But that's actually okay, because I will not satisfy a woman, either". And that's how Sex Drugs & Cocoa Puffs kicks into action, to embark upon a Low Culture manifesto, exploring the deeply superficial phenomenon that modern culture has turned into. Exactly the kind of trash literature you can only find in the otherwise bare shelves of an airport bookshop. And I guess it was that phrase that made me pick it up from LAX.
There are two ways of look at this book. Actually there are thousands of ways, but the preface said there were only two that me & the author might have in common. The first and of course, the less popular view is that everything's a product of chaos and inherently independent of everything else. On the other hand, everything pretty much stays the same and everything's bound in a chain of causality in an inherently holistic big-picture. And yes, reading each essay of the book somehow emphasizes both the views in some strange paradoxical sense. Completely random thoughs & events, but from a single man's perspective.
There's no semblance of order or even pretence of continuity about this book. But there is a certain domino effect to the essays as they dove-tail into a impressionist masterpeice, but one which exists merely to demonstrate the ever broadening palette of culture.
Porn: Nothing's more representative of the dark side of modern humanity than porn. He's done to porn what Andy Warhol did to a humble soup can. He has framed the entire trend of internet porn, which has acquired a certain Marxism to it, into - "when you don't have to be Lenny Kravitz to know how Lisa Bonet looks like in a shower. You don't even need hemp pants.". And the comfortable knowledge that your wife and Gwent Stefani have more in common than you would admit in the first place. Essentially stealing back the power we lent to celebrities, their privacy (or lack there of) & their exclusivity, as a sort of a price to be paid for fame.
There's more to it than just that. More on that later. My thoughts, which are inextricably weaved into his ideas, probably deserve blog posts of their own.
--Do not write below this line.
It's a protest. A protest against all the gags the establishment has put on php functions - big, small and useless alike. No more shall they remain ignored and voiceless. Hear me now, as the day has come for them to shake off their silence and SCREAM!
@Error: Php uses the @ operator to silence errors from functions, so that they fail silently. But while tracing through code which uses it, it becomes nearly impossible to properly figure out what is going wrong. The band-aid that is '@' makes it a complete pain to debug code.
Introducing the SCREAM 0.0.1, which has come out of someone else's frustrations with some pear modules which are liberally peppered with such gag instructions. Essentially, it uses the user opcode functionality to override the silence functions into NOPs (literally).
php -dscream.enabled=1 -r '@foo();' Fatal error: Call to undefined function foo() in Command line code on line 1
Dump it into php and hopefully debugging sloppily coded libraries should become much easier. This message was brought to you by the dread of Mondays. It's all over now - End Transmission.
--You have not convinced a man because you have silenced him.