While I’ve always felt somewhat estranged from the world of puzzles and games, I don’t agree that it is an activity that is necessarily at odds with reading or other creative pursuits. But this dude does:
It’s a terrible thing to behold: on commuter trains, in Starbucks, in offices, the Slaves of Sudoku hunched over their puzzle books, addicted to the mind-numbing hillbilly heroin of the white-collar class.
Heh, nice. But not everyone can crank out a novel on a train, and even if the rank and file of commuting cattle everywhere were to start writing poetry, would anyone want to hear it? Uh, careful what you wish for.
What are some of the other defenses of the puzzle people? “It trains the mind.” No, sorry; it only trains the mind to think in a tragically limited and reductive fill-in-the boxes way. I’d say that instead it drains the mind. Drains it of creativity and imagination while fostering rat-in-a-maze skills.
Not necessarily. It’s at least some form of mental exercise. Having recently attempted (unsuccessfully) a few crosswords I would say that they do increase your appreciation for memory related chores. But me, I think I’ll wait until I can download a “google for the human brain” applet and forget memory altogether.
Last week I watched Battlestar Galactica on my computer, full screen, 10 hours before it aired on the sci-fi channel. There were 3 or 4 Intel commercials that were really short. I think networks are starting to get the picture. TV is going away, like CDs are, and like radio is, like all traditional media is.. But then again nothing is going away, fools, it’s resurfacing in new environments, with updated, perhaps tighter business models. If a band like Vampire Weekend can get big overnight because some pretentious website says they are the new “IT” band, well, you can hardly blame the internet pirates for ruining the world. The media is the message, the message is free, but the resulting buzz is what people will make money off.
Going but not gone. Tonight I thought I’d kick back and watch BSG on Hulu, which has been putting up the episodes, but someone at corporate sci-fi gave millions of sci-fi nerds blue balls and decided not to let them post it. The Gods giveth, the Gods taketh away.
That was all very high-brow. But like Nietzsche said, the “very great philosophy so far has been…the personal confession of its author and a kind of involuntary and unconscious memoir.”
So here’s a low-brow guilty pleasure of mine, POD. Well, this one song. Takes you back to like…’02 or somethin’!
This has been said many places before, and I’ve been wanting to say it for a long time, but keep forgetting. See these shoes, or clogs or “crocs,” or whatever the fuck they are? I hate these shoes with a passion that defies all logic. Please don’t wear them within eyesight of me or I will kill you.
The best thing about travel, besides enjoying the unique cultural and mulleted wonders offered by the location in question, would have to be discovering a new form of music or art. Or snack food. Holland didn’t disappoint, and on Saturday at Waterpop, a large free festival adorned gratuitously with sunflowers and traditional windmill in the distance, I discovered jumpstyle, the apparently preferred dance-step of young people throughout BeNeLux. It was a surreal moment, as I discovered a new favorite euro-cheese dance hit at the same time, “Me So Horny” by DJ Porny. A dance instructor with a boom box blasting the song, was illustrating the kick-crazy steps to a group of young pre-teen girls, all the while the lyrics carrying on, “DJ Porny, me so horny, come on get the vibe.” Perhaps too much irony. And I was confused, like when I heard Kid Rock for the first time and wondered, “is this a joke?” Please just watch the DJ Porny video for a proper education on all these matters.
By the way, I did spot a new mullet that I don’t think i’ve seen before: the dreds mullet. It’s short hair all around except for a few straggly dreads in the back. It’s these little bits of cultural arcana that you wouldn’t have otherwise been exposed to that make travel so necessary for me.
So Saturday was the double header, with us playing Waterpop and THEN jetting across the border to Petrol (club) in Antwerp. That’s two shows in one day in two different countries. I like that. Reminds me of mountains where you can see into different countries simultaneously from some vantage point. Petrol is a very cool club in an old shipyard warehouse type place by the river. There are many different rooms and scenes in the club, and a big black curtain that they draw only when the band is ready to play, which was totally weird. Best show to date, and we are finally in a pretty solid groove. Touring will do that. Saturday night brought much needed sleep and Sunday was the final festival in the little city of Ell. Tough sell, err, to the kids in Ell. But I think they liked our t-shirts.
You’ve certainly heard of Parkour by now, even if not by name. But have you heard of Por Quoi? Give it till halfway through when they start doing the goofy stuff. Skate pool scene kills me. If I were Wes Anderson, or a Wes Anderson competitor, my next feature film would involve a rising Parkour star, and Will Ferrell would be the obvious choice for lead.
I’m all for studies and research and anything in general that makes sense where there formerly was none, or tosses some long standing, ill-begotten misconception out of the window, but I find all this happiness research stuff kind of silly. Um, The World Database of Happiness…are you kidding me? Now I’m a big fan of the InterWebs, and the varied geekness you may find on said webs, including dorky databases, but I really hope they were being ironic with that name. I doubt it however, because the website is so horrifyingly 1996 that the author wouldn’t have- wait a minute….the whole thing is a great big giant ironical culture jam! Perhaps the Yes Men are behind it.
But seriously, isn’t it fucking obvious safe to assume that people will be relatively happier with more wealth, with more health, with more freedom, with more leisure time, but that these things in and of themselves do not guarantee “happiness?” Didn’t we learn this boring lesson over and over again in all those bad novels that we had to read in high school? What more is there to say? And I’m suspicious about these psychological polls because they are fallible and people are also fallible (and they lie, conscious or not!), so let’s stick to measuring things that make sense, like blood pressure. I know this: the smiley checkout lady at CVS will be happier than I will ever be, and good for her. But I don’t envy her line of work, or to be honest, even her smileyness. That’s right, I’m Scrooge, bitch!
I’ve always thought there was something missing from rock festivals. No, plenty of puke, obnoxious teens, and bad radio music. I’m talking about the prayer tent. Gotta get me one of them “I Love Christian Boys” trucker hats too. Why is there no Buddhist rock movement in this country? I remember when Jello Biafra jokingly wondered why a genre of Islamic Metal didn’t exist. Perhaps because no one is allowed to play it, but you know them terror loving types would do much better with less cheesy-graphics propaganda films and more metal. Young hellions love metal. Please note that this website does not condone the use of Heavy Metal for non-peaceful purposes.
Business 2.0 on the rising ad revenue generated by blogs. Uh, perhaps it’s time to start my own celebrity gossip blog, you know, give the people what they want and all that.
Boing Boing, a four-person operation that bills itself as a directory of wonderful things, is on track to gross an estimated $1 million in ad revenue this year.
And Fark.com, a site packed with sophomoric humor run by a lone guy in Lexington, Ky., is on pace to become a multimillion-dollar property.
With overall Web advertising expected to grow by 50 percent to $23.6 billion in 2010, it’s certain that more and more ad dollars will land on blogs.
Denton won’t discuss financial details, but industry experts estimate that Gawker Media will bring in as much as $3 million in revenue this year. Gawker Media’s average CPM is between $8 and $10; CPM rates on Google AdSense and competing automated systems are estimated at anywhere from 50 cents to a few bucks.
His authors range from tech-oriented guys like Arrington and Om Malik, who writes about telecom on GigaOm and just left his full-time gig with Business 2.0, to Heather Armstrong, whose deeply personal Dooce site is bringing in enough money to allow her family to live comfortably. Her enterprise has a staff of two: Armstrong and her husband.
Frequent man.under.stress contributor and former book reviewer, “chilly,” or in the preferred Taoist nomenclature, “chi-li,” began podcasting interviews with friends and acquaintances, the unsung celebrity of the everyman sort of thing, some time ago. Well now he’s expanded the service into a full blown blog, complete with the continuing series of podcasts, PLUS, psychedelic arcana, all things Asian and much, much more. And so far he’s out of the gate and running, with sometimes more than one daily post. That’s more than I can say for my sorry ass. When Chi-Li is not slurping a Starbucks mocha frapp in the comfort of his Tarantino shrine, we can assume he’s hard at work finding interesting things for you to contemplate. So check out and bookmark The 10,000 Things.
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