{ Category Archives }
O, Canada. We on the left like to hold up your healthcare system as an example. Those on the right attempt to do the same. But they get it wrong.
Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, pt 1
Mythbusting Canadian Healthcare, pt 2
Good reads, both. Especially if you want the ground-level view from someone who lives there to use against people who speak loudly about it even though they don’t have first hand knowledge of it.
The Library of Congress has started posting pictures from their archives to Flickr. That is seriously cool. And in case you missed it, NPR covered it this morning on Morning Edition.
And it’s that coverage that lead to this post. Specifically, I got ragingly ticked when I heard the smarmy woman from Flickr prattle on about how having these photos mixed in with snapshots of the new baby or your drunk friends “breaks down that idea that museums are something special, and authoritative and, you know, important, you know?”
No, I don’t know. Museums are special, authoritative and important. That’s part of their magic.
I’m all the fuck for celebrating the majesty of the “common man.” Let’s come together as a people and a world. Let’s do away with aristocracies and classes and all that shit. Or, to quote Oklahoma:
I’d like to teach you all a little sayin’
And learn the words by heart the way you should
I don’t say I’m no better than anybody else,
But I’ll be damned if I ain’t jist as good!
But let’s not try to insist that a blurry picture of my fat ass on vacation is the moral, artistic or any equivalent of the fucking Mona Lisa. Or any other stuff that hangs in a museum.
Technology, and the whole web2.0 thing (blogs, flickr, etc.) especially, should never be thought of as a way to bring {newspapers/museums/politics/whatthefuckever} down to the level of the “common man.” Instead, these things should be thought of as a way of elevating the experiences of the “common man” to the level of {significance/art/cultural impact/whatthefuckever} as the things covered by those institutions.
It’s a subtle difference, I admit. But the main point is, humanity should always strive to move upward towards greatness rather than to deny greatness and drag it through the gutter. Egalitarianism should be about raising, not lowering. All men were created equal not by stripping everyone of rights but by ensuring that those rights were applied to everyone, even the “common man.”
In the end, it’s all well and good to speak of “leveling the playing field” - let’s just not insist on making everyone equally ugly when we can focus instead on making everyone beautiful.
I think I might have been less galled if today weren’t Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.
I’m not sure what floors me most about this. I think it might be Cindy’s hair. But the unexpected cameo of a not-directly-related Austin musician caught me off guard, too (Hi, How Are You).
Anyway, it’s Zeitgeist (I mean, The Reivers) c. 1985. And it’s Austin how it was even before I got here full-time. Check out Croslin’s Rangers shirt. It just goes to show that sincere underground rockers loved baseball long before pitchfork put together a fantasy league.
Oh, and… MAD DOG AND BEANS! The best burger you probably never got to taste. Sigh.
Rodney Anonymous tries very hard to save the last little bit of the Sex Pistols’ relevance in Commodify Your Dissent Part 849.
So there I was, watching baseball when a commercial for Wendy’s “New! Flaming Hot Caliente Super Burning Chicken Sandwich of DOOOOOOOOM!” comes on. Guess what the soundtrack was. Go on, guess.
Nope. It was “Blister In The Sun” by The Violent Femmes. They didn’t use any of the lyrics, of course, it was just the repeating guitar and drum (duh-duh, duh-duh) bit. But still, your chicken sandwich should taste great when you’re staining the sheets and your girlfriend is at the end and starting to cry. Um, what the fuck?
So today’s “fuck you, scumbag marketing person who is roughly my age and feels the need to disembowl the meaning from the songs of our shared youth” award goes to whoever the fuck decided to use this song in a fast food commercial.
For the record, I never really like the Femmes all that much, so this is less personal than other events. But it’s still galling.
Calvert DeForest, better known as Larry “Bud” Melman, has passed away.
The early Letterman show had a huge, nearly immeasurable impact on who I am. Most of you knew that already. So perhaps a moment of silence is in order for this particular giant of that age.
