Friday, December 29, 2006

New Year's resolutions

I never was much for New Year’s resolutions — not that there’s anything wrong with them.

I always figured that you shouldn’t wait for a special time of the year to do something you wanted to do. You should just basically — I wish Nike hadn’t taken over this saying — do it.

But I know that the New Year’s thing works for some people, so I guess they can be helpful.

If I was the New Year’s resolution type, here would be my Top Ten:

1) Never watch TV during the day. (Unless you work nights, and for you, day is night.) (Or a really good game is on.)

2) Pray more, cuss less.

3) Be especially nice to kids. Childhood should be as fun as possible.

4) Don’t expect a hurricane to hit in ’07 just because we got spared in ’06 … after getting hit in ’05. It doesn’t work like that.

5) Have more patience with morons who almost cut you off when you are driving. Let’s face it; sometimes we almost plow into some other driver.

6) Have less patience with people who waste your time. They will bother you as much as you let them.

7) Try not to complain that it’s too hot in the summer or too cold in the winter. That’s what summer and winter are all about.

8) Eat less, work out more.

9) Vote in those “minor” elections, which for some people is any election that doesn’t include a candidate running for president.

10) Roll with the punches. Some days will be good, some not so good. Adjust accordingly.

Those are mine; what are yours?

P.S. I’m taking a week’s vacation; will blog again in the second week of January. Be good.

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Thursday, December 21, 2006

Person of the Year?

Thanks, it was nothing. I just sent a few e-mails, paid a few bills online, put up a few blog entries and even started this blog, “Back on Earth.” (With this post!) For that I get named Time magazine’s Person of the Year!

What an honor. To be honest, I thought I’d never find this one on my resume.

OK, to be technical about it, it’s not just me. It’s also you … and you … and everybody else responsible “for seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game.”

For this achievement, if you’ll permit that word, I/you/we have been named Time’s Person of the Year for 2006.

Is it just me, or does this choice seem, uh, silly?

Granted, cyberspace — or its latest variant, Web 2.0 — is extremely cool. It probably does represent the biggest change in human history since the development of writing or the automobile. Somebody sure as heck should get a gold trophy for it.

But … all of us?

For starters, some technophobes and poor people still don’t log on first thing in the morning or read newspapers from Europe online at midnight — and, I might add, still function quite well.
Even among “us,” there are lots of folks who are, shall we say, sittin’ in the wagon instead of pulling it. I’m talking about those who:

— spend hours drooling over porn,
— forward Urban Legends to everybody on their contact list,
— try to sell us things we don’t want or need,
— force their crackpot political beliefs or religious theories on everybody else.

And the list goes on. In the macro sense, the Web is wonderful. At the micro level, it still has a few flaws — and Time’s recognition doesn’t seem to differentiate. And how many proud members of our new global village haven’t talked to their sister in months or know the name of their next-door neighbor?

So thanks, Time, but next time pick an actual person to be Person of the Year, not an archetype, not a machine and certainly not everybody. After all, there are 6.6 billion members of Homo Sapiens on this planet. Surely one of us stood out since January.

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