Welcome to the back end of the wild world that is Lot 49. If you don't feel like reading my summary, which is very long even I still think it too short to do this madness justice, feel free to jump to the questions at the bottom. But if you need a refresher, then I'd recommend you kick back, throw on some California-appropriate music, and join me and Oedipa Maas as we disassociate our way through the glittery circuitry along the Pacific Coast.

Chapter 5

“Though her next move should have been to contact Randolph Driblette” Oedipa kicks off chapter 5 on a trek back up to Berkeley, seeking out Lectern Press and hopefully some more info on Trystero and Warfinger, and have a nightmare about looking in a mirror and a better dream about sex with Mucho on a beach somewhere all in a hotel also housing a gather of deaf-mute people along the way.

The copy of the play she does get a hold of only opens up further questions, replacing “Who’s once been set his tryst with Trystero” with “Who once has crossed the lusts of Angelo,” while also referencing further variations of the play than Oedipa had believed. To make matters more complicated, Emory Bortz, who edited the copy of the play Oedipa has just discovered is no longer at Berkeley, but now lives in San Narisco, “Of course.” Not that, at least for us, the trek to the University of California, Berkeley has become a total loss. While there, Oedipa reflects on how much things have changed from that other world of the 1950s. How college students no longer bask in bland retreat among the simple grounds of terrestrial power structures. Now everything is more complicated, the tunnels beneath the ivory towers are twisted and winding, and there’s a new energy—the kind of energy that can collapse a state.

After the university Oedipa finds herself at the apartment of John Nefastis, builder of a real version of Maxwell’s Demon, through which a “sensitive” (should they be real) and the Demon (should it be real), will seize on the coincidence of thermodynamic and informational entropy to communicate in order to manipulate particles such that it will allow them to flow through the Demon machine against the demands of heat decay. As with Oedipa, the physics of it all is honestly beyond me. The important thing is that it does not seem to work, or if it does, Oedipa cannot be sure. So she leaves, after warding off Nefastis’ sexual advances.

Oedipa heads into San Francisco, gets pulled into a gay bar by a group of tourists

He seems to be really controversial. I have read a few of his books

Misquoting Jesus

Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics

And I really like him personally. Wanted to know if he is reliable or not.

Background: Several years ago, I got interested in the JFK assassination, and I did a little studying. I joined a forum to banter back-and-forth a little, watched a few videos, and delved into huge portions of the source documents, commentaries, and research.

After reading a recent book, I engaged with the modern author about some issues I wanted to discuss, and I even got two older authors involved, the names of which most JFK researchers would recognize. These questions, and my research, is still located on my website under the title, "The National Archives Switches Shells in Midstream 11-22-2016." I maintained a little bit of hope that the National Archives would fix some of these glaring issues and keep JFK physical evidence in better condition.

(I'm not here to promote that. I want to move forward with more research.)

My Research: Coincident with that research about the shells and shortly thereafter, I accidentally stumbled across something unusual: there is one aspect of the Zapruder film that has never had any serious research, and I was able to quickly determine that the film appears to be authentic. By "quickly," I mean that it took me less than a week or so to produce the basic research for about half of the film. It's somewhat tedious, but can be performed by your average Joe/Josephine with some teaching aids and some prodding.

It takes a bit of some subjective determination, but large swaths of it can be done objectively. That means that if I published my research, it's very likely that another person conducting similar research would agree with it in over 90% of it, perhaps 98%. In other words, it is reproducible. If I go back to my 2016-2017 raw data, I should get most of the same results today. Furthermore, a quick look at some of the collated results showed me that the raw data looks consistent and valuable.

Tentative analysis: I believe that my research will lead people to conclude that the Zapruder film, at least in respect to the data I have produced, is authentic. It doesn't authenticate the entirety of the film, because as we all know, there's definitely a chance that alterations occurred in particular frames and in particular spots (which would not necessarily be discovered by my method). My research leaves alone manipulative things like airbrushing, matting, and frame-cutting. Such things are up to other researchers to analyze. (I should mention that my research doesn't necessarily point to authenticity, and ca

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The topic we’re going to cover today is one that I’m passionate about, and that’s personal study: study of the scriptures, study of Church history, study of the prophets, and study of the Gospel. Many if not all of the prophets of the Restoration have encouraged us to do our own studying in addition to the lessons we receive in Sunday School, Seminary, or Institute.

At church the goal is to learn to the doctrine. Some history gets thrown in, particularly when we’re talking about the Doctrine and Covenants, but for the most part that isn’t the focus of our lessons. That’s something we’re meant to study on our own time. We’ll skim through the scripture verses we were meant to read that week, and we’ll go over some words of modern prophets that align with those scripture verses, but we don’t really dive in very deeply to most of the topics we cover each year because there are just so many. Many teachers only have time to hit the most important points and skim over the rest.

That’s why personal study is so important. If you’re not doing that, if you’re not making the effort to study the church you belong to and its history and doctrine, then you’re only cheating yourself. That’s what President Nelson was talking about in his bizarrely controversial Conference address entitled “Christ is Risen; Faith in Him Will Move Mountains” when he said the following:

> Through your faith, Jesus Christ will increase your ability to move the mountains in your life, even though your personal challenges may loom as large as Mount Everest.

> Your mountains may be loneliness, doubt, illness, or other personal problems. Your mountains will vary, and yet the answer to each of your challenges is to increase your faith. That takes work. Lazy learners and lax disciples will always struggle to muster even a particle of faith.

> To do anything well requires effort. Becoming a true disciple of Jesus Christ is no exception. Increasing your faith and trust in Him takes effort....

He then offered five suggestions for making that happen: first, to study and become an engaged learner so that we can understand God’s power in our lives; second, to believe in Christ and study with the desire to believe rather than to f

Do your worst!

For context I'm a Refuse Driver (Garbage man) & today I was on food waste. After I'd tipped I was checking the wagon for any defects when I spotted a lone pea balanced on the lifts.

I said "hey look, an escaPEA"

No one near me but it didn't half make me laugh for a good hour or so!

Edit: I can't believe how much this has blown up. Thank you everyone I've had a blast reading through the replies 😂

The following post is devoted to debunking a pseudoscientific paper by Halim Sayoud titled "Author discrimination between the Holy Quran and Prophet’s statements" and you can find here.

Before going into the argument of the paper itself, I will comment on something that appears extremely problematic to me. This paper is an attempt to prove the truth of Islam using computational methods. It was published in the journal Literary and Linguistic Computing, a computational journal published by Oxford University Press. That itself is actually quite startling: why is a computer-science-devoted Oxford journal publishing a paper which attempts to prove the truth of Islam? This is the conclusion the paper draws;

>The result of this investigation rejects, then, the doubts assuming that the Quran was written by the Prophet and it confirms what has been stated by Muhammad: that the Quran has been transmitted to him (by Allah).

To claim that you can reach this conclusion by any form of computational methods is completely pseudoscientific and the fact that it was published in what appears to be a legitimate journal is a disgrace. Who were the editors and peer-reviewers at the time? How did they let something like this into their journal?

Besides the extremely sketchy facts surrounding the publication of a paper with a conclusion like this into a scientific journal, the argument is completely pseudoscientific. The premise is that the authors will use computational methods to see if the Quran and Hadith (based on the traditions that appear in Sahih al-Bukhari) have the same author or not. Using computational methods, they conclude that the stylometry shows that the statements attributed to Muhammad in the Hadith are in a different style than the text of the Quran. Their conclusion is that Muhammad was therefore not the author of the Quran, and that this therefore proves he did not make it up himself but that Allah revealed it to him.

This conclusion is completely pseudoscientific on every single level. Let's accept the data the author claims they generated from their computational analysis: all the actual data says is that the Hadith attributed to Muhammad in Sahih al-Bukhari have a different style than the text of the Quran. The idea that the only way to explain this is by Allah handing the Quran to Muhammad through Gabriel is absurd. What about the following possibilities and considerations, all com

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I am what some people on the internet commonly refer to as a “basic white girl.” Most of my preferences are mainstream and wholly unoriginal. I like Converse and Vans, the color pink, s’mores, steel water bottles, canvas messenger bags, Friends, unicorns, Harry Potter, murder mysteries, Funko Pops, Apple products, baking shows, fun nail art, and playing with makeup. I like wearing leggings and yoga pants, because at a certain point you stop caring so much about looking cute and just want to be comfortable. Even though I normally prefer listening to various subgenres of rock music, I still love boybands and other cheesy pop music. I like Fall, Halloween, pumpkin spice flavoring, and wearing sweaters and flannel shirts. And, most importantly for this week’s post, I love true crime.

I’ve loved it since well before it was popular, back when reading about serial killers and kidnapped kids as a hobby was considered strange for some reason. I enjoy it because I like stories: reading them, watching them, listening to them, creating them, telling them, and writing them. It’s one of the reasons I like history so much, because it’s just a giant collection of stories that weave together. As a storyteller myself, I’ve always found what human beings are capable of doing to one another far scarier and more interesting than any supernatural danger could ever be. True crime focuses heavily on those different stories and the real people involved in them, and to me, it’s fascinating and heartbreaking in equal measure.

My family moved to Utah in the early ‘80s when I was about 3 years old. One of the things that fed my interest in true crime while growing up was hearing horror stories about things like the Hi-Fi Murders and Ted Bundy’s killing spree through Utah and the way he used his membership in the Church as a shield to hide behind while doing it. [Note: Some of those crimes are horrific and you should be aware of that before clicking on either of those links if you’re unfamiliar with them.]

We members of the Church tend to be trusting of people in general, particularly when they’re other members. Most of

The Village Voice - January 25, 1973 - Pages 27-28, 30-31

Upward and Juanward: the possible dream

by Ronald Sukenick

Everything happens and everything that happens is part of the story and everything that everyone thinks about what happens is part of the story and "Journey to Ixtlan" is part of Carlos Castaneda's story about Don Juan's story and this is my story about Carlos Castaneda's story.

My story begins as I was finishing another story a few years ago, the very last sections of my new novel,“Out." At that time I happened to read the first published excerpt from Castaneda's second book, "A Separate Reality," and I was astonished to find a number of similarities in incident and idea between "Out" and Castaneda's story. The more so in that the things in "Out" most parallel to Castaneda's book came out of my dreams, on which I have come to draw heavily in my writing. How could such a thing have happened, I wondered, unless I were a sorcerer or Castaneda a novelist-alternatives I have good reason to think equally absurd, Joyce Carol Oates, though I have to admit that the possibility of Don Juan being a kind of new Ossian presented itself strongly at first.

The mystery only deepened when I read the whole of "A Separate Reality" and found still more similarities, as in fact I continue to find them in "Journey to Ixtlan." Shortly after this I discovered from Anais Nin that Castaneda lived and taught in Los Angeles near which I live, and she offered to invite him to her house so we could meet. The fact that this happened through Nin is an important part of the story. It was Nin who helped Castaneda publish "The Teachings of Don Juan" when he was having publisher troubles. And it is Nin more than any other writer I can think of who has over the years insisted on the continuity of dream and reality, as does Don Juan, and whose theories about fiction as controlled dreaming provide such a precise counterpart to Don Juan's ideas about learning to control one's dreams. Isn't it interesting how in stories everything comes together but to continue.

One of the first things I talked about with Castaneda when we met was the novelistic quality of his books. I told him frankly that as a novelist the first thing that occurred to me when I noticed the similarities between our books was that he too must be writing a novel. Since Joyce Carol Oates's letter to the Sunday Times Book Review raising the same possibility, I understand this must be a natural speculation

They’re on standbi

It really does, I swear!

When I was in the midst of this book I said to Stew that it was "the best book I have read since Infinite Jest". I've since realised what I was saying then was that it was "my favourite book I have read since Infinite Jest". I've since finished the book and it remains the case. This is a great book. I found it a pleasure to read.

I say favourite for a number of reasons. The topic of authenticity, the distrust of religion, the contempt of modern society & its members, these are not things I find it hard to cheer along in a book. As well, reading Jack Green's Fire the Bastards! and his take down of reviews of The Recognitions he found wanting, did lend itself to a kind of feeling of superiority. People Who Read William Gaddis And "Get It". But to stay with that feeling would have been to let myself be unchanged by the book.

I think I read this book over approximately four or five months, with some significant breaks in reading. It is a long book, but I felt not oppressively so? I didn't read it in one week like Jonathan Franzen, and I'm not sure that is the best way to read it. I found reading up prior to starting about how Gaddis indicates spoken dialogue in this book worthwhile, and eventually you don't even miss the speech marks. Yes, there are a lot of characters and I would recommend keeping track of them; this is especially helpful when you have taken a break from the book and are resuming reading it.

The really essential recommendation is to read this book alongside Steven Moore's A Readers Guide to William Gaddis's The Recognitions (http://williamgaddis.org/recognitions/trguide.shtml) (hat tip to Stew for that recommendation). It is excellent; I don't quite know how it is available online for free but make the most of it. There is a review from 1955 by Herbert Cahoon in the Library Journal where Cahoon writes 'The constant use of literary allusions and book titles in the narrative fascinated this librarian.' Without Steven Moore's guide I would have missed the vast majority of these. But it is not essential to comprehend every single one of them. The book works just as well through what's on the page. For myself, reading the first half of the book there was a pleasure navigating pages on my own and reading the synopsis after each chapter and going "oh! that's what was going on there". Later, impatient to finish the book, I would read the synopsise first so I could move through the

Terms To Know

Naver Cafe – Naver is basically the Google of South Korea. According to Wikipedia, in September 2017, the search engine handled 74.7% of all web searches in South Korea. A Naver Cafe is similar to a subreddit, in that it is a community that can be made by any user, moderated by other users, and usually centres around a common topic or interest.

Netizen – Internet Citizen, aka an internet user. I’ve never seen it used outside of East Asian internet users, and in this post, it specifically refers to South Korean internet users. Not sure if it’s a common knowledge term or not, so I thought I’d add it here just to be sure.

Note: In Korea, last names come first. So, for example, in “Shin Jung-ah”, “Shin” is the surname while “Jung-ah” is the first name. Of course, this wouldn’t apply to non-Korean names (Daniel Lee: Lee is the surname.)

Note for the Kpop fans reading: Tablo refers to himself and Epik High as Kpop despite, I know, not really technically being idols and thus not Kpop. But for categorization purposes, I considered them Kpop in the title, as it seemed justified.

Who's Tablo?

Formed in 2003, Epik High is a hip-hop trio consisting of members Mithra Jin, DJ Tukutz, and Tablo.

At the centre of today’s post is Tablo, real name Daniel Lee. He spent much of his child and teenage years in Canada, and graduated from Stanford before moving to Korea to pursue his dream of becoming a musician.

Hip-hop wasn’t big in Korea at the time, and so understandably, Epik High’s first two releases largely went under the radar. But with their album Swan Songs, aptly named to be their last album before they disbanded, they unexpectedly hit it big. Their album prior to Swan Songs only had just over 10,000 sales in Korea, while their album released after garnered over 120,000.

After a pregnancy announcement, Tablo marries popular actress Kang Hye-jung (probably recognizable by most non-Koreans only if I introduce her as “the girl in Oldboy”) in October 2009. This puts him even further into public view, and people seem to be overall supportive of their relationship.

In 2009 and 2010 respectively, members Tukutz and Mithra started their two-year mandatory military service, which Tablo was exempt from as a Canadian citizen. Therefore, Epik High was on hiatus during this time.

Sound’s great; his career’s going well, he’s getting married, and his wife is having a baby. W

Pilot on me!!

Dad jokes are supposed to be jokes you can tell a kid and they will understand it and find it funny.

This sub is mostly just NSFW puns now.

If it needs a NSFW tag it's not a dad joke. There should just be a NSFW puns subreddit for that.

Edit* I'm not replying any longer and turning off notifications but to all those that say "no one cares", there sure are a lot of you arguing about it. Maybe I'm wrong but you people don't need to be rude about it. If you really don't care, don't comment.

What did 0 say to 8 ?

" Nice Belt "

So What did 3 say to 8 ?

" Hey, you two stop making out "

I won't be doing that today!

You take away their little brooms

This morning, my 4 year old daughter.

Daughter: I'm hungry

Me: nerves building, smile widening

Me: Hi hungry, I'm dad.

She had no idea what was going on but I finally did it.

Thank you all for listening.

It’s pronounced “Noel.”

After all his first name is No-vac

https://twitter.com/PhDniX/status/1115340718711635970?s=20

>So from this it should be clear that we do not have letters from the prophet. These are clearly modern forgeries. This does not mean that the letters mentioned in the literary sources are fake: They may have existed, but we only have those sources as proof of them.

When I got home, they were still there.

There hasn't been a post all year!