Posted on 11 Feb, 2010 -
Why Blu-Ray is Rubbish. Onions are GOOD
* BAD news about onions. GOOD news about our belief in them
* Why things like Blu-Ray, LCD tellies and Vista are all RUBBISH
* We’ve had the power of ‘now’ and in praise of ‘slow’. Discover what embracing ‘softness’ can do for you today...
First of all, it would seem, I owe you all an apology. It would appear that at least one of the stories I told you last week about onions were actually an urban myth. There were also, in fact, some tips about mobile phones in the ‘Half an Onion and a Folded Newspaper’ PDF I sent you that were urban myths too.
As my husband always says, for someone who’s often so analytical and even scathing, I’m also amazingly gullible.
But is gullibility such a bad thing? I prefer to think of it as an inevitable side-effect of a more positive quality. I also like to think that, as long as they don’t do any harm, urban myths are actually a product or at least a symptom of a very positive side of human nature.
And it is in fact that side of us - where meaning gets blurred at the edges and feelings have more power than rigid facts - that I wanted to talk about this week.
In fact, I wanted to put just two words up for discussion: the words ‘soft’ and ‘old’.
And I do actually mean the words (at least for the minute).
Permit me to drag us into a little light philosophy here
You see, many many years ago when I still had the time and youthful openness and exuberance to discuss such things, a certain friend and I were somewhat obsessed with the word ‘soft’ - in all its onomatopoeic beauty, complexity of meanings, feelings and sensations.
For what, indeed, are words exactly? Are they not nothing more than shortcuts we use in an attempt to communicate to each other our inner thoughts, feelings and sensations? And for each individual using any particular word, the meaning they are trying to describe is very often not quite the same as the complexity of nuances and memories that help make up the listener’s understanding of it.
A discussion I had with my daughter the other day about the word ‘good’, for example, could have gone on for hours… if only she wasn’t seven years-old and more interested in chocolate cake and stories about ponies.
But I digress…
Why ‘soft’ is the new hard and how it can take some of the pain out of living
Because what I actually meant to say was that I am finally getting an idea of why ‘soft’ or ‘softness’ might actually be very important for our lives.
* Try, for example, to soften your body for a minute. Feel the muscles in your neck and shoulders soften. Look at your hands and think of their inner softness. Uncross your legs and allow your feet to feel soft. Soften your expression into a smile…
* Think for a minute of the fact that the bones of a sleeping person are less likely to break than the bones of someone more rigid. Or that you must break up and soften the earth before you can plant seeds to grow in it.
* Or how about the thoughts and opinions we have in our heads? It is so often when we are more flexible in our opinions, in our desires and in our aims that we find contentment, success and friendships.
All the challenges and pressures of life can turn us hard and spikey
Life throws up so many constant challenges and pressures every day that we often clench our muscles and brace ourselves in a rigid stance against it as if we were going into battle.
But what if we try and add a quality of softness to our attitude and moods? How does it change the way we feel if we think of cars, or buildings, or our problems or even other people as softer than we currently think they are?
What if I walk with a softer step? Try to be less rigid and defensive towards others?
Or what about any pains you may have in your body? Could it help to try thinking of that part and letting go of the hardness that is in charge there - or the hardness that is causing the pain?
Is there a particular aim or desire or opinion you have of yourself or life at the moment that is causing you upset or anxiety? Would it lessen the upset if you tried to soften it somehow? Make it more flexible in meaning or flexible to reality…
Softness, of course, is not to be confused with weakness. It is the flexible stick after all that bends under pressure, the rigid one that snaps. But it may just make a useful antidote to the fast, hard, competitive and demanding world we line in.
Why old things like phones and cameras and tellies were so much better
The second thing I am thinking about today is a real appreciation for old things.
Firstly, it has been a hard couple of weeks for me because my faithful old car of nearly eight years has died aged 15 and I have had to replace it. The new one is certainly smarter but it just doesn’t feel the same and there are so many functions I can’t work yet.
I also read a very interesting article by the American camera reviewer and blogger, Ken Rockwell, entitled ‘Everything New Sucks’ in which he gives scientific and market-force reasons about why a lot of the technology we have in our homes is actually getting worse.
Talking of his mum’s old style CRT (tube) TV, for example, he says “Not only does her old CRT TV have much better colors than any modern plasma, LCD or LED flatscreen, every picture always fills her big, tall 25” screen, not just the middle or sides as they do on HDTVs. On her TV, not only does every picture fit… no one looks stretched-out or fat.”
And it’s not just TV. He also talks about how emails take up hours of your day while actually decreasing your productivity… how cars have become so complex you need to read the manual to turn the radio on… and ditto with things like microwaves and toasters.
Energy-saving lightbulbs create a horrible light and the lead and mercury inside them make them terrible for the environment.
HD-DVD, he says, is even worse. And Blu-Ray is the worst of them all…
It was so much nicer talking to people on landlines. The quality of CDs gets worse by the year. And Windows has always been a disaster - even before Vista…
BUT WHY?
The reason for this, apparently, has something to do with consumers being too-easily impressed by long lists of impressive-sounding features because “they lack the skills and experience to appreciate more subtle, but more fundamental, quality differences.”
Manufacturers, on the other hand, are only too happy to increase the complexity of digital features and software because it’s so much easier than adding an extra nob or button.
Sure, there is no doubt that many new technological inventions or improvements bring us good benefits. The rapid proliferation of such innovations in pursuit of ever-more profits, however, means that as consumers we should start asking more questions about what we’re buying rather than just assuming that it must be better because it’s newer.
