Rock the vote

For some silly reason, people don't vote as much as they used to. The apathy crosses all demographic groups, but it is especially worrisome among the young. Conventional approaches - akin to Mr. T. bellowing "Stay in school and don't do drugs and take off them huge gold chains, sucka" while jabbing his stubby finger at the camera - just don't work with media-savvy kids.

While watching last night's second presidential debate, it occurred to me - beyond the fact that I'd need to power wash my house down to the foundation if I ever had either candidate over for tea - that a little bit of levity would make the whole process somewhat easier to swallow. I call it the Jon Stewart Effect, because more GenX&Y folks seem to be getting their news from The Daily Show than from traditional media.

With that in mind, perhaps this site will cross the electoral divide by tossing a laugh into the proceedings and . And if it doesn't, it's still a pretty cute example of political satire. Swallow your milk before clicking the link.

Some thoughts on links

If you click some of the links that I embed in my messages, you'll notice that some of them are, shall we say, odd. I do this because, like the little easter egg surprises that developers hide in the menu structures of virtually every DVD that comes out nowadays, I think it's fun to stumble across the unexpected.

Allow me to elaborate (and recognize that even if you didn't allow me to elaborate, I would proceed regardless. This is, after all, my blog and I answer to no one. Well, my wife, but that's in the real world, not the blogsphere.)

Let's say I've written something that contains an opportunity to link to a famous American broadcaster. Like the CBS/60 Minutes curmudgeon Andy Rooney. The conventional approach would have me linking to his home page at CBS News. There's nothing overtly wrong with this. It serves as a valuable starting point for learning all about the man who has come to typify the acerbic and satiric show-ending opinion piece. Few people do the signoff as he does, and he truly does represent a unique example of an era that will soon exist solely in our collective memory.

The site, however, is about as middle-of-the-road as seventysomething CBS news producers will allow. One can't help but yawn when the milquetoastness of it all becomes fully apparent. You will doubtless remember nothing from your visit after 48 hours (pun somewhat intended.) In short, it's flippin' boring.

A quick trip out to the fringe might reignite your curiosity, however, and leave your brain with something that will prompt you to wake up laughing at 3 a.m. weeks from now. For example, Chickenhead.com has this repository of too-hot-for-TV Andyisms. This Quicktime movie of a cantankerous Rooney contending with AliG (a British hip hopper/actor who seems to be popular these days, for some reason) is similarly classic, if not exactly mainstream.

Star of television's The A Team and general man-about-town Mr. T. is another great example. His Internet Movie Database entry is tame enough. The Flash-based movie, Mr. T. Goes For A Drive, is decidedly less sober. It's beyond funny. Similarly, The A-Team Drinking Game is significantly closer to the edge of the comedic spectrum than the previously-linked IMDB entry.

So as you read my blog, pay attention to the links, because you never know when they'll send you off on a magical mystery tour from which you may not emerge until your tummy recovers from the laughter.

A tree grows in London

You can tell my wife has been hanging around me for far too long. Ever since I can remember, I've pointed my camera lens at the weirdest little subjects that most of us would otherwise ignore. Our photo albums are full of studies of cake icing, flower petals, wood grains, and rock faces, to name a few.

I've often been accused of wasting film. I look at it as seeing the world from a different perspective. Now my wife seems to have picked up the bug.

While playing with the kids at the park yesterday, she practically filled the camera's SD card with the expected snapshots of smiling children playing without reservation. She also took some pictures of the local flora, including this neat observation of a gnarled tree trunk.

She even admits my photographic psychosis has begun to rub off on her. Poor dear. Anyway, enjoy this pic, and feel free to let us know what it reminds you of. Whatever it looks like to you, it's nice having another set of fresh eyes in the family.

Bad bloggers!

Never let it be said that bloggers are meek pacifists. They send hate mail, too. Read on.

Quoted, Geekily

The pontification bug has bitten me once more. My chat with a reporter from Boston-based tech publication Mass High Tech resulted in a quotation in the article, Heeding the Call, in the October 4th edition.

The article is pretty fascinating if you have a particular interest in the evolution of Voice over IP telephony. If you're part of the other 99 percent of the population that would rather watch Scooby Doo reruns while debating the merits of Daphne vs. Velma (I was always a Velma fan myself, frankly, but I'll save that thought for another posting), you'll likely find the topic a little on the geeky side.

Still, it's always fun to read something I said and think, "Holy faifoli...I said THAT?" Here's the passage, with a bit of a preamble thrown in for context:

Nevertheless, the IP-PBX is not yet a large market. IP-PBX sales totaled just $89 million in the second quarter of 2004, a 3 percent increase over the previous quarter, according to an August report from Infonetics Research.

But the changeover from circuit to IP-PBX is unstoppable, said Carmi Levy, a senior research analyst with Info-Tech Research, a technology research company based in London, Ontario.

“It’s a small but rapidly growing market,” Levy said. “And even if a company isn’t buying now, they’re looking at it. The hearts and minds of tomorrow’s buyers are being won now.”

The putrid stench of learning

Robin Nagle is a New York University anthrolopogist and the author of the about-to-be-published We All Wear Green: Loading Out with Sanitation Workers in New York. She just spent a week of on-the-job training with the garbage with the new crop of New York City garbage men and wrote about it in MSN Slate Magazine.

I know "garbage man" is not the most policitcally correct term for the role, but she used it in a relatively self-deprecating manner, so I figure it's acceptable here as well. Alternatives like garbage person, refuse management specialist, materials lifecycle engineer, and pie hole leader don't seem to have the same ring to them.

The links to each entry in the five-part series are here:
Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday

It's a worthwhile read because garbage is one of those things we wish would simply go away. Like sewage and the other grimy bits of society's underbelly, we pretend we're above all of them until the very moment there's some kind of accident or disaster. Over the next few years, I firmly believe that garbage, recycling, and all related elements of same will become somewhat more prominent in our lives as the unsustainability of a consumer-driven lifestyle comes back to bite us in the collective keester.

I suspect we'll see more of Ms. Nagle in the process. Based on her imagery-filled observations of her first week on the job, that likely won't be such a bad thing.

Life in the cubicle world

Jared Sandberg writes the Cubicle Culture column for the Wall Street Journal. I trolled through some of his previously published pieces and came away impressed. If only the decisionmakers of the world would point their browsers here, open offices would be better places to work. Here's the rolling archive. Beware: addictive.

A Shark Tank Story

Many thanks to Trillian for sending this my way. It comes from ComputerWorld's excellent Shark Tank series. This one struck a very funny chord. Even if you don't work in technology, the humanity of these stories is still funny as heck.

---
Shark Tank: Sometimes the quickest solution is the best one

This pilot fish is the lone IT person at a small manufacturing company. So when the music-on-hold system stops working, you know who has to deal with it.

"The music-on-hold player continuously replayed a CD and fed into the simple phone system we were using," fish says. "Eventually the player broke. Since I had a spare PC in my office, I wired the audio jack on the PC to the phone system, ripped the CD and set the media player to continuous replay.

"I gave myself a pat on the back for coming up with an immediate solution and made a mental note to order a new player the next time I made an equipment purchase."

A few days later, a buddy from another department drops by fish's office so they can spend lunchtime blasting each other in a multiplayer computer game.

"He used the spare PC in my office and I used my workstation," says fish. "We were well into destroying each other when the CEO's secretary frantically burst into my office, scared, panicking.

"She explained in horror that our music on hold had turned into death screams and hellish demonic noises!"

Fish knows instantly what the problem is -- the game's audio was playing on the music-on-hold system -- and he takes instant action. He leaps up, tears the old music-on-hold player from the wall, throws it to the floor and stomps on it.

Meanwhile, his friend quits out of the game on the spare PC, and the music-on-hold system goes silent.

"They bought a new player that day," fish says. "And for a long time, you could still hear them talk about the possessed music-on-hold player."

Who's reading me?

As much as I like to hide behind the pen, it still thrills me that people actually want to read what I write. That they voluntarily take time out of their day to experience my words is a pretty heady experience for me. It never gets old.

Which explains why I added a little statistics-gathering tool to my blog. If you look over on the right and scroll down a screen or two (or three, depending on what kind of computer you're using) you'll see a rectagular button that says "Site Meter". If you click on it, you'll see how many folks read me in a given day. Average traffic typically ranges around 30. If you dig a bit deeper, you can tell where all these folks are coming from by clicking on the Domain link.

Frighteningly, today's statistics indicate 14% - the biggest group - are visiting from a certain organization which may or may not have employed me in the not-too-distant past. At said organization works one person who recently toiled long and hard to have me banned from the building because of worries that my presence would negatively impact productivity (yes, you heard it here first: I'm a productivity-killer. The shame!)

I referred to the original incident in an earlier post - Carmi the Security Threat - and may eventually turn it into a comedy routine. It's all rather amusing, given the fact that so many of my former colleagues now enjoy my writings in this new medium. So much for the productivity argument, then.

Welcome aboard, Lifers. It's wonderful to have you along on my journey.

(And, no, I'm not typically this combative. In fact, I'm about as easygoing as they come. But when small-minded people run smack into my black-and-white sense of right and wrong - which mixes into the whole freedom-of-expression/journalist thing - I get my dander up. And my dander is not pretty.)

The unbearable lightness of being...tired

I woke up before dawn today so that I could edit some work that was deadlined for this morning and really should have been finished last night. Problem was, I fell asleep while tucking our kids in - don't ask, there's something about reading bedtime stories that just pushes me over the edge.

Next thing I knew, it was past 1 a.m. and my wife was rousing me from my comfortable (yeah, right) perch at the end of our little guy's bed. I mumbled something about needing to get on the computer so I could finish my work. But instead I rested my head on my pillow - "just for a minute" - and promptly fell right back asleep.

Maybe I subconsciously enjoy pushing my work until I'm so perilously close to deadline that if I so much as sneeze, the resulting loss in productive time will force me to miss my deadline. Perhaps I recall my early years in radio, when I would write the morning news run - a new script every half hour to feed the maw of the news machine. It was an incredible rush, but the adrenalin gets to you after a while. And when it's over, you feel spent until you have to come back the next day to go through it all again.

Which brings me to this morning. The alarm clock in my head kicked in around 4-ish to let me know it was finally time to get serious. So downstairs I went to my ever-friendly PC. I popped in my headphones, cranked up some tunes - Good Charlotte seems to be the band of the week, for some reason - and got to work.

I flew through an absolute ton of work before the littlest man in our life trundled down the stairs and ever-so-politely asked if he could watch Finding Nemo. I chatted with blueberry boy for a while - he was wearing a one-piece pair of blue pyjamas, and I'm a huge fan of such attire because it looks so darn cozy - before the DVD decided it had spent long enough booting and started the movie.

Long story short (um, sure, like that's possible with me, but let's assume this is the case for a moment), I got everything done before I left the house in time for our morning review meeting. It wasn't pretty. But it worked.

Now I need a nap. Can someone cover for me, please?

Google Zeitgeist

Because I spend my days trolling the Internet looking for cool stuff to write about, I'm always wondering what's hot, what's not, and where people's heads are at. Writers live for this stuff, for the more we know about our audience, the more effectively we can create work that people want to read.

Imagine that!

So with that in mind, I stumbled across Google Zeitgeist and found myself mighty intrigued. Zeitgeist is defined by a now-forgotten online dictionary as "the spirit of the time, or the spirit characteristic of an age or generation." My university professors used to toss it around like so much popcorn not because I think they wanted to make a point, but because I suspect they thought it sounded cool.

Really. Say it a few times fast. Try to look authoritative while you're doing it. Wear a tweedy blazer with patches on the elbows. Bonus points if you carry a pipe in your left hand and wave it wildly while you try to convince your audience that they'll be permanently lost in Nunavut if they don't memorize the definition to the word Zeitgeist.

I'm digressing again. Sorry about that. Force of habit.

So back to Google. The company is much more than a mere text-driven search engine. Behind the scenes, they are working to advance the state of the art of search. They're paradigm-busters (ah, another one of my favorite words; it just rolls into your ear like a swishy, foamy wave at the beach) who look closely at how we use search, then develop tools and utilities to meet our ever-evolving needs.

They post their new toys in Google Labs (more on that in another post) to give us mere mortals the chance to try them out. Google Sets - which has bailed me out of more research pickles than I dare admit - is a great example. Google Webquotes is another. Some services don't go further than there, and are eventually retired from service. Remember the Google McRib? Didn't think so.

Some services, however, graduate to full-blown status. Google Language Tools, Google Wireless, and Google Directory all gestated in the warm embrace of Google Labs before being tossed into the cold, cruel world. Google News and Google Catalogs are no longer considered lab rats, but they still carry a Beta tag. Odd, but as long as they're still available, I'm happy.

But I'm still digressing. The title of this post is Google Zeitgeist, after all. This resource is a one-page, constantly-updated snapshot of what people are thinking and doing. Google defines it as:

For both breaking news and obscure information alike, people around the world search on Google at www.google.com. With a bit of analysis, this flurry of searches often exposes interesting trends, patterns, and surprises.

The Google Zeitgeist page is regularly updated to reflect lists, graphs, and other tidbits of information related to Google user search behavior.

My definition is a little more out-there: it's nothing less than a peek into the collective conscious of online society at any given moment. Or something reasonably reminiscent thereof. As such, it's a pretty neat launching pad for whatever fun you want to have online. Just remember to practice safe mouse, Zeitgeist Boy or Girl.

Publish Day - Of Band-Aids & Kids

It's another happy day in the Levy household because, in addition to the fact that I'll be working from home today and I finally managed to log six continuous hours of sleep last night, my latest column was published in today's edition of the London Free Press.

This piece, entitled Fixing the hurt - one bandage at a time, marks the second time that I first posted a rough cut of the article to my blog before shaping it and submitting it to my editors. It's yet another useful purpose to this blog. I'm sure I'll discover even more cool things about this medium in the coming weeks and months.

I was inspired one morning last week by my daughter, who came to me with news of yet another in a long string of boo-boos in her still-young life. This time, she bumped her knee. A couple of days earlier, it was her finger. An hour later, her little brother trundled over and tearfully showed me his earlobe.

I don't quite know why some events spark an idea while others just languish in the ether for an eternity. But this one did. As soon as I had her all fixed up - with a Strawberry Shortcake bandage, some soothing words and a hug - I dumped my thoughts into the computer and let them sit. After a quick temperature check with my wife - I think she has a better sense of which ideas will ultimately fly and which ones won't - I realized this could be a good thing if I evolved it. It ended up being a really simple story filled with colorful imagery that, I hope, readers can relate to their own experiences.

I hope you enjoy the piece. I hope it evokes more than a mere smile, however. I hope it takes you back to whatever happies you encountered during your own childhood and have held on to ever since. We all seem to have a rich trove of recollections from that long-vanished time in our lives. Going back there every once in a while isn't such a bad thing after all.

Old vs. new

AP (via CNN) is running a story on how some university professors continue to hold onto old-style methods of classroom-based interaction, namely blackboards and chalk. This is another one of those interesting interface points between old and new technologies that makes studying the field so interesting. The article is called Some professors won't give up chalk for technology's sake.

It's of particular interest to me because I also teach part-time at London's Fanshawe College. I'm a huge proponent of technology, and use it extensively when I'm in class - through an Internet-connected PC and an overhead projector unit - and when I'm out of class via a richly-featured web site that uses multiple tools to dynamically deliver course content and facilitate student interaction in a virtual environment.

As much of a geek-head as I am when it comes to leveraging technology in an educational setting, I'm also keenly aware of its limitations. When the vaunted technology has failed - and sooner or later, it fails for everyone - I've had to revert to good old blackboards and chalk to both get my initial message across, and to facilitate the interaction (and learning) that followed.

Education is all about picking the best medium at any given time. No one form is ideal, and the best teachers are the ones who appreciate that concept right through the core of their very being.

Quote this

I'm an avid collector of quotations. It must have started when I took an Effective Speaking extra-curricular course in the sixth grade. The leader was the now-late Mr. Leibovitch, and he held court every week in the gymnasium of our elementary school. I remember the electrifying feeling I got when I was on my game in front of a group of my peers. It was an early taste of a multifaceted literary exercise of the mind.

Every week, we'd have to prepare a speech on an assigned topic. I'd write them on cue cards and practice delivering them by forcing my long-suffering mother to stand in for the live audience. Every speech always had to have a quotation that somehow related to and supported the central theme. I became intimately acquainted with Bartlett's Book of Quotations that year, and the obsession has stuck with me ever since.

I'll be dropping them in here and there to keep things interesting and leave you with even more to ponder. This quote comes from Robert McKee, the character played by Brian Cox in the movie, Adaptation. The real Mr. McKee is a hard-driving screenwriting instructor profiled by a CNN reporter.

This quote stuck out as particularly relevant to my current existence. And likely to yours as well, since, at the core of it all, we are all storytellers:

"[A writer has] one responsibility: Tell the truth."

History: achieved

It's official: Burt Rutan's SpaceShipOne has won the $10 million X Prize. Let the real games begin.

The pursuit of history

SpaceShipOne is all set for its second of two flights into suborbital space in its pursuit of the X Prize.

My gut tells me that at some point, an accident is inevitable. Rather than bemoan the fact that people might perish in the process, we need to accept that this is the deal when humans push the bounds of possibility. Indeed, even the participants in the X Prize readily admit the risks are real. Yet without exception, they all vow to push on even in the event of a disaster. They’re made of pretty amazing stuff, these folks.

Instead of covering our eyes and tagging them with the daredevil label, we really ought to thank all the people who are willing to risk it all so that humankind may advance itself. Without them, we’d still be tooling around in horse-drawn carriages.

A long time ago, a couple of bike mechanics named Wright risked life and limb to get their oft-ridiculed heavier-than-air contraption into the air. They and those who followed made it possible for us to see our grandma after a routine five-hour hop across the continent. Progress has to start somewhere, no matter how crazy it may seem at the time.

To SpaceShipOne and all who fly in its wake, safe flight, happy landing, and Godspeed.

Modern ruins

I've long been intrigued by the stories buried within the wreckage of past-their-prime pieces of architecture.

My preferred medium for telling these stories is black-and-white film. As compelling as digital photography has become in recent years, nothing approaches the grain structure, the resolution, the sheer starkness of a quality b&w film run through a good camera with a tack sharp lens. In the absence of color, it's up to the subtle shading gradations and edgings to tell the story. It seems simple on the surface, but the interaction of grays can be significantly more engaging than you might initially assume. Black-and-white seems to invite the viewer to linger over the image for a longer period of time. It's a world that's comforting to eyes all too often blinded by the crassness of the modern landscape and its accompanying cacaphony of color.

My weapon of choice in these cases is my now-ancient Nikon F-801s and my 85mm/1.8 portrait lens. Loaded with an agreeably high-resolution, low-ISO-rated b&w film, I can shoot all day until I get what I want.

This shoot was from last September. Happy that I had just decided to quit a miserable job in favor of one that would finally allow me to do what I always intended to do - namely write - I took our two older kids downtown to run some errands and shoot some pictures around a building that was being partially demolished.

This is my favorite of the bunch, since it nails that moment where the future confronts a past it never knew existed. Like a Fitzgerald novel, it's full of obvious differences of size, scale and perspective. And like any good picture, it absolutely takes me back to the moment when I tripped the shutter. I hope you enjoy the view - and the experience - as much as my kids and I did.

Another late night writing jag

When you work the french fry machine for a living, the occasional tap on the shoulder is considered an acceptable encounter within a normal work environment. You deal with these interruptions as they come up, then get back to work cranking out your process-mandated 1,800 perfectly-golden sliced potato slices per hour. One fry every two seconds. No more, no less.

(By the way, the "you" to which I refer is clearly a rhetorical one. Didn't want y'all to think I was deliberately stigmatizing you.)

Given the relatively low level of complexity related to your current activity - remove fries from freezer, dump into bin, place bin in boiling, artery-clogging oil, set alarm, remove assembly when alarm goes off, dump into catch basin, fill cardboard boxes - you hardly have to get into the right mindset to maintain a given output velocity of the deadly confection.

Writing presents a whole new challenge. I write because I was likely struck by lightning very early in life. My brain has its creative and not-so-creative moments. It takes time and energy to get into a state where the words just flow through my fingertips and into my keyboard. Writing speed, quality, and the elusive groove that drives them both are far from binary, on-off propositions. One doesn't simply pick up where one left off. Not so easily, anyway.

A just-a-minute tap on the shoulder or a ringing phone doesn't just stop my progress for the 10 seconds it takes to take care of whatever it is that's so seemingly important. It yanks me out of that creative zone and forces me to once again force my head back into that space that I was in before I was so abruptly interrupted.

This process can take a while. Some creative types say a 15-minute lag is typical. Worse for me, if I had a slew of words in my head just before the ringer went off, I will very likely lose them to the ether as a result of the stoppage.

Writers and other creators seem to get this. Non-creative types generally do not.

I don't mean to sound arrogant or perjorative. We do, after all, have kids. Three of 'em. And when you're four years-old, Daddy's writing idiosyncracies don't matter a whole lot to you when all you want is for someone to get you a cup of milk and take out your Lego set.

But intentional or not, trying to write one cohesive piece, or shape an existing one to a razor's edge before a deadline, is virtually impossible when the world buzzes around you and more often than not bumps right into you as well.

To counter the effects of our interrupt-driven world, I've gotten into the rather non-sustaintable habit of pushing my bedtime back to a sometimes-ridiculous hour. I write when it's way past any sane person's bedtime because it's the only continuously clear stretch of absolutely silent time in my otherwise-crammed-with-activity day.

Tonight is just such a night. What started out as a quick check of tomorrow morning's weather forecast in advance of tomorrow morning's bike ride turned into a dimly-lit writing session when my head decided now was a good time to finish off my next column. I ended up editing a mostly-written piece, and it turned out better than I expected. I'm a psychotic perfectionist when I write, often playing with multiple iterations of particular words, phrases or other constructs until I'm beyond happy that I've achieved an ideal sense of balance and flow.

I always know I'll pay for it the next day thanks to the inevitably abbreviated sleep period. But that's a tradeoff I'm willing to make if it means pushing a published piece from good to great.

Some nights, I'll completely ignore the clock and end up writing until the birds start singing just before dawn. Those are the days I lay on an extra mug or two of full-strength tea to keep me going. That this is normal by now is a pretty ridiculous comment on how I've evolved the writing processes that sustain and advance me.

But it works. And as long as I keep moving the literary bar forward, I'll continue to shave as much shuteye out of my life as I can possibly manage.

And with that, I'll hit Publish before hitting the hay. 'Night all.

Volcanic Dumbth

I'm generally an optimistic person who tries to see the best in others. Even when they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt, I always seem to find some modicum of good in everyone I encounter. I'm not sure why, but it helps me sleep better at night.

Still, you've got to admit there's a huge amount of stupidity in the world today. In a small way, it became evident as I was watching the news earlier tonight.

As you know, Mount St. Helens has reawakened with its strongest level of volcanic activity since the May 18, 1980 eruption that blew the top of the mountain off, killed 57 people and decimated the surrounding landscape.

The United States Geological Survey is now warning of an imminent eruption. The risk increased so much on Saturday that they expanded the danger zone around the volcano and asked the snap-happy tourists who have flocked to the site in recent days to move well outside the zone.

So there was a USGS geologist, fresh from telling the news folks that we're looking down the barrel of an imminent reuption. As soon as he finished the interview, he turned to begin the process of shooing the still-oblivious tourists back to wherever they came from.

They ignored him.

He raised his voice and followed them as they walked away from him.

Still, they ignored him.

Finally, one of the fat-butted touristas approached the camera and complained that "there are nice ways to ask us to leave, and there are rude ways to ask. He chose to be rude."

Let's step back and observe the situation from an objective perspective now, shall we? Here's the deal:

An expert who has spent his life studying these things has just told you to move way the heck away because you could become a modern-day incarnation of Lot's Wife (in ashen form, of course) if you stick around Dodge any longer. And instead of thanking him and naming your first- and second-born children after him, you first ignore him, then crudely criticize him on national television.

Moronic doesn't even begin to describe what this dork deserves to be called. This isn't a restaurant where a haughty hostess needs to be put in her place. The stakes are just a wee bit higher here, yet brain-dead tourist seems to have missed the message.

I sure hope the pictures she gets are worth it. They may yet be her last.

BTW, if you originated from the top half of the human gene pool and you'd like to monitor the proceedings from a safer distance - like your living room or home office - the USGS has set up a real-time monitoring web site here. The USGS has also built some historical data sites here as well as here. Finally, Google's constantly-updated MSH newsfeed is here.

A Wal-Mart sentiment

Much has been written and said about the big box invasion and its impact on the main streets and malls of our cities. Much remains to be said before the final verdict is rendered - if it can ever be truly rendered.

While chewing over this issue with my engagingly enlightened colleagues the other day, I was suddenly possessed by this clearly dichotomous perspective that pretty much sums up where the midpoint of society stands:

They are the evil empire, but I appreciate their vast selection of reasonably-priced goods.

Repeat it a few times, if you wish, and the polarizing truth of it all should become apparent.

When you're done, seek out the flashing blue light in the distance. I believe it's hovering between aisles seven and eight, and it will be there for no more than the next 15 minutes.

Thanks, Trillian!