There's a nice video piece -- hard to call it a clip, since it's over an hour long -- of Stephen Colbert at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He drifts in and out of character, flirts with people in the audience, presents the school a large portrait of Bill O'Reilly, and talks seriously about the show and its lack of political intent/influence.
Until I went to college in 1997, I had rarely (and never seriously) used a computer. This is partly a matter of timing and partly one of circumstance. My family didn't have one. My aunt's could do word processing and print signs and banners -- at least, that's all I knew how to make it do. The required computing class in high school was a glorified typing class on an old version of MS Works for DOS. The internet and email were toys; most of the computers at school weren't wired anyways. So the tech boom was something that occured somewhere at the horizon of my knowledge and interests. Something was going on, and some people knew a little bit about it.
I had the good fortune to have a roommate in college who (among his other virtues) both had a computer and knew a little bit about it. Our dorm was one of the first on MSU's campus to be wired with an ethernet connection. Soon, Chad's computer was indispensable to me. I typed all my papers (I had handwritten almost everything for high school, including my college application essays), I searched the corners of the internet, I wrote long daily rants and emailed them to everyone I knew (this is probably before blogging was invented), I stayed up late nights emailing back-and-forth with the girl I loved (I never really glommed onto IMing until it was incorporated into Gmail), and I figured out how to play old Nintendo games and how to beat the expert level of Minesweeper in less than two minutes. (All-time best: 69 seconds.) The discovery of the computer was like so many things that happened to me when I went to college: empowering, individuating, maturing, yet full of irresponsible energy.
I'd had use of a hand-me-down for two years prior, but I finally bought my own computer when I went to graduate school in 2001. I moved to Chicago, leaving family, friends, and bank account behind. My Dell was one of the first computers to ship with Windows XP. I got into mp3s and freeware -- again a little late, but better than never. This was when I first started using the internet to connect with the world -- reading the New York Times online, following Pitchfork and Arts & Letters Daily, doing my banking, paying my bills. More and more, I crossed over into the virtual world, where more and more of what I did for work and play was dependent on computing and the internet. To a certain degree, this happened to everyone -- but in retrospect, my own change feels sharper than most. This was when I also learned more about the guts of the computer and started modifying it -- adding memory, swapping hard drives, network and USB cards, a DVD burner. I created my first, second, and third web pages. I started using Amazon to send Christmas gifts home.
Through all of this, I've been a Windows user and almost always worked at a Desktop. But when I'd finally had it with the limitations of what I could do with a five-year-old desktop. I recently bought a new MacBook Pro laptop. I don't know whether it's the fact that it's a new machine, the superiority of Mac over Windows, the rewards and challenges of learning the ins and outs of a new system (even after all these years of school, there's nothing I like better than to learn something new), or the freedom of being able to lay on my stomach or sit at my couch and type.
But it's fantastic again.
Since I moved and lost cable, there are only a few TV shows I still watch regularly: "Simpsons" and "Seinfeld" reruns in syndication, "Meet the Press" on Sunday mornings, "The View" (what can I say -- I almost always have an hour to kill before noon, and I like Rosie O'Donnell), the surprisingly good kids' cartoon "Jacob Two-Two," and, a mainstay since I started college in 1997, "Late Night with Conan O'Brien."
Which brings me to www.hornymanatee.com.
If you haven't heard about it by now, here's the story: Conan does a sketch on bizarre college mascots. One of them is FSU's "Webcam Manatee," featuring a guy in a manatee suit dancing around parodically-provocatively. Conan makes an offhand, ad-libbed reference to the Webcam Manatee appearing on a then-fictitious website called hornymanatee.com.
The next night on air, Conan reveals the aftermath. When the sketch aired, NBC freaks out. What if there's a real "horny manatee" site that Conan inadvertently promoted on air? Even if the site doesn't already exist, someone could register the domain and put inappropriate material on it -- Conan/NBC could still be held liable, in terms of bad press if nothing else.
The standard move would have been to cut or mute the reference to hornymanatee.com in post-production. No harm, no foul. Instead, NBC aired the episode as is, bought the rights to hornymanatee.com, threw up some porn-parody content -- and got over 3 million hits after Conan advertised the site (for real this time) on the air.
NYT has a nice recounting of the story here. And you can always see for yourself.
From the AP sports wire:
" [Vinny] Testaverde, who turned 43 Monday, was the first overall pick by Tampa Bay in the 1987 draft. He has played 19 NFL seasons and has 269 touchdown passes, eighth in NFL history, and is sixth with 45,252 yards passing."
I started following football as a kid in the mid-to-late 1980s. I was seven years old when Vinny Testaverde came into the league, and he was already a joke. He made a lot of money, threw a lot of interceptions, and played for a team that wore bright orange that never won.
The only team that was worse wore pink, and they were the New England Patriots. Which happens to be Testaverde's new team.
Testaverde had a brilliant college career at the University of Miami. But Miami quarterbacks had mixed success in the pros, and each generation seemed like a parody of the one before: Jim Kelly --> Bernie Kosar --> Vinny Testaverde?
It's stunning to me that Drew Bledsoe, who I still think of as a young quarterback, has now been in the NFL for thirteen years. But it's downright astonishing that Testaverde has now been to two Pro Bowls, and has become -- statistically, if nothing else -- one of the best quarterbacks of his generation.
I turned 27 a few weeks ago. Is it strange that I find myself most affected by both how many professional sports athletes are younger than I am -- and just how old athletes not much older than myself are beginning to seem?
South Africa, folks: Apartheid to gay marriage in less than twenty years.
South Africa: where the minister of health tells people AIDS can be cured with garlic and beetroot.
South Africa: where, until the 1990s, sexual contact between members of different races was prohibited by law. (Sodomy and miscegenation laws were overturned around the same time.)
We have got to get with it.
File under random whimsy. From Gmail:
"All messages marked spam have been deleted forever."
There's something about the balance and weight of it, that just feels right. Not just techno-speak. It tells the truth.
On the other hand, it's unexpectedly funny. The purported finality is absurd. If your email account is anything like mine, you're going to have to delete all messages marked spam "forever" in about five minutes. (And indeed, I've got more spam in my box since I began typing.) You could take the "forever" not as literal truth (that deleted spam messages are unrecoverable -- is this true? Where do they go?) but as ironic commentary on our deepest desires - that is, our deepest email desires - that we be done, once and for all, with messages we will not read, that we no longer wish to receive. We want spam to be deleted forever -- like a theological salvation, we want to be delivered from spam -- yet spam, like sin, is constantly renewed, something from which we find only momentary relief, if any at all.
Like all good lapsed Catholics, I believe in sin but not salvation. Likewise, I believe in spam. You could say that I only believe in spam. The "spam" folder gives us the assurance - perhaps false - that our other messages are NOT spam, that they demand at least reading and sorting, if not a reply. We can believe that the message for which we've been waiting, the good news, is on its way, because we have a sure means of detecting false prophets. (If anyone calls you to the desert or the inner rooms with promises of blemish-free skin, low mortgage rates, and sexual enhancements, do not believe it, for even the elect can be deceived.) But deliverance remains, perhaps always, only an outstanding promise, a possibility. Spam, and falsehood, is the reality.
Electronic letters, waiting for deliverance, and upon deliverance, acceptance, deleted, forever. Irretrievable. What never existed, had only little reality if any reality at all, shall exist even less. The power of purgation, of liberation or nullification. And what is done, is done -- the foregoing of the possibility of retrieval, that what was lost can be found again, regardless of our decisions, wherever it might hide, is what we bind ourselves to -- that here, if nowhere else, is certainty, finality; that these messages, if no others, I will never see again. Yet of course you will -- in fact, only these messages will stay constant, as jobs change, as friends, as online retailers shift and sway and fold, as email addresses and online profiles become defunct. Spam endures.
It's a negative theology. Only spam, by having no positive characteristics that we can attribute to any genuine earthly message, is real. Only spam is always at the top of your inbox -- present in this absence. We believe in spam precisely because we delete it. We ride its wave, and the wave rides us in return.
Eh, maybe not.
Last week, the New York Times ran an article about Detroit's mildly successful body collection industry, which prompted my first Short Schrift post in months.
1) "It’s very touristy. This is a neighborhood where they sell single bananas in the food stores."Hint: one of the sentences actually comes from the article about Detroit.
2) When her marriage came to an abrupt end two years ago, she found this apartment, a condo she sublets for just under $3,000 a month and which she described as “dangerously close to Bergdorf’s.”
3) “On the Upper West Side, everyone knew everyone,” she said of her early years there. “It was too much! I thought: ‘I’ve got a lot of friends. I don’t want to fill my friend list right now. I want to go someplace where I don’t know anyone.’ I wanted to land on a different planet.”
4) Ms. Pierson, executive creative director at 141 Worldwide, a subsidiary of Ogilvy & Mather, is also a writer and has completed her fourth book, “Males, Nails, and Sample Sales: Everything a Woman Must Know to be Smarter, Savvier, Saner Sooner,” now available from Simon & Schuster.
5) Snowy days and thunderstorms did her in. “Once we lost power right before the Tonys, and I wanted to kill myself,” she said.
6) "I get to know the carriage horses. Just seeing them everyday and saying hi is fabulous.”
7) So delighted is she to be back in the city, in fact, that she even rhapsodizes about the garbage trucks that crowd onto her street every night. Perhaps it helps that the trash comes from the particularly well-heeled, out the back doors of the Plaza and Ritz-Carlton.
8) “White people kill themselves. Black people kill each other. Chinese people don’t die.”
Who reads Short Schrift anymore? Unless you've left it on your RSS reader for sentimental reasons, or you're wondering whether its author has dropped off the face of the planet, nobody. That's what happens when you don't write for months on end.
I've had good excuses. I moved house twice, for complicated reasons better left unsaid. I fell into a deep dank hole of depression that turned out to be probably food poisoning. (Still coming out of that one.) I started classes again and became busier than I'd been in a couple of years.
So you'd think that a renewal in posts would be the result of some happy event that caused me to change my mind, refresh my point of view, renew my sense of sharing and togetherness with the world.
Wrong wrong wrong.
I'm blogging because as miserable as I feel these days, as little hope as I sometimes have for the world in which we live, I have one thing to be thankful for.
I don't live in Detroit.
How could a city like Detroit get worse? It's almost hard to believe. But there are so many nuggets in this bizarre New York Times article -- who wrote this? why'd it get printed? does anyone in New York or anywhere in the world care anymore about Detroit? or do they just like to kick it when it's down -- that have to be shared, with anyone who knows, or might know.
Like: "80 percent of people die naked and 70 percent die in the toilet. That means most people die naked in the toilet. I can’t explain it."
Or: “White people kill themselves. Black people kill each other. Chinese people don’t die.”
Possibly the best: "It was the height of summer and people were supposed to be outside and killing each other, dropping dead from sunstroke, etc. Mr. Thomas wondered how he was going to feed his children the next week."
My god. What's happened to us?
