Saturday, February 20, 2010

Things strike you weirdly when you're under the weather

I've been fighting off a cold for about a week now. I have a bit of an upper respiratory thing going on that won't leave me alone. It hasn't manifested itself to its fullest extent yet because I've been keeping it at bay with Nyquil to keep me asleep, and going to bed earlier. That's working OK so far, but it's kickin' my butt during the week. It's sucking the life out of me, and I'm coming home dead tired. Being without my glasses hasn't helped. I gotta get this thing beat so I can go back to mistreating myself!

And because I haven't been feeling well, I've noticed some things that wouldn't normally get much attention from me. I'm noticing more humor in the Bible than I have before, stuff like that. The strangest thing though, by a wide margin is the whole cultural phenomena of the Amber Lamps video, and how it's taken off. I know you've seen it. If you haven't, just search Amber Lamps on YouTube.

I'm just amazed at what gets noticed and run with. I had no idea there was even a young lady on the bus, until I started seeing links on various forums. All this happened with the speed of fad. It's puzzling to me that what maybe a handful of people would have known about ten years ago was known to something like three million within just days. We truly are in the information age.

That is disconcerting to me. For somebody with as much of an Intardweb presence as I have, I've done an adequate job of staying off the grid with my name. But all it'll take is to be in the wrong place at the right time and somebody having a video camera, and all that will go away and everybody will know the name...for a while. I guess one of the plus sides to this phenomena is that people that would really get into this will be done with it in a short time. I really didn't see this situation coming, and I think I should have. I've been online for a long time now. I'm no geek, but I have a decent understanding of it. I think all it's done is to make me see how flat out weird, or perhaps overly bored, people in this world are. Ya'll be some crazy pipples!

3 comments:

NotClauswitz said...

Get well soon!

Never knew about the "Amber Lamps" thing before - but I did hear about the AC Transit fight. hat's right here, over over in the East Bay where life can be short and brutal (like in Richmond with all the shootings). White East Bay dudes typically are Oakland Raider fans - hard-core blue-collar who don't accept being pushed around at any age.

Trying to keep a low webprofile too - but the occasional thing leaks out like an old photo from a '97 event, patents, old cartoons ... and whoops, an article on Brownells website - there was another guy with the same name in England covering for me but he passed away young.

Haji said...

My cold has decided being a cold wasn't good enough, so now I'm on Horsepillocillin to combat strep.

The amount of Amber Lamps stuff out there now is outrageous. I can't believe how much there is. Talk about taking on a life of it's own!

NotClauswitz said...

Ugh - strep? Kill the nasty green head-bugs!!

Thing is an AC Transit bus serving the poor in the East Bay WILL have a high percentage of passengers who are clinically insane and in most cases violent. The subject of the beating was delusional - he was insane to attempt a confrontation (and apparently an at-large parolee) - but bullying other passengers is a typical example of Stage-1 psychosis.

Chick did the right thing and the only thing, she didn't make eye-contact or engage in any way the other passengers. Riding Bay Area buses teaches you quickly to hide in plain sight because there's no telling what might happen. The guy in the nice looking suit - nice from a distance - suddenly turns into an uncontrollable talker, a bad-smelling, large-vocabulary, full-volume lunatic who soiled himself. You don't need a new friend like that.

The other Whacko Fruit-Bus on this side of the Bay is the Sam-Trans 7-F that comes down the Peninsula from San Francisco with it's own *unique* denizens. Some of Them People just ride it up and back all day to have something to do. When I was a poor kid I had to take that, and never once rode it without something strange, weird, and desperate taking place for some unfortunate passenger - but fortunately not for me.