I’ve been working as a security guard and bouncer at various sites for a few years now, and I’ve noticed that at most places there’s at least one of my peers who has a hook-up for things like flashlights and knives.
Guards go gaga for accessories.
Especially for knives. I haven’t thought I really needed a knife since I was ten, and while I find myself in way more potentially dangerous situations these days, when I think about whether I want a knife the first use that comes to mind is declaring “That’s not a knife: this is a knife.”
Prior to the Sloan period humans had discovered and rediscovered the art of creating artificial sounds that they then refined into music. Leading into the period new forms of instruments had also been invented. The ingenuity of humankind had also bounded forward technologically and this resulted in mixing the now widespread use of electricity with the instrumentation that was ingrained within the culture. The most popular form of music was soon heralded by the electric guitar, which helped to market a new style of music called Rock and Roll.
With this new popular form of music the economy saw an explosion of industries that branched off from powerful record labels. For decades these cabals would control how music was created and presented to the masses.
Eventually this system broke down as more and more bands became ‘indie’ and eschewed the idea of working for the conglomerates. The most common terminology for the decade that saw a rise and fall of independent artists and labels is the 90’s.
The ‘indie sound’ was imagined early in this period and sometimes overlapped with ‘grunge’, ‘brit pop’ and other sub-genres of ‘rock’. Soon, though, many of the artists who were independently produced and shared the indie sound chose to give up their independence for cash while keeping the sound that had allowed them to do so.
Every major label desperately grabbed for any band they could.
This is something I just had to write about. Recently, there was a murder in Toronto, Ontario near York University. Check out today’s reporting on it here.
What is known so far is that a young woman, a student from Beijing, living near York University’s campus was murdered while her friend – thousands of kilometres away – watched on webcam. A man apparently knocked at the door and asked to use her cell-phone; this man then entered the apartment and murdered her.
This is, of course, a shocking crime and not to make light of it, but as soon as I heard about this I was reminded of one of the few episodes I’ve seen of CSI: New York. Check out the scene I’m thinking of here.
Since I’ve restarted my blog, I’ve found myself reading more blogs and when I think about it, circa 2005 when I had my previous blog, I was also reading more of them. I don’t know exactly why this is but I suspect it has something to do with wanting to see what other people are sharing when you are sharing.
Recently, I’ve come across an interesting, seemingly connected thought process across several blogs, and I’ve been intrigued. It started with a friend’s blog: he’s been having something he’s referred to as March Madness (which has now bled into April as it seems that he knows many more people who are interested in bogging than I do) in which he has people he respects post entries on subjects they care about in his ’10 Things I’ve Learned’ format. The one I linked to started the ball rolling for me when I followed the guest poster to her blog. She had some interesting entries dealing with internet dating.
Based on my personal observation of human interaction these days, pessimism is running rampant. It seems to me that a great many people blame ‘the world’ for their current circumstances, presupposing that their current circumstances are bad and comparing the situations of poorly defined others who have ‘better’ lives and/or the imagining of another era (that never existed) in which things would be ‘better’.
I’ve never really understood this idea of blaming everyone else for not ‘getting ahead’. It seems to me that if you were to give up on a goal because it’s too hard to achieve due to the obstacles ‘others’ have placed in your path, then you’ve traded a difficult task for an insurmountable one: how is whining about it going to change the world around you to suit your needs? Isn’t it easier to circumvent the obstacles in your path rather than to point at them hoping that someone will remove them for you? In addition to that, it is necessary sometimes to acknowledge that an obstacle cannot be removed or a goal cannot be reached and move on to something else.