Open2Discussion

Politicians do confessing all wrong. They always seem to wait until they've been caught on something instead of airing it out, getting in front of it, and letting it go away by itself. I can recall three high-profile affairs confessed to in the past year, and if rumors are true, my very own governor may be next. In the spirit of living my life better than a politician in every conceivable way, I've decided I have some confessing to do, and what better venue than my internet readership of three people. Also, the speech act is one of my favorite quirks of language, so I'll take any opportunity to act through words. I hereby confess: I'm the one who farted really loudly in Yoga class that one time. Everybody looked and the girl next to me got all red-faced, so I just let everyone else think it was her. It wasn't. I don't know what an airbender is, or why the last one is not even a person but an avatar, but that didn't stop me from borrowing the game ...

When I turned 30 I decided to get myself a present and buy a Playstation 3.  I had long ago traded in my PS2 - the gaming device/DVD player that carried me through college.  I felt that it was time to see how awesome this new Blu-Ray experience supposedly was.  As Sony is generally known for their ability to make decent media players, TVs and gaming devices, I thought it would be worth picking up at least a used one.  I decided that the hype behind why everyone thought - it was overpriced, and underperforming was just rumor, and found one on Craigslist that was a good price for a used 60GB PS3(one of the hardware backwards compatible ones).  It came with a few games, and I thought it would be a great addition to my home theater because I've always had some nit-picky problems playing music and movies through my Xbox 360.  I have an iMac for a primary computer, so it makes it a little challanging to get through some of the hoops required to get media to stre...

I almost got punched at a party over this one, but I still believe it to be at least 50% true, so I think I need to get it out there to at least have the option of a conversation on the topic. I live my life, as everyone does, between the small and big pictures. I recognize that my actions have consequences in my life, and I recognize that my life has an infinitesimally small, approaching zero effect on the universe. In fact, to borrow a misuse of Newton ’s first law, every one of my actions is met by an equal and opposing reaction, so I’m really just a random motion in the giant equilibrium machine of existence. I’m mentally at the end of I ♥ Huckabee’s where they realize that everything is connected, but it’s nothing special. Here’s my problem, I grew up in the culture that changed “whatever” from a pronoun to a sentence. Today, that attitude is unacceptable. Today we have two generations bookending the Xers that are acting like the Vatican should add apathy to make 8 deadly sins. ...

If you've read anything about iPhones lately, you'll notice that there isn't a lot of good press regarding the only carrier that officially supports and sells the so-called "God-Phone."  AT&T has long been the brunt of scorn with their extremely frustrating issues supporting and handling the volume of calls and data going to and from these fantastic devices.  Most recently, there have been complaints that the visual voicemail service (where the voicemails show up as media files that you can play right on the phone) stopped working completely.  It's been almost a week since the first reports of that came through, yet AT&T has yet to actually acknowledge that there's a problem, let alone when it will be fixed. When the iPhone was initially released on June 29th, 2007 (right before the iPod Touch which debuted on September 14, 2007), I seriously considered getting one... But I opted for the 16GB iPod Touch instead.  The first generation iPhone was...

Walter Cronkite passed away last Friday. He was 92. The world has lost many people this summer: people that have shaped the world with their existing. It's hard to judge a man or woman's worth in our age of information. I have lived in an age where everything is known; where everything is questioned. It's telling, isn't it, that I was born two weeks before Cronkite retired. Known as "the most trusted man in America," Cronkite was in place to break the news that disillusioned our country. He was the voice to reveal Watergate, to sway public opinion about Viet Nam. He cried when JFK was pronounced dead and proclaimed "Wow!" when the first images of man on the Moon were broadcast. Unfortunately, I wasn't around for him. My news casters are petty and vindictive. Whereas Cronkite thought of himself as merely a conduit of the news, now we get our choice of pundits who hawk their opinions and rants. Current news is like flavored water: just enough of a...

When I was in college, it was a requirement that undergraduate students take several different courses that included a writing component - specifically to prepare you to express yourself through written language.  I took several courses specifically for writing (Creative Writing, Contemporary American Lit, etc.) that we were instructed to provide some feedback or use some creative processes to talk about our thoughts and emotions regarding pieces of poetry, novels, etc.  It was all very academic, but the one thing I really enjoyed was the ability to explore ideas beyond the bounds that the professors assumed we had in our limited student minds.  If you could come up with an exciting idea, the professors I had were really great in that they let us explore them deeply, as long as we were ready to back up the ideas with some sort of background story, or verifiable source of information. One of the hardest things about writing is really having some good information to start...

The other day, I was listening to a podcast in which the participants were reviewing/discussing the latest Johnny Depp vehicle, Public Enemies , a movie so far off my radar that I had to look up the title just now. I’ve seen the trailer a few times. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen enough of that movie in fewer than five minutes that I don’t need to spend the more than two hours to see it entire. I’m also pretty sure I’ve seen enough of Depp for my lifetime. It’s not that I think he’s a bad actor, and I certainly don’t see him as great. He just kind of exists on the fringes of my consciousness, exhibiting a certain Depp-ness that I’ve only once felt was very compelling. In fact, other than his turn as Thompson, the most enjoyment I ever got out of Depp was the episode of Extras wherein Orlando Bloom was totally obsessed with comparing his looks and acting to Depp’s. Back to the point of all this, these particular podcasters were discussing what they felt was the lack of characterization po...