I sometimes experience dismay when young people are surprised that I know how to use a computer, travel alone, or do household repairs. I have been doing all those things for decades and am not ready to stop doing them yet. The assumptions some people make shouldn’t surprise me, but they do. I am fully […]
Tag: media
Things That Make Me Say “Gah!”
Things That Make Me Say “Gah!”: 1. Car commercials. 2. Politicians running for office. 3. Corporate phone menus. 4. TV shows with laugh tracks. 5. That little Chrome rainbow circle that never stops. 6. Surprise airline fees 7. Government red tape 8. Just missing the bus 9. Fake English accents 10. Mental arithmetic Now that […]
Cascading Failures
San Jose just had a flood. Before we had a flood, though, we had lots and lots of heavy rain and strong winds for a few days. This coincided with an overflowing reservoir and some bad judgements by some civic engineers which resulted in a floodplain full of homes and cars being under water. I […]
We Need More Fence-Sitters
It is starting to worry me that I find myself dismissing as sadly misguided the perceptions of people on the other side of the political spectrum from me. I look down on their choices of news source as clearly being inferior to my own. Then I realize that they are doing the same thing to me. […]
Who Do You Trust When You Can’t Trust The Experts?
Is coffee good for you, or bad? How about wine? What is the latest on gluten–does anyone know? Warm-up exercises are either essential or a waste of time, and homeopathic remedies are either closer to nature or criminally dangerous. It seems as though we have been fed a steady diet of junk science […]
Narrow and Broad (Perceptions of) Women
Listen up, media people. We want more women in our entertainment. Young women, old women, middle-aged women, gay, straight, and transgender women. We want to see people like ourselves. We want to see our mothers and grandmothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, cousins, and nieces. We want them beautiful, plain, or wrinkled. Firm and flabby, fit and frail, […]