globalnook

Hardware and software

""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

The nature of media--in fact, all of life itself--could not be fully understood until the advent of the computer.
The computer is an in-your-face, cut-and-dried, loudly proclaimed combination of hardware (equipment) and software (instructions).
Mankind's  tools down through the ages were actually nothing more than a combinaton of hardware and software. If you use a club, a knife, a shovel, a gun, a hammer... any kind of hand tool, the tool is the "hardware" and the user is the software (instructions).
When you drive your car, the car is the hardware and you (instructions) are the software.
The dynamic meshing of hardware and software within a computer is a universal paradigm for all of life.
With computers, as in life itself, if either is lost, the other is useless.
Software can perform cerebral gyrations unimagined by the human mind. Hardware can perform movements unimagined by human hands.
When you draw an arrow in a bow, the bow, arrow and string serve as hardware and the perceptions, thinking processes and musculature of the archer serves as software.
When you read a book, the book is the hardware and your perceptions and thought processes are the software.
When you play music, the machine is the hardware and the CD is the software.
If you ride a bicycle, the bicycle is the hardware and you are the software.
In nature, all designed movements represents some form of hardware (equipment) and software (instructions).
When a worm moves across the earth's surface, the gelatinous substance which makes up its body bulk is hardware. The crude system of natural instincts and involuntary reflexes which makes up the worm's "thought" processes is the software (instructions).
In one very real sense, all living things are a combination of hardware  and software.

Blogging and globalization

Blogging is the perfect forum for the global village.
If necessity is the mother of invention, then blogging arrived right on time.
Now that the global village is here, members needed a medium through which every individual voice could be heard. Blogs were the answer to that need. A blog is an individual-to-village interface. Websites were primarily designed for communciations between groups and individuals. A blog, on the other hand, is like a personal letter open to the world. All human eyes and ears can hear your innermost thoughts, know your innermost desires and examine the deepest nooks and crannies of your psychoterrian. Websites were sort of the newspapers and magazines of the internet. A blog is the personal letter of the internet. A blog gives the individual a voice to the world. Everyone on earth can now spill their hearts to everyone else on earth. The great database of human knowledge can now we built by all the peoples of the world. Everyone--every breathing human on earth--can be a contributor.

The first true beauty of blogging is that its virtually free. All you need is a pc and $10 a month and you have a megaphone to the world. The second true beauty of blogging is that you don't have to beg someone to publish your work like you do in the traditional publishing world. You write what you want and you publish it just the way you want it. There's  nobody going to say you can't say: "Damn!", that you can't use a double negative or that you can't publish a photo of Frankenstein on the front age.  In a blog, you have TOTAL individual freedom.

While mechanical media empowered groups, electronic media empowers the individual.  And let me tell you,  my friend, he is being empowered.... Blogs are the ultimate democratic medium. Within the blogosphere, 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. The only reason some one comes to your blog is because you have (or they hope you have) something interesting to say.  In this environment, participants are made aware of their similaries rather than their differences.  Blogs are the great equalizer. Blogs represent human homogenization via electronic media at its finest.

Me and "Slick"

I've always been fascinated by snakes. Few critters point up the true majesty and glory of natural evolution like a snake. With no arms and no legs, they manage to motivate in a weird, but highly effective manner. Prey is killed via either constriction or poisoning. Their digestive process is a miracle in itself. You must remember that when food is swallowed whole, the digestive process must have intricacies unimagined when compared to critters who eat "civilized" processed foods. Snakes have a crude pattern of emotions. I've seen guilt, contentment, lust, anger and fright in the snakes I have owned. I always felt that snakes got a bum rap in the Bible when the writers cast the serpent as the bad guy in the Adam and Eve saga. As creatures of nature, they represent the pure, perfect genius of natural evolution.

In the late seventies while living in Florida, I owned two snakes, one a small pink Boa female named "Puffy", and a 14-foot male Burmese python I had named "Tyrone" after a running back I had seen in the NFL.  "Puffy", at three-feet long, was pretty boring. Once she got out of her cage and crawled up into the wall and my girlfriend had to call the sheetrock guys to tear out a section of wall to remove her. I only had "Puffy" for about 6 months.  "Tyrone" was a different story.  With "Tyrone", I learned that lots of  people get totally freaked out at the sight of  a 14-foot snake, especially a Burmese python. The Burmese has a dark, slithery, jungle-like essence which engenders an intense promodial fear in most people, especially those who believe in the Holy Bible. When I bought "Tyrone", the guy at the pet shop said he was a good eater and shedder, had regular bowel movements and was very gentle because the last four generations of his ancesty had all been bred and raised in captivity.

So I put "Tyrone" in a 50-gallon aquarium in the garage and he and I got along handsomely. I always fed him once a week. I would feed him a baby chicken as an appetizer, then wait about an hour for digestion to begin then feed him a two-pound rabbit as the main course. His bowel movements were like clockwork. Sometimes, he wouldn't shed cleanly and I would add a couple of tablespoons of baby oil to his bathwater and the remaining scales would slip right off. On Sundays, I would take him out of the cage for exercise in the grassy knoll near the condo when me and my girlfriend lived. Naturally, when I was exercising him, a crowd--especially children--would gather to gawk. One Sunday, a Jewish kid who lived in the same condo complex, asked me if  "Tyrone"  was a Jewish snake. Once when my girlfriend had her upper-crust Palm Beach ladies over for tea and crumpets, "Tyrone" got out of his cage and slithered into the midst of the festivities. Although "Tyrone" meant absolutely no harm, the Palm Beach ladies knocked the sliding glass door off its rollers making their escape to the patio. My girlfriend--who was livid over the incident--said I had to choose between her or "Tyrone".

Three months later, I moved out and headed to California. Naturally, "Tyrone", the cage and reptile-keeping paraphernalia went with me in the U-haul truck. For the trip, I had installed "Tyrone" in a cardboard box in the seat beside me. When I arrived at the toll booth at the end of the Florida turnpike at Wildwood, the woman took my ticket to calculate the toll. When she turned back to me and said: "That'll be $12.60...",  she saw "Tyrone" who had crawled out of his box and was sticking his head out the window, flashing his tongue at her. Instantly, the toll woman jerked back her hand and screamed in fright. I calmly handed over the $12.60. The woman, her face white with fear and her eyes as big as saucers, started shouting: "What kind of nut are you?!! Get that thing out of here!!"  I took my receipt and drove away. He had a great bowel movement in Sierra Blanca, Texas and I stopped to exercise him at a truck stop near Blythe, California where a bearded trucker, wearing a "Cat" cap and chewing tobacco, observed: "One of these days, that critter is going to twine itself around you and have you for dinner."

In Santa Monica, I met up with my English friend who had just divorced his wife.  He had an arctic house rabbit called "Beau" and explained that I couldn't keep "Tyrone" in the house because the rabbit would be in mortal danger.  I agreed and installed my Burmese in my friend's garage. But it was cold and damp in the garage and I knew "Tyrone" was not going to be happy. I placed a heat lamp in the cage to warm him up.  It helped but I knew he still wasn't happy. Four days after I arrived, I met this long-legged brunette next door and I started spending time with her rather than "Tyrone".  For three days, I failed to check on him. On the fourth day, I went to feed him and he had escaped.  I looked high, low and in-between at my friend's house, but failed to find him.  I called the local SPCA people over and over and questioned neighbors, but there was neither hide nor hair of "Tyrone".  I never knew his fate.  I was heart-broken.

In late March of 2003,  I was living near Atlanta and spending a lot of time with my 12-year-old grandson Christopher.  I told him about "Puffy" and "Tyrone" and how I loved snakes and what beautiful creatures they were.  From that point on, he began to push into buying another snake. I explained over and over that the proper care of a snake required lots of time, patience and discipline.  He said he didn't care, he wanted a snake.

The following June, my grandson and I began checking out local pet shops.  We looked at Columbian red-tails, Brazilian tree snakes, some black Boas, several ratsnakes  and several California kingsnakes. We finally ended up at a pet store near Decatur, Georgia. There, in the back of the store, away from all the other critters, we found a three-foot Burmese python with a "For Sale" sign on the cage.  Over the past four months, the critter had been marked down from $125 to $80. When I showed an interest in the snake, the kid said: "Now you understand that the Burmese is very aggressive, especially those that have been taken directly from the wild."
This kid explained that this snake had been taken directly from the jungles of Northern Thailand about two months earlier and, as a result, was more aggressive than those whose parents were bred and raised in capitivity.
"No problem," I said.  "I mastered a 14-footer many years ago, so I shouldn't have an problems with a three-footer."
"Ok," the kid said, "I'll let you have him for $75."
So, I bought the snake, a cage, a watering bowl, a heat lamp and substrate (a finely-crushed walnut shell material for the snake to nestle in) and left the store.
"Let's call him "Slick", my grandson said as we drove from the pet shop back to my house.
"No, let's name him Oswald and Chester or Homer...some weird human name."
"Grandaddy," he objected, "You don't give animals human names. You have to give him a descriptive name, something that describes him like "Slick".
"But he's not slick," I replied. "That's a misconception people have about snakes. His skin is an dry as yours or mine".
"I want to call him 'Slick', grandaddy," my grandson pressed.
"Ok," I replied, not wanting to argue, "Slick it is...."

Once we had the cage set up back at my house,  I took the snake out of the cloth bag so my grandson and I could get acquainted. As I held the snake in my hands, my grandson was stroking the snake's head and saying: "Hey, little snakie, snakie... good, good snakie"
Suddenly, the snake lunged out and bit my grandson on the nose. My grandson, whose nose was bleeding, started crying hysterically.  I put the snake in the cage and went to my grandson. I wiped the blood off his nose and dried his tears and consoled him as best I could.
My first instinct was to kill the snake, then and there. I had visions of grabbing the snake and taking it outside and slamming it against the picket fence in the backyard until it was dead. But I tried to control myself.  I had bought the critter so me and my grandson would have something to do together, so I relented from my murderous visions. Finally, I told myself the snake was probably under severe stress from being moved to new surroundings, so I decided to let it live. I felt it might be a challenge to try to "civilize" my new pet. How wrong I was! At first, I tried to teach him some manners with the "gentle" treatment. When I would open the cage, I would speak in quiet, soothing, dulcet tones to let him know I was present. Then, I would softly caress his back and tail, continue to speak in soft tones until finally, and ever so gently, lift him out of the cage. After the first week, it was working like a charm. I thought I had it down. I thought "Hey! He's learning some manners."

So at the end of the first week, I proceeded to give him his first bath.
As before, I quietly slide open the cage door and speaking ever so gently, I started to stroke his back. About the time I started to grasp his body to lift him out, he suddenly lashed out and bit my hand. Instantly, I withdrew my bloody hand and wiped it off.  "You little SOB!", I said to myself. "You were just waiting for me!"  Moments later, I tried the same ploy again and withdrew a bloody hand a second time. 

Several days later, I decided that it was futile to try to "gentle" the snake into civility, so I tried a new tactic.  This time, before I opened the cage door, I started shouting:"You little SOB! I'm going to kill you! You're going to be breakfast for the chicken hawks!" Then I started beating my fist on the side of the cage and the whole stucture started to shake. Since there was nowhere to run inside the cage, he instantly froze with fright. I placed a glove on my hand and reached inside, saying nothing. When he sensed my hand coming into the cage, he went into a penitent position. When a snake feels guilt, he will coil and put his head deep inside the coil. This body position lets the onlooker know that the snake is at their mercy.  It is the opposite from the strike position. He was gentle as a lamb when I placed him in the warm bath water. He had a good bowel movement and I cleaned his eyes and small bits of scales from the previous shedding. "Slick" got his first bath successfully and everything was hunky-dory.

Two weeks later, when he was due for a second bath, I went through the same drill. I froze him into fright by yelling and beating on the cage. He went into penitent mode, I lifted him out and placed him into the bath water. Then I took the snake and the plastic tub containing the bath water out on the patio.  As I reached my hand in to begin the bath, he struck at me. I jerked my hand back and, as I did, he crawled out of the plastic tub and tried to make as escape across the backyard. Sensing the wide open spaces, he must have thought he was back in the jungles of Northern Thailand. Instantly, I was on my feet after him. I grabbed his tail and held him out at arms length like the snake handlers on TV.  Boy was he mad!! As I held him out from my body, he kept lunging toward me trying to bite me and spitting a gray, thick liquid at me. But he was helpless. Finally, after the anger had dissipated, he calmed down and I returned him to his bath and finished it without incident.

As mentioned earlier, the digestive process of the snake is truly a miracle. When a snake ingests  prey, the whole rat is swallowed, hook line and sinker. There is no cutting up of the meat, breaking off a leg from the shoulder or adding salt and pepper. The rat's bones, hair and tissue is all ingested in one fell swoop. As a result, his poop was made up of three balls. One is a black, gelatinous ball which is the digestive aftermath of the rat's tissue. The second ball is a tiny spheroid of pure white calcium. This is what the snake's digestive tract makes of the rat's bones. The third ball is a hair ball. Apparently, the snake's digestive apparatus cannot digest the rat's hair so it is rolled into a neat little ball of unprocessed hair and excreted. So much for the miracle of a snake's digestion.

The biggest fight me and "Slick" had occured about six months into the relationship. One Sunday morning, I had gone to the pet shop, bought a live rat and returned home to feed him. The moment I opened the cage door to throw in the rodent, he lunged at me, grabbed the side of my hand and began to wrap his body around my hand and arm in a constricting motion. This time I was the one that flew into a rage. I grabbed him behind the head and started squeezing as hard and I could. All the while, he was turning his head from side to side to try to bite my hand, but I was grasping him directly behind the head and he had no room to bite my hand. I squeezed as hard as I could and held on for several minutes. Suddenly the snake went limp in my hand. His body twisted around and I could see the white-ivory scales of his belly turn upward toward me. In nature, this is a sign that a snake is dead. In nature, a snake never shows its soft white underbelly unless it is either fighting or dead.

Well, I said to myself, the inevitable has occurred. I guess he's gone.  He won't be around to bite me ever again.  So I placed his limp body into a clear plastic box and put it on the patio. Then I grabbed a shovel and went out to the backyard to dig a grave.  After I had the hole dug, I sat down in front at the tv, drank a Gatorade and watched a golf tournament. Once I saw that Tiger Woods had won, I returned to burial services for my pet snake. When I went back to the patio, I picked up the plastic box and looked inside. "Slick" was as alive as ever. He was just faking death, a ploy often used in nature to get predators to relent in an attack. When I saw him alive and well, I took pity on him and decided: "Well, we'll let bygones be bygones. If he's that tough, I'll let him live."  So I returned him to his cage and, over the next few months, "Slick" and I had few problems. I think he learned something from the near-death incident.

After I had had him for about a year, I decided I wanted to start breeding snakes. I was especially interested in a pair of Honduran milksnakes. At the pet shop where I had been buying rats to feed "Slick", the woman said she could get a pair of Honduran milksnakes but they would be $250. I asked if she would take a trade-in and she asked:"What do you have?"
Three days later, I returned to the pet shop with "Slick". She took the snake and wrote me a receipt which was a credit for $100 toward the purchase of the Honduran milksnakes. And "Slick" was gone, just like that.

About a week later, I went back to the pet shop and looked around for "Slick".  I didn't see him, so I asked the woman what happened to him.
"Oh, we had to get rid of him," she said. "He got out of his cage one night and killed some baby kittens. We couldn't keep a snake like that."
I didn't question her as to specifics. Posing the question was like asking about the fate of an old friend.  I guess that, once you have personal interface with a snake, as with humans,  you can't help but wonder about their final outcome. Part of me didn't want to know what happened. I hope that whatever his fate, it was good. He contributed to my life and I contributed to his. Despite all the trouble and turmoil in our relationship, I still have fond memories.

As for my grandson--the whole reason for buying the critter, he never went near the snake again. After he was bitten on the nose during the initial encounter, he refused to even help me dry the snake off after a bath.
"That snake bit me one time too many," he said afterwards. "I'll never trust it again."
My grandson has got more sense than me.

Billiards gets its comeuppance

Over the course of human history, it is interesting to note all of the ways humankind has created diversions out of balls. All kinds of balls. Baseball, football, basketball, tennis, soccer, golf, marbles, ping-pong, lacrosse, and last but not least, billiards, otherwise known as pool.
Baseball is played on a diamond; football on a gridiron, tennis on a court; golf is played on a man-replica of earth itself; marbles are played on natural earth, but ping pong and pool are played on a "table".
Each and every one of these diversions have their own means of thrusting and controlling the spheroid. Golf uses a thrusting instrument called a club; the human arm is used in baseball and football; the human foot and head is used in soccer; a racquet in tennis and a paddle in ping pong. Pool is the only diversion in which the thrusting and control of the ball is done with a "stick" called a "cue". The billiard cue is a five foot long piece of wood which has been lathed to a tiny tip on one end and a size on the other end which was designed to fit the human hand for gripping. The spheroid is propelled by striking the cue ball and its movement is achieved with the use of English. While the baseball player has curve, sinker, fastball and change up, the billiards player has draw, stop, side, kill and running english.
Until the advent of the global village, pool was viewed as a backstreet activity for ne'er-do-wells. Since all forms of individual artistry is appreciated in the global village, pool has gotten its comeuppance over the past few years. Today, top billiard players collect and meet for world championships. These events draw huge television audiences and players sign lucrative contracts, promote the products they serve and become national heroes.
It is interesting to note how that, in pool, the female's essential physical weakness (a dynamic that separates male-female competition in other "ball sports") has been neutralized. The women players are just as good as the men. Playing pool is closer to playing a violin than it is to hitting a baseball or a golf ball. In fact, in many ways, the female has the advantage because competition occurs at a "table". The female has a much longer tradition of performance at a "table" than the male. In the sport of billiards, the male and female have been "homogenized", so to speak. This is a perfect example of the way media (as a performance art) equalizes the differences among human beings.

Food and information

Both are best when served fresh.
Both are consumed in bits and bytes.
You have a "taste" for information, like you have a  "taste" for food.
Once information has been consumed,  it must be "digested".
Your mind can be constipated,  just like your body.
You can spoon-feed information just like you can spoon-feed food.
Surfing the net is like going through a food line.
Both must be stored and preserved for future use.
Concentrated orange juice is compacted food; a zipped file is compacted information.
Each has its own form of input and output.

Essence of globalization

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are nothing more than the growing pains of globalization. As globalization marches onward, we have a handful of religious lunatics and renegade nations who refuse to join in the global fold. With the religious fanatics, the clerics teach their followers that the religious traditions of the past must be preserved at all costs. If those traditions are not preserved, the clerics will be out of a job. These clerics justify their teachings under the guise of worshipping their God. In the case of renegade nations, if the status quo is not preserved, the dictators who run those nations will be out of a job. The dictators of these same nations justify their teachings in the name of national strength. In essence, globalization cannot move forward until the bad apples in the barrel are dealt with. President George Bush has enough vision to deal with the the clerics and the dictators. At least, he's trying.... He's not sticking his head in the sand and preaching a "cut and run" strategy like the pointy heads who see only the local view.

Humankind has reached the point in its history in which it must come together under a single guiding principle. If this does not occur, the raging animosities among nations will at some point escalate into another world war and culminate in a nuclear holocaust which will probably wipe most humans off the face of the earth with the resulting disunity, starvation, disease and pervasive radioactivity. While the U.N. has tried to serve as this single guiding principle, it has not been taken seriously in most cases. Many nations see globalization as nothing more than a pipe dream and consequently the U.N. as a stooge to this dream. Those who do take it seriously must constantly battle the non-believers. Many nations use the U.N. as nothing more than a forum for the own agendas. They could care less about the nations and peoples of the world coming under a single umbrella. Until the leaders of the world's nations take globalization seriously, this attitude is anathema to globalization.

Democracy--as practiced in the US and western European nations--will serve as a model for globalization. America has been referred to a melting pot. Despite some hiccups here and there, our nation has assimilated different cultures, religions, languages and races from throughout the world into a prosperous, peace-loving nation. True globalization will occur when all the nations of the world throw out their religious lunatics and dictators and allow the citizens of those nations to recognize their sameness with the other citizens of planet earth. At some level within the human spirit there is a universal frequency at which all men recognize one another’s sameness. Yet there is also that part of human reason which manages to find perceived differences which many men will use to set themselves apart from their fellow man. This is the essential human trait that prevents assimilation into the global fold. Globalization will not occur until humankind recognizes his sameness with his fellow human beings. As long as differences are emphasized--religious, idealogical, philosophical, political or otherwise-- globalization cannot occur.

True globalization will only occur when all the nations of the world have become melting pots.

Prejudice

(The following is another selection from my recently published book "Alabama Stories".

       As a small child growing up in the hills of North Alabama, I didn’t actually meet a Negro face-to-face until I was five years old. Of course, I was aware of their existence from a distance. While shopping in the nearby town of Hamilton, Alabama, with my parents, I had seen black families browsing in the stores, walking the streets and riding around in cars. I had seen black men working in the chain gangs along the county roadways and I had heard my mother speak to my father about “colored town.”
       Also, I was keenly aware of Etta Mae Jackson, the young, talkative black woman who would sometimes come to help my mother in the fall when she was canning fruit. When Etta Mae came to our house, she and my mother always stayed on the back porch and in the kitchen, peeling and paring and packing, so I never actually spoke to the Negro woman on a personal basis. That’s why, when I did meet a Negro on a one-to-one, up-close social basis for the first time, it would be an experience I would always remember.
       One Saturday morning in late May of 1946, I was playing in the front yard at our home when I heard a vehicle on the road and turned to see an old rickety pickup truck pull into our driveway.
       A Negro man, lanky, muscular, blue-black in color and maybe 28 or 29, got out of the truck and walked toward me. I could see the man had black skin like the other “Negroes” I had seen, but this single characteristic held no special significance for my young eyes. In every other way, he seemed to fit the same general specifications of most whites I had known.
       He stopped about ten feet from me.
       “Hi,” I said. “My name is Billy.”
       He examined me for a moment.
       “Are you Mister Robert Johnson’s son?” he asked finally.
       “Yes, sir,” I answered. My father had taught me to always address older men as ‘sir.’
       For a moment, he looked at me inquisitively, almost amused. Then he asked: “Will you go tell yo’ daddy that Calvin Washington is here?”
       I studied him for a moment, then quickly turned and ran into the house.
       In the kitchen, my mother was cleaning up the breakfast dishes while my father was having his last few sips of morning coffee. My father looked up when I burst into the kitchen.          
       “There’s a man outside, daddy,” I said. “His name is Calvin.”
       My father got up from the table, coffee cup in hand, and peered out the window. Then he tossed down the last swallow of coffee, sat the cup on the table and turned to go outside. I ran after him.
       Outside, the black man was still standing in the same spot where he had talked to me. I noticed that my father didn’t shake hands with the man.
       “You Calvin Washington?” my father asked.
       “Yes sir.”
       “Mr. Wiley Gilbert over at the crossroads says you know how to dig a ditch.”
       “Yes sir.”
       “A straight one?”
       The Negro nodded.
       “And I got my own pick and shovels,” he added.
       My father peered over at the pickup. Then he looked at the black man again.
       “See that corner over there,” my father said, pointing toward the corner of the house.
       The black man peered toward the point my father was indicating.
       “I need a ditch for a water line from that corner,” my father said, indicating with his index finger, “to the barn over there. It’s about fifty feet.”
       Interested, the black man walked over and peered along the imaginary line between the corner of the house and the barn.
       “What about the rose bushes?” he asked.
       “Just dig ’em up and put them off to the side,” my father said.
       The black man studied the project for a moment.
       “Looks like about three hours work,” the Negro man said.
       “That’s about right,” my father said. “How much you charge?”
       “I usually get seventy-five cents a hour,” the black man said, almost embarrassed.
       My father looked at the man.
       “I’ll pay fifty,” my father said finally.
       There was a long pause.
       “That the best you can do?” the black man asked. “About everybody I know gets at least sixty cents an hour.”
       “Fifty is the most I’ll pay,” my father reiterated.
       The black man, emotionless, stepped over and sighted the line between the barn and the house again.
       “I’ll replant them rose bushes for you for sixty cents a hour,” the black man offered.
       My father shook his head slowly.
       “I’ll replant ’em wherever you want ’em,” the black man added, almost as an afterthought.
       “I’ll replant the rose bushes,” my father said emphatically. “All I need from you is to dig the ditch. Fifty cents an hour is my best offer.”
       The black man studied for another moment, looked at me, then back at my father. After a long pause, he inhaled resignedly.
       “All right, sir. I’ll get my tools,” he said, turning back to the truck.
       “Have you eat?” my father asked.
       The Negro stopped.
       “No sir.”
       “I’ll get you some breakfast,” my father said.
       “Thank you, Mister Johnson.”
       My father turned to go back into the house. I watched as the Negro man walked back to the truck, then I ran into the house after my father.
       Inside, my mother was still washing dishes.
       “Virginia,” my father called as he walked back into the kitchen. “You got some sausage biscuits and eggs left?”
       “I got some sausage and biscuits, but I’ll have to cook eggs,” she said.
       “Fix something for that boy out here,” my father ordered.
       My mother, wiping her wet hands on her apron, stepped away from the sink and peered out the window at the Negro man.
       “It’ll take a few minutes,” she said.
       My father went into the back room to put on his work clothes. I took a seat at the cleared table and watched as my mother put the cold sausage biscuits into the oven.
       “Mama, that man’s got black skin,” I said.
       “He’s a Negro, Billy,” my mother said matter-of-factly, breaking an egg into the skillet.    “Way back yonder, his people were slaves on the old plantations.”
       “Why is he black like that?” I asked.
       “’Cause God made him that way back in Africa. Just like He give you white skin, He give Negroes black skin.”
       “Oh,” I said, acting as if I understood.
       On the top shelf of the kitchen cabinet, my mother always kept several chipped plates and some old fruit jars for outsiders to eat out of when they came to our house. There was a drifter named Mr. Robertson who passed through our little community from time to time. My mother said he was a ‘no-count’, but my father gave him odd jobs, let him sleep in the barn and fed him from our table. My mother always served Mr. Robertson’s food and drink in the eating utensils on the top shelf.
       I watched as my mother reached down one of the chipped plates and a fruit jar for the Negro’s food and drink. Then I watched as she dumped the eggs into the plate, neatly placed the warm sausage biscuits beside them and filled the fruit jar with steaming, hot coffee.
Seeing the food was prepared, I wanted to help.
       “I’ll tell him to come in and eat,” I said and started out.
      “William Vernon Johnson!” my mother yelled, raising her voice. “Get back here!”
      I stopped at the back door, not understanding.
       “I’m going to tell him his breakfast is ready,” I ventured.
       “You stay right where you are, young man,” she said firmly. “Yo’ daddy will handle this.”   
       “He’s got to come in to eat,” I said.
       “No, he don’t,” my mother said firmly. “Black folks don’t eat at white folks’ table.”
       “Why?!”
       For a moment, my mother stared at me long and hard, not knowing quite what to say.     Then she regained herself.
       “You just hush up,” she said angrily. “Yo’ daddy will take care of this.”
       I knew better than to talk back to that tone of voice.
       “Robert!” my mother called toward the back room. “Robert! Come out here!”
       My father reappeared in the kitchen.
       “That boy’s food’s ready,” she said, calmer now.
       I watched as my father picked up the plate of food and the fruit jar from the table and started back outside. I followed.
       The black man was standing at the back porch steps. My father offered him the plate of food and the hot coffee.
       “Thanky, Mr. Johnson,” the black man said politely, eyeing the eggs eagerly.
       “You’re welcome, Calvin,” my father replied. “Just give me a good straight ditch.”
“I will, Mister Johnson.”
       With that, my father turned and headed toward the barn. At first I started after him, then I suddenly stopped and turned to the black man.
       He had seated himself on the back porch steps, the plate perched firmly on his closed knees and the fruit jar of coffee planted on a higher step within easy reach.
       I watched as he ate the eggs and sausage biscuits and I wondered why he was not allowed to sit at our table. Even with his black coloring, I wondered what was so radically different about this man that my parents seemed to view him as a species separate from themselves. Even “no-count” Mr. Robertson ate at our table. But he was white.
       As I watched this black man eat, I was somehow filled with a mysterious sadness. Finally, I walked over and took a seat on the steps below him hoping that I could somehow make him feel better after having been treated so differently. I asked him where he lived and if he had any kids and where his mother and father were. I asked him if he liked to dig ditches and how many shovels he had.
       The black man listened patiently and politely to my childish attempts to make conversation, eating all the while. I know he heard my every question, but he didn’t reply to a single one. When he had finished the food, he handed the empty plate and fruit jar to me and politely said I should take it back inside.
       “I gotta work now,” he said, getting up from the porch steps.
       I watched as he picked up the shovel and broke open the fresh, black earth to start the ditch to the barn. After he had thrown aside several shovelfuls, I went back inside with the empty plate and fruit jar.
       In the years that followed, my father tried in every way to school me in the ways of prejudice. He said I should never defer to blacks and they should always call me “sir.” My father said blacks had their own way of life, their own set of values and were destined to forever remain separate from the white man. When my father was around his farmer friends, there was a tacit understanding among them that blacks were lazy, illiterate and inferior to the white man. They had their crude jokes and clichéd stories to support their beliefs.
       During the early sixties, when the civil rights leaders marched through our little town with signs proclaiming “We want our freedom!” my father, who was almost 70, asked me,   
“What do they mean they want their freedom? They have their freedom. Nobody has them in chains.”
       “It’s economic and social freedom they want,” I said cautiously.
       “What does that mean?”
       “It means they want the same economic and social opportunities as white people. They want to get a good education, earn a decent wage and have a sense of social pride.”
       “They’re Negroes,” my father said, indignantly. “They have their own place in the world just like the white man.”
       I tried to explain the meaning of social justice and the equality of all men but my father countered that the Negro is not equal to the white man and that Negroes were destined by God to fulfill a subservient role.
       From there, the discussion would continue--as it had so many times before--from one impasse to the next until I would finally drop the subject. Then my father would very accusingly say I had learned all “that equality stuff” in college. Then, he would bitterly shake his head and say college had turned me against everything he had tried to teach me. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that, throughout all those years, I had always had my own ideas about Negroes and the way they should be treated.  I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that his so-called “teachings” had all been in vain.
       Somehow, I’ve been sitting on those back porch steps with that Negro man all my life. On one hand, knowing that at some level within the human spirit there is a universal frequency at which all men recognize one another’s sameness. Yet, on the other hand, also knowing that human reason always manages to find perceived differences which most men will use to set themselves apart from their fellow man. This is the essential human trait that leads to prejudice. In my heart, I knew that trait would never totally die during my father’s lifetime. Many times, I have wondered if it ever would in mine.

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Cars and computers as media

As media, the automobile and the computer share numerous similarities.
The car represents the crown jewel of all mechanical media. In terms of electronic media, the computer is the car's counterpart.  Within each media category, the car and the computer empowered and changed the lives of humankind more than any other single example.

In terms of human history, mechanical media has had a much longer and more diversified past than electronic media. Mechnical media began at the dawn of history when the upright ape created the first hand tools. This was probably a stick which was used as protection, to kill prey or (as has been widely theorized) to pull fruit on a tree limb to within reach. Some have theorized that the first tool was a stone used to break open a nut or some type of fruit. Whatever the case, these were the beginnings of mechanical media. Later, other hand tools would  emerge which included clubs, knives, spears, axes and such. There would be domestic tools like hammers, saws, augers, plows and such. Then there would be weapons of war--swords, spears, shields, bows and arrows and such. In each case, these tools served as hardware and the cognitive process and will of the user served as software (instructions). After the invention of the wheel, a new class of mechnical media emerged. This included the human-powered cart,  the animal-powered cart,  the engine-powered cart and finally the automobile in the late 19th and early 20th century.

    "They (cars) suggest an absolute freedom, freedom that could take the mind to anywhere. They can go even where there are no roads; they can run over everything old and suggest a constant present. They seem like so much freedom but they actually are so much dependence. When you gain a car you lose a self....."  ~ John Akre (Source)

The car extended mankind's legs and psychology in ways he could never have imagined. Not only did the car serve as automatic legs, but it required no effort on his part other than maintaining the fuel level and serving as the software (driving, i.e. providing instructions) for the hardware. The automobile changed mankind's essential concepts of time and space. With the car, the world became infinitely smaller. Like all media, cars provided information much faster. By travelling over the next hill, you learned what was over there.  Cars provided this information much faster than walking or earlier forms of wheel-related mechanical media. Cars created fast-food restaurants, drive-in theaters, hotel chains and surburbia. Cars changed mating habits. God only knows how many children have been conceived in the back seat of automobiles. By the early thirties and forties, cars included all of the comforts of home. They had radios and cigarette lighters and you could eat and sleep in them. In short, cars put the world at the fingertips of the individual.

The first practical application of electronics as a media didn't appear until 1844 in the form of the telegraph. It was the  first time that electronic signals were adapted to the syntax of 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, a typewriter, a calculator, a phonograph.. the list goes on and on. It should also be noted that, like the car, the computer put the world at the fingertips of the individual.

Computers, however, are changing human social habits and psychology in different ways that the automobile. While the automobile allowed humankind to extend his external space, the computer allows him to extend his internal space.

"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

Unfortunately, this casual observation is becoming all too true. It seems that as we meld ourselves deeper and deeper into the cyberworld, we begin to see ourselves and our psychological/biological processes as little more than another mechanistic replica of the cyberworld. Food we put in our bodies is input. Excrement  is output. Our brains are CPUs, our long-term memory is a hard drive where data is stored. Our central nervous system is nothing more than random access memory where processing occurs. Our involuntary muscular system (breathing, heartbeat etc.)  is the biological counterpart of ROM (read-only memory). Our hands and feet are nothing more than peripheral devices connected with cables we call arms and legs.  It's scary, but it is happening each and every day.

Just for fun, let's examine the John Akre quote above and substitute the word "cars" with "computers". It would read like this:

"They (computers) suggest an absolute freedom, freedom that could take the mind to anywhere. They can go even where there are no roads; they can run over everything old and suggest a constant present. They seem like so much freedom but they actually are so much dependence. When you gain a computer, you lose a self..."

All of the same characteristics apply perfectly.  As media, the two are very, very closely related.

Honore de Balzac

In the early sixties, a group of well-known literary pundits got together to decide who were the greatest novelists of all time. Their conclusion was that Leo Tolstoy wrote the greatest novel in "War and Peace", but they also decided that the French novelist Honore de Balzac was the greatest novelist simply because he produced so many good novels in his lifetime. It was a well-deserved honor. Balzac not only had an incredibly prodigous output but a fire and ambition as a literary artist which is seldom seen in human history.

Born in Tours in 1799, Balzac’s father was a member of the upper class and had been a regional administrator during the French Revolution. The father had hoped that Balzac would enter the legal profession and, as a young man, he studied law first at the College de Vendome and later at the Sorbonne. Despite his father's wishes, Balzac was too restless and ambitious for such a staid profession and, in 1819, at the age of 20, he announced he wanted to be a writer. With that, he moved to Paris and installed himself in a shabby garret at 9 rue Lediguiéres.

As a chronicler for local magazines on social and artistic subjects, Balzac's early writing attempts met with mediocre success although he did receive some recognition for the novel Les Chouans, a historical potboiler in the tradition of Sir Water Scott, in 1829. During that period, Balzac unfortunately tried his hand at business and bought a publishing house which failed to bring in printing. After this and several other business ventures failed, Balzac was left with a heavy debt burden which would plague him until the end of his career. "All happiness depends on courage and work," Balzac once said. "I have had many periods of wretchedness, but with energy and above all with illusions, I pulled through them all." (Source)

In 1832, he began corresponding with a beautiful, wealthy  Polish woman (she claimed to be a countess) named Eveline Hanska. Early on, he became enamored of her and asked her to marry him. She replied that she would marry him only if he became rich and famous. With that, Balzac set off on a furious pace to write as many novels as fast as he could. His work habits were legendary. Balzac wrote standing up, dressed in a monk’s robe, drinking pot after pot of Turkish coffee. Many days, he would write for 15 hours straight, sleep for a few hours and then write for another 15 hours. 

Balzac was close friends with French novelist Alexandre Dumas and he often visted their home to discuss literature. In the wee hours of the morning, Balzac, hungry and dog-tired, would visit and ask for food and a place to nap. Dumas’ wife would fix up a concoction of whipped butter and sardines that Balzac loved, then he would lie down for a nap. Before he started to nap, he would tell Dumas’ wife:”Now I only want to sleep for one hour, then wake me up.”  After an hour, Dumas’ wife, knowing how he had pushed himself beyond the bounds of human endurance, would let him sleep for two hours. When Balzac would wake up, he would see the time and curse Dumas’ wife and exclaim:”You crazy woman, you let me sleep for 2 hours. I could have written a novel in that hour.”  With that, he would storm out of the house and return to his garret to write for another 15 hours.

Over the next 17 years, he wrote an incredible 90  novels. About the time he proposed to Eveline Hanska, he decided to encompass all of his writings under a larger framework entitled "The Human Comedy". This massive undertaking would include more than 2000 characters in 90 novels and novellas. The overall series would present a sprawling portrait of the habits, social customs and atmosphere of bourgeois France during his lifetime. The most famous titles in the series were La Peau de chagrin (1831), Eugénie Grandet (1833), Le Père Goriot (1835, his most famous novel)  Les Illusions perdues (1837I, 1837; II, 1839; III, 1843),  La Cousine Bette (1846) and Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes (1847). (Source )

By October 1848, Balzac was world famous and wealthy and traveled to the Ukraine to try to win the hand of Madame Hanska again. Finally, after seeing that he was everything she had hoped for, she agreed to marry him.  They were married in March of 1850. Shortly afterward, Balzac wrote a friend:"Three days ago I married the only woman I have ever loved." Two weeks later, he triumphantly returned to Paris with his new wife.

But the years of overwork and stress  had caused his health to fail and, in mid-August of 1850, Balzac lay on his deathbed. French literary greats Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas were at his bedside as he lay dying. It has been said that, as he lay dying in one room at their Paris home, his new wife--the woman he had spent his life trying to win-- was in an adjacent room in bed with some stable boy she had picked up on the street. So much for true love.  At the funeral,  Hugo delivered the eulogy. The great novelist noted:"Today we see him at peace. He has escaped from controversies and enmities..... Henceforward he will shine far above all those clouds which float over our heads, among the brightest stars of his native land. (Source)"

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Tips for GOOD dividends

When it comes to investing, few things will perk up a portfolio like dividends. Dividends are like free money. While everyone invests for capital appreciation, dividends are an added benefit. Dividends can not only offset a drop in a stock's price, but when the stock is going up, you're getting the capital appreciation AND the dividends. Ideally, what you want to do is buy good stocks that are low relative to the overall market AND pay good dividends. Happy days are here again! Some investments pays no dividends. Lots of investments pays up to  2 percent. Others pay 4 per cent or more. I will list my favorites later in this article. There are 2 keys to finding good dividend-payers. These are (1) the company's payout ratio and (2) the company's five-year average dividend yield. The first number will tell you the percentage of earnings a company pays out in dividends relative to earnings. A low payout ratio means the company is hanging on to most of its earnings and paying out little in dividends. A high payout ratio means the reverse, the company pays out a large percentage of earnings in dividends. The second number, the five-year average dividend yield, tells you the average dividend percentage the company has paid over the past five years.  But it takes some research and time to discover good dividend payers.The best online tool I have found for finding good dividend payers is Yahoo's financial page (Click here ). Here's how:
(1) Go to Yahoo's financial page and enter the symbol of the stock you want to research.
(2) On the right-hand side near the middle of the page,  click on "More Key Statistics".
(3) On the next page on the right side near the bottom, you will see a heading that says "Dividends and Splits". That's where you'll find the information you want. Ok, go ahead and knock yourself out. Here are my favorite dividend-paying stocks. I am only listing the five-year trailing dividends for each of these stocks based on Yahoo's finance page.
Altria (MO), 4.8%
AT&T (T) 4.4%
Verizon (VZ) 4.1%
Bank of America (BAC) 3.7%
Merck (MRK) 3.5%
Dupont (DD) 3.2%
Wachovia Bank (WB) 3.1%
Remember, it's nice to have a stock appreciate in price, but it's doubly nice to have one that pays a hefty dividend.
There's nothing like FREE money!