Liz Cox’s pessimist’s guide to the Web
Liz Cox is a writer and communications consultant who’s worked in the high-tech industry for years.
“It’s always darkest just before it turns completely black.”
Pessimism deserves more respect. “Both optimists and pessimists contribute to our society,” British novelist G.B. Stern said. “The optimist invents the airplane and the pessimist the parachute.”
I think of it as mental Kevlar – the safest way to start the day. Pessimism won’t make you rich and successful, but neither will cock-eyed optimism. (Let’s discuss “The Secret” some other time.) I need to know what I’m up against, so there are several “fasten your seat belts” sites among my Web favorites.
Finance and business
The first stop is Marketwatch.com. I look for contrarian trends because optimism is so closely coupled with gullibility, it can lead to astoundingly bad financial choices. Note: The White House assured us that February’s stock market dive was a total fluke. There’s even a theory that the meltdown was caused by a Matt Drudge headline saying Alan Greenspan is predicting recession.
Whatever you think about Drudge’s politics, you have to admit his site grabs a big cross-section of the day’s news, and it’s got a link to every media organization imaginable. DrudgeReport has been my homepage for years. (Gotta love those flashing, twirling, breaking-news police lights.)
Politics
For keeping tabs on the most catastrophic president in U.S. history, TheRawStory has my vote. The site summarizes stories and syndicated columns from the major newspapers and does some solid reporting of its own. You also can get video clips from The Daily Show, MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann, Tim Russert and the other Sunday TV pundits.
If I’m in a snarky mood, Wonkette never disappoints. This is Gawker Media’s down-and-dirty Beltway gossip blog. Whatever you thought of D.C., it’s worse. Like most blogs, it borrows heavily from others, linking to this, that and everything. What a recursive world blogging is.
Shaky Ground
Watch the USGS’s Earthquake Center site (Earthquake.usgs.gov) for a few days and you’ll thank your lucky stars you live in a tectonically stable part of the world. Click on a quake and it will take you to a map of where it happened. Suffice to say that many parts of the U.S. are living on borrowed time.
Humor
And now for the antidote. Nothing puts reality into perspective like The Onion. Come to think of it, maybe I should change my home page from an unintentionally funny site to one that’s funny on purpose.