Memeingful

If you have $200.00USD to spare, there's a book you need to buy -- "Religion and Psychiatry:  Beyond Boundaries" -- and if you don't have that much scratch, I'll try to fill you in on a bit of what you're missing.

The other night, I was half-watching television and half-listening to the radio when a commercial popped on the TV screen.  I thought someone had changed the channel from TLC's newest fetish show, Our Little Lives and I was watching a comedy skit for a new product called "Booty Pop."

Do you own your own good name?  Or can someone take your name, your expertise in the field, and use it to sell t-shirts and postcards without your approval or knowledge?  My beloved wife Janna Sweenie and I write American Sign Language books together.  One of our bestsellers is "Hand Jive" -- and that's where this torrid story begins and ends.

We know when an economy sours, the first to suffer are the children and the disabled. As technology ascends, we also see the rapid deceleration of literacy.  Instead of full words, we get text speak.  Instead of logical arguments, we are flooded with irrational comments.  Instead of the Blind reading books in Braille, they "learn by listening" to audio books instead -- and become illiterate in the process:  The Blind can hear and respond sound, but they are unable to argue against to what they hear in written form.

McSweeney's Quarterly Concern is a quarterly literary magazine started by Dave Eggers, originally with the goal of publishing stories of high literary merit that were rejected by other magazines. Eventually, it turned into a mixture of rejects and original submissions and Eggers made sure that every issue was different from the last -- one issue came looking like a big stack of mail, for example. Another issue was nothing but graphic art and came wrapped in a giant newspaper comic section with original Sunday Funnies.

It is rare in a lifetime to realize, in real time and in the moment, that a meme is not only fading away, but is withering on the dying vine of communication.  The TDD/TTY -- Telecommunication Device for the Deaf/Teletypewriter -- dies a little more each day in the Deaf Community.

I have often wondered why so many people take so many photographs and digital images.  It's as if they're obsessed with the recording and the creation of false memory.