Some genius called Keith Burgess-Jackson, who frequently complains about the lack of civility in public discourse, has “called me an illiterate idiot”:http://analphilosopher.blogspot.com/2004_04_01_analphilosopher_archive.html#108293340865578311 for saying that his blog doesn’t contain much good philosophy.

I can’t even think of a funny joke about the illiteracy (am I the infiniteth monkey?) but I will admit that I’ve done one or two things that show less than optimal intelligence. (Probably even some that stretch to idiocy, but I wouldn’t say them here, would I?)

It probably isn’t smart to have as much of my emotional well-being tied up in the fates of the Boston Red Sox. It’s working well for now, if spending time every day with stress levels of a fighter pilot could count as working well. And a utility maximiser wouldn’t have had quite as many PBR’s at the Paradise over the weekend as I did. And it was wrong, or at least misleading, to say there isn’t much good philosophy on Burgess-Jackson’s blog. There isn’t, as far as I can see, any.[1]

Speaking of the Paradise, Saturday night there was great.

In the front room they had various bands playing Smiths covers of varying quality. Much fun. I was reminded that one day I have to write a vagueness paper called “Some Sentences are Truer than Others”. That’s not just because it would be a funny allusion – I’m pretty sure that that Smiths song was partially causally responsible for my thinking about ‘truer’ in the first place, so it would be just a kind of acknowledgement.

In the main room Mason Jennings was playing, and it was a great show. I was worried how an acoustic act would carry in that venue, but he (wisely I think) had a bassist and drummer accompanying him, which helped a lot. Either he responded really well to our called out requests, or we were channelling the playlist. I guess the latter, but who knows? The crowd loved all the songs from his first album, and was relatively lukewarm about the later stuff. If I was in his position, I’d be a little bit annoyed by that. I certainly wouldn’t want to go around delivering a paper I did years and years ago everywhere because that’s what the crowd wanted. It’s times like this you’d wish you’d been the one to write “I like your old stuff better than your new stuff”:http://www.lyricsdepot.com/regurgitator/i-like-your-old-stuff-better-than-your-new-stuff.html. Alternatively, he could just try writing an album as good as his first album, but I suspect that may be beyond him, just like it is certainly beyond most of us.

fn1. My methodology here possibly leaves a little to be decided. Wading through Burgess-Jackson’s tripe for more than a few days worth was beyond even my celebrated powers of tolerance.[2] So the conclusion in the text is an inductive inference based on a small sample. Still, we rely on such samples to conclude that I’m probably not going to get many votes at the next Presidential election, so it’s not like sampling can never lead to reasonable conclusions. But like a stopped calendar, maybe he’s right once a year, and I’m not going to be the one to check this rigorously.

fn2. And yeah, I know it’s been a while since _I_ posted anything really substantive here. Thank God for the “papers blog”:http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Philosophy/Opp/ or people couldn’t even be indirectly linked to philosophical work here.