LIVE FROM NYC: HURRICANE SANDY

Batten down the hatches! Board up the windows! Hurricane Sandy is set to land in NYC around 12pm EDT tomorrow, but as we've seen countless times before....it's the lead-up to the storm that proves most entertaining. I'll be liveblogging the chaos from my apartment on E 90th Street, in case you're interested in seeing stuffy Park Ave'ers freak out about a little rain/wind.


7:36 PM EDT (10/28/2012) - Subway service has been shut down. MTA hasn't announced when  it will resume or even when they'll be making a decision about reopening. If you are a white person who happens to be stuck above 110th Street, may God have mercy on your soul...you're not going anywhere.

A 24/7 fruit stand packs up in preparation for Hurricane Sandy on 90th Street & 3rd Ave. 

7:52 PM EDT (10/28/2012) - Here's weather.com's impossible to understand "Interactive Tracker" of Sandy's projected path, if you want to play along at home: http://www.weather.com/weather/hurricanecentral/tracker/2012/sandy

8:02 PM EDT (10/28/2012) - All's quiet on the Eastern Seaboard. Forecasts indicate that the rain should start early tomorrow morning around 2am.

8:21PM EDT (10/28/2012) - Grand Central Station is locked and shut down.

"KloZed 4 dA hurricane. sux toO b u SMH"

AMERICAN IDIOT: Lil Wayne

Some video footage of recently incarcerated rapper Lil Wayne has cropped up on the web, where we witness Wayne answering deposition questions in a civil suit he's filed against producer Quincy Jones. Contained in the video is some of the best recorded footage of the juxtaposition between [for lack of better terminology] street 'attitude'/vernacular and traditional or common English. I just read the previous sentence back to myself and I have apparently aged 40 years more than I was aware.

My sudden outbreak of old-ness aside, there's something inherently infuriating that comes with watching a millionaire entertainer act out like a 5 year old, whilst attempting to retain the rough and tumble attitude and broken english that we've come to associate with the high crime, inner city population. Wayne, at one point, lays his head in his hands and refuses to answer the line of questioning that Jones's attorney presents, only answering with reductive mumbles of "I don't recall" and "I can't remember". Later in the video, when asked what image he is presenting to the media- Wayne again shoots down the question, is told by the presiding judge that he must answer, and decides to inform the attorney that "he [the judge] can't save you in the real world". One can extrapolate that Wayne saw the judge's support of the line of questioning as backing up /siding with the attorney and wanted to remind him that rational debate has no place in his world and violence would reign supreme if the joust were happening in a different context. It's really just an embarrassing 6-minute display of the apathetic and anti-intellectual approach that is "cool" to a substantial block of young people. It's par for the course for Lil Wayne, we've seen this and much worse from him before....but god damn is it frustrating to see him thrive while there are tens of thousands of infinitely more talented (and better adjusted) artists that aren't able to scrape by.

"Virtual Crack" or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love The Web

I might need to change the theme of my (seldomly updated) blog from my thoughts on atheism in America to some sort of "why the internet is the best shit ever (and i mean ever, ever) and how we've already taken it for granted...less than 20 years into mainstream adoption" soapbox where I tell you that anyone with the ability to read this has witnessed a modern miracle. Honestly, I don't think many people would disagree with the overall sentiment there and most just haven't taken the time to, or aren't reflective enough to put it into that sort of context. It may be the case that a similar cultural reaction followed the printing press in 15th century Europe, but I'd contest that it is important to consciously recognize what an impressive and useful concept we've discovered. I think we're hindering potential progress by allowing technology to become a mundane, almost burdening staple of our lives that is more of an expectation than an exciting portal into another "world" (ANOTHER WORLD, MAAAAAAANNN!)

Recently, I've discovered that I need to "sync" my online presence with my tangible meat-body. It's been therapeutic to abandon the shame of spending hundreds of hours each week I spend learning by watching documentaries, reading news articles/opinion/book excerpts, and engaging in meaningful and impassioned debate with others online. The time I spend online is accelerating the speed at which I am able to consume information, and I've chosen to spend a substantial chunk of this time doing things which I think will help me grow and evolve. Sure I've watched the past 2 years worth of the "FailArmy" YouTube weekly series, and I have a stage-4 terminal hook on every TV sitcom, but I honestly enjoy the time I spend accomplishing the objectives that primary school and college led me to believe was, indeed, learning. Wikipedia is well on the way to making learning "cool", and there's nothing we need more in the world right now than anything we can get that resembles a learning Renaissance. What I'm referring to is a redefinition of traditional learning, but couldn't that be just another really, really good side effect of a connected planet?

So why is it that we already feel entitled to modern tech, and every mouth-breather Tea Bag rally participant and strikingly dull/apathetic teenager feels tech-savvy enough to complain about their iPhone? Silicon Valley can't completely thwart responsibility, as their marketing campaigns were/are based on their tech being a lifeline, rather than a better-than-the-last-one magic wand that waves you in to a different dimension. Their strategy is vulnerable to the reality that any slip-up creates immediate animosity, which eventually leads to (apparently) a weird arrogance that obscures the larger picture benefit of possessing the tech at all. But we also need to consider that the public at large has gone all-in on a concept that it seems to reject at some fundamental level. If you can fix a computer, you're still a geek. If you've got a World of Warcraft character that's higher than level 50, you still probably live in your parents basement. These notions are the remains of a foregone era and contribute to the level contempt that many have to their precious technology. It's better to yell at or slam your phone than it is to put on your thinking cap and work through the problem (consequently learning the software in the process.) We want to take our stuff out of the box, turn it on, and GO. No assembly required; nonexistent learning curve. As we move forward, I'd like to see more necessity for manual processes and a deeper understanding of the tools we're all now using. Who knows, maybe when we reach Singularity, we will have been able to deselect the dull, uninspired masses. Oh god, I think I just advocated eugenics.....uh, nothing to see here, move along!

I know, I know, I'm preaching in a vacuum here.. and even if there was some directive I could offer to set us on a better course...it's far too grandiose and unrealistic of a mission to even consider. We've got more urgent matters to attend to. I can only hope that as time passes, we begin to recognize the game changer we witnessed as the cables were laid and the world became, for the first time, connected.

The Disconnected Life

I'm laying back on my couch, writing this post from my iPhone via the miracle we refer to as the 4g data network. In front of me sit two working MacBook Pros with 18GB of combined RAM and nearly a terabyte of total hard drive storage. Yet, earlier today, in an incident which could only have been caused by the dark lord Morgoth, these computers were instantly rendered useless. The internet...turned off.

Seconds turned to minutes, and minutes to hours; at the time of writing this I've been down for 5 hours. Even with a completely capable (albeit sporting a cracked screen) smartphone and a lightening-fast mobile connection, I can't help but feel isolated, unprepared for some disaster. If I might happen to need to know the highest grossing Patrick Swayze film...I'm totally fucked. I bet it's Dirty Dancing. No, wait, it could be or Red Dawn. I'll be right back. I've got to switch to my imdb app and find out...this is going to bug me

***writers note: "Ghost" is the top earning Patrick Swayze film with an international gross of $517.6 million***

Evil: What's In a Word?

After Friday night and the "Dark Knight Rises" massacre at a theatre in Aurora, CO, America is in a deep collective search for a motive that would cause James Holmes to shoot 70+ people before turning himself in to police outside of the screening. But, as is usually the case, the conversation is never elevated to a point where we can investigate societal, political, or idealogical factors that would turn a quiet college student into a mass-murderer. Instead, we label the perpetrator as "crazy", "maniacal", or "evil"; and we allow ourselves to avoid confronting the true reason that Holmes opened fire in a theater of innocent moviegoers.

Of course, this psychological deception is par for the course here in America. The most obvious example of this is the September 11th attack, where (if the official story is to be believed) radical Islamic terrorists hijacked planes and crashed them into designated targets, killing almost 4,000. The attack was quickly labeled as an "act of evil" and less than 2 months later...we had boots in the ground in Afghanistan to find and destroy Al-Qaeda cells. It's unfortunate that we weren't able to turn these tragic circumstances into an analytical study of why these terrorists wanted to commit such heinous violence and use this information to promote a more harmonious world. It wouldn't have been very hard, either. The easiest element of the attack to deconstruct would be the targets themselves. The Pentagon is a universal symbol of war, and commands that have been issued from here have affected the majority of the world's population. The World Trade Center is an international financial hub and represents both the good and the bad of our global monetary system. Knowing these basic facts about the targets, we're prepared to investigate the true motive of Bin Laden and Al Qaeda and come to a greater understanding of their grievances against the US. This, by no means, exonerates the crime. Nor does it mean that the attacks were in the slightest bit valid. It does, however, paint a picture of the world we're actually living in, and exposes the foundation of international resentment of America.

Why We Shouldn't Be Praising Barack Obama For His Support of Same-Sex Marriage

Today should have been a hopeful day. On the heels of yesterday’s successful vote to amend the North Carolina State Constitution to ban gay marriage, the internet quickly and vociferously decried the intolerance we witnessed with the passing of A1. I was relieved to see the overwhelming opposition of this amendment through discussions on a multitude of politically neutral online communities and in the columns of today’s (supposed-to-be politically neutral) papers. My faith in the conjecture that the majority of well-informed, rational Americans did not see gay marriage as a “real” issue anymore was quickly reaffirmed, as the conclusion of this morning’s discussion tended to be that this amendment was archaic at best.

But this afternoon, President Barack Obama announced that he now supports same-sex marriage. Even though I believe that this is a step in the right direction, and that the effects of this decision will be advantageous for the LGBTQ community… I don’t think we should be praising President Obama for finally adopting a policy that grants a large group of Americans such a basic human right. Furthermore, we should question the integrity of this decision given the events in North Carolina yesterday, and the falling poll numbers of the Obama campaign.

THIS GUY