Whew! It’s been some kind of day today. I mean, I don’t talk about my work to much—that’s done on purpose—but I will say that some days are more exciting than others, and today way, for better or worse, one of the more exciting days.
I hate it when that happens on a Friday.
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Sorry for all the crazy videos today, especially the last one, the one with the bikini girls. Frankly, I didn’t even watch that one save to see the one girl with her ass-cheeks hanging out. I mean, I like ass-cheeks as much as the next guy—and maybe even a little more than most—but I’ll be honest: I have no idea what that contest was even supporting. I turned the sound on it off and scrolled through it with this morning’s Tesla songs as my optional soundtrack.
Good old Tesla. I almost feel like I should apologize for putting up Modern Day Cowboy, too. Not my favorite Tesla song, that, but Tesla is far more known for their power ballads, and I didn’t want to start my day with one of those. So… Cowboy it was. But while I like that song okay, the video was nigh-unwatchable. Those guys look so ridiculous when they try to act tough. Not for nothing are all their good songs about love. They’re practically French that way.
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We hear a lot about the Haves and Have-Nots in America. The so-called one-percent and the other ninety-nine. This week, ForeignPolicy.com ran an article/slideshow about employment in the developed world that I think nicely highlights some of the issues involved. I particularly liked the slide on Page 2 that shows the change in jobs (by millions of employees) in the U.S. between 2001 and 2009. Bottom line, employment is fine for folks who can manage complex interactional tasks that are difficult to code into some kind of computer language—because, let’s face it, finding folks who can actually do those tasks reliably is a serious challenge—but if you do something that is essentially repetitive in nature, i.e. assembly line worker and/or bank teller, then the odds are corporate America is looking to replace you with a machine of some kind or ship your job out to some kid making $.08/hour in a suburb or Taipei. For example, ATM Machines have replaced lots and lots of bank tellers.
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| The Teller's Office from the Queensland Nation Bank, circa 1922. They don't build 'em like this anymore because they don't need to. With ATMs, the truth is that they don't need nearly as many tellers. |
The other interesting thing in the report is on page 4, where we learn that that nation’s unemployment problems are largely regional, but unfortunately today’s workers are less likely to relocate for a better job than were past generations. That might seem strange to you—I personally find it downright bizarre—but I think the issue here is really one of real estate more than unwillingness. Which is to say that folks would be happy to move in order to get a better job, but right now, they can’t sell their houses for enough to cover the remaining principles on their mortgages, and it takes a lot of gumption—and quite a bit of savings—to take a loss on your house’s principle.
In any event, I’m not particularly worried about my kids doing well enough in school to find decent jobs when they get older. Both my girls are smart, motivated people, and we’re very tough on them. However, I do worry about the country as a whole because it doesn’t seem like there are a lot of other parents out there with the intestinal fortitude to teach their kids life’s hard lessons. So many parents just want to throw their kids in front of the TV or the X-Box just because they don’t want to deal with all the headaches and the incessant questions, and frankly, the idea of saying “No” to their kids—on anything—is a totally foreign concept. Sally and I see these wimpy parents all the time, even in “nice” families, and it drives me crazy. It makes me wonder who among my girls’ generation is gonna have the sheer motivation and stick-to-it-iveness to do the hard jobs of the future. What kind of future are we building here?
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I read a crazy article on small-time semi-pro MMA fighters on SB*Nation this week. Who even knew there was such a thing? I certainly didn’t.
At any rate, reading the article reminded me a bit of the small-time pro-wrestling scene, save that the fact that these are actual fights—with both more realism and more real bloodshed and bodily harm—seems to have made small-time MMA a better draw. For example, the article itself is about an event in Colorado, and it seems to have been well-attended despite the fact that there was no one of note on the card, and in fact, virtually all of the fighters have actual jobs in addition to their activities with MMA.
Personally, I can’t understand what would make a guy with a regular job get in the Octagon more than once or twice, but y’know, what do I know? I mean, I know we live in a society that increasingly devalues the manly arts of fighting and physical conquest, so maybe that right there is enough to explain it. Maybe guys are just looking for a way to be, well, Men. Nothin’ wrong with that, I suppose. Certainly, it’s a big part of what keeps me in triathlon year after year.
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| Teen Titans: A Kid's Game |
Finally, I finished reading Teen Titans: A Kid’s Game this morning, and I think I now understand DC Comics’ desire to move Cyborg up to the Justice League. I mean, aside from the fact that the Justice League obviously needed a token black guy. A Kid’s Game sees Cyborg take a leadership role in the Teen Titans, and it really works. Not only is it development for that one particular character, but the book as a whole has a kind of High School feel that is, I think, totally appropriate to what is—or ought to be—a core DC Young Adult (YA) title.
In the story, we see the core members of the Titans—Cyborg, Beast Boy, Starfire, and eventually Raven—trying to integrate with new members since some of their old members have recently graduated on the bigger and better things. For example, Nightwing, their old leader, is now firmly established as an adult and a member of the Justice League, and he is apparently also the commander of the Outsiders (although I don’t remember “Nightwing and the Outsiders” ever being a thing), and the old Kid Flash is now the Flash—and also in the JLA—while Donna Troy (Wonder Girl) is dead. So the Titans have to bring in some new members, which makes sense because in the time that the title was apparently out of print, a lot of the primary heroes have taken new apprentices, none of whom have ever been Teen Titans. Tim Drake is now Robin, Conner Kent is now Superboy, Cassie something is now Wonder Girl, and I’ve no idea what Impulse’s secret identity is, but by the end of A Kid’s Game, he’s the new Kid Flash. And it’d be weird in the extreme to just throw those guys onto the Titans without even noting that, hey, Robin and Nightwing aren’t the same guy.
In any event, A Kid’s Game was released in trade paperback in 2004, meaning that the individual issue probably came out in 2003. So that’s almost ten years. Assuming the Cyborg continued to grow as a leader and lean more towards the role of Troop Leader than towards that of Boy Scout, it only makes sense that nearly a decade on, he’s ready to follow Nightwing’s lead into the Big Leagues. Now granted, DC just re-booted the whole universe, and they could’ve used that to de-age Vic Stone and stick him back in the Titans, but that re-boot was selective. The Bat titles, for example, got only a mild updating. And though I don’t know what the plan was for Cyborg, I can well imagine that his fans from the Titans are more than ready to see him finally grow up, move out of the Tower, and get into the Majors. If that’s the case, then kudos to DC for keeping something that was working in the midst of their re-boot. Certainly the re-boot itself seems to have been a good idea, but it that’s so, it’s only because it was done selectively and intelligently.
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So like I said, today was a day. And yeah, I still don’t wanna get into it, but I will say that I think it’s important to live in the moment. You get maybe seventy-five years, and of those, you’re pretty useless for the first five and last five. That gives you a very limited span… not enough time that you really want to waste any of it. So it’s not like there’s a tomorrow. In a cosmic sense, there isn’t.
Live in the moment, and live the best life you can. That’s all I’ve got.
Hell, that’s all any of us have.
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