If I had a million dollars

I'd be rich.

And I probably wouldn't give it to animal shelters. With Katherine Heigl's announcement this week that she's giving $1 million to LA-area animal shelters, I was wondering what that same million dollars might do for LA-area homeless shelters.

Don't get me wrong. I love animals. And I think we should do everything we can as a society to treat them with respect and prevent an overpopulation. But I also think the least fortunate of us humans may be a bit higher up on the food chain than animals. And while it's noble that Heigl is helping out our animals, it would be great to see that same amount of money go to helping out those in our species. Heigl says in People:

"How can we change the results for these animals?" she said. "[Shelters are not only] euthanizing sick, old dogs. It's gotten brutal, you know. It's inhuman, really."

It is inhuman. It's also inhuman how we treat our humans. Maybe if we did treat our humans better, then our animals would follow.

A good commercial

I enjoy a good commercial. Especially one that speaks directly to its target audience and knows the insight about that audience to touch them on an emotional level.

The new commercial for the Nissan LEAF is the perfect example. Someone needs to buy that creative director a drink. He just earned himself at least one sale (of course, once the Honda dies).

Has Facebook made us lazy?

It's been awhile since my last post and I realized that, over the years of having this blog, my posts have become less and less frequent. Maybe this is because I have less to talk about, but that seems hard to believe. Instead, I've found myself posting little snippets on Facebook, using that as a way to express myself. And I wonder: has Facebook made us lazy?

Rather than write out our thoughts and feelings, we post quick sentences to the world. We scan the quick sentences that our friends - or acquaintances - post, getting a little taste of everyone's life, rather than the full meal. On one hand, we can multi-task, learning a little about everyone's life. But on the other hand, we lose the depth of focusing on people and truly expressing our own feelings.

I watched an episode of The Colbert Report (that show and The New Yorker are pretty much the extent of my news sources) and he had a guest that asked: Is the internet making us dumber? While the internet allows us to search for all kinds of things, we end up only scratching the surface of knowledge about any particular topic. The internet lets us avoid the digging and reading and learning that goes into gaining knowledge, so we end up learning a little about a lot. With that and multi-tasking, we rarely have the chance to focus and think deeply.

At work, I've been trying to concentrate more - by stopping the multi-tasking and focusing on one thing at a time, spending time to just think about a topic. And it works. Even taking an additional 10 minutes to mull something over results in better ideas and approaches.

I wonder if that's the same with Facebook. We don't get a chance to stop and focus and think more deeply. We read a quick post and move on to the next. And because it's so much easier to do that than to write out our feelings, we lose the art of thought.

So I'm going to try ("try" being the operative word) to be more diligent in my postings. Even if it's just for me. Even if it's just to take a few minutes to really think about something and put pen, er, keyboard to paper.