“No one can get a drivers license or fly an airplane without taking a test. Why should marriage be any different? If you want to make marriage more stable, make divorce illegal. If people knew they couldn’t get out of it, they’d be more careful getting into it.”
Category Archives: Media & Culture
Doc Searls on TV as an information medium
“Life’s too short. I’m already 56. Time gets more precious every day. Why waste time sitting still consuming thin information on TV when you can hunt the thick stuff down and eat it up at your own pace, on your own personal screen, or in a book, or on headphones while you excercize?”
St. Louis Traffic and Weather.
I finally got around to listening to the new “local weather & traffic” channels on XM Radio. Twenty-one cities to start, including St. Louis. I can’t speak to the accuracy of the content but it sounded like most other weather and traffic reports to me. For that matter, I have no way of knowing –without being in it every day– the accuracy of such reports on local stations. I did like the continuous feeds. If I didn’t want to wait 10 minutes for the next report on KMOX, I could punch up XM 218 and get it almost immediately.
NYTimes editorial on Google
What Google also reflects is our changing sense of the dynamism of the Web. Nothing captures how statically we used to see the Internet as well as “information highway,” an old phrase that embodies pure linearity and the smell of asphalt. That stasis is also captured in the increasingly outmoded notion of an Internet portal like AOL, much of whose dynamism comes from offering a Google search bar. The fact is that many of us have grown comfortable within the amorphousness of the Web. We no longer need a breakwater like AOL when a good search engine promises to make the sea itself our home.
— NY Times editorial
Five more proposed pieces of legislation supported by Mr. Bush (5ives)
1. Protection of Words Fewer than Three Syllables Act
2. Bill to make the “High Five” the US’s official greeting
3. National ‘Everybody Wears Jeans’ Day (March 14th)
4. The “Pretty Girls Shouldn’t Act All Stuck Up” Amendment
5. Presidential proclamation that “California Must Apologize to Jesus (and It Has to Sound Like They Really Mean It)”
Attention Baby Boomers
David Brazeal writes:
This is to inform you that the Vietnam War ended 30 years ago. Please refrain from referring to this event in political discourse, except as it shapes our continued effort to frustrate the goals of world domination by our Cold War opponent, the Soviet Union.
It has been called to our attention that this war shaped your worldview when you were young, impressionable and intoxicated by hope and marijuana. While we understand your obsession, we can no longer tolerate it. Thus, we shall treat any continued prattling in the same way you treated the prattling of your grandparents, who spoke of The Great War ad nauseum between longing remembrances of FDR–with rolled eyes and involuntary commitment to a group home. Thank you for your consideration.
David was born in 1969 so he was a teenager in the mid-eighties. I just spoke with him on the phone and asked what he considered the defining event of his generation. The best he could come up with was Cyndi Lauper‘s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun.”
101 Ways to Save the Internet
Paul Boutin offers 101 Ways to Save the Internet. A few of my favaorites:
* Upgrade phone booths to Wi-Fi
* Death to fax machines. Send us an attachment instead
* Stop with the jokes
* Turn off your HTML email It makes you vulnerable to viruses – and bugs us.
Wal-Mart Super Centers, etc.
From a website called Scarf Creations:
“Mike Smith has been a Elvis fan since he was 3 years old, when he heard his dad’s 8 track of Elvis. Mike’s career started when he was 25 years old and he performed in Kennett, Missouri. Mike has performed throughout Missouri, Arkansas, Illinois and Tennessee… at private parties, nursing homes, charity events, country clubs, restaurants, Wal-Mart Super Centers, etc. I perform in three stages of “Elvis” from his wild suits, 68 leather , to his most famous jumpsuits.”
“Besides doing Elvis, Mike works full time for Pepsi Mid-America in Sikeston, Missouri. I have performed 75 shows in the 3 years of my career as an Elvis impersonator and my recent being “The Jailhouse Rock” in Illinois.”
George Carlin on slavery, freedom
“This country was founded by a group of slave owners who wanted to be free.”
— George Carlin
Religious sites devoted to Elvis
“The number of religious sites devoted to the King is just staggering: Church of Elvis, The Eighth Day Transfigurist Cult, Elvis Sance, The Elvis Shrine, The First Church of Jesus Christ, Elvis, The Gospel of Elvis, Little Shrine to the King, and Oracle of the Plywood Elvis, and of course, The First Presleyterian Church of Elvis the Divine.”
The review above was written by Kimberly Villalba Wright. I’m pretty sure I don’t know Kimberly but according to the credits on the review, she “was born in Hollywood, Florida, and has spent most of her life in Mobile, Alabama. She earned a BA in English at the University of South Alabama in 1997. Her poetry has appeared in the Epiphany, Arrowsmith, Doggerel, Dicat Libre, El Locofoco, as well as Poetry Caf. This fall, Wright will begin working toward an MFA in creative Writing at the University of Memphis. Wright currently resides in Kennett, Missouri.”
Kimberly… I’ll be in town Christmas Eve. Let’s hook up, pound some Buds and remember The King.