TIM RYAN: MC's COOL NEW STEPDAD

And if you were wondering: he totally got us the proper jammers. And he's really supportive of my writing and Liz's dance -- unlike somebody we know. (old "cool" stepdad).

6 Reasons to Love the Future

1. http://www.hedweb.com/ I don't see anything to be wary of here.

2.http://www.moller.com/ DON'T GIVE UP HOPE! This dream is like physical internet. All space: collapsed. All of the earth: at our fingertips. Culture as it has always been known: loses. Democracy/humanity: wins. SORRY CULTURE AS IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN KNOWN:( I feel like the myth that astronauts had any real purpose outside of being symbols of hope-cum-political tools was fully exposed when they played golf on the moon. Still, astronauts were great . The SkyCar should be the turn of the century astronaut, if not the turn of the century everything.

3.

What would we do without this guy?

4. The Millennial Crier. Aren't you loving it? Me too*

5. The future loves you:

And it's funnier now


6.

Doesn't this feel right? Capture this image, put your own hopes for the future in BO's speech bubble, and post it on your own blog. Suggestions: "Suffering no longer exists," "Everythings cool in Darfur," "Weed is legal," "Recess is extended and you can drink pop in class."


Don't throw away your zorkpods quite yet. The future is still on the horizon and it's looking good.


* still not that confident in my ability to recognize real love.

Ge'in Snarky: Books

I found Chris Bohjalian’s myspace page. You may remember him from Oprah’s Book Club. He’s a bestselling novelist who, interestingly enough, “writes beautiful and riveting fiction featuring what the San Francisco Chronicle dubbed 'ordinary people in heartbreaking circumstances behaving with grace and dignity'. "

Here's how he handled "who I want to meet" :

“People who read books. You know, books? They are those antiques made from ink and pulp? They have a spine (literally and, on occasion, metaphorically). Once upon a time, we read them instead of dish about Paris Hilton on the Internet."

Here were my thoughts:

What? That’s so fucked up. It’s awful. Whereas we used to have inky pulp and tiny spines, now all we have is an information superhighway. And we use it to talk about the lives of socialites, their parties, their tortured romances, their mad grabs and desperate clingings to power and fame, their dealings with family names and fortunes. What is society coming to? We traded the ration of time given to us each day to read books for internet surfing, and it’s leading us closer and closer to our demise with each passing second. I AM ONE OF THE "PEOPLE" HE SPEAKS OF.

I felt fucking AWFUL. Needless to say: I b-lined it to books and stole not just one but TWO of them. I used the reading skills I had developed on the internet and read and comprehended every word in each of them. OMG you guuyyss. THEY WERE FUCKING GREEEAAAT. The first one was a rich tale of socialites and heiresses, their grand parties, their tortured romances, their dealings with family names and fortunes, grabs and misgrabs at social power, integrating a young woman from one sector of high society into another and the issues that brings up about both cultures, and all the while a war was going on. It was fucking crazy. It was written in the 19th Century, which is “once upon a time” if I’d ever heard it. And I had. Now I knew what I had been missing all my life. I mean, it was kind of like the internet, only instead of seeing images and videos of the heiresses and thinking “they look just as cheap and kind of boring and real as me and the millions of other people who post pictures of themselves on the internet,” I thought, “these people lead the most fascinating, beautiful, important lives in Western history! They define the human experience. They define Art.” I mean, people wrote whole books about them. Whole entire, beautiful, beautiful books.
The second book I read was full of facts and figures. Like ones that compared literacy rates today to those in the past. And ones that showed me the rate of book publication today versus that in the past. And ones that described who used to have access to books, what kind of books they read, and how often they had the chance to read them. Even ones that compared children’s IQs of today to those of yesteryear. Interestingly, the coolest thing I learned was that Chris Bohjalian is perpetuating a really annoying, baseless, self-serving myth and should shut the fuck up. And that older public figures don’t understand how quickly you can wring the essence of someone’s being out of their attempt at tackling myspace profile creation, but they should learn before they wreck everything for themselves.

Extra! Extra! Charlie Rose Loves Butts

Did you know that Charlie Rose is a player? I had no idea. That sort of changes everything. And by everything I mean my top five list of replacement grandfathers. (That list has come in handy many a time.)
It is funny to know that the reason he never pays attention to what his guests are saying is because he's thinking about butts.
Also, he has a pig's heart? That's neat.

In Defense of Poesie

I wrote this poem about my favorite lady on TV. And it you don’t think it’s good, that’s probably because you don’t know enough about poetry. First of all, you have to read poems slowly, because poetry requires the gift of loving attention. You might even say poetry gives us that gift. Secondly, the golden rule of poetry is that you can never have too much alliteration. Finally, remember that poetry is not just about the meaning of the words but their sounds. In that way it’s a lot like music; even rap music!! Poetry is also just as fun to get drunk with your friends and go out and dance to as rap music. That’s why so many people care about it and it will never become irrelevant.

It was less than a year ago ere I met you,
Yet it seems like a lifetime,
And a millisecond,
Combined.
Did I just blow your mind?
Your hair is sometimes curly, sometimes straight,
But it is always bright yellow as the sun,
Which orbits the earth like my soul your face.
You’re sweet, sassy, saucy, you’re pert, fresh and bossy,
When there’s a case you just can’t say no.
That’s partly why you and Logan break up every show.
I didn’t like him at first, but now I feel kind of bad for the bro.
I also like you and your dad’s rapport,
Some say it’s creepy, but they’re just sore
Because their own dads probably abandoned them.
Beneath your tough veneer and your stubborn pride
I can tell you have a soft feminine side
Because you like to bake,
Like when you baked cookies for that guy Josh.
Did he murder his dad? Did you help him escape?
I don’t know
Because I missed last Tuesday’s show.
So if you saw it please tell me what happened.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Suck on that, poetry. And in case you were wondering, no, I didn’t use a rhyming dictionary even ONCE.

Online Gaming Revolution

Let's play "What Cultures Make You the Most Uncomfortable."

I'll go first: Chinese

Let's get political

Did anyone see Norm Coleman on "Meet the Press"?
In case you missed it:




On a meta-note: Bloggings going really well.

Scientific Method

Liz's post about people getting smarter got me thinking: are people getting smarter? I hit the web to find out.


circa 1998:


Black & White! Awesome guys!!!!!!

2007:


Then I google image searched "boogers" to try and cover my research in dried boogers -- to make Liz look stupid, as a kind of vindictive gesture -- and I couldn't find ANYTHING.


Looks like Liz was right on the money.

I smell utopia

I’m so glad NBC Thursday nights are back (if you don't count MNIE). I like what it says about our times. It’s like it’s 1998 again, only people are smarter.
This fits into my theory that people are getting smarter. Think about how much better you would be now if you had had access to any knowledge you wanted as a kid, and it came in the form of a neat future medium that didn’t have someone else’s dried boogers on every tenth page (shout out to Capitol Hill Elementary library!!!). My eight-year-old self would have been a non-stop research machine. And people who say that the internet makes kids gullible obviously never went to an elementary school where it’s completely acceptable to use the Encyclopedia Britannica CD-Rom as the single source for every research paper you write. Although you have to admit the EB-CDR has some good facts about the Holocaust and Native American storytelling. When I watch kids today surf the internet, which I do strangely a lot, I can tell those mofos are going to be savvy readers. And they’ll never have to go through a year where they can’t find out what “orgy” means, so they keep alluding to it in conversations.

FIRST STEPS

NOT EVEN FEEBLE!!
testes, testes, 1..2..3

Bush Administration: WATCH THE F OUT