Social networking crap

I’m not sure what to make of all this “liking” going on with Facebook. But I don’t think I like it. (It’s great being a crusty old crab.)

I realize there’s an actual benefit of sorts in being liked on FB. I’m probably just being an old fart who’s semantically miffed here. But I’m also haunted by the specter that at any given time, you’ve got a guy out there who has 328 friends on Facebook, but he’s still thinking that the most positive thing he can do in order to solve his problems and the way that he currently feels is to go home and stick a gun in his mouth.

In his bitchin’ new book, The Billy Bo Tapes: A Cave Full of Ghosts, Billy Bob Thornton tackles one of America’s most puzzling social problems head on when he says, “This Twittering shit has really got to stop.”

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Another mindful quote from the late Adam Yauch, MCA of the Beastie Boys, who once said, “In a sense, what Western society teaches us is that if you get enough money, power and beautiful people to have sex with, that’s going to bring you happiness. That’s what every commercial, every magazine, music, movie teaches us. That’s a fallacy.”

That quote is from ’98, after Yauch, realizing he had now made enough money to be literally set for life, also realized that he wasn’t especially happy, and turned his eyeballs towards the teachings of the eternally present troublemaker, the Buddha.

Then there’s the classic quote from modern American Master Mae West, who said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better.”

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There were some appropriately memorable moments at the memorial service for newsman Travus T. Hipp this past weekend in Silver City. It was a typical Nevada Memorial Day, weather-wise—cold, blustery, with occasional showers and intermittent nastiness.

In other words, a jiffy day for a funeral, provided you remembered to wear your thermals. As Hipp’s simple pine coffin lay exposed in its final resting place in that ornery Silver City soil (a gravedigger in S.C. better have a well-maintained back or a well-maintained backhoe), there was a 21-gun salute, delivered by a group of seven old Comstock hippies who fired off three fairly unified volleys with their rifles/pistols. Between the first and second rounds, a visibly concerned cottontail was seen emerging from the target area, wondering WTF was going on with the sudden hail of hot lead.