An audience member made a sign asking the band to do something

Playing the theme music when the hero walks in

The first iPhone was released in June of 2007, and smart phones in general started to take off in the late 00s. This has ushered in an "app era" of society or maybe a "cloud generation" of children or maybe SkyNet is about to start or whatever, but lets instead stop and think about the implications for high school musicals.

For the sake of my made up argument here, let's pick 2010 as the "basically everyone who has young children owns a smart phone and can record things they are doing on very short notice" year. This means that anyone born after 2005 or so has had a good chunk of their childhood photographed and recorded, and it means that anyone born after 2010 has had essentially all of their childhood recorded (and stored in THE CLOUD).

The film "Frozen" came out in late 2013, and features soaring musical numbers which for all I know are completely typical in children's movies, but strike me as sort of similar to the things you might see in musicals performed on stage. What this means is that there is a generation of musical theater directors right now who are thinking ahead to the high school musicals they will be exhibiting in the year 2026 and what they've realized is that they will have access to video shot in beautiful 1080p True HD quality which features the entire cast of their high school Frozen performance -- singing all of the songs in the thing they are performing as 4 year olds, and they are already working out the technical details of how they can use video projection to include this material in the performances.

How many things can you make butter from?

It's not every day that I walk the corridors of power and interact with the real makers and shakers of our society -- but it is more or less every month. One interaction that keeps happening over and over again is that I'll say something that I didn't even think was that insightful, and some political crony or bureaucrat will say "Goddamnit Jankowski, that is brilliant! I wish I'd had you with me on my campaign in '92 - things would be different today!", or something like that.

At moments like this I pause for a brief moment and reply with something like "Yes, senator, but that would have been a really awful decision because I was like 13 years old and probably would have given you horrible advice on your '92 campaign".

Then they'll say "see, you've done it again! It's quick thinking and doing quick math years that I need more of!"

Parlaying success into more success

When you find yourself doing something where you stop and think "man, this is pathetic, what have I come to, I'm a big mess", it's hard to know what to do next. Conventional wisdom is that you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and get your act together, but that's not always the case. Let's explore this with an example and maybe that will help.

Let's say you're out on the town and looking forward to a special date night with a special lady, only you're not really even sure if you're going to have a date night. Maybe you got a text message with the implication of a date night and now you're waiting to hear back and you don't want to go home because then you can't go on the date night, but you also don't want to just walk around for hours on end waiting for a text back, because that's a huge waste of your night and you could have been doing something else.

In a situation like that, you might find yourself stopped, sitting on a park bench, and thinking "man, this is pathetic, what have I come to, I'm a big mess", and not knowing what to do next. In this moment, you are reflecting on yourself and how you have - AGAIN, dammit! - put your own happiness into the hands of someone who isn't you; in this case, the special lady on the other end of your text messages.

So what you want to do here is one of two things, and unfortunately they are opposites. The first way to go is to make a fist and slam your hand on the table (you should find a table in moments like this) and say "that's it, fuck this, I'm leaving!" and just walk back home and forget about the special lady and the date night. You need to commit to replying with something like "sorry, got tired of waiting and went home" if'n she does in fact text you back. In this case you are saving your dignity but maybe missing out on a special date night.

The second thing to do is to go all-in on your text messages and keep asking her what's up, and maybe even escalate things to a phone call, professing how interested you are in the special date night, and so on. In this case there's some chance that she'll be impressed by your bravado and decide that you are her soul mate; but there's also a chance that she'll change her phone number and move to a different state.

The problem here is that both of these approaches can completely backfire and even in their best case scenario the outcome might not even be that good, but uh, that's just kind of how it is, so stop worrying about your special lady and just do something, it doesn't really matter what.

We're getting even odds on the odds being odd

Whenever I travel to a spot to meet someone I leave a small drone behind that I can remotely control via the internet, so that I can survey the goings-on after I leave the area. I've been doing this for years now and it's sort of expensive, but I does mean that I can tune in on a moments notice to watch someone that I might have met years ago, and see what's happening in their driveway or at the office or whatever. It sounds sort of creepy when I type it out like that.