Think About, Pop Music.

For the majority of western culture, popular contemporary music, or pop music B.E. (Before Elvis) used to be something to politely dance too, enjoy a drive-in cheeseburger too or polish your Bakelite dishes too. After Elvis blew the scene open (Daddio!) with his gyrating toilet areas it became a movement of rebellion also, Bakelite and cheeseburgers were discarded for gaily coloured bobby socks and quarts of Brylcreem as most young men got themselves highly polished hotrods and much less polished New York accents plus whole fad of sex before marriage clubs sprung up based around rock 'n' roll malted milkshake bars and it seemed all the headway in morality that the Spanish Inquisition had achieved would be cast aside completely.

But big business countered quickly, adapt to survive was their motto! They saw the money that could be made using teenage rebellion as a theme for manufactured rockers like 'Presley Gutenberg -The Tweed Terror'. Gutenberg had a short string of hits in 1959 but his live act was his big draw, pogoing up and down on each leg alternately while playing the flute until collapse, he packed out show all across the East cost of America.  'Carol the Crab Pruden' was another great act introduced in 1958. She was the first rebel rocker to use the now old trick of combining a hit song with a dance, 'Do the Carol Crab' sold 2 million copies in 1959 and Carol was on every variety show on television that year performing the song and dance that involving scuttling across the stage sideways while singing and snapping her ''claws'' at her backing group, what fun!

These days we have Bieber and lots of lot less ''fringey'' manufactured pop stars to look up too I can't be bothered to mention, they only ever act badly for publicity which is really appropriate and generally prescribe safe fun for their fans. I think the message here is yes, do rebel a little, but do it in a way that the music business can profit from because if we don't support our music and media giants they may not reveal another Jonas Brothers too the world?  

Emoting...not a con.

  How many times have a been mistakingly thought sarcastic or rude in an email or text? Like, heaps of times, and it's caused no end of hassle including having to explain myself again but in a longer form and sometimes via a telephone conversation, oh the horror! This is all because I've been coerced into thinking emoticons are stupid, where they  actually are an excellent substitution in text based communication for body language which is so important in making yourself  properly understood. An 'angry face' emoticon cannot be misinterpreted as  joking around, a 'smiley with tongue out' is a clear expression of cheekily joking around and a 'smiley' clears up a lot of grey areas, consider the sentence ''I got the job!'' , now is that good or bad it's a little unclear, here's the solution ''I got the job : )'' now we clearly know what the typer is trying to express. 

  So to avoid awkward actual face to face communication I say should we rethink our stance on using emoticons, it's an excellent timesaver.  While I'm on the subject of social interactions let's end shaking hands with ladies, ladies themselves quite often don't shake hands with each other on meeting and I don't see why men should have to either it's very awkward and everybody knows it! Shaking hands with men can be hard enough so I propose we all greet no matter of race, culture, age or sex with a high five, they are always fun right?

  One more thing, if you know me even a little bit you don't have to start an email with 'Hi, how are you?''  you can just assume that I'm acceptably ok otherwise you would have seen a post from me whining about it on Facebook or Twitter, just tell me your information but make it clear and use emoticons, don't hide your text based feelings from me, it's eating into my day clarifying stuff.