Edumacation

There is this bizarre notion in education that rote learning is unnecessary and harmful to children.  I went to a gifted school and we had multiplication drills, spelling tests, history tests, science tests. When I was in grad school, teaching math, kids couldn't do basic math without a calculator, couldn't spell... I don't know what they knew about history or science, but I'm guessing not much. I think it's great to encourage creative thinking in kids, but there just is a certain amount of rote learning you have to do before you can successfully move on to a higher level of study.

Time Travel

According to scientists, time travel is possible, but only forwards.  So, instead of going back and warning people about Hitler, we can just go ahead and then comment on what a nightmare everything has become (spoiler: it will just get worse from here on out). Something I did as a joke once (because I am a strange person) was to run up to a man on the street and yell "what year is this?" and after he told me (I think this was 2012) said "oh, thank God, there's still time" and ran away.  I hope to this day that he tells his friends he met someone from the future who prevented some sort of catastrophe.

Sasquatch

The notion of Sasquatch is one of the weirdest legends (I would say "urban legend" but it precedes urbanity) ever.  If one of them ever existed, they would have discovered one of their skeletons eons ago. I mean, we know about the Dodo, a bird that existed on a remote chain of islands in the Indian Ocean and that died out 400 years ago.  But somehow we have no empirical evidence of a giant hairy ape man that exists in the mountains of the West Coast to this day?

The Baseball Song

I have always found it slightly bizarre that one of the traditions of baseball is the 7th inning stretch, in which everyone stands and sings Take Me Out To The Ballgame, a song about... the experience of going to a baseball game. It would be as if between the third and fourth quarters of a football game everyone rose and sang Huzzah For Football.

Beardiness

I grew a beard in 2002, and at the time it was considered really "edgy". I worked at an insurance company at the time and I later found, when I quit, that the CFO of the company thought it was a fireable offense, and that I was only spared by the head of my department (the actuarial department) intervening and pointing out that a number of employees had goatees and mustaches and that a full beard wasn't that far removed from those things.

And now... everyone has a beard. I went to the bank the other day and the teller had a beard longer than mine, which would be unthinkable ten years ago. Disneyland, which is notoriously conservative about the appearance of their employees, recently permitted men to have beards.

I once read something that said in times of prosperity, men and women became more androgynous and that in less prosperous times they would revert to standard gender norms.  This would explain the 90s, when every guy had long or shaggy hair, or dyed hair, and girls had bobs or even shorter hair (I even knew a few girls who shaved their head) and the present day, when most guys have short-cropped hair and beards and most girls have shoulder-length hair.

Vinyl not Vinyls

I started collecting vinyl records in the 90s because I could pick them up in thrift shops for $1 a piece. Huh? This record with a song I like? To quote Robocop (the good, original one) "I'd buy that for a dollar."  Then through much of the 2000s vinyl versions of records were cheaper than the CD versions. Then they became millennial fetish items and it was like $10 for the CD version, $25 for the vinyl. And you have bullshit stuff now like comedy albums coming out on vinyl.  Really? Your jokes are going to sound better on vinyl than just downloaded?  Also, the plural of vinyl is vinyl, not vinyls, ya know, kind of how the plural of sheep is sheep, not sheeps.

Under The Skin

Under the Skin is sadly known to most of the internet world as the movie where ScarJo gets totes nude.  Which is unfortunate because it's a really amazing movie about how alien most people seem to other people.  We all sort of feel like we live on a planet surrounded by people we mostly don't understand.  And it has an incredible soundtrack by Mica Levi, a rare female avant-garde composer (most modern avant-garde composers are male) that is appropriately unnerving.

https://vimeo.com/97853822

Bein' a Nerd

I am what once upon a time could be legitimately called a "nerd." I had a 3.95 GPA in high school and in college, and graduated with a degree in math and computer science. Now, being a "nerd" means liking video games and comic books, both of which I set aside in high school (I mean, I play the odd game of Dig Dug occasionally, and there are graphic novels I've enjoyed, but I don't have an Xbox or read X-Men). It annoys me that being a nerd no longer means being socially awkward and possessing intellectual curiosity, but consuming certain things deemed "nerdy" by an earlier generation.

Modest Mouse = Red Hot Chili Peppers

Modest Mouse are kind of my generation's (i.e. not quite Gen-Xers but not quite millenials) Red Hot Chili Peppers in that they're a band that started out interesting, but as they got more boring they got more successful. They even kind of sound like each other now... this sort of bland white people imitation of funk.

Inappropriate Songs

I was constantly amazed at how many ads in the 2000s had "Lust For Life" soundtracking them, given that it's a song about kicking heroin.  And now Johnny Walker has ads out soundtracked by Plastic Bertrand's "Ca Plane Pour Moi" which was later remade as "Jet Boy Jet Girl" by Elton Motello and The Damned with lyrics that... uh, would probably be approved of by Subway's Jared, if you get my drift. (As an aside... what a bizarre celebrity that guy had.  He was a dude who was really fat, decided to go on a diet mostly consisting of garbage faux-deli food, lost a bunch of weight because he was mostly eating terrible, shitty sandwiches, then became their spokesman).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQKyMZ8gsPI

Pixar

People say about Pixar, "they make films meant for children that adults can appreciate" and my feeling is exactly the opposite. They have made a few movies that were more expressly for kids, like Finding Nemo (which is their third highest grossing movie, because, sadly, the reason most people go to the movies anymore is for a temporary respite from their kids that doesn't require a babysitter) but three of their five top grossing movies are Toy Story 3, Inside Out, and Up, three incredibly sad movies that I can't imagine anyone under 12 could fathom. I mean, the themes are loss of innocence, loss of joy, loss of a partner. When I saw Inside Out this summer, I looked around, and every adult was crying, and all the kids were looking at them confusedly.

{Parenthetical Aside}

I had an English teacher in high school who would constantly make fun of me for writing long sentences with lots of (parenthetical asides).  Then, Infinite Jest came out, which is by a far better writer than me, (David Foster Wallace) but who wrote in long sentences with a lot of parenthetical asides and even end-notes (there's something like 200 pages of end-notes in Infinite Jest - I read 'em all). So take that, English teacher whose name I can't even remember! The way I write turned into a bestselling, critically acclaimed book... by an author who went on to hang himself in his mid-40s.  I guess if you write in long sentences or short sentences (a la Hemingway) you're going to kill yourself.  Mid-sized sentences are the way to go.

The Phantom Awakens

I'm starting to get a little nervous that The Force Awakens might not be so hot, largely based on the international trailer in which Finn and Rey (the protagonists) introduce each other in the most staid manner possible, and we get to hear more of the cartoonish mechanical bad-guy voice in which Kylo Ren (the villain) speaks.

I waited with friends outside a theater for several hours to see The Phantom Menace its opening night and the aftermath was... we sort of stood around for a bit kind of mumbling "I guess that was OK."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XNit858b6I

No More Nekkid

http://www.inquisitr.com/2506138/playboy-wants-tina-fey-to-pose-nude-in-their-last-naked-issue/

I have a couple of thoughts on this:

1. namely why Playboy's reaction to the preponderance of nudity on the internet is... no nudity for us?  It never had that much nudity to begin with.  I bought a copy of the January '77 Playboy (my birth month) on a road trip and a female friend found it and was like "I thought Playboy was just wall-to-wall naked women... this is almost all articles"

2. I kind of hope Tina Fey goes for it, and it outsells every Playboy from the last 20 years or so (it probably will because it's the last one with nudity and every idiot who thinks that it will be their "collectable" goldmine in a few years (it won't - buy a faberge egg instead) will buy it) just to show that the reason they're failing is the fact that men with heterosexual leanings (of which I am one) like women who aren't 21 year old blondes with fake tits.

Here We Go

I started this because I was tired of cluttering Facebook with my thoughts.  Facebook should really just be used for meal/cat/baby photos and bizarre political rants.  I had a blog, Invader, in the early 2000s, but felt so much stress over maintaining it (this was kind of the dawn of the political blog era - which mine was - this one isn't) and dealing with crazy commenters and nutty right-wing blogs linking to me and calling me a traitor that I just gave it up.  So here I start anew.