Lifestyle & Culture
« Older Entries |Is Throwing Puppies In The River Bad?
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on August 30, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, August 30th, 2010I think I may finally go fully vegetarian.
Be warned. The following includes some pretty grisly content. You may have seen or heard about the video of a girl taking a bucket of puppies and throwing them one-by-one into a river. Yes. A bucket of puppies. Unlike car accidents, which I’m pretty good at NOT stopping to gawk at, I had the misfortune made the mistake of watching this video (also below). It was incredibly upsetting. I was mesmerized by the tragic failure of humanity I witnessed. I really just felt sickened, and experienced a brief hopelessness that if a young girl could do this and video the whole thing and post it on the internet, what else are we capable of as humans? It seemed more horrible by an incredible magnitude than the woman in England who put the kitten in the wastebin recently. I’m not the only one to get upset; much like the vigilantism that took place with the kitty abusing biddy, users at 4chan have already initiated the hunt. But this raises two issues for me. First of all, sometimes these Human Flesh Search Engines end up going after the wrong person. And in the case of the girl and the puppies? As dementedly cruel as it seems, is it any more cruel than how the food industry treats the male chicks that we don’t want because they won’t provide eggs or enough meat? Or any of the other cruel acts against animals featured in movies like Food, Inc.
Positive Panhandling - Is Information As Valuable As Cash?
[ 2 Comments ]Posted on August 29, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, August 29th, 2010Most of us can’t afford to simply give away cash all day, but would still like to help people out. I think I may have a clever idea to change these interactions, and would love some feedback.
 This kind of shtick is getting tiresome |
Before I get to the precious links that I know you really come here for, I’m going to preface things with an interesting experience that I had recently. Early in the morning the other day, I walked out of my house to head to what I knew was going to be a long meeting. I lit a cigarette, and as I rounded the corner was confronted by a woman who asked if I had another. I said “sorry” and kept walking. I live in a town that even in bad economic times has service jobs going wanting, which makes it easy for me to pompously justify to myself my reluctance to give things away to the 5-15 people that ask me for something each day. As I walked on, she muttered something incomprehensible, which I assumed was some Gypsy curse to punish me for being such a selfish bastard. About a half block further along, I remembered how my recently deceased mom ALWAYS gave things to strangers, and thought “Great. That lady was probably Jesus in disguise or something, and now I’m going to hell”. I resolved to try to be just a little bit nicer. Just for that day. So a few hours later, I walked out of the meeting, and headed to a nearby alley to indulge in my shameful nicotine addiction. Guess who was sitting at the entrance to the alley. I was on the phone as I passed her and she asked for a dollar. I ignored her because, well, I was ON THE PHONE dammit, so DON’T BE SO RUDE. When I headed back I wasn’t on the phone, and because she had been SO RUDE while I was on the phone, I ignored her as she asked for “just a few” dollars. I walked about 20 feet further and thought to myself “Damn. I planned to try to be just a little nicer, just for one day.” I walked back and asked her exactly what she needed, and she said “oh please mister, just five dollars would really help out.” I explained that I wasn’t likely to just give her five dollars, but would gladly go with her to the nearby store and buy her a bunch of food or other basics she might need, or even take her to a cafe or something for a bite to eat. To which she replied, almost sobbing, “can’t you please just help out with twenty dollars?” I’m not sure how we got from a cigarette that morning to 20 dollars just now, but I explained that there was no way I was just going to give her a bunch of money. I walked away, actually more angry than anything. I was reminded of this little set of interactions today as I read a fascinating article called Westerners vs. the World: We are the WEIRD ones. It explains how we WEIRD people (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) are in fact quite weird in our perception in many ways. It tells the story of how researchers used something called The Ultimatum Game, in which you are given money and asked to share it with someone else. You can offer that person any amount, and if he accepts the offer, you each get to keep your share. If he rejects your offer, you both walk away empty-handed. The results in various parts of the world were quite telling. Along the same lines, a Toronto Star reporter tried a little experiment recently to see how panhandlers would use free credit cards. The actual results were interesting, but not all that surprising. And frankly raises a small question of the ethics of “charity experiments” to create news content, when this sort of thing occurs naturally and probably gets about as much readership. This kind of experimenting is something that can be taken to incredible extremes, as in the case of doing A-B testing to see if a homeless guy can generate more revenue by refining his sign design. I’m not sure if that’s even a true story, but all of these stories reminded me that I’ve been struggling for a long time with how to deal with the people in my everyday life who ask for money on the streets and how I might do something positive that doesn’t involve simply giving away money. To that end, I already have a project in the works to teach computer skills to the disadvantaged, as I think computer illiteracy is a common obstacle to job-hunting confidence, even for homeless people. But I long for a simpler, practical solution to helping those that are struggling, and I think I’ve hit on a clever idea that may have some sense in it. I’d love input on the idea; I’m not sure if in reality it would be pointless or seem condescending. I explain it a little below. Read the rest of this entry »
I Was A Punk Before You Were A Punk Part I
[ 3 Comments ]Posted on August 21, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, August 21st, 2010How Gutter Punks, Crusties, and Travelers represent a conformist and freedom-motivated lifestyle “brand” that isn’t Punk at all.
 Has Anarchy Become A Brand? |
That’s not only a song by The Tubes that I really don’t care for, it’s also a simple truth. It was all kind of an accident really. In 1977 I didn’t mean to be a teenage punk. I just had the misfortune of having a British hairdresser and a predilection for buying my clothes at resale shops at the same time that bands like the Sex Pistols were first making a splash. Suddenly, and for almost a decade, I was “punk”. Which was annoying, because the fact was that in spite of my appearances in the early eighties, I HATED most punk bands, and just about everything else that was officially punk. My friends and I were just arty types who liked drugs, had weird haircuts, wore a lot of black clothes and makeup, and didn’t want to be Ronald Reagan’s suggested version of a young adult, i.e.: a YUPPY. All of which is why I have a sort of anthropological fascination with contrived American urban tribes and subcultures like Gore Lolitas and Juggalo Furries, body modders, self-cutting emos, and most recently “Gutter Punks”. You may have noticed more of these kids lately; while they’ve been annoying people in hipster havens like Williamsburg or the Haight in San Francisco for quite a while, they’ve more recently been invading more middle American towns as well. I was actually spending time with a few of them recently to write an in-depth piece, but got tired of being stood up by them over and over, so have shelved the idea for a while. Which was kind of a relief in a way. Because although some of the kids I talked to were witty, reasonably intelligent, and had some interesting things to say, they really, REALLY smelled awful. And I’m not the kind of person that needs everybody to smell “Zestfully Clean” or anything; I’ve been around all kinds of people who don’t have the same hygiene standards as an urban American. The natural smell of a healthy human really isn’t unpleasant. But almost every crowd of these kids I’ve spent time with smells like some horrible collision of urban grime, petrol, beer, patchouli, urine, feta cheese, and Cool Ranch Doritos™. Not necessarily in that order. That may sound superficial, but try spending an hour with it. In any case, what I really find intriguing about this kind of “tribe” is that these kids have made a serious lifestyle choice, and usually possess refined hoboing, trainhopping, and grifting skills that are all wrapped up in a hybridized cookie-cutter countercultural brand that borrows from beats, hippies, punks, and rastas to create a new lifestyle that is “off the grid” and seems rebellious, but is ultimately based on conformity. It’s like “anarchy as a brand”. Which is why I cracked up when I learned that there was a The Decline Of Western Civilization: Part III for sale on Amazon for 200 bucks
Scientist #1: Blah, Blah, Blah. Scientist #2: Nuh-uh!
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on August 18, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, August 18th, 2010It’s interesting how two scientists with the same information available can arrive at diametrically opposed positions. Is science just another religion? Ray Kurzweil says we’ll reverse engineer the brain in 20 years. PZ Myers says “nuh-unh”. Oh yeah, and the web is dead. Or it isn’t. Or it is.
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| No it isn’t. |
I would like to clarify that I am not an expert in any of the areas I’m about to discuss. This is obvious to most intelligent people whenever I start to speak, but I just want to make sure that you know that I know. In spite of my lack of expertise (some may call it actual ignorance) in the fields of science, technology, religion, and philosophy, I have a great deal of enthusiasm for learning about and discussing them, which is why I love it when a real scientist or expert makes a broad, bold assertion, and another immediately refutes it. This happened twice today in the tech press, and in one instance, the contested “science” veered dangerously close to the metaphysical. The more mundane example was when Wired Magazine’s Chris Anderson (who most recently got a lot of attention for his book Free
Why You Need To Stop Uploading Photos From Your iPhone To Facebook. Now.
[ Add A Comment ]Posted on August 17, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, August 17th, 2010With over 2 billion photos uploaded to Facebook each month and 24 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE, when will we have time to enjoy it all? And where will we keep it until then?
As I bemoaned the fact the other day that I had nothing I wanted to listen to in my music collection, I had to pause and laugh. I have what some of my friends consider to be a rather puny collection at about 14,000 song files. Really? Nothing to listen to? If I DID choose to listen to it all, I just did the math, and it would play non-stop for just over 48 days! And my collection is only about 0.001% of the 13,000,000 songs on iTunes. This reminded me of a discussion I had years ago when I worked in a bookstore and I asked one of the more seasoned bibliophiles on staff when he thought was the last time a person might have read all the books in print, and without hesitating he replied “around the time of Voltaire”. I guess book store employees have time to ponder these things. Today, if you were to read a book a day, it would take you 355,794 years to accomplish the same feat, at least based on Google Books’ count, which is 129,864,880 books. Things get worse when it comes to user-generated content. If you wanted to watch all the videos uploaded to YouTube from JUST TODAY, it would take you about 94 years. Of course, somewhere in there you’d be watching a few thousand versions of Keyboard Cat, but that’s how much video was uploaded today; 24 hours’ worth every minute. And things are for all practical purposes just as hopeless if you have any intention of trying to keep up with feature films; this source says that globally, there were 6,324 made by major studios in 2009, and if you include indy films submitted to major festivals, the number jumps to 50,000 each year. Even if you stuck to only watching the major releases, that’s still 17 movies a day. So where do we store all this media? And when will we have time to consume it? Well, the answer to the first question may soon become a problem; 2008 was the first year in which the data we generated exceeded our available storage space. Thank God we delete old e-mails, right? And the answer to the second is up to you. Personally, this all made me realize that with an estimated 37 years to live (according to this MSN calculator, who knows how much storage space it uses) I probably need to select my media more carefully, and maybe read a book before years’ end. That hour on YouTube, 3 hours on Wikipedia, and 2 hours sharing it all on Facebook last night was probably time better spent. Read the rest of this entry »