Agamemnon has now been upgraded to a Category 4 year

[cincinnatus_c]

Currently at Toronto Pearson: -10. Falling more or less all day from 1 at midnight.

I think 2012 is a pretty stupid name for a year. Isn't that like a Rush album or something? (Not that I have anything much against Rush, although I don't like to look at Geddy.) I think we should've skipped 2012, like the Samoans skipped Friday.

Come to think of it, why do we keep naming our years after numbers? Why don't we give them actual names, like tropical storms? Or, you know, awesome names, like, um, um, I don't know, Strychnine. Or Feldspar. Or Muskellunge.

Comments

[kest]

I think it sounds imaginary. Last chance at an apocalypse until the twelfth of never!

[http://users.livejournal.com/cincinnatus_c_/]

I was surprised to be reminded that the Mayan apocalypse is supposed to be this year. The Mayan apocalypse seems so 2011.

[pnijjar.livejournal.com]

Somebody hasn't been reading his Infinite Jest (or its Wikipedia entry, at the very least).

[http://users.livejournal.com/cincinnatus_c_/]

Heh, I had a feeling as I was writing that that chances were it wasn't a completely original idea. It also struck me that naming years opened the possibility of naming rights, but I supposed that corporations might want to avoid owning years for the same sort of reason they would want to avoid owning hurricanes ... although taints seem to wear off of years pretty quickly ... maybe. I wonder how many Americans have a bad feeling about 2001.

Most of what I know about David Foster Wallace comes from All Things Shining, which didn't leave me with a good impression (or at least didn't leave me wanting to read him--they do call him "the greatest writer of his generation; perhaps the greatest mind altogether"). Mostly I will (probably) never read Infinite Jest because it's too damn long, and if I'm going to read a novel that long, why not Moby Dick (which All Things Shining did leave me wanting to read--I was tempted to review All Things Shining thus: Moby Dick is probably worth reading; David Foster Wallace, not so much), or Karamazov, or, uh, War and Peace, or something....

[pnijjar.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's long. I thought the parts about AA were pretty good, but that's because I was kind of obsessed with AA at the time. I also found it amusing that the plot (such as it was) revolved around Digital Rights Management.

I can't say I loved the book, but it was better than Gravity's Rainbow. (Is that too low a bar?) If I want to read a gigantic novel that's entertaining (as opposed to educational) I usually turn to John Irving.

I loved Moby Dick, on the other hand, but unlike many I loved its randomness/arbitrary scope. It was like falling down a Wikipedia rabbithole before there was a Wikipedia.

2001 was awesome because that was the year Saint Jobs came out with the iPod. What could possibly have overshadowed that?