Hype around a new summer replacement show called The Days attracted me to the interesting storyline, so I watched the first twenty minutes of the show. Promoted as unique, edge, and unexplored, the show was disturbingly flat. It’s failure is an example of postmodern hyperbole in contemporary panic culture. Consider this review from Zap2It.com (A Tribune Media Service), “‘The Days’ Gets Chance To Shine”: Booked for a six-week test run, “The Days” is a bold attempt by creator John Scott Shepherd (“Life or Something Like It”) and executive producers Mike Tollin and Brian Robbins (“Smallville,” “One Tree Hill”) to revisit a series format that hasRead More →

CDs are obsolete. By the time I got my first CD player and my first CD, back in 1985, CDs were already obsolete. Now, if you think about that, that’s just about the dumbest lie ever I ever told you. In 1985, however, the third generation of CD players were on the market already, and CD-ROM drives were released. From there, it’s a downhill slide to Napster, Kazaa, and DVDs. It’s inevitable, teleological. My computer is in the shop. I’m getting a DVD write drive installed. That’s already obsolete. I’m moving offices from one room to the other at home…moving into the bigger bedroom, right?Read More →

I must have wanted simple abundance in my life, otherwise why buy this book, Simple Abundance, by Sarah Ben Breathnach. The Oprah Book Club sticker on the cover was not a selling point. Simple Abundance is a “daybook” diary/journal that teaches readers to “simplify” their lives through consumption. The message is so ironic. On one page, Breathnach tells readers to discard all their glossy women’s magazines because they make us feel bad about ourselves and then on the next, in the very idiom of those glossies, she tells us to go shopping in order to discover our “authentic” selves. For instance, here is a representative

Harry Potter is all the rage, of course. Some people are happy about that and others aren’t. Crooked Dimwit is one of those who isn’t.

Annoyed and exhausted by the Harry Potter hype, Crooked Dimwit argues that the media overstates Harry’s preeminence at the box office. Because the rating system ignores inflation, HP rankings are actually exaggerated. When adjusted for inflation,