible deeds is limited; my patience with gathering up large numbers of people without trial and shit-beating them into confessions is even more limited.

I’ve just finished reading the first of three installments of The Guantanamo Memoirs by Mohamedou Ould Slahi. You can find the redacted versions on Slate’s web site (this link will take you to the introduction by Larry Siems, and then link you to the memoirs themselves), and I felt I had to share this with my loving readers.

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Blame The Parents

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bad{Note: This is ultimately in response to a letter I read today, but is not about that story in specific}

I remember Columbine. After a couple of days of reading all the “OMG WARE WERE TEH PARENTZ” comments, I wrote me a letter to the Calgary Sun. It was very long, and I knew it would not get printed. I was wrong, they printed it but managed to cut it down to a blurb, missing the entire point of the letter and making it pathetic enough that someone else wrote a letter to the editor asking if I needed to talk about all my personal pain and sadness. Or something like that. Jesus, that was years ago, I can’t be expected to remember everything. My intended perspective, though, was to say, “Maybe it wasn’t the parents’ fault. Maybe these were bad kids. Or maybe they were good kids who got pushed too hard by the bad kids they were surrounded by.”

I mentioned Aziz, a kid I knew in high school. Aziz was a prick, but he came by it honestly. He was targeted by a bunch of people on a regular basis, and (if I understand the story correctly) wound up pulling a starters pistol on a group of guys outside the school who wanted to yet again kick the crap out of him. A bus driver saw a kid with a gun, tackled him, and “saved the day”, ensuring that Aziz would be kicked out of school and, for all I know, wind up with a criminal record. I said before, Aziz was a prick, but he wasn’t a dangerous monster. But it was a fine example that sometimes someone gets pushed into a position where ugly things happen.

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On The Arts

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artsThere are very few people in my life today who knew me before I hit high school. To those of you who know me, you would be amazed at the difference in who I was prior to high school, and I’m not talking about physical differences. I was painfully shy and quiet. I describe myself as a shadow back then, a quite shade who slipped through with nobody really noticing his existence. I had a very small core of friends, and that was that. But in high school, things changed. In high school, I got involved in theater.

I had always been involved with the arts. I was in school and church choirs, but always as a part of the ensemble. I would never have tried for a solo. I took band, where I comfortably stayed in the Third Clarinet position, tucked in the back and away from scrutiny. But in grade ten, my sister convinced me to audition with her for the school play.

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