Repeat Rule #1 11 more times if necessary.
2. Now that we've got that nonsense out of the way, there are 11 more slots in which I can say something interesting, edifying or otherwise useful (to some).
I wonder whether the world is divided up into Giorgio Moroder fans and Dario Argento fans? Moroder and Argento were both born in 1940 in Italy and they both compose music and produce musical recordings, although you might not know it from Argento's Wikipedia entry. Moroder has produced albums by the Bee Gees (disco version), Donna Summer, Blondie, David Bowie, Janet Jackson and many others, as well as composing and producing some movie soundtracks. "Stayin' Alive" and "I Feel Love," that's him. The soundtracks to Cat People, Scarface and DC Cab, that's him too.
Argento, on the other hand, may be more well known as a movie director than for his music. He made the soundtracks for some of the movies he directed and for some movies directed by others, notably, George A Romero's Dawn of the Dead.
Anyway, back when I used to hang with a bunch of film aficionados, it seemed we were divided into those who liked Moroder and those who liked Argento. And I can't remember anyone from that group except me who liked Moroder. Anyway, it just seems to me that it would be very difficult to really like them both.
3. There's a squirrel who lives outside my house who's as black as the blackest black-eyed cat you ever saw.
4. I had schwaerma for the first time yesterday. It was okay, I'll probably get it again. I first heard about schwaerma toward the end of the first Robert Downey Jr -- Scarlett Johannson Avengers movie. I wonder how many other people first heard about Schwaerma this way. (It is also spelled shawarma and other ways.)
5. I spend a significant amount of time, maybe too much time, worrying about whether the populations of cities are measured in ways which are similar enough around the world that people from one part of the world can get a good idea of the sizes of cities in other parts of the world without quite a lot of world travel and attention to population statistics. For example, the population of Detroit is around 700,000, or a little under 4 million , or a little more than 4 million, or almost 6 million, depending on how you define it. Which means that Detroit has less then half the population of Phoenix, or almost as many people as the entire state of Arizona, depending how you measure it. Forget other countries -- is Phoenix measuring even close to the same way Detroit does?
6. I finally figured out, a little while before I stopped hanging with New Atheists, that New Atheists define religions much more strictly than most of the adherents of those religions do. A New Atheist may well insist, "A Christian literally believes that an old man in the sky created the entire universe, and gave souls to humans but not to any other forms of life, and that there is no life anywhere in the universe except Earth, and that Jesus was born without his mother becoming pregnant or having sex, and that Jesus died and then rose from the dead, which was necessary to give humans a chance of not spending an eternity in Hell [...]" and they may go on in this vein for quite a while, adding more and more items to the list of things which Christians, they say, literally believe, when in fact many people who identify as Christian don't believe any of those things.
7. I keep reading the figure 750,000 for the number of copies Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules has sold. I think that figure might be out of date. Or maybe it only counts US sales. The damn thing is still selling, #52 just now on the Amazon bestsellers' list, and hasn't yet come out in paperback, I believe. Peterson has claimed sales of over 2 million (perhaps he was referring to worldwide sales), threatened to sue one reviewer for a negative review and to slap another one.
8. By the end of WWII over 40 countries were at war with Nazi Germany.
9. When Pulp Fiction was filmed, there were no Red Apple cigarettes and there was no restaurant named Jack Rabbit Slim's. Since then, several bars and taverns have opened which are called Jack Rabbit Slim's. I do not know whether Quentin Tarantino has sued or slapped any of the people who opened those establishments.
10. With few exceptions, mostly within the Soviet bloc, cars have only been exported in significant numbers from companies headquartered in the US, the UK, France, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Korea, Japan and China.
11. Some of the earliest watches were made in Switzerland, and they say it had something to do with Calvinism. (Make as much much money as you can but be sure not to enjoy it? I don't know.)
12. More than 7% of the electricity generated in Germany is solar.
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