Yes,

before you ask, the Google ads are an intentional and essential irony. Attend them or ignore them as you wish.

Frigidity

Holy dancing jesus, it's cold in the office where I work today. Maybe we could export some of the coldness to Iraq, where the lack of electricity and attendant lack of air conditioning seems to be the root cause of many problems.

If only those reconstruction contractors were as good at, say, reconstructing as they are at carting off boatloads of money, maybe it could happen.

Television viewership

So I understand Larry 'For the Hour!' King's interview with that woman snagged 3.2 million viewers. This is seen as something of a ratings coup. Media pundits are practically fellating themselves over this triumph for the news network nobody watches anymore.

But this isn't about her, or about CNN.

At its peak, Arrested Development would draw 6 million viewers. Constantly the show was in danger of cancellation until the day, of course, when it finally was.

I find the Bluths infinitely more entertaining. At least they were intelligent.

An important question

Have you done something to make yourself happier today?

(note: Masturbation does not count.)

Is there a Hilton in Paris, anyway?

Consider this. It is equally bad to complain about all the coverage Paris Hilton receives as it is to provide that coverage in the first place. She still serves as a vacuous distraction from the truly important events of the day.

Yes, even this post. Embrace the hypocrisy.

i Phone ...

just fine with my Samsung A640, thank you very much.

I'm a recent Apple convert and devotee, so you'd think that I'd be chomping at the bit to purchase an iPhone, to empty my bank account so that company at 1 Infinite Loop in Cupertino, CA, can pad the executive bonuses a little more this year.

It looks pretty. And it does absolutely nothing that I need a phone to do. of course, I'm still trying to figure out why they thought putting cameras on cell phones was a good idea. You end up with a crappy phone AND a crappy camera.

But I still like my Samsung A640. It's black and mysterious, like the monolith in 2001.

So it's like this ... (The YANLI Manifesto)

This is the kind of society we live in. Your value as a being is, broadly and generally speaking, literally your value -- that is, how much you have and how much you can spend (particularly this last; I'd point to that social pressure as the chief reason for the explosion of untenable consumer debt we've seen in recent years).

I'm not even saying that's necessarily or entirely wrong. To a certain extent, if you're not contributing greatly to the arts or the sciences or philosophy or things like that, the one thing you can do is work and buy things. And if everyone stopped buying anything but the bare necessities and made everything else themselves, I daresay our society would collapse. But everything in moderation.

And we've now arrived at a place where we pay for everything -- our TV, our internet, our telephone ... even water, despite the fact that there's perfectly good stuff coming out of our tap (though sometimes it may need a little filtering), and still we get marketed to.

With technology, too, it's possible to crunch data about us that we didn't even know we were leaving behind, so as to narrowcast advertisements and endlessly customize media and online content to match us and only us.

In the process, we become prisoners of what the computer thinks we are. Our identity is that trail of things with which we've identified ourselves. We become slotted into an increasing number of tiny boxes, usually to the exclusion of other things. We become a listener to British hip-hop who gives to Republican candidates, reads the New York Times, watches The Office and only calls long distance to Pennsylvania, and always from the cell phone, which has a Lady Sovereign ringtone purchased for $2.99.

Each of those bits, and hundreds more besides, puts us in a little box from which those who study the data think they can draw information about who we are. Each of those choices implies the exclusion of others, because when we become one thing, in the eyes of those who need to study these things, we equally become not a whole bunch of other things they've decided are mutually exclusive of the thing we are.

So when you are logged in, you are telling The Machine to classify you, to stratify you, to tell you who you are. What I strive to be about here is shattering that paradigm, embracing the duality and multiplicity of existence and embracing the necessary hypocrisy of modern life. Because if nothing else, if you can hold two 'opposing' ideas in your head at the same time, or see how they're not really opposites at all if you hold them at the right angle, you at least have something going for you that the Neo-Cons never will.

This is not a political blog. But politics may enter in sometimes. I can't help it; I'm a political animal.

But music, pop culture, consumer electronics, the fate of humanity and the incredible shrinking (and simultaneously ballooning and growing-more-complex) global village, random deep thoughts and carefully considered silliness ... I intend for them to be more the par for this course than the heavy blog entry you're reading now.

If you're reading. I can't tell.

You are not logged in.