January 2009
11 posts
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bits of data
My brain is not a good keeper of things. It is a great analyzer of things, and occasionally it can create great things, but if they are not recorded on a more reliable medium, they are lost.
So I record thoughts on paper, sounds on computers, moments on jpegs, bits on blogs; these are all far more dependable keepers of things.
I’ve never had a great memory, and for whatever reasons...
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on liberal education
A friend sent me a good article in today’s New York Times: What Life Asks of Us.
And it got me thinking.
My only problem is that the approach Brooks describes only works for the majority of people, but not for all of us. It’s most usually outsiders that revolutionize an institution’s methods and theories, precisely because they are not indoctrinated in the institution’s...
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Poland
Take the worst football hooligan in the country; the kind of guy that would beat another man to near death for wearing the wrong team’s colors. Place him on a bus, and as soon as an old lady gets on, he would give up his seat for her.
I never feel frightened walking home at five in the morning here. When a man stops me to ask the time, I don’t hesitate; I pull out my phone and tell...
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the middle ground: smoking
Ok, here is yet another example of how people who see the world as black and white, with no shades of grey or concept of balance, piss me off:
Brokaw: “Finally, Mr. President-elect, the White House is a no-smoking zone, and when you were asked about this recently by Barbara Walters, I read it very carefully, you ducked. Have you stopped smoking?” “You know, I have, but what I...
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a failure of society
It’s very easy to blame the American media for the failure of democracy that resulted in the past eight years; I’ve done that myself many times. But that’s only grasping a glimpse of the problem, and not the whole picture.
A properly functioning democracy relies on a well-informed public; the journalistic community exists to inform that public. It’s easy to say that the...
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timezone shuffle
My current job is wonderfully flexible about scheduling. Granted, my boss occasionally gripes a bit if I show up anytime after noon (which happens fairly often), but in general if I work most of my eight hours per day while other people are around, it doesn’t really matter whether I come in at 9 am or at noon.
Lately, though, I’ve been operating in timezones a good hemisphere over...
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too short, too shallow
I’m not a fan of the recent “write anything quickly” microblogging webvelution. Status updates on Facebook. Twitter. And most recently, Musebin, which does exactly what its slogan says: “1 line music news and reviews.”
There is a reason parents tell kids, “Think before you speak.” They should be told “Think before you write” as well. I have no...
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priorities
There are two industries that I’m deeply immersed in and that desperately need fixing: the music industry and the newspaper industry.
The music industry is slowly fixing itself, and there is a new generation of artists fluent in the art of online self-promotion (myself included) who are bypassing the old structures. Nonetheless, they still exist, and still hinder real progress. The...
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Why I write
About three years ago, I was going to have a column in an English-language Krakow-based magazine. The magazine ended up folding after a few issues due to lack of funds and the column never got published, and I completely forgot about the pieces I had written. I dug them up recently as I was backing up some files, and as I re-read them I realized they still made sense; so, I’ll post them up...
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dreamers anonymous
“Hello, my name is Anna Spysz, I’m 26 years old, and I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”
“Hello Anna.”
“Now Anna, what seems to be the problem?”
“Well, I’m really good at, but not great at, a lot of things, and I’m interested in everything.”
“Everything, really?”
“Yeah, pretty much....