lovehatethings

Sitting in the lobby of the Sheraton Hotel and Convention Centre in Richmond Hill, Ontario for four days of conference and training, I awoke at 4am and could not get back to sleep even after listening to a full CD's worth of 80's progressive rock and begrudgingly watching some Olympic coverage because my only other choice was an infomercial about an exercise machine that doesn't look nearly as fun as some of the well-toned automatons seem to indicate.

Normally, at such events, I'm loathe to be startled by a wake-up call that rattles through my skull like the demented cross between the bells of St. Mary's and a Nine Inch Nails B-side. On this morning at least, I was not subjected to such an ordeal.

Being lucky enough to have found employment in a career that affords me a long summer vacation (and being a nighthawk by nature) I usually find myself, by the second week of July, waking no earlier than the crack of noon and often getting to sleep after dawn's break. While this morning, as I occasionally glance up past the horizon that is the top of the monitor at the early-risers in their caffeine-induced wanderlust, I am content to live with novelty of having become conscious at a time where, for the past six weeks, I had often remained up to see. In the summer I'm wont to ask friends, "you mean there's a 10am?"

Morning is just wrong in so many ways.

I drift around in a semi-conscious haze and am annoyed by people that are way too happy and energetic for their own good. I would much rather see the stragglers from an all-night run at a club come staggering through the lobby - at least they look how I feel. They've done their best to try and make me comfortable in the Hilton lobby. They've provided me with a complimentary PC to bang away my thoughts (although using IE6 again is a painful experience). They've gone through great pains to create this crazy open feng shui environment that runs an unbroken stretch incorporating the front desk, TV lounge, internet stations, bar, coffee shop and restaurant. But for the restaurant it kind of looks like an upscale Barnes & Noble. I feel so damn cosmopolitan I might just throw up. If I see one more light fixture that looks like it belongs at the MOMA or one piece of smoked glass I may just need a bucket.

If you awake early in the mornings while travelling, it can never be a good thing. It usually means you have stuff you HAVE to do (and nobody wants to HAVE to do anything), or you evidently didn't try hard enough to have fun the night before.

And as the TV in the lounge shows sports highlights and the overhead cascade of piped-in music plays Aerosmith's "Dream On" (and oh, I so wish I could have dreamed on from 4-8am) , and a Peewee baseball team from Whoknowswheresville tramps in to kill time in front of the TV until they're allowed to check in (it's 7:30 am!), and I frame my vision with a print of a elephant with the title "Kenya" behind the coffee stand barrista, and the lamp beside my monitor screams to be reunited with its Ikea brethren, and most people are dressed WAY better than I am with my "I'm what Willis was talkin' 'bout" tee, I take some solace in looking at the gentleman two PCs over, who, by his body language, seems to get it.

Fourteen minutes typecast the frantic hack
Slack-jawed pushing out dimestore crap
For the masses displacing defacing the rhyme
A crime of abundance a vow of intolerance
Twelve rings high the noontime parade
Soft shoe charade of the Paris view
Eyes glistening trembling fearing the queue
Gladhanding demanding the how do you do's
Manacled beaten bereft of intent
Repel the flow go below the treeline
Under the radar subduing signs of destruction
Elimination lost within false elation
Walls undermine this palace of crime
Hold within
Hold within

Seven sought solace but Six evaded
Thought tricks were for kids rid his mind of doubt
Find the power to shout out injustice
Miracle patience veering from towers of hate
Grim told the number of fate and he followed
Three down to go to faces of fear
Traces a vision of insolent stasis
Two reconnects a lost point of view
Annointing the wrecked impassion renewed
One left a solitary headlight in shine
Till battery darkened the enemy mine

Enriched flour (bleached wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), water, high fructose corn syrup, yeast, soybean oil, canola oil, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, contains 2% or less of each of the following: sesame seed, salt, wheat gluten, calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate, monocalcium phosphate, ammonium chloride, calcium carbonate, baking soda, soy flour, dough conditioners (may contain one or more of the following: distilled monoglycerides, DATEM, ascorbic acid, azodicarbonamide, enzymes, ethoxylated mono- and diglycerides, sodium stearoyl lactylate, guar gum, mono-and diglycerides, calcium peroxide), calcium propionate & sodium propionate (preservatives), soy lecithin. 100% pure USDA inspected beef; no fillers, no extenders. Prepared with grill seasoning (salt, black pepper). Soybean oil, pickle relish [diced pickles, high fructose corn syrup, sugar, vinegar, corn syrup, salt, calcium chloride, xanthan gum, potassium sorbate (preservative), spice extractives, polysorbate 80], distilled vinegar, water, egg yolks, high fructose corn syrup, onion powder, mustard seed, salt, spices, propylene glycol alginate, sodium benzoate (preservative), mustard bran, sugar, garlic powder, vegetable protein (hydrolyzed corn, soy and wheat), caramel color, extractives of paprika, soy lecithin, turmeric (color), calcium disodium EDTA (protect flavor).

Potatoes, vegetable oil (canola oil, hydrogenated soybean oil, natural beef flavor [wheat and milk derivatives]*), citric acid (preservative), dextrose, sodium acid pyrophosphate (maintain color), salt. Prepared in vegetable oil ((may contain one of the following: Canola oil, corn oil, soybean oil, hydrogenated soybean oil with TBHQ and citric acid added to preserve freshness), dimethylpolysiloxane added as an antifoaming agent). *
CONTAINS: WHEAT AND MILK (Natural beef flavor contains hydrolyzed wheat and hydrolyzed milk as starting ingredients).

Vanilla Reduced Fat Ice Cream: Milk, sugar, cream, nonfat milk solids, corn syrup solids, mono- and diglycerides, guar gum, dextrose, sodium citrate, artificial vanilla flavor, sodium phosphate, carrageenan, disodium phosphate, cellulose gum, vitamin A palmitate. CONTAINS: MILK. Syrup: High fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, water, cocoa (processed with alkali), natural (vegetable source) and artificial flavors, salt, potassium sorbate (preservative), vanillin (artificial flavor).

I want to start this lovehate in reverse. I love journalism. I love the sense that a media outlet, be it print, television, film, radio, website or blog has the ability to maintain an objective integrity that allows for informative and enticing stories about the world around me. I do, however, have an ability to distinguish the ever-increasing blurring of the objective and the subjective in mainstream journalistic delivery.

Quite plainly, the human interest story is now 99% of journalism and human interest is governed by the least objective body in existence: humanity. Let me also admit that while this is often a tired subject that's been around for years, it's the look forward that concerns me. Its basis has been batted around by satirists from Mark Twain and Umberto Eco to Peter Cook and the tagteam of Stewart & Colbert. People gave the knowing wink when Colbert exalted the term truthiness, but we're getting dangerously closer to that threshold. Not to be misanthropic about some sort of dystopian future, but I have to wonder if facts will even matter in 100, 50 or 10 years from now.

Commentary has become the new story; on the web front, isn't Digg really about the importance of opinion and commentary over the actual links themselves? In teaching even high school students the basics of writing a newspaper article, there is the tried and true W5H model of Who, What, When, Where, Why, How to deliver all of the facts pertinent to a situation. Facts are checked and double-checked, sources are required, and above all, there can be no sense of bias on the part of the writer.

We have been devolving down a sliding scale toward a point where the Who, What, When, Where, and How of a story has been reduced to a soundbite. "News" has given way to entertainment and entertainment has glorified the 5th W - Why. The why allows for commentary, expert opinions, punditry, and no-so-expert opinions not just on the story, but, more importantly to broadcasters, every tertiary aspect of the story that market research says will get more viewers.

In reporting on the events in Georgia over the past couple of weeks (not the home of the Braves), I'm sure more time has been spent on McCain's and Obama's opinions on the matter and less on educating the general populace about the fact our Americentric view should allow for a Georgia that doesn't have peach farms. Check that! We're not even hearing about what people who are political forces think about a political situation, we're hearing from the pundits and none of them are adding facts. Journalism has become a culture of who can yell the loudest and who is most entertaining. And even the most idiotic blowhard can be entertaining in the right setting.

Television news has been reduced to 5-6 hard news stories a day. I hope the defense for such a concentration is that not enough interesting things are happening. On the day I write this Paraguay has a new leader, Zimbabwe continues its collapse, Polan gets rocked by a tornado, Peru has thousands march in protest, 14 million people in Africa are on the brink of starvation due to food costs, India is concerned about a cement industry cartel, people in Haiti are eating mud, Taiwan's former president is laundering 31 million dollars off-shore, the tropical storm heading to Florida has killed people in Haiti and the Dominican Republic, trees are being genetically enhanced to swallow up double the carbon, and Argentinian authorities are investigating the deaths of 14 children in clinical trials. And that's the news, back to the blowhards... wait, incredibly we've taken all the time reporting REAL news.

I would certainly rather know some of these world events are happening rather than listening to O'Reilly, Hannity, Matthews or Olbermann wax redundantly about the world on NEWS stations. When personality becomes the news, it says more about what broadcasters think of us as consumers of information.

I started by saying that I love journalism, but I love opinion as well. There is a place for both. No one will ever accuse me of being a journalist, and I don't want to be - it's far too much work. I enjoy a well-crafted rant. I like listening to a good rave. Hell, I even enjoy hearing someone else fly off the handle letting invectives fly. None of this, however, is news, and the more we buy it, the more they'll serve it up with a side of slick computer-generated overlays.

"That is not to say that it was an easy decision for them to let Blake leave school last September. They would have preferred that he stay in high school with his brother. But he bugged them until they let him quit."

Find out why they let him quit

The English language, as bastardized a creation as it is, heavily relies on decscriptors that are drawn from endless languages, local dialects, colloquialisms and sometimes pure invention. Going through language as children, we are beseiged by the basic prefix "list": anti, de, dis, ex, in, mis, pre, re, and un. As we move to secondary and post-secondary education we are ultra-mega-inundated with superlative prefixes like... ultra and mega, contra, hemi, hyper, infra, inter, peri, semi, syn, trans. When we slide our minds into the realms of "intelligensia" we enjoy dropping pseudo and quasi before every idea so that we don't actually have to cop to anything concrete. In most cases our prefixes meshed well with the root words we were using, and, in some instances, to the point where the prefixed word became more common to regular use than the root word itself.

Then technology, as it usually does, took things in strange direction.  At first the invasion was subtle, yet foreshadowed insidious fallout. Our reality became "virtual" and so did, apparently, everything around us. Not officially a prefix, yet pretty much used as one, the descriptor was often used, not to elucidate meaning, but to sound cool. So in a virtual reality we gathered in our virtual teams and vitually communicated in our virtual world operating our virtual machines. It wasn't enough that, years earlier, dish detergent had made our dishes "virtually spotless". Now "virtually spotless" indicated a tech-savvy dog catcher.

Virtually months later, or let's call it the 1980s, William Gibson took a prefix that was only regularly used on one word, and started a trend that would force "virtual" to give way to "cyber". And much like the language meme that strangled us previously our cyberspace filled with cyberhomes occupied by cyberpunks having cybersex and cyberhating each other the next morning. And things were going swimmingly, at least cyberswimmingly, until we decided that virtual's three syllables was WAY too much and cyber's two syllables was STILL too much. Something had to be done.

No one thought much about it when CompuServe first used "Email" from 1981 to 1984. Those in the know probably thought, "Yeah. Okay. Mail. Electronically. I get it." We all would soon get it as we sent out billions of e-mails with e-cards so we could be e-tailing and e-marketing our new Ebay e-business and be part of the e-commerce revolution... sorry e-volution. As a prefix I got the distinction between mail (soon to become snail mail) and e-mail. At least in this instance the "e" indicated a new face that people needed to know if they were going to communicate. Basically, e-mail wasn't the same as mail and the lazy prefix worked just fine. As for the rest, couldn't we just have said marketing, business, and commerce and understand it included everything our companies did? And e-tailing was just plain wrong. My e-health was suffering.

On October 23, 2001, Steve Jobs became the new William Gibson of prefixes when Apple released the iPod. Not only had we reduced the prefix down to a single syllable, now, unlike the tenuous grasp "e" had to electronic, "i" pretty much meant nothing other an even more innocuous reference to a personal pronoun that added nothing to attached noun... nothing except being cool! Apple would iSell the iPod, iMac, and iBook in an iStore or iTunes until everyone was iTouching themselves. We now iPlay and iEarn in our iVillages and are iSafe with iTools because we have to go watch our favorite iStar in an iFilm which we find out with iNewswire on iGoogle.

I'm guessing the only logical conclusion is to move onto to other vowels with even less meaning than "e" or "i"". Of course "a" doesn't work too well because it is already a prefix that means without; e-marketers wouldn't like that. "U" has already been scooped because of its personal pronoun association... marketers really love personal pronouns; what's next something stupid like the "we"? Wait a second.... I suppose we could just move on to consonants. Maybe we can cash in on nostalgic ties to Q-bert, X and Y Generations. I'm putting my money on the "B". Think about it. In a society where everyone wants to be told what's cool, we could have bMusic, bVideo, bGames, bCommerce, bPCs, bWorlds and bSex... maybe that's why all the bees are disappearing - they know something we don't.

I think, in 25 years, techonology will enable us to prefix things with a shrug or a caustic eyebrow twitch and, until that day, iHate tech prefixes.