I cannot be the only male thinking that group sex is technically an inevitable part of their future (if it has not already occurred). Are related film offers already pouring in? I would imagine they could command a fair amount in that department. (Female readers are now thinking “What? Who would want to see that?” while males are thinking things like “Yeah, a friend of a friend of mine is a guy who decided he’s mainly attracted to amputees.”)

On a more mature and philosophical note: the Wikipedia entry about them notes what things they do in common, coordination-wise (given that one basically controls the right half of their body and the other the left), and what things they do separately, which is fascinating — particularly (at least to me as a writer/editor) the fact that they not only type together (each controlling one hand and requiring little verbal communication to coordinate efforts) but alternate between using “I” (not “we”) when they agree and their individual names when they disagree, which is not exactly what I for one would have intuitively predicted. (I’m impressed they can even type at a normal speed, but apparently they do — and my naive predictions on that front clearly reflect pre-Hensel limb notions.)

All this warrants discussion in philosophy class, I’d say — I’d give them A’s just for being willing to discuss it in a class on identity theory. Talk about a hivemind. Even the Borg say “we,” which seemed collectivist at the time but is less odd than all of them saying “I” simultaneously.

I’m very pleased that the Hensels seem to be leading relatively ordinary lives and are able to keep out of the media spotlight most of the time, but as one of my favorite bartenders (a Tim Burton fan, a punk, a former Columbia biology student, and a self-professed Nietzschean nihilist who is friends with various sideshow performers) notes, fewer biologically-odd people participating in sideshows explains the big upsurge I’d noted in the past couple decades in sideshow performers who are simply punks, anarchists, or extremists of some kind willing to do bizarre stunts — not that I’m knocking that.

Indeed, if you’re willing to spend $100 per head — or per person, if you will — I see that Gersh Kuntzman is co-hosting a benefit Thursday next week for the Coney Island sideshow. He promises booze and sideshow performers, not to mention the terrifying Kuntzman.

•Cirque du Soleil, originally from Quebec, may be trying too hard to seem New Yorky with their new show based here: flappers, jazz dance, Vaudeville, urban motifs — and it’s called
Banana Shpeel.

•George Lucas just had to go and “improve” his original Star Wars trilogy with various digital enhancements and lame prequels — but, despite his billions of dollars, he has paid some small price in lost fan loyalty, as exemplified by this trailer for the impending documentary The People vs. George Lucas.

•In other remake-related news, I only just learned that the classic David Bowie-Bing Crosby duet of “Little Drummer Boy” was later covered on The Daily Show Holiday Spectacular by Bob Mould (composer of the Daily Show theme, now performed by They Might Be Giants) and (then Daily Show host) Craig Kilborn. This may be one of those cases where historians will need diagrams to explain why this is funny. Maybe we already do.

•Strong aesthetic convictions do not give you the right to vandalize or otherwise alter private property without permission — but might knitting tiny sweaters and covertly covering pieces of public property in New Jersey with them be forgivable? I did paste some event flyers onto Post Office mailboxes many years ago, convincing the left-anarchist with whom I was doing it that this was more acceptable than putting them on private property. While we pasted, he chatted, no joke, about going to some poorly-organized anarchist events and sometimes wishing there were a Stalinist to take charge.

P.S. Speaking of knitting and Bowie, I see tomorrow 2pm at Knitting Factory (now located on Metropolitan Avenue in Williamsburg) brings a singalong to The Muppet Movie, one of the best films of all time, hosted by my acquaintance Jerm Pollet. I associate this event with Bowie only because it will likely be a reminder to any millennials who attend that Gen Xers’ favorite singalong Muppet movie — THE Muppet Movie — is better than theirs, namely Labyrinth.

Baz Luhrmann & Claire Danes invite you to honor John Leguizamo…

NR suggests making lots of phonecalls to wavering Democrats facing reelection battles.  There’s no need to assume waverers are principled agents who can’t be turned against the bills, either, since, as Don Boudreaux recently noted, members of Congress have had a reputation for shiftiness for so long that Mark Twain, for instance, said, “To my mind Judas Iscariot was nothing but a low, mean, premature Congressman.”

Many an 80s film buff is probably hoping right now that Corey Haim has an immortal soul, after news of his untimely passing. I never met him, though I did once overhear a drunk young man on the streets of Manhattan complaining that he had just come from a party where “That movie guy, Corey Feldman, was hitting on my girl!” So that’s, like, three degrees.

I would be less excited about a connection to Sandra Bullock. Best Actress winner Bullock apparently turned down her role in The Blind Side three times before finally accepting it, because she was uncomfortable portraying a devout Christian. So how good an actress could she be?

•••

More amenable to portraying a Christian woman was my companion at an NYSalon event last night at which Ron Bailey and other panelists discussed genetic reductionism/determinsim, which revealed that even some scientists — in this case British neuroscientist and panel member Stuart Derbyshire — are inclined to think that something nigh-mystical is going on (or at least vaguely Hegelian and non-material) when humans exercise agency and make “free” choices.

To my companion, this sounded about right, even if it was rather vague, but to me, the whole discussion was mainly a reminder that I’m in no danger of becoming a mere genetic determinist because I’m an everything determinist. Genetics is causal, environment is causal, choices are causal, social context is causal — it’s all one big avalanche of events leading inexorably to later events, running downhill from the Big Bang, and just because you aren’t fully conscious of every factor leading to your next action doesn’t mean those factors aren’t there, are wholly under your conscious control, or are in any sense acausal, undetermined, or supernatural.

Disagreeing with this materialist view, no doubt, would be editor J. Bottum and his colleagues at First Things, which just celebrated its twentieth anniversary issue — which reprinted his 1994 essay that I think may have been the earliest instance I’ve seen of something that’s become disturbingly more common since: Religion-defenders distancing themselves from us “modernists,” with our belief in objective truth and a stable, outside universe, and instead embracing postmodernism, with its sketchy plurality of truths and arbitrary epistemological stances.

This move has greatly helped many a young, hip Christian — including ones I’ve met — put a Continental philosophy-like veneer of sophistication on their old-fashioned claims. But it’s a bit like dropping a smoke bomb to create confusion when someone points out that your math doesn’t add up. Very dangerous, intellectually shifty ground to be left standing on, if standing is the right word. (And First Things’ very first essay in their first issue, also reprinted in the anniversary issue, lamented the “monism” of modernity’s search for one solid truth, calling for more “pluralism” — strange in a conservative publication, especially one claiming to possess revealed truth.)

•••

Oddly enough — or by the hand of Providence — I was sitting in Irish-staffed bar Doc Watson’s, reading my twentieth-anniversary First Things, when I saw the new Michelin TV ad that depicts the Michelin Man displaying two superpowers I’m not aware of him having had before: spewing tires from his body, which he can throw like Frisbees, and, more astoundingly, the ability to resurrect the dead — specifically roadkill, since he brings back to life animals run over by a swerving car. Now that’s service.

It also reminds me of the bizarre exhibit I saw at the Museum of Modern Art back when I was in college (and wrote about in the Brown Daily Herald) that surveyed the colorful history of the Michelin Man, who began as a monocle-wearing beer-chugger (the idea of beer and car travel being in the same ad today is unthinkable), depicted in a variety of odd ways including an amazing stained-glass window of the Michelin Man wearing a loincloth and kickboxing toward the viewer to show off the rubber treads on his feet. I declared him an earthbound god akin to Cthulhu in my newspaper column, and after seeing his new powers on display on TV, I’m sticking to that story.

But you can discuss all this with religious conservatives, non-religious conservatives, and likely some drunk Irish people, if you join me at next week’s March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day) Manhattan Project gathering at Merchants NY East bar/restaurant (62nd and First, southwest corner), back of the second floor from 6:30-on. Normally, it’s for people who like to talk about politics, but this time we’ll also accept any ornery drunk. That may be the policy going forward.

P.S. Speaking of drunks, let the record show that one of the only occasions I ever got drunk in college led to me blacking out a period of the evening in which, apparently, I was driven home by straightlaced future architect Dave Whitney but almost refused to complete the trip because I remembered just before reaching my dorm that I’d promised to drop by the Brown Bookstore and retrieve the cardboard Michelin Man display they were planning to throw out that night (Bip being my new god — or Bibendum, as MoMA taught me he was originally called, from the Latin “Bibendum,” meaning “Let us drink,” also unimaginable in an automotive mascot today).

Indulgently, future George Mason law professor and Deputy Assistant Attorney General Michelle Boardman agreed to go in and try to retrieve Bip for her drunk pal — but the impressively loyal staff at the Bookstore said they couldn’t give it to her, as they were saving it for some guy who said he’d retrieve it at the end of the week, and so indeed I picked it up the next morning, after realizing I had no more memory of my trip home after being told the details than if I’d been told I made the journey in a hovercraft piloted by Abraham Lincoln.

The Sam Adams Alliance (itself a reminder that brewing and freedom go together, like the fine reading I heard last night by Max Watman from his history of moonshine, Chasing the White Dog, at the bar Half King) has done a survey of Tea Party organizers and finds, as has been my impression from attending a few, that they are admirably focused on the less-spending message instead of tangential social issues.

Among findings from the survey listed on the Sam Adams site:

•A large number are politically involved for the first time. 47 percent of activists surveyed said that they were “uninvolved” or “rarely involved” in politics before their participation in Tea Party groups.
•When asked which issues were “very important” to them, 92 percent said “budget,” 85 percent said “economy,” and 80 percent said “defense.”
•No respondents listed social issues as an “important direction” for the movement.
•86 percent oppose the formation of a third-party.
•90 percent cited “to stand up for my beliefs” when characterizing their initial reason for involvement.
•62 percent identified as Republicans, 28 percent as Independents, 10 percent as “Tea Party”

Meanwhile, within government, things continue to get done through ugly wheeling and dealing, and on that front, retiring New York congressman Eric Massa now says he’s being forced out by Rahm Emanuel and other Democrats because of his opposition to Obamacare, using what he claims are exaggerated sexual harassment charges against him.

Without knowing the details of the accusations against him, though, I just like the fact that he (A) uses being completely drunk as a defense, something you don’t hear from politicians a lot these days, and (B) paraphrases (presumably) his lewd comment to an associate as a remark about “frakking” — which may, of course, mean that Massa, like so many political people I know, is a Battlestar: Galactica fan.

In a similar vein, if you spent last night’s Oscar broadcast hearing friends or family complain about bad movies, you might enjoy, as a change of pace, this brief, list-like denunciation of annoying common problems with role-playing videogames.  I have almost never played these sorts of games, but after reading the article, I too want medieval shopkeeps to stop giving speeches about their wares before I can buy things from them, for example.

Ironically, though, Douglas’s real-life son is now in prison, and it sounds like that matters to him a lot more than his movie work, which is to his credit, really.  I was already tempted — half out of a sense of duty, half out of perverse curiosity — to see the film just to discern what fresh anti-capitalist propaganda America’s favorite Chavez-lionizing director is foisting on us.  Now it may become one of those things like Martin Sheen’s performance in Apocalypse Now or Heath Ledger’s in The Dark Knight that we all have to see just to watch the cracks forming.

I suspect the film will not emphasize the fact that the homogeneity bred by regulation contributes to the potential for broad, systemic collapses instead of isolated ones — but that idea is explained at some length in last year’s special issue of Critical Review on “Causes of the Financial Crisis,” soon to be reprinted as a book, so pick that up as a supplement to the film.

•an ill-advised-sounding thriller called Frozen about three men stuck throughout the film on a ski lift chair after dark (claustrophobic terror done wrong, sounds like)

•a trippy film called Enter the Void about a ghost watching the after-effects of his murder on criminals in Japan, from the same director who did the earlier film Irreversible, which was made controversial in part by having a nine-minute-long one-take scene of Monica Belucci’s character being raped, all of which sounds like stuff the Wachowskis might enjoy

•the parkour-themed sequel District 13: Ultimatum, from a series that I only now realize is not only produced by Luc Besson but directed by the director of Taken. I bought the Taken DVD on Nybakken’s pro-patriarchal-violence recommendation and liked it (Kyle Smith did not).

There’s been talk that the same director may do a Dune remake (which might sound something like, “You have my son. If you give him back, this ends and I will let you go. If you run, or you hurt him, I will find you, I will attack you with giant sandworms, and I will kill you.”) My two main hopes for a new Dune: subtract 80% of the stuff David Lynch tried to squeeze in but add the stuff about Paul Atreides perceiving branching timelines every time he makes a historic decision — one way peace, the other death-dealing hordes marauding across the galaxy with him at their head, etc. Just like when I decide where to eat lunch.

On the parkour thing, it occurs to me that I don’t really know the rules of parkour (or “free running,” the art of running and climbing one’s way across urban landscapes, so frequently deployed in action movies from Bond to Bourne to Hulk in recent years). Would I automatically lose if I concluded, “You know, I think, weighing all my options, I’m going to try running on the sidewalk, thus avoiding the whole scaling-fire-escapes thing and the clambering over a parked bus thing”? Do you get points for climbing extra-crazy objects, even while ostensibly trying to move as quickly as possible? I’m sure the Wikipedia page explains all this, but for the moment I’m enjoying the old-fashioned sensation of not knowing.

I must go (reception 6:30, film 7) if only to cap this religious-discussion-themed week (which also included our fine, feisty Debate at Lolita Bar between Richard Spencer and Helen Rittelmeyer, in which a crowd with admittedly few Christians concluded, by not too wide a margin, that Christianity is indeed for wimps). Tonight, I must also spread the insights of my friend Read Schuchardt who has pointed out that the first Matrix movie, while invoking numerous overlapping symbol-systems and philosophies, owes a great deal of its remake-reality-to-your-individual-will vibe to the bland yet creepy Landmark Forum self-help cult, of which the Wachowski Siblings are apparently graduates.

Read correctly predicted before the Matrix sequels came out that Christians enthusiastic about the first film and its messiah narrative would be disappointed by the sequels, which, to stay true to the Forum formula, would have to end with the messiah subverted, slain, and supplanted by individuals’ own diverse efforts. No more Trinity by trilogy’s end, either.

Of course, the Forum grew out of the older self-help cult Est, which was a conscious attempt to create something like Scientology without the aliens — and to some it might seem almost as nutty for Ethical Culture to have something resembling a church without a god, but for all their flaws, I’d say both at least represent slight improvements over their source material, so I may as well check out the latter group for an evening. Icky as watered-down quasi-religions and, say, Unitarianism can be, they may be a crude glimpse of the future if humans retain the social cohesion and moral lectures that religion contains but are capable of gradually shedding specific supernatural claims for lack of evidence (as careful thinkers, with intellectual integrity and honesty, eventually must).