.:Colter:.

I’m slowly devouring Cameron Crowe’s archive of interviews, and came across this fine nugget from David Bowie:

CROWE: Did you ever get into acid?

BOWIE: I did three times. It was very colorful, but I thought my own imagination was already richer. Naturally. And more meaningful to me. Acid only gives people a link with their own imagery. I already had it. It was nothing new to me. It just sort of made a lot of fancy colors. Flashy lights and things.

This helps confirm my long-held suspicion that illicit drug use only tends to medicate psychologically injured people (with ailments ranging from simple stress to childhood trauma) and/or to make boring people seem more interesting to themselves. I don’t begrudge anyone their drug of choice; I just hope they know what they’re doing - that they’re not hiding from something they need to deal with, or that they’re not using drugs as a crutch to get them somewhere that they could get to on their own.

If only Nancy Reagan had said “Just say ‘meh’ to drugs.”

I was about to begin this entry by saying “I am continually fascinated by…” and then I started to wonder how many times I’ve used that phrase on this blog. A quick Google search reveals at least four. I am considering changing the name of this site to “Continual Fascinations.”

Anyway, I dig Newton’s Third Law, “for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.” It seems to cross over from physics to areas of social interaction, politics and technology in the form of my new favorite axiom, “for everything you gain, you lose something.” Consider a man in a room full of women, wishing to express to a particular woman that she is singularly beautiful. If he does so, the other women would assume by implication that they were not singularly beautiful, and they would despise him for it. Most probably, what he might gain in affection from the one, he would lose from the others.

The same is true for most religions. The statement of “I believe in my particular God” also carries with it the implication that everyone else who does not share your God is thoroughly wrong. Or even nationalistic sentiments, especially “God bless the USA,” which implies that God would not be blessing any of the other countries in the world any time soon.

I suppose this is the nature of praise. To single something out is to separate it from that which it is not. To define is to delineate. As soon as something is somewhere, it is not elsewhere. Which brings us back to physics I suppose.

Can you handle the meta? I’ll be commenting on Mark Morford’s comments on a piece in New York Magazine about these kids today and their internets. Here’s Mark’s ever-eloquent, ever-snarky summary:

“If you believe the media skew, if you see it all through a lens of fear or lack of nimble perspective, suddenly it’s all drooling MySpace sexual predators and binge-drinking frat-boy idiots and millions of lost brain-rotted teens snorting ketamine off each other’s stolen iPods and then shooting each other in the face after playing 6 million hours of Grand Theft Auto, one giant violent sexed-up gum-snapping body-pierced eating-disorder STD-ready freak show ready to implode at the drop of a hat or the shave of a Britney.

And it’s also one big dumb, overblown lie. Well, most of it.”

The message to parents: calm down. Raising kids today isn’t weirder or more dangerous than it used to be, it’s just differently weird and differently dangerous. In the 50’s, conventional wisdom was that rock and roll was dangerous, and now people pay upwards of $100 to see crusty dope fiends like the Rolling Stones play at their local arena. Yes the Internet allows kids to put more of themselves online, but the threat of online predators is about as valid as that of muggers in Manhattan: real but rare.

For everything you gain, you lose something. What kids gain with the social Internet (MySpace/LiveJournal/Flickr/Facebook/et al) is a way to express themselves, a platform for communicating more easily with their friends, and an archive of their adolescence that they can refer to throughout their lives. What they lose is perhaps some measure of safety/privacy, the ability to escape past mistakes/embarrassments, and maybe some fresh air.

There’s a real temptation for a parent who grew up in front of a TV watching cartoons to feel disconnected and paranoid about their kids growing up in front of the Internet, because it’s a different world from the one they grew up in; but isn’t that always the case? Personally I’m more afraid of kids growing up eating so much fast food and/or microwaved crap as fewer parents seem to cook these days.

And for heaven’s sake, if the sight of your kid glued to a laptop all day bugs you, take them outside! I had my nieces and nephew over Monday night, and when I saw each of them playing online games, I immediately suggested we go play frisbee. Fortunately they have not lost their zeal for real world activities.

As you may have heard, AOL released vast swaths of private search history data to the public recently. Now some crafty geek has made that data available for convenient browsing.

AOLSearchDatabase.com allows you to query and randomly view selections from the AOL data. Although users are identified only by an ID number, you’re able to view examples of the phrases on which they have searched. Frankly, I feel pretty dirty looking at it. But like a virtual car crash, I can’t look away. It’s an utterly fascinating series of psychological profiles of average Americans. Add to that the undeniably voyeuristic thrill of peeking into people’s search histories, and you have the makings of an ethical conundrum. I’m still not entirely sure how I feel about this. Maybe I’ll take this post down later, as AOL tried to do with its data, but for now I’ll just pretend that this information wants to be free. It’s interesting to note how difficult secrets are to keep in the Internet Age.

Setec Astronomy.

I am realizing of late that my generation was the first to really get marketed to in a psychically deep way. Where in my father’s generation, something like the Red Rider BB Gun might have been the cool thing to have, my generation insisted I have every facet of the Star Wars/Transformers/G.I. Joe/He-Man/M.A.S.K/etc universe. So many toys. So many commercials and cartoons for toys. And then came the explosion in video games. Now, as the children of the 80’s are hitting their 30’s, I see that we have yet to put away childish things, many of us unrepentantly so[1]. Now, I’m personally proud to admit that I have not, nor will I ever “grow up” in a conventional sense, but more and more I wonder if my position wasn’t psychologically impressed upon me by the Toys R Us jingle, “I don’t want to grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid.”

What if a significant portion of my personality was marketed to me by Hasbro®? Maybe we don’t want to give up on acquiring toys because we’ve been conditioned to continue enjoying them, so lodged in our subconscious is the allure of the fantasy world, so appealing is the packaging, or in the case of videos games, so gratifying is the accomplishment of the game? And this isn’t just a nerd thing…I just watched leading man Vince Vaughn play video games in his swank Chicago high-rise condo in The Break Up. Are we a generation who has had the the Peter Pan Syndrome psychologically transmitted to us by Madison Avenue?

It’s harmless of course; I’m still a mature 30 year old who has a career and a mortgage, and who doesn’t behave like a teenager. I do, however, prefer to dress in odd t-shirts and I still find trips to the toy department appealing, even if my purchases there are fewer and further between. A great lesson from Twilight Zone: The Movie that I took to heart was to grow old with a fresh young mind. I think that’s something good for everyone to do.

1.) Of course I’m not talking to you, Josh. What would make you think that? ;)

Paul Newman asks repeatedly in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, “who are those guys?” That was my overriding impression when I started thumbing through the gallery at Little Rock Blog. If anyone needed more support for the idea that all white people look the same, take a look at the people on those pages. They’re all terribly beautiful by modern standards, but I’ll be darned if I can tell any one from the other. All the girls have the same hair and faces. It’s Stepford-esque. The guys are all similar, too. And everyone smokes light cigarettes and drinks light beer. Can a brother not get a stout and a Lucky Strike once in a while?

I’m not just saying this as a nerd looking at the cool kids[1], I’m saying this as someone who is continually fascinated by human behavior and social interaction. The homogeneity is weirding me out, plus the fact that I don’t know any of these people even tangentially. I never realized what a vast social circle exists in Little Rock with which I have no connection whatsoever.

I just noticed the tag line “image is everything” underneath the page header. Apparently that’s the case.

1.) Because there is probably an element of that to it.

Of course the Internet speeds the exchange of information, allowing scientific communication to accelerate and advancements to be made more quickly, but something I’ve noticed recently is that it has a similar effect on the distribution of historical facts. I have seen more references to Saturnalia this holiday season than in any previous year, and I blame the ease with which the Internet allows us to transmit information. In the case of Saturnalia, it’s likely a side effect of this hubub regarding references to “Christmas” versus “holidays.” Apparently the tide of political correctness is being turned back toward the Christian majority who want to make sure that everyone knows Christ is the reason for the season. I won’t get into that, though [1].

What I’ve been seeing lately are a flurry of emails and weblinks discussing December 25 and its Saturnalian origins. Much the way Easter was co-opted by the Christians from pagan tradition, so Christmas was conveniently placed at the same time of the Romans’ Saturnalia in an effort to convert the heathens. In fact, most biblical scholars put Christ’s actual birth a few years back into the B.C., and probably in spring or summer, as the Nativity would have been an unlikely scene in the dead of winter. Not many shepherds would keep their flock by night in the fields during the cold season.

Another, completely unrelated historical item I came across today was graffiti from the walls of Pompeii. For some reason I never considered that the scrawlings on the walls of truck stop bathrooms have a long tradition, stretching back very likely to the first days of indoor lavatories. The Pompeii markings read nearly identically to their counterparts in the modern day. The topics are alternately scatalogical (”show us your hairy privates”) and romantic (”Marcus loves Spendusa”). I also never realized “I was here” has been written on walls for millenia. Were we to intuit the central message of humanity from these writings, one could only assume that it would read: “We were here, we had sex, we loved.”

For anyone searching for the meaning of life, the answer may well lie right there.

1.) Yet.

Fark.com, as hopefully everyone knows, is the best place to get news. Fark allows odd news stories from various regions to be concentrated into a central location. These stories are the kinds of things you might read in your local paper but almost never see on national news. Something I realized today is that, as a result, Fark makes us aware of human behavior patterns that we might otherwise miss. For example, cat hoarding.

Headlines like “today’s house with 300 cats brought to you by X” show up on Fark with remarkable regularity. On a local level, cat hoarding might seem like a peculiar, isolated incident, but with the advent of Fark, we can see that it is in fact something of a national mini-epidemic. People hoard pets all the time. There are hundreds of pet hoarders out there. It’s a legitimate psychological disorder.

So there’s another benefit of the Internet. It allows us to discover how truly freaky we really are. Pet hoarding just scratches the surface if you consider that the Internet also allows people with niche fetishes to come together more easily.

It’s easy to take for granted what the invention of the telephone has brought to courtship and human relationships. Getting a phone number from a member of the opposite sex is such a crucial first step in the dating process; how did we ever date without them?

And how will the Internet change this? Obviously the exchange of email addresses is taking on a status similar to that of the phone number exchange, but I truly believe that the Internet will affect the very way we meet people. Why go to a bar and hope to find someone interesting enough to ask for a phone number? Why not flip through profiles and web pages of people so that you can move quickly past their physical exteriors to get some idea of who they really are? Sure there’s the likelihood of subterfuge, but it will always be smaller than that of its outdoor counterpart. Assuming of course that you’re looking for a personality to match yours, and not just an attractive body.

Consider this. Jamie B started a profile at Nerve.com for her sister Amy (the twins mentioned in the June 16 entry), whom I then met and with whom I became good friends. I later got onto Orkut.com (wherein I met my other Jamie) and pulled in Jamie B, wherein she met her now-fiancee Charles. I’ve also made a few new friends via myspace.com. So it’s already happening. And it’s not just for hopeless nerds who never leave the house. Not anymore.

We now have an official zeitgeisty term for what the Internet brings to advertising/marketing and popular culture, The Long Tail. Where previously all forms of commercial creativity (be it movies, music, advertising, TV, etc.) were aimed at attracting the most people by appealing to the widest audience (the head), the Internet offers the ability to cater to the multifarious niche markets that pervade the periphery of our culture (the tail). In many ways, the traditional limitations of distribution can be done away with altogether: books need never go out of print, obscure movies need no longer gather dust (or get incinerated by savage evildoing behemoths). Ebay is the biggest example of Long Tail thinking - where else would you find a hideously rare Ibanez RB Jem? Only a few hundred were made and probably only a few hundred people would even care.

One of the biggest ramifications of this concept is the potential for breakdown in our popular culture. Not many people are old enough to remember the days before radio and television united us in a shared cultural experience[1]. Culture was previously more regionally derived[2]. Now, perhaps culture will be more individually determined. People with shared interests will be able to connect with each other more easily based on their own likes and dislikes. I’m seeing it even now as I have made new friends based entirely on our connection to this movie. I’m not saying pop culture will die out, but it will likely decline; a best case scenario would be that the stuff that survives will suck far less than the usual crap that’s handed out these days.

1) That statement sits somewhere between generous overstatement and hilarious irony.
2) For better or worse, this is probably why there are fewer barn dances these days.