Rodney

Cats are my favorite animal. And here is my favorite kitty video so far.

Sorry, it's not meanness--it's my own brand of showing off. It's an oh, such a hungry yearning burning inside of me!

"Whether nearer to me or far, It's no different, darling, where you are," Barbara, you're a bit off! It's "Whether near to me or far, It's no matter, darling, where you are," I have the sheet music, but I don't even need to consult it. I'll take this occasion to quote some Porter lines that always get to me: "I give to you and you give to me True love, true love. So on and on it will always be True love--true love!" It's that third line that does it to me.

What Barbara said.

This is wonderful work. I especially like "Pensive." The reason I did not respond right away is that I suspect a lot of artists whose work looks great at first blush rely heavily on tracings from photos, which they then embellish and stylize so that the source of the basic image is not evident. This has the effect, I think, of inhibiting full stylization or selectivity in the artistic process. So, to the extent that this is not true of your work, I admire it all the more!

As regards love poetry, another favorite of mine is Alfred Tennyson's "Come Down, O Maid." I once set this to music, which I posted on RoR a few years back.

I would have to say my favorite poem is Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

And, of course, Paul also sang harmony. One of my favorite Beatles records. There's not a dull moment in the song, and the ending is perfect.

Hi! I'm Canadian also, and part of the reason I occasionally post here is to support Barbara Branden, and by implication Nathaniel Branden, in the current nonsense against them. Hope you enjoy it here.

Actually, at some point, Lennon got disaffected with all the activists using him and asking for his involvement with their causes. He was no thinker, that's for sure. But toward the end he seemed to have gotten a clue or two, especially when Sean was born. He even got reconciled to his Beatles past, collecting memorabilia (such as bobblehead Beatle dolls) and saying, "Why didn't I just let myself enjoy all that instead of whining all the time?" (this is not verbatim). One more indication, to my mind, of McCartney having more on the ball than his partner.

I would also caution that one should not read too much into specific plot details and wordings used by Ayn Rand. In her fiction she was operating as an artist, and sometimes the artistic effect took precedence over intellectual precision. For example, one might, if reading myopically, conclude that Ayn Rand had a touch of mysticism because of that line following the occurrence of the words "Cortlandt Homes" to the effect that, to Keating, "the name had sounded like the muffled stoke of a bell; as if the sound had opened and closed a sequence which he would not be able to stop." But clearly all it means is that Rand wanted the reader to experience a certain sense of significance and inevitability attached to the events that followed. I see the same mistake in reactions to her nonfiction statements as well--especially in assessments of her epistemology. But if you keep in mind that Rand espoused both the exact and the natural use of language, one can put her words in context and perspective.

“Everybody Loves Somebody” is one of my favorite recordings of all since childhood. I also liked “Houston,” which was expressive of my own wandering, independent nature (but that’s not the whole reason why I liked it). I enjoyed his TV show, especially for his “coolness” and his sense of humor. Once, he was performing--really lip-synching--“Houston,” in which there occurs a harmonica solo. He pretended not to know it was coming, and kept singing; but at the first harmonica note, he acted surprised, immediately stopped, and quickly recovered by miming blowing on the instrument!

Breathtaking! Compare this to what Dali did with the same material.

To Mike: Oh, I remember now. (I should have remembered--I've read AS ten times!) It's not such a joke then, and I see why I did not react to it as a taunting contradiction. un-LOL!

I remember that line, and I never noticed the whole joke--the contradiction! Thanks, Mike! Now I'm trying to think in what situation Francisco said it. Without looking it up, my guess is, knowing AR, he was speaking to an intellectual.

There is also a subtle intellectual humor in Rand. For example, recall Lois Cook's line: Let's be gods. Let's be ugly. I found that line terrifically wicked in its humor. Ayn Rand's scenes where contemporary intellectuals are schmoozing together are full of this sort of pointed mockery. This is what I mean in my "theory of humor" given above, when I say humor seems to be essentially the indirect presentation of truth and values. Is the nature of joking essentially "the implying of metaphysical non-importance," as per Rand's thinking? (Actually, to me it is not clear she intended this as a full-fledged definition or her final word on the topic.) Only in the sense that humor is a kind of playfulness, which should only be indulged in when circumstances allow. But it can't be maintained that this is the basic nature of comedy.

That's what I get for cutting and pasting from a forum posting! I did have access to the correct spelling, but was too lazy.

I can confirm Erich Veyhl was present.

Paul, I lit my indoor campfire and quickly put it out three times. Both, Do either of you fellow Torontonians know of any O groups or O-related social circles here?

Actually, just to round this off, the phrase mentioning Mayhew was, I recall, tacked on by me at the last moment. And I took it back only because I did not have the leisure to re-study the article in detail. So on the basis of revisiting the article briefly and seeing that Mayhew did not seem to stray from the small safe territory of the strictly limited sense in which Ayn Rand’s sense of “humor” applied to The Fountainhead and elsewhere, I withdrew my mention of Mayhew--as a stopgap measure until I had time and desire to analyze the article in detail. I ought to mention that being a “most careful and diligent scholar” does not preclude rationalism and error, or making too-wide generalizations. I’m quite sure Mayhew is a good thinker and also a grand fellow. In fact, when the article came out, I was a bit jealous, because in all other respects the piece is excellent and I had often thought about writing on the same topic myself. By the way, the mental gymnastics that strict adherence to Ayn Rand’s idea must lead to were amply displayed in the Noodlefood exchange. The quickness with which this happened indicates how I could be so confident it might have happened in the Mayhew article!

I posted on Noodlefood some months ago on the nature of humor, if anyone wants to look it up. I made the point that Rand focused on humor in only one usage: making light of, or fun of, something. I proposed the alternative view that something humorous indirectly points out some pleasing or significant truth in an oblique manner that requires a flash of perspicuity to grasp. (This would explain, for example, why both caricatures and kittens are funny; and it suggests a trigger for the laughter response.) At least, I got some of that out before I decided not to continue on that board. I am just too busy, and not in the mood these days, to get into intense online debates (especially there--I don't like the tone). Humor is intimately involved with truth, our evaluation of it, and the various ways it might be hailed among others, to our mutual delight.

That has got to be a fake quote. Shame on you, MSK.

I would have to ponder a lot to properly answer this question, but one name mentioned above leapt out at me, one I might have forgotten to mention in such a list, but which belongs above all (and it has nothing to do with "loyalty" to AR): We the Living

Some of you may know that my step-grandson is Ashley Parker Angel, whose struggle to forge a solo music career was followed on the show There & Back, which was the #1 show on MTV this year. (Previously, he had been a member of the boy band O-Town.) Well, his album, Soundtrack to Your Life, is out now, and it debuted at #5 on the Billboard Hot 200. Call me prejudiced, but STYL is a great album. (I think of it as APA STYLe.) The tunes, all of which he wrote or co-wrote, have great hooks and wonderful variety. If you look at the reviews on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/customer-...&n=5174&s=music), of which there are currently 88, you will notice that most of them mention the fact that all the songs are good. Only a handful of the writers give the album fewer than the full 5-out-of-5-stars rating--one fellow sneeringly gave STYL one star and a dismissive, unintellectual comment, and the others gave him four stars out of five and good reviews. There are several moving ballads, and one of the slower cuts sounds just like a forgotten Beatles record--a good one at that! I believe many of the members here would love this album, especially those who like some of the harder rock (which is clustered in the first half of it, and which normally I do not care for myself). One standout is "Crazy Beautiful." People usually don't like to be asked to listen to music, so I won't do that. What I request here is that you watch this video: http://www.ashleyconnection.com/media/APA_...indowsMedia.wmv You will get a crash course in all things Ashley Parker Angel. Apart from his career, Ashley is a very beautiful person. I love him, and I think you will be glad to have been made aware of him. Try to pay attention also to the music in the background--it is from the album. Listen for "Crazy Beautiful," which I hope is his next single ("Let U Go" was his first)--though my favorite is a quietly haunting cut called "Shades of Blue," not heard here.

I have that article by Boydstun, having requested it from him some time ago. However, I have not read it yet, since it has merely tangential relevance to a topic I am thinking about, the epistemology of math. I plan to look at it after I finish writing about my conclusions, in case there is anything there that might be related and that I might want to allude to. This issue of measurement-omission at every level of cognition has never presented a problem for me, so I am not impelled to study it as things stand now. (When I do write on my thinking about math, it will be for an audience of math teachers and mathematicians first of all. According to the reaction, I will tie in Ayn Rand more strongly and make it into an article on conceptualization in general. I still do not know what audience to write that piece for.)