2013: The Year in Review (Part 2)

Hey, we're on a roll here. Not really, but cut me a giant slackburger with cheese, okay?  It's Christmas.  Here are some more highly desirable and coveted awards for the Year That Almost Was - 2013!

The ONE-TRACK MIND/NO-TRACK BRAIN Award goes to the Republican Scandal Industry:  "Benghazi.  Benghazi.  Benghazi.  Benghazi.  Benghazi.  OH LOOK! A SQUIRREL!  Benghazi.  Benghazi.  Benghazi.  Benghazi."

The WINTER OLYMPICS AWARD FOR SPECTACULAR WASTE TIME AND MONEY goes to the government shutdown last October.  This was when the Republican party completely lost their minds and got hijacked by a bunch of noisy, obnoxious douchebags in their own caucus and brought the entire US government to a complete halt.  The Tea Baggers, ostensibly led by pasty-faced bed-wetter with questionable citizenship Ted Cruz (aided by his completely demented, Alzheimers-ridden father), threw a hissy fit and turned what should have been a routine budgetary procedure - raising the federal debt ceiling, something that Republican false idol Ronald Reagan did 18 times during his reign of error in the 80s - and tried to use it to cripple the Affordable Care Act which also debuted in October.  Because that's the way one of the oldest representative democracies in the world changes legitimately-passed laws that run afoul of a bunch of dimwitted loose cannons in the House of Representatives - by shutting down the government.  Millions of federal employees furloughed, national parks closed, airport security compromised, for what reason?  Less than three weeks later the Tea Baggers capitulated in a hugely embarrassing loss, gaining ABSOLUTELY NOTHING other than a monstrous amount of bad publicity, the Republican party rightfully buried under the condemnation and derision of the public, and the Office of Budget and Management estimating that over $64 BILLION dollars of taxpayers money were completely squandered by this useless exercise in constipated government.  And the target of their misplaced ire, the Affordable Care Act, was completely and utterly unscathed by all this (although it definitely had problems of its own making, more about that later).  Hope you enjoyed your little 64-billion-dollar tantrum, Tea Baggers, because the result was that most people in this country had their pre-existing opinion reaffirmed - that you are a bunch of selfish, useless, idiotic dicks.

The WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE? Award goes to Miley Cyrus and her delightful twerking episode on her appearance at the MTV Video Awards (or something, I can't tell any of those award shows apart anymore).  Stretching the definition of "entertainer" to nearly the breaking point, Ms. Cyrus and her grotesquely large tongue made their entrance from the inside of a gigantic teddy bear complete with Battlestar-Galactica-Cylon scanning red eye.  And things went downhill from there.  Floundering and gyrating around on stage like a zombie scarecrow with a severe neurological disorder, she made her way through a bunch of confused dancers dressed up like plush animals.  Then singer Robin Thicke sashayed out of nowhere, decked out in the latest football referee formal wear and warbled out his current song "Blurred Lines" (which, I'm embarrassed to say, I find irresistibly catchy and have on my MP3 player).

But, cultural critical mass and nuclear detonation was achieved when Cyrus bent over, backed into Thicke's crotch and did some half-hearted spasmodic twitching which the kids nowadays call "twerking."  500 years ago folks would have called it "St. Vitus' Dance" and burned her at the stake.  Well, the next day the American public went completely batshit crazy, just like they did when Janet Jackson had her infamous "wardrobe malfunction" during the 2004 Superbowl halftime show with Justin Timberlake, and kiddies all over the world were treated to the unexpected sight of her boobie and nipple shield (and I'll bet THAT made for some interesting post-Superbowl parent-child conversations).  Every single pundit went into overdrive and were unanimous in their conclusion that this is America, not some godless wicked society which would allow such a wanton display of abysmal taste and moral dissolution.  Ironically, this really IS America, and the only bad publicity is no publicity.  Instead of being banished to the outer reaches of cultural Siberia, Cyrus received an unprecedented avalanche of publicity which she funneled right into the release of her latest music album, resulting in spectacular sales and well over 35 MILLION likes on Facebook.  Jesus Christ's Facebook page, by comparison, has fewer than 6 million likes.

So what are we to make of this, when a very marginally-talented, utterly forgettable celebrity behaves in an overwhelmingly crass and tasteless fashion, and immediately reaps an enormous, priceless bonanza of attention and publicity?  In our culture, sensationalism trumps quality any day of the week, and people delight in watching others degrade themselves, the more publicly, the better.  What we can expect in the future is more of the same, because nothing succeeds like success, and Ms. Cyrus has very clearly shown us that the reward for bad behavior is infinitely more lucrative than the reward for good behavior.

The "PLEASE LET ME KNOW IF THERE'S SOME OTHER WAY WE CAN SCREW UP" Award.  The name of this award comes from a scene in the classic movie "Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country."  After a particularly awkward and uncomfortable dinner with a delegation of Klingons, Capt. Kirk says, "I'm going to bed now.  Please let me know if there's some other way we can screw up tonight!"  This award is given to the most monumental screw-up of the year, something that was so horrifically misconceived and so dismallly executed that the inevitable carnage was spread far and wide, from sea to shining sea.

Everyone knows that the staff here at the Careless Whispers blog (me and 17 rabbits) is nothing but even-handed and impartial (I would have said "fair and balanced" but those dirtbags at Fox News have ruined that phrase for the rest of eternity), and we assign blame wherever appropriate, regardless of political affiliation.  Thus, this award goes to the roll-out of the Affordable Care Act.

The ACA had been in the works for a long time, and is the signature legislative achievement of the Obama administration.  Central to the idea of health care reform is a national website which would allow people to shop for health insurance and sign up online.  The website is widely reported to have cost over $400 million dollars when it went live on October 1st.  For nearly HALF A BILLION dollars you'd think you'd get the Lamborghini of websites, a platinum-standard of efficiency and user-friendliness.  What we got instead was a clunky, poorly-designed mess which was well nigh impossible to navigate.  I got on the site about two weeks after launch and it was incredibly slow and tediously frustrating.  There were many things wrong with it, too many to list here, but suffice to say it was a big pain in the ass to use.  I stopped using it whenever it took 20 minutes to get some information back after you hit ENTER, and the questionnaire part that gathered personal information was a complete mess, asking ridiculous questions and taking an unacceptably long time to do anything.  I went and did something else for a month and came back to the site, and it had improved considerably.  I found a health care plan which I liked and the rest of the process was really pretty easy.

But the damage was done and the entire country went crazy.  The Republicans jumped on it like a pack of ravenous hyenas on a geriatric antelope and took every single opportunity to inflame and misinform the public regarding the entire concept of health care reform.  At this writing, the Obama administration has just barely begun to drag itself out of the mammoth crater it dug for itself and hopefully by this time next year, the extreme screw-up that greeted the launch of the ACA will be a distant, unpleasant memory.  But not before the Republicans squeeze every single drop of political advantage out of it.

Next up:  Part 3, in which we tie up the loose ends and send 2013 to the Promised Land.

Meme Madness

I love internet memes - you know, those mostly one-panel images you see on websites that are basically a photograph but with a caption superimposed, most often in the "Impact" font, the font-of-choice for memes.  Quirky and off-the-wall, they can take an innocuous photo of something innocent and send it flying down some dark hallway of the human psyche.  You can take a 30-year-old photograph and with the right caption, make it as fresh and relevant as if it were shot yesterday.  The same meme photo can be used and re-used countless times, making it infinitely recyclable, and each one can be as funny and new as the original.

Making internet memes is a snap, it's coming up with the photo and accompanying concept that's hard.  Sometimes you'll see a photo and the right caption will just jump out at you.  Other times you'll think of a caption but then spend a huge amount of time finding a photo that will work with it.  But that's the challenge and the fun.  When you get the perfect picture together with a great caption, well, it rarely gets better than that.

The internet's life-blood is snark, and memes are no different.  Just to level-set: "snark" is a combination of sarcasm and wryness.  A very dry sense of humor is a necessity, along with total irreverence and a complete disrespect for authority figures.  It also helps to have a basically foul temper and cynical outlook, and a big dollop of innate bitchiness will come in quite handy.  Obviously, snark and I were made for each other.  Add the visual delights of photography, and you have a bottomless pit of fun.

But hey, memes can also be useful, and helpful when it comes to spreading an important message.  Below is one of the first memes I created for Brambley Hedge Rabbit Rescue, for the annual message we put out around Easter. It was seen by over 1,700 people and shared over 500 times.  Click for larger image:

Rabbits and memes are a match made in heaven, and much fun can be had when those two get together.

They can also be sweet and aww-inducing, like this one of Kenai blissfully relaxing in the arms of his foster (now adoptive) mom:

But the most fun can be had through smart-assery, of course, with politics and politicians being prime, irresistible targets.  Here's one I did for the repulsive mountain of flab known as NJ Governor Chris Christie:

Religion is also a huge target just begging to be disrespected, and I am more than glad to step up to the plate and fire away.  Here's one I did for the Agnostic page on Facebook:

And another one:

Memes are loads of fun to think up and create, I feel like I'm just barely getting started with them.  I plan on doing many, many more memes in the future and launch them into cyberspace, spreading cheerful (or mean-spirited, as the case may be) snark far and wide.  This is a medium tailor-made for me, combining bad attitude with good visuals, and I could not be happier or more thrilled.

There are plenty of memes which I love and which inspire me; this is one of my current favorites:

This takes a bit of explaining, because a lot of people have absolutely no idea what is going on.  A huge amount of meme info and history can be found on this great website, www.knowyourmeme.com, the internet meme database.  The caption by the seal in the corner is a mangled version of "Oh my God - Penguins!" and its origin is with this meme which first appeared in March 2012:

This is a photo of a rather scary-looking young girl holding up some copies of her favorite children's literature, a mystery series on the order of the old "Hardy Boys" books called "Goosebumps."  To translate what she's saying: "Goosebumps - my favorite books."  Knowyourmeme.com explains it as "the phonetically written captions are meant to sound like a speech impediment caused by the use of an orthodontic retainer."  Soon the initial keyword "Ermahgerd" ("Oh My God") was created, and in six short months this meme exploded on the internet and spawned many, many tasteless variations, leading to the "Perngwens" one above.  Yeah, it 's a little harsh to make fun of speech impediments (I should know) but this is just too good to pass up.

So, that's today's crash course in internet memes.  As I said I absolutely love these things, and feel I have found one of my true callings.  My most cherished dream is to come up with a meme which will go global and be enshrined on Knowyourmeme.com.  Other than winning several hundred million dollars in a lottery, that is something that I really, really want.  Oh, I also want world peace, but I really like memes, too.

Obama's White House: Its Own Worst Enemy

There are times when the Obama administration really seems to working well, passing legislation which appears to benefit working-class Americans over the obscenely wealthy (the recent financial services reform bill as an example), generally triumphing over the obstructionist Republican party and keeping some of the lofty campaign promises Obama freely made. Other times it appears as if the White House is secretly working for the far-right conservatives who leave no stone unturned in their self-declared war to make the current administration a failure in everything they attempt. The recent debacle with Shirley Sherrod, an official with the U.S. Department of Agriculture, shows in very painful clarity an example of the latter.

Sherrod gave a speech in the not-too-distant past regarding the DOA's history with poor farmers. A conservative blogger and disgusting toady to the right-wing named Andrew Breitbart found the video record of the speech and excerpted a two-minute segment, lifting it entirely out of context and posting it on the web as proof that the respected and highly-regarded Sherrod was racist against white people. If you listen to the whole speech nothing could be further than the truth, but that didn't matter. The clip was launched on the Internet and it went hyper-ballistic in minutes. It didn't take long before Fixed News, I mean Fox News, picked it up like a dog eating another dog's feces, and ran with it. The idiotic and incompetent Secretary of Agriculture, Tom Vilsack, saw the clip and did not bother to do any sort of calling-around or fact-checking, and God forbid he would think of going directly TO HIS EMPLOYEE Ms. Sherrod and get her take on it. No, he just took the clip as being the Gospel truth and demanded her resignation. She in fact had to pull over in her car and submit her resignation via Blackberry.

Now, a huge screw-up by a high-level government stooge like Vilsack is not that much of a surprise, but what is truly, awfully astonishing is the White House doing the exact same thing - hearing about a video clip storming the Internet and also assuming it was valid, and then calling for Sherrod's head. Are they kidding us? They believe every ridiculous thing they see or read on the Internet? That's like watching Battlestar Galactica and then calling 911 because you think your neighbor is a Cylon. Are they four years old or something that they have to be cautioned not to believe everything they see or read on the Internet?

After this catastrophe exploded on the mainstream media, Breitbart was universally denounced as a non-journalist, a hack of the most base and vile nature, a totally amoral muckraker and someone who is not even worthy of the most utter contempt anyone can muster. After the White House figured out that 5 tons of the stinkiest manure imaginable just hit the giant fan they were standing in front of, they started furiously backpedaling, but as if often the case it was too little, too late. Vilsack started dithering around like a dog chasing his own tail, and Obama himself had to call Sherrod directly and apologize for the stupidity and incompetence of his staff. I so would have loved to listen in on that little chat, although I'm sure Ms. Sherrod (whose own father was murdered by a Ku Klux Klansman when she was a teenager and who has every conceivable right to have a problem with white people, but doesn't) showed enormous grace and magnanimity to the President who clearly felt like a moron for falling into a trap set by the right-wing, one that worked perfectly and flawlessly.

As my dear friend Julia pointed out, Obama is simply too much of a gentleman to go after Breitbart and call him an asshole, a craven coward, a galaxy-class douchebag and an ass-sucker of the highest magnitude, even though that and a whole lot worse is absolutely true. If this had happened in the previous administration, George Bush might have been too oblivious and distracted to care, but you can bet the mortgage that Cheney would have been all over it, sprouting horns and breathing fire into the face of whoever was responsible. Vice President Joe Biden is too enamored with his "elder-statesman" role to kick someone's ass, no matter how well-deserved, so the hatchet job should have fallen to Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, the White House's yappy little attack dog. Like a chihuahua with a bad attitude, Emanuel has a reputation for savage, one-on-one political combat and has a scorched-earth policy in regards to his political enemies. But they must have put little Rahmie on a short leash made of prozac recently because he was very conspicuous in his absence and his silence.

Bottom line, the Obama administration showed blinding, unbelievable incompetence by charging like a runaway freight train directly into a trap set by a brittle, angry, paranoid right-wing pundit, and they gave the far right exactly what they wanted - the legitimacy of knowing that the White House listens to what they say, unconditionally regards it as credible and reacts accordingly. The conservative movement in all its variations has stated in the clearest possible terms that they and Obama are deadly enemies in an almost classical, epic battle between good and evil, and they will take any action, tell any lie and exploit every opportunity, no matter how underhanded, immoral or unfounded, to discredit and embarrass this administration. This incident with Shirley Sherrod shows in a most discouraging fashion that the administration is all too willing to play along and provide them with a huge, slow-moving target that is too stupid and too incompetent to fight back, or even realize it is under attack.

Famous Tweets Throughout History

I remember reading a little while ago that some experts think Twitter has "peaked;" that is, the number of new people joining for the first time has leveled off. We're not sure exactly what this means, but maybe the once-darling of the brave new world of "social networking" is not as popular as it once was. Facebook, on the other hand, is going gangbusters in its drive to take over the entire planet. They just passed 500 million members, which is like the entire population of the United States, Japan and a couple of other countries combined. Someone said recently that if their growth continues at its present rate, everyone who is on the Internet will also be on Facebook by 2012.

That is pretty astonishing when you think about it. What makes Facebook so much more appealing than Twitter? Facebook's content is of course much richer than Twitter, with pictures and millions of other applications available. Twitter is just text, but with the immediacy of instantaneous posting, although Facebook is not that far behind. Facebook is not limited to 140 characters per entry, so a much richer, detailed experience is allowed. Although that is not always a good thing.

I admit to not being a fan of Twitter. I tried it once and found it a horrendous, ridiculous waste of time. My life is just not that interesting that I feel the need to post endlessly about the minutiae with which I deal. What is it that I need to tell my friends on such a critical basis? "The sky is blue today!" - check, got that. "Rabbit took a dump in her cage, missed the litterbox by three inches." - That's lovely, I'm sure people need to hear that. "It's a 112 degrees today." - wow, some things are best left ignored. To be fair, Facebook can also get cluttered by random, meaningless observations, and sometimes people reveal an amazing amount of information about their private lives that would definitely be better left private.

But the other day I let my imagination run free (I know, historically not the best thing to do, but bear with me here) and tried to think what some of the prominent figures of history would have Tweeted had there been the internet and Twitter around. Here, then, are some of history's famous events, served up in concise, 140-or-fewer-character info-nuggets:

@abelincoln: "I just want to stay home and soak my feet, but the missus wants to see some dumb play at the Ford. Whatevs."

@georgewashington: "They want to name that city on the Potomac after me. are they kidding me? that sh*thole is a swamp. after all I've done for them, f**king ingrates!"

@galileo: "New telescope's great! watched the mayor's wife get ready for a bath Yowza! moon is full of holes, looks like crap, nothing interesting there."

@kinghenryVIII: "Just got rid of #5, or was it #6? Don't know, can't keep track any more. If this marriage thing doesn't work again, I'm going gay."

@leonardodavinci: "Jeez, can't wait to finish this painting. I hate doing portraits and this Mona Lisa chick is creeping me out with her weird smile."

@cleopatra: "OMG! Marc Antony is a hottie. Julie Caesar called me Queen of Denial, WTF? Out of eye shadow again, LOL!"

@michaelangelo: "Jesus Christmas my back is killing me. last time I do a chapel ceiling. will paint a couple more naked people and call it a day!"

@darthvader: "Kids can be a bummer, tried to talk to Luke yesterday and he pulled a saber on me, wtf? This helmet gives me a headache."

@chriscolumbus: "Been sailing west for weeks now. better see some chinese guys in silk suits soon or else my ass is grass back in Genoa."

@kinglouieXVI: "What's a guy gotta do to have some fun around here? Itching powder in the queen's knickers again?"

@GOD: "I am so done with these damned people, same stupid stuff over and over again. Should have stopped with animals and left well enough alone!"

7 Things We Did Wrong

As threatened earlier, here is my list of some things mankind has done in his unending quest to reshape the world to his liking, which did not turn out quite as well as intended. Along with some possible silver-lining upsides that resulted:

1) Organized Religion. Probably the biggest and most spectacular failure of all, organized religion is likely the most destructive and crippling pestilence mankind ever inflicted on itself. An incalculable amount of damage, misery and suffering has been wreaked in its name. How many billions of people have been enslaved by it, how many lives ruined, how many bright promising futures stifled because of it? How many native cultures were exterminated by missionaries imposing their beliefs? Organized religion's lust for money and power have supplanted any good intentions it might have had in the beginning, and nowadays it appears to be more of a political force than a spiritual force.
UPSIDE: As much as I hate to admit it, during the Dark Ages most of the world's knowledge and intellectual activity were preserved by monks and clerics in abbeys and monasteries.

2) Democracy. Probably the best form of government we've ever come up with, democracy as a concept sure has a lot going for it. Imagine a system where the people being governed are actually in charge and making decisions that affect them. Jeffersonian democracy - a government "of the people, by the people and for the people" - is stunning in its simplicity and its genius. Too bad it didn't turn out that way. In order for democracy to work as intended, a critically important component is an informed, engaged population. Those being governed need to be intelligent enough to understand the problems they face and willing to participate in the solutions, even if personally uncomfortable sacrifices are needed. Unfortunately being a responsible citizen takes time and effort and far too many people are just too lazy to do the work.
UPSIDE: Makes it easy to see how ridiculous communism and Marxism are.

3) Capitalism. Again, like democracy, great on paper but not so easy to implement in real time. It seems like a good thing - the success you have in life should depend on the market for your goods or services and how hard you are willing to work. Somewhere along the way things go off the rails and market inequities take over. Then you get really valuable, worthwhile occupations like teachers, nurses, firefighters and police being extremely undervalued and under-compensated, and worthless scumbag entertainers, politicians and sports figures being paid astronomical salaries far out of proportion to their societal worth, to the point of obscenity. Capitalism invariably generates a have/have-not society distributed through an upper/middle/lower class system, with subclasses and extremes on both ends. The result is a world where extreme wealth and extreme poverty co-exist side by side.
UPSIDE: Motivates people to reach higher, if only to get more money.

4) The Art of Medicine. Medicine and the healing arts are one of man's greatest triumphs, to be sure. The number of lives that have been saved by the accumulated medical knowledge over the millennia has to be in the billions. All but a very few of us are alive today, I believe, because of some sort of medical intervention in the past, and that includes me. But in modern times, greed has taken over the nobler ambitions and when making a profit depends on a steady supply of sick people, then more sick people mean more profit, right? Health insurance companies, drug manufacturers and for-profit medicine have come together in a huge medical-industrial complex. If drug companies in particular would take a fraction of the money they spend developing and marketing drugs and use it to educate people in making sensible, healthy choices in their lives then maybe we wouldn't need all those expensive drugs. But that's not where the money is, is it? When sick people are no longer profitable and healthy people are, then we will get medicine back to being the best it can be.
UPSIDE: People are living longer! Unfortunately some of them are Republicans.

5) Nuclear Energy. Boy, did this sound like a great thing or what? Harnessing one of nature's basic forces and turning it into a nearly limitless amount of energy, to inexpensively supply the world's ever-growing power demands. And didn't it turn into a really bad idea when the military got a hold of it and changed it into the most destructive force ever unleashed on this planet? Today, enough nuclear weapons exist to destroy the earth something like 30 times over, and a small but worrisome number of these weapons are either unaccounted for or not-too-closely guarded. Why, some crazy bunch of religious fundamentalists could conceivably get a hold of a couple of them and ... well, that's kind of too scary to consider. We should have known the idea of extremely cheap, unlimited energy would be too good to be true, and it is.
UPSIDE: Really cool but really scary atomic explosions.

6) Freedom of Speech. Being able to say whatever you want is a relatively new concept in human history, with totalitarianism having been the rule rather than the exception in the past, and tyrants and despots have always taken a dim view of the enslaved masses getting uppity. But once people started backing away from monarchies and dictatorships and education became more widespread, the idea of speaking your mind without fear of dire consequences began to take favor. This of course has achieved its highest expression in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, but it also has its drawbacks. Hate speech and bigotry which really need to be controlled are in fact protected, and many people are unable to recognize them when they are all gussied up with patriotism and nationalism. Modern-day blights such as telemarketing and pornography are also considered protected forms of speech, although it's pretty difficult to see any benefit coming from their continued existence. So, we take the good with the bad, even if sometimes the bad gets pretty bad.
UPSIDE: Funny truth-tellers like Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Joan Rivers. HA! I made that last one up.

7) Internet. Yes indeed I did list the Internet in my previous post about things mankind has done right. But the Internet is such a vast and powerful entity that we need to look at the other side of the coin. I believe the Internet critically needs to be open and free and pretty much unregulated - that is perhaps its greatest strength. But when we open the doors to the world like that, bad things can sneak in, just like if I left my patio doors open and hordes of repulsive vermin like scorpions and spiders would stampede each other to get in. With just a couple of mouse clicks you can, if you are so inclined, wallow in huge amounts of extremely graphic pornography, learn how to build bombs and engage in terrorist activities, be exposed to the most virulent, loathsome hate-speech and bigotry, and fall victim to a whole galaxy of identity-theft schemes. Spam is a vile, cancerous plague that threatens to bring the Internet to a grinding halt. Does all the good that comes from the Internet outweigh the bad? I think it does, but just barely.
UPSIDE: Online bill-paying, emails from good friends, belch videos on YouTube.

Well, that's all I got. I'm getting depressed thinking about this stuff. It's been such a beautiful, cool autumn morning as I sit on my back patio, with a happy little rabbit playing in the outdoor playpen and another lounging contentedly behind a bougainvillea bush. The world can be a beautiful place, it is too bad humans always have to screw it up.

Twitter Your Life Away

Nothing makes you feel quite as old as when you realize that technology is passing you by. Our tech-saturated life is truly a miracle - it virtually puts the world at your fingertips and allows you access to unprecedented amounts of information, with a speed and quantity unheard-of in all of recorded history. A Google search on even the most innocuous subject returns gigabytes of information, providing more than you ever wanted to know in a split-second. Whether or not you take the time to sort through all the digital flotsam-and-jetsam to get to whatever pearl of wisdom you originally sought is another story, but everything you wanted to know about anything is right there on your monitor just waiting for you to dive in and look around.

I consider myself relatively tech-savvy, at least when it comes to the Internet. The web reordered and reshaped my life around 1999, when I finally went online and had a look around. Right afterward I created my own website (I'm currently on Version 7) and I quickly adapted to earning my living as a web programmer. Since then I have come to live on the web and spend many hours a day on it, doing so many interesting and productive things from the comfort and privacy of my home. I pay my bills through the Internet which is a huge convenience - a book of postage stamps lasts me well over a year now - and online shopping and other forms of e-commerce mean that I can shop for what I want, when I want, and I don't have to worry about driving anywhere or store hours or other annoyances. The only reason I set foot in a shopping mall is for things that absolutely require my physical presence, like getting a new battery for my watch. Not good news if you're a shop owner in a mall; I did hit the local mall a month or so ago and took a quick run through. I was amazed by the number of empty and closed-up stores. Also, all the book stores were gone and replaced either by cell phone outlets or really crappy clothing stores. It was truly sad, and really people like me are to blame for that. The Internet is far too seductive and convenient, and it spoils you very quickly.

Mobile phones have quickly evolved from being a handy way to keep in touch, to a mini-computer in your pocket with video, games, applications, music and a hundred other things you didn't know you can't live without. I'm not sure I need the ability to pull up a weather report for any place on the planet any second of the day, but it's out there for those who do. I was thinking about phones the other day, and how you used to have to "dial" a number to reach someone. The handset was attached to the phone itself by a cord, and you could only go a certain distance from the phone itself if you wanted to talk. As a matter of fact, when I was growing up my family had a little "phone desk," shaped like a figure-8, with a small desk for the phone to sit on and room below for all the directories, attached to a small chair so you could actually sit down and talk on the phone. Also if you called someone and they weren't home the phone just rang and rang until you gave up - answering machines were still 20 years in the future. Somehow we managed to get by and survive these monumental inconveniences, which would be completely intolerable today.

Technology is constantly changing - notice I didn't say "improving" - and new things are constantly popping up on the web. Sites like MySpace and Facebook give you a free presence on the web and make staying in contact with all your friends very easy, including those you didn't know you had. Twitter has rocketed into stratospheric levels of popularity, as everyone and every entity that can type are twittering their every activity, no matter how mundane, every second of the day on a world-wide stage. I used to have a Twitter account but closed it recently. I thought it was incredibly stupid to read about the minutiae of everyone's lives as if the world couldn't survive without knowing what everyone was doing all the time. Stuff just doesn't happen in my life quickly enough that I need to inform the rest of the world every two minutes. Also I would get lots of "follower" notifications from these Russian mail-order brides who've never met me but are terribly interested in my Twitter updates, and wouldn't I like to send them a personal message and meet them? Hooking up with disease-ridden cyber-skanks is not high on my to-do list, and Twitter rapidly became a blight and an annoyance. Good riddance to it, and everyone in eastern Europe who is just dying to meet me.

People whine and moan about how technology is isolating us and making actual human contact obsolete, and I don't want this blog post be about that. I view all these things - the Internet, cell phones, networking applications, etc. - merely as tools, extending our abilities to do more things with less work. Mankind has been using tools to augment our natural abilities since Neanderthals started toting around clubs to aid in hunting. Tools are exactly what we make of them, they can be extremely useful or very cumbersome. Technology likewise can limit our interactions or facilitate them, depending on if and how we choose to use it. I know people who send hundreds of text messages a day. I choose not to text, maybe because I grew up without having it around and fail to see any advantage to instantaneous communication in my life, but if other people like it, more power to them. Many people are growing up today without ever knowing a time when the Internet or cell phones were not around, just like I never knew a world without television or telephones. Their view of the world, and their wants and needs are going to be completely different from mine, and the wants and needs of their children are also going to be different from theirs. As we ride the crest of a wave of technology sweeping over the planet with ever-increasing speed and power, some of us choose to ride on the very edge and others choose a more comfortable spot on the quieter shoals and beaches of Techno-World. And wherever we fit in the best, is where we need to be.