Here we are. Another Christmas is upon us and the worst Friday for the idle clock watcher. What to not do when there may not be much to actually do? Eat candy canes in the morning, feel ill and ridden with guilt in the afternoon.
- Sad Tech Update: Twitter as best bloggy app thingie of the year? Worth having the italicized statement that it "matters"?? While it is sweet to read that some people believe that some others don't "get it" when, in fact, something just sucks and/or sucks time, how it is possible to think that something as useless (if usable) Twitter "matters"? Love matters. Health matters. Twitter is a place on the web for people who cannot sustain sufficient attention to write, comment upon or even read a blog. The content-driven internet without the obligation of substance. Warning: thought-fraud is afoot. Look out for consultants. Observation: Snood was the last great addition to the world of computing.
- Update: David updates his post on Catholic rights and I respond sorta thusly with less than success technically speaking so I repeat myself:
As much as to make sure I comment here as anything, Catholic rights seems a very odd concept to me but, as you will say, it is there plain as plain can be and most likely it is the lack of relation to me that makes me scratch my head. These rights are like PEI being a province, a fact of positive law making it so regardless of the need. But unlike PEI, Catholic rights now seem unbalanced as they are not balancing against their former nemisis - Victorian era Protestant power. Left to its devices, PEI would become Anticosti - but would Rome in Canada fall so easily? In the secularized Canada, is it not the faithful against the materialist shallow Hitchenites as much as the violent puritanical terrorist hijackers whether of Oklahoma City or 9/11? But could there be general Christian rights to state funding, to acceptance as a minority? If not, can Catholic rights (surely now a sub-set homogenous within the whole of the shrinking Canadian patch of Christendom) be anything other than a historic quirk locked into our Constitution? This is not to be anti-Catholic so much as contemporaneously contextual, something admittedly the constitution and perhaps the Church cares little for.
- Speaking of the workplace, is boredom the natural outcome of the technological miracle of the last 40 years? Not only have we not received out jetpacks, we have not entered into that leisure society that was promised as someone has to answer the phone - or at least record their voice mail message - every single day.
- Are they morphing into one? Pete Roger Rose-Clemens? Is Schilling that nutty?
- From meany-pants to Mr. Drip. Please oh please can we be given an effective Federal opposition communications campaign under the tree this year?
- Wow - doing the right thing actually is a heck of a lot less painful than doing the wrong thing.
- Rejoice! Now there is more Europe for neocons to crap on. The most successful economic and social experiment since WWII is taking in the poor and making them kings. What will this mean for the dirt poor guy on the bus in Poland who looked at me like I was from outer space when I was there in 1991 teaching in a small Baltic city, when bootlegged western shampoo that smelled like a flower instead of industrial effluent was just showing up in the market?
Comments
Sean Liddle - December 21, 2007 10:07 AM
I have in past told my wife how we as humans developed emotions, especially love and general affection, through evolution, as those that stayed close to home with mate and kids had more success in life and thereby produced more brood and had more food etc.. Then I tell her that pretty much everything we do in life is for the sole purpose of passing time and keeping us from being bored, because if we do stop and think about our sole biological purpose in life, it all seems a little futile and we become less productive worker bees..
Then she looks at me all sad stuff and I feel like dirt for being such an analytically minded dufus. Ugh..
But yes, where are the jetpacks.. Where is the leisure time (says the guy on day 7 of a 19 day vacation).. where are the 3 day work weeks. But seriously, unless you are in a job where you essentially do for a living what you would normally do as a hobby, what is work but a way to pay the bills? Living for ones job and viewing it as more than a paycheque is just buying into the corporate brainwashing, like calling yourself a sales associate team member instead of what you really are, a stock-boy.
Alan - December 21, 2007 10:12 AM
That is a very odd use of "analytically minded".
Chris Taylor - December 21, 2007 11:16 AM
I think my hobbies are sufficiently base that I am more likely to be paid <i>not</i> to do them.
I can't think of any job in the whole wide world that would allow me to fly, sail, dabble in halfassed archaeology and anthropology, and spend a full week every month playing computer games obsessively.
Alan - December 21, 2007 11:21 AM
International playboy? You know, I really wish I had checked out international playboy booth at that high school job fair back in '81.
David Janes - December 21, 2007 11:51 AM
As per my post, I'm not making here the argument that Catholic rights are particularly (and in particular) endangered. And absolutely it's a historical quirk -- I like historical quirks, as they provide a context as to why we have a history and a now. And bridging to my original post, I'm arguing that we shouldn't be too quick to sweep aside historical quirks as the current context evolves. Especially since (i) start cleaning up too quickly and they might be throwing out something you like and (ii) there's no particular hardship imposed by these quirks.
To expand the argument in (ii) slightly, yes, there's a constant stream of letters to the paper from (primarily) Jewish and Muslim groups arguing how oppressed they are by this. Given that every one of these letter writers is most likely dual citizens in countries where rights are very much dependent on religion, well, they can go blow it our their ass. Likewise to their argument that their religion requires them to separate their kids from non-believers. As for the Catholic side of it, functionally speaking it's basically identical to the public school system. Yes, there's duplication but I suspect analysis will show this to be a level of a rounding error.