Chubby Nickel Audio Vlog

Tiv are a quaint group of west African people who, in an article by Laura Bohannan called “Shakespeare in the Bush”, presume to know the meaning of a Shakespeare play, perhaps you’ve heard of it… It’s called Hamlet, now despite the low profile of the author (after all who’s heard of Shakespeare?) when the play was described to the Tiv elders they decided that they would tell her what the play was about.

Though the Tiv elders are hearing this third hand and have no prior knowledge of the underlying culture behind Hamlet they found entirely different meanings than a westerner would have… not to say they’re wrong but you’ll just have to read the article at This link.

The kind of assumptions are very different from their prospective and found that Hamlet’s mother should have remarried so soon after the death of her husband, not in the least bit precocious or non ordinary, queer, weird, odd, awe-inspiring, awful, creepy, curious, dreadful, eccentric, eerie, far-out, fearful, flaky, freaky, funky, ghastly, ghostly, grotesque, haunting, horrific, inscrutable, kinky, kooky, magical, mysterious, occult, oddball, ominous, outlandish, peculiar, preternatural, queer, secret, singular, spooky, strange, supernal, supernatural, uncanny, uncouth, unearthly, unnatural or crazy do you get my point? they thought it was normal.

I wonder if we could learn something from this…

Poor Richard

The war in Iraq according to when i last checked has cost America around $503,000,000,000.00. And according to my calculations of about $6,200 per semester at a public college, the government could have put ten million plus people through to get their bachelors degrees on full scholarships. Instead we’re learning how stupidity can cost lives and opportunity.  But hey, who cares about school we can just join the army and fight and die in a war that shouldn’t have ever been started.

Maybe some of you (three) avid readers have had this conversation/argument. That perception frames an individual’s reality, or that reality is reality whether or not it is ever perceived for what it is.

I’ll try to be as fair to both sides as possible, so let’s start. The arguement for perception is this: perception is reality, meaning that how a person sees something is reality I.E. John Doe thinks that if a tree falls down in the forest and nobody’s there to hear it, it didn’t make a sound and for that matter it may have never fallen at all. Simply the fact that it wasn’t perceived by anyone means that it didn’t happen.

In contrast the realist believes that if a tree fell in the forest “of course it made a sound dumbass! physics proves that!” to which the perception promoter quips “they’ve only tested what they’ve seen, maybe if they could test an unperceived tree falling in the forest” Which would prompt reality man to reply “You’re such an idiot, how can they test something that is unperceived? you’d have to see and hear it to test that theory and if you do that you would be ruining the experiment because you’re there!” as you can see attempting to acquiesce either side would be moot, and both parties would be mooters! though mooters may or may not be a real word is beyond the point, I perceive it as a legitimate word, so it is.

So, perhaps this arguement is a bit more logical, one person sees the color red, but to them it appears the same color as another person sees blue, now the fact that they were told since preschool that the colors were the colors doesn’t change the fact that one person sees blue as someone else sees red, so that person’s perception would be different so their reality as it pertains to that color would be different. Or the realist would say that all eyes have the same optical receptors and that only if a person was color blind would someone see color in a different way than another because all humans have the same equipment.

Hasta (insert spanish words for whenever i seeya!)