Ignore that Theranos image. Today's subject is a series of television ads promoting Xfinity's wifi capability that uses "boomtown" as a theme. Wifi is "booming," we are told. I am amused by the use of stereotypical examples of other historic booms. There are gold prospectors (a/k/a the '49ers), -- oil barons (suggestive of the source of Clampett family wealth that fueled its collective relocation to LA) and "tech founders" (a contemporary plague, though these boomtown tech founders have a dotcom/ '90s look). The company offering us these vignettes, XFinity, is suggesting that the new gold is wifi, and that they have staked their claim. AdWeek did a sympathetic writeup of the "Boomtown" ads. As to the "tech founders" portrayed in the ad, there is a bit of dialog that is deliberately obscure. Two stereotypical Silicon Valley types are in the same room, a man and a woman. He asks her a question and she answers with w...
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The full lyrics here. Comment below. When I was just a little girl I asked my mother, "What will I be? Will I be pretty? Will I be rich?" Here's what she said to me "Que será, será Whatever will be, will be The future's not ours to see Que será, será What will be, will be" When I grew up and fell in love I asked my sweetheart, "What lies ahead? Will we have rainbows Day after day?" Here's what my sweetheart said "Que será, será Whatever will be, will be The future's not ours to see Que será, será What will be, will be" Now I have children of my own They ask their mother, "What will I be? Will I be handsome? Will I be rich?" I tell them tenderly "Que será, será Whatever will be, will be The future's not ours to see Que será, será What will be, will be" ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This is not a bad account of one aspect of ancient Stoicism. What y...
Since the Olympics is upon us again, I might as well admit my long fascination with the song "One Moment of Time," memorably sung by Whitney Houston in 1988, and often used as a sort of background music for highlight reels. I want one moment in time When I'm more than I thought I could be When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away And the answers are all up to me Give me one moment in time When I'm racing with destiny Then in that one moment in time I will feel I will feel eternity. ------------------------------------------------------------------- My mind follows a well-worn chain of association from these words. Think of an older athlete, say 70 years old thinking and perhaps talking about his marvelous 'moment in time' fifty years before. Like one of the two characters in the Springsteen song "Glory Days," but let's stick to the Olympics. "Ah, yes, in the fifteen hundred meters in the Olympics of that year -- I was just hitting my s...
I recently took some vacation time at the Mohegan Sun hotel and casino in southeastern Connecticut. It is a fine place, and as you might guess from the title it is tribally run. I'm not a big gambler. The shows are a bigger draw than slots or roulette wheels. When one speaks of 'shows' at the Mohegan, one may be thinking of the Arena, of the Wolf Den, or of the comedy club. This last trip I was there largely to check out an act at the Wolf Den. I saw and heard a country-music vocal group from south Georgia, the Castellows. The Mohegan Sun Arena (capitalize the 'A') has the headliners. I've seen Pat Benatar there, Aretha Franklin, Lionel Ritchie. One pays well for the privilege of seeing such artists. For the Wolf Den, though, the privilege is that of seeing someone whose name is not recited with regularity in households across the land: people of whom you may have never heard until you checked out the Wolf Den Upcomings page on the Mohegan Sun...
The silliest 'pop culture' controversy of the moment involves the actress Margot Robbie, who plays the title character in the blockbuster 'Barbie.' https://time.com/6576866/oscars-2024-greta-gerwig-snub-internet-fan-theory/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon The Academy did not include either the lead actress or the director of Barbie as nominees for Best Actress or Best Director respectively. But we are repeatedly reminded that both women are producers. If the movie wins Best Picture, they'll each have something nice for the home mantle. The indignation feels forced. As does the sense that it is all a set-up for the campaign to win that Best Picture prize on a guilt theme. These are inside-Hollywood controversies that ought to concern us as much as a good watch to a retiree we've never met from a corporation for which we've never worked. (Ah, but we buy their products! We should care who gets the nice gold watch. Sorry, no.) Now,...
I generally try to keep track of these Bachelor/Bachelorette seasons even though I seldom actually watch them. It's like baseball that way. It has been a long time since I ever sat down in front of a screen (and even longer since I sat in a stadium) to watch a game. But I could conduct an intelligent conversation if asked about Chaim Bloom (the new general manager of the Boston Red Sox) and his off-season strategy (if he had one). My relationship to the Bachelor franchise is a lot like that. And I know that one of the rivals for the heart of this season's bachelor, Pilot Pete, is Mykenna, (above) whose occupation is "fashion blogger." I was on her 'team' as soon as I heard that. It is a part of the charm of the season that the rivals have occupational or sometimes quasi-occupational tags assigned to them as Homeric epithets. I generally side with the rival with the nerdiest job title. And, yes, a fashion blogger is still a blogger. I imagine Mykenna...
There is a new anthology out, a collection of essays by philosophers addressing in their various ways the "Liar Paradox." I'll discuss the paradox myself today, and then say something about the new book in tomorrow's post. Most people, surely most people likely to be reading this blog, are familiar with most of the following material. I trust you will read on regardless. We begin, as is conventional, with the semi-legendary Cretan seer Epimenides, who is supposed to have said "all Cretans are liars." This is a rather fuzzy non-paradoxical comment, actually. Our tendency is simply to say that even liars don't generally lie all the time. A "liar" is someone who lies out of habit, pathological need, or to take advantage of other people. There is no logical inference that every sentence from the mouth of a "liar" in the ordinary language sense be a lie. So Epimenides may well have been telling the truth. Over the next couple o...
Just thinking aloud here. There are several theories extant about how what we think of as the universe, the totality of spaces you could in principle get to from here, and of moments in time that came before or will come after this one, is only one of many. A multiplicity of multiverse theories, so to speak. I'll still to three (I'm sure there are more). 1) A multiverse exists because every black hole is also a big bang . I'm told that mathematical modeling of a black hole leads to the inference that a mass of any size may somehowishly be reduced to a single infinitesimal point (meaning: infinite density). Also, that this makes the formation of a black hole look like the big bang postulated as the start of our universe in reverse. From such premises, the italicized inference above seems possible. If every black hole you can get to from here is a big bang, though, then it is the big bang of another universe, one you can't get to from here, one with its own space an...
I recently saw the latest biopic about Apple co-founder and re-fashioner of industries Steve Jobs. It was a fine movie. The Rolling Stone reviewer calls it brilliant. But it hasn't been a commercial success. Why not? I don't know, but I'll make the simple observation that it is the antithesis of an action film. It isn't even a very visual film, it could almost have been done on the radio. Everything depended on the dialog. Still, that dialogue was very well-written and acted by a world-class cast. It is written as a three act play, and each act is a product launch. Various backstage dramas each time precede the moment when Jobs walks on stage to unveil a new product to the world. We also get some quick flash back scenes to events the characters are talking about, and some very brief news anchor narration in inter-act transitions. The essentials of the familiar story are conveyed through this structure. Job and Woz co-founded Apple. As it outgrew them, Woz ...
The novelist Jonathan Franzen has a new novel out, PURITY. I haven't seen it, and frankly don't really plan to. But I have it on good authority that the following passage appears near the end: Just when it was time to be leaving, the band launched into a must-dance song, the soul-sister song. "Hate the lyrics," Jason said, dancing. "Hate the cooptation for a car commercial. And yet --" "Great song," Pip said, dancing. They danced for half an hour while the rain came down and the San Lorenzo rose. This seems to have set off some speculation as to which song (if there is any one song in the non-fictional universe referenced here) is the so-danceable one that Jason and Pip enjoy. My immediate thought is of "Lady Marmalade," as recorded by Labelle in 1975, also known by the chorus, "Voulez-vous coucher avec moi?" which begins, Hey sister, go sister, soul sister, go sister Hey sister, go sister, soul sister, go si...
I saw a few minutes of an old NCIS episode recently, one of several episodes that turn on the interaction of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service with Israel's Mossad. Why does a show that seems to have started off as a "CSI in uniform" idea go back to that well so often? I was wondering about this, and suddenly thought about the '60s show, Hogan's Heroes. That show was conceived during the worst of a long period of nuclear tension between US and USSR as competing hegemons, but it was about a period when the two nations were allies against a common foe. In HH, there was a recurring character -- Marya, a flirtatious Russian spy. The screenwriters treated her with ambivalence: you understood she was on the same side of the war as Hogan, whom she called "Dah-link," but she was also trouble and he was rightly wary of her. The figures from Mossad who show up on NCIS are treated with that same sort of ambivalence. For very different reasons in te...
The Jan/Feb issue of Men's Journal includes a piece of salesmanship on behalf of the tourist industry in the city of Miami, Florida. Why am I slumming for blog topics? My love of paradox. Anyway, the gist of this piece is its effort to bathe the already tourist-friendly, and tourist-befriended, city in the waters of sophistication. The writer, Mark Healy, is not to be held responsible for the headline or subhead. The writer never is. In this case, though, I submit that the headline fairly expresses the gist of Healy's lead paragraph. So I'll start with it. "Miami Gets Real: America's greatest urban beach has evolved beyond its cheesy South Beach years with an international art scene, serious cocktails, and food that's worth the flight." The angle of the story, then, is that you - a traveler sufficiently sophisticated to be looking to Men's Journal for guidance -- are too high-brow to have been taken in by the cheesy look of, say, The Birdcag...