A couple of things that I'm jumping on way late. Jimmy Eat World. The first time I heard about them I was talking with Elder Ashby, one of our traveling APs, in my mission back in 2000. We were talking about music from home and then we kind of got into how we wouldn't be going to concerts anymore (ha!) and toning down our tastes and he was telling me about this new genre of music called "emo." And then he mentioned this one band that was pretty good, and he predicted that they were going to be really big - Jimmy Eat World. Sonofagun was right. The other thing is Google411 and the SMS service. I remember seeing that this came out a year or two ago, but didn't realize just how useful it would be. I should've known to just trust the Google product. But you can text for information to Google, and you can get movie times, sports, tons of stuff. It's so great. I just keep wondering to myself, where was I while these things were going on? What was I wasting my time with? I'm sure there are a hundred other things that have been around for years that I should adopt that I've yet to even hear about.
Do you guys read good writing regularly? I don't mean just good, but I mean good writing. I love Jay Nordlinger. I love the conservative voice. It's refined, moral, and in-tune. But of course I would feel that way. I'm just always so impressed with ideas and the fluency of ideas and proferring cogent thoughts through the written form. One person I know always used to talk about the Federalist papers and how every American should be familiar with those writings because those pieces essentially spurred America toward ratifying the constitution.
In Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card has the two main characters gaining worldwide influence as children through the medium of what they called the "nets." They help guide the world and the people look forward to their ideas through their writings and this provides the framework under which major leaders would make their major decisions. I thought that was cool because he wrote that back in 1986, before anybody really new anything about the internet. But that just gets back to my point that so much of the world moves because of ideas and the proliferation of information, which so often comes from writing.
I guess I just wonder how often we expose ourselves to those all so important ideas that people express through their writings. Or even through various forms of media like art, music, and movies, etc. Do we really seek out the best books? I wish I did more. It's important though. The wheels of the world are turning based on these ideas.
Do you know the artist for the painting? It should be very familiar. It is Norman Rockwell's Breaking Home Ties. Anyway...I wish I had more time to spruce up this post, but I should get back to work.
1 comment:
I've been listening to Jimmy exclusively for the past week or so. The more I listen to them, the more I fall in love with them. Top 5 bands, I'd say. I've listened to them for years and years, but it feels like I'm rekindling an old romance lately. Weird.
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