I hate ballroom dancing. I would never want to do it. Dancing in general isn’t that interesting to me and doing it slowly to bad music with a bunch of people in stuffy clothing even less so. Also those people probably like ballroom dancing… but so do I. I love it in fact. I love a lot of things that I don’t like but have absolutely no effect on my life.
I want the whole world to be full of things that I don’t do. Variety is the spice of life some say. I don’t say it but others do and I agree with them in principle. Life would be less interesting if we all did and thought the same things. At the very least the lines for those things would be longer.
I’m not sure what the internet is doing to underground culture but it is certainly making it more accessible. It used to be if you wanted to do something a little non standard you had to really look to find info about it. For me it was radio controlled cars or paintball. You would find a magazine or go to some little shop and talk to people there. Now all you have to do is google (v. to google, also see yahoo).
I had a Western Civ professor in college who claimed pop culture began with the Sears Catalog. One big piece of mass marketing that everyone got so we could all know what to buy. I don’t know if he was the first to think of that but it makes sense. Suddenly everyone had the same options as what to buy. Given the same limited options do we all tend to gravitate to the best options? I don’t know, I’m just making all this up but the internet is both consolidating certain experiences such as shopping with amazon.com or giving us seemingly infinite options for in-depth info on any edge case hobby we want.
What does it all mean? I don’t know but I love the fact that there is a whole world full of stuff I don’t like and know nothing about. It means there are plenty of options of new things to do and others that I don’t need to worry about.
. That said I have Pandora’s reasoning:been fairly impressed on what it has played for me. I took 2 playlists I created and wrote down the next 5 songs it played. These weren’t the first 5 it played because I didn’t think about blogging it fast enough. It is interesting to see how they categorize certain songs. My comments in italics
For some reason around Christmas time I decided I should learn more about American history. Because of that I named a few history based books from anyone looking for Christmas ideas. This year I got 1776 by David McCullough. I have always been interested in war history going back to reading a book about the German World War II flagship Bismarck. The 2 wars I decided on learning more about were the Revolutionary war and World War I. I knew a little about the American Revolutionary war but not much more than what you what you learn in grade school. 
Vengeance is a novel by George Jonas detailing the Israeli counter intelligence department’s response to the killing of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympic games. A group of Palestinian terrorists broke into the Olympic compound and took 9 Israeli athletes hostage. All of the hostages died either in captivity or in a rescue attempt. In response to this Israel undertook a covert operation to assassinate 11 people who were believed to have masterminded or been involved with the attack. The story is told from the point of view of the team leader Avner who is regular field agent but is none the less picked to lead this mission. The story is like a movie plot but since it is supposedly true it becomes all the more fantastic. The charge of the Israeli team was to kill the men in fantastic ways, not just to gun them down on the street but to kill them when they feel secure at home or among their peers. For example one way they devise is for a telephone to explode when it is picked up. The plan is not only to take revenge but to attempt to make terrorists paranoid as well as deter and disorganize them. 
