It’s hard to go anywhere in the tech industry these days without hearing something about the ongoing crisis of high-tech job migration to India. White collar codemonkeys like myself are seriously spooked about this. Part of the reason for our trepidation is that we’ve been floating along on a wave of society-abetted self-importance for many [...]
First of all, I hate snow. I don’t like snow at all. I will grudgingly acknowledge that it can be — in its pristine, unsullied, just-fallen state — quite beautiful, all smooth and white and perfect and all; but its perfection (like all perfection) is ultimately a ruse, and its loveliness does not in any [...]
I just saw the interview that Dean and his wife Judy gave Prime Time a couple of days ago. Diane Sawyer asked a whole series of really stupid questions, focusing obsessively on the post-caucus rally in Iowa, the scream, and all manner of soft weak-kneed touchy-feely bullshit: why doesn’t Judy show up more often, didn’t [...]
I recorded Bush’s state of the union speech, because I didn’t think I could handle the whole thing in one sitting. But when I sat down to watch, I noticed something strange about the way he was talking; something purposeful in the usual string of odd pronunciations, sputtering cadences, inexplicable stresses: a pattern. So, on [...]
You could sort of feel it happening. After the media blitz, the covers on Time and Newsweek, the crazy dot-com-style hype, you stopped hearing about Howard Dean. You heard about all the money he was amassing, of course, and about his sterling organization in Iowa, and about the way his candidacy had changed everything about [...]
There are demons all around us, of course, but they’re mostly invisible, and nearly impossible to see. Sometimes you catch one flitting by out of the corner of your eye; sometimes your shadow bulges in strange, unnatural ways; sometimes your reflection flickers and leaves you with an odd impression of fangs and scales, bulk and [...]
Once upon a time, the Lord of Language created a punctuation mark called the derwit. The derwit was shaped like an inverted cow’s udder, with curved horns on the teats, and was intended to modify melancholy in the same way that a question mark modifies a question. A phrase like “Ah, I remember well that [...]
KALAKASHNORA, Gusev — Another one of those strange, toy-sized Earth probes fell out of the sky today. It bounced comically along for a while, encased in its balloon-cocoon, before it rolled to a stop and began to unfold itself. This one looks a little like an unattractive go-cart, festooned with cameras and dirt scoops and [...]
Franklin Delano Roosevelt said: “The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.” Are you listening, Mr President? Of course you’re not. You’re too busy drafting budgets that chip away at the massive [...]
I’ve just come upon a bunch of Billboard Top 100 Singles lists, one for every year from 1946 to 2003. The recent lists were pretty dispiriting, last year’s especially: it’s crammed with songs I’d never heard of, by artists I know only marginally, if at all. Ignition, by R. Kelly. Get Busy, by Sean Paul. [...]
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