Northern USA: Shut Up About Snow Already

I'm sick and tired of people and the media crowing on and on about SNOW. Fer the love of mike, if you live in places like Wisconsin, Minnesota, Colorado and numerous other states where it snows…hello people: IT SNOWS DURING WINTER! Every damn snowfall is treated like a serious disaster. The tsunami - THAT was a fucking cataclysm. Thousands of people dead. Snowing in the midwest is normal, innocuous weather behavior, it's nothing to get worked up over. So you have to shovel, so going to work is slow, so your car goes into the ditch…so what? How long have you lived here anyway? The way people act around here you'd think they lived in Arizona their entire lives and just moved to Wisconsin. It snows in the winter, it happens every year. What is the big deal?

Naughty vs. Nice: YouTube & Flickr Commentary

As a unrecovering screen addict, I find myself quite often on both YouTube.com and Flickr.com. Both of these sites share a fundamental purpose: they display a small rectangle with an image in it posted by a certain user and below the image other users comment on it. YouTube does moving images and Flickr does stills (I know they do video too, but nevermind that for now…personally I never watched any video on Flickr). However, there are dramatic fundamental differences in the commentary:

YouTube comments are generally crude, nasty, mean-spirited, stupid, childish, horribly written and filled with senseless arguments between commenters often about issues outside of the subject of the video itself. No matter WHAT the video is about, if it has comments at all odds are good that they will be crude and moronic. The overriding impression I get from reading YouTube comments is that humanity is a vulgar assembly of idiots and the sooner the human race is wiped out the better.

Flickr comments are almost entirely positive, filled with gushing praise about the photograph, slightly better spelling\grammar and users are constantly heaping praise, respect and admiration and "awards" upon one another. On Flickr one even feels uncomfortable about offering any kind of criticism whatsoever of a photo, even if it is not negative. The overall impression is one of good cheer and mutual respect.

Nothing on YouTube is safe from an outright ad hominem attack for no good reason. People feel entirely comfortable telling you your video sucks, that you're a stupid faggot or use whatever manner of nasty insults they feel like posting. Nobody bothers to capitalize their sentences, use punctuation of any kind and most of the words are loaded with annoying text message acronyms.

What could possibly account for this discrepancy? Why is YouTube such a magnet for the worst in human behavior and Flickr is the opposite? My theory has been that people will behave more graciously towards one another when the communication is not solely text-based. Text-only allows people to hide behind a mask of anonimity so there is less pressure to not act like a jackass. I thought that if you knew what a person looked like from a still photo you would be nicer, and then I thought for sure if you posted a VIDEO of yourself then for sure people would be nicer since that's even closer of a representation of a real person. But apparently this theory doesn't hold on YouTube.

Why is Fabric a Femenine Material for Crafts?

Why is it that amongst the numerous crafts humans engage in, that men in general don't work with fabric or cloth? Men will work with wood, metal, stone, paper, plastic, but cloth—not so much. Why is that? Men don't sew things or knit things; the only time I've ever seen a man sew something was a leather motorcycle seat on a TV show. But by and large men just don't like joining two bits of cloth with thread whereas they will gladly join wood or weld sheets of metal together. These are all sweeping generalizations I know, and I'm sure there are plenty of exceptions but it would seem that the overriding consensus is that fabric is in the realm of femenine things. It just seems odd. But in my own experience there is some kind of biological repulsion to sewing. My mom once showed me how to crochet, but it was like showing a dog a card trick. I held the needles as if they were artifacts from another universe…my mind could not figure out how to use them. It was a hopeless thing. But in the hands of a woman she had created a hat within minutes. How is it that these skills are so seemingly restricted by gender?