The Empirical Manifesto

A Commute Mix

This is the time of year when people may tell me of their traumatic experiences with Christmas when they were growing up. When pressed it's always something like, "Grams always made the stuffing too dry," or "Hand-to-God my mom always gave me socks - for Christmas!" Its an interesting perspective.

You see, despite the fact that every scholar of Christianity is aware of the pagan origin of Christmas, in the Worldwide Church of God I was raised to believe celebrating it was the difference between life eternal and burning to death in the Lake of Fire (Revalation 20:15), and that Lucifer, the most beautiful and artistic of all the archangels - the one who practically invented freaking music (Isiah 14) - used that same skill set as Prince of the Power of the Air (Ephensians 2:2) to make Christmas Carols catchy; memorable. This way, when one got stuck in our head, we would dishonor God almost unintentionally. Not that engaging them was a one-way ticket to the Lake of Fire (though you can bet your ass we never listened to them), but more a gateway into dropping our defenses which would open us up to being susceptible to other evil persuasions.

So I've got that going for me. Growing up believing Satan invented Christmas Carols to lure us to our eternal deaths. I'm sorry Grams' stuffing was too dry.

Anyway, unlike my last two Xmas mixes, this one is a harbinger of the seedy underpinnings of the holiday season; the inverse of all that cheer. What we may suppose those who've hit rock bottom on the most joyous of days must hear as they seek a reason to trudge onward one more day. Those who are inclined to do so can blame Satan for that as well I suppose. But you can thank suzanne1945 for this one. She had gone on some trippy, hippy convention (as she is wont to do) and ran across this dude who plays a freaking Chapman Stick, which is another way to say, "creepy guitar." Well, I suppose its not creepy if you aren't trying to summon the undead with Away in a Manger, which suddenly sounds like the worst Christmas Lullaby ever. I played it for my kids and they hugged themselves, sat down and started crying. And I've never heard Julie Andrews sound so wrist-slashy. So yeah, I'm starting to finally connect the dots between Satan and Christmas carols.

May the Force be with you.

:53

( Ho )

46:50

( THINK )

Wikipedia defines functional psychology as a general psychological philosophy that considers mental life and behavior in terms of active adaptation to the person's environment. It good to finally have a name for what it is I muse about. While I was theorizing about the practical application of Kohlberg's Development of Moral Reasoning I kept getting off-track as I had to jump between scores which were conducive to my formulation and subsequent articulation. James Horner's A Beautiful Mind was a given, but as these things often do, one thing led to another, and another.

As I endeavor to not repeat tracks in my various compilations I was struck with a challenge as I have used a handful of these previously. This lead me to wonder if I could find re-recordings of some of my favorites - most notably lush orchestrations of otherwise "flat" synthetic compositions. And indeed I did! Armed with the iTunes store and "City of Prague" as my divining rod, I found exactly that.

This is essentially the playlist I ultimately put on repeat as I was authoring Game Theory. Enjoy!