Remember when passing notes in class was the best way to quiz friends on "What kind of vegetable are you?" and "Who will you marry?" Now sites like Memegen.net let teens post quizzes like "How Gangsta are you?" and "Are you hott?" (sic) on their personal blogs at Livejournal or MySpace.
There you have it - according to the CNET editorial staff, high arbiters of English, "Gangsta" is now an accepted spelling while "hott" deserves a (sic).
:: My life is mostly different from Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freemen, but not entirely
Yesterday morning as I entered the subway station I was selected for a bag search. An armed police officer sorted though my messenger bag and determined that I was not in possession of any threatening items. I've seen the searches before but never been pulled aside personally. It was a little creepy, and all I could think afterwards was "this would never happen to Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman." Mr. Freeman is pushing 70, highly esteemed, and instantly recognizable, three factors I speculate would dissuade the NYPD from stopping him. Furthermore I suspect the judgment of a police officer in the subway would be moot, as Mr. Freeman is a wealthy man who is, as I already mentioned, elderly and not likely to be taking the subway in the first place.
Yesterday evening I arrived home by taxi cab. The fare was such that in order to give the driver a satisfactory tip I would need to break a $20 bill. When I attempted to do this, the driver asked if I could pay with single dollar bills. I replied that I did, but would only be able to tip him $0.40 if I were to do so. "Forget the tip," he responded. "I bet this kind of thing happens to Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman all the time," I thought. Mr. Freeman is a famous and respected entertainer; I am confident he receives complimentary goods and services - sometimes in the form of reduced gratuities - fairly frequently. In addition, as I noted in the above paragraph, Mr. Freeman probably takes taxi cabs or a car service when in New York.
:: Very kinky data / the kind you won't take home to momma
One of the uses of Google Trends I was most excited about was pinpointing the Superfreak crossover point - the time at which the majority of the world would hear the opening riff to Rick James' "Superfreak" and anticipate that the original song would follow, instead of believing it to be the sample backing MC Hammer's "Can't Touch This". Alas Google's results only extend to the beginning of 2004, well after my best speculation as to the point's date, and on top of this records no trend data for "superfreak" until August of 2004, coinciding with an obituary traffic spike for Mr. James.
Those who fancy themselves free thinkers harbor a dirty secret, which is not that they aren't as free-thinking as claimed (common knowledge) but that much of their close-mindedness stems from a need to continually assert their open-mindedness. Free thinkers don't think in a rhetorical vacuum, after all, and for most the term is a proud, more endearing and enlightened, euphemism for "rebel". And rebels, driven by an urge to prove independence, must repeatedly highlight the disparity in thought distinguishing them from their dogma of choice. The degree to which such opposition reveals itself varies wildly and its more extreme forms - think Hitchens post 9/11 - can even be confused for wholesale ideological border crossing. The enemy of my enemy within becomes my friend, as the old proverb might be bent to say.
Anyway, Ben Stein has always framed himself as a free-thinking type, the academic bow-tie-sporting former poverty lawyer turned Nixon speechwriter and Republican diehard. Most of the time our viewpoints diverge. But, committed iconoclast that he is, once in a while they are aligned.
We all know - and I mean all, even Congress - that the oil companies are not fixing prices. We all know that the oil companies are not creating these wild prices out of thin air.
The worldwide market is at work, and traders and speculators are driving up the price, based on uncertainty of supplies and inventories, and presumably becoming very rich in the process (at least some of them). That's the market at work. It's not up to the government to set the price or to fix the situation except by opening more space for exploration, and even that may not help.
In the same way, even I was startled when I read about the pay of Lee R. Raymond, the former chief executive of Exxon Mobil, who recently retired. His retirement package was in the neighborhood of $400 million - a breathtaking sum, even for those of us who admire the job that Big Oil does and think that the industry gets a bum rap.
Still, that's between him and his stockholders, not a matter for Congress. And it would not even remotely be addressed by a windfall profits tax - an idea that has been tried and has failed miserably.
The real problem is the difference between the rich - including rich oil people, of whom there are not many, but there are enough - and the poor. It is up to the government to redress this extraordinary difference in incomes of the rich and the nonrich, even at the margins.
What Congress can do, and should do, is address the stunning underpayment of military men and women and the staggering budget deficits that will be a burden on our posterity for decades, by raising the taxes on the rich. It's fine that there are rich people. It's even fine that there are superrich people.
But if they are superrich, they derive special benefits from life in the United States that the nonrich don't. For one thing, they can make the money in a safe environment, which is not true for the rich in many countries. It is just common decency that they should pay much higher income taxes than they do. Taxes for the rich are lower than they have been since at least World War II - that is to say, in 60 years.
I came to work this morning to find a massive amount of music equipment being unloaded from an 18-wheeler and into the recording studio next door. Each large crate had "Guns n' Roses" stenciled on the side. I am very underwhelmed by the prospect that Axl will birth even a small portion of Chinese Democracy into this world mere feet from me. At this point, a decade in the making, it must be few studios indeed that have been spared the role of midwife.
A part of my new job with which I'm going to have to come to terms is exposure to the college lifestyle, like an outcast from Eden going back to conduct focus groups. Last week we took a trip to Montclair, NJ and Washington DC (apologies for missing everyone in the areas, I had no free time) to better acquaint ourselves, even staying overnight in a residence hall.
I noticed an alarming dearth of Frisbees considering the warm weather. I wrote a wistful poem:
My preferred Frisbee
(Not owned by yours truly)
Used ball bearings
For gyroscopic revelry
