{"id":3804,"date":"2007-06-04T15:14:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-04T15:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/?p=3804"},"modified":"2017-11-28T16:13:13","modified_gmt":"2017-11-28T22:13:13","slug":"things-i-can-do-that-my-father-cannot","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/04\/things-i-can-do-that-my-father-cannot\/","title":{"rendered":"Things I Can Do That My Father Cannot"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Blogs are getting a lot of pixel inches out of an essay entitled <a href=\"http:\/\/everything2.com\/index.pl?node_id=1279877\" target=\"_new\">I Can&#8217;t Do One-Quarter of the Things My Father Can<\/a>, which plays into an Instapundit <a href=\"http:\/\/instapundit.com\/archives2\/005876.php\" target=\"_new\">narrative<\/a> about the loss of traditional male skills.  In my defense, I&#8217;d like to point out that I know how to do a number of things that my father can&#8217;t do.  These include:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><b>Order a Starbucks drink just the way I want it.<\/b><br \/>Face it, it&#8217;s only a triple venti cap, but I not only know the sizes of the cups, but I know <i>the order in which the barristas call it<\/i>.  My generation knows how to express its drink preferences in ways the Greatest Generation or Baby Boomers can only dream of, which is probably why they mostly still drink coffee.\n<\/li>\n<li><b>Hook up any game console to any television or entertainment center.<\/b><br \/>\nWhat, you don&#8217;t have the cables?  Brother, I have all sorts of cables and transformers so I can still hook that old Nintendo Entertainment System to your Yamaha receiver.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><b>Operate video game controllers.<\/b><br \/>\nLet&#8217;s face it, when confronted with keys marked with triangles, squares, and Xs, my father would totally be lost.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><b>Time shift my television viewing.<\/b><br \/>I&#8217;m no longer bound to watching <i>Lost<\/i> on Wednesday nights, which means I can watch something else, probably something I had to record because I was watching a recorded episode of <i>Lost<\/i>.\n<li><b>Insightfully quote culturally meaningful films.<\/b><br \/>\nBecause a proper quip from <i>Office Space<\/i> or catchphrase from <i>Napoleon Dynamite<\/i> identifies the user as intelligent and witty enough to use canned touchstones instead of uttering original thoughts or keeping my mouth shut and sounding smarter.<\/p>\n<\/li>\n<li><b>Blithely ignore the implications of my dependence.<\/b><br \/>Mommy State and Daddy Professionals are only a phone call away if I&#8217;m not afraid of ceding my rights to free thought and using all of my revolving credit on lifestyle maintenance.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>So there you go.  Maybe I do lack some basic skills required at the root level for survival, but I have mad skillz to mindlessly enjoy the fruits of an increasingly fragile modern civilization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Blogs are getting a lot of pixel inches out of an essay entitled I Can&#8217;t Do One-Quarter of the Things My Father Can, which plays into an Instapundit narrative about the loss of traditional male skills. In my defense, I&#8217;d like to point out that I know how to do a number of things that [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3804","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3804","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3804"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3804\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18048,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3804\/revisions\/18048"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3804"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3804"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3804"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}