Christmas List 2K9

Not really expecting to receive (m)any of these things, but it's fun to window shop.

In descending price order:

AKAI E2 Head Rush

This Gap vest, size M, color Blue Galaxy

A capo similar or identical to this

One or two-year subscription to Mental Floss magazine

Flight of the Conchords Season 2

Assassination Vacation by Sarah Vowell

Cure Songs That Belong on Sesame Street

I happened to see this while flipping through Hulu's Sesame Street archives:

I think we can all agree it's amazing.  But then I got to thinking about other washed-up bands whose back catalogs could benefit today's PBS kids.  The answer is obvious: The Cure.

Think about it.  Many of their radio singles qualify as both educational and informational:

• Friday I'm In Love: an upbeat, happy way to learn the days of the week!
• Lovecats: clearly better than the current background music for this:

• Lovesong: Uh... hmm.  Maybe Robert Smith and Snuffy's dad could sing a duet to him for this unaired episode.
• Boys Don't Cry: ... I give up.

Wish For Authenticity

Today a Starbucks regional manager humiliated one of my store's shift supervisors to tears because he didn't like the cappuccino she made.  Never mind that it probably was bad because most people at Maple Street make drinks incorrectly (and we're still the best store in the city); that's not the point.  The point is that there are right and wrong ways to motivate people to do better at their jobs, and someone in middle management should presumably be hip to one or two right ways (hint: not making girls cry).  If I weren't outside on my break when it happened, I might have been leaving Starbucks a little earlier than planned.  I can belittle with the best of them and I'm not afraid to do it to people two or three pegs above me.


I had a few more paragraphs ready, but in the interest of keeping this post relatively accessible, suffice it to say that this breakdown in motivation is part of a growing trend.  For example, a key component of encouraging product sales is creating credible products (I'm looking at you, VIA).  Here's another one: if you want happy, productive employees, offer incentives to balance penalties.  Stock bonus?  Lunch?  Extra markout, even though that's more like punishment when I have a whole cupboard full of coffee I'll never use?


This concludes today's rant.

Keeping Up Appearances

It is hard as hell to find a decent theme, or template, or whatever, for this blog.  Except the look to change frequently over the next few days (weeks?).

In other news, my World of Warcraft account should sell either today or tomorrow, at which point I will pool that money with birthday money and visit Guitar Center.  Mexican Telecaster?  Chinese Les Paul?  Something else?

Of course, if you give a mouse a guitar, sooner or later he's going to want to play it.

Writing Wrongs

Keeping a blog is only slightly different than keeping a diary, which is only slightly different than talking to yourself at the grocery store and making people really nervous.

Einstein Was a Cute Kid

Okay, so first of all, this is one of the oddest framings of the problem of evil I’ve seen thus far.  I’ll refrain from ranting about the incorrect assertions and broad generalizations about the nature of heat and light, because that’s not the point I’m trying to make.

More importantly, Einstein never said anything of the sort, or at least none of his biographers felt compelled to mention it.  Einstein was more apt to say things like this:

"I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.”

So what we have is a Christian organization with the best of intentions presenting its video sales pitch, yet inadvertently (I hope) tainting it with the spirit of error.  The closest approximation to anything said in this video would have originally come from St. Augustine of Hippo, who posited that evil was in fact the absence of good.  But mention Augustine of Hippo to the man on the street, and you’ve immediately lost him to childhood nostalgia:

No, it’s better to misattribute this concept to someone who is irrefutably intelligent by popular consensus… someone like Albert Einstein.

And that’s exactly what people have done ever since Einstein’s theory of general relativity began altering our perception of the world around us.  Evangelists for all sorts of causes, from Christianity to Buddhism to astrology, have misattributed quotes and concepts to Einstein in an attempt to imbue them with greater credibility.


The thing is, it’s a nice story even without involving the late revolutionary theoretical physicist (who, incidentally, seems to have been either a deist or pantheist).  Everyone likes it when the student confounds the teacher, and everyone roots for religion to topple the ivory tower of science (as if the two were irreconcilably opposed).  Surely it’s not too flimsy to stand in its own?


At any rate, theodicy is a pretty neat concept.  Good black-coffee-and-quiet-room reading.  Let’s come together and forge new explanations and understandings of the nature of evil, shall we?  You go ahead and get started.  I’ll be over here playing Hungry Hungry Hippos.

In Which Ira Remembers He Owns a Blog

I heard a rumor that blogging is cool again. Alternatively, I heard a rumor that blogging still isn’t cool but I’m doing it anyway. Alternatively, I heard a rumor that blogging was never cool and I’ve decided to make it cool.

Enough rumors. Shall we?

I kept a Xanga for a couple of years and wrote some halfway decent content through my early, formative twenties (xanga.com/wemetintheair if you’re interested). Now I’m 27, married, and living in New Orleans, as close to the equator as I am likely to ever comfortably exist.

It’s been a long time since I wrote for pleasure, but it seems that writing throwaway papers for undergraduate classes just might be the impetus I need to shake off the dust. We’ll see how long the impulse lasts.

My Saturday morning cartoons are now Car Talk and Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me, although the magic of podcasting allows me to listen to them on Sunday night.

That’s all for now. Cartoons are on.