I'm getting old?

Every day I wake up and get [some of] the news from the radio and reading online. This makes me grumpy about the world. (See the "whinge" tag.) Everything is broken and wrong -- our "news" deliverers are unabashedly biased. Governmental organizations hide information from the populace and oppress us with unreasonable Big Brother-hood from the TSA, the Toronto police, the legislature, the executive. The world these days! -- it's not like it was back when I was young! -- whine whine whine grump grump grump.

Pretty much anything that would be mentioned in a voice-over at the beginning of a disutopia movie is true. Propaganda everywhere is designed to keep us confused and docile. (Even to the point that I am not entirely convinced this is a bad thing.)

Even inspirational statements like "Even if what you're doing feels small, you still have to have faith in the grandeur of it all." fail to inspire me. I am frustrated. I feel like there is very little I can do to improve the world, and very little I can do to make it worse, too -- I have no impact on anything. Nevertheless, I feel it's important to act with dignity and try to do good work. What else can I do? Being the change I want to see in the world (à la Gandhi) is not enough.

The only thing that makes me feel better about the status of the world is to completely ignore it. I am lucky in that "ignore the outside world" is nearly part of my job description as a grad student. I will feel better as soon as I leave the house and get away from this global-news mindset.

Ivory tower, whoo!

This post's theme word is sesquipedalian, "pollysyllabic."
This post written like Cory Doctorow.

I, Robot rhetorical device

I came across a clever bit of writing that particularly tickled my fancy while reading Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. Its self-aware authorial voice was reminiscent of David Foster Wallace. (Or perhaps, given their respective places on the timeline, it was prescient of David Foster Wallace.) On page 148 of the 192-page-long edition I read:

Francis Quinn was a politician of the new school. That, of course, is a meaningless expression, as are all expressions of the sort. Most of the "new schools" we have were duplicated in the social life of ancient Greece, and perhaps, if we knew more about it, in the social life of ancient Sumeria and in the lake dwellings of prehistoric Scotland as well.

But, to get out from under what promises to be a dull and complicated beginning, it might be best to state hastily that Quinn...

What an excellent device! I would like to be proud enough of my writing to refuse to remove the dull bits, and instead simply acknowledge them as dull and move along.


This post's theme word is nihilarian, "one who does useless work."
This post written like H. P. Lovecraft. Although if I include the extended quote, it's Isaac Asimov.