weekend preview

Feeling tired. I may not dmt this post since I didn't nap before work. We went out for Dixie Dairy Dreem rather than dinner at home, so things were skewed along with the fact I slept until noon after I got off phone at 5:40 DTM. Maybe I need to sleep six or less hours to merit a nap, but my mind wanted one as I drove to work. Meh, it's my weekend now.
I think I know what's for dinner and I know Mr. Selfridge is scheduled, but the rest of Monday depends on how the stars align. Tuesday only has Agents of SHIELD as a definite maybe. All depends on how the stars align... I would hope to get up and about before the kindergarten bus motors through but I have to be on the ball at 6 DMT to consider that. Well I have coffee made in the Aladdin so I may have a go if the alignment of balls of gas in distant places dictate as much. I just don't want to be sucked into place that makes feel me like a bad parent when time comes unstuck.

Disney and Netflix

Read the other day that Netflix bought license rights to Disney movies starting in 2016, but what caught my eye was that Disney vaults stuff would be available NOW. Sure enough, we have access to things we didn't the day before, which is cool. Then again, stuff is still rather dated no matter how timeless Disney movies can be.

Food

Yesterday was a nice day. I don't recall going outside, but I did watch Nova Science Now on PBS with J. I like watching TV with her, but I usually lack the interest in things beyond football and Breaking Bad of late. Thankfully, J is tolerant of football, and that we have separate areas of the house where we have tvs.

The installment of Nova was about food science. It's a subject I think about a lot. In my opinion, food science is a subject that needs to be hammered daily across the fruited plain. Seriously, so many real world elements of practical knowledge are embedded in the subject.

Economics, chemistry, and nutrition are three important subjects that come to mind instantly for me. Of course, math and logic are embedded into all of those subjects, while art is implied due to the aesthetics of what is visibly edible. In addition to explaining the molecular structure of edible organs, biology explains how the senses of taste and smell receive food.

Everyone needs to eat to live. Though food grows on trees, it is not free. Food requires money to be developed and purchased.

Not all food is created equal, so food has a variety of costs for its various shapes and forms regardless of caloric measurements.

If everyone learned how to eat healthily, contently, and cheaply, then everyone would be able to theoretically live longer, happier, and more productively.

We spend so much time and money on food. A lot of the food is a waste in that it's not good for you. A lot of food goes to waste because it doesn't taste appealing.

I can go on about food for a while, but there's one thing I feel I must say, thus end this post: Everyone should know how to make a burrito.

Cybertrash

Remember Myspace? Did you leave it formally, or did you just forget to logon indefinitely?
I read the headline about Lady Gaga having 71% of her Twitter followers being "fake accounts." When you are talking about millions of unattended accounts, it makes you wonder about cybertrash. It's in Twitter's best interest to have as many unique users as possible for valuation of the company and its marketing reach, but a deluge of redundant content makes searching the internet feel like the pre-Google days where everything  seems to be garbage when you use Google to look up a roommate you have lost track of 10 years ago.

I tell people if I can't find you on twitter or Facebook, then you may as well be dead. Google seems to index those two locales more than anything else.

Trivial thoughts. When I die, I will be abandoning at least 10 email accounts. Spam finds me, so I suppose that I  must exist in some plane of reality, regardless if I'm alive or not.


Is it possible to destroy the internet? What if an EMP  somehow wipes out all digital knowledge, would that throw the world back into the dark ages? 

Sad to think that "57 channels and nothing on" meant something when 57 channels was a lot of channels. Imagine if there was no television from all the satellites becoming somehow fried. Scary, huh?

What is point of watching the news?

I read some articles on the trial, but no where did I see it mentioned that Jerry Sandusky was a closeted gay man. He engaged in sexual relationships with underage boys, so he's a child molester/child rapist. The boys were men when their stories became known. 

Why didn't they tell anyone? Were they afraid of being labeled"gay" in the eyes of peers? Did they want to protect Jerry Sandusky because they cared for him? Why did Joe Paterno let the boys' abuse be covered up? Was JoePa gay? Did JoePa like to have sex with little boys, too? Did Jerry and Joe share a perverted secret?

There are days that I wonder about what is reported in the news. How much of it is verified as fact? How many facts are left out of the story to give biased spin? What questions were asked when doing the story? What questions weren't asked when doing the story? Were the sources biased? Were the sources vetted?

We live in a 24/7 news world where everyone can don the reporter handle and blog about whatever they feel needs to be set loose upon the clutternet.

Amazingly, major news sites have been known to use The Onion as a source for some of their stories.

There's been a lot of spin about who is a bigger offshorer of American jobs, but the term being bandied about is "out sourcer in chief." Most Americans outsource their dry cleaning, food gathering, energy generation, communications network, entertainment, and children's education, so the latter term seems to be a stupid one to be used by President Obama, because using his logic everyone that owns a television is outsourcing, thus evil.

Celebrity voice actors

With K and B being into animated television shows, we hear a lot of the variety of voices crossover from PBS, Nickelodeon, Disney, and Cartoon Network. Was watching WordGirl and I swore that "The Masked Meat Marauder" sounded like Anthony Bourdain, so I had to look it up. Elliott Gould does his voice. For some reason I find it funny.

Cowboys vs. Aliens vs. Rango

There was a time that I took a few film studies classes. I took enough that I could have easily minored in film studies if I had known it existed.

In film class, we always talked about the various themes of the genres. I remember watching The Searchers for the first time and thinking that John Wayne was a jerk. we watched it since it was the definition of a classic Western.

J and I watched Cowboys and Aliens tonight since B was asleep and K was busy on the 'puter. J checked it out of the library when it was first released on DVD, but had to return it before we had a chance to see it. She's been home on vacation, so she got it out again.

It wasn't a bad film. We both liked it. Not something for the whole family, but it reminded me of Rango a bit in that it brought people of various alliances against a common foe.

Neither are of the sort of film that I'd feel compelled to watch if I were flipping stations on a lazy weekend like used to feel compelled to watch films starring Clint Eastwood like Spaghetti Westerns and Unforgiven.

Moments of blah

Calling "blah" a "rut" is one thing but doing something about it is another thing that gets redundant.

Being cheery is not my MO. Not saying I'm surly or overtly moody, but I have my moments of frustration so I have guarded optimism as my standard modus operandi.

I am not outright afraid of failure, I just don't want to wander into realms I'm not familiar and potentially damage prospects before having proper insight into proceeding towards new endeavors.

Again, I'm a cautious explorer rather than running into things like a modern Don Quixote.

Good intentions mean little when the only things in life that matter are results.

I've had a lot of failure with regards to pursuing gainful employment. I've changed my game plan over the years, but my results aren't getting much better. 

I try not to get hung up on things beyond my control. Life isn't always fair, but life is what you make of it.

I am very fortunate to have the wonderful family that I have. Circumstances being what they are, I have no regrets for I already have all that I truly need.

It's easy to feel underwhelmed by the commercialization of life as depicted on television. Television isn't real, but rather it is pulp fiction derived from concentrated perception of happiness of the most shallow variety.
Regardless of the image quality, television is nothing beyond two-dimensional when it comes to emotional depictions due to the detached voyeur element of being a non-participating viewer.

Social media has come to fill that void in some ways, but what has come of it?

Having a blah day

Not saying I am bored or anything, but I've been feeling less than motivated of late. Could be I'm neglecting to take my vitamins regularly, or my thyroid is not happy with me. Who knows?

Dogs days of June, I guess. Baseball season has been filled with ups and downs, and I'm a junky. I can't give it up. I can give up Camels and Bass, but following well compensated athletes, I can't.

Something wrong with following sports when there's much more that is actually important to be accomplished.

I guess that all commercials placed during sporting events are dead giveaways as frivolous wastes of personal income for anyone watching such things knows how to waste time and money to be "entertained" without giving a second thought.

I gave up tv in that I feel no desire to watch things that eventually are available on DVD.

Just have to figure out how to stop being consumed by the radio and internet time bandit. If I sleep through such things, they will still happen without my needing to know about them when they occur. Infovegan concepts transferred towards productive activities that have gainful results beyond the lull of blah when the fix of following a winner doesn't manifest itself in real time and sputters in a numbness of frustration. If only I could program myself like a robot.

FACEBOOK FREEFALL CONTINUES...

What exactly made anyone think that Facebook stock would be a good buy?

• Was it the free games?
• Was it the free means to keep in touch with old flames just in case your marriage got irreconcilable?
• Was it the success of Myspace?

Seriously, it makes money on advertising and selling its users' information for market research. What else does it sell?

I only saw Obama For America ads blanket the site of late, and people aren't fond of their info being used for marketing. Maybe I'm missing something since I only see Facebook as a fad, but something must be wrong in Menlo Park, right?

What's driving people to use it? 

• Cyberstalking? 
• Farmville?
• Chat features that AOL used LAST CENTURY?

 I don't know, since there are plenty of sites out there that do things better than Facebook does, which makes Facebook seem to be a fad. Myspace was better for blogging and sharing music, if I remember correctly, but it turned ghetto once everyone caught on to its existence. Now it's a punchline: Facebook is for people you know. Twitter is for people you wish you knew. Myspace is for people you wish you didn't know.

Facebook simply peaked prior to its IPO, so it had no where to go, but down unless it bought up/merged with Yahoo and Microsoft to compete against Google.

Mergers don't exactly work all the time as AOL/Timer-Warner clearly indicated.

The IPO made sense for Facebook, because it needed capital to grow/develop beyond its current rut.

• It costs a lot to run servers to allow up to 900 million users access to their online Facebook content.
• Facebook has a number of issues with hackers, so they have to prevent outside parties from invading their servers. 

Off course, I'm just saying what is on my mind regarding the subject, so who am I to say it was a bad buy or not? All I remember about first learning about stock is from looking at the daily paper as a kid. I liked Coke and McDonalds, but the stocks never did a whole lot from my vantage point since they were big and established companies that stayed about the same + or - a few cents. They mostly went down day to day when I looked, so I figured just because I liked their products that I didn't need to own a piece of the company.

Stock Market needs to be taught in basic high school education. People need to understand how corporations are developed and structured. Some people assume things about the market since they see how successful people get rich quick and young, so they relate the markets to playing the lotto or outright thievery. They get involved for the wrong reasons, and nothing good comes of their endeavor..

Critical thinking

When I declared my major, the first official class was Critical Writing.
In hindsight, I don't recall being critical, but I remember writing on novels, plays, poetry, and essays. I wrote a few papers, and I was glad to turn them in and to be done with them until I could resubmit for an improved grade.
English was my weakest subject in high school. It wasn't a competitive subject, so I didn't really try as hard.
I never felt the need to read a book outside of school until I was 15. I liked various comic books, but I was never into them like the fan boys you see on  Big Bang Theory. It was mostly in response to collecting the Marvel Universe cards or to the Tim Burton Batman movies. I liked Frank Castle and The Caped Crusader the most for they didn't have superpowers and had a cool costumes. Dolph Lundgren and George Clooney ruined the characters as far as I was concerned.
I ceased following such things until X-Men and Spider-Man came out when I was an adult, but I never bought the books. Collecting was over-rated and over-priced. Like all good things, Marvel movies ruined  themselves with over-hyped titles.
Comic book heroes are different than when i was a kid. Story lines mean nothing. Watching Batman: The Brave and the Bold has introduced me to characters from DC I never knew existed. Seriously, I didn't know there were three different Flashes. Doesn't matter, I guess with them being fantasy, but there's something inherently wrong with George Lucas re-inventing the Star Wars Trilogy by digitally enhancing thus destroying my childhood memories.
I learned in English 273 that Star Wars was technically a Western. As a child, it was simply a story that was cool, but as an adult, I could think of it critically. Over thinking a movie based on nothing is another way to kill one's childhood memories.
When is too young to develop critical thinking?
Regardless of thinking critically or not, I have no interest in seeing The Avengers. I never got into Iron Man, the Hulk, Cap'n America, or Thor, but I wouldn't mind seeing the Marvel Zombies made into a movie.

Ignorance is bliss

Ever get the feeling the world is getting nuttier?
With the explosion of television channels and the internet, there's simply too much information out there for healthy consumption. I read Clay Johnson's Information Diet a couple months ago, and it really got me thinking about how uneasy we have gotten when it comes to how we react to any variety of news.
It seems like everyone is covering the news for the sake of generating revenue rather than providing actual news. So rather than having slow news days, the news makes the mundane into something it is not, News.
For this reason amongst others, I don't watch television regularly. I'm in the dark on a lot of pop culture matters, but I follow people on Twitter. (The things said on television can be heard and misunderstood by the little ears of my children much easier than the 140 characters remitted by those I follow.)  I google things I don't understand, and I often find myself saying "Really, people are concerned enough about 'X' enough to tweet about it?" (Yes, I get the irony of this post, but I have more free time on my hands than I care to have.)
From what I've been seeing online the last couple days, I'm wondering about how many parents will explain to their children that Bo, the First Dog , is not going to be eaten by the President if the latter isn't re-elected in November.

Disclaimer: I stopped watching television in September 2008 when Hurricane Ike knocked out our power for 10 days. It was a cold turkey thing.