R.E.M.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3CmXGKXOmk

Political

Is is me, or do I see a huge bias in the way mainstream newspapers present the presidential race?

The DNC would have been painted strong in the face of the hurricane, not off to a rough start because of the hurricane. The GOP convention is in Minnesota, for cryin' out loud.

Taronga

My latest reading as follows:

O-Zone by Paul Theroux

Taronga by Victor Kelleher

O-Zone was not a bad concept, but the writing was unpolished, repetitive, too wordy, and made me impatient. I was glad to be done with the book, and honestly felt no sense of accomplishment, no sense of learning something new, not even gladness at the characters' journey. The moral: Not all books by a good author are good.

Taronga is a little more engaging. A disaster has happened in Australia, and a boy who was in the bush decides to strike out on his own, and get back to Sydney. He makes it. A bunch of animals are still at Taronga zoo, incluing a tiger that hates the boy's guts. Some people are trying to get into the zoo and some people are trying to keep them out. It's not a very long book, only just under 200 pages. I'm almost through reading it.

Hair Straightener

In a prior post, I explained how much I love a good head of hair. I'm sure it's harder to achieve for some, and I'm certain I don't appreciate how much time an effort is required, since I have short hair.

However, there are a lot of women who don't seem to know what to do with curly hair. Hair dressers and hairstylists seem programmed to straighten it out first. Most of Nicole Kidman's movies have her in straight hair. If you saw her in Dead Calm you'd know how unnecessary that is. Another example is Keri Russell, of Felicity fame. First she cuts her hair, and then she does Waitress in hair that looks obviously straightened. What kind of example is Hollywood setting?

Related to my prior post, I just love Keri Russell's hair when she was younger.

Family Photo

I realized I had started doing something, and it was getting to be a pattern. I've started visualizing people in the metro and in the mall, and well, wherever, as part of their family photo. It's not anything one could possibly know just by looking at the person but it's as though I'm trying to visualize the rest of the family just looking at that person.

Sometimes they just seem to be from a large family. Sometimes they just seem to be the prettier one in the group. Sometimes they just seem to be the uglier one in the group. All of those assumptions are of course unfounded and baseless and subjective and mostly even you might say illogical.

Where did this guessing game come from? Not sure.

Cognitive Dissonance

Minor, but still, cognitive dissonance occurred. It was an ad about wind power, which I saw on the mentros on my way to the cubicle.

The ad was very well done, clear, crisp, eye catching, in a word, expensive looking.

It was styled as a cork board, perhaps the kind found in the employee break room, just to the side of a time clock. It was made to look like a big sign was thumbtacked to it, in bright yellow caution colors, saying: CAUTION: STOPPING WIND TURBINES WILL RESULT IN LOSS OF JOBS. 'Stuck' underneath the eye catching and large caution sign were a 'note' explaining more (which I was too far from to read) and a crisp beautiful snapshot of some wind turbines.

Why is this so odd, you might be wondering. It is odd because of the quality of the ad. One of two things is happening: 1) Big money is invested, or 2) Big talent believes in the cause. I would tend towards option 1, because of the message itself. Loss of jobs is usually the argument of government or political wranglers. It's inevitable jobs are lost if a company goes under or the flow of money is stopped, but loss of jobs is a symptom, and rarely the cause. I can only guess the small writing explained how I can prevent this disastrous joblessness from occurring. It would have made more sense to me to focus on the benefit rather than the non-benefit of non-doing. Because that wasn't the message, I feel that a good idea, wind power has been appropriated by big money, the people behind this political ad.

Similar, this is, in ways, to the appropriation of organic farming. The FDA simply must be in the middle of the whole process or it might find itself small and inconsequential, since organic farmers might potentially sidestep all the carefully constructed policies and procedures for the regular food. Thus, 'organic' eventually turned into simply another gimmick to market to consumers.