Category: words mean things (Page 141 of 223)

Seems like everyone is either sick, sad, depressed, anxious, lonely, bored, worried, or a combination of those lately. Including me. What a crappy month this has been. I’m thinking maybe it has something to do with these mild winters – they don’t allow you to hunker down and ride it out, and thus enjoy the hell out of it when it goes away. It’s just a big grey expanse.

If it keeps going like this, pretty soon we’re going to be living in Waterworld, and we’ll have to have Kevin Costner tell us what to do. Which is something to be depressed about, as if we needed anything more.

words mean things

Homer: That Timmy O’Toole is a real hero!
Lisa: How do you mean, Dad?
Homer: He fell down that well, and…and he can’t get out!
Lisa: How does that make him a hero?
Homer (angrily): …It’s more than you did!

“It Spoke to Me” Quote of the Day:

“Sure, 90 percent of science fiction is crud. That’s because 90 percent of everything is crud.”
-Theodore Sturgeon

Poor Andy Rooney. It’s easy enough to make fun of him as a commentator who makes millions writing ’60 Minutes’ pieces about the contents of his desk drawer, or whether women make better lawn mowers than men. But things get even worse when Andy tries to make a serious point.

I found myself rubbing my eyes tonight as Rooney began to make a cogent, if simplistic, argument about the misuses of patriotism – to hawk products and advertise the Olympics. Then he had to go screw it up with this jaw-droppingly clueless ending:

“The rest of the world doesn’t like the way we behave as if no one else’s country is as good as ours and we ought to stop acting that way ? even if we’re right.”

Way to make your own point, Andy.

Went to Sam’s Club with my mother today. Sam’s Club, for those not familiar, is a subscription version of Wal-Mart, where people pay a yearly fee to be able to wander the gargantuan aisles, filled with trampolines, frozen giant shrimp, paperpack books, jewelry, jean jackets, pork roasts, and packages of toilet paper the size of a Buick. Everything is in massive quantities, stacked up inside the airplane-hangar-sized building like so much consumerist cordwood.

My mother, of course, goes there to get one item, and stands in line alongside people who are pushing giant double-sized flat-bottom carts, like the ones they use on the loading dock at the airport. Then you box up your own purchases, and get “checked-out” again at the door to make sure you aren’t carrying, oh, 40 pounds of frozen hamburger patties in your coat.

Usually when I go there, I just marvel at the culture that has created a place like this. But in my current grumpy-old-man mode, it made me almost physically ill to see all these people jockeying for position as they consumed massive quantities of a bunch of processed food and other junk they don’t need. Is this all there is?

In case you were wondering, I am not a veterinary assistant at an animal clinic in western Kentucky.

Just wanted to clear that up.

(Who are your online doppelgangers?)

Inspired by Robin’s wonderful collage of artifacts from her father’s house, I decided to do the same sort of thing for my father. I was surprised by the amount of stuff I had connected to him, and even more surprised there wasn’t more of it – his artistic and photographic output was prodigious. Every one of these items has a story behind it. I hope the resulting images will give you some flavor of my father’s personality.

My thanks to Robin for bringing back a lot of memories.

I’m going to take my Snickers and Mars Bar on the plane from Wisconsin to New Jersey. (via Xkot)

The web is an amazing organism. It routes around obstacles; it gives ordinary people extraordinary powers of communication; it blasts through barriers to information exchange; it rewards openness and punishes small-mindedness and corporatespeak.

So how is it that people are still screwing it up so much?

Dave Winer linked recently to a great article by Eve Andersson, one of the founders of ArsDigita, a cool web content management firm that was a pioneer in releasing web applications as open source. It details how a thriving web company was brought to its knees by venture capitalists, who came in knowing nothing about the web and dismantled everything good about the company.

Now, it could be said that it was the founders’ fault bringing in the suits in the first place, if everything was going just fine until then. I guess the lure of big bucks, especially before the internet bubble burst, was too much for most people to resist. Still, it shows how fragile the web culture can be.

The story reminded me of my former employer. We had a fun and useful web culture growing there, until some management types came in and wrecked it. They knew very little about technology and absolutely nothing about the web, and didn’t much care to learn either. Our mission and our very jobs were made irrelevant by flowcharts and directives and new complex chains of command. Where before we just jumped in and got things done, now any action meant three or four meetings and explaining things to people who couldn’t care less.

It’s no wonder I became a freelancer.

A recurring theme on this site has been my “let’s junk the culture and start again” moments. I think one of my first ones was when Hammacher Schlemmer was selling a plastic doodad whose only function was to form perfectly round snowballs. And then came Anne Heche, and each new Olsen twins series, and on and on.

Well, just when you think things can’t get any worse, they keep surprising you.