Abstract

Warning: studying sociology can be harmful to your ego -- Un-occupied, un-employed: don't just do something! Stand there! -- Un-TV: you are what you watch -- Un-TV II: don't just watch something! Sit there! -- The looking-glass self: from the familiar stranger to the empty mirror -- The looking-glass other: close encounters of the third kind -- Riding the elevators with Comte, Durkheim, Parsons and Garfinkel -- The auto and the ego: car wars -- The toilet and technology: the Buddha and the bowl -- Earth walk: Antaeus meets Gaia -- Heaven, earth and human: a day in the life and death of a day -- Power and no power: inside the message of McLuhan's media -- Psychoanalysis and denial: "there's a dead animal on my plate!" -- Non-ordinary reality in ordinary, everyday life -- Death-as-an-advsor [sic].