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Showing posts from March, 2011

A man, a plague, a book, and a journey long overdue

Borders is going out of business! Well, it has been for awhile . How does a 40-year old company with 19,000 employees go bankrupt? "A series of missteps". It's funny how easily that simple phrase can be used to characterize any number of tragic failures, business or otherwise, that have come and gone. Take the Black Death for example. Who knew that not rushing to bury the rotting enemy corpses that were flung (by them) into your town but instead making your swift escape would bring a disease so contagious and lethal that it would end up killing a third of the population of western Europe over the next 2.5 years? A series of missteps, indeed. Or take President Franklin D. Roosevelt, an otherwise meritiorious individual who did well beyond his duty for the good of men, who, through a series of missteps, ordered the internment of 120,000 people in the interest of "national safety", in spite of the fact that many of them were legalized immigrants and even

I Can't Stop, Fridayin', Fridayin'

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Ok, sincerest most seriousest apologies for any of those who are reading this. I am about to mention a viral video that you may or may not be aware of, after which you have now become aware of because of my mentioning it. And for that, I apologize, most sincerely and seriously! The video I speak of can be found here . If you are too lazy to click through a link, I've also embedded it here: Okay, breathe. Breathe. After an experience like this, the best thing to do is to not react. I mean, what's the use of reacting, really? She's just a kid. Remember that. The car in the video is automated. Her friends are all underage. They can't even have driver's licenses. What are they doing driving a car? And those dresses. Who lets their 13 year-old wear clothes like that to a house party teeming with other similarly dressed kids doing things that only intoxicated adults would do, including record a slow-motion music video featuring underage girls and evocative auto-tunin

Being Misunderstood in the Best Possible Way

I recently had the opportunity to read through the entirety of "Brave New World" in a single sitting. I would call it more of a privilege, but I don't want to alienate any of my readership more than I already do with my various rants and introspectives... Not that I had much else to do on a 14-hour plane ride, but still, it was far from a chore or a bore to read the novel cover to cover. It was also the first time I had ever read it and, though I don't recommend doing so on a regular basis, I felt it was a great way to do it. Attention span deficits aside, there are so many novel-reading experiences that feel vast and epic, but I think this is in large part due to the fact that they are read over long periods of time, during which our minds attempt to fill in those blank spaces (in terms of novel-reading) with relevant or speculative information. It adds to the fiction, so to speak. But the original work itself actually remains unaltered. So, in other words what I

perhaps I've been too blind, please pay it no mind

I'm watching a video about "the social animal" , humans. It's interesting, engaging. It's, ironically, somewhat alienating as well. I know that it seems intuitive to believe that seeing and hearing a talk about people would make me feel more connected, more human than not. But it's not. It's making me realize how little people know, how little I know, about people in general. When I'm enlightened about mathematics, or chemistry, or even psychology I feel an immense amount satisfaction, as though I've opened a large dusty volume that's been closed for a thousand years and, to my great elated surprise, find that I can read it easily and that the ideas contained therein are intelligible and in fact aligned with my own.  But not right now. Right now I feel so, so disappointed. I feel disappointed because, if what this presentation is saying is true, then humans have fallen a long, long way from where they once were. Is it so hard to talk about em

forget the format, I'm going in deep

We treat women like rice because they stick to all our meat We like cars and PCs because they use electricity We can't write no papers or poems or autographs But we supplement our words with abnormally accurate pie graphs What, what, what you gonna say now Chinese, Japanese, ain't the same anyhow we can't always be seen, but we rock in every scene even though we take our time we still can find the best ways to succeed Like copying ipods, iphones, ipads and what and dropping phat beats that have already been cut by the blacks and the mexicans but man who gives a damn because when you hear it in the club it's like, man oh man Then on the TV it's like, Ken Jeong beeeotch! Quakes don't stop us, the shakes don't stop us, We drive fast cars because no brakes can stop us CNN even said it, tsunami's gonna regret it even with 10,000 lost, we still don't let it let it break us down, we got 1 billion plus and an army on the way still don&