So I bought a new TV and Blu-Ray player. Very good deals, relatively, anyway. $900 + insurance + tax + shipping for both. Am I bragging? I’m trying to be straight up, here. I declined to buy a Sony PS3 because I won’t play games on it. I don’t want to play games on it. I want to play games less often, not more.

I don’t need a TV, but the one we have is dying, and I like watching movies. Sometimes I watch broadcast television. I don’t have cable or satellite. I despise telecom companies, and have no use for the vast majority of television programming. What I like, I watch on DVDs (I rent from Film Fest Video on Duplex north of Eglinton in mid-town Toronto).

I got the TV and player online; they’ll be delivered on Wednesday, probably. Means I’ll have to work from home New Year’s eve. Tomorrow I’ll go down to College Street and find HDMI and optical cables so I can actually use them, and then maybe buy or rent a couple of Blu-Ray discs. Kim says she’s going to buy the Planet Earth boxed set. That is a worthy purchase, I think. Maybe I’ll buy Blade Runner. It now makes sense to own movies that have real photographic artistry.

I don’t buy many movies. I download some. I think I would like to be part of a Blu-Ray rental club. I don’t really want to “own” movies, nor do I want to download massive Blu-Ray movie files and store them or burn my own copies.

As much as I hate consumer culture, I’m a product of my generation. But if I like consuming anything, it is information. And I still like books the best. But that’s probably just how my brain is wired.

Read “Build a frontier, you get cowboys” Part I and Part II. (The link at the end of the first page is broken, but my link works.)

I just watched Michael Moore’s SICKO. I have mixed feelings about his methods, but I applaud his message.

The world is at war. And it is being fought over a single driving disagreement: who gets to have a better life. And there are only two points of view.

The first point of view is that a minority of people get to have a better life. There is endless disagreement over which minority, but taken together, it is the majority view that a minority deserve to have a better life.

The other point of view is that everyone deserves to have a better life.
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Why Work? What is a Wage Slave?

I spammed the hell out of twitter and now I feel a vague remorse. But Christmas is the one day of the year where I’m really not supposed to work or I can’t because of all the stupid distractions and gift giving.

I pretty much hate Christmas. More than that, I hate atheists and agnostics and their self-indulgent, self-congratulatory buying orgy. Christmas is disgusting. The one day of the year people can get pissy if you don’t give them what they want. Socially mandated generosity. How putrid. Christmas, as it is practised in Canada and elsewhere by soulless consumer zombies, makes me hate the human race. At no other time of the year does my childhood longing to wake up from the nightmare of being a human being in order to find out that I’m really a robot planted on earth by advanced aliens to observe these ridiculous talking apes.

Anyway, Christmas is just kind of stupid. And it’s only a symptom of wider degeneracy in a culture of self-absorption, self-entitlement and self pity. How do we not go insane and kill one another in droves? How many people actually have meaningful lives doing meaningful work? We’re most of us all slaves to laziness, gluttony and all the rest of the qualities of our baser natures. Spoilt children! Cowards! Toadies! And yet we’re so pleased with ourselves. Crowing about our pathetic accomplishments and gloating over our stacks of material garbage or engaging in endless and pointless tribal rituals. It’s so low. It’s so disgusting. I am overwhelmed with disgust on this day more than any other day of the year. It makes me sick.

Of course there are exceptions. There are a few people trying, in their way, to encourage responsibility, thoughtfulness, self-restraint and other qualities without which we will inevitably destroy our culture, our heritage, our self-esteem, our environment and ultimately ourselves. But they are so easy to ignore, or to mock, or discount. Their message can be distorted, bastardized, taken out of context, or drowned out with the noise of a billion televisions and computer screens. Youtube is all we need to be happy. Or a nice Santa Claus hat. That’s what life is really about, isn’t it? Fat men wearing funny hats giving out free presents? What more could you possibly want?