Archive for July, 2014

Monty Memories

Friday, July 25th, 2014

This week I saw Monty Python perform live. I was thousands of miles away at the time, so I was not only not in the room with them, I wasn’t even on the same continent. Not that they were on a continent. They were in England, which is an island, but, well… You know what I mean. Because of the distance, I watched them in a movie theater, broadcast up on the big screen, so really, performance-wise, it wasn’t any different then if it had been recorded in advance.

Yet I put value on it being live, and on it having an element of artificial scarcity.

But why?

God tells me that the value comes from the same part of my brain that handles nostalgia. She said it’s the same part of me that values memories of having been to Old Faithful over having seen professionally produced film that showcase the geyser in ways that merely being there can’t match. But was particularly odd about this, she said, was that I was putting together a sort of memory stew in my brain, mixing in bits and pieces from having seen the Monty’s so many times before. Memories from seeing their TV show, from having gone to their movies, from hearing them on the radio and from when I did see them live and in-person at the Hollywood Bowl. So, yeah, nostalgia. Nostalgia for what had come before but also fresh nostalgia, created there on the spot for what was happening right in front of me even though it was happening a third of the way around the world.

Zounds What Sounds

Friday, July 18th, 2014

I was pondering this week that the slang terms “frou frou,” “hoity toity,” and “chi chi,” all pretty much mean the same thing, all follow a consistent pattern, while all not quite being words. They have a certain onomatopoeic feel to them, but they’re not actually onomatopoeia.

I tried to get some insight from God on the subject, but he just said that following the minutiae of the evolution of English slang was just too too much to expect of him.

Inventor-y

Friday, July 11th, 2014

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but for a few months now a sort of corporate street fight has been going on between Hachette Publishing and Amazon. I’m not going to actually take sides here, though I’m definitely on one side over the other, based on the publicly available information. God pretty much refuses to discuss the situation at all, let alone take a side.

What I do want to talk about though is the further devolution of the language that I’m seeing in this fight. Time and time again, I’m seeing articles that talk about Amazon’s contribution to the publishing ecosystem citing how valuable it was that they invented the Kindle.

And that’s what angers me. I hold inventing things in very high regard. Inventors, to my thinking, are probably the pinnacle of the human species.

The Kindle was not “invented.”

To invent something there has to be a spark. There has to be inspiration and a new way of seeing things or of doing things; there has to be uncharted territory, a path that isn’t visible. What was unclear with the Kindle was whether or not there was money to be made. It was unclear if the product could succeed. But it was never unclear if it could be made.

And don’t think I’m trying to put down the engineers that created the Kindle, engineering is noble and important, but creation, well creation is a pretty god-like ability. So full props to the engineers who created the Kindle, but my hat’s off to the inventors out there. May they never rest, never settle, and always love what they’re doing.