All posts in Current Events

I thank my lucky stars every­day that my fam­ily and I were over­seas from mid-June through mid-July. We went to Italy. It was won­der­ful and we had a great time and our fam­ily felt bet­ter again since Kim and I had been work­ing 60+ hour weeks.

In the town of Loro Ciufenna that we were stay­ing there was a news­stand that sold, on each Sun­day, one copy of the Inter­na­tional Her­ald Tri­bune. The IHT is the Euro­pean ver­sion of the New York Times, but from a decid­edly Euro-centric view­point, but you still have to put up with Paul Krug­man and Roger Cohen. So the first time we bought the IHT (for  2 Euro) and splashed across the front page was a story about Michael Jack­son, sort of a career ret­ro­spec­tive and how it men­tioned that he had planned to tour in the fall. Only after 10 or so para­graphs did it men­tion that he was dead.

Wow. Michael Jack­son was dead? I called my mother and asked her when it had hap­pened and was told that it was a few days after we had left the States, which made me happy to be in Italy, because it meant that I didn’t have to live through all of the crap that was going on in the States about how, oh my God, he’s dead! What hap­pened? What will we do with­out this lov­able eccen­tric genius who died before his time? Let’s all run out right this freak­ing sec­ond and buy every­thing that we can that has Michael Jackson’s voice or pic­ture or essence on it!

Sup­pos­edly Michael Jackson’s estate has earned over $100 mil­lion since his death. And yes, I feel for his chil­dren, whom I’m sure loved their father, even though he nick­named one of them Blan­ket. And I’m sure that his fam­ily was sad when he died, but I hope there is some remorse they feel cash­ing checks for every­thing from their shares of his estate to the new real­ity series that is going to be broad­cast with most of the Jack­sons in it. I’m prob­a­bly being pes­simistic, given what human nature is really like, of course.

I think that the thing that gets me the most about this Michael love is that every­one seems to have for­got­ten how com­pletely freaky this per­son they are wor­ship­ing was. All of these “Thriller” dance things and “Thriller” on Party City tele­vi­sion ads and Nev­er­land Ranch and the child-sex thing — what the — ? This per­son, only a few years ago, was con­sid­ered a freak of nature, a pos­si­ble child rapist and under­stand­ably dis­trusted by many peo­ple. Is the new love the prod­uct of a remark­able PR cam­paign? It’s def­i­nitely pos­si­ble. Who knows.

And why do I care? Part of the “Thriller” thing is, I’m sure, a long-lost love of an ephemeral, imag­ined 1980’s and a sim­pler time. Do peo­ple feel lonely for this? Should I care at all?

Give it a lit­tle while. It will go away.

I hope.

God bless the Internet.

The Inter­net Archive, also known as the Way­back Machine, is a won­der­ful thing. You can see the way Google looked a long time ago or the web­site of the New York Times from Sep­tem­ber 11, 2001. It’s not the fastest thing in the world (and come on, if you archive the major­ity of the inter­net for free, do you really have to answer to any­body about the speed of your servers?) but it sure is awesome.

And its awe­some­ness now trav­els over to this site. My first blog that I wrote years ago Cen­tral Ser­vices — The Minstry of Infor­ma­tion Retrieval¹ is on the Way­back Machine. Not all of it, sadly, but a large por­tion of it. So if you start see­ing new posts appear in your RSS reader or you’re just pok­ing around the site avoid­ing the boss, check ‘em out.

1. Taken from the movie Brazil. [↩]

Every­one,
I’ve decided to leave the pro­tec­tive arms of Feed­burner behind for RSS and email feeds. They bro­ken my feeds (for both this site and tellyouwhatithink.com) over and over and wouldn’t couldn’t let me send out the last post that I’d put on tellyouwhatithink.com let­ting every­one know that I was mov­ing the blog to glennvance.com for some stu­pid rea­son. Enough is enough! I’m host­ing the feeds from now on myself. I’ve always prided myself on self reliance. Who needs a Google-run com­pany to do it for you when you can do it yourself?

I’m going to do away with the email feed for awhile. I can’t get the plu­gin that runs it to work. Sorry.

So, if you’re read­ing this, and you sub­scribed at some time to my website’s feed, please point your eyes to the new feed in the upper right of the grey bar at the top of the screen. Thank you.

The other morn­ing Pey­ton, the baby, woke up early, and, being the con­sci­en­tious father, I decided that rather than hav­ing him wake up every­body else in the house that he and I would go and drive around for awhile. It was approach­ing 7 am and I was tired, hav­ing already been up with him for an hour, and I wanted to do some­thing with him besides say “No!” and grab things out of his hands before they entered his mouth. So I grabbed the keys to the truck, loaded him up and we headed out for a morn­ing drive around the lake.

“The lake” is White Rock Lake, and peo­ple of all shapes and sizes go there in the very early morn­ing hours to run, walk, jog and ride bikes. It’s a lovely tran­quil place to just drive (or run, walk, jog or ride bikes) around the lake and look out at the water. Noah loves going there to feed ducks and also try his hand at (very ama­teur­ish) fish­ing. I like to go look at the gigan­tic houses and just while away a lit­tle time before I real­ize how much money I’m blow­ing on gas.

So Pey­ton and I were dri­ving and I’d come to the south­ern por­tion of the lake where the road diverges from the lake­side and I was out in res­i­den­tial land again and there’s a pack of about 20 bicy­clists com­ing towards me. I knew from learn­ing to ride a bike that the safest way to ride is towards traf­fic in a sin­gle file line, but these bicy­clists were only doing the for­mer and not the lat­ter. Because of this there was a giant swarm of bikes and we were on a col­li­sion course with each other.

But I kept dri­ving towards them. “They’ll real­ize they’re going to be killed and they’ll avoid me, the larger vehi­cle.” This did not happen.

I drove on, approach­ing them at about 35 mph. They kept on com­ing straight at me.

I got to about 15 feet from them before I steered clear of them. I also gave them a very notice­able fin­ger, let­ting them know that I was num­ber one and they weren’t.

The arro­gance of some peo­ple! Where do they get off think­ing that nat­u­rally I, the auto­mo­bile dri­ver, am going to avoid them just because they are on bicy­cles? “We are exer­cis­ing and you are con­tribut­ing to mak­ing Dal­las one of the fat­test cities in Amer­ica,” was what I assumed they were think­ing as they ped­aled on.

So bicy­clists, this is your warn­ing. I will take you arro­gant muthas down!