Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Feb 02, 2009, 11:22AM

From the "Um, what?" files

What if the man behind Walden had the chance to liveblog the Superbowl? Now we know!

Right...

You have to ask yourself, if you are Thoreau and you are live bloggin', and you now have a little more hope for Arizona to come back, now that they are only 6 down, what's the best commercial? If you are pretending you are Thoreau and live bloggin' you have to like the careerbuilder ads, even if the best single line was a promo for the Conan O'Brien show ("If you have a Conan lasting for more than four hours, call a doctor"--or whatever it was that Tina Fey said in the Conan O'Brien promo). You have to like the careerbuilder ads because they so relates to Thoreau. People think, Thoreau: nature, trees, birds, etc. But it's really, Thoreau: the nature of work, the ecology of our lives--how are we living if we are living only for one thing, work. Career was not really a word used for what we today call career before Thoreau, as can be seen in this illustration from the Oxford English Dictionary--a list of the years in which the career as we knows it begins to appear. After Thoreau, career becomes a word and, sadly, it begins to gain on the word life, the way the Cardinals seems to be gaining on the Steelers.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

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