-
The Genre Debacle
Ever since I started digitizing my music library, I’ve struggled with the pronunciation of the word “genre.” I started out saying John Ree, perhaps imagining him as a pioneer in the field of music classification; sort of a spiritual ancestor to the Music Genome Project. Later, I adopted the slurred buzzing intonation that inhabits a…
-
Barrier to Entry
A while back (2006, to be exact) Coke started My Coke Rewards, a semi-digital version of those frequent customer reward programs. It’s supposed to be very simple: you buy Coke brand drinks and enter the code under the cap online. Apparently now you can even text the codes in on your cell phone (how delightfully…
-
Deadlights
It’s been raining a lot around here lately, which means a lot of driving around with windshield wipers. A while back I replaced my broken wiper blades with new ones by Rain-X, followed quickly by replacing my blue windshield washer fluid with bright orange product also from Rain-X. The combination of the two has created…
-
The Religion of Science Fiction
Good science fiction authors are at the same time remarkably prophetic in their thinking and humorously influenced by their own time. I remember laughing aloud when one of the characters in Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land began darning a sock. To me, it was hilarious that in a futuristic world with space travel, characters would…
Matter, Energy, and Life of Michaela A. Castello.