Opinions

I think the only hope now is that shame disappears altogether.

It’s pretty clear that privacy of any sort is on it’s way out. Anything you do anywhere at anytime will available for public viewing. Anything you ever write or say to anyone will be in the permanent and unerasable public archives. This would call for a standard of behavior I suspect I can’t meet. How about you? You perfect yet? I used to place my hope in the idea that there would be simply so MUCH private behavior in the public realm that my occasional intemperate remark or gesture would disappear into the morass. But then I realized it would all be searchable, by name. Throw in the unblinking eye of coming-soon Google Glasses’ cameras and computer face-recognition technology, why don’t we? Surely they will record our spoken words as well!

So I’m sunk. Unless public standards of acceptable behavior sink right along with me, under the weight of seven billion people’s daily misbehavior all out there for salacious consumption and delectation. The privacy battle appears to be lost. Other things will need to go to.

I imagine everything that can be said about Graceland has been said, or sung, but it was new to me.

In what I think was an unintentional way, the place was fairly perfect at capturing the Elvis story. When he purchased the house, which by contemporary standards doesn’t really seem all that mansiony anymore, it was already called Graceland. The name works for Elvis’s career, which began with a an off-the-charts natural talent (the Grace), but soon enough became processed into the crasser and tackier aspects of mainstream American culture, and became “Graceland”, a sprawling commercial enterprise like “Hollywoodland’ or “Disneyland”. Perfect.

The house, like Elvis, has been swallowed by a immense array of support services, buildings and staff and an unctuous audio guide that describes Elvis’s life as all fun and family meals and go-carts and a beautiful house, while you’re looking at rooms that might possibly strike an observer as garish even if you leave your sunglasses on. But the whole successfully congeals into an appropriate monument to corrupted genius, though you won’t get much sense of the actual music part of the genius buried under the mountain of schlock. He sure had a couple of long wallfuls of gold records, though.

But if in the area, visit the Stax Museum if you want to feel something about American music other than vague dismay.

I stopped drinking coffee when the Food Police pulled me over and told me it was bad for me. The next time they pulled me over I was happy that I didn’t have an open-container of the evil brew with me, but this time they handed me one and said have a nice day! The Food Police make conservatives crazy for a lot of reasons, first of course for being enforcers of nanny-state proprieties. The other reason is that they keep saying DIFFERENT THINGS! One minute a food is BAD, the next it’s GOOD!

This ‘DIFFERENT THINGS’ complaint is one of the laziest excuses for umbrage and dumb jokes going. Yes, they say DIFFERENT THINGS because NEW DATA COMES IN. This multiple variables problem is one that cannot pass the blood-brain barrier in certain people with extra-thick craniums (crania, for the Word Police). Yes, evidence is always incomplete and changing, and you also have to weigh probabilities, costs, benefits, upside gain, downside risk, and black swans. Or, conversely, you can give science a raspberry and make a predictable joke or two (see Climate Change).

But lately the Food Police are resembling the affable neighborhood beat cop of yore and lore. Coffee’s fine now! GOOD for you even! Oh, and have a square of DARK CHOCOLATE to go with it! And wait, is that a corkscrew and a bottle of RED WINE? Why yes it is! I’ll drink to that! An excellent way to pass the time while waiting for further evidence.