6 posts tagged “bs”

Soda? Cola? Pop? What do you say? Any other regional words that set you apart?
Question submitted by Gladys.

I say "Soda" as befits someone who's lived in big city metropolitan areas. My grand-father said pop, but then he lived in Madison, WI. I use the word "giznank" a lot which is a very regional expresson, though. I've also been known to describe good things as "frampton" and sometimes even "fetch."

What's your favorite drink or cocktail? What's in it
Question submitted by charm.vox.com

My dad makes a cocktail called the "Trader Bob" which is basically three fingers of gin, a healthy dose of graprefruit juice and then tonic water until the 20 ounce glass is full. It's basically the sixty year old economist equivalent of what Snoop Dogg refers to as "gin and juice." (Other interesting similarities between my dad and Snoop Dogg: their first names are both Cordozar, and they were both founding members of Tha Dogg Pound.) He used to drink one every night until he got gout, now he rations himself one to only special occasions.

Employers are starting to use social networking sites to check up on potential employees, according to this NY Times article:

For Some, Online Persona Undermines a Résumé

Securing one's onliine identity is going to be a huge growth business in the next 4-5 years. One possible Vox monetization strategy might be to have a free advertiser-supported service, but also provide a secure flavor running on https. Like for $5/month.

You have to wonder about some people's judgment. In the article one recruiter, while researching a job candidate:

found explicit photographs and commentary about the student's sexual escapades, drinking and pot smoking, including testimonials from friends. Among the pictures were shots of the young woman passed out after drinking.

Query: what is the evolutionary advantage of such behavior? Or, rather, talking about it? My theory is that it's the same principal at work as to why the male  peacock has such huge tailfeathers-ungainly adornment that doesn't help them fly, hunt or escape from predators. What the male peacock is saying is "hey look at me, I have these ridiculous feathers and yet I can stil survive. I must have really fit genes." Why do teenagers and young adults like getting fucked up? It's an advertisement to the opposite sex–I can inflict so much damage on my self, yet I can still function.

It's interesting how information that used to be transmitted verbally via conversation and gossip is now documented in the cold, hard detail of photographs, video and blog postings. It's one thing if you're telling your friend "oh man I was so wasted last night" but it feels a lot different if someone took documentarty footage of you slurring your words, hitting on women you have no business hitting on and stumbling around until you fall in a gutter. It feels a lot different. The images allow you less wiggle room, less positioning, less control over your story. Since must of people's creation of personality is based on stories (observe young children) in a sense you now have much less control over you. What's happening now in society is what celebrities have had to deal with for years.

I don't think anyone really knows what's going to happen to society and culture when everything is documented, archived and searchable. It could be as big a change as the invention of language. It might end up being hell. Nobody knows. I think it's as impossible to imagine as someone looking at a combusion engine in 1870 and trying to imagine the interstate system.

It's a blog post about Veronica Mars and other televison blogging. Blogging about blogging. It's like a pyramid scheme... only no one gets hurt. Until the bubble bursts of course. Can the attention economy have meme bubbles? And if so, when a meme bubble bursts, what are the consequences? An empty feeling of having wasted one's life?

Anyway until that day comes, I will continue priming the pump of the Veronica Mars meme. To wit, this article about UPN hosting a Veronica Mars bloggers' day, and how involved the shows' producers, especially Rob Thomas, are with the online community.

I thought this qutoe was interesting, in how being able to connect online with other fans can actually change the experience of "watching" a TV show.

“Movies are more of a one-time thing, and they don't allow for the kind of speculation that TV does,” said Kathie Skerry, a Boston-based blogger whose detailed “Veronica” reports on givememyremote.com got her an invite to the press-day event. “Logan (Echolls) can make some snide comment, and there are 15 different ways you can look at it. When things like that happen, people want to discuss what they see and what it means for the future episodes of the show.

“Since I started blogging, the way I view TV has changed. I feel like it's a whole different experience watching a show knowing that as soon as it's over, I can get online and talk about it.”

This made me think about my earlier post, where I speculated that TV shows were able to push the envelope of narrative complexity precisely because there are so many resources available to fans to keep track of it all. In a sense, one of the big distinctions between print and moving picture media, that with a novel (for example) you can leaf back in the pages and refer to something if you lose your place, but in a movie or TV show you can't do that, you can only go forward as fast as the creator wants you to-is no longer true. Remember Jane Austen's famous quote about the "tell-tale compression of the pages" at the end of Northanger Abbey? Now it's a progress bar in iTunes.

Veronica Mars is really starting to hit its stride as it heads into the climax of season 2. Today's episode was titled "Plan B" and it had it all-Veroica-Logan snarking, relationships crumbling, a stadium demolition, more clues than you can shake a stick at-I feel like it will take weeks to process it all. Thank for for the internet. Query: has the internet enabled television shows to become more complex? Pre internet, would shows like The Sopranos, 24, Veronica Mars and Lost been possible? I feel like these shows have so many mysteries, characters and activity packed into each epiosde that they can only truly be appreciated with the help of the world's bigest Cliff's Notes, the 'net. Furthermore, is it possible that the one-hour narrative drama is the great art form of her time? It's hard to argue that music is the best now that it's ever been, or painting, or novels... but no other era of human history has had dramatic television of the quality and complexity that we're experiencing now.

Featuring the return of Veronica's ex-boyfriend (and as I recall from season 1, not very exciting character) Troy Graff. However, this guy (from the New Jersey Star-Ledger (shouldn't he be writing about the Sopranos?)) liked the 'sode, and singles out Jason [annoyed grunt]ring* for praise:

Yet despite his sour ruthlessness, or maybe because of it, you can't take your eyes off him. Brilliantly played by Dohring, who has the young Mickey Rourke's self-aware swagger...

He agrees with some others' contention that Veronica and Logan need to spend more time together:

But it's still hard to shake the feeling that Thomas and company are neglecting their most precious resource. Veronica and Logan's strange bond is the show's true life force. Yet each week they're lucky to get one or two short scenes together.

I agree with that, although i'd hate it to become like "Friends" where the show just runs through every possible permutation of two characters liking each other, getting together, breaking up, marrying other people, blah blah blah, ad infinitum, ad absurdam.

One of the things about Veronica Mars that I really like is that it's not a soap opera, but the characters act out soap opera like roles because they think that's what they're supposed to do, having grown up in a culture saturated in that sort of relationship ideology. It's all very meta. A lot of the humor of VM comes from the characters skill and self-awareness in manipulating the tropes and signs of youth culture, and culture in general. Which make sense, makes it's a detective show, and what detectives do is recognize and explicate clues (signs.) In fact, you could argue (I won't because I don't really have any evidence to back it up) that V-mars is like The Name of the Rose, a semiotic detective story.

Perhaps I'll try real-time blogging the episode, like I did last week.

* first person to comment on this entry and explain this joke gets a prize. Actually, you should get a prize just for managing to get all the way to the end of this post and actualy reading the footnote.