Archive for Society & Culture
October 10, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Society & Culture, Language & Literature
The city in which I grew up is a suburb of Pittsburgh—in the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, less than an hour’s drive from both Ohio and West Virginia. Decades ago, the region’s economy was largely based on the production of steel. Pittsburgh was a busy, thriving, industrial city, and the residents—who sometimes refer to themselves as Pittsburghers—were by and large blue-collar working families. But the numerous coal-powered steel mills and factories were not kind to the environment. The air quality made today’s Los Angeles look crystal clear by comparison, and earned Pittsburgh the unfortunate nickname “The Smoky City.” When the mills and factories began closing due to the lower prices of imported steel, Pittsburgh’s air began to clear, and the ever-industrious populace reinvented the city as a center of technology, medicine, learning, and culture. Today’s Pittsburgh is a beautiful city, made all the more colorful by cultural and linguistic remnants […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
October 6, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Society & Culture, Language & Literature
When I was a child, I’d come home from school each day and immediately flip on the TV to watch my favorite show. The original Star Trek series—by then already well into its years of syndication—had me completely hooked. My mother used to tease me that I could summarize the plot of any episode by the time the first chord of the theme music had played. I was a serious junior Trekkie. Years later, during the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, I rekindled my interest in the show, going so far as to attend a few Star Trek conventions.
Ironically, it was the conventions themselves that started to wear down my interest in Star Trek. I was a fan, but not the sort of fan who would wear a uniform, pointy ears, or a communicator badge. Not the sort who would memorize scripts, install Star Trek sounds on my […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
September 19, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Technology & Computing, Society & Culture
Author Douglas Adams famously made fun of earthlings for being “so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.” Shortly before he died, Adams gave a talk at the University of California, Santa Barbara (not far from his home), at the end of which there was a brief question-and-answer session. A woman stood up and asked Adams the question that had been bothering her for decades: what did he have against digital watches? The crowd probably expected him to toss off a witty one-liner in response. Instead, he gave a very thoughtful answer that, in true Douglas Adams fashion, made ordinary human behavior seem self-evidently absurd.
After admitting that his comment had originally been written in the days when digital watches were themselves fairly primitive (and, ironically, required two hands to operate), Adams couched his complaint—appropriately—using an analogy. In the early days of personal computers, he […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
September 17, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Society & Culture, History
The other day I was at a restaurant with some friends, and one member of our party arrived a bit late. Before sitting down, he started heading toward the corner of the room, and when someone asked where he was going, he held up his hands and said, “Demunification.” Although I had never heard that word before, I understood immediately what he was saying: he was heading to the lavatory to wash his hands in order to “de-MUNI-fy” them—MUNI being short for San Francisco Municipal Railway, the transit authority that runs the city’s buses and streetcars. When you’re riding a bus or streetcar that’s so crowded you have to stand, you end up holding onto the handrails, which perpetually feel (and probably are) grimy from being handled by untold thousands of people before you. Almost everyone I know who rides MUNI habitually washes their hands as soon afterward as possible, […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
September 15, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Clever Ideas, Society & Culture
One day I opened up my mailbox, and there inside was a box from Gillette containing a brand-new Mach3 razor. It turned out that the box was addressed to my neighbor, which is just as well: the idea of shaving with a triple-blade razor seemed a bit—excuse me—over the edge. That was just a few years ago, and since then, the Mach3 has been superseded by models with four and five blades, with or without a vibrating feature—the mind boggles. But the twin-blade Gillette SensorExcel razor I used for many years also came in the mail for free, and also, coincidentally, wasn’t addressed to me—I got it from a friend who didn’t want it. Still, exactly as Gillette hoped, I spent many, many dollars over the years on their obscenely overpriced blades before breaking down and buying an electric razor. Like countless other people, I was sucked in by the […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
September 10, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Science & Nature, Society & Culture, Food & Drink
When I was in college, I had a professor who was known for being a bit on the odd side. Although he was smart, friendly, and much loved by the students, he had some strange and inexplicable habits. For one thing, he had a very peculiar way of speaking, including about a dozen idiosyncratic phrases that he repeated over and over. A friend and I, when we got bored, used to sit in the back of the classroom and keep a tally of how many times he used each of these phrases. The professor always kept a pen clipped to his collar, even if he was wearing a shirt with a pocket (a practice that amused me so much I adopted it myself—and keep it up to this day). And he encouraged us, on multiple-choice exams, to write in our own answers in the margin if we didn’t like any […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
August 29, 2008 at 10:00 am · Filed under Science & Nature, Technology & Computing, Society & Culture, History
As an American, I have always been a bit ambivalent when it comes to units of measurement. I learned units like inches, pints, and pounds first, but all through elementary and secondary school, the metric system (or S.I., Système International) was taught, along with dire warnings that we’d better get used to the new measurements because the U.S. was going to be giving up Imperial units Real Soon Now. That would have been fine with me, because I’m fluent in meters, liters, and grams too, and they all make more sense to me than their Imperial counterparts. (Temperature, strangely, is the exception: I can’t seem to switch my brain out of Fahrenheit.) The entire world—excluding us wacky Americans—has come to the sane conclusion that units of measurement based on outdated and arbitrary standards should be abandoned, and that everything should be based on easy-to-calculate units of ten.
Everything, that is, except […]
Original post by Joe Kissell
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