Month: September 2006

The whole concept of TGIF has been laid aside somewhat since the disco era. Something happened around the time the Smashing Pumpkins were being miserable. I think it was then because when the Smiths were miserable at least you could still dance to it even if you had to try a little too hard sometimes.

• Update: What is it with today that there is muchly going on? Anyway, here is another lunchy update. John Gushue has provided this excellent passage on the Colbert Report‘s addressing o’ the nuttiness that is wikipedia and its attack on reason in favour of buying bulk:
  

  Over the last month, Colbert has given us another gem: wikiality. “What we’re doing is bringing democracy to knowledge,” Colbert said on his July 31 episode, as he introduced the word. He then invited his viewers to log on to Wikipedia – the open-source encyclopedia that allows any user to edit most any document – and write that the population of elephants had actually tripled in the last six months.

  The population of elephants has in fact declined, but Colbert – the persona, it should be remembered – argued that environmentalists could be corrected on anything if enough people said it was so. Colbert’s fans – heroes, he calls them – did so, with enough volume to crash the site temporarily, and (more enduringly prompting Wikipedia to lock down almost two dozen articles containing data about elephants.

  Colbert made his point, but that was just the start. A month of so after it was coined, “wikiality” at this writing returns more than 290,000 hits on Google, and has spawned a funny site by that name. (With, yes, a full – and fictitious – entry on elephants.) The so-called Web 2.0 revolution has been made fun of before, but never so sharply or so well.

  “Wikiality” now joins Web Twenny as my favorite “new era” commentaries.

  One further thought: won’t it be nice when we soon have a word for the sort of dope who believes what is read on a blog over authoritative sources? I suspect that will be one characteristic of the impending but not yet here new broader era of post-post-9/11 thinking. We are still, as you know, locked into the many forms of gullibility in the pre-post-post-9/11 world that that terrible tragedy unleashed as one of its many unanticipatible, incoherent and tangential off-spring. I am thinking of a word. It might be “clog” but I sorta used that up with the concept of “clogging” though they are not unrelated.

• Update: David Frum just said this on NPR’s The Connection:
  

  Military action has a better record of solving problems than social work does.

  Exactly one pack o’ lie. If you, as it is reasonable to do, include social welfare and public health in the concept of social work, this is the classic example of an unchallenged toss-off line that a guy like Frum uses as a bullying smoke screen hovering above his eloquent vacuity. He moves on to pose the argument that if you do not have regard for the policies of George Bush, you cannot have regard for human life. Dopery. Next time you are with Frum, please ask him to slow down and explain himself before he moves on to the next unfounded postulate. It is a technique that would make the finest used car salesman blush.

• Update: Nicholas quotes a quotable quotation about blogging that is worth a link and a repeat:
  

  Sadly, I’m willing to bet a fairly hefty sum of money that almost none of the [. . .] bloggers who linked to it originally will link to my attempts to rectify their misunderstanding. Because after all the point of blogging is not to have an interesting discussion; it is to make fun of people who don’t agree with us, in the company of like-minded companions who will reinforce our conviction that other opinions are risible. But we’ll know, won’t we, dear reader. And the important thing, of course, is that we all agree . . .

  I have had to use and separatelty defend the use of my manners policy this week and I am happy to do so. I believe that there is a place between demanding and enforcing gawk-jawed fawning acceptance of the blogger’s party line on the one hand and, on the other, promoting mean-spirited auslandering and screaming finger-pointery of any and all. That zone is called civil discourse and that is that thing I want here. It is ok, therefore and because the world is full of them, to call some one a dope and their ideas dopey but only if you can support the allegation with supportable examples and links to evidence. It is never right to call someone a mother(#&$*&ing dope even if you have such examples. Fair?

• Gary remembered the Pretenders this week which was definitely a band that you could dance to as you were thinking about how Monday took you back to the chain gang. Both their self-titled first album in high school and Learning to Crawl nearing the end of undergrad were massively important.
• Speaking of undergrad, I started it 25 years ago this week. That is uncomfortably more than Oldie Olson when I think of it. I remember thinking I was getting creeky when I hit 25. Jeesh.
• So what if we are chilling the relationship with China? It is a totalitarian dictatorship. That should be a simple, straight-forward rule. No kissy face with dictatorships. And while we are at it, how about doing it with these guys, too.
• Is modernity getting you down?
  

  The fast pace of modern life is the biggest health worry, a survey says. The public cited lack of exercise, lack of sleep, fatigue and stress in their top five concerns with passive smoking and drinking much lower down the chart.

  I have a trick. Ignore expectations. And now that I am truly Oldie Olson, I can be left alone to do so. For years I was a junior slob, a man ahead of my time in terms of going to seed. Now my age is catching up to me and I am thinking that middle age is the true era for Gen X slackers. Like childhood, it is an era in which much is done to you. Unlike childhood you have a credit card and know how to use dirty words usefully.

• This is actually interesting. One of the reasons we have shock of the new is that the internet for a long time has effectively erased the past by not archiving pre-digital era events in a handy-dandy fashion. Through YouTube we have regained the videos of our youth and Google has now launched the Google News Archive Search which apparently goes back 200 years. Soon I will be able to meet my old anxtity youthful self on the internet so that we can look at each other and call each other losers.
• Watching local New York state TV as I do – as I am doing – I am getting the election ads and I have to admit watching ads with strong leaders without right wing agendas is quite refreshing. Say what you like as you demonize Hillary Clinton, she is a shoe-in for repeat Senator due to her hard work as a local representative for the state. The funniest thing is people who thought she was a carpet bagger. No one with the name Clinton can be a carpet bagger in upstate New York as far as I can tell.

Must run now as I leave you earlier to hoist weights each morning. I am aware that “hoisting” implies something more than the actual weight I throw around but if I use words like “hoisting” and “throwing around” it sounds cooler and more effective than it actually is.