You Tweeted Me, You Tweeted Me

Hey! I just sold The Creepy Little Mailbox Man to Everyday Weirdness! Yay! It should be up on March 22nd for your eyeing pleasure.

If you're wondering about the title of this post, first off, you have to sing it to the tune of Anne Murray's You Needed Me. Secondly, it's there because people were tweeting lots of things I wanted to share.

@paolobacigalupi linked to this excellent article: The Gospel of Consumption.
For the past couple of months I've been asking people and just plain wondering, in light of what we see in the economy, is it impossible to run a healthy economy in which people can also save their money? I had my suspicions about how it could work and this article confirms them. Our economy today is based on businesses which want to make as much money as possible and consumers who feel the need to buy way more than they need. Dump as much money as you want into the system and it will all flow to the top given our current behaviors. Of course, when we dump all the money into the top in the first place, the people don't even get their products, they're by-passed completely. So, please, if you want to save, do so. Empowering the current economic model to screw you isn't your responsibility.

@expatpaul tweeted a link to this, and when you think about it, it fits in the last item. The media convinces us that what the government and corporations want is good for us:

Nobody tweeted this, but I think I might:
The shepherd always tries to persuade the sheep that their interests and his own are the same. - Stendhal

@jfmarchini tied it all together in a brilliant summation by Bill Watterson (It's a Calvin and Hobbes comic so click on it already): https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhiV-UaiqGZYeP1MA-4BtAqxBMCGeo4GBBG5WGX76bGITYyfL7rBQpNZjI7Kp_vfyeU_Vj0UQiFnaKLPEZ89MoyP66a-Z2WRgaVbiVGq7BjR9UuzRqoCyVtJPTe3GLOumrePS4d/s1600-h/CalvinHobbs.BM

And on a fun, non-economic note:
@steveattwitter turned me on to this yesterday. Found it on youtube through HuffPo so I could embed it today and it seems to be popping up all over the web. Steve is a trend setter:


Lastly, I worked an early shift today and my co-manager turned on the 8os Muzak before we opened the store. I heard this song which I hadn't heard in over twenty-five years and had forgotten it even existed. It's a wonderful little thing to rediscover something like that:


I've got sheep, I've got Split Enz. Grant's going to think this is all about him. I just realized I mentioned Calvin and Hobbes and Stendhal in the same post. I'm the living embodiment of Generation X.