As far as I can tell making up new words has been going on ever since word #1. I think it is really great that new words can be created, but I also think we need some ground rules. So here they are......
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People who CAN make up new words:
- Rappers
Can you imagine a world without fo' shizzle? I can't.
People who SHOULD not, ever, under any circumstances make up new words:
- Clergy
- Politicians
- Teachers
- Lastly, and most importantly, sports broadcasters.
Which brings me to my warning. If I'm ever with you, and I hear you say "trickeration", in any context, I will reflexively punch you.
I'm having nightmares about "trickeration" this football season. Some might say I should blame the wildcat offense, but that would be giving these idiots an out. The only thing that drives me even more mad is when there is "extracurricular" activity after a play - but of course that is a word.
Key take away: I hear you say "trickeration", there will be extracurricular action.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Users Guide to Making up Words
I like this song "Home" by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros
When global warming turns my swampland into desert 30 years from now, I'm inviting all of you down and we'll have a dusty good time, just like these happy folk.
Monday, January 04, 2010
The NY Jets Have a New Super Fan
Did you see him fist pump after the direct snap/57 yd run to Brad Smith in the 1st half? What poise!
Secondary shout out to Chad Ochocinco who is not following through on changing his name back to Johnson but is following through and getting Fireman Ed VIP tickets to next week's rematch in Cinncy. I think we need more of the OCHO. Class act all the way...
Redneck, not Yuppie
It was a big weekend in the KillerB's household. KillerB2 and I watched football, saw a movie, and conducted KillerB2's annual year end audit.
She has been doing this for several years, according to the spreadsheet she showed me, but this is the first year she has included me. Presumably a result of our marriage.
The spreadsheet is basically your standard balance sheet of assets and liabilities. As expected, I had a lot to contribute on the liability side - enough student loans to bankrupt a small nation. On the asset side I struggled. It turns out I don't really have assets aside from retirement accounts and the like. I don't own a car, I don't collect art, I drink whatever comes into the house, so there aren't any rare wines laying around - but under pressure to come up with something to fill those rows, the following 3 emerged as my most valuable tangible assets
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1) Pocket knife collection - rare Remington bullet series knives, and a few other odds and ends
2) Antique Winchester, over-under double barrel shotgun
3) 1.75 acres of surveyed but off-the-grid Florida swampland adjacent to Lake Okeechobee
The later I would not have included last year. Earlier this year, however, I received a letter from the Nature Conservancy offering to buy it from me. Turns out I'm fortunate enough to own land that 8 endangered species of birds call home. SCORE! Apparently my lot falls under their tier 1 priority. I learned this by Googleing my lot details, and found their planning document as a PDF. Negotiating 101: don't post your position online.
I didn't sell it though. I'm saving it to build my dream shanty on.
Knives + Guns + Swampland is basically the most perfect redneck formula ever. That's what I brought to the annual audit.
Congrats
Evil
Friday, January 01, 2010
New Years Quickies
Evil
Thursday, December 31, 2009
Sometimes I Feel Like This Guy -- Indie Short Film Edition
Evil
Wednesday, December 30, 2009
Worst Decade Ever (Part 1 of 2)
Evil
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Pop Culture Images of the Decade
Do you guys remember when X-tian dyed his hair blonde, bought a 12 pack of white t-shirts and walked around with his arms folded for what seemed like an entire year? Well that year was 2000.
This, of course, is from the 2000 VMA's. The VMA's were a show people like us used to look forward to - like a Top Chef finale for the beginning of the decade.
The OOs: TV Shows We Liked to Watch: #1 The Wire
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The concept was huge
The concept was simple enough I suspect when he sold it. A police procedural about drug dealers and wire taps in Baltimore. David Simon (a former City Reporter for the Baltimore Sun and later a producer and writer for Homicide and author of the The Corner) delivered on this but he also gave us so much more. In the end he told a broad story about the failure of large US cities at the beginning of the 21st century starting first with the drug trade, and subsequently exploring the evaporation of the middle class, the inherent bureaucracy of local government, the complete failure of the educational system and finally why the media is no longer in a position to expose all these limitations.
The narrative and the characters are complex
Lots of writers who got paid to watch TV called the show “Dickensian in scope”, something that annoyed Simon so much that he used it as an example of the sort of drivel that Editors use at flailing newspapers in season 5. What the meant is that he managed to avoid following a strict linear narrative. Dominic West was ostensibly the star of the show but he spent the entirety of season 3 showing up every other episode, smirking, and then drifting back into the background. This is because the city (its street corners, funeral homes, projects, police precincts, city hall) was the star with several characters going into and out of focus at any given time.
They also never give you an upper hand over anyone in the show. You learn things as they do. You also have to pay attention. Police Chief Bunny Colvin shows up for 3 minutes in season 2, quietly observes a situation and decides then and there what his only course of action is; as witnessed by his Hamsterdam experiment in Season 3.
People love Omar Little – the Robin Hood of the ‘hood. They fear Marlo Stansfield. They inexplicably want Bunny to succeed and mostly because you are willing to trade anything away for a cessation of the insanity.
It also manages to be quite funny.
It won’t make you feel good
There is no redemption for the system it’s a disaster. Some characters find individual redemption but its few and far between and even then their position is assumed by someone else from the cast ensure that their system stays broken and things stay hopeless.
Season 4 is essentially about the children raised on the streets of Baltimore and it is at times heartbreaking. Your investment in the “hoppers” – Namond, Michael, Dukie, and Randy will leave in pieces after you realize where Baltimore leaves most of them… You also get to meet Kinard – who turns out to be the most evil 5 year old ever.
A closing thought
This is a tough show to watch. No one stops to explain anything to you - its one long sprawling narrative that unfolds bit by bit. It was also the single vision of one creator - an auteur – just like filmmaking in the 70s. This is the conceit of television in the 00s. Prior to this decade TV shows were pretty consistent. The status quo could not be disrupted week to week so viewers could check in or out without much work. This is no longer the case. As technological advances drove a drop in prices (as VHS went to DVDs then On Demand to our eventual post net work future), the revenue opportunity for television series also changed because revenue could be made up in the secondary market. This allowed people to stretch on TV. I suppose it could have happened earlier with VHS but it didn’t for whatever reason. I mean really, who went out and bought MASH or even Friends on VHS? I don’t know many folks who did.
I am not sure which was the chicken or the egg here. Was it the burning platform (the 10 hour drama of the Sopranos, FX’s The Shield or ABC’s Alias) or the technology? The best answer is that they probably helped each other out – a virtuous circle with each element re-enforcing the other. Now telling a story (large or small) across a series was possible because any audience sacrificed week to week could be made up future consumption. The medium of that consumption continues to evolve and soon no one will consume DVDs and eventually we won’t even being paying for cable (the next inefficiency to fall and I can’t wait)
So this is the TV story of the 00s. The first few examples of this in the decade (JJ Abrams work on Alias and the guy from Sopranos) begat others like Lost and even Glee. But it reached it potential with The Wire - a brilliant show that is probably best consumed on DVD or on Demand as one long single narrative.
A Question That Needs To Be Asked
Evil
Tuesday, December 29, 2009
A Prodigy In Douchiness
Evil
Shocking Fact Of The Day
Technological Advances
When we look back on this era, it will be hard to explain to our grandchildren just how fast technology was changing our lives. This decade really began to deliver on the promise of the massive internet technology investment bubble of the late 1990s, bringing connectivity to a place that would have seemed like science fiction in 1990. Below are 10 technological innovations born of the 00’s that have changed our daily lives (note that some of this technology existed in the 90s’, but reached critical market mass this decade).
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10. Flat screen TVs & monitors – In January 2000, nobody had a plasma or LCD TV. Today damn near everyone does. One could argue that these TVs didn’t change anything; they just replaced a slightly different version of the TV. But I would argue that they are changing our lives at least aesthetically. The TV as furniture is done. The hulking entertainment cabinet as the centerpiece of a home is a thing of the past. These fantastic TVs have also changed the viewing experience. A decade ago, a 37” TV was really, really big. Today it is the smallest model Costco carries.
9. GPS + mapping sites – There is just no reason to be lost anymore. Nobody uses atlases or maps. We print up directions before we go, or we pop in our destination in our ubiquitous GPS devices.
8. Digital cameras – Over the course of this decade, the price of taking a picture went from ~$1 (film + development), to zero. This declining cost has led to an explosion in photography. Every human event is thoroughly documented in a way that would have been unfathomable a short time ago, as noted in a recent Onion article. Interestingly, as the ability to take and share photos grows, the production of physical photos has fallen off a cliff. I have shoeboxes full of pictures from college and before, but only maybe a dozen physical photos from the last 7 years. Sure hope my hard drive holds up!
7. Wikipedia – Wikipedia started out as a joke, but man, they have really turned things around. I would argue that it is the single most useful site on the internet (search engines collectively are more important, but there are several of them, and only one Wikipedia). I wasn’t thinking of including it in this list until I realized that I had looked up every one of my entries in Wikipedia. It has killed the encyclopedia outright, and it has evil designs on research libraries. Here’s a fun wiki time killer, if you are interested.
6. Facebook – Email brought down the cost of keeping up with people you don’t see every day. A lot of us still have high school friends we would have lost touch with in an era of letter writing. But keeping up via email still has a cost. You need to compose a message, get the right email address, etc. Facebook dropped the cost of keeping tabs on people down to zero. Kids today will need to opt out of keeping up with their high school friends. The concept of whittling down one’s social circle as life progresses – a constant feature of civilization for the last 5,000 years – will cease to be.
5. TiVo – Remember trying to be home at a specific time to catch your favorite show? As recently as 2004, I was scheduling my graduate school classes so I could catch the 5pm Simpsons reruns. TiVo has made that a thing of the past. Good riddance!
4. Wireless internet – As the importance of the internet grew in the 1990’s, the usefulness of the laptop computer diminished. What’s the point of having a mobile computer if it had to be tethered to your network to be at all useful? Nowadays, we just assume every café, airport, hotel and strip club has wireless available. At the end of this decade, it’s the desktop computer that is looking more and more obsolete.
3. Home broadband connection – Remember that terrible shrieking sound your modem made when it connected to your ISP? Remember the per-minute charges? Can you believe that was just 8 years ago? Installing the capacity to bring broadband internet access into every home nearly took down the entire telecom industry, and it certainly bankrupted a number of its biggest names. But the result was worth it. Bringing the internet in all of its glory into every middle class home has really unlocked its potential, allowing everything else on this list to flourish.
2. Smart phones – Man, what can’t these things do? They have truly turned the 10-hour worker into the 24-hour worker, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your perspective, but definitely a different thing. It has made escaping work harder and less tolerated, but it has also made escaping the physical office much, much easier, for which I love my Blackberry dearly. To grasp its importance, 25 minutes of downtime of a device that didn’t exist 10 years ago now makes the front page of the NYTimes.
1. The Segway - Do any of us even remember life before the Segway?
And now a few things that get a lot of talk, but did not warrant a top-10 placement on my list
Google – It’s a search engine. Yes, we use it every day, but before we used Google, we used Yahoo, and before we used Yahoo, we used Alta Vista. Whatever algorithmic advantages it may have over its competitors doesn’t mean much to the casual search engine user.
Ipod – I had a walkman that a rarely used. After that, I had a discman that I rarely used. Now I have an Ipod that I rarely use. The concept of carrying music around with you has been around for 25 years. Yes, the Ipod made it easier to carry much, much more music, but there is a very finite amount of music one can actually consume on the go. The Ipod changed nothing and doesn’t deserve a spot here.
DVDs – No consumer product has ever taken off as quickly as the DVD player. But I am not sure it changed our lives very much. I use DVDs exactly as I used VHS tapes – to watch movies and occasionally to use as a coaster.
Net Flix – This almost made the list. It has singlehandedly made the phrase “going to the video store” as obsolete as “going to the soda fountain.” Let's call it #11.
Pop Culture Images of the Decade
Now this one is a bit of a political image of the decade, but let's face it, this had crossover appeal. Even people who didn't give a flip about politics enjoyed watching Howard Dean implode in Iowa on that brisk January evening in 2004.
Things I don't want this man doing:
1) Responding to emergencies
2) Responding to requests
3) Responding to enemies
4) Responding to supporters
5 - Infiniti) Anything that is more than trivial
Of course, he's now in charge of the party that largely supported him before this epic meltdown.
Manuary Beard Update
Evil
Monday, December 28, 2009
Exposé!!!
Evil
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