Follow my logic here:

If you don’t fill out the census, the population of your house, municipality, state, ethnic group, gender, etc. doesn’t get counted.

If you don’t get counted, you lose out when it comes time for congressional redistricting, transportation funding, government aid, and various other kinds of targeted, taxpayer-funded appropriations.

If you lose out on these benefits, someone else is getting your share, and will end up being disproportionately over-represented in all of these things.

Therefore, those people who are over-represented are the people who bothered to fill out the census.

Who is the government strongly encouraging to fill out their census so that they can stand up and be counted? Women, minorities, people in urban areas, illegal immigrants, etc.

Ergo, Angry White People (TM) don’t fill out the census, becoming disenfranchised at the expense of women, minorities, etc.

How does this benefit Angry White People (TM), you ask? It doesn’t. It makes life harder for them. They become Even Angrier White People (TM), now with even more racist paranoia! And since this all happens on the watch of a Democratic President, Congress, etc., you can be sure that the Republican National Committee will be inciting them to vote the bums out.

Thus, working-class Angry White People (TM) will continue to vote against their own self-interest, even as the government is doing more for the working class than anyone’s done in over 40 years. Meanwhile, people like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh get higher ratings, sell more advertising, and become even richer than they already are.

Care for some tea?

It was a pretty torturous process–oh, I’ll get around to reading Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist someday (no I won’t); it’s good to have a copy of the Norton Anthology of English Literature around (no isn’t); what if I want to read The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test again? (go to the library)–but by the time was said and done, I’d filled up old beer boxes with 85 books. It felt incredibly freeing; I think I’m going to go to work on Round 2 pretty soon. Maybe I’ll start a 1-for-1 policy: if a new book comes in, an old one has to go.

People have so much trouble getting rid of their old books. No matter how ratty, outdated, or uninteresting the volumes may be, people are always trying to find a good home for them. There’s a real antipathy towards the idea of throwing books in the garbage. I’m certainly no exception to this, and so it was great to discover Google Books. Before listing the books on Amazon.com or bringing them in for credit at my local used book store, I added them to my “library” in Google. Each book was tagged with the reason I had the book in the first place (e.g. “college”) and whether or not I got around to reading it before giving it the old heave-ho. Now, in the highly unlikely event that I decide I absolutely need to re-read Francis Harper’s Iola Leroy, I’ve got institutional memory of having owned it, and I can either read the text online, borrow it from the library, or re-acquire a used copy.

To borrow a computing metaphor, it’s like moving old data off-site to an Iron Mountain facility. And I’m that much closer to being free of the burden of unwanted crap I just can’t seem to throw away.

1. The presidential limo still has the new car smell.
2. The President is a lame duck.

All this business about Obama brainwashing the youth of America is a bunch of dittohead Limbaugh nonsense. By giving the “issue,” such as it is, this kind of legitimacy, people are talking about it on Glenn Beck’s terms. And Glenn Beck his ilk are wingnut a-holes given bully pulpits out of proportion to their being representative of the nation’s pulse to an elephantine degree.

I’m not providing any links to any articles about this story–pro or–con, because I don’t think it deserves the attention, and the purveyors of this crap don’t deserve the rewards of higher Google rankings and more banner ad revenue for making the nation more stupid than it already is. A problem, I might add, the media has been heavily contributing to for the better part of 25 years.

Oh, and heaven forbid that youth of America are forced to learn the lesson that sometimes the President will be someone you don’t like or agree with but you still have to take part in civic life.

How is it possible that Oasis were so good from 1994 through 1998 and so atrocious afterwards? Now that they have been mediocre for nearly twice as long (ten years) as they were radiant (five), one wonders what happened. Well, I do.

I have three theories:

1. The Man From Stratford — Noel Gallagher is not really the person who wrote all those great songs, and the original songwriter has died, retired, or been replaced. In a sense this is what happened, since the rest of the group is now allowed to write songs to disastrous effect. Strains of “Paul is Dead.”
2. Franny & Zooey — When Liam expressed an interest in songwriting, Noel, out of fraternal resentment, began withholding his songwriting services from his ungrateful little brother. Like Salinger, he has been sitting on reams of his best work for years. Indeed, the oft-rumored Noel Gallagher solo/acoustic album is the Waiting for Godot of Rock ‘n Roll.
3. Faust — Noel made a deal with Satan that has now expired: “Noel Gallagher, in exchange for your mortal soul, I will make you the greatest songwriter on earth for a five-year period. After that, you are completely on your own, pal.” I think this one might actually be it.

I don’t need to rattle off a whole list of examples because they’re all around us, and you just have to take a baby-conscious look around you to see what I mean. In fairness to my peers, they haven’t invented this. They’re just following the example of their parents. This stuff has actually been gurgling to the surface since the baby boomers started popping out babies from their second marriages, circa 1990. Proof, once again, that the baby boomers ruined everything, squandered their generation’s time in power, and generally sabotaged everything they collectively stood for. But that’s a story for a different day.

What’s grinding my gears this particular day is a gorgeous case-in-point from Slate Magazine, which is always a pretty good barometer of thought-leadership amongst the Whole Foods class: Sippin’ On Milk and Juice — Searching for the best sippy cup on the market.

Before we go any further, note that the headline is a Snoop (Doggy) Dogg reference. Here’s the lead:

Ever since our 2-year-old son, Angus, stopped breast-feeding, my wife and I have served him milk in sippy cups. Now and then, we leave one in the bottom of a bag or the back seat of our car, only to find the receptacle days—or, in several memorable cases, weeks—later, the contents curdled and foul. A run through the dishwasher takes care of the cup, but when there’s a leak, we’re tempted to declare Angus lactose-intolerant and put him on a strict water diet. (For the record, it’s impossible to completely eliminate the odor of rancid milk from car upholstery.)

But I hear calcium is good for the bones. So after an especially nasty cleanup, I quelled the desire to deprive my son of milk from here on out and scoured the marketplace for a truly leakproof cup for kids.

Right off the bat we’ve got a trendy baby name, ironic detachment (from parenting…a hell of a thing from which to be ironically detached), and some bitching and moaning about the car getting messed up. What follows is a faux Consumer Reports breakdown of the rubrick and testing for a number of sippy cups. Graded on Leakproofness (is that allowed in Scrabble?), Ease of Care, Ease of Use, and unsurprisingly, Style. There’s a lot of BPA-panic going on, too.

Sippy cups from various designer brands are reviewed:

• Foogo — Designer Thermos-branded containers for babies; the website promises that their products will reduce food-borne illness. They also use the Ivy League (status!) to back up their claims. Were you aware that Cornell University did a study on this and Foogo came out on top? Yeah. Me neither.
• Sigg — I will let the Slate piece speak for itself on this: “The SIGG was the surprise flop of this experiment. Maybe it’s the overexposure: Just as a regular SIGG water bottle is a must-have for any eco-chic celebrity, the company’s kid bottle has become the sippy of choice for the likes of Cindy Crawford and Madonna.” In other words, how can it not be the best one? It’s an eco-chic product!
• Dr. Brown’s — Generic baby product. Needless to say, its poor style scores torpedoed its candidacy. By the way, if style scores were not counted, this would have come in second place. It’s also the cheapest one of the bunch, by quite a bit. And let’s be honest. There’s no way that it was going to win if it was cheap.
• The Safe Sippy — I have nothing snappy to say about this one. Actually, I do. It kind of looks like a dildo. Which seems appropriate.
• Nalgene — The old bo-bo standby. It won. It costs almost $9. Meh.

The article has the reek of a pay-to-blog vibe about it. I’m a little puzzled as to why someone who cops to leaving sippy cups unwashed for weeks at a time is investing in quality on this one. If you treat your stuff like crap, wouldn’t you want to have cheap stuff? Never mind the fact that kids will lose anything if it’s not attached to their body. I can’t help but wonder if this whole exercise is all about getting the sippy cup equivalent of the latest brushed aluminum yuppie tchotchke?

Babies as fashion accessories. I will never understand what makes my generation tick.

When people see the television appearances I made when I was a little boy–8 or 9 years old and just starting off my lifelong music career–they see a little boy with a big smile. They assume that this little boy is smiling because he is joyous, that he is singing his heart out because he is happy, and that he is dancing with an energy that never quits because he is carefree.

More than anything, I wished to be a normal little boy. I wanted to build tree houses and go to roller-skating parties. But very early on, this became impossible. I had to accept that my childhood would be different than most others. But that’s what always made me wonder what an ordinary childhood would be like.

-Michael Jackson, 2000

“Oh,” cried the farmer with his last breath. “I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel!”

The snake replied, “You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.”

- “The Farmer and the Snake,” Aesop’s Fables.

Van Morrison.

It’s complicated.

Not least because he used to look like Charles Manson and now he looks like my grandfather. If he wanted to, could Van Morrison have a man killed? I bet he could. Then again, would he need to? I bet Van Morrison could beat any guy less than six feet tall in a fair fight. Does Van Morrison remember how to do the math homework he had in 12th grade (or whatever the equivalent of it is in Ireland)? I should say so. Does Van Morrison listen to his own records like Prince is reputed to do? Certainly not. Could he drink me under the table? No doubt about it. Is Van Morrison impressed with Bono? Doubtful. Could Van Morrison put away a 21 ounce steak and a fifth of scotch whiskey and then play for 3 hours? Absolutely. After whom does Bruce Springsteen dread taking the stage, even with the holy, furious wind of the E Street Band blowing at his back? Van Morrison.

There’s an Evernote desktop client, but I’m not interested in it right now. I’m still on that “less crap on my computer” kick. Maybe someday I’ll feel the need to take advantage of the features the desktop client offers. But that day isn’t today. Or tomorrow.

I realize that this is probably old news for all the people living on the Lifehacker Autism Spectrum, but I’m still pretty excited. Small victories, eh?