Once again, I found a cool thing at Boing Boing. I have to resist the temptation just to repost everything they post, so awesome are the peeps over there. For some reason I've always been interested in the regional differences that seem to crop up in the terminology for carbonated beverages, and once again, the omniscient virtual realm has provided neatly organized answers to my questions. Alan McConchie is responsible for this, and you can look at the info and contribute to the information via his survey.

Yesterday I had the very fortunate experience of travelling to one of my favorite places of all time (Maastricht, NL) to attend a very small and intense conference on freedom in Psychoanalysis. It was held at the Jan Van Eyck Academie which seems to be a small group of independent artists and scholars who do what they do and then host lots of cultural and academic events. It was a really great day, I was all aquiver with new information and they provided lunch! I wasn't confident enough to say anything, but talking to some of the scholars I think Lacan's interpretation of Kierkegaard indicates the way the modern paradigm is forced to conceive human freedom negatively in terms of our freedom to die/defy the law. It is certainly the case that Adam's freedom in the garden is limited to the possibility of sin, which is of course unlimited, but once he takes that "qualitative leap" and eats of the fruit, we're all condemned to that distance from God that allows us to rattle around anxiously and do all kinds of things that seem contrary to nature. This is the account Haufniensis gives in The Concept of Anxiety anyway. I think that this corresponds to the distance that the symbolic order (language etc.) gives us from Lacan's sense of the Real, as an utterly meaningless transcendent element we need protection from. So says Lacan, the dilemma is now: "Your Freedom or your Life." You can be free, but that means giving up everything that makes your life meaningful.
Yee ha!