Perhaps the best news story created about 9/11: onion.  ¶ 9/29/2001 04:59:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

Embrace! Embrace the miser within! Today I spent more than two hours pouring over corporate expenses and credit card reports. I managed to scrounge up $1600 that people still owe me. Now I will make fists of cash and greedily clutch them to my heart. Muhahaha!  ¶ 9/28/2001 01:37:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

I would get my car washed at those "Touchless" car wash places more often if it weren't for the obvious class issues involved. Armies of Latinos slaving away on BMW's and SUV's while their upper middle class owners chat away on cell phones and sip Starbucks. And there I am, awkwardingly standing with the owners, feeling like now I've become The Man. It's too much Marxism for one afternoon.  ¶ 9/27/2001 01:41:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

Suburban lawns satisfy some sort of bizarre human agricultural instinct that I can't quite figure out. All the sodding, fertilizing, weeding, mowing. It's like a farm supplement for city boys.  ¶ 9/25/2001 05:54:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

Perhaps all the war enthusiasm is being cultivated by geography teachers. I never used to know where Turkmenistan was.  ¶ 9/24/2001 02:41:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

Business travel is really the one-night stand of tourism. You show up in the city, go to meetings all day and fly out early the next morning. Then later you tell your friends "I've been to Minneapolis."   ¶ 9/22/2001 05:16:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

America may be the most media saturated country in the world. TV, Radio, E-mail, Web, cell phones - we're constantly surrounded by and digesting our media. Like millions of nerve cells in a giant brain. Our lives hum with the messages of others. What's interesting about this is how sophisticated and powerful our propaganda is about to become in the next few months. MTV will have war anthems, e-mail lists will titter with "informative" chain letters, news networks will overflow with computer animated flags waving in the digital breeze. I can feel myself succumbing to their heart-string pulling ways already.  ¶ 9/21/2001 02:22:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

Most artificial intelligence enthusiasts fall victim to a form of flawed reasoning I call the "not-yet fallacy." It goes something like this: in the 1950's, no one believed a computer could beat a human at chess, prove a mathematical theorem, write a poem, etc. - yet today they can. Therefore, given enough time, a computer can do anything. I'm reading a book right now called "The Age of Spiritual Machines" and the author seems to think it's quite possible to download one's mind into a computer. "Moore's law shows . . . blah blah blah." This is a ridiculous proposition of course and I could rant about it for many paragraphs, but that's not what's important here. What is important is that to prove his claims, he need only put the words "computer" and "future" together in a sentence. Irrefutable!  ¶ 9/21/2001 12:00:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

I have to stop telling smokers that I've quit smoking. I can't even hang out with them anymore because when I tell them I've quit, they get all self-conscious about it. "Yeah, I should quit too." I can't keep having this conversation - it gets them all depressed. I'll have to tell them I'm addicted to second-hand, or that I'm trying to pick up a habit of standing outside clubs with strangers for 8 minute intervals. Something like that.  ¶ 9/20/2001 04:00:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

i have a friend who's so gay, he can't even think straight.  ¶ 9/16/2001 07:12:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

I seriously can't deal with all the American flags flying right now. When did this country get so jingoistic all of a sudden? All this is really freaking me out. I just hope that before this war starts we can all just agree on a nice, round death toll number. "We'll kill 6,784 arabs and then our vengeance will be sated." Something like that.  ¶ 9/14/2001 11:36:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

Despite steely-eyed candlelight vigils and the confident bravado of official announcements, there are those Americans who sense the possibility of this nation’s mortality lurking around the next concourse. The stature of the American nation has long allowed its citizens to wall out such thoughts, but they have returned unbidden regardless. Two centuries of increase and power argue against the possibility of decline, but five millennia of recorded history argue much more persuasively in favor. All empires have their twilight. One is forced to consider if we have entered ours. As Rome was not built in a day, so it did not fall in an afternoon. People rarely sense the darkness approaching until it is too late.   ¶ 9/14/2001 02:35:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

The time has come for some concentration camps! We'll round up all the arabs, shove 'em in a camp and dispatch planes to bomb their homelands. I figure, each innocent American life lost to terrorism can be compensated for by one innocent Arab life lost to aerial bombing. Then we'll have 5000 innocent people dead on our side, and 5000 innocent people dead on their side. That'll work: 10,000 innocent people dead. One of the bombs might even hit a terrorist.  ¶ 9/14/2001 03:20:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

The draft for this war should be women only. Men were drafted and killed in the last ten US wars and some might say that women should get to fight the next ten. Personally, I think we should just alternate every other war. Women can fight in this one, men will get the next one.   ¶ 9/12/2001 09:33:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

I am an urban hunter. No parking spot shall escape my watchful eye. I see brake lights from a mile away, hear the clinking of keys like a siren. The slightest opening of a car door elicits vicious U turns - emergency lights flashing, wheels screeching. I'll squeeze into any spot more than four feet wide. Let it be known: Brian Carroll is at the top of San Francisco's food chain!  ¶ 9/07/2001 01:30:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

The belief that the corporate media spends its time manipulating the content of the news in furtherance of some nefarious plan for control is getting old. The season provides us with a particularly useful example: the so-called “Summer of the Shark” which has been clogging the airwaves and op-ed columns of practically ever elite media outlet for weeks now. A colleague of mine has been on national television about a dozen times in the last month alone, being interviewed about shark attacks, why they occur, what government policies impact sharks populations, and the rest. The biggest of the big media conglomerates are spending a lot of time on the issue; covering it is obviously a priority for them. Yet the producers who arrange these segments are not doing it keep people from hearing about imperialist atrocities in third world countries nor to inspire their audiences to a spasm of unreflective consumerism. They are desperately trying to attract viewers, to get members of their key demographics to watch their particular squak show 30 seconds longer than last week. The producers keep themselves in a veritable frenzy trying to figure out what their viewers want, and it turns out that what cable and network news viewers want are atavistic echoes of mangled limbs and touching stories of angelic tykes bravely recovering from unexpected horrors. I have seen the puppet masters, and they are reading People magazine.   ¶ 9/07/2001 12:11:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

Here's something interesting I found out: flight attendants are snobs. To all the waiters, bartenders and cashiers at airport restaurants, flight attendants have huge attitude. Apparently they feel a measly "stationary" service job is beneath them. It's funny how mobility is a status symbol.  ¶ 9/07/2001 03:32:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

Here's the thing about the "slimey sales guy" stereotype: it's based on car salesmen. And car sales is really the bottom feeder of sales jobs. No professional sales person would take that job, and no professional sales person would be pulling the cliche' "slimey" tactics - it puts too much revenue and reputation in jeopardy. So our popular myths about sales are really just the result of being exposed to amateurs.  ¶ 9/06/2001 02:34:00 AM 0 comments links to this post

A quote I like: "Intentionally live different from the masses, because it's inspiring and powerful to be awake."   ¶ 9/03/2001 11:00:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

Teaching English is America's version of the Catholic missionary. We're sending thousands of Americans all over the world every year trying to convert the third world. We dangle goodies in front of the native's eyes - like the ability to understand Michael Jackson lyrics and watch Baywatch. Surfing the Internet is the promise land for good students.   ¶ 9/03/2001 10:38:00 PM 0 comments links to this post

It's pretty amazing to sit here and watch all the people go by. Hundreds of tourists from thousands of miles away have come ten blocks from my home and are walking around looking at my neighborhood. They think Haight street is very interesting. They're probably looking at me thinking "I bet he lives here."  ¶ 9/01/2001 08:53:00 PM 0 comments links to this post