Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

Yet another poor sleep night. I slept for half an hour, woke again, and have not been able to get back to sleep. I'm not sure it's what woke me this time, but leg pain is what kept me from falling back asleep.

I don't know why it took me this long to figure it out: when the clowns try to eat me, they start with my legs. That's why it's so often my legs that wake me when I can't sleep.

... can't sleep, clowns are already eating me ... can't sleep, clowns ...

"The trick in a good relationship is to have two people who love each other very much who don't need each other. They just want each other." -- theferrett ... you may want to check the context (including followup discussion) before commenting.

I've noticed that when I watch a band on television, there are nearly always instruments I can see but not hear. For example, they may show a keyboardist's busy fingers and all I'll hear are drums and guitars. Or I'll clearly hear what one guitar is doing but not a note of what I can see the other guitarist's fingers playing (in which case, if there are keyboards, that'll be the day I hear those instead).

So I've been wondering: is it me, or is it them? Is it the way the bands are being mixed (this is mostly Late Night, The Tonight Show, and The Late Show, BTW, but I think I've noticed the same phenomenon elsewhere), or something about compression for broadcast? Or am I listening at a lower volume than the engineers expect me to, is the little speaker on my television not up to the task, or am I having an odd problem with my ears? Sometimes it seems as though I'm only hearing half the band.

The first clue to gather is: are other people noticing this as well, or is it just me?

Looking for the silver lining (or rather, the lemonade) in my being awake when I don't want to be, I figured I could at least get a start on responding to the (almost all helpful) comments to yesterday's QotD in which I sought help with the nature of good and evil. Along the way the question of whether Christians consider humans to be basically born evil was asked, and that got me thinking about original sin. I've got an unorthodox (as far as I can tell) take on the concept of original sin, and since I'd conventiently recently typed it up to post on Usenet and was already considering reposting it here, this seems like a good time to do so.

I'm reposting it in case folks here find it interesting, and as "where I'm coming from" background which may or may not help make sense of some of my comments in the good-and-evil discussion. But this is not "I shall argue this position as dogma as though my very soul depended upon it" stuff; it's an interpretation that makes sense to me but which is based on what I know is an unreliable translation of the Bible ... and which may have some holes I haven't noticed yet. I may or may not listen to criticism of it, but I'm not going to pick fights over it (and if you point out a hole that utterly deflates it, well I'll be annoyed, but better to have it pointed out than not).

But pointing out that I'm using rather a Christian concept of "sin" doesn't count; I wrote it assuming that the primary audience (the newsgroup) would be expect that as default background in that forum, and we can wrestle with the whole [Nature of Sin / Existance of Sin / Usefulness of the Concept of Sin] in a comparitive-religions context (which ought to be fun and educational) some other time.