"I managed to get my head up and scream 'croc' and then this giant dragged me under again."

"I got my head above water again and this time I was swearing and saying get this thing off me. I was just screaming for help. I couldn't feel any pain but I could see his teeth sinking into my leg. I thought I was going to die. I could only see about four centimetres of the top of my leg and the rest was in the croc's gob."

Well, clearly she survived, since we have that quote, but how did she survive? (The saltwater crocodile was 3 meters long.) Her friend on the shore — Al Sartori — went in:

"I jumped into the water and on to its back and stuck my thumbs into its eyes until I felt it start to slacken off.... I picked up the croc and chucked it back into the water and it came back at me. It was pretty heavy."

Great heroism by Satori! A euonym? "Satori is considered a 'first step' or embarkation toward nirvana."

The student's mind must be prepared by rigorous study, with the use of koans, and the practice of meditation to concentrate the mind, under the guidance of a teacher.... Chinese Zen master Wumen Hui-k'ai (無門慧開)... struggled for six years with koan "Zhaozhou’s dog"...

The koan is: "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" Does a crocodile?

Wumen, having understood the koan wrote this poem:

A thunderclap under the clear blue sky
All beings on earth open their eyes;
Everything under heaven bows together;
Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.

I know a poem about a crocodile:

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!

Protestants are no longer the majority in America... and sectlessness doubles.

It's the other Pew survey that just came out — the religion one.

Do you accept the word "sectlessness"? It's pretty much my coinage, but I'm going to promote it as a good, short headline word to refer to the absence of a religious affiliation. I originally had "atheism," but it's the wrong word, because many of the people who say they belong to no religious group also say they believe in God and even that they pray and have what the Washington Post refers to as "regular spiritual routines." I'm trying to picture those routines, and I don't know, I'm just seeing a blank. Hmm. Seeing blankness — that could be a spiritual routine. What do you think? Seems zen, doesn't it? Yeah, that's the ticket. I'm spiritual. Seriously, what do you think these regular-spiritual-routines folk are doing? Anything fancy with bread and wine or just gazing at nature and feeling aglow?

I'm reminded of my father, who when asked (by me) why he didn't go to church, said you can commune with God anywhere, for example, on the golf course. He liked to golf. Sorry, am I being too puritanical? Either participate in some official group ritual or lay off the claims of worship? No, I don't really think that. I'm just skeptical. Hell, I'm skeptical about whether the people who go to church (or other place of worship) really believe what the ritual is supposed to demonstrate. I think many people are there to honor the tradition they feel part of or to keep in touch with a social circle or to facilitate the efforts at community organizing. Maybe the sectless souls with spiritual routines are more sincerely religious.

Ah, well. It's American etiquette to accept whatever people say about their religion and move on to more easily debatable topics. Within that scheme, I'm being rude.

Back to the Pew survey: 79% of Americans named "an established faith group" that they belong to. The 21% — atheists, agnostics, and "nothing in particular" — skew strongly toward the Democratic Party.
This group is the Democrats' "largest... faith constituency" — at 24%. Or so the WaPo says, but that's only if you split Protestants into groups like "black Protestants" (16%) and "white mainline Protestants" (14%), which, added together, is 30%. Note that "white evangelicals" — also Protestants — are viewed as a separate "faith constituency," and these folks skew Republican. 34% of Republicans are white evangelicals.

The study presents a stark map of how political and religious polarization have merged in recent decades. Congregations used to be a blend of political affiliations, but that’s generally not the case anymore. Sociologists have shown that Americans are more likely to pick their place of worship by their politics, not vice versa.

How awful! What are you supposed to do when your family's traditional religious group is one that channels politics you don't like? Can you stand to attend services and sit through lectures (sermons) about politics blended with religion? You're supposed to change your religion to accord with your political ideology? That should lead many sincerely religious persons to stay away... and insincere politicos to gravitate toward the like-minded crowd.

***

I did mean to allude above to our President's religion. For context, let me repeat my own summary of  Chapter 14 of Obama's "Dreams from My Father":

While working as a community organizer, Obama was told that it would "help [his] mission if [he] had a church home" and that Jeremiah Wright "might be worth talking to" because "his message seemed to appeal to young people like [him]." Obama wrote that "not all of what these people [who went to Trinity] sought was strictly religious... it wasn't just Jesus they were coming home to." He was told that "if you joined the church you could help us start a community program," and he didn't want to "confess that [he] could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly." He was, he writes, "a reluctant skeptic." Thereafter, he attends a church service and hears Wright give a sermon titled "The Audacity of Hope" (which would, of course, be the title of Obama's second book). He describes how moved he was by the service, but what moves him is the others around him as they respond to a sermon about black culture and history. He never says he felt the presence of God or accepted Jesus as his savior or anything that suggests he let go of his skepticism. Obama's own book makes him look like an agnostic (or an atheist). He respects religion because he responds to the people who believe, and he seems oriented toward leveraging the religious beliefs of the people for worldly, political ends.

At the Zen Custard Café...

... turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.

Obama's "Choom Gang."

Everyone's reading this, so I thought you might like to talk about it.

Excerpts from David Maraniss' Barack Obama: The Story dealing with the elaborate drug culture surrounding the president when he attended Punahou School in Honolulu and Occidental College in Los Angeles. He inhaled. A lot.

(The Maraniss book doesn't come out until June 19th. You can buy it here.)

ADDED: Here's a long excerpt from the book, covering Obama's college years:

Most of Obama's classmates could not see how hard he was working to reconcile the contradictions that life threw at him. They thought he was cool, smart without being pedantic, and seemed to have his act together. To Mark Parsons, who came to know him mostly because they both smoked and spent a lot of time together huddling outside the student union, Obama seemed "almost Zen in walking through all the chaos in our dorm". He displayed one trait that showed he wanted to be a player though: he wore a lot of "stupid hats". He usually wore them cocked, to look cool. Obama also had a peculiar smoking style, a little affectation. He turned his wrist up and cupped the cigarette between thumb and index finger. He smoked a cigarette the same way he smoked a joint. "I have a sense that he smoked because he was addicted, as I was," Parsons said. But, Obama told Parsons, there was another reason. "I remember him telling me he would quit after he got married. He didn't want to quit smoking because he said he would gain weight, but after he got married it would be OK to gain weight. I think it was mostly a joke."

"But when I'm shooting a gun, I guess I feel empowered, and empowerment is sexy."

So says a woman, so isn't it adorable? From a very silly CBSnews.com article about women and guns and how "feminine" and "girly girl" they feel. Replete with New Age nonsense:

"I'm a yoga instructor, I work at a vegan bakery — and I also like to shoot guns.... Yoga's Zen-like quality can be applied to shooting guns in a lot of ways... Shooting guns takes focus, concentration, and it doesn't always have to be about violence."

Imagine a man going on in a similar fashion about guns making him feel "sexy" and "empowered" in some "Zen-like" way.

Intelligent adults, contemplating why they play a mindless video game.

Lori Culwell sees the game "Angry Birds" as her "meditation tool" and thinks she's "picked up some sage wisdom from those self-sacrificing birds and their mortal pig enemies. Call it an Angry Birds satori, perhaps."

[T]he birds put my mind into a deeply Zen-like and hypnotic state, not unlike "flow" as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Maybe the people at Rovio have given us a game that is part meditation, part allegory for life. Maybe Freud would point out that my finding Zen in a game based on pig destruction signals latent anger issues.

("Flow" by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is one of my very favorite books, as I've noted before.)

And here's William Ian Miller in "Losing It"  — a book I first talked about here — talking about solitaire:

Everything distracts me... I interrupted the writing of this paragraph to play a game of solitaire, and then when I lost I allowed myself to play until I won, and then one more in case I won two in a row, and then I kept on until I won two in a row. Says the ancient rabbinical Pirkei Avot: The Ethics of the Fathers, written some eighteen hundred years ago: “If a man is walking by the way and is studying and then interrupts his study and exclaims: ‘How beautiful is this tree? How beautiful is this plowed furrow?’ Scripture considers that it is to be regarded as if he has forfeited his life (or as if he bears guilt for his soul).” If the beauties of nature cannot justify distraction, what of solitaire? My offense is (as if) capital; if only I could remember which circle of hell awaits me. My will—an element of my name, no less—never strong to begin with, has become weaker. The “I am” that remains in Will -iam is thus a ghost of its former self. If William James is right, and I find that he usually is, then I am in trouble: “The essential achievement of the will, in short, when it is most ‘voluntary,’ is to attend to a difficult object and hold it fast before the mind" (italics in original).

Do you use video games in a way that makes you want to explain it — like Culwell — in terms of meditation and wisdom or — like Miller — to read it as a signpost that you are walking downhill toward the grave?

Zen, hula, and Althouse.

You may be thinking: It's always Ann Althouse. Why can we hear something about the other Althouses around the country? Okay! Let's start here, on a blog called The Dude Abides (subtitle: "An Existential Crossing Guard at the Intersection of Spirituality and Pop Culture"). The blogger, Cathleen Falsani, attends a hula class at the Zen Community of Oak Park, which was founded by Abbot Robert Joshin Althouse and his wife June Kaililani Ryushin Tanoue.

Over the summer, the Oak Park Zen Community consecrated a vast hula mound Althouse built in the back yard — two large, enjoined grassy knolls that together form the shape of a yin-yang symbol....

"Hawaiian spirituality is in some ways opposite of Zen because there are in excess of 40,000 gods and goddesses" in its pantheon, [Tanoue] explained....

There is a spirit in the dance, she said, that complements, rather than competes with, her Zen practice. "The sacred is how we treat our experiences, how we're open to them," Althouse said. "We don't create something sacred. We find it right where we are by the way we deal with experiences. I think hula is very much an expression of that, and obviously, I also think that Zen is a way to access that.

"Hula's operating on a lot of different levels, metaphorically and psychologically. It's very hard to pin these things down, but when you see it, you recognize it," he said....

"Like now, for example," she said, referring to the tense climate we're all living in right now, with economic, political, societal and spiritual uncertainty all around.

"It's a good example of transforming something by approaching it with a lightness of heart," Althouse added. "Having joy in the midst of chaos."

All right, then. Althouse says, have some joy in the midst of chaos.

"But he left me naked shorts, the best metaphor known to gnomes of Zurich since the snake in the tunnel."

But he left me naked shorts, the best metaphor known to gnomes of Zurich since the snake in the tunnel.

Just a William Safire sentence I like.

What do you look like in naked shorts? It's the koan of the day.

Tea time.

I said I was green-tea blogging -- not drunk-blogging -- the debate last night, and Ricardo asked: "What kind of green tea was it? Enquiring minds need to know. Life is in the details." Okay, then. It was Tazo Zen Tea. If you want to drink the tea I usually drink, however, the #1 choice is Twinings Lapsang Souchong, which has been my favorite tea since I first tasted it more than a quarter century ago.

"Turn It On"... turn on the Top 40 grunge recordings.

"Turn It On" by the Flaming Lips is #40 on the countdown, put together, with video, by Jac, who's in his mid-20s and thus experienced the grunge era in his formative years. Was grunge important to you? Did you pick up your guitar and play it?

What counts as grunge? Per Jac:

My basic definition of grunge is music that was made mostly in the '90s, drawing on the early punk and heavy metal of the '70s-'80s as far as dynamics and tone quality (namely, loud and distorted), but drawing more on the songwriting of the '60s. There's usually a loose, lazy, "Anyone could play this" vibe, and there are rarely any instruments other than guitar, bass, drums, and vocals.

He's only giving us 5 at a time, on Fridays, but I love the first 5 choices. And I'm allowed to love this stuff. I didn't experience during my formative years, but my son Jac played it, and just as he liked my 60s music, I liked his 90s music. I loved having the bands practice in my basement, and I loved being the adult that was happy to drive teenage guys to concerts — including that one Jac mentions in the discussion of #36 ("Everything Zen").

There is always some poignancy to looking at things from the past, but there's a really hard twist of that feeling at #37 — "Feel the Pain."

"Have you dated liberals before. If so, any difference you can tell between liberal and conservative guys?"

Right Wing News interviews conservative female bloggers about dating.

I tend not to date liberals, for a reason. Politics is so important to what I do and I follow it so much. I can't respect a guy who's liberal all that much because it makes me question his intelligence. So, that's a big minus because I'm thinking how smart can this guy be if he thinks John Kerry is a great politician? (Laughs) If he thinks Barack Obama would be a great President, I think, gee, how bright could this guy be?

Ugh. This is almost as annoying as this essay the other day in the NYT — it's now #1 on their most-emailed list — about these literary types who abhor love from people who don't know all the authors or don't like the right books:

Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast....

[S]ometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem... “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.”...

Judy Heiblum, a literary agent at Sterling Lord Literistic, shudders at the memory of some attempted date-talk about Robert Pirsig’s 1974 cult classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” beloved of searching young men. “When a guy tells me it changed his life, I wish he’d saved us both the embarrassment,” Heiblum said, adding that “life-changing experiences” are a “tedious conversational topic at best.”

Look out, there's a lot of aversion out there. But really, my question is, what did those guys who loved John Kerry, Ayn Rand, and Robert Pirsig look like?

In Madison...

The Zen Sushi cart is parked in front of St. Paul's:



And the sign the University put up to celebrate our progressive tradition -- (enlarge) -- is just not left-wing enough for the local graffiti scrawlers:

I have a theory about the new Sundance Theater here in Madison, Wisconsin.

This is how I look while explaining a theory... specifically, how I look at the Sundance Theater bistro while explaining my theory -- which is mine! -- about the whole Sundance Theater enterprise.

I mean, check out this place:



This is upstairs, in case you want to get something to eat and drink before the show. Relax and mellow out. You won't have to worry about going down in time to get the seat you want, because you've got a ticket with the seat number on it, a seat you selected on a touch screen computer down at the box office. And don't worry if you don't have a dining companion to amuse with your theories. Go to the restaurant alone. There's WiFi. And think about it: you should go to that café downstairs all the time and hang out, use the WiFi, drink some coffee, and just see if you get in the mood to drift over into one of those arthouse-type cinema concoctions they're always showing.

Mmmm... but isn't this kind of... mmmm... elitist? I thought Robert Redford selected Madison for its lefty politics. Who's going to this place, anyway? How much money did you drop there? Who are these people?

Ooohhh.... look... trees:



This place is so... green!

See my theory?

What a fabulous commercial niche for the wily old Redford! What a perfect merger of left-and-right-winginess as aesthetic pleasure and refuge from the riff-raff are served up in perfect style. From the right, the aesthetes and sybarites will show up and bring their money because it's beautifully designed to dispense film art, and the lefties can set aside their worries about elitism and bring their money because it's Redford and it's green and it's lefty.

Ah. Enough theorizing. Let's say goodbye to the waitress and go downstairs to see the movie "Waitress." But first, let's pause in the stairwell to rake the Zen garden:



And now, to our supremely comfortable reserved seats. There will be no commercials, no piped-in music, just a perfectly charming and subtle animation occupying the screen to maintain the purity of our aesthetic experience:

Flow/flOw.

A video game based on the theory in one of my favorite books, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow."

A deceptively simple video game called "flOw," in which players control the feeding and evolution of an aquatic organism, is making waves in the $30 billion market better known for fictional blood and bullets.

The game forsakes typical testosterone-fueled activities of killing, racing and blowing stuff up. Inspired by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's Flow Theory, which holds that people are happy and fulfilled when they are fully immersed in what they are doing, "flOw" is pure Zen.

Let's get a better description of flow than happy/fulfilled/immersed/Zen. In his book -- at page 49 of the 1991 Harper Perennial edition -- Csikszentmihalyi describes flow in terms of 8 components:

First, the experience usually occurs when we confront tasks we have a chance of completing. Second, we must be able to concentrate on what we are doing. Third and fourth, the concentration is usually possible because the task undertaken has clear goals and immediate feedback. Fifth, one acts with a deep but effortless involvement that removes from awareness the worries and frustrations of everyday life. Sixth, enjoyable experiences allow people to exercise a sense of control over their actions. Seventh, concern for the self disappears, yet paradoxically the sense of self emerges stronger after the flow experience is over. Finally, the sense of the duration of time is altered; hours pass by in minutes, and minutes can stretch out to seem like hours. The combination of all these elements causes a sense of deep enjoyment that is so rewarding people feel that expending a great deal of energy is worthwhile simply to be able to feel it.

(I originally typed that out to use in this article, which I wrote for the "Bloggership" conference. I say that that blogging is a flow experience for me. But this post isn't about that.)

Now, looking at that description of flow, I think you can see that all good video games produce flow, whether they are called "flow" or "flOw" or "fLoW" or whatever. The real question -- assuming you decide you want to live in flow -- is whether you should be finding your flow in games that have been manufactured to produce a flow experience. You can see that part of flow is becoming absorbed for long periods of time in something of a trancelike state. The book highlights individuals who find flow doing productive or healthy things like surgery and rock climbing. If you're finding your flow in something that is sedentary, uncreative, and nonlucrative, well, it might be okay. But maybe it's a problem. And I say that as someone who used to throw away a stupid amount of time playing games like Tetris.

The dreaded bias report!

From Java Zen.

Labor Day topic: idleness.

Tom Lutz has an op-ed that's mostly about the pleasures of a professor's flexible work schedule but has a really cool section about how workers in the 19th century behaved -- claiming flexibility for themselves:

In 1877 a New York cigar manufacturer grumbled that his cigar makers could never be counted on to do a straight shift’s work. They would “come down to the shop in the morning, roll a few cigars,” he complained to The New York Herald, “and then go to a beer saloon and play pinochle or some other game.” The workers would return when they pleased, roll a few more cigars, and then revisit the saloon, all told “working probably two or three hours a day.” Cigar makers in Milwaukee went on strike in 1882 simply to preserve their right to leave the shop at any time without their foreman’s permission.

In this the cigar workers were typical. American manufacturing laborers came and left for the day at different times. “Monday,” one manufacturer complained, was always “given up to debauchery,” and on Saturdays, brewery wagons came right to the factory, encouraging workers to celebrate payday. Daily breaks for “dramming” were common, with workers coming and going from the work place as they pleased. Their workdays were often, by 20th-century standards, riddled with breaks for meals, snacks, wine, brandy and reading the newspaper aloud to fellow workers.

An owner of a New Jersey iron mill made these notations in his diary over the course of a single week:

“All hands drunk.”

“Jacob Ventling hunting.”

“Molders all agree to quit work and went to the beach.”

“Peter Cox very drunk.”

“Edward Rutter off a-drinking.”

At the shipyards, too, workers stopped their labor at irregular intervals and drank heavily. One ship’s carpenter in the mid-19th century described an almost hourly round of breaks for cakes, candy and whiskey, while some of his co-workers “sailed out pretty regularly 10 times a day on the average” to the “convenient grog-shops.” Management attempts to stop such midday drinking breaks routinely met with strikes and sometimes resulted in riots. During much of the 19th century, there were more strikes over issues of time-control than there were about pay or working hours.

What are you going to? They got thirsty. When did coffee come into the picture? I'm guessing there's already a book called "How Coffee Created the Modern World" or something. Lutz has a book, "Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers and Bums in America," which I hope is full of stories like that, though there's nothing relevant about coffee -- I learned, from pursuing my curiosity through the ultra-easy "Search Inside the Book" tool at Amazon. Despite that lack, I'm interested in the book. Slackerishly, I wonder: Is there a downloadable audio version?

A book I do have -- right here on the shelf -- it's one of my favorites -- is "Essays in Idleness," which was written in the 1300s by a Buddhist monk named Kenko. It starts off:

What a strange, demented feeling it gives me when I realize I have spent whole days before this inkstone, with nothing better to do, jotting down at random whatever nonsensical thoughts have entered my head.

How many words in that sentence do you need to change to make it all about the blogger? That's no Zen koan. The answer is too obvious: one! But there is a deep mystery in Kenko's sentence. "Nothing better to do" can be understood to mean not that one has nothing good to do but that this is the very best thing.

How much do you value your free time? Do you use it to rest and recover or do you use it to do work that, because it's done in your own time -- in time you own -- is transformed into pleasure?

Thinking about your muscles makes you stronger.

Really.

The team wired their subjects up to weight machines which monitored levels of electrical activity in their biceps and asked them to think in two different ways while exercising.

The more electrical activity measured - the more the muscle is doing.

When subjects were asked to focus on what their muscles were doing and how they were working there were significantly higher levels of electrical activity.

But when they were asked to visualise lifting the weight, electrical activity was lower.

So much for your Zen philosophy!

The NYT picks up the "Six Feet Under" eco-burial theme.

Catering to the Boomers will always be good business:

Here, where redwood forests and quivering wildflower meadows replace fountains and manicured lawns, graves are not merely graves. They are ecosystems in which "each person is replanted, becoming a little seed bank," said Tyler Cassity, a 35-year-old entrepreneur who reopened the long-moldering cemetery last fall....

Mr. Cassity, a GQ-ish sort with rock-star stubble who wears sunglasses indoors, has cultural feelers well tuned for the business. He previously did an extreme makeover of Hollywood Memorial Park, the formerly bankrupt final resting place of Cecil B. DeMille, Tyrone Power and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Sr. With his brother Brent, 38, he runs Forever Enterprises, a Missouri company with cemeteries, cremation societies and a coffin business.

Together, they transformed the once-derelict cemetery into Hollywood Forever, a pastoral "Sunday on La Grande Jatte" of death, where weekend screenings of classic films projected onto the side of Rudolph Valentino's mausoleum attract 2,500 picnickers.

As Forever Hollywood tapped into the zen of Southern California, an oasis for the Rodeo Drive dead, so Mr. Cassity anticipates Fernwood will do for the mountain-biking, Luna bar-eating culture to the north.

So are you hankering for an eco-burial to match the other boomerified rituals of your life, like those self-penned wedding vows and videotaped childbirths?

Blog theme drift.

It looks as though RLC (AKA my ex-husband) is moving toward a new format, not only is he cutting down on the zen koan-ish things, but he's changed the blog subtitle from something about koans to a Jack Kerouac quote:

1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy. 2. Submissive to everything, open, listening. 5. Something that you feel will find its own form. --Jack Kerouac, from "Belief and Technique for Modern Prose"

Or is that koan-ish too? I think Kerouac seems like the blogging type. Graphomania.

Anyway, RLC has started to opine on current affairs too, so that's definitely a veer away from the zen. Today, he's got a little spoof of death-obsessed news media.

"Not One Damn Dime Day."

Have you noticed "Not One Damn Dime Day"? A lot of people have gotten many copies of this email that urges them to protest the war in Iraq by not spending any money on Inauguration Day:

On "Not One Damn Dime Day" those who oppose what is happening in our name in Iraq can speak up with a 24-hour national boycott of all forms of consumer spending.



During "Not One Damn Dime Day" please don't spend money...



For 24 hours, please do what you can to shut the retail economy down.



The object is simple. Remind the people in power that the war in Iraq is immoral and illegal; that they are responsible for starting it and that it is their responsibility to stop it....



There's no rally to attend. No marching to do. No left or right wing agenda to rant about. On "Not One Damn Dime Day" you take action by doing nothing....

Here's a website about it, which doesn't explain why not spending money for one day is a good way to get a message across. Snopes declares it ineffective "slacktivism":

[T]he suggested scheme is one of the least effective forms of symbolic protest one could devise: it literally proposes that people do nothing, and doing nothing generates little, if any, publicity or news coverage. Massing thousands of people in one place and engaging speakers to make rousing public speeches provide vivid, well-defined images for the news media to pick up on, but pictures of people not spending money just don't make compelling fodder for newspapers and television. (Images of normally bustling malls, restaurants, and airports standing eerily devoid of human traffic might make for a good news story, but public opinion on this issue is far too divided for this protest to be able to bring all business to a grinding halt.) Even worse, when you call upon people to do nothing, how is anyone supposed to gauge the success of your efforts? There's no way to distinguish those who are doing nothing out of principal from those who are simply doing nothing out of habit.

This protest is so lame one suspects it started as a hoax to give people who support the President something to make fun of.



UPDATE: Citizen Z says: "'Take action by doing nothing.' It's a protest and a zen koan!" And now -- awfully late -- my blog's theme of the day has emerged: it's nothing! The first post today built toward the Seinfeldian "phone call about nothing." This post quotes Mel Gibson saying there's "nothing" to Gibson/Moore opposition. This post worried about the message implied by not blogging about something. So, if I were looking for more things to blog about on this relatively heavy blogging day, I would engage in some deliberate nothing-blogging. But nothing doing.