the hijinks of molly & tara

The other day I watched the SNL parody of the Couric/Palin interview, and I thought it was pretty funny. Tina Fey is brilliant as Palin. But I found out after watching the actual Couric/Palin interview that SNL took a lot of material pretty much VERBATIM. It was already so ridiculous that they hardly had to make anything up to exaggerate it. The thought of Sarah Palin being vice president (or, in all likelihood, president) basically terrifies me. I think I might start actively campaigning for Obama less so to promote him, but rather to urgently campaign AGAINST McCain and Palin.

Here is the SNL version…

And clips from the actual interview: foreign policy, McCain and regulations, and the bailout proposal.

I think this article sums it up pretty well:

Sarah Palin is a symbol of everything that is wrong with the modern United States. As a representative of our political system, she’s a new low in reptilian villainy, the ultimate cynical masterwork of puppeteers like Karl Rove. But more than that, she is a horrifying symbol of how little we ask for in return for the total surrender of our political power.

Not only is Sarah Palin a fraud, she’s the tawdriest, most half-assed fraud imaginable, 20 floors below the lowest common denominator, a character too dumb even for daytime TV -and this country is going to eat her up, cheering her every step of the way. All because most Americans no longer have the energy to do anything but lie back and allow ourselves to be jacked off by the calculating thieves who run this grasping consumer paradise we call a nation.

The great insight of the Palin VP choice is that huge chunks of American voters no longer even demand that their candidates actually have policy positions; they simply consume them as media entertainment, rooting for or against them according to the reflexive prejudices of their demographic, as they would for reality-show contestants or sitcom characters.

!!!

-Molly

I am SO GOING to the next one of these!

weareoneparty.org

The weareOne parties are free, and feature live music, short films, performances, shared food, dressing up and general foolery and fun. From their website: “Every party is an immersive experiment in harnessing the vibracy of and playfulness of living in the moment. People leave feeling in love with life, other people, and most importantly themselves.” My people!

-Tara

Salute to Tesco, a 10 min walk from my dad’s house…

-Tara

So, the whole Large-Hadron-Collider doomsday scenario whereby Scientists in an Underground Laboratory are creating Miniscule Collisions that will create Miniscule Black Holes eating away at the Core of the Earth resulting in the Eventual Preemptive End of Civilization got me hyperlinking through Wikipedia (once again) discovering an anti-apocalypse group I didn’t know about. (Mol, I bet you knew about it. I bet you’ve read all Wikipedia has to say on the subject…)

They’re called the Global Scenario Group, and they did all their prophesizing in 1995. That’s right, 1995, pre-Inconvenient Truth, pre-reusable grocery bags initiatives, pre-widespread Nalgene vogue. They came up with three possibilities for the future: 1) Barbarization, i.e. collapse of civilization, 2) Conventional Worlds, i.e. we manage to cover our butts as we go, putting out forest fires with tsunamis, 3) The Great Transition, i.e. everybody becomes an environmentalist, locavore, and (most importantly) a humanist.

Unsurprisingly, it’s The Great Transition that they’re trying to push, and within that scenario there are two more, straight from Wikipedia:

“Eco-Communalism: Localism and civil society help bring about the environmental transition. The Great Transitions scholars do not view this path as being incredibly plausible.

New Sustainability Paradigm: Population stabilization, lower consumerism, and greener values create a more humane world. Civilization has a smaller ecological footprint and its members live healthier, more equitable lives.”

Their literature sounds academic at first, but ends up being much more like my first-year end of term papers: good topic, good ideas, some research, well written, but frustratingly inexact generalizations and conclusions that aren’t actually going to help anybody. (And only now do I realise that the LHC sounds familiar because two years ago I read Angels and Demons by Dan Brown.)

It’s still a nice juxtaposition to other Wikipedia articles which calmly remind me that the Earth’s eventual end is inevitable in astronomical terms (the Sun is scheduled to become a Red Dwarf and swell in size, consuming our planet, in about 5.5 billion years).

Being in London, a city which collects compost along with plastics, paper, and metal to be recycled and has a congestion charge in effect to discourage traffic gives me some hope: I still feel like maybe governments can enact large-scale changes that people can join in with. The analogy, I suppose is war, where sacrifice is encouraged with nationalism as the motive. Why can’t humanism be the motive for equal ’sacrifices,’ for allocating resources, energy, time and thought toward finding and implementing solutions that may literally ensure the future?

Done ranting. For now. Sorry for the length.

Happy thought to leave you with: Guerilla Gardening.

-Tara

Okay, SO Tara and I have been horrible at blogging the last few weeks, but we’ve both been rather busy moving. To be fair, I moved only from North Amherst to Hadley, about five miles away, and Tara moved from New York to London… Here is a picture of us hugging goodbye a few weeks ago. And, here are some random scattered thoughts and article excerpts about social interaction the internet and such things.

I read an interesting article a few days ago about digital intimacy, and it had a few new media terms I liked: microblogging (posting frequent tiny updates on what you’re doing, like Twitter) and ambient awareness.

“This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.”

But: “If you’re reading daily updates from hundreds of people about whom they’re dating and whether they’re happy, it might, some critics worry, spread your emotional energy too thin, leaving less for true intimate relationships.” It’s a long article, but I recommend reading all of it, very fascinating stuff.

I also just read an article in Hampshire’s student newspaper, the Climax, about so-called “Facebook celebrities” in the incoming class – those kids who, before school even starts, go and and friend every single person they can find. So when you meet someone you’ve friended on Facebook in person for the first time, do you pretend you don’t already know where they’re from, their favorite music, relationship status, and employment history? Is it taboo to ask about an interesting picture you saw of them on a vacation?

Facebook was the new thing when I first started college, and our generation is still navigating the social do’s and don’ts of how online information is used in real life interaction. But do you suppose, in a few years, there will be a more universal, unwritten social code about how we interface with such things? OR, maybe at some point ALL of our socializing will just be digital? This virtual reality cocoon is amazing technology, but it kind of freaks me out.

We joke casually nowadays about googling or stalking someone online, but in the age of social networking, digital intimacy, ambient information, and blogging, where is the line drawn between curiosity, obsession, and straightforward stalking?

-Molly

I’m about to move to England for seven months. This weekend I went up to Hampshire for a few days, a trip whose express purpose was mostly to hug people. It really reminded me how much a part of a community I am there of people who make me feel happy & comfortable just being in their presence, people with whom I share a little history and look forward to a future with. I definitely have connections in London (family, friends) but I will be building that kind of familiar supportive network there this year, instead of re-entering an already made one…

I will definitely be milking the City for exciting art, community, youth, and performance opportunities & happenings. Those excursions, projects, and events will be well-documented here so y’all can live them vicariously through me. Beginning with classes at The Circus Space, the place in London that fed and nurtured my little seedling of circus interest into the Little-Shop-of-Horrors-sized plant it is today!

If you’d like my English mailing address so that you can exchange letters, bookmarks, pictures, found things, semi-important out of date documents, photocopies, postcards, photographs, magazine articles, birthday cards, advertisements, artwork and the like, then comment here with your email address…

And did you know that, according to Wikipedia, Viagra can help with eastward-travel jet lag? Fascinating.

-Tara