On one hand, this story is sad because the mean people at Shop-Rite wouldn’t make a 3-year old a personalized birthday cake. On the other hand, this story is sad because his parents named him Adolf Hitler.
Filed under: apocalypse
I’ve mentioned Seth Godin’s genius before. And i hate to pin that tag on someone who doesn’t care if he’s entitled that way but day in and day out, the man impresses me. I read this post the other day…and it kicked me in the ass…actually, no…it knocked me down, kicked me in the head and then, just to make sure i didn’t hit on his girlfriend, it kicked me in the ribs. It didn’t catch me by surprise…so much as it just articulated what my brain has been complaining about for a while.
His post was about creation. About not reacting to what we see. About not looking in our “sent” box and seeing a sea of “RE:”s. About our own ideas.
In the life of this blog, i thought i was creating something. i have seen things. I have paid closer attention to the news and the “weirder” section of Reuters than i care to admit…In reality, i was just reacting to things that were already happening, instead of making things happen. You were too.
I’m not going to lie…there’s a cottage industry to be made from adults reacting to what kids say “are happening.” (ie. Mark Zuckerberg was lucky, the Google guys never went to Happy Hour and Buzz Bissinger hates blogs.) There’s a lot of money to be made by looking at what someone else did and tweaking it (i’m looking at you MySpace). You can live your entire life and not do anything but react to the world around you.
I have numerous beefs about new media, Web 2.0, social networking and every other thing that falls under this new paradigm that we’re all engulfed in. “This place is a prison, these people aren’t your friends.” I won’t go into all of them here…but the one that i am talking about is the world of reactions…of @everyone, of building this “community” that we can hide in without ever facing an opposing thought or idea. Of reacting to everyone else in a shitstorm of conversation that doesn’t end up accomplishing anything.
And, as opposed to others, it isn’t the death of old media i’m afraid of. In fact, FUCK old media. As a journalism student, it sucked…and was replaced, as such. If ESPN and the proliferation of useless news has taught us anything, it’s not that Blogs killed old media…it’s that old media killed old media. The faster we learn to process news, the faster we make ourselves obsolete. Blogs are the 4th most popular way to transmit news and information…and 4th is way too far down the line. Twitter is #2…and have you seen the news on Twitter? It’s not news.
The major point Seth makes is…how far down the line did we get? Did we create something important and new? Or did we just react to the news and to the youtube and to the social interactions we recieved? Have we made anything new??? Right now…i’m sick of reacting (hence the slowdown in the blog).
Spencer and Heidi are going to Iraq! OMG!
Hey Spencer, smile for the Camera!
(But seriously, who the fuck are Spencer and Heidi?)
A prison shower should humble Joseph Genovese a bit.
Sign of the Apocalypse:
This man:
was arrested when he showed up at a house to meet a 14-year old for sex.
Irony, thy name is Daniel Everett.
WTF Award Nominee: A guy named Rampage was arrested for going on a… well, Rampage.
I wonder how they would have identified him if he had gotten away?!?
Did you know that U.S. Customs prohibits HIV positive people from entering the U.S.? I did not. But apaprently that could end soon.
Bush Lifts Offshore Drilling Ban…the Onion’s take.
Some follow-up thoughts on the Obama New Yorker cover…from an e-mail i wrote to Nole:
The beauty of this — i think — is that The New Yorker assumed, rightfully, that their readers are smart, intelligent and aware people that would understand satire when it was presented to them (major clues include the obvious overstatement, overt mockery AND THE FACT THAT IT’S A FUCKING CARTOON!) but where this went wrong is that The New Yorker thought they were publishing in a vacuum. They thought that only their readers would see it. As soon as some moron walks by the newsstand on his way to buy a pack of smokes and this month’s copy of Juggs, he’s going to be like “See? I told ya’ll that he was a towelhead.”
They were talking about it on talk radio last night while i was on the way to see Wall-E (have you seen it? it’s awesome) and the guy was saying how he feels like the cover is OK because he wants to believe that people are smart enough to realize a joke when they see one, that we don’t have to protect readers from themselves. But then he quotes the statistic that 12% of voters in this country still think Obama is actually Muslim (and by extension, that Muslim = terrorist) and it totally disproves his argument. Americans are not smart enough to separate it or understand the difference.
Beyond that, Obama screwed this up completely by pretending to be appalled by it. Why couldn’t he endear himself to the intelligentsia in this country by saying “Hey, idiots. Relax. Read the article. It’s satire. They actually have my back and were just showing how dumb you all are by getting caught up in rumors and mudslinging and believing dumb email forwards. I appreciate that New Yorker for starting an intelligent debate on these beliefs which i’ve been fighting my whole life.” That would have been a huge moment. Instead, he just fell back on the stock press conference BS statement, “I’m disappointed that this is published…blah blah.” Want to know why he did that? Because he’s playing for the middle now and he needs the dumb people to vote for him. He already convinced us when we bought his book and actually read it 2 years ago (because, you know, we learned how to read.). We’re on board. Now he has to pander to the idiots. It’s really disappointing.
When i was a kid, i played Little League. I wasn’t great, but i wasn’t bad either. I never made the all-star team, i never practiced during the off-season, i wasn’t as good as the majority of my friends. During my final year, i got beat out of my favorite position (catcher) by someone younger than me (Justin Arnold). I was relegated to the bench, where i would have never gotten into a single game if it hadn’t been for the mandatory league rules that stated that every player got to play for 6 outs and one at-bat. The result of only playing two-innings a game and never seeing live pitching was that i got progressively worse and less confident, so when i did get a chance to play, i sucked worse than i had before. Eventually i quit completely, having never made an all-star team.
Now, some might look at this as anecdotal evidence that this little league made the right decision when deciding to cancel it’s all-star game. But i disagree completely. I wasn’t great at baseball, so when i quit, i started playing hockey, which i was pretty good at (and still play as an adult). I started getting into computers, which kind came in handy when they started controlling our lives recently. I read books. I became smarter than all (ok, most) of my friends who were playing baseball 4 nights a week and not getting their homework done. I found ways to cope and deal with it. These kids can too. We have to stop coddling all these kids’ self-esteem and self worth. Kids need to find out that they’re just like any other group of people…a few winners, and a whole lot of losers. It’s life. Handle it.
(However, now that i think about it, given my semi-permanent struggles with anxiety, inadequacy, cynicism, attention span, confidence and depression, maybe there is something to this after all. Little did i know it started way back then…fucking Little League! It all makes sense now! DAMN IT!)
Single Mom Selling Home, Heart
Is this the same marriage that George W. Bush and all those “christian” guys are talking about? Because yeah, totally seems “sacred” to me…
Filed under: Death Penalty, Gun Control, Obama, Suns, apocalypse, basketball, bees, colony collapse disorder, green, guns, rape
I’m excited right now. Lot’s of good stuff going on. Lots to talk about. I’m typing at warp speed and none of my co-workers are any more the weary. They think i’m working hard. Ha!
- In sports, the Suns spent their 15th pick last night drafting Sideshow Bob!
- In other news, scientists are placing 2 to 1 odds on the North Pole melting completely this summer. Awesome.
- If you read this story, and look at this woman’s picture, you find yourself saying, “Yup. That woman looks like a big enough bitch to OWN SLAVES.”
- This “Obama is a Muslim” conversation is killing me. It’s insane. It’s mind-numbing. And there is no winner. If he tries to distance himself from any type of Muslim ties – perceived or otherwise — then the media is going to rake him from being anti-Muslim (a hypocritical action, to be sure)…but if he embraces anything Muslim or is even pictured near Muslim people, then i’ll get 8 Forwards from my father and his friends claiming that Obama wants to turn America into an Islamic country and open an Al-Qaeda training camp on the White House lawn…and there are millions of people (10% according to polls) much dumber than me that will totally believe it. It’s absolutely terrifying the lengths that this country will go to to ignore important things and focus on the inane. And don’t blame the media, blame yourself. The media shows you exactly what you ask them to see. It’s your fault. Take some responsibility.
- There is a great conversation going on over at Nole’s blog about some recent Supreme Court decisions concerning gun control and the death penalty. Surprisingly, I’m torn on these issues. I am against the government deciding that we shouldn’t have guns while they get to keep a firm grip on theirs, and i’m also uncomfortable with any politician deciding who should live or die. But as i said in my comment to Nole’s post — if he ever approves it — anybody who rapes a kid should die. Sorry if that’s a mixed message, but seriously, i’m not kidding. In one case that they reviewed, the guy raped his 8-year old step daughter so brutally that he almost killed her. Because doctors were able to save her, the guy can’t be given the death penalty…if she had died (and for much of that experience she probably wished that she had), we could have fried the fucker. How is that justice? How is that right? This guy should have been put on his knees and executed on the spot. No mercy. No trial. No chance to work the system, make a lawyer rich or waste tax-payer money. You raped an 8 year old, fuck you, die. I understand that there have been numerous murder and rape cases overturned years later by DNA evidence, etc. but what would be the harm in making the rape or sexual exploitation of a child so unbelievably taboo and the punishment so amazingly immediate and harsh in our society that no person would ever think of putting themselves anywhere near the situation? What would be the harm in that? And furthermore, what is the benefit of keeping someone who would do such a thing alive? How does that benefit anyone but the guy who did it? I don’t advocate death or speak in absolutes that often, but if someone rapes a kid, in my mind, they have given up their right to enjoy a heart beat.
- Moving right along to other enjoyable and positive topics…remember that bee thing – Colony Collapse Disorder — that we were talking about a year ago? Well yeah, it hasn’t gone away or gotten any better. And in a final homage to George Carlin this week, i bet if instead of calling it something sterile and scientific sounding like Colony Collapse Disorder, they called it “Holy Fucking Shit! The bees are dying and we’re all going to fucking starve to death!” i bet more people would pay attention. Just a thought.
Filed under: apocalypse
Good to see things are still competely normal in Arkansas.
