Stickybuffalo.com

I don’t know what day, exactly, stickybuffalo was “born.” I remember having lunch with the blog’s founder at Rock Bottom Brewery, in West Des Moines, while he explained the origins of this curious domain name he’d acquired and his plans to launch a blog. But I wasn’t an active participant, then, so I don’t recall a specific “launch date.”

I’ve got an e-mail dated February 14, 2001, announcing the blog (and it’s amusing to count the number of recipients in the en clair list of addressees still using @iastate.edu accounts at that point). But maybe the blog was up and running a little while before then; I don’t know. In any event, I think we’ve reached the point of being, as they say, “close enough for government work.”

So, happy tenth birthday, stickybuffalo:

At this point, I’ll turn things over to any lurking oldtimers who may wish to make a few remarks.

<crickets chirping />

Having let events play out for about a week, now, since a deranged loser sprayed bullets into Gabrielle Giffords and other people in Tucson, I feel like the situation is adequately established to make a few comments.

I’ve probably got three main points I’d like to make. The first, and foremost, is: what utter, fucking ridiculous tripe. What an absolute fucking farce. Normally I don’t like the “everyone is at fault” cop-out, but in the responses to this ugly little incident, I’d say that about nine-tenths of what has followed has been so goddamn painfully stupid that it’s been very tempting to just ignore the whole mess. Even sources I usually respect have, with few exceptions, lost touch with perspective and critical thinking and joined in the collective national anguish orgy.

In a way this is like a miniature replay of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath, when this kind of hive-mind seemed to form, leaving out only a few baffled observers like myself. Suddenly nine in ten people approved of George W. Bush, why? Were that many otherwise-critical people so impressed by the way he stood on that pile of rubble with a bullhorn? “They’re saying it’s another Pearl Harbor,” people kept parroting. Aside from the invalidity of the premise itself, I kept wondering: who was saying this? Everyone seemed to be assigning the statement to “they,” without anyone endorsing it personally.

This time, “tone down the heated political rhetoric” or some close variation seemed to become the mantra spilling from everyone’s lips, within mere hours. It seemed like everyone was instantly declaring that we should not rush to judgment, or to point fingers, yet apparently no one felt that they could afford to wait before making their statement. And so by Monday, the actual reality of what had actually happened in the real world was completely submerged beneath a torrent of reaction, pre-emption, counter-reaction, meta-reaction and other such largely meaningless garbage. (more…)

I have decidedly mixed feelings about writing this post, because it’s going to go into “2012″ and while I do mean something potentially apocalyptic, in a sense, I don’t mean anything involving dubiously-interpreted prophecies of a failed civilization. Or a John Cusack movie.

No, I mean that 2012, the one which we’re going to be hearing and reading about ad nauseum over the next 22 months. For which reason I hesitate to contribute in any way to the obsessive chatter, but 1) most of the post won’t be directly about 2012 and 2) I’ve concluded that it might be necessary to start dialing down expectations, in which case, better to start early. (more…)