Trying to Stop being Clever

In a world with 8 billion people, or in a country with 330 million, it's impossible for everyone to get everything they (think they) want. We're always going to have some reason to grumble, even if we have to make something up. For many, complaining is part of our personality. We can't take every dissatisfaction in our lives and treat it as a life-or-death issue. I think personalized news feeds are one of the worst things we can do to a nation. If we're not all seeing the same stories, we'll never be on the same page. In the interest of not losing their users, websites filter out anything we aren't predetermined to want to see, to keep us comfortable and scrolling and seeing their ads. This shields us from the uncomfortable fact that things are going on that we don't like, and that people, who are otherwise just like us, have different opinions than us. I've blogged before about how we need a common enemy to rally us together, to unite for our own good.

Thinking about school this morning, for some reason I started to compare myself to my parents. I'm not a college graduate. Soon I will have an undergraduate degree, but not even the higher one, just the lowest, easiest one to get: the Associate Degree. I guess I will officially be an associate.  While I tend to look down on this degree as barely significant in the grand scheme, I am wrangling a little bit of pride in the accomplishment. That's when I started to compare myself to my parents. With an Associate degree, I've essentially matched my father's level of education; he earned his AS long ago, and had some supplemental education classes, I believe. So, technically, I have a broader general education than he received from school, because of the concentration of core/GE classes required between the Arts and Sciences degrees. In the "school of life" I believe I also have a broader education than him, because he has limited his experiences to mainly things he

  I was reading a letter written by Pedro Almodovar about the Academy Awards ceremony. This isn't going to be about The Slap. Neither was Pedro's letter. Anyway, he mentioned early on in the story that he doesn't watch his own films. I've heard that about actors as well. I have a musician friend who once said something about getting "caught" listening to your own music is some sort of taboo. Well, I'm here to say that I do listen to my own music. For one thing, you can hardly help hearing it when you're writing it, practicing it, recording it, mixing it. But once it's done, does it go on a shelf, never to be listened to again? Is it "uncool" to listen to your own stuff? Well, I don't listen to my music because it's the cool thing to do. I listen to it for several reasons. First of all, I'm listening for ways that I can improve it. As I'm going through the production process, I listen to it in the office, in the bedroom, in

I've seen a lot, and to use the modern parlance, a lot a lot a lot, of dramatizations of backward time travel. You know, where someone goes back in time to meet their parents, or to discover the answer to some mystery, or just by accident. Whatever the reason, there are many complications. We've heard of the "butterfly effect" that can cause untold changes in future history from the smallest change in the past. The dramatizations often address certain aspects of this, but they can't possibly capture all the many changes and the drastic result of such interference. There's also the fact that, if backward time travel were possible, wouldn't we be all too aware of it by now? The people who come "back" usually end up going forward again to where they came from, like time travel is a round-trip ticket. Aside from the presumption that, for this type of time travel to be possible, many (if not all) points in time must exist simultaneously, there are so

So-called "Cancel Culture" isn't about taking things away from you. The removal of possibly-offensive items from the offerings of some companies is not about depriving you of these things, it's about the companies wanting to no longer contribute to things and ideas that offend some people. It's a basic business principle: give the people what they want. If the majority of people are calling for change, most big companies will make that change in the interest of business. I can almost guarantee you that there are changes which have been made in the past for exactly the same reasons as the recent decisions, which have benefitted you. Just to get to where we are now, to where you have these things to be outraged about the changing of, has taken many, many generations of change and progress. When the few cry out that injustices are being inflicted on toys or cartoon characters by those who control said commodities, what they are really saying is, "I value the sta

I'm glad someone is thinking beyond Drake's Equation and considering more aspects of the possibility of extraterrestrial civilizations. But there is something they don't seem to be considering (I wonder if they are). It may seem juvenile to bring up dinosaurs, but there, I just did. In considering the evolution of an intelligent life form, and the development of civilization, do they consider the role that dinosaurs played? When narrowing down the likelihood of a life form going through a similar process as Earth humans did, you have to recognize that the odds of the catastrophic event that killed the dinosaurs happening on these other planets at around the same time in the evolution of said sauropods would be very slim. So, on a planet similar enough to Earth, where similar events have taken place in the evolution of life, doesn't that suggest that something akin to dinosaurs would develop first? With the unlikely event of a catastrophic end mirroring that on Earth tak