#BLIZZARDSHRUG
The End.
*
Aug
21
Lexus Executive: We pay you guys top-dollar to sell our cars. We’re not leaving this board room until one of you come up with a useable idea to sell this new RX.
12-year-old: I’ve got an idea.
Lexus Executive: Alright big guy, shoot.
12-year-old: Ok, well, the commercial will start with the car just sitting on the ground…
Lexus Executive: Boring.
12-year-old: …but, then, it starts being lifted off the ground, by, like, giant cables and trophies that say, like, “Most Awesome Car,” or “Strongest Car,” and there are robot sounds like, PPFFFFRRRRTTTTT CHK CHK CHK PPFFFRRRRRRR, the cables are making the robot sounds when they lift the car up…
Lexus Executive: Sounds awesome.
12-year-old: …and then lasers come out of the wa…
Lexus Executive: Wait a minute, are the trophies lifting the car up because there are so many of them? Like a counter balance scale?
12-year-old: What?
Lexus Executive: Never mind, keep going.
12-year-old: So, these lasers come out of the wall, and are like, BRRZZZZZZZ, and they cut through the cables and the car falls down, and the trophies go EVERYWHERE.
Lexus Executive: …
12-year-old:….
Board Room:…
Lexus Executive:…and then what?
12-year-old: Um, well, then the car starts driving, no, wait, at the beginning when the car was lifted in the air it was like spinning its tires, like, “LET ME OUTTA HERE! PUT ME DOWN!” And THEN the lasers cut it down. So, then it starts driving all over the room and around the trophies and there are flashing lights on the walls and then the car is like SCCREEEEECHHHHH and the car stops right in front of the camera and all the trophies hit the ground because the car was driving so fast that it was like the trophies were falling in slow motion.
Lexus Executive: You guys get all that?
A Quick History of Tutting by George Justin Blizzard:
Tutting was born out of the need for kids to express themselves while not breaking out of frame of their front facing laptop camera streaming to Facebook. There was also a strong desire to be known for doing something while applying as little effort as possible, like not having to even stand up. Tutting’s origins are deeply rooted in tecktonics.
As an expert in whole brain learning and good friend of mine Steven Snyder put it, “There are only two problems in life: 1) you know what you want and you don’t know how to get it, and/or 2) you don’t know what you want.” If that’s true, and I think it is, then there are only two solutions: make it up, make it happen.
David Allen from Getting Things Done.
People are constantly doing things, but usually only when they have to, under fire from themselves or others. They get no sense of winning or being in control or of cooperating amongst themselves or their world. People are starving for those experiences. The daily behaviors that define the things that are incomplete and the moves that are needed to complete them, must change. Getting things going of your own accord before your forced to by external pressure and internal stress builds a firm foundation of self worth that will spread into every aspect of your life. You are the captain of your own ship, the more you act from that perspective, the better things will go for you. Asking “what’s the next action?” undermines the victim mentality. It presupposes that there is a possibility of change, and that there is something you can do to make it happen. That is the assumed affirmation in the behavior. And these kind of assumed affirmations often work more fundamentally to build a positive self image than can repeating, “I am a power effective person that can make things happen,” a thousand times. Is there too much complaining in your culture? The next time someone moans about something try asking, “so what’s the next action?” People will complain only about something they assume can be better than it currently is. The action question forces the issue. If it can be changed, there is some action that will change it. If it can’t it must be considered part of the landscape to be incorporated into the strategy and tactics. Complaining is a sign that someone isn’t willing to risk moving on a changeable situation, or won’t consider the immutable circumstance in his or her plans. This is a temporary and hollow form of self-validation.
David Allen from, Getting Things Done.
Read this book.
Kony 2012
Sorry, what I meant was: #kony2012 #stopkony #komen #trayvonmartin #egypt #japan #tigerblood #supertroopers #10prettypeopleIfollow #uganda2012
Your Morning Shot: Bob Dylan
“People seldom do what they believe in. They do what is convenient, then repent.” - Bob Dylan
I wonder if in 1988 Spike Lee knew that in 2012 a 29 year old white guy would hear “Da Butt” played on the radio, and think, “There’s no way the radio is playing a song with the chorus ‘do it in the butt.’”
Apparently the chorus is, “doing da butt,” but I’m still skeptical.
One of the few performances/pieces of art that gives me the chills every time I watch it.
A lot of memories are soundtracked to The Last Waltz. I watched the film, listened to the album, read about the concert so much that it became mythical; I researched every detail that was available: production notes, rumors, camera movements, commentary, what guests did just before and just after they were on stage.
I remember reading a column, Rolling Stone used to have a Revisits section at the end of their reviews that it might have been from, that expressed the urgency of all the performances during The Last Waltz. The Band was breaking up, there was a lot of inner turmoil around it, Levon Helm maybe being the most vocal and adamant about not breaking up. The writer describes being in the ballroom, watching The Band perform, seeing them put absolutely everything they had into these songs, because they know it would be the last time they performed them together.
It leaves you with an almost unsettling mixture of feelings. The excitement you feel of watching a band perform so cohesively is intercut with feelings of longing or sadness. And the ability to see it all in Levon Helm’s performance. I don’t think you have to do all the research and obsessing to notice it. Helm’s performance is just so good.
It’s the type of feeling that takes a tremendous amount of talent to describe, and I certainly don’t possess it.
R.I.P. Levon.
Do you remember when you first listened to mewithoutYou’s “Gentlemen” and thought “man, this guy is really serious;” then you listened to the song again, this time reading along with the liner notes, and you saw that the original lyric was actually “what good is one mitten without the other,” and you thought “‘mitten’? hahaha, who’s idea was that?” but now whenever you listen to the song you can’t help but replace “glove” with “mitten,” and you forever call gloves “mittens” because to you it’s funny that anyone would ever try to write the word “mittens” into a rock song?
- Barry: Yeah, my parents tried to do that scared straight shit with me. Put me in a cell with my cousin for a day.
- Tree: What'd he do?
- Barry: Beat up a minor.
- Tree: How long he get?
- Barry: 5 years, it was his cousin too, beat his ass cause he moved the basketball hoop while he was trying to cut the grass. He was like, 'You don't wanna live this life cuz.' I said, 'I KNOW BITCH, I'M NOT TRYING TO LIVE THIS LIFE, I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHY I'M IN HERE! I AIN'T TRYING TO BEAT UP NO MINOR LIKE YOUR DUMB ASS.'
But the analogy between television and liquor is best, I think. Because (bear with me a second) I’m afraid good old average Joe Briefcase might be a teleholic. I.e., watching TV can become malignantly addictive. It may become malignantly addictive only once a certain threshold of quantity is habitually passed, but then the same is true of Wild Turkey. And by “malignant” and “addictive” I again do not mean evil or hypnotizing. An activity is addictive if one’s relationship to it lies on that downward-sloping continuum between liking it a little too much and really needing it. Many addictions, from exercise to letter-writing, are pretty benign. But something is malignantly addictive if (1) it causes real problems for the addict, and (2) it offers itself as a relief from the very problems it causes. A malignant addiction is also distinguished for spreading the problems of the addiction out and in in interference patterns, creating difficulties for relationships, communities, and the addict’s very sense of self and spirit. In the abstract, some of this hyperbole might strain the analogy for you, but concrete illustrations of malignantly additive TV-watching cycles aren’t hard to come by. If it’s true that many Americans are lonely, and if it’s true that many lonely people are prodigious TV-watchers, and it’s true that lonely people find in television’s 2-D images relief from their stressful reluctance to be around real human beings, then it’s also obvious that the more time spent at home alone watching TV, the less time spent in the world of real human beings, and that the less time spent in the real human world, the harder it becomes not to feel inadequate to the tasks involved in being a part of the world, thus fundamentally apart from it, alienated from it, solipsistic, lonely, It’s also true that to the extent one begins to view pseudo-relationships with Bud Bundy or Jane Pauley as acceptable alternatives to relationships with real people, one will have commensurately less conscious incentive even to try to connect with real 3-D persons, connections that seem pretty important to basic mental health. For Joe Briefcase, as for many addicts, the Special Treat begins to substitute for something nourishing and needed, and the original genuine hunger—-less satisfied than bludgeoned—-subsides to a strange objectless unease.
David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, 1993.
Replace “TV,” “television,” or “watching TV” with “internet,” and “checking Facebook.”
David Foster Wallace was really smart.
1/7
