Powerlessness. Helplessness. What can you do? I’ve been writing about the feeling and how people respond to it lately, trying to get at the root of what people don’t really talk about when they dance their way around the issues of the day. Little did I realize that events would conspire to make me feel terrible for even bringing it up.
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Category Archives: Nooze
Journalism and other myths.
Popular Doom
For the second time in 10 years, a major wave of doom prophesy has become very popular. Like the Y2K predictions of disaster, the Mayan Endgame is based on the idea that the end of human-devised cycle is the end of everything – which is to say that we are the center of the universe. What’s different this time is that the proposed failures that make up general doom and/or panic are more mystical. Nevermind that not a single Mayan ever said that the end of their cycle is the end of time – they would have simply gone to the Cozumel Hallmark store and purchased a new calendar. The end of the 5,125 year cycle proposed by a group most people never heard of is as good an excuse as any to end it all. The question is – why is Doom so popular?
Context
When kids are learning to read, a good teacher gives them as many tools to use. Young readers are taught to sound out words they don’t know, words and concepts are repeated, and stories are put into a form that are familiar and warm. All of these help us even as adults along with one more critical tool – context, a bigger whole than the details that support it. Context comes from the pictures that support the text, either in a kids’ book or a magazine, but it also comes from the text itself. It also happens to be something that is fading from our culture altogether in strange and chilling ways.
Upon the Turf at Metrodome
I thought that it was time to write a Christmas Carol that honors our true savior – Brett Favre. The tune is “O Little Town of Bethlehem” for the Carol-Impaired.
Cookies for Santa
We’ve had a lot of sweet economic news lately. The Gross Domestic Product was announced to have grown at an annualized rate of 3.5% in the third quarter, which even after it was revised down to 2.8% seems like a decent number. The number of new unemployment claims was down to 474k last week, and the unemployment rate fell from 10.2% to 10.0%. It’s all good, right?
Plus, we have less than two weeks until Santa arrives! Better make cookies!
Barataria - The work of Erik Hare 