Easy Wind and Downy Flake

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I don't know, why don't you ask Thag. Who's Thag? She was that woman who made the first wheel and axle to help her move an item too heavy to carry or drag. or Plink. You remember Plink, he figured out that a sharpened wedge of stone could be attached to a stick and the stick thrown to kill an animal from a distance.

Or you could ask Archemedies. Or Guttenburg. Or Eli Whitney.

I study life in the Internet Age for a living and I can say with no small amount of confidence that all technology is simply something that provides a mechanical or communicative advantage (and sometimes both), nothing more, nothing less.

It's what we choose to do with that advantage that makes the world better or worse.

(Who the hell comes up with these bullshit questions. They've never used any of mine).

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No and most people who have any emotional maturity don't. Lust at first sight? Yes. Interest at first sight? Sure. Attraction, curiosity, assumptions, a desire to quell loneliness? Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Love is something that grows and develops over time, it doesn't spring up like a weed.

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I've seen plenty of famous people ranging from local news people to big movie stars to major rock stars. Met as in talked to and touched? Not that many because in this area of the country you just don't do that. This is where they come to not be noticed. Two stories

1. When I was about 20 I was at a party with a lot of theater types and met Raul Julia who flirted with me shamelessly.

2. Back in the early 90s I went to a book signing in Manhattan. After the author read from the book there was a reception where you could buy copies of the book and get it signed. There was a guy in back of me in line. He was about 6' and very good looking. He looked very familiar and I turned around to look at him a second time asking, "Excuse me, do we know each other, did you go to Rutgers maybe?" He shook his head and said no and I at that moment it hit me: it was John Kennedy Jr.

Color me clueless and embarrassed.

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More cowbell

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Grass fed beef.

(Wait. Was that inappropriate?)

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When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun....

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Well the danger on the rocks is surely past
Still I remain tied to the mast.
Could it be that I have found my home at last?
Home at last.

Home At Last--Steely Day (from Aja)

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I'd take in a heartbeat.

While I believe in entities that are not human, I don't buy into the whole Amityville Horror type thing. I have more faith in the power of good to protect me then I do in the power of evil to hurt me. Assuming there is anything there in the first place and in the unlikely event there is that it is something evil in the first place.

(Heck, there's a lot of "if" in that statement, huh?)

Who comes up with these questions, anyway? Is there really someone who would say no?

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Angry Birds for the Android Platform. That game is like crack (um, not that I would know what crack is like.)

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15 or 17 years ago, I was living in what I refer to as my "Bachelorette Pad" in a quaint bedroom community that held an annual community street fair and where kids still went door to door on Halloween.

Every Saturday, I used to get up and take a stroll to the post office to pick up my box mail. Since the walk took my through the downtown, on the way home I would stop at the same little take out Chinese joint and pick up a spring roll and beef with broccoli. I got the same thing every time I went there and the moment I walked through the door they would start working on my order.

One Saturday I had a nasty case of what would turn out to be bronchitis but decided to take the walk to the post office anyway because I needed to get out of the house and get some fresh air. I went to the Chinese takeout place like I always did. Looking like death in jeans and sneakers, I coughed up a lung and wheezed like my first car. I got my order and went home. As I paid the lady behind the counter said, "Feel better!". I thanked her and left.

I got home, sat down on the couch and unpacked my brunch. There was my spring roll, my duck sauce, my chopsticks, my beef with broccoli, and my white rice but the bag still had some heft. I peeked inside.

The lady behind the counter had packed a free pint of won ton soup. For rheumy, germy me.

I’ve been lucky in my life, very lucky. There have countless people who have showed me kindness but, and I wish I could figure out why, that small gesture touches me today as much as it touched me then.

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Next year.

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Okay 2 decades means between 1990 and 2010 so (for me at least) this eliminates Michale Jackson since his great musical innovations came in the 80s. Ditto for Prince, spectacular though he was and still is, I think his greatest musical influence was in the 80s.

No surprise here, the first musicians I would cite would have to be Nirvana. They might not have been the best of the first generation grunge bands to break through, but they were the first. And probably the greatest breakthrough video since Billie Jean.

Next I would have to put Liz Phair. Pretty much any woman rocker, and not a few male ones, from the 90s forward cites her as one of their influences. Her lyrics were nasty and could make you feel like you were in the back seat with her. This has not been a great couple of decades for women in non-traditional genres of music. In music, women have always been sex bombs, tough girls, and sweet voiced folk singers. We had singer-songwriters, piano players and girl groups. Far fewer have ever hefted an axe and said, "Hell yeah, this is who I am, deal with it" (Sorta like you do, the_nibbler609).

That's what Liz Phair brought to the table and little girls everywhere are all the better for it.

I'm also going to throw Metallica into the mix. Yes, I know they'd been around since the 80s but they really broke through into the mainstream in the 90s. Hell, I've head my mother hum Enter Sandman (and no, I don't think she has any idea of the source of the tune).

The next two: Jay-Z and Snoop Dog. Up through the mid 90s rep music was either scary or empowering depending on your vantage point. The men who performed it put on the attitude of ruthless thugs and seemed to enjoy scaring and shocking the gentler elements of society. Then you had these two. Within a 15 years they created the image of "Rapper as Trumpesque business mogul" (I'm not putting Russell Simmons here because he was never a musician) and "Rapper as Genial Comic Relief" (Hey, that Snoop is okay, he plays golf with Lee Iaccoca). Don't know that this did much for their street cred but it certainly changed how the public perceives rap music.

I realized that yardstick for answering this has been who broke through and made a niche genre less niche. Liz Phair is an exception to this.

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I learned that there is no such thing as good shit or bad shit; shit just happens; people you love die, babies are born, we achieve a log desired goal or a dream dies a painful death. Shit truly just happens.

What is good or bad is what we do with the shit that happens.

Back in the 90s British researcher Dr Richard Weisman did a study in which he looked at people who considered themselves "lucky" and those who considered themselves "unlucky". His study turned up people who had lived through similar circumstances yet one would consider themselves lucky and the other, unlucky. Here is an article that discusses that study. I was unable to secure the original study in the European Journal of Parapsychology but if you access to that journal it is in Vol 12, pages 35-43

Dr Weisman found, succinctly, ones perception of ones luck is a trick of the mind. Shit happens, it's what we do with the shit that matters.

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Possession by AS Byatt.

The book tells parallel stories; one is a literary mystery set in the world of English Lit academia and the a bittersweet fated 19th century romance. It won the Booker Prize.

They completely botched the movie. What went wrong? I can tell you in two words: Gwyneth Paltrow. Okay, maybe she wasn't the *only* problem. How about making the slightly befuddled Hugh Grant like protagonist an American and cast suave Aaron Eckhart. How about letting In the Company of Men's Neil LaButte write an direct?

The movie was ridiculous. A poor adaptation of a book that is considered in some corners to be one of the best books of the 20th century.