We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom. We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We’ve learned how to make a living, but not a life. We’ve added years to life not life to years. We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space.

We’ve done larger things, but not better things. We’ve cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We’ve conquered the atom, but not our prejudice.

We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less.

We’ve learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes.

These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill.

It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete.

-George Carlin

(source: Sarah never speaks.)

Snow Patrol has selected an opening band for their current tour and it’s Foals from the UK. I had never heard of these guys until now. They don’t remind me at all of Snow Patrol, but their music is groovy. If you are going to give them a listen, ignore their most recent stuff and listen to 2008′s Antidotes first. Try this: Olympic Airways.

Also worth checking out from Snow Patrol is their frontman’s (Gary Lightbody) Tired Pony. You can listen to a limited bit of music on their webpage here: Tired Pony.com. Very cool sound.

If you haven’t already been introduced, let me show you two great songs by a couple bands you will hopefully want to listen to more.

These links will take you right to music: We Were Promised Jetpacks and Stars. I hope you like ‘em.

You are a wicked awesome service. My friends and I love you. This is before you were forced to block non-American users, of course (). Like others, I tried to circumvent this restriction and got a few more weeks out of you, but eventually these methods just got tired and frustrating compared to the real thing.

Until very recently I have completely been ignoring the best Pandora alternative out there, while simultaneously being a huge user of this alternate service. Quite odd, yes. I have been a last.fm user since late 2005, and all along I’ve failed to give the subscriber service any interest. I don’t know why… I guess I’ve never been fond of forking over money to a corporation if I could avoid it. But I have changed my tune and now, for a pithy $3/month, I am rocking out with the subscriber service which I find is just as powerful and actually more flexible than Pandora.

With last.fm’s radio I am much more into the music than I ever was with Pandora. This is because with Pandora I was always thinking about up- and down-voting songs to try to craft the perfect station which I could never seem to do. Now I can just punch in a friend’s profile, a tag, my neighbors, or an artist, and I’m set. I couldn’t be happier with the service, which only bolsters my enormously positive history with Last.fm. Thanks for being awesome, Last.fm.

- Mitch

The purpose of the site is quite readily idenifiable from the URL, but if you haven’t already guessed, the site is a music sharing tumblog dedicated to sex music.

You won’t be able to stop visiting once you’ve started.  If you need convincing, check out their superb playlists (on occasion — such as new year’s — the tumblog curates some of their more popular posts as a playlist).

This past summer I spent some time compiling all of the camping, picnic, fishing, and recreation areas I’ve been into a public Google Map which is the point of this post.  If you’re interested in the oudoors in places like Nordegg, Canmore, and Red Deer, then give this a gander: http://tinyurl.com/albertacamping.

I think this lifestyle is awful.  It is mine and you may recognize parts of it as your own, but you may not dislike it as much as I do yet.

Being a capitalist means that everything has a dollar value attached to it.  The instant you or I are introduced to something new we almost instantly associate it with a value.  It’s possible that this could be the same for every single person on the planet, but with capitalists and people in Western civilization in general, that value is money and nothing else.  Money is so souless, it can’t possibly encompass any sort of value other than materialism. Capitalism gives the mentality that you can own something because of your job.  You can spend money and satisfy yourself because you have a job and you can float on that income, owning anything you want.

Capitalism imbues entitlement.  All too much we forget to think of something as hard-earned and deserved, or something that money can’t buy.  Nothing you can ever have has any spirit any more.  You can own plastic and wood and leather, but unless you are very naive, you probably don’t feel like you earned it.  If we worked for the things we own directly, that would be a very different story.  Imagine if you worked for your house instead of money for your house.

No matter who you are, if you have cash in your pocket you feel entitled to get what you want.  Money is the physical manifestation of narcissism.  I wish we could all just forget about associating value to things in that sense.  We need to feel attached to things we own.

In short, people who are raised on capitalism are materialistic.  And it is ugly.  Everyone like me who identifies with this feeling will one day realize it too.

- Mitch

Louis Gray wrote us all to say that he feels Facebook failed him for not alerting him to an event in the lives of his immediate family.  Which in itself is a ridiculous thing to admit to, but what I have a problem with is the “I’m a normal Facebook user” part.  Louis has 1377 friends on Facebook as of writing, plenty of which he admits are web people who generate more online than average.

Here is my response to his post:

Louis,

You’re a big dolt if you think you’re a regular internet user for whom regular internet tools will always work. If you think this was a “big miss” by a trusted tool that applies equally to everyone who uses it, then you also must think that it is an atrocity when hard drive manufacturers neglect telling server operators that they should count on higher utilization of the hard drive compared to a layman, and therefore more frequent dead disks.  The disclaimer is implicit and it is to be expected!

You should literally be doing the exact opposite this kind of thing. Instead of claiming to be a “normal internet Joe” who has things break on him for no apparent reason, you should be the guy telling us that something broke because he pushed it to its limits. You can’t be in the 99th percentile and expect normalcy.

- Mitch