no recession

Who said this?

"...the pleasure of music...fades with familiarity, and requires either to be revived by intermittance, or fed by continual novelty."

This idea, if true, could accurately predict the trajectory of popular music that would accompany technological advancements in recorded music, specifically, as music gets more portable, and the opportunity cost of listening to it approaches zero (as is the case with record players originally, but limited to the home, and iPods and the like currently, which make the opportunity cost of listening to thousands of songs almost zero provided that one is committed to being alone, such as in the home or in the car), popular music would necessarily respond with novelty, with rapidly shifting tastes and disposability. I notice recently tht one consequence of owning an iPod is the diminishing marginal return to music I enjoy. I grow tired of music I like much more quickly now because it is much more available to me. I should temper my listening to revive the pleasure with intermittance, so to speak.

If music were only available, as it once was, in live performance, one's tastes would be remarkably more stable, but it would take a brilliant mind to forsee such a consequence of technology.

So who said it?

John Stuart Mill--a brilliant man indeed-- in his autobiography published in 1873, who claimed to be "seriously tormented by the thought of the exhaustibility of musical combinations." Funny, I used to have the same thoughts when I was a kid: "when are we going to run out of songs?" I would think.

porn as academic inquiry

This appeared in our schoor newspaper this morning, about an Asian-American studies professor here that made a porn film to overcome the stereotype of Asian Americans as "desexualized nerds" in popular culture. He defended this pactice by saying that "a yellow porno practice can help recuperate [an Asian American] sexuality that has been distorted ...[by] an oppressive system of white racial supremacy" (The California Aggie, November 18, 2003).

So now oppression has taken the form of the exclusion of Asian males in porn films. Does anyone honestly believe that racial bigotry motivates any business decisions in the porn industry? The application of the neo-marxist meta-narrative has reached a new height of ridiculousness.

Of course he does have a point that Asian males in films in general tend to be either geeks or martial arts action heroes with no apparent love interest or sexuality. But people tend to demand love stories portrayed by people that they identify with. The trend to produce romantic comedies targeting the African-American comunity is a response to demand from a significant market. Is the fact that the demand for love stories involving Asian(-American) men (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a notable exception) a function of oppression? And if so, does making porn lend that argument any scholarly credibility or positively influence those stereotypes?

Horrifying!

This is just too funny. From the Onion's latest issue, THIS will be making the rounds in the blogging community I'm sure.

My Daughter, on Her Way to School

Every morning, my daughter Abby grabs her lunchbox from her mother and runs out the door, across the playground and into the preschool where she spends part of her day playing with her friends and singing songs and finger painting.

What is this kid going to be when she grows up; what will she be good at; what will she study? Who will she marry? Looking at her like this, having no idea what these thoughts of mine would even mean, well it's almost enough to make me cry. The only disappointment she's ever known is not getting to watch tv or having to go to bed. The only pain from falling or walking into a post while looking in the other direction (she got that from me, for sure). In this world of sin, that's sure to change, but I want desperately for her not to have to experience the pain and loss that I did as a child; I want her to be as happy for the rest of her life as she is right now.

Funny Baby Names

Update: Seems this has become quite a popular forum for discussing baby names. Since this was not my intention in writing this post, I closed the comments. That caused quite a stir, so I am reopening it; feel free to discuss baby names to your heart's content. It has little to do with the original post, but who cares?

When our daughter was born I was amazed at the numerous new spellings of formerly common names. Individuality in names is quite a trend now. What the article (now offline) doesn't mention is the problem we're going to have when they're no longer any standard spelling of any common name--schoolteachers are going to go insane.

Analog vs. Digital Watches

Yesterday a new watch arrived at my door that I recently purchased on ebay. I was excited for it to get here, as I have been without a watch for a few months now, and I have been suffering the consequences of never knowing what time it is (especially when I am teaching my class), and I really liked this particular watch and thought that I would not be able to find it as they had been discontinued (I am picky about these sorts of things).

Anyway, though she offered, I had absolutely no interest in borrowing my wife's watch (she has a backup), because I would rather do without that use her digital watch. She was puzzled that I could not tolerate a digital watch, and I was curious about how this revealed differences in our thinking. I am also curious as to whether any readers have strong preferences either way and if any of you have preferences that are opposite your spouse/significant other's.

The reason that I prefer analog is that I am a spatial thinker; I interpret time in terms of space, and to me, fifteen minutes is more easily symbolized by a hand moving 90 degrees around a dial. To me, the space that the hand travels is like a map of the fifteen minutes, whereas if we represent this amount of time into the digits 1 and 5, I have no map, but rather a symbol of the time, which I must then convert in my own mind into the map. Many people who have an analog watch for style's sake find themselves converting the analog time into digits so they can "tell" themselves what time it is. For me, if I read a digital watch, I usually convert it into analog time (not always, but esoecally if I am looking forward to a particular time, I need the spatial representation in order to conceptualize how much closer I am to the time I am looking forward to).

To some of you this may sound really bizarre (I'll just go ahead and preempt the sarcastic comments right there), but can anyone identify with this?

I am the pop culture mastah!

A veritable vault of lyrical information:

98.5, when I went back and corrected my spelling errors. If that's cheating, then it's a 95.5.

thanks to verbingnouns for the link.