The Future and hope... from the past?

I was watching "The Top 100 One Hit Wonders" - a fantastic VH1 rockumentary. I am a big fan of their special programs, they are educational (about music and pop history at least), fun, interesting, and generally have good clips to watch.

Interestingly enough, at least half of the One Hit Wonders was from the 80s. Perhaps the economics of the day just set things up naturally for one hit wonders. Many of the one hits made it big because of MTV, so that is not a small part of it. (Cue analysis of unfragmented pop culture consumer market of the 80s vs the fragmented pop culture market of the late 90s,00s).

But I realized while watching that show, that I just love 80s music. Not just the music, but the looks, the video clips - especially when set to music. It just fills me with a weird sense of hope, wonder and excitement for the future. Which seems weird since some of these clips are 20 years old.

Of course, perhaps the bigger issue is that the vision of the future from the 80s is better than the current non-vision not being offered. I would say that the national mood is one of deep pessimism, the midterm results might have offered a momentary lapse, but it will be momentary.

In the mean time, I need a full set of the 3 "I Love the 80s" series VH1 did. That is almost 20 hours of quality analysis from the likes of Weird Al and Lisa Lisa.

Cheating on Hairstylists

So I posted earlier about cheating on hairstylists. I did have an oppertunity to revisit my hair stylists and admitted (tearfully I might add) to my wayward ways. She seemed pretty cool about it, so luckily she still cuts my hair. A month later I read in an advice column about someone who was seriously worried about cheating on their hairdresser. A choice quote:

He as much as said that he wouldn't be able to take it if I were to leave him.

Now to remind you, we are talking about a woman who is unhappy with her current hairdresser and wants to have someone else cut her hair. I had no idea that people could be so obsessive about such things, and my original post was completely in jest.

Seattle Mindcamp 3.0

Well I think I'm finally recovered from Seattle Mindcamp 3.0. It was quite the event, unlike 2.0 where I was only there for about 8 hours, this time I did 15 hours worth.

Here's are some of the things and people I met:

• Singularity talk - random arguments as most discussions of this goes.
  


• Vegetable gun with the Make people. Cool, but abortive. Only one shot, sad.
  


• The Make Drawbot
  


• How to read Finnegans Wake by Ron Hale-Evans.
  


• Supper with a bunch of people, and a conversation with Tom Bihn
  


• Chilled out with Make's Bre, Sparktography, more Make people, and even more people during a multi-hour Werewolf game
  


• Guitar hero on the big screen
  

Also, either thanks to, or no thanks to sparktography, I learned about Zipfizz. I don't think I have ever been wired on caffeine before. Specifically it was the fruit punch liquid shot, with 41,667% your B12 RDA. I stayed up until 6am quite handily, but as soon as I lay down, I fell asleep instantly.

Elections? Say what?!

This edited text replaces some stupid rant about political outcomes from the 2006 midterm elections. I guess my main point there was something about the market reacting, blah blah. But now I realize this was a pointless post, so instead I replaced it with a meta-post about the post. I figure it's probably slightly more interesting to read the executive summary and meta-meta discussion about a post than actually reading some opinion. Next step is to replace this post with another summary. Check back in about 3 months.