Even though I'm not getting married, ever, at all, anytime,

(thank you mom for reminding me my twenties are wasting away in singleness), this is still cute. From The Times, things to answer and have your potential other answer. The charm lies in the questions themselves, so without further ado:

• What are the best things about your sex life now?
• What words do you use for your "bits'?
• How would you feel: (a) if you had difficulty in conceiving; (b) if you found you were expecting an unplanned child; (c) if you found you were expecting a child with disabilities?
• Would you ever want to check up on each other and is it OK to have secrets?
• How do you feel about older people making love?
• What inscription would you like on your gravestone?
• Do you have any nightmares that make the future look less bright and can you do anything about them?
• Do you believe in God and are your beliefs different from those of the family you grew up in?
• Will you go to church after your wedding day?
• How many Christmas cards do you send to members of your family?
• Do you understand the difference between credit and debt?
• What is your view on the difference?
• If Great Aunt Jemima left you 500,000 pounds, what would you do? And what would you do if she left you 500 pounds?

Being cool is really really hard

I was just perusing, like, five different extra-cool hipster t-shirt sites. I ain't even gonna bother to link them, because all you have to do is go to Boing Boing and look for the smoking Mickey (damn you Disney lawyers) t-shirt that will soon be gone and click on the following, following, following links and you will have seen about seventeen hundred clever, understated, nicely colored plain boring $45 t-shirts. And the chick ones are never cut right.

And after this half-hour journey, all I can think is that it's super-hard to be cool these days. I tried reading an article from a New York rag making fun of hipsters, then realized about three paragraphs in that I didn't get the references, and then tried Vice and realized I was rolling my eyes so much I ought to stop reading. I have astigmatism, you know.

I've joked about being hip before, but it IS funny now, because styles seem to stop and start in the middle of decades, not the beginning or the end (think of the sixties--it was really '64-73, right?), and so 2005 marks the "oh-crap-I-do-not-like-my-clever-t-shirt-what-do-I-do" phase. I'm not saying that things are different now than they were in 1995; rather, they're different now than they were in 2001, when Ashton was new and fresh and now you're internally making fun of me for even mentioning Ashston Krutcher, aren't you? Well, screw you; if I spelled his name right, that was a COINCIDENCE.

Anyway. I just looked at a bunch of cool sites and I was repelled even by their cleverness. One t-shirt said, "Mmmm...oranges!"

That's what it said. I kid you not. "Mmmm...oranges!" The other day the new owner of my favorite coffeeshop came in with a t-shirt that said "5-4=1." I don't know what either means; I don't think humans are really relating to each other differently than they used to, and I don't think anymore is happening philosophically than the post-post-modernist movement. But I do wonder about these irrelevant t-shirt slogans. Why, why? After this era of an intense push towards individual originality, will we all be allowed to wear the same exact space uniform? 'Cause I always thought going to a school with mandatory uniforms would save me both the stress and my cash. Not only that, but I'm an iPod owner...I can handle being one of many.

Okay...lame-o

Actually this is the opposite of lame-o, but here it goes, because it so exactly sums up my feelings about the iPod Shuffle:

Turn your iPod into an iPod shuffle...

Hearts flutter about my head everywhere. They don't mention actually opening up your iPod and knocking out 19/20ths of the hard drive, but that's okay--it's a Flash drive!

City of Sound goes on about the crazy shifting perceptions behind the whole shuffle concept. They take it too far, as philosphers always do, but that's okay--they're good writers. My key concern here is for the artist.

Witness the horrible text at the Apple webpage:

"Welcome to a life less orderly. As official soundtrack to the random revolution, the iPod Shuffle Songs setting takes you on a unique journey through your music collection--you never know what's around the next tune. Meet your new ride. More roadster than Rolls, iPod shuffle rejects routine by serving up your favorite songs in a different order every time."

So frigging hedonistic for one thing, but for another, it's sheer laziness. It claims to make life "new" and "unpredictable" and move you away from the known to the unknown; but unless you're randomly rebuilding your library, like I have been for the last few months, there will be no real surprises. "Daily gridlock feels less mundane when you don't know what song will play next." Uh-huh. Our poor lives are so unbearable otherwise.

Anyway, as I was saying: laziness. An acquaintance of mine once burned me a CD that contained about ten different, complete albums. I had thought he was just making me a mix, but he said he rejected that idea, saying that instead he thought an album was a full idea, a concept that was meant to me experienced as a complete thought. I don't know if this is actually the case with a lot of commercial pop music, but I understand it is most likely the case with higher-quality works. Green Day and the Decemberists have released their concept albums; the idea is perhaps most fully realized with the like and the rock opera, but even Grandaddy's Sophtware Slump was self-referencing. "Exit Music for a Film" sounds best on OK Computer, not the end of "Romeo and Juliet." And so on.

And it is all useless when you listen to everything on shuffle. You forget names, you forget bands, you forget albums; you don't care. You just hit next next next.

Holy mother of a divine being!

The iPod Integration Kit for Mercedes-Benz.

Look!



"Use your Mercedes-Benz steering-wheel controls to browse through your entire iPod, including tracks, artists and playlists, all viewable on the in-dash multifunction display. No other integration solution let's you "see what you're hearing" with such ease."

*head explodes, but in a good way*

*rolls eyes*

Finally, I am incredibly hip before my time, but it's about my stupid overpriced daily planners?!

It may seem like a backward step, and not the sort of thing a technology columnist would suggest, but have you ever thought of ditching your laptop, personal digital assistant or smart-phone for a pen and paper?

Uh. Yeah. I have like seven old Moleskines filled with my day-to-day activities over the last few years. And I've finally decided I need a PDA, because it's not possible to re-enter contact information in the back every time.

Having said that, I decided to switch to a PDA, then went out and bought another Moleskine for the meantime. These last few months that I have been daily-planner-less have been the longest time my life hasn't been duly summarized and written down since I was nineteen.

I just found out "Moleskine" is pronounced "mole-ah-skeen-ah." How completely lame-o.

Also lame-o: iPod Shuffle.

I wanna find more lame-o things, and label them as such.

Coronation

I never noticed before that Bush's inauguration is taking place on Eid-al-Adha, the "most important feast of the Muslim calendar."

More:

"It concludes the Pilgrimmage to Mecca. Eid al-Adha lasts for three days and commemorates Ibraham's (Abraham) willingness to obey God by sacrificing his son. Muslims believe the son to be Ishmael rather than Isaac as told in the Old Testament. Ishmael is considered the forefather of the Arabs. According to the Koran, Ibrahim was about to sacrifice his son when a voice from heaven stopped him and allowed him to sacrifice a ram instead."

We are just, like, the biggest jerks on the planet.

I'm confused.

I decided 1000 minutes a month is too much for me ($60), so I went over to T-Mobile to change my plan back to 600 minutes ($40), and they had a promo going on where you could get 1000 minutes for $45 a month with apparently no change in, well, anything.

So I did it, after reading and re-reading the plan descriptions, but other than having to extend my contract, I couldn't see a downside. Maybe that was the downside? It's just a fiendish plan to make you continue with haphazard, spotty reception for yet another twelve months?

I want to buy a PDA. I have no idea which one to get.

Well, I know where I'd like to be.

Here.

2005 International Consumer Electronics Expo.

*weeps quietly that it is thousands of miles away*

"[Bill] Gates will ... construct a "home of the future" in the car park of the conference. The so-called NextGen05 Demonstration House will feature lighting, climate control and a security system that can all be operated via a single remote control — or a computer loaded with Windows Media Centre software."

Waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Not that I want a Microsoft house, but still.

I've been planning to be an expatriot since I was about twelve, but this article in the Asia Times is encouraging me to take what little cash I have and exchange it beforehand:

THE NAKED HEGEMON Part 1: Why the emperor has no clothes

"Uncle Sam has reneged and defaulted on up to 40% of its trillion-dollar foreign debt, and nobody has said a word except for a line in The Economist. In plain English that means Uncle Sam runs a worldwide confidence racket with his self-made dollar based on the confidence that he has elicited and received from others around the world, and he is a also a deadbeat in that he does not honor and return the money he has received.

How much of our dollar stake we have lost depends on how much we originally paid for it. Uncle Sam let his dollar fall, or rather through his deliberate political economic policies drove it down, by 40%, from 80 cents to the euro to 133 cents. The dollar is down by a similar factor against the yen, yuan and other currencies. And it is still declining, indeed is apt to plummet altogether."

Well, aside from that, the article mostly talks about what crooks we Americans are. But, correct me if I'm wrong, we do have the ability to kill tons of people and ruin lots of the world's liveable areas, right?

And this bit is just questionable:

"Uncle Sam absorbs the savings of others who themselves are often much poorer, particularly when their central banks put many of their reserves in world-currency dollars and hence into the hands of Uncle Sam in Washington, and some also in dollars at home. Their private investors send dollars to or buy dollar assets on Wall Street, all with the confidence that they are putting their wherewithal in the world's safest haven (and that, of course, is part of the above-mentioned confidence racket). "

Most Americans know that the stock market is a gamble. I'm not sure exactly how that knowledge would have bypassed foreign investors.

The author, Andre Gunder Frank, mentions that the U.S. is also horrible at saving--we have a .2% savings rate. "Super-saver Japan" invests $140 billion annually in our stock market. But they aren't exactly fools over there. I seriously doubt that "Uncle Sam obliges them, through the good offices of their own states, to send their thus literally forced savings to Uncle Sam as well in the form of their "service" of their predominantly dollar debt to him. " How we so persuasively "oblige" them isn't discussed.

But that wasn't my point in mentioning Japan. Rather, I had a question: how do the Japanese do it? I mean, from what I read, the rents are extraordinarily high. The costs of living is high. The amount of stuff you're expected to buy is high. The prices of those things are high. The rate at which you're expected to replace them is high. The things themselves are small, but everything else is high, high, high. So how are they saving money? Do they not eat? No man can do everything; something always gives; so what gives in Japan? Do they scrimp on Post-Its and paperclips?

I must complain for a minute.

Apparently the people in my organization decided it would be a good idea, back in 2000-2002, to create their own little extensions on Word documents. So instead of "johnsonmemo.doc" (or "johnsonmemo" if you turn off the extensions view) they decided go with a style like "johnson.mem." Which means that now every time I try to open these files, Windows asks me what program I want to use.

Grr.

Fortunately, it automatically remembers that files with the same extension are Word-compatible if it works on one of them. Unfortunately, there's a lot of creative extensions out there. In one folder, we have: .522, .tlk, .bio, .fax, .526, .lst, .601, .mem, and .pts. And there's only nineteen files in that folder.

I tried to sign up on Benrick, but it wouldn't let me. Apparently I'm not evil enough. I was redirected to Playgirl, which was very confusing for a bit.

I am reading all of MegaTokyo. It's like a lovely dream. Nobody cares what you wear, how you smell, or where you live; you just get to sit around and play video games and drink beer till you're dead. Although, of course, these are all guys sitting around playing video games and drinking beer. The chicks all have gaming consoles, and but never actually play them unless they're kicking some dude's butt.

I could only be the perfect chick if I didn't have to sleep. Sorry, dudes, but makeup + clothes + hair + rent = not so much games for me. Although the more I read the more I have a burning desire for a GameCube...so I could play it all the time, back the way I played my N64 all the time, back when I was a guy.

Tomorrow is the big day. I can't wait to see what happens...

And luckily for me I still haven't seen "The Life Aquatic." Plus, Wes is back. Plus, Luke likes the Hut. Plus, me'n Sara are going out Sattiday. So, all in all.

Boy, I think I'm pessimistic or something.

I love pixels and bitmaps

And so I love this:

http://www.pixelfreak.com/v3/b2/ah.html

That is amazingly awesome. So is this:

http://www.pixelfreak.com/v3/img/poster.png

And so is this.

http://www.sequentmedia.com/prophecyanthology/content.php

I'm such a sucker for cool-looking books...And they have a "style guide." Examples:

Style No. LC01 - Grayscale tones catch the light and cast it across a world carefully and realistically rendered.

Style No. MD02 - Expressionistic hand-painted art evokes strong moods with powerful characters and haunting settings that defy simple line-work.

Are they being silly? It sounds like some sort of online quiz: What Drawing Style Are YOU?

Now it's 2005. I've read or heard people asking, "What will this year bring? What are your resolutions?" etc., etc., etc. I know these are typical beginning-of-the-year questions, but I don't feel a change at all. I was much more excited when I graduated. Maybe that's because the world seemed full of possibility. Now I'm still in the area, I have an office job, and I'm not

going

anywhere

anytime

soon.

Which is depressing, frankly.

I need...a change.

I say this every once in a while. Things don't change. But I suppose it's somehow reassuring that I can still occasionally stick my head above the day-to-day repetition that is my life and note, however briefly, that I need a change.

I could go to Zurich or Prague. I mean, really, who would miss me? It is a sad--but healthy, I suppose--truth that everybody I know has someone or something else they depend upon when things are bad. Me, I can go. I guess that's what I wanted.

Geez, when did I become such I whiner? Cut off the whining! Focus on good things!