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 If you ignore me, you're an ignoramus. My friend Braxton was the first person I knew who joined Facebook. The other day, he sent an e-mail to announce that he’s also the first person to quit it. “You may have noticed that I have shut down my Facebook account,” he began. “Please don’t take this as me not wanting to stay in touch with any of you. I definitely do and you have my email and phone number, of course. But Facebook was just getting out of control.” And so it begins. Allow me to pose a huge question based on thin anecdotal evidence: Is Facebook dead? Answer: maybe. Inane status updates are one thing, Braxton explained, but the creepy leveraging of your personal information is quite another. “You mention that you’re getting married in a message to a friend, and suddenly wedding cake companies know about it and are advertising on your web page.” Wait, so companies can scan the topics of your Facebook conversations to send you ads? Because if that’s the case, I’m going to start a couple of businesses called Immigrants Are Ruining the Country, and No They’re Not, Glenn Beck Is. I don’t even know what they’ll sell, but based on the daily arguments on Facebook, a lot of people would see ads for my wares. Which, now that I think about it, will be tee-shirts that read, “Volcanos Are Major Ash Holes.” Then when Eyejackafrack erupts again, I’ll be rich. Because, according to my estimates, 90 percent of Facebook is now devoted to pointless political bickering. For instance, I have two friends who’ve known each other for years. She’s conservative. He’s liberal. After a Facebook political blowout, they no longer speak to each other. For the longest time, neither of them knew or cared about the other’s political leanings. But with Facebook, it’s like you’re walking around with a bumper sticker on your forehead. And whatever that bumper sticker says, it will lead half your friends to conclude that you’re a moron and the other half to cheer your preexisting opinions. Now, I suppose you could simply refrain from commenting on political arguments, but then how will the morons know how moronic they are, and the correct people know how correct they are? I try to stay out of Facebook brawls, but I did go through a phase when I was pretty heavy into the ’Book. I changed my profile photo more than once every six months. I became a fan of something or other. I posted a mobile update. But I knew I was starting to suffer Facebook burnout during the Kentucky Derby. The horses were heading to the gate, and a graphic showed each horse’s lifetime winnings. I thought, “Man, I hate when a horse has made more money in its lifetime than I have in mine.” Then I thought, “Hey, there’s a status update!” But then I thought, “Well, who cares, really?” Which neatly sums up most of what’s on Facebook. Facebook must know that it needs to figure out some new angles, because it’s getting more ambitious all the time. It recently asked me, “Hey, do you mind if I go into your phone and take a stab at assigning photos to your contacts?” And I said, “Sure, Facebook, you hardly ever screw up—knock yourself out!” Now, when my brother-in-law, Rick, calls me, my phone shows the Facebook profile photo of a high-school friend named Rick. In the technology business, this is what we call Rick Synergy, and Apple and Facebook have finally made it work. Letting Facebook get its tentacles into my phone is just one privacy issue among many. Last week, someone I know used Facebook to find photos of another friend’s new girlfriend, to prove that she was recently at a party making out with some other guy. OK, maybe they weren’t my friends. Maybe they were Pam and Michael on The Office. But they feel like my friends when I welcome them into my home each Thursday night, those rascals. The point is, stop tagging me in photos. Or at least, stick to the ones where I’m conscious and wearing pants. If you can find any. At this point, I’m ambivalent about Facebook. We’ve seen this trajectory before, most recently with MySpace—initial enthusiasm, rapid adoption by everyone you know, then growing disillusionment. But at least MySpace was seedy and porn-infested. Facebook is the tedious airline companion of the Internet, chatting your ear off all the way across the country. But I’m not ready to quit. Not because I care that you’re tired today or that you have some new imaginary farm animals, but because I don’t want to end up like Braxton, opting out of Facebook only to have everyone make rude Amish jokes about me. Jokes that I wouldn’t even know about until they’re mentioned in a magazine column. Seeing as they’re all posted on Facebook.
 Northerners need country songs about their own particular interests. Like ridin' snowmobiles. And ice fishing. And making maple syrup. Last month I went to a wedding in Richmond, Va., and drove down Monument Row, which features a series of giant statues depicting Southern civil war heroes. Growing up in New England, you take it as sort of a given that the Confederacy was the bad guy in the Civil War. You know, the pro-slavery agrarian secessionists bent on destroying America—as those biased Northern textbook manufacturers would have it. Granted, guys like Jefferson Davis and Robert Lee are historic figures, but they lost, and Monument Row was startling because America doesn’t celebrate losers. At the surrender at Appomattox, Grant should’ve demanded that Lee sign a form declaring, “There shall be no statues of any of us losers, because we lost, and even though it’s mildly impressive that we managed to build a submarine in the 1800s, the only future monument to my life shall be a totally awesome orange Dodge Charger that can jump over barns. Signed, Robert E. Lee.” All of this brings me, naturally, to country music. I’ve embarked on a few road trips lately that have taken me to the hinterlands where country music is about the only thing on the FM dial. And, after listening to a fair helping of modern country music, I’ve come to the conclusion that northern country fans need their own tunes. Despite Robert E. Lee’s best efforts, this is still one big country, and therefore the life experiences and priorities of the northern redneck are not necessarily reflected in music produced by the Southern hillbilly. For example, I was driving through Canada when I heard the song “People are Crazy,” which tells the story of a male bonding session that takes place in a bar in Ohio. I mean, can Canadians even relate to a story set in an exotic sunny paradise like Ohio? And if they nevertheless enjoy such music, imagine how much more they’d enjoy it if it made cultural references they could understand, like workin’ on the Alberta oil sands, eatin’ at Tim Horton’s, drinkin’ Molson and watchin’ hockey. I think I just wrote the next Canadian country music hit. Somebody get me a twangy guitar and a lumberjack shirt. In other major music genres, offshoots of the form tend to eventually spread over the entire nation. Hip-hop has the East Coast, the West Coast and whatever planet Lil’ Wayne came from. Rock is international. But country music is very much of a place, and that place is the American south. Consider these lyrics from Josh Thompson’s “Beer on the Table”: “Once the bills are paid and that bass boat tank has gone from E to F, I fill that big ol’ cooler up there ain’t a whole lot left.” While bass boats do exist north of the Mason-Dixon, they’re much more of an inland Southern phenomenon. If you showed up at the Pemaquid lobster boat races in a bass boat, you’d be laughed straight out to Monhegan Island. Easton Corbin’s “I’m a little more country than that” asks listeners to, “Imagine a dirt road full of pot holes, with a creek bank and some cane poles, catching channel cat. I’m a little more country than that.” After the part about potholes I’m completely lost, but I infer that southerners somehow use canes to catch cats. Mr. Corbin, if his boasts are valid, is even a little more country than that. Certain country music tropes are universal—the desire for a loyal soulmate, a nice truck, a dog who don’t chew up yer guns. But other concerns of the New England rural dweller are sadly unrepresented. Where are the country songs about snowstorms, gay marriage and coffee brandy? What about lobstering, moose hunting and riding snowmobiles? Has Toby Keith ever made his own maple syrup? No, because if he had, there’d be a song called, “I made my own maple syrup and I ain’t sharin’ it with no illegal immigrants.” Here’s a song I just made up for my northern country music aficionados. I call it, “Your driveway ain’t all I want to plow.” I love diggin’ clams and eatin’ mussels from Maine, I love the smell of a moose in the rain. But I’d trade my Ski-Doo for your lovin’ right now Cause your driveway ain’t all I want to plow. The South has warm weather, all the manufacturing jobs and college football teams that are actually good. It’s not fair that they also have a monopoly on hokey song lyrics about fishing. Plus, it’s past time that the North had another win. So get ready, South. In the words of Abraham Lincoln, take your tongue outta my mouth, cause I’m kissing you goodbye.
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I probably end statements with "so" more frequently than you do, so.
There’s a strange linguistic crutch that’s sweeping the nation. It’s an epidemic of epidemic proportions. I see it on TV, I hear it on the street and I even [...]
Who needs bread when the world has fried chicken? Fast food chains get a bad rap for contributing to the nation’s obesity woes. Thus Burger King offers apple fries and McDonald’s dutifully [...]
After an interminably damp summer, beach weather finally arrived this month and I earnestly participated in my first “beach day.” I use quotation marks because I don’t think that two hours can honestly be claimed as a day. But my beach time was long [...]
Last night I watched “Whale Wars” for the first time. It’s a depressing show, because the anti-whaling people really just mildly annoy the Japanese as they go about their business. If I were a whale, I’d probably prefer that these guys go try to get the [...] |
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