globalnook

Yes, Virginia, there is a war on Terror

Despite what the pointyheads tell you, Virginia, we live in an age in which religious lunatics want to destroy us simply because we are Americans. They hate us because we live free, say what the hell we want to, drive nice cars, live in comfortable homes, own microwaves, computers, plasma tvs, ipods, Xboxes, and cell phones and are filled with hope, humanity and a sense of self-fullfillment. These people want us under their thumbs so they can indoctrinate us with their beliefs; they want us poor because these are the people they have found to be the easiest to prey upon; they want us to be silent because they have found that such people are easiest to control; they want us to give every fiber of our being to their God to the same extent they do. If we don't and won't, their intend to kill us. These lunatics call this type of war Jihad. It is the greatest, ultimate act of their faith. To die in the course of killing non-believers is their greatest act of faith. Jihad does not question the means of achieving victory, it only sees the ends. If the lives of innocent women and children are taken in the course of Jihad, then so be it. After all, since it's all done to please and promote Allah, it's okay. While most of the human race wants to join together into a peaceful, prosperous, homogenized global village, these people fear such assimilation. They feel they must preserve the old traditional ways of the 14th century. Their clerics teach that goodness and righteousness and eternal life can only come from unswerving devotion to their God. They teach that being free, living comfortably and being happy and alive is a mortal sin. In their desolate, isolated, miserable lives, they only have time to worship their God and kill those who don't believe the same way they do. They love death, despair and austerity. We love life, happiness and self-fulfillment.  As a result, we must protect our borders, our ports, our national monuments, our transportation systems and the very lives of all Americans. The lunatics are forever seeking chinks in our armor. We must screen calls from foreign nations; we must be ever vigilant at our airports; we must beef up security at foreign installations and, unfortunately, we must have troops on the ground in both Afghanistan and Iraq. Whether the reason to invade Iraq was right or wrong, we are much stronger in this war by having troops in Afghanistan AND Iraq. Of course, the pointyheads have made much political hay out of the reasons for the invasion. It is far easier to say the reasons for invasion were wrong than it is to admit that we are much stronger by having troops in both Afghanistan AND Iraq. This position intimates that our president is a liar and is therefore untrustworthy as a leader. The pointyheads are putting their political agenda ahead of the nation's security and the lives of American citizens. So the next time you hear someone criticize our president about the way he has taken the war to these lunatics, tell them that our nation's leader was only trying to do his job and prevent another 911. Tell them that you refuse to believe that, if America leaves these lunatics alone, they will leave us alone. Tell them we can't put our heads in the sand and hope they will simply disappear if we pull out of Afghanistan and Iraq. Finally, Virginia, and most importantly, tell them you love your life as an American and you feel it is worth protecting, defending and preserving and you are going to support your president in his efforts to keep us and our Democratic way life safe and sound. Tell them you're trying to be REAL.

Poor Charles Babbage!

Talk about people who were born ahead of their time. Consider the sad case of Charles Babbage whom some have called "The father of computing". Born in London in 1791, Babbage was a mathematician and inventor who taught math at Cambridge from 1828-39. He spent most of his life attempting to build two calculating machines. One was a contraption he called a ‘difference engine’ which was intended for the calculation of logarithm tables and similar functions by repeated additions using trains of gear wheels. An unfinished portion of the machine can be seen today at the Science Museum in London. Babbage’s second gadget was an “analytical engine” which was designed to perform many different computations, using punched cards. In essence, Babbage had conceived the idea of the modern electronic computer, but the hardware necessary to implement his idea was more than 100 years away. Babbage was a man with a dream which would never be realized in his lifetime simply because his thinking was too far ahead of the hardware of the day. In Babbage’s day, there were NO electronic media. It would be more than 100 years (1844) before the most rudimentary of electronic media (the telegraph) would be invented. It would be another 85 years before the transistor--the forerunner of the integrated circuit and the basis of all digital technology-would make its entrance. The only hardware Babbage had to implement his great vision was steam-driven wheels, gears, sprockets, axles and such. If Babbage had been born 150 years later, he might have been another Bill Gates, a Steve Wozniak or a Stephen Jobs. But alas, fate can be very fickle. Despite the bad karma history handed him, Babbage was a colorful character in his own eccentric way. It has been said that Babbage, commenting on Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem “The Vision of Sin”,  and referencing the couplet:

   Every minute dies a man,
   Every minute one is born

wrote the great poet and noted:
“I need hardly point out to you that this calculation would tend to keep the sum total of the world's population in a state of perpetual equipoise (at a standstill), whereas it is a well-known fact that the said sum total is constantly on the increase. I would therefore take the liberty of suggesting that in the next edition of your excellent poem the erroneous calculation to which I refer should be corrected as follows:

Every minute dies a man,
And one and a sixteenth is born

I may add that the exact figures are 1.167, but something must, of course, be conceded to the laws of metre.” (Source)
Now there is a true mathematician for you! In essence, Babbage was saying to Lord Alfred: “To hell with poetic license! Get your calculations correct, then write your poetry!” In the late seventies, NASA scientists named a crater on the moon Lake Babbage in his honor. Perhaps history felt that was a small consolation for a man whose dream of a machine which would change humankind forever would never be realized during his lifetime. History can be incredibly cruel. Poor Charles Babbage!

Every Medium Creates a "Reality"

Every medium creates it's own "reality". A different combination of senses are required for every medium and consequently a new "reality" is created. If you're reading a book, you are staring at the printed page and the sequence of words are triggering images and scenes which play out across the stage of your imagination to tell the story. This is the "reality" of reading. If you're watching a movie, you're in a darkened theater staring at a silver screen where a sequence of still images are being superimposed to create a "moving" image coordinated with matching sounds. This is the "reality" of movies. It is interesting to compare the "reality" of movies with the "reality" of the stage. With the stage, the movements and sounds are created in "real" time whereas, in movies, both the movements and sounds are created separately and artifically and then combined. Both movies and the stage are combined visual/auditory "realities". When interfacing with television, you are staring at a pixel-filled screen and controlling the output on the screen with a remote. As with film, the sequence of "moving" images is coordinated with matching sounds. But again, television has its own "reality"; you are viewing the screen in your home and the concommitant activities in the home (sounds of kids, dogs, wives etc.) are competing with the sounds/images from the television for your attention. Hence, television has its own "reality". Clothing as a medium (extensions of the skin) has it's own "reality". When you put on fresh clothes, you feel different and see the world differently. When in your "Sunday best", you feel different than when you are in your grungy jeans and tee shirt. Each set of clothes creates its own "reality" because each engages the tactile sense in a different way. When you're driving your car, you have still another "reality", but this medium requires more senses that television, movies, the stage etc. Your hands (tactile) are on the wheel, your eyes (visual) are staring at the road ahead, your ears (auditory) are listening for sounds from adjacent traffic; your nose (olfactory) is attentive for input from the car (burning rubber, engine smells) and other signs of possible danger from surrounding traffic. It is safe to say that, since more senses are involved, driving a car is a more intense "reality" than most of the others. The computer interface represents still another "reality". In this interface, rather than staring through a windshield and gripping a steering wheel, you are staring at a monitor screen and manipulating the images and data within that screen with a mouse and keyboard. It is interesting to examine how, when media are combined, new "realities" are created. Consider the amalgamation of silent film with a sound track (radio, so to speak) to produce "talkies". The silent film had its own "reality". It engaged the visual sense (primarily) and the auditory sense within certain limits. The radio "reality", however,  was primarily auditory in nature. As with books and magazines, you followed the story in your imagination. With books, the input into the imagination was primarily visual. With radio, the input into the imagination was primarily auditory. Thus, when "talkies" came along in 1929, an incredible new "reality" was created since it engaged the visual and auditory senses at a totally new level. The list of media and the special "realities" each creates goes on and on, but overall, it's safe to say that the basis for each of those "realities" is relative to the senses the medium engages.

Trapping Rabbits

(The following short story is a selection from my recently published book: "Alabama Stories".)

            During his boyhood years, William Vernon Johnson always spent his summers with his father and the black hired hands working the flatland fields of North Alabama growing cotton, corn and alfalfa hay. By mid-April of each year, when the land had lain fallow after the spring plowing, Billy’s father and the hired hands would lay off the rows and plant the cotton and corn seeds that would soon cover the brown fields with a rich carpet of green for as far as the eye could see. By late June, when school was out, the young corn and cotton plants would be almost knee-high and Billy, his father and the black hired hands would then “cultivate” the plants by turning fresh earth over the weeds around the plants which, if left alone, would smother out the young corn plants. On one particular day in late June of 1951, ten-year-old Billy, his father and the two black hired hands were cultivating the corn plants when something happened that he would never forget.
           Billy’s father always referred to the 15-acre field near the river as the “big cornfield” because, while he had two other fields, the 15-acre field contained most of his corn crop. On the days they would work the “big cornfield,” the black hired hands would take the mules and the plows to the field while Billy and his father would take their lunches and the pickup truck and meet them at the haybarn near the river.
           On that particular day, the quartet had started working just after sunrise and, by 9 a.m., had “cultivated” almost five acres of lush, green corn plants. When work started, the sun had presented itself high and hot in the eastern heavens and, from all indications, it promised to be a hot, sweltering summer day. By late morning, however, the temperatures had cooled quickly and huge, black thunderheads began forming in the northern skies.
          “We’re going to get some rain,” Robert Johnson told his son as he stopped at the end of the field to get a drink of water. “Might as well take your plow to the haybarn,” he added, “and go tell Rufus and Calvin to stop until we see what the weather’s gonna do. I’m gonna make another round.”
          Obediently, ten-year-old Billy turned his mule and plow away from the field and guided it along a hedgerow to the haybarn. There he unhitched the mule and tied the animal to a sheltered feed trough. Some 50 yards away, Billy could see Rufus, the older of the two black hired hands, guiding his mule and plow to the end of the row.
          “Rufus!” Billy called.
          The black man turned at the sound of his name.
          “Daddy said to stop plowing ’cause it’s gonna rain.”
          The black man looked up at the sky. Then, wiping the sweat from his brown forehead, he nodded.
          “We’ll be at the shed at the big oak tree,” the black man replied.
          By the time Billy had returned from the barn to the feed trough with hay, the sky overhead was blanketed with black, rain-laden thunderclouds and huge drops were beginning to fall. As Billy looked up, he knew that rain would be coming down in bucketfuls any minute. With no time to waste, Billy threw the half-bundle of hay into the feed trough, then dashed back to the haybarn.
         Finally, standing under the eave of the haybarn, Billy watched as his father hurriedly guided his mule from the field to the feed trough. By the time his father had tied his mule at the feed trough and started for the haybarn, rain was beating down.
         “Damn!” his father said, taking his hat off and slinging the water off the brim. “What a rain!”
          Some ten minutes later, Billy and his father were sitting in the doorway of the haybarn eating their lunches and watching the rain fall. In his lunch bag, Billy had his favorite food, a tomato and mayonnaise sandwich with lots of black pepper and lettuce. From the other lunch bag, his father pulled out a bulging cold chicken sandwich and wasted no time taking a bite.
          As they ate, the father and son watched as the wild rabbits, who lived in the bushes and thick undergrowth along the river banks, scampered to and fro among the low weeds. By day, the rabbits would hide in the thick undergrowth along the river’s edge. By night, they would come to the barn and feed off the oats that fell through the cracks in the barn floor and walls. Usually, if someone was at the haybarn, the rabbits would scamper off and hide in the undergrowth. Then, when the barn was unattended again, they would return to eat their fill of grain. On that particular day, for some reason, several extraordinarily bold rabbits had ventured to the edge of the undergrowth and were feeding on the sweet green grasses that had sprung up along the river’s edge.
         After his father had finished lunch, he reached into his lunch sack again and pulled out his favorite snack, a large red apple. Examining the apple, the father polished it on the sleeve of his blue workshirt.
         “An apple a day keeps the doctor away,” he said. Then he bit a huge chunk out of the apple and began chewing. After a few moments of silence, the father turned to his son.      
          “Remember the old apple crate we put tools in last spring?” the father asked.
          “Yeah,” Billy replied.
          “Go get it.”
          The son hesitated.
          “What are you going to do?”
          “I want to show you something,” the father replied. “Go get the apple crate.”
          Billy quickly gobbled down the rest of his tomato sandwich, got up from the doorway and went inside the haybarn. There he found the old apple crate with the tools inside. Quickly, he set the tools aside on the barn floor and picked up the empty apple crate. Back at the barn door, he watched as his father began whittling three small sticks of wood. Within minutes, the father had expertly cut several well-placed notches in the sticks and together they formed a triangle. With that, Billy’s father ordered him to get the empty apple crate and follow him to the edge of the river.
          “What are you going to do, daddy?” the son asked.
          “We gonna trap a rabbit,” the father answered.
          At the river’s edge, the father stopped and Billy watched as his father fitted the sticks together and used them to hold up one end of the upturned apple crate. As Billy watched, he could see that the carved sticks, when fitted together, formed a collapsible support for the upturned end of the apple crate. Next, his father sliced off a piece of the apple he had been eating and placed it on the pointed end of a stick which served as a triggering device. If a rabbit so much as touched the apple, the support apparatus would collapse and the apple crate would fall, trapping the rabbit under it.
          “Now, let’s go back to the barn,” the father said.
          As they walked, ten-year-old Billy could see that, high overhead, the sky had cleared and the sun had reappeared. Billy knew his father would want to return to the fields soon.
          “It’s cleared off, daddy,” the son noted.
          His father looked up at the sky.
          “Yeah,” the father replied absently. “We’ll go back in a little while.”
          Billy looked curiously at his father, not quite understanding. He had never seen his father not want to plow before. Despite this, the son obediently followed his father back to the haybarn and took a seat beside him in the doorway to watch their trap.
          The first rabbit, longs ears upright and nose wiggling curiously, scampered up to the apple crate and sniffed briefly inside. Apparently suspecting some sort of trouble however, the animal didn’t venture any farther. Moments later, another rabbit which had also smelled the sweet apple fruit, ventured up to investigate. Suspecting nothing, the second rabbit wasted no time in scooting under the upturned apple crate and nibbling at the apple. Immediately, the flimsy scaffolding collapsed and the apple crate fell over the helpless rabbit.
          “We got one!” Billy yelled gleefully as he ran to the captured prize. Through the cracks in the apple crate, Billy could see the trapped rabbit, a furry ball of fear and panic, lunging helplessly against the sides of the apple crate. With that, Billy’s father, with a burlap feed sack in hand, went to the apple crate. Carefully, the father slid the feed sack over the apple crate and the frantic rabbit lunged into the sack. With that, the father gathered the top of the sack and held it upright with the helpless rabbit inside.
          “Now,” Billy’s father said triumphantly, “we got a trapped rabbit in a feed sack.”
          As his father held the bag, Billy could see the frightened rabbit jostling around frantically inside. Suddenly, their attention was diverted by a call from across the field.
          “Mr. Johnson!”
          Rufus, the older black hired hand, was calling.
          The father, still holding the feed sack with the flouncing rabbit, turned.
          “It’s stopped rainin’,” the black man said. “We goin’ back to the field.”
          Billy’s father looked up at the sky.
          “Yall go on,” Billy’s father said. “I’ll be on in a while.”
          Billy couldn’t believe what he was seeing and hearing. His father had never let a hired hand plow unless he was in the fields with him.
          “Now there are several ways to kill a rabbit,” Billy’s father continued, holding the bag for his son to see. “The best way is to break its neck.”
          With that, the father gathered up the space in the feed sack and trapped the rabbit in one corner. Then, grasping the rabbit inside the sack, the father placed one hand around the animal’s body and the other around its head.
          “If you can get him like this,” the father said, demonstrating, “it’s pretty easy to break his neck.”
          Billy was watching.
          “Now if it’s a big rabbit,” the father continued, “and he’s strong, you may not be able to grab him through the sack to break its neck.”
          Billy glanced back toward the field. He could see Rufus and Calvin following their plows along the rows of corn.
          “If that’s the case, then you tie up the top of the bag and sling the rabbit against a tree,” the father said. “Like this.”
          Billy then watched as his father showed him how to gather the sack at the top so it could be slung against a hard surface.
          “It’s pretty easy to kill a rabbit this way,” the father continued, “but, when you do, you break some bones and it’s harder to clean.”
          Billy--still not understanding the reason behind this demonstration--was listening.
          “If nothing else,” the father continued, “You can always tie up the top of the sack and beat the rabbit to death with a stick. If you have to do that, always try to hit it in the head so you won’t break the bones.”
          The father, still stood holding the bag, was looking down at his son. Inside the burlap bag, the rabbit was still flouncing frantically.
          “You got all that?” the father asked.
          “I think so,” Billy said thoughtfully.
          Billy’s father smiled. With that, he untied the top of the burlap bag and dumped the frightened rabbit out on the ground. In a mad dash for freedom, the rabbit quickly darted across the grass and into the thick undergrowth along the river banks to join his brethren.
          Billy’s father looked up at the sky. The sun was shining brightly and the skies were clear again. The father turned back to his son.
          “Think you could catch a rabbit and kill it?” he asked.
          Billy nodded.
          The father smiled, then he turned away from his son and peered across the cornfield where he could see Rufus and Calvin following their mules along the rows.
          “Let’s go,” the father said. “I want to get this field done today.”
          With that, Billy and his father retrieved their mules from the feed trough and returned to the fields.
          Billy never questioned his father’s impromptu lesson in rabbit trapping. He was well aware that his father had a great love for the outdoors and enjoyed all types of hunting, fishing and trapping. In later years, when Billy thought back on the incident, he dismissed the lesson as nothing more than a devoted outdoorsman teaching his son the art of trapping a wild animal.

 

                                                                                       
          In June of 1975, 34-year-old William Vernon Johnson was working as a sports writer for the Herald in Birmingham. Although he was a well-respected writer, the sports editor had said during a recent staff meeting that he wanted more in-depth features from Billy.
          “Hard-hitting, colorful pieces,” the editor had said. “I want good solid human interest stories with a strong sports angle, particularly baseball and football.”
          “How about an interview with the stepmother of a former major league baseball player?,” Billy asked.
          “Who?” the editor asked.
          “'Pig' Thomas,” Billy replied.
          “Howard ‘Pig’ Thomas? The one that played catcher with the Phillies?”
          “That's him,” Billy said.
          “Good possibilities,” the editor said, “But I want drama, good quotes and lots of color.”
          Many years before, Billy had heard his father talk about Howard “Pig” Thomas Jr., a Birmingham native who had played minor league ball in Birmingham and later played for the  Phillies.  He was nicknamed 'Pig' because once, during a game in Mobile, he had chased a farmer’s pig off the playing field. His father, Howard Thomas Sr., had played in the minors and had had major league aspirations, but had never made it in the big leagues. After drifting around the old Southern League for several years, the father finally gave up his baseball aspirations, got a job at a local car dealership and married Nellie Hardy, Billy’s father’s sister. That meant that Billy’s aunt was 'Pig' Thomas’s stepmother.
          The following morning, Billy called his Aunt Nellie.
          “Billy!” the aunt said when she heard his voice. “My goodness, I haven’t seen you since Robert’s funeral.”
          Billy explained that he was working as a sports writer in Birmingham and wanted to come visit her and do an interview about 'Pig' Thomas.
          “Why, sure…” she said, “I’d love to see you, Billy.”
          Late that afternoon, Billy drove from Birmingham down to his aunt’s house in Bessemer. As always, she hugged him and seemed so happy and surprised to see him. Although he was a grown man now, she still made over him as if he were still a little child. Finally, after the greetings and small talk were finished, the aunt and nephew sat down to do the interview.
          Of course, she remembered 'Pig', she said, and how he had made lots of money as a professional baseball player, but could just never seem to hold on to it.
          “If 'Pig' had money, everybody had money,” his Aunt Nellie said, “and he would just give it away to his friends. He was too good for his own good.”
          With that, she told several stories about Pig’s relationship with his father, how his heart had been broken when the Phillies dropped his contract and how finally, broke and deep in despair, he shot himself to death in a car one night in Tarrant.
          Finally, after the interview, their talk turned to a discussion of his father’s childhood. When Billy was growing up, he remembered that his father had talked very little about his own childhood. Somehow, Billy sensed that his father didn’t want to remember those years because there were hidden pains and bad memories he didn’t care to relive. Despite this, Billy had always wondered about the details of his father’s childhood, so he plied his aunt for answers.
          “When our mother died in 1909, she left behind five children ranging in ages from four to thirteen,” the aunt recalled. “Our father couldn’t work and take care of all us kids too, so he married a woman who had six children of her own. This meant there was a houseful of eleven kids and we had it pretty rough.”
          “How do you mean ‘rough’?” Billy asked.
          There was a pause.
          “Didn’t your father ever tell you about our stepmother?” the aunt asked hesitantly.
          “Not really,” Billy answered.
          “Well, our father would go off to work in the coal fields,” the aunt continued, “and he would be gone two and three weeks at a time. Lots of times, there wouldn’t be enough food in the house to feed eleven kids, so our stepmother would lock us kids out of the house and feed what food there was to her own kids. One time, when things were really hard, she locked us out of the house for  almost a month.”
          “What did you do?”
          “Well, the oldest ones could do some kind of work and take care of themselves, but the three youngest, me and your daddy and aunt Evie, were left at the mercies of the world.”
          “Daddy never talked about that,” Billy said.
          “Your father didn’t talk about it because we had some really hard times,” the aunt continued. “We borrowed quilts and slept under trees and in old houses.”
          “How did you eat?” Billy asked.
          “Your father would trap rabbits,” the old woman said. “He was the best rabbit trapper God ever made. If there was a rabbit anywheres around, your father could catch it and cook it.”
          “You mean all you had to eat was wild rabbits?”
          His aunt Nellie nodded sadly.
          “We young kids would have starved if your daddy hadn’t known how to trap rabbits.”
          With that, a bright light suddenly glowed inside 34-year-old Billy Johnson and his mind trailed off to early June of 1951.

                                                                            ******

Internet as Globalizer

The internet has been called the most democratic medium ever devised. Truer words were never spoken.The internet is a metaphor for globalization. On the web, all participants are equal. There are no big guys and no little guys. The playing field is perfectly level for all particpants. In this environment, there are no considerations as to race, gender, nationality or religion. Everyone is equal and all comers are invited to participate in and contribute to the collective intelligence of the human race. In this environment, participants are made aware of their similaries rather than their differences. Everyone on earth can potentially talk to everyone else without the interference of governments, mainstream media, public relations agencies or other "middlemen" who traditionally stand between individuals who are trying to communicate. The internet is the great equalizer. It represents human homogenization via electronic media at its finest.
It must be noted that other forms of electronic media made thier contributions to bringing people closer together, but not on the same scale as the WWW. Telegraph was the first time human beings used an electronic medium to communicate among themselves. This is the first time that electrical signals were given a syntax which would match the human alphabet. The sequences of dots and dashes in Morse code was a metaphorical forerunner of the basic language of all computers, binary. These dots and dashes were the infant beginnings of the internet we know today.
From those early dots and dashes would emerge a vast plethora of electronic media. The telegraph morphed into the telephone. the telephone into the radio, the radio was combined with silent movies to create talking movies and talking movies morphed into television (poor man's movies).
While all of these analogue devices were evolving, there was a curious little device called the computer which was getting its own comeuppance. In 1926, the first transistor--later to be the the basis of all digital devices--was invented. Over the next forty-five years, that little piece of genius would become the first microprocessor in 1971. During the ensuing years, there would be hardware innovations in motherboards, CPUs, memory, cables, hard drives and peripheral devices. But all of these hardware innovations would be useless without software innovations to make the hardware do its thing, so in 1975, Microsoft was founded and the following year, the Apple I and Apple II microcomputer stepped on the computing stage. By the early 1990s, the pc revolution was in full swing. Words like word processing, browsers, random access memory, email, spreadsheets, Microsoft Windows and other words common to computer jargon were being heard everywhere.
It is interesting to note how computers embody all of the other electronic media. A computer is a calculator, a movie projector, a telephone, a television receiver, a typewriter, a phonograph.. the list goes on and on.
It is only natural that, once humankind had a contraption that could create, manipulate and store electronic symbols like never before, he would try to connect them all together. Thus, we moved from ARPANET in 1972 to TCP/IP (arguably one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century) in 1982. From there, the internet exploded around the planet and resulted in the so-called dot-com bubble and resulting burst in early 2000.
Today, seven years later, the internet has gotten its second wind and it is virtually impossible to conduct your life and business (at least in civilized societies) without it. Nowadays, if you don't AIM, Google, Yahoo, email, download songs/files or subscribe to a blog, you aren't with the program (pun intended).
Those dots and dashes have come a long way since Morse invented the telegraph a mere 163 years ago.
So remember... the next time you AIM your best buddy, buy something online, download your favorite song or send an email to your significant other, you are a member of a very special group. You are fortunate enough to be living in an age where everybody on earth can potentially talk to everybody else. An environment where neither gender, race, nationality or religion hinders the communication. An environment where participants are made aware of their similarities rather than their differences.You are a member of the global village. You're very special.... Use it and enjoy it!

On Smoking...

Every age seems to have its own unique set of symbols to denote power, influence and style. From the early twenties up until around the early sixties, it was smoking cigarettes. If you watch Humphrey Bogart movies, you see that syndrome is full force. A cigarette was an integral part of Bogart’s onscreen persona. Virtually every move he made involved a cigarette. It was as if Bogart was not completely dressed unless he had a cigarette in his hand.  He was a living advertisement for cigarettes. I remember, in the late fifties, seeing Arnold Palmer playing golf and before he hit his shot, he threw his cigarette into the grass. Immediately the tv camera zeroed in on the brand, then a big logo for the cigarette company flashed on the screen. You got the impression that it was fashionable to smoke.  I’ve often wondered why cigarettes were such a power symbol during that particular era. I venture to say that smoking was a personalized, symbolic carryover for the major industries of the day. During that period, the industrial revolution was in full swing in America. The most powerful companies--the symbols of power and influence--were steel mills and automobile manufacturers, chemical plants, power plants and other such smoke-producing entities. Smoke was a symbol of power and influence. If you smoked, you were somehow personalizing that power and influence. Nowadays, financial advisers refer to such companies as the “smokestack” industries. Today, the symbols which denote power, influence and personal style are electronic gadgets.  But in a world where the most powerful companies are software, hardware, web publishing, computer networking, electronics manufacturers and other information-related firms, what else would you expect? Ipods, cell phones, hand-held computers, laptops… these seem to be the cigarettes of the early 21st century.

Memories of Laurie....

Some nights in my loneliness, when the moon is full and the wind is high in the Chinaberry trees, I will remember Laurie, this Jewish woman I knew in the late seventies in Santa Monica. A classic beauty, she had long legs, big boobs, a quick wit and a masters degree in anthropology from Berkeley. Laurie was special in every way. She didn't want roses, she wanted orchids. She didn't want to go to the movies, she wanted to go hear Quentin Crisp lecture on his flaming gay lifestyle.  She wasn’t interested in hamburgers and cokes, Laurie wanted Bombay-style lamb kebob and sweet lassis. Of all her specialness, the thing I remember most was her neck. The sweep of the line from her shoulders to just below her ears was a thing of beauty. That neck would make Nefertiti green with envy. That neck formed a perfect perch for her head and spoke of ancient Greek goddesses and classical architecture and all things glorious and eternal. After about a year, I wandered away from her. I forgot about her and the orchids and the sweet lassis, but I never forgot that neck. What a woman! What a neck!.... . Finally, my memories  will fade into nothingness, the great loneliness will kick in again and I’ll fire up Bob Dylan's “Oh, Where are you tonight?”

Make a monkey out of me!

Check out this link: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/238852_chimp01.html

I never cease to be amazed at people who says that Darwin's theory of  evolution is a load of bunk.  Invariably, these people have strong religious feelings and, if you even mention evolution, they feel that their precious spiritual shelter (their innate belief that they will never have to die) is being threatened. These same people trust science to save their lives through modern medicine and provide the latest gadgetry to make their existence more comfortable and luxurious. But when you tell these people that science also has discovered that human beings are direct descendants of those hairy critters you see at the zoo (especially chimps), they turn a deaf ear. The two concepts are mutually exclusive.  There is an essential division in their thinking process. The right hand is  scared to death of the left hand. It a form of schizophrenia which these people live with with no apparent side effects. I don't understand. I know, in my own life, I couldn't subject myself or my rational processes to such a dichotomy.  All I have to say is: Go ahead!   Make a monkey out of me!!

I never cease to be amazed at people who says that Darwin's theory of  evolution is a load of bunk.  Invariably, these people have strong religious feelings and, if you even mention evolution, they feel that their precious spiritual shelter (their innate belief that they will never have to die) is being threatened. These same people trust science to save their lives through modern medicine and provide the latest gadgetry to make their existence more comfortable and luxurious. But when you tell these people that science also has discovered that human beings are direct descendants of those hairy critters you see at the zoo (especially chimps), they turn a deaf ear. The two concepts are mutually exclusive.  There is an essential division in their thinking process. The right hand is  scared to death of the left hand. It a form of schizophrenia which these people live with with no apparent side effects. I don't understand. I know, in my own life, I couldn't subject myself or my rational processes to such a dichotomy.  All I have to say is: Go ahead!   Make a monkey out of me!!

Favorite Quotes

      "The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men, but that men will begin to think like computers." - Sydney J. Harris

      "I like my new telephone, my computer works just fine, my calculator is perfect, but Lord, I miss my mind!" - Author Unknown

      "I dreamed I was a butterfly. I wasn't sure if I was a man dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I was a man." - Lao Tse

      "He not busy being born is busy dying." - Bob Dylan

      "Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity." - Marshal McLuhan

      "Hell, there are no rules here. We're trying to accomplish something." - Thomas Edison.

      "If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger." - Frank Lloyd Wright

      "I keep the subject of my inquiry before me and wait until the first dawning opens gradually, by little and little, into a full and clear light." - Sir Isaac Newton      

      "Technology... the knack of so arranging the world that we don't have to experience it." - Max Frisch

Way to go, Bill!!

Several days ago, my daughter asked me to rummage through my garage and dig out some old pictures of her college days. With that, I started rummaging through the testimonies of my past. There were old clothes, tools, letters, beach stuff, old furniture, fishing gear and boxes and boxes of books. For old time sakes, I decided I would take a random stroll back through my intellectual journey and opened one of them. There were UNIX manuals, a Thomas Guide to LA County, a dogeared copy of the “The Grapes of Wrath”, an Apple II instruction booklet and several of Shakespeare’s plays. Off-handedly, I picked up “Romeo and Juliet” and thumbed through it aimlessly. My eyes fell on Romeo’s famous line: ”But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” I wonder if the great bard, when he wrote that line, ever dreamed that he was predicting Microsoft Windows?