one person's floor is another one's ceiling (in apartment buildings, especially)

utopyr brings to my attention the opening pages of one of Terry Pratchett's humorous fantasy novels in which recent posts from joculum are reprised more or less verbatim, including a better formulation of a maxim I had been trying to figure out how to word: "Just because something is a superstition doesn't mean that it's wrong."

utopyr has observed that he writes things meant as jokes that other people turn into actually existing enterprises. Ones that work, at least when it comes to winning film festival awards.

And there is a longstanding custom in more habitually ironic parts of the world of encoding the most arcane wisdom in extremely funny folk tales, thus ensuring that it will be more or less accurately remembered (because otherwise the punchlines won't make any sense) and transmitted.

The problem is that in a fashion of which the late Jean Baudrillard would have approved and the still living Umberto Eco probably would still approve, by the time we get back round the world to Europe the wisdom has turned back into real jokes that are indistinguishable in style and content from the jokes that are not meant as jokes.

If you insist that you are saying something that is not true enough times, does that make it true?

I have noticed that the most insightful gurus of our time have also been outspoken atheists who sometimes have chaired Humanist Associations. They get the articulation of the stuff right, whereas the loosy-goosy New Agers get it reliably, predictably wrong.

Gee.

I'm just kidding.

a cloud no bigger than a man's thumbnail

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/9268.html :


Former Vice President Al Gore is launching a $300 million, bipartisan campaign to try to push climate change higher on the nation’s political agenda.

The three-year campaign by the Alliance for Climate Protection will begin Wednesday with network television advertising that will include “American Idol” and other non-traditional shows that reach a non-news audience.

Pat Robertson and Al Sharpton just filmed an ad for the We Campaign, sitting on a couch on the beach. In the ad, now being produced, they say that while they may not agree on many things, they do agree that they have to work to save the planet.

A future couple in the “strange bedfellows” or "unlikely alliances” spots will be recorded soon: Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Republican former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The campaign aims to harness the growing awareness of the climate crisis and turn it into one of the top issues on which voters make decisions.

The campaign is being paid for in part with profits from Gore’s global-warming book and movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and with the prize money from his share of the Nobel Peace Prize, which he matched.

The alliance is also raising money online through a new website, WeCanSolveIt.org.