Miscellaneous Rambling
Well, I reversed course with respect to lectures. I still like my idea of buying the used audio CD and ripping them into my iTunes, but there are three problems with it: (1) Amazon is not clear whether you are getting the audio CD or the book format of the lecture (hardly a useful thing while I'm working in the field), so one of the three lectures came in book format; (2) The Amazon listings aren't clear about what you're getting, so if you're ordering a huge lecture series, you might only get one part (like I only received part V of Professor Robinson's five-part Great Ideas of Philosophy; (3) iTunes isn't a great mechanism for starting-and-stopping the lecture. Each six minutes is treated like a separate song, so if you stop and go back a few days later, you have to start that six-minute session over again (assuming, of course, you remember at which six-minute session you left off).
I'm not complaining, btw. I tried something and didn't work as well as I had hoped. Because I touted the system last week, I felt obliged to pass along the shortcomings I discovered, and to mention that, in light of the problems, I think it's simply better to get an Audible membership through Amazon. I pay $15 a month, and for that, I get one free lecture series per month (normal cost of the lectures are much more). Yesterday, I ordered the 43-hour lecture series, Great Minds of the Western Intellectual Tradition. We'll see how it goes.
I'm about halfway through the Netflix documentary, Wild Wild Country. It's about the Rajneeshee invasion of Oregon in the 1980s. Riveting stuff. When I noticed that Thaddeus Russell had interviewed the Rajneeshee attorney last week for the Unregistered podcast, I immediately downloaded it and listened to it yesterday. I highly recommend it. The attorney came off as a douche bag in the documentary, but now that I listened to him for three hours discussing things with Russell, I kind of like the guy. He said a lot of interesting things, including one thing that Osho (f/k/a The Bhagwan) emphasized: "All men are enlightened, but they refuse to acknowledge it" (not an exact quote). That resonated with me.
