Posts in the Culture Category

A couple of weeks back, I threw out a relatively strong opinion on civilians who drive Hummers.  At the time, I didn’t back up what I said, and fortunately I don’t have to now.  Seth Stevenson has explained it for me in his analysis of a recent Hummer ad.  The three points in the middle of the analysis very nicely sum up my perceptions of Hummer owners.  Just past that, Seth says:

Of course, some will love the shameless Hummer kid and his take-no-prisoners, win-at-all-costs individualism. Not coincidentally, these are the sort of people who buy Hummers…. The Hummer kid is a me-first kid, and the Hummer is without doubt a me-first vehicle.

That ties it up all together for me, providing a near-perfect summary of reasons behind my opinion.  I’m all for individualism, but not win-at-all-costs individualism.  Sometimes victory is not worth the cost, and that’s usually when your victory damages those around you.  Society plays an important role in all our lives, except of course for those of you living completely off the land—that is, no electricity, sewer, or heat utilities, and absolutely no trips to the grocery store for food—and those of us who benefit from society owe it some consideration and preservation in return.  Express yourself as you see fit, believe what you want to believe, take chances and chart your own course… as long as it isn’t needlessly harmful to others, or to society as a whole.  Have some consideration for the people around you from time to time, and take the time to ponder how your actions might affect them, positively or negatively.

In other words, be a responsible adult—which, so far as I can tell, civilian Hummer owners simply aren’t, and I find that irks me.  I’m not about to call for the abolition of Hummer ownership or anything like that: everyone has the freedom to display their short-sighted wastefulness and arrogance as much as they like.  I just wish we (as a whole) were a little more grown-up than that.

And don’t even get me started on people who own more than one Hummer, let alone five.

So that’s why I said what I said, and why I’ve been careful to make it clear that I’m talking about civilians who drive Hummers (not all SUVs, although I think some of them are excessive as well).  They’re incredibly useful vehicles for the military, forest rangers, and other people who have to go where there are no roads and not much in the way of flat terrain.  It’s the people who think they need a forty-ton vehicle to pick up a double latté at the Starbucks down the street who could use a good whack with a clue-by-four.

My views on the relationship betwen the individual and society also explain why I have little patience for Americans who complain about the cost of gasoline and our income tax rates, and even less patience for people who think the way to revive an economy is through reduced federal taxation and increased federal spending.  Pick one or the other, chief.  Otherwise you end up with debts large enough to, you know, crush an economy.

• Hummering Past the Graveyard was published on Saturday, December 20th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been no replies.

It’s been a month since I announced my foray into consulting, and it’s been a busy but rewarding month.  I did of course finally get the official site online, but also put in time working with Macromedia, created a three-day training course for the staff at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and shorter training sessions for two different universities.  Between that and preparing to chair a track (and present twice) at the Seybold-WOW Web Design and Development conference, I wasn’t lacking for things to do.  So much for using my newfound freedom to lounge around eating Cheetos and playing XBox games.

Not that I would anyway, to be honest.  Kat can’t even take me on relaxing vacations in tropical venues, because after two or three days of not doing anything productive, my head implodes.

Someone let me know that Containing Floats hit #9 on Popdex as well as Blogdex, so thanks to all you linkers out there!  Y’all are the greatest.

Since we’re mentioning the greatest, we went to see “Weird Al” Yankovic play the Taste of Cleveland festival.  I say “the greatest” not because I think he’s the greatest musician of all time, but because I completely agree with what a friend of mine said about him:  he’s out there working it every night like it’s the only show he’ll do all year.  That’s professionalism at its finest, and I respect that no end.  Al always makes it a fun show, a high-energy show, and the only way you can leave disappointed is if you’re a humorless sourpuss in the first place.  In which case, what the hell were you doing at a Weird Al show?

And now that “weird” has come up, you might remember I mentioned that I’d received time-traveler spam a while back.  Wired has the whole story behind that spam, and as you might expect it’s a bit odd.  I feel so special to have scooped Wired… especially since I inadvertently fooled them three and a half years back.

• When the Going Gets Weird… was published on Monday, September 1st, 2003.
• It was assigned to the Consulting and Culture categories.
• There have been no replies.

Everyone complains about Jakob Neilsen’s site design, but nobody ever does anything about it—until now.  Bob Sawyer has announced a “redesign useit.com” contest that’s being held with the blessing of Dr. Neilsen himself.  Dare we call it Designer’s Eye For the Usable Guy?  The contest closes at the end of October, so you have some time to really do a great job.

The trends described in the Time article “Believe It, Or Not” bother me quite a bit.  The last paragraph in particular seems chilling to me.  I’ve no objection to religion, as long as it isn’t being shoved in my face, and frankly I think more people could use a strong moral/ethical core.  It’s the decline in intellectualism and critical thinking, and the view that one can’t be moral without a belief in God, that trouble me deeply.  I can say with absolute certainty the latter is patently false, unless one defines morality to be solely derived from religious teachings, in which case either the term needs to be expanded or we need to ask a different question.  For example: “Is it necessary to believe in God to be an ethical person?  A good person?”

As I looked at this and the last several entries, I see that most of my recent posting has been personal in nature.  The CSS has fallen more or less by the wayside, which also bothers me.  I’m going to take a week off and think about the balance or technical content versus personal commentary, and how I want this site to evolve as I move forward with the consulting business.

• Grand Designs was published on Saturday, August 16th, 2003.
• It was assigned to the CSS and Culture categories.
• There have been no replies.

The advent of Independence Day (U.S.) caused me to reflect on freedom and what it means, and I was going to say a few things about that when I started thinking about the recent court rulings on the Pledge of Allegiance and school vouchers, and that took me in a whole new direction… one that went on for a while.  So I turned it into its own short essay.  Take it for whatever it’s worth to you.  Finally, proof that on occasion I do think about stuff other than CSS!

• On Freedom was published on Thursday, July 4th, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been no replies.

As some of you know, I have a weekly radio show on a local community/college radio station.  We’ve been Webcasting for a while now.  So yes, this is going to be another rant against the recent ruling of the Copyright Arbitration Royalty Panel (or CARP; feel free to rearrange letters as you like).

It isn’t necessarily the fees that I mind so much, although they obviously could be ruinous to any highly popular Webcaster.  They also don’t make a lot of sense, since we don’t have to pay anyone to broadcast our air signal to (potentially) about two million people in the greater Cleveland metropolitan area.  No, what I find so objectionable are the parts that regulate what you can play in a given period of time.  For example (and thanks to Jim Gilliland for pointing me to this information), per Section 114(j)(13): In any three hour period, [a Webcaster] may not play more than:

• three songs from the same record, two consecutively
• four songs by the same artist, three consecutively
• four songs from the same box set (even if “various artists”), three consecutively

On my most recent show, as it happens, I played a number of album sides and live recordings.  When you’re a non-profit, non-commercial radio station staffed by community volunteers, you can do that kind of thing.  My playlist included:

• Duke Ellington: “Small Band Shorts (1928-1935)” – Side 1 (soundtrack to the short film Black and Tan Fantasy)
• Louis Prima: “1944” – Side 1 (recording of a live broadcast from 1944)
• “From Spirituals To Swing” – Side 3 (concert recordings of various artists at Carnegie Hall, 1938-1939)
• Benny Goodman: “On the Air (1938-1939)” – Disc 1, Tracks 2-11 (recordings of radio broadcasts from 1938-1939)

Under the new CARP rules, I spent two hours violating the law with that show.  The same would be true of my D-Day special, which draws fairly heavily on the compilation “Swing Out To Victory.”  If I can’t come up with enough war-themed recordings on different records or compilations, then I’ll have to discontinue the D-Day special, which has become an annual tradition and always draws appreciative calls from listeners.  Ditto for my occasional broadcasts of the first Benny Goodman and Duke Ellington concerts at Carnegie Hall.  History?  Eh, who needs it?

Of course, all this becomes moot if we stop Webcasting.  So we have a choice: interesting and diverse music or worldwide reach.  One gets the feeling that the media conglomerates, who obviously chose reach over diversity, are trying to impose that same choice on the rest of us.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m all for honoring the rights of artists, and seeing that they’re fairly compensated for their work.  The CARP ruling isn’t the way to do it.  For that matter, neither are the contracts offered by media conglomerates—but I suppose that’s a whole different story.

• Saturday, 22 June 2002 was published on Saturday, June 22nd, 2002.
• It was assigned to the Culture and Politics categories.
• There have been no replies.

Memorial Day came and went without any real incident, and that includes going to see Pearl Harbor, which we didn’t do on purpose.  Neither Kat nor I has any real interest in the movie, although I expect that I’ll rent it (or better yet: borrow it from the library up the street!) when it comes out on disc, skip to chapter before the battle sequence starts, watch the attack, and then hit the eject button.  Well, okay, maybe I’ll watch the sequence twice before I eject it.

I have to say that living within a block of a library which has DVDs for checkout is really darned cool.  I’ve at long last seen Casablanca and the entirety of His Girl Friday, for example, and also caught up with some of Ken Burns’ Jazz, U-571, and Topsy-Turvy, to name some recent titles.  All free!  Publicly supported libraries: an idea whose time should never go.  Bruce Sterling agrees, so you know it must be true.  If I’m going to be taxed by the government, and of course I am, libraries and public schools are kind of thing which I want my money to buy.  Wouldn’t it be cool if we could check boxes on our tax returns indicating where we want our tax money to be spent?  Especially if the converse were true: anyone getting a refund should check boxes indicating the programs which should have to pay for the refund.  I’m not suggesting that these choices be binding, at least not at the start, but it would be a fascinating snapshot of what Americans consider to be important.

Geek moment: DSL arrived in the Manor Meyer last week, and my home networking hardware came in today.  Next up: wiring the house, setting up a Linux box to run the show, and migrating Web and mail services onto it.  By the time it’s all done, hopefully before the week is out, Kat might actually be able to send e-mail again…

• Tuesday, 29 May 2001 was published on Tuesday, May 29th, 2001.
• It was assigned to the Culture category.
• There have been no replies.