Meanwhile, the NHL experts blog at Yahoo! Sports has been running some very funny eulogies for teams that get knocked out of the playoffs, and the Sharks eulogy is up here.  Honestly, it’s not that great; it’s not nearly mean enough. This one for the flames is totally brutal, which is what makes it hilarious.  I was really hoping for some nasty digs at my favorite players (Brian Campbell in particular has been made into a hot scapegoat for this year’s annual second round breakdown), and some potshots at the city of San Jose.  This comic was good, though:

Anyways, like I said, it’s been a fun season, and I’m (once again) looking forward to next year with high hopes.  Maybe I’ll get a Brian Campbell jersey so when they release him in the off season I’ll have a jersey for a guy that was only on the team one year, that’s always fun.  And meanwhile, I get to watch the Stars get completely thrashed by the Wings (ooh, I should submit one of those obits for the Dallas stars when after they get trounced), and the series in Pennsylvania should be really fun to watch.  And I’d better enjoy it while it lasts, since the period between the end of the NHL playoffs and the start of football season usually involves listening to my friends blab on and on about fantasy baseball every night.

A pair of intrepid explorers find themselves on a strange planet and wind up in a cave with some fish-scaled cherubs who party like there’s no tomorrow. Then it gets weird.

I’m really pleased with the sharpness of this lens as well; in the original of this shot I took of Keith, I can zoom in on his eye and actually see myself holding the camera, clearly reflected in his iris.  Pretty awesome.  I’m really looking forward to using this in most casual situations, and it should also be great for shooting bands from the front row.

Davis: I don’t know what you have against God, but some of us don’t have much against him. We look forward to him and his blessings. And it’s really a tragedy — it’s tragic — when a person who is engaged in anything related to God, they want to fight. They want to fight prayer in school. I don’t see you (Sherman) fighting guns in school. You know? I’m trying to understand the philosophy that you want to spread in the state of Illinois. This is the Land of Lincoln. This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God, where people believe in protecting their children.… What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous, it’s dangerous–

Sherman: What’s dangerous, ma’am?

Davis: It’s dangerous to the progression of this state. And it’s dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists! Now you will go to court to fight kids to have the opportunity to be quiet for a minute. But damn if you’ll go to [court] to fight for them to keep guns out of their hands. I am fed up! Get out of that seat!

Sherman: Thank you for sharing your perspective with me, and I’m sure that if this matter does go to court—

Davis: You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.

Listen to the clip of the exchange here:

Rather than discuss the logical fallacies involved in her arguments (and there are tons: her ad hominem abusive arguments regarding Sherman’s chosen realm of activism, her ridiculous argumentum ad populum about belief in god, and her wholly unsupported implication that Illinois was somehow built on Christianity, just to name a few), I’d like to address the most frustrating aspect of this tirade, which is her claim that being exposed to atheism is somehow destructive to children.

Look, I understand what’s really going on here; if this woman genuinely believes that children unexposed to the teachings of Christianity are going to burn in hell, no one can really blame her for feeling that the perspective of an atheist is something corrosive that should kept away from impressionable minds at all costs.  But unfortunately, that’s a fully circular argument; it points to belief in god, but it only holds if you believe in god in the first place.  And more importantly, it’s missing the crux of the issue at hand, which has to do with teaching our children how to think.  The irony of her position is that the only children so easily susceptible to indoctrination are ones who were never taught how to think, how to analyze, how to discuss and debate; the ones who were never exposed to any new ideas in the first place.  And that’s why I’ve yet to ever hear a single valid unbiased argument against teaching children about critical thinking.

I hate to post the same stuff over and over again, but it appears my goal of getting this document into the hands every human being on the planet has not yet been achieved, so allow me excerpt once again from Walter Lippmann’s essay The Indispensable Opposition. Friends, please, read it right now if you never have before. It’s short, I swear.  But I digress; here are some relevant portions:

We miss the whole point when we imagine that we tolerate the freedom of our political opponents as we tolerate a howling baby next door, as we put up with the blasts from our neighbor’s radio because we are too peaceable to heave a brick through the window. If this were all there is to freedom of opinion, that we are too goodnatured or too timid to do anything about our opponents and our critics except to let them talk, it would be difficult to say whether we are tolerant because we are magnanimous or because we are lazy, because we have strong principles or because we lack serious convictions, whether we have the hospitality of an inquiring mind or the indifference of an empty mind. And so, if we truly wish to understand why freedom is necessary in a civilized society, we must begin by realizing that, because freedom of discussion improves our own opinions, the liberties of other men are our own vital necessity.

This is the creative principle of freedom of speech, not that it is a system for the tolerating of error, but that it is a system for finding the truth. It may not produce the truth, or the whole truth all the time, or often, or in some cases ever. But if the truth can be found, there is no other system which will normally and habitually find so much truth. Until we have thoroughly understood this principle, we shall not know why we must value our liberty, or how we can protect and develop it.

And here we get to the heart of the matter, which is that society genuinely needs different viewpoints because exposing people to different viewpoints is what helps learn how to learn, and what help us discover truth.  Atheists, as the opposition, (or Christians, were they the minority) are not something to just be tolerated.  They serve an important function: to either weaken or strengthen your own beliefs by putting them to the test.  And if a belief doesn’t hold up under scrutiny, is it really worth having?

I was quite proud of myself for coming up with this idea, because, seriously, it’s awesome.  Which brings us to the today; here I sit, feeling pleased and quietly developing pictures of band shoes, when out of the blue, I get a phone call from Jesse:  “Hey buddy… I’ve got some bad news.”

Thus enter French electro-popsters The Shoes and their new single, “Knock Out”.  Apparently, they have pressed 300 copies of the 7″, and each one comes bundled with a Polaroid of (guess what)… shoes.  And here’s the kicker; they (being significantly cooler than I) have far more famous friends than I could hope for (although I do sorta know the drummer from Lady Genius and one the guys from Altman).  Each Polaroid is of someone indie-famous and is signed by the aforementioned semi-celeb; notable notables include folks from Bloc Party (left), CSS, and The Darkness.

So what’s the moral of the story? Apparently, it’s “never try to do anything cool or fun or awesome, because someone will just rip off your idea and flaunt it all  over the internets”. Internets like NME, Pitchfork, and MixMag. Well, crap.

What do you guys think… should I go ahead with the project or toss it in the fail bin?  Jesse has already made it clear where he stands (and I’m paraphrasing here): “I dunno, man. I was just worried you’d have someone over to your apartment who would see the pictures, yell, ‘Hey, that french band The Shoes already did that!’, and then burn the place down.”

No award for Least Melodic Metal (Torche)? Or Best Incorporation of a Band’s Name into Their Wardrobe (White Shoes and the Couples Company)? And, my personal favorite: Most Charistmatic Lead Singer (Ezra Furman and the Harpoons, of course).

Nice. These inspired me to come up with a few more awards; consider this post the"Technical Achievement" awards ceremony they always do before the real Oscars.

• Most Devastated By Loss of a Banana Suit: Coconut Coolouts (Seattle, WA)
• Most Likely to Win a Jamie Kennedy Look-a-like Contest: No Age (Los Angeles, CA)
• Most Likely to Self-Destruct Before Age 30: Nick Diamond of Islands (Montreal, Canada)
• The "Nastiest Chops" Award: Jamie "Hotel" Hince of The Kills (London, UK)
• Most Able to Press Play on a Laptop and Dance Around: Dan Deacon (Baltimore, MD)
• The "Time to Hang It Up" Award: Roky Erickson (Austin, TX)
• Highest Percentage of All-Denim Outfits and Sunglasses: Dr. Dog (Philadelphia, PA)

Also, be sure to check out the SXSW photos I took during the festival at my SXSW 2008 Flickr set.  I’ll be adding more photos to that set as I finishing sorting and developing them.

Oh, and by the way… the 2007 winner of the "Most Able to Press Play on a Laptop and Dance Around" Award was Girl Talk, and in 2006, it went to Jason Forrest.