The List, or How I Stopped Thinking and Learned How to Consume Bullet Points

Tunes. You could say I'm a music lover. I always have a tune in my head that I can barely resist expressing one way or another. Rarely am I not whistling, humming, tapping my toes, or banging out a rhythm with my fingers on a table top. Others (my fiancee) view this as being fidgety, which I suppose isn't entirely wrong. Regardless, music rocks, so I am fascinated by the recent book that just came out, 1,000 Recordings You Must Hear Before You Die.

The list, as a genre, is particularly consuable, which may be why it has become such a popular media format over the past 5 years or so. Most people don't want to read long, fleshed out ideas (Take that, academia!). Our collective attention span has been shrinking for years. Don't believe me? Watch any film from the 1950s and note how even the shortest shots and scenes seem long by today's standards, and they are rarely enhanced by music or sophisticated camera effects.

The list, though potentially long, is really just a series of bullet points, only ranked according to whatever criteria the lister settles on. So not only are our attention and focus not being tested, we are presented with fodder for discussion. Do we agree with the rankings or the methods by which they were determined? VH1 caught on to this and seems to release new lists on a monthly basis. They take it a step further and hire pseudo-celebrity types to comment on and make snarky remarks about each listed item. Many of those personalities have ridden this wave of success so far as to build careers off of it. Hal Sparks, anyone?

So the music list. I don't see myself ever listening to all 1,000 recordings, much less digesting and aprpeciating them for all of their merits. But as a wannabe music snob, I can't resist chasing that white whale. Perhaps what first set me on this path was realizing that I've only listened to no more than five of the entries in their entirety. I'm better than that and should be much more culturally literate. So I've gone and raided my dad's CD collection and pulled out a few gems, from Paul Simon and the Police to Bernstein and Copland. Music is expensive, so my mission is to find the most cost effective way to appreciate as much music as possible.

Quarterly Update

Fake Out. It's a cliche to write about how infrequently you update your blog, so don't even go there. Moving on...

Another start to another semester. I had low expectations going into PSMA 6008: Information & Computers in Public Service. The "Information & Computers" part of title makes it sound like this course was offered 15 years ago, back when Computer Class was still a thing, consisting of Mavis Beacon and the Oregon Trail. Dragon's Keep if you were lucky.

After our first meeting, I'm more optimistic. There are only five of us in the class, and the professor is the best one in the department, whose past two classes I've enjoyed so far. The assignment for the week between now and the next class is as follows...

Page One: My Tech

During the course of th enext week, informally keep track of your own interaction with information and computer technologies. Some possible but by no means exclusive examples; How often did you e-mail? Visit a web page? Post to a blog? Use a GPS? Twitter? Conduct an online business transaction? Find Information from or about a government agency? Text message? Update your Facebook or My Space page?

Page Two: What did I accomplish?

What did you actually accomplish by using technology this week? Communication (e-mail, text) is one thing; but was the communication social, professional, transaction based or something else? Try to think about specific things that you were able to do through your use of technology. The more tangible (e.g. I payed a parking ticket online) is better than (I e-mailed my friend).

I have a feeling this is going to get very embarassing. I use information technology regularly, so I'm not short on material. But off the top of my head, hardly any of it is productive. In fact, 90% of what I do over the course of the day is counter productive. I'll need assurances that none of this data makes its way back to my employer. So here we go, Day 1, wrote in my blog about writing in my blog...

Cityscapes Amaze Me

Hong Kong. Say hello to my new desktop background. Just awesome.

Hey Philly, Get A New Thing

Rocky. This film first came out in 1976, followed by three good sequels and two that never happened. Just go with it. Ever since then, every pathetic lugnut and ham-and-egger from the greater Philadelphia area has been getting an erection whenever they hear the first few bars from that seemingly inescapable theme music. The Phillies' recent run to the World Series has made that song even more prominent. I propose that they get over it and find one more lousy thing about their city to latch on to outside of some fictional heavyweight boxer that was conceived and portrayed by a guy whose entire film resume up to that point consisted of porn.

Never mind that Philly is home to one of the greatest heavyweight boxers of all time. He's black. In Philly, that doesn't count. Does anyone else find it a bit sick that a city would sooner build a bronze statue of a fictional boxer "from" that city before they build a statue of a real boxer who happens to be African American? Bill Burr does, and he has a lot more to say about this fine little city. It's long but worth every single glorious second. Not convinced of Philly's dirty little prejudices? How about this Philly institution. That's not to be confused with the other Philly institution of giving endless shit to Donovan McNabb.

The cruel irony of it all is that Frazier was considered an Uncle Tom when he was in his prime and was often derided by African Americans and, specifically, his rival Muhammad Ali. Looking back, you can see that Frazier was OJ before OJ was OJ and killed two people. When he's in the ring or on the field, he's good as gold, but once that's over, he's just another... you get the point. 

Anyway, with the Phillies clinching a World Series victory as I type this, perhaps once their obnoxious celebrations settle down a bit, Philadelphians will no longer feel the need to cling to the one good thing that ever came out of that God-forsaken city. But probably not.

Things More Important Than What We're Seeing in the "News"

In no particular order...

Health care
ENVIRONMENT
Iraq war
Economy
Education
Creating jobs

If this election is about the issues, Sen. Obama wins in a landslide.

Hot Hot Heat

Busted. No, my night job as an exotic dancer in a gay night club called The Tool Box is still a tightly guarded secret. I mean the status of the central air unit in our house. As in, we need to buy a whole new one. Damn. Luckily, it's my folks' unit, I just use it. Or used to.

We don't realize how dependent most of us middle class and above people have become on our controlled indoor climates. Just ask the Dub. She grew up in a house that is constantly kept at 70 degrees. Any (READ: Normal) temperature above that makes her uncomfortable, even though she's equally sensitive to low temperatures. Come to think of it, I'm not sure she's ever not been too cold or too hot the whole time I've known her.

I don't mean to throw my dear, sweet future wife under the bus (okay, but I still did), but I think her situation illustrates how it is possible for us to lose touch with our normal, preset equilibrium. Take another issue I've been dealing with lately, lower back pain. Granted, I'm experiencing this pain because I'm working on my Olympic lifts, but anatomically, we're not built to sit down. Sitting down places undue stress on the hips and lower back. The natural idle position for bipeds like us is a squatting position, as in "your balls are showing."

On another note, now that classes have started back up, I'm adjusting well to yet again being the know-it-all go-getter in my classes, at least for the first few weeks. I do find it amazing how reluctant people in grad school are to step up and take leadership of projects. The fact that I'm being forced to be that guy is nothing short of appalling.

A little image to go with my last post...

Gag (order) Me With a Spoon

Off-limits. I get it; families are off limits. I get it; young people have sex. And I get it; teenage pregnancy shouldn't be touched with twelve 10-foot poles taped together end to end. Here's the thing. The Republican party has been in the business of telling families what to do for the past 15 years. The Republican party has been preaching abstinence only education for at least as long. The Republican party has a proud history of pulling out all of the stops when it comes to sleazy, inappropriate attacks. So forgive me if someone needs to call bullshit here, with all due respect to Sen. Obama's demand that the families stay completely off limits.

So Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK), newly selected (and hardly vetted) Republican Vice Presidential candidate, has confirmed that her 17-year-old daughter is five months pregnant. Nice to see the abstinence-only education that Gov. Palin strongly endorses is working so well for her family. As a new Christmas gift for left-leaning voters throughout the country is left under our collective tree seemingly every morning, this little tidbit just boggles my mind. While Sen. McCain's aides promise that they conducted the most exhaustive research on Gov. Palin, I can't help but be skeptical in light of this development.

Methinks Sen. McCain had his heart set on BFF Sen. Joe Liberman or similarly moderate Tom Ridge, but since both are a little too moderate (if that even means anything), the senator from Arizona knew he had to pick the most medievally conservative candidate available to fire up the lukewarm socially conservative base. It also wouldn't hurt to make a splash and steal some of Sen. Obama's post-brilliant-speech thunder.

I've got two words and one gesture for Sen. McCain...



Of course, the problem is that all of the hype that this pick has generated has been confused at best and downright negative at worst. Sen. McCain himself claims to have known that Gov. Palin's daughter, Bristol, was pregnant before making the pick. Given how badly the conservative base needed to be courted, at least in the eyes of Sen. McCain, I really, really doubt that. I'm curious to see how the right shrugs this off. Of course, I shouldn't be surprised if they come out of this unscathed. I mean, this is an affluent white girl we're talking about.

Two more things...

1) Does anyone else find it disturbing that conservatives feel the need to commend Gov. Palin for not aborting her Down's Syndrome child?

2) The best speech of the convention wasn't Sen. Obama's, it was Sen. John Kerry's. Watch all of it, it's worth it...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1yri5CXDZg