More words please!

This article gave me a huge headache. Not becuase of the issue at hand, per se (though I'd count myself as being against forcing online journals with "swears" to come with warnings), but the dearth of vocabulary evidenced by just how many times the word "blog" is used. I know it' s the topic but god damn if you can't talk about a great many topics and be able to go more than two sentences without saying (for example) "climate change" over and over and over.

I realize that I'm guilty of linguo or biblio-fascism from time to time...but lord almighty, there are consequences to language shrinkage.

Meanwhile, for reasons unknown to any, the dam finally broke and I found myself able to write a good deal on the train this morning. Thank the lard, I was beginning to get really worried since in this case I would be disappointing others than myself (Re: Myspace Man and the sci-fi parkour bit). Why, there might even be a new Bronze Age Sky God this week... The only down side of this is that (if the dam hadn't broken) I was going to paint out my frustrations tonight and it would have been curious to see what that would be resulted in.

In totally incidental news, I was listening to the very Belle and Sebastian song discussed in the latest Cat and Girl strip as I read it. Coincidence aside, I have to admit that I agree with Girl! Normally I don't find that the personal beliefs and behavior of a muscian have any great effect on my enjoyment of their music. I don't think I could have been such a big Oasis fan through my teen years, otherwise! But there is something about that moment when you pay a ltitle more attention a certain song in a musicians roster and you realize "Heyyyyy, they're preaching the word a gawd! At me!". It just feels sneaky and even a little underhanded, which essentially leads us to the feeling that I should give my consent before bearing the stern glare of piety.

Despite all this and my usual vitrolic feelings towards religion, one of my favorite Richard Ashcroft songs is God in The Numbers. Hearing that song the first time, it drew me in and made me actually want to learn more about Ashcroft - supposedly to sniff out whether or not I wanted to keep listening to him. I learned that he admits to having several points of view on the matter and this is expressed rather well in the high quality song Why Not Nothing? that lead the charge in his latest album. To give you an idea, it contains the line "Let's get some of the God squad in the dock, where they belong". Ashcroft himself had the following to say:

"I wrote this song a few years ago when I was feeling completely disillusioned with all the establishments. It's a ranting two chord rock 'n' roll tune that's asking why we can't accept that there's no greater power. I first heard the phrase 'Why not nothing?' from my father-in-law, and I think it conjures a lot of ideas in your head. It's not some hippy statement, it's more like an anarchist concept, why can't we accept that there's nothing?"

So there you go. Though I've yet to encounter something in B&S' work that suggests they take anything but a Catholic view on the world and our need for the bible's teachings...I think I'll be be patient and hang in there. Given that so much art in the world has been inspired by religion, I'd be really losing out to close my ears and eyes to it. Coming back to the latest Cat and Girl, I know I'd miss the works of Caravaggio if nothing else!