The Internet is as Exhausting as You Make It

Last updated on: April 3, 2011 at 4:00 am By Paul Fidalgo

In the consistently-fascinating journal n+1, Alice Gregory insightfully expounds on the modern race to keep pace with the imagined expectations of the social digital world. I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both “keep up” with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests. I blog about real life; I talk about the internet. It’s so exhausting to exist on both registers, especially while holding down a job. It feels like tedious work to... Read more

Bell, Dinged

Last updated on: March 19, 2011 at 4:00 am By Paul Fidalgo

Pastor Rob Bell has my attention. From what I’ve gathered of the various bits of media that have sprung up in recent weeks about him, he’s a relatively hip, relatively liberal evangelical who is trying to open up Christianity to folks who find its more dogmatic and arcane aspects intimidating. He is repackaging Christianity — as many liberal religionists do these days — as essentially about love. Of course, he’s still completely wrong as far as the existence of God... Read more

Fumes

Last updated on: March 9, 2011 at 5:00 am By Paul Fidalgo

There’s been a lot of upheaval in Fidalgo Land since my violent encounter in October of last year. As my tens of regular readers already know, not only have we left behind a city, I’ve left behind not just a job, but perhaps a career. My master’s degree is specifically for professional politics, and while I did not anticipate abandoning that particular industry permanently before October — I only meant to put it aside for a while as I focused on my kid — events and my... Read more

Facing Irrelevance

Last updated on: March 9, 2011 at 5:00 am By Paul Fidalgo

How many readers does it take to make a blog worthwhile? What constitutes a sufficient number of pageviews for a given post? The most obvious answer is that there is no line of demarcation; the act of writing is an end in itself. If I were to have a meaningful conversation with a single person, or even just have something good and substantive to say to an audience of one, would that not be enough? And yet when it comes... Read more

Topping Off at the Ebook Station

Last updated on: February 11, 2011 at 11:46 pm By Paul Fidalgo

Booksquare’s Kassia Krozser is on to something. In a larger post on the necessity of physical booksellers, she adds in a parenthetical: . . . I would not mind the ability to purchase Kindle-compatible ebooks from my indie booksellers. . . . it would be lovely if all the Kindle owners out there — the ones who, you know, don’t have a friggin’ clue about formats and DRM and compatibility — could shop at your store. Seriously, you want to focus... Read more

The Food of Art

Last updated on: February 9, 2011 at 5:00 am By Paul Fidalgo

On last week’s Thinking Unenslaved podcast, we considered raising for discussion the topic of religion in the arts, and what might become of the arts if religion were not the force it is in our society and culture. We wound up not getting around to it, though I expect we probably will. Regardless, I had written up a few paragraphs to get the conversation started, and I thought I’d post them here. Remember, it’s intended to be the beginning of a conversation,... Read more

Coulda Been a SOTU

Last updated on: February 5, 2011 at 5:00 am By Paul Fidalgo

Last month, John Kerry gave an excellent speech to the Center for American Progress which almost word for word ought to have been what the president gave as the State of the Union. In fact, he even used “Sputnik moment” as a theme, which makes me assume that someone at the White House was listening, even if no one else was. A key passage, emphasis mine: For the last months we’ve watched the news and read the campaign literature and heard a lot the... Read more

Yesterday

Last updated on: February 3, 2011 at 5:00 am By Paul Fidalgo

Yesterday was kind of an important day for me. As many of you know, I was brutally attacked by two thugs on the street outside my Metro stop in DC a few months ago. I was transitioning to a new part-time retail gig in order to reclaim some sanity in my life, and to be able to care for my boy during the weekdays. So: As I came home from my second day of training at my then-new part-time retail job in DC on... Read more

The Unforgivable Mitt Romney

Last updated on: February 2, 2011 at 5:00 am By Paul Fidalgo

Mitt Romney is waving his proverbial arms about this week, getting as much attention for himself on TV, readying himself to run for president again. Most of the chatter around his probable candidacy revolves around the similarity between “Obamacare” and his own health care reform law from when he was governor of Massachusetts. Liberals are of course enjoying the sight as he squirms his way out of comparisons between the two initiatives, despite their striking similarities, and in the mean... Read more

I Don’t Know Who to Boycott Anymore

Last updated on: January 31, 2011 at 5:00 am By Paul Fidalgo

The wife and I are struggling with chicken. We’ve always known Chik-fil-a to be a “Christian business,” whatever that means, if only because they’re closed on Sunday, a fact which often chaps our asses. But — not surprisingly, I might add — Chik-fil-a has been in the news for tipping its hand as being against gay equality and for discriminating against non-Jesus worshippers. But we looooove Chik-fil-a food. Love, love, love it. We even like how goddamned nice the employees are, even... Read more