Interesting blog meme spotted over at Glorfindel of Gondolin‘s blog: the Caesar’s Bath question: ‘list five things that people in your circle of friends or peer group are wild about, but you can’t really understand the fuss over. To use the words of Caesar (from History of the World Part I), “Nice. Nice. Not thrilling . . . but nice.”‘. So let’s see….
Celebrity TV poker: The latest TV fashion seems to be to stick actors, or sports personalities, or whatever around a card table and viodeotape them playing poker. Tedious…. I’d rather watch the actors act, or the sportspeople do sporty things.
SUVs: They’re ugly, inefficient, and seem to encourage thoughtless, selfish behaviour on the part of their drivers. When I pull into the Sun parking lot next to an SUV, and an otherwise blameless colleague climbs out of it, I never know what to say. (“Are you compensating for something, perhaps?” No, that’s tacky.)
TiVo: OK, I know that a couple of times I’ve been rescued by people with TiVos (when I forgot to record a program), but some people seem to live for their TiVos. They spend ages discussing TiVo hacks, complicated configurations of TiVo boxes and satellite receivers, and so forth….
The Matrix: It’s not just friends and colleagues. Even philosphy professors seize on the film as an explanatory device. (Think “brains in vats”.) But it wasn’t even a good film…. (The Animatrix, a DVD of Matrix backstory details by various anime film-makers, was vastly superior to the film itself.)
Blog hit counts (or page ranks, or whatever): Some of the bloggers I know seem to be obsessed with knowing how many people are reading their stuff. C’mon guys: with all the aggregators around, and spiders (which are getting increasingly clever at disguising themselves), and spambot probes, you can’t believe any of the numbers. Just relax and have fun – OK?