Enough charts. Time for something really important. Evil thoughts!
Slope of Hope Blog Posts
This is the heart and soul of the web site. Here we have literally tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. You can also click on any category icon to see posts tagged with that particular category.
Facebook Fatigue
Lazy Eights
Depending on where you live in the country, you may or may not have any knowledge about Chinese superstition with respect to numbers. . I’ve got a passing understanding of it, which is why real estate ads like these (which I just tore out of the morning paper) strike me as intended for Asian buyers here in the SF Bay Area.
Taking The Good with the Bad
I suppose it’s a symptom of being the youngest-born child in my family, but I’ve always had a special fondness for Christmas. Now don’t get me wrong – – I can’t stand the consumerism, and I’d gladly forego the entire getting-and-giving-of-gifts for the rest of my life. And yet there are some sustained pleasures of the season which I wanted to consider as we approach December.
Sturgeon’s Law still holds sway, however, as i does everything in this life, so there is no shortage of awfulness to deal with at the same time. I have, over the many years of this blog’s tenure, written many times about various cultural artifacts of the holiday season, but I thought there would be no harm in sharing a few more off-the-cuff thoughts. This time, in the interest of balance, I wanted to propose five favorite things about the holidays and an equal number of baddies. We’ll start with the good stuff. (more…)
Tower Records
When I was growing up, Tower Records was the place to be. I would spend just about every weekend there. Sadly, the company shuttered over a decade ago, but I stumbled across an absolutely marvelous documentary. For those of you who get Amazon Prime Video, it’s free, and I’m sure it’s elsewhere too. If you were a Tower kid, or if you like business documentaries, I cannot recommend this movie more highly.
Moth Into Flame
If you’ve been dropping by the lair for more than a few weeks then you probably know that I’ve been a huge Metallica fan since the mid 1980s when they released Master Of Puppets. So the other day I’m at the gym listening to some testosterone inducing station on Spotify. And out of the blue ‘Moth Into Flame’ pops up, which confused the heck out of me as I had been completely unaware that Metallica was releasing a new album. I thought to myself ‘wait a minute, this sounds like some of their old stuff but somehow I must have missed this one‘. You can imagine my joy when I later realized what was actually going on.
Life in a Minor Key
Preface: I’m quite aware what happened with Doha; I’ve been following it every second; but I thought we’d all just take a break from market talk until Monday’s regular open.
It’s obvious that music is a big part of the lives of Slopers, as it is one of the most frequently-shared and discussed items in the comments section. There is no shortage of posts specifically about music, and I thought I’d add another.
When I was in high school and college, a question I’d invariably ask a person I just met was what kind of music they liked. It was, for me, somewhat of a litmus test, just as effective as glancing at the contents of their bookshelves. The worst answer was along the lines of, “I like anything, as long as it’s got a good beat and I can dance to it.” Such an answer assured me I would never want to talk to this person again.
The Will of Landru
Thank You, Internet!
Jesus in a Bright Red Cup
Although Slopers have proved themselves a passionate lot, even when it comes to as pedestrian a topic as Krazy Glue, I’m going to remove my shoes and go tromping through the verboten topic of religion, because it’s been on my mind, thanks to the widely-reported kerfuffle that the management of Starbucks, by way of changing their holiday cups to a simple red design with no holiday imagery, have proved that they hate Jesus.
The chap declaring this ostensible war declares “I think in the age of political correctness we become so open-minded our brains have literally fallen out of our head.” It’s not surprising, I suppose, that such a fellow would commit so many verbal pratfalls in the span of a single sentence, but I’d rather set aside the syntactical foibles and misuse of “literally” and focus on the bigger picture.
