I usually hate reality shows but Jersey Shore is in a class of awesomeness by itself.I've decided not to go to law school unless I'm bowled over with a scholarship offer. I'm going to graduate school for public policy next fall at a location to be determined in the next four to six weeks.
Can't wait.
To say that the years 2000 through 2009 have been an eventful 10 years is to state the obvious. But still. The rolling over of two digits on the odometer of years invites us to look back and consider all that's changed in our lives since we last argued about when new decades begin (pedants are quick to point out that it's technically not until Jan. 1 of years ending in 1, so we have another 12 months to prepare to look back on the first decade of the new millennium).
To do that, earlier this week and with the help of suggestions from online readers, I started making a list of things -- products, technologies, ideas, people -- that are now commonplace but that weren't on most of our radar screens in late 1999. For a "radar screen" I used the Tribune's digital news archives and searched for when things were first mentioned, even in passing, in our pages.
The first time any of our writers mentioned blogs (then "weblogs"), for instance, was cultural critic Julia Keller's Sept. 7, 1999, column headlined "She has seen the future and it is -- weblogs."
Careful readers of the Tribune had seen five scattered mentions of a new Internet search engine called Google before Jan. 1, 2000, but most of us had never heard of it.
Jared Fogle, the Subway guy? First reference was Jan. 26, 2000.
A Tribune article in March of that year focusing on promising (but now long forgotten) new products named "PageWriter, "Timeport" and "Talkabout," made a glancing and seemingly obligatory mention of "a wireless messaging product ... called the BlackBerry."
The first use of the term "Homeland Security" to describe a government agency to combat terrorism was Feb. 1, 2001, seven months before the 9/11 attacks that defined the decade.
And on May 14, 2001, we told our readers about texting, "which allows users to punch in a brief message that is instantly transmitted to one receiver." Our article noted that this texting thing "has become so popular with teenagers and young adults (in Europe) that an entirely new vocabulary of shortened words has sprung up."
Reviewing these clips is like looking back at baby pictures from a more innocent time:
Oct. 29, 2001: The "iPod (is) a $400 pocket-size hard drive that carries up to 1,000 songs in a metallic case about the size of a pack of cigarettes." (Today, an iPod that holds 1,000 songs costs $100 and is the size of a pack of gum.)June 17, 2002: "Ringtones constitute only the first movement of an entire symphony of new music services mobile network operators and entertainment companies are planning to offer consumers."
July 14, 2002: "Phones with digital cameras that shoot and e-mail photos are popular in Asia. ... Motorola plans to introduce a camera phone in the U.S. at the end of the year, though it's unclear whether the phones will take off here."
May 31, 2002: " 'American Idol: The Search for a Superstar,' (is) based on a popular series in England. Musical hopefuls will vie for success, with a celebrity panel of judges knocking them off one by one."
Nov. 8, 2004: "Tune in to these blog-based homemade radio shows, and you'll hear regular people, unschooled in radio, talking about anything and everything the way real people talk -- clumsily, with curses, dead air and all. If you've never heard of a podcast, don't worry."
Other dates of first-blips on the screen: Facebook (May 25, 2004); Wikipedia (Jan. 16, 2005); Sudoku (May 25, 2005); YouTube (Dec. 29, 2005); Taylor Swift (Sept. 28, 2006); Twitter (March 14, 2007); green jobs (April 16, 2007); and Lady Gaga (Aug. 6, 2007)
We first mentioned Paris Hilton on Feb. 12, 2003, and Perez Hilton on Nov. 17, 2005. Glenn Beck popped up on Nov. 14, 2002; Rachel Maddow on March 31, 2004.
We can only guess what household terms and names we'll be batting casually around 10 years from today. All we can be sure of is that there are life-changing inventions, ideas and people incubating out there in obscurity, and that we'll find it hard to imagine life before them.
See the full list (so far) of aughtie debuts here.
Mary Schmich and I will be helping to lead the "Caroling at Cloud Gate" singalong Friday from 6-7 p.m. in Millennium Park. Many of our friends from the Old Town Schol of Folk Music will join us.
There's no admission charge, and complementary hot coffee and cider will be served.
fly away little application, come back with an interview.
So now we are in a situation where I am super-stressed and worried that....Shannon might go to India w/o me, and I might have to go later (my contribution isn't needed till the end of process) or in the worst case, send a frozen contribution. Having gotten really into the idea of going, and planned the trip, now I am really committed and it is stressful to maybe have to change.
Minds - they are not good at dealing with change!
What one film do you think everyone should see? Sponsored by The Official AVATAR Community on TypePad. See AVATAR in theaters December 18, 2009. |
Blue Velvet
So we will see.
Suckage 1: I give it 3:2 that we manage to get the visa in time. Which means we still don't know - I hate this massive uncertainty! Hard to plan anything when I don't know if I am spending the next 3 weeks in India or not.
Suckage 2: How does it make any sense at all to gate a visa application on a "confirmation" with ZERO security value? Anyone can register at a hotel under any name - there was no validation at all by hotels.com! The hotel registration is meaningless as a security measure. Security theater...
There was no explanation of why my app got this unusual level of scrutiny, maybe it was just random?
We may hear later today that they released my visa. Or in the morning. Or not at all, in which case I will drive up to the consulate again and be annoying in person again.
This is a promo/ad, but I sense it's a good look at where "print" journalism is headed. Worth paying for? Gosh, it sure looks like it:
- Location:Cubeville
New keyboard: $30
Getting the house wrench-wench to install it: 1lb chocolate-covered coffee beans
Not having to fuck around with the Windows on-screen keyboard anymore: Priceless
Should be all better by the end of next week. Meanwhile I shall continue to amuse myself by updating LJ from the computer hooked to the 32" HDTV.
So if looks could kill, Theo would have died on the spot. As the spot was in the station rather than on a train, London Underground would not delay the service and no body, other than Theo, would have been inconvenienced. With that in mind, Theo considered a third attempt, this time laying his oyster card carefully on the scanner, but self-preservation won out and he stepped aside to let the queue of commuters through.
"I must have run out of money on the card." He thought, and went to join the muttering line of people who were waiting to get a top up or to renew their travel cards. The machines, unusually, were all out of order, so he had to wait behind three old dears, and a middle-aged man who looked one stressful day away from a breakdown.
The man looked like he had slept in his clothes; he wore a crumpled shirt and a stale odour of sweat and panic. The man was muttering to himself and seemed to be crying. He would have paced up and down, but he would have lost his place in the queue, so he tried to pace up and down on the spot. He looked like a bewildered ex-ballet dancer who had let himself go, turning arrhythmic pirouettes.
Theo waited his turn with increasing annoyance. The old dears seemed to be waiting for a chat rather than to buy tickets, "They must be telling their life-stories to the ticket seller," though Theo. The queue moved like a wet Sunday afternoon - Church-service slow.
A girl joined the line behind him. She had legs up to there and a short skirt. Theo watched her in the convex mirror. She looked very thin, like a super model, but the mirror distorted her and she seemed washed-away and emaciated. On second glance her legs looked like pipe-cleaners.
Theo stole glances at her wasted legs for a minute or two, wondering how they supported her weight if they were so frail. Eventually caught a glance of the rest of the girl and realised she was skeletal-thin; like one of those anatomical models, made from cardboard.
By now it was the crying man who got to the window. Theo heard him ask for a single to somewhere-or-other and then he fumbled in his pocket for some change.
Time passed. For a moment Theo thought he must had nodded off, because although he knew time had passed, he did not remember it passing. Eventually the man in front handed over a few coins and the man in the ticket office topped up his oyster card.
Theo got to the front of the queue and pushed his own oyster card and a ten pound note through the well-worn wooden trough. The oyster card was in a bright yellow plastic Ikea folder. Theo didn't much care for Ikea. He described it as 'Hell on Earth'.
This time, when he swiped his oyster card on the gate, the barrier opened. Theo noticed that the message came up that read 'soon expires', but was in too much of a hurry to query it with the man in the ticket office, and besides, the queue had grown again. There were a couple of elderly blokes behind the skinny woman, and a kid with a hacking cough.
Theo took the escalator down into the tunnel and then turned right onto the platform. He did not have to wait, indeed Theo got on straight away.
There was a ticket inspector, he showed Theo his identification. Theo noticed that the name on the ID was old and Greek, but he did not really read it. Theo handed his oyster card to the old man, who scanned it. The oyster card system removed two obols from his total and Charon handed the card back to his passenger. The train crossed under the river Styx from this world into the next. Theo, forgetting his name, his family, his life, still clutched his oyster card wallet, tightly, in his dead fingers.
It seems very odd for me to be singled out for a visa denial. Have my blogging or politics finally started being a problem? It's a narcissistic theory, but I don't know that I have a better one. An alternative is that I just got a crotchety bureaucrat, but if so, this should happen more regularly and not be such a unique thing for the visa agency to see.
Anyway, on my way home to get some supporting paperwork, then to the consulate.
From my column archives, discussions of when new decades (and centuries and millennia) actually begin:
July 6, 1998:
Fussbudgets everywhere are grousing louder and louder that the next millennium will not begin until Jan. 1, 2001, so we should all hold off on grandiose, epochal merrymaking until that date and not make such a whoop-dee-doo about the moment 1999 becomes 2000.
I'm tempted to argue with them.
Though there wasn't a year zero--we went right from 1 B.C. to 1 A.D.--this was an error, like starting a timer at 1 minute. When the calendar makers hit "reset" on history, that date (1-1-01 B.C., in retrospect, for convenience's sake) should have been 1-1-0000. Therefore 1-1-2000 is far more momentous an anniversary for civilization than 1-1-2001.
But there's no need to argue. No matter how many enraged, contemptuous, superior letters to the editor they write about the enormity of this misapprehension, they never will change the mind of anyone whose imagination is fired by this turning over of the odometer in the Christian era.
The votes are in. The year 2000 will be the first of the new millennium.
December 9, 1999
What finally turned me around on this "millennium" controversy was the pure, stone-headed idiocy I heard on the subject on a couple of talk-radio programs recently.
Hosts and callers alike were downright splenetic in insisting that in a little more than three weeks we will enter "the new millennium," and that those wet blankets who claim otherwise--that it's actually about 55 weeks until the 21st Century begins--are simply wrong.
Well, that did it. Since July 1998 I've taken episodic whacks at the "enraged, contemptuous, superior" fusspots who seem to be trying to take the fun out of Jan. 1, 2000 by scolding us that it marks the beginning of the final year of the second millennium, and that the third millennium will not begin until Jan. 1, 2001: "We know you're technically correct," I advised them in an April column. "We don't care. Now shut up."
But since I now believe that my premise was wrong--"We," as in the vast, giddy, slightly apprehensive public, don't know and so don't agree that the 2001 partisans are technically correct--I am retracting my conclusion and my admonition. "We" as in, well, me, anyway, do care. Speak out.
My stance was predicated on the belief that millennium madness was just another Christmas conspiracy: It's widely acknowledged that Dec. 25 is not literally Jesus Christ's birthday--scripture is imprecise on the event and the best guess of scholars and historians is that he was born in the spring around 4 B.C. Dec. 25 is simply when we've decided to celebrate that birth, just as we've decided to celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday on the third Monday in January and Columbus' landing in the New World on the second Monday of October.
Tradition and other cultural factors make Dec. 25 feel right for Christmas, even though the margin of error may be 20 percent or more.
In contrast, the margin of error in celebrating the coming millennium a year early is a paltry one-twentieth of 1 percent. And most of us have decided to celebrate it then because tradition and other cultural factors make Jan. 1, 2000 feel right for the arrival of a new epoch.
There's magic in nines rolling into zeros: We feel it on birthdays and anniversaries divisible by 10, when our cars reach 100,000 miles and even when we break 100 in bowling. Jan. 1, 2000 will be momentous. It will be a major milestone. But it won't be a millennium.
The reason, one more time:
The monks who devised our year-numbering system did not start with zero--the way odometers and babies do--but with one. The year before year 1 was year minus 1. So the first hundred years of the Christian calendar, the first century, was year 1 through year 100. The second century started Jan. 1, 101. And so on.
I'd long been prepared to celebrate the millennium a year early and thumb my nose at the pedants and poopers still caviling about the statistically insignificant error. But now that the day is so close, I'm finding myself increasingly uncomfortable with the company this requires me to keep--specifically stone-headed idiots.
Until I sense that the public is in general, conspiratorial agreement that Jan. 1, 2000 will be a celebration and commemoration of the new millennium but not its literal beginning, I can't use the m-word in good conscience. So moisten another blanket for me, you lovers of history, words and truth.
Let's party like it's 1998.
They charged (Tiger Woods) with careless driving and fined him $164. It's nothing really. It's like fining a regular person a Skittle...Jimmy Kimmel
How close to the truth is this joke? A rough estimate: Tiger earned about $100,000,000 last year. The average regular person earned about $50,000.
That means that for every dollar the regular person earned, Tiger Woods earned $2,000. For every dime the regular person earned, Tiger Woods earned $200. So a $164 fine is to Tiger Woods what an 8-cent fine would be for a regular person.
Figures culled from online suggest a 16 oz. bag of Skittles containing roughly 400 Skittles sells for about $4, or approximately a penny a Skittle. So to be more accurate, Kimmel's joke would have concluded "a small handful of Skittles."
Rim shot!
UPDATE -- Here's a more exact calculation:
I went and bought a 2.17 oz. bag of Skittles for $1.20,including tax, at my neighborhood supermarket and counted out the Skittles.There were 59, so let's round that off to 2-cents per Skittle.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics "National Compensation Survey: Occupational Wages in the United States" report (.pdf) says the median annual earnings of a civilian employee in the United States in 2006 was $33,634. Let's round that up to $35,000 for inflation and ease of calculation.
So, now, doing the same first pass at these numbers as above ($110 million divided by $35 thousand) we come up with the result that Tiger earned about $2,850 for every $1 the "regular person" earned. $164 is to $2,850 what $0.0575 is to $1. Round that up to six cents and we get the result that, in fact, fining TIger Woods $164 is like fining a regular person three Skittles.
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December 10th, 2009: It is time for a CHARITY AUCTION, everyone! To support Child's Play Squishable and I teamed up with an auction for not only a Squishable T-Rex, but one that comes with a tiny woman, an out-of-scale car AND a little log cabin. Plus, signed copies of the original design docs! It is a special package, you guys! – Ryan | |||
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- champion : Jersey Shore. [+0]
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ericzorn : From Google to Gaga, a decade of miracle, wonder [+0] - ericzorn : Folks, dress up like eskimos and come sing with us [+0]
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- patrissimo : travel problems [+8]
- ericzorn : When will the new decade begin? [+0]
- ericzorn : We never really settled this, did we? [+0]
- djhawz : Clockwork Orange Meets Ray Bradbury [+0]
- ericzorn : Less than a Chuckle, however.... [+0]
- dinosaurcomics : remember when knowing different types of shorthand was something people bragged about? it only happ [+3]
- ego_likeness : North, Live at Jaxx with both drummers. [+4]
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