The Molloy-verse - The junk drawer for my interwebs

What is It?

 

There was a thought provoking op-ed piece by William Gibson in the Times yesterday about Google. In light of all the product announcement hysteria that went on yesterday, the measured wonderment of what Google is and what it might be offered a stark contrast to consumerism cult of Apple. Apple is making more stuff for us to buy. Google is changing how we fundamentally interact with information and the rest of the world. 

Lately it seems that every article is pronouncing the death of something old or traditional. The death of the book, the death of television, even the death of the internet. These are the easy pronouncements. Decrying big change that you'll never be called to prove or illustrate moving forward is easy. I've grown weary of the hype machine that seems to be flipping stories and ideas as quickly as pancakes. The idea that everything new is good and exciting. Everything old unnecessary and bad. The bravado that comes with creating the fiction of the future with clumsy fingers.

Gibson, however, deftly writes with uncertainty. Gibson's most powerful line is shrouded in ambiguity:

We have yet to take Google's measure.

Maybe that's what we could all use for now.  A little uncertainty. A little more consideration over time. A pace that allows for the true measure of ideas to unfold and our brains the time and luxury of reacting in a meaningful way.

On Birthdays

So tomorrow I turn 38.  I remember when I was a kid the excitement that marked the approach of my birthday.  What would the day bring?  What would I get?  A whirlwind of emotions followed by the giant let down the next day that school started in a little under two weeks. As I got older, for a while I thought birthdays were something to be feared. While they are a sign of getting older, I'm finding that they're not that big of a deal anymore. They're essentially another day.  There isn't anything really big that I want anymore, no ponies or themed parties to get me all riled up. I greatly prefer a quiet day spending time with people I love and doing things I enjoy. Plus I'd rather pour that big event energy into making sure my son gets his heart's desire for his birthday.

This year we'll celebrate by having a mystery date night (which in itself is exciting) and dinner at a local pizzeria with my parents tomorrow night. Throw in a little baseball on TV tomorrow afternoon and what could be better? It got me to realize that as I get older, the big thrill has lost some of its shine. The thrill comes more in those everyday moments that my son provides or the quiet times with my wife doing things we enjoy. I think I'll get more of a thrill this weekend from our quiet plans than I would a party, a big expensive steak, etc. 

It all got me to thinking about life in general. I told a friend that today is the 20th anniversary of us moving into the same freshman floor in college. Essentially a bunch of semi-crazed, fully stupid 18 year olds running around like morons. While we're as snarky as ever, his response kind of said it all quite nicely:

That's just an unreasonably long period of time. But I'm sort of happier being older, in a strange way

I couldn't agree more. So happy birthday to the rest of you born on August 21 (I'm looking at you Kenny Rogers). I hope you all get what you want for the day.  I'm happy to say that I have already.  

Growing up Star Wars

via flickr.com

Someone asked me what movie defined Generation X and immediately the first thing that came to mind was Star Wars. To further make the point, check out the Flickr group: Growing up Star Wars. I liked this picture specifically because it combined my favorite two toys as a kid: Star Wars and the train set.

New Trend: Please Shut Up

Too many consultants, news people, and infotainment sources are trying to spot the next new trend.  They want to be first. They want to create it so they can show the world how savvy and astute they are. The problem? Too often they're just full of shit.

New trends come about because people (either individually or collectively) begin to behave in the same way and then feed off of others behaving like that.  It's kind of like the wave at a football game. One drunken idiot (the forward thinker in this case) spends half the game screaming at everyone to stand up and do the wave.  At some point, the entire stadium does it a few times and then it dies down because we all grow sick of it. Chances are, you have no idea how it started and barely notice when it ends. But you may or may not take part in a little group think.

The Internet seems to have given voice to too many of these drunken idiots, I mean self-actualized forward thinkers. Too many experts are pointing at every new thing they see as a new trend (thus the picture I retrieved from a twitter feed proclaiming "New trend: fun socks for men." God I hope not). Even brands are trying to push their crappy wares onto consumers and claim them to be a trend. Occasionally consumers are duped into adopting these trends.

The best trends are the ones that happen organically. By the time the experts and Fortune 500 companies notice them, they're already played out. 

Essay on Fascism

My wife posted a link to a great essay by Umberto Eco regarding Facism on her blog today. It's an easy read and enlightening in many ways (especially when you consider many of Obama's critics claim he is a facist). That being said, point number three seems to be the philosophy du jour in America today.  As people decry a liberal elite that doesn't exist, one line from Eco's piece jumped out at me:

Thinking is a form of emasculation

It reminds me of the seventh grade.

Can We Kill the 24 Hour News Cycle?

I'm all for getting news, especially breaking news, in a timely fashion. I love getting sports highlights as they happen. But I was wonder, can we please kill the 24 hour news cycle? It's now officially doing more harm than good. The whole story surrounding Shirley Sherrod should show us that the speed we use to either get news out or make decisions with that news is too fast. We cannot process everything instantly and get it right. Moore's law does not apply to humans.

For those of you not familiar by now, a conservative blogger cut up a video, showed it on Fox News, and accused Ms. Sherrod of some warped form of racism. So the blogger (who clearly has an agenda) and Fox News (who never seems to just report a story) link up to call foul because the Tea Party was called racist lately. The problem? They doctored the video and ruined an African American woman's life to push their agenda. So they fought the charge of racism with a racist practice.

Racism is more than just insulting another person or making them drink from a separate water fountain. The Tea Party has a sizable racist element that attacks the President using racial imagery, slurs, and racist cultural references meant to demean him and an entire ethnicity. The Tea Party movement also refuses to distance themselves from what they consider a fringe element. This attack on Ms. Sherrod, claiming she is a racist when in fact she was telling a story of overcoming a racial bias, is patently racism. It's calling out an individual based on the color of their skin and totally warping their words to accuse her of something she did not do. 

By reacting to every news story without first investigating the source or the motivations of those breaking the story we allow this kind of warped "logic" to take over. It would be nice if a news source actually took the time to research and tell the entire story instead of everyone wanting to break it first.

Yoga and Neal Pollock

A little earlier this year due to high stress levels and some health issues, I decided to try to find a way to take better care of myself. I wanted to add something that would reduce stress but nothing crazy like joining a gym. For a few years, my wife had been encouraging me to take a yoga class. I was always resistant for some reason, but I thought why not? So after two classes I'd describe as "old lady" yoga (lots of napping, farting, and lying still under blankets), I found a class that for eight weeks or so did the trick. 

For the most part I thought I was the only non-hippy, sarcastic, asshole doing Yoga. Then we discovered that Neal Pollock was raising money to go to Yoga school via Kickstarter. It was all in support of his soon to be released book Stretch: The Unlikely Making of a Yoga Dude. As part of our support, Neal was kind enough to send us a number of books, including his soon to be released tale of his Yoga awakening. 

It all starts when the New York Times calls him fat. Role in pop culture references including Star Trek II, The X-Men, Star Wars, and the rest of my nerd sphere and you get a writer who goes from being a 35-ish sarcastic writer to a 40-ish sarcastic yogi. Not only is the book inspiring (by taking some of the weird/scary/unknown out of yoga) but it's one hell of a good read too. Neal's journeys take him everywhere from doing yoga with a small group of dedicated people within walking distance of his house to conferences in San Francisco to Thailand. Through the course of the book you get a clear picture of how he's trying to be his "best self" more often. To tap into that attitude and bring it into his day to day life. At the same time he writes with humor, tenderness, and the Gen-X sarcasm you'd expect from him.

It's totally worth the $10 or so on Amazon. 

Look Up

I was looking through some pictures and noticed that I've taken some shots while looking up.  I didn't have a lot to say today so I thought I'd share some photographs instead. They're all over here in case you want to look at some more.  Maybe I'll do a series for Look Down too.

               
Click here to download:
Look_Up.zip (2192 KB)

Killing the Past Doesn't Help the Future (or Why I'm Tired)

Why does every article I read lately feature the death of something or the end of another thing? We keep hearing that the past is dead. Murdered by progress.  Good riddance because we'll never need it again. The hipster hordes want to stamp out the imagery and completely remake the world in their image and ideal. Is this the insecurity of my generation coming to the forefront? Or is it a younger generation living entirely in the now and wanting to stamp out nostalgia?

 If it's the end of everything like newspapers, what will happen to those scenes in movies when the spy is sitting on a bench, passing time reading a newspaper. You know the one, the spy is waiting for his next meet up (maybe he never lowers the paper) or is using the newspaper to conceal his identity. If we kill the past, a newspaper might make the spy stand out as suspicious. It's interesting that in fiction, various technologies always look forced or dated. The iPad in someone's hands in a movie today might be this generation's version of the 70's porno mustache. Does our culture really need to move that fast and constantly be up to date?

Can we all agree to stop with the hipster aesthetic? I don't need everything to be the apex of design and functionality. It all makes me tired. Is the need to murder the past borne from the same hell that gave us jumpsuits, disco, and the pet rock? Is it the cousin of the Swatch watch and acid wash jeans?

It's accelerating. Maybe not in the way Douglas Coupland imagined, but things are getting faster and faster. On the one hand we're awash in information. It's delivered to us in both raw and curated forms: Information Democracy. On the other hand, the zombies haven't vanished. They're still here cycling through meaningless trends and the need to be first (at a much quicker pace). Instead of raising the discourse, the fad-hogs are just hungrier. The rest of us? We're just more tired. While we never worked to keep up, it's become more of an arduous task to fight it off.

So as I hear more often that I'm weird for not liking soccer or NASCAR, for continuing to read paper (instead of digital or nothing at all), for desiring open solutions to technology and information gathering (instead of choosing design or a fear of technology witchery), I'll just wish it would all slow down again. Just a little.

What do I want/believe in?
  • Not being available 24 hours a day
  • Apple is just another big tech company and is sometimes not the best option
  • Physical books and newspapers
  • Big companies should be regulated but individuals should be left alone to make (sometimes poor) decisions for themselves
  • Children should be kept out of bars but smoking should not
  • Baseball doesn't need replay but football does
  • The 1980s were the worst decade known to man and should never be celebrated
  • There is nothing wrong with a healthy does of cynicism
  • Everyone is too worried about being productive all the time

What's Wrong with Everything

 I read an article in today's New York Times that seems to highlight what's wrong with everything these days. The article written about the end of the best friend, highlights an odd trend among school and camp administrators to break up friendship pairs between kids. These adults prefer that kids hang out in larger groups to avoid excluding anyone. They want kids to forgo the best friend for a larger circle of casual friends. Forgetting that friendships teach us how to pair up romantically, learn about different (and possibly destructive) types of people.

Once again adults are trying to force kids into what they see as the correct behavior. As we limit the free time kids have, decide on their friends, censor their reading, schedule their activities, etc. I wonder what kind of adults are we raising? It's already been shown that the constant flow of information in snippet form is hurting critical thinking skills. What next? 

Personally I hope my son is lucky enough to find a best friend to go through life with. Beyond my wife, I've been blessed with a few very close friends. My dad told me when I was a teenager that I would be lucky if I could count the friendships that would last my life on one hand.  They're few in number but incredibly fulfilling (despite my friends living in other cities). When one of them passed away suddenly last year it was a shock and left a hole in my life.

Why on Earth would we want to deny our kids these strong relationships?