With all the fast paced abstract thoughts that can transpire throughout the modern mans workweek I have found yet another reason to continue blogging. I think it has forced me to take my abstract thoughts, that come and go so quickly and have a tendency to linger and repeat in my consciousness, into constructing full thoughts and letting them pass when a blog is posted. It has forced me to train myself to finish thoughts out and take ideas from a very nebulous form into one that is less so by me needing to focus enough on those thoughts and attempt to put them down on paper in some legible format. The fact that these messages will be public forces me to even further examine my thoughts into legible writings so as to not look too crazy. Man it is so much harder then I thought it would be to translate all the things swirling around in my head as some written topic. I am not a good writer but that wont stop me — My fear of writing poorly is what has probably made me such a bad writer today.
I asked an uncle of mine one day to tell m the top three things he thinks made him successful and one of his top three things was “always write what your thinking down”. As he explained it, “it exposes all the holes that your imagination so easily covers up”. So true, I so often propose things verbally and for the most part the propositions work out but since I started catching myself and writing every small to large idea down, and not just as notes. I mean I stop and draw diagrams or spreadsheets and fill in all the holes that end up revealing themselves as concepts become physical structures on paper. I have found so many mistakes or holes so much earlier then usual as a result. I have noticed that the ideas seem to evolve a few times before I present them to my peers and allows me to think about more angles since I have a full system to look at in front of me, let my mind wonder around the core of the idea instead of just try to retain the core itself in my head.
For example, this post has been swirling in my head for weeks. Without this new found hobbie of blogging I would probably have to deal with these thoughts conciously or unconsciously and they never would feel complete. You bring it up on conversation and let others know about your perspective on things but its always just a thought. Now i know the thought has been completed and exists in time and space, almost indefinitely; I can now move on completely. This realization gives me a whole new appreciation for writing that was not impressed upon me as a child. I never really saw the point other then emails, letters and books to write well. But man not being able to construct your thoughts into a written form leaves you feeling incomplete. Your legacy, your feelings are all just inside you if you cant express them in some sort of infinite format like the written word. My kids are going to write a page about something everyday while they are under my house and the will thank me for it later….
BTW another great tip for obsessively ideas swirling around in your head…put a white board up in your room or a notepad next to your bed. You may have heard it before but do it if you find yourself going to bed with sleep or tossing and turning. and just expunge every thought weather its good or bad on paper or as graphics on a boar dand you get so much better sleep. Even just having the board or notepad sitting there eases the mind.
This movie was pretty long but all in all I would say it was a good movie. It provoked a new found interest into WWI and the fact the the movie focused all of its attention to the last week or so that Hitler was in power from the perspective of those in the bunker with him in Berlin was interesting. The german guy who played hitler was very convincing and intense and it was eai to watch how faithfully those around him followed him to the end. Without giving to much away the end was almost sureal with the way each officer valued thier lifes and how much tinnel vision fell upon the camp. It was worth seeing and a nice mix of docu/drama.
Watchmen
Watchmen
At first glance I can see many people finding this movie a bit campy at times and unnessacarily perverse or gory. For those that give it a chance and take the movie in has a whole, not only as a parody but a desertation on the human condition, they will get hours of pleasure afterwards in debate and conversation with friends. The movie is set in a aletrnate unniverse where Nixon has been re-elected 8 times vietnam was won and vigilatism became an acceptable government backed measure against war and crime; those vigilantis dawned costumes to protect thier identity. No charatcter has any super powers except for one, Dr. Manhatten. The author does an excelent job at poken fun at man kind at thier unnessacary need for right an wrong. Each character eggegertated a principle of man kind. I feel like one could write a paper on this movie a hundred times over…..My brief character anylization would be The comedian realized that anyone who thought there was a right and wrong was fooling themselves and he acted on what he as a human fealt like doing with no restriction, Royjcak was idealistic to his core and could not comprimise becuase of those ideals weather it was life or death, Teh Night Own was a man who stood on the side lines, Vic thought he knew what was best for humanity and in some ways was right but was to logical to find the passion in life, and to me dr manahatten was Christ or god where he had all the power in the world but never actually did anything when he was needed all looked to him for answers and used him to fight wars he was an impotent giant in was…..like I said one could go for hours on chatacters and the ploty etc but this is a blog post and not a paper so I’ll stop there but there is depth in this movie that can get you thinking if youlet it.
Good
Good
Two Nazi German movies in 1 week. Makes you think a bit about where we hav been as a people. Like Downfall Good depicted a not so tipical depcition of nazi germany. Set in the periphrelas of the WW II era Good gave a glimpse into how basic life was in Nazi Germany. How friends were seperated and a crazy leader reshaped the country and its people through power, elitism, seperation, persuasion, and propeganda. Its easy to say how could anyone do this when it comes to Nazi’sm, whats harder to do is truly try to undertsnad how regular people came to the conclusions they did. The main character was a depiction of how every single comprimise on the smallest of levels can , althought not always, lead to one loss of relatity or belifs. I think the movie tended to jump around a bit to much and didnt flow as much as I would have liked. I personally didnt like the main charcters voice and over timidness, but it may have been impotant too show how his like of passion or ability to be concered with events unfolding led to his life being decided for him and being inndiferent doesnt neecesarily make you good.
The day of charging directly for goods may be back! People are scrambling to figure out ways to make the new mobile phenomenon lucrative and with apple ingeniously associating a credit card and account for each individual along with their iPhone to handle all transactions apple has masterminded the perfect segway to this new consumerism cost structure. With all your credit info on file apple makes it easy fora business to accept a users purchases with no overhead. A business can focus on thier ocntent and thier app and apple takes care of sales a distributions allowing companies to sell apps for only a few bucks and hopefully make up for it all in the amount of churn these simple apps produce. Sort of the same way charging 99cent for a song instead of 15$ for an album in a store apple now has people spending hundreds or even thousands a year on music, the same can go with the new micro payment model for segments of applications and content introduced withe the latest iPhone sdk 3.0.
Now with micro-payemnts that concept of the neo consumer is refining itself yet again. Imagine getting high quality content where more in depth info only costs an additional 10cents. Yeah you’re paying for content when it may have been free but less ads, greater focus and the ability to pick and choose you whats important to you on an adhoc level is way ore costefective and simple the buying a whole newspaper form a stand for over a buck and throiwng half of it away since you only want the sports section. 10 cent is a sneeze for most people and you dont have to open your wallet or input your credit information. Maybe this is what PayPal envisioned for their future in their earlier more mobile days.
Imagine breaking up cost points by actions where an in depth graph can be download and send to your coworkers for 50 cents, extra weapons in games to help defeat your opponents and extra dollar or ecards that costs only pennies on the dollar. Your finances for all purchases are funneled through a single source and sent as a weekly or monthly statement. Pick and choose what content work best for you and pay almost nothing for the thing you specifically want. This could be an interesting revolution in the online charge model.
Not caring IS easier…and then easier must be better, we believe the easier road is the less rewarding road and ultimately bad……but…if there is a but……doesnt that make easier only bad because harder has a bigger reward.isn’t going after a bigger reward directly or indirectly selfish. What if wanting to do the easier thing is the least selfish option to choose. Maybe ‘good’ and ‘earn’ are all the result of addiction to increasing the higher reward. In this case one can’t discount the easy route and immediate satisfaction that is gained from the easier solution as any worst then the hardr path as it is just a smaller reward proportionally to difficult routes but other than that it is the same relative product.
Just saw a pretty cool documentry called Sketches of Frank Gehry. Frank gehry is and artist/ architect that is probably most known for his Disney concert hall or the the Guggenheim in Spain. The docuemntry exposes a man who cares nothing fro conformity and captures the essance of entrepenuership. He quits his job as an architect as as he puts it “he has nnever been hapier”
Musical Minds examined the inate symbiotic relationship man has with music, more specifically in this peice was the extraemem cases of this relationships. The film is broken up into 4 stories the first about a man having no music bone in his body who was struck by lighting and is now a composer and pinists playing to sell out crowds, the next is an amazing story of a blind autistic boy who began playing piano at 2 and now has the ability to
Derek Paravicini
process music he hears in microseconds and then can play them back, a young man with a bad case of tarets who’s tcks are completly subdoed when playing the drums and finnaly a case of a woman who has amusia which is like color blindness for music, rythm, or melody. Cool show based on the works of Oliver Sacks, who is the man behind the movie awakenings and many of famous books on oddities of extremes of human mental limits such as the man who thought is wife was a hate. This is a fun movie that expores ow deep the connection between man and music go and as oliver pits it, Rythm is the only thng that can not be taken from the core of a man.
My good friend Brian moved to Athens Georgia a few short years after high school. He always had a little country in him so we all felt that although the move was sudden it wasn’t all that surprising. As most of you all know winter is not my favorite time of year so I usually find myself trying to find a quick vacation to warmer, albeit often only slightly warmer climates. I took the opportunity a few years ago to visit my old friend and see what a small southern town had to offer.
I didn’t want to make assumptions about the newest city I was adding to my “places I have been list” but from what I have heard about the “south” it is known for its uncanny ability to bring out the color in a conversation better then a Van Gough fan club in the Amsterdam museum. I did however ensure that my escapades would not have a chance of falling victim to an unruly mob of yokels by surrounding myself with a predominately white crew. The hope was to offset my dark complection; to improve the ratio so to speak. It is common practice for minorities in small southern towns to check, kind of like double checking whether or not one has clean underwear, or thier wallet.
I was introduced to my new batch of a weekend wariors composed of friends and friends of friends. The ice was broken rather quickly as it often is with my in your face brand of humor — gloves are for mice in disney land and I come without. As our eager blood cells received the perfect marination of alcohol our voices grew louder and our friendships grew stronger. Well, as strong as anyone would expect them to grow having only known one another for all of two hours — a life time on NBC’s The Bachelor. We were ready to hit the town.
One story after another was closely coupled by one drink after another and we were all extremely hammered in no time. The new group of extended friends had bonded through the iron clad chains of Yager and Redbull and the ‘fat’ had been trimmed by the umpteenth round of shots we had forced upon the group. There now stood — more like wobbled four strong, three guys and one impressivley hard core chick.
City Snow
We kicked ourselves out of the bar before anyone running the place had the pleasure to do so. The doors swung open and we walked out to a Varisty Blues meets Edward Scissor Hands backdrop. The dark night was lit up by the street lights, all reflcting off of the snow filled sky and the landscape was covered in a light dusting of pure white flakes. Being from DC snow is not all that special to me, but it turns out that snow is exteremly rare in this small town and the excitiment level of my bar buds was quite contegous. We stuck our hands out to feel the snow flakes melt on our fingers and yes there was an ocasion or two where we let them land on our tounges — we were drunk, dont judge me!
So lets do some math: new firends + old friends + new town + drunk + late + a rare snow fall = a bunch not ready to go home and definitely too energized to simply go to bed. But since all the bars were beginning to close up a group meeting was called to order:
“This is awesome!” said the chick
“I know, I know — ww..what — what do we do now?”, brian said in a drunken studder
“Let’s go to a strip club!” shouted the only chick in the bunch. The guys all looked at eachother with a suprised grin and without any uncertainty watsoever we were all in.
As we removed ourselves from our 3rd and 10 huddle we began to walk in no specific direction. It would seem that the desicion to go to a strip club was all the direction we needed, knowing the actualy direction was less then important.
Part II: Winter war land
The sound of snow smacking into Brians bare face was unmistakable. Although it all happened in a matter of seconds I could still hear the droppings of the imapcted snow ball hitting the slushy pavement….there had must have been some ice in that one!
I turned around and saw Brian, his eyes as wide open as his mouth was as he wiped off his face.
“What the f##k!” he said, in a surprisingly more upeat manner than you are probably imagining it.
He was half laughing as he looked at his snow covered hands and checked his chest as if to see if there was any damaging shrapnel he should tend to. After finishing his assessment he perked up and looked into the distance to see if he could make out the origin of the Bogey.
We all looked up in the direction Brian was now pointing and saw three kids, about 15-30yd away, watching us. They must have been as surprised as we were by their accuracy at such a distance, or in retrospect the lack there of. Once they realized that Brian was okay and that they just threw an ice ball into a complete strangers face twice their size instinct kicked in and they began to run; thusly we began our pursuit.
As we ran down the side walk in a dimly lit part of the local park we scraped the tops of bushes for ammo. We balled them up without slowing down and started barading the kiddie culprits with what we could make. Some were of course prematurely launched and flew off into the distance as dust, but there was one or two that were able to give us some satisfaction towards our revenge. These kids picked the wrong two guys off the street, our experience with snow ball architecture at the DC Univ. of hard Knox was light years ahead of what these country bumpkins were aware of. Their backs began to become more and more aware of that fact as the chase continued.
They rounded the corner and so did we, they cut through the woods and we were right behind them. In the midst of the chase of predator and prey the feeling of revenge became less so, and playfulness was now the main theme; there was plenty of laughing on both sides of the coin. It wasn’t long before we found ourselves on the main strip, the center of this fair town. I think they had thought that the public streets would deter us from our hunt. Once again these young lads did not know who they started up with and we could care less what the public thought of us, plus we were still too drunk to really notice.
They took shelter behind a low wall and we squatted behind some bushes. The snow had now filled the ground with plenty of white gold and the exchange continued. Man was it fun! One would have assumed this part of our lives was past us, but here we were in snow ball fight in our 20’s! Our experience in the field soon paid off. Without any need for discussion a line formed in our group: the Snow ball builder, then the snow ball stacker, and of course the gunners.
Snowball fight
Have you ever heard about the saying that goes to the effect of, all enemies become friends when there is a greater common enemy? It is amazingly true and we saw such an undertaking take place right before our eyes. A truck made the corner and without pause both camps stopped the attacking of one another and began firing at the truck…..It was kinda stupid and f’ed up I know, but at the time it was just such an obvious thing to do, and at that time it just didn’t feel all that wrong. It was snowing in Athens for got sake, live a little!!!
The truck didn’t stop but you could see the man driving within flinch at first and then simply smile and shake his head….Really? Did we just get away with that? This rotation of enemy and enemies enemy would take place over and over. Batteling one an other until some poor sap made the bad decision to turn into OUR street followed by the re focused attention to the moving vehicle at hand, when the moving target was out of range we went back to our war.
I took a step back for a moment and observed our surroundings. What had started out as a simple snowball to ones face has now become something far greater. This battle was no longer us vs them, or even just us vs car. People on the street, I mean regular passer byes, were constructing their own little firing squad. We were getting hit from all sides and snowballs were flying over head on all corners of the street and in all directions. It was unbelievable!
Now, if that was all that happened that night I would have walked away giddy and amazed. I would have still remembered that night in Athens as an amazing night of unexpected turns, but the night was not over just yet. Now remember I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP! This is all true first hand account, no exaggeration at all. By this point in the night this block was completely covered in hostilities. Snow balls from parents at kids, old at young, store owners and patrons were in some way or another involved in this battle. People started to get out of their cars, parking in no particular spot, just to get out and throw a snow ball or two of their own.
No snow ball was thrown with anger, well some started as anger but the beauty of what was happening was that it all quickly turned into good wholesome fun. Not only were people on the streets now participating but some windows were opening up above the stores and people in their apartments began to take pictures. Flashes were going off from above like explosions in the sky. Once spectating the carnage wasn’t enough for these ad hoc journalists they began to get involved in any way they could. Why should they miss out on all the fun. Some would come down into the streets, but others to lazy to put clothes on, grabbed ice or cups of water and splashed them down on people; a travesty in the snow ball throwers community. We would all ban together at those moments and pummel the widow that water was spilled from with what we could. There ARE rules of engagement after all in every war.
It was unreal – chaos was in the street that night. I’m not sure if this all transpired in minutes or hours but it all just kept coming, escalation upon escalation. More and more people would get involved. Where were they all coming from? As it turns out, not to be any less expected of the night with our luck, there was a police station only 1 block down the road from the anarchy. And being what looked licked a city riot from any onlookers perspective the law began to react. I noticed that over time one police officer would peek out the door and go back inside, then two would peek out and then three — then nothing for a few minutes. I told Brian about what I was observing and that we should probably start making our exit before things became less fun and more fines. No one was really paying attention though, my request went un-heard.
What wasn’t so easily ignored was that moments later the whole police force, about 10-15 officers in full riot gear, started to march out of the station. Some of us noticed and stopped like dear in head lights, followed by more and more of us. And then there was silence, only a straggling snow ball was now flying through the air. The streets were silent and what was only moments ago utter chaos was now eerily silent. The officers marched out and formed a line with their shields out in front, much like a roman army, making two rows.
Then what seemed to be the lead officer spoke into the mega phone,
“READY?!”
Brian and I looked at each other in disbelief…
“AIM!” —
“FIRE!!!”
Snow balls began to come at us like rockets from behind the row of the newly formed row of shields.
“Are you serious!?!”, we said almost at the same time to one another.
We began to laugh, and as most of the anxious public began to do we started throwing snow balls at the police officers….yes who were in full riot gear!
It was the most unbelievable scene I have ever witnessed around snow, without a doubt. The three of us as drunk and in public as you can be, where disturbing the hell out of the peace, assaulting one another including police officers in the middle of the night, and they were throwing them right on back. Thinking that our luck must soon run out and unable to judge if we were in a good enough state to be spoken to by officers once this exchange had died down we decided to get up and began to jog away.
We looked back on the well lit city as we ran, the noises of laughter and screaming echos soon died down and the commotion was just a faint murmur. The was now in the distance and dulled, drowned out by the darkness of the night. We had created and left behind one of the greatest winder wonderlands in Athens history……..it was time to hit up our original plan and were off to the strip club. We let the natives enjoy our masterpiece.
Sean Shadmand 