are behind the cut. but first, i wanted to show everybody the much-fabled apple cider donut:

and point you towards this delicious-sounding recipe on how to make your very own apple cider donuts that i recently found in the post. i think i'll try it sometime soon.

selected photos behind the cut. i have to admit, i'm feeling very lazy, and there are about two billion photos, so i'm just going to post certain ones, and you can browse the directory at your leisure here. it's mostly apple-picking photos, but there are also some from a recent trip to charlottesville, and one of that crazy bigass security blimp that was floating around d.c. last week.

we've totally kicked cancer's ass.

today my contact at the lombardi center sent an updated spreadsheet detailing the most recent donations we've received. and i was shocked to find that in the four months since june 3, when i first posted that above entry stating that i had decided to enter the marine corps marathon and raise $2,000 for the lombardi cancer center, i've received over $2,600 in donations.

i mean really. holy fuck.

and guess what? almost $600 of that came through people who donated through the blog. it's totally amazing. i know i've already gotten gushy here and thanked everyone about 2 billion times, but really, just humor me once more and let me say it again:

thank you!

i thought all along that raising money was going to be harder than running the marathon, but i should have counted on my friends' and family's generosity. running this motherfucker and not dying is definitely going to be the harder of the two.

i've been fairly good about weekday training - i've taken to running up and down rock creek parkway for 8 or 9 miles, which is a gorgeous trail, as long as you don't get raped and/or murdered on it. but this saturday i'm entering the 10th circle of hell, commonly known as the 22 mile run. behold:

wish me well!

As some of you might already know, Universal is making a movie based on the Doom videogame franchise. It's easy to understand why when you consider the games' vibrant fictional universe, saturated as it is with concepts like: being on Mars; the sudden, unexplained appearance of monsters from hell; the shooting of said monsters; and many other, uh, ideas. Ahem.

Well, if that sounds as fascinating to you as it would have to me when I was thirteen, be sure to check out this interview with its first-time screenwriter, in which he reveals the exciting plans he has for expanding upon the rich backstory, while remaining true to the spirit of the franchise. Among the juiciest revelations:

• The movie is no longer set on Mars


• The monsters are no longer from hell


• The main character's name is "John"


• There will still be shooting


• Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson will co-star!

Sounds like that licensing fee is really paying for itself.

i was totally anxious during the vice presidential debates the other night (i was sure cheney would wipe the floor with edwards and i didn't really want to witness it), so instead of sitting in front of the tv with charles and tommy, i headed towards the kitchen to use up some of the apples from our carter mountain orchard extravaganza (pics should be up soon) and make an apple crisp.

i was originally inspired by this recipe here, but since i can't read, am terrible at following directions, couldn't find dates at whole foods, and can't do the basic math in order to convert grams into cups, etc, i kind of flew by the seat of my pants and just mixed a whole bunch of ingredients together. it came out not terribly, but i think i added too much milk to the topping and so it wasn't as crumbly as it should have been. but it's pretty good heated and covered with a ton of vanilla ice cream. anyway, if you want to know the recipe, eccola:

-preheat oven to 400 degrees

-take 8 apples and peel and core them (the afternoon before i made the recipe, i asked tommy via IM if we had a corer at home. he responded by laughing hysterically, apparently because this is not a reasonable question to ask. i told him that he and charles are very domestic and gay, and they should not be surprised if people were to ask them if they owend an apple corer). anyway, i just used a knife to slice and peel. i am lucky i still am in possession of all of my fingers.

-arrange the apple slices in a buttered baking dish. oh yeah, i would use a smaller baking dish rather than a large baking dish. i think the one i used was too big, and i ended up not having enough topping to spread over all the apples.

-take 1/2 cup brown sugar, 1/2 oatmeal, 7/8 cup of all-purpose flour, and a stick of salted butter. dice the butter and mix them all up. the original recipe says to do this with a food processor, but i just did it by hand in a bowl. i think a food processor would be a much better idea, as i ended up with a lumpy mess. the original recipe also suggests adding a small splash of milk. i would not do this, because your small splash of milk might accidentally turn into a huge splash of milk, and then you have a lumpy, milky mess. i also read another recipe that suggests mixing all the above ingredients (minus the milk) in a big ziplock bag and squishing it with your hands. that sounds fun, so i'll recommend that.

-spread your lumpy mess over the apple slices in the baking dish. before spreading said mess, i also sprinkled some white sugar and added pats of butter to the apples in hopes that it would somehow salvage the whole thing.

-bake for 45 minutes to an hour, until apple juices are bubbling and the topping is crispy and golden brown. let it cool a little bit, then scoop some out and serve it with vanilla ice cream or cool whip. luckily, baked apples are essentially good and hard to screw up, so even if you've fucked everything else up, it should still taste alright.

voila!

Over at BeliefNet, Robert Wright is twisting Dan Dennett's words into an endorsement of his position. Dan Dennett, although not quite as much of a jerk about it as the late Francis Crick, is an atheist, and a modern philosopher famous enough that people have actually heard of him despite his complete failure to inspire the birth of any fascist dictatorships (the true benchmark for any 20th century thinker).

Wright's article twists Dennett's position like an ad exec quoting two words from a movie review. Wright lays out a very broad descriptive framework -- one so broad that there's basically no option but to agree with it. When Dennett does so, Wright ignores all of the qualifications Dennett inserted, and goes on to use this weak endorsement as a vote in favor of some crackpot speculation about the planet evolving into a thinking organism.

More specifically, Dennett agrees that evolution as a process can be described as a "designer", insofar as it plays a causal role in the development of organisms. He also agrees that evolution can be ascribed a "direction", although he thinks that direction is probably arbitrary.

Wright simply gets Dennett to agree that these descriptive metaphors can be applied on a global scale to the planet. As I understand it, this is the limit of his assent: that the earth's development is proceeding in an arbitrary but consistent direction, and that this development is caused by natural, deterministic processes to which, if you're intent on it, you can apply the term "designer". That's it. He doesn't talk about God, or morality, or the meaning of life. He
just agrees on the validity of a very broad descriptive framework.

From there, Wright engages in some frankly sophomoric philosophizing, throwing out Gaia theory speculations and implying that complexity is synonymous with meaning, and that linear progression indicates deliberate design. Although I'm sympathetic to some of this, it's completely obvious that there is no factual justification for it. And it opens up some unpleasant cans of philosophical worms, which Wright is mostly happy to ignore. For instance: does his position mean that evolutionary progress is synonymous with morality? If so, would I be a better person if I had, I donno, retractable claws? I mean, clearly it would be awesome, but would a prehensile tail make me a righteous person?

I'm no Dennett apologist -- for one thing, I'm not at all satisfied with the only work of his with which I'm very familiar: his account of consciousness, which, after 500 pages, basically boils down to saying you don't really need to explain subjective experience after all (although he would deny this and probably send some enforcers/philosophy TAs to rough me up and/or confuse me). And frankly I am pretty receptive to the idea of existence having a higher purpose, in much the same way that I am receptive to the idea of free ice cream. But I think Dennett will be unhappy with Wright's characterization of his position, and downright pissed-off by the way bloggers like Begging To Differ and Sullivan are linking to it -- which is tending to be surround by language along the lines of "ATHEIST RECANTS! THERE IS A GOD!"

UPDATE: Dennett responds (thanks, Catherine, for finding this)