Morford

Sorry for the hiatus, spending much less time surfing this summer...

Mark Morford has another scorching hot treatise on the state of society over at the SF Gate - he discusses the scientific hurtle towards, "...advances that open so many cans of ethical and spiritual worms it shakes us to the very core of what we believe, of who we think we are and where we fit in and What It All Means...Hence, religion. This (at least partially) explains why so many are so eager to cling to religious dogma, to some sort of immovable, reliable framework of understanding, something that can help make sense of it all, even if making sense of it all involves shutting off your brain and killing your divine intuition and soaking up giant gobs of blind faith so you don't have to actually swim in those bloody murky confusing pools of ethics and meaning and actually thinking for yourself. Mmm, numb groupthink. It's what's for dinner."

Go read the rest!

I'm Drunk And Naked On MySpace!

The always spot-on Mark Morford takes on what it means to be part of the Generation Next with his column this week. Does it really matter that a wide swath of society is putting up for the whole world to see, every drunken body shot, every joint passed around at a party, EVERY SINGLE PICTURE from your cheap digital camera that you happily snapped away, not censoring in any way all the blurry, out of context, out of legality memories that will now become part of the information superhighway. Well the answer is mostly no, no it doesn't matter. He supposes that eventually people will get over it, stop caring completely about all the silly shit you did in college, even if there exists a permanent record like no generation before has been able to collect. I personally uncheck all the privacy boxes in facebook and myspace, leaving my online avatar only available to people that I at least loosely know from somewhere. Anyways enjoy the article because his writing is so much better than mine:

It is like watching ferrets finger-paint. It is like watching kittens with ADD chase flashlight beams. It is like reading only US Weekly and eating chocolate Pop-Tarts and masturbating with a brown Microsoft Zune. Interesting for a few minutes, then it's all oh my God my brain is seeping through my toes and everything hurts and please make it stop.