Duel, Citizenship

Chorus vs. Diva

Who beeped at me while I was walking in the giganto-mart parking lot the other day? I need to know so I can apologize for delaying your trip to the stop sign by 5 seconds. 

I am by no means a gritty urban person, but industrialized suburbia is not my culture. Cities, like my fair city of 97% Obama, are choruses.  Yes, often it is practicality and not brotherhood that makes it so, but still. Industrialized suburbia, though, are a bunch of greedy soloists who beep at you when you dare to wander into their spotlights. 

Homo sapiens vs. Homo Xapian

A dear friend once said that I had a novelist's imagination, his delicate way of pointing out that I might not remember facts, but I could always be counted on to supply the analogy or metaphor for what a fact should mean. Imagine me now in an environment peopled by H. Xapian. A literal world of cause and effect, where dots need to connect. A world that does not recognize that declaring a positive or a negative should also convey something about its opposite state. A world of the trivial and the non-trivial, where trivial is the positive. A world of the eye-roll for H. sapiens.

It's a marriage that needs to work, even if it can't be saved. 

Silicon Valley vs. Feudal Lords

It's open plan and open ideas until the fiat. 

The DX Version: New-Fangled Devices and Old-Fangled Human Nature (suckers!)

Now that you might have invested some mindshare in reading my earlier post, I hope you won't feel duped at the new larger DX version I'm posting mere hours later. 

It's been fun to follow all the articles and debates about the Kindle lately, or rather, ever since I bought one a few months ago.  Apparently, the Kindle can't pronounce Barack Obama correctly in the "text to speech" function, the same way Microsoft Office thinks I meant to type "barrack boatman." Of course, I checked this out directly, and it's not that bad. It just sounds like the kind of McCain supporter that embarrassed even McCain. I happen to use the "text to speech" function mainly for New Yorker poetry, which can be vastly improved with an inept vocalization, so I hope that any fixing of the Kindle won't fix the poetry too. 

The outrage over the newer bigger Kindle is kind of interesting because it proves the law where the scope of indignation is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the actual transgression. (And this is from a journalist who kept silent for years about all the real outrages being perpetrated on Americans.) There's another fascinating article about how Kindle users actually skew much older than Amazon thought or wanted, and for some reason, I see a connection. What this means for the coveted student audience, I can only guess. What it means for Amazon is that they might have scorned their pool of finicky retail-Americans. 

The new Kindle is called the DX just like it's a car, so I'd love for Amazon to act like a carmaker (let's say Fiat, not Chrysler) and roll out its different skins for the same chassis: the CX, the DX, the high-end S series, and then the Hummer series, which can be the final generation when the screen is actually the same size as an opened newspaper. Seriously, technology-makers need to version differently and to understand that there isn't one vanishing point in the horizon. I don't want one Ring to rule them all, although clearly others do.  

If you have a good name for the "high indignation to trivia" law, let me know. I would also like to propose the occasional return to "inrage," where you stay quiet outside your head when you know you're being seriously ridiculous.

New-Fangled Devices and Old-Fangled Human Nature

It's been fun to follow all the articles and debates about the Kindle lately, or rather, ever since I bought one a few months ago. The outrage over the newer bigger Kindle is kind of interesting because it proves the law where the scope of indignation is inversely proportional to the magnitude of the actual transgression. (And this is from a journalist who kept silent for years about all the real outrages being perpetrated on Americans.) There's another fascinating article about how Kindle users actually skew much older than Amazon thought or wanted, and for some reason, I see a connection. What this means for the coveted student audience, I can only guess. What it means for Amazon is that they might have scorned their pool of finicky retail-Americans. 

The new Kindle is called the DX just like it's a car, so I'd love for Amazon to act like a carmaker (let's say Fiat, not Chrysler) and roll out its different skins for the same chassis: the CX, the DX, the high-end S series, and then the Hummer series, which can be the final generation when the screen is actually the same size as an opened newspaper. Seriously, technology-makers need to version differently and to understand that there isn't one vanishing point in the horizon. I don't want one Ring to rule them all, although clearly others do.  

If you have a good name for the "high indignation to trivia" law, let me know. I would also like to propose the occasional return to "inrage," where you stay quiet outside your head when you know you're being seriously ridiculous.

The Last Single Taskers

Saw first professional soccer game last night, just after the rain, at a 50-year-old stadium holding 20,000 fans and families in a space for twice that many. 

For a neophyte like me, I was in the perfect group: Friends who knew soccer and played soccer, with the added bonus of knowing the history (and suspecting the future) of the team. I lucked out on this score. We live in an age where knowledge often substitutes for experience, and when the experience of playing is limited (football or hockey, for example), people heckle because they think they could do better or coach better, never having tried. 

Before the  game, the announcers ran through a litany of elementary and junior high school soccer teams as the players and coaches walked around the stadium. My favorite team was the Midnight Turtles, perhaps channeled from Marianne Moore. But the list was truly so long and so repetitive that you could hear the announcers lose sense of the words within the rhythm: blah blah blah grade 4 girls, blah blah blah grade 4 girls, blah blah blah grafergirls, blah blah blah grafergs. And that might be as close to a petscan of my own brain functioning as I'll ever get for free.

When the game started, each player walked on the field holding the hand of a small boy or girl from a school soccer team, which was so sweet. How cool must that have been for a little player? 

The game itself was really fun to watch, punctuated by smart comments and funny anecdotes. (Not mine!) These athletes play an amazing full-on 45 minutes each half, with very few player substitutions allowed throughout the game. Who does anything for 45 minutes at a time these days? Are these the only single taskers left in America? 

And we won, thanks to two goals by a player considered past his prime just a few years ago and traded away before being brought back.  What can't Obama do??

I have to compare this to other sports I see live: No voiceovers throughout the game: Yea! No statistics blinking at you from around the stadium like the eyes of some virulent spider: Yea! No dancecam, kisscam: Yea! No plastic blaring trumpets or horns: Yea! A mad hatter walking around beating a huge drum for us: Yea! (This last guy, Salvatore, was a well-known fan with his own fan base and a drum the size of a tractor tire. He paused in front of one man on the aisle who was totally dead to the world and pounded and pounded and pounded his drum--to no avail. Blessed medicated sleep.) 

It's also interesting to be in a place so unrefurbished. (Is there another word capturing more truly the opposite of onomatopoeia than "refurbish"?) Many things speak of an older age: The best views are still for the fans and not the corporations. The seats are narrow, built before the golden age of the American butt, but the leg room is vast. The seats are simply for sitting, watching, and disparaging or encouraging the teams--your choice--and not mini-cockpits with food and drink consoles.

 Not one of these things is a bother.