Charles C. Cotton

An acquaintance writes:

I just saw an ad on TV for Hallmark Cards. It showed a daughter visiting her mother for mother’s day and then leaving. The mother then goes to her desk and picks up a card for another child. The voice then says something like “Give her something she can keep for Mother’s Day. Give her a card.”

What the hell is the message here? It’s better to send a card to your parent than to visit? A card is better than being with someone you love? It seemed to me that Hallmark was putting down the visitor because she had to leave and suggesting that cards were better. Subtle, but nonetheless disturbing to me.

Here’s my greeting card-scrooge rant:

What totally mystifies me are people giving cards even though they go to see the person (like to a birthday party).

I mean, we go over to my in-laws (my parents happen to be dead, the story would be the same, however) and we give them a card for their fill-in-the-blank occasion (that’s in addition to a present if it’s their birthday for example).

But after having giving it some thought, I realized the whole point of “a card” was to send them a message, as in, you couldn’t tell them something in person / be with them so I sent you this card…

But since WHEN (cough*HALLMARK*cough) has “the card” become (part of) “the present”?

What a racket.  Then to add consumerism to injury, the recipient, seemingly right out of the commercial, ceremoniously reads the damn out-of-the-box poem / saying as if the giver wrote that pap themselves.

I like to give cards, but you should give cards for those times YOU will be there.

I honestly don’t care, dear reader, if that’s always been the case in your limited experience, I’m saying it DOESN’T MAKE SENSE.  *HALLMARK* *WANTS you to consider this some half-assed “tradition”.  BREAK THE CYCLE!  FIGHT THE SYSTEM!

If you’re THERE, YOU DON’T NEED TO GIVE A CARD. (only exception: money goes with it)

AND STOP GIVING CARDS FOR EVERY DAMN THING.  Thanksgiving Day cards?  HALLOWEEN CARDS? Oh come ON!

PEOPLE: TAKE BACK OUR CULTURE FROM THE MERCHANTS!

http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/the-sizzling-sound-of-music.html

Jonathan Berger, professor of music at Stanford this week revealed the results of a multi-year survey he’s been running:

Students were asked to judge the quality of a variety of compression methods randomly mixed with uncompressed 44.1 KHz audio. The music examples included both orchestral, jazz and rock music. When I first did this I was expecting to hear preferences for uncompressed audio and expecting to see MP3 (at 128, 160 and 192 bit rates) well below other methods (including a proprietary wavelet-based approach and AAC). To my surprise, in the rock examples the MP3 at 128 was preferred. I repeated the experiment over 6 years and found the preference for MP3 – particularly in music with high energy (cymbal crashes, brass hits, etc) rising over time.

In other words, the present and future consumers of music now prefer inferior sound quality!  First, crappy music (yes, I said it) and now crappy SOUNDING crappy music!

What’s next?  Have them pay for something they don’t use?  Well Comcast has beat you to THAT!