Musings from Ballantine 666
“Burnout is nature's way of telling you, you've been going through the motions. Your soul has departed; you're a zombie, a member of the walking dead, a sleepwalker. False optimism is like administering stimulants to an exhausted nervous system.”
― Sam Keen, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man
When you last heard from us over a year ago, we were writing with a spirit of optimism as we seemed to be emerging from a pandemic that had stolen a year of our lives.
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...Rachel: “It would be really weird to have sex with an invisible person.... I guess it wouldn’t be any different from a blind person having sex.”
Jon: “Yeah, Daredevil could date the Invisible Woman and he wouldn’t even notice she’s invisible.”
In our last post, we talked about the power of invisibility in comics and movies, first touching on some common mechanisms which render a character invisible, and then discussing the obvious benefits of such a power as well as some potential negative consequences.
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..."If I wanted to listen to people have random conversations, I'd turn invisible and go to a cocktail party."
-Rachel, on why she only really prefers very well-produced and well-structured podcasts, if at all.
The age-old debate, as exemplified by Act I of the This American Life episode “Superpowers,” asks people to decide whether they would want to be able to fly or turn invisible. Jon's opinion was that while flight would possibly be the most thrilling power and would be useful in at least a few types of situations,
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...The Superhero Landing - sometimes referred to as a "three-point landing" - involves heroes touching down after flying or jumping from a great height by catching themselves on two feet and one hand, typically crouching into the kneeling position at the end, if not flat out landing on their one hand, one knee, and the opposite foot in a bend-leg crouch. Here to demonstrate it is Tony Stark - aka Iron Man - at his very own Stark Expo in Iron Man 2:
The landing is certainly impressive,
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...In Week 2 of "Superman and God's Cocktail Countdown to the New Year", we've decided we should pay homage to the workplace of the world's greatest superhero by making drinks in honor of two of his closest friends and colleagues.
...Looking for a pick-me-up over this long, long holiday season? Not sure how to reconcile like pretty much ALL of 2020 with your lingering suspicion that maybe you shouldn't be drinking ANYthing at this point? Why not try some of these creative and inspiring cocktails recommended by the creators of Superman and God themselves: Rachel and Jon!
...We are what we do. The world, be it our closest friends and families or the general public, will remember us for the impact that we have on it. When people meet and ask each other "what do you do?", we tend to answer with our career, not a description of our hobbies and personal activities. But what if you're all meeting in the context of a new job, or a new academic program? For example, when I started working at UNC Chapel Hill in 2011, my new coworkers didn't ask me "what do you do". They asked...
...Superman and God is the brainchild of Rachel Bachmann and Jonathan Tweedy. Beginning as an arbitrary book title suggestion in the Fall of 2001, it gained traction in our minds over the years, simmered on the back burner through the ups and downs and twists and turns of our lives and our friendship, and then started to boil over when we reconnected several years ago. Initially intended to be a collection of essays, it evolved from a book idea into a blog idea because of the immense diversity of the discussions that we find ourselves wrapped up in whenever we talk.
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