Category: General

I just submitted this letter to the NPR ombudsman via their contact page. If it echoes how you feel, feel free to submit it as your own.

Dear Ombudsman,

Ever since Vivian Schiller and her CNN cronies took over the operation of NPR, the service has become an embarrassment. Accurate, comprehensive reporting has been supplanted by inane interviews in which incompetent hosts censor competent journalists. Coverage of cultural affairs has been replaced with the same coverage of pop culture that dominates the celebrity-obsessed commercial media. Unbiased, monotonic delivery that is characteristic of journalistic broadcasting has been abandoned for oratory intonations that characterize irrelevant entertainment sources like CNN. The accurate reporting of facts has been slashed in favor of the cheap, sensational and worthless chronicling of political drama in the nation’s capital. With every day, I find fewer, and fewer reasons to listen to NPR. Every time I turn off the insulting charades on NPR, I am overwhelmed by a strong desire to start a movement to cut federal funding for NPR and to encourage my local public radio stations to find alternatives to this poor adaptation of CNN.

In the meantime, I have found just about enough podcasts to obviate NPR’s sensationalist, worthless reporting. I’m getting the word out, and I’m finding many sympathetic ears. I am eager to see the day when NPR either becomes respectable and relevant again, or dies.

I finally received the 1000 bonus rollover minutes that AT&T had promised, and my suspicion was true.

The minutes arrived two days after the iPhone 4S was announced, along with its availability on both Sprint and Verizon. Of course, Sprint will be offering a completely unlimited plan for only $10 more than the severely limited plan that I have with AT&T. Were I a big talker or big downloader, I would dump AT&T for the unlimited plan at Sprint without hesitation. (This is something many are positively doing.) I will, however, stay with the evil cheapskates who like to grease government officials until my contract expires next year because my usage still falls well within the severe limits of the cheap plan that I have with AT&T, and, hey, $10 a month will support a much faster DSL connection at home.

Even if this particular post makes me especially popular around the world, the probability that people will call me enough to make a dent in the more than 2300 anytime talking minutes I now have is slim to none.

People will most likely pat me on the back via Facebook, email or text messaging. In the case of the former two scenarios, my 2 gigabyte cellular plan and my home wifi should suffice. In the latter case, however, I would quickly run against my 200 text limit. Once that happens, I would have to cancel text messaging altogether and resort to unlimited texting on my Google Voice number, or switch to Sprint.

I’m begging you people. Text me! I want some justification for the iPhone 4S. Any justification.

For the last 90 minutes this woman had me alternately crying and laughing. Lessons in perseverance, persistence and love.

Who would have thought that of all the celebrities I could have run into this last Thursday night that I would have run into Bjorn Borg. The tennis great looks absolutely fabulous at 55. He is still spry, in fantastic spirits and astonishingly active intellectually. All of these attributes are remarkable for a 55-year-old former tennis champion who has gone through considerable trials and tribulations over the course of a very eventful life.

Of particular and perhaps peculiar note were his amazing insights into identity, memory and technology. These are among the last things that one would be inclined to associate with tennis champions. His insights were particularly keen with respect to the way in which the digital age is shaping identity. I was taken aback by his pointed and novel arguments about how a careful cataloguing of one’s digital “presence” might possibly lead to insights into one’s own identity. The thought had never occurred to me, and I was quite struck by the depth of this tennis great’s intellect. He was indeed quite keen of mind.

At some point I seized upon the fact that it was happy hour at Eric Ericsson’s on the Ventura pier, and that the deft participant in this conversation was none other than my dear friend Pete Ippel, the great promulgator of hypermodernity and other germane concepts. The caricature sketched above doesn’t stray too far from Pete’s story. He was a remarkable athlete in college who set records at his alma mater, and he has since been a tireless chronicler of the effect of technology on social and individual psyches alike, a courageous subject for his own works and the works of his friends, and a fearless journeyman and teacher in the real of modern art.

In light of this career track–of Pete’s supreme performance as an athlete, a philosopher and an artist–it occurred to me that he ought to be called Bjorn Borges. Jorge Luis Borges’s classic works on human existence have earned the adoration of generations and the unending accolades of writers, physicists and philosophers. Pete and I are huge fans of Borges, and Pete’s inquiries overlap Borges’s considerably. So, what better a moniker can one possibly assign to a great artist whose visceral experiences as an athlete are as prominent as his abstract notions about identity and existence than Bjorn Borges.

Now, there is a guy who can keep himself entertained for lifetimes on end.

Whatever that means.