TMI?

4 January 2009 | 11:41 PM

I’m sort of a sucker for Venn diagrams, so when I came across this particular one, I decided that its site could use a shout-out.

What?

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Why I Used To Want My MTV

10 November 2008 | 1:48 PM

A couple of weeks ago, MTV launched the ironic service MTV Music, ironic because it’s the last actual place on Music Television that you can still see, you know, music videos. Lord knows you can’t find them on their network anymore. In any case, it’s a real treasure trove, and I got a bit lost in it over the weekend. Here are some of the gems I found:

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This Is Why I Shouldn’t Take Days Off…

18 September 2008 | 10:08 AM

I’m taking a day off today at the behest of my higher-ups, who have warned me that my carried-over vacation days from last year (which should’ve expired in March, but since I was so slammed with work I was given a further extension) really are going to vanish shortly.  The problem is that, for me at least, a little time on my hands can be dangerous.  Consider my return (eh?) to blogging, my initial foray into the land of Twitter and the fact that I’m still not wearing any pants.

Lord help us all and, preemptively, I’m sorry.

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Don’t Call It A Comeback

19 June 2008 | 10:03 PM

Although you wouldn’t know it – given the precipitous drop-off in posts over the past month or so – I’ve been blogging like a comic-book nerd at an X-Men convention.  The truth is, even though I’ve been generating mega-nano-meta-content (how’s that?) like crazy, ever since I belatedly discovered the concept of private posting in early April I’ve been doing most of my blogging on the down-low.  (As an aside, does anyone even say “down-low” anymore?  Oh well, at least I didn’t say “on the D-L”, right?)  Now, while all of this nanopublishing masturbation has doubtlessly saved me thousands in therapy bills – especially given the the fact that the first thing most shrinks will advise you to do is begin a journal (which sucks, because one would assume that $230/hour means you can get away with just verbally spouting one’s craziness rather than having to write it down in essay form, but I digress) – it’s somewhat less-than-compelling for you, dear reader, to keep visiting a blog that never gets updated.  Unless of course you hate seeing new content, in which case perhaps you’ve loved it.

In any case, I’ve made a personal vow to start doing some public posting again, if for no other reason than I’m probably more isolated these days than ever, and jotting down things for others to see is at least a primitive – albeit, admittedly, one-way – form of communication with the outside world.  So keep your eyeballs glued here, people: there’s more skullduggery, tom-foolery and general chicanery to come!

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In Which Our Hero Arrives In The 21st Century

20 April 2008 | 12:15 AM

Bear in mind as you read this post that I am a web software programmer, and as such am supposed to be imbued with some serious technical kung fu spanning all things computing. The truth is, generally I am able to suss out what’s what technically, if for no other reason than I have very little fear of pressing buttons and checking checkboxes and the like to find out what they do.

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Get it? Got it? Good? Erm, Not So Much…

16 April 2008 | 8:02 AM

I like to think of myself as a pretty open-minded and empathic person. While I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed, as the old axiom goes, I am at least casually aware of what’s going on in the world around me, particularly in that rich fabric of oh-no-they-didn’t we like to call the popular culture. That said, there is a long list of things which, while I understand from an academic point of you, I will never really “get”. Maybe it’s a function of my rapidly advancing years, but it feels like that list has been growing at a faster clip of late. Why, just in the past two weeks, the popularity and/or very existence of these things alone has left me with an Excedrin-written-all-over-it style headache:

• American Idol
• celebrity political endorsements
• videoconferencing technologies in the auto-lane at the bank
• bukakke
• the Brain Hemorrhage
• wearing adidas flip-flops with white socks
• Wisconsin divorce law
• k.d. lang
• constant Twittering and/or Tweeting
• Taco Bell’s “Cheesy Beefy Melt” (also, the fact that someone decided to call a product “Cheesy Beefy” anything and yet still has a job)
• gigantic chairs in movie theater restrooms
• the bag-boy at the local grocery who’s a spitting image of Javier Bardem in No Country For Old Men, right down to the iron hair and the flat, menacing tone in his voice
• inter-mammary intercourse
• Microsoft Windows
• making a pilgrimage to see a Pope nobody actually likes give a speech at Yankee Stadium
• one-bedroom houses

Believe me, there’s a lot more to the list, but frankly those topics alone have made my brow furrow and my head hurt for the past week as it is.

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Sticks And Stones

12 April 2008 | 3:08 PM

Everybody has certain words or phrases that really tend to push their buttons. Face it, nobody on this planet is so magnanimous that literally nothing offends them. Sure, a lot of what makes some words offensive while other terms are acceptable is context: not just what a person is saying, but when they’re saying it (and why, I suppose). But still, even granting that, some things just cross a line.

When I was in grade school, middle school and high school, the words “retard”, “retarded” and “tard” were staples of my peers’ everyday conversations. (Come to think of it, the word “homo” was, too, but that – as my friend Eena would say is a whole other Oprah show). My lifelong recollection is those terms made me wince palpably when I heard them, and I always had misgivings about the words’ use. But while I never actually referred to people, situations or activities as “tards” or “retarded”, I also never worked up the moxie to challenge my classmates about it, either. Yeah yeah, it was school, and I spent most of my formative years trying to fly as far below the radar as possible, but still, I never said anything. I don’t mean to make it sound like I lost sleep over it, either: while there were people and kids with disabilities in my community and schools, my interaction with them was so infrequent and brief that I didn’t feel enough of a connection with any of them which might prompt me to pound my fist in righteous outrage. The bottom line was that the use of those terms was sort of like LSD: I knew some of my peers were into it, but I kept out of it and felt that was good enough to keep my nose clean.

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