The Red Sox (one of the BIGGEST teams in baseball) is on board for what seems to be becoming a tradition of the Blue Jays hosting exhibition games on April 1st and 2nd at Montreal's Olympic Stadium...the ex-home of the Ex-Expos.
Baseball Legend, Cro, with owner and president of Red Sox
The official spokesman for the return of the Expos to Montreal, Mr. Warren Cromartie, President of the Montreal Baseball Project was in Boston a few weeks ago finalizing details to get the Red Sox to barn storm north of the boarder to the barren baseball-less city of Montreal where fans really want that baseball back. His mission seems successful as the Red Sox organization was excited at the idea of coming here to play some good ol' ball games.
We had the Mets come play here in 2014, where both teams honored the life of Gary Carter. They also invited the roster of the 1994 Expos to the pre-game ceremony and everyone collectively flipped out to see those dudes again.
Vlad, The OC, and the Mayor in 2015
We had the Reds come play two games here in 2015, Tony Perez and others came to hang before the game....but during the second game....VLAD showed up....and everyone collectively flipped again. Tim Wallach's son got to dress for that game for the Reds and got to see his dad's old stomping grounds and the fans gave a standing ovation to Chad Wallach because they remembered and liked his dad so much. It was fun, it was good, everyone had a good time at it.
In 2016, thanks to Cromartie's trip to Boston, it is 100% confirmed that the team coming to the Big O next year will surely be the Boston Red Sox. The Red Sox are very popular here in Montreal...mainly I think due to their championship seasons and it probably has a lot to do with Pedro "sharing his ring" with us when he won one with the Sox.
Pedro back at Big O (circa 1999)
I remember the first time I saw the Red Sox at the Big O, it was 1999 and interleague play was still a new fangled thing-a-ma-bob. The pitcher at the game I was at for the Sox was none other than Pedro Martinez, the guy who won the only Cy Young in Expos history for Montreal two years prior in 1997. We friggin' crushed Pedro in that game (box here)...well he only gave up 4 runs over 6 innings...we crushed Mark Portugal and Mark Guthrie more than we did Pedro. I remember that game, I even remember where I was sitting and everything. It happened like over 15 years ago too.
Things are Gettin' Nuts, Yo.
I saw baseball legend Ellis Valentine tweet something today while I was at work to a sports writer. Valentine, who comes up for these games to sit with the fans in attendance and watch the ball game and reminisce and chill and everything, tweeted that he might have to sit in the "nose-bleeds" this year round. ("Nose bleeds" refers to the altitude being so high that your nose starts bleeding. It means bad seats. It's those seats Bob Uecker sits in when he drinks Miller Lites. It's those Uecker seats).
Why? Because after being on sale for ONE SINGLE DAY....both games are almost 100% SOLD OUT. Wow. If you live in Montreal or want to travel here to watch these games you better buy your tickets right now because they went like HOT CAKES, MAN. They sold like hot cakes.
I've sat in the "400s" before over the years, I sat there for the Reds games this year...I never took no elevator as Ellis Valentine states in that tweet exists. I didn't know there was one. I always walk up those winding gray cement pathways. I actually liked doing it this year too. Walking with all the other fans and seeing all the Expos hats and shirts...seeing old people with hats and jackets that looked worn in and like they bought those Expos hats in like 1985...and seeing young kids with new shiny Expos gear. I liked being with those people. Those are my people, they really are.
Every year I write an article about these exhibition games and every year I predict that 100K will come over the course of 2 games. Both years they came close with well over 90K both times...this year we hit 96K a mere four thousand off of getting One Hundred Thousand Baseball Fans over two days.
This year I am not predicting/speculating/prognosticating 100 thousand fans...I am 100% GARAUNTEE-ING that 100K will be there over the course of two days at the Big O in 2016 for Red Sox versus Blue Jays. Mark my most humble of human words on that.
I love you, Baseball. I seriously seriously do.
I got a sinking suspicion that Pedro might be honored before one of these games. I haven't heard anything official....but there are rumors abounds that Hall of Famer and all-around legend Pedro Martinez will be back at the Big O in 2016.
Gonna right a short one just to point something out. Social media is wigging out loose over something that I'm not sure the average hippie/jabroni/mongoloid really understands.
The main conspiracy/natural/organic sites and publications are running wild with news that California is putting a warning label on products that contain glyphosate. It's a very scary sounding chemical and the natural-conspiracists are having a field day with this.
All I want to do here is make a little chart which will list common crap we expose ourselves to everyday and what the general consensus is on what is the Median Lethal Dose of those substances.
Term Define:
What is Median Lethal Dose? Or LD50? It is the amount of a substance that if consumed by a human guy or human lady...will more than likely result in the death of that person.
I've had many jobs where I've worked with chemicals and I know how dangerous they can be...but I also know that it will actually take a fuck load of them in a lot of cases to kill you. I got that Heirloom Furniture Stripper (or some such product) in my eyes, big time once. The old formula too...the new formula smells worse but it won't even fuck you up at all.
Yo, my brush was hardened from the last time I was using it and I pushed the brush to the bottom of the container of stripper I was using to force the brush to open up and un-harden...and it did...but really fast and it shot the stripper up into my eyes. Yo, I still remember that...and my memory is stupid. I remember that pain like it was yesterday...maybe the top pain event I can think of. So much of it and directly in the eyes...it was like burning and burning. I was jumping mad...I thought I was gonna go Super Saiyan or some shit, g. It was bad.
Ya, and one time....I swallowed deck bleach by accident while I was water sealing a deck. It tasted bad, bleach, fuck.
I dunno, I can attest that chemicals are very bad for you and dangerous but I mean...I'm still fucking alive...I'm not even that scared of them, really.
Anyways this isn't important, it's just a personal preamble....okay, here is a list of various substances and their Median Lethal Dose.
LD50 Chart
Consuming this amount of the following, WITHOUT VOMITING or pee-ing or sweating anything out, will very likely spell the end for you....
These are denoted in mg/kg (this stat means how much of it in grams into how much you weigh in kilos) and the list is in descending order from safest shit to least safest shit to consume. We'll start with water and work our way down, okay?
(with mg/kg...let's say you weigh like 170 pounds or 77 kilos....you'd have to multiply the mg/kg by your weight of 77 kilos to find out how many mg will kill you. For example salt is 3000mg times 77 which is 231K in mg or about 231 grams. It would take 231 grams in one sitting of just eating salt by the spoonful to kill more than half of all people who weigh 77 kilos)
I love these stats...they are like Dragon Ball Z power levels. The higher the number the safer it is, okay?
Water: Too big for mg/kg...You need to drink about 8 liters or 1.5 gallons without puking/sweating/peei-ing to overdose on water. Unless a body was rendered unable to sweat or pee or puke I don't think you really can overdose on water.
Table Sugar: 29700 mg/kg (about 150 table spoons in one sitting without barfing will do it)
Vitamin C: 11900 mg/kg (it's hard to OD on OJ but it is possible)
Alcohol (ethanol): 7060 mg/kg. (About 20 hard shots without vomiting or without getting your stomach pumped may kill you.)
Table Salt: 3000 mg/kg (about 14 table spoons without pukin')
THC (the muscle relaxant in weed): 1270 mg/kg
Arsenic: 763 mg/kg
Vitamin D3 (Cholecalciferol): 352 mg/kg
Aspirin: 293 mg/kg
Caffeine: 192 mg/kg (About 100 cups of coffee)
Cyanide (the stuff from James Bond movies): 6.4 mg/kg
Those are the toxic levels of dosage for stuff around us that we've heard about. Note that things like Vitamin D3 indeed are very toxic but our body needs it in small doses or you'll get rickets and gait. Our body needs all kinds of scary sounding things in small doses to be healthy like iron, zinc and other metals, even.
Nicotine is very toxic but you're not getting a lot of milligrams from smoking one cigarette. Still, I would rank smoking as the least healthy thing you can probably do. It really is.
So I'm not showing you these lethal doses to scare you...Vitamin D3 is low on the list but it's not something to be scared of.
So where does Glyphosate, the substance California is putting warning labels on, fit on the LD50? It's about 5000 mg/kg...putting it between salt and alcohol. It's lethal dose isn't that insane.
"If it's 'Safe' You Should DRINK IT, Smart Guy!!"
I was watching a video the other day where a natural-conspiracy type is saying to some old business PR-looking guy...that if glyphosate is safe then why don't you drink it, Mr. Man!? In my opinion, that man shouldn't drink it to prove its safety as a pest-control substance....there's no reason for him to drink a glass of glysophate to appease people's worries.
My response to that would be...well, you naturoes use animal shit to fertilize your plants while they are in the fields...if you think animal shit is safe to use on the plants we eat...then why don't you prove it's safe by eating a handful of manure?
I think people should start drinking glyphosate to prove this silly point ONLY after organic people eat shit to prove shit fertilizer is safe to use in fields.
What's that? You're not going to eat a bowl of manure? Well then why are you using it on the food I eat? You're not gonna eat a bowl of pathogen infested shit to ease my concerns of organic farmers using poop to grow food for people (AND CHILDREN) to put in their precious human bodies?
In the end, that logic gets us no where. Look, I'll eat food that was fertilized with shit and I'll eat food that had bugs kept off it with glyphosate. Neither is something that really scares me...I wash my fruits and stuff anyway before I eat on them.
IMPORTANT: If you Think you are Poisoned!
Drink water! Vomit! And Call your Doctor or poison control! It's not a joke...I'm not trying to say poison is safe by any means...I'm just trying to put the LD50s into context. If you really ever do get poisoned and shit then remember those three things. It's like STOP n' DROP n' ROLL for fire...but it's for poison...it is... 1. Drink Water 2. Puke 3. Call your Doctor or Poison Control
AEEEEIEEE! He's using POISON! AAAAAH!
I'm not trying to say poison is safe...I'm just saying that, sometimes I don't think the Organic/Natural community really understands chemistry. Everything on earth is a fucking chemical. Our bodies evolved to feed off of some of these chemicals (oxygen, water, and other shit) so people who think they can live a chem free life don't understand anything about the world around them.
You can over dose on all sorts of stuff and die. The science right now that is available is placing glyphosate in the region of pretty safe to have exposure to. That can change, but as of right now it is not known to be a fantastically dangerous chemical.
You know, I've had strong chemicals pretty much burn out my eyes...I've felt bleach work its way through my system....I know how fucking awful these dangerous chems can be...but when it comes to this particular chem...I'm not sure glyphosate is as crazy dangerous as the Naturals make it out to be. Its LD50 is pretty chill.
Would I drink a glass of glyphosate? No, I wouldn't...I'm not stupid. Probably tastes bad. Then again, I wouldn't eat a bowl of manure either. Both of these are used in fields to help grow crops and whatever residue, if any, that is left on the produce before I eat it...is negligible and I'm not scared of it because (A) I know it's not a lethal amount and (B) I run water all over fruits and vegetables before I eat them to get any weird stuff that's on them off (like crap from the farm or people who handled them).
I'm not a schill, I'm not anything. This is my opinion. I don't get any money from anyone at all to write opinions in this blog. I don't like these big companies either, I'm not on their side. I just honestly don't think the organic crowd has any grasp on reality sometimes. Like, you can argue with a scientist about facts but you can't argue with a natural/organic person because they really don't have any concrete knowledge loaded into their brains to work with other than conspiracies they've read on the internet.
They really have a "Boy Who Cried Wolf" thing going on. What if glyphosate really is bad but the Natural-Conspiracy-Enthusiasts have just been so offensively misguided over the years that everything they say is taken by anyone with intelligence as being automatically wrong. I don't think it's constructive for them to have distanced themselves so far from rationality to the point where no one can take them seriously anymore.
What if the Natural/Organic weirdos really do have an important and correct concern to voice one day but years of nonsense will act as a miasmic wall which will prevent anyone from taking them seriously? They've crossed the Boy Cried Wolf line so long ago...what if one of their concerns actually does hold merit one day? There's no chance in hell anyone would take it seriously after the years and years of offensively misleading nonsense they promote.
I didn't watch baseball for like 10 years. From 2004 to 2014. When my team (Expos) moved I didn't watch it or follow it anymore. I play baseball sometimes for fun and stuff but I didn't follow it for a full decade.
The exhibition games in Montreal lately and the talk and the Cro and the mayor and everyone trying to get the team back has me following it again big time. It's different now than 10 years ago I can tell you that much. I can say WITH CERTAINTY from what I see that most if not all of the roids are gone....at least the whacky whacky hormone ones at least.
There's things in the baseball world I missed a lot...and now that there's some hope that my team might come back....I gotta follow it again. I like the Royals, I like the Mets....I like those pitching teams...I love how the Royals run the bags.
I miss this shit, man. I do.
I wanna talk some baseball, I really fucking do, I want to talk more about the science end of the game right now though instead of something funner. I've been reading shit's that getting me up into a jabroni of a tizzy lately, I must say. I want to rap loose about the Supination vs. Pronation debate...which is not very talked about...outside of hardcore mechanic circles.
I want to first define what Supination is and what Pronation is before we even get started because... if you follow this debate online the main search result is: "What is Pronation?" and we can't have a buck debate if most maw flippers don't even know the terms even.
I'm interested in this lately because Science is coming into the equation here and it's not looking pretty. I'm not happy with University people's "findings" and the articles being published in accredited academic journals at this point. All the S vs. P meta-data journal articles were done on CADAVERS (non-living bodies)...the findings are close to useless and absurd. I'm just gonna tell you straight up what the heck all this crap is. Okay?
Let's Define These Terms of Terms
Supination
What the heck is Supination? In pitching mechanic terms we gonna deal with arms so....Supination is the act of turning the arm out as you make your arm motion....you corkscrew your arm out pointing away from yourself. It is the act of turning it "Out" and that's basically it. It's not hard to understand what Supination is.
When I was a kid at grade school, kids used to impress each other and make each other flip by turning their hands back or I used to curdle my fingers into my hand sorta...we called it beng "Double-Jointed" but that was just nonsense talk. You CAN stretch like this...it's hard...you don't need "two-joints" but you can. The thing is...why would you want to?
Now, what is Pronation?
Pronation
Well if you're not OUT then you IN like Doug Flynn, no? Basically, yeah. Every human on earth who has arms...I'd say 99.9999% of humans with functioning arms....can turn their dumb arms In pretty much a billion times easier than they can turn their arms Out. This lady for instance can pronate to the point of the arm being upside down:
She's not "double jointed"
In like Flynn
She can do that because that's Humans base setting...we can turn In WAY MORE than we can turn Out. If she would have tried to go Upside Down with her arm by going Outwards she would have done an incredible amount of damage to her body. Turning In to go around is actually pretty easy. That's just the base setting of the Humanistic Body As Such...we can go In with our dumb arms but we can't go Out.
Try it right now...try to Upside Down your Arm by going In/Towards yourself and see how far you get...now try to Upside Down your Arm by going Out/Away from your body....which one was easier? Yeah if you're like any other person then In/Towards was way easier and you got farther.
That's just how our bodies are...it's plain fact. Plain as day. plain as rain. The Arm can go In way better than it can go Out. Get used to it.
What Does this Mean?
Many baseball pitches rely on Supinating the arm..an act which is not compatible with the human body. Coaches want the arm out and the hand back...both are unnatural motions to us...yet pitchers are expected to train the supination muscles in the arm to the point where they can endure throwing 100+ pitches every 4-7 days (plus training and warm up pitches). Many have trained these muscles to do that and it is downright an act of masochism.
Maybe they love the pain, I dunno. I've worked very hard jobs in my life...and I can attest that a body will develop a Love for Pain...and it feels good to deal with it and feel it and grow from it...but we have to factor in that injuries to pitchers and time spent on the disabled list is something that happens to almost every pitcher at some time in their life at this present time. Scouts, owners, coaches and the like get heart attacks when their gem of a young arm gets injured. Can pitchers who are impervious to injury be developed? Nope. Can you develop pitchers less likely to get devastating injuries? Yes.
The Scientists are getting into it and their findings so far have been jabroni-esque, I will say, many of their published findings are in the terrain of... "oh Pronation 'aint shit, baby" sort of angles...but like I said these articles being published have been on cadavers. They cut up dead arms to see how developed the S-Muscles and the P-Muscles were in dead dudes. It is data that I don't consider relevant.
Yes, as the cadaver data suggests, you can train Supination muscles to be wicked powerful and tough but you're still dealing with muscles that are not designed to do the task being assigned to them. If the dead arms had over-developed Soup muscles then good for them....it doesn't change the actual facts for living (non-dead) humans.
If you throw soup pitches for long periods of time you WILL damage your body... an incredible amount.... no matter how much you've trained those muscles. You cannot make dat funk da p-funk!
Let's Look at Two Pitches, Ok?
I'm gonna use the top Google search videos for the two popular pitches in question and then go from there....Okay?
A Supination Standard Curve Ball:
This man is teaching the 12-6 curve and he's telling kids not to "turn the door knob" too much (OUT) although the pitch is designed with the hand opening out on release...and even though he says kids shouldn't snap off and "turn the door knob" (why are door knobs designed for supination? good question)...that's how you sell this sucker...that's how you get the fuck spin off this shit...you turn the door knob on it...you SNAP OUT....you whip out and snap off OUTWARDS with the hand. This is a poorly designed pitch.
A Pronation Screw Ball (again the first how-to google result video I got, nothing fancy):
Haha, he uses the word Pronation in it. I couldn't have asked for two better videos and they just happened to be the top google search terms for "how to throw curve" and "how to throw screw."
When the screwball first came out, people hated it, it was such a break from the normal procedure that everyone thought it was so stupid...but it is designed for a HUMAN BODY and not some kind of backward ALIEN body.
It's not new to baseball....Carl Hubbell, Tug McGraw, Mike Marshall, and Fernando Valenzuela amongst others mastered it and had amazing careers. None of them had Tommy John to replace the supination muscles....in fact one of those names in the above sentence introduced Tommy John surgery to Tommy John (my homeboy Marshall). The Man of the Science Mike Marshall introduces the Baseball World to the Science World with that recommendation to Tommy John.
Semantics get in the way a bit too. Japanese pitchers love the screw ball but they refer to it as the "Shootoh" or the "Gommu Gommu No Shootoh Sanzen Sakai Hyakuhachi Poundo Ho." The Japanese LOVE the screwball and understand the science of it. Basically, "Shooto" is the name for "screw ball" in Japan. It's not, in any way/shape/form a different pitch.... it is literally the screw ball... so all the Japanese guys who throw the Shoot-Oh are screw ballers too. Watch Dice-K whip a "Gyro-Ball" which is another fancy fucking name for the screw ball:
From the 9 second mark to the 11 second mark you can see his hand go towards himself instead of away. It is 100% a beautiful pronation pitch that doesn't destroy his arm. Whether you call it a "shoot-oh" a "gyro-barrooh" or a "100 pound dying pheonix three styles succession of my ancestors pitch" it's still the pronation break pitch in physical terms.
That's the shit he threw in Japan but when he came here to the West...he had to become a standard Curve/Change/Fast/Slider pitcher.....and what did you ("you" as in those who paid him to come here) get out of it? Tommy John surgery, that's what. Let him throw two-seamers and shoot-ohs all day and he would have pitched for 10 more years for the Red Sox.
Dice, who I saw pitch as a Met at those Jays/Mets exhibtion games in Montreal live and in the flesh before they sent him to Vegas....he looked good but.. like a fish out of water, I knew something was wrong with my boy ...this Legend was okay from the age of 19-25 in the Nippon League but only lasted two full years in the American League? Why? They wanted to change his shit and they fucked up their investment. His two-seamer and shoot-oh/gyro/screwball (whatever you want to call it) combo would have lasted another decade before breaking down. Well, then again maybe he would have got homesick and went back....he's a human... when thinking in retrospect.... it's not all this "would've this and could've that business" ..though I'm sure his demotion to Las Vegas (the Macau of the West) wasn't all that of a terrible ordeal for him.
I remember, Irabu, he pitched for Montreal and probably had fun....but a as a Yankee he was tormented into suicide. He blew his head off, as my friend Hide the Ultra Bide told me. Homesick is a real disease...so I can't just say in regards to anyone "this would have been or that would have been" ..... Rest in Peace, Mr. Hideki Irabu, I saw you pitch in Montreal at Olympic Stadium live on three occasions... people think because I'm not religious that when people die it does not break my heart,, but, yeah, it does.
Sports and Science: The Universes Collide
I'm a Mister Inbetween when in comes to Sports colliding with Science. I love Science like shit and I love Baseball like crazy. I'm really a Mr. In Between when it comes to Soup versus Pro, g. In this collision of worlds...I'm like this:
Yeah, I mean...I understand the science types...they play with cadavers and dead bodies and pretend like they're smart....yet due to their non-hands-on experience they are maybe but mere jabronies. Oh wait, that song above is a little too old...I'm more modern-ish.... I'm more In Between like this kinda In Between.......
I am actually In Between. Baseball and Science are like literally my two favorite things and just like I can see why the Science World doesn't understand the Basball World... I can see why Baseball people don't like Sciencey-smart guys too. The good ole baseball boys have been doing their country-honed methods for a century and don't want any smarty pants g-units to tell them what they are doing wrong...but sadly they are doing a lot of things terribly wrong. They sit around and chew tobacco and pretend they are smart.... everyone in both worlds are sitting around just pretending they are smart... and never learning from one another.
Everyone pretends they are smart...but....when can both these worlds just Collide in Perfect Harmony? Can the things that are Right from the world of Science and the things that are Right from the World of Baseball just combine at some point and merge..and stop being perpetually In Between?
Conclusion
Pete Rose? Who cares, man. Honestly.
Mike Marshall is the black balled player who deserves to be a Hall of Famer. This guy deserves to have his name in the Hall of Fame....twice (for player and doctor).
Mr. In Between
Add-on Note ( Sept. 06/ 2015): I didn't find a good video of the slider the other day for one of those sections but here's a good explanation of the slider and the supination it requires to be effective:
Like Carlton and Gibson mastered...this pitch has a nasty break that moves horizontally from one end to the other....but it requires a GREAT DEAL of soup to throw it and has a high risk factor when it comes to arm damage.
I've been reading a lot about the concept of "Joke Theft" recently, it's a fairly interesting thing to think about.
I don't know if anyone's ever read the "Author's Info" or whatever in the Index Section of this blog-ee-oh-lee before but in that description of myself (which is mostly STOLEN verbatim from words Beetlejuice has said over the years)...I say something along the lines of "if you read something you like in this blog you can steal it if you want, I don't care" and then I stated a joke to finish that section off which went "If I was President I'd legalize stealing!" which is of course something I STOLE verbatim from a Rudy Ray Moore joke off of the album "Dolemite for President."
So yeah, I have an open attitude towards stealing of read-words by readers, or the stealing of heard-words by listeners, I'm not super offended by the whole idea of something I thought out and wrote being read and said/wrote by someone else. Why? Because that's what humans do.
I hope people understand by now that we evolved from monkeys and the saying "Monkey See - Monkey Do" really rings true for our kind. We learn from observing and we try things for ourselves through the act of mimicking things we've seen/heard/etc before. Stealing things we observe is literally what Humans do...that's the reason why we're the top species on earth is because we're really good at emulating and learning from each other.
There's no way around the stealing of "bits" or "jokes" or "concepts" or "ideas" because that's what we do. That's the cold hard facts.
Even though this isn't a popular publication I have goin' over here, have I ever been sorta angry when I've seen something I've wrote...100% verbatim....re-produced on some other medium...and sometimes on a BIG medium? Yeah, I guess. I mean, I do think some people rip stuff off from this shitty obscure blog from time to time and some are pretty fucking famous to be honest....but even then...there's this sort of feeling of "WOW, that person reads this shit!? Cool" that goes on too. I'd say, all in all, seeing my ideas absorbed and re-vomitted back through another brain isn't that offensive to me.
I will say this: IT IS IMPOSSIBLE NOT TO ABSORB THE CONCEPTS/IDEAS YOU EXPOSE YOURSELF TO.
If you grew up in the jungle away from any other humans and never learned to read/write and speak/understand any language then you'd be able to create without influence. Even then your creations would be based on things you've seen monkeys or wolves or something do in the wild. You'd make like bone-carvings out of animals you ate that look like trees or bugs you saw. Even a jungle-boy/jungle-girl, when you think about it, couldn't free themselves from outside influence.
What about a cave person? A child who grew up in a dark dark Patmos-style cave of some sort? You know, like a Poor Little Blind Girl, you know? A cave so dark she never learned to see, a cave so quiet that the poor girl never learned to hear? She eats mud and dirt and stuff. She knows "nothing about everything" but "everything about nothing"? Could she live an influence-free life? Yeah, maybe.
But us? Regular non-FacelessMay and non-N.Senada brand of humans? Can we live influence free lifestyles? NO! Us regulation non-cave-isolated humans have to abide by the laws of Monkey See and Monkey Do.....so get used to it.
If something works? We use it. If someone thinks up a good way to pick meat out of teeth, or get olives down from olive trees, or how to get from point a to point b faster....everyone will start doing it that way. Why? Because it's the best way to do it....and it works.
Look, I understand in the artistic world that intellectual property rights and identity exist and am not 100% for theft but I just want to show how hard it is not be a thief and many who accuse others of theft should think about how much shit they've stolen.
As a person who loves history, it's SUPER RARE that I can watch something and not say to myself...."oh that's like what whats-their-name does." A lot of things that "work" in show business are used for that reason...they work. You can get to the root of a lot of things that "work" and find out that these methods have been done for centuries.
Extreme Cases
I'd say I side with the defendant in about 70% of joke-theft cases. Due to the laws of Monkey See and Monkey Do...and knowing how hard it is not to be influenced by the world around you...I usually give the defendant leeway when reading about these cases and trying to form an opinion on it.
Sometimes, the case is so extreme that it's just ludicrous though. About 30% of theft cases are too effronterous to accept. I'm gonna throw out a few examples.
Jerry Lewis was A HUGE ACT back in the day and he had copy cats galore but none to the level of Sammy Petrillo who copied his voice, mannerisms, facial contorts, and hairstyle. Observe:
Petrillo, Bela Lugosi, and a Gorilla star in......oh boy.
I watched this movie the other day and it's actually pretty fucking good....but if I was Jerry Lewis....I'm sure I'd be fucking pissed that Petrillo is basically trying to pass himself off as being Jerry Lewis. It's not just a little theft here and little nip there....it's like ALL of his STUFF being ripped off.
Mitch
Another case that I find offensive was young comic Mitch Mullany (who I first saw as "White Mike" on Wayans Brothers). Mitch died in 2008 and then the very next year a guy showed up and did Mitch's act in clubs....WORD FOR WORD....and ACTION FOR ACTION. Literally stealing the whole thing under the pretense of "oh well, he's dead, he doesn't need this act anymore." Because of the untimely death of the 39 year old Mullany...this theft that I read about really stood out as being extreme and fucking stupid. It's the blatant disrespect for the young man's death.
Even though I'm usually okay with borrowing, learning, adapting, and outright stealing material....there's some extreme cases where obviously it went WAY too far.
Yet on the opposite end....
Accusers Actin' the Fool
For someone to claim theft they must first claim to own whatever was stolen...and I've seen over the years people claim ownership to things that have made me think...."Really? you OWN that? How?"
I heard aninterview once where, I think it was Jim Breuer, telling a story about how on SNL....the host was Matthew Perry and Perry was working on a bit with Norm MacDonald. Apparently, Perry wanted the bit to center around something he INVENTED called "Chandler-Speak" and Norm asked him what that was and after hearing Perry's explanation....witnesses claim Norm's response was....."Oh, you mean sarcasm?"
Yeah, it's pretty grandiose and...let's face it....retarded for Matthew Perry to claim to have invented sarcasm. That's beyond the pale. It really is beyond the pale.
Another one that got me scratching my head was a feud between Louis C.K. and Dane Cook. Now look, I know in comedy circles Dane Cook is like public enemy number one...but his target audience is a female audience and he works pretty well with that. I'm male (aged 25-35) and thus he's not my thing but I don't necessarily hate on the dude. I don't find him funny but I don't really dislike him as much as C.K., I mean with C.K.....this guy's bits are mostly penis-stuff, gross-out stuff, and other mundane shit that's standard fare....and yet somehow....Louis C.K. fans seem to think he invented penis jokes and things like that. I'm not sure a person can claim intellectual property patents on "My Ass Itches. Oh my god, my ass itches!" or "you're a penis-face!" or "I want to masturbate!" or "I wanna name my kid something funny!"
Naming your kid something funny? Wow that's original ass shit there Louis n' Dane. You both stole it.
Can you imagine a patent court setting and the plaintiff walks up and says..."Your honor, the defendant STOLE the concept of naming children funny names...and then had the nerve to talk about having an itchy butt!!"Yeah, okay there.
Speaking of Beavis and Butthead, Mike Judge once said people saying the words "[something] sucks" are ripping him off but I've seen that said in movies back in the 60s even. A good example that everyone's seen is GhostBusters where Bill Murray says something sucks a minimum of twice in the film. I like Mike Judge, and consider Beavis and Butthead to maybe be the greatest show of all time, but he did NOT invent the term of "[something] sucks." No way, Jose.
I can't find the clip from G-Bustas so here's him in Scrooged (circa 1988) using the term as well...
"Oh my gosh...does that suck."
The point of this section is....if someone is accusing someone of stealing then they are thus claiming ownership of a concept and claiming to literally OWN sarcasm, something sucking, itchy anuses, and other mundane things is pretty absurd to say the least.
It's naive too, I mean how can Perry for example really believe he invented sarcasm? What kind of an idiot can he be? Could he be any more of an idiot?
Rising to the Top
I don't want to hurt nobody's feelings or nothing, but it's safe to say that people at the top are not necessarily the most talented...but the most expert of thieves. Ninjas, even, if you will.
Word to the wise....just steal from more obscure sources and you should be safe from heat. Steal from weird-ass blogs, shit your co-workers say, guys from bars or the street...those are safe ass sources, g. No doubt.
I was watching that "Last Comic Standing" the other day and this Indian chick's opening joke was taken from the stupid "Epic Beard Man" video of that drunken maniac assaulting people on a bus. That video has been seen by millions of people....do you really think that's an obscure enough source to rob material from? Are you fucking stupid?
I watched an episode of a really shit Canadian show called "The Air Farce" once where they literally robbed a bit from SNL about Elton John almost 100% verbatim. Stealing from SNL is going to make a lot of people go..."wait a sec, I've seen this before...gimme a break." It's not a very hard to trace source.
You think the pros steal from things millions and millions of people are familiar with? NO! They get their "influences" from stuff maybe like 10-1000 people are familiar with...those 10-1000 people get mad that they recognize the bit-theft but there's still millions and millions of other viewers who don't get mad....those millions think it's wicked cool.
Conclusion
Basically, we have two choices....
A) Play off each other, learn from each other, share concepts with each other...and sadly...STEAL from each other.
or....
B) Live in a cave like N. Senada or that poor poor little blind girl from that Nomeansno song "Faceless May" and never be influenced by anything other than the feeling of cold on our sightless, audio-less, smell-less bodies.
I don't know 'bout you but I'm not going to live in some fucking cave. Fuck that shit.
(END NOTE:If everyone tries to have no influences all we'll have is surreal/absurdist comedy like the Williams Street people make. I like those shows but I wouldn't rank absurdist humor at the top of the list of comedy, to be honest. Wackiness can get old fast, the format is usually like 10 minute shows with the Williams cartoons. You can't work topical, or have a message with absurdist/surreal humor. Tim and Eric work over-the-top absurdist and it's original that's for sure but it wouldn't hurt them to have like a bit of structure. That "Bag Boy" of Steve Brule's show which had a story to it and thus some structure was one of the best things they've ever made, by far. To achieve super-originality through absurdity and nonsense is often really really funny and it's unlikely someone will say "I've seen that before" while watching it...but it's like abstract art a bit...it's just whacky shit everywhere with no rhythm or reason. )
(END NOTE 2: Conan is in the news for being sued for joke theft and the guy wants 600K, i don't know what value jokes have, I know Rodney and old timers paid the kids in the hall of clubs money for jokes, and I know Jackie Martling devised some joke-value system with Rodney that is not very scientific sounding ("I borrowed 1000 bucks from [Rodney] but I paid it back in JOKES").
That guy suing Conan, I don't know how someone can put something into the public sphere for everyone to absorb and then want 600K from people. If you wanted that joke to be TOP SECRET...THEN DON'T FUCKING TWEET IT, FUCK! If it's secret data worth 600K to you then why put it in the public for EVERYONE to see? Why not keep that six hundred thousand dollars worth of jokes under lock and key at the bottom of the sea...where no one can take it from you? Also that dude "Fat Jew" guy is getting hype from joke theft, there's so much buzz around him and I'm pretty sure he paid for the buzz. Why everyone is helping him get buzz by talking about him endlessly is beyond me. They don't like him but they are giving him all the attention humanly possible.)
(Amendment: I re-found and re-read that datum where Mike Judge claims to have invented stuff sucking...and it seems to maybe be a joke. I'm unsure but decide for yourself: (John K. interviews Mike J.)
Election season is in full swing up here in the "coolest" (literally the coldest) nation on earth....Canada.
The leaders are debating the big issues on the television screens, such as their official stances on "TV Shows" and "Movies" and other fascinating topics....
Golly gee whiz....I love TV Shows too!
This is what we get in Canada, so all you people hating on Trump down there in the states....try and imagine how Howdy Doody our election is. You Americans should be grateful for the entertainment value and debates surrounding your elections. You don't want what we have, we have people with the intelligence of five years olds debating each other up over here.
"Golly gee...Do you love TV Shows Mr. Prime Minister of Canada?" "Well howdidly doodidly ms. Reporter, oh yes, I most certainly do love Movies and TV Shows. Thanks you kindly for asking me that."
I would love to have the media circus of an American election in Canada, believe me, your shit is so much better than our shit...so don't take it for granted. Believe me, you'll miss the circus if it ever leaves town, even though you don't appreciate it now.
If one day the media circus surrounding the American election disappeared and was replaced with Trump telling you what his favorite kind of jam is and how much he loves going ice skating on the lake up near his house...believe you me....you'll be angry. You'll wonder why the circus left town and was replaced with this boring obnoxious drivel.
The thing that gets my goat the most about the lame-wad Canadian election is that people get on my case for not taking this boring garbage seriously. I've never voted in my life, when I turned 18 I felt like I should vote but when I did go to vote I'd end up writing in old Expos baseball players on the ballot when I got to the booth because I didn't know what else to do.
When I tell people that I don't vote, especially old folks, they tend to get bent out of shape over that. They look at me like I'm some sort of social pariah with no brains for not caring about Canada's lame-wad political farce. I'm not even a "young voter" anymore and don't vote so it's like a double-faux-pas apparently, but I'm a chronic non-voter and I doubt anything will ever change that.
Alrighty so, I'm gonna harness the power of statistics in this opinion piece to try and show why the fuck I don't need to give a fuck about these dumbass leckshuns at all.
Young Canadians...Does your vote even Matter?
Ok, first off we need to look at Canada's age demographics before we talk about anything else. This next link shows out of the 35.5 million dudes/chick/n' trannies that live in golly-gee jolly-gosh Canada what age group they are:
Young voters I will classify as being 18 to 30. Let's take a nice round number like 7 million to quantify "young voters" okay?
Now how many "old voters" are there? People from 31 to Soylent Green years old? Let's round it to a nice number like around 22 million.
Let's say 29 million people are voting age in Canada and young voters are 7 million of them. How is that on a pie graph? Let's take a look-see:
Beauty graph eh?
Now, it seems Young Jabronies are a pretty small piece of the votin' pie. It looks like Soylent Greeners are actually a big green Pac-Man like creature that is devouring Young Jabronies according to the data.
If you aren't familiar with statistics and sample-size and things like that... this might not have an effect on your young mind. I don't want be bursting bubbles up in here but this data is suffice to say that for every 1 vote the young people demo have...oldoes have 3 votes.
Soylent Greeners have 3x more voting power than Young Jabronies do.
Speaking in realistic terms, young voters are a niche market that's barely even worth catering to for someone trying to win an election. From a strategic standpoint that's the reason why the Red Party (Liberals) have sunk down to third place in the polls. They are trying to get young voters to vote for them and young voters is a niche market not even worth investing any time in to try and cajole.
When Justin Bieber or Justin Timberlake or Justin Trudeau or whatever the fuck his name is...goes on TV and talks about smokin' blunts and takes his shirt off to do boxing promos...all it does is turn off almost 75% of voters in order to cajole less than 25% of voters. It's a horrible strategy, whoever the Liberal strategist is...that person should be let go and fast.
From the data we can clearly see that Young People's voting power is not enough for anyone to take seriously and thus when Young Jabronies pretend they are important it's just annoying and dumb.
A Four Hundred Million Dollar Boring-Ass Dog and Pony Show
Next off, let's rap loose a little bit about money. This election as everyone knows is the most boring, howdy-doody, offensively condescending, loser-filled, freak fest LOAD OF NONSENSE on the face of the planet that no one with half a brain would pay any interest in...
....and yet...
Experts and members of Elections Canada predict this election will cost tax payers 400 million at the least. Now, American readers have to remember that Canada isn't a big deal like the states is and maybe that number doesn't seem large but if we look at population and GDP, we can see that Canada is such a miniscule region that this amount of money is a pretty large sum.
USA Population: 320 million
Canada Population: 35 million
USA GDP: 17 trillion
Canada GDP: 2 trillion
Canada is not a big Juggernaut of a nation by any stretch of the word yet its Elections cost their citizens 400 million dollars each time they engage in these shenanigans. It's not big enough of a Country to have such a long and circus-esque election season.
On top of it all, the 400 million price-tagged show payed by tax payers... IS NOT EVEN ENTERTAINING AT ALL! It's lamer than fuck. It's more boring than shit. It's something only the most mentally-neglected loser could find entertainment value in. It's atrociously boring.
It's an atrociously boring 400 million dollar rinky-dinkin' Dog an Pony show that tax payers have to pay for. It's offensive by all accounts.
Conclusion
Look Young Jabronies of Canada, for you people to invest even one iota of care into these election proceedings is a gigantic mis-use of your time. For every second of care you're currently investing into politics...please take that time and invest into learning a skill, learning a trade, advancing your understanding of mathematics, read a book, write a book, go visit your grandma in the hospital or old folks home, join a rock and roll band, write a rap, preform some rap, learn how cook, etc. etc. etc.
Basically anything you do with your time, Young People, is better than wasting your time caring about politics and this lamewad of an election. There's serious problems in the world today, you can change things. You can become inventors and tech experts. You can become doctors. You can volunteer and feed the hungry n' thirsty kids of the world. You can do shit that actually isn't stupid. Your time has value.
For a young person to convince themselves to care about politics is the corruption of a young brain. It is the waste of a young person's brain power and its time here on earth...it really fucking is. If any Soylent Greener calls you dumb or uneducated or socially unresponsible because you don't vote...next time...tell that Soylent Greener to go take a bath because they smell like an old person and are disgusting.
And, as for Americans angry over the media circus of their elections and wanting it to be toned down. Be careful what you wish for, guys. Be careful what you wish for. Put yourselves in a Canadian's boots and just try to picture for one second the topics our 400 million dollar freak show covers....
"Mr. Leader what is your favorite kind of Tim Horton's Donut?"
"Honorable Member of Parliament...what kind of ice cream do you like?"
"Prime Minsiter of Canada...what color in the Smarties box tastes the best in your opinion?"
"What is your official stance on Movies and TV Shows?"
If you Americans had to be in our boots for even 5 seconds of this you'd literally kill yourselves. You wouldn't be able to handle this level of howdy doody, you wouldn't. Believe you me....you'd go crazy having to listen to this shit, man. No joke.
End Note: I think the template media-character the Canadian politicians go with is the "innocent retarded child" character. Good examples of this are Andy Merrill's "Brak" character or John C. Reilly's "Steve Brule" character. It's un-comprehensible to me how Canadian politicians go with this as their default image. Apparently the minds of Canadians is comparable to a mind of a 4 year old if these are the personas our politicians think we will relate to.
I was listening to a Jesuit on the Neil Tyson show the other day, that show does some pretty interesting segments sometimes, for sure. One part of that Jesuit show that was interesting was the priest talking about how Einstein often used the word "God" and Tyson tried to explain to the priest that science's concept of "God" is not what you think it is.
This essay will use three instances of popularizers of science and try to further explain what Tyson was trying to explain to the priest. The popularizers of modern science will be A) Buck Fuller, B) Carl Sagan, and C) Albert Einstein.
We'll do Einstein last to talk about his definition of "God" after the other two popularizers are explained to help delve into what Einstein's concept of "God" was.
Alright so first my boy Fulla...
Buck Fuller on "God"
I've read most of what Buck's written and there's a lot to work with in using his texts to try and explain how people of science view the concept of God, but, one clear-cut easy to work with example is Buck's re-writing or "re-thinking" rather of the "Lord's Prayer" which was composed in 1979 and reads as follows:
To be satisfactory to science all definitions must be stated in terms of experience
I define Universe as all of humanity’s in-all-known-time consciously apprehended and communicated (to self or others) experiences.
In using the word, God, I am consciously employing four clearly differentiated from one another experience-engendered thoughts.
Firstly I mean: —
Those experience-engendered thoughts which are predicted upon past successions of unexpected, human discoveries of mathematically incisive, physically demonstrable answers to what theretofore had been misassumed to be forever unanswerable cosmic magnitude questions wherefore I now assume it to be scientifically manifest, and therefore experientially reasonable that
scientifically explainable answers may and probably will eventually be given to all questions as engendered in all human thoughts by the sum total of all human experiences; wherefore my first meaning for God is: —
all the experientially explained or explainable answers to all questions of all time —
Secondly I mean: — The individual’s memory of many surprising moments of dawning comprehensions of an interrelated significance to be existent amongst a number of what had previously seemed to be entirely uninterrelated experiences all of which remembered experiences engender the reasonable assumption of the possible existence of a total comprehension of the integrated significance — the meaning — of all experiences.
Thirdly, I mean:– the only intellectually discoverable a priori, intellectual integrity indisputably manifest as the only mathematically statable family of generalized principles — cosmic laws– thus far discovered and codified and ever physically redemonstrable by scientists to be not only unfailingly operative but to be in eternal omni-interconsiderate, omni-interaccommodative governance of the complex of everyday, naked-eye experiences as well as of the multi-millions-fold greater range of only instrumentally explored infra- and ultra-tunable micro and macro-Universe events.
Fourthly, I mean: — All the mystery inherent in all human experience, which as a lifetime ratioed to eternity, is individually limited to almost negligible twixt sleepings, glimpses of only a few local episodes of one of the infinite myriads of concurrently and overlappingly operative sum-totally never-ending cosmic scenario serials
With these four meanings I now directly address God.
“Our God — Since omni-experience is your identity You have given us overwhelming manifest: — of Your complete knowledge of Your complete comprehension of Your complete concern of Your complete coordination of Your complete responsibility of Your complete capability to cope in absolute wisdom and effectiveness with all problems and events and of Your eternally unfailing reliability so to do
Yours, Dear God, is the only and complete glory.
By Glory I mean the synergetic totality of all physical and metaphysical radiation and of all physical and metaphysical gravity of finite but nonunitarily conceptual scenario Universe in whose synergetic totality the a priori energy potential of both radiation and gravity are initially equal but whose respective behavioral patterns are such that radiation’s entropic, redundant disintegratings is always less effective than gravity’s nonredundant syntropic integrating
Radiation is plural and differentiable, radiation is focusable, beamable, and self-sinusing, it is interceptible, separatist, and biasable — ergo, has shadowed voids and vulnerabilities;
Gravity is unit and undifferentiable Gravity is comprehensive inclusively embracing and permeative is nonfocusable and shadowless, and is omni-integrative all of which characteristics of love. Love is metaphysical gravity.
You, Dear God, are the totally loving intellect ever designing and ever daring to test and thereby irrefutably proving to the uncompromising satisfaction of Your own comprehensive and incisive knowledge of the absolute truth that Your generalized principles adequately accommodate any and all special case developments, involvements, and side effects; wherefore Your absolutely courageous
omnirigorous and ruthless self-testing alone can and does absolutely guarantee total conservation of the integrity of eternally regenerative Universe
Your eternally regenerative scenario Universe is the minimum complex of totally intercomplementary totally intertransforming nonsimultaneous, differently frequenced and differently enduring feedback closures of a finite but nonunitarily nonsimultaneously conceptual system in which naught is created and naught is lost and all occurs in optimum efficiency.
Total accountability and total feedback constitute the minimum and only perpetual motion system. Universe is the one and only eternally regenerative system.
To accomplish Your regenerative integrity You give Yourself the responsibility of eternal, absolutely continuous, tirelessly vigilant wisdom.
Wherefore we have absolute faith and trust in You, and we worship You awe-inspiredly, all-thankfully, rejoicingly, lovingly, Amen. (Buck)
Here in this prayer he is in total "Synergetics" mode which is kind of like some super-autistic language he made up. In English, Buck is basically saying that the concept of "God" is a direct synonym to the word "Universe". Everything that exists and can be understood by humans is defined as our Universe and our Universe is our God. Buck, just like Nelson Dwight Sickels, never put the word "the" in front of Universe...to him that was a form of blasphemy. It is "Universe" not "The Universe"...just like a religious person wouldn't say "The God" like "I'm praying to The God today" they would just say "I'm praying to God". Similarly with Buck, who believes Universe IS God, he never referred to Universe as "The Universe."
This, I think, is a good intro into understanding how people who deal with science view the concept of "God" and even though Buck mentions God in his prayer....he is not invoking the same concept as a religious person is when they use that term. God to Buck is simply Universe....nothing more and nothing less. God to him is "a series of integral truths which are a combined plurality of generalized principles."
Carl Sagan on how Spiritual this "Universe" is
Ok, so in trying to explain this rational yet spiritual view of "God" we are going to continue on with the definition of "Universe" to be a synonym of "God." If Universe is deified to represent "God" can people thus have spiritual experiences from this plurality of integral truths known as Universe?
Sagan has a book, I think it was a post-humous printing of talks he gave, which is called Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God.
Since this essay is trying to show that Universe can be spiritual in itself this book is a good place to go to next. The topic of spirituality derived from the beauty of the "Cosmos," on the radio show the other day where Neil Tyson debates a Jesuit priest he does cover this. At one point Tyson stated that while looking off a tall mountain and seeing the world under you and the clouds under you....a person can feel this sense of awe inspiring emotion from the beauty of the world. The beauty of Universe itself can surely be a spiritual experience in and of itself without the need for deities. A guest on the radio show was also Richard Dawkins, a evolutionary biologist, who once described Sagan's book Varieties of Scientific Experience as....
"Was Carl Sagan a religious man? He was so much more. He left behind the petty, parochial, medieval world of the conventionally religious, left the theologains, priests, and mullahs wallowing in their small-minded spiritual poverty. He left them behind, because he had so much more to be religious about. They have their Bronze-Age myths, medieval superstitions and childish wishful thinking. He had the Universe." -Dawkins
First off, I don't know why he refers to Universe as "the" Universe...it looks really odd that "the" there. What he's saying makes sense though. I mean why when you're looking off a mountain enjoying how awesome your world is should you need to thank some voodoo "god" or stone-age deity for it? Why can't you just enjoy it? Not only enjoy it but let it invoke a sense of wonder about it that urges you to study it and understand it?
Who needs those "Bronze-Age" myths and texts anyway? There's parts of those books that are not very uplifting for today's society. A good chunk of the christ book is on how to properly punish sinners that's rife with eye plucking and terrible terrible burning, there's parts of the muslim book on what's the proper procedure for having relations with a child slave, there's parts of the jew book about what a jew isn't allowed to do and what you need to force "goyim sub-humans" to do that stuff for you. These old religious texts are ATROCIOUS and FUCKED UP. They don't instill a sense of wonder or awe in me....the bible, talmud, quran, etc. are super-duper depressing! I wouldn't allow children to read these books....they are 100 times worse than today's most violent movies and video games.
Not to burst your bubble but people like Carl Sagan and Neil Tyson are MORE religious than conventional religious people. These Bronze-Age myths aren't edifying or awe-inspiring in the least...there's nothing spiritual about them. They are just offensive and gross. Sagan and Tyson and others, can enjoy the beauty of Universe without the bull-doo-doo that goes with organized religion.
Since we're laying out the quotes hard up in here...we'll throw down a Sagan one too:
In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind. - Sagan
Science is all of humans' combined understanding of the "Cosmos" (which thanks to Tyson has become a popular word again.) Science is thus a "meta-mind", an all encompassing log of all humans' opinions/thoughts/feelings/generalizations/principles over all of trans-generational time.
"Cosmos" is a pretty good synonym for God too. I'm not so crazy about "Nature" anymore because over the last decade that word has been bastardized and ruined by the "organic food" and "organic medicine" people. "Natural" is quickly becoming a word solely used by jabronies in modern times so "Nature" with no "the" isn't a good go-to word for "God" these days.
Cosmos is written with a "the" so it can't be the best replacement word for "God"....it seems "Universe" with no "the" is still the coolest word at this point, I think.
Einstein and his Concept of "God"
So, coming back around to the main point, where the priest on the Tyson show claimed Einstein believes in God and Einstein is like the smartest guy so therefore smart people believe in God. As we can see from the previous two popularizers of science/rationality it is unlikely that this claim is gonna hold true. Einstein's concept of "God" is much more like Buck's concept of "Universe" and Sagan's concept of the "Cosmos."
Here is Einstein on religion:
"Scientists believe that every occurrence, including the affairs of human beings, is due to the laws of nature. Therefore a scientist cannot be inclined to believe that the course of events can be influenced by prayer, that is, by a supernaturally manifested wish.
However, we must concede that our actual knowledge of these forces is imperfect, so that in the end the belief in the existence of a final, ultimate spirit rests on a kind of faith. Such belief remains widespread even with the current achievements in science.
But also, everyone who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that some spirit is manifest in the laws of the universe, one that is vastly superior to that of man. In this way the pursuit of science leads to a religious feeling of a special sort, which is surely quite different from the religiosity of someone more naive."
-Einstein
From these words it's not hard to deduce that yes he was a religious guy and did believe in "God" yet after reading Fuller's concept of "God" and Sagan's concept of "God" can you maybe begin to suspect that Einstein is more in that area as well?
The final statement is him saying that, yes, he is religious but not in the "naive" sense of reading the bible/quran/talmud and praying to voodoo gods in the sky for a plentiful harvest this year or to make it rain. His belief in "God" is of a "special sort" which is based on the "laws of nature."
His view of God is an amalgamation of the laws of nature....the combination of all generalized principles in Universe and the trans-generational meta-data of the Cosmos....nothing more and nothing less. Yes he uses the word "God" but that doesn't mean he thought he's going to "Heaven" when he dies or that he can ask a magic man in the sky to give him a thousand bucks if he thinks really hard to him...no....he believes "God" is a set of natural laws.
Conclusion
The views of rational thinkers on religion and spirituality is not that much different than that of non-rational thinkers. Rational dudes/chicks just cut away the bull crap to get to the good part.
It's like chipping away at a rock until you are left with the diamond stuck in the center. Rational thinkers cut away all the silly crap associated with spiritualness....they cut away all the silly passages from books written two thousand years ago about floods n' slaves n' castration n' flying human-faced donkeys who kill entire armies of infidels...they throw ALL that GARBAGE away and focus on the meaty part of spirituality....the ever-invoking awe and wonder of the cool-cool world around us.
They find comfort in how cool the Natural Laws are that govern the Cosmos of our Scenario called Universe. You know what I mean?
End note: I'm not always sure Carl Sagan was that less naive than conventional religous-types as Dawkins was saying. With Sagan's alien bull-doo-doo, he did believe that there was a force "out there somewhere" that we can talk to and entrust our hopes and dreams to and this force in space would end up being our salvation.
His views on finding Aliens with radio signals really is a conventional religious experience, no doubt. The yearning for science people like Sagan, Hawking, SETI Institute and others to search for these "aliens" is definitely a replacement for religion for them. Sagan recorded messages for these Aliens which, I dunno 'bout you, but listening to them...it pretty much sounds like he's "praying" to these alien deities "out there." The alien stuff might be a very conventional religion for the non-religious types to use as a replacement for their discarded religions.
The other week I experimented with a form of writing called "Screen Play Ritin'" and it was fun. It was a projected-film called "The Rick Cerone Story".
Punchin' up scripts is pretty fun, I must say. I'm gonna try another one, this next movie I've been thinking about lately is called "The Diarrhea Tree."
I can't think about this movie at work or in public because I start to laugh and people think I'm weird because I laugh for no reason. I only think about this movie while I'm at home, usually.
Since I'm gonna try and shop this script to movie houses to try and get it optioned, I won't be putting the whole script in here, just a synopsis, a brief a character list, and a few choice dialogue samples.
The Diarrhea Tree
This movie will have a point, it won't just be literally about a diarrhea tree. There's three points/messages that will be not-secret but two of the main points of this film will be left to the viewer to devise themselves.
Brief List:
Main Character: Dr. Delphinius Lorimar (phd) Villain:The Diarrhea Tree Other Characters: Art faction, Religious faction, Hippie faction, other factions.
Main Themes: Don't Judge a Book by Its Cover, Aesthetic Values are Over-Rated, Science is Good, and two secret themes which won't be divulged. Secondary Themes: Toilet Humor, Swearing
Setting: Earth in the Modern Times
Synopsis: One day a beautiful tree grows to be big, strong, and picture-esque-ingly beautiful. It is described by any who see it as "The Most Majestic Tree of All Time."
It is by all standards the most largest and by far most beautiful tree that has ever blossomed on earth. Long oak trunk, gorgeous multi-color leaves, various fruits and flowers bloom from its branches....it is the most incredible tree by a far and wide margin.
People come from all around the world to partake in gazing upon its majestic beauty with their humble eyes. It brings about feelings of euphoria by simply looking at this wondrous tree. It's so beautiful, my gosh.
People start to write poems about its beauty...and scholars attempt to understand the Tree. Everyone seems to have a different theory as to where it came from, what it means/represents, and what its purpose on this planet is. All sorts of factions of humans develop theories on the origins and importance of the Tree.
The religious community sees it as a gift from God, a bountiful Tree sent to earth by God to nourish and feed God's children.
The artistic community views its aesthetic qualities as being the greatest work of art of all time, they gush and rave about the aesthetic virtues of the Tree.
The Hippie community views the Tree as "Mother Earth" herself...the protector of all Earth...they name it "Yggdrasil" and vow to protect this Tree for it is their God.
Yet one man simply cannot wrap his head around how everyone is losin' their shit over this one dumb ol' tree. This man is Doctor Delphinius Lorimar....a man of the science. He takes it upon himself to study this natural wonder and what he finds is a shock to both himself and the audience....
...the Tree is a god damn Diarrhea Tree!
The tree consumes the fruit it produces and also consumes small animals who nest/habitat in it. The inside of the tree is a biological intestine which converts what it consumes into....the most pungent and horrific waste by-product ever seen/smelt. The Tree is infinitely growing, consuming, and shitting TONS and GALLONS of dairrhea into the earth under it. An underground RIVER of DIARRHEA is brewing and roiling in the depths of the earth as the roots of the Tree pour diarrhea deep into the earth's crust....turning planet earth into some sort of giant septic tank.
Delphinius Lorimar predicts that if the gigantic Tree continues to grow, consume, and shit at this rate...It will drown the earth in a deluge of Diarrhea. Raging torrents of shit covering the entire earth and drowning all human and animal life. Not even fish will survive the Diarrhea Deluge...all life except for stupid bugs and e-coli will DIE.
Our hero tries to warn the world leaders and all the factions... he implores them to destroy the Tree but it is viewed as a symbol of hope and comfort by all of the humans of earth by this point. Delphinius Lorimar is the only man who has a negative view of the Diarrhea Tree....and thus....is sentenced to life in prison.
There are two possible endings to this film:
A) When the Diarrhea Deluge occurs, the world leaders of all the factions come to Lorimar's cell and beg him to stop the shit flood....but Delphinius is adamant about letting humanity reap what it deserves. Their stupidity and love of aesthetic values will be the death of all humans...and for locking him up in that cold cell...Lorimar is happy to watch all of life (including himself) perish. I call this "The I Told You So" ending.
B) All the world faction leaders come to Delphinius Lorimar's cell and implore him to stop the Diarrhea Deluge caused by the Tree....and he busts out of the cell....grabs a rocket launcher and single handedly destroys that god damned fucking Diarrhea Tree ONCE AND FOR ALL!!!!! I call this the "Bad Ass Ending".
Delphinius Lorimar
If we go with the crappier I Told You So ending I think some straight-laced guy should play this role, like a William Hurt or a Ray Walston-type would be good....someone like that.
Dr. Delphinius Lorimar
If we go with the much cooler Bad Ass ending...then the person best suited to play Delphinius Lorimar is Terry Crews....he'd make a great Diarrhea Tree Killing Machine.
I doubt this film will ever get optioned and made by someone...but I actually think Terry Crews would get the Oscar for this role. I know it sounds weird and stupid...but it's actually a very deep and symbolic film.
Note: Since the two names of this character aren't standard first or last names they can be reciprocated if need be. The character could be called Dr. Lorimar Delphinius as well...which ever one sounds better, really.
Sample Dialogue
-Sample 1: This scene is Lorimar trying to convince one of the factions, the hippie faction, that this tree is gross and stupid...
Dr. Delphinius Lorimar: That Tree 'aint no GOD! That's a mother fucking DIARRHEA TREE, BITCH! Soleil Moon-Wagon: Excuse me? Don't talk about me or Yggdrasil in that fashion...it is a hate crime. Dr. Delphinius Lorimar: You wanna know what a real hate-crime is? Soleil Moon-Wagon: What? Dr. Delphinius Lorimar: An unquenchable roaring storm of diarrhea raining down on the earth! Soleil Moon-Wagon: This is making me sick! Go away you vulgar man! Dr. Delphinius Lorimar: Damn it! All our lives depend on DESTROYING THAT MUTHA FUCKING DIARRHEA TREEEEEE! Soleil Moon-Wagon: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
-Sample 2:
In this sample scene, the leader of the religious faction comes to tell the tree that Delphinius has been sentenced to life in prison for hatin' on the tree. Yet the jokes on him as he takes a fruit and eats it....
Reverend Wilson Brand: Oh bountiful gift from god...I have come to inform you that the horrible man who blashpemed against you has finally been silenced. His hateful words will no longer spoil your majestic reverence...oh tree of trees. Tree: ..... Reverend Wilson Brand: You giveth us this day, our daily bread. We thank God for giving you to us. Your fruit....your nourishment. You are truly a saving grace, tree. Tree: .... Reverend Wilson Brand: I feel silly talking to a tree....yet I know you are a message from God, and I know through you....tree...God can hear my prayers for the dead and for the living. Tree: .... Reverend Wilson Brand: Grace be to you...please God, let me taste your bountiful goodness. Let your sheep, your child, taste the fruit of your benevolent love, my Lord. Tree: .... Reverend Wilson Brand (takes apple): Such perfect red hue on this apple, Oh lord. Your creations are perfection. Thanks be to thee. Let me take a bite of your benevolent and reverent sustenance. Tree: ... Reverend Wilson Brand (bites apple): GRRrrrhgrhrghrgrhgrhr. Pew, pew! YUCK! This apple! This apple.....this apple..... Tree: ....
Reverend Wilson Brand: THIS APPLE TASTES LIKE SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII-IT!
-Sample 3: This is a short dialogue from the Bad Ass Ending where Terry Crews....I mean Delphinius Lorimar is let out of his prison cell at last.
Dr. Delphinius Lorimar: Well, well, well...if it isn't the President himself. Come to laugh and ridicule me as I rot in this cell?
President Archibald Amsterdam: No Doctor, we need you.
Dr. Delphinius Lorimar: Need me? Lemme guess...that son-of-a-bitch Diarrhea Tree is diarrhea-ing all over your fucking place isn't it?
President Archibald Amsterdam: .....................Yes.
Dr. Delphinius Lorimar: HAHAHA! Now gimme one good reason why I should help you bitch ass pieces of garbage after all y'all mother fucking bitch ass fuckers locked me up in here AND THREW AWAY THE KEY!!!
President Archibald Amsterdam: Please Doc, I'm sorry, we were wrong to shun you....you were right....right about everything...the floods of Diarrhea...the rains and rains of unending Diarrhea....Diarrhea is.....everywhere.
Dr. Delphinius Lorimar: Good! YOU ALL DESERVE IT! YOU ALL DESERVE TO DROWN IN THAT DIARRHEA YOU DUMB FUCKING ASSHOLES!
President Archibald Amsterdam: Doc, I know we doubted you and laughed at you....and even put you in prison for blasphemy against the Tree....but we were wrong...that thing is nothing but a god forsaken Diarrhea hemorrhaging shit tree. You're the only one who knows the biology of that Diarrhea Tree....you're the only one who can stop it.
Dr. Delphinius Lorimar: Get me my rocket launcher.....before I slap you in your stupid mouth. I gotta Diarrhea Tree to take out and a Death Wish, Mr. President.
President Archibald Amsterdam: Del, thank you.
Conclusion
After thoroughly weakening that no-good Diarrhea Tree with an array of deadly missiles from his rocket launcher, Delphinius is shocked to see it still standing. With his last bit of strength after giving it his all to destroy that piece of shit Tree....he grabs it by the trunk, and similar to Lu Da in Outlaws of the Marsh when Lu uproots the willow tree....Delphinius uproots the Diarrhea Tree and TEARS IT OUT FROM THE GROUND SCREAMING AND CURSING AS HE THROWS IT LIKE A CABER TOSS!!!!!!!!!!
....The world is saved. See you in hell you fucking Diarrhea Tree!
