Thoughts on convenience

I wonder if we have made convenience a virtue in itself. Do we ever ask ourselves, "This [whatever it is] is convenient, but convenient to what end?"

Personal examples of the pleasures of inconvenience:

Even though French-pressed coffee is much less convenient than instant or drip coffee, it is much more pleasurable for me to drink.

Even though vinyl records are much less convenient to listen to than songs on an MP3 player, they're much more pleasurable to listen.

Another music example: concerts are massively inconvenient at face value. They may require hours of traveling, expensive tickets, standing for long hours in a hot/crowded venue for 1-2 hours of music from a band. Yet, we still go through the inconvenience, and love every minute of it.

Thoughts on the corporate media

Televised news is a consumer product just like a pair of Nike shoes or a Sony television.

Packaging, marketing, and corporate image are just as crucial for TV news networks as other products. Individual consumers have individual tastes.

To say that the media is controlled by coporations isn't quite adequate; the media is owned by corporations.

The market of TV news channels is not the viewers, but advertisers.

Thus, to call any televised news program a "no-spin zone" (or anything like that) is as absurd as calling a billboard a "no-marketing zone."

Thoughts on War Films

Most war films unconditionally heroicize U.S. soldiers, and any that doesn't is denounced as liberal propaganda by squeamish critics. When I saw the reviews bashing "The Battle for Haditha," an Iraq docudrama based on actual events, I immediately wanted to watch it. Fantastic film that does exactly what a war movie is supposed to. Although the US troops commit some monstrous deeds and the camera never flinches, they are not depicted as monsters. They are humans thrust into the madness of war. The film features two especially terrific scenes: one in which the leader of the platoon reaches out to a woman grieving the man who the platoon leader has killed, and one in which the same leader breaks down in a cathartic moment after the battle, confessing his hatred for what he has done and lamenting that no one in the Marines cares about him.

Another excellent Iraq war movie: "The Hurt Locker." It's been copiously reviewed by the critics; check out the reviews and go see it.

Random Thoughts:

For the vicious, unscrupulous, man-eating media gossip machine (People, InTouch, Us Weekly etc.), the Tiger Woods scandal was the best thing that’s happened to them all year. Human suffering is their lifeblood.

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Lil Wayne said, “Music is another form of journalism, another form of news.” If music is indeed journalism, then I respect it as a form of journalism more than 24-hour news channels (all of them). At least musicians make no pretensions of unbias.

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What is most poisonous about the American dream is not that it is a materialistic dream, but that it is a dream of self-fullfilment.

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After watching a brutal documentary on the United States’ policy on torture, I was dismayed considering that pro-life groups were silent (and remain silent) about the issue.

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A few weeks ago I attended a ceremony for a collegiate honors society. I realized that it is more or less the exact same thing as high school honors night, with a little more pretension and a few Greek letters for a logo.

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Ten years ago, we were worried that computers would cause the downfall of industrialized society (Y2K). Now the culprit is different and the stakes are bigger; it’s carbon-churning cars that are the enemy and it’s the planet itself that’s going to collapse. Who knows what our big fear will be in 2019.

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I have concluded that there are two Christmases: a commercial one and a religious one. Churches run the religious one and they mark it with advent rituals and Christmas Eve ceremonies. Wal-Mart runs the commercial Christmas, and they mark it with TV & print ads with “Holiday Special” tacked onto their ad campaigns.

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Rolling Stone calls the iPod the invention of the decade, with a humorous commentary: “It was thin, white, seductive, prone to breaking down every six months – yet we obsessed over it from the first glance. No not you, Tara Reid!”

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In the entertainment world, this decade had its ups and downs. On the upside, we had the aforementioned iPod as well as The Lord of the Rings movies. On the downside, we had Ashlee Simpson, screamo bands, and the Transformers movies.

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Seen on the shirt of a Christian t-shirt: “Evolution: a sudden change in a system of beliefs.”

First Post

Here's to the beginning of a blog, and I dedicate this post to the memory of David Starr Jordan.

"Die Luft der Freiheit weht"