Not flying. Failing, with style.
January 7, 2010
“Have you noticed that everything on planes is very tiny? There’s always tiny food, tiny liquor bottles, tiny pillows, tiny bathroom, tiny sink, tiny soap, everyone’s in a cramped seat working on a tiny computer. There’s always a small problem: there’ll be a slight delay, we’ll be a little late, if you could be a little patient! We’re just trying to get one of those little trucks to pull us up just a little closer to the jetway so you can walk down the narrow hallway and there’ll be a man there in a tight suit and he’ll tell you you have very little time to make your connecting flight. So move it!”
-Jerry Seinfeld
I really wanted to find a coffee shop in this airport, since I don’t think I have Phoenix on my “Life in Caffeine” list. Unfortunately I was only able to find a Starbucks. Alas, the great Arizona coffee investigation twas not meant to be.
The quality of life on an airplane lies somewhere between freshman all-male college dorm and refrigerator box, but no one seems to notice. We drink our watered-down juice, sit in our ultra-upright seats, breathe recycled B.O. and flatulence, and sit physically closer to strangers than we are emotionally close to our immediate family. No one complains, though. We shuffle around each other in the isles, sneeze on old people, and drop suitcases on six-year-olds and no one says a thing. At the dawn of the age of the airliner, it’s as if they were playing a sick game of “would you rather…”
Travel by automobile and ship for the rest of your life.
or
Travel ten times faster, but lower the quality of your life tenfold while doing so.
No...he didn't. Yes. I did.
Of course, someone has to make money off of this travesty, and, as we all know, it’s not the airline industry. Once you’ve lowered your living standards to plane flight level, suddenly you desperately need to feel privileged. Eating at a high-priced Burger King after getting off of a plane flight just adds insult to injury (or injury to insult), so I opt for the comparatively ritzy bar and grill. If I’m going to get ripped off, I at least want to enjoy the food. It’s also fun to listen to people spending $12 for chicken strips and $7.50 for a beer gripe about the superficial excess of Southern California.
Well, the turkey club sandwich was horrid, and now here comes the bill…
“He’d just been hosed pretty hardcore.”
Your friendeds are not my friendeds.
January 5, 2010
Once again, if you haven’t read William Deresiewicz’ article “Faux Friendship,” I highly recommend it.
I recall my first year of grad school being crazy enough without the complications of electronic social networking. As if I didn’t have enough reasons to feel old in my early twenties, on my first day I had a student abbreviate a discussion with me into another language (“Hey. Can we convo? LOL. Sorry, I like to abbrev.”), and soon after I felt the outward pressure of dealing with virtual friends—hereafter referred to as “friendeds.” After much prodding from my peers, I finally opted to give Facebook a shot, but only if I could assure that I could have all the privacy I wanted, and more. I resolved to only “friend” people that I had actual face-to-face interactions with, but my interactions on Facebook were limited until I discovered my personal Holy Grail: ultra-paranoid privacy settings. Thanks to the setting which removed my searchability on Facebook, I was free to happily enjoy all Facebook had to offer from the confines of my virtual cloaking device.
As the years have gone by, however, the ever-widening user base has had some undesirable results. While Facebook features (Facebook chat, applications, video, etc.) have consistently expanded, I’ve always had my private little wall that prevented “that one creepy guy from the coffee shop who I really never want to talk to” or “that obnoxious girl from my sophomore physics class,” or “my high school graduating class” from attempting to “friend” me. Sure, you can always ignore the friend requests, but can’t they just not know I’m there? Regardless, I’m proud to say that I’m still app-fee and I have resisted the urge to upload video or engage in real-time chat. I also was completely invisible to all but those I actually wanted to communicate with. What’s nice, is that I have had that choice.
You can run, but you can't hide. At least not anymore.
As of December 10th, I can still opt out of search results, but I have no means to opt out of being “friended” by “friends of friends” if they happen to see my picture or name in a group or wall post. “But they’re your friends’ friends,” Facebook says. “Why wouldn’t you want them to be your friend?” Well, if you’ve got one Facebook acquaintance that’s “friended” all of Northwest Ohio—and we all have got at least one who has—then that opens you up to all of Northwest Ohio as a “friend of a friend.” My real friends’ friends are not mine, so why on Earth would the Grand High Facebook council assume that I want to have the friendeds of my friendeds be able to see me? Facebook friendeds of friendeds are exponentially further away from being actual friends. Sure, there might be some that are, but does that make it worth opening me up to all of the friends of a guy a met once at a conference in New York?
The painful truth is that social networks like Facebook and MySpace have the power to dictate social privacy trends. What makes Facebook different from myspace is its respect of privacy, which has steadily eroded with every new app. Every “feature” which enables users to share more establishes a new trend which eventually becomes a standard. Not only do these new features presuppose that people want to share as much as possible, they actually encourage people to make public things that they would have never considered to display in the past. As much as I hypocritically condemn the self-important web 2.0, whether or not you want to share pictures of yourself doing a keg-stand in a unitard isn’t my business. However, you make it my business by giving all of them access to me.
I notice that every time I type “friend,” it means less and less until the word is almost meaningless. I wonder if having 1,283 “friends” on Facebook has the same effect on actual friendship?
“This information is name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, friend list, and Pages. The overwhelming majority of people who use Facebook already make most or all of this information available to everyone. We’ve found that most people who do limit access just want to avoid being found in searches or prevent contact from strangers.”
-Facebook Blog
Coming to a clearance rack near you!
January 3, 2010
With every consumer product, whether it be music, clothing, food, or what-have-you, there is a mastermind and a target demographic. When the item is released upon into the public, someone had to have been the brainchild to say “This is exactly what I had in mind! People will love this.” This idea is particularly baffling to me when I hear about large-scale productions such as The 41 Year Old Virgin Who Knocked up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It or Stan Helsing and realize that people had to conceive these films and put forth significant, time, effort, and money to producing them. Perhaps, like the dozen incarnations of Coke and Pepsi that came out in the late ’90s, they’re just banking on one very specific demographic, but these poorly conceived, humorless cesspools dressed up as “parody” consistently tank at the box office and rarely make enough money to warrant their production. Why do these things happen? Why?
I bet Rahm Emmanuel bought one.
If you’re going to produce something of questionable market value, do so on a small scale. Case in point, Obama family paper dolls. Sure, the obvious question is “why is it necessary to produce paper dolls of the Obama family?” Action figures, Barbie dolls, and bobble-heads I can almost understand, but cut-out paper dolls? I have to wonder whether little Sacha and Milea Obama are happy or horrified at what must inevitably be poor depictions of themselves in two dimensions. When it comes down to it, I guess I’m just curious who’s buying these things.
By the same token, who the heck is reading this blog?
“When people think you’re dying, they really, really listen to you, instead of just…”
December 14, 2009
Have I seen this place before?
I chilled in the cleverly named Ugly Mug before a lax Wednesday night gig at Burdigala Wines. In spite of their following the PDX coffee shop paradigm to a tee (chalkboard menu, Stumptown coffee, secondhand furniture, local artwork, microbrew, kooky color scheme, free Wi-Fi, vegan menu, *yaaaaaaawwwwn*), I had a pleasant stay. I was there for nearly two hours and didn’t see one Mac (well, except mine). They are nice enough to provide power strips for laptop users, which, in my experience, is a sign of cafempathy. They did get into the spirit of the season with a community diorama auction, with proceeds going to a local charity. In this season, and particularly in this day and age, it’s nice to little snatches of humanity as we gradually lose touch with physical community. Of course, it’s also difficult to build a diorama as a Facebook group.
Dioramas: because anything that ends in "o rama" must be awesome.
As I sit back and proofread my latest stroll through blogsville, I realize two things. First, I need to stop making up words and use a thesaurus. Secondly, it doesn’t take a college level of critical analysis to realize that my “reviews” are short on criticism and long on complain-ism. This would trouble me more if it weren’t for the fact that this is a blog, which is essentially a web surfer’s license to rant. I recently read William Deresiewicz’ article “Faux Friendship,” which examines the new phenomenon of the social network “friend.” While I do not necessarily fall in line with Deresiewicz’ nostalgia for old world friendship, his article confronts one of the most common misconceptions about the world of Web 2.0. Web 2.0 does not foster collaboration, it fosters self-obsession with collaboration and correspondence as mere byproducts.
Hm, I think I think this post got derailed a bit. Look, a new Coupland book!
As a Facebook “user” with my privacy settings set to ultra-paranoid, it’s been some time since I’ve actually logged in and participated in any real facility. The heyday of my Facebook activity was when I was actually having face-to-face contact with most of the people I was “friended” with (to differentiate from “friends with”). I’ve found that my Facebook interactions merely reflect my actual interactions, in the sense that the only people I send messages to are people I would otherwise be communicating with personally. What is sad is that if it weren’t for the convenience of Facebook, email, or text messages, I might actually be calling them.
Coffee & cake at the Ugly Mug
Unfortunately, the issue of self-obsession goes far beyond our social networking habits. Now Google and Yahoo are returning Twitter and MySpace feeds as search results, under the guise of “real-time” search. I’m reminded of an in-class exercise in which students dissected the Google privacy policy, uncovering the not-so-subtle way that the information age erodes privacy standards under the guise of “improving service.” I don’t believe search engines are out to get us, we’re out to get ourselves, literally. Real-time search gives our information age data-diet what it’s been craving the most—a healthy dose of “us.”
Of course, I could make the same excuse for self-obsession that I made for friendship. As the world changes, it’s no stretch that the words that describe it would change along with it. Perhaps “selfishness” needs redefinition. How about selffriendness?
“…instead of just waiting for their turn to speak.”
“Hey what’s the mileage on that hybrid car?”
November 25, 2009
I don't want to be that guy, but someone needs to tell them about their little spelling snafu.
I’ve been told many times that Portlanders seem to have a certain, lets say, “hatred” of Californians moving to their beloved city. I find this somewhat strange since Portland essentially wishes it was San Francisco and since California has been quietly plucking coffee-related ideas from their Northwest neighbors. Okay, okay, so California isn’t copying the Northwest, but It’s just interesting to see a place like the koffi cafe in Palm Springs being praised for providing the the standard amenities that should be found any non-franchise coffee shop. Locally roasted coffee, sustainability, free WiFi, artwork by local artists on the walls. Did I somehow get on a plane for two hours only to land back in the the Northwest?
Sippin' my berry tea thing next to the "pond." Am I with it or what?
No, because this place is clean. They’ve also got this trendy misspelling + lowercase letters thing going on that I’m not sure I’m cool with. Whereas in New York and Vegas they frequently miss the mark entirely, California takes the standard coffee shop core and dresses it up like a UCLA art history graduate student. Even my darling Elevated Coffee doesn’t look this good, and that’s about the classiest damned coffee shop in the greater Northeast Portland area. Not only that, but the folks chillaxin with their MacBook Pros in the koffi cafe actually dress like they could afford them. In the words of Mark Whalberg: “What’s that all about?”
Californians needs to take lessons on being degenerate from Portlanders. Pretentiousness doesn’t just sell itself.
Anyways, I’m taking my MacBook over to Tully’s and getting a Green Tea Latte to sip while I work on my novel. Ciao.
“Dolce Gabbana, don’t you know
Soy latte, shade-grown”
-Hot Buttered Rum
Some might say that’s my big problem.
July 5, 2009
The Boondocks: Public Enemy #2
The Boondocks begins by chronicling the adventures of Riley and Huey, two African American boys who live with their grandfather in the suburban community of Woodcrest. Where Huey represents the ignorant, pop-culture brainwashed side of contemporary black youth, Huey represents the informed, radical antithesis. As the comic progresses and McGruder finds his voice, the plot and supporting characters fall to the wayside in favor of McGruder’s message. This shift coincides with the comic’s Doonesbury-esque shift from the funnies to the op-ed section, and this seemed to only fan McGruder’s flames and he took blatant shots at everything from the Bush and Regan administrations, to Kobe Bryant, O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson, to Star Wars, Vivica A. Fox, and Anna Kournikova.
McGruder–like another author whom I admire but have mentioned waaaaay too much–likes to play with extremes. He uses caricatures, rather than characters. He’s rarely subtle and when he is, it goes over my head. More so than most comics, The Boondocks give you near-unfiltered access to the mind of the author. Reading a Boondocks anthology can be compared to getting to know a highly functioning sociopath: initially the quirkiness is funny, but eventually you read their interviews and realize they’re actually bat s**t crazy. In this case, however, it’s still funny to me and I’m not sure why. What perplexes me most is that in most cases, listening to artists/writers/directors rant through their characters makes me want to set things on fire. For some odd reason, Aaron McGruder’s blatant rants entertain me. The possible reasons why can only be troubling:
Possible Reason 1) Rather than the comic, I’m actually taking delight in the frustrated dissatisfaction the radical left.
Possible Reason 2) I find the decline of our society–and particularly black culture–side-splittingly amusing.
The Boondocks: A Right to be Hostile
Possible Reason 3) I’m entertained merely by the fact that this “anti-comic” of sorts sticks it to mainstream media.
Perhaps I don’t mind because when it’s all said and done, I don’t really disagree with him. In a spirited interview with Hard Knock TV, McGruder admits that in regards to the problems with our country and particularly our government, awareness of the issues is no longer the problem. I’d agree with him. If you’re an activist today (which I’m not), you aren’t fighting ignorance, you’re fighting apathy. Apathy fueled by information over-saturation brought on by conduits like mainstream news media, the entertainment industry, and self-important wannabe muckrakers who regurgitate their dissatisfaction into blogs, tweets, and…
Whoops! This was supposed to be classified as a “review” and not a “rant.” Scratch that last part from the record.
I don’t think Aaron McGruder is bat s**t crazy, he’s passionate. He’s also living proof that when given direct line to the masses such as a nationally syndicated comic (or a blog…) if you’ve really got something to say and try to sugar coat it, it will sooner or later come out in a way that ain’t always pretty. If the syndicated run of The Boondocks comic and the movie Me, Myself, and Irene have taught me anything, it’s that you either let it out or shut yourself away before you hurt someone. In the spirit of that idea:
National Blog Posting Month is an ill-conceived idea that can have nothing but adverse effects our quest to build collective knowledge. Encouraging individuals with an over-inflated sense of self-worth (bloggers, tweeters, etc.) to make a special effort to increase the frequency of their spewing into electronic vomit bags known as blogs only contributes to general epidemic of information apathy that continues to plague our society.
Aaahhhh. That felt good. I’ll see you tomorrow!
Oh yeah. Tell me about your terabytes, baby.
July 2, 2009
According to NaBloPoMo, it is National Blog posting Month, a “fitting occasion for posting regularly to your blog on the topics that interest you.” Since I am an irritable tech curmudgeon , I will take this moment to share what an irritatingly obnoxious idea it is to encourage people with the overdeveloped sense of self importance to post every day for a month, particularly when there are organizations working very hard to archive all this crap that we’re spewing into the collective eConsciousness.
The camera which recorded the plenary session on data storage. I took a picture of it in an existential moment.
A few months back I attended the Sixth Media in Transition Conference at MIT where the plenary session “Institutional Perspectives on Storage” primarily consisted of the panelists, archivists from various European organizations, getting off on how much storage space they had to offer. My favorite contribution came from Richard Wright, an archivist from the BBC who not only pointed out that they had the least amount of space to offer because they only archived items of value, but also shared that as the amount of space we have for storage has increased exponentially, the durability and reliability of the medium decreased exponentially. This is why we have stone tablets with three digits on them that are thousands of years old, but have to buy a new flash drive every other month or so.
I also admired Wright because he was brazen enough to not only illustrate a file corruption example using an image of Steamboat Willie, but also add the caption “Used Without Permission.” Wright has certainly got some balls bollocks going up against Disney, but perhaps the BBC is full of hardcore badasses cheeky bastards, and the archivists are the cheekiest. I don’t know what I’m talking about. Lets move on.
The issue of archival stayed with us well into the session on information sharing. In response to a fascinating presentation by Alison Byerly entitled What Not to Save: The Future of Ephemera, I formulated what some tweeters would call the “Scrooge McDuck Theory of History.” This was partly a mistake, since I only likened obsession with saving ridiculous amounts of useless data to Scrooge McDuck swimming in a pool of more money than he could ever spend. My real point was the fact regardless of the effort we put into archiving damn near everything, historians 10,100, and 1000 years down the road will be obsessed with whatever we don’t save anyways.
So yes, I refuse to support this silly cause, and it is only by mere coincidence that I have now posted every day in July. All two of them.
What’s the point? We all gonna die anyways.
-Meatwad
Dear Coupland-aholics (and Douglas Coupland, if you’re listening),
If you’ve had a conversation with me that’s lasted longer than 36 seconds in the last two weeks, you’ve probably heard me mention jPod, a doomed early-2008 Canadian television show based on my second-to-least favorite book written by my favorite author (Girlfriend in a Coma FTW!). I love my favorite Douglas Coupland books about as much as I despise television, which may explain my conflicting emotions when I not only discovered fairly recently that the show was made, but realized that it’s the one of the worst shows ever mistakingly syndicated onto the idiot box we call television…and I couldn’t stop watching it.
The Podsters
After four drafts of this post, I’ve yet to find the right words to properly describe the hearty plot casserole that jPod serves up in every episode, or how prime-time buzzword “edgy” translates to “brutal” in Coupland’s screenwriting hands. I love senseless violence as much as the next person (…), but to see characters fall victim to kidnapping, detonation, murder-suicide pacts, electrocution, assault with a deadly weapon, vehicular homicide (x2), heroin addiction, and assault with a cuddly weapon was a bit much for one season!!! Fortunately the super-saturation of plot actually made me feel like I got a twelve-hour jPod movie rather than one season of a TV show, which I kind of dug in a weird way.
Critics (read: myself and other people vaguely referenced on Wikipedia) chided Coupland for inserting himself into the jPod novel as an insufferably dickish character. In the series, Coupland merely cameos as a character dead in an elevator (woo hoo for gore!), but drops enough references to his books hat he may as well have written himself into the series. The Gum Thief got a few nods through the appearances of Glove Pond, while the series ends with a humorously literal nod to Girlfriend in a Coma. All Families are Psychotic could have been a working title for the series, and Microserfs is basically the show played backwards. He’s even nice enough to foreshadow his next book through a documentary on bees which plays on television in the final episode. I love you Doug, but please get over yourself or get over pretending to be way into yourself, whichever applies.
In the end, Doug, I’m still watching the show, well, because I love it. Not because it’s particularly good, 
mind you. It’s a disaster in every way a tv show can be. In fact, it’s a microcosm of all the strengths and weaknesses of both jPod and what draws me to your books in the first place. Like Ethan, Cowboy, John Doe, Caitlin Kaitlin, and Brie, I always felt like a twisted spawn of Generations X, Y, and whatever the hell we’re in now, conceived by the overactive gland we call the information age. I can’t help but be drawn to the unwatchable mess that is jPod because, good or bad, it presents me with what I’m looking for when I pick up each of your books, an honest interpretation of what it means to exist as an individual in the 21st century.
Thank you, Mr. Coupland, for giving me that experience.
…and thank you, WB for cancelling that gruesome, mindless train-wreck.
And the “what did you expect?” award goes to…
June 2, 2009
Microsoft released its new web browser “Bing” today. According to PC World, apparently there is some surprise that it efficiently finds pornographic video clips and displays them in convenient previews. I guess what surprises me the most is that the words “shocked to find porn” actually found themselves together. I mean, in this day and age should that ever be a surprise? Anyways, PC World reports:
One spicy Bing-related topic popping up on the Web today is the Bing Video Search preview feature. Some say it is every adolescent boy’s dream come true. Just set your preferences for Bing Video Search to unfiltered search results, and run a search for “porn” or whatever naughty search term you like on Bing. What you’ll find are explicit video previews from the deepest, darkest corners of the Web. As you can imagine, this trick has gotten some serious attention, and some bloggers have apparently spent the entire morning running these searches (in the name of news of course).
So…you typed “porn” in the search bar and found pornographic videos? So far, the only thing surprising about this is that it made the news. Of course, if the search engine could somehow produce a pornographic result in the top five results of ANY search, well, that would be newsworthy. Imagine typing in “Viola de Gamba” and getting…um…Renaissance chamber music..and smut.
Wow, I’m essentially 0/3 the last three posts on keeping things clean. Jeez, what does that say about me?
The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to bitch about movies and share pornography with one another.
-Holden McNeil
My coffee and my desk. Sideways.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve lost all patience and interest in the American mainstream news media, opting for NPR and the occasional BBC headline ticker. As if just to spite me this morning, first NPR reports that pirates may “very possibly” team up with Al Qaeda to threaten national security, and now the BBC posts a headline entitled “Girl Chooses Japan Over Parents.”
If I wanted to listen to CNN, I’d shoot up 16 oz. of valium, saw off my frontal lobe, and listen to CNN.
In fairness, the BBC news article did report on the actual story of a Japanese-born Filipino whose parents bent immigration laws. The girl, and most importantly the parents, decided she would be better off in the custody of her aunt in Japan. Given the headline, however, I had expected some story about an American teenage super heroine that jetted across the globe at supersonic speed to save Japan from a meteor attack only to return seconds too late to stop the propane explosion in her parents’ basement.
By the way, while I don’t condone pirate attacks, I’m pretty sure Fisher Price toys have killed, or at least injured more Americans this year than pirates have. Hell, registered Democrats and Republicans have killed more Americans than pirates have, and we haven’t sent the Navy after them. How much mileage do we really have to squeeze out of this story? While I understand that Al Qaeda is a legitimate threat, we should really just be thankful they haven’t formed an alliance with ninjas.
Perhaps my standards for the BBC are too high. I nearly forgot that a guy in Norway who got pulled over for having sex with his girlfriend while exceeding the speed limit on the motorway also made the global BBC news ticker. No, really. He did.
“[The vehicle] was veering from one side to the other because the woman was sitting on the man’s lap while he was driving and doing the act, shall we say,” he added. “He couldn’t see much because her back was in the way.”
- Tor Stein Hagen, a superintendent with Soendre Buskerud Police District
