One of the arguments against Nickelback over the years has been that liking the band could not be the result of an active human decision: that everything about the band is, in effect, a default setting—sound blasted out by commercial radio run by robots.
.. And so the band’s music was dangerous because of its very harmlessness; its success suggested that rock fans could be swindled or lulled into liking anything, meaning that the genre itself had been rendered obsolete. Nickelback was rock’s black hole.
Mitt Romney is living every social scientist’s nightmare
Late at night, when your humble blogger is troubled in his sleep because of some crap argument he was making in his day job, some version of this Annie Hall scene plays out in his head
‘There Are No Fat People in Paris’
“There are no fat people in Paris.” But I think this misses something more telling. There are “no” stunningly athletic people either. There just doesn’t seem to be much gusto for spending two hours in the gym here. The people don’t seem very prone to our extremes. And they are not, to my eyes, particularly thin. They look like how I remember people looking in 1983. I suspect they look this way because of some things that strike me — the constant movement, the diet, the natural discomfort — are part of their culture.