The Talking Dog

May 7, 2014, I had a really good idea for a blog post...


I'm just having a hard time remembering what it was.

Maybe it was about Americans' seeming (on a comparative basis) non-concern with issues climate-change, even as said climate-change bites them on the ass.

Or at the moment our Supreme Court seems to be enjoying a rebound in popularity...

Not quite sure where I was going. Doesn't matter so much, as no one seems to be reading. Much has happened in the 12 1/2 or so years since this "the talking dog" exercise got going (or the two and a half decades or so since "the world wide web" came on)... but just as television proved that what could have been the greatest opportunity for education and cultural enlightenment proved instead a very useful way to anesthetize an addled factory (and lately, "service sector") work force while selling them beer and cosmetics and pepsi and doritos (and lately, viagara and reverse mortgages)... so the internet, which has several orders of magnitude more potential than even television for... education and... cultural enlightenment... is instead... largely used to... sell shit...

To go all Tyler Durden on you, the internet has just managed to accelerate (and put it in everyone's hands all the time via "mobile-devices") the preexisting trends to work jobs we hate (assuming we can even get those jobs!) to buy things we don't need to impress people we don't like. With the ability to access almost any periodical on Earth in English (if not almost any other language... not to mention the ability to learn just about any other language)... instead, we choose to passively consume what we are served.

I admit that blogging was somewhat more fun back when I had a (non-bot) audience. I also admit that thanks to a combination of allergies from hell turning into a seeming flu, and weather that just will not give me that clear signal to "plant now" that it did so consistently my first two or three years of roof gardening, I continue to put off my annual seedling and seed installation, even though I really enjoy it (and the few fruits and vegetables it yields)... all this gets later and later as "spring" becomes ever more tenuous here (and I write this on a spectacularly nice day in Brooklyn).

Here's Jan's tribute to the 60th anniversary of Roger Bannister's cracking of the four-minute mile six decades ago... and Jan's tribute to the "Mission Accomplished" speech of one decade ago.

Somewhere in the stream of consciousness, I was trying to say something... maybe that there are a few basic things going on-- try to improve the quality of your lives in a physical sense, in a spiritual sense, have a few people whose presence you actually value... I don't know... I had a good idea somewhere in there...