Historical Summer 2004 article. Dates, prices, services and contacts describe the source period; current availability has not been established.
My attention span has never been very, oh what do you think of the wonderful weather we’ve been having, good.
It is hard to keep me occupied and on-task, I can’t believe that Bush is as dumb as he sounds, even under the best of circumstances. Say, do you think all of these restaurants on Delmar can make it?
I mean, how many eating establishments can one neighborhood have, which reminds me, I wonder if the new baseball stadium will ever recoup the money that was spent on it.
In his book, The Rise of the Culture Class, Richard Florida talks about how foolish it is for communities to spend money on erecting stadiums. What attracts young and talented people, he maintains, is lots of coffee shops, street-life, and an urban feel.
A significant gay and lesbian population also helps a community. What we call multi-tasking today, you see, is really just a euphemism for not being able to stay on task. That reminds me, do you think Princess Diana’s death was an accident?
Some of us will never have the luxury of focusing, winnowing, staying on task, hedge-hogging, and finding closure. That doesn’t mean we’re not tenacious; we are.
It doesn’t mean we don’t get things done; we do.
It does mean, by the way, wouldn’t it be great if John McCain ran with Kerry?
It does mean that we tend to flit and veer.
Here one minute, there the next.
Now where were we? Well, for those of us who are attention-span challenged (raise your hand if you’ve been paying attention), the internet is both the best of times and the worst of times. For the past few hours, I’ve been sitting, trying to write an article.
I wonder how old Albert Pujols really is.
In the old days, pre-internet, I’d get up periodically and wander around. I’d check for the mail, play with the dogs, light a stogie, look out the window.
I mean, he has to be in his late 30’s, despite what the Cardinals say.
The internet has changed all of that. Playing first-base will help him, though, regardless of his age. You see, now, sitting here with my laptop, I can write, spinning prose with my fingers being ever-so eloquent to myself.
But then when the attention span goes out the window, say after 3-4 minutes, instead of physically getting up and exerting myself by moving around, Heaven forbid, I can surf the net. Yes, that’s right.
I can stay in my same easy chair, the pooches asleep around me, and simply with a score of keystrokes find myself in another world.
This is so easy, it’s too tempting.
I would have liked to seen Pujols stay at third base but once he hurt his arm, I knew that it was over. Getting rid of Martinez was wise.
I wonder if any candidate will be brave enough to come out for recognizing Cuba as a country? Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks NBA team and each year he sets a record in fines for outlandish behavior. How fine is sand, really?
I mean, in a million years, will it be finer because of additional friction? Who will win the MVP in a million years, someone from the Orion galaxy? Anyway, there I went again.
I worry that my attention span, what little there is of it, puts me at a competitive disadvantage.
I mean, it takes me longer to do just about anything because I’m likely to wind up doing just about everything. You, dear reader, I know, are much more focused.
If you’ve read this far, surely, Shirley, you’re focused. (And probably a bit bored.) So, in the interests of trying to regain my competitive position, I want to be contagious. Yep, below you’ll see the internet sites that beckon and taunt me. They, not my genetic make-up, I wonder if my Dad was attention-span challenged too, are the problem.
I share them with you in the hopes that you, too, will have as much difficulty as I do in staying on task.
If an asteroid hit us, how much warning would we have? Enjoy. http://www.m-w.com/home. htm the Merriam-Webster dictionary and thesaurus.
I actually use this a lot.
It has a really cool oral pronunciation symbol so you can actually HEAR arcane words. http://forums.stltoday.com/viewforum.php?f=31 The Post’s Dick Weiss leads a discussion on writing. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/asteroid_warning_040322.html a space.com article on asteroids pummeling our small planet.
I suggest you read it in your basement, under a table. http://www.takara-usa.com/ bowlingual.html a collar that translates dog’s barks. Honestly, I am not making this up. Check it out yourself. Everytime I go hear and it barks, my dogs run to the door.
This site is so wild, I expect it will be fodder for a future column. Arf! http://www.washingtonpost.com/ the front page of the Washington Post. http://collectibles.listings.ebay.com/ Kitchenware_Salt-PepperShakers_W0QQsacategoryZ4049Q QsocmdZListingItemList ebay salt & pepper shakers (of which there were 13,156 – or is that really 26,312?).
I specialize in steamship salt & pepper shakers, those in which the smokestacks hold the condiments. Do you have any for sale? http://www.kwmu.org in the morning, I like to listen to Mike Sampson’s “St. Louis On the Air” while I write. http://www.triumphpc.com/psst!/ mar04/future-education.shtml this is an article in Psst!, an on-line magazine, by one of my favorite writers. www.edge.org a panoply of scientific and historic interview. You can easily get lost here. www.newyorktimes.com it doesn’t get any better than this, and reading it means you don’t have to go outside if it’s raining to get the paper. http://ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/i ndex.htm a guide to grammar and writing.
It ain’t badly at all. http://www.universetoday.com/am /publish/puzzle_mars_spiral_icecaps.html?2532004 an article about Mars’ spiral icecaps. http://www.matahuiroad.school.nz/ index.htm this is on a New Zealand Multiple Intelligences School. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/s mithsonian/issues04/apr04/photos.html an ad for a Smithsonian photo appointment book. Cool stuff here. www.albertpujols.com you can read about his age http://cyberatlas.guggenheim.org/w _cyberatlas/w_intelligent_life/w_disintell.html a cool site that I don’t fully understand (so what’s new?) that links the notion of “distributed intelligence” (using the resources outside one’s skin to solve problems) and the Guggenheim Museum. It’s wonderfully bizarre. http://www.cartoonbank.com/ Need a smile? Check out cartoons from The New Yorker. http://www.weather.com/ just what is the weather outside at this nanosecond? http://www.quotationspage.com/ the quotations page. Who said what?
I spent a lot of time here. http://drucker.cgu.edu/DruckerArch ives/data/ the archives of Peter Drucker, my favorite management theorist.
This lets me know what I should be doing. Happy surfing, I wonder what it would take to teach a monkey to surf. And I wonder what monkeys think when they watch people watching them at the Zoo. Were there zoos in ancient China, I wonder?
I wonder what I’ll find if I go to www.moveon.org?
Originally published in The Times of Skinker-DeBaliviere, Summer 2004.
Read this article in the original newspaper issue.
Original source: SD_Times2004_06.pdf, printed page(s) 8; PDF page(s) 8.
