Somewhere...

Somewhere, in some screening of Brokeback Mountain, an older gentleman in a plaid shirt with suspenders is leans over and whispers to lady of similar age sitting next to him: "Momma, are those two boys on the screen gettin' ready to fight? They jist put their hands on each oth.. err..."

Cool, and Worth Every Penny

I don't think I could ever say it better.

Millenialism

The Millenials are back in the news again. For those of you keeping track at home, the Millenials are the tech-obsessed brats to my anti-establishment angst; they're one of the big generational waves, like Gen-Xers or you aging hippies, the Boomers. (Not to get on a tangent, but you know that if you throw a Boomer off a cliff, they 'thud' just like anyone else.)

If you strip the article to its core, it points out that the twentysomething Millenials use technology to engage in nearly constant communication with a wide-circle of friends and acquaintances. They excel at group-consensus and team-based decision making. Millenials also multi-task instinctively.

If I were to pull some of my 'Global Marketing' memories from deep storage I'd call them high-context, polychronic and relationship-oriented. (And that's oriented, not orientated; I'd no sooner name somebody orientated than I would label them an octoroon.)

'Context' refers to how much of the meaning of a message is contained in the message. Low-context cultures invest their messages will all of the meaning that is intended while high-context cultures immerse their messages in a sea of allusions, metaphors and references to past interactions. (Watch some Japanese commercials: you'll see toilet cleaner ads that consist of images of sunlight, a sea breeze and a baby's smile. But I digress.)

Polychronic people multitask effectively - they'll talk on the phone, email, edit and update and slug coffee all at once. Conversely, monochronic people prefer to do those things one at a time.

Americans, and Northern Europeans in general, are historically low-context, monochronic and 'deal-oriented' with a concept of a wide personal space. Thus our traditional affinity for solitary offices, extensive legal agreements and moody alcoholism.

Millenials are, in short, different than the generations that preceded them. They seem to have much more in common, culturally, with certain Mediterranean, South American or Asian societies. This has resulted in a significant generational divide, with major differences in how we communicate and interact with other people.

Do the Millenials mark a permanent sea change in american society or will come back to the farm?

Looking back, at the time the 'Summer of Love' was heralded as being Year 1 of an entirely new way to live. Lord love rock'n'roll, open marriages, nudity and the destruction of hierarchy! ('Lord' meaning either God, the local Yogi or the chapter leader of the local Hell's Angels.) Of course, the summer eventually ended and, the majority (Tommy Chong, where are you?) left the commune, got a shave and went back to life with nothing but some fond memories and a persistent rash or two.

My money is that it'll be somewhere between the two. When the Millenials start getting married, having kids and settling down there will be a little retrenchment...after all, responsibilities suck but there you are. However, to claim that Millenials will be 'just like us' is to be blind to the reality. And then there's the young evangelicals...

Financial Excesses

Apparently the United States government has moral authority when it comes to fiscal responsibility.

View From Outside

You know, upon arriving home from work yesterday I thought to myself 'I feel great! I only had an 11 hour day today.'

I paused for a moment, then started feeling worse again.

Time Redux (v2.0)

I tend to flit from topic to topic like an erratic 160-pound hummingbird, so for another note on time. And that's erratic, not erotic. Definitely non-erotic.

Anyway, I measure time in moments, not hours. A moment can last for seconds or span weeks, though it seems that my moments have been ginsu'd for many years now. But that's why seconds have but little meaning - moments are the events and living grain of existence.

If ten thousand seconds pass but there is no meaningto them, did they ever exist at all? That is why I try to treasure situations and not count the minutes.

There is a time for solitude, just as there is a time for sleep. But we can not sleep all the time.

Mayor Ray, Say It Isn't So!

Well, in the interests of seeming to be fair and accurate I wanted to mention that Mayor Ray has apparently had a change of heart. It seems that God didn't destroy New Orleans because of some Mardi Gras-related high spiritedness. It's nice to know that booze and flashers didn't doom the city. I am sort of sorry that he also retracted those 'chocolate city' comments about how floods just scared the white folks away.

Well, It Had to Happen

Mayor Ray Nagin suggested Monday that Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and other storms were a sign that "God is mad at America" and at black communities, too, for tearing themselves apart with violence and political infighting.

The American Diet

I used to think that the European uproar over American food in general and GMO's & additives in particular was simply another example of anti-american hysteria. But now I've really started to wonder.

I read recently that the average US Citizen eats over 60 pounds of corn syrup every years. When was the last time you remember sprinkling Karo over your wheaties? My mom is a good cook and she goes through, like, 1 bottle a year. And my god, do you know how many products you can find dextrose or malto-dextrose in? It's all over the place!

For those of you in the peanut gallery, dextrose is a tasteless complex carbohydrate that is added to many, many foods as a flowability agent (I think it prevents caking). Granted, our bodies can't digest dextrose but the intestinal flora & fauna in our digestive tracts can. And what is consumed encourages growth...

My larger point is that a lot of things are being put into our food supply that we're not aware of. Not that I'm a tinfoil-hat freak, but you really don't want to know about the processes that create trans-fats or how Splenda is really made...

Encomium MLK

I'd like to take a moment here to recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Not as he was, for he was a man of his time and his views on the role of women and of marital fidelity were of his time.

Rather, I would like to recognize the idea of MLK. The idea that a person can stand up and be counted; to be able to make a difference. One person who places himself in the crux of events has the capability to change the times in which they live.

Let us recognize him as a man, and remember that he was remarkable not in spite of his flaws but because of them. He prevented his wife Coretta from becoming part of the civil rights movent, though she repeatedly volunteered. There were also infidelities, used as stress releases before speeches or after protest marches. Though worn out by struggle, riven with doubt and torn by fear of failure, he followed his course to the bitter end, and refused to relinquish to those who cried for violence and revenge.

He was no stylite, peering over an austere desert landscape - to idolize Martin Luther King Jr. is to abandon the very human aspect that made him great. It is foolish to claim that MLK was special to proclaim that he was above or better than the rest of us absolves us of the responsibility to be more, to hope more and to strive for more.

Let us, therefore, see Martin Luther King Jr. not as a saint, but as a man who (as a man) fought with his own demons and fell prey to his own vices, but had the courage and conviction to step forth and place himself in the crux of social change, and lead such a movement as to change the very society in which he lived.

Interstitial Time

Def (n):
1. Relating to or situated in the small, narrow spaces between tissues or parts of an organ.
2. Online ad that loads between two content pages.
3. Pertaining to material (such as oil, natural gas or trace minerals) in the pore spaces of a rock.

In other words, it's the stuff between other stuff.

This morning I had to get up extremely early (in a relative sense: 4am is pretty darn early when you work second shift) to go to work during the day today. The day has felt very interstitial so far.

To me, interstitial time is defined by the anticipation of what's to come, not what is occurring at that moment. There are certain times that highlight interstitial moments. The gloaming, when the sun has set but light yet remains, is one such time. Similarly, I'm getting ready for work now but that's of no real moment; my real focus is on what will happen in the day ahead... I'm in the gap between the blackness of sleep and the rush & press of today.

Interestingly, time seems the most interstitial when I'm alone.

Walking with, talking with even just being with some one else seems to greatly reduce the sense of anticipation... The gray fabric of the between-time fades and is replaced with a world of color; that time suddenly becomes a moment of its own.

You Might Have An Image Problem If...

If one of your senior executives, who has already plead guilty to tax evasion & wire fraud, claims that rather than add embezzlement to that list, the money he took from company coffers was used in a corporate campaign to spy on, bribe and corrupt union leaders and people believe him.

If I were Walmart and my own executives were exploiting the company's anti-union stance as a defence in their criminal trials, I would really wonder if I'm being penny-wise but pound-foolish.

And ok, ok Tom Coughlin was really using Wal-Mart's general reputation for evil, not just its union-busting image. Honestly, when was the last time anyone heard about something good, or even non-bad, going on at the Behemoth?

Death of Television?

Those of you who declared television dead when 'Dallas' left the airwaves can ignore the rest of this post. For the rest of us, take note: Google and Yahoo have announced the beginning of the end of the television as an independent media device.

Some content (including both old shows that are having trouble finding a home even on TV Land as well as a selection of new & recent programming) is already available directly from media providers, and from 3rd party software like iTunes. The CBS deal, and the prospect of major search companies getting into the act can only accelerate this trend; television studios will find it difficult to ignore a new revenue stream, especially as their competitors and smaller independants start making money from it.

Within a few years, we'll be able to order and watch television programs just like we pull up websites now. Who woulda thunk it?