Entries Tagged 'cybertherapy' ↓

St. Isidore, Patron Saint of the Internet. The Pope has deemed Isidore Patron of the Internets. (And here I thought it was Saint Al of Gore.)

Maybe things will run a bit more smoothly from here in?

Hello there! I have come out of the cave in which I am working (dissertation, job, unpacking boxes, you know) in order to bring you a special bulletin.

Cyrille de Lasteyrie (aka Vinvin) is a genius, and I am not in the habit of using such terms loosely. His Bonjour America is the best thing I have ever seen (for free, on the web). I discovered him while trying to catch up with Bicyclemark’s recent blog postings. (It’s a truism that most of my good internet finds come from Bicyclemark.) He’s a Frenchman who has something to say to America. And he is a very funny man. What’s refreshing is that while Vinvin is critical of American culture and foreign policy, his commentary is (from what I have seen) always funny and never facile. He obviously loves us, dislikes Bush, and wants to teach us about cheese.

Go and watch “The Frencheese Project.” As Vinvin says,

You’ll be scared, and then you’ll learn a few things about cheese. Is the french cheese good for the health? This is the big question of this episode!

Or watch “What do we think about America? A big poll,” and find out what the French think about Dick Chenay. (Yes, Dick Chenay.)

Or just enjoy a nice impersonation of Charlie Sheen with a French accent.

What could be better? Well, there is a whole archive worth of vlogs from Bonjour America. So have fun answering that question yourself. And do answer it, please. If I keep posting at the heady rate of once every 5 weeks, I do expect you to try and keep up. In return, I will endeavor always to include a picture, Dear Reader, for your enjoyment.

I just want you to know that in the last few days before this current post was written (and this post will no doubt skewer my statistics contained herein), googlers found my site rated:

#4 with the search “Picture of a man giving chapati to a dog”
#5 for “sagittarius chameleon”
#6 for “the strangest chameleon”
#9 for “Matt Groening volunteering”

I’m also inexplicably #2 on yahoo for “Jorge the chameleon,” and people also surfed in from Yahoo searches for “washing machine humor,” and the more disturbing “video of jeff weise walking through hallway.”

Let me also take this moment to apologize to all those students (Hello Birkbeck College, London!) whose attempts at finding entries for +chameleon and +zoology here so miserably failed them. As an education professional, let me take this moment to encourage you to begin your research in your university library’s electronic databases.

Have you ever watched Jon Udell’s screencast “Heavy Metal Umlaut: The Movie”? It’s a screencast (a kind of low-budget internet movie) of the development, editing, and re-editing of the Wikipedia entry for “heavy metal umlaut” (you know, the mostly gratuitous little dots over letters in heavy metal band names?) Anyway, it offers not only an amusing glimpse at the use of heavy metal umlauts, but also a really useful case study of how one Wikipedia entry evolved. Tracing edits and re-edits in elapsed time is really fascinating. It answered a lot of my own questions about what happens when people change Wikipedia entries, and says a lot about how democratic this medium truly can be. Click on the word screencast from the page this is linked to.

I was just explaining to the Sicilian why I put a slice of bread in his cookie tin. (Lemon thins from Ikea, if it matters. I can take or leave them, which is why I buy them, if you know what I mean.) The cookies were getting a bit stale. The bread took the stale out; I just replaced it. All is well.

The other magic kitchen trick that I know is this: if your soup / stew is too salty, add a raw potato. It will soak up the salt. (And that’s why if you ever eat a soup or stew that is too salty, it will be the potatoes that are the saltiest part.)

That’s all I got right now.

You got any tips for me? Non-kitchen tips are probably the most interesting.
Discuss.

A UK man has been sentenced to 12 months conditional discharge, had his laptop and wireless cards conviscated, and been fined 500 quid for surfing the net off his neighbor’s wireless connection. I know I’m not the only one who’s shocked. As the BBC reported, “The perception in the past has been that borrowing a bit of bandwidth is cheeky but not really criminal behaviour.” Well, since the ISPs are the ones who suffer when we do not each have our own subscription, the times they are a changin’.

In other news, the BBC has been running a series of articles on the digital age: interviews with bloggers, podcasters, creative commons devotees; they’ve also been soliciting readers’ views on how the digital age has changed their lives. While some of those articles are rather superficial, I really appreciate that the BBC is taking this on as an ongoing theme. Some of the articles are more practical: this one on blogging while on vacation. Or their article on RSS feeds. Very hands-on.

I was going to write a post about writer’s block. But I realized I have both writer’s and reader’s blocks. Basically, no trouble filling my day reading something. But I have been getting nothing done as far as reading or writing for my dissertation. Nor have I been keeping up with your blogs. (Sometimes I have lurked, but I haven’t commented. You know who you are.) And I have missed it.

And although usually in the past I’ve found that writing a nice wee blog entry gets the old gears working, and serves as a warm-up for the writing I’m supposed to be doing, somehow, the last few weeks, I haven’t written anything at all.

I have cast out a few nets for dissertation fellowships, and am waiting to see if any of them come in. The hopes are slim. As the time to finding out about them approaches, I have been mega-stressed-out to the point of intellectual paralysis (thank you, Mr. James Joyce) by the process of waiting to see if I will have a fellowship or a new job for next year. (My current job ends in August.) This is not to excuse what is, at the end of the day, procrastination. But I am trying to figure out its cause, and I think I’ve got it.

I don’t like waiting. This happens on a day-to-day basis: if I have something to do later in the day, something exciting (whether it’s teaching a new workshop, or hosting a public event), it’s really hard for me to focus on doing anything substantial in the meantime (rote, mindless work is just fine, but nothing involving the whole brain). It’s as if my adrenaline stores are already gearing up for later, and I’m caffeinated before I even walk towards the espresso machine.

I have noticed this for some time.

But I had not recognized the fact that this inability to focus in the face of an upcoming event–in this case, news of my future financial status–can occur over a period of weeks or months.

It’s darned frustrating.

As an aside, I had a wonderful dream a few weeks back (before a trip to the dentist), in which a dentist did all of my tooth x-rays, then showed me the curve of my teeth along the jaw, and pronounced me as having ADD, based on this. In the dream, I said, “Ahh, that makes total sense.” Of course, I have never been diagnosed with ADD. But I liked the idea that dentists could see something of your personality through their bite-wings. And, coward as I am, I preferred being told I had ADD to being told I needed dental-work.

My few regular readers have probably thought I’ve lost my marbles: first software reviews, and now self-analysis. What next?

I note that I won’t be apologizing, dear readers, for the slackiness of my posting, and then–when I do post–the non-blogginess of it all (I resisted posting two more NYT articles today.) I know I am letting you down, but I am nonetheless eschewing the self-inflicted guilt-trip. Though I did begin an apology, before deleting it.

Apparently you have to take what you can get. Call it a potluck of a blog. (Oh, we Quakers, we love our potlucks.) Bear with me! And if any of you has any part-time jobs on offer starting in about September, let me know. I only get writer’s block with my own work…

When you set it to play songs randomly, does your iPod play certain songs or performers over and over, out of proportion to their presence in your music library?

The question of whether iPods choose songs in a truly random fashion, or not, has been much discussed of late. Though Apple engineers have claimed there is nothing but pure randomness at work, many iPod owners, like myself, are quite skeptical.

Even within a playlist, it seems to select certain songs over others. When I set the thing to shuffle my “five-star songs,” it comes back time and time again to “For the Benefit of Mr. Kite,” by the Beatles, “Bizarre Love Triangle,” by New Order, and Louis Armstrong’s “Mack the Knife.” On the other hand, it never, ever plays Lotte Lenya’s “Moritat von Mackie Messer,” from the same list. What’s with that? It loves “Sex and Candy” by Marcy Playground. (I never did hear another song by that band, so help me. But no girl with a Fender bass in her closet could resist that bass line.) All of these choices are ones I approve of–except I like the German “Mack the Knife” better. But it does make me wonder what this thing is up to.

I was thinking about posting this as I walked from the bus this morning, and I was going to say, “Damn, why won’t the thing play Linton Kwesi Johnson?!?” And then, like magic, LKJ came on, singing “Lorrain.”

I am not a techno-snob, or a materialistic person (just a Mac-junkie), so I did not mean to direct a posting at iPod owners. But if you do have one, or if you use iTunes to listen from your computer, I’m curious to hear what songs it wants you to listen to, when it’s doing the driving.

In December, Bill Moyers, after receiving the Global Environment Citizen Award from Harvard Medical School, gave an amazing speech, which I’ve somehow not come across until now.

In it, he puts his finger right on the button, to mix an old Cold War metaphor, of what’s wrong with American policy today: the Rapture Index. Basically, the idea is this: an enormous number of Americans (some say 1/3) are living like there’s no tomorrow–because they believe there won’t be. The idea of the Rapture, when they believe Jesus will come and take the devout away with him, is a rationale for not giving a rat’s arse about the environment. Moyers describes the difficulty of working to solve our environmental problems in such a climate:

As difficult as it is, however, for journalists to fashion a readable narrative for complex issues without depressing our readers and viewers, there is an even harder challenge – to pierce the ideology that governs official policy today. One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the oval office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington. Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a world view despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): once Israel has occupied the rest of its ‘biblical lands,’ legions of the anti-Christ will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon. As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts, and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

And from the George Monbiat article published in the Guardian on 20 April 2004:

By clicking on www.raptureready.com, you can discover how close you might be to flying out of your pyjamas. The infidels among us should take note that the Rapture Index currently stands at 144, just one point below the critical threshold, beyond which the sky will be filled with floating nudists. Beast Government, Wild Weather and Israel are all trading at the maximum five points (the EU is debating its constitution, there was a freak hurricane in the South Atlantic, Hamas has sworn to avenge the killing of its leaders), but the second coming is currently being delayed by an unfortunate decline in drug abuse among teenagers and a weak showing by the Antichrist (both of which score only two).

Actually, that was almost a year ago. The Rapture Index today is 154. Anything over 145 is described in the key as “fasten your seat belts.” (Odd, that, since the bumper sticker I refer to in my title implies that the Raptured will float upwards from their cars.)

Sometimes it is easy for us progressive folks to talk about how stupid fundamentalists can be. (Of course, it’s only really PC to diss Christian fundamentalists.) Harder than dismissing them, though, is trying to figure out how they got to their beliefs. And in the same world in which I got to mine, as a lefty Quaker, and you got to yours, as a liberal athiest, and how he got to his, as a progressive Muslim, and so on.

It’s easy to say, “what idiots.” Harder to figure out how to convince them to care about our agenda. Do we say, “Yes, I know you believe the Rapture will come and we (me and my ilk) will all be left behind, and who cares what happens to sinners. But do you mind taking out the garbage so those of us left on the planet to rot after you’re gone can survive a little longer?”

See, it’s hard. I could not think of what to say that wasn’t snotty.

You know, I want to ask how they believe their God would want them to ignore the destruction of earth. And what if the Rapture comes later rather than earlier? Do you want your kids to get asthma and skin cancer and live under global warming and never see a whale?

And then, I also get creeped out how the whole “legions of the anti-Christ will attack Israel…” prediction plays right into both Israel getting the rest of its Biblical lands back, as well as a middle eastern war that destroys the new Israelites. And then the Rapture. So anything we can do to hasten mayhem in the middle east is going to bring the Rapture all that much faster. (And, Hello, Israel, are you listening? Fund-y Republicans only want to help your land increase as they wait for your impending wars, after which you will have to become Jews for Jesus right quick, or be destroyed. Does that really fit in with your prophecies? Doesn’t that piss you off? Aren’t you starting to feel a little used?)

And you know, the more people that are looking forward to Armageddon, the more likely it is to happen. Nothing to do with God; it’s called a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then, I am dealing in cause and effect here. And you know where I learned about cause and effect? In science classes. And you know those ain’t popular with religious fundamentalists.

But there I go again. Fundamentalists are not evil, they’re just like you and me. They’re my cousins, in fact, and some of them are the salt of the friggin’ earth. But in this area, misguided. They’re reading something literally that we’re not. I am not surprised there aren’t more fundamentalist English professors, ’cause you have to be able to see language as figurative, not only literal, in my world.

Those guys in the Old Testament may well have lived, but they didn’t live to be literally hundreds and hundreds of years old. We may have descended from a bloke in a fig leaf, but he may in turn have descended from tadpoles. It doesn’t all have to be mentioned in the text. “And then there was light,” “and on the sixth day he…:” all of it can be figurative. There can be a God, but it probably ain’t an old man with a long beard. And his son did not look like Errol Flynn. You have to have some imagination. (I learned that from PBS, that hotbed of evil, as a kid.)

What’s figurative can be true. And words can be true without being literally true.

I can deal with this; did reading poetry and stories teach me that?

In today’s installment of Homophobia Today, the Concerned Women for America (CWA) are, um, concerned that PBS animated character Buster is making being gay look, um, normal. Found this link at Michael Bérubé’s site.

CWA Applauds Education Secretary Spellings for Busting ‘Buster’; Group Urges Constituents to Voice Support for Her Action Against PBS

“For years, PBS has been slipping pro-homosexual messages into its programming,” said Robert Knight, director of CWA’s Culture & Family Institute. “And the federal bureaucracy and their client, the education establishment, have done their share to destroy children’s innocence using the cover of ‘diversity.’ Along comes Secretary Spellings, who takes action as a servant of the people instead of a timid, go-along bureaucrat. Good for her.”

Yes, clearly we should go back to the good old days when Bert and Ernie lived together quietly and humbly, under a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

The yet-to-be-aired episode of Postcards from Buster, titled “Sugartime,” features an animated rabbit taking a tour of Vermont during the early spring. Along with farm life and maple sugaring, the episode explores Vermont’s same-sex “civil unions” by featuring two lesbian couples.

Sugartime, indeed.

“Congress’ and the Department’s purpose in funding this programming certainly was not to introduce this kind of subject matter to children, particularly through the powerful and intimate medium of television,” Spellings added, requesting that a funding grant be returned and that the Department of Education be removed as a backer of the segment.

“Parents don’t want their children homosexualized in the name of ‘education,’” Knight said. “Mrs. Spellings has given notice that left-wing lobbies will have to find other ways to peddle their pansexual propaganda. Let’s hope that other leaders in federal and state agencies find a backbone thanks to her courageous example.”

Children are being homosexualized, now? What exactly does that mean? It sounds like being pasteurized; our children are being subjected to a process by which they’re made to be homosexual? And how come I never get to see any of this Pansexual Propaganda? That sounds interesting.

How interesting, Concerned Women, since the vast majority of homosexuals in the world grew up with straight parents, watching straight television. They did not have PBS to encourage them. No one in the American media before 1990 suggested being gay might be fun, or even, for that matter, alright. And we still have all these gay people running around trying to get married. What’s that all about? Could it be that people who are gay do not catch it from cartoon characters?

I apologize to my non-homophobic readers, for I appear to be engaging in one of my favorite rants. But until these people get some sense, I am afraid I will have to keep at it from time to time. Bear with me.

In the great abyss which is the new reality television, producers are willing to sink lower and lower in order to gather our attention. Whereas reality TV was once an original concept (with an albeit absurd premise–that what we would see in the fishbowl on the screen would represent some kind of reality), it’s now been done to death.

The latest offerings from VH1 are the nadir (the Ralph Nadir, if you will):
Celebrities on a diet (Daniel Baldwin vs. the judge from Divorce Court), a burgeoning reality-romance featuring Brigitte Nielson and Flava Flav, and the new edition of the Surreal Life, featuring a whole lot of people I’ve never heard of, and Christopher Knight, AKA Peter Brady.

He looks as he did all those decades ago, that Peter Brady. He always was a hunk, even as a gawky teenager.

Tonight, I took a break from grovelling-for-money (aka fellowship applications with looming deadlines), and my current reality was pretty frustrating. In the offerings of the local cable service, frankly, I was fit for nothing more sophisticated than reality TV tonight.

And I saw clean-as-a-whistle Peter Brady (who’s gotta be 47 now) getting a lap dance in prime time on a Sunday night.

All my illusions are now shattered.

If this is reality, I’ll take some more fiction, please.

On the other hand, here’s some real reality: the Children of Iraq

I was at Times Square on Wednesday night, and saw a man sitting-crouching in one of those passages where you walk from one subway line to another. He was holding a cardboard sign that read, “Tell me off for $2.00.”

It was one of those creative variations on the panhandle–singing from people who are not musicians being the most popular one I’ve seen. And this was original; I’d never seen it before. I wondered if this was just the service contemporary urban dwellers needed.

Case in point: on Thursday night I was at the slum veterinarian’s office. That’s my pet name for the vet I’ve been going to for years. He is in a rough area in an outer borough. In that ‘hood, everyone who has a dog has both a tough dog and a frou-frou dog: a pit and a shih-tzu, a rottie and a poodle, that sort of thing. One for the lap, and one to scare the people you want to scare. (Most of the pits and rotties are sweet little mushes anyway, but their appearance does the trick.)

The slum veterinarian is kind and damn good at his job. He also charges half of what any other vet charges. As a student, I find this to be the winning combination: good and cheap. So even though I’ve long since moved out of that area, and it is way out of my way, I make the trek there when my pets need anything. They’re well-cared for there.

But the slum veterinarian’s low prices come at a cost: they’re always overcrowded. They take walk-ins after people with appointments, but even with an appointment, you’ll wait an hour. And pick-ups can be 45 minutes. Plus the waiting room is small, usually kind of dirty, and overcrowded. It’s like the public hospital ER, except more of the patients will try and lick your hand.

So the other night, there I was, waiting to pick up my little shaggy monster after he got his dental cleaning. (This may sound silly to those not in the know, but small dogs often need their teeth cleaned–and it requires general anaesthetic!) And I am waiting for a bit. And while I am waiting, a twenty-something couple with a pair of pugs in tiny human t-shirts are getting more and more agitated.

It becomes apparent that the receptionist is having trouble finding their file. And she has asked them a few times to spell their last name. And though his woman is trying to get him to calm down, saying, “let’s not have an argument here,” the man completely loses it, after spelling his name and the dogs’ a few more times, he jumps up and starts yelling. What-kind-of-a-place-are-you-people-running, etc., etc.

And he throws (yes throws) his little pug down on the floor, rather too roughly for my taste. And as the woman gathers the pugs and watches, the man waves his arms and tells off first the receptionist and then the good doctor, who has heard what’s going on and come out. More words are exchanged, and the exasperated-but-still-cool doctor asks the young man to leave and go to another animal hospital.

This makes the man even angrier, as he grabs what looks to be a laptop case, “What do I look like to you? Some trash off the street?” And as the woman is taking the dogs towards the door, the man comes in for a final approach, pointing at the doc’s sign-in sheet and saying, “You’re lucky. If my name wasn’t on this piece of paper, I’d bash your face in!”

Then the vet tells his good receptionist to call 911, and the man expresses more horror at this latest insult directed towards him. As the vet repeats the request, the man exits, and for several minutes can be heard raving in anger as he goes down the street.

The thing is, I think I know what he feels like. The place can be a pain–all that waiting after a long day. And didn’t I have my own frustration earlier this week when I thought the customer service in the physician’s office was exceptionally bad? Though I personnally did not go medieval on anyone’s ass, the leap from frustration to anger and threats seems to snowball these days: in the post office, the grocery store, at stoplights in cars, people are losing their cool left and right.

When the man was well gone and my dear mutt was being presented to me with his newly odor-free grin, I said to the vet, “You know, I always worry when someone goes off like that, what if he has a gun or a knife?”

The good vet took my left hand and held it to his hip. “That’s why I carry this.”

It isn’t often I touch a man’s loaded gun.

I wondered later if what the angry-pug-man needed was not a visit to our friend in Times Square. Tell him off for $2.00. Hell, it would be my treat.

Note to my readers: something funny was going on with my site this week. I could not log on for three days, though the site stayed up. I think it’s passed now. And to those who did not see comments appear for a while–comments are moderated. And usually up within a day. But this week, I could not moderate them while the site was down. They are up and running again. Comments do work, and I love them, so please keep ‘em coming!

I fear I have disappointed the people of the Seychelles.

I still have nothing to say.

It’s a blah time: school is in session, which means a harried workpace. I had flu and then bronchitis-or-something, so did not get enough research done in the intersession. The congestion is almost gone, except when I go outside in the cold, or move around, which means cabin fever and no exercise. And my usual way of dealing with stress and the doldrums is walking out and about, and going to the YMCA.

I know, I keep saying I have nothing to say, and then I say something. But you know what I mean: it isn’t very exciting. So to amuse you, or try to do so, I will add a nice phot-ey here:

There’s just so much in this photo, and yet, it renders me speechless.

If the Green Giant does not put things in perspective, what will?

I have nothing to say to you right now.

You didn’t do anything, honey. It’s me. I just have nothing to say. No, I’m not sad, I just have nothing to say.

Well, as usual, I have one thing to say, but I thought it might bore you. You want to hear it? Okay, but don’t say I did not warn you.

gmail, baby. What the heck? I got an invite, thanks Laura. And I kind of appreciate the vast improvements over hotmail and yahoo. But there is one glaring problem with gmail: you have to hit “More Options” before you get an option to “trash” (delete) a message.

In my world, I want to see a button while I am looking at the post, and I want to click the button, and email-be-gone. But no, gmail makes this into a two-step process. And honey, I do not have time for that.

And to make matters worse, there are oodles of keyboard shortcuts for composing, searching, etc. ad infinitum, but damnit, no shortcut for deleting. Why can’t I hit the ampersand key or control+d and delete something?

Hello! I know gmail is designed so you can archive everything, but you people obviously have no idea how much email the verbal chameleon gets. No idea. And you have no concept, obviously, that most of what passes through my email, like most of what passes through my mailbox, is just plan not archivable. By a long shot.

And you people obviously have no idea how quickly someone can use up 1000 MB from their main email account, if they use your silly archive feature to archive everything. I am a recovered pack-rat, man, and I do not need this kind of system to bring me back to the gutter. Like vodka to a drunk, your gmail is to a recovered archiver.

That’s all I had to say. I feel a bit better now.

Update (1/24): My, that was a pointless rant, I do apologize. It turns out I just needed to figure out what I was doing. “Show Options” yields a two-step-delete process. but “More Actions” drop-down menu just one drop-down to delete. What an idiot I can be, eh? Well, I am laying it all on the table for you folks. And the verbal chameleon is a big enough woman to say she was wrong. Maybe I was just too tired to deal with the tiniest learning curve the other day. Or maybe I needed a good rant. In any case, thanks for nodding patiently, and not telling me I was an eejit.

Despite not being a very materialistic person, really, I do have a few possessions that I’m quite fond of: for their utilitarian value, of course. And in the coming socialist revolution, like good bread and subway passes, all the people should have them, and a mac to hook them up to.

I love the iPod. Yes, it is way overpriced and imperfect in many ways. And product hype can be ever so annoying.

But Dell CEO Kevin Rollins seems to be sowing some sour grapes when he compares it to another product he sees as a flash-in-the-pan (!), the Sony Walkman:

In an interview with Silicon.com, Kevin Rollins claimed the product faced an uphill struggle to capitalize on the success of the iPod and sustain it into the future, drawing parallels with Sony’s Walkman. “It’s interesting the iPod has been out for three years and it’s only this past year it’s become a raging success. Well those things that become fads rage and then they drop off. When I was growing up there was a product made by Sony called the Sony Walkman – a rage, everyone had to have one. Well you don’t hear about the Walkman anymore. I believe that one product wonders come and go. You have to have sustainable business models, sustainable strategy.”

I’m sorry, what? You don’t hear about the Walkman anymore? The Sony Walkman was huge. Yes, it was an overpriced brand-name item, and most normal folks got a cheap knock-off. But my generation spent our pre-teen and teenaged years wrapped in individual musical comfort and oblivion. It was revolutionary. In the States, “Walkman” (like Kleenex and Band-Aid and Jell-O) was one of those brand-names which managed to morph into a generic noun: what could be a better sign of the lasting hold a product has had on the populace? (In contrast, in Britain, where as a general rule brand names are not substituted as generic nouns, people have “personal stereos.” But in the U.S. it was always a “walkman,” no matter who made it.)

Yes, portable music killed quality audio, ruins our hearing, and makes everyone into anti-social hermits. But as much as I love music, I’ve never owned a really good stereo. And as a teenager, I would have been an anti-social hermit in the back of the car anyway. Sadly, I believe most families who stopped talking to one another did so well before they plugged into their headsets.

Since I stopped being a teenager, my use of personal stereo-type devices has been relegated to use in transportation and, only very occasionally, while walking down the street. Like when I tried to learn a few phrases of Polish on my way to work before a recent trip. Or when listening to Ben Kweller cheered up my commutes during a stressful and busy first week-on-the-job.

And I do lament the loss of hearing which I am convinced those headphones blaring U2’s War for most of the 80’s engendered. Or did it? My dad started to have trouble hearing in crowded bars and restaurants when he was 30, a good ten years before he started to listen to Offenbach on a personal stereo. (By the way, I’m not losing my hearing by a long shot, Thank God, but I do have trouble hearing people around a table in a crowded bar or restaurant.)

It’s true, I am an Apple junkie. They’re not perfect, but the company just seems to have a handle on user-friendly interfaces. I am the first to admit they need to bring prices down in order to get the world on board with their superior personal computing platform. They also need to listen to their users more carefully: the new under-$500 Apple Mini is a nice idea, but only for people who have a monitor lying around. The iPod Shuffle is ridiculously overpriced. And I don’t get the need for an iPod photo at all. Hasn’t everyone been asking for an Apple-designed PDA for years?

And yes, I think if I had a Creative Zen or an iRio or whatever-the-heck, I’d love it too. (Hey, especially if it was orange or pink.) It’s the utilitarian value, after all, (and the color!) that matters. But there’s something to be said for a well-made ground-breaking invention. Where’s that box of Kleenex?

Photos above from iPods Around the World at iPod Lounge.

When I was little, my dad bought my brother and myself an electric train set. On birthdays and other gift-giving occasions (like Chrismahanakwanzakah), bro would get train cars, and I’d get houses, buildings, landscaping materials, animals, and little people. Dad built a nice big platform in the basement, and we set it all out, and added as new items came in. It sounds really pre-Feminist, but actually, I liked the houses, people, animals, and landscaping–they gave me something to do. And I think bro liked the electronic trains best.

It looked a bit like this (only with a train going round it):

The best time we ever had was the night we painted the people. They were little neutral colored people–in different shapes, with different clothes and tools attached to them, and they were maybe 3/4″ tall. And we painted them with increasing recklessness as the evening wore on–two adults with wacky senses of humor and two kids of 7 and 10. Good times. I also thought it was so cool how Arthur, played by Dudley Moore, had a train running around his spoiled drunken rich boy-man home, but then I was seven.

The whole kit and kaboodle has long been dismantled and packed away for future generations.

Well, if you enjoyed Sorry Everybody, then you’ll love the sequel, Apology Accepted. Now that that’s out of the way, what do we do now? Can we skip the global-equivalent-of-makeup-sex and do something?

We need a website called whatthef***dowedonow.com? (Don’t click, it’s just an idea.)

Not that I don’t like thinking about the global-equivalent-of-makeup-sex.

Hmmm… podcasts are fun. What is podcasting? See iPodder. I am right now listening to a really bad Air America feed of Morning Sedition (bad audio–tinny and full of echoes–but too soon to see if it is a bad show).

But the individual podcasts–made by Jane and Joe Schmos around the world–that I’ve checked out have been veddy interestink and been of MUCH higher audio quality. For example, the engagiing Dawn and Drew Show, which I checked out after Bicyclemark blogged about it. Come on, Air America. I haven’t listened to them on the clunky normal radio yet, but their RSS audio feeds are crap. What is with that?

And come on, BBC Radio, do you really need me to listen to streaming audio, or try and hijack those streams using Audio Hijack?

Oops. I think I am giving off a lot of rants lately. Sorry for the pent-up hostility. The you-know-whos have stopped barraging me with random comments as per the last few days of hell, so I should chill out now.

Imaginary shares in my blog are worth $1000. Pretty good for someone with one reader. And I thought people selling imaginary gold and imaginary piles of poo for real money was weird… Okay, I guess that’s still weirder by far. BlogShares – verbalchameleon.com