I was at our local mall just yesterday and saw no obvious indications of imminent Santa-fication, but I am willing to bet that they’ll be hanging the garland and the giant snowflakes by the time my birthday rolls around (August 27, for those who are joining us late).

See Also

• November 23, 2009 -- It’s Like A Reverse Slot Machine!

Also, I don’t really like the idea that everything in the online world has to be seen through the filter of Facebook. It really defeats the sense of exploration that makes going online an interesting endeavor for me and reduces everything to just another commodity to be peddled. Monolithic entities like Facebook and Google and Microsoft are antithetical to the chaotic spirit of the Internet and lessen its real impact by overconcentrating.

I still think it’s a damn shame that Facebook killed personal blogging, but blogging was actually a very imperfect tool for people who were looking for a way to engage in personal interaction. Facebook is similarly very imperfect, but comes a lot closer, as long as you are satisfied with very superficial interaction. From the looks of things, it’s pretty clear that a vast majority of people are really only capable of that vapid communication in the first place. What gets lost on Facebook is the exchange that would happen when someone wrote a thoughtful or moving or infuriating blog post that could trigger comments and counterposts and e-mail and friendships and feuds. Absolutely none of that happens by clicking the “I Like This!” button. Last year around this time, I wrote that I thought there could be a renaissance of personal blogging once all the poseurs and wanna-bes had been sucked into the Facebook vortex, but I haven’t seen it happen. More’s the pity, because I think the people who really fit the blogger mold are still out there and might still have something to say.

See Also

• November 24, 2009 -- It’s A Small World After All
• December 10, 2009 -- Think Before You Click
• October 5, 2009 -- Last Blog Standing
• March 27, 2009 -- Two Roads Diverged In A Yellow Wood
• January 27, 2009 -- And Now A Few Words From The Pontiff

Once I finally catch up with the tagging, I’d like to se if I can import some of the older posts from before I switched from Movable Type to WordPress. At the very least, it would be great to have the posts from the first half of 2007 and from 2006. I do have archives of every single post dating back to when I first began using Movable Type, which was around October, 2000 if I recall correctly, but it’s not terribly likely that I’ll ever get everything back online, nor is it necessarily desirable.

See Also

• August 16, 2010 -- =^’_'^=
• June 14, 2010 -- Anti-Social
• January 27, 2010 -- Because Road Runners Live In The Desert, Silly
• December 2, 2009 -- Follow-Up: Mad-Lib Blogging
• November 24, 2009 -- It’s A Small World After All

Well, WAS the current record holder, because he died on Saturday at the age of 21.

Of course, this puts me back in the Number Two position, but I hear one of those little people from TLC might edge me out in the next round of competition.

See Also

• March 2, 2010 -- I Didn’t Ask For A 12-Inch Pianist

See Also

• February 23, 2010 -- Observe The Snow, It Fornicates
• December 3, 2009 -- There’s No Business Like Show Business
• December 3, 2009 -- Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright
• November 13, 2009 -- Ephemeral Effluvia
• October 30, 2009 -- Addenda

Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we can remember what Harvey looked like with hair. We’re having a slightly-below-average snowfall so far this winter, including the “Snore-easter” that missed us a couple of weeks ago, so any mention of the Blizzard of 78 this season is totally gratuitous anyway. It’s time to relegate the legend to wherever things like Harvey’s hair have gone to its reward.

And to Bob Costas, Al Michaels, Dick Ebersol, and pretty much everyone else who works at NBC: the same goes for the motherfucking “Miracle On Ice”. It’s one thing for Mike Eruzione to make his entire career milking it to death, and maybe even Al gets a free pass for putting it on his resume, but otherwise STFU. There will never be another “miracle” hockey team because the whole Olympic hockey competition is basically an NHL round-robin tournament, so let’s agree it was an amazing upset moment, like 1969 was for the Mets> and the Jets, and move on to more exciting things like those smokin’ hot curling chicks.

See Also

• December 19, 2008 -- Six To Ten
• August 10, 2010 -- Random Infographic Of The Day
• July 29, 2010 -- The Hot Hot Hot Top Ten
• July 8, 2010 -- Hot Enough To Boil A Monkey’s Bum
• May 12, 2010 -- The Four…TWO Seasons

Meanwhile, the other primary commercial use for menhaden is to be ground up and turned into fish meal, which is then fed to farm-raised fish (because, after all, the sea is a hungry place), continuing to keep pressure on the fishing stock. Now, a research arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture is looking at using genetically-modified barley protein as an alternative to menhaden in farm fisheries. The researchers believe that the barley could be sold at half the price of conventional fish meal. Also, a second derivative of the barley called beta-glucan also has potential health benefits.

See Also

• January 21, 2010 -- I’ll Take Menhaden, The Bronx And Staten Island, Too
• May 2, 2008 -- Food Link Dump
• December 14, 2007 -- Locavorian, Or Else

It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.

Since you cannot click a link without getting someone telling you something about the iPad, iHave iNevitably wound up reading a few of them, and iThink this guest piece at Tech Crunch by iPhone app developer Ethan Nicholas is the closest to my own opinion: the iPad is the final distillation of the personal computer into the iDiot’s dream machine. And I mean that in the nicest possible way, because he is talking about his mother…and my mother…and your mother…and every other person who wants this level of technology to be as simple as turning on the television. And so now the Next Big Thing has reduced the personal computer to a television you hold in your hands and also use for some other entertainments like music and books and those addictive little iPhone games, and they’ve taken away all the scary stuff like video editing, spreadsheets, antivirus programs and Flash.

I talked to my mother on the phone a few nights ago, and she told me that she is considering buying a netbook to replace her aging desktop computer. She asked me for a recommendation on the hardware, which I gladly gave her, but now I’m thinking SHE should get an iPad, too, for the same reason: even a netbook is more computer than she really needs. For example, I spent this weekend watching my wife drive herself mental trying to install iTunes on her Windows netbook. All she wants her netbook to do is to play videos, play music, play simple games, and the netbook still want her to be able to finagle her way through downloads, installations, customizing the software, syncing the iPod and then troubleshooting when it doesn’t work properly. The netbook is not simple enough. If my mother buys a netbook, you-know-who will have to drive up to Maine to set it up for her and continue to provide her technical support as I have done for the last nine or ten years.

I wish I had some sort of data source to support my hunch, but I’ll go out on a limb and say that you could probably replace 60% of the home PCs in the United States with iPads without the owners feeling the slightest bit cramped by the limitations of a closed-source proprietary device that only supports a single task at a time and imposes content restrictions. In fact, I’ll bet that most of those people would PREFER it, because it takes away the intimidating vastness of all the things you can do with a full-fledged computer, but still lets you enjoy the benefits of being able to magically access all the wonderful things the Internet has to offer. It’s no accident that the basic iPad is priced to compete with netbooks, after all. For all the talk about the iPad killing the Kindle, et.al., it’s actually a netbook killer.

If the fanbois would all just shut up for a bit and let the people who are the ACTUAL intended market for the product have a chance to discover that their long-awaited Home Entertainment Device Of The Future has arrived, it might actually turn out to be more transformative than the technobabblers said their fantasy iTablet was going to be.

See Also

• August 12, 2010 -- Coming To A Resenferseher Near You!
• April 21, 2010 -- The Difference Between Cats And Dogs
• January 31, 2008 -- Ask And Ye Shall Receive (With Purchase Of Unlimited Minutes)
• November 7, 2007 -- Decisions, Decisions

Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into pre-packaged ten-year segments that align perfectly with the calendar. And we won’t even go into the whole “No Year Zero” argument that needed to be made over and over again about the turn of the millennium. This is a good opportunities to realize that there was no such thing as “The 60s” or “The 80s” and that we’re probably nowhere near the end of the era that began on September 11, 2001.

See Also

• Sorry, No Related Posts

This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with:

• Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the hole
• GateCrashGate
• Meredith Baxter Birney, stealth lesbian
• Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and those intensely awful Best Buy carolers

¡Ya basta!

See Also

• March 11, 2010 -- Top Ten Overdone Stories Of The Week
• February 23, 2010 -- Observe The Snow, It Fornicates
• December 3, 2009 -- There’s No Business Like Show Business
• November 13, 2009 -- Ephemeral Effluvia
• October 30, 2009 -- Addenda

Nowhere near enough responses to fill in all the blanks on the Mad-Lib Post game, so I guess we’ll chalk it up as a loss and try it again some other time. Maybe I’ll try it on Facebook instead.

See Also

• August 16, 2010 -- =^’_'^=
• June 14, 2010 -- Anti-Social
• April 21, 2010 -- Tag, You’re It!
• January 27, 2010 -- Because Road Runners Live In The Desert, Silly
• November 24, 2009 -- It’s A Small World After All

More additions to the list:

Levi Johnston
Carrie Prejean
Blue Dog Democrats
The Entire Lohan Family
The 2012 Apocalypse
The Republican “Comeback”
“ordinary heroes”

See Also

• March 11, 2010 -- Top Ten Overdone Stories Of The Week
• February 23, 2010 -- Observe The Snow, It Fornicates
• December 3, 2009 -- There’s No Business Like Show Business
• December 3, 2009 -- Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright
• October 30, 2009 -- Addenda

More effluvia:

• Those Northwest Airlines pilots
• Zombie Michael Jackson
• Sexy ____________ Halloween Costumes (in fact, anything to do with adults and Halloween)
• Celebrity Twitters
• Balloon Boy and His Crazy Dad (thankfully, this one has already faded quite a bit)

See Also

• March 11, 2010 -- Top Ten Overdone Stories Of The Week
• February 23, 2010 -- Observe The Snow, It Fornicates
• December 3, 2009 -- There’s No Business Like Show Business
• December 3, 2009 -- Tiger, Tiger Burning Bright
• November 13, 2009 -- Ephemeral Effluvia

Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s website has the entire thing on its website in easy-to-digest segments.

I’ve just finished watching the first segment, which lets Epstein get in a nice plug for his new book, and features a typical Boston-area yuppie couple who are atheists themselves but still want all the trapping of a traditional religious experience for their daughter — a “naming ceremony”, Christmas, etc. Epstein lays out the central conceit of Humanism — you can have all the warm fuzzy lovies of belonging to a church without all that silly God/Jesus stuff. The ideal message for people who are smart enough to realize that nobody needs all that superstition, but who can’t quite bring themselves to let go of their middle-class American upbringing. It’s the same marketing device that the Unitarian Universalists use to a large degree: “Come for the company, stay for the moralizing.”

Yes, I am being too cynical about that by half, I know, but c’mon kids. If it looks like a duck, and walks like a duck, and sounds like a duck…well, you know. Believe it or not, though, I am sympathetic to the promotion of Secular Humanism because one of the things that traditional religions highlight is the ability to provide a community of like-minded people to share consensual meaning and context. A lot of people simply need that to make their worldview work. If Humanism can impart context and assert the validity of non-belief as a worldview, then good for them; my concern is that by doing so, organized Humanist communities will, over time, develop the same bigotries, exclusionary tenets, and transference of presumed divinity that Christian churches have. I like my atheism like I like my sushi: raw, fresh, and with a big dollop of wasabi to clear out my head.

See Also

• March 17, 2010 -- If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him
• April 21, 2010 -- Myth…Busted
• October 21, 2009 -- I’m Good With That
• September 2, 2010 -- A Minister And An Atheist Walk Into A Bar…
• May 26, 2010 -- Gimme That Old Time Non-Religion