Thursday, May 21, 2009

clearing out the irritations of a long day...

...by blogging. therapeutic, right? far better than plotting how to do damage to the town office of the miniscule town i went to high school in. demands for money should be both carefully timed and, ideally, not phrased as though the recipient is a blithering idiot and this one was neither of those things.

anyway, the amusing thing about this article, "in defense of distraction" by sam anderson is that i did have to follow the advice he gives in the first paragraph. i had, in fact, forgotten a brief but important email i had to send to a friend so i went and did it and then returned to read the rest of the article with, it has to be said, two interruptions to deal with other emails. which is fair, i think. i don't think the article covers anything particularly groundbreaking in terms of internet distraction -- or other kinds of distraction, for that matter -- but mr. anderson writes well and he makes some interesting points although i'm not sure if his conclusion is that great; it seems kind of like a cop-out to "the internet generation is just different. woooo." and it works as an interesting counterpoint to the bishop of paisley's outburst against twitter.

i sent jeremy clarkson's article about the honda insight to my mother because she and my father are talking about getting a new car. not that i seriously think they will buy a hybrid -- and if nothing else, the insight is far too low to work on our gravel road without getting the bottom torn out of it regularly -- but because clarkson writes excellent snark, describing the car as "Biblically terrible" at one point. this is quality snarking, guys.

i've watched the trailer for the road a couple of times now in the hopes that i will become more convinced. but it just isn't happening. the book is awesome; i read it in one sitting last summer after wandering across it in the bpl's immensely date-flexible "new fiction" section and thinking, "what the hell." great stuff -- really; but you should probably wait for a nice cheerful sunny day before you read it, make sure you have a kitten (or puppy, if your tastes swing that way) close to hand, and maybe some alcohol to go with it because it is not cheerful. not even a little bit. the closest thing to cheer that you can really find in it is that not quite everyone dies. although this is a pretty good thing, i have to say. anyway, just in case you haven't seen this video nineteen times already, i'm putting it here, too, just so i can consider it again later:



i was still tired enough before work this morning that, having arrived about half an hour early as usual (it's either that or be ten minutes late), when i wandered over to the guardian website to check out the uk headlines, the picture of john barrowman leading this article completely baffled me for a minute. now of course i'm linking the article because john barrowman is awesome and i'm marking time 'til torchwood season 3 but i also don't really dare check out much of the text of the article due to fear of spoilers. still, i don't doubt that any re-staging of la cage aux folles will be improved by his presence!

lastly, a dailyom post from a month or so back that i find helpful.

4 comments:

beagley said...

Hey, thanks for the distraction article. Someone else posted about that but when I went back I couldn't find it.

If you liked reading The Road, I unreservedly recommend the authors other stuff. All the Pretty Horses is one of the greatest things I've ever read.

KarraCrow said...

@ beagley

glad i was reference-helpful! what did you think of the article?

i've got a copy of all the pretty horses at home somewhere, but i keep forgetting to retrieve it. i'm definitely going to reread the road pre-film and mccarthy's others are on the list.

annajcook said...

finally had a chance to read this, now the computer screen isn't making me feel sick...

I'm nonplussed by the poor Bishop of Paisley who seems to think that the internet somehow invented "inane chatter," and even more confused as to how social networking tools decrease understanding and tolerance. I'd say they more or less replicate the way people behave in (gasp) non-virtual spaces...

And the dailyom is spot-on. Thanks for linking.

KarraCrow said...

@annajcook

perhaps he keeps getting the fail whale?