snowdeal.org - conflux

conflux

The New York Times: Opinion The Thanksgiving Call
[requires 'free' registration]
"The phone rings � the call is from one of the missing siblings � and still the first thing to talk about is how clear the connection is or how to slip your words into the slapback echo if the call is coming from way overseas. The phone is handed from person to person, or perhaps everyone takes a turn at the extension in the one room of the house where you can hear yourself think. Some hang back, because there has always been a little coolness with the person on the other end of the line, and others would talk all afternoon if the turkey weren't coming to the table just this minute. The last person to talk does a quick check to make sure everyone has had a chance to say hello and then hangs up, feeling almost guilty, as if what was merely absence had somehow turned into exile. The holiday is not complete until all the calls have come in, until everyone who could not be there knows just how the day is being kept.

And for the person on the other end? The day is being kept there too, and perhaps in a way as sustaining, as filling, as it is at home."

Suck Turkey Day Tidings
"Another year has come and gone, and if it's anything like the ones that preceded it, we'll remember it mostly for the bland loss, arbitrary misery, and chronic regret that served as its main ingredients and the squandered opportunities, failures of nerve, inexplicable oversights, wanton double- crossings, and blind impotent rage that seasoned it. To express our gratitude for such bounty, we offer these Thanksgiving Day e-cards. Save us a leg."

SatireWire Screw Tradition, Let's Spend This Thanksgiving Online
"Let's be honest. The traditional Thanksgiving is a 96-hour nightmare. Overcrowded highways with their jack-knifed tractor-trailers. Sales-engorged department stores with their greedy, grasping shoppers. Bulkhead-bursting airplanes teeming with palsy-eyed passengers who reek of freshly belched Yorkshire pudding.

So this Thanksgiving, let's start a new tradition. Let's all stay home and stay online.

All 96 hours. Everybody. Forget the malls, the airports, and your bloody neurotic sister-in-law and her bloody Cheetoh-bloated kids."

bookmark: del.icio.us ::digg it ::furl ::reddit ::yahoo ::
10:16 AM 0 comments

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

[ rhetoric ]

“"You're not a designer, you're not a writer, and you're not an editor!"

Well, no, blogger, you're not. And therein lies your gift. Because even if it's true the vast majority of blogs would not be missed by more than a handful of people were the earth to open up and swallow them, and even if the best are still no substitute for the sustained attention of literary or journalistic works, it's also true that sustained attention is not what Web logs are about anyway. At their most interesting they embody something that exceeds attention, and transforms it: They are constructed from and pay implicit tribute to a peculiarly contemporary sort of wonder.

...[T]he Web log reflects our own attempts to assimilate the glut of immaterial data loosed upon us by the "discovery" of the networked world. And there are surely lessons for us in the parallel. For just as the cabinet of wonders took centuries to evolve into the more orderly, logically crystalline museum, so it may be a while before the chaos of the Web submits to any very tidy scheme of organization.”

[ outbound ]

conflux

0 Comments:

[ rhetoric ]

[ search ]

[ outbound ]

[ schwag ]

[ et cetera ]