Cuz Saving Our Planet is the Thing to Do

When people at parties tell you about the Internet and how it's changed the way we work and live, leading to huge gains in productivity and the freedom of information and overthrow of dictators, I want you to think of the above picture. Facebook is a billion-dollar company that makes money by...uhhh...targeted advertising? Maybe? Does anyone really know? I know you can pay facebook and they'll send your friends a happy birthday cake or whatever, but I'm pretty sure it's mostly the targeted advertising. Maybe people who make the apps have to pay a fee to get facebook to post them? I don't know.

But I do know that there are very few places that annoy me as much with their advertising as Facebook. Sure, there's that mother of 2 who lost 50lbs. of belly fat by taking a pill. That's annoying. But this is at a whole other level.

I've never met the woman with the eye-black and sports jersey who wants to buy me drinks. It's possible that she's really nice, likes sports, and honestly, truly, wants me to have a drink for free because she is charitable and wants me to be happy. But I'm also really sure that thetaoofbadass.com is not my kind of place. It's openly manipulative, slightly misogynistic, and just generally juvenile in its view of human interaction. And I know this within 10 seconds of reading the ad that that's exactly what thetaoofbadass is all about.

I don't want to learn a technique to get girls to buy me drinks. I want to meet a woman I like and trust that sometimes buys me drinks, and who I sometimes buy drinks for, but we mostly just buy ourselves drinks when we want them. And if she likes sports and doesn't care who knows, then ok, and if she doesn't like sports, no big deal.

There's a similar advertising failing with the BeerStache. It's not that something you clip onto the side of a beer bottle that looks like a mustache isn't cool. I can produce my own mustache very easily, thankyouverymuch. It's that Facebook is a place for defining your identity: what you look like, who your friends are, what you like and dislike, your causes, concerns, jokes, videos, and games. And defining myself as 'the kind of person who clips a fake mustache on a beer bottle' is just entirely foreign to my (carefully cultivated) Facebook self-image. Again, I've never met the two young ladies with mustaches drinking beer at what appears to be a rocking party. Perhaps they have many virtues. But I'm pretty sure that we would not get very far in a conversation. (This is what a psychologist would call 'projection' of my personal hangups and distastes onto the blank beer-swilling slates of these two women as an explanation of how they must behave)

And as much as I like ROCKER girls, the dyed hair, Johnny-Depp-in-Pirates-of-the-Caribbean eye shadow, look-I'm-not-smiling-in-my-picture-because-I'm-quirky-and-countercultural expession, and complete lack of a front of a shirt are all signals to me that there is no place in my identity for a complementary part like this, like her. Not that there seems to be a place in my identity for a complementary part like anyone, but you get the point.

As for the MBA in Sustainability, I'd consider myself lucky to one day get a job where my immediate supervisor will have an MBA in Sustainability and will constantly talk about 'best practices' and 'lean processes' and the 'triple bottom line' while I roll my eyes and dream of a world without MBAs.

I can take it if She can!

With the coming of the Great Recession, many eyes in imprisoned unemployment turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of Graduate School. Madison became the great embarkation point. But not everybody could get to Madison directly, and so, a tortuous, roundabout refugee trail sprang up. Eau Claire to La Crosse, across the Mississippi to Winona, then by train, or auto, or foot, across the frozen wastes to Minneapolis in Norwegian Minnesota. Here, the fortunate ones, through money, or influence, or luck, might obtain admissions letters and scurry to Graduate School, and from Graduate School to the Real World. But the others wait for their applications to be reviewed in Minneapolis and Madison.

And wait.
And wait.
And. Wait.

New Years Resolutions

Today is a good day I think to resolve that New Years resolutions are kinda strange.

I'm not here to make my own resolutions. That could be potentially productive and not a waste of my time, whereas I tend to do only those things that are a colossal waste of time. No, I'm here to snarkily criticize the New Years resolutions of others.

A local radio station was airing the New Years resolutions of people who called in, and it was going about as well as you'd expect. After all, who calls into a radio station to share their New Years Resolution? What goes through the mind of such a person? Do they not have the kind of self-restraint or introspection required to determine that the contents of what they're about to say shouldn't be shared with anyone, let alone the wide audience available via radio?

Anyway, callers are limited to three resolutions. One woman lists these:

1. To lose some weight, of course.
2. To be better professionally and as a person.
3. To spend more time with her family.

First of all, that's four resolutions, lady. And second of all, when you resolve to be a better person, you make every other resolution redundant: being a better person already implies being in better health, being more productive at work, and being closer to your family.

This will cheer me up

Normally, facebook is pretty good about knowing what's going on in my life, and my personal tastes in single ladies, music, and Jim Doyle. But sometimes it's good to know that the artificial intelligence can get things completely backwards, too. Be happy, everyone: facebook becoming self-aware and playing nice games of thermonuclear war and Farmville is less likely than we thought.

Sidenote: Anyone who gives or gets the atheism shirt for Christmas gets a sweet visit from the irony fairy.

I'll be less cryptic

Or more accurately, I'll let Al Mohler express exactly what I was thinking in my last post.

I won't light a candle, but I wish I could set hearts aflame

Homophobia doesn't lead to repentance. Guilt might, but the Accuser was a murderer from the beginning and knows how to make people feel guilty, too. And believing that there can be no forgiveness is the last thought that went through Judas' mind.

Maybe if that kid knew just what happened on a Friday two thousand years ago he'd still be alive. Maybe others would too. But how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them?

But what shall we preach? That there is no law and therefore no transgression?

And so John came, baptizing in the desert region and preaching a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.

Jeremiah Was A Pretty Good Prophet

Tonight's facebook ad:



No more after this, I promise.