I don’t know about you, but the water cooler talk all last week about how The Sopranos was going to end was really draining. There was nothing too outrageous as far as ways the writers could cap off one of the most beloved mini-series of all time. But by not saying anything at all they actually ended up saying as much as they should have.

In a short story titled The Lady or the Tiger? by Frank Stockton a similar ending was used. In fact I think the writers of The Sopranos may have ripped off the ending from Stockton’s classic short story, and they were right to do so. The story, which is about four pages long (so read it), is about a man who must choose between two doors. Behind the first door is the woman of his dreams, and behind the second door is a Tiger which would surely kill him instantly. This has nothing to do with The Sopranos, the ending however does.

The question of her decision is one not to be lightly considered, and it is not for me to presume to set myself up as the one person able to answer it. And so I leave it with all of you: Which came out of the opened door - the lady, or the tiger?

NOTICE ANYTHING? Yes, they end the same way. The writers from The Sopranos couldn’t possibly make a decision about what was to happen. In fact no matter what direction they chose they would surely have drawn ire from fans anyways.

I smiled when the credits rolled, the nytimes also smiled, have you come around yet?

1. Will Robots Inherit the Earth?

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   to schoolofthought … saved by 10 other people … on may 01

2. Will we comprehend supra-human emergence?

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3. David Foster Wallace - Commencement Speech at Kenyon University

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   to schoolofthought … saved by 347 other people … on april 17

4. Jacques Derrida - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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   to schoolofthought … saved by 40 other people … on april 11

5. Dan Gilbert on TED Talks

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I stumbled upon David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement speech which he gave at Kenyon University and found it to have some great advice. Interestingly enough this speech was given on my 21st birthday, wish I had read it back then.

Here is a snippet:

“If you worship money and things, if they are where you tap real meaning in life, then you will never have enough, never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly. And when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally grieve you. On one level, we all know this stuff already. It’s been codified as myths, proverbs, clichés, epigrams, parables; the skeleton of every great story. The whole trick is keeping the truth up front in daily consciousness.”

Read the whole thing here. It will probably make your day.

Douglas Rushkoff has done a couple of documentaries for PBS on how the media affects our lives on a daily basis. He gave a talk last year in a bookstore in NYC with another fellow and during this he talked about open source reality. I watched the video, all two hours of it, and then I watched it again a couple of days later when the idea’s they had been talking about started to make more sense. I took the time to transcribe Rushkoff’s introduction because it really made sense and I wanted to be able to refer to it. If you have some free time I would suggest reading it:

“Its funny oddly enough i wasn’t prepared to talk about psychedelics but I may as well. for me the most illuminating thing about taking psychedelics was the insight that i had been living in a particular reality tunnel, right, and that had been constructed for me and some of it has been constructed by myself and we all have been living in these reality tunnels and there are ways you can remove some of the filters, some of the constructs in order to see, or at least see second hand through the chemical.. that theres a whole bunch of different way of looking at things. And it sent me on a mission, ever since college when I had these experiences, to help people get that the reality that we’re living in is much more up for grabs than most of us acknowledge on a daily basis. That, to use the programming metaphor, that reality is open-source, and that if you learn the code through which its programmed then you can be a reality programmer rather than just a user. And that we walk around in our daily life mistaking a lot of whats actually software, for hardware.

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