I’m kinda-sorta intrigued by the Scion, Toyota’s new unabashedly-boxy compact wagon, just starting to be sold in the U.S. But the website blows. All demographic-target-marketed, it’s an over-the-top laff riot in trying to identify the vehicle with hot young photo models. (One page even proudly uses the gag-phrase “Generation Y!”) Let’s hope, when Scions do become widely available, that the car’s better than the ads.

GET LOST IN a long, long list of all the year-end “top” and “bottom” lists you could ever want.

HAVE WE BECOME a “planet of the nerds?” And is that a bad thing or not?

PAUL GRAHAM has put a lot of thought n’ pondering into the eternal dilemma of “Why Nerds are Unpopular.” Among his theories: They don’t, or won’t, or don’t know how to, play the “popularity” game.

IF YOU BELIEVE a Murdoch tabloid’s account of a Stanford research study, women are indeed turned on by porn videos after all! Just not by skanky, silicone-y ones.

BRITAIN’S NEW STATESMAN has a cool li’l long piece by Simon Blackburn in defense of lust.

EVERETT EHRLICH ARGUES that Internet-age info gathering will, sooner or later, make the major political parties obsolete. One can only hope this is one Net-prediction that actually comes to pass…

ONE OF THE FEW intelligent conservative publications out there, The World & I (founded by pals of Unification Church honcho Sun Myung Moon), has a long, intriguing essay about “The Feminization of American Culture.” The writer, Leonard Sax, implies a connection between the rise of feminine values and a rise in “environmental estrogen,” due to chemical leakoffs from all the plastic products lying around our homes and landfills.

I’d already heard about the latter phenomenon in a Hugo House lecture a couple years ago by Olympia postcard designer Stella Marrs. Marrs didn’t think the pervasiveness of estrogen-like chemicals was a good thing, for women or anybody. Recent medical disputes about the long-term effects of (deliberate) estrogen therapy regimens, such as a possible increased breast-cancer risk, might back her up on this.

Which brings me to the good friend of mine who’s studied a lot about the Greek Amazons, warriors of legend who would undergo masectomies to gain better bow-and-arrow skills. Are the women of the industrialized world, Sax’s article asks, gaining more dominance at the expense of their own health?

…the place to be for ambitious young techno-careerists, “a striving class of young Americans for whom race, ethnicity and geographic origin tend to be less meaningful than professional achievement, business connections and income.” In other words, don’t expect parking in Belltown on a Saturday night to get any easier any time soon.

…the Frankfurt Book Fair last week (whose schedule is one reason the Northwest Bookfest doesn’t have as many global bigname authors these days). Anyhoo, she gave a long but intriguing speech about the recent Euro/American rift, with the following closing benediction: “In a time in which the values of reading and inwardness are so strenuously challenged, literature is freedom.”

The NYU professor and longtime showbiz-basher passed away last Sunday, but (perhaps appropriately, given his contempt for all things media-esque) the papers didn’t mention it until Thursday.

The following is not intended as a “flame” message, but I always felt frustrated at Neil Postman’s writings. He said he wanted people to avoid deceptively simple ideas, but his books were full of those.

In the past, I’d publicly belittled Postman as a grumpy ol’ baby-boomer elistist of a character type I used to know in college, whose examples were always stringy-bearded, always disdainful of anything in culture or entertainment that didn’t remind them of The Late Sixties, and always contemptuous of anyone who dared commit the mortal sin of being younger than them.

This past February, some of you might recall, I was asked to join a panel discussion at the Tacoma Public Library entitled, “Are We Amusing Ourselves To Death?” (from the title of Postman’s best-known book). I found myself essentially arguing against the premise, vs. a stringy-bearded baby-boomer film critic who essentially argued that anyone whose lifestyle or demographics were different from his was automatically a dumb mainstream dupe.

I argued, and would still argue, that popular culture is not intrinsically evil (and neither are heterosexuality, meat, or non-co-op grocery stores). I would also argue that the world situation is not nearly as one-dimensionally simplistic as Postman claimed it to be (even while he denounced the masses’ excess simplicity). The books of his that I’d read were full of a priori arguments, gross overgeneralizations, ageisms, sexisms, and us-vs.-them dichotomies (although, like all my stringy-bearded professors, Postman often said “us” when he really meant to say “them”; when he wrote “we,” you could tell he meant “all those ignorami out there in dorky mainstream America who don’t know what we know and wouldn’t understand it if they heard it”).

Some of you reading this might imagine that I must be a right-winger who disliked Postman as a left-winger. NO, NO, NO. I believe Postman wasn’t too radical, he was too conservative. He was too comfortable in his hermetically-sealed ideology. As far as I’ve been able to determine, he never acknowledged that life, politics, et al. are complex, and that our schoolchildren need to learn to deal with these complexities; that there are more than two sides to most issues, and that there are a lot more than just two kinds of people in this country.

If I can now say something positive on Postman’s behalf, it’s that, at times, he did proclaim the need for critical thinking, even if he insufficiently practiced his own prescription.

…via an MIT online journal, offers a list of “Ten Technologies That Deserve to Die.” I agree with almost everything on his list.

• Nuclear weapons; land mines: Only a GOP-machine politico could like those.
• Coal mines; internal combustion engines: Powerful and nostalgic, but wasteful as all heck and often fatal to their operators.
• Cosmetic implants: Usually dorky-looking.
• Lie detectors: Overrated and way fallible.
• Prisons (not really a “technology” but a social institution): A costly waste of human energy, particularly in the war-on-some-drugs US.
• Manned spaceflight: Now Sterling gets into potentially pissin’ offi some of his own sci-fi fandom. But is there really anything those dozen dead shuttle crewpeople did that a radio-controlled robotic space explorer can’t do?
• DVDs: The miracle movie medium doesn’t impress Sterling one whit. He hates their frailty and their copy-protection schemes. He seems to prefer unprotected digital downloads, but fails to answer how downloaders will conveniently store their acquired data. I happen to feel the discs are still way useful, if that dumb CSS and Macrovision can be gotten rid of.
• Incandescent light bulbs: As long as fluorescents are as irritating as they are, the warmth of the classic Edison bulb will, I say in opposition to Sterling, remain most welcome.

…in an essay about today’s global/corporate elite, suggests British Prime Minister John Major would likely feel more comfortable in a Seattle wine bar than among the everyday citizens of his own country.

…the fulcrum of the US economy, and hence of US culture, is flowing away from NY/LA/SF and toward the likes of second-tier cities such as Omaha and Orlando. (He doesn’t mention Seattle, except to claim Asian immigrants are increasingly settling in the Midwest instead of here.)

…about sex, TV sets, death, song lyrics, food, etc. (and a few grownup misunderstandings about same) can be seen at “I Used to Believe.”