One of my biggest worries as Yahoo! has continued to garner more and more bad press relating to their financial situation is that I would lose access to their services. I doubt that a situation would come up that would result in all of Yahoo!'s services simply ceasing to exist, but I do worry that their services would get folded into another, inferior service. (For example, I worry that, if Microsoft ever buys Yahoo!, Yahoo! Mail would be absorbed into Hotmail, which I find far clunkier to use.) I don't want to say that my experiences with Yahoo! have been perfect over the years, but I've been using so many of their services for so long that it would be supremely difficult to move over to another company's services.
Unfortunately, the move has already begun. A few weeks ago Yahoo! announced it would be selling its Launchcast music service to CBS. For a few years now I've been a subscriber to their Launchcast Plus service, which makes their Internet radio services far more robust than their free offerings. I spent a very long time getting my Internet radio station customized just the way I like it; it still plays too much Simon and Garfunkel for my liking (I like Simon and Garfunkel, just not that much), and when CBS takes Launchcast over, they're going to discontinue the custom radio stations. In all honesty, I haven't used the custom radio station so much lately because I tend to need a certain genre of music at a particular time (new age, folk, etc.), but on the whole my station was a great place to turn to when I just needed music, and I even directed some of my students to the station when they asked me for recommendations for music.
In order to make up for the upcoming demise of my Launchcast station, I've started a last.fm account. I started moving my CD collection to my computer over the winter break, and as much as I don't like listening to lossy MP3s, I guess that the compression doesn't really bother me unless I'm paying particular attention to the music. (Believe me, these days I hardly ever have free time just for listening to music.) I'd heard good things about last.fm for a while now, and I guess that for now it's fun to tinker with, but it looks like the custom radio stations aren't as easy to tinker with as Launchcast's were. Anyway, I'll switch my radio station link in the right-hand bar once Launchcast moves to CBS over to my last.fm link, and in the meantime I'd invite you all to listen to my last.fm station if you'd like, and add me as a friend on there if you have an account too.
Because the majority of my students fall between the ages of eighteen to twenty, I spend a fair amount of time on YouTube and Websites oriented towards that young adult demographic, so I can get a bit of a handle on what is popular in that age group. I'd watch television, but I just can't stomach American Idol and its ilk, and the radio on my stereo -- like so many parts of it -- just isn't working that well right now. I really need to catch up book-wise, though; I still haven't read any Harry Potter, and so many of my creative writing students are fans of Chuck Palahniuk that I feel obligated to read at least a couple of his books. Anyway, on the balance I find myself more aware of certain Internet fads than my students -- I had to explain to one class last semester what LOLcats were -- which is probably a sign that I shouldn't spend so much time researching this stuff on the Internet. (Hey, it's free, it's readily available, and I have an itchy mouse finger if I ever find something truly revolting.)
I had certainly taken note of rickrolling when it started a while ago, and yes, I've been hit by it more times than I care to count. It had seemed that it was a fad that had run its course long, long ago, but when Cartoon Network rickrolled the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade last year, all of a sudden I heard people who had declared rickrolling blasé long ago say it was the greatest thing ever. Since then I've been wondering just why so many Internet people switched tunes on the Thanksgiving rickroll; certainly it was rickrolling on a scale that no one could have ever anticipated happening, but there was something more to it than that. Perhaps Cartoon Network gets a pass because of their image thanks to stuff like the Adult Swim block and their other cult shows (Powerpuff Girls' tenth anniversary, anyone?), or because rickrolling such a huge event as the parade was truly unexpected, or because they actually brought Rick Astley out instead of just cutting to the "Never Gonna Give You Up" video. Whatever the case, none of my students last term brought it up, so I never mentioned it to them; the last thing I need is to seem even less cool than I already am (which is to say, not cool at all).
That being said, Nancy Pelosi rickrolling everyone on her YouTube account ... no. Just no. This is why you leave political comedy to the masters like Stephen Colbert and Rick Mercer; very few politicians know how to make jokes, particularly in relation to their own work and images. President Obama manages it well, which may make his presidency more bearable to watch these next few years, but he is one in a million here in America. (Seriously, everyone should watch Canadian political comedy television shows and see how much better both the comedians and the politicians are up there.) Pelosi inserting a rickroll into an already banal video smacks of a bad joke told months after everyone stopped caring about the joke in the first place. I know the Democratic press ate this up with a spoon, calling it yet another sign of good change in Washington, but I just shook my head when I heard of it and wondered if we could President Obama to write the Democrats' jokes for the next four years. He's got more important stuff to do right now, though.
Labels: internet, politics, teaching, work
I believe that I have watched every inauguration that featured a transition between presidents in my lifetime. (Okay, my memory's fuzzy on 1977, but I was less than a year old then.) I'm sure that I didn't catch Bush in 2005, but I remember watching him in 2001. Although my interest in politics has certainly waxed and waned over the years -- to be honest, I feel it waning now -- there is something about these transitions of power that I guess I feel obliged to watch. Obviously, this inauguration was more special than any of the ones that came before, with the historical significance of this one magnified for this family by the fact that Dad didn't quite live long enough to see this moment. Even though Dad got disillusioned by politics after Walter Mondale got blown out of the water in 1984, I believe that he would have taken great pride in what happened today. I never asked him if he thought that we would break the colour or gender barriers in the presidency in his lifetime, but I suspect that his pessimism when it came to politics would have caused him to say no. This would be one instance, though, when he would have been glad to have been proven wrong.
Although I caught most of today's proceedings up here in my room, I did go downstairs to watch the pivotal moments with the rest of the family. I never had the crying jags that I had on election night (and later watching clips of that night's celebrations on YouTube), I did tear up a few times; Mom got emotional seeing a lot of old faces there, including Ted Kennedy, Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin, and Itzhak Perlman. It seemed like for all of us, our normal business got put on hold for the whole day, as we watched the inauguration festivities and talked about what will happen in the next four, possibly eight, years.
I did not vote for Obama; long before he secured the Democratic nomination, I knew that his opinions and worldview were too different from mine, particularly compared to more progressive candidates like Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, and Cynthia McKinney. I was worried that the progressive rhetoric we heard from him early on would soon give way to the same stultifying Democratic centrism I've seen from my teenage years and the rise of the Democratic Leadership Council, and so far, given how he's pulled back on topics from drilling to prosecuting the last administration for war crimes, I fear that I am bring proven right. Unlike with our last president, though, I can look at President Obama -- there is still something surreal for me in using that phrase -- and believe that he is, deep down, a decent man who truly wants nothing but the best for each and every person in this country he now leads. I can only hope that in the weeks, months, and years ahead, he will prove my fears wrong.
Labels: politics
My apologies for going dark on the .org for the past few weeks. By mid-December I had already become quite frazzled, and the confluence of the semester ending (and me having sixty student portfolios to grade in a very short period of time), Spookytooth's death, the holiday season, and a cold on top that all, just left me feeling out of it. The combination of emotions resulting from Spooky's death, going through Christmas without Dad for the first time, and feeling lonely since I didn't have classes to teach, put me in a position where I felt like I needed to shut down and deal with my internal issues before I started writing here again. (I did keep Twittering over my break, but Twittering and blogging are two very different animals.) In the eight years since I launched the .org I don't think I've taken an updating break longer than ten days, so perhaps I was overdue for a vacation from here.
As far as what happened in the interim, we survived the holidays somehow. I got about ten different video games, a few books, and some new cookware for the holidays; I gave Mom enough sweaters and sweatshirts to get her through the winter. (Speaking of which, aside from one sixty-degree day in December, it's been unbelievably cold, with temperatures below zero most of the past twenty-four hours.) I didn't have my car for a week, as a small, routine repair took forever thanks to the incompetence of the repair shop. I've also been buying an unbelievable number of CDs off of Amazon because they have so many classic CDs of artists whose material I crave (Tom Waits, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen) between five and seven dollars. I pampered myself a bit while I was sick, and now I'm trying to get back into the old routines here. I can't say that I'm feeling 100%, but at least I'm feeling better than I was four weeks ago.
The new semester started this past Monday; I'm only teaching two classes this term, but one of them is creative writing, my first time teaching the creative arts. It's a once-a-week class, so I don't want to make any assumptions based on just teaching a single class, but so far the teaching and the planning have made me think a lot about my future career, and whether I want to focus my teaching on creative writing or composition. Unfortunately, I'm moving past the point where I can really afford to take my time making these decisions, and I don't have that many people whom I can turn to for help. I'll have more to say about this later, but for now I'm just trying to get a better feel for my creative writing class and how well I think I can teach that class (and what good teaching it will do for me).