dkSez : : : : : : Don Kahle's blog

Fifth Friday Footnotes, Follow-ups and Far-Flung Fripperies:

• When you stop and think about it, “Happy Memorial Day” sends a confusing message.
• I want to support friends who share sad news on Facebook, but I feel uncomfortable hitting the “Like” button.
• How did hipsters fall so in love with brunch?
• I predict future generations will be amazed that we got along with unchilled, tepid water coming out of our “cold” faucet. Ice cubes will seem a hilarious work-around.
• Few who use the phrase “preaching to the choir” have ever been in a pulpit or a choir.
• Whoever first added the suffix “ish” to a time post deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. How many fights have been prevented with this elegant approximator?
• Be honest. When was the last time you heard the word “suffix”?
• High-speed stock traders shouldn’t get an unfair advantage. Yet some think creating a “fast lane” for the Internet is a good idea. Uneven playing fields will be exploited. That’s not foretelling the future. That’s telling the truth.
• There’s a fine line between ego strength and arrogance. The mystery is this: arrogance is usually evidence of too little ego strength, not too much.
• Life is measured more accurately with a slide rule than a tape measure. The world may seem linear and straightforward, until we begin moving through it.
• A Eugene comedian coined a very useful term. He’s 23, graduated from college, looking for work, and living at home. He described himself as a “stay-at-home son.” For those of us who remember “stay-at-home moms,” just the term explains a lot.
• Nothing prevents people from being loved more than their insatiable need to be liked.
• Are there any sports that use more than one ball? I came up with billiards, croquet, marbles, bocci and juggling. No contact sports.
• Beauty is frightening to many, but a disinhibitor for some.
• Shoe stores that don’t sell shoelaces are part of the problem.
• It’s slowly dawning on us how much of what we called freedom of information relied on inconvenience to keep it in check. A Spanish businessman has sued Google to “forget” a transaction that went sour decades ago. Local police scanners are being encrypted because anyone with a smart phone has access. Once we switch to digital money (for convenience’s sake), won’t every penny spent and received be trackable forever?
• Whatever happened to Kevin Cape?
• Philosophy is what simple people do when they want to feel complex.
• She’s such a pacifist, she refuses to wear bangs.
• We shave too much.
• Fusion cuisine is all the rage. And yet fission cuisine never really took off.
• Hatchbacks were a good idea.
• Insiderism is often an undetected intoxicant.
• Now that the city of Eugene has decided that a year-long test of a redesigned Willamette Street is a good idea, what other issues might be resolved in the same way? Could Fred Meyer build the largest pop-up store ever inside Civic Stadium? Homeless camps not populated with homeless people? Inflatable EmX stations? Our motto could be: “Pretend to build it, and if they come, then build it.”
• I’m not surprised flip-flops have broken into the fashion scene, but I would have guessed they’d trade in their onomatopoeic name.
• I wonder if street thieves consider footwear when looking for targets. No one wearing flip-flops is planning to win a footrace.
• One thing I never get used to in Washington, DC is the number of people who commute by helicopter.
• If you can’t be in two places at once, the next best thing is to be in two time zones at once. When I work from the East Coast, it’s like having a 27-hour day.
• I don’t trust movie reviews written by vegetarians. They deny their tastebuds to make the world or themselves better. So why wouldn’t they also praise a film in pursuit of some larger ideal instead of whether it’s simply a good movie?
• I’m no longer middle-aged, unless there are some 112-year-olds in the room.
• Why do striped sheets always follow the length and never the width of the bed? Do we want to look thinner and feel taller in our dreams?

==

Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column each Friday for The Register-Guard and blogs

Tags: No Comments