Feb
8
A New Viagra Commerical Cautions You To…
Filed Under Books, TV | Leave a Comment
“…ask your doctor if your heart is healthy enough for sex.”
What it fails to add, in terms of follow up advice: “if the answer is no, ask yourself if it’s worth it to keep on living.”
I joke, I kid, I josh.
If you really aren’t healthy enough for sex, though, you could always do what my old pal D.H. Lawrence did when it happened to him, and write the raunchiest novel in the world (at the time) to make up for things.
Boink boink.
I can almost promise that I will attempt to try to write an actual, lengthy, engaging post - complete with points and anecdotes and everything - sometime soon.
Boink!
Jan
21
Save Trees: Read “Books” on Your Cell Phone
Filed Under Books, Cell phones, Entertainment, Life, Writing | 4 Comments
About a year ago, I was having lunch with a friend, and was just starting to launch into my usual “communications-technology-is-killing-communication” speech, when she stopped me pre-rant. “I know what you are going to say,” she said. “And it’s so much worse in Asia.”
My friend is Korean. She was born and raised in the United States but has worked in Korea and Japan for much of her life. And according to her, the average citizen of each of these countries - and especially, the average young person - is completely dependent on his or her cell phone as a source of not only communication but entertainment as well.
Now, I don’t have statistics to support that claim, but let it be known that my friend is both observant and intelligent. Even if her point of view is somewhat exaggerated - probably in the face of the possible ramifications of what’s in that point of view (something that admittedly often happens to yours truly) - there’s very little chance that she’s not somewhat right. I’ll leave it to my Korean and Japanese readers, and my half Korean and half Japanese readers, to add some more perspective or information if they feel the need.
But back to the point, before it stabs us:
Novels written and distributed via cell phone are starting to dominate the best seller lists in Japan.
Dec
27
Add what I am about to say to the growing list of additional points that should have been included in the introduction to the site but weren’t…
I am writing the posts for this site from the (somewhat) unique perspective of someone who purposefully descended from a more stable and secure income bracket into one that’s slightly more…difficult to navigate. In simpler terms:
BEFORE: Good money, good benefits.
NOW: Okay money, zero benefits.
The move itself is of very little importance to the discussion I am about to begin. I made it because I needed to make it (because my brain is starting to turn into a computer!) but some of what I have experienced since making the move represents an important piece of the pizza nonetheless. What pizza am I talking about?
The American economic pizza, of course.
As a late holiday present to my current list of two readers, I’ll skip this opportunity to rant against capitalism in general and proceed straight to a more specific (as well as a more defensible) point.
It’s no secret that this country’s health care system is trouble. Most people would say (the media included) that it’s in trouble, but in actuality it’s the system itself that is the trouble. Popomatic Healthcare Trouble.
What does this have to do with my BEFORE and AFTER income brackets, and with economic pizza?
Observe the difference, in percentage of income, that my health benefits cost me now, as opposed to when I had a salaried job with benefits:
BEFORE: About 5.9% of my total monthly income (paid in addition to what was being paid by my employer)
NOW: About 13.8% of my total monthly income (paid entirely by me)
Okay. So that’s a big, but not huge, increase. In the words of my tenth grade history teacher, however: “Brotha, that ain’t even the whole story.”
The exact numbers are my bidness, but let if suffice to say that when someone says something like “I descended into a lower income bracket,” they don’t mean that their total income dipped down thirty-seven bucks. So that larger percentage is being taken out of a much smaller pizza. I’m also now paying about three times as much money in out-of-pocket health care expenses as I was before. My old health plan cost me a slight piece of my salary, but it didn’t cost me much more past that. My new plan costs me plenty. I try not to use it. It’s mostly there in case I get hit by a truck.
Look. Those are facts. Partially they’re there because I made a conscious choice to move from that safer place (the desk job) to the riskier place that I currently inhabit (the half a desk job plus personal projects). But they’re also there because things in America be bad. They be bad, at least, for everyone who is less than rich. They be bad economically, they be bad politically, and they be bad culturally.
The cultural badness will receive its share of attention on this site. All my fury and some of my romanticism stem from my frustrations regarding the extent to which the average American sells his or her self short in intellectual, social, and spiritual terms. In terms of politics and the economy, however, I know about as much as said average American (not enough). This in itself is a problem, but it’s a problem that I’ll explore here, in public, only after I feel better about my personal efforts to improve my knowledge and capabilities in this regard.
For now, I just want to point out that there are smart people out there who both understand these “more complicated matters” - and want to fix them in those places where they’re broken.
The point: Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal is a good book. Probably, it’s an important book.
I say it’s probably important, instead of just straight-up important, because a few years have to go by before anyone will be able to tell if it has accomplished anything. What the book seeks to accomplish is fairly simple - Krugman would like to see all the power and money that is currently in the hands of “a Republican few,” returned to the many from which it was taken (or who unwittingly gave it away). In explicit terms, he wants to see a return to the some of politics (and subsequently, the economics) of The New Deal. I won’t say much more, because I don’t want to oversimplify Krugman’s points, but I should also mention that a good deal of pages are spent tracing how we got to where we currently are in political and economic terms (a pseudo-democratic oligarchy or plutocracy), as well as how we might be able to get back to a better place (something closer to an actual democracy).
The main goal of the book is to address, diagnose, and treat the issue of rising political and economic inequality in the country. Krugman also spends a fair amount of time outlining those of his suggestions that are centered around what can be done first and now. The biggest of these is the establishment of a universal health care system for all Americans. Booyah says me.
You can read the first few pages of the book on Amazon. Or go to the library.