Category Archives: Blog

PAD 2/1/13 – Flangiprop

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“Invent a definition for the word “flangiprop,” then use the word in a post. “

Flangiprop – A half-broken rudder that is connected in only one place and so is thrashing about, endangering the propeller and causing general mayhem while underway.

“Because nobody listened to the techs, the event was only half-baked and eventually had to be cancelled due to the danger of a out-of-control flangiprop.”

“The sailboat skipper paid no attention to the wrenching sounds coming from the stern of his boat and when he started his outboard motor the flangiprop became wedged between the keel and the propeller causing the engine in the boat to seize. The cam shaft was wrenched free and pierced the hull, leading to the boat foundering on the sandbar.”

“Mitt Romney’s “Binders Full Of Women” was his political flangiprop.”

PAD 1/31/13 – Burnt

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“Remember yesterday, when your home was on fire and you got to save five items? That means you left a lot of stuff behind. What are the things you wish you could have taken, but had to leave behind?”

What would fire consume? Everything. That’s what insurance is for. There are things I would miss. Things that weren’t saved because there is just too much of it, it’s too difficult to rescue or move in time. What kind of things would I miss? My wardrobe, Scott’s comic books, our extensive entertainment library with both DVD’s and books. So much would be lost, but that’s one of the reasons why there is safety equipment at home and fire extinguishers, but even then, disaster could strike.

There is something about living simply which bears here I think. The wisdom that if you have a lot of things in your life that in certain ways, you don’t own the stuff, but rather the stuff owns you. Reducing the amount of stuff you own is likely a wiser move, but it runs so much against American culture, that you own or rent a residence and then fill it full of treasure and then keep it. Adding to it and never reducing it. I’ve read so many articles online about radical simplification and there is something in it. I cannot deny the wisdom in living simply and rejecting the consumer culture that abounds here in America. Always having more stuff and adding more stuff to that just doesn’t make much rational sense.

This works a lot like greed in a certain way as well. People are driven by greed to always increase the amount of money they have, to earn more, corner the market, whatever it takes to maximize your fiscal health. I don’t think I could be any more left-leaning if I tried. I’ve said before and I still believe this that the irrational accumulation of stuff is just as silly as the irrational accumulation of wealth. It runs directly against capitalism which pushes us all towards making as much money and keeping it as possible, even beyond rational understanding. I think that you should earn what can make your life comfortable and anything beyond that is actually wrong. I’ve thought long and hard about this and I put the limit on personal wealth at $75,000 a year. Beyond $75,000 and the money does less and less for you. Eventually that money means nothing and it starts to injure you. Look at the filthy rich, they lead lives of plenty with endless funds and they are miserable human beings. They are sad, they abuse drugs or alcohol, they act irresponsibly and generally are poor little rich people, devoid of true happiness. Sometimes, when I’m feeling very liberal I do spend time considering the forceful redistribution of individual wealth, where everyone’s wealth is capped at $75,000 and those who don’t earn enough to reach that limit are given money so that they can reach it, on the backs of the rich who, lets face it, wouldn’t even notice the money being gone. This of course would upset anyone who is a capitalist and would brand me as a socialist – why stop there, why not just go all the way to communism? Yes, I write this out of mean spite. I don’t really think the world will ever be like this idea in my head, but after years of watching the poor, the children, and the disadvantaged suffer while the rich build their obnoxious residences and waste their money on worthless endeavors, it’s actually a great reaction. Consider it not in terms of capitalism but rather in terms of suffering. How much suffering could be alleviated by forcefully redistributing the wealth of the richest people amongst us? I think it’s a worthy to consider a world like this, because to me, this seems to be something that Jesus himself would likely smile at and approve of. It has always struck me as odd, how people can maintain the wealth disparity in our society with their self-professed belief in Christianity.

I look forward to your spirited responses to this idea. 🙂

PAD 1/30/13 – Burning Down The House

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“Your home is on fire. Grab five items (assume all people and animals are safe). What did you grab?”

I would rescue these items from my house:

  • Important Documents Folder
  • Backpack of Data
  • Messenger Bag
  • Antiques
  • Family Photos

These are things that I cannot easily replace. Everything else would be a matter of homeowners insurance. While much of the things I would rescue, such as the Important Documents Folder may not be exactly irreplaceable it does hold some things that I have an emotional connection to, the real physical things that I have earned – like my High School Diploma and my Bachelors Diploma. I am sure I could get reproductions of both, but these are originals and they are important to me. Antiques may surprise people, that I have some which I do, and that they are on my list. Some things, even if they aren’t worth very much have an irrational value because they are physical threads leading backwards through time to people I never knew but revere because without them I would not exist. I list them as “antiques” because I do not want to cover what they are. They are important to me, and that’s good enough for me. I’ve taken the concepts of readiness that I did for my professional life at work and extended them to my home. There are some habits that I have like placing certain things in bags, like a backpack where all the hard drives are kept and my trusty Messenger Bag which stores the lightweight but vitally important objects in my life, like my Nook HD, my iPad, my Laptop, that sort of thing. Photos of family would be rescued as well. Again, almost everything can be reproduced but I am guilty of ascribing extended properties to physical objects in an irrational capacity. Photos are just chemical marks on paper, but these are of my loved ones, my family, and so they are more than the sum of their chemical marks, in many ways they carry a piece of that family member with the photograph. Looking at my family in photos brings their memories back and help me return a part of their existence to my life through the blessings of memory. Very much like how the Prophets discussed the flow of time to Benjamin Sisko on Deep Space Nine – “You exist here. Why?” and I like the idea of memory in this way, that the past, present, and future all exist at the same time. Our consciousness and bodies move forward in time, but parts of us exist in other times and we can access those by the act of remembering. That the sheer act of remembering in a way helps us to return to when our loved ones existed with us and so, they can again, in a fashion.

If people are safe, and my pets are safe, and these objects are safe then the rest can burn. I think that over time this list will get smaller as some of these objects are stored in places where disaster cannot strike like safety deposit boxes and the like. More and more of life, I think, will end up being digital and stored on the cloud – so much of the material that is digital becomes proofed against loss, against burning, against flooding, against everything.

PAD 2/7/13 – Right to Health

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“Is access to medical care something that governments should provide, or is it better left to the private sector? Are their drawbacks to your choice?”

 This is the central question of socialism. What things, if any, are appropriate for society to bear versus private citizens or companies? I think that this question has several parts actually, how big is the topic being considered, does it have any ethical or moral implications, and is there any need for democratic oversight? When it comes to health care I argue that it’s a human topic, it’s vast and universal and it’s incredibly expensive. I think that  when it comes to healthcare, that society can best provide coverage more than private companies and that as a member of society I would be willing to underwrite the costs of covering every American so that none of us have to endure catastrophic loss because of a health issue. I also argue that companies are inherently amoral and unethical. Companies that are publicly traded have shareholders and the promise of good behavior is not for those receiving the healthcare but rather the welfare of the shareholders themselves. Even if a company is not publicly traded, greed still overwhelms the greater good and renders companies amoral and blind to ethics. Companies are not people, companies have no conscience, they have no compassion. They are a mindless thing, sometimes the best thing you can say is that a company that doesn’t rape, pillage, and plunder is about as moral and ethical as they can get. I think “rape pillage and plunder” is a natural expression for a company because when you add people together in masses beyond 150 members, their ability to understand the consequences of their behaviors drop precipitously to zero. It is also vital that there be some public (democratic) oversight of the entire structure and so in this last condition I think it’s best that government do the work as ultimately government can be taken to account for their activities through the judicial branch of government.

There is a sidelight to all of this, that America has a problem and that is we have celebrity career politicians. This, I believe, has to end. We have term limits for many parts of government and I think it’s vital to extend this to the legislative and judicial branches of government. I think that a congressperson should serve for a maximum of four years and then be barred from future service in that branch. They can pursue other branches if they wish, but that’s where it ends.

So that is my answer to this question. Best that healthcare be done by society and done universally. Single payer, nationalized, social.

PAD 1/15/2013 – Arguments

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“It’s never a good idea to discuss religion or politics with people you don’t really know.” Agree or disagree?

 Without a doubt this is the one piece of advice that has taken me the longest time to learn and I had to learn it all by myself, which of course is the most difficult way but what you learn is honestly yours. I used to engage in arguments with my family over religion and politics and those arguments just upset me, or irritated me, and the central thing that really got to me was that nobody was really listening. They weren’t listening to me and I wasn’t listening to them. It was easy for me to not listen to them because in both situations they were preaching from their comfort zone and since they were family I knew for years and years the extents of those arguments. Nothing they said impressed me or had value to change my mind. Either the arguments were self-referential and circular, as in the religious arguments – not discussing how things might be but rather arguing over the shape and form of scripture that was already established. I was questioning everything from the beginning and the family member I was arguing with never questioned those parts but started all their arguments from what was written down and starting from there. Honestly I think we could never actually have a good conversation on religion because I had dismissed the pretext of their entire religious argument. With politics it’s quite the same, instead of scripture it was a political playbook which was constantly being spooled against me. Thinking really wasn’t a part of the argument as it was mostly scripted shorthand being flung at me and blanket protestations that anything but the way that my family member saw the world was the correct way.

Politics, Religion, Climate – these are the toxic pillars that people really shouldn’t discuss. That’s why faith, at least in America is a very private thing and I am fine with people practicing whatever faith they have as long as they keep it out of the public space. Months ago, during the Christmas season we went to the local mall and a church group was leading a Christmas sing-a-long in the public space of the mall. The violation of that space, a public pluralistic space which suddenly was filled with singing with lyrics that included “Fall on your knees” and references to Christ abounded. I don’t have any problems if those things are sung in church or private homes or even in public spaces when I see that I am walking into that situation. What I walked into was a passionate christian sing-a-long powered by a flashmob. I started to get jumpy and uncomfortable, it was awkward and embarrassing and irritating. Politics is only slightly less upsetting in public spaces, in this vein. Working in a public institution of higher learning you have to accept that sometimes you’ll run into political or religious crazies on campus with a bullhorn trying to convert or accuse students of impure living or wrong political thinking. Even where I work the space is different, it doesn’t upset me because you sort of “expect the unexpected” in a college or university setting. Even in that space it’s more of a sideshow entertainment than a space for actual discourse. I don’t think that discourse is possible, so these topics really should be a matter of personal self-contemplation and secret ballot. You should vote secretly and you should seek out spaces where your religious pursuits match those of those around you as close as possible. Anything else invites disaster.

To other people considering this very question I would tell you that you should just skip it. Don’t engage in the battle. People aren’t really interested in modifying their positions when it comes to religion or politics so it’s best to remain silent and nudge any incoming arguments that touch on these topics to other less upsetting subjects. In many ways, much like the Golden Retriever in Disney’s “UP” movie, sometimes the best response to a political or religious argument is “Squirrel!”

PAD 2/5/13 – Call Me, Maybe, Maybe Not.

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“Describe your relationship with your phone. Is it your lifeline, a buzzing nuisance, or something in between?”

I’ve never understood why people exclaim that their mobile phone is some sort of yoke or control collar that was tied to them. You don’t have to attend to it, even if your company pays for the device. Then there are people who think of mobile phones as possible risks to their privacy. For those who are that paranoid I often get to laughing, “You really think that anything you are fretting about is a risk?” You can’t conduct business without leaving a huge paper trail behind you. Instead of fearing all of that, I say that people should revel in it, nay, wallow in it. What are you protecting?

For me my iPhone is an indispensable intellectual swiss army knife. I use it for many things, work, personal, pleasure, business, you name it. It’s my camera, the loom of my social network and the device where I play Letterpress. I am addicted to it, and I am perfectly fine with the notion of being addicted to a device. I’m addicted to alcohol so what the hell am I protecting? Some image of myself that never existed? What I can’t understand is why more people don’t see the value as I do.

My iPhone is still a phone, and that I suppose will always be true but the device has become much more than just a plain old telephone. Voice is full of noise, errors… problems. English demands so much and then the immediacy and interruptibility of vocal communications just add to the pile of unpleasantness. When you get a call it’s a moment transfixed and pinned to the ground. Someone is imposing their will upon yours, taking up your time, ignoring your flow and your tasks and imposing theirs on top as if the previous did not matter. This isn’t so much a problem with an iPhone as it is a gripe I’ve harbored for a very long time about the more general telephone technology that we all use. Telephones are a lot like walk-up service at work. Knocking on my door, ringing my phone, either of those demands that I entertain a very expensive intellectual interrupt so that I can put whatever it is that I’m working on into a wait-state so that I can switch mental contexts and engage in either a face to face conversation or a telephone conversation.

Just the presence of this technology alone is bothersome, but the language brings even more awkwardness. There is no chance to plan and consider what you are about to write, no opportunities, really, to proofread and revise before sending. The pressure of speech, body language, and freudian (jungian?) slips abound. English, and the culture that surrounds it like a cloud demands a proper greeting, a discussion with turns, and a proper closing. That’s how you are supposed to conduct yourself without seeming rude, insolent, or impertinent. All of this would be fine if it wasn’t for the fact that normal human beings are fleshy water-filled bags of error just waiting to pounce. Modern discourse doesn’t value listening so people tend to talk at each other instead of talking to each other. You can’t get a word in edgewise and because you value the other person you are talking to, you let them just trample on. This creates a self-reinforcing reward for future verbal tramplings. After a few conversations it’s not really pleasurable any longer, it’s a battle. Then there is the proper closings. You don’t want to seem cold or rude so you attempt to close the conversation with some sort of closure marker like “thank you” and sometimes these events don’t actually take and you end up sending multiple passes of closure invitations to the other side. You go from feeling bad about being curt and rude to feeling bad about appearing to be mentally defective.

I have said in the past, and I will say time and time again that text beats voice all the time. Especially for technologically-tied workers like myself. When I am at work, or engaged in any activity really, I often times find myself within a flow. It’s texting and iMessage and IM’ing and email where you can strike a new playing field. Text is planned and groomed, opening and closing control symbols are cliché and common as dirt, so they aren’t a problem, and the way these messages are propagated does not necessarily break flow. In many ways, these technologies are more polite forms of communication. “I need your attention, but it isn’t life-or-death and so, since I value your time, energy, and flow I will send a queue’able message that you may defer until you are ready to accept it.” and I have said time and time again that text communication is much more respectful and gentile than face to face communications or telephone communications.

What about family calls? Yes, this is a point at which all of my arguments fly right out the window. Nothing, not even flow is more important than your family, so for that there will always be a need for telephone technology in the world. I would argue that actually FaceTime technology, which is video-augmented telephone calls are superior to plain-old-telephone-calls because there is so much more there. You see the other person, something that usually takes airfare or a long car ride to accomplish. The level of information in a FaceTime conversation I would argue is far higher than in a basic telephone conversation – you can see body language, facial expressions, so much more than can be carried by voice alone.

At least for me, my family can FaceTime call me, or call me on the phone. Everyone else really should use some text infrastructure. The only part where any of this is flexible is who you consider family? Friends and family? I draw the line at coworkers and professional contacts. If you aren’t my friend outside of work, keep your phone calls – send me an email or a text.

PAD 2/3/13 – Writing Room

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“A genie has granted your wish to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?”

I’ve got the room, which is the library in the house I currently own. Right now this room is a makeshift guest bedroom with a library that has accumulated along the walls. There is a great design for a modular stackable bookshelf that really intrigues me and I imagine the library would feature this along the walls, improving on the current cheap particle-board bookcases that we currently use. I would also build these into the built-in closet in this room and take the doors off of it. In the center I would place an overstuffed leather chair with an ottoman for the legrests and behind it a floor lamp with multiple lights attached to a central body, much like this lamp. If the room was just a little bit larger I would also like a old-fashioned secretary desk to do writing and composition. I’ve written before about my affection for mixing up the traditional and the technological.

Truth to be told, if I got my hands on a Genie I’d likely not ask for these things, but instead relief from debt.

PAD 1/29/2013 – Looking Outside

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“Go to the nearest window. Look out for a full minute. Write about what you saw.”

I can just turn and look out my office window and the world out there looks like a freshly shaken snow globe. Everything is covered in snow and the wind is carrying snowflakes in a slow gamboling gyre. The tree just beyond my window has lost all of it’s leaves except for one dead branch that apparently can’t lose it’s leaves – perhaps they are permanently attached and just won’t fall off. Beyond that there is the start of the vine neighborhood ghetto that lines up against Austin Street. This particular street is comically steep and usually very slippery. Nobody parks out there during the winter because usually as cars try to climb the grade they tend to slide left and right bouncing into other cars and leaving some pretty breathtaking property damage. The ground is speckled with footprints of various creatures. Humans, deer, rabbits, and squirrels. The trees are loaded with snow and the pines across the way look to be strained with their ponderous load of white snow.

This is only the beginning as tonight the lake effect snow bands will shift towards us again and much of this will be covered over by the blizzard of snow to come. Visibility will be lost and all of the colors and the road and the tracks will be obliterated by the thick blanket of snow.

Cold

PAD 1/12/2013 – Inside vs. Outside

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“Run outside. Take a picture of the first thing you see. Run inside. Take a picture of the second thing you see. Write about the connection between these two random objects, people, or scenes.”

2013-01-30 10.02.022013-01-30 10.02.26

These two images are from my workaday world. On the left is the view out of my office window, as the weather is quite awful outside I chose not to just dash outside. The picture on the right is inside my office and features one of my favorite things on my desk, my very evocative Edison bulb desk lamp. It’s cold outside, the weather is just beginning to demonstrate how surprisingly variable it can be, thanks in no small part to climate change. It’s not that the world will actually warm up, although it very well might just do that very thing, I rather suspect we’ll see more variability in the weather patterns instead.

Cold and Hot, as well, perhaps even impersonal and inviting. Once you start spotting dualities they can sometimes just carry you off. It’s not that there are just a finite set of dualities either, and I’m sure including more pictures would just add to this particular sense of contrast that we see here. I don’t really find the outside to be that compelling except during the spring, or I should say the true spring and not the false springs that appear now midway through winter on accident. There is more stability and comfort in the Edison bulb. This simple and anachronistic bit of technology emits a very warm yellow glow that in the early mornings and late evenings gives my office a very subtle old-world atmosphere. I’ve written before about my affections for both the bleeding edge of technology and the anachronistic throwback technology of the deep past living contemporaneously together and I will always posit that the very old and the very new belong together and that there is wisdom in keeping things that are throwbacks around because you never know when something that has been well-tested may become all important when conditions change and the newest technology cannot cope with changing environments. The classic example i use is how an electromagnetic pulse could render all my bleeding edge technology useless but my Edison bulb and my mechanical hand-wound pocket watch will continue on. This mixing of the newest and oldest makes a lot of sense and speaks to infinite diversity in infinite combinations, something that everyone should take away from Star Trek if you are as earnest about that series as I am. That respecting diversity, even when it comes to levels of technology are vital for survival because you may not have the neat whiz-bang working all the time while the older bits of tech continue to chug along. I keep a fountain pen in my bag because I trust the classics more, as there are no moving parts to a fountain pen other than it’s ink. Older items, or items that harken back to the bygone days are also important to remind you that the world still has room for elegance and simplicity and that complexity, while dazzling isn’t the pinnacle of living.

This connection between the new and the old also is playing out in another part of my life, as I am using something very new, my Day One app,  to do something that at least speaks to the past, which is journaling. I write everything in the journal and then selectively share either on my blog or on social media, depending on the level of security and privacy that my writings require. I’ve discovered that over the past few years I’ve accidentally logged every day of my life in Twitter, at 140 characters at a time and including these bits in my Day One journal is cementing my past so that years from now I won’t have to ever wonder about what I’ve experienced and when it happened, there will be a log of it. I’ve found journaling to be a very mixed bag of motives, right now I feel like a digital squirrel bounding all over collecting and burying bits of my past in a safe place – but eventually I will browse this resource and think about what has happened to me and perhaps I’ll learn more about myself or at least remember more of what it was like to be me during that time in my life. On an expanded tangent I sometimes wish I could include journaled stories from my parents and their generation. The things they experienced and the feelings they felt, shared with the younger ones amongst us. I’m very enamored of the idea of learning this way, not from prepared texts that have been curated and vetted, but from personal experience with all its rich colors and opportunities for interpretation and even its foibles and pitfalls. Much of this resembles the StoryCorps project, where the stories of the past are recorded. This is a wonderful place to start browsing, if you are engaged with this idea, and I think the power of journaling speaks to this and maybe someday I’ll get enough bravery to publish all that I have written, maybe some of it will be useful to someone else in the future.

PAD 1/25/2013 – Write Your Own Eulogy

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The height of immodest self-flogging comes with todays rather morbid and silly prompt:

“Write your own eulogy.”

No. I won’t. My life hasn’t been written yet and even if it has, can you sum up something as incredible as a human life in words? So instead of it being long and flowery and really just so much verbal masturbation I will write this:

He was born, during his life he laughed and others laughed. He died. The End.

So you know, take your eulogy and masturbation and sit in the corner where you belong.