So I’ve gotten kindof into the idea of talking about theater lately, and where it should go, and what it should look like. And I realize there’s a difference between my idea of theater, and the idea of theater in some town where they get hundreds or millions of dollars in funding. I mean, I’m a little bitter about Zach Scott getting a new theater on my dime, but it really seems kind of practical when you read this. To sum up for those of you not interested in the subject matter:

FugardChicago2010 is a website jointly created by three Chicago theatres, my day job, Remy Bumppo and Timeline. The League of Chicago Theatres supported the project by helping to cover some of the costs around the project. The rest of the project was paid for by the three theatres. The purpose of the website and the related efforts is to increase the public’s awareness of Athol Fugard, a South African playwright and author.

For those who don’t know who Athol Fugard is, this is basically like 3 south african theaters geting together to create a website to increase awareness about Arthur Miller. Athol Fugard is probably the most famous African playwright. A few people have heard of him. Like a few people have heard of Tony Kushner.

So apparently to raise awareness of one of the world’s most well known living playwrights (which I realize makes him still about as well known as your favorite indy band), we need to pool our grant money to make a website?

Seriously. Established theater’s cannot die quickly enough to stop wasting their resources.

So, I’ve been thinking some more about ticket prices. About as experimental with prices as we’ve gotten in Austin is “Pick-you-price”.

So The Holmes wrote a great post that pretty much sums up how I’ve been feeling about religion lately. One of the things I’ve been struggling with is our brain’s love of narrative (I know, crazy for a writer, right?). One of the things that I’ve heard people use to justify the idea of a God (any God) and an afterlife is that pretty much everyone on earth seems to think there’s something after death.

But I just wonder if that’s because our brains are hard-wired to invent narrative. What happens in a romantic movie after the final kiss and the credits roll? Our brains tell us that these people live a wonderful life, do wonderful things. But they’re characters in a story. And unless there’s a sequel, technically nothing happens. They’re gone. No thoughts. No actions. Nothing.

Our brains have a real problem with this concept. Sure if we think about it we can wrap our heads around the idea that at the end of Jurrassic Park the survivors don’t continue living their lives. It’s just credits and black. But we like to imagine new adventures. New lives. We do it naturally without even thinking about it. My brain thinks of the characters who are still alive at the end of the story as still being alive (which is definitely bizarre if you’re talking about a silent movie from the turn of the century).

Which, coming back to religion, I just wonder if this built in need for narrative is what drives our need for religion. Because we have a real problem with death being nothing. Not nothing like a black void. But nothing, as in no continued consciousness. Not watching our children grow old. Not hanging around in robes continuing our life on earth more or less with more singing. Just the end.

I’m still trying to wrap my brain around it. And my brain keeps suggesting alternatives. It really doesn’t like this idea of an unresolved narrative that just abruptly ends.

And that makes me wonder about the evolutionary function of it. As a species did we get too neurotic knowing that death could be around any corner and that was the end? Does this evolutionary delusion make us more productive and more likely to take risks thus increasing our genetic mixing?

I’ve been spending way too much time thinking about this.

Went to the tail of lights on Sunday. It was pretty miserable for us due to miscommunication and illness, but I thought it was still really pretty and worth the trip.

We drove to Barton Creek Mall, parked near the lower level Sears and got on a number 30 bus. It’s a bit of a circuitous route, but they drop you off right at the entrance to the trail. It’s a great painless way to get there.

Although we’ve got to do something about people letting their dogs off leashes and not picking up. It smells horrible there. Anyone who’s run the Hike and Bike trial when it’s raining knows the smell. I think that this area due to the number of people who let their dogs off leash might be even worse, though. I understand some people have high energy dogs, but seriously , if we’re going to have places where dog’s can go off leash they probably need to not be parks. They probably need to be outdoor areas completely covered in mulch, carefully graded for runoff to go directly into the sewer system. Like a cattle yard.

How do other cities deal with this? It’s foul.

Let’s get really pro-life. In addition to not letting Americans buy health plans that provide coverage for abortions, and not allowing the government to pay for abortions with tax dollars, I think we should also deprive health care funding for any prisons that have a death row. Seems fair to me.

Hey, I’m just taking a page from the Republican playbook.

When I worked on Empty Bowl I wrote some playwrighting extensions for MediaWiki. This lets you write scripts quite easily. You get easy revisioning and diffs. The scripts look something like this:

Seth 
The girl is not the problem. This house- I won't marry.

Laurel enters

Laurel 
Sure you will Seth.
 

And when you view or print them they look like this:

Seth

The girl is not the problem. This house- I won’t marry.

_(Laurel enters)

_

Laurel

Sure you will Seth.

	Act I
	Scene I
	Character Name
	Stage Direction on its own line
	Inline Stage Direction within a line

I have no plans to keep developing this, but I’m open to writing a couple more plugins if anyone wants them. I’m open to farming it out to some source control system if anyone else would like to keep developing.

Download Mediawiki Playwrighting Extension

So this meme has come up a lot recently in my life, and I’m trying to figure out where it comes from. There seems to be a Republican meme that the Obama administration is incredibly opaque. This is obviously completely false unless we’re comparing his administration to the administration he was describing while campaigning.

You know Texas has been lauded a lot as a new model for how to run a state. California (and Democratically run) is the old way and Texas (and Republican run) is the new way. Rick Perry certainly is quick to point this out.

But when you look at what’s really going on, about the best thing you can say for the state legislature and governor is that they stay out of the cities’ way. They’ve kept tax rates low which has allowed cities to raise more taxes. And past that they don’t interfere very much.

When you look at the power house cities in Texas, they’re all run by Democrats. Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, and Houston all have Democratic mayors. And those are really the cities that are being looked at when they talk about Texas as a great place to live and do business. The rest of Texas is poor, uneducated, and propped up by moving money out of the urban areas to help pay for the rural ones. They are a massive financial liability for the state. The places that don’t work are overwhelmingly Republican and run by Republicans.

There are Republican suburbs, but those are all simply leaching off of the good Democratic policy. They get the roads, the public transportation, and the business infrastructure paid for by the cities, and they can spend all their money on education.

So perhaps Texas is actually a Democratic triumph in spite of Republican inefficiencies. It looks that way from where I’m sitting.

So, my friends and I talk a lot more about circumcision these days. Probably talked about it more in the past 3 years than in the previous 29 of my life. It came up at a party the other day and how parents are having to fight grandparents over not circumcising their boys, on religious grounds. These are Christian grand parents. Growing up in “bible believing” churches I was very aware of this schism. Circumcision is viewed as being done for religious reasons. Which is fine if you’re Muslim or Jewish, but there is a lot of space spent talking about Circumcision in the New Testament. A lot more than any of your hot button topics like homosexuality, abortion, or pre-marital sex. So much time is spent talking about it, that you might get the idea that Paul is obsessed with penises (just saying).

Ok, so first let’s start with Genesis 17:11:

You are to undergo circumcision, and it will be the sign of the covenant between me and you.

This is where most Christians are going to begin and end their discussion of Circumcision. Of course they’ve felt free to reject a host of other “barbaric” traditions that occur in the first few books of the bible, so it’s odd they’ve kept this one. God obviously didn’t want much intermarrying and this was a great way to ensure that you were serious before you got to marry some hot jewish chick. Old testament God was pretty anti-gentile.

So in Romans 2, Paul starts talking about this. He starts off just discussing what he feels circumcision means. If one is used to born-again analogies he’s basically saying you don’t need to be crawl back inside mom and literally be born again. Just believing and changing your life will do:

25Circumcision has value if you observe the law, but if you break the law, you have become as though you had not been circumcised. 26If those who are not circumcised keep the law’s requirements, will they not be regarded as though they were circumcised? 27The one who is not circumcised physically and yet obeys the law will condemn you who, even though you have the<sup class=“footnote” value=“[c]”>[c] written code and circumcision, are a lawbreaker.

28A man is not a Jew if he is only one outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. 29No, a man is a Jew if he is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code. Such a man’s praise is not from men, but from God.

Then in First Corinthians:

1 Corinthians 7:19

Circumcision is nothing and uncircumcision is nothing. Keeping God’s commands is what counts.

Then in Galatians 2 we have fear of circumcised Christians:

12Before certain men came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcision group.

And here’s one that requires a lot of um… creativity to read “literally” and still advocate circumcision. Well I guess you can advocate it in Paul’s eyes as long as you go back to stoning adulterers:

2Mark my words! I, Paul, tell you that if you let yourselves be circumcised, Christ will be of no value to you at all. 3Again I declare to every man who lets himself be circumcised that he is obligated to obey the whole law. 4You who are trying to be justified by law have been alienated from Christ; you have fallen away from grace. 5But by faith we eagerly await through the Spirit the righteousness for which we hope. 6For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision has any value. The only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love.

Here again in Collossians:

11In him you were also circumcised, in the putting off of the sinful nature,<sup class=“footnote” value=“[a]”>[a] not with a circumcision done by the hands of men but with the circumcision done by Christ,

Here in Titus, pointing out again that the circumcision group were actually the Christians who didn’t really believe and were trying to destroy the church:

Titus 1:10

For there are many rebellious people, mere talkers and deceivers, especially those of the circumcision group.

And that’s not even all of the mentions. It’s incessant. So please, next time you’re talking to a Christian who’s planning on getting their kid circumcised for relgious reasons, point them towards the Bible. Let them come up with a more valid reason, like germaphobia, or making it more unpleasant to masturbate.

And I know some people are going to come up with the extremely creative answer that they want to show their fealty to God in the bodies of their Children, and Paul was just referring to adult males not needing to get circumcised to be Christians, but please - you’re just making stuff up to justify your beliefs.

Oh and don’t try the “it prevents AIDS” defense, unless you already have an appointment to get your daughter the HPV vaccine. Remember abstinence is the answer.

I’ve started seeing a lot of people complaining about their inability to get the H1N1 Vaccine for themselves, their kids, and their pet cockatiel Roy. I’ve been hearing a lot of talk about the government munging this. And how the government isn’t making enough vaccines.

First off people, the government isn’t making the vaccines. It’s a company called Novartis. This is one of those private partnerships that Republicans like to talk so much about. Those partnerships that are far superior to anything the government could do. So here we are. This is (supposedly) better than the government can do. So quit your whining. Or not. Just direct it appropriately.

Novartis is delivering lots and lots of vaccines. The problem is that it’s not going to deliver vaccines for everyone who wants one. Why? Because they only have so much manufacturing capacity. And there’s no value to them of having extra H1N1 vaccine after flu season is over. They’ve done the math and exactly the number of doses that they’re making is what makes sense for them. A certain number of deaths is ok in their fiscal plan to not overbuild vaccines or manufacturing capacity.

So why isn’t the federal government that concerned? Because so far the deaths are pretty much on target with any other bad flu season. So realistically everything’s working the way it’s supposed to.

But it makes me concerned, and we should use this public outrage to do something. Does it really make sense to outsource vaccines? Isn’t this one of those things like having a military where the federal government should just have factories on standby ready to make vaccines for every American?

If we translated our vaccine policy to the military it would be like outsourcing the military, and having the private company decide that really it only made fiscal sense to have resources available to protect about 10% of the United States. The rest would probably get captured, probably some of the states would raise militias that could fight the invaders off, the wealthy would hire private security firms but we’d just accept that there would be some substantial loss of life and territory. A politician trying to sell that would have to be nuts.

And yet that’s basically our national vaccine policy. Now I’m not saying we shouldn’t use private labs to develop vaccines. I think that part of the equation is working well. We should just set it up where we pay some large chunk of royalties to the company that comes up with a viable vaccine and then the US government produces it. If anything it would get more players in the market as scientists could work on developing vaccines without having to have a massive manufacturing capability to build out what they produce. Essentially the US government pays for the development of open-source vaccines to use a software analogy.

Because frankly flu vaccines are small potatoes. It’s debatable if they really work at all (since what goes in each year is just best guess). What happens when we really need a vaccine to some new disease, that’s killing more than a percentage of a percentage? And we can only provide vaccines to 10% of Americans? It seems like we’ve outsourced a pretty important part of our national security.