February 2008
The Archives
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02.27.08Oh, to be au courant![No wonder monetizing eyeballs1 isn't working for traditional media outlets trying to transport themselves meaningfully to the web;)] I've been reading New York magazine over RSS for some time now and always thought that most of their content didn't come through the feed to tempt me to buy the magazine itself (yeah right), but upon picking up the magazine for the first time in quite a while I realized that its heft (relative to a static screen at least) gives the impression of content that is simply not there; once you strip away the advertisements (of which there are many) ...
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02.20.08Erm…It's been a while since freshman year of high school, but this cloying New York Times article about The Great Gatsby as inspiration for immigrant youth is egregiously inaccurate, not to mention downright annoying1; it could have been a marginally interesting article about contemporary reinterpretations of the American dream, but instead settled for romanticizing immigrants who romanticize our good ol' U.S. of A.--a myth, I think, whose time has come to expire--based on a embarrassingly pigheaded reading of the aforementioned book. . .shame on you, NYT...shame. Naturally, I'm not the only one who noticed.↩
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02.18.08OM NOM NOM NOM.So, catching up with my neglected OPML file, I see that several of my favorite blogs all made posts about Valentine's Day, which, even though I do sorta kinda have an ersatz boyfriend of sorts, isn't all that significant to me in either a positive or negative manner; my real cause for glee once the holiday arrives is for discounted delectables in the days afterwards--the same chocolates I know and love, but at fifty percent off because they're wrapped in pink and red--who can complain?!
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02.18.08Relevance alert.Whoa...I never thought as semicolons as rare in usage or erudite in nature, and most certainly not as a "pretentious anachronism," as they are referred to in this New York Times article today, which has since sorted out my linguistic misperceptions; I'd like to think that my punctuation is up-to-date, hip, and relevant to today's youth--I mean, anachronistic? Really?--but evidently I am a stodgy prescriptivist living in the grammatical past, mired in syntactic history, and increasingly alone in pretentious punctuating.
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02.11.08Phew!Finally, after almost three years, Pandora is properly pandering (heh) to my lousy musical tastes; my Mirah radio station is serving up gem after gem, a good twenty minutes have passed with nary a thumbs down, and I'm finding myself more than content in gentle lo-fi grandeur (no, "lo-fi grandeur" is not an oxymoron--I know what I mean), and by the by who knew that Mirah was queer--tfti, Wikipedia!
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02.11.08Sure we can, but we probably won’t.The first, last, and only person to whom I showed the treacly Will.i.am (do not phunk with his heart) Yes. We. Can.1 video had the most bizarre reaction: he felt neither unduly inspired nor unduly dismissive, he just kept asking me who the different celebrities were and twenty seconds before it ended shrugged, turned away, and declared, "I don't recognize any of these people," a sentiment at which I felt quite aghast2; I didn't even consider that its validity as a political statement/art/campaigning tool/wev would be based on the relative percentages of A-, B- and C-listness of the people ...
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02.07.08Yes, it was an OutKast cover.Some 16-year-old boy in skinny jeans, a dumb hat, and a dumber haircut is playing the exact same song I have been practicing (I initially and intentionally used the British spelling practising, but changed it just in case someone thought it was an ignorant misspelling; I would have chosen the Anglo version if only Firefox were a bit more worldly1 and thus accepting of the spelling of my choice) on guitar...his skills are superior to mine and I am thus thoroughly put out, mostly because this is the second time today that my petty insecurities have made me feel like ...
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02.06.08Dark-rimmed glasses. Messy [black] hair. Mmmmm.I enjoy (I was going to say "love" but let's keep things realistic here) Chuck Klosterman for the same reasons that I like Project Runway and True Life: it's still pop-culture soma, but I can quite readily convince myself that they have more substance than their more populist analogues (Project Runway:Top Model::Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs:I Love the 80's1); I still wouldn't publicly announce2 enjoyment of Klosterman's fat-free cultural criticism--I mean, the index of ...Cocoa Puffs is little more than an alphabetized summary of Gen X trends (not that I am disparaging of Gen X; at least they comprise some ...
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02.04.08No, it’s not just a game.Gosh, my year-long hiatus from spider solitaire was much needed, but my return to the game has been devastating; I never expect to do well on the "hard" level, but I thought myself at least competent on the "medium" level -- alas, my previous card-playing heuristics must have escaped me because I am now finding myself stumped far more often than before and - with great dismay - taking my stats down with me; in the past I have taken the game to be far more serious than it actually is (deleting it from the start menu, for example, in ...