People have been begging me for another post.
That’s a total lie. If anyone ever read this, the last thing they’d do is ask for more. However, last night Lulu did query me by chat about why I haven’t written lately. The answer lies in what my mother always used to say: If you don’t have anything nice to say about somebody, don’t say anything at all. Oops; wrong quote. It was something about not talking if you don’t have something to say.
As you well know, that’s never stopped me, so here we go.
Recent scenes I’ve stumbled upon…
At the health food store
A six-year-old boy, shopping with his wheelchair-bound father, kept plucking items from his father’s lap: a can of vegetarian black beans, a raw-food fruit-and-nut bar, a loaf of whole-grain bread. “What’s in this? Read the ingredients,” the boy demanded, handing his father the box of organic macaroni and cheese.
As Dad started through the list, the boy interrupted. “I don’t think that’s good for us. Why are you buying this?”
“It’s okay. It’s healthy,” the father reassured the child.
“No, it’s NOT. We can’t get this. I’ll put it back.”
“No, really, it’s fine…
In line at the Freight & Salvage
Person One: “That sign in the window says Tracy Grammer is post-modern. What’s post-modern?”
Person Two: “It’s after modern.”
Person One: “When’s modern?”
Person Three: “It must be now.”
Person Two: “I guess we’re post-modern.”
Recommended…
I just finished an assumption-rattling book called Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Mob, whose author, Lee Siegel, spoke a few days ago at Larry Benksy’s Media Interpretation & Criticism class at Berkeley City College. While my poor, rusty little gears couldn’t grasp much of his brainy (and witty) discourse, I was intrigued by the big ideas. He explores the dark side of the so-called democracy of online publishing: the success of Web and blog journalism (and “journalism”) being measured by popularity rather than merit, and the unremarked distinction between unlimited information and knowledge. It was a refreshing challenge to the way I think of the Internet, though I found the swath of his opinionated slashing too broad.
It unnerved me to recognize myself in his description of how people publicly “perform their privacy” on blogs:
“People don’t want their privacy invaded. They now want other people… to watch them as they carefully craft their privacy into a marketable, public style. Real private life has gone underground.
Upcoming…
I’ve been researching the river trip I want to take in Nepal. This is a likely option.
Tomorrow I’m going to Drupal Day at a conference at Yahoo! in Silicon Valley. Called Journalism That Matters, the conference is “a conceptual mashup for journalists, technologists and entrepreneurs.” I hate that word, mashup. It’s so ’07. Plus, the first time I read it I thought it said “a conceptual messup for journalists…” They have a wiki that I’ve been messing around with.
Today’s photo…
Here’s a photo I took a couple days ago of Esmeralda after a modeling session. Eyes were on her that night as she walked through the Mission and rode BART home.
Bye. I’m going to try rock climbing now.