no one cares about your kids

In my boredom, I took a few moments to cycle through the "Next Blog" buttons at the top of the page of my own blog, and I'm sorry I did. Blog after blog about what cute little things Madison and Jackson (and other early-American-last-name-given children) did this morning. You love your kids, and I love my kids, but the minutia of your children's day to day lives are of no interest to anyone but you. I leave you not, however, on your own to determine what is entertaining. Here are some excellent examples.
Cats That Look Like Hitler
People of Wal-mart
There I Fixed It
Laugh At Rice (RIP)

sort of....the eloquent man's umm

At post number 3, this blog is still finding itself. At the risk of typecasting myself into the role of the grammar police, today's entry returns to this blog's roots of criticizing general abuse of the English language. Today I will examine the increase in use of the term "sort of". I was first introduced to this term in 2002, when a business venture took me to the UK for several months, and I found it there to be in common use. Women everywhere wearing fuzzy pink pajamas outside of their homes (a trend which made its way to the US several years later) were using "sort of" to allow their brains to catch up to their mouths during normal conversation.

Because of the deep-seated admiration of the English culture in America, and our idea that a person speaking with an English accent is to be believed (ref Supernanny or Mr. Belvedere), the term "sort of" migrated to the upper echelon of US speakers. Scientists, politicians, commentators, and the like can now be heard on various media overusing this term themselves.

Just the other day I was listening to a woman on NPR describing the life of Henrietta Lacks, whose Hela cells have allowed the medical community to make great strides in cancer research. It was a subject that I found thoroughly interesting, but the speaker's overuse of the term "sort of" made her interview all but unlistenable. It was as if in the course of each sentence, the woman would enter a very brief vegetative state; her voice and demeanor would change entirely as she delivered the dreaded "sort of" again and again. I could just imagine her eyes glazing over and a pock of drool forming at the corner of her mouth with each utterance, followed by a quick shake of the head before returning to the normal cadence of the interview. I didn't go so far as to keep tally, but I would venture to guess that I heard those awful words at least 50 times in a 10 minute interview (10 * 60 / 50 = once every 12 seconds).

I miss umm; there was something more honest about it.

puscifer

In my middle age, I've become either busy or lazy enough (probably some combination of the two) to get out of touch with subjects on which I used to be on the leading edge. One such subject is music. I used to take great pride in discovering unknown bands and doing my best to support those I liked most. I find now that most new bands in the genre of music I listen to sound the same to my ear, and deciding which I prefer is just splitting hairs. I quickly get discouraged and start looking for bands that don't sound the same, but I find them to be generally unlistenable. I then realize that much of the music that I listen to would be viewed the same way to a prospective new listener, but through some course of my past I've managed to find it acceptable. Roger Waters' solo music is a good example. If I were to listen to it today for the first time (The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking, for sub-example), I'd likely find it highly objectionable. Because, however, I was introduced to it through the music of Pink Floyd, and because I was introduced to it at an impressionable time in my life, it now sits as a part of my standing music collection.

It had been a number of years since such circumstances lead me to enjoy an otherwise unenjoyable band, until last week when I discovered Puscifer. For those unfamiliar, Puscifer is the latest project of Maynard James Keenan of Tool and A Perfect Circle fame. I'd heard a few years back that Maynard settled in the southwest and began making wine, but I didn't realize that there was music attached to his latest insanity. It is typical Maynard - there is a stream of logic in there somewhere, but it is surrounded by oddity. I find the talk of it across the net highly entertaining, from the "yeah, I GET it, man..." ramblings of teenagers to the "what the hell happened" ramblings of late Tool/APC fans. It's just Maynard, and at the depth of it, I think he's found funding to live on a corner of the grid in which he can continue to make music, travel, and contemplate ways to further confuse his fans.

I also find the idea of a song not being "fixed", as Maynard puts it, but subject to limitless remix, intriguing and slightly disturbing. As much as I like his explanation of why it is, I tend to believe it's an easy way to collect royalties with no addtional work.

In the end, some of the songs (and associated media) are stupid and sophomoric, but there is still heart in much of it. Check him out.

the proliferation of the term "and stuff like that"

This post is actually my motivation for creating a blog to begin with. The world around me appears to be getting dumber at an ever more alarming rate. I consider myself fairly forgiving when it comes to intelligence. For those with a less than stellar IQ, I tend to appreciate their other qualities, and I certainly don't consider them as lesser people. I do, however, have my limits. Just this evening, for instance, the short-lived game show "1 versus 100" was the background noise of our lives, and I'd listen in to catch the occasional question to fuel my disgust of the general public. The question this evening read something like this:

"If Santa were to parallel park his sleigh, what part would be perpendicular to the curb?"

A. The side
B. The other side
C. The back

This is essentially testing whether one knows what the word perpendicular means, and even if not, if they can even successfully determine which one of the answer choices is not like the others. The contestant struggled with this for, I kid you not, four minutes. Finally, she decided on answer choice A. This was bad enough, and sent me into a minor rant about how stupid people have become. As my rant subsided, they revealed how many of the 100 people against whom she was competing also missed the question. FIFTY THREE. Yes, FIFTY THREE. The majority of the people in that group did not know what perpendicular means. But I digress...

My original intention here was to express my disgust for what I find to be the ever-increasing population that adds the term "and stuff like that" to the end of every other sentence. Not only that, it has morphed from a synonym of "etcetera" to the new "sort of", used to fill the air with noise while the next lot of drivel is put together in the speaker's mind. If I have time, I may attempt to do some web research on popular search engines to determine how the number of matches to the search "and stuff like that" has increased each year over the past decade. I realize that this result will be skewed, as this is likely more of a verbal issue than a written one, but it may provide some insight.

Until then, if you share my disdain, go rent (or download) Idiocracy, an admittedly stupid movie by Mike Judge that explores a future in which Darwinism has failed and the stupid rule the earth.