digital garden

I’m not the gardener on The Hilltop but I long ago placed an order with my gardeness that would entail getting rid of the grass and doing a natural garden/native grasses property. I have issues with lawns but I guess if you have kids that like to play in the yard then feel free to carry on. Of course, the number of kids I see actually playing on the lawn might total one or two every year or so. There’s a piece in the WaPo today (with a slideshow) about folk up Maryland-way (just over the District line) that have gone the route of garden vice grass and they look like ideas that are right up my alley; or, at least along the lines of my work order.

A few weeks ago Prince pointed out that the Internet is dead, or useless, or losing it’s mojo. Actually, it was a diatribe partly on music distribution and partly on its influence. I laughed it off as Prince playing his games again and didn’t think about it again until earlier this week. A quick hit from Prince:

The Internet’s like MTV,” [he} said to The Mirror’s correspondent. “At one time, MTV was hip, and suddenly it became outdated.”

My position would substitute “full of use” for hip and “full of crap” for outdated. I had a hard time explaining this in conversation so typing it will be harder. I think the quantity of great stuff the Internet does (research, ordering products, music distribution, publishing, etc.) is growing everyday. But, the percentage of that good is being outpaced by the giga-acres of useless, time wasting, pointless junk (this blog might be a case in point). There’s a bit of a parallel between the Internet now and TV in early ‘90s when we started to hit triple digit channels. What we seem to do nowadays is to start online with the intention of checking in with family and friends (e-mail, Facebook), getting the news, reviewing sports’ scores, and ordering some rugs; suddenly we’re sucked into watching YouTube videos of a kid hitting his dad in the junk with a whiffle bat, a sloth playing a Gretsch, or two episodes of Cops on Hulu.com. I understand that one man’s junk is another man’s gold but my somewhat considered position is that the amount of ‘value’ time spent online vs. the amount of junk time is something like 1:10. Not much different than when you finish watching your favorite TV show and all of a sudden you’re snoring on the couch, in your underwear at midnight, with Telemundo playing on your eleventy-billion inch plasma donor TV. Think about it.

I’m running L. to the orthodontist in a few hours to get her braces taken off. I think I’ll pop some corn tonight and we can sit on the couch and watch some TV….or surf the Web.

Love to all,

T