Inspired by El Mediablo, I’ve done my own status check. To paraphrase Ol’ Waylon: After several readings, I’m amazed to find that I’m fairly sound.

Reading: The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Knots & Ropework, Geoffrey Budworth; The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, Alan Watts.

Eating: Bread baked over the weekend.

Drinking: Three-buck Chuck.

Noshing: Garlic-flavored plantain chips.

Watching: Shaun of the Dead, way too much of The Simpsons.

Finding: That St. Petersburg has a good heart.

Writing: Theosophical clap-trap. And the last few parts of a planned 10-part flash fiction exercise. Ten chapters, 100 words each.

Downloading: A soduku Dashboard widget.

Listening: “Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun,” Pink Floyd, Umma Gumma.

Pondering: The misguided dichotomy of objective and subjective truth. Also, what is it about zombie films that I get such a kick out of?

Attending: To my newfound soduku addiction.

E-mailing: Less these days.

Avoiding: The First Cause. Like a plague of locusts.

Celebrating: A new job, in a new and strange place called “St. Petersburg.”

Lamenting: That Google Maps tells me my girlfriend lives 1,218 miles up the road.

Recovering: From a month spent between jobs.

Wondering: How a guy could go through life not knowing he was black.

Reminiscing: Salmon fishing, Big Bear Creek.

Purchasing: A drying rack, so I don’t have to give the landlord $3 when I want to do laundry (only $1.50 for the wash).

Sending: Mom a birthday gift. I promise.

Applying: For full membership in the Stonecutters. (”Who keeps the metric system down? We do!”)

I wrote: “I believe in subjective truth (read, reality)” in my last response to Theological Corner. Stupidly, I made an outlining error in that post, now that I reread it. I had my words reversed, and probably caused more than a bit of head-scratching. What I meant was:

“I believe in objective truth (read, reality).”

and, later:

“But, I believe also that, given human fallibility (which Mike and I, I’m sure can agree on), we can only hope to experience reality subjectively.

Dumb error. Big difference. I’ve been playing a lot of soduku, and it’s skewed my brain from words toward numbers; I can think of no other reason.

It looks like Mike got my point anyway.

I don’t doubt the existence of truth. Given the facts (elephant) and proper, agreed-upon metrics (eyes), we can both plainly see an elephant. Yet, I refuse to be drawn into a realm of pure logic for what I view as a philosophical discussion.

What you call “objective” truth slips through our senses, and since we are not omnipotent, we squeeze what we can handle into a smaller package I might call “subjective” truth. We share that experience with others. In doing so, ideals, morals, ethics, and other prevailing ideas are vetted and added to the common human experience. A gestalt, if you will.

It’s all truth. Asking the question as a dichotomy misses the point.

It’s as if you’re asking, “heads or tails?”, and I answer, “coin.”

(And I’ll probably answer “coin” if you ask me about First Cause…)

Does that mean I’m a complete relativist? No. Does it mean that I have a simplistic view of religion? I’ll concede that.

I paint a wide swath by saying, to paraphrase myself, all religions lead to the same place. More precisely, I mean that prevailing moral and ethical sensibilities, which are obviously reinforced by a variety of faiths and teachings, can be (mostly) settled on. Outliers do exist, but society naturally condemns them to sufficient degree to ensure their frequency and relevance remain outside the norm.

Jesus and Buddha appear to disagree. But, it’s a delusion to say that one is “right” and one is “wrong.” One universe of experiences makes up the concept “Christian,” and another universe encompasses “Buddhist.” To say there’s no overlap, however, is erroneous.

Does it make sense to debate the reasoning by which people justify not killing other people?

One cannot bisect truth. Could an observer witness an objective event (truth, reality, whatever) without considering it subjectively? The idea sounds preposterous. Likewise, the observer depends on the observed.

That we can agree on anything, the “chair” I’m sitting in, for instance, proves to me that there is a common experience, what you call “objective.” Yet the experience of sitting in this chair is an equally valid “subjective” truth. I sit differently in a lawn chair vs. a rocking chair vs. an armchair vs. a seat in a fine restaurant. I’m still sitting.

Just because I say x (This chair’s rock hard) and you respond y (Eh, it’s not so bad. Kinda comfy, actually), it doesn’t mean there isn’t considerable overlap in the universes of experience that make up those realities. It’s still a chair.

Dichotomies, of course, are still logically possible. Take your Baton Rouge example. The city can only be the capital of Louisiana, or it cannot be the capital. It is a measurable, factual matter. In this case, there is no plausible overlap of the experience. One person is clearly mistaken. Any reasonable observer of could prove or (in this case) disprove the statement.

But are dichotomies philosophically necessary to the discussion of truth’s finer qualities? I don’t think so. Put a Christian, Muslim, Jew, Buddhist and atheist all in a room and imagine the blacks and whites they’ll find when they start comparing dogmas. Yet, all agree that murder is generally bad, that breaking bread with others is a special event, and that death and taxes are unavoidable.

Many times, as you’ve pointed out, there just isn’t overlap. Take as an example the divergence over what happens after death and taxes weigh an earthly body to the ground. Inferring from those instances, however, that there always must be no overlap is simply wrong.

Jeff Jarvis is a pretty smart man. I don’t always agree with him, but I do think this is a good point.

Media is now, as my brother and tech tutor would say, “platform agnostic.” In particular, my interest lies with the news and information facet of media. The newspaper I now work for has a passion for that agnosticism, even if it doesn’t state that as a goal. The paper product is strong, the Web site’s fullness shows it’s not an afterthought, and it has blogs and podcasts (which themselvs have RSS feeds). The site even has a text-only version for no-nonsense surfing.

It provides the same quality information consistently, regardless of the channel through which that information is provided. As an information source, it gets out of the way and lets the information speak for itself - while showing me a few ads in the process (remember, those ads pay my salary).

Not that I’m trying to puff up my employer; the point is, it doesn’t need my help. Many news providers still think in their own medium, be it TV, magazine, newspaper, whatever. That’s brick-wall thinking. The St. Petersburg Times doesn’t think that way, and that’s one reason I’m here.

A lot of older media companies use people in expensive suits with six-figure salaries to try to triangulate the focus of younger consumers’ attentions. That’s a nice idea. But, when it comes right down to it, we want their information. All they have to do is (unobtrusively) give it to us when, where and in what fashion we want it.

This wild strategy called “service” will build trust in the product (in this case, information), and encourage news consumers to build a relationship with the provider.

Kanye West may or may not be right about George W. Bush not caring about black people.

But, this group, which distributed fliers at a Brooksville, Fla., event over the weekend, definitely doesn’t. They sought help for the “White victims of Hurricane Katrina,” according to their handout. “… (T)o bring hope to our people - who have become the forgotten men and women of this disaster …”

It must really burn them up to see all those poor black people CNN keeps showing getting helped. How could the Red Cross do such an un-Christian thing?

Don’t get me wrong. The National Vanguard Tampa Unit has a right to distribute their fliers. Go nuts; I’d rather have the ignorant people out in the open, where sensible people can keep an eye on them.

I remember some well-meaning lefty student approaching me in Ann Arbor, and asking for my signature on a petition to prevent a similar Klan-derivative group from holding an event on the Diag. (That’s the common square, if you will, of the University of Michigan, and home to the famous Hash Bash marijuana legalization rally.) I refused. She didn’t understand.

She walked off in a huff when I tried to explain that the Klan can’t win at a podium. It’s an unreasoning hate group. It was once a frightening collective of terrorist cells. But, just as I believe is the case with Islamic extremism and Ann Coulterism, moderate voices always subvert and temper such non-platforms once they’re forced to compete in an arena of ideas.

Let them talk. Let people see how ignorant they are.

Veering off the highway into questions of deep meaning, I’d like to answer Theological Corner. Mike Veronie, soul proprietor, posed this question to me (in response to my earlier question to him):

Do you believe there is such a thing as objective truth, which is true regardless of human opinion? And if so, what is its foundation?

I’d like to start with a passage from Alan Watt’s essay What is Reality?

We tend to think that the universe consists primarily of stars and galaxies. They are what we notice. The space containing them is sort of written off, as if it weren’t really there. What one has to realize though, is that space is an essential function of the things that are in it. After all, you can’t have separate stars unless you have space separating them. [The Culture of Counter-Culture, p. 34, Tuttle, 1998]

I believe in subjective truth (read, reality). I believe in balance. I believe that whatever fills in those spaces between stars - be it God, Brahman, the karmic wheel or the space in between, maintains that balance by acting simultaneously as a generative and destructive force for all that we see and experience.

God works in mysterious ways.

But, I believe also that, given human fallibility (which Mike and I, I’m sure, can agree on), we can only hope to experience reality, or truth, objectively. That’s why we’re having this discussion: I see truth as x, whereas Mike sees it as y. To me, this explains the hundred-fold paths of religions, all of which profess similar destinations.

That fallible nature gets us up in the morning striving to act better, be nicer to our fellow man and point our compasses toward Zen. Unfortunately, that same nature keeps us out the night before killing brain cells.

It’s an indirect answer of sorts, and it may prove a circular one bringing Mike and I back to my precious humanism. But, that’s one thing I love about the Internet; used for good, it can set the stage for the civil discourse that proves all-too rare these days.

And, for the record, if I’m stellar at the St. Petersburg Times, I am a very small star within this massive constellation. Thanks, though, for the kudos.

Part of being a copy editor is committing to a lifestyle of noticing words and their use. Seeing misspellings, malapropisms and other bits of language that jump out in the world around me is part of that, and I wanted to share a few items I noticed on my recent trip down the I-75 corridor.

The top item on that list involves a billboard. High-speed Internet has caught on along the highway, and dozens of hotels and restaurants tout it on their signs. Many of these long-standing signs were amended with another, smaller sign to include Internet service. One restaurant had its slogan high on a billboard, with a small sign advertising Internet access posted on the top corner. Unfortunately, it covered up two important letters:

When you’re hungry
we’re open

A good copy editor thinks with dirty parts of his mind so readers don’t end up giggling (like I did when I read this sign).

Another billboard extended warm greetings to truckers with the sign “18 Whellers Welcome”. You might think a business owner would run his message by an editor before making the letters two feet tall.

Lastly, and this is neither a misspelling or malapropism, I saw a vanity license plate that read “DUUUDE”. It just left me wondering what kind of message the driver wanted to pass on to fellow motorists. That he’s a half-wit?

Anyway, I just wanted to share a few of the coloquial highlights of my trip from the Detroit area back to St. Petersburg. Enjoy.

I’ve written about bias before. A visit to Borders spurred me to revisit the issue after so much time. (That’s not to say that I don’t think about bias and fairness issues, just that I don’t often write about them.)

On this recent book-shopping expedition, I spent a lot of time reading through the store’s “Journalism” section. The three or four shelves plainly bore the label “Journalism” on a stark, black placard. What, might you ask, does Borders include under that heading? Not much of what my professors and mentors might consider true and fair journalism. Under that heading, one might hope to find an Associated Press Stylebook, or perhaps the ubiquitous Strunk & White The Elements of Style. At least, that’s what I learned to associate with the craft of journalism - from a host of mentors and teachers all better educated than I am.

Instead, there were books by provocateurs Michael Moore and Ann Coulter. The reefer magazine High Times even offered a collection of (quite interesting) interviews featuring such names as Dave Chappelle and Peter Tosh. A whole library of books, perhaps better labeled “Media Studies,” ran the gamut of opinions from severe right to extreme left.

Only a few of the selections included anything I might like to define as journalism. Even those were subjective. For example, books by New York Times reporter Judith Miller. If I had a nickel for each time I’d heard her credibility and integrity challenged since the weapons of mass destruction fallout, I’d have at least a couple of dollars. Aren’t Times reporters supposed to be unassailable beacons of neutrality for other lowly journalists like myself to look up to?

Not anymore, thanks Jayson Blair. Forty-five percent of readers, according to a Pew Center survey, believe little or nothing they read in their daily newspaper. How many of the rest, do you think, believe that journalists are at least fair and even-handed?

Apparently not the people who buy and stock books for one of the largest chains in the country, Borders.

Geoffrey R. Stone over at Huffington Post breaks down the record of the Rehnquist court on the aspects of the First Amendment I hold most dear: freedom of speech, and of the press.

RIP to a long-serving, albeit conservative, American.

Just because it’s the nation’s largest natural and human disaster in memory, it doesn’t excuse newscasters from using correct and accurate terms. I keep hearing, particularly on CNN, the poor souls being bussed to Houston (and now San Antonio) as “refugees.”

Wrong. They’re evacuees.

Refugee: n. a person who has been forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution, or natural disaster.

I have a question for Mike over at Theological Corner: If you prove God’s existence through reason, as you have in parts one and two of a recent post, does he exist absent reason? That is, if man - the only reasoning beast we’re aware of - did not exist, would God? Or does that wade into humanistic centrism?

Mind you, I’m not arguing against the existence of a higher power. I believe (despite the contempt I often show for organized religion). It’s just an idea that occurred to me on reading his recent posts.

Perhaps it’s a topic to discuss over a game of Texas hold ‘em.

Still, Mike (and notable others) have gotten me noggin-scratchin’ an awful lot about religion lately. I continue to put myself in the agnostic category, with a moral and spiritual framework borrowed from Buddhism, but I get a charge from debates about faith (though not near the charge I get from discussions on politics…).