Time to Blog, who has it? Apparently not me.

OK, so I'm not much of a blogger.  i confess.

but then, i'm trying to work a 10 hour a day job where I'm cut off from the real world and can't multi task, like I used to do.

clever bastards have made this job so that you have to multitask continuously to do their work, so there is nothing left.  Most jobs allow you to do a few things at once but not this one.

Guess I was spoiled by my previous employment.  I was hugely productive because I could do three different things at once.  Talk on the phone, type about something else, think about a problem I was solving, and sometimes be waiting for hardware or software to do its thing.  But I was only expected to do one thing at a time.

Now, I have to do three things at once for the company at half the pay.

And economists wonder why the economy is shrinking? At least pay people what their skills and efforts are worth.

And don't say or think that there isn't enough wealth to go around.  There's more wealth, more money than ever before in human history.  It is just not moving through the system anymore.

Not good.

January post and Mr. Jobs.

January post.

Wow.  Thought I'd make another post.

Some people seem to have too much time on their hands, and others, not enough.  I'm the not enough group.

Blame a truly, as a friend from my college years said back then, Catholic taste.  First time I'd heard that.

I was offended.   Although I was a WASP through and through by appearance and past, I'd already gone a long way, at that point in my adulthood, to shed that ghostly skin and was far far more something like a Buddhist.  He pointed out it was an adjective.

Today the expression is lost.  It used to be admired, an encompassing passion and understanding of all of something.

You like music?  Then you should strive to find all the music, from as many cultures as you can, past and present, to find out what you like, not just following what your friends or family like, and then understand why you like it.

A few years later someone looked over my record collection and said, "You're the only person I know who likes ACDC and Bach."  ACDC  first compose their music on piano.  Their songs at that point sound like classical piano pieces.  Not that I knew that then.

I think that today there is a huge gap between this human desire to have a rich life, not a wealthy life but a life rich in quality experiences, and the clinically over-focused, singularly devoted, overly specialized and emotionally simple personality that seeks to achieve success, usually financial but some times power related success, at all costs.

I'm reading the recent Steve Jobs biography.  For all his aesthetic design sensibilities that helped shape his company's products he was otherwise in his life a most unimaginative and primitive man.

Example.  He loved the Zen Gardens of Koyoto, for himself the most beautiful places on earth.  He was worth billions of dollars.  And he was incredibly smart.  And was a Buddhist who strove for enlightenment.  A Zen Buddhist.  And he could make time to do anything he wanted with his life from the age of thirty on. Anything.  He seemed to understand that Buddhism is achieved in the doing, and one of the ways to achieve enlightenment is to...strive to build a Zen Garden.  But he never did.  Didn't even try.  All he really worked on was his company, to the sacrifice of just about all else.

Maybe his consumer goods are his Zen Garden.

He hoped it was so.  We'll see.

Hollywood look-alikes

Post Number 5

Granted, the Xmas post was just a few minutes ago, but owing to the magic of the human imagination, you can believe that a chasm of time and space separate that one from this one.

Good.  Done.  Thank you.

Ever notice that there are always two stars in Hollywood who look very similar.  Like shades of the same meta-type.  Or archtype.

Latest that comes to my mind is Holly Hunter and Jodie Forster, only because I am watching Home for the Holidays.

Ever see them in the same movie?  No.

I’ve noticed this for years, and wondered how deliberate this ploy is. 

Charles Durning and M. Emmet Walsh.

David Stratharn and Jonathan Hyde.

Paul Gleason and Jerry Orbach

Dina Meyer and Sharon Stone

Edward Herrmann and Ed Begley jr

Charles Grodin and John Lithgow.
[Early in their careers, that is, when Grodin was trying to be funny and Lithgow was trying to be serious.]

James Woods

and Geoffrey Rush

When did we see these two in the same film?  Oh, um.  Never.

Judge Reinhold






and  Steve Guttenburgh.

Well, Ok, that’s a stretch.  But they've never acted together either.

Tell me that this isn’t true.

And then, there are the actors in commercials who are supposed to remind you of these archtypes…er…stars.

What I am wondering about is whether this is truly deliberate or whether it is the result of ‘The System’.  That thing that exists as if it were an actual organism, the sum greater than all its parts, the Ghost in the Machine, the Invisible Hand.  The Evil that Men do…oh, that’s different.  Sorry.

We may never know, but I say that this is the truth.

Merry Christmas, Everyone

Well, Merry Christmas.

I wrote another Blog entry, but didn't post it.  Maybe repeat the same sentiments later.  But I've been trying to get my professional website updated and its slow going, with the season and all that upon us.

And that I was looking for an interesting chapter that wasn't either an enigmatic transition that would mean nothing out of context, or didn't have some description of or reference to adult private parts.

Ho Ho HoooOOOOO!!!

this isn't a tool like an axe

Post 3

Good Lord!  They don't make it easy to make new posts.  Complained about it the last time.  Or at least they don't make it easy to find the link.

But then, it is relatively free.

Head is still buzzing from helping the technology challenged operate their devices.

There is some irony or something in the idea that we can afford to own a device that is like the Ferrari of technology but use it to go to the grocery store.

At one time I said the same about Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, when I had to design them and help people use them in a business environment.  Most people who use them use understand about 1 percent of the capability of the program itself and of that one percent understand probably about a tenth of how it works.  Someone shows them what to do and they do it.  Over and over.  So it is a tool.

But this isn't a tool like an axe, which mind you still has to be mastered and you certainly get better at it the longer you use it.  No, this is a modern thing, which has little precedent in the past.  Screwing up a spreadsheet might come back on you, but it won't put a gaping hole in your knee.

Anyone who has worked in, well, anywhere, will recognize the dynamic.  What did Mr. Jackson say?  Joe Jackson, that is..."Pretty women out walking with Gorillas down my street...if my eyes don't deceive me, there's somethin' goin' wrong around here."

Anyway, no justice, and no real credit for being the smartest one in the room.  Socially savvy, slightly sociopathic, somewhat lacking in compunction.  Don't worry, you'll go far.

These days.  Or probably always.

At the end of time, someone will be trying to corner the market in squirrel pelts, despite some smarty pants explaining that if you kill all the breeding pairs, there'll be none left for next winter.

Chao

Oh Ho!  Post number two.

After slogging in the trenches all day, I come home through a miserable cold rain, in the dark, and can't find my way into the Blog to make a new post.

The old online interface that worked for Post 1 wouldn't let me back in... hummm.  Couldn't call myself a techie if I couldn't get back into my own Blog.

But I'm here.

Watching Storage Wars, which takes place in sunny Southern California, and wondering what the heck I am doing wrong.  Not only is the weather miserable, the grand daughter has a cold, the days are a whopping nine hours long, being late November, and I'm not having nearly the kind of fun they are having buying other people's forgotten treasures.  Which is always fun, if you've ever been to an auction.  At least it's not snowing.  Thank you Global Warming.

My theory on that is that the world was too small the very first day that some human being decided it was too cold for just the firs on her back, and got her man to light a fire to keep warm.

Sure, fire had been around for a while, for roasting meat, protection, singeing off your eyebrows and lighting your enemies on fire, but the moment it was used for keeping warm, the world was too small.

Thus, its been a long slide into the shitter ever since since.  I dare anyone to prove me wrong.  To all the nay-sayers, there are two simple words:  peak oil.

But we shall preserver.  Read A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Gotta do some more writing.  I'm bogged down telling Laura's story.  This damn novel is driving me nuts.  I want to get it done so the trilogy is wrapped up but its starting to sprawl.  Not 2611 pages or anything...but I need to see the end.

Chao for now.

Post Number One

Hello cyber world!
Welcome to my blog.
How are you doing?  Well enough?
At least well enough to be reading this, so the juice is still flowing.

Why read these musings?
Well, any answer will make me appear either to have a truly inflated ego or an enormous inferiority complex, or both, or something...so I'm sayin' nothing.

Then again, whatever I write could be different, subversive, or even diverting, so who knows?

A hint:  some posts will likely be chunks of a novel.  Not polished stuff either, but raw, rough stuff.  Prose you can chew on.

Here is an example...well, just a little bit polished:

The Soldier looked in the mirror and for the briefest moment did not recognize his own face. 

At first this was disconcerting, but not as alarming as he had once anticipated.  In his youth he had expected that someday he would do this:  Look in the mirror and find out his mind had left him behind.  Of course, he had told no one.

All children discover that no matter how hard you try, you cannot see your own eyes move in a mirror.  But his eyes moved, looking out at him with a comforting, benign expression, and though startled, he was almost relieved that he didn’t feel particularly unhinged.

Once, he had been on a sound stage and seen his eyes move in the Assistant Director’s monitor, and this had been absolutely terrifying.  The camera had followed him as he moved way off scene, still saying his lines, to where he was able to see himself onscreen and he flinched and choked on his words. 

“CUT!”  yelled the Asisistant Director, pulling off his headphones.

“That took me off guard, I suppose,”  he explained, pointing.  “You know, we actors wear it all out on the sleeve.”  Or something like that.

The AD had said, sternly, “Richard.”

“I saw my eyes move.  But you can’t see your own eyes move. ”

“Oh yes,” the Assistant Director had said, already distracted by some other detail of import, turning half away, “Sometimes you can.  Something to do with servers sort of misfiring.  Makes a fractional delay as the feed goes through some circuits.”

“Oh.”

“So don’t look at the monitor, which you have no business doing.  And bear up.  Lets try it again, everyone, shall we, humm?”

“Places!”  someone yelled.

And then the AD’s rah rah boy jumped in, script in hand, to focus his mood or some such shit.

But this time, in the tiny lavatory, in the early morning with the hot sun rising over the desert, there was no electrical wizardry.  The circuit misfiring was inside his brain.