Last night I did my taxes while listening to the state of the union speech. I’m not quite sure what I enjoyed more, hearing people (both republicans and democrats) voicing their displeasure with various parts of the speech or how much bigger my refund will be this year than it was last year. I guess all those charitable contributions actually do make a difference!
Frankly, I was somewhat surprised that I was able to multi-task as well as I did. In general, like most of my gender, I am not very effective at doing more than one thing at a time. This is yet another reason why I think that in another million years or so women will be running society, while the last few remaining men will be penned up in zoos or kept as pets by the wealthy - sort of like llamas today. Part of the problem is that whenever we try to multitask we often choose really unrelated tasks to combine. Think grocery shopping and thinking of what to buy for an anniversary gift, or driving and viewing porn. Neither of these combinations leads to anything good, and is in fact only more likely to get us in trouble – the former in particular*.
On a completely different note, I was watching the Daily Show last night** when Jon Stewart made a particularly salient point about the whole James Frey fiasco. I don’t remember the word-for-word statement he made but his main point was essentially asking why Oprah was so incensed when a guy who writes a book fictionalizes part of the story but says nothing about a presidential administration that consistently demonstrates its own “gift for fiction”. Hmmm…what is worse…person gets lied to and loses $13? Or person gets lied to and gets their kid killed in Iraq?
Obviously, Oprah is not going to do anything political (having learned from Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods’ successes, obviously). But I still thought it was an interesting point by Mr. Stewart.
* “Happy Anniversary Honey! I got you something special!”
“Oh boy, what is it? [opening] Wow, it’s…a…box of Hot Pockets?”
** Pre-taxes and speech. Two things I can sometimes do but three at once is only a pipe dream.
Frankly, I was somewhat surprised that I was able to multi-task as well as I did. In general, like most of my gender, I am not very effective at doing more than one thing at a time. This is yet another reason why I think that in another million years or so women will be running society, while the last few remaining men will be penned up in zoos or kept as pets by the wealthy - sort of like llamas today. Part of the problem is that whenever we try to multitask we often choose really unrelated tasks to combine. Think grocery shopping and thinking of what to buy for an anniversary gift, or driving and viewing porn. Neither of these combinations leads to anything good, and is in fact only more likely to get us in trouble – the former in particular*.
On a completely different note, I was watching the Daily Show last night** when Jon Stewart made a particularly salient point about the whole James Frey fiasco. I don’t remember the word-for-word statement he made but his main point was essentially asking why Oprah was so incensed when a guy who writes a book fictionalizes part of the story but says nothing about a presidential administration that consistently demonstrates its own “gift for fiction”. Hmmm…what is worse…person gets lied to and loses $13? Or person gets lied to and gets their kid killed in Iraq?
Obviously, Oprah is not going to do anything political (having learned from Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods’ successes, obviously). But I still thought it was an interesting point by Mr. Stewart.
* “Happy Anniversary Honey! I got you something special!”
“Oh boy, what is it? [opening] Wow, it’s…a…box of Hot Pockets?”
** Pre-taxes and speech. Two things I can sometimes do but three at once is only a pipe dream.
Comments
I watched about the first 15 minutes of the SOTU. After that I had to shut it off because I was pulling my hair out because they all kept giving him a standing ovation after every sentence.
I wanna buy one of them hybrid peoples that bush was talkin about.