A juggling technophile shares personal stories, challenges, humor and perhaps some political commentary.
This made me laugh so hard today! I have watched it over and over and over. Tommy Chong! You’re my hero!
Jazz from Hell has some additional words and the original MSNBC interview with Contessa Brewer regarding Paris Hilton to put this in perspective.
Update: For those who have’t watched the original MSNBC interview, Colbert’s very direct question to Chong is mocking Brewer.
Jon has decided against live blogging his children’s lives. I like how he phrased that-"live blogging" their lives. As I post our adventures, I had never thought of it that way before. I spent some time replying to his post and since it was so lengthly thought I should repost it here.
I watched my great Aunt, an English teacher from the College of William and Mary and a world traveler, lose her latter years of her life to Alzheimer’s*. There are stories of my childhood I have been told but have either grown fuzzy or gained exaggeration over the years and the keepers of those stories have either passed or are living far away. My mind falters from time to time even today (mostly due to stress). I never heard a single story of my grandfather’s experiences at Normandy or my other grandfather’s at the chemical weapons plant in Kentucky.
I record my family’s time together and the special events in the children’s lives for prosperity. A journal they can return to view later in life. Is it folly to think that a WordPress application will work 15 years from now? Yes, but something will import the data or maybe some antique computer will rest in grandpa’s garage for the purpose of story telling. Shoot, Oregon Trail is like 35 years old and is still going! I find it nice to be able to return to dates and times and see the events that influenced our moments.
Privacy? It slips further away everyday. Between AT&T becoming the evil empire, AOL dishing over search engine queries, the swipe of your credit card or request for id putting you at a place and a time, Google Street Maps, and the hundreds of cameras that film you daily (from street corners, convenient stores, satellites, gas pumps, ATMs, cashiers, camera phones and others), our lives are recorded whether we want them to be or not. The stories I tell online I would tell in person or even in print in the hometown newspaper. Maybe I’ve gone out of line a couple of times but nothing that is going to keep my children from job opportunities or earn them embarrassing nicknames.
The stories create bonds between other people with children. It’s nice to know that your child isn’t the only one that at 10 years old lost all common sense. In a sense though, a mommie blog or a daddy blog can start to look like one of those family vacation slide shows where you as the guest have to endure the kathunk kathunk of monotonous slide after slide while family laughs at memories and inside jokes with you staring at out of focus strangers. If anything, that could be a reason to not live blog the children’s lives.
I would not be so presumptuous as to try to influence your decision one way or another. That’s personal. It could be over safety or privacy (as you stated). This is just why I do it. And we have dared to be so bold as to let the 3 older children each have their own blog with their own domain name. Our reasoning for doing such outweigh the safety concerns of the dropped chin people we tell "sure, they each have their own blog."
*Several readers may be quick to note that I didn’t personally interact with Aunt Mary in her final days (or years even). Her passing was impactful none-the-less. There was one Christmas we drove her from Richmond, VA to Norfolk Beach with Dad behind the wheel, Aunt Mary riding shotgun, and me in the backseat (was Dean there? Yes, I think he was).
Aunt Mary looks back at me/us and asks Dad, "Who are they?"
Dad replies, "Those are my illegitimate children."
Aunt Mary exclaims, "The bastards!"
It was riotous and a sad sign of what was ahead with confusion like turning on the stove top to wash dishes.
I have an essay I want to write soon explaining why I am less concerned with online privacy, why online pictures of the children (geotagged even) are not dangerous, why having the children get involved in online publishing and social networks at an early age can be good for their futures and careers, and how the media scaring the public for revenues is hurting technological advancement.
Update: See the media puts unreal fear into us evoking "protect kids from online predators"
The next time someone starts telling you how important it is to “protect kids from online predators,” send them to this record of the DC Internet Caucus panel on kids and predation, wherein quantitative social scientists describe the real situation with predators and kids. Kids do get preyed upon, but not in the way that it’s depicted in the media, and none of the cell-phone-tracking, spyware-installing fear-based parenting does squat to protect them.
…first fact is that the predominant online sex crime victims are not young children…
It’s also interesting that deception does not seem to be a major factor. …The offenders lure teens after weeks of conversations with them, they play on teens’ desires for romance, adventure, sexual information, understanding, and they lure them to encounters that the teams know are sexual in nature with people who are considerably older than themselves….
That’s right! I don’t want to work anymore. I just want to blog! That means my readers, all five of you, must each click my ad links about 1000 per day. Do that and I’ll be fine. Now hop to it!
They gathered, and there was much posting!
Cathy felt I needed an opportunity to socialize with other bloggers without chasing Evan around.
He chatted with strangers trying to enjoy their meal with the exception of the older gentleman and his
daughterco-workerdateescorthooker which is regretful because that could have been a fun conversation, “pardon my son for interrupting your, uh, uh, thang. So, do you measure those heals with a yard stick?” [Source]
Tommy decided to join me on the promise that he would get to play some pool. The downside of letting me go by myself was that Cathy was not around to keep me in line..ahem!..Sorry about the shiny head jokes guys. It just came to me in a flash. This blogfest promised to be interesting as I really could put name to face and I would be able to talk without that "where’s the toddler" twitch. Rich assures me that Evan is great at the events and that I need to worry about him less. The first Blogfest we attended has a sense of apprehension to it. I mean, we all knew other and simultaneously knew nothing of each other.
we all read each other so…is there really anything to talk about? "Um..Post #1345." "Ha! That was great. I responded in comment #12768." "Read it! Excellent retort! Did you catch the Youtube video on that?" "Covered it in post #4491." Silence. "Check please." [Source]
The second Blogfest was more natural but faces and names were still coming together.
When people from the online world meet for the first time, the experience is unnerving, fascinating, and enlightening for these online people have shared stories and know of each other intimately but are always surprised to find that often the person they "know" online is not the same as the person in real life. [Source]
The attendees at this third Blogfest were Mushy’s Moochings (who’s review has much clearer pictures than my cell phone pictures above), Shots Across the Bow, LissaKay (she impressed me with her semantics), The Kat House (also great pictures in her review), Blogitude (another great picture..beginning to think the camera phone isn’t sufficient!), No Silence Here with Knoxville’s youngest blogger – Mckinley, Les Jones, and Tommy (picture above at the pool table).
The turnout was a little smaller than previous events. I hope that is because of the summer and not partisan politics, or a mistaken thought that we like each other better in print than in person. The event really was fun! Several of the bloggers even tracked down one missing blogger (Barry of Inn of the Last Home) to hear him play at the Eagle’s Lodge. Unfortunately, I had kept Tommy from World of Warcraft too long and had to skip the Eagle’s Lodge to treat his withdrawal symptoms. See you guys next time!
Side note, we did have a couple of baseball players try to join our conversation ala Jon Stewart’s giant head of Brian Williams but we mostly ignored them.
Don’t have time to read? SimplyAudioBooks.com has a few free audiobooks to try out. Naturally, this is to encourage you to join their monthly subscription but even if you don’t join you can listen to some good works.
Last night Jon Stewart brought it home. He nailed it for me last night. I laughed until I cried. It was so subtle. Did you catch it?
Paul Rudd, "I have a feeling that in the entire history of Comedy Central I’m the first person that’s ever said ‘pump out a Rene Auberjonois‘"
Jon Stewart, "There’s actually uh Carlos Mencia does it as a recurring bit."
Paul Rudd, "I knew I’d heard it before!"
So why’s it so funny? Read this exceptional article, Take the Funny and Run in full to really understand the joke. For those that don’t want to click over, here’s the brief:
Rogan, who refers to Mencia as "Carlos Menstealia," claims it’s common knowledge among his fellow funny men that Mencia takes bits from other comics and performs them as his own. [Source]
Anyone who has ever performed stand-up is familiar with the red light, the universal signal that warns dawdlers it’s time to wrap things up. In the ’80s, comics at the Hollywood Improv came up with a novel use for the light. When shining steadily, it had the conventional meaning. But if the bulb began sputtering, it was the comedic equivalent of an air-raid siren, warning performers to lock up their original material immediately unless they wanted to lose it to a master thief.
Robin Williams, comedy’s most notorious joke rustler, was in the house.
…the famed Comedy Store in Los Angeles has even instituted a Mencia early-detection signal similar to the Improv’s for Williams, though considerably less high-tech. "Every time he walks in, the guys in the cover booth just start yelling ‘Mencia’s here!’"
[Source]
This left my heart pounding! There was a time in my life I think I would have loved to have tried this but not now.
Update: And a quick tour of Paris courtesy of Willful.
Ray Bradbury wants it understood that when he wrote [Fahrenheit 451] he was far more concerned with the dulling effects of TV on people than he was on the silencing effect of a heavy-handed government. While television has in fact superseded reading for some, at least we can be grateful that firemen still put out fires instead of start them.
[Source]
I have multiple reasons for posting this link. The main one though is that it has been talked about so much and seems like such a cool book! It’s time to take the bubble wrap off our children!
This challenge as demonstrated in the video is to hold two corks as if they were interconnected rings and then pull them apart without letting go of the corks.
If you missed the WVLT news around 6pm, you can catch me in this article which includes a link to the video.
This video is innocent. It’s your mind that’s not.
If you push play, you won’t be able to quit watching. Video of a tough kid and his pet. Bad parents?
Due to some recent developments, like being politically active in regard to the Knox County school rezoning and our daughter showing our online publishings to a variety of people who otherwise probably would have never seen these writings, our visibility is up a bit.
Sarah doesn’t like her parents reading her blog so she snipes to her mother, "How’s it feel to have people reading what you write?" If the work was not meant to be read, it would not be publically published…As a friend of ours said, "You put it out there!"
If Instapundit and BusyMom are A-list bloggers, we are probably still somewhere down in the Ts. Some of our friends and family might ask, "Why do they do this?" My answer is published here. The long and short of it is that blogging is fun! It is also a playground for experimenting with thoughts and actions you may not explore in the real world much like an actor might explore a character on the stage. Online is an arena that may allow for exaggeration or outright fiction although Cathy and I tend to call it like we see it. That separation between real world and online world is important. When people from the online world meet for the first time, the experience is unnerving, fascinating, and enlightening for these online people have shared stories and know of each other intimately but are always surprised to find that often the person they "know" online is not the same as the person in real life. Online publishing shows but a glimpse of the person’s real life (unless you are Justin then you get it all) and in real life the person may have much more depth, be less revealing, and more politically correct.
Welcome! Read. Enjoy. Judge or not. Comment and participate or lurk in the shadows. And next we meet, smile and laugh with me!
