thinglets: 16 lovehatethings Anti-Smoking Slogans

1. See ya soon, but probably not.
2. You are what it sounds like when lungs cry.
3. Nick O'Teen is the cancer leprechaun chasing a pot of tar at the end of the rainbow.
4. The filter is to protect the cigarette from your breath.
5. Smoke menthol. Like lacing your shit with mint.
6. You are Darwin's proof.
7. You can't spell "tobacco" without your lungs.
8. You know all those oldtime movie stars that made smoking sexy? All dead.
9. Worried about your teeth and fingers turning yellow? Your lungs are dreaming of yellow.
10. Stop kissing ass. Get the butt from your mouth.
11. Cancer's cool... if you're a zodiac symbol.
12. If they put cigarette package warnings on milk, would you pour it on your cereal?
13. Every cigarette shortens your life by ten minutes. Light up. I want your job.
14. Light up. You're in my dead pool.
15. How many roads must a man walk down? Don't worry, we've got oxygen masks.
16. When someone calls them Cancer Sticks, let's not argue over the semantics of them being "sticks". You don't have time to waste. I'd rather spend our remaining time basking in your asphyxiating musk.

lovehate: Tension and Release in Social Media

In exploring the archetypes of any media (and especially entertainment media) I like to think that there are fairly common standards in which my emotions are tugged at for enjoyment's sake. Though the paradigm can be exercised in many ways, depending on the medium, I like to simplify the pattern by commonly calling it "Tension and Release".

In music, tension and release can occur in many ways. Sometimes it's a musician simply playing with volume. Think of the grunge standard of the quiet verse followed by the loud chorus ala Smells Like Teen Spirit or Creep. While these examples are very basic approaches to tension and release (T&R) volume, made effective by immediate contrast, slow builds culminating in auditory climaxes have been around from early drumming to classical to jazz to rock. But music also allows for T&R through harmony and dissonance, varying speeds, rhythmic complexity and simplicity, and varying tonal densities. How many people have had cerebral orgasms upon hearing the cutting single guitar bend that breaks through repetitive vamp of a chord progression?

The basic concepts of T&R extend to novels, films, poetry, visual arts, and basically any other sensory media. It's why the action film often inserts comic relief. 120 minutes of non-stop action eventually becomes wallpaper without contrast in the same way that thrash metal bands have to consider some sense of dynamics if they don't wish to become redundant.

So, I ask myself the question. If most (maybe all) of enjoyable entertainment consumption contains T&R, where does paradigm fit, if at all, with Social Media or Networking. While set pieces like songs, films, and novels have, at their core, a sense of time constraint that contributes to the anticipatory set that one comes to the medium with, what which set do we approach Social Media?

The problems that arise in applying such parameters (and I'll fully admit the marriage of this paradigm may seem forced with SM) lie in the multi-pronged creative approach to the content output. It's kind of like a freeform jazz odyssey with musicians from virtuoso's to drunken karaoke performers. But I think the tools have offered some parallels that help to form the T&R of Social Media.

Twitter is the noisy, fast, guitar solo full of notes that run the gamut of multi-octave scales. Facebook is the dissonant amalgam of everything we want and don't want at the same time. Seesmic is the sample ripped from another artist and dropped in to the pastiche of sound. Youtube is the brief respite leaving the cacophony of sound behind for a time... well, to be replaced by other sound anyway. And blogs are the deep sweeping textures and swaths of sound that allow us to escape for periods of time and consume by... reading. How can all of these content creators possibly orchestrate anything so intentional as an artisitic process like T&R? They don't - you do.

In the ultimate vindication of "reader response" theories, we inherently mix or consumption to achieve appropriate T&R. I could just use Twitter all day or watch Youtube clips or sift through pictures of people's kids in Facebook. I can, however, mix and match, often by instinct to achieve the ebb and flow that best suit my sensibility. Because like anything, there is an "artistic" component if you fly high enough or zoom in enough.

And if you haven't bought any of this, consider the experience of reading it nothing more than the the long sustained notes of a Klaus Schulze composition or the outer movements of Shine On You Crazy Diamond. You may now return to the metal solo.

thinglets: The Kingdom of Could Be You

Podcast 90 - The Cheese Inc. Conference Keynote with iCheddar Announcement

Click here to download:

lovehatethings - The Cheese Inc Keynote with iCheddar Announcement.mp3 (4974 KB)

Instead of going to the Apple Developer's Conference today, I went to the Dairy Food Expo, and, while nowhere near as chic or glamorous, the announcements about Cheese 2.0 and the new models of the iCheddar were something to behold.

thinglets: Begone Dull Care

thinglets: Dear Alex & Annie 1979

Podcast 89 - How Not to Piss Me Off

Click here to download:

lovehatethings - How Not to Piss Me Off.mp3 (8158 KB)

Including the 10 Commandments of How Not to Piss Me Off, a Ten Minute Stream of Consciousness to the Cucumber Club, and the Longest Names of Things and other Long Things... get your minds out of the gutter.

lovehate: The Ten Commandments of Not Pissing Me Off

I.

Thou shalt not try to convince me there is a God or gods or godesses or demons or devils or cosmic intelligences we surely don't understand. If you want to buy into all of that, go crazy, but leave my realist brain out of your cornfield.

II.

Thou shalt not try to convince me that Prince or the Artist Formerly Known as Sane is a musical god for two reasons. One is contained in commandment number one, and two is that the man, while clearly possessing talent, took a long walk off the pretentious pier long ago and convinced himself he was Aquaman in the process.

III.

Thou shalt not try to convince me that the chemicals in fast food are going to kill me someday. I live in a city that chuffs out more carcinogens a day into the air than you can imagine. I was weaned on the stuff. My body is a chemical factory. When I die, and my body decays in the ground, you may as well salt the earth because nothing is growing there again. And if you cremate me, anyone looking at the smokestack will think that Jerry Garcia's been elected pope.

IV.

Thou shalt not come to a COMPLETE STOP when making a right turn with no stop sign, no oncoming traffic, and no possible reason to slow down to a crawl other than the faint possibility your heart has stopped because you're sneezing from the dust gathered on your living corpse that moves too slow.

V.

Thou shalt not take a look at the Double Gulp Diet Coke I bought at 7-11 and say "How can you drink all of that?" Like anyone drinks! Okay you idiot? Starting with my mouth, ending with my bladder, wash, rinse, repeat! Got it?

VI.

Thou shalt not exclaim, for any earthly reason, "same difference". Other than being oxymoronic, it's just plain imbecilic save for one example: 10 minus 8, 5 minus 3, 2009 minus 2007 is the same difference.

VII.

Thou shalt not try to justify the ingestible viability of any gelatin made from reduced animal hoofs. Oh I know that during the great depression your ancestors may have lived off the stuff along with fatback and pork sausage, but that doesn't change the fact I'd rather eat a dolphin.

VIII.

Thou shalt not try to convince me there are secret conspiracies bent on overtaking the world. Get your head out of your ass and smell the soot and sulphur. There are plenty of completely visible organizations trying to take over the world that have great PR contracts to boot. The fact that anyone believes Britney Spears has talent or that A-Rod is anything but an asshole or that this entire Susan Boyle thing isn't a complete fabrication is definitive proof of that.

IX.

Thou shalt not claim to be good at television trivia without being able to sing at least 20 theme songs, word for word, from the 70s or earlier. You will be excused from one theme for each well-placed reference to the Wondertwins or Gatchaman (Battle of the Planets for all you unbelievers).

X.

Thou shalt not, through any circumstances, under pain of verbal tirade and relentless mocking through a series of pop culture subreferences, fly footloose and fancy-free with the definitive article "the" before things like: Walmart, Twitter, Windows, Google, or Kids Today.

XI.

Thou shalt not expect me to hold to any promises or parameters of only holding to lists of ten things when clearly it's permissible for me to take things to eleven.

XII.

Thou shalt not expect anything less than the unexpected grapefruit edsel waffle iron ukelele.

thinglets: 10 Minute Stream of Consciousness Trip to the Cucumber Club

Sometimes stream of consciousness is the order of the day tripper from the heights of sanity to the bend around the Credence Clearwater Revival churchgoing folk never thought well of the young buck from Arkansas but soon found with a little bit of grooming he could become the astronaut we always thought he could be.

Signs pointed west, but signs will often do that when black is orange and orange is grape and there aren’t enough hostess potato chip bags in the world that could be simultaneously crinkled to quash the din of the baby crying in the booth across the restaurant.

Maybe if there was a time and a place the place could be venus and the time could be swiss and we’d chat gaily of the wandering secret agent who lost her memory amidst the culmination of a black box mission set down by the powers that be for the defence of the people by the people for the people made of people – soylent green.

So I ask you young psychotic blithering tattletale of the night – are you up to the call of the man in the pink suspenders and crying behind curtain number two the 86 year-old Monty Hall fan who sits in Beckett-like fashion waiting for a deal to be made and an appearance to be imminent and an autograph book to be signed somewhere between Bob Eubanks and Chuck Woollery.

I remember the days of wine and hosers when men were men and women were lite brite illusions on the battlefield of playtime when the vast ocean of meandering opened up its arms and said “Give it to me straight Doctor. I can take it,” without a second glance or thought or premonition about the forces at work or the elements at play.

Surely there must be semblance. Surely there must be coercion. Surely there must be a recipe that includes semi-sweet chocolate chips, because the semi-sweet chocolate chip lobby has been doing their work and putting out their 365 day tear-off calendars for the world to see and without their efforts the civilization would have faltered long ago and without their efforts the typhoons would have raged eternal and without their efforts the ghost of TS Eliot would have risen in April and decried the he was a pair of ragged claws on some beach-like region.

Oh sure, you may weep for the downtrodden with your tears made of copper and your heart made of glass and your Debbie Harry affections with consummate incredulity. You may weep for the death of the bison and the culmination of the cataclysm of the crisis of the caucus of the collapse of the cacophony of the Cucumber Club.

Oh Moose.

Oh Beaver.

Why have you forsaken us?

thinglets: A long title of one entry to a blog when the title is about the length of titles and other things?

Abbreviation (Russian)

NIIOMTPLABOPARMBETZHELBETRABSBOMONIMONKONOTDTEKHSTROMONT

Laboratory for Shuttering, Reinforcement, Concrete and Ferroconcrete Operations for Composite-monolithic and Monolithic Constructions of the Department of Technology of Building Assembly Operations of the Scientific Research Institute of the Organization for Building Mechanization and Technical Aid of the Academy of Building and Architecture of the USSR.

Longest Baseball Throw

Glen Gorbous, a Canadian minor leaguer, who had a three year stint in the Majors from 1955 - 1957 still holds the record. In 1957, after a running start, the ball left his arm at an estimated 120 MPH and it flew and flew and flew. After all was said and done the baseball covered a total of 445 feet 10 inches before hitting the ground and breaking the old record by a whole nine inches.

Job Title 

"temporary part-time libraries North-West inter-library loan business unit administration assistant."

Song Title - Christine Lavin

Regretting what I said to you when you called me at 11:00 on Friday morning to tell me that 1:00 Friday afternoon you were gonna leave your office, go downstairs, hail a cab, to go out to the airport, to catch a plane, to go skiing in the Alps for two weeks. Not that I wanted to go with you; I wasn't able to leave town, I'm not a very good skier, I couldn't expect you to pay my way, but after going out with you for three years, I don't like surprises. (A musical apology)

...special mention goes to

"The Sad But True Story Of Ray Mingus, The Lumberjack Of Bulk Rock City, And His Never Slacking Stribe In Exploiting The So Far Undiscovered Areas Of The Intention To Bodily Intercourse From The Opposite Species Of His Kind, During Intake Of All The Mental Condition That Could Be Derived From Fermentation." By Rednex 

Film Title

Night of the Day of the Dawn of the Son of the Bride of the Return of the Revenge of the Terror of the Attack of the Evil, Mutant, Alien, Flesh Eating, Hellbound, Zombified Living Dead Part 2: In Shocking 2-D

...but it once was

The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade

Band Name

The Clouds That Fondle Jagged Crags And Raging Storms Conspire And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead

Album Title - Chumbawumba

The boy bands have won, and all the copyists and the tribute bands and the TV talent show producers have won, if we allow our culture to be shaped by mimicry, whether from lack of ideas or from exaggerated respect. You should never try to freeze culture. What you can do is recycle that culture. Take your older brother's hand-me-down jacket and re-style it, re-fashion it to the point where it becomes your own. But don't just regurgitate creative history, or hold art and music and literature as fixed, untouchable and kept under glass. The people who try to 'guard' any particular form of music are, like the copyists and manufactured bands, doing it the worst disservice, because the only thing that you can do to music that will damage it is not change it, not make it your own. Because then it dies, then it's over, then it's done, and the boy bands have won.