============= MARK MORFORD'S NOTES & ERRATA =============

[madokie]

SFGate.com - Wednesday, January 31, 2007

== How to Make Yourself Smarter =
In an age of bland evil and dumbed-down everything, how to inflame your shriveled brain?
(By Mark Morford)
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/01/31/notes013107.DTL&nl=fix

It was somewhere between the second and third glasses of wine and just after finishing the rice pasta but before I reached for the vegan chocolate-covered pretzels (Rainbow Grocery, 8 bucks a pound, incredible) for dessert that I happened to glance up at the TV and felt it, a massive, dull stabbing hammerblow of pain way, way back in the subcorteal nerve, where it bends and weaves and reaches down to meet the soul.

Something snapped. Something gave way. I think my head actually snapped back. I blinked a few times, shook my head, looked around to check my surroundings to see if the world was still on its proper axis because it was a feeling, a rather startling sensation that I was just hit in the face with a giant mallet made of sponge cake and road tar and death. You know it too? Sure you do.

What was on TV, exactly? Doesn't matter. I think it was an interstitial ad for that channel's upcoming slate of shows, a typical snappy voice-over wrap-up of sitcoms and reality-show dribble, nothing really unusual in its tone and pitch and loud garish inanity, but somehow it sounded, if you blocked out the actual words, exactly like something that would make a small monkey hit itself in the face with a brick, intentionally.

But while the cause of my sudden pain was surely the waves of malicious dumbness coming straight at my head from the TV like some sort of brain tumor on rails, what happened next was broader, and deeper. ...

Read the rest:
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/gate/archive/2007/01/31/notes013107.DTL&nl=fix