1981 just called. It wants its Internet back.

I recently turned twenty-eight and I had those same thoughts I do every January.  1981… Man that was a long time ago.  This year it was brought into a new perspective since the innauguration was in full swing shortly before my day.  Back in 1981, my mother was home on maternity leave on January 20th as Gov. Reagan became President Reagan.  Three days later the Iranian Emabassy hostages were deboarding a plane and my mother was in labor.

It is no secret that I am now a teacher myself and I will be marrying my partner-in-blogging Back this summer.  TWENTY-EIGHT YEARS.  So when I saw this YouTube retro-rewind on Ben Smith’s Politico blog, I did what I often do; I took a moment to wonder at all the crazy things we have today.

Back will tell you that every so often I throw out a comment like, “Can you believe that I am talking to my parents in a video chat as I WALK around my apartment?!?”  This is not an infrequent occurence for me.  Yes, yes, I get how it happened – the microchip – but at the same time I am still boggled by everything.  It is my hope that this all comes off as a youthful exuberance for life rather than a country bumpkin revealing his naivety.

I HAVE A WEBSITE?!?  Can you believe that?  In 1993 or ‘94 when the Internet went public my dad bought an Internet phone book.  That was the only way to find websites and now I HAVE ONE.

I remember the first time I ever saw two people play a video game online.  My friends younger brother was playing Warcraft II-back when there was no World of it- against his buddy across town over the phone line!  They had to dial between one another.  Now I can turn on an XBox 360 and play any number of games with Farmacy any time we want.

Hey, I know this post isn’t going  to top our charts as most viewed and it probably won’t even have many comments but that doens’t bother me. The next time you are Twittering from you iPhone or pulling out your laptop in a coffee shop to use the FREE WiFi -we used to be charged by the minute for the Internet- take a moment, look around and smile at how CRAZY this would have seemed to the people in the video I linked above.

~Forth

I Heart Terry.

You’ve gotta know that Forth is just chomping at the bit to write about the Inauguration, along with the other four ideas he came up with in the shower last night. However, since I don’t have a whole lot to blog about, I’m going to devote this entry to one of the best things in my life:

Terry Bernadino, from Reno 911!

Of course, he is better known as Nick Swardson, a stand-up comedian and actor that has also appeared in Grandma’s Boy, Click, Blades of Glory, and I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry. Guy has THE best gay voice I’ve ever heard in my life. Pair that with roller skates and a ridiculous attitude, and you’ve loads of entertainment for Back.

Now, since Reno was the first thing I ever saw Nick Swardson in, I wondered if he seriously had the same voice in real life…..I mean not like real exactly, but maybe just close. So, I looked up some of his stand-up on YouTube and I’ll be damned….he sounds pretty much like Terry. Nick is from Minneapolis, so I don’t really understand the logistics, but whatevs.

Terry is an ambassador for Reno…..and heavy on the assador.

**Back.

Field Runners and Paul Krugman

If you watch the news or pick up a paper or anything of the sort, you have seen in the last few weeks talk of the possible stimulus plan.  I believe the super-uplifting name we are calling it now is either American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan or Where’d All the Monies Go?  I don’t remember which.

If you want the down and dirty on the possibilities floating out there, I recommend you read 2008 Nobel Prize Winner in Economics Paul Krugman’s New York Times column or his blog.  Much of what he writes is so marked by clarity that I wonder why I didn’t get what he writes about on my own.  He is that good at making sense of all of these trillions flying around the world.  It has been his opinion as of late that the numbers that Team Obama have been floating are going to be insufficient to fill the vast void that is this economic slowdown.  His best estimate right now shows that the stimulus plan as proposed will only serve to reduce the problem by a third over the next 2-5 years.

Krugman further points out that the plan includes far too much money for ineffective tax cuts.  If you want to know the capabilities of tax cuts to taxpayers and businesses to effectively save the economy, I refer you to the last eight years.  Instead,  many economists are showing numbers that suggest for every dollar spent by the government there is a 1.5 dollar effect on the gross domestic product.  This number got me thinking about an hour ago while I was playing a popular iPhone game in between grading papers.  

Field Runners

Field Runners is one of those games where I have to stop the little enemies marching from one side of the screen to the other.  For each enemy I kill I profit a specified amount of money that I can then turn into more gun emplacements on the map.  Stay with me, I swear this is about the US economy.

After have played half way through I decided to make a sandwich and just let the game run for a few minutes.  I had a pretty sound maze of guns set up and I didn’t think I’d let any little guys make it across.  I though to myself, Well when I come back I’ll have a big chunk of cash and I can make some sweeping changes.  Really build up the end of my maze.  This is where Paul Krugman entered the picture.

Krugman talks about “shovel ready” projects frequently when discussing alternatives to tax cuts that will probably just end up in the bank or used to pay off credit card debt.  Shovel ready means that if given the money, project supervisors could start building whatever it is they are building within six months to a year.  Awhile back I wrote about the idea of high speed rail in America and how that idea excited me.  With the government about to spend Lots and Lots of money we don’t have, I’d like to see some sweeping changes.  

The second largest economy in the world is Japan; Germany is the third.  When these nations decide to make sweeping changes like the Eisenhower Interstate system was here in the 50’s, they do not have as much ground to cover.  Yes, they have other challenges but my point is that the distances don’t seem so astronomical.  Here in America sweeping changes cross four time zones and go through 200 subcommittees it seems.

Five years ago, there would be little chance for high speed rail or any other great national project to get 1-5 billion dollars.  Much like in my iPod Touch/iPhone game, most of the time we operate by spending little amounts of money to add on little improvements; just enough to keep us ahead of the game.  In five to ten years time the US economy is going to have to be robust enough to start paying back some of these many monies we are about to spend.  There will just be no room for the government to spend the billions necessary to complete projects like these.  As long as we are going to spend the stimulus, I am hoping that we can use it on something as monumental as the US Interstate System was in its day, rather than spending it on Best Buy gift cards and Vera Bradley hand bags, shudder.

Sex En Fuego.

Dear friends.

It has been long…too long….I know. However, Forth and I are done bouncing all over the midwest, we still have entirely too many leftover Christmas cookies, and we have returned to continue with (semi) regular blogs.

Today is brought to you by the letter K, for Kings of Leon.

This lovely Nashville band is currently my favorite of the hour–it all started about 4 years ago when I first started working at the coffee shop in the Cities. Two of my co-workers were obsessed with the band and played Aha Shake Heartbreak on the overhead at every opportunity. I liked the sound and how the music made me feel, so I ripped the CD and particularly enjoyed this track:

Though their latest record, Only by the Night, was released nearly 5 months ago, I only listened to the whole thing through this afternoon, and I’m more in love than I was previously. Caleb Followill’s voice is, as many high school girls say nowadays, SEX. Plain and simple. The things he does to the ends of words is like reaching into my chest, removing my still-beating heart, nestling it into the palm of his hand, and then watching it explode into thousands of bright glittering lights and butterfly twinkles and long walks on the beach and shit.

When I hear Kings of Leon on the radio (and I was surprised) I want the song to last and last until I reach the Pacific.

Speaking of the radio, I was unsurprised to hear “Sex on Fire” pulled as their first single off Only by the Night because……..it does not really sound like Kings of Leon of old. This is much like how My Chemical Romance didn’t get airplay till they dropped the metal act and started being “punk.” But nobody really cares about MCR now, so whatevs. There are obvious similarities in the sounds of Only by the Night and Aha Shake Heartbreak, but KOL dropped the quirky oddities of their old sound and thus….radio magic.

Even still, there is no denying that this song:

makes me all sorts of happy….even though there are chickens hanging from the ceiling in the video. We can get beyond that, and the fact that Back is trying to be some sort of music critic. Bottom line is when it comes to Kings of Leon, I like what I hear.

**Back.