Voicemail: Stop leaving it
To anyone who stumbles self-consciously through voice messaging: relax, voicemail is dying along with the home landline. To everyone else: let’s not prolong its suffering. [Read more →]
Entries Tagged as 'diatribes'
Exaggeration nation: Orwell
Is George Orwell’s1984 the most influential novel ever written? That’s what Geoffrey Wheatcroft says in a recent essay in the New York Times:
No other [novel] can have so enriched the language. Try a Web search for countless contemporary uses of Newspeak, the thought police or doublethink – the expressions, that is: a glance at the political pages or op-ed columns provides plenty of examples of what those brilliant coinings describe.
My, with all this “coining” and “enrichment,” Orwell is practically the Royal Mint. Maybe Orwell’s words are still in circulation but are his ideas really in good condition?
Who are the people in my neighborhood, and why are they obsessed with snow?
Recently my part of the world experienced something rare — two blizzards within a week that added up to a lot of damn snow. Lest I get mocked by those living in Minnesota or upstate New York, understand this: I live in the city, where a lot of people share a small amount of coveted space. We normally have a fair amount of tolerance for one another, having learned to peacefully coexist and respect the unwritten rules of the neighborhood. Following the snow, however, all social conventions got lost in a snowdrift. The first blizzard brought out the ugly side, and the second blizzard invoked a new level of lunacy among my neighbors. I started to ask myself “Just who are these people in my neighborhood? And do I really want to meet them each day?” [Read more →]
Five things officially true this week
Kids should be shot. Measles/mumps/rubella (MMR) vaccine does not cause a reaction in children’s bowels that causes autism. What? Bowels? Somebody believed that? Somewhere Jenny McCarthy stamps her little foot and tosses her blond hair, and yet is still not a doctor.
Exaggeration nation: Disappointed
Feel like a chump nowadays? Mark Morford’s disappointment is better than yours:
My God, did you hear that pathetic State of the Union? That guy, that President Obama? Disappointing times a thousand, am I right? What the hell happened to him? Why is he so weak and ineffectual? Why the hell can’t he step up and fix the entire planet in under 400 days like he promised he would, in my dreams and fantasies and impossible liberal grass-fed organic tofu greengasms? Doesn’t he know I put a goddamn bumper sticker on my Subaru for him? I’ve never done that for anyone. Bastard.
Heartbreaking.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D): Makin’ it rain
I usually try to stay away from populism. Having lived around cows for much of my life, I know, vividly, exactly what herd behavior is, and how much we don’t want it in human society. But the Speaker of the House, Ms. Nancy Pelosi (D), has earned a good dose of populist rage, and I think we should give it to her.
Exaggeration nation: Chuck Norris
Recently, President Obama signed an Executive Order immunizing the five-person Interpol office in New York City from a handful of federal laws.
Gadzooks!
Machine guns on Wall Street
I’ve been waiting months for Public Enemies to come out on DVD.
Reason number one: I love Johnny Depp.
Reason number 2: I love guns.
The movie was just OK, as I expected from the mixed reviews I’d read. The plot was a little anticlimactic, and the love story lacked the romance novel passion I had hoped for. But the guns, both Johnny Depp’s flesh ones, and the black, shiny, metallic ones, were all I could have hoped for and more.
And it got me thinking about parallel circumstances. [Read more →]
A self-centered list for a self-centered decade!
(N.B.: Tongue is firmly planted in cheek throughout. Expect offense in response to one of the more offensive decades in recent memory.)
It’s that time of the decade again. The toll of tonight’s midnight church bells or the image of that big-ass crystal ball slowly descending into the madness of Times Square will signal that we’ve let another decade slip away. The…um…“naughts” have been a decade like no other, so I’d like to take an opportunity to honor this decade in what seems the only way possible: with an egocentric list.
The Uber-List: A Proposal
It’s nearly the end of the year, and you know what that means: lists. And ferret-wrestling matches, though I don’t want to get into that now. No, the end of the year is a time when we look back, and compile lists of things. And happenings. And celebrity deaths. Usually ordered backwards, though in the case of the famous the lists are usually ordered by cultural importance or the number of original teeth the celebrity had at their death.
[Read more →]
Another 10 words and phrases I am asking everyone to stop using in my presence
The following 10 words and phrases can be added to the previous list of 10. Both lists can be printed out, kept in wallets and purses, taped to the bathroom mirror, and given away as gifts. I like all of my friends and family and would hate to lose anyone. [Read more →]
Global warming and other histrionics of the season
I’ve realized the other day that the reason I may be feeling so blasé about the whole “Nothing Less Than The Survival Of The World Is At Stake!!!” hysteria is that I’ve been desensitized by watching too many “Nothing Less Than The Survival Of The World Is At Stake!!!” movies. In every one, it all works out somehow. [Read more →]
Tone it down, Miracle Whip
It’s not often that a television commercial has the power to send me into a white-hot rage. You know the ones to which I refer: skinny, cooler-than-thou hipsters stuffing their faces and singing their songs of youth atop the roofs of a land that responsibility forgot. I tuned them out at first, assuming that the scruffily adorable trust-fund babies were shilling for vodka or the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce. Sure, they were annoying but they were harmless, right? Wrong. To my horror, I realized recently that these ads are for something much more soul sucking-ly lame than smart phones or American Apparel. These ads are trying to put a positive spin on something that is pure, unadulterated evil: Miracle Whip. And now I’m pissed. [Read more →]
The Supreme Court is standing up for liberty, not destroying the country
I’ve really gotta stop reading the HuffPo. Did anyone else see “Supreme Court to Hand Government to Republicans, Again: This Time, Forever.” by Paul Abrams today? Man, does that piece ever make your blood boil, or what?
Moving Forward
This piece of hackery is most often heard in business settings, but I’m afraid it has even crept into the hallowed halls of academe, where one is as likely to hear Latin freakery such as sui generis.* [Read more →]
An open letter to Netflix
To Netflix, Reed Hastings, CEO;
Dear Reed,
First of all let me say how much I enjoy your service. Watching movies that I don’t own without having to drive to the video store or subscribe to cable TV is well worth whatever it is I pay you on a monthly basis. Also, thanks for leading the way on delivering video content via the internet. Now I can catch up on all of those episodes of Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe that I miss out on by not having cable. What? No? Okay, well, get on it then. But you still managed to put the other guys out of business by doing what they do better. That’s the creative destruction of the market at work, and truly the essence of the American Dream.
But unless you’re looking to hire someone to watch movies all day and write summaries of them, I’m not here just to heap praises upon you. I’m here to discuss your site’s use of genre. [Read more →]
The news is magic
Until tonight, I hadn’t watched the news in months.
After work, I ducked into a bar to have something to eat and drink. A veggie burger and Maker’s Mark on the rocks, if you must know.
Unfortunately, a TV set was mounted over the bar directly across from me. I had little choice but to watch Hardball with Chris Matthews. [Read more →]
Railing against the average: notes from a soul-sucking commute
Author’s note: For 10 months I traveled to work in New York City from my home in southeastern Connecticut. Notice I used the word “traveled” and not “commuted.” The difference, to me, is mileage and duration. My daily “commute” was three hours each way, including a 45-minute drive, an hour-and-40-minute train ride, and subway rides across and uptown. Occasionally, I took notes on the people sitting around me on the train. What follows is the seventh of several stream-of-consciousness entries I made in an untitled journal.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Lumbering they came onto the train. They are turned on, fully awake, already well into their routines. Rodent automatons. And here they come again, sweating from the burden of their girth. They sit but are not still, rooting through bags for their computers to get plugged in, Velcro straps tearing away from one another, logging on, at the office here until they get there. [Read more →]
Parenting advice: the research tells us to ignore it
Even though I am a parent, I try to avoid parenting advice. When I was pregnant, reading What to Expect When You’re Expecting made me too nervous, so I stopped before I got to the third month. After that, I found parenting information in books and magazines to be overwhelming, so I made it a policy not to read them, and stuck to studying more informative publications like Us Weekly. Given my dislike for all parenting rules, I’ve uncharacteristically taken to reading the New York Times blog called “Motherlode“. Surprisingly, it sparks some good conversation among readers about motherhood. [Read more →]
Railing against the average: notes from a soul-sucking commute
Author’s note: For 10 months I traveled to work in New York City from my home in southeastern Connecticut. Notice I used the word “traveled” and not “commuted.” The difference, to me, is mileage and duration. My daily “commute” was three hours each way, including a 45-minute drive, an hour-and-40-minute train ride, and subway rides across and uptown. Occasionally, I took notes on the people sitting around me on the train. What follows is the sixth of several stream-of-consciousness entries I made in an untitled journal.
Monday, August 4, 2008
The gentleman sitting across the aisle from me represents what I am loathe to become. The cell phone in the holster on his belt, Bluetooth earpiece attached to his head leaving him free to fill out some sort of official-looking pink piece of administrative paperwork, his laptop a convenient table to be deployed for use during his commute. He is plugged in, always connected. [Read more →]
