John Lennon
Thirty years ago today, The Sister walked into my room in Carleton Place, Ontario and said, “Wake up. Grandpa and John Lennon are both dead.”
Really, every morning since then has been a snap, relatively speaking.
Imagine
Category Archives: philosophy
Everything I need to know about America I learned from YouTube
I'll have a double chili nihilismdog to go
It’s true, though. It’s not like America is complicated anymore.
Back in 2001 (nearly a century ago, if you don’t think about it too hard) the New Yorker published a truly ground-breaking article on the ways that Powerpoint (itself around and changing worldviews since 1987) was reducing the American capacity for original thought.
PowerPoint, which can be found on two hundred and fifty million computers around the world, is software you impose on other people… The usual metaphor for everyday software is the tool, but that doesn’t seem to be right here. PowerPoint is more like a suit of clothes, or a car, or plastic surgery. You take it out with you. You are judged by it—you insist on being judged by it. It is by definition a social instrument, turning middle managers into bullet-point dandies.
But PowerPoint also has a private, interior influence. It edits ideas. It is, almost surreptitiously, a business manual as well as a business suit, with an opinion—an oddly pedantic, prescriptive opinion—about the way we should think. It helps you make a case, but it also makes its own case: about how to organize information, how much information to organize, how to look at the world.
and, as anyone familiar with human interaction or communications theory could tell you, the way you get information about the world changes your concept of the world, and that in turn changes the world in which you live, if you do in fact live and not just exist. And what does this have to do with burgers, YouTube, and America? Plenty, my friends, plenty.
Think about this: the greatest technological success story of our time is Twitter, which limits what you can say to 140 characters; or we can equally say that it gives you 140 characters of void to fill with existential screaming. Some people have to pad to make the word count.
You thought I was kidding, didn’t you?
Think about the Tea Party, and think about exactly how deeply its members are thinking about the most important issues of the day. You can’t say their politics are not heartfelt, but you’d be hard-pressed to defend this particular capito-populist tribe as an intellectual movement. They make Pat Buchanan look like Bill Kristol. On the opposite side, a relatively intellectual President had to dumb down his message to single-word talking points; not much room for nuance when it has to fit on a Shepard Fairey poster.
Shepard Fairey does Barack Obama in words of one or two syllables
And of course, popular culture is debased to the point where the Kardashians have not one but two television series among them, simply because sister Kim has a sex tape and a legendary caboose. It’s not exactly Witness to Yesterday, my friends.
So, yes, everything you need to know about the USA right at this moment, you can get from two brief YouTube videos and twenty or thirty minutes of cogitation thereon.
Here is the greatest scene from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle that does not have Neil Patrick Harris in it:
Now that immigrant can-do-ism and aspirational capitalism have been explained, it’s time to take on geopolitics, and who better to tackle that nest of vipers than Team America, World Police?
The Secret of Enjoying Life
Jerry Lewis has the secret of happiness
Another quote o’ the day, this time one from HP Lovecraft, never known as a barrel of laughs at the best of times, but one of the very sharpest knives in all the cutlery drawer.
And he said, of an acquaintance…
He enjoys life — as do all who are spared the curse of intelligence.
Thinkabowdit. All I’m sayin’.
Avatars of Feminine Power: Bad Role Models
Endora was the shizznit and don't you even TRY to say different or I'll turn you into a newt. A special-needs newt
One of an ongoing series featuring Angie Dickinson, Suzanne Pleshette, Catherine Deneuve, Catwoman, Britney Spears, Mylene Farmer, Vanessa Paradis, an Iraqi police woman in training, Rembrandt’s Pallas Athena, Barbie, and now, Endora from Bewitched.
I always wanted to grow up to be her, and I think I may have finally succeeded. Now to get my hands on that wardrobe!
Pucci Galore!
What I like about her is…seriously, everything. I even dyed my hair red for a couple of years! She takes no prisoners, takes no shit, takes names and kicks ass, and she was right: her daughter married a total dork. Derwood was a feeb. I’m sorry, all you Derwoods or Darvins or Dickwads or Whatevers out there, but you’re just not good enough and it would be cruel to let you go through life in a fog of self-delusion, correct?
Endora would NEVER stoop to psychoactives. Other than Martinis, of course
Do you know the Sedona Method? Its aim is to give insecure, dweebish people a feeling of accomplishment. Regardless of whether or not they have, in fact, accomplished anything.
You can see why Endora and I would have a problem with that, yes? [clue for Derwoods: say Yes]
So, from Endora I have taken my vociferous contempt for the inferior, my belief that if one is magical enough one can get away with anything, and my taste for earrings of true splendiferositude.
Endora enjoys Champagne mainly on the plane over Spain
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Endora and me: can we help it if we're fabulous?
Flamewar of the Day: Gawkers
No parking in rear
This actually happened last week, which is right and natural when you consider what a shitstorm last week was: when ELSE would it have happened, right? Instead of our usual fun flamewars, toying with the early drinkers and short bus riders of the blogosphere, this one went a little bit sideways and turned into something akin to watching hara kiri right there in the comments section on Gawker. What people are willing to do in front of strangers, and blame upon those strangers, never ceases to fascinate me.
There’s no question I was guilty, but what of exactly what, nobody is quite sure, except for the victim, who is quite sure of many things despite being quite wrong.
What is pretty much certain is that some grownups still have to learn that lesson about when to keep your mouth shut, the one most of us learned around the time we first encountered those savvy genii of the interwebs, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, not to mention Socrates, who came later (what with him being an old man and all).
Judge for yourselves, as always. This is from the comments section of a Gawker post about a “Spiderman” who freeclimbed a 58-story building with suction cups and was arrested for trespassing once he got to the top.
If residents gave him water en route, he can persuasively claim to have been a guest who was there with their permission.@raincoaster: How about the floors in which nobody gave him water? If I invite you to my apartment does that mean you get to visit all my neighbors? How about reckless endangerment of parked Dodges? How about his impending Darwin award nomination? Questions, questions for the jury..Seriously, this will be only a misdemeanor, no?
raincoaster promoted this comment@lethedrinker: Presumably even if you don’t invite him in, if your neighbors are okay with him walking by, he’s allowed to walk past your door via the hallway. He didn’t invade the apartments.@raincoaster: Well, he climbed past their windows without their permission. I’d consider that an invasion of privacy.This happened to me a few months ago. I live in a high rise condo looking directly at a bay, so privacy is not usually a concern. It’s a 1BR with a window in the BR; the LR has floor-to-ceiling doors to the balcony.
I got a notice saying that the window washing crew would be there on a certain date, and that they did not clean the windows in the LR, so I shut the blinds to the bedroom and thought I was all set.
Imagine my surprise when I was seated in the LR wearing only panties, and the crew appeared in my LR window to clean the glass balcony! I gently sank lower in the chair and raised my kindle to try and hide the tits. Not that they are anything to look at, I just prefer that people don’t.
They took 30 minutes to clean the damn balcony, and I couldn’t move in all that time.
So, with respect, your defense fails.
raincoaster promoted this comment@Registered: Isn’t there some merit to the argumenet that by keeping the blinds up or door open, one implicity lowers the threshold for reasonable expectation of privacy. According to my lawyer friend, cops often use this excuse (made up or otherwise) to get around fourth amendment restrictions – not directly relevant to the privacy argument..@lethedrinker: I don’t know about open front doors – they’re against the fire code here, must close automatically – but if I live in, say, a 26th floor condo that faces directly onto the ocean (or bay, in my case; you’d need the Hubble telescope to look in unless you are on a scaffold cleaning the windows ) then I would say the police lose their case.Also, are you suggesting that people should live in caves with the blinds shut and the doors closed, or else lose any right to privacy? Bushish.
raincoaster promoted this comment@Registered: I said reduced not lose any or all. Bushish? I bet such dubious arguments existed long before either Bush and will continue to be used till 2084.Anyway, it was a generic comment not specific to the 26th floor dwelling, bay watching, automatic door closing kindle readers.
@Registered: If you got a notice that the window washing crew would be there washing your windows on a certain date and you’re sitting in your apartment topless in your panties, SOMETHING ain’t an accident. And it ain’t invasion of privacy, either.
raincoaster 