Dear friends,
I have a new hobby.
You see, I fixed up my bicycle over the weekend and have been taking it on voyages around the neighborhood. It was in a sad condition last year when I discovered it in storage — though by ‘in storage’ I really mean ‘outside, mostly unprotected from the elements’ — where it had been for around 3 years. I found it at the perfect time, though, as I have recently become determined to do more, you know? And bicycling definitely involves a lot of doing.
Image credit: Matt H. Wade
A run for president has all of the same problems as being a celebrity (including a lack of privacy and everybody trying to backseat-drive your life) plus a smaller paycheck, required pandering and much, much more responsibility. The vetting process for the highest office in the land should certainly be difficult, but these days anyone who plots a run for President is an idiot — and doubly so if he expects to win!
Every four years an array of driven, accomplished people (well, usually) trip over each other in their race to Iowa and New Hampshire on a quest to the White House. This always results in one winner and a dazzling amount of shameful, humiliating pandering. The candidates pander to voters in places far removed from the power centers in the major cities in peculiar ways: eating lots of corndogs, kissing many a baby, acting folksy and otherwise doing their best to stroke the egos of normally inconsequential flyover states. As a nation we’ve decided that in these ways we must knock each successful suitor down a peg or two before we give them their piece of cheese at the end of the rat maze.
At the same time us voters demand silly, scripted actions from those we might entrust with the nuclear football, the donors who power a candidate’s campaign are even worse. Having amassed enough wealth that they can literally throw millions toward a particular candidate or issue, these individuals feel even more entitled and knowledgable than the average voter. They ask silly questions and are unrelenting with their advice and scorn. If a candidate doesn’t allow these life-giving donors to backseat drive the campaign or if they sense that their contender is losing they will jump with their bags of money to another horse, figuratively speaking, leaving behind the burning wreckage of a campaign. Voters may choose the office-holder, but the elite among us appear to have veto power over a candidacy.
Meanwhile, the media also has a hunger for information and, more importantly, a narrative (they do need to fill 24-hours of coverage for Pete’s sake). This means they can quickly become fickle and edgy if deprived of action and movement in the race. They’re going to find a story one way or another — it doesn’t matter whether said story is perceived or material, partisan or objective, gossip- or policy-based. This means privacy cannot be taken for granted, a sad state of affairs for someone who is constantly forced to pander to disparate groups across the nation for both votes and money. A camera in the right place can really ruin a campaign’s vibe or even cripple an otherwise powerful candidate.
But the most important component of the pain and humiliation that is the modern campaign for the presidency is the very real possibility of winning. The winner does get his very own airplane and has a theme song played every time he enters a room, but imagine the campaign state of affairs protracted over not a few months but 4-8 years! Add in a Congress that is vying for attention and needs its massive ego rubbed in order to pass a bill, an opposition party that will say or do anything to tear down the winner, and the fact that the office of Presidency is a magnet for the violence of mentally unstable individuals and you can sense the magnitude of what a candidate is sacrificing to have all that power. Plus, we totally stopped adding faces to Mt. Rushmore decades ago.
So we may call the President the most powerful person in the free world, but I think we should perhaps be calling him the idiot-in-chief.
Phones have become complex and full of fancy and useful gadgets such as GPS, 4G, Gorilla Glass, Apps, video calling, voice recognition and — if my rambling letters to the various phone makers are heeded — flasks. With all that complexity comes cost, which has made smartphones and tablets a big moneymaker. Where there’s lots of money to be made there’s conflict to be found, and this field is no exception — we’re talking about a modern day war. The winners of this patent war have yet to be decided — though it’s safe to assume it’ll be the lawyers — which leaves time for us to become well acquainted with the main parties involved in this war.
So, without further introduction, let’s look at the “armies” of this war in a way anyone who has passed a history course should understand, here’s a survey of the field, World War I style.
Oh the wonderful meetups we’ll have! At least, that’s the idea.
Unfortunately, my experience browsing Meetup.com — one of the foremost internet-to-real-life portals and, by default, a moderately creepy place — has been less than stellar. Granted, the scope of my experience is rather limited: for instance, I have never actually attended a meetup with individuals from this particular website. My history with Meetup.com, however, comes down to recommendations.
For several months I have been collecting the site’s meetup group recommendation emails in my inbox. First it was unintentional. Before long, however, it developed into a hobby and an odd experiment. You see, these suggestions were 85% terrible — approximation, of course — which led to the insight that I have become spoiled with the quality of Google search results, Facebook friend suggestions, and Netfilx film recommendations. By comparison, the level of personalization from Meetup quickly became a near-daily topic of giggles.
With that in mind, I present to you some suggestions the Meetup (non-)algorithm presented to me, a 20-something geeky male with reading, writing, music, science, technology and community service as my main interests:
Christmas is only a few short days away. I’m a curmudgeon, it seems, because I have been having a miserable time trying to find gifts for people. Anti-consumerism aside, I despise crowds of people shopping. I’d probably like the crowd of people in the mall better if they all dropped their pants and started performing lewd acts. Instead, they’re bussing around frantically like they have dynamite in their pants (If this were to happen in real life, it would be a form of domestic terrorism known as Holiday Butt Explosion. The alert level turns to red every Black Friday and, in some rare cases, the month of July). I have given up on the idea of the perfect gift because it’s about as impossible to reach as the sane corner of Newt Gingrich’s brain, as illusive as Rick Perry’s train of thought, as incomprehensible as Michelle Bachmann… herself.
So in this spirit, I’ve compiled a highly scientific and in no way random list of things that should be on nobody’s Christmas list.
First they occupied Wall Street, then Washington. Now it’s Oakland, Dallas, and next it’ll be American Samoa (being such a tiny island, it should be easy). The Occupiers protest about income inequality and tax rates, corporations and money in politics. Of course, someone will soon tell them that the corrupting power of money has been an issue of worry among our nations’ voters since the day our nation first began. Indeed, our politics are actually quite tame compared to other historical time periods. Nonetheless, I hear the voice of the people and I’m here to help.
The way I see it, private interests will always be trying to use their money to buy influence. What we should do is take a note from the private sector and allow these sorts of activities while making it work for the system as a whole instead of individual candidates. What better way to do this than allowing corporations to directly sponsor our great nation, following the path set out by the NFL in the USA and FIFA more generally?
Under this plan, the government would start publicly financing campaigns. To pay for this, we’d simply auction off the naming rights to federal buildings, agencies, and certain necessary activities. Public education is already leading the way in this department — we see this done by school districts when they contract for vending machines and universities as they name lecture halls, buildings, and even trees. With the greater visibility and reach, and taking the NFL sponsorships as a guide, these agreements could be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This would take the influence off of the individual candidates and give it a less harmful manifestation.
The world following the adoption of this plan would not look too different from our current one. There would be minor changes here and there. For instance, you would get reward points when paying your taxes with Visa, America’s official payment system. Pepsi would not only be the voice of a generation, but the voice of a nation – and the only soda available in federal buildings. Those entering the nation’s museums and national parks would receive tickets via Ticketmaster (and only pay a modest $15 convenience fee). There would, of course, be some slightly disheartening sponsorships such as the National Weather Service being brought to you by America’s clean coal producers. However, these minor hiccups would have no influence on the underlying agencies.
Public financing would allow our representatives to spend more of their time working for us, instead of working us into a frenzy for a cheap vote. We could rest well at night knowing that our politics are cleaner and more efficient, with the stewards of our democracy hard at work more of the time in the Halliburton United States Capitol Building, the RIAA Supreme Court Building of America, and the White House presented by Goldman Sachs.
Venture into the wide open north and you might just find yourself in Tioga, Texas (birthplace of Gene Autry, doncha know it?). This is where I found myself late last week, traversing the countryside on the hunt for the mythical abode of Clark, Master of Barbeque. [Note: This mythical status stems from my father’s insistence we travel to Tioga, Texas for BBQ.]
On this quest to Clark’s Outpost BBQ, you’ll know you’re near when you pass Buck Creek Road (yep, readers, we’re entering the real Texas) and the outpost will soon appear on your right. I would call it a hole in the wall, but there are far too few walls in that area for it to hide from sight – besides, it has too many awards on the walls to classify as unknown.
Few movies have garnered more critical, symbolic, and allegorical analysis than Martin Scorcese’s paean to post-Vietnam masculine isolation, Taxi Driver. Between the smoldering psychosis of Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle, the forlorn insomnia from the ever-present, latently perturbed jazz soundtrack, and Martin Scorcese’s singular depiction of New York as a character in itself, like a silent-film starlet rapidly descending into coprophagic putrefaction, there’s a hell of a lot to talk about! 
However, this movie was released in 1976, so everything that needs to be said about Taxi Driver has already been said ad infinitum by high-profile professional critics, lower-profile passionate scholars, semi-authoritative IMDB top 500 reviewers, totally-irrepressible YouTube babblers, ADD afflicted smartphone cineastes, and Ain’t It Cool News, right?
Well….this is what I thought too, as I prepared for a very special midnight showing of Taxi Driver at the Inwood Theatre in Dallas with fellow Castle in the Pie blogger Alex and our mutual friend Andreas. At last, I imagined, I could FINALLY extricate myself from the erudite straight jacket of hyperanalysis and cognitive balderdash. At last, I could just watch a movie for pure enjoyment, Heaven forbid! At this exact moment, I acquired a banana for a measley 79 cents at my local Exxon gas station’s Tiger Mart, a gesture that at the time only seemed relevant from a slow-GI food perspective. However, little did I know that this very same banana, sporting a musk faintly suggestive of low grade octane Caramello, would usher in an unprecedented revolution in cinematic critical analysis that will shed new light on Eisenstein’s banana-split montage theory, spawn countless adherents to slippery peel dramaturgy, and most importantly, breathe brand new life into Taxi Driver — though with a horrendous case of halitosis. Nonetheless, no bona fide cinemaniac ever left home without halitosis, allowing Banana Cinema to naturally — and tropically — separate the wheat from the chaff, and the Goodfellas from the New York, New Yorks.
The day you thought would never come is finally here. For too long, men, we have been forced to work long hours with expensive equipment to keep a manly physique. Long workouts are difficult, challenging, all around tough but now, thanks to this revolutionary product, they’re a thing of the past.
Our savior? The Shake Weight for Men! It may do the same thing as the original Shake Weight (for women), but now it has a manly color-scheme — men simply can’t use a white exercise device — and a booming narrator to market it to us. Point being: use a woman’s shake weight and you might as well turn your testicles in. Also, it features many creepy background grunts that were clearly made during a Shake Weight for Men exercise routine — and not some sort of perverted activity — as no average exercise equipment could produce that sound! Seriously, this thing is kick-butt!
Best of all, it only takes six minutes! Other workouts take hours upon hours over weeks of intense work, but that’s the old American work ethic. Now you can finally upgrade your workout mindset for our modern instant gratification culture!
Imagine seeing this late at night, as I did, and wishing you could have an insomnia fueled bout of late night exercising (this company clearly knows where to look to find men who feel they should be healthier and more active).
Now we have a Shake Weight for both sexes, which leaves us with a question: what’s the future look like for this device? Personally, I’m imagining a Shake Weight for Babies.
Matthew McConaughey plotting the downfall of humanity
Since the dawn of written records, doomsayers, soothsayers and even naysayers on occasion have divined mysterious predictions, based on inspiration from Gods and Goddesses, Kings and Queens, metaphysics and forlorn spirits, foretelling the ever-so-tragic downfall of humanity. Typically, these predictions, while seemingly ethereally inspired, are in actuality quite earthy as they employ well-studied techniques practiced frequently in the murky underworld of graft and the Federal Reserve. As a computer scientist myself, ever trusting in axiomatic truth and rigorous proof, I possess a healthy skepticism of the mystical realm.
However, even when employing my most skeptical instincts, I simply cannot deny the seemingly endless expressions of a mysterious, yet plainly observed harbinger of unimaginable destruction: a Matthew McConaughey inspired downfall of humanity. In true scientific form, I present the evidence below, as noted in the arts, sciences, literature, and any other vocation even remotely connected to the human experience.
