Name that movie. Episode IV: A New Hope. As virtually every entertainment site and news outlet is reporting, the Star Wars original trilogy went on sale today (on DVD). After another yoga session I swung into Sears and it hit me. I could have purchased the set from amazon.com, or Best Buy, or any of a thousand e-tailers…. …but I went to Sears. I never go to Sears. As a non-homeowner I don’t buy tools, I don’t buy durable goods and despite their “softer side” campaign, I’d still opt for Target. Heck, I don’t think I’ve been to Sears since I finished my driving school there over 10 years ago.

I’m going to post this every fall to my friends with young children. http://m.motherjones.com/media/2014/06/computer-science-programming-code-diversity-sexism-education Code is the new literacy. IF you let them play with the iPhone or iPad but do not start making them make the games, you are dooming them to be a consumer. You are capping their career mobility. You are ensuring that the people who can code will be their masters for their entire life. You are setting them on a path of servitude and lower-wage in the same way you would if you promoted ESPN over arithmetic flash cards. If your school does not have CS, rage today.

Was America ever so optimistic?

As I wrote my recent post that leaned heavily on the post-Marxist, post-Structuralist philosophy of Jean Baudrillard, I looked about at my living room, stuffed with moving boxes and bags destined for charity donation, and thought:

Why is there so much stuff?

There was stuff I’d not touched for weeks, months, even years. And yet there were also clearly things I could recognize as having gotten after we had moved in to this apartment. Why was there so much stuff? Why had I acquired yet even more of it? And why had I not gotten rid of more of it earlier? The evidence was unmistakable, something, beyond rational understanding had driven and was still driving my urge to continually get more or consume.

When a behavior goes beyond reasonable measure, it suggests that something more is driving it: a compulsion, a mania, mental illness, or, perhaps most insidious of all, a narrative.

In a previous post, I complained about globalized fashion producing the same, boring, classless, tasteless, shapeless garments for the .01% regardless of the ostensible home-country of the label. But this blanding the world with on brand isn’t limited to clothing labels. At several certain class tiers, one can expect to find the exact same experience ‘round the world.

• There’s a Shakespeare and Company in Paris and New York
• There are Pret à Mangers all over Manhattan, Paris, and London
• Virginia’s “Five Guys” can be found on Broadway (NYC), all over the South and even across the street from “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”
  • …which, itself, is also findable in New York.
• New York’s Shake Shack can be found in London or Jeddah

Denmark’s Joe and the Juice looks like this on Broadway, by my house (with Byron):

and looks like this in SoHo: