From the desk of Bill Gates “Email is not a good way to get mad at someone. . . . You can send friendly messages very easily since those are harder to misinterpret.” (A 1994 New Yorker story by John Seabrook.)
The angry among us found our way around Gates’ caveat. SIMPLY USE CAPS. We can shout at each other even in an email.
Years ago I saw Pele play at the Polo Grounds. It was a privilege to witness his electric performance.
Today, December 29, 2022, the soccer great died at 82.
When Pele was on the field, America was attracted to the charisma he brought.
My assessment that Americans would not embrace soccer’s big moment this year proved wrong as well.
Team U.S.A. made a decent showing. The World Cup was a fever that caught all of us in its embrace.
I lament the Ben-and-Jerryification of the creamy flavorful cold dessert most all of us love for its texture and its taste.
Ice cream should be smooth.
Ice cream should be velvety.
Lumps of candy bars and cookies complicate a straightforward treat.
I don’t want my tongue to encounter popcorn when I look for the excitement of a neutral flavor, simple chocolate.
Uninvited caramel candy bars or hard peppermint mar my experience. I turn to gelato for what I crave.
“You scream, I scream, we all scream for ice cream.” What’s your favorite flavor? A clever pun or a single origin like plain old vanilla or coffee?
I missed National Fruitcake Day. It started earlier today, December 27th but I feel I should have been there to commemorate it from the beginning.
Too late now at 6:15pm to show true appreciation. I jest. I cannot in any fairness celebrate. Fruitcakes- and this includes the pannetone- lack any emotional or tangy connection for me.
As Sam-I-am would have it “I do not like it” anyway it’s sliced. Heavy cakes that can double as doorstops or the Italian lightweight versions have no appeal.
The culinary imagination that decided to throw all manner of dried fruits and some nuts into a batter is foreign to me. It does not matter from which continental provenance, this cake ain’t to my liking.
It’s astounding to think that a person’s life often spans nearly a century. Even more so when I realize mine has already covered three-quarters of one.
In some ways, the experience of all those years has been futuristic.
As an aside in the midst of this ramble, I wonder if the cave dwellers in our distant past didn’t have that same intimation. When fire was discovered or the wheel, didn’t they feel they were encountering the future?
In my lifetime so far, it’s the digital information that I appreciate as new and fresh. Computers have evolved to help orchestrate my life from the smallest of screens.
AI, like Hal in the Star Trek film, is a real thing. My experience of it has a robot scheduled to assist with my upcoming mammogram (for an add-on fee of $59.) Many other examples of artificial intelligence abound. One, of the many I am only vaguely aware of, is the rather alarming driverless or self-driving car.
At the beginning of my time on earth, there were no such gadgets or doodads. They would soon become a reality but not an everyday presence. When they crept further into our consciousness, computing devices loomed large but seemed vaguely improbable.
Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy contended with one behemoth of a machine and a budding romance in Desk Set.
In 1957, there was room for some skepticism about just how useful such mechanical interventions would be. Not so anymore.
We carry a whole lot of computing power in our pockets now. Who woulda thunk? I mean back in the 1940s?
Ethical considerations about how much data we share and how much of our identities we give up or over to the machine are somewhere lost in the shuffle of convenience and notoriety. Look at all I am sharing here with strangers.
Without the devices we use to post these thoughts there would be no online forii.
The public square would be a sheep meadow in the middle of town. Those of us so inclined would argue our propositions from soap boxes. Others so inclined would be entertained by the spectacle.
There would be no data breach just a lot of shouting.
When I judge films, I consider the narrative. I want to be told a story. A movie’s success in my eyes has to do with how cogent a tale it tells.
What if the story isn’t the point? This is a visual medium. Pictures might be what you want to see. Sometimes the visuals are the story.
Splashes of color, images moving speedily or in slo-mo, all carefully superimposed over a generational chronicle are what you’ve come to see.
Or perhaps it’s just the art or the movement without the annals and references. Some films need no consistent content to be great or great fun.
Early films, before we had color to beguile us, were often short comedies, like the Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton movies or Western dramas or sometimes long dark fantasies like Nosferatu or Metropolis.
I hear, for instance, that Avatar 2 is spectacular. By all appearances that doesn’t mean I would find that it makes sense.
Likewise, I hear that Babylon, by the LaLaLand team, is another beautiful spectacle. In this case, based on its predecessor it likely has a lovely plot.
My assessments about a movie may need an overhaul. Just as I have come to like the ridiculous slapstick of The Stooges and the confusing dialog of the Brothers Marx, perhaps I can absorb and value fantastical ramblings in technicolor and beyond.
Holiday decorations take an inventive turn when penguins join the fun.
The sun is always a welcome sight, isn’t it? It’s warmth in winter is referred to by the archaic apricity.
The word derives from the Latin and is a cousin to apricots.
The 2022 Merriam Webster words of the year included the less sunny gaslighting.
Slang is source for new tacks in approaching life’s conundrums. This year reveals touch grass courtesy of teens who want to keep it real as we might have said older school.
All The Best