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Michael Jackson was probably a complex character, just like every single one of us is probably a complex character. He probably did a lot of good things (would being successful at making music be considered a good thing?) and he probably did a lot of wrong things as well. A number of years ago, I got the distinct impression that we all wanted Michael Jackson to go away. The pejorative “Wacko Jacko” gained traction and he was widely maligned by entertainers, reporters, and regular folks. I’m not saying anything new.

Well, we got our wish. He went away. In his death, he’s being celebrated and he should be. Redemption is part of the human experience. I don’t want to take away from the rituals we perform when one passes away, no matter how far from our dailies lives they exist. It just all seems so duplicitous. The very voices and faces that ridiculed the person for who he was now celebrate his life or mourn his passing. I’m having a hard time believing that it’s anything but business for them. Just as they capitalized on his eccentricities and transgressing of our social mores, they’re capitalizing on his death. Part of me recognizes that this part of business. The reality is that one of the purposes of business (if not THE business) is to meet demand and demand comes from us.

So, do we mourn out of pure loss or do we mourn as an act of collective guilt? It was our prurience that brought Michael Jackson’s behavior to the forefront so we could flog him with our words and our brows. I feel that he was, in many ways, one of our modern scapegoats.

My own feelings on Mr. Jackson? I didn’t know him enough to like or hate him. I didn’t like the character Michael Jackson that the media showed me but we all know how that is. I really wanted the stories to go away but really, if it wasn’t him, it would be someone else so my complaint was a general one not one with him per se. His business was his business and the business that other people had with them was just that. My life was in no way enriched by reading the latest goings on.

The one thing we should be talking about that we aren’t talking about is our faceless aggregate prurience and our conceit to being this all-knowing eye. I’d like to see people asking if it’s okay to form an opinion on a subject after reading one news article. What about two? Read five to seven paragraphs on a subject and all of a sudden we’re experts. We’re informed. I just don’t think it works like that.

And yes, yes I am quite guilty of thinking that way myself. That’s why it’s worth talking about.

I can’t tell if this is just the waxing and waning of mood but these days I’ve felt rather uninterested in politics. I’m not sure if uninterested is the word. I don’t know what the word is. There’s a quote and an almost-quote that seem to reflect how I feel. My friend Craig once said, “Peter, you’re making a common mistake. You believe that politics is about governance. It’s really just about winning”.

And to bend a quote Richard Rorty once said on Entitled Opinions, the problem with politics is that anyone can say anything about anything and get away with it. Maybe this is what apathy feels like.

I really don’t know.

A great find that was posted on the philosophy sub-Reddit. As an aside, I’ve found the way to a meaningful Reddit experience is to aggressively use sub-Reddits. Now that I can’t see the main page or anything that would make it to the main page, I’m much happier with the site.

Okay, so the schedule is 2 p.m. every Saturday at Wendler Jr. High.

I just thought I’d mention that I thought the ad by Chevy regarding Honda and their lawnmower was pretty tasteless that I saw during last night’s NBA Finals. I think the ad’s been around for a while since I did a Google search and saw mentions of it before the Finals.

I wonder what sort of support they’re looking to create with that kind of, “Ugly American” ad when they’re getting hand outs from the government. Just sayin’.

I sometimes amaze myself how rude I can get when I’ve been concentrating on math for a few hours. I don’t know how to describe it, it’s almost like listening to someone else use my voice. There’s the small fact that I do actually feel the way that I do that leads to me saying the rude crap I say but I don’t want to feel that way. When Rachel calls for me and I’m already up with my yogurt, there’s zero reason for me to be annoyed that she wants to talk to me and I know this. Yet. Well, I’m annoyed and then I say stuff I want to punch myself for. Well, she’s a better person than I am and either doesn’t notice it or ignores it or just forgives me for it.

Oh, and Dave, until Opera can take my Delicious RSS feed and post them as something other than articles,  I don’t care how snappy and awesome your Opera is. As much as I want to use another more niche browser, the reality is that I keep coming back to Firefox/Flock. I can’t quit you Flock.

Ain’t nobody’s business but our own.

I’m going to fanboy it up a bit right now. Opera 10 beta came out and I’m using it. It’s great.

I like the tab thumbnails, although I probably won’t use it much. I love how you can customize the speed dial, although I was already hacking mine for extra slots anyway. At least now I can synch those extra speed dial slots.

Overall it seems snappier, and I even like the new skin.

I think overall though, I’m most excited about the HTTP header info you can get at with Dragonfly.

In other news, I’ve been doing work on a Wordpress site for a client at work. So… uh… maybe I’ll actually get started on redesigning this site.

Wasn’t it awesome to download hundreds of songs over Napster and spend hours sorting through them, figuring out which ones you liked, and then heading down to the record store and dropping a mint on albums? I wonder if Mammoth is even still open.

Had it not been for Napster it would have been much longer, if at all, before I had discovered Pavement, The Dismemberment Plan, Radiohead, Red Stars Theory, 764-HERO, Matthew Good Band, and so much more. In fact, the hundreds of albums of 90s in my shed is a direct product of the awesome days of Napster.

I had fun.

I’ve never really liked Preview. When I have to read a PDF, Preview makes it painful. I could’ve gone the Acrobat Reader route but I opted instead to go with Okular. That meant I had to install KDE 4 Mac. The installation process was actually pretty painless. While ugly as sin, Okular makes reading PDFs on my laptop pretty simple.

While we’re on the topic of PDFs, I want to mention that I’ve had a really good experience with Yep! I have over 600 PDFs on my laptop and the need was really high for something that could organize them with minimal pain. Yep does that. I should mention their support is extraordinarily helpful. I had some issues with my trial version and their support team worked with me until I got them resolved. They didn’t owe me anything, I hadn’t even bought their product but they did anyhow. Great team, great software.

My buddy Jack and I were looking at subscribing to Google Groups via Google Reader today and he couldn’t subscribe to his. Of course, I could subscribe to mine. Jack notices that his requires a sign in and mine doesn’t and he does a search and finds this:

I guess I don’t understand the problem. Why do Google Groups and Google Reader not understand each other? To take the obvious and unfair pot shot, these guys are geniuses. They’ve solved harder problems than this over and over again. It’s either harder than it looks or they just are too busy to fix it or both. It’d be nice though.