One of the joys of getting old is that all of that stuff goes away to what the Lord wants you to do now. Simplify. N ow, if could only live that out consistently. >chortle<
BTW why does Bono of U2 sing that he still hasn’t found what he’s lookin’ for?
The streets have no names! 🤦♂️
I should tell you of a fun thing that happened during one brief foray into art school. Some flyers appeared one week, laid about, or pinned to a board, reading FRED IS NOT REAL. I paid almost no attention to these, assuming it was yet another local concert announcement for some punk band.
Then one night a girl interrupted our class and said oh, you guys come down the hall, you have to see this. Our instructor was only too happy to take a break so we all wandered down to the student gallery where, well…let me try to set the scene:
The room was not large and now had some people milling about. Stuck into the back wall were 84 sharpened wooden dowels in neat rows. On each had been impaled a fresh hot Burger King hamburger, still in its wrapper. On the far wall were 56 dowels, and on these were the open pull tabs of various Pepsi canned soft drink products. In between, on the floor were TV monitors playing the student’s experimental film, which I remember being heavy on Reagan in bombing-Libya mode. Anyway the film kept showing words, titles or something, more than once informing us that indeed FRED IS NOT REAL. Another repeated message was EAT YOUR HAMBURGER.
The procedure was to enter the room, take down a burger, but put the wrapper back on the dowel to preserve the visual integrity of the piece (the artist was walking around policing this). On my third burger I told the artist he would go far.
Of course he had successfully baffled the bourgeoisie, a major aim of modern art (see Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word) but he also included a crowd-pleasing element so simultaneously offered mainstream appeal
I don’t want to be that “old man yells at cloud,” so this is the primary critique I use for a lot of products and services today: Is it as good as it once was?
Sure, level up if it makes sense and doesn’t drive everyone involved to an early grave. But all I really want is for every product and service I use to stop getting crappier and more antagonistic toward the customer, me.
Because, damn, you buy a bag of hot dog buns, and every last one is sliced all the way through. For all our technological expertise, did we somehow lose the technology to slice grocery store hot dog buns?
Or you buy a box of Pop Tarts, and you not only can almost see through one, but you worry it lacks the structure to survive being toasted at all.
I think for many people, the despair is that they were once able to afford to buy the car, but now they can’t afford to fix it because parts and labor are exorbitant. Or they save for a surgery and it’s botched, and then they’re asked to pay even more to fix the bad fix.
What’s amazing for Louis CK is increasingly out of reach for the average person who can’t buy artisanal hot dog buns hand-sliced in Italy. The people who are just trying to get by are running into the reality that his reality is not theirs because they don’t have a Netflix series. Hell, they can’t afford Netflix even with commercials added (sheesh, what’s the point at all then).
The _Black Mirror_ episode “Common People” is where a many of us are with a lot of the amazing stuff out there. Sure, we buy in at first, but why does it keep getting crappier?
Yes. I understand that there is something unreasonable about demanding a pizza that cost $15 25 years ago remain no more than $15 today, but I also don’t want to look at my options as either the pathetic thing that’s $15 today or the $45 “take out a loan” alternative. Something needs to give here, and it can’t always be me.
One of the joys of getting old is that all of that stuff goes away to what the Lord wants you to do now. Simplify. N ow, if could only live that out consistently. >chortle<
This is very good.
BTW why does Bono of U2 sing that he still hasn’t found what he’s lookin’ for?
The streets have no names! 🤦♂️
I should tell you of a fun thing that happened during one brief foray into art school. Some flyers appeared one week, laid about, or pinned to a board, reading FRED IS NOT REAL. I paid almost no attention to these, assuming it was yet another local concert announcement for some punk band.
Then one night a girl interrupted our class and said oh, you guys come down the hall, you have to see this. Our instructor was only too happy to take a break so we all wandered down to the student gallery where, well…let me try to set the scene:
The room was not large and now had some people milling about. Stuck into the back wall were 84 sharpened wooden dowels in neat rows. On each had been impaled a fresh hot Burger King hamburger, still in its wrapper. On the far wall were 56 dowels, and on these were the open pull tabs of various Pepsi canned soft drink products. In between, on the floor were TV monitors playing the student’s experimental film, which I remember being heavy on Reagan in bombing-Libya mode. Anyway the film kept showing words, titles or something, more than once informing us that indeed FRED IS NOT REAL. Another repeated message was EAT YOUR HAMBURGER.
The procedure was to enter the room, take down a burger, but put the wrapper back on the dowel to preserve the visual integrity of the piece (the artist was walking around policing this). On my third burger I told the artist he would go far.
Of course he had successfully baffled the bourgeoisie, a major aim of modern art (see Tom Wolfe’s The Painted Word) but he also included a crowd-pleasing element so simultaneously offered mainstream appeal
For years, I had a portion of that Roosevelt quote (clipped from a newspaper) hanging on our refrigerator.
"It is not the critic who counts....."
What a great reminder!
I don’t want to be that “old man yells at cloud,” so this is the primary critique I use for a lot of products and services today: Is it as good as it once was?
Sure, level up if it makes sense and doesn’t drive everyone involved to an early grave. But all I really want is for every product and service I use to stop getting crappier and more antagonistic toward the customer, me.
Because, damn, you buy a bag of hot dog buns, and every last one is sliced all the way through. For all our technological expertise, did we somehow lose the technology to slice grocery store hot dog buns?
Or you buy a box of Pop Tarts, and you not only can almost see through one, but you worry it lacks the structure to survive being toasted at all.
I think for many people, the despair is that they were once able to afford to buy the car, but now they can’t afford to fix it because parts and labor are exorbitant. Or they save for a surgery and it’s botched, and then they’re asked to pay even more to fix the bad fix.
What’s amazing for Louis CK is increasingly out of reach for the average person who can’t buy artisanal hot dog buns hand-sliced in Italy. The people who are just trying to get by are running into the reality that his reality is not theirs because they don’t have a Netflix series. Hell, they can’t afford Netflix even with commercials added (sheesh, what’s the point at all then).
The _Black Mirror_ episode “Common People” is where a many of us are with a lot of the amazing stuff out there. Sure, we buy in at first, but why does it keep getting crappier?
Enshittification (more accurate than planned obsolescence) is at work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification
Yes. I understand that there is something unreasonable about demanding a pizza that cost $15 25 years ago remain no more than $15 today, but I also don’t want to look at my options as either the pathetic thing that’s $15 today or the $45 “take out a loan” alternative. Something needs to give here, and it can’t always be me.