Because…

 

Ah!  What a time of year!  The first few months of the year are always incredibly busy for me.  Work is predictably hectic and coaching basketball is in full swing, so there is precious little time left for doing any new projects around the house or to play much online.  This evening however I had some free time on hand, so I thought I might start organizing and thinning out the club room and storage area of our home’s rec level (a nice word for finished basement).

The club room is currently home to my original stereo system, a holdover dating back from my college days along with a fairly large collection of record albums.  What memories college and that stereo bring back!  Life was definitely simpler, the possessions austere.  Furniture motif was “Early Parents”, cobbled together with some thrift store lamps, cinder block bookshelves, and of course, a $1,000 stereo system with dozens of albums.  Priorities you know…

Where was I?  Oh yes, organizing the club room and storage.  I thought to myself, why not put one of those old albums on the old stereo and have some music to listen to while organizing?  Just flipping through each album was a fun, nostalgic experience, bringing back memories of when I bought each one, looking at the album art, and feeling the different textures of the album covers.  I settled in with one of my old favorites I haven’t listened to in ages:  The Beatles – Abbey Road.  I fired up the old turntable, flipped on the receiver and put on the vinyl.  Man oh man, I forgot how nice that old stereo sounds.  I had also forgotten how talented and fantastic the three part harmony was on Because…

 

With the music playing, my wife peeked in and came downstairs to see what in the world I was doing, which was basically me sitting on the floor and not doing much of anything.  I asked her to join me, while I ran upstairs and poured us a few glasses of wine.  We both just sat on the floor, and we listened, and we chatted like a couple of college kids back in the day.  What a pleasant, nostalgic moment.

 

No, we didn’t get much work accomplished around the house tonight.  Who cares?

 

Youtube now has the entire album uploaded if you are interested.  Here’s hoping you enjoy your evening as well.

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Calling Out BS in the Google Age

This past weekend, I had the entire family over, mostly to watch our beloved football team in the playoffs, but also to have one last meal before my youngest son returned to his Spring semester at college.  Now whenever my children (all in their twenties) get together, it can be a rather loud, rough-and-tumble affair, filled with debates and spirited banter.  Competitiveness runs high in this family, and with an added layer of our ethnicity’s tendency to “discuss loudly” and passionately, the result is not for the faint of heart.

The wide range of topics my kids argued passionately over discussed are of little relevance to this post.  I was more intrigued by modern-day tactics available to them in being able to call out BS.  It seems that in these modern times, whenever anyone makes a statement that another disagrees with, out comes the iPhone, and a quick Google search to find a citation or reference in order to prove or disprove a point. It was an epic battle of the iPhone and search engine apps.  Each was fact-checking statements of the other in real time while the discussions were bubbling away.  The thumbs were getting as much of a workout as the mouths.

It made me think about how very different things were regarding debates and discussions in our day and age.  I made this observation to them, whereupon they asked me, how did we check our facts and figures back then?  It made me think a bit.  I managed to tell them that we relied a lot more on memory, drawing from things we may have read or perhaps heard from others, but the reality is, we oftentimes didn’t really take the time to fact-check, as precious few of us visited local libraries on a regular enough basis to consult the tomes of knowledge in painstaking detail.  Their collective sentiment and comment was, “So, you basically were able to bullshit everyone a lot more than today.”  Ouch!

All of this leads me to the following questions:

Did we really BS each other more in the past, when we were reasonably confident that most folks we discussed matters with were not inclined to check out the accuracy of our statements?  Were we more cocksure in our statements?  Did we exaggerate more?

Are we more careful in these modern times to make statements because of the ability for someone to immediately call BS?

Have at it folks – I’m interested in what you all think.

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If You Were Me…

I have returned from a most restful and peaceful holiday getaway.  Of course, the irony is not lost with my previous post, which proclaimed “I’m back!”, whereupon I then immediately proceeded to disappear from it all.  While I certainly needed and enjoyed a semi-comatose uneventful existence in a tropical setting, it was refreshing only in a way a good nap or night’s sleep may be.  Naps and sleep are necessary, but now I’m awake, refreshed, and full of energy, looking to do something that will stimulate my incessant curiosity.  There are places to go, people to meet, things to discover.  And that, my dear readers, is where you have an opportunity to stimulate me.  (I can only imagine what the google search engines will do to direct spam my way with that last sentence)

So… if you were me, what kind of things would you plan to do in this very young, new year so full of hope and promise?  Where would you go?  What would you see?  What would you want to do or accomplish?  And most importantly – Why?

I’ll leave it to you dear readers (that is if I have any left after my prompt disappearance) to give me some interesting vacation and touristy ideas to ponder and stimulate my imagination.  Who knows, I might wind up with a few holiday getaways I could never have imagined myself, and that’s what seems so delicious about it all.

I thank you all in advance for your thoughts – random ones of course…

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