Thursday, February 23, 2006

Bill Maher Mentions Blogging


I was watching the season premier of Bill Maher on HBO last weekend. He is a cocky SOB, a self-professed playboy, who changes model girlfriends like underwear and personally, I find that Jon Stewart is wittier, but I happen to agree with most of his views on things.

Anyway, he was saying how we (the Americans) often say that we cherish privacy, but in actuality, we are a bunch of self-absorbed, exhibitionist attention whores. He brought up a number of examples to support his argument. One of them was the fact so many people want to be on reality shows or as he put it, "People actually compete to be on a show called 'Big Brother'!" He went on to mention how people want you to "Please, read my blog" as another example. Touche, Bill, touche...

I still harbor some personal disdain for blogging as I remember how, in the late 1990's, the IRC community, which I was a part of, frowned upon the great grand-daddy of modern blogging, The LiveJournal! It was the domain of whiny, depressed goth teenagers and vain, attention-craving girls, the place where they posted their awful gothic poetry and underwear webcam pics. I just realized that most of today's blogging activity would fit into that description as well. (chuckle)

These days, the depressed goth boys have all grown up and become the uber-geek "power bloggers". For the most part, their writing abilities have greatly improved and instead of bitching about how the school jocks pick on them and their parents "just don't get them", they now write witty, mildly-useful little articles on network security, W3C-compliant web design and the like. In between those articles, they insert random bits from their lives, mostly for the purpose of bragging about their newly-achieved life status; a link to a picture gallery featuring their hot foreign student girlfriend and/or Lexus, a description of their new gazillion megapixel SRL camera (complete with horribly-shot pics), their endless, 4-star hotel business trips, etc. When they express an opinion on something outside of their immediate area of expertise, it's usually incredibly shallow and cliche. I'm afraid they are still as annoying as they were back on LiveJournal.

One of Those Days...

Ever have one of those days when you're in your car, feel like shit, running late to work and can't find a damn spot to park in places that normally have plenty of spots available? I just hate that. But, I particularly hate it when there is actually room for a lot more cars to parallel park on the side of the street, but the assholes who got there first, parked too far apart from one another, taking up all the space. I mean, some of these jokers park far enough apart for a VW Beetle to fit in between them, but not any normal-sized car. Makes me wanna attempt a parallel parking and hit their cars on purpose.