November 28, 2009

Huzzah!

It can’t come soon enough.

November 28, 2009

Merlot is just as bad as chardonnay.

November 28, 2009

I often hear people bemoaning the compensation of teachers. They suppose that teachers are incredibly valuable people, doing incredibly valuable work, and our society — for some crazy reason, a reason which has been at the root of generation after generation of low pay and prestige — irrationally undervalues and underpays them.

What if, however, they are paid exactly what they are worth?

November 28, 2009

One often hears about how horrible most technology is, how it prevents “true” communication (whatever that is), and does more to separate people than bring them together.

Who are these monsters, who would force us to spend more time with other people? Who are these madmen who think that being in the same room with some random person or persons is a good thing, is something preferable to communicating via electronic devices or not at all? Have they not met most people? Have they not smelled most people? Have they not listened to most people? The number of people who can carry on a conversation is small; the number of people who can carry on a conversation and who actually have something to say is comparably smaller.

Those who would force us to spend time with others are facists, for they believe that humans can be forced to enjoy things that they ought not enjoy, or even want. There is nothing about another human which makes them worth talking to just because they are another human. There is nothing about my time that makes it yours to tell me what I ought to do with it, or who I ought to spend it with — if it is to be spent with anyone at all.

November 23, 2009

I knew it. I’ve always known it. There is no hope.

November 7, 2009

The medium does, at the least, make a difference. As I drove in my car this afternoon, Gloria Estefan’s “Falling in Love (Uh-Oh)” came on the radio. This would normally lead to the changing of the station, but I didn’t. The song sounded different — the sound had more depth, the mood was darker. I didn’t even recognize it at first. What was the difference? AM. AM was the difference: the sound had little range, crackles came through with the voice and the notes, and all the faults of AM came together to make a piece of bubblegum pop taste surprisingly good.

What could this mean, other than that my ears had an unexpected treat? It could help explain just why some songs were considered classics or even life-changing in their day: it was the medium; it was AM, doing its thing to the music. How to simulate this with my music collection? How to find out just how much difference AM vs FM really made?

October 26, 2009

How I loathe chardonnay.

October 18, 2009

The recent T-Mobile MyTouch ads scream “we only sell this phone to boomers; we primarily target boomer celebrities and out-of-the-public-eye older comedians”. Is this their intended audience? Is it because this may be the last group of people who are likely to have money in five years?

October 17, 2009

I remember when John Cusack was in good movies.

October 10, 2009

Few things may infuriate a woman more than an encounter with someone who claims to have her pegged, who suggests they know her motivations, desires, and inner workings. She wants to be the most special individual woman in the world by far; the claim that she can be truly known threatens to pop that shiny balloon of hope that she really is that woman.