Fresh apricots

We just ate our first fresh apricots of the season. Mmmmmm... reminds me of being a teenager and climbing my grandparents' apricot tree in the backyard, eating apricots right off the tree. Hard to beat that.

- posted @ 5/18/2004 02:28:00 PM / Permalink / comments (0) / /

  Wal-mart and digital music

Wal-mart has taken up the second spot in online music sales, after iTunes. One likely reason for this is that they price tracks at 88¢, rather than everyone else's 99¢. The NPR story on Morning Edition today remarked that this is Wal-mart's typical strategy: undercut on price by taking advantage of economies of scale. But how does that apply to digital music? Where are the economies of scale that Wal-mart is taking advantage of that are not available to other online music sellers like iTunes? It seems to me that digital music levels the playing field, so to speak. The overhead of selling and distributing music online includes application development, server hardware, bandwidth, etc., but it's not clear to me how Wal-mart has any advantage there.

Still, I'm glad to see what may be the beginning of price wars among digital music sellers. Like the commentator, I think the sweet spot for me is somewhere around a quarter a track.

- posted @ 5/12/2004 09:12:00 AM / Permalink / comments (0) / /

  Silly language innovations

It seems that one of the driving forces in (American) English public communication is the search for one-word nouns that encapsulate ideas. Unfortunately, this leads to some very silly innovations, like the one I heard on NPR the other day. They were discussing the recent reports of abuse of Iraqi prisoners, and the fact that the military had outsourced interrogation to private contractors. The reasoning behind this outsourcing was not merely financial, the analyst said, but also because the politically-driven desire to be distanced from such unsavory activities. “It's the politics of it,” said the analyst, “It's the optics of it.”

Optics?!? What does the study of the refraction of light have to do with motivation to outsource interrogation?

Yes, I understood what he meant: that it has to do with how such interrogation appears to people -- with how it looks. Some people would say that's sufficient; after all, he chose a term to communicate his meaning and I understood it, and isn't that what communication is all about? True, but there's a lot more to communication than merely conveying a meaning. The words we choose say something about us and our audience, and I'm not sure I like the connotations of his choice to use “optics” to describe this. It's too much PR. I suppose that's only fitting in a culture like ours where optics appearance is everything...

- posted @ 5/05/2004 12:03:00 PM / Permalink / comments (0) / /

  Bush Democrats?

I just finished reading Orson Scott Card's recent essay at The Ornery American (dictionary.com doesn't recognize the “onnery” pronunciation). Last year, Card called himself a “Tony Blair Democrat,” but it seems from his recent essays that he's really a Bush Democrat: socially conservative, fiscally liberal, and a hawk. Bush certainly hasn't been very fiscally conservative in this term (though he may not be spending the money where Card would prefer).

Is there something to the old saw about becoming more conservative as you grow older?

- posted @ 5/03/2004 02:07:00 PM / Permalink / comments (0) / /

  Value of a life

So, we've all heard the news about the death of Pat Tillman in Afghanistan (I first heard about it from all-encompassingly). The flurry of media attention given to his death contrasted with the relative lack thereof for other fallen soldiers. Why? And what was a key point of most reporting of his death? The fact that he gave up a 3.6 million dollar salary to serve his country. Money, money, money -- is that really such a big differentiator? Other soldiers have given up their families, their futures. Isn't even a few million dollars a pittance compared with that? It seems that we care so much about money that we value a fallen soldier who gave up a large salary more than we do another soldier who didn't. “Net worth,” indeed.

- posted @ 4/25/2004 10:30:00 PM / Permalink / comments (0) / /

  It's Personal

I started my foray into blogging with a Mormon-themed blog, Let Us Reason. Almost immediately, I discovered that there were things I wanted to blog that didn't really fit into the focus I wanted on Mormonism in that blog. I needed a personal blog. And voilà! GrasshopperMuse was born.

Though I use the online moniker “Grasshopper”, my “real life” identity is Christopher Bradford. I live in Minnesota and work as an internet consultant. My wife Lucy and I have five boys. Amazingly, I somehow find the time to read a lot, particularly online, where I participate in a few discussion boards and as a regular commenter on various blogs in the Mormon Blogosphere, affectionately known as the Bloggernacle (a term I coined).

This blog will deal with cultural, political, artistic, and personal musings, hopefully complementary to Let Us Reason.

- posted @ 4/25/2004 03:00:00 AM / Permalink / comments (0) / /