{"id":32,"date":"2004-07-19T01:48:52","date_gmt":"2004-07-19T05:48:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/2004\/07\/19\/"},"modified":"2020-08-08T23:28:37","modified_gmt":"2020-08-08T23:28:37","slug":"32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/2004\/07\/19\/32\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have spent the last few days with little social interaction.<\/p>\n<p>Today when my friend Mara came to my room I started blabbing about a<br \/>\nmillion different things, because I had saved up stuff to talk<br \/>\nabout.&nbsp; I must have appeared quite manic.&nbsp; She seemed OK with<br \/>\nit though and manically spoke back so I guess it was fine.<\/p>\n<p>Over the course of the last two days I have decided that the world is starting to fall apart.&nbsp; Here is my evidence:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>New Zealand, of all places, caught Israeli spies trying to<br \/>\nfalsify their passports, and has starting cutting off a lot of the<br \/>\ndiplomatic ties it has with Israel in response.<\/li>\n<li>The police in Palestinian cities have been doing nothing lately,<br \/>\nallowing anarchy to run rampant and leading to mob rule, as several of<br \/>\nYasser Arafat&#8217;s top deputies resign left and right.<\/li>\n<li>The Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, informed all Jews in<br \/>\nFrance that they &#8220;must&#8221; move to Israel to escape French anti-Semitism,<br \/>\nwhich supposedly is on the rise.&nbsp; France is not happy with these<br \/>\nstatements.<\/li>\n<li>The 9\/11 Commission is set to report that Iran was helpful to Al Qaeda prior to the September 11 attacks.<\/li>\n<li>Iran has halted the trial of an Iranian intelligence agent who<br \/>\nmurdered an Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, tearing apart whatever<br \/>\ndiplomatic relations the two nations held.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>In addition, I have found myself reading all about Bobby Fischer,<br \/>\nperhaps the world&#8217;s best chess player ever, and certainly the chess<br \/>\nworld&#8217;s most outspoken anti-Semitic anti-American reclusive<br \/>\nnutcase.&nbsp; Bobby Fischer praised the September 11 attacks on a<br \/>\nPhilippines radio broadcast and went against a presidential order in<br \/>\n1992 to play a chess game in Yugoslavia.&nbsp; He was found the other<br \/>\nday at Narita International Airport in Japan and is in the process of<br \/>\nbeing extradited to the United States to stand trial.&nbsp; <a href=\"http:\/\/home.att.ne.jp\/moon\/fischer\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">His website<\/a> is a hilarious mish-mash of misplaced criticisms and paranoid banter.<\/p>\n<p>But they hauntingly reminded me of the website of a certain <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ishipress.com\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Sam Sloan<\/a>.&nbsp; Here is a small list of similarities:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Both play chess incredibly well.<\/li>\n<li>Both have plaintext websites with gobs of links as to why they have been persecuted by forces all over the world.<\/li>\n<li>Both scan pictures of checks and all sorts of paper documents as evidence.<\/li>\n<li>Both completely reprint news articles to support their causes.<\/li>\n<li>Both attempt to completely libel individuals who they believe victimized them.<\/li>\n<li>Both have spent time in East Asia fleeing some type of authority figure.\n  <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>However, Sam Sloan is not a wanted criminal and is instead running for<br \/>\nthe House of Representatives in the Bronx.&nbsp; He also is the last<br \/>\nperson to have represented himself to the Supreme Court.&nbsp; He won<br \/>\nhis case 9-0.&nbsp; By the time the decision was rendered, it seems he<br \/>\nwas in a prison in Afghanistan, which he escaped from soon thereafter.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway my current theory is that the &#8220;savant syndrome&#8221;, which I am reading about in my book <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Phantoms of the Brain <\/span>by<br \/>\nRamachandran, is at play.&nbsp; Both of these men are great chess<br \/>\nminds,<br \/>\nyet both seem horribly paranoid, constantly reinvent their lives, and<br \/>\nproselytize their bizarre and specific views through verbose text-based<br \/>\nwebsites.&nbsp; Socially I think their lives are completely complex<br \/>\nmesses, and yet they maintain a careful constant determination to<br \/>\nsucceed in whatever they do above all.<\/p>\n<p>So, yeah, that&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve been up to.<\/p>\n<p>On Saturday, after a failed attempt by Tucker and Mara to get us<br \/>\nShakespeare in the Park&nbsp; tickets, I wandered alone through the<br \/>\nstreets of the Morningside Heights district of Manhattan, between 123rd<br \/>\nand 110th Streets.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"text-decoration: underline;\" src=\"http:\/\/students.olin.edu\/ghutchins\/xanga\/mailbox_liquor.jpg\"><br \/>\n<br style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><br \/>\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"text-decoration: underline;\" src=\"http:\/\/students.olin.edu\/ghutchins\/xanga\/123rd_st_park.jpg\"><br style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><br \/>\n<br \/>\n<\/span>This view shows the red line of the subway as it becomes an<br \/>\nelevated train.&nbsp; I live on the street right where it comes<br \/>\nout.&nbsp; 122nd St. goes over the subway, 124th Street goes under the<br \/>\nelevated track, and 123rd St. runs right into the point of intersection<br \/>\nand abruptly ends.<br style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><br \/>\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><br \/>\n<\/span><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/students.olin.edu\/ghutchins\/xanga\/elevated_subway.jpg\"><\/p>\n<p>My weekend also involved a lot of reading.&nbsp; I finished the final half of the Ramachandran book and read some of <span style=\"font-style: italic;\">Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing<\/span>,<br \/>\nwhich I borrowed from my Biology (and Art) professor Helen<br \/>\nDonis-Keller.&nbsp; This book ties right in with the Ramachandran book,<br \/>\nexpanding on the cognition of seeing and applying it to the world of<br \/>\nart.<\/p>\n<p>I am enrolled in a three student course with Prof. Donis-Keller for<br \/>\nthis fall semester called The Intersection of Art and Science.&nbsp;<br \/>\nPersonally, I cannot wait.&nbsp; I have always obsessed over the senses<br \/>\nand the function of the brain, and the small size of the course means I<br \/>\nwill get a good chance to explore with a lot of guidance from my<br \/>\nprofessor.&nbsp; I often disagree with her, both politically and<br \/>\nartistically at times, but appreciate her perspective because it often<br \/>\ncatches me off guard and forces me to reconsider what I am doing.<\/p>\n<p>Tomorrow I go bowling in Hoboken, New Jersey.&nbsp; Soon I will have an update for the <a href=\"http:\/\/students.olin.edu\/ghutchins\/bowling.html\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Grant Bowls!<\/a> page of my sister site <a href=\"http:\/\/students.olin.edu\/ghutchins\/\" target=\"_new\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">Grant Page Central<\/a>,<br \/>\nwhich is in dire need of an update.&nbsp; My plan is to convert Grant<br \/>\nPage Central into a static content site of my musical works, some<br \/>\nwritings, and of course bowling scores, while letting this page, Grant<br \/>\nPage X, be my blog.<br \/>\n<span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><span style=\"text-decoration: underline;\"><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have spent the last few days with little social interaction. Today when my friend Mara came to my room I started blabbing about a million different things, because I had saved up stuff to talk about.&nbsp; I must have appeared quite manic.&nbsp; She seemed OK with it though and manically spoke back so I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":70,"href":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32\/revisions\/70"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/xanga.nertzy.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}