I don’t know what this says about my viewing habits, but I’ve been seeing a lot of Cialis commercials lately. I don’t think I noticed it until about the 300th repetition, but now the line quoted above always makes me a little giggly.

How is the timeline on that supposed to work? Would you really be lounging priapicly in the hot tub until 3:59:59 and then, one tick later, jump into “Oh shit gotta see a doctor!” mode?

From The Road to Wigan Pier:

And the peculiar evil is this, that the less money you have, the less inclined you feel to spend it on wholesome food. A millionaire may enjoy breakfasting off orange juice and Ryvita biscuits; an unemployed man doesn’t. ere the tendency of which I spoke at the end of the last chapter comes into play. When you are unemployed, which is to say when you are underfed, harassed, bored, and miserable, you don’t want to eat dull wholesome food. You want something a little bit ‘tasty’.

Read the entire passage (you’ll have to CTRL+F for it, the link’s to the whole book) for more, and then the passages before and after for yet more still. Replace “unemployed” with “just getting by, or not” and you’ll have as much of the story, I think, as you’ll need.

(Thanks to commenter Steve LaBonne on this Pandagon thread for bringing up the quotation.)

In comments to a post at The Last Psychiatrist, I saw something of interest but largely unrelated to the post itself:

Ehhh. .NET is still in demand. The bigger issue is that he was still programming at 48. You generally either move on to management or some other function by then. Coding is for kids. He was probably worried, given the generous salary he made, that he’d be replaced by someone younger and cheaper.

I want to say I’ve seen this attitude before, but I’m not sure where. Is this a commonly held belief in the IT community? (Note we’re talking about support roles here, not independent software development.)

This implies that the field is expected to grow exponentially, unless there’s a hidden assumption that it loses a large majority of people by attrition or ridiculously early retirement in their mid-40s.

I can see how IT might actually have grown exponentially over the last couple of decades, as first affordable microcomputers and then internetworking created the need for an entire new infrastructure. Couple this with non-negligible economic growth in IT-heavy fields and I might buy 20 or 30 years of exponentiality. But I would think the field is mostly mature by now, and that any growth would closely match that of the economy in general. But is it still the case, has it even been the case recently, that every (say) 15 years the number of “coding kids” needed grows from n to n^n?

(Even that carries the assumption that, at any point in time, any manager is already working at hir maximum capacity. It does ignore, though, the assumption that new layers of management will be created.)

Chris Wallace, on Fox News Sunday:

Usually people don’t even contemplate end of life until they’re in an irreversible coma.

As I clicked another link, a wave of something like sanity rolled over me and I decided to count. Thirty tabs, I had thirty Encyclopedia Dramatica tabs open. I cringed at the thought of going back and seeing how many I’d already read and closed this evening.

On realizing what I’d been doing, what I’d done, what I would inevitably continue to do, I first thought of the obligatory XKCD strip, and I marvelled again that a man who draws stick figures for a living could be considered a modern prophet.

And but yet then I thought of the true prophet, and of his Great Work.

David Foster Wallace presented the Entertainment as an all-consuming audiovisual production, but he was wrong. The true Entertainment, the technology that leaves us always and ever wanting more, that eats our time and infests our minds, is the wiki. Any wiki, it doesn’t matter. ED, TVtropes, the venerable Wikipedia[1] itself, they all expand fractally and ineluctably in our browsers, yea until the end of recorded time.

[1] As an aside, one of my most recently minted pet peeves is people who refer to Wikipedia as “Wiki”.

During Opening Week, one of the incoming freshmen’s activities is to visit a career-fair type arrangement where they can go around and ask questions of reps from the various support departments on campus. In exchange for a question, each rep will give the student a ticket; tickets can be later redeemed for prizes. It’s really a pretty neat idea.

I staffed the library’s booth for a couple of shifts. The title of this post probably tells you where this is going.

The third time a student asked, “So, do you have any books that people can, like, read”? I looked him in the eye. I looked him in the eye, and I gave him my biggest smile, and I said, “No, we actively discourage reading.” And I turned to the next person in line.

(And then I turned back and savored the real shock on his face, and I gave him the stock “yes, we have some leisure reading” answer.)

I kept count. Eight times in two 30-minute sessions. I estimate that the “books to read” formulation was used by nearly a quarter of my querents, and it was used by almost all the querents asking if we had leisure reading.

In an action movie, you can show your hero jump out of a fifth-story window, smash into the pavement below, then do a manly neck-popping thing and run off as if nothing had happened. The audience won’t bat an eyelash.

If you showed the same hero jumping out of a twentieth-story window and running away with no ill effects, though, you’d probably get hooting and derision.

So: What’s the highest window you can use without losing your audience?

Was having a contentious conversation with a colleague about ten years my senior. She made the familiar claim that people are more polarized, less able to reasonably disagree, than when she was a youth/younger adult. I maintained that people have always been mostly assholes.

(Actually, the contention was around whether Google was a harmful influence because it tailors results around your earlier searches.[1] The civility thing was a bit of evidence for her larger position. Anyway.)

Of course, neither of us had any actual research backing up our positions and were, in the moment, entirely reliant on personal anecdote. Since her anecdata were from a time right around when I was hitting puberty, I was at a loss for rejoinders.

But…geez! McCarthyism? Little Rock schoolhouse? The John Birch Society? Cities in flame, assassinations, Gore Vidal v/ William Buckley? It seems the 1950s and ’60s were none too civil, and that can hardly be blamed on Google.

Maybe the mid-’80s through the mid-’90s, which I think would be her frame of reference, were a golden age of civility. Except the early ’90s saw a public embracing Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern, and I remember how heated the political discussions I witnessed around then were. So the golden age was 1985ish-1990? Does anybody know enough about that period to talk about the state of discourse around then? I know the audiences on Donahue could get pretty het up, but I don’t know how representative that was.

Actually, I get the impression that my colleague comes, as near as I can tell, from a solidly middle-class background, and now she mostly witnesses conversations among people raised in subcultures in which tribalism has traditionally been expressed more vigorously. Since One Doesn’t Talk About Class, though, that wasn’t an avenue for exploration.

Hmmmm. Having written that, I’m getting dim memories of Paul Fussell’s Class. Although published in 1992, the book definitely had an ’80s flavor, and one of Fussell’s themes was that people in the upper-middlish classess–two steps above blue collar, but still below truly wealthy–tend to equivocate, to be solicitous, and to be constantly on guard against giving offense.

Fussell held that these characteristics were an expression of the tense nervousness that defines these strata, the constant fear of slipping down, of losing cash and cachet. After about a decade of strong economic growth encouraging the notion that their positions were unassailable, I guess it’s plausible that this persistent, low-level background fear would fade away, taking the desire-to-please with it.

Please note that I’m batting way out of my league here.

[1] I didn’t even want to start in on how true that is.