I’m a fan of Stephen Fry. I have especially enjoyed him as Jeeves in Jeeves and Wooster, and as the reader of the entire British version of the Harry Potter series. This is a cool little video he narrated that I saw on All Confirmation Bias, All the Time:
These fake drug commercials are hilarious. Maybe it’s just that I have psych-meds “on the brain” because I’ve just finished a child-diagnosis class and reading Robert Whitaker’s Anatomy of an Epidemic.
I’ve never been a huge fan of Dan Savage. He rubs me the wrong way kind of like Dr. Laura rubs me the wrong way. They both have moral codes so strong that they don’t need to know very much about a person before dishing out copious advice. Of course, they are both in the business of giving advice, so I guess it comes with the territory. I just want anyone with that much power to listen more and be less sure of their moral code. Their supplicants are real people with complex, unique histories, families, confusion, and pain. Advice before understanding is premature–I read that in one of my textbooks and underlined it. True. And if you think you understand someone after they’ve said a few sentences, you are wrong.
But this video makes Dan Savage a hero to me. This is using power for good. So many gay kids kill themselves! It’s a real, ongoing tragedy and shame in the US. Just at the developmental phase where fitting in is the highest priority, these kids are often denied respect and bullied mercilessly. But it gets better:
My sink has leaked since I moved in to this apartment over a year ago. It hadn’t been bad or consistent enough to make me call my landlord, just annoying. It got bad, though, in the last couple weeks, dumping all water onto the floor unless I manually held the drainpipe onto the basket. I was stuck because I really needed to clean up before calling my landlord–she would probably want to try to fix it herself–but had no time for that job. I’ve been way behind on cleaning.
I was saved by the internet. All I needed to know was what slip-joint nut was, and especially how a wedge-shaped slip-joint nut seal works, which I found out in a few minutes by searching “how to fix a drain leaking” and watching a few of the middle minutes of a video by a nice, slow-talking, slow-moving plumber.
The now next-to-newest Long Now Seminar is by Jesse Schell, “Visions of the Gamepocalypse.”(Look under “downloads.”) He believes that we will soon be playing internet games 24 hours a day. Literally. He says “The 21st century will be a war for the attention of humanity,” fought between four groups: the Persuaders, corporate/advertising types trying to make money, Fulfillers, who are trying to satisfy people’s wishes, Artists, who are trying to push the envelope of their medium, and Humanitarians, who want to make people’s lives better. And he reminds us of the golden rule, “He who has the gold makes the rules.”
Here’s a YouTube clip of him doing the beginning of his spiel. He takes a few minutes to get warmed up, but it’s good. (The Long Now version is much better, but an hour and a half long.)
I kind of like the automatic tracking thing. I do a lot of tracking of my own life and it would be cool to have all of that stuff just show up in a handy stats program. But the idea of corporations and the government recording every movement of every part of my body is just creepy. Not worth it.
He even presents a plausible idea about putting commercials in our dreams and why we will love it.
Here’s the video of me and Karly performing in downtown Eugene. (Thanks to David for filming!)
I wanted to learn this sequence because I wanted to steal some of Todd Yanacome’s moves and some of his style. Watching this I’d say I’ve been partly successful. I learned a bunch of moves, most of which I’ve been able to lead in improvised dances. I’m still quite a ways off on style, though. That’s my major criticism of my performance (not Karly’s–I think she looks great). I don’t have Todd’s relaxed poise, I hang my head a lot, my arms are not graceful or precise, and I look a little frantic. It’s good to see what I need to work on. (I posted Todd and Naomi’s original (improvised) version of it here, if you want to compare.) I was having fun, too–that’s another sign of my improvement. Performing Lindy used to freak me out.
It’s the nicest I’ve ever dressed up to dance. I came right from the clinic, so I’m in my therapist costume.
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 