Florida Mountain Bike Locations - A Sampler

One of my favorite things to do with my computer is to fire up Google Earth and find places that I know or want to go to. One of the little projects I'm working on in Google Earth is to find every significant Mountain Biking trail in Florida and mark its exact coordinates. Geeky? Yes, but so much fun and very useful to boot!

After some fiddling around, I figured out how to publish onto the Internet what I had stored in my local copy of Google Earth. So, for all you bikers out there, here's a live map of all the great placed to ride here in Florida. I've even included some GPS-enabled trail maps of Oleta and Markham! Just click the link below and start zooming to the places you like to rip it. Ride on!

Do the clicky thing here to see my work!

Identity Crisis

Lately, this blog has been suffering an identity crisis.

In the beginning, I started this blog to post photographs that I took of things that interested me. Then, I started to intersperse other people's photographs into the postings, giving credit to the photographer as required. After a drought, I started posting silly pictures of myself dressed as a zombie.

Somewhere along the way, I started to post stream-of-consciousness rants, more for me than for my readership (such as it is). I never really bothered to make such rants coherent, rather letting them meander about without sense of structure or resolution. Lately though, I've started to post on more pensive topics, but keeping the structure loose and the arguments looser.

Now, I know my writing style, and this blog really has not been a good representation of it. It's all over the place, really. This space was never meant to be a place where I formally laid out arguments, or wrote meaningful prose, or even posted anything that I'd like to have quoted back to me in a court of law. It's been a drawing board, an empty desk, a fifty-five gallon drum in which to dump ideas.

But, reading back on some of the previous posts, I'm starting to realize that I may not be doing my own rants justice by posting them so loosely. I'm not getting the meat of several ideas I'm floating about, mostly due to intellectual laziness. For example, a few posts ago, I ranted about the nature of reality as it relates to belief, five ways to fundamentally alter our form of government for the betterment of the People, and so on; not really the funny pages here.

So, this blog finds itself with an identity crisis. It wants to be a place where structured arguments can be made, but it also doesn't want the scrutiny that comes with that. It wants to be a place to showcase personal photographs, but without the ego that this implies. It wants to be a place where deep personal thoughts can be shared, but wants to remain anonymous and out of sight. It wants to be a place where beauty can be showcased, but still remain cold and impersonal.

I don't know what I'm going to be doing with this space in the future. One day you'll see silliness, another day might bring structured logic. I may post images of my own or images that I find interesting. I may republish someone else's opinion with credit, or I'll lay down some original ideas that might just blow your fucking mind.

Whatever I do, it will still be worthy of the ThoughtCancer persona. Speaking of which, no one really knows where that persona came from. That might be a good post in the future...

That Which Is Real Does Not Require Belief

Today's somewhat flawed premise (I say "somewhat flawed" because the argument tends to hold water unless examined too closely, after which is falls apart) is that "That Which Is Real Does Not Require Belief". That is, if one must believe in something for it to exist, then it does not really exist, since lack of belief would lead to lack of existence.

This flawed argument can be applied across a multitude of disciplines, aggravating all who take it too seriously. To wit, here are some examples to help clarify the proposition:

Things That Exist Regardless of Belief:

• The wet qualities of water
• The elliptical motion of the earth as it orbits around the sun
• The Macro- and Micro-evolution of organisms on planet earth.
• The efficacy of aloe vera in soothing sunburns
• Human Intelligence (and lack thereof, in some individuals)
  
• The dramatic change in the earth's climate caused by man's pollution and neglect of their place in nature
• Mathematics and all disciplines that stem from it

Now, the idea here is simple (if you haven't caught on already): the above examples exist whether or not one believes them to exist. I can stop believing in evolution and global climate change, but they still most definitely exist. I can proclaim that I do not believe that pi does not equal 3.14, but it still will. Water is wet, the sky is blue, oceans are deep, etc. These things do not require belief; not believing will not cause water to be like sandpaper, the earth to rotate around the sun in a rectangular pattern, etc.

Those of you who know me know exactly where I'm going with this.

Things That Cease To Exist Without Belief In Them:

• Homeopathy
• Gods (anyone want to make the case for existence of Thor, Zeus, Hera, or Kali?)
• Truth
• Vampires (Bram Stoker-style, not the clinical pathology of drinking blood)
• Hope, Love, Hate, Jealousy...emotions in general, really
• Astrology
• Spell-casting, Prayer, Divining, and other summons of supernatural powers

Obviously, these examples would anger, annoy, offend, or otherwise put off the majority of people out there. The good reader would question why I would put Vampires and Spell-Casting with Love, Truth, and God.

Well, would not all of the above examples cease to be without someone believing in them? I can go down the list and show that each of these points simply are not "real" in the same way mathematics, gravity, and aloe vera are.

Think about it.

Emotions, though felt very vividly by everyone, aren't necessarily real. They're only real to you. One can act based on emotion, and the actions are real; but emotions themselves are not. "Hey, wait a minute," says the reader, "emotions can be traced to electrical activity in the brain. Emotions can be measured, induced, and controlled by external functions. Does that not make emotions real, that they exist?" Hey, buddy, I told you this was a flawed arguement that doesn't hold up upon close examination. What were you expecting? You were warned!

See if you can find the logical workarounds to the the "Not Real Without Belief" list above, WITHOUT falling into Cognitive Dissonance traps (that's the hard part!). Try to reconcile what you perceive to be reality, with what can be proven to be without you having to will it so.

Ain't metaphysics fun?

A Letter Of Appreciation From The Rich

Let's be honest: you'll NEVER win the lottery. On the other hand, chances are pretty good that you'll slave away at some miserable job for the rest of your life. That's because you were, in all likelihood, born in to the wrong social class. Face it - you're a member of the working caste. Sorry!

As a result, you don't have the education, upbringing, connections, manners, appearance, or good taste to ever become one of us. In fact, you'd probably need a book the size of the Yellow Pages to list all of the unfair advantages we have over you. That's why we're so relieved to know that you still continue to believe in all of those silly fairy tales about "justice, equal opportunity, and the value of hard work in America".

Of course, in a hierarchical social system life ours, there's never been much room at the top to begin with. Besides, it's already occupied by us, and we like it up here so much that we intend to keep it that way. But at least there's usually someone lower on the social ladder you can feel superior to and kick in the teeth once in a while. Even the lowly dishwasher and garbage man can find some poor slob further down in the pecking order to sneer and spit at. So be thankful for all of those migrant workers, prostitutes, and homeless street people!

Always remember that if everyone were economically secure and socially privileged like us, there would be no one left to fill all of the those boring, dangerous, low-paid jobs in our economy. No one would be available to fight our wars for us, or blindly follow orders in our totalitarian corporate institutions. And certainly there would be no one to meekly go to their grave without having lived the full, creative, and satisfying lives we have. So please, by all means, keep up the great work!

You also probably don't have the same greedy, compulsive drive to possess wealth, power, and prestige that we have. And even though you may sincerely want to change the way you live, you're afraid of the very change you desire, thus keeping you and others like you in a nervous state of limbo. So you go through life mechanically playing your assigned social role, terrified what others would think should you ever dare to "break the mold".

Naturally, we try to play you commoners off against each other whenever it suits our purposes: high-waged workers vs. low-waged, unionized vs. non-unionized, Black vs. White vs. Mexican vs. Asian, male vs. female, Christian vs....well, everyone else! We continually push your wages down by invoking high-falutin' things like "foreign competition", "the law of supply and demand in the labor market", "national security", "the federal deficit", or whatever other nonsense we can think of.

We will gladly throw you in the scrap heap of you step out of line or jeopardize our profits. And to give you an occasional break from the monotony of our daily economic blackmail, we allow you to participate in our stage-managed shell games, better known to you ordinary folks as "elections". Luckily, you have no clue what a real democracy or a real election looks like, and you beat your collective chests and pronounce the system we've built for you as the worlds' best. Happily, you haven't a clue as to what we're really doing; instead, you blame "terrorists", "jews", "China", "the devil", "aliens", "planetary mis-alignments", "welfare queens", "immigrants", and countless other phantoms for your troubled situation.

We're also very pleased that many of you still embrace "work ethic", even though most of the jobs in our economy degrade the environment, undermine your emotional, physical, and spiritual health, and basically suck your one and only life right out of you. We obviously don't know much about that kind of work, but we're sure glad you do!

Of course, your life could be different. Society could intelligently be organized to meet the real needs of the general population. You and others like you could collectively fight to free yourselves from our total domination of your lives. But you don't know that. In fact, it is our greatest achievement that you can't even imagine that another way of life is even possible! And that is the most amazing thing about our system: completely robbing you of your imagination, your creativity, and your ability to think and act for yourself and your own best interest.

So, we'd truly like to thank you, from the bottom of our black hearts. Your loyal and blind sacrifice makes possible our corrupt luxury! Thank you so much for knowing your place...without even knowing it!

Rich $cum of America
"He who hath the gold, makes the rules."
"Fuck You. Pay Me."

Surgery

I woke up in the middle of my surgery, and asked the doctor if everything was going ok. He said, "everything is going fine, almost done". I said, "if you need anything, I'll be right here". I was promptly sedated.

Two days later, the drugs I'm on do nothing for the pain. They do, however, induce dizziness and dehydration. Pain meds, anti-biotics, and all manner of herbs is the name of the game in this recovery process, and I'll be damned if I let it get the best of me.

I'm a little delirious as I write this. I was watching elves crawling on the ceiling earlier. What kind of pain medication leaves one stupid, numb, hallucinating, but still in pain? Darvocet, apparently; the doc didn't give me a sufficiently high dose of the stuff, so I'm suffering while in La-La land.

Need.....more.....narcotics.....