All I know is that it was much bigger and less capable than my current computer. But – then again – it wasn’t designed to monopolize and commoditize my attention.
In summary: bigger, slower, less capable, but less sinister.
A self-administered lobotomy.
Having to watch MELANIA.
The state of the modern world. Increasingly, I feel humanity has jumped the shark.
Years ago, I heard someone wise use the term “information inflation” to describe the fact that we were so awash in information that each piece of information became virtually valueless. [Not to mention that with so much information it becomes harder to distinguish quality information from junk information or quasi-information.] I think we are now treading water in an ocean of [mostly shit] information and quasi-information, and the exhaustion is setting in.
This makes people crave simplicity, which would be great except that we often try to simplify the complexities that must be accepted to have a bit of tolerance and humility.
[The one thing I learned in years of education involving policy is whenever anyone says, “This problem would be so easy to fix, all you’ve got to do is ____________.” that person has no idea what he is talking about and is completely blind to the challenges, complexities, feedback effects, and externalities of the issue at hand.]
I would gladly watch free-form survival games, such as the Hunger Games or the Running Man, if such sports were actually available in my viewing area. As for playing, I like darts.
Be fearful. Since I don’t play the usual lottery, the only kind I could win is the kind that they use to draft people for fighting alien invaders.
I’ve always gotten bogged down in Joyce’s Ulysses. There are some books you need to be in the right headspace to attack.
I should probably read the Bible and the Koran, speaking of literature I’ve never had the mental energy to take up.
1.) The Feast of St. Nicholas of Myra: It’s like Secret Santa, but each family member draws a name from a hat, and they then abscond with a prized position of the person whose name they drew and pawn it at a local pawn shop. They then hide the receipt in the house. Family members each have 15 minutes to find the receipt. If they find it, they get their shit back. If they do not, the “Secret Santa” gets to keep the cash.
2.) Hide the weasel: You hide a hungry weasel in someone’s room without telling them, and they have to find it before they get a toe bit off.
3.) Candle lighting roulette: candles are set in a revolving candelabra, which is given a spin. Family members take turns stepping forward to light the candle that is closest to them. One candle hides an M-80 firecracker which explodes to spatter the unlucky family member with hot wax.
Nothing that involves wearing a leisure suit, or a suit of any kind. Except, perhaps, a swimsuit or my birthday suit, or playing a suit in a game of cards… What were we talking about?
Exhibition: Bigfoot! (a.k.a. The Sasquatch Museum.) It’s not very close, but it is by far the closest of this nation’s many Bigfoot and Sasquatch related collections.
1.) When getting on an elevator with strangers, I like to look at the little inspection placard with consternation and say, “Oh no… oh no, oh no!” When someone asks what’s the problem, I point to the inspector’s name and say, [for example] “John Smith is a hack. He wouldn’t know a frayed cable from a firehose. WE’RE DOOMED!”
2.) Sometimes I’ll stare at the grates on a city sidewalk. When someone asks whether I lost my keys, I’ll say, “No I saw a Leprechaun run down there with a pot of gold. I’m waiting for it to come back out so that I can murder and rob it.”
3.) Alternatively, I stare up at the sky, and when someone stops to see what I’m looking at, I say, “It’s a lovely day to be hurtling through space at two million kilometers per hour, isn’t it?”
5.) I like to skip the number four, and when someone asks why I say because it’s bad luck in China and Japan because the number four is pronounced the same as death. When the person points out that I’m not in China or Japan, I confidently bark, “That’s your opinion!” and rapidly walk off as their consternation and / or infuriation grows.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 