Links that I’m reading/watching/listening to/thinking about
According to the Environics 3SC Survey (which I found on /usr/bin/girl), I’m an Autonomous Post-materialist. I agree with the motivations (personal autonomy and self-fulfillment) and key values (freedom, spontaneity) it lists for me, but not the icons. Dennis Rodman? As if. I do quote Eric Cartman quite a lot, though.
“I’m, like, up myah, and you guys are, like, down… myah.”
Roger Ebert’s got a new Movie Answer Man column up. Topics covered include Hannibal, Gladiator, and various Academy Award nominees.
R.I.P. Etoys. All you scavengers should dig in before everything’s gone.
Matthew Perry’s in rehab again (scroll down). No mention of where or why. Poor Chandler.
The beef situation just keeps getting worse over here. Now there’s an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. It really is quite dramatic, with analysts showing maps predicting the spread of the disease and newscasts full of footage of burning animal carcasses. It’s like a bovine version of The Stand or something.
Matt linked to an interesting article about obituaries today. Coincidentally, my sister types up the obits for the News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, Indiana. She wrote a poem called “The Obituary Writer” about the thoughts she has when summarizing somebody’s life. It’s pretty good.
This Salon article about the “new slackers” really annoyed me. First of all, the reference to Richard Linklater’s film Slacker is totally incorrect. There was no “just-out-of-college temp slave” made famous in that movie. Linklater was depicting an entire culture, not some Ethan Hawke wannabe. The camera just follows interesting people around Austin, Texas, and none of them bear any resemblance to the newly unemployed dot-commers profiled in the article. What, they couldn’t spare 97 minutes for some cinematic research?
The whole thing just smacks of Schadenfreude, you know? It’s like, everybody’s been slagging off the dot-commers for a while now, but these authors have taken it a step further: “Hey! This means we can rag on Generation X for being unemployed, ambition-less, waste-of-space slackers again!” And that’s just bollocks. That stereotype was never true in the first place, and taking a few well-deserved months off after a year of working sixteen hour days doesn’t make you a derelict either. I swear, if I was in their situation and some smug, smarmy Boomer accused me of being a slacker, I’d kick their ass. *pause* Well, no, I wouldn’t. I’m a wuss. But I would use their e-mail address to sign them up for pr0n.
I can’t help laughing. William Shatner will host the Miss USA pageant this Friday in Gary, Indiana. Y’all know that I regularly defend my Hoosier state, but there’s nothing that can be said for Gary. If you ever have the misfortune of driving to Chicago on the Indiana Toll Road, you’ll see why: it’s the ugliest city in the country. It literally looks like hell, all fire and brimstone and sulphurous fumes from the steel mills. (A helpful tip: when you find yourself rolling up the windows and putting the air on “recycle,” you’re in Gary.) And it was the murder capital of the country for, what, several years during the 90’s? I guess they’re hoping Captain Kirk’s endorsement will turn things around… but it doesn’t seem bloody likely.
Dubya gave his first press conference, and the verdict wasn’t good. My favorite part: “An informal poll of White House reporters indicated that 100 percent were confident Bush had absolutely no idea what the BBC reporter was talking about. That won’t be in their stories Friday, I’ll bet.”
