The iPad Conversationalist
What is it to have a conversation? Don’t ask me, I sure as hell wouldn’t know. I live in a land populated by bulldozers but I am decidedly not a bulldozer.
It is common for babies, once they’ve reached the age of two, to go through an “I have a ball” phase. “I have a ball,” they say. They grasp a ball tightly in their little hand with their little kung fu grip and show the ball to everyone they meet. “I have a ball.” They can be rather monotonous.
It really boggles their little two-year-old brains so much that they have a ball. And they really love it if other people show interest in the ball, the one thing they’ll never ever share. “Ha! I have a ball!” At least until people show interest in something else which they’ll immediately covet and take for themselves. Then they’ll say, “I have this other thing.” Damn two-year olds.
I don’t want to put too fine a point on it so I’ll get on message and I’ll be brief: “I have an iPad!”
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iLife’s an iBeach
Not too long ago I took a wee trip to an old-growth forest where I frolicked in a shady glen with frisky elves. (See: Forest Grump.)
But that’s not the only place I went. Driven as a lemming I set off on a quest to find where America ended. (And I got the answer I was seeking in more ways than one.) But, alas, there weren’t any cliffs from which to jump onto craggy rocks. Only a beach. A remarkably flat and wet piece of transitionary property where if one tried to throw himself down people would only laugh and children would point and ask, “Mommy? I thought whales swam in the water?”
As always I had to settle. Dammit. I can’t blame the children, though. It’s not their fault I was born with a blowhole.
And yet it turns out that I given the gift of photogenic scenery for a travelogue pictorial post. And this is that very post. If the subject line didn’t provide enough iClues see the inset image for a preview of the journey that awaits.
When he arrived in the New World, Cortez burned his ships. As a result, his men were “motivated.” If you click the link to make the jump you’ll be doing exactly the same damn thing. Beyond here there be iDragons.
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Listen up! Can you hear me now?
I had an out of body experience recently and found myself surfing the Huffington Post religion section. Say what?
Don’t worry. This post goes downhill from that. 🙂
So, yeah. While I was there I found this video about listening. At first I thought it was touchy-feeling mumbo jumbo of the sort I would normally sneer all over, but I gave it a listen and I think she makes some damn good points. She approaches and communicates the subject matter in a way I wish I could – only without curse words and using actual intelligence and sensitivity.
My problem, I guess, is that I’m too busy wanting to punch in the face of asshole communicators to take the time to explain things this way. So I’ll leave it to her.
Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t fall for all of this hook, line and sinker, but I can’t help but think the world would be a better place if us human beings stopped being such selfish assholes and practiced the long-forgotten art of listening.
Who the fuck is this “other” of which she speaks? I like to call it “someone besides your own fucking self, you asshole.” But that’s just me. I have the gift of translation which I often use to put things in layman’s terms. In other words, there are people out there, other than yourself, who may also occasionally want to get in a word edgewise, so shut yer fucking blowhole and give ’em a chance once in a while.
The video is only two minutes long. Do you feel lucky? Well? Do ya punk?
WordPress didn’t make it easy to embed a Huffington Post video here. So pay a little respect and absorb this shit, k?
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Shouts from the Abyss 
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