The Tech Toddler has struck again. Naturally it was McSweeney’s that called him out best.
As a free speech absolutist, only death could stop me from defending the rights of Twitter users to speak without censorship. Well, either death or a request from an autocratic leader asking that I censor certain content that could be sensitive for their regime. Whichever comes first.
I WILL DEFEND FREE SPEECH TO THE DEATH. OR UNTIL AN AUTOCRAT ASKS ME TO STOP
I’ve earned a lot of credibility with my girls for openly enjoying Taylor Swift’s music. Or at least everything from the Red singles on. I think I would enjoy seeing her live, but I’m not sure I could handle everything that came with it. Especially the 20,000 screaming girls.[1]
I loved this piece by site favorite Tom Breihan about his experience taking his 14-year-old daughter to see Taylor last week. Not afraid to admit some of her songs get to me, too, although not so much that I burst into tears. Who knows how I would react if I was standing with one of my girls and watching them get floored by the moment.
The Taylor Swift Live Experience Made Me All Emotional
BTW, don’t tell M that C and I were talking about music last week and she said that while she likes the music of both Taylor and M’s fav Harry Styles, she likes Taylor a lot more because “I think she’s a good person. I think Harry is kind of a creep.” 😂
MTV shuttered its news division last week. Like many kids who grew up on MTV, my initial reaction was “MTV News was still a thing?”
I spent a lot of time laying on the couch watching MTV News during MTV’s glory years. No longer did I have to go to the school library to read Rolling Stone or Spin to get the latest music news, delayed by the natural publishing timelines. It was just entertainment news, but I think it had a profound impact on my generation’s life.
“It Was Lightning in a Bottle”: An Oral History of MTV News
I vaguely remember Skylab from the summer of 1979. When we visited Kansas City, The Jones Store had cardboard sheets for sale from which you could punch out a novelty hat that was supposed to protect you from the falling debris. And I recall sitting in my grandfather’s pickup in central Kansas, listening to the news that Skylab had crashed into remote Australia. Sometimes I remember weird shit.
Here’s the story of the Aussie who collected some of the scraps that landed near his home.
A space station fell to Earth. An Australian boy brought it to San Francisco
I love stories like this, that explain how things that are a deep part of our modern culture came from humble beginnings. It’s especially interesting to consider that when sushi was first brought to the US, World War II was still in the relatively near past. I remember my parents getting shitty looks because they bought Toyotas in the late 1970s. Can you imagine trying to get WWII vets to eat Japanese food?
How two friends sparked L.A.’s sushi obsession — and changed the way America eats
- One of M’s friends was at the Nashville show that was delayed nearly five hours. On the one hand, no way do I wait that long. On the other, I’m assuming thousands – plural – of dollars were dropped on those tickets, so how could you not wait out the storms? ↩