Dowbrigade

As I sat
the other night blogging, writing brief posts in between paying bills
and correcting student essays, with a baseball game on the potable TV
with the sound turned down and the legendary lost King Crimson album
on the speakers, Norma Yvone wanted to have a conversation.  Fine.  As
a progressive male, I fully accept the desirability of regular and open
communication between partners in a relationship. The problem was she
expected me to stop doing the other things in order to devote my undivided
attention to our conversation.

“You can’t pay attention to more than one thing at a time. When you
try to do so many things at once you end up doing all of them badly.  That’s
why you do such a bad job vacuuming while you watch sports on TV.”

Be that as it may, I am utterly certain that my brain works BETTER when
it is working on several, or even many, things at once.  Concentrating
on just one thing may work fine for the Dalai Lama, but in the real world
it is not behavior geared to survival.

Since reading John Lilly’s seminal
1967 paper “Programming
and Meta programming in the Human Biocomputer” in college I have been
interested in analogies between computers and the human brain. Whatever
version of system software I am currently using, it was designed for multi-processing.
On the surface, I am fully aware of my surroundings and capable of seemingly
intelligent interaction with other people.  But this occupies only
a small percentage of my available processing power.

Part of my mind, for example, is at all times thinking about my next
meal.  It may be planning it, or imagining it, or actively lobbying
for pursuing it.  Another part is thinking about why no food is
colored blue, and if it is true that an experiment proved that if you
give people perfectly healthy food in unusual or unexpected colors they will get sick.

While driving, I get my best ideas for blogging.  I have narrowly
avoided many accidents as I try to just notes on the backs of envelopes
or the margins of periodicals with one hand and half an eye on the road.  But
part of my mind, perhaps due to my felonious past, is always scanning
the horizon for cops (and not just when driving, this is a sixth
sense one never loses).  Another part is continually composing and
erasing justifications and explanations to be used in case of an accident
that (hopefully) never happens.  On the theory that if it DOES happen
you better have your story ready because in all the excitement you’ll
never be able to improvise.

In that vein, a substantial part of my brain, which in fact I would
seriously like to reduce, is constantly thinking of snappy comebacks
and rapier-like repartee to be used in conversations that have already
taken
place. Things I SHOULD have said.  Conversely, I would like to increase
that portion of my brain working on making and accumulating money. Some
people’s brains seem to do this almost exclusively.

Not to mention Sex.  If I am not playing some stupid mental game
like “The ten hottest babes in the Supermarket…” then at least some part
of my brain is thinking about sex with women I know, sex with women I
don’t know, sex with fictional women from literature, etc.

And
this entire phantasmagoric mental cacography has a soundtrack, composed
mostly of classic rock and industrial house imperfectly remembered and
mushed together as if by a demented DJ high on some psychedelic downer.

So don’t tell me to do one thing at a time, Norma Yvone.  Now
please go over one more time everything you just said, I’m not sure I
really understand.  Of course, I was LISTENING. I just need to hear
it again to decide what I really think…

Mark McGowan, a 37-year-old
artist, arrives outside 10 Downing Street, in London Friday Sept. 12,
2003. McGowan protesting against student debt, completed the bizarre
stunt Friday of rolling a nut seven miles to Downing Street using only
his nose. Crawling on his hands and knees, McGowan nudged the nut up
the steps to the famous black door of Number 10. He began his journey
at Goldsmiths College in south east London on September 1, and has covered
around three-quarters of a mile per day, working in eight-hour bursts.
McGowan handed the nut over to Number 10, along with a letter asking
Prime Minister Tony Blair to accept it as payment for his student debt.

I would gladly trade one of my nuts for a blanket amnesty for my own student
debt. They could probably put it to better use than I

from AP

Over
the years, I have tried a variety of brushoff techniques with those pesky
telemarketers. For a long while I used five simple syllables: "No hablo
Ingles", but then the Spanish-language calls started coming in as well.
Abusive venting can be a therapuetic outlet for some, but I just don’t
feel comfortable using that kind of language on the phone, afraid perhaps,
after all these
years, that my parents are listening in on another extension.

Sometimes I use lame-ohs like "I’m just housesitting" or "they moved
away." For a long time I kept a little tape recorder with the 60-second
scream from Pink Floyd’s “Careful With That Axe Eugene” looping around over and over next to the phone.
Nowadays, when I am in a bad mood or feeling rude I just hang up, but
lately I have
been
having
a
lot of
success
with
the
following
line:

"Gee, I’m kinda busy right now, but if you don’t mind giving me your
home phone number I would be happy to call you back sometime when you
aren’t
at
work and I am." I must’ve used that over a hundred times so far, and
only two of the telemetiches gave me their "home" numbers – the rest
hurriedly hung up, suspecting madness or some sort of reverse sting.
Both numbers, of course, were fake.

The Great Dave Barry has gone me one better.  He printed the home
and office numbers of several major telemarketers, not coincidentally
those who had been calling his home, in his column
of August 31, which
appears in hundreds of papers.  Thats when things got interesting.

Dave Barry’s Aug 31 column

article from AP about the furor since

"SonicVision," which opens Oct. 3 at the Hayden
Planetarium in New York, is 35 minutes of soaring, churning and immersive
visualizations set to
a thumping score of techno-electronica and contemporary rock mixed by
the recording artist Moby. A recent test screening revealed vast, surreal
three-dimensional visions that morphed back and forth from the purely
abstract – a kind of kinetic, cosmic tie-dye – to whirling wheeled machines,
seas of blinking human eyes, architectural forms and optical puns. All
of it is computer-generated and none of it involves lasers.

Much of the wow factor of the three-year-old planetarium, which replaced
the original 1935 building, is supplied by a supercomputer that, among
other attributes, harnesses 118 microprocessors.

from
the New York Times

California
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Lt. Gov. Cruz Bustamante (R) and the
Rev. Jesse
Jackson chat following a rally at Pacifica of the Valley Hospital September
17, 2003 in Sun Valley, California, to oppose the recall election. California’s
political war raged on two fronts as lawyers fought over an appeals court’s
decision to postpone the Oct. 7 recall election and candidates soldiered
on as if the ruling never happened.

Let me get this straight. This guy Bustamonte is the leading Democrat
in the California Recall Election, and he’s going to a rally AGAINST that
election. He’s in hot water for associating with some questionable Chicano
organization, so he decides to chat up that paragon of popularity Jesse Jackson. And
is that Kobe Bryant lurking in the background? Who plans his political strategy,
Hugo Chavez?

from Reuters

For 90 years, the Little
Mermaid statue has looked out longingly
at the Baltic Sea from atop a rock in the picturesque harbor. And in the
years following Disney’s 1989 film and heavy merchandising, the Little
Mermaid has become a top tourist attraction.

But on Sept. 10, the bronze mermaid was blown off her rock with what police
suspect was dynamite, with some pieces left in the shallow waters along
the shore. Proving that the world is always fascinated when stars suffer
tragic falls from grace, tour boats continue to circle just to view the
rock from which she was blasted.

This is not the first time she’s been treated so brutally. She’s had
her head chopped off twice, been spattered with red paint, sullied with
dye, and humiliated in innumerable other ways. . From the Boston Globe

It
is hard for those of us who grew up listening to the world as related
by Walter Cronkite, and first heard of all of the seminal events in our
formative years – the elections, the assassinations, the confrontations, the accomodations
– from Chet Huntley and David Brinkley, to imagine a world where people
who matter get their news from anywhere other than the Major Media Conglomerates.
I imagine it is that much harder for those who were weaned on CNN and
MTV.

This may be part of the reason that so many people have a hard time accepting
the possibility that blogs can function as a vial alternative network for
the diffusion of news about the things that we currently find out about
through network news, cable and newspapers. But let us not forget that
this Media Cartel is of relatively recent origin, dating only to around
WWI, during the days when the proto-industrial powers carved up the Ottoman
empire and laid the plans for a 20th century built on oil.

I don’t believe that even they could have imagined the degree to which the
mass media they created would become the ultimate arbitrator of the world
view of the global ruling class. Fueled by advances in technology culminating
in the 24-7 newsstream of CNN, now augmented by the minimally parallax
vision of FOX to give the illusion of three-dimensionality, the Mass Media
first became our window on the world, and then they began to define and
delineate that world. Personally, I am convinced that even Ted Turner has
become chagrinned and aghast at the monstrous golem his creation has become,
powerful enough that it had to be absorbed by the old-line media cabal
directly.

It wasn’t always that way. The Founding Fathers didn’t get their news from
CNN. They got their news, and their views on the issues of the day, down
at the neighborhood tavern, putting on a buzz with their buddies. They
got the news at the customs house down by the docks, waiting to pay their
extortionary taxes to get their goods out of hock. They formed their opinions
in the churches, temples and meeting halls, in the markets and hanging
on the streetcorners and commons. And you know, if they could, they would
have blogged.

Look at old Thomas
Paine, rabble-rousing bard to the Boston Boys who plotted the
end of an empire. A Natural Born Blogger if there ever was one, Paine penned
a series of anti-government screeds excorciating the British Crown, both Houses of Parliment, their
tax collectors, army, religion, philosophy and diet. Author a series of
titles to make any blogger proud: Common Sense…The Rights of Man…The
Age of Reason…The Crisis. Even his very first published article
had a catchy bloggerish title: The Case of the Officers of Excise;
with Remarks on the Qualifications of Officers, and on the numerous Evils
arising
to
the Revenue,
from the Insufficiency of the present Salary: humbly addressed to the Members
of both Houses of Parliament. You KNOW if he could have, Thomas Paine
would have blogged the American Revolution.

There is no natural law that says that the distribution of information
in a free society must be centralized and in the hands of those with the
greatest political and economic power. They have succeeded in taking that
control BECAUSE of their existing power, and want us to believe that they
have
a natural,
evolutionary right to it, but that is not the case. They continue to exercise
absolute control over our worldview because nobody has told them they can’t,
and because there is at present no alternative for a planet of inquiring
minds with an insatiable need to know. Perhaps there will be soon.

Colombian soldiers
patrol near the area where alleged members of the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC) are thought to be holding hostage eight foreign
tourists, including Germans, Britons and Israelis, in Santa Marta on
the northern coast, September 16, 2003. The Colombian Army is carrying
out intensive search operations to try and rescue the tourists that were
abducted while visiting the Lost City ruins.

I know that part of Colombia.  It is gorgeous, lush, full of pre-Colombian
ruins and the legendary Santa Marta Gold.  But you gotta wonder about
these tourists.What were they thinking? Kidnapping is the national pastime
in Colombia these days, and there are more guns in the country than bottles of beer.
The
last time
I
was in
Colombia (1988) I was assaulted with machine guns, threatened with death, and robbed of everything of
value I had on me TWICE in ONE DAY. And that was by the police.

Next time go someplace pacific. Like Bali, maybe.

Photo from Reuters

Just
got home from the office. On the way,
I was caught in traffic, listening to WTKK jackboot libertarian Jay
Severin.
Hey, will somebody check this guy for rabies? He was on a vintage rant
about how he can’t believe that liberal politicians honestly believe
in communist ideas like affirmative action and welfare, and if he could
actually
find a hypothetical intelligent liberal in a truly off-guard, off-the-record
momentl he or she would agree.

Severin went on to elucidate his basic view of the US political system:
that while Republicans are honestly out-front bigoted elitists (justifyably),
Democrats are HYPOCRITICAL closet bigoted elitests who secretly believe
in their own innate superiority but put on a caring charade in order
to
get elected
by "the great unwashed" (here he wryly noted that one out of every five Americans
speaks "Mexican" at home). He claims the entire Democratic party is a cynical
scam to provide a pressure valve and give the poor minorities the vain
illusion of participation in a system which doesn’t really give a rat’s
ass about their wellbeing.

You know, I hate to say it, but it makes a certain twisted sense…..

You know how Science keeps us on our toes by constantly
updating what is good for us and what is not? Like wine, butter, chocolate,
fish, sugar, aspertane, aspirin, etc. etc. etc.? Well, my Aunt Dorothy
must have told me a thousand times that if I kept making those faces
my muscles would freeze and I would be stuck forever.

Now, accordiing to todays
Boston Globe, "A thicket of books, videotapes,
and pulsing wands promises to rejuvenate the face by erasing wrinkles,
lifting skin, and plucking crow’s feet — all without face lifts, collagen,
or injections of Botox."  How? Facial exercises!  Here is
an example of one, from the book Facercise by Carole Maggio.

These are impossible to do with a straight face.  Believe me, I
have tried….

The Eye Enhancer

Either lying down or sitting, with your palms toward your face, place your
middle fingers between your eyebrows, above the bridge of your nose.
Place your index fingers with light pressure at the outer corner of each
eye, so each hand creates a V, while keeping your brows and skin from
wrinkling. Look toward the top of your head. Squint up with the lower
eyelid, feeling the outer eye muscle pulse. Squint up and release 10
times. Hold the squint and squeeze your eyes tightly shut, keep your
buttocks tight, and count to 40. Repeat twice daily.

Don’t forget to keep those buttocks tight, or you might wind up in big trouble!

from the Boston Globe