Thought That Came Unbidden

I admit it: I own one of the fetish objects we call iPod® Normally I’m not a fan of Mac technology. Yes, yes, I know: the MacOS is much more stable, much less susceptible to virus, Trojan horse, and spyware-based attacks than Windows. (Have we ever thought that perhaps this is because there are about three-dozen people in the world actually using Macs? I digress…) In the case of the iPod®, however, I must admit that the good folks at Apple got it right.

The gizmo itself is like a little gold brick in your hand, all sleek and rounded corners and elegantly functional in a way that makes your eyes narrow and your mouth make that little O of pleasure. The interface for the iPod® itself is sleek and easy to use, and iTunes, the software that helps you load all of these glorious musical interludes onto what is essentially a dressed up hard drive with a minimal operating system loaded on to it, is even easier. But what Apple does that is so revolutionary has more to do with the purchasing of music than anything else.

Apple has taken chunking – the basic principle of writing for the web – and applied it to media. Gone is the album side. Gone is the idea of a sequential album that needs to be listened to from cut #1 through the end in order to get the full story contained therein. Music has been broken down once again (for I truly believe that this is not a new phenomenon) into tasty, bite-sized chunks that now, thanks to digital technology, you can arrange in any order you like. TimeLife Music…this is your wake up call. The beauty part, though, is the way they haul you in.

Every Tuesday Apple offers a free download. They give away one of their base units of commerce as a loss-leader in the hope that you’ll explore their well designed store and purchase an appallingly high number of those base units of commerce before you realize that holy, crap, you’ve just spent $22 on cheesy singles from the 1970s and discovered a scary affinity for neo-country music.

But while the iTunes store is very well organized and their Beta “recommended for you” functionality is alternately scarily prescient or completely off base, there’s something I just don’t understand.

Could someone please explain to me just what the big deal is about the Black Eyed Peas?

Sometimes the thoughts that come unbidden don’t form enough to make a complete blog entry. Here are a few things that I’ve been noodling with over the past few months that I haven’t gotten a chance to expand upon.

• Being news free: STB has said that he is going to try a news blackout in 2006. It’s not an entirely bad idea. The thing of it is, the world goes on whether you’re paying attention to it or not.

  Mark Morford is operating on the theory that we all need to put out positive energy to avoid being sucked under by the three soul-sucking years that are left the current administration, and to prepare for the future (do we really want another decade of Republicans in the White House?).

  The simple fact is that most of us are too small to make any change alone in the things that really matter on the grand scale. I can’t affect environmental policy. I can’t change the fact that BushCo. is one step away from having me deposit my tax money directly into Halliburton’s off-shore bank accounts. There isn’t anything I can do by myself to make the war stop. And, frankly, I’m sick and tired of being made to be afraid, which is really all the news in the U.S. does. And yet, I can’t quite justify opting out of all news just yet.

  Where we can make a difference as individuals is in the little things: helping a stranger with a dead car battery on a rainy day; holding the door for the person behind you; being aware of the fact that you’re not alone on the planet. And you don’t need to read the New York Times every day to do any of the small things.

• We need more reality in our reality: Remember when I said this: “From iTunes blurb about the single of the week “Rock & Roll Queen” by The Subways: If you’re a fan of coolly disaffected pop with stylish punk energy, then you’ll understand why “Rock & Roll Queen” is our Free Single of the Week” would be important? Just a random thought: do we really need more things that are disaffected in this increasingly fractured world? All this great technology was supposed to make the world smaller yet we seem more divided than ever (well, give me another reason for the fact that Billboard has 18 separate genres for sales charts). Maybe instead of things that are coolly disaffected we need things that aren’t afraid to be earnestly real.
• Jimmy Carter has TiVo: How freaking cool is that! It’s amazing what you can learn watching The Daily Show
• Fighting for gay marriage is pointless: The fight for gay marriage in the U.S. is based on an unhealthy desire for acceptance. You can never get people to accept something they believe is wrong. And, frankly, I don’t give a flying fuck if the bible thumpers think I’m going to hell when I die. Maybe I am, but if they’re right and their God exists then I’ll pay the price for my life and how I’ve lived it.

  What the leaders in the glbtiq community fail to realize is that the homophobes of the world, both in and out of the community, will never be comfortable with anything but Kinsey 0 heterosexuality. What our vaunted community leaders need to do is what the Republicans do so well: follow the money. They’re so fixed on calling it marriage equality that they’re losing sight of the fact that money is power and that without the benefits of recognized partnership under the law we’ll continue to get screwed over. Although, you’d think that given their focus on the almighty dollar the Republicans would be lobbying for single-sex marriage instead of trying to reform the tax code. After all, more couples where both members work means more money to spend.

• (And while we’re at it) When are the lawyers going to realize we’re already protected under the law and all these stop gap measures are just pissing people off? : We don’t need any special additions to state constitutions or housing laws to protect gay and lesbian people against discrimination. If someone is discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation that person is, by default, discriminated against on the basis of sex (after all, you can’t be a lesbian without being, under the law, female and sex is a protected class under U.S. law).
• With all these movies available on DVD, why no two-channel stereo mix?: I’ll take a plain vanilla DVD that includes an audio option for a two-channel stereo mix over the most loaded DVD that includes nothing but the 5.1 channel surround sound mix. It doesn’t matter how good the rear channel effects are if they’re being shoved out the same two speakers as the rest of the mix. Lazy audio mixers need to realize that while DVD players are cheap, surround sound systems are not. Have a bit of mercy on those of us with only two speakers in the living room.

He died quietly, holding my aunt L.’s hand. Whatever pain he might have been in finally ended at 7:53pm EDT. May he rest in peace my smart, kind, loving uncle.

Charles Enoch Barrick
November 21, 1946 – December 26, 2005

He was loved by many and will be missed greatly and for at least as long as I live.

* “Step down, brother. That’s all” is what my grandmother would tell him as a toddler after she was done feeding him in the highchair. It’s the first thing he ever said.

I’m not sure who is making the programming decisions at ESPN but whomever this person is he needs a sharp blow to the back of the head with a 2×4. When I got home last night ESPN was showing the final match of the world Scrabble® tournement.

Scrabble.

For the love of whomever, it’s a board game! And while I realize that 24 hours are a lot to fill up with sports related programming, not everything that takes skill, like poker, is a sport, and certainly not everything is visually interesting enough to show on television.

I mean, hell, soccer is actually a sport. Show some of that instead. Maybe you might, you know, build up a fan base or something.

My Aunt L. finally faced up to the decision that my uncle is too weak and too debilitated for radiation and chemo. She asked him late last week in one of his more lucid periods, and even with several brain tumors (and there are several) his lucid periods are a lot more lucid than the best of most of us without a brain tumor, to think about radiation and what he wanted. He said he wanted to go home. It also doesn’t help that Monday’s MRI shows that one of the small “lesions” in the back has gotten significantly bigger since they went in and did the biopsy on the big one.

My mother and her sister, Aunt M.T., have been down there since Sunday and will be home tomorrow. It pains me that I couldn’t help my aunt get to this place, that I couldn’t help him get home. Aunt M.T. says that Aunt L. really needed to hear from his sisters that it was OK to skip the radiation, that the path we followed with my grandmother wasn’t necessarily the right path for him. That makes sense, I suppose, after all I am just a kid, right?

So he is home now, set up in the rented hospital bed with the oxygen tank and looked after by hospice care workers and my Aunt L. It seems selfish to sit here and wait when I could be down there (TGF would probably understand if I skipped out after Christmas but she wouldn’t like it much), but I’m not entirely sure I have the strength to be there.

And what would I do anyway but be in the way? If he doesn’t know I love him by now then telling him in the last few weeks of his life isn’t going to do much good. My mother is convinced he won’t see the new year, and my mother is the ultimate pragmatist.

No matter when it happens, at least he is at home now where he wanted to be all along.