The Reaper

The title should be a link to Linguistic Erosion where this story is posted. 500 words based on the poem Reaping which is found on this site.

Drill, Faster, Drill!

One of my facebook ads right now is "Gas Prices Are Too Damn High," an organization dedicated to domestic drilling in order to reduce American dependency on foreign oil (and almost certainly to increase profits for American oil companies since someone is paying for the facebook ads) another is for buying a Prius, which is such a contradiction that I can't even get into it right now. What I do want to get into is the false dichotomy of gas prices and American drilling. Oil companies (and shady organizations like this who don't openly say who's funding them) want you to think that the solution to high American gas prices is to lower foreign dependency on oil. Your options, as they tell you, are to ravage our own territory by drilling everywhere there could potentially be oil, or continue to let gas prices rise. In reality though, no matter how much American oil we find, gas prices will ultimately rise since gasoline has to be refined from fossil fuels which take thousands of years to create in the first place. Since our rate of oil consumption is far greater than that of oil creation, more drilling can only hope to postpone the inevitability of our completely depleting supplies of fossil fuels.

While I'm a firm believer in delaying inevitable problems for as long as possible, the pragmatist in me just looks for ways in which these problems can be avoided entirely. In this situation the answer is pretty obvious: what if we didn't have to depend on fossil fuels, whether domestic or foreign? Wouldn't it be great if we could utilize some sort of renewable source of energy rather than draining one which is so outrageously slow to replenish? Wouldn't it be ironic if the very winds we build shelters against could power the heating systems used inside those walls? Wouldn't it be amazing if we could somehow store the energy produced by the sun so that we could use it in the most overwhelming darkness? We are able to do these things, and with little to no detriment to the environments we live in. In fact, the only people negatively impacted by the decreased use and supply of fossil fuels are those who profit from them.

If you were to walk in to any building which meets American structural standards, would you be able to identify their power source without inspection of their utilities? The heat and lighting in a room powered by solar, tidal, nuclear, or wind energy is no different from that powered by oil, the only people who would know the difference are the owners and those providing the power. At this point, most rational thinkers may ask "Well if there's no noticeable difference in the quality of output between mediums, and such a large difference in the availability, why would anyone seek to maintain a clearly unsustainable process?" The answer to this is incredibly simple: because while oil companies have almost no control over the availability of oil, they have even less over that of renewable energy sources.

Oil companies can't produce oil. They can't create oil in laboratories, and despite what they want us to think, they can't magically just find new sources of oil indefinitely. What they can do is drill absolutely everywhere in an effort to find oil. Of course, the chances of just finding a profitable source of oil from digging in a random location are incredibly slim, or else we wouldn't have any sort of energy crisis at all. As we continue to use oil as our primary source of energy without the option of creating any more, it becomes a much scarcer resource, and therefore harder for oil companies to find. This is exactly why gas prices continue to rise. We are currently drilling for oil more than ever, and have better methods of deciding where to drill, but consumer demand for oil continues to increase while our world's supply only decreases as we use it. Now I'm no business expert, but the kind of exclusivity created by these supply and demand factors allows the sellers to raise prices. Allowing for domestic drilling may well open a number of new sources of oil, temporarily decreasing gas prices, but ultimately we would deplete these sources as we have others, leaving others in the same positions we are in now but without the possibility of further procrastination. So for oil companies, the choices are cut profits by maintaining consistent prices regardless of supply and demand factors, hope to maintain profits by continuously raising prices as supply continues to drop while demand raises, postpone inevitable declines in revenue due to supply and demand factors by finding new sources and therefore temporarily maintaining a supply, or produce energy from renewable sources so that their supply can always meet the consumer demand.

Unfortunately, most oil companies have chosen the third option since it means maintaining profits for now. Some have chosen to invest in renewable energy in the hopes that they can somehow make it as profitable as oil has been, but it never will be because making raw petroleum into an energy source requires so much more specialization than it does to harness renewable sources. First, it has to be found. Unlike wind, water, and sun, oil isn't abundant and unused. The geologists and other specialists who are hired by oil companies to determine where best to dig have to be trained, as do the hundreds of people who operate the equipment used to drill and regulate the output of oil. On top of that, oil has to refined before we can use it "efficiently." This forces oil companies to set up places whose only purposes are to turn raw petroleum into products suitable to burn for energy. In comparison to these factors, transportation of petroleum or already refined products is almost as nonexistent as oil companies' ability to produce more oil. The reason this specialization actually works (at least temporarily) for these companies, is that they can keep the whole process out of the hands of their consumers.

Compared to supplying a household with energy from petroleum based sources, doing so with renewable sources is amazingly simpler. With just a small initial investment, most American businesses could outfit themselves with instruments meant to collect and convert renewable energy sources into usable and sustainable energy. Oil companies don't want to invest in renewable energy sources because even though they would be able to keep profiting after we've completely exhausted oil sources, the profits would be so much less than what they make now in the face of such a crisis. Instead they've chosen to act as if they can solve this problem through procrastination, calling on American consumers to support them in their complete lack of responsibility. The only way American citizens can change this approach to renewable energy sources is to make oil less profitable, and the only real way to do that is to lower the demand for it while some supply still exists. If we were all to stop buying oil and petroleum based products, the oil companies would have no choices but to find some other way to profit or just give up. The sad truth behind every oil company is that while they fuel us, we fuel them, and they're not going to break this cycle as long as they can profit from it.

The Infinite City

Click on the title and it should bring you to the site where this was published. You can read for free.

Recycling PSA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u7g7Ou7vx-Y

For my final project I chose to make another public service announcement, though both the style and subject matter of this one are very different from the last. This PSA is about recycling which, as a more widely recognized and less life-threatening issue than pharmaceutical abuse, deserved an entirely different kind of commercial. I ended up using clips from various iconic movies and TV shows involving garbage in an attempt to create a lighthearted feeling of responsibility. Recycling is already an issue that many people care deeply about, so instead of trying to shock viewers with the realistically abysmal amount of things we waste every day, I decided to create more of a friendly reminder that recycling is something important that everyone can take part in.

The visuals used in this commercial are, with the exception of the Star Wars clips, all from comedies. It starts out with a brief scene from Futurama, an almost instantly recognizable show to many American viewers, in which the crew is on a giant pile of 20th century trash which was launched into space. Whether or not the viewer knows the original context of the clip, the basic concepts are all pretty much laid out: they're in space, on a pile of trash, and it's 20th century trash. Viewers who are familiar with Futurama might take away more meaning from this clip than nonviewers, though, because they would know that the show is set in the year 3000, and in that context, when Fry calls the trash a “glorious monument,” it's not much of a metaphor. They might immediately take away the implied meaning that our trash will be here long after we are gone, but for those who are not viewers of Futurama, many of the other visuals used also include this meaning in some sense.

As well as being mostly comedy, most of the video clips I used were also set in the future. The most obvious examples of this are the Futurama and Star Wars scenes, but the garbage avalanche scenes are from the movie Idiocracy, in which the solution to waste management continued to be dumping for another 500 years. Even the Simpsons clip at the end has a futuristic feel to it since the waste depicted is a bright green river of nuclear waste through which Radioactive Man floats in a Flash-looking costume. The only exception to this theme is the clip from 30 Rock, which is set in the present, although Tina Fey's cry of “Mortality!” as plastic bags are blown into a tree can be seen as a less explicit version of the idea expressed by the first clip's memorial comment: our trash will outlive us.

I chose to use mostly future oriented clips because recycling and waste management aren't really the kinds of issues that can be once-and-for-all resolved. Even if we managed to reduce our waste as much as possible, we would have to continue doing so in the future also, or the same problems will continue to arise. By using future oriented visuals of trash this idea that there is no quick fix is very subtlety implied, and the feeling of responsibility is also included through the idea of working towards a better future.

Besides being mostly future oriented comedy, most of the clips used in this commercial are also easily recognized. The original Star Wars Trilogy is of course, one of the most widely known series of movies ever created, and the white Storm Trooper armor seen in the clips used is immediately evocative of the trilogy even to those who wouldn’t recognize Luke, Hans, and Leia. Both the Futurama and Simpsons visuals are easily recognizable due to their well-known animation styles, the Simpsons especially since they’ve been a part of pop culture for almost a quarter of a century. By using iconic visuals viewers should be able to identify more easily with the scenes shown, even though they are fictional and set in the distant future.

Earlier I mentioned that the attempted tone of the commercial was one of “lighthearted responsibility,” which may sound like an oxymoron, but is certainly the easiest kind of responsibility to bear. The entire reason satire exists is to bring attention to important subject manner in a non-threatening way. As Freud so dryly puts it in his Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,
“If [any] speech is given such a marked appearance of logic which, on careful examination, is recognizable as being only an appearance, the truth behind it is that the joke declares the [speaker] to be in the right; the thought does not venture to do so seriously... It is only this employment of sophistry for the disguised representation of truth that gives it the character of a joke.” (128)

In other words, we recognize satire as humor because it appeals to our ideas of what is right by asserting the opposite. For already widely known subjects like recycling, comedy can be an especially useful tool in reinforcing basic ideas to which the viewer has already been repeatedly exposed.

While comedy can be helpful in making responsibility easier to bear, it can also have the drawback of being easily dismissible after the initial thought has passed. To make up for this, I reinforced the idea of responsibility through the Radiohead song, “Just.” This song's chorus repeats the phrase “you do it to yourself,” which may be a little harsh since many people are trying, but we could all be doing more and this song makes the commercial as a whole emphasize individual effort. When combined with the future oriented visuals, the overall effect should be to foster a feeling of worthwhile responsibility.

Of course, just about every individual piece used to create the commercial has to be taken out of its original context to be given the pro-recycling meaning. The exception to this might be the Futurama clips, since they were from an episode criticizing 20th century waste management procedures. The Star Wars movies were not about recycling, and a (entirely hypothetical) case could be made against recycling if one were to assume that the Death Star was only built with a trash compactor because of their own inefficient recycling program. The garbage avalanche clips from Idiocracy are only slightly out of context because the movie asserts the mountains of trash as more of a policy (or lack thereof) problem than one of individual effort. The episode of “30 Rock” from which the trash bag clip came isn't our trash outliving us, but about the futility of trying to remain in control of a world dominated by chaos. Of course the song used almost certainly wasn't about recycling, though it can be interpreted any number of ways. In each of these cases I have assigned new meaning to these pieces of the commercial by placing them in different contexts than they were created under.



Works Cited

“A Big Piece of Garbage.” Futurama. Twentieth Century Fox. 11 May, 1999. Television.

“Everything Sunny All the Time Always.” 30 Rock. NBC. 28 April, 2011. Television.

Freud, Sigmund. Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc, 1960. Print.

Judge, Mike, dir. Idiocracy. Twentieth Century Fox, 2006. Film

Lucas, George, dir. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. Twentieth Century Fox, 1977. Film.

“Radioactive Man.” The Simpsons. Twentieth Century Fox. 24 September, 1994. Television.

A Clean Well-Lighted Conflict

In accordance with Hemingway's style and conventions, “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” is not really a story about a place, but rather about a particular set of mentalities which the place represents. The real story is told almost entirely through character dialogue which reveals what the existence of clean well-lighted places means to each. In this sense, the cafe in which most of the story takes place is as much a plot device to reveal character psychology and a deeper philosophy as it is a physical setting.

According to the William B. Bache criticism, Hemingway uses the characters of “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” to represent two conflicting ways of life: “The young waiter standing for a materialistic way of life: the older waiter and the old man standing for a nihilistic.” (1956) Bache later uses all three characters to create a sort of continuum of age-related conflict in which both spiritually devoid mentalities fall. At one end of the continuum the young waiter represents the materialistic viewpoint, though Bache also mentions that it has been suggested that the young waiter is already starting to become jaded with his materialistic notions and is on his way towards the nihilistic side of the continuum. Since Bache claims that “with the passage of time materialism often loses its meaning,” we can view the older waiter and the old man as representing two different stages of life which have progressed passed materialism and into nihilism. In this sense, the three characters can be seen not just as separate entities each representing the seemingly polar values of materialism and nihilism, but also as a threefold division of a greater philosophy which includes both of these mentalities.

There are several lines throughout the story which would seem to imply that the younger waiter's mentality is not purely materialistic, but is in fact already tarnished by the spots of nihilism which come with age. If we assume the lines “’Nothing’,” and “’He has plenty of money,’” are spoken by the young waiter, they become the first glimpses of his materialistic values that the reader is granted. According to the Joseph Gabriel criticism, if spoken by the young waiter “’Nothing,’” comes to mean “For no reason,” (1961) expressing the young waiter's materialistic notions that possession can bring happiness and therefore anyone with money has no reason to despair. He briefly breaks from this materialistic mentality, or at least seems to understand that it may not work for everyone, when he tells the old waiter “’A wife would be no good to him [the old man] now.’” In this sense the young waiter seems to recognize that the comfort he derives from knowing his wife is waiting for him at home cannot be the same for the old man who has lived long enough to see such things come and go. This is symbolic of the overall philosophy that materialism shifts towards nihilism with age, as the longer one lives the more things one sees fade away into nothingness. As Bache puts it, “From the older waiter to the old man lies a progression in despair, for the three characters are actually parts of an implied progression from youth through middle age to old age.” (1961)

The next glances the reader is given of the young waiter’s shifting mentality are in the exchanges between him and the old waiter after the old man is kicked out of the café. When the older waiter asks of the younger “’What is an hour?’” the response he is given is “’More to me [the young waiter] than to him [the old man].’” This clearly shows his materialistic tendencies, but can also be used to once again demonstrate that he can at least understand the nihilistic side. Perhaps the line which best reveals this shift comes shortly after this, and is one of the only places in the story where the young waiter’s dialogue is expanded upon with a brief glimpse of his thoughts.

“’No it is not’” are the most revealing words the young waiter says throughout the whole of “A Clean Well-Lighted Place” because they are the only words which explicitly express his understanding of ideas beyond his own materialistic notions. Every other place which would seem to indicate this same conclusion does so through implication, and each could very well be inferred as meaning something else entirely. What makes this line unique is narration which follows it: “He did not wish to be unjust. He was only in a hurry.” With these two short sentences, Hemingway tells the reader that the young waiter at least partially understands the meaning of the café, or clean well-lighted places in general. Had he been a pure representation of materialism, the young waiter almost certainly would not have agreed with the older one, or if he had it would have been only a method of ending a conversation which he cannot appreciate. The line “He did not wish to be unjust,” shows that the young waiter truly does believe what he says while “He was only in a hurry,” reinforces his materialistic side. With these brief, simple sentences, Hemingway shows us that the while the young waiter has mostly materialistic notions he is already beginning to adopt the nihilistic viewpoint of the older waiter.

Through these brief snippets of dialogue the reader can see the young waiter as “even now clutching at the straws of materialism.” (Barthes 1956) Since he would have killed himself if not for his niece's intervention, the old man clearly represents the extreme nihilistic end of the continuum. Barthes calls the older waiter the “truest symbol of modern man,” because, like most people, he is somewhere between the materialistic and nihilistic views. His utterance of the nihilistic Lord's Prayer shows that he is clearly leaning towards that end of the spectrum, yet his ability to understand both the young waiter's viewpoint and the stability of his job show that he is not so far gone as the old man.


Works Cited
A Clean, Well-Lighted Place by Ernest Hemingway". Short Story Criticism. Ed. Jenny Cromie. Vol. 40. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. 153-269. UMass Dartmouth. Gale. Literature Criticism Online. 15 December 2011 

Welcome to Strangeland

Today marks the day of Aaron Yates's (better known as Tech N9ne) 40th birthday, but more importantly for Technicians everywhere, today is also the day that Welcome to Strangeland becomes available across America. As Tech's 14th studio album since '99, it's safe to safe that fans already know exactly what to expect from him: rock n roll beats, haunting opera sounding vocals, and the brutally paced rhythmic rhyming of the independent rap giant himself, Tech N9ne.

Right off the bat, Welcome to Strangeland provides all three of these elements in the song "Stars." It opens with a deep voice-over with an eerily beautiful piano accompaniment, eventually giving way to the bass/snare/clap rock beat and the lyrics. In tracks like this it's easy to see where Tech takes his name from: he spits verse like bullets, and just when you think he's through he reloads and comes at you even faster. Excellent use of breaks throughout the song give exactly that feeling: stop, reload, kill it, while the beautifully harmonized chorus haunts you even after it's gone.

"Stars" gives way to the album's title track when the star lands in Strangeland. To introduce him, the outro in "Stars" is the intro from the track "Strangeland" off of All 6's and 7's. After the first track, which is an all Tech track, it's easy to forget that this is the fourth Tech N9ne Collabos album, which means it heavily features the other Strange Music artists, or really just anyone Tech feels like rapping with. "Welcome to Strangelan" gives us the album's first taste of versatile vocal wizard, Krizz Kaliko, who in my mind immediately becomes the Willy Wonka of Strangeland (Gene Wilder not Johnny Depp).

The Tech/Kaliko combination has always reminded me of a more wide-ranged Dre and Eminem, and this one's no exception. First of all, let me just say that I am not exaggerating when I say that I could listen to just the beats of Tech N9ne songs all day, their rapping over them is just icing on the cake. They are one of the foundations of the entire Tech N9ne style simply because they're so very different from every other artist out there. "Welcome to Strangeland" features bass heavy synthesizers over a moving bass/rim/clap drumbeat. The Krizz Kaliko chorus is the perfect welcome to the rest of the Tech N9ne collabos, who are featured more heavily in the rest of the album

"Unfair," the third track on Strangeland, feature Kaliko and Ubiquitous and Godemis, both of Ces Cru. This is another perfect example of unique Tech N9ne beats, but the main focus of this song has to be the chorus. How many rhymes for "Unfair" can you think of? In the chorus of this song Tech gives you about 30 of them in 15 seconds. The rest of the song is excellent, the Ces Cru verses are particularly well written, but there's just no competing with the chorus.

The fourth track, "Kocky," features Kutt Calhoun and Jay Rock, and features a beat that sounds incredibly similar to Dre songs. The slow simple beat makes this song all about the verses, which are great but fall short after the first three mind-blowing songs. The next track is another all Tech track. "Who Do I Catch" is another slow beat track, but this time with a soothing piano melody and the fine vocals of the lovely Liz Suwandi. This song takes the album in a dark direction, which continues until the eighth track. "Bang Out" features the 816 Boys (they won a grammy for their song "Aeriola," remember?) and a slow beat which contains haunting high-pitched vocals.

Track 9 is "Beautiful Music," the last all Tech verse track, but this one with Krizz Kaliko working his magic on the chorus. This song doesn't have that great of a beat (nice bass drums though), but it shows how Tech and Kaliko work so perfectly together. Tech keeps his verses moving quickly which are interrupted only for Kaliko's stunning and meaningful choruses. "Won't You Come Dirty" is the 10th track on the album, and it's one truly different from the most other Tech songs. It features Young Bleed and Stevie Stone, and has a slow techno feel to it. It's not a bad song, but as Tech's style is already like a combination of rap and hard rock, adding the techno feel is just a little off-putting.

"Sad Circus," as its name implies, is the beginning of another set of songs from Tech's darker side. It features Brotha Lynch Hung and Courtney Kuhnz as well as a tragically beautiful piano melody. If you prefer Tech's slower depressing songs, you'll like the last five tracks best, as they're all like mixtures of rock ballads and remorseful rap songs. The four after "Sad Circus" showcase the beautiful vocal talents of ¡Mayday!, Krizz Kaliko, Kutt Calhoun, and Jay Da 3rd.

So, like most Tech N9ne albums, Welcome To Strangeland progresses from upbeat to down-tempo, features artists you wouldn't have heard of otherwise, and is worth whatever you pay for it. It's the kind of album that you can't even appreciate properly the first time you listen to it.

Ask Your Doctor About You PSA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgw892-ZwBA

For my visual rhetoric creative midterm project I have chosen to make a public service announcement urging people to have actual conversations with their doctors instead of simply asking for a drug they've seen advertised on TV. The only visual components I chose to use for this PSA were attention grabbing red slides with thick black text for high contrast and easy reading. I considered using still images in addition to the text, but decided that this might distract the viewer from the real highlights of the commercial which are the text and the sound. There are a total of 14 different slides, though most of them are only 1 word different than the ones before and after. I chose to set up the visual portion like this mostly because I feel that this simplistic method of conveying my message compliments what is itself a simple message (Ask your doctor about you), but also because this is my first time using any movie editing software and this method resembled an advanced powerpoint type format. Every audio clip featured in this video is direct from a U.S. Pharmaceutical commercial which has been broadcast on TV in the past 10 years, and it was a simple process to add these sounds to the still images I had created.

While setting up the visual component was easy, designing it was a little more difficult. To begin, I watched about an hour of pharmaceutical commercials online to establish some things they had in common. I ended up finding 4 common themes* that exist in almost all of them, and a fifth which is in most of the ads of a particular type (possible fatalities appear in a large number of pharmaceuticals designed to alleviate symptoms of psychological disorders), but due to time constraints I only sampled clips regarding 3 themes: talking to your doctor, side effects, and possible fatalities. The two that I did not use were an establishment of symptoms (many of which could be caused by a wide range of disorders) and product superiority (ie “#1 doctor recommended,” “the only prescription which treats/proven to treat...” etc). I didn't use these common pharmaceutical advertisement themes due to time constraints with my own commercial, but also because of the five I established, they are the only ones which are designed by the pharmaceutical companies to sell the product, while the others are what they absolutely need to say.

First of all, since what I have focused on in this commercial is prescription drugs rather than over-the-counter or illegal drugs, I have chosen to rely rather heavily on the morality of doctors in general. The argument may be made that pharmaceutical lobbying in not just government but in healthcare practices and doctors' offices is the real problem, since they are paid to hand out prescriptions for certain drugs and not others, but that's certainly not an issue I have the power to affect through rhetoric. Instead, I am assuming that all doctors faithfully uphold the Hippocratic Oath, and that the burden is therefore on the American public to seek, at the very least, a basic understanding of their own medical conditions. That is why the first focus of my commercial is on the common theme of “ask your doctor.”

To legally obtain prescription drugs, you must go through your doctor. This is why pharmaceutical companies lobby in healthcare practices and tell you to talk to your doctor about their product. They list a long list of symptoms and a product which they say will alleviate them, and ask you to do the work of bringing these subjects up to your doctor, and the bribe the doctors to recommend their brand because it would be a shame to do all that work and lose the money to a generic brand. All of this, though, starts with the viewer, whose unprofessional diagnosis already comes with a cure in mind. By asking my own viewers to talk to a doctor about themselves, I hope to shift doctor-patient conversations from patient demands towards doctors' recommendations. Again, this places a strong emphasis on the individuals involved in the doctor-patient relationship; it is not meant to change how direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising operates, but how we respond to it individually.

The second focus of my commercial is “side effects.” This is a part of pharmaceutical advertising which they are legally required to include in their commercials, and it's always the part they want to finish quickly. This portion of their commercials is best known for rushing through a list of everything from headaches to internal bleeding, and doing it all in a cheery voice while images of puppies and happy couples flash by. My commercial does just the opposite; there are no happy images but there are also no horrible side effects. The idea here is that having an actual conversation with your doctor may not bring you that puppy, beautiful wife, or perfect lawn, but it could bring you piece of mind. In both the first and second portions of my commercial, the audio tracks are meant to remind the audience of the prevalence of pharmaceutical advertisements by placing the soothing voices out of context.

The third part of my commercial is the most serious one. This uses a statistic which I gained from a Fox News story, but which they gained from the CDC. Fox goes on to say that there are more annual deaths from prescription drugs than from heroin and cocaine use combined in the U.S. And that the prescription drug overdose rate is four times higher than it was a decade ago (Fox News). The message on the two slides used in this portion is clear: thousands of people die every year from prescription drugs but no one dies from having a straightforward conversation with their doctor. These slides and the final one are accompanied by seven audio segments from real pharmaceutical commercials explaining that their product may lead directly to the user's death through heart attack, stroke, coma, or suicide.

The final slide shown is a repetition of the overall message of the commercial. The possible fatality audio plays through this slide to reinforce the necessity of the message. What viewers should understand from this commercial is that prescription drugs are dangerous and should not be taken unless absolutely necessary as dictated by a doctor with a full understanding of the patient's condition.

* As an interesting side note, I found that many non-prescription pharmaceuticals were fond of boasting about how many doses they required to be effective. This was mostly in terms of “1 a day” “half as many as the leading brand” “lasts twice as long as the leading brand” and so on.


Sources:

“Abilify for Depression Ad.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsqJju3ePJU

“Celebrex Ad.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GvYI4VdVEI

“Cymbalta TV Ad (2005)” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JkKzVKnR7w

“Detrol LA.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVF2ek95Ltw

Fox News. “Surge in Accidental Prescription Drug Deaths. ”http://video.foxnews.com/v/1253221053001/surge-in-accidental-prescription-drug-deaths/

“Lunesta You Can't Stop Thinking? Suicide By Butterflies! (American Commercial FAIL)” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRUVkZ7DKlc

“Prozac TV Ad – Let the Sun Shine In.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p5NzaRcAgY

“Real Valtrex Commercial.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iLTfG75s6g

“Restasis Ad (2009)” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUIyE_q7SAo

Words Are More Than Just Ideas

As I write this, I have just finished unpacking a collection of books left behind by my grandparents from their passing earlier this year. Despite the generational gap between us, much of what I found myself placing on bookshelves were things I have read before. Classic works of fiction such as Treasure Island, 20,000 Leagues, a collection of Sherlock Holmes stories, Frankenstein, and The Wind in the Willows, greeted me as old friends, as did the poetry of Robert Frost and Longfellow. While I already have digital copies of most of these on my Nook, I found that holding the old, printed copies was evocative of a whole different set of emotions and memories than those gained through simply reading the stories themselves.

For a great deal of human history, the written word has been the only way to be sure that your words would be heard by future generations. We may credit an unknown man named Homer for the creation of some of the greatest and most renowned stories ever told, but most historians agree that each bard would tell the stories differently, while keeping only the major points the same. One can only imagine how many stories and oral traditions have been forgotten over the ages simply because they were not written down. While we may never know who the man William Shakespeare was, or even if he was the definitive author of all the works attributed to him, the words he wrote have been copied, reprinted, read, and even re-imagined by countless people. While we may consider the availability of such well-known texts trivial, many societies, both historical and modern day, have used censorship to deny writings to their people.

I consider myself a fairly modern person; I grew up in a house filled with computers, (both working and in pieces) I was born into a world where we can communicate and share information with each other effortlessly, and I dream of a day when mankind can do the same on other worlds. I believe that the ease with which we can share and access information is one of the defining aspects of my generation, and that such availability, if properly used, is beneficial to all those involved. Seldom do I enjoy looking back at our own history, content instead to keep looking forward, but as I flipped through their delicate pages, I could not help but wonder at the history contained in the books themselves.

By far the oldest of all the books I recently unpacked was the collection of Longfellow poems, which was printed in Cambridge in 1882. It was an odd feeling to hold in one hand a thing which was created more than a century before my own birth, odder still to imagine how many people had held the very same book. How many had been touched by the words, or even just the illustrations within, and how many of them carried this influence with them to share with others? When was it first read with the assistance of an electric light? When was it first transported by an automobile? Even sitting on a shelf in a single room for all that time, how many memories long ago forgotten might it have seen? I can't speak for the book's history any more than it can, but I do know that simply by being there it has more history than any digital copy ever could. While I love my Nook for allowing me to carry an entire library around with me wherever I go, I seriously doubt that one day my grandchildren will also gaze at its screen.

I often find it hard to imagine a world without the technology that we take for granted every day. As I said, I look forward to the future; I prefer to imagine a further evolutions and applications of the things we are just beginning to understand now. At the same time though, it scares me to think that one day, not long from now, there will come a time when all books are considered relics such as the Longfellow now sitting on a shelf in my room. Will our own histories be typed, written, or simply forgotten? Might a future society look at the practice of printing words on paper as we look at hieroglyphs on stone tablets: not just obsolete, but barbaric? What will we leave behind for them to remember us by?

If these words are found years, decades, or even centuries from now, may they be in some way physical and not just pixels on a screen.

R.I.P. Charles and Anne Reid

Reaping

Weeping willows whip in the wind

On the banks of a river they've cried.

They drink in the mornings

And mourn in the evenings

Breathing each other's sighs.

Cloaked in their shadows a pale figure wanders

Beneath the gnarled branches of woe

With sickle in hand

He harvests their sorrow

And tends this most ancient of groves.

All You Need to Know

Wonder at the universe

And wander outside its bounds.

So much of what makes life worth living's

Intangible right now.

Earn your money earnestly

And with it break your bread.

Make your bed in a humble home

But take pride in your head.

Idle minds the Devil's playthings

Their busy hands his tools.

Doing without understanding

Is the work of fools.