Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently posted some thoughts on “young people today” that has been getting a lot of play. Here’s the pull quote:

In certain young people today like these two from my writing workshop, I notice what I find increasingly troubling: a cold-blooded grasping, a hunger to take and take and take, but never give; a massive sense of entitlement; an inability to show gratitude; an ease with dishonesty and pretension and selfishness that is couched in the language of self-care; an expectation always to be helped and rewarded no matter whether deserving or not; language that is slick and sleek but with little emotional intelligence; an astonishing level of self-absorption; an unrealistic expectation of puritanism from others; an over-inflated sense of ability, or of talent where there is any at all; an inability to apologize, truly and fully, without justifications; a passionate performance of virtue that is well executed in the public space of Twitter but not in the intimate space of friendship.

I find it obscene.

I think this is well observed and very nicely expressed, but I’m put off a bit by Adichie attributing this frame of mind to young people. It’s a targeting I hear a lot and I think it’s unfair, even a bit of a smear. Are young people the only ones behaving like this and having these sorts of opinions? Some of them are. And I do put a lot of the blame on social media, which is having a terrible effect we haven’t begun to plumb the depths of yet. But are kids the worst offenders?

Not in my opinion. If we’re playing the generational blame game I think Adichie would find spending time with some retirees a revelation. In my own experience it’s the much- and justly-maligned Boomers who are even more politically intolerant, rude, bitter, selfish, narrow-minded, entitled, angry, and narcissistic. To make the easiest point, in the U.S. it was older voters who elected Trump. I find most (but not all) young people to be pretty decent. I find most (but not all) old people (a group I’m having to include myself in more and more) to be insufferable.

New type of tree, wearing a towel.

I made a comment a while back where I mentioned Jamie Dornan’s calves. Here’s a picture of what I was referring to.

Jamie Dornan is a model/actor/musician whose best known turn was playing the kinky billionaire in the 50 Shades franchise. I haven’t seen any of those movies (or read the books) but thought Dornan was great in The Fall. I even preferred his performance to that of his co-star Gillian Anderson.

Dornan’s a good-looking fellow, and apparently was named “the Golden Torso” by the New York Times. What surprised me the most, however, were the scenes in The Fall where he shows his calves. I mean, they really stand out. I don’t think you can get calves like that from doing anything in the gym. They have to be genetic. And while they’re impressive, they are kind of weird to see on a model.

I’m a card-carrying Luddite, and by “card” I don’t mean the kind of digital ID you put in a virtual wallet or display on a cell phone. My Luddite status can be established simply by the fact that I watch a lot of DVDs, which remain my preferred way of enjoying movies.

I do hope that DVDs will be with us for years to come, though I’ll admit to having doubts about this. I’ve heard rumours recently that some studios are thinking of abandoning the format entirely. It seems like everything is moving to streaming. But recently I’ve found even my love of DVDs is starting to be undercut by my inability to understand the language of icons. Evidence is here supplied by the “menu” to the DVD I recently watched of the three-part series they made out of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End.

What do these symbols mean? OK, the first you pressed to play the movie. I got that. The second? I don’t know. And I still didn’t know after I clicked on it. It took me to another page that I couldn’t understand the purpose of. I thought it might be scene selection, but I don’t think that was available anywhere. At least I couldn’t find it. The third button was for accessing the DVD’s special features. But how would you get that from an asterisk? The fourth looks like it’s meant to control sound settings, but actually it’s for languages. Which turned out to be superfluous since there was only one audio track and it was English. The fifth was for subtitles, though the only subtitles available were in English. Still, it did allow you to toggle whether you wanted them on or off (if you couldn’t do that from your remote).

Years ago, or really decades ago now, I remember the despair in some circles that arose when it was revealed that more and more automated services were being designed for people who couldn’t read even the simplest instructions. Meaning that menus were entirely controlled by buttons marked with icons. It now seems that, at least in some cases, we’ve lost written instructions completely, to be replaced by visual prompts and cues that are both unnecessary for overcoming language barriers (this particular DVD has no language options other than English) and confusing.

It’s a brave new world, and I’ve been left behind. Childhood’s end, indeed!

There are few groups that have been as widely mocked and vilified in the media during this COVID-19 pandemic as anti-maskers: angry gangs of ignorant yahoos and assorted scofflaws who decry the pandemic as a Chinese hoax and who just want to party or go to church without Big Brother telling them to wear a “face diaper” or in any way limit their freedoms of speech and association.

Much of this sneering contempt for the unmasked is well deserved, though I have some sympathy for those among them whose lives have been more than just disrupted by the impact of serial lockdowns. I find much less has been said, however, about a group I think of as the double-maskers: the officious and righteous who use the cover of fear as an excuse to act like idiots and jerks.

A lot of blame has to be laid on the media, which gets the currency of attention by beating the drum of fear. Every day begins with  reports of new risks we can’t afford to ignore and new precautions we need to take. The latest of these has been the call to double mask. This struck me as overkill, a feeling I had no reason to change after hearing Dr. Fauci on the subject: “if you use common sense and say, until we get the data, if a physical barrier with one mask works, it makes common sense that two layers or three layers — and you should have a double layer mask in one mask anyway — but if you want to put an extra mask on, there’s nothing wrong with that. . . . We can’t formally recommend it because we don’t have the science behind it. But I would not hesitate to tell someone if they want to wear two masks.” Hm. So no science, but it can’t hurt. Fauci himself wears two masks, but only because he likes the way they fit.

Another example of overkill are the social distance police in grocery stores. If everyone is wearing masks already and there is no physical contact, what are the chances of your getting infected by just walking past someone? And yet I’ve seen people yelling at other people to “stand back six feet!” Or getting angry because you walk down an aisle the wrong way. Most grocery stores now have aisles for which directions are indicated and I’ve never understood what the purpose of them is. I mean, in the first place there’s usually only two or three people in an aisle anyway, most often stopped and turned toward one or the other side. Second: what difference does it make if someone passes you in the aisle from behind as opposed to passing you going in the opposite direction? Why do people get exercised over this?

I’m sure there’s a common-sense middle ground. Every day I walk through a park where a group of people meet so that their dogs can run and play together. There’s usually anywhere from 5 to 10 people, including a couple of small children. People stand a little bit apart. Maybe six feet. Nobody wears a mask, though I’m sure they all do whenever or wherever one is required (as do I). And everyone is friendly and sociable. I know most of them and have never heard of any of them getting sick. Meanwhile, the people who (literally!) run away from you on the street, or who go into fits in the grocery store just strike me as so many bitter and anti-social assholes. A month or so ago I was walking toward one woman on a sidewalk and she scrambled in a panic through a snowbank to get away, tripping and sprawling awkwardly into the street. I was amazed and disturbed at the performance. People like this are deeply disturbed. I also suspect most of them are total hypocrites and don’t follow “the rules!” nearly as strictly as they expect other people to. Then again, a contractor I know told me that at one house he’d been hired to finish a basement in the owner had refused to allow his assistant to enter, which resulted in a doubling of the quoted price for the work to be done. Why? Both workers would have been wearing masks and gloves when in the house, and the contractor and his assistant shared a “bubble” so allowing the one in the house but not the other made no sense. But like the woman falling into the street, panic and anger had taken over.

The depressing conclusion I’ve come to is that between the anti-maskers and the double-maskers, and I know people in both camps, I actually like the anti-maskers a little better. They’re crazy (one of them I’m friends with honestly believes COVID-19 was developed by Bill Gates as a method of population control), but you can at least talk to them about other things and they seem, on balance, to be a lot less angry than the people who are going into hyperanxious, paranoid meltdowns and looking to phone the police every time they look out the window. The anti-maskers may be a bigger health threat, hating government and the medical establishment, but the double-maskers strike me as hating their neighbours, which I think is worse. Put another way: anti-maskers are nuts, double-maskers are nasty.

The other depressing thought I have has to do with the oft-asked question of what things will be like when people start getting vaccinated. How will these double-maskers ever get back to “normal”? Their special reality now seems rooted so deep in anger and fear I don’t think they’ll ever be able to pull back out. They’re mean and sad, and there’s no vaccine for that.

I used to buy quite a bit of stuff, mostly books, on Amazon. Mainly for the convenience, but also because they had the cheapest prices and free shipping. In the past year, however, as their stock price has gone through the roof and they’ve solidified their position as king of online retailers during the pandemic shutdown, I think I’ve only ordered a couple of things. And at this point I can’t see myself ever shopping there again.

Two reasons for this stand out. In the first place, their prices for almost everything have gone up, to the point where they are no longer even close to the best deal available. I’ve had conversations with friends who shop for other sorts of goods that back this up. They have similar complaints about how there are “no longer any deals on Amazon.”

I don’t know if this is because the pandemic has placed their operations under extra strain or if they are only using that as an excuse. Or perhaps it’s just the natural next step in their dominance of the marketplace. Since they really aren’t in competition with anyone, why not jack prices up? Even this year’s Boxing Day sale prices were double, or in some cases triple, what they were for the same product just five years ago.

The second big thing I’ve noticed is the huge number of sponsored products, or ads, that come back with every search. There are now as many of these as there are regular search results, and none of them have any bearing on what I’m looking for. Shopping on Amazon has become like searching for something on Google: not just a crapshoot, but a very unpleasant experience.

I doubt this matters much to Amazon. Nor am I sure if it even has any bearing on their game plan is now, their next step on the way to establishing a global media and retail monopoly. But they’ve lost me as a customer. Not for any political reasons (of which there are a few that are serious) but because they suck. There are better places to shop.

As you know, I’ll watch or read anything that has to do with zombies, so I’ve been working through The Walking Dead at a very sedate pace for several years now. I’m still only up to the fifth season. Among the many things that get me about the show (I’ve mentioned another already) is the way that nobody seems to be losing any weight. Given the survivors’ diet and lifestyle it seems like they all should be emaciated by now. But they’re all carrying a few extra pounds. Even the hefty Tyreese hasn’t slimmed down a bit.

I guess it would be impossible to expect an entire cast to get extra-skinny and keep the weight off during the course of a multi-year project like a cable series, but it’s another one of those things (like the ability of all the survivors to kill every walker with effortless head shots every time, like the most expert marksmen) that makes the zombie apocalypse seem like not such a bad thing. Nobody ever gets cold and there’s lots of snack food lying around.

I find it interesting when certain words and concepts get picked up by the media, who then ride them to the point where they become ubiquitous, sometimes with their original meaning greatly expanded or radically transformed. Why does this happen? Where does it start?

One example that became very popular during the Trump presidency was “empathy.” It got a lot of play because Donald Trump was seen (I think correctly) as someone lacking in it. But I suspect its mainstream adoption goes back to George Lakoff’s 2008 book The Political Mind, which popularized the idea that there are progressive and conservative modes of thought, with the latter characterized by authority and the former by empathy. At least the timing seems right.

The other big example, and one that I find a bit grating, is “existential.” Let’s face it, until recently the only time you would have heard this word being used would be in a discussion of developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophy and literature. Today, however, it is used all the time by people who may have never heard of Kierkegaard or Dostoyevsky, Sartre or Camus. What it means now is, simply, “a matter of life and death.” That is, any situation where one’s existence seems at stake. I’m not sure where or when this took off, but it has the feel of a fad that’s likely to burn out pretty soon. It just seems stupid to talk about a business having to make an existential decision, or if dining out at a restaurant during a pandemic might involve such a choice.