You Read That Right

Camden Riversharks - riversharks.com: "Saturday, August 1, 2009 @ 5:35
vs. Long Island Ducks

Dog Days of Summer Presented by Nutro Products
BRING YOUR DOG TO THE BALLPARK!

Post-Game Kids Run the Bases
All children are invited down to the field to run around the bases after the game!

Post-Game Fireworks Spectacular"

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Yes, I'm going. My dog, like many dogs, is terrified of fireworks. So I guess we'll leave early. But man, I'd love to see what happens when you shoot off huge fireworks near a whole bunch of dogs in Camden, NJ. I feel like I'm going to be missing the best part.

E Unibus Pluram

So I just read “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” an essay written it the early nineties by David Foster Wallace. In it, Wallace writes about the pervasiveness of television in U.S. homes (citing evidence that a TV runs for six hours a day in an average household) and how that pervasiveness shapes modern fiction – and not in a good way.

But more importantly, Wallace argues that television’s ability to spread pop culture without restraint has created a new generation of writers who are constrained by a sense of cynicism and irony. This is because, Wallace writes, a fiction writer must be an honest voyeur of the human condition to create characters, plot and dialogue that are an accurate reflection of culture; television is an artificial sweetener, a poor substitute. Yet, that’s what today’s fiction writers use to observe, and work with to create. The end result is a copy-of-a-copy reflection of culture with an unmistakable “too cool for school” attitude.

Even more prescient is that Wallace takes this stance before the advent of reality television, which is about as insincere, ironic and cynical as it gets. I say “ironic” because what we’re seeing is supposed to be “real,” but everyone – everyone – knows it isn’t. Even when the cameras in a reality show are hidden – like Big Brother – nobody forgets they’re there. So what’s being said and done is really real at all.

Occasionally, media like “The Truman Show,” “Secret Cinema,” and even an old episode of The New Twilight Zone, “Special Service,”  (written by  J. Michael Straczynski, and starring the guy from “American Werewolf in London,” no less) play with this idea to an extent, “The Cable Guy,” take on this idea; that television is an ironic reflection of reality and that it would be a twisted person indeed whose socialization occurred entirely through television. Wallace argues that we’re all a bit twisted. His point is that true revolutionary writers would eschew pop culture references, inside jokes, self-deprecation, cynicism, and irony and write dangerously sincere works.

It’s an interesting idea, and reminds me a lot of a quote I heard Ben Harper say in an interview once that he’s never been afraid of being too sincere in his music; in fact, it’s when he’s not sure if he should put something in a song because it’s too personal, that he knows he’s writing well.

Along the way, incidentally, Wallace discusses advances in HDTV and interactive television that make him seem at times prescient (for example, his ideas that television will become more personal and specialized as the viewer gains more options and control over playback) and a little shortsighted (for example, his arguments that the commercial will become obsolete after this control becomes commonplace).

Less incidentally, this essay was written before the internet, which distributes pop culture oh so much faster and more effectively; Wallace writes that the viewer will “create their own reality” through interactive media. Combine that with hundreds of channels and a niche market opens up for exactly the sort of sincerity and depth Wallace demands of his revolutionaries. Web sites such as postsecret and futureme allow people to make what appears to be achingly sincere media, albeit anonymously. As a true interactive medium, the internet allows people to be sincere, but with training wheels; they can walk away from the keyboard and let an internet romance die, or they can be one of the thousands of internet couples married in real life. I remember when an internet romance was stigmatized; like many such stigmas, it’s at the single-eyebrow-raising level and fading fast.

Three of the most popular television dramas of the last few years are an example: “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” and “Breaking Bad” all feature protagonists that face serious ethical issues on a near constant basis – and often make decisions that the viewer simply would not make.

Nevertheless, as I admit earlier, even “Breaking Bad” – a show so stunningly well-plotted that it has caused me to pause the DVR and have a breakout discussion of what I might do were I in the main character’s shoes – is a copy of a copy. Dialogue is always snappier than a real-person conversation. Life is rarely episodic, and even when it is, it is only so upon reflection. There is no 30-second skip when life drags. People go to the bathroom. Etc. Wallace’s main point – that artists should risk embarrassment and ridicule by the blinded-by-ironic-media masses and choose sincerity – is not lost today. If nothing else, it should be read by artists to remind them that, to the extent they build their art on the socialization fed to them by TV, their art can only reach a certain level and go no farther.

When Curtis Granderson slipped and fell in centerfield during game four of the 2006 World Series, essentially rendering my tickets to game six of that series useless, I fell to the floor, pounded it, and did not get up for half an hour. It was, in effect, a temper tantrum. It remains the worst feeling I’ve ever had watching television that didn’t involve live coverage of a natural or man-made disaster in which people were injured or killed. (Tigers fans may argue that the bunts to the pitcher during that series were, in fact, such disasters).

As bad as that feeling was, it really was a copy-of-a-copy of the breakups, funerals and disappointments in my life.

As Wallace points out, more or less: TV can make you laugh, cry and kiss six hours a day goodbye, but you have to actually talk to people to get your heart broken.

E Unibus Pluram - Google Search.

walked to new jersey yesterday

and man, my dogs are still barking. not Kyle, of course, he chooses to express himself nonverbally.

Burning One's Own House Down is Very, Very, Very Ohio state

ABC/ESPN college football commentator and former Ohio St. QB, Kirk Herbstreit and his wife donated their house to to the local fire department back in 2004 and the Herbstreits took a $330,000 deduction on their tax return.

In an extremely convenient coincidence, the IRS, for the first time, challenged the practice of donating individuals’ homes for such purposes the same year.

The Herbstreits were audited and paid back taxes and interest of $134,606 but are now suing the IRS to get that money back.

Apparently this is a matter of debate amongst tax wonks out there, some saying the donation is kosh and some saying it isn’t. You Michigan fans obviously hope Herbie gets stuck paying the extra scratch but the real question is whether Lee Corso is getting to the age where he’s burning down houses just because he’s totally gone senile.

IRS Doesn't Care for Kirk Herbstreit Burning Down His Own House - Going Concern - A Tabloid for Accountants, CFOs, & Finance Execs.

Geez

Not a banner day, today.  A side effect of my position is that sometimes, after a full day’s work, a full day’s worth of work comes in.  This is more likely to happen on a Friday, unfortunately, as the cascading effect of weekly deadlines pushes the work to be done down the totem pole around close of business.

I hope the dog forgives me; he was in the crate for many hours today.  He’s eyeing me suspiciously.  Only through many treats, will I regain his trust.

The Big Money: The Pennies Add Up at Swoopo.com - washingtonpost.com

Imagine for a second that you've set out to come up with an online shopping site that would take advantage of everything we know about consumer behavior.

Your goal is to separate people from their money as efficiently as possible. What would you do? You'd probably try to draw buyers in with bargain prices. You'd pit them against one another in an auction. You'd ask them to make snap decisions without taking much time to figure out just how much money they're spending. On top of that, you'd ask for only very small amounts of money at any one time, letting payments of a few cents build to hundreds of dollars.

But relax. Someone's beaten you to it: the folks at Swoopo.com. It's an online auction site that fiendishly plays on every irrational impulse buyers have to draw them in to what might be the crack cocaine of online shopping sites.

The Big Money: The Pennies Add Up at Swoopo.com - washingtonpost.com.

 

Oh, man. Swoppo. If you’d pitched this idea to a lot of investors, I gotta imagine many of them wouldn’t get it, and wouldn’t give you the money. Unless they’d worked in a casino or had taken classes in behavioral science.

It bottles up the irrational behavior of somebody trying to “win their money back” (and those are quotes of dripping gooey sarcasm) at a gaming table and puts them into play.  Absolutely incredible.  Read the whole story and see how a $2k piece of equipment can sell for less than that AND make a ton of money for the site.

It’s somewhat like the poker table in the casino, where everybody playing pays to play, but (split pots aside) there’s only two winners; the high hand and the casino, who takes the rake.

Outstanding. Scary. Wonderful.

Back

So, yeah. It’s been a couple of years. 

It is so, so deceptively easy not to write. But a good friend over the weekend talked me back into the saddle.

 

Moved!

Into Center City, Philadelphia. Oh, the movers accidentally charged me $1,000 more than they should have, and the Comcast guy spent three hours rewiring the house's built-in ethernet connection - the wrong way - and the back yard isn't useful for the doggy because the city historical commission hasn't given our landlord the permission to build the steps yet, and I can't find the hair cutting scissors so I look like an unfrozen caveman lawyer, and I'm pretty sure, but not really sure that my cell phone charger is at work which I hope it is because my battery sure is dead. And I have to call Apple's customer support to complain about the backwards compatability of iTunes (if you have a video iPod, do NOT plug it in to a computer running iTunes 6. You will not like what happens); Comcast to complain about our installer (seriously, three hours? did he take a nap or something); Sprint because someone (not me) signed me up for their expensive equipment replacement plan when I bought my new phone; and of course Chase bank, to make sure the refund owed to me by the movers goes through (lest I really start complaining).

But.

Everything's out of boxes except for our book collection - and that's like 13 boxes or something - and a bunch of Meg's boxes full of random stuff, much of which was never actually packed because it was never unpacked from when we moved to the last place a year ago (she's funny like that).

The dog is fairly well settled during the day, but pretty much a basket case at night.

Walking to work is infinitely awesome. Having tour buses go by on the street outside your stoop, also awesome. Grocery delivery is awesome. Across the street from a high-end sushi restaurant; awesome. Moving into the city and *gaining* a back yard; totally awesome.

Pictures soon.

Officials worry of summer terror attack - Yahoo! News

Officials worry of summer terror attack - Yahoo! News

...the very definition of all bun, no burger.

Synopsis:
-The director of homeland security has a gut feeling that a period of increased risk may happen
-An official who dare not be named is worried without any knowledge of a specific threat.

What's to be done, then? A level of super extreme readiness? Will we ever get to terror level "a-okay"? Do we even know what the colors are underneath yellow and red?

What reasons could there be to run an article like this? To inform the public that the guy who's responsible for being concerned about possible terror attacksis concerned there might be one? As opposed to every other day, when he has a long lunch and naps under his desk?

Is it trying to inspire the public to be more vigilant? I hope not. My experience in the vigilance of the ordinary citizen has not been the greatest. Most people I see on mass transportation do their best to ignore their fellow travelers, and do so fairly successfully. So, is an article like this *really* going to supplant basic self-preservation as an impetus to be watchful?

If not, what is it trying to do?

Is it blatantly fear politicing? I guess, but man, a little subtlety wouldn't be too tough.