Contraria

Edward C. "Coe" Heller is a Los Angeles-based film producer who believes that if everyone knows something to be true it is probably false. A friend, tired of listening to rants has suggested a blog as a harmless outlet. Coe believes it is vanity, and a chasing after the wind, but is unsure it is harmless.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Propriety Sucks

Contrarians are fated to react poorly to changes in the language, for changes in the language almost always appear to be like a muddy meandering stream ever seeking a lower level and rarely as improvements. I am confident that in the future all oral communication will be by grunting or screaming and written communication will have excised vowels, all text talk all the time.

There are some changes to which we accede with varying grumpiness. For example, I have come to accept and if necessary live with new rules as to split infinitives and prepositions, such that a preposition is a proper word to regularly end a sentence with. Aaaaargh.

On the other hand, the creeping acceptance of “sucks” in common parlance is for me more of an acquired taste, and I have not yet acquiesced in its general usage. My father banned “lousy” from the house for general impropriety and the matter declined from that level for some decades, until “sucks” began appearing on bad sitcoms, seeping into the general culture from below.

Currently a TV ad for some nicotine patch now says that withdrawal “sucks”. How much it sucks is shown on a Suckometer with an arrow pointing from green on the left to red on the right. The patch moves the Suckometer down towards green.

I must admit to occasional use of the word in one context. When a male (but not female) friend is whining I am inclined to “it sucks to be you” in lieu of sympathy. Other than that I usually think there is a better way to express a thought.

Can we get used to absolutely anything? Stick around, time will tell. In the meantime my Suckometer is pretty much stuck on red.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

All the (Good) News That's Fit to Print

The Gray Lady is smiling, and the whole world smiles with her.

Like it or not the New York Times is the “newspaper of record” and much of our generation reads every day what the Times wants read. And now the Times wants all the good news to be read. I feel a sense of relief that suddenly not everything in the world is a problem and all to be roundly blamed on President Bush. A year ago crime, traffic jams, global warming, terrorism, unemployment, every possible disease, family disfunction, obesity and skin rash, were all bad and getting worse on a daily basis and all caused by President Bush. There it was – I read it in the Times.

Now, like “Yesterday”, all our troubles seem so far away. The news, of course has not changed at all, but the coverage is 180 degrees reversed. All is spin, spin, spin.

It is December, 2009. This month President Obama has given a muted call to arms at West Point to announce his Afganistan policy. The “surge”, loudly condemned in Iraq in 2007 is acceptable to the Times. The next week the President tells the Nobel Prize committee that “There is evil in the world”, paraphrasing Niebuhr (the President is a contrarian!! See http://contrariat.blogspot.com/2009_01_01_archive.html ) and proclaiming American exceptionalism to police the world. President Bush never went nearly so far, but all is well with The Gray Lady.

Within the past week She has declared the Copenhagen environmental summit to be a limited success and the recession to be over. Faithful reader, I am greatly relieved to see that progress is made on all fronts. It is only if I look elsewhere – not even as far as Fox but even going only to CNN to see that these are indeed impossible conclusions. It is all spin, spin and more spin, but if we are to be spun we might as well be happy about it.

Wednesday, December 09, 2009

Lost in Storage

I have resisted Kindle, in part because I do not think of books as “digital information”. The having of the book and its location on the bookshelf is part of the experience. The medium is the message.

The thought came to mind when we recently had a conversation with a library science student. Skipping over the part of the conversation where I stepped in it by being naively unaware that so-and-so is transgendered, we talked about electronic media. A hot issue in library science (yes there are!) is the effort to categorize and preserve various forms of electronic media.

Take for example the Kindle. How 2009 is the Kindle? In 20 years will Amazon be supporting Kindles while they are trying to peddle Kindle Super 5’s? Will all those books be lost?

Closer to home, I’m writing in Word and html (hyper-text mark-up language) to be posted on the Internet and located by http (hyper-text transfer protocol). In 20 years there will be an Internet, but Word? Html? Http? In the future someone is going to need ancient technology to find Contraria. There will be no book on the shelf.

Of course it has already happened, but I never thought about it. My attic has dusty boxes of 8” disks in c/pm format WordStar. Is there some magical machine somewhere that can read them? I have a box of 5 ¼” disks in DOS formatted Q&A word processing and 3 ½ inch disks in Word 96 for which I keep one 3 ½” disk drive for emergencies. All lost, lost and lost.

So the Library Scientists have a challenge. We live in the moment, writing in Word then html found by http, oblivious. Since Gutenberg we have had books as we know them. The future? As usual, not so clear.