Wired article struck a cord and so I am copying and pasting the whole thing...

Ok. I am not really going to do this. But I just want to do something about this article: Scott Brown's "Gag Reflexes" in Wired (April 2009). The online edition has a longer title: "Scott Brown on Stand-Up Comedy, Lingua Franca of the Wired World" which sums up Mr. Brown's theory.

Maybe crumple up the page and eat it. But I already promised my husband that I will refrain from wrinkling up any magazine pages before he's done with them. (Ok. I am attempting to be funny here. If you read Mr. Brown article, you would understand why I feel exposed, caught in the act of trying to be funny. To earn more currency in this new economy...)

Is it wrong to want to quote an entire article really? Ok. Maybe not 100%. I don't really care for the examples Mr. Brown gave to support his argument. But the insights sprinkled in-between, those struck a cord.

I am no writer, and I am too tired (not to mention lazy), and here is my journal (i.e. I will do what I damn please), so I am going to jott down sentences that particularly resonate with me, and be done with it: (Thank goodness for Ctrl + C & Ctrl + V !!)

"... everything is 'material,' and life is one big writer's room, a massive clusterchuckle of witty one-upsmanship"

"More than that: Everyone must be funny. Because 'funny' is becoming a language unto itself, the lingua franca of the wired world."

Always feel this way since I got hooked on Twitter. Sometimes it feels almost like a comedy show writers' room, the pressure is on to be the next funniest. hence wisest, person in the Twitter stream that you can see.

"Humor saturates the infosphere, for at least two reasons: First, a successful joke implies insight, and insight, especially if it's pithy and self-explanatory, is the basic currency of a high-speed information economy. Second, the fundamental tools and techniques of that economy—memory, annotation, contrast, collage—are also the fundamental tools of comedy."

I absolutely agree with #1. Feeling grateful that someone actually voiced this murky concept so clearly in one single sentence. Everyone is a guru of life, and the shallow shall be deep again. Not so sure about #2 since those are the fundamental tools of storytelling, upon which human history has been, and will be, passed on. What we don't see in the histories in the past is IRONY and self-awareness, imo, which, well, make intelligent comedies.

Moreover, it has always been my one belief that a great sense of humor indicates a great presence of intellect and tolerance.

And this final quote may sound like an accusation "Gotcha!"

"If the references are flying over your head, no worries: You can zip over to Wikipedia and be back in time for the punch line."

Like I said, Google is Your Friend! Raise your hand if you have NEVER done this... Thankfully Mr. Brown provided hyperlinks to all the references he cited for the article.

Today is the day: Inaugration of President Obama, yet, I am not feeling the fever. What's wrong with me?

I am a liberal alright and a staunch Obama supporter. In fact, I am proud of the fact that I "called it" in 2004 before Obama gave that fateful speech at the Democratic Convention that launched him into the national spotlight. (And what's more, he wrote it himself!) I called it even before that: I saw him on TV being interviewed for something, and I told my husband, this guy could run for the president one day and I would vote for him. After the 2004 Dem Convention speech, I was utterly convinced that he has what it takes to be the POTUS and I anxiously waited for someone, someone that mattered to make this official.


I still tell my husband, "I called it before anybody else did!" from time to time, and it annoys him to no end since, of course, it cannot be true that I was the very first one to see this coming...

I was guessing 2012, but it came 4 years earlier to my excitement. At the same time, I was worried that the timing was off, and the country might not be ready for someone so young, and this might ruin his chance forever. (Not ready NOT because he's black but because he is young, relatively "inexperience" - I already predicted that the country would be ready for an African American man to lead them before a woman... but that's for an entire different post later)

During the election, I constantly had panic attacks that we were going to lose again, and be under the GOP thumb for another 4 years. I joked, "kidding on the square", with my husband that we should consider moving to Canada, as we did 4 years ago when Bush won again. On November 4, 2008, I was so happy that my worry was unfounded. He won. WE won!

I admire Obama very much and would like nothing more than the opportunity of speaking to him in person, or even just shaking his hand, like the rest of the nation, judging by the blogs, Facebook updates, Twitter followings, even the news media that lavish praise after praise upon him. He has made so many speeches that brought tears to my eyes. He is able to get in touch with many on a very personal level. I have posted tribute to him myself as well.

I admire Michelle Obama as well, on so many different levels, esp. her being an intelligent person, and a working mother to boot. Like her husband, many have responded to her on a very personal level as well. They are truly an inspiration to the "regular" Americans since as far as I can tell, they have absolutely no ties to any big political names, not the nephew or niece of so-and-so. And for African American women, her being the First Lady has begun to carry so many symbolic meanings, and many of them have been materialized in the new book Go Tell Michelle.

Oh, I have felt the fever alright. During the election.

But I woke up early this morning, at 2:46 am to be exact, feeling a panic attack, because I am not feeling the excitement that the news media has shown us, the screaming fans and all. Don't get me wrong, I am happy. But it feels like, all of a sudden, at a party where everybody is screaming and laughing and drunk with youthful abandon, and well, partying, I am standing in the midst of all this, sober.

I can understand the significance of this event for many people, a significance much much deeper than the face value of a Presidential Inauguration - He IS the first African American to be elected the President of the United States. I cannot begin to imagine the significance of this event on the psyche of African Americans. This is truly a watershed moment that can potentially change the lives of so many, not just in the US, but around the world. The policies he will make, the changes he will carry out (or at least try his darnedest), the wrongs that he will correct (starting with banning waterboarding outright!), the people that he, as the first Black U.S. President, and Michelle, as the first Black First Lady, will inspire, again, not just in this country but all around the world.

But I am not feeling the screaming fan blind adoration bestowed on him as if he were a rock star or a movie star chosen as Sexist Man Alive. Maybe that's my problem. This man has a wife, and two young daughters. And he is going to be OUR President for the next four years. To be honest, I am not cool with screaming female fans treating him like some sort of sex symbol. (Call me a prude... I am never one to fall for a celebrity so maybe that's why I am such a party pooper at this moment). Calling him Obama-daddy trivialized the election of an intelligent capable man who just wants to do the right thing and inspire others to do the same. Selling thongs with his image on it and words "Sleep with Obama" is disrespectful to his wife, not to mention anything else.

Yes, I do have a sense of humor. I found the Obama Girl funny, during the election. But now we have reached our goal and elected the man, hmmm, don't you think it is time to let it go? Last time I checked, this here is the United States, not France....

There lies my problem: I am not seeing him as a celebrity, commanding my unquestioned adoration.

This man is human. He is not Superman.

It is 4:30 am, on the day of the historical Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama who I voted for and wanted for president since before 2004, I am completely sober, much to my liberal chagrin, in the midst of youthful obsession that turns anyone into a Hollywood-style "celebrity".

My cure? Psyching myself up by shopping for the commemorative items on the official PIC2009 website. Get them before they are gone! If I am not feeling the party, at least I can fake it!

My favorite quote: "The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously."

"The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously." Henry Kissinger

 

I am sure he said it in a context that was different from what I take this saying to mean.  FWIW, for some reason, it's been haunting me.  Sometimes I see it as pessimistic, sometimes I see it as optimistic, Grin and bear it.  This is what existentialism is distilled down to, at least in my book, "Life sucks, but you've got to deal with it."  When Goethe said, "God is dead," I believe that's what he meant: Regardless whether there is God or not, human beings need to take responsibilities for our actions.  Accountability, and the will to see things through.

 

As I tell my kids on a nearly daily basis: You've got to do what you've got to do. 

To Tweet or Not to Tweet...

Upon learning my having joined the latest phenom which is Twitter, my male co-workers asked me point blank, But, WHY?

Why not just use emails if you want to talk to people you know? Why not use TXT? You can email to an entire group of people if that's your reasoning for using Twitter ("one to many" instant communication)

Or, is your intention of letting strangers know what you are doing at any given minute? Waiting in line in the grocery store? Watching TRM at airport lounge?

Why? What is the rational excuse for this? Or even, the psychological needs behind this?

Excuses I use for being on Facebook, despite not having lots of "friends" (or Peeps) nor being a teenager, nor leading an active interesting life, cannot even be applied to Twitter: I can share pictures with people that I know on Facebook, only when they want to know; I am not shoving my cute kids' pictures down anybody's throat. And my friends may not want to know that I have been up to on a daily basis (for some, perhaps once-a-year Christmas cards have been adequate?) , but if they check my Facbook status, again, only when they want to, they can see that I have been traveling a lot more for business and that my husband is traveling around the world for his own consulting gig.

No. The same rational does not apply to Twitter. So why indeed?

I happened to read an article in Spectrum, the less-techy (and more Wired-like version of IEEE's publication), in the current issue: "To Twitter or Not to Twitter" by Robert Lucky (I wonder whether he gets teased for his last name a lot...)

(Right off the bat, the author showed his Newbie status by not using the correct verb "Tweet"... But it's the type of endearing mistakes that anybody over 30 in this day and age could relate to...)

He mentioned his puzzlement over a young speaker's Tweeting about "waking up in the morning now". Any sensible (perhaps older person) would ask, "Why would anybody want to know?" And if they want to know, can't you call them? TXT them?

This new need experienced by the Internet-generation to be connected to the World all the time is intriguing to me, and I doubt that our children ever even stop and ponder at the wonder of this. To them this is part of existence, "I TXT, therefore I am." The real grown-ups say this now often as a gentle tease, but there is truth in this saying. "I am Connected on the Web, therefore I am." A life that is not documented is not worth living.

Excerpt from Mr. Lucky's article:

"Twitter, the social-networking Web site that allows users to broadcast short text messages to a group of friends, has burst into popularity with millions of subscribers. I'm a confirmed e-mail user, but that's so 20th century. I feel a certain pressure to get with it. So, to Twitter or not to Twitter? I view it as a question for the ages—the ages of the users, that is.


It was my generation of engineers that created the Internet, but it is largely today's youth who are molding the social connectedness that is coming to characterize cyberspace. These are the so-called digital natives, who grew up with the Internet already a part of everyday life. They're always online, inhabiting multiple identities, living a culture of sharing and peer collaboration. For them, multitasking is just the way it is. We older engineers built cyberspace, but our kids live in it, and for many of them the technology is transparent and almost irrelevant.


So as a digital immigrant, already an adult as the new culture was forming, I am amazed at what I see. At a recent meeting a young speaker casually mentioned that every morning he Twitters that he has just woken up. Alarm bells went off in my head. I thought about the fact that several scores of people are going to read a message that this guy has awakened. Isn't this is an incredible waste of time for everyone involved? But a more unpleasant thought also formed in the back of my head—the worry that no one would care that I myself had just arisen. There must be some social consequence that I'm missing. An older acquaintance told me that he had been using Twitter and that after a week he had begun to feel a sense of connectedness."

Mr. Lucky referenced two cartoons published by The New Yorker 12 years apart to illustrate how things have changed through the years, and how things have not really: these priceless (and thought-provoking) cartoons can be found here:

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." (A dog, sitting at a computer terminal, talking to another dog.) by Peter Steiner, The New Yorker, 5 July 1993

"I had my own blog for a while, but I decided to go back to just pointless, incessant barking." (One dog talking to another.) by Alex Gergory, The New Yorker, 12 September 2005

Metablogging

I came up the term "Metablogging" on my own in my last post: blogging about blogging. I am a genius.

For safe measure, I googled the word and darn, it has been written to death. So now my hope is to meta the meta, a blog about the blogs that blog about the other blogs. But that has been done also. Search came back with titles such as "meta, meta, meta"... Sigh.

I wish I were still in grad school, majoring in Cultural Studies, or even Ethnography, the Blogsphere is a such fertile ground for dissertation subjects. Even for a Psych major. Darn!

Where do people find the time to blog? And the Huffington Post's guide to blogging...

I am seriously puzzled.  I have checked out the "competitions" out there: do a google search (or a google blog search, even better), and there are a lot of suburban moms out there, clicking away. Many of them are writers, professional even, were or still are.  Thank god!

 

They all have kids, well, duh, that's the definition for "mothers".  So, where do they find the time to produce such abundant material for their blog? 

 

I have to decide whether I want to go to bed or blabber away in the cyber space.  And even in the cyber space, there are so many "social media" choices for my insomniac mind: Facebook, My Space, Slickdeals, Baby Bargain chat rooms, in addition to all the wonderful professionally written blogs: the Huffington Post, ReadWriteWeb, Micro Persuasion, and, let me not forget the most fun of them all, randomly searching the interweb for funny stuff to read or watch.  (Oh, YouTube, you are the ultimate time sinker!)  Even Twitter, the haiku model of the social media, proves to be a great aide to procrastinators, despite its claim to brevity: read the "Everybody" section like a great "found object poetry", and click on all the TinyUrl links that people shared. FUN!

 

Hack, even reading reviews (and dueling comments) on Amazon.com is entertaining sometimes. 

 

And actually, spending more time on my computer, now that the kids are in bed, requires me to put on the blinder and ignore the 3-day-piled-up laundry, the unwashed dishes, the toys strewn about the floor, oh, and yes, BILLS TO PAY, and Quicken to enter (I am proud to say that I have been diligently keeping records on Quicken since 1993...  that's an astonishing record for someone who has never managed to keep a journal past page 10...) 

 

Really, I could be watching one of the Netflix DVDs that I haven't touched and need to return soon to get our money's worth. Or, I could read the newspaper. Or, heck, I should take a shower!  I could also use some exercise on the machine that is now, as predicted, the clothes hanger. 

 

It amazes me every time I think about this question. 

 

In her latest (and probably the "lightest" and least political) book, The Huffington Post Complete Guide to Blogging, Arianna Huffington proposes that everybody should have a blog, and that one should write something down instantly, no thinking required, no minimum for length for each post. And that's where the fun is, and probably what the point is about blogging. 

 

I have taken a liking (more an affinity, actually) to Arianna Huffington ever since her appearance on the Jon Steward Show this past December (promoting the book, of course).  Jon true to himself wasn't persuaded by Arianna's ensued plea, "hey, you should have a blog!"  What got me was what she said, as a side comment, about why she personally likes blogging, "This way my accent won't be an issue: people cannot hear my accent..."  It was mind-blowing to me that with her wealth and power and position, she still minds her own accent.  Perhaps I read too much into this. But I now think of her often and wish her well. 

"I wish Mary Poppins is my mom..."

The other day when my 6-year-old was very frustrated with me for saying NO to most of his requests, he sighed and said with longing, "I wish Mary Poppings is my mom."

 

Startled but not offended, laughingly I said, "Yeah, I wish she were your mom too."

 

He in turn was shocked by my non-reactive reaction. 

 

Then today, after pointing out to me that I didn't feed him a "proper" dinner (Note to self: Bagel with cream cheese does not count as a "proper dinner"), he said, in mock-earnestness, "I am going to ask Santa for a better mom."  "Oh, I am just kidding."

 

Ah, a great sense of humor is the sure sign of intelligence, I always say. 

 

Being self-reflective to a compulsive degree, I often picture my kids sitting in a shrink's office, discussing their childhood with their unstable mother and her effect on their great novels of the decade.  Perhaps all the tribulations in our repressingly liberal suburban household will become cannon fodder for their artistic endeavors one day.  One can only hope.

 

Coda: Turned out that hot dog on a piece of white bread (since I don't buy buns because they always go bad before we can finish them) is an acceptable entree for dinner.  Thank goodness.

 

p.s. I am well aware of this:

 

self-reflection + lack of action to correct any un-motherly behavior = rampant self-indulgence in the guise of mock self-pity

"Pay-As-You-Go Airline Charges by the Minute"

This from one of my fav magazines, Wired.

 

When I saw the headline, I thought to myself, "Great, now they have run out of things to charge us for, since they are asking the passengers to pay for everything including tiny bags of pretzels and water, they are going to charge us for sitting on the runway too?"  Luckily for travelers, the upstart airline, Airtime Airlines based in South Africa, will not be charging their passengers more for time spent by the plane idling and waiting in line to take off.  Whew. Now that's a relief.

 

This reminds me of the "Onion-esque" unveiling of the fictional airliner Derrie-Air threatening to charge by individual passenger's weight: "the more you weigh, the more you'll pay. After all, it takes more fuel—more energy—to get more weight from point A to point B..."  (It's a shame really. That would be one urgent reason for me to finally follow my default annual New Year resolution of getting on a diet...)  Only that Airtime Airlines is not fictional, it is a real airline, or, well, almost a real one, as soon as they get their hands on real aircraft that can fly real passengers... 

 

"Taking a cue from the cellphone industry, an upstart South African airline is selling flights by the minute and allowing customers to buy tickets and book flights via text message...  passengers will buy minutes instead of a traditional point-to-point ticket. They can buy a "starter pack" of prepaid minutes and top off their accounts by purchasing more minutes — by text message — at the going rate of 5 Rand (about 53 cents) a minute. Flight times have been mapped out in advance, so sitting on a runway for three hours won't triple the cost of your ticket.

Topping off accounts is where things get interesting. The cost for Airtime minutes can fluctuate, presumably according to promotions and market factors, so topping off becomes an exercise comparable to fuel hedging. Buy a big block of minutes when you think they're at their cheapest and you look smart, unless the price drops again the next day. Then again, it might go up. The price recently rose from 3 Rand to 5 Rand, meaning the cost of a round-trip flight from Durban to Cape Town climbed from about 750 Rand ($81) to 1,250 Rand (about $134). Still that's cheaper than the $200 it would cost on South African Airlines."

Read the entire article here.

My pet peeves (Part 1 of a long series I am sure...)

• People who say "How are you?" or "What's up?" and then give you that look when you actually try to answer the question other than "Fine"
• People (ok, men) who do not look at you when they are talking to a group of people and you are the only woman in the room -- scan, scan, skip. Repeat.
• People with bad manners in general
• People who check their BB constantly when you are talking
• People who do that hand motion to signal you to hurry up and finish what you have to say - what are you? The time-keeper at a debate?
• People who say "Fine" instead of "Yes, please." when you ask them whether you could bring them something (to eat)
• People who do not hold the door open behind them until your hand is on the door
• Drivers who do not put on their frigging turn signals - your car has one, use it!
• People with really nice cool powerful cars and then drive slowly like a Florida retiree - You have a nice car. Drive it!
• People who are rude to "foreigners" because they do not speak English (well enough) - hey, you know what? Their English is better than your "insert the language spoken by the said 'foreigner'"

That's it for today. What are yours?