inkbluesky

train car interior b&w

What a great effect. The lighting and finish accent the clean lines and help give the illusion of depth, while at the same time leading our eye up to the window that frames a scenic picture within the picture.

Jolt Culture has twice the trivia

Did you know: * That “the first paved road was 7 1/2 miles long and 6 feet wide and was built in Egypt … 4,600 years” ago.

* That “Antarctica is the world’s largest desert, covering 5.5 million square miles.”

* That “A typical human skeleton consists of 206 bones including 22 in the skull, 14 in the face, 1 in the throat (hyoid bone).”

* The Cracker Jack dog’s name is Bingo.

More important, do you care? If so, head down to your local bookstore or library, where the shelves are bending from the weight of books packed with such fluffy nuggets.

snip

After riffling through a dozen of these titles, I can understand Maslin’s mystified shrug. But I also think she’s missing the cake for the frosting. Each tidbit or bound collection of factoids may be so insignificant that calling it trivia is almost an honorific. However, this growing genre signals a profound trend in America: The rise of Jolt Culture, which combines our quest for information — this is, after all, the Age of Information — with our lust for immediate gratification.

Jolt Culture can be seen in the thrust of contemporary magazines from Rolling Stone and People to Maxim and Entertainment Weekly, which increasingly rely on pictures and short captions rather than longer form stories. Newspapers are responding to the trend through the heavier use of what’s known as “alternative story forms” — quick-hit information boxes that boil down the essential facts of any given story to a few easily digested tidbits. It is apparent in the rise of “talking-head” television, which substitutes passion for analysis, and in films that trade in jaw-dropping spectacle rather than taut narratives about characters facing tough moral choices.

Jolt Culture is often conflated with the “dumbing-down” of America. They are, undoubtedly, partners in crime.

I think we all like a certain amount of trivia, but like soda it is easy to over do it. Over the years I’ve read articles like this that push back against the trend , trivia as a way of condensing information down to the point that it all becomes, except for the most shocking stories, trivial. I’m not sure that its game that can be won. Where television news could inform people millions at a time, it simply tells us the latest mini-tragedy. Its all sound bites for four minutes and then off for five minutes of commercials for products with dubious benefits that we’re probably better off not buying. The Daily Show and few others point this out to an audience that is already aware of it. Part of it may be a tendency to play to the people that buy the extra strong paper towels and super clean smelling kitty litter, maybe their attention span just can’t handle ten minutes of what will happen to America and millions of jobs if the Pacific Ocean continues its decline. Maybe all we can take is the happy talk over the incredibly irritating banner of bad news that runs across the bottom of the screen.

Why We Spend by Jonathan Weiler

James Surowiecki’s piece in the August 7/14 edition of the New Yorker, entitled “Unsafe at Any Price,” outlines our profligate “defense” spending practices over the past five years. I put the word defense in scare quotes because, as Surowiecki points out, it’s really not clear how much of our ever-increasing military expenditures are actually defending America from real threats to its security. For example, despite Rumsfeld’s and others’ call for fortifying our capacity to engage in asymmetric warfare to combat a non-traditional enemy, Surowiecki writes that “we’re building a new military while still paying for the old one…far more [money] is being spent on high-tech weapons to fight enemies (like the Soviet Union) that no longer exist – eighty billion dollars on attack submarines, three billion apiece on new destroyers, and hundreds of billions on two different new models of jet fighter.”

Furthermore, Surowiecki writes, “not only are we buying stuff we don’t need; we’re buying it badly. Astonishing budget overruns are routine. The Future Combat System, for instance…began as a ninety billion dollar project, then became a hundred-and-sixty billion dollar project and…will eventually cost three hundred billion dollars.”

Additionally, not only is such incompetence/corruption seldom punished, a lesson which we’ve learned all too clearly about contractors in Iraq, but the Pentagon appears unable even to mount a successful audit of spending practices. “A few years ago,” Surowiecki writes, “the Pentagon’s own Inspector General found that more than a trillion dollars in spending simply couldn’t be explained.”

I’ve had a thing for new military jets since I was a kid. We need to spend money on R&D and new toys for the military,you can’t crack eggs without some good egg crackers, but damn looking back over the last six years its like I live in a banana republic with some people who have all the ethics of The Riddler on speed in charge.