Lunar
Eclipse 2010
Next:
June 15,
2011, 100 minute Lunar Eclipse, longest in 11 years, visible
everywhere but North America
Solar
Flare (NASA)
2013:
NASA
anticipates large solar flares, possibly as large as the 1859
flares that fried telegraph lines throughout the U.S. and Europe
Letter to Conservatives: The
Party of Wealth – Theirs
Sam Broussard -
Writer, Songwriter, Musician, member of Steve Reilly and the Mamou
Playboys
www.sambroussard.com
Three of the front
runners for the Republican nomination are now just memories, pundit
fodder: Huckabee and Trump, and Palin recedes into political tinnitus.
But the retiring of all three has one thing in common, and it’s money.
Huckabee just bought a huge house in Florida and is enjoying his status
and salary at Fox News. Trump is more at home on his reality show. And
Palin is enjoying both Fox money and reality TV and will probably be the
next Oprah Winfrey, although she’ll never get more than twenty percent
of the viewers because only that percentage of Americans can identify
with her spunky pride in her ignorance. And yes, she’s pretty.
Read Post -
Comment
Trumpenstein Created by Karl
Rove
Karl Rove is
bemoaning the presence of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate –
odd, since Rove created him. In fact, Rove dumbed down the entire
Republican Party so much that a clown like Trump now makes perfect sense
to the majority of his Party.
Read Post -
Comment
_______________
We
Need A New Party!
Kenny Lee
Lewis - Member of The Steve Miller Band,
Guitarist/singer/songwriter, Novelist/screenwriter'
www.kennyleelewis.com,
www.stevemillerband.com
I am a rock
star. Ok, ok, I am in a band with a rock star. I am also a
husband, father of three daughters, and a small business owner who pays
his taxes like anyone else. I never got into politics until the last
election and wrote and produced a non-partisan PSA video for Comcast
called “Get Out and Vote” to help assuage voter apathy throughout this
ailing nation. I didn’t vote for either one of the major candidates in
2008. I am all about trying to rally everyone to start voting again so
we can possibly support a third political party that makes sense. If we
can educate and get people out to the polls again, I believe that there
could be a groundswell of voters who could turn the tides in future
elections.
We need a party “by the people and for the people”. As corny as that
sounds, it is a precept that our nation was founded upon and if we are
to lift up and resuscitate this
suffocating political system, we are going to need a leader who actually
leads rather than folds like a cheap stroller just to please his
parties’ special interests.
(Use the link
below to read Kenny's entire post (© Kenny Lee Lewis, 2011 - All Rights
Reserved).
Read Post -
Comment
____________
The RCJ Posts Issues
Questionnaire on Obama -
Obama 2012 – Where Do You
Stand?
Rick Alan Rice -
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the
Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting
firm Rick A Rice Consulting.
The Revolution
Culture Journal (RCJ) invites you to participate in a little experiment
to help us understand public perception of President Barack Obama,
particularly as it relates to enthusiasm for his re-election in 2012.
We have identified
34 issues in U.S. foreign and domestic policy and devised a scale to
determine how well respondents feel President Obama is doing with each.
Use this link to go to the questionnaire.
Read Post -
Comment
____________
Bechtel’s Long-Term Commitment
to Nuclear Disaster
Rick Alan Rice -
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the
Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting
firm Rick A Rice Consulting.
Somehow the idea of
using nuclear fission, and eventually nuclear fusion, to boil water,
produce steam, drive turbines and produce direct current electricity has
found its way back into the list of acceptable alternatives as an
environmentally friendly solution. This bit of Houdini depends entirely
on comparison to power generation through the burning of coal, which
produces carbon emissions and is a primary contributor to rising levels
of greenhouse gas (GHG) in our choking environment.
Read Post -
Comment
___________
Applying Grover Norquist to
Corporation Intellectual Starvation
Rick Alan Rice -
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the
Revolution Culture Journal. He is also proprietor of A&E/IT Consulting
firm Rick A Rice Consulting.
In my career as a
consultant, I have all kinds of opportunities to interact with different
personality types at different levels of organizations. Some of these
are of the kind that might make others feel that life is not worth
living, but the advantage of consultancy is that my involvements are
focused, short, and generally sweet, and then I leave the office dramas
behind for a quick dip into the next kiln of opportunity. I am like a
merry mercenary in that way, unexposed to the daily grind of the
organizations with which I work.
Staff people, on
the other hand, are subject to hierarchical structures and personality
profiles, and their critical path issue is: a) whether or not to stay in
the roles they are in, given the odds of rising up to a more satisfying
position within the organization; or b) to cast their fates to wind,
which is the job market.
So much of life
happens at the initial sell-in.
Read Post -
Comment
___________
Appointment with Disaster -
Republican Domestic Policy
Rick Alan Rice
-
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the Revolution Culture Journal.
While the rich
are enjoying tax breaks they have no need for and U.S. corporations are
holding on to record profits, padding their accounts to ensure that this
is not their rainy day, but doing little to further the
employment and domestic security needs of United States citizens, word
comes that we are running out of money to provide help for a growing
population of homeless (see the Huffington
Post on this date).
Read Post -
Comment
___________
Welcoming the Arab Street to
U.S. Foreign Policy
Rick Alan Rice -
Publisher of RARWRITER.com and the
Revolution Culture Journal.
I was all set
to thank the progressive Arab world, or at least the 25 percent of it
that is situated in Egypt, for taking charge of U.S. foreign policy and
forcing it to make sense. Then those pro-Mubarak thugs showed up and
shocked the global community back to reality.
Read Post -
Comment
___________
Why Your College Student Can't
Read, Write or Even Think
Rick Alan Rice -
Publisher, Writer, A&E / IT
Consultant
Back a hundred
years ago, when I was in college, all the guys who were doing the best
in the classes I took all seemed to be Viet Nam veterans going to school
on government grants. They tended to stand out because they were older
and far more experienced than their classmates. It seems unlikely that
they were brighter, but they were fundamentally different in terms of
focus and perspective in ways that seemed obviously helpful to them.
Read Post - Comment
___________
CONSTITUTION
CORNER:
The RCJ Prefers Seth
Meyers' SNL "WEEKEND UPDATE" Take on the Firepower Referenced by our
Founding Fathers - see his Constitution Corner video on the Front Page
(middle column).
Early Blogging for Gun Rights
James
Madison - Author of the Federalist Papers
"Besides the
advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the
people of almost every other nation, the existence of
subordinate governments, to which the people are attached, and
by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier
against the enterprises of ambition, more insurmountable than
any which a simple government of any form can admit of."
|
George
Mason - Ratifying Member of the Constitutional Congress
"I ask, sir,
what is the militia? It is the whole people, except for a few
public officials." |
Sam
Adams -
Ratifying Member of the Constitutional Congress
"That the
said Constitution shall never be construed to authorize Congress
to infringe the just liberty of the press or the rights of
conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States who
are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms" |
Alexander
Hamilton - Author of the Federalist Papers
"The best we
can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be
properly armed."
"If the
representatives of the people betray their constituents, there
is then no recourse left but in the exertion of that original
right of self-defense which is paramount to all positive forms
of government, and which against the usurpations of the national
rulers may be exerted with infinitely better prospect of success
than against those of the rulers of an individual State. In a
single State, if the persons entrusted with supreme power become
usurpers, the different parcels, subdivisions, or districts of
which it consists, having no distinct government in each, can
take no regular measures for defense. The citizens must rush
tumultuously to arms, without concert, without system, without
resource; except in their courage and despair." |
Richard
Henry Lee - Member, Continental Congress
"To preserve
liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people
always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young,
how to use them." |
Thomas
Jefferson -
Author of the Declaration of Independence, 3rd U.S. President
"What country
can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from
time to time that their people preserve the spirit of
resistance? Let them take arms."
"No Free
man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." |
John
Adams - Constitutional Congress Member, 2nd President
"To suppose
arms in the hands of citizens, to be used at individual
discretion, except in private self-defense, or by partial orders
of towns, countries or districts of a state, is to demolish
every constitution, and lay the laws prostrate, so that liberty
can be enjoyed by no man; it is a dissolution of the government.
The fundamental law of the militia is, that it be created,
directed and commanded by the laws, and ever for the support of
the laws." |
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Previous
Entries
What's
So Great About History?
_________________________________________________
Published October 31, 2008
RETURN OF COOL BLACK
Do sagging black dudes,
with their jeans clinging to their hip bones with about half of their
boxer shorts exposed, realize that they are advertising that they are
available for anal intercourse?
These and many other
questions about today's black youth culture leave me perplexed, though
that allusion above to prison culture ranks at the highest reaches of
the list. That kids would imitate the behaviors of the worst role models
society has to offer is ass-backwards to begin with. That a black
culture that is famously homophobic would adopt as street fashion a
display of such a supplicant - and homoerotic - nature is just a head
scratcher. That the imitators of this fashion may be too unsophisticated
to even know what they are portraying is downright disheartening.
But did you see Lil Wayne
on Saturday Night Live this season?
With his pants down to his knees?
Lil Wayne must know all
about this weird affectation and its
origins, so what explains him? Pandering to his audiences? He has
several, a true
crossover on the streets of Rock R&B and hip-hop. Or has prison survival
technique morphed on the street to become just another passé rebel pose.
I guess I suspect the latter.
On the brink of an Obama
presidency, I find myself thinking back to 1970, when I can last
remember when being "black" was really cool. There was a time, as an 18
year old kid roaming the campus of the University of Kansas, when I
looked around myself and thought it was impossible for me to be
cool, because what was cool was being black, and I was about as far from
"black" as a guy could get. Even the cool white guys I knew were having
their hair permed to affect white boy afros. (I would admit that I once
tried this, with horrible results.) They looked right for the times,
with Army surplus outfitted Yippies roaming the hillsides along with
their more blissed-out Hippie brethren, many of whom were equally
enamored with the "natural" look - natural, that is, to a black dude.
White guys were useless
in the early '70s, at least as far as youth culture was concerned. The
times were getting grittier, as the Viet Nam War dragged on, and the
post-Beatles generation of white musicians were weirdly transfixed with
warm and fuzzy folk and country-rock. Why, it was disgusting, as if
white people were naturally gravitating back toward the milky folk era,
with all its blandness.
The
sizzle of the black male music stars of the '60s, including Jimi
Hendrix, Sly Stone, Otis Redding, and the Motown acts, was largely gone.
On the other hand, the blues was reborn as a white man's fascination,
and older black musicians were, for a short time in the late '60s and
early '70s, in vogue. This gave the rise to prominence, in terms of
crossover recognition, of such bluesmen as B.B. King, John Lee Hooker,
Muddy Waters and others. Young guitarists were studying up on newly
available blues roots tracks recorded by Robert Johnson decades earlier.
The United States of
America has for some time been becoming a wholly different place than
the country I grew up in, far more divergent in its cultural mix. My
Uncle "Gene the Plumber" was the first, in my personal realm, to really
notice and acknowledge this. One might have expected a "Kansas redneck"
to express qualms about "changing America," but that wasn't him. He was
a big Nat King Cole fan, as big a fan of Nat's as his sister, my mother,
was of Harry Belafonte. They both enjoyed Sammy Davis, Jr., too.
They weren't really progressives, just had ears.
I think what people may
not fully appreciate about the civil rights movement of the 1960s was
the extent to which it was supported by creative black dudes who were
making extraordinary contributions to society as a whole. I would argue
that the music produced at Stax Records and Motown represented real
advances in giving voice to our - blacks and whites - shared
experiences. While we haven't all experienced despair and disregard in
equal measure, we have all experienced love and pain and joy and the
other attributes of being human. I would argue that the "race music" of
the '60s helped a gap be bridged between whites and blacks that was
critical to the advancement of American society. If you can "feel" with
someone, you can probably also eat and go to the bathroom with him. A
level of trust was established through those mainstream tunes. And its
worth noting that everyone in the 1960s heard the same stuff, America
not being nearly the fractured experiential thing then that it is now
(i.e., we don't share media experiences universally anymore).
Ironically,
the black dudes I knew as a young man never had any respect at all for
white dudes like me. I mean that on an intellectual level. Me and the
guys I knew - the whitish guys, except possibly for the Jews - were not
sophisticated enough for the black dudes, all of whom seemed to have
roots on the east coast and backgrounds in elite formal educations. My
sampling may not have been typical, probably having to do with the
creative community with which I was associated, but I knew a bunch of
really bright black guys. And for the most part they looked right down
their noses at me. And in retrospect, I respect that.
I recall playing
guitar one day with a black sax player, whose name can never be spoken
since it was no doubt a phony to begin with, and native Congolese
percussionist Titos Sompa.
I was stumbling through a standard jazz tune, trying to find some common
ground there with "Ornette Coleman," which wasn't easy, and trying not
to sound too white for Titos. And when it was finally over the sax
player looked at me and says - "So why don't you like that tune?"
It was that way once,
with the black dudes owning "expression," from the way we sang to the
way we cooked. (I say that because that awful sax player also taught me
to make ham hocks and beans in a way for which I am mildly famous to
this day.)
Then, as the 1970s wore
on, something changed - something specific.
Manufacturing died and
the gap between the "haves" and the "have nots" became really
noticeable.
The 1965 Watts Riots in
L.A. had shown that, whatever positive strides were being made by the
civil rights movement, a deep well of resentment and dissatisfaction
underlay the changing American society. And as the
Peace and Love era of the late '60s wound down a "gang" called the "Crips"
was founded in southern Los Angeles by a couple 16-year olds -
Raymond Washington and Stanley "Tookie"
Williams. Though ostensibly
a further extension of the '60s ideology that had created the Black
Panthers and the radical Weather Underground, young Washington and
Williams were not a part of the intellectual elite and they never
developed a political agenda.
What the Crips offered was identity to
a bunch of kids whose parents lost their jobs as local manufacturing
concerns disappeared, leaving large tracks of L.A. without an economic
base. The Crips gave a generation of hopeless kids a way to get
something out of life, primarily through involvements with criminal
pursuits. Gangsters without purpose, they festered into competing subset
neighborhood groups, with the Piru Street Boys rechristening themselves
"The Bloods," thereby launching the most notorious feud in street gang
history.
As America became less and less a
manufacturing society, and jobs for unskilled workers became fewer and
fewer, "black musical expression" morphed further and further away from
the pop-oriented sounds that had made their music so popular with
crossover audiences going way back to the early part of the 20th
Century. Rap and Hip-Hop became the dominant sound starting in the late
1970s, gained ground in the 1980s, and went mainstream in the early
1990s with entrees that were a real jolt to the "system." "Gangsta rap"
spoke for a generation of primarily young people who were dispensing
with pleasantries, in favor of straight talk and, all too often, vulgar
display of pride and vanity.
Gangsta rap has proven to be a fad
that passed, but it has left an edge on the music that is now called
"R&B" - a blend of hip-hop, rap and '70 era soul, now including disco.
Speaking as a guy with a couple kids
in middle school (what used to be "Junior High," in my experience) in a
highly diverse community, kids these days won't listen to anything else.
The "ghetto" music starts about 7 o'clock each morning at our house,
rides with us to and from school, and starts again at home after school
hours.
The reasons my kids and their friends
like it is the same reason those kids on American Bandstand rated songs
high back in the '50s and '60s -
it's got a beat and it's easy to
dance to.
One other thing, too. It is easy to
"do" together. The kids I haul around sing all the R&B tunes together,
like a weird comic chant. They seem to find it funny.
There are young black dudes at our
house all the time, which bothers me to the extent that a father gets
bothered by young dudes hanging around his daughter. It is interesting,
though. They are bright, clever, inquisitive, and put me to mind of
those black dudes I used to hang out with all those years ago. They are
courteous, too, which goes a long way with me whatever color you happen
to be. You notice, these days, the people who take the time for
civility. At least I do.
The kids all love Obama, which I find
reassuring. I'm not an Obama man myself, but I recognize decency in him,
and it makes me feel at ease that my kids do, too. Young people need
role models.
There is so much talent out there to
be tapped.
- RAR
COOL BLACK:
Photographs (roughly clockwise) include
Cab Calloway, Ike Turner, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Harry
Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Sidney Poitier, Chuck Berry, Little Richard,
Otis Redding, Miles Davis, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Samuel L. Jackson,
Clarence Williams III, Richard Roundtree, Buddy Guy, Lil Wayne, Prince,
Sammy Davis Jr., John Coltrane, Sly Stone, Jimi Hendrix, and Robert
Johnson. |
|
BLACK DUDES:
Clarence Williams III and Richard Roundtree are both included on this
panel on the strength of their era-defining looks. That aside, the
amount of artistic genius represented in this panel is awe inspiring.
That's sort of what I am hoping of the likely election of Barack Obama:
a new golden period of black creative contribution. I rather like Lil
Wayne as a starting point, in our new niche-defined world. |
|
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|
_________________________________________________
Published September 24, 2008
BE AFRAID:
Imagine this happening on
your block, in your life.
You make a big decision, take a
chance. You gamble your future on your optimistic assessment of your own
prospects. It is a big and important place you find yourself in, and you
feel that you are on the top of the world.
You must know that light begets
darkness, an immutable fact of your pursuits.
But you can't be prepared.
Without warning, everything
changes. You are knocked off balance, disoriented by a feeling of doubt.
Suddenly no one will have anything to do with you because it has
gotten out that you put all your eggs in a basket that has turned out to be haunted.
You look again at what you have and wonder how you didn't see it
yourself. You want to disentangle, but you can't break away. You
can't dump the thing, because the place is just scary, and you have
borrowed more to finance your twisted scheme than what you actually own is worth.
That is the talk, which you hear as a bad street buzz.
Worse yet, the neighbors are starting rumors
about your mental...stability. Your stock on the block is falling like a rock.
People shun you, avert their eyes as you pass, pretend like you aren't
there.
It isn't long before you can't
arrange a job, let alone a deal.
As your cash flow dries, you start
selling off your assets, your own desperation driving your acceptable returns
lower and lower. All of the respect anyone had for you is gone now, and
it is known that whatever you have can be gotten on the cheap.
It is as if you have been left to
be picked clean by the ghouls you thought you knew - your friends and
associates.
Then just as quickly as the
darkness enveloped you, a protecting angel appears. An Uncle with whom you have always had a
special relationship. Let's call him "Sam," as you always
have. He sweeps in like a huge tri-colored bird, with stern, watchful
eyes, and a decisive way. He covers your losses and
takes the creepy place off your hands.
You know it wasn't really magic,
as it seemed. You know Sam really coerced resources from your frail Aunt Samantha,
who doesn't put up much of a fight these days, whipped as she is from
Uncle Sam's philanthropies.
But what do you care! Old Aunt Samantha hasn't
got much life left in her anyway, and doesn't need the liquidity, and
besides, you
have been exorcised of your awful stewardship. Hands washed clean, you are back
on the streets, looking for the next better transaction, back in the
good graces of your friends and vampires, who tend to gravitate toward
people in just your situation. It has all changed again, you are a
player.
If you are good and your
intentions are pure, you really can survive this hairy, scary world of
weird finance.
It is sad for the rest, though; for those
who don't have someone like your Sam. You just wish that luck and good
fortune would be with them, too. Or at least that they will refinance with God's speed.
-
RAR
|
_________________________________________________
Published September 11, 2008
|
Vomiting in Ketchikan
Probably the best way to get to
Alaska is by the ocean-going ferries that traverse the inner island
straits up past Ketchikan, Sitka, Juneau, Skagway and the rest. That is
how the tourists go, and by all reports it is a wonderful experience. My
parents and my brother's family did this recently and thought it was a
great experience.
The second best way is probably to
fly non-stop into Anchorage, which you can do from U.S. airports as
distant as Newark, New Jersey and Boston, Massachusetts, each seven and
a half hour flights.
The most scenic and adventurous
option is to drive up through British Columbia until you finally reach
the Alaskan Highway, known as the "ALCAN" for "Alaska-Canada," which
winds from Dawson Creek up through the Yukon Territory and to Delta
Junction, Alaska, 100 miles southeast of Fairbanks. I took this arduous
route myself to Alaska in 1983, driving through the wilderness all by
myself in possibly the stupidest and most terrifying solo journey I have
ever made. It is a great trip but go prepared. You will see bears and
all manner of wildlife. I met a 7-foot tall mountain man at a gas
station in the Yukon - gas stations are few and far between so watch
your gauge - who seemed to want to make me his girlfriend. I have never
driven away from a gas station so fast in all my life; in fact, drove
the next hundred miles watching the road behind me in my rearview
mirror.
The ALCAN Highway is known as
Highway 1 in the Yukon Territory, which just about says it all if you
think about it for a second. Not a lot of pavement in the Yukon, though
in 1983 Highway 1 was like a super highway compared to Highway 97, which
is what the ALCAN stretch out of Dawson Creek is called. I drove up from
Boulder, Colorado, which took days, and recall stopping at a gas station
in Dawson Creek and stupidly asking the guy at the cash register if I
was anywhere near Alaska. I know this sounds like a stupid question, but
it says something about how utterly unprepared I was for this trip. I
was driving a Ford Pinto, about as ill-equipped to handle this terrain
as any vehicle imaginable. Roads, often unpaved, were so rough that at
one point I sheared the pins attaching my car's generator to the engine
block right in two, just from the force of the buffeting ride. I wired
it back on with a coat hanger and limped into the next berg to buy a
bolt to affix the generator back in a functioning position.
The cash register guy at the
station in Dawson Creek thought it was a stupid question, too. "You are
two thousand miles from Alaska," he said condescendingly. It wasn't
accurate information - I was only a little over half that far from my
intended destination - but it gives you some idea of the distances we
are talking about when we talk about driving to Alaska, a really remote
place.
At one point, after driving for
what seemed like hours without even spotting another car, I hit a
stretch of "highway" that was nothing more than a rutted dirt road. Then
out of nowhere came a guy on a grader who ran me right off the roadway
as he leveled the surface, never even acknowledging my presence, as if I
had stupidly driven onto a construction site and deserved rough
treatment.
There is a crossover from the
ALCAN that brings you into Skagway, Alaska. This, too, was just dirt
road when I took the trip, 96 miles long, called Highway 2 until you get
into the United States, where it becomes Klondike Highway. The 96 miles
seems a great deal longer when you are traveling at 45 miles per hour,
bouncing along like a bobble-head doll.
I recall feeling like I was in the
middle of nowhere, signage being non-existent at the time, really
wondering if I had taken some wrong turn into a wilderness I would never
return from. As night fell I drove on, gaining elevation as I fought my
way up the White Pass, and snow began to fall. This was in August.
The temperature dipped
precariously as darkness enveloped me. I drove past a bear in a ditch on
the side of the road at one point, barely visible in flaky, confettied
darkness. Then eventually I found myself coming into Skagway, a tiny
former gold mining town that like all the Southeastern Alaska towns is
nestled into the steep terrain along the inner island strait. Exhausted,
I slept that frozen night in my car in the parking lot of the ferry
terminal, waiting for an opportunity the next day to drive aboard the
car ferry that would deliver me to Juneau.
The ALCAN way of travel to Alaska
is the most wonderfully horrifying adventure you will likely find
anywhere in North America if your thing is doing wild road trips.
Without a doubt, however, the
wildest way to go to Juneau, Alaska is to go by air. Sounds impossible,
right? Wrong.
Riding the low altitude flights
that hop and skip up through Ketchikan, Wrangel and Sitka is like riding
a roller coaster, the rugged terrain creating high and low pressure
areas that toss even a commercial jet around like a toy boat bobbing on
the ocean.
When I was in Juneau I would hear
stories of a commercial jet that actually did a complete barrel roll
coming into land at Juneau International Airport, where pilots are
forced to take a wild turn at the last moment upon approach to fit in
between the mountains rising on either side of the runway. This barrel
rolling commercial jet story may have been apocryphal - I don't even
know if a commercial passenger airliner is capable of such a thing - but
the story seems feasible when you are bouncing along on that death
flight into the wilderness.
The touchdown in Ketchikan was
particularly awful.
I flew in once on a plane that had
only a handful of passengers on it; I couldn't even see anyone else on
the flight from where I was seated, but knew they were there by the
sounds they were making. Unpleasant sounds.
When we landed, after a good air
beating, we were informed that we would all need to disembark
temporarily so the crew could clean the plane before boarding the few
passengers getting on at Ketchikan.
The plane was a mess. Most
everyone aboard had vomited.
- RAR
|
______________________________________________________
Oh
Poncho...
Oh Cisco! You Are A Villain?
Do you ever feel like somehow you got selected to be one
of those people things "happen to?" Not necessarily good things,
not things that happen "for you." It makes all the
difference in life, whether it is a tapestry of joy or a sea of pain. I suppose
we all get to knit and sink, and life's "losers" have stories as nicked by fate
as do life's "winners." That it is usually hard to perceive the karmic justice -
that bad things happen to good
people - only darkens the waters. That in our new age of social and
professional networking we are engaged with strangers only perpetrates
the surreal and increases the likelihood of the unexpected occurring.
Around the first of the year,
I was sitting at my desk in the office of the engineering company I was working
for at the time, when I started getting calls from this friendly guy named Bill
Davis. Here is where the surreal part starts. Bill had found me on the Internet,
where I have a big presence because I'm an Internet junky. You can learn almost
everything there is to know about me on the Internet, I'm an open book. You can
even hear me warble off key, if you've a mind.
Bill told me he had an opportunity
for me as a Bid Developer with Cisco Systems. I'm perfect for the job, he said.
It paid $104,000 per year and, among the benefits, I would work from home.
I am a California mortgage slave. I
not only have to work, I have to make dollars almost out of the range of
an English/Journalism major, even one with 30-plus years of professional
experience. (Having a certificate in technical writing ups my market value.)
Still, I'm screwed for anything beyond about $4,000 in monthly mortgage-related
payments. I was working for a good firm, one that had made its reputation doing
environmental remediation and cleanup projects. The people were pleasant. It was
the kind of place where I would bring my kids. In fact, one pleasant graphics
person there had Lego sets that "needed to be built," and my son Griffin would
sit in a cubicle and go to town on the construction. One could hardly hope for a
better company, except that they weren't quite paying me enough to keep me from
sliding ever further into debt. It is hard to feel optimistic in an employment
in which you work all the time only to have your fortunes decline. There is that
disconnect
again, that surreal aspect of modern life.
Which brings me back to Bill Davis.
Bill, it turned out, is with a Florida company called K&J Consulting and he told
me that his firm has a standing deal with Cisco Systems to provide technical
support, and he needed to fill a Bid Developer position for his client. He
repeated, "It's $104,000 per year..." In fact, he started playing that drum
pretty hard. "$104,000 per year..."
Now $104,000 per year in California
money isn't a great amount, purchasing-power wise, but it is more than I was
making. Plus, this wasn't just some IT firm Bill Davis was touting, it was Cisco Systems. Cisco has "rigged" 70 percent of the entire existing
Internet! More importantly to me, they are annually touted as "One of the 100
Best Companies to Work For in America," maybe even the best.
I stalled Bill for awhile, while I
thought about making a move. The company I was working for had just given me a
raise, 100 percent of the maximum under their system of managing pay increases;
it more than matched the rate of inflation. And around Christmas the proposal
group treated me to an expensive night out with them at Bing Crosby's place in
Walnut Creek, and they gave me a little gift over dinner. It was not easy for me
to leave these people who had been really good to me, but Bill Davis was
offering better money and "Cisco Systems" on my resume. He assured me that K&J
was in good with Cisco and had maintained a client relationship for nine years,
with no reason for it to stop.
Over Christmas break I went into San
Francisco and met some "Proposal Experts." That is the name of the group I was
being hired into - the Proposal Experts. The two experts I met with seemed like pleasant guys,
which sort of cinched the deal. I decided I couldn't say no to Bill Davis and
his $104,000, so I called him back to accept the offer, but not after first
confirming what I thought I had understood to be "the deal." It turned out I had
the salary right, but the benefits did not include health insurance. In fact,
they only included expense reimbursement and two weeks paid vacation the first
year.
Without health insurance, Bill's
$104,000 package shrunk significantly, but I felt confident that we could
purchase individual coverage health insurance and still be money ahead. Besides,
my company at the time was offering Great Western health insurance, which is
practically like having no health insurance anyway. In retrospect, I was lost in
heedless optimism regarding the practicality of buying individual coverage
health insurance, but it was part of a broad trend. I was headed into the weird
realm of Cisco Systems and their dark underling K&J Consulting.
- RAR
Click
here
to read the complete "Oh Cisco! You Are A Villain?" essay, an account of
mendacity in the staffing of Internet giant Cisco Systems.
The Nature of People
-
90/10
Rule
California is spending a huge amount
of money to incarcerate people, and recently Aunode da Gubernator signed a bill
to spend $7.4 billion to add 40,000 prison beds and 13,000 county jail beds to
the system. When this expansion is complete, the Golden State will be the only
state in the union to spend more on incarcerating people than it spends on
educating them. That's pretty grim because in shear numbers we are incarcerating
a great number of people who are no danger to society. They are rule breakers,
jay walkers on the avenue of strict enforcement. Somehow we want to have room in
lockups for them, along with the murderers and those violent offenders who will
be back among us soon enough. This prison-building exercise doesn't change any
laws, it just provides more cells.
All of this is wrong in a hundred
ways, but I am always taken by how much worse it could be. This is my Pollyanna
side showing, but as I traverse the cross section of the citizenry it
consistently occurs to me that at least 9 out of 10 people you meet, probably
more, are basically fine. I, personally, have never been attacked by anyone,
rarely been assaulted, infrequently been harassed or intimidated, and only
occasionally been taunted. An astonishing number of people are either not
trained in etiquette or just don't care, but what astonishes me might not faze
another person. I tend to detest rudeness, so if 20 percent of my encounters are
with the impolite I tend to think of it as epidemic. Actually, though, that's
pretty good, isn't it? The majority of people just let you be, and a special few
are even courteous.
The other thing I am taken by is
that this 90/10 thing seems to me to hold true across the racial divides. I find
that young people misbehave at a proportionately higher rate, but sort of expect
that; their brains aren't even fully formed until they are 25, so I deal with
the ignorant young (and that is a minority, in my experience) as "retards." They
might get better, but maybe not. I do not find that Blacks are any more rude
than Latinos, or Chinese any more rude than Pilipinos.
Quite honestly, given the pressures
of life, the injustice in the distribution of its rewards and hardships, and the
natural inclination toward suspicious feelings toward unfamiliar types, it
amazes me that we aren't constantly in a state of civil war. But we aren't. In
fact, even when we were in the American Civil War only a minority of Americans,
many of them conscripts recently off the boat from Europe, were involved in
that.
I have always believed that the
energy we living beings create is an entirely neutral thing, as malleable a
force for good as it is for bad. Maybe how it gets directed is a function of the
dual nature of man, but that makes it all the more amazing to me that it is
generally channeled so positively. Clearly we learn of places like Darfur where
unspeakable violations of humanity are commonplace and see that the balance of
mankind can be undone, and we get these events throughout the world throughout
human history. We have sectarian violence in Iraq right now, given reign
by an impenetrable will to impose order on an imposed chaos. People in power can
make decisions that make you wonder about humankind, but look around. The vast
majority of us are just fine.
So why do I feel like such a
misanthrope? - RAR
(May 2007)
|
Guitars
On Stands
|
I
recall many years ago being in the home of a really well known guitarist, there
to interview him for a publication I was with at the time. We sat in his living
room, me on a sofa, arranged like a stick along the wall, and he on a
high-backed chair positioned more or less at the head of the living space. The
whole throne-room setup was made more pronounced by the two electric guitars he
had on stands, one positioned on either side of his chair, angled respectfully,
forward and in. One was a gorgeous Les Paul, the other an archtop, and both were
polished to a fine sheen. I love guitars almost more than any other object I can
think of, and I found his Gibsons distracting. I was envious of him owning such
marvelous instruments. But I recall, at the same time, that I felt sort of
uncomfortable for my host. He had created a little tableau that represented the
way he thought about himself. And I recall that it made me feel a little sad. As
much as I wanted his stuff, it somehow seemed as weight to him. |
This
odd memory flooded back to me yesterday because of something my wife said. She
has a budding business in interior re-design, real estate staging, and color
consultation, all of which has been taking her into the homes of a lot of
strangers of late. She has noticed a pattern. Her clients, primarily wives of
middle-aged and older men, never mention anything about it, and certainly don't
imagine incorporating it in any meaningful way into their design concepts, but
their husbands all play guitars. Or, at least, they did. They don't really have
any time to play anymore, and lack of involvement has developed into lack of
interest. And yet they have all these artifacts of their youth: Gibson SGs and
Mosrites, Flying Vs, knock-off Epiphones and Ibanez, Teles and Strats and tube
amps, Fender and Vox and Marshall; Martin Dreadnoughts and 12-strings and
Ovations, Guilds and Yamahas; the Resonator they had to have; if they're well to
do, The Beatles' suite from Gretsch, Rickenbacker and Hofner; Taylors;
Silvertones; Takamine; the occasional PRS. They have mixing boards and
microphones and stomp boxes and music stands; compressors and reverb units and
old analog delays; 4-track recorders and tuners. |
The
wives are embarrassed by it, but the husbands won't let it go. Some people have
built large cabinets to hold and hide it all, this crafted detritus - spruce,
maple, mahogagy and rosewood that absorbs string vibrations and oil from hands
and grows richer with age, provided it is touched, though most is not, not
anymore. Mostly they, the guitars, stand like silent tombstones, haunting the
corners to which they've been shunted, signifying the past and maybe holding out
some hope of some golden future, when it will all come back: the way it used to
feel to set motion to those cables, the way their sound landed on the ear with a
clarity that lives in rarely accessed memory, sometimes to be bestirred by a
song on the radio, or a blasphemous commercial soundtrack on TV (Nike and
"Revolution"). |
We
all ran off and bought our axes and formed our bands then in different measures
melded into adult lives; fighting for a time to hold on to our romance and
infatuation with beauty as we knew it. There were girls who saw light in our
fascination and admired our pilgrim souls, until united we redefined
"us" in a way that didn't include who "we" had been, until
finally that part of us was dead. And there are our markers, 22 frets in 24
3/4" scale, 1 5/16" at the nut. |
My
wife had thought it was just her, but it's a whole generation of wives slightly
embarrassed by a whole generation of husbands; all the same, all slightly
diminished now by the mockery of time and an aesthetic association that hadn't
the staying power of its vessel, the guitar.
- RAR (4-21-07)
|
|
Serious
Doubts in the Ranks of the Color Guard
A
year ago my family bought a home in a community new to us, a little upscale from
where we had lived, and a little "outside," in some ways, our previous
life experience. We've lived in upscale communities before - Pacific Heights in
Frisco, San Anselmo in Marin - but now we are in Benicia, California, a historic town of 28,000 population spread along the Carquinez Strait off San
Pablo Bay. We are up in the north end of San Francisco Bay less than an hour's
drive from "the City," as area residents call San Francisco.
One
could hardly imagine a sweeter berg than little Benicia, a community that does
the rare trick of being quaint and pricey while also being undisputedly
characterized by the creativity of its citizens. (My own experience is that
"artists" usually live among the poor, though I am revealed by my
range.)
What
makes our experience in Benicia different from previous is that we have kids
now, and kids "of a certain age." Parents know that kids don't just
change your life (co-opting or blessing it, depending upon your point of view),
they keep putting it through a blender roughly synched to their maturation as
human beings. Our current family dynamic is hugely influenced by the needs,
wants and desires of our 12-year old daughter. Even she would admit that these
days these are rarely reasonable and logical, her cover being that she is in the
grip of being "an 11-year old girl!" She's 12 now, but apparently, in
her mind, the 11-year argument is stronger, which must say something about where
her "head" is at. We're all going through changes together.
She
is a "good" kid, high-achiever in school, trained and talented dancer,
wonderful writer, Internet ace, and...I could go on all day. She is highly
sociable and extremely energetic.
She
has transferred seamlessly into the fabric of her new community and numbers her
friends - I mean the classmates with whom she routinely exchanges communications
- in the thirties, which is amazing to me. Playing a pivotal role in this
successful melding has been her participation in the Benicia Middle School
Color Guard. Say it loud, say it proud, Benicia Middle School Color Guard is
"legend" in the halls of the guard, which are many and varied. You get
Color Guard programs in the military, of course, but also in high schools,
colleges, and in independent associations, and sometimes in middle schools,
though more rarely in the latter. Benicia Middle School Color Guard is notable
because the unit has a history of competing impressively against high school
guards, most notably at the annual Winter Guard International (WGI) Regional
Competition in Las Vegas, Nevada.
For
those of you who don't know Color Guard beyond a reference to a half-dozen
military types in their dress uniforms parading about in a ceremonial
way...well, you're like me, or at least the me that used to be before a
deeper understanding changed me. Color Guard, as practiced by the Benicia Middle
School, is a marching, flag waving accompaniment to the middle school band,
though the involvement is almost incidental, a wave of the cap to a
school-sponsored program that the guard otherwise has nothing to do with. There
is no football team at Benicia Middle School, and having no stadium halftime
programs at which to perform practically obviates the need for a marching band,
which further obviates the need for accompanying flag wavers. Never mind, the
main thing about Color Guard is that, after the band baloney is dispensed with,
it morphs into "Winter Guard." Sounds like something from Narnia,
doesn't it?
Some
- "namely" whomever wrote the most helpful
Wikipedia
definition of Winter Guard - view it as "both an athletic
competition and an art." My daughter participates on a team of 26 dancers
and saber, rifle and flag spinners, who perform in gymnasiums, doing
choreographed routines atop a painted tarp. Judges sit and review their
performances based on their choreographed movements and object spinning. They
perform to the rhythms of a pop soundtrack, often culled from the current top
sellers but also from lush neo-classical orchestrations. The choreography hints
at narrative. There is usually a story being told in these movements, though to
me this is where Winter Guard goes weird. There aren't that many stories that
naturally incorporate the tossing of swords, flags and rifles, which renders
these accoutrement as just props, in which case why "swords, flags and
rifles?" Winter Guard is taxed by its own nonsense, its force fit of a
gymnastic dance version of whatever "competitive cheerleading" is. I
wonder if it isn't revealing of the current state of humanity that our young
people don't notice that these group enthusiasms have no point beyond being
judged? We now have color guards flying colors representing no institution
beyond their own, and cheerleading teams that don't cheer at all but rather
dance, kind've.
Winter
Guard, at its "best," is a Will Farrell comedy. It is almost entirely
a female preoccupation along with a scattering of effeminate young men. (This is
not a slur of any kind, just an observation.) Because the male performers number
so few, one tends to notice them among the happy, bouncing nymphets. A
surprising percentage of them are on the heavy side and they don't look that
great in the stretch fabrics the guards typically wear. This, of course,
heightens the "Will Farrell-ness" of it all as these beefy sensitives
act out their yearnings and angst to the thumping rhythms of Alanis Morrisette,
Pink and other Guard favorites.
In
California the King of Guard is a dandy in his mid-20s named David somebody, who
performs with an independent "World Guard," comprised of dancy types
who are out of school and thus disconnected from a natural sponsor; though it
should be noted, that many of these programs are not school sponsored to begin
with. Anyway, David has rock star status and is held as the exemplar of Winter
Guard perfection. "Be more David..." is a common instruction to my
daughter's Winter Guard team, and they all know what that means. David is over
the top at emoting. His routines often begin with he and a girl in lip-lock -
which puts the audience all a-titter, because everyone recognizes that David is
gay - before becoming a showcase for his prancing, growling leg extension and
balancing feats, and his lip-synching, played large and directly to the
audience. David becomes surrounded by his young admirers following his
performance and befriends all of them on MySpace. There is a rumor that he will
retire after this season, but everyone hopes it isn't true. David is Winter
Guard in California, a superstar of the "sport." Most of Winter Guard
season is over now, but David and his team will still be competing in the World
Guard Championships in Los Angeles this month.
So
where's the discontent, you might ask?
Discontent
#1 is the cost. My wife is convinced that Winter Guard in Benicia, however
well it has worked out for our daughter's matriculation into the new community,
is really an elitist organization, a past-time for "the haves" and a
tool for separating them from the "have nots." It cost us $1,000 just
to get our daughter started in the program - money we had to borrow from my
mother-in-law, to our great shame. We naively said yes to our daughter's request
to join and then were shocked when the initial invoice came in.
Discontent
#2 is the venue. Fully half of the $1,000 initial fee is to cover the cost
of a trip to perform in Las Vegas at the WGI Regional Competition. The kids got
to see a Cirque de Soleil show while they were there, which is nice, but in my
home we were asking "Why are they even there?" Benicia is the only
middle school that sends a team to this competition, where they compete against
high school kids. This has made their legend - their chutzpah at throwing
themselves up against more "seasoned" performers - but they don't
really compete to win. This year they finished 14th out of 40, pretty good given
their ages, but not inspirational. So why are they in Las Vegas, a city that
doesn't really represent the aspirations the wife and I would hope to encourage.
Discontent
#3 is the military connection. My wife, a teacher, believes rightly or
wrongly that Color Guard, with its rifles and swords, wormed its way into the
fabric of the school system through on-campus Reserve Officer Training Corps
(ROTC) programs. I don't know if its true, but it makes sense. It is the only
way I can imagine how swords and rifles became part of a "school
program," though again Color Guard is not a school-sponsored offering, but
instead a private enterprise. I doubt anyone actually thinks of the rifles and
swords as in some way encouraging militarism, and certainly they appear less
insidious when reduced to juggling tools, but still...what have they to do with
dance programs offered through the school? Or with anything, for that matter?
Why superficialize weaponry?
Discontent
#4 is that Winter Guard is a hard pursuit for a parent to support through
attendance at events. The performance only lasts the length of an extended pop
song, about four to five minutes, but the event goes on all day and well into
the night. The dedicated Color Guard parents, and there are a number of them,
spend as much as 10 hours at these events, not including the travel time, which
often adds another two or more hours to the day. They stay for the all-important
award ceremonies, which often take place later in the night, often past 9 p.m.
Only the most committed (or only those who maybe should be committed) will give
up an entire day to support their kids' 4-minute performance. And here's the
kicker: in the meat of the Winter Guard season, there are sometimes a couple
shows over a weekend! Bless their hearts, these dedicated parents and
grandparents put their lives on hold, or cancel them altogether, to support this
weird semi-dance, neo-militaristic mish-mosh of fabricated "art form."
Discontent
#5 is the home-wrecking effect of involvement in the Guard. Our daughter has
guard practice after school on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday until 5:30 p.m. -
about 8 hours of routine weekly practice, plus frequent all-day sessions on
Saturdays (prior to the start of weekend competitions) and sometimes on Sundays,
too. Some weeks she will dedicate 24 hours to Guard rehearsals, and then the
season starts. On several Saturdays and Sundays during the season, we are up at
4:30 a.m. to get her ready and to school by 6 a.m. It's not necessarily that
they are leaving for the competition that early. Often they will do a two-hour
rehearsal at Benicia Middle before going on to the show, where they will do
another two-hour rehearsal prior to performing. I have returned to school to
pick her up after midnight on several occasions, making for a long day for
everybody involved. As the season wears on, my girl becomes physically, mentally
and emotionally exhausted. She falls behind on homework and on her home chores,
and she becomes irritable and sharp. Worse, conflicts arise at home over me and
my wife's perceived lack of support for her efforts; a conflict that is
aggravated by the more committed parents of other Color Guard participants who
seem constantly to challenge our daughter on why her parents aren't attending
all of the events.
The
Winter Guard season is mercifully over now. Color Guard is back in session, with
the dancers back to marching alongside the band. There shouldn't be many more
out-of-town trips. My daughter is thrilled because she's been advanced to a new
position. She won't just carry a flag as she did in the fall Color Guard. This
spring she'll get the privilege of spinning it.
- RAR
(04-01-07)
Give
Willie His Pot Back!
The
photo on the left (lifted from the Rolling Stone site) is of the
pound-and-a-half of pot Louisiana law enforcement officers confiscated from
Willie
Nelson and members of his band.
I'd be curious to know who was keeping their
stash in the little heart-shaped box. But more than that, I'd be curious to know
when we are going to come to our senses in this country and stop preventing
people from partaking in the one substance that never does anyone anything other
than good.
I mean for Christ sakes! Here's someone, probably
a long-time "abuser" of fine herb, who is using a little heart-shaped
box for their weed! And given that this is Willie's band, and the perp is
probably a hundred years old, any potential this practice has to become a
"gateway" to a life of harder drugs was surely opened, crossed,
closed, re-opened, crossed and closed over and over again a long time ago, and
still this person is around to keep their pot in a little
heart-shaped
box!
And besides, if this heart-shaped box isn't
evidence enough of a gentle spirit, this is Willie Nelson's shit! Willie Nelson
has contributed more to the well-being of our society during my 54 years on the
planet than virtually any other human being I can think of. He was in his
bio-diesel powered bus, demonstrating for the environment, when this bust took
place. Willie's a pot head and he's a saint! What kind of character reference
must this naturally occurring substance - well okay, Willie looks like he's
smoking some greenhouse stuff - have before the knuckle draggers that make
and enforce laws this stupid finally see pot for what it is: a gift from Earth
to its unfortunate inhabitants; something to make the unwell feel well, to help
a man cope with his heavy load. Something to put a grin on our faces so we can
see how wonderful it is to be alive, because people forget, especially when they
are persecuted for something like what was going on here with the
heart-shaped
box.
- RAR
The
Secret Life of Hyperlinks
In the infancy of the Internet,
links were
the only pram available. If you wanted to go to a site on the web you pretty
much had to find the hyperlink(s) that would take you there, which was a clumsy
process. That's why guidepost sites that weren't anything but links were
popping up all over the place. Search engines weren't developed yet that could
handle a query and return a number of pathways and possibilities. Navigating the
Internet was pretty dumb in those days, reliant on lightweight bridges - links -
to span the virtual voids between sites.
The modern Internet search engines - Google,
Yahoo, etc. - that are now the main source of web traffic are still using that
same network of links, not only to navigate to sites but to understand why
people want to go to the places they go.
The competition for users (market share) among
the search engine people is waged on the playing field of artificial
intelligence. That's what they are selling - how well they understand you as
represented by the rank order of results they deliver.
How do they
understand you? They - the
ranking algorithms - "perceive links as a proxy for a human judgement, or a
user's positive endorsement of a page. The idea is as follows: a user discovers
a page, likes its content, links to the page, and the page gets higher ranking.
This is the so-called 'natural way' of acquiring links."1
- RAR
1 Entire Web Newsletter, October 26, 2006
What's
So Great About History?
When
I look back at the Viet Nam War my first thought is How could we have been so
stupid? But then my second thought explains that it was an extension of the
not unjustified fear of the spread of the "red menace."* Then my third
thought goes to this morning's Meet the Press, where familiar pundits were
debating the struggle within the Democratic party over whether to take the
"longer view" toward the Iraq situation, or just stay stuck on a focus
on Republican mistakes made in the past regarding the war's conduct.
And
yada-yada-yada.
Half
of the 58,000 Americans who died in the Viet Nam War were killed after Walter
Cronkite's 1968 statement "There is no way this war can be justified any
longer." It was 1973 before we got "peace with honor." Three
hundred U.S. soldiers were dying each week while politicians argued over how to
save America's prestige in the world community. To Senators and Congressmen,
America's prestige is always at stake.
You
wonder whom this international community is who is teetering on the edge between
opposition and support for U.S. Iraq policy. It seems to me that virtually no
government other than Tony Blair's -- or maybe it was just Tony by himself --
ever thought the Iraq invasion was anything but daft. American prestige was lost
years ago, but certainly the Iraq War cemented world governments' views on
America's honor.
Given
the Viet Nam experience, which has had a lasting sobering effect on America, at
least outside of the circle of chicken hawks in the Bush administration, you
wonder how we can continue to justify this mistake.
The
American people are telling the world that we know that Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld,
et al are idiots. I don't think the international community is vague on that.
America's prestige is intact as long as we find a way to get rid of these
entrenched, deluded bums.
The
debate regarding Iraq is now all about when we pull back (not really out,
because we will always have an emergency response force in the Persian Gulf
region). The Right somehow believes that America's prestige will be lost if we
pull out too early, before the international community sees that they were
correct all along and before Iraq has a stable, supported, well-run modern
western-style government. They believe that if we do what Democrats like Kerry
and Feingold want to do in issuing a "date certain" for American
withdrawal "they will just wait us out."
"Wait
us out? Of course they are going to wait us out! We are in their country! They
are home! And we aren't!"
Wait
us out? Of course they are going to wait us out! We are in their country! They
are home! And we aren't! They are going to wait us out whether we say in advance
when we will withdraw or just stay there in perpetuity being targets for IED
development.
Remember,
Americans and, yes, some terrorists are dying every week that we continue to
pretend that we are protecting America's honor. Mostly, though, it is Iraqis.
Civilians. Iraq's morgues issued a statement this week that at least 50,000
Iraqis have been in morgues since the War began, but the number is really far
higher because in a war not every victim gets processed through the system. Some
are disposed of where they fall. America won't begin to regain credibility in
the world until we stop being a part of this carnage.
All
of these same idiotic debates about the value of the war and the danger of a
pullout took place back in the '60s and '70s, and all of these knuckleheads who
are going around in circles on Iraq were around for Viet Nam.
Don't
we ever learn? Is history anything more than interesting?
- RAR
(6/25/06)
*Our
dialogue has gotten a lot tougher, hasn't it? Now we fight "Terror"
and "Evil" and other less nuanced foes. By contrast, "The Red
Menace" sounds
like someone in pajamas.
|
The
Soul of the Simpler Machine
I have always loved
to write. One of my earlier memories of this fascination involved my being an
awful playmate to my backdoor neighbor Mike Miller, whose father had a basement
office in their home where I used to go to steal time on his old manual Royal
typewriter. While Mike and the other neighborhood kids were playing in age
appropriate ways, I would be hurriedly typing out stories, trying to finish
before I would finally be asked to vacate the premises. So began my love affair
with the typewriter, which eventually led to my being one of only two boys in my
typing class in high school, the other being a fey young man who blended more
easily than I into the surrounding tapestry of skirts and blouses. I took some
heat from my peers on that, but it never bothered me in the least. I was in
command of those keys.
My first newspaper
jobs were as a reporter working away on old manual typewriters, handing my copy
off to typesetters who prepared galleys for mechanical paste-up. I long ago
moved on, with the rest of the world, into the computer age, in which I have
thrived, but I have never really loved modern word processing the way I did the
manual typewriter. The old ways were limited, compared to what we do now, when
everyone is a typesetter and a page layout designer, but I have never felt much
soul in a computer keyboard the way I could feel it in those old carriage throw
manuals. They had something else the modern equipment doesn’t have: enforced
discipline. Ask anybody who came up in the years I did. The typewriter forced
you to be a better writer. You didn’t have to use too much white-out or
correction tape, or go through many sheets of carbon paper, before you caught on
to the merits of getting it down on paper right the first time, especially if
there were deadline pressures. I would argue that computers have made us less
efficient as writers, if only because computers have democratized the process.
Any marginally literate person can construct a sentence nowadays, given spell
and grammar check and time enough to test out a variety of alternate approaches.
Does anyone really consider the quality of writing in commercial publications
and corporate documentation today and conclude that computers have made us
better? Or faster?
- RAR
(6/1/06)
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A
Simpler Machine - 1978 As you can see, I was already very serious about myself.
My wife just looked at these pictures and said: "If you would have looked like that when I met you, I would've thrown
you a quarter and kept on walking."
I probably could've used the money. |
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YOU ARE ON THE Essay
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©Rick Alan Rice (RAR),
December, 2010 |
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