The Halls of Eternal Disbelief by Joseph Dunphy
Joseph Dunphy
Posted on a Googlegroup called "Joseph Dunphy", where the only member
is "Joseph Dunphy" and probably the only person reading it is "Joseph
Dunphy" and yes, this does remind me of a scene in "Being John
Malkovich".
If you're not 100% clear on what the Halls of Eternal Disbelief are,
that's to be understood. I wrote them, and I'm not 100% clear on what
they are, myself. Sometimes I refer to them (and think of them) as
being this entire cluster of sites, the group you're looking at
included, and sometimes just this one section of my site at Newsguy
which is partially mirrored at Geocities. I know that's ambiguous, but
then, so are the exact boundaries of a site, when sites interlink as
much as these ones do. Here's a partial listing of those sites and
what I'm about to do to them. Keep in mind the fact that most of these
are just starting up, so you won't see a lot on them now, but there is
A LOT more to come.
1. Joseph Dunphy's Page O' Squat
http://www.geocities.com/commonsense666atlast
Yes, I do need a better name for that one. When I first set up the
site, though, looking for a place where my side of the story of the
encounters I had with a few tale telling trolls, there wasn't much
there and that's what I was joking about.
http://www.geocities.com/commonsense666atlast/intro.html
The place had little personality of its own, being little more than a
partial mirror of another site with a slightly drabber layout.
That's changing. I have a Chicago photo gallery
http://www.geocities.com/commonsense666atlast/Chicago
with a large box of photos waiting to be uploaded. What's the holdup?
Look at the unevenness of the quality of the images and you'll see.
The problem, as always, has its roots in my poverty. Like well over
70% of the disabled population, I'm grossly underemployed (to put it
delicately), finding that what I did in school has mattered far less
in the job market than who I partied with. Or, in my case, didn't.
Being poor means that one has to sometimes settle for choices that one
would otherwise know better than to make, like say, having somebody
else develop one's photos for one instead of going into the darkroom
oneself. Darkrooms cost real money, and low cost developers just won't
be bothered.
In one case that comes to mind, I got back a picture that I had shot
toward sunset, which had been developed as if I had shot it at
noontime, with colors misadjusted accordingly. One might think that
the fact that the streetlights were visibly glowing might have been
taken as a sign that something was amiss, but this is mass production
that we're talking about. Factor in the fact that I shoot on film and
turn everything digitial with my trusty Epson which produces results
just as good as a professional quality printer (NOT!) and you begin to
see that I have to put some serious work into photoshopping.
Sometimes, as in the case of that sunset shot, the color is so damaged
that there's no point in even attempting a digital touchup, but some
of the results are starting to look very nice. What I'm doing, then,
is practicing until I can get my first set nice and presentable (or at
least more nice and more presentable) before applying the modest
skills I've practiced to further sets.
I'll probably end up changing the name of my Geocities site to
something like "Joseph Dunphy's Chicago Journal", and my, didn't that
sound pretentious? It's going to mainly be local, Chicago themed
material.
2. Joseph Dunphy's Cowboy Wannabee Site
http://commonsense666atlast.tripod.com/
The name is half given in jest. I would make one sorry excuse for a
ranch hand, but I really did like the desert southwest, twice so far,
Arizona the first time, New Mexico the second.
http://commonsense666atlast.tripod.com/New_Mexico/new_mexico_2004.html
There is, of course, that third time we won't talk about
http://commonsense666atlast.tripod.com/Green_Tortoise/green_tortoise.html
but that's not really an experience of Nevada. Burning Man is more a
matter of taking a chunk of San Francisco and dumping it on top of a
chunk of Nevada for a week. I hope to see the place for real, someday.
This site mainly focuses on Southwestern Photography and Travel, and
as soon as I find the time to set this up, will be including a number
of Southwestern styled recipes.
This raises the obvious question of how somebody who is not from that
cultural background can legitimately create any such thing. By
carefully reading about what others have done, and treating this as a
learning experience as one adds one's own small touches (let's not do
plagiarism) to create something reasonably original, that remind one
of things that one saw out there. This is a work in progress that I
hope will get truer to its subject matter as I take further trips out
west, if and when I find a way to get out there on my budget, but I've
already seen enough to have plenty to think about
http://commonsense666atlast.tripod.com/Southwestern/
This site is loosely affiliated with another site with which it shares
a guestbook:
3. The Saguaro Lounge (by Joseph Dunphy)
I started this guy because I didn't like the way the guestbooks at
Lycos looked. Here I had an account at Bravenet, just for the sake of
getting a guestbook, and a whole site that came with it which I wasn't
using. Right now, I'm just barely using it for a mild bit of teasing
with definitely more snark to come. Aesthetic and postmodern
philosophy are just too rich as subjects for satire for me to pass
them up. Aside from that, anything? Yes, most definitely, a lot of
Spanish and Mexican recipes (yes, there is a dramatic difference),
with maybe a few items from elsewhere in the former Spanish empire.
One notes that this is on the same server as
4. Cafe Satan by Joseph Dunphy
http://cafesatan.bravehost.com/
This is the homepage for what I had intended to be a Burning Man camp
before I found out how unpleasant burners could be
http://commonsense.artshost.com/Burning_Man/burning_jung.html
Really unpleasant
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/Joseph_Dunphy/message/17
and more than slightly antisemitic, to judge from the threads seen on
ePlaya over the last few years, which I guess would explain a lot of
the rabid hysteria I saw in the material that first link takes one to;
bigots looking for an excuse to exercise their bigotry. But even if
(as is too often the case) I've had lousy taste in friends, it's still
a fun mix of subjects to play around with, a mix of improv,
theological satire, African culture and liqueur making. Africa is very
much a part of the cultural roots of New Orleans and the South in
general, to varying extents, so this is the site where photos taken in
the Southern states go, starting with this
http://cafesatan.bravehost.com/louisiana.html
gallery of pictures taken a few months before Katrina hit. If only we
had known, if only everybody had known, I suppose. The standard party
line on the subject was that only the French Quarter and the Garden
District and MAYBE the Fauborg Marigny were anything worth saving. So
wrong, on so many levels, one of which should have jumped out at
anybody passing through some of these places with an open mind. These
places may have been poor, but they were beautiful. I wish I had
photographed more of them, because many of them were bulldozed into
oblivion with reckless abandon, at the call of a president who was
talking about demolishing these places before the water had even
dropped an inch. His mind was made up before the facts had a chance to
come in, and the fact that his vice president used to head up the
company that got the contract ... but that's not what you're here to
read, is it?
Let's move on to the next site, one I've just barely placed a marker
on, but which is going to be fundamentally unlike any of the others
5. Joseph Dunphy's New Page at Angelfire: Canada or the Measure of All
Things
Like any of my sites, a variety of things, this one being where my old
Webring membership pages ended up, when I began to relocate a number
of my rings (which I'm hoping to find applicants for) from Webring to
some of the Ringlink powered services. What is different on this site
is that here, more than anywhere else, I'm writing as a professional,
not an amateur. The focus is on Mathematics, and yes, I really have
studied that subject at the PhD level and have taught it at the
collegiate level, so when you see me working problem sets, I do know
whereof I speak.
There will no pre-calculus material covered, but there will be plenty
of rigorously done Calculus and Statistics, along with a few other
subjects. A primary goal of mine in publishing this site, aside from
providing a little added peace of mind to the frightened student
trying to make sense of his lecture notes as the exam approaches, will
be to nudge the reader away from what I see as being a willfully
generated statistical innumeracy widespread in the general population,
widespread because a number of would-be opinion makers would sooner
manipulate than persuade and honestly take their rhetorical chances. I
will try to help you see through some of the trickery. I think that
conservatives may like my choice of targets about 90% of the time, but
sad to say, the Right seems to be getting into that kind of
gameplaying itself.
6. Name this site by Joseph Dunphy
http://commonsense.artshost.com/
At present, mostly home to my documented accounts of incidents on the
Burning Man forums (I learned from the betrayal at my previous
provider the merits of distributing my homepage across a few servers),
but here there will be - more African recipes and maybe some crude
attempts by me to retell a few folktales. In this case, Southern
African, Cafe Satan's African focus being on West Africa.
7. Joseph Dunphy's Blog: The Green Tortoise and Other Travesties.
General ramblings from the Bad Times on the Green Tortoise guy, mostly
about Chicago
http://josephdunphy.blogspot.com/
For some odd reason, that story is what I'm best known for online, a
reality I accept with a shrug. I think I've written much better things
than that piece, but if people like it, I certainly don't mind, and if
they get worked up over it and the radical suggestion that breach of
contract is wrong - I don't mind that either. One should never be
comfortable with one's own sleaze.
This is the blog that the group you're reading is a companion to,
mostly. Blogs tell the truth about their author's present, so
presently you'll see a lot of material about Webring, but you will be
seeing a shift to more Chicago oriented material. About architecture?
Maybe a little, but not so much because that's just getting
depressing. Any attempt to get architectural preservationism going in
Chicago runs into a bulletproof, know nothing attitude. More than in
any other city I know of in the Western world, a would-be
architectural photographer in Chicago finds himself in the position of
chronicling mindless destruction, as he hears the refrain endlessly
parroted "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". As much as I've
resented the widespread bicoastal view that Midwesterners tend to be a
little bit slow, sometimes I do have to admit that there is some
factual basis for such a view.
What you'll be seeing are snippets of street life from somebody with
deep roots in a city he intends to leave, because what was good in it
is dying and what was bad is getting stronger than ever before.
If you want to know when these sites will be updated, though, this is
not the group that you probably want to be looking at. For site
updates, you want to subscribe to
8. Joseph Dunphy. The Halls of Eternal Disbelief Update list
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Joseph_Dunphy
where I talk about what's going on with my sites, mainly. If you'd
like to see me talk about what nitwits both American political parties
are coming to be dominated by, I do sometimes talk about that on my
"miniblog" located on
9. Joseph Dunphy's Yahoo 360 profile
http://360.yahoo.com/cafe_satan
but you won't be seeing as much of that as you might have once. Think
of the self-conscious romanticism of the early middle ages and you
might have a glimmering of the reason why somebody might do as I'm
doing, as I make a conscious effort to turn my back on the present
without losing track of the reality that I am in the present. This is
not a good era, in part because any attempt to make it a better one is
ideologically shortcircuited before it can begin, and so the thought
occurs to few that they might want to better it. "All is the best in
this best of all possible worlds by definition, even the extent to
which we gripe about the place, because even our imperfection is
perfect", or some such nonsense. When one finds that one's
civilization has gone off the deep end, the only sensible thing to do
is to get one's affairs in order as best one can and then, having the
peace to do so, dream of the better times one wishes one had been
around for, and that I shall do. It is a good era in which to do one's
reading and maybe a little writing, which right now is scheduled to
maybe be located on the barely worked on
10. My Little Corner of Hell: Joseph Dunphy's Guide to the 21st
Century
http://joe.dunphy.googlepages.com/index.html
which does have the virtue of having an amazingly reliable server and
very liberal TOS (liberal in a good way, in the sense of being pro-
free expression), but there are some annoying and pointless
limitations placed on one's creative freedom in terms of the look and
feel of one's site that incline me to try to find another free website
provider that would be accepting of material that is a little raw.
More to come later, maybe.
Joseph Dunphy
On Apr 11, 2:15 am, I <commonsense666atl...@yahoo.com> carelessly
wrote:
> Lycos looked. Here I had an account at Bravenet, just for the sake of
> getting a guestbook, and a whole site that came with it which I wasn't
> using. Right now, I'm just barely using it for a mild bit of teasing
>
> http://saguaro.bravehost.com/
That should read: http://saguaro.bravehost.com/Postmodern/
Joseph Dunphy
For further postings or to return to where you were
http://groups.google.com/group/joseph_dunphy/web/halls-redirection