Lifestyle & Culture
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[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 16, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Saturday, October 16th, 2010Or: “If You Really Know All The Secrets Of Success & Happiness Why Are You Writing About Them On Some Crappy Blog?”
 Why is this woman smiling, in spite of her hideous appearance and trivially self-involved thoughts? Because just by being born, she has everything you spend you whole life only praying you had. |
I’ve been both a victim and a beneficiary of the self-help movement since the 1980′s. You couldn’t swing a dead cat without hittin’ a self-help guru in those days; I even had a band manager/mentor (Hi Jim!) who simultaneously inspired my band with forward thinking, and tortured us with pleas to become his est podlings. While there’s a lot of self-improvement tripe out there, there’s also a lot of great stuff. Laugh if you like, but I can shamelessly say that I’ve found something useful in books by all the big names, from old school stuff like Napoleon Hill
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Facebook Really Puts The “FB” in “FBI”
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 14, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Thursday, October 14th, 2010But we can all sleep a little better knowing that yesterday’s paranoid delusions are today’s ho-hum realities.
Remember a few years ago, when most people over 25 were just beginning to join Facebook, and this seemingly tinfoil hat paranoiac video (also below) was going around, trying to scare the bejeebus out of everyone by pointing out all of Facebook’s connections with the CIA, NSA, and the IAO’s Total Information Awareness program, as well as the details of its creepy privacy policies and user agreement details? Well, it’s not so tinfoil any more, is it. We’ve talked about privacy a lot before, and how both Mark Zuckerberg and Google’s Eric Schmidt have already decided your privacy is a thing of the past, but until the EFF got their hands on some Homeland Security documents the other day, any Big Brother paranoia you might have experienced about your Facebook activities was still a little hypothetical. Well, now you can pretty much rest assured that your every move IS being catalogued, so relax. It’s too late now. Just don’t make casual observations about things that go boom in places where people might shop, or you’ll have the FBI crawling up your ass too. Or at least under your car. Read the rest of this entry »
Is Bob Dylan A Folk Nation “O.G.”?
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 13, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Wednesday, October 13th, 2010Researching gang signs on the internet may save your life, but it won’t prevent arthritis.
As I glance at the server reports for Dissociated Press, I occasionally get to see amusing patterns. Last week I noticed we were getting a fair amount of traffic for the phrase “folk gang signs”. Which perplexed me for a moment. It immediately conjured an image of Bob Dylan and Woodie Guthrie throwin’ gang signs or stackin’. But then I remembered there’s a massive coalition of gangs called Folk Nation, and it made a little more sense. Except, then I wondered… who the hell looks on the web for guides to gang signs? I mean, when they let you in the gang, they must show you all the secret hand signs, right? And by the time someone studies them, designs detailed graphics, and puts them on a website, well, if your gang is still using them, they’re not very good secret gang signs, right? So I figure maybe it’s the millions of members of the Scissor Gang Mafia. Which leads to a scary thought: what if all of those people were a real gang? If every stupid guy or girl between 3 and 30 that posed for their Facebook profile with pursed lips and a gangsta sign were part of a real organization, it would dwarf the US Military. So don’t tell them; the results would probably be scarier than the aging white guy angst of the tea party. So kids, keep researching those gang signs, if only to make sure you don’t get shot for accidently using your hands to say “Crips die and I love Justin Bieber”. Who is, by the way, a confirmed SGM member. And remember. Gang signing may not be Cerebral Palsy, but it does cause Arthritis.
Say Jello To A Jiggly New World Of Possibilities
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 5, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Tuesday, October 5th, 2010From patching your lawn, to wrestling, to making body parts for ballistics testing, it seems like there’s no end to the uses for Jello.
 Suck it, Aunt Mildred. |
Your aunt Mildred probably thought she was pretty crafty, the way she managed to make not only marshmallows, but actual food suspend itself magically in jello formed in a bundt pan. She had no idea. Personally, I have a basic policy of not eating anything that wiggles, so it’s a good thing there are so many other things to do with Jello. Today someone sent me a link to My Jello Americans, a blog devoted to the creation of amazingly artful jello shots that range from the macabre – like The Jason Voorhees – to the delicately beautiful, like the MJA School of Entomology . This got me wondering what else one could do with jello, and I was surprised by the answer, which is a lot. Like patching your lawn. Or wrestling in it. Or making body parts for ballistics testing on Mythbusters. Or inventing a form of marketing that lasts for decades. The possibilities seem nearly endless. Why, if you’ve grown tired of looking for sanity in modern life and feel like exploring a different sense of futility, you can even try nailing it to a wall. Both literally and metaphorically. Me, I’m gonna wait until it stops wiggling. Read the rest of this entry »
7 People Who Still Haven’t Joined Facebook
[ Comments Off ]Posted on October 4, 2010 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Monday, October 4th, 2010It’s hard to believe that with Facebook’s incredible market penetration, there are still a handful of people who haven’t joined. Do you know of any?
 Although Jesus is more of a Twitter kind of guy, he may have been the original inspiration for the “Like” button “Thumbs Up” |
If you’re reading this, that means you’re on the Internet. And since you’re on the Internet, you probably have a Facebook account. And if you don’t, well, don’t bother. Although the party will probably never stop now that Facebook has over 500 million users, the party you’ll be joining isn’t the same party that was going on a year or two ago when Facebook enjoyed its early explosive success. Everyone finds their own special relationship with a social networking site like Facebook, so maybe you’re still quite delighted to have a bunch of people you would never have lunch with as friends, because it gives you someone to play Mafia Wars with. Or maybe you derive genuine gratification from “Liking” things or joining political causes, so you can incessantly share your liberal, conservative, or wingnut point of view (not that those are mutually exclusive terms) without actually having the skills or focus to engage in real activism. But if you happen to have joined around the time I did in 2008, you may have found the witty repartee has fizzled, the great friend reconnects have taken place, and you may have come to know all too well the banal existences of both yourself and your “friends”. If that’s the place you’re in, you may have also noticed a couple of interesting waves of new users over the past year or two. First, the ones who joined around that same time as you and I did in 2008 and just didn’t get it, treating the site like the next MySpace. Then, the wave of over-40′s who read about the site in Time Magazine, also didn’t get it, popped in and made goofs of themselves, and then got quiet abruptly, having no idea how to de-activate their account. Then everybody’s mom and grandma joined a few months later, and more recently, it seems that the kind of people who are still on AOL joined, and everything went to hell. What may surprise you though, is the fact that there are still people who haven’t joined. Below are just a few. Do you know anyone who hasn’t joined? Let us know. Read the rest of this entry »