Category Archives: Social Constructs

Work–Life Balance: Inside RoadDave

Posted on October 18, 2011 | 3 comments

It’s funny looking back over several years of RoadDave, in that we see where we’ve been really busy with other stuff, the usual Life intruding.  Some months there is one mere post, other months, seventeen thoughtful screeds of depth and logic.  The backstory is interesting, at least for me and hopefully for you.

Back in the 20th century, there was no such thing as blogging.  But there were personal websites that you could update as frequently as you wanted.  That was the original genesis of RoadDave.  I worked for a company out of the US that saw me on the road for weeks at a time, doing IT training for a very large company out of Redmond, WA that was owned by that Bill guy. 

We used to travel with 50 laptops in touring cases, as excess baggage in the pre-9-11 days.  We’d fly into a city, set up the night before, do two intense 10 hour days of hands-on training, then pack up, fly out to another city and do it all again.  My personal record was 14 weeks on the road, living out of a suitcase, on Room Service and hotel laundries who never understood “No Starch In Underwear – Starch Shirts Only”  Recreation consisted of falling asleep with the television on, while re-writing lab notes, or improving the demos as part of the training.

Being away that much meant I couldn’t keep up with what friends and family were up to.  Birthdays, anniversaries, deaths, births and the rest of the minutiae of life were missing, as I was in Joplin, King of Prussia, or Phoenix, heading to Charlotte, then St. Louis and on to Salt Lake City after a stop in Downer’s Grove.  So, I created the original RoadDave to post photos and musings for my friends to read and observe.  At its simplest, the original RoadDave was a frequently updated personal website.  After a few years, RoadDave was eventually moved to WordPress, as Microsoft got out of the personal web space business and gave us legit blogging tools.  I stopped the insane travelling in 2009 when I moved back to Ottawa and home. 

I’ve been asked by some readers “How do you come up with that shit all the time?”.  I’ll answer in a roundabout way.  I started writing professionally back in the late 70’s in broadcast radio as on-air talent, in news reporting and commercials.  Both forms of writing are as punishingly strict as writing haiku.  Reporting consists of saying “Lord Jones Dead” to those who never knew Lord Jones was alive.  A radio commercial has to fit 30 seconds, not 29 and not 31 seconds as spoken words, music, sound effects and feelings regarding the product.     

You find out if you persuaded someone to buy or try whatever the advertiser was flogging within a day or two.  When the client calls you up and says that commercial you slaved over every word, comma and pause  “didn’t sell shit, you asshole.  What the hell are you messing around with.  I gotta sell some slacks!  Do it right, fakakta Mister Writer, you putz!” you learn very quickly how to write effective copy.  You also get any delusions of ego or grandeur regarding your prose beaten out of you with a length of rubber hose across the soles of your feet in the elbows-up world of retail radio. 

Compared to writing commercials, reporting was easier, as long as you didn’t stray from Who, What, When, Where, Why and How and committed the Canadian Press Style Guide to memory.  Elements Of Style by Strunk and White was a constant companion.  So was The Law and the Press in Canada by Wilf Kesterton.  With that kind of training in radio, then television, then marketing, then speechwriting, tossing words around became very easy in a recreational setting like a blog. 

As to where I get ideas from?  I read the newspaper, watch the news and generally keep up to date on current events.  The amount of utter madness that comes out of that interweb thingy is remarkable and eminently usable to twist to my needs. 

This implies I have an agenda, which I do and will now share:  Common Sense and the application of same, while laughing at just how silly us humans really are.

If you notice, most of RoadDave can be read out loud by the human voice:  That’s how I write, by ear.  No, not with my ears, as I never learned to touch type with my ears, but by ear, as in spoken out loud and heard.  Ear typing means too many typos and too much editing after the fact, as well as that annoying waxy build-up on the keyboard.  Fingers really do work better than ears for typing as there are at least six more fingers than ears on most humans, unless they have had trouble with power tools and hand-eye coordination issues followed by a hospital visit.

As for anguishing over every last word, comma and carriage return, slaving away in a dusty garret, agonizing over every nuance of my timeless utterances?  Oh hell no, we don’t roll that way. 

Most of it is first-draft, edit-on-the-fly then proofread if something gets underlined in red, or the piece isn’t working.  Also, I tend to bury my lede, (Go look up what a lede is, if you don’t know) so after I write a ‘graph or three I go back.  That means a typical RoadDave might take all of an hour to write.  Some just jump off the fingertips, done and dusted in ten minutes, while others take longer.  This one took about average, forty minutes or so.

And the real reason for removing the cloak from RoadDave, violating the first rule of Theatre:  Never Let Them See The Machinery?

According to WordPress, this is the 601st posting to RoadDave.  I figured some kind of small milestone like that is worthy of recognition in the usual backhand way by explaining some of the backstory and showing you the mechanism that goes into it.

Thank you for listening.  We now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

3 Comments

Posted in Computers and Internet, Hobbies, Social Constructs

Occupy For A New Idea

Posted on October 16, 2011 | 1 comment

(Ed. Note:  Sorry we haven’t written earlier, sometimes work intrudes on the spare time.  We’ll be better about that whole work-life balance thing.)

Around the world, various cities have seen the rising up of a new type of protest:  The Occupy Protest.  Generally peaceful, the Occupy movement is, as best we can tell, a loosely knit grouping of various groups with an aim of raising some ruckus regarding financial inequality globally.  Since these are loosely knit groups, there tends to be side protests regarding globalization, environmental issues, human rights, political restructuring, hockey violence, peanut allergies, democratization of Syria and the repeal of Daylight Savings Time.

This isn’t to say that the wider objectives are not sensible.  The rich are getting richer while the poor and middle-class are heading over the cliff to be dashed on the rocks below.  That is a given, in that we’re building a societal iceberg:  If you’re rich enough, economic woes don’t affect you much.  The rest of us can lose our incomes on the capricious whim of some investment arbitrageur in Belgium that decides our pensions are too expensive for the company, or that our national currency is overvalued. 

We’ve written before about the global economic system.  It’s pooched.  The whole investment industry is built on insider trading, which is technically illegal, but goes on every hour of the market day.  Simple proof?  What is a “whispered” number?  It is a stock analyst and/or corporate chieftain’s informal assessment of how well or how poorly a company will do this quarter, released before the actual legal reporting.  If a stock makes its whispered number (or street number or cred number), then the analyst looks like he or she has the inside track, or the CEO has already seen the books and wants to pump the stock price.

Research In Motion, the Blackberry folks, took a beating over the past week. Their email and messaging system took a Cleveland steamer because someone didn’t test a patch applied to their servers, which made the system puke, worldwide, for three days. What happened to their stock price? 

According to the capitalist theory, if a company does something dumb, their share price should go down to reflect their dumbness. In reality, what happens is that bottom feeder brokers see a company in trouble, (Their products suck today) they buy up a lot of shares in the hopes that when RIM fixes their little problem, the share price would jump a few bucks on good news and the ambulance chasers would make some money.

Simultaneously other folks look at RIM, see a network outage, figure the entire company is teetering on the verge of cratering and sell everything they’ve got in RIM to the ambulance chasers.

That causes “action” in the stock, while another subset of buyers come in to buy any busy stock, the thought being someone knows something, (why else would there be so much action?) and if they have a position in an active company, they might make some money either buying or selling. Then the folks who bet against any trend step in and sell off or buy up.  More action, more speculation on nothing more than graphs and a network outage.

To close the circle, RIM was trading around $22 a share before their network freckled the bowl. They’re now trading at $24 (and were at nearly $26 during the outage) give or take, meaning they were rewarded for being stupid. A complete abnegation of the theory, almost all attributable to stock churn for no good reason other than a perception that on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of last week, RIM sucked.

Essentially, the whole system is based on rumours, insider knowledge and speculation on speculation, with a fine mist of hedging sprayed on top.  The whole game isn’t set up to invest in businesses and countries:  It’s set up to churn stocks, trading as much as possible, as many times as possible, on the slightest tick of valuation change.  The only folks who make money on this kind of millisecond madness are the stock brokers.  They always get their commission, good news, bad news, rumours, fear-mongering, hemlines, or sun spots.  Funny that…

In the ancient days of a dozen years ago, one bought stocks because one wanted to invest in a company for the long term, knowing that over the expected ups and downs, the business you were investing in would improve, making you money.  Timelines were measured in months and years.  Buying HP, GM or GE meant that you had some reasonable assurance that over the long term you would make some reasonable coin and could retire in relative comfort.

Now, trading is almost fully algorithmically derived, automated and based on millisecond clock ticks.  This is not some pit man signalling he wants to buy 1000 futures on Frozen Concentrated Orange Juice (FCOJ) and another pit man taking the order.  Trading has become well-written sets of computerized trading rules that the Big Boys use to simultaneously buy, hedge and sell their holdings several times a second.      

We have a simple suggestion to reform a lot of the investment industry.  A 24-hour hold on any transaction:  You can’t buy or sell any instrument more than once in any given 24 hour span. 

This puts an instantaneous end to churning stocks by the millisecond, causing prices to wobble erratically.  A company can know, at least for 24 hours, what they’re worth in the opinion of ‘the stock market’ and plan accordingly. 

A second benefit of the 24-hour rule would be that stock brokers would have to actually have knowledge and business acumen making recommendations on tangible facts of a substantive nature.  They can’t churn their bouncing dead cats on whispers and rumours.

As for the Occupy folks?  Agreed, the system is rigged.  Now, put on your thinking toques and come up with an alternative to capitalism that works for the majority of humankind. 

Just remember that in Capitalism, Man exploits Man.  In Socialism, the Reverse is True.                  

      

   

1 Comment

Posted in News and politics, Organizations, Social Constructs

Ten Years After–Don’t Ask

Posted on September 11, 2011 | 1 comment

We’ve written about 9/11 before, recalling where we were when everything changed.  Marking the tenth anniversary it is important to see if we’re any better off than we were that morning in 2001.

According to some reasonable estimates, the US has spent somewhere around $1 Trillion dollars on Homeland Security since 9/11.  Canada has spent around $92 Billion.  The difficulty with the whole subject is four-fold. 

First, how dare one even question the wisdom of Homeland Security spending?  What kind of unpatriotic, vile, Osama FanBoy, bearded degenerate would even consider asking the question of what the government has spent to protect us? 

Second, it’s all classified Secret, so you can’t be told, as you are not trustworthy enough to know what we’ve spent a trillion dollars on, for fear you will immediately tell Osama’s fourth cousin Maurice about our defenses. You want another 9/11?  There’s plenty of room at GitMo.

Third, is the nature of terrorism.  Terrorists only have to succeed once in a million attempts.  Defenders have to succeed 100% of the time, every day, in every situation, in all circumstances against any and all attempts by mainstream enemy, fringe groups and lunatic loners determined to get their fifteen minutes of fame.

Fourth, there is a very strong emotional loading regarding 9/11 in North America that we can’t shake.  Ireland, the UK, Greece, Germany, France and Spain have had their share of violence, going as far back as the 1900’s with the ‘troubles’ in Ireland, up through Basque separatism, Communists uprisings and so forth.  A goodly piece of the architecture of Europe is no older than 1945, the originals having been erased in the Second World War. 

We’re not saying Europe is used to it, but North Americans most certainly are not used to terror strikes, which is why 9/11 left such a big dent in our collective psyches.  The last big wallop we took was the American Civil War, which ended in 1865.  The other hits we’ve taken, like the FLQ Crisis, or Pearl Harbor were smaller and regional in nature.

Tuning out the emotional component as best we can and ignoring the knee-jerk patriotism argument as intellectually vacuous, we come back to what we’ve done to make things safer and have we succeeded?

The CBC’s Adrienne Arsenault, along with Dana Priest of the Washington Post have spent significant time and effort to get a handle on what we’ve spent and the results are not encouraging.

A couple of factoids should suffice if you don’t want to follow the links: 

Liberty Crossing, the new home of Homeland Security in McLean, VA, is bigger than the Pentagon in size.  You can’t go there.  The whole project is Secret and secured.  Don’t ask.

There are some 850,000 people with Top Secret clearance in the US.  That would be more than the entire population of Washington, D.C., most involved in analyzing security data.  Again, don’t ask.

The Shoe Bomber, the Underwear Bomber and the Times Square bomber were not caught by the security apparatus put in place to protect us:  They were stopped by regular citizens who happened to have their wits about them.  There may have been other incidents that we don’t know about.  Again, don’t ask.

The 7/7/7 attacks and the Madrid attacks were not stopped, despite the expansive, extensive and expensive security infrastructure in place to detect and interdict them.  Again, don’t ask.

So far, the score isn’t very good.  Most of it is covered by the Homeland Security blanket:  Don’t Ask.

We can mark the passing of the anniversary of 9/11 with the solemnity is deserves, honouring those who fell and those who tried so hard to save them.  But we still have to ask:

Is it worth it?

1 Comment

Posted in News and politics, Social Constructs

Jack and Irene

Posted on August 30, 2011 | 3 comments

We’re behind in our work so we’re going what is called in the printing business, two-up.  The first is Jack.

Jack Layton that would be.  Jack lead the New Democratic Party, the Official Opposition after our Federal election of a couple of months ago when we gave the Conservatives the keys to the joint.  Jack passed away Monday after a short battle with cancer.  He’d had prostate cancer before, but this was a new one and he didn’t survive.  Those who saw his last press conference when he stepped aside temporarily, surmised that things did not look good. 

His legacy, aside from getting the NDP into Official Opposition, is his final letter to Canadians.  If you want to read the whole thing, this link leads to the whole text, but we’re going to excerpt the last ‘graph as it perhaps the most telling.

My friends, love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. And we’ll change the world.

All my very best,

Jack Layton

(Translation for Americans:  Jack Layton’s role would be sort-of like John Boehner down your way.  The NDP has been Canada’s Third Party for decades and is an honest-to-God Socialist party.  Yes, we can vote for a Socialist party and have put them in power several times in our various provinces.  No, they’re not full-tilt nationalize the toilet paper industry next Tuesday and you must drive a Volvo while wearing Birkenstock sandals kind of socialists.  More left than the left side of the Democrats, but still have a sense of pragmatic policy.  Social Democrat is the closest political term you can use, like Germany’s Social Democratic Party.)

Irene, or to use her proper name, Hurricane Irene, was our other story of the last while.  The various media outlets dusted off all the old bumper, interstitial and theme music from Hurricane Katrina to play Irene as the Storm of The Century, battering the East Coast to a Certain Death. 

Which brings us back to Jack too.  He did deserve and get a full state funeral last Saturday.  Both Canadian networks went wall to wall as well, but what was more telling was the comments of Persons In The Street who were interviewed after his passing.  One would have thought that not only had Jesus returned and died again, but he was joined by the Pope, Richard Gere and Celine Dion in the tragedy. 

The last high water mark for mawkish, media-manipulated, inappropriate, insincere mourning was Michael Jackson.  The reaction to Jack Layton’s passing came almost too close to that mark. 

Which is where the question resides today:  Are we getting the media we need, covering things that are actually important in our lives and informing us, or are we getting a media that sees an easy to cover fixed-length story with dramatic pictures as the only news story of note?  Not only do the media tell us it is important but they tell us how to react to the story and if we don’t react appropriately for the media, then we don’t exist. 

Jack Layton’s passing was sad for his family and for Canadian politics.  He did some very remarkable things with the NDP in federal politics as well as his long career in Toronto city politics, but it wasn’t the passing of Gandhi, or Churchill.  Judging by most of the streeters, I doubt a third of them would have ever voted NDP, even at gunpoint, but there were tears-a-plenty from people who wouldn’t know Jack Layton and his politics from a bag of brown rice. 

The same exaggeration held true for Hurricane Irene coverage.  Perhaps FEMA and the other emergency management organizations over-reacted a bit and I can live with that.  It is safer to err on the side of caution with mandatory evacuations, instead of trying inform the next of kin of several thousand unidentified victims who have washed up on shore in Long Island Sound.       

At one point, I swear I saw Anderson Cooper in full wet-weather gear, interviewing a stranger near a fallen tree branch the diameter of my thumb, during what could charitably called light drizzle.  Throw to John King in what is at most a strong wind with rain.  Oooh, the End of Days, as there is Sand On The Boardwalk in Atlantic City. 

Yes, it was a nasty storm in a few places and the clean up will take a while, but it was not, nor would it ever be, the Apocalypse as made out by the media.

Which speaks back to the media and our milliseconds of attention span:  Today’s Top Story?  2011 MTV Video Music Awards from last night with Lady GaGa doing reasonable drag as Joe Calderone.  Beyonce is pregnant.  Oh and clean up on the Vermont aisle of the American supermarket, as half the state has washed away in runoff from Irene.  Over to you Chad!

3 Comments

Posted in Social Constructs

We’re Just Askin’

Posted on August 14, 2011 | 1 comment

The question “why” is a double-edged sword that can lead the wielder of the weapon into madness.  Small children sometimes become enamored of “why’ as a way to stave off bedtime, starting with the basic “Why is the sky blue?” and devolving rapidly into assessments of grammar, science and sociology that the harried parent is unable to satisfactorily answer.

As a grownup, at least on paper, “why” has always been a personal means to an end.  So much contemporary life is utter foolishness imposed upon us by well-meaning, but moronic, process-monkeys who haven’t had an original thought since 1974.  Asking “why” and getting the moron in charge to admit he or she has no earthy idea why, usually results in no tangible changes, but at least you both know and acknowledge that the system is irredeemably pooched.

To wit:

If you’re economically oppressed and marginalized by your society, why would you trash your own economically oppressed and marginalized neighbourhood?  Wouldn’t it make more sense to go to the rich part of town to trash their stores, homes and cars?  They’re the ones purportedly screwing you over, so taking revenge on the wealthy would only seem to make sense.  Besides, the rich have nicer stuff than your next door neighbour, who is just as economically oppressed and societally marginalized as you are.  London rioters, are you listening?

Deserts are by definition, lacking in water with a concomitant lack of arable land to support the production of food or support of any form of animal husbandry.  Why do people insist on living there and why do we in the Western world seem all astonished that there is a drought that is killing hundred of fellow humans every day?  Perhaps all the well-meaning charitable donations should be going to a very large school to teach humans to not live in deserts.  This would include Los Angeles, Phoenix, Las Vegas, a goodly piece of Texas, most of New Mexico and enough of Africa to make your eyes hurt.

If the rest of the market is offering 1% return on investment and some guy in a suit is promising you 12%, why do you think the guy in the suit knows more about things than five thousand other experts?  He’s either lying or selling heroin to kindergarten children.  Either scenario mean you are never going to see your money again, so don’t write the cheque in the first place.    If you have, take your lumps for being a dumb-ass and shut the hell up.  This would include those who decry the AAA ratings fall for the US and blame it on everyone except their own mindless greed.  It would seem that nobody on Wall Street is losing their job over it.  You can’t spend more money than you have and that applies to people, businesses and countries. 

When someone runs their shopping cart into your ankle, why do we apologize for being in their way?  They’re the ones being inattentive, boorish and stupid, while we’re hopping on one leg, trying to staunch the flow of arterial blood.  Perhaps they should be the ones apologizing for their own idiocy and we should be gracious enough to not call them the names we hear in our head.

Some would say I have a pleasant if lupine smile.  Why can I not smile during a passport or driver’s license photo?  I don’t normally look like I’ve just had someone forcefully insert an unlubricated 8-inch catadioptric telescope up my rear orifice, but that is the resulting photo.  However, with a little clever timing, one can game the transit pass photo process with a picture that actually resembles the bearer.

Our food is an endless series of questions.  How is a country half-way around the world able to grow, produce, pack, ship and distribute a simple allium, namely garlic, for less than half the price than a farm twelve kilometers away from my kitchen can produce it for?  They’re either growing it on a toxic waste dump, using prison camp labour, or a combination of all of the above, with mammoth government subsidies.  What possible political benefit can we possibly reap from putting our farmers out of work, aside from having to build more jails for their kids who will have no job prospects?  Why are we letting this stuff into our country?

Chocolately Coating.  At one time a chocolate bar contained chocolate.  Today, it is no longer a chocolate bar, it is ‘candy’ which means it can contain anything the manufacturer chooses.  If that means a combination of ski wax, Vaseline and corn husks, wrapped in Mylar, then that’s what we get.  The film of chocolately coating on a Crispy Crunch means you have to rinse your mouth with acetone to get rid of the taste.  Why do we let them get away with it, when we have the ability to exact fiscal revenge on the manufacturer by not buying their product?  If you can’t pronounce the first five ingredients of any packaged food and that includes chocolate bars, you are ill-advised to put your hard-earned money down on the counter, regardless of age.

As you can see, “why” is very powerful.  Remember to ask it. 

 

 

       

1 Comment

Posted in Food and drink, Language Police, Social Constructs

Common-Sense No-Show

Posted on July 24, 2011 | 1 comment

Three events this week have expressed the complete disappearance of common-sense on our planet.  Submitted for your approval: Amy Winehouse, the US Debt Ceiling and Norwegian Terrorism.  Why not start with Winehouse?

It follows the usual pattern, international success at 22, lionized by the media as a slightly off-kilter darling with the beehive and tats.  Stir in a couple of public meltdowns, a unique marriage, professional-grade substance abuse, the rehab revolving door and likely a circle of sycophantic cling-ons who do nothing but blow rainbows up their butts.  You have a Betty Crocker Approved recipe for an early death. 

The media must help society kill the popular.  If we can’t kill them, then at least we must gnaw their leg bones with examples of Lindsay Lohan, Brittney Spears, or as far back as Marilyn Monroe serving as sound examples.  We eat our young.

The US Debt Ceiling Debate is simple enough:  The US has run out of money and must either a) cut back on what they’re spending it on, b) raise taxes or c) a wise combination of both. 

There is a choice d)  Declare bankruptcy and throw the entire economy of the planet into the toilet from which it will not recover for at least a generation.  Where common sense is missing is the knee-jerk reaction of the various parties involved.  The Republican-Tea Party morons are adamant that taxes must not be raised especially for big corporations and the fabulously wealthy. 

This is nothing more than the last vestiges of Regan-era trickle down voodoo economics.  It didn’t work in 1976; it didn’t work in 2001; it doesn’t work now and it won’t work in the future.  Would the US please grow up and recognize that you can’t run an economy on the basis of a sound bite?  You can only spend as much money as you have and if you don’t have enough money, you have to cut back somewhere, or get more money by raising taxes.  General Electric earned $5 billion in profit last year and paid no taxes.  Why not try simplifying the corporate tax code and canning about 98% of the tax credit dodges set up by previous administrations of both political stripes to reward their buddies? 

What you have developed is a form of corporate welfare socialism that wraps itself in a free-market capitalist cloak when someone looks too closely.  We can only quote Eisenhower so many times:  Watch the Military-Industrial Complex.  Those guys don’t so much as set their alarm clock unless the government is paying for it in some manner. 

If the sole reason large corporations have for doing anything or being in the US is the tax breaks, then you don’t have an economy. If the US economy is as wonderful as the press release says it is, then they’ll stick around and pay their fair share of the bill while making damn good profits from doing things well.  That would be how an actual economy works.

The Norwegian bombing is very much a story in transition.  Close to 100 killed in two incidents, one a bomb let off in the government area of downtown Oslo, followed by an execution spree at a youth campsite.   

We can hear the NRA doing a logic backflip now decrying Norwegian gun laws as unable to protect the citizens who should have been armed and would have ended the killing spree by massed fire.  Except the shooter was disguised as a police officer. 

The Fox News commentators are disappointed:  The story isn’t about towel-headed bearded terrorists with bombs sewn in their bellies, detonating for Allah.  The perpetrator is homegrown Norwegian loon with a Timmy McVeigh complex.  He allowed himself to be taken alive, one would assume so he can read his manifesto at his trial.

So what happened to our common-sense gene?  Has it gone recessive and like the little toe, will soon be nothing more than a nubbin on the side of our pituitary gland?

We can lay a percentage at our media, who pander to nothing more than our basest, most vindictive instincts.  We love to see the famous and fabulous brought down several dozen pegs at a time, like reading the News Of The World, TMZ.com or the Huffington Post.  At the same time, we’re the ones who insist on there being an entire cultural subset of hollow celebrity presented for our amusement and entertainment.  We are confronted by a fire-hose of minutiae about hundreds of thousands of events, screaming for our attention, demanding their fifteen minutes of importance.

Back in the Golden Era of Hollywood, the publicists did the same thing, building profile for budding stars, grooming the images of the anointed, piling up little mints of image.  Their timelines were measured in months, each week a new photo set coming out, to add another particle to the image of Deanna Durbin being the girl-next- door, or Roy Rogers as the singing cowboy with his loyal horse Trigger.

Today, our timelines are measured in trending-now minutes from Twitter as the measure of success.  We don’t see beyond the next hour, looking for the next data fix masquerading as news.  It isn’t much different from fans writing in for an autographed picture of Cary Grant, except the time scale is compressed. 

That might be where we’re losing our common-sense.  We don’t reflect, taking actual minutes to think about what we’re hearing and seeing.  To close the circle, Amy Winehouse is tragic and predictable.  The US Debt Ceiling Debate could be fixed if someone grew a set and told the business elite to either bucks up, or get out.  The Norwegian terror killings have nothing to do with Islam and everything to do with a hyper-politicized loon.

1 Comment

Posted in News and politics, Social Constructs

Pity the Thumbstruck

Posted on July 16, 2011 | 2 comments

We must be devolving at a rapid rate, as we have come to dislike the smartphone with a certain intensity that is nearing that cross-the-line moment of slapping the phones out of the hands of strangers.  Having owned a cellphone in various guises since the coal-fired days of a Motorola clamshell, we’re not technological Luddites.  We get the connected, agile workforce meme and understand why it is important to a boss.  It’s a load of manure, but we get it.

Certainly, realtors, doctors, on-call technologists and several dozen other professions need that always-connected technology to respond to situations.  No question and no issue either.  What we don’t get is the head-down, but still moving lopsided gait of the Thumbstruck. 

You’ve seen them walking purposefully along the sidewalk, then suddenly, as if someone had thrown a switch, their head ducks, their walking skills deteriorate to that of a toddler with a full diaper ambling from side to side at best, or totally paralyzed.  You keep waiting for them to fall over, face-plant into a light pole or stagger into the side of a bus.

Downtown street corners are notorious for the Thumbstruck.  Well-dressed, prosperous, allegedly intelligent business people suddenly gone rigid, except for the fingers and thumbs, incapable of locomotion and completely unable to get out of the way.  They stand like momentary Polynesian sentinels, fixated on their thumbs, impervious to their surroundings and the pigeon crapping on their shoulder.    

Grocery stores are terrible places to see the Thumbstruck.  Mother, Father, two yard apes in full sugar binge scream, a cart full of processed food and she comes to a dead halt in mid-aisle, intently pecking away in a Grand-mal Thumbstruck seizure that rends her incapable of movement.  Father stares off into middle distance, distracted by the shiny bags of Cheezie Poofs, oblivious to the savage fruit of his loins who are attempting to stab each other with the sharp corner of a tetra pack of juice and a set of grilling tongs. 

A full minute later, Mom comes out of her seizure and shares the earth-shattering issue.  Was it a sudden need of the launch codes by NATO?  Was her input vital to the stock market and the spot price of copper?  Did Obama need her immediate feedback on how to avoid the debt ceiling crisis?  Father blinks once, twice and then one last time, surfacing from his Cheezie Poofs reverie, his attention leaning towards the current environment, still oblivious to the children engaged in gladiatorial combat.

No.  “Cathie wants me to pick up some raisin bread for her for next week but not the Sun Maid brand, just the generic store kind as she’s making her French Toast and she’ll leave the money on the back deck under the gnome.” 

Father blinks twice more in comprehension, his head nodding in that peculiar husband-mode known as “I am not listening to you, dear” as Mom returns to her Thumbstruck seizure, while attempting to push the cart at the same time, bumping forward into the display of previously frozen crab legs, blocking the entire width of the aisle for another minute.  It would seem that the Thumbstruck lose all visual acuity and problem-solving abilities when in mid-episode, as Mom could not comprehend how to back up a shopping cart. 

Father wisely returned to Cheezie Poofs land, having seen something shiny reflect off the Mylar packaging and was again incapable of movement, standing directly behind Mom, the cart full of groceries and howling children who were now engaged in attempted mutual self-trepanation using cans of cat food as medical instruments.

Her seizure concluded and the smartphone merely clutched desperately in her hand, Mom suddenly recognizes she is in a grocery store, with a cart stuck against a freezer and two familiar looking children trying to open each others’ thoracic cavities with frozen perogies.  

Is she contrite, or even vaguely embarrassed?  Of course not.  In fact, she looks angry that the other shoppers have delayed her for the last five minutes.  How dare they!

The Thumbstruck.  Incapable of movement.  Incapable of conscious thought.  Incapable of anything except the ability to move their thumbs.  Filled with the fat sense of entitlement that they’re cutting edge communications-critical, they’ve become the sidewalk and store bollards to which Stupidity binds its lines to our society.

Pity the Thumbstruck.

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Posted in Social Constructs

Two Gone

Posted on July 9, 2011 | 1 comment

Two milestones have passed in the last week that cause us to look back a bit and see where we’ve come from. 

The first passing was the terse note from James Murdoch, son of Rupert Murdoch, owner of News Corporation that News Of The World would cease publication on Sunday, forever.  It would seem that NOTW’s fascination with hacking into the voicemail of victims, families and celebs along with some serious corruption charges are going to stop the presses for good.  To say that News Of The World was the singularly most tawdry UK Sunday paper in existence would be perfectly accurate and perhaps even a moderate understatement.  However, the line was crossed when it was revealed NOTW was involved in hacking into the voicemail of murdered British teen Milly Dowler to see what kind of dirt could be dug up.  Even the families of British soldiers killed in action have had their mobile phones hacked, purportedly to garner headlines like “Dead Vet’s Nanny Buys Undies Online From Same Store As Posh Spice”  

Being in the same store where NOTW is on sale makes you feel like you need a half-hour shower afterwards.  Not even the National Enquirer  makes you feel that soiled and News Corporation has done the right thing by closing the paper for good.

The Space Shuttle on the other hand was almost always a feel-good story, with a couple of notable exceptions.  Designed in the early 70’s, the Shuttle was the reusable delivery van of the new frontier of space exploration.  The last flight is under way with Atlantis dropping off a years’ worth of groceries at the International Space Station as STS-135.  Of course the Shuttle has been overhauled and updated a few times in the past thirty four years.  Now NASA is going to have to bum rides with the Russians to get to the ISS.  There is no replacement for the Shuttle, except some pretty drawings and PowerPoint presentations that would make a stone statue yawn.  

Perhaps that is the sadder passing of the two.  The end of the Shuttle and no obvious inheritor means we’ve given up.  The various surviving Shuttles will become gate queens stuck on pylons until they rot away. 

In thirty years expect a two line story on your smartphone implant that some old geezers are trying to raise a few million Yuan to restore the rusted out remains of the last surviving Shuttle from a defunct outdoor water park in Toledo, Ohio.  The geezers want to remind us of the days when humans did really cool, heroic things.  Back when we could tackle any problem and solve it with a combination of education, determination and genuine effort. 

Back when we were Good.  Damn Good.

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Posted in News and politics, Social Constructs

Followin Up the Hockey

Posted on June 19, 2011 | 2 comments

Dave says I can follow’er up, as he’s paintin the trim right now.  Which I don’t quite understand so it ain’t the kind of trim I know.  He’s just MiSterMessagered Me and said, Baseboards you stupid fook, so’s I guess it’s all OK.  Dave says Hi and he’s workin hard.

Them clowns what were rioting in Vancouver were sure in for a big surprise weren’t they when they busted out the windows of London Drugs.  During the hockey riots some snotwipes figgered it’d be fine to put the mitts on some DVD players and TV’s whilst their buddies were burnin the cop cars.  ‘Cept nobody told’em there was something like forty close-circuit cameras watchin their every move, from tossin the bricks to running out the door with an armload of consumer electronics. 

The Premier of BC was on The National pointing at some faces of them arseholes on video saying “Who’s dat guys boss?  What’s that guys Mom gonna say?  Where’s that shitheel work?  We’re sendin the cops after their arses and we’re gonna give them three hots and a cot in the Crowbar Hotel for a goodly long time”  I’m whatcha call paraphrasing her words.

Seems the Socializer Media joints like Sit On My Facebook and Twatter have all these sites up, some from private citizens, some from the cops and some from the media, playing back the video and asking the musical question:  Who The Fook Is This Moron?  Let Us Know.  Click Here To Fry His Arse.

To that I’m sayin Giv’er Lads and Ladies of the Law!  There’s gettin into some roughouse and then there be whats called Crossing The Line. 

At the same time, at The Bay Le Baie in downtown Van, where they busted out a block of windows, the plywoods up to cover the holes.  Seems that on Friday a lot of normal folks, as in more than a couple hundred, came down and wrote on the ply that they was sorry that some of their fellow citizens were arseholes.  Over at a cop car, they just covered her with PostyNotes sayin the same thing:  Sorry Lads, we do like you, some of us got Alpo when they was in the brains lineup in Heaven afore they was born.

To which I’m also sayin Good On Yer Vancouver.  I’s been there a couple of three times and she’s a fine city with decent folks.  Sometimes it’s hard to find a place where the coffee’s less than 14 dollars a cup, but the folks whats there are fine folks, even them what hasn’t been there that long.  They’ll help you out anytime youd like. 

Likes the time I was in Van lookin for a good curry but I didn’t want to spend half the cheque on it, so’s I asked around and they sent me to a joint that looked like some family’s kitchen with a cash register and a Coke cooler.  Ten bucks later, I’m into a Lamb Madras, salads and pappadums and shit, with a big ass Mango drink named after the dog called a Lassie.  Thought I’d died and gone to New Delhi, it was so good.  Nobody spoke a word of English and I don’t speak Indian, but we had a time of it with a big bunch of smiles all around. 

That’s what you call proper Vancouver hospitality.  We don’t give a shit where you’re from, or where you’re goin, but you’re welcome here, right now. 

Which if you think about it for another moment is sort of what Canada is like.  Did I just get all philosophical there?  <From Dave:  Yes Mason, you did.>

I se suppose that’s what I really mean.  If all you saw of Canada was those jagoffs riotin in Vancouver, you’d have a pisspoor impression of Vancouver and of Canada.  We’re not like that. 

I’d challenge anybody, black, white, green, red, brown, blue or purple to go to any city, town, village or unincorporated rural municipality five miles back of nowhere in Canada and walk up to a complete stranger.  Ask’em for directions to a Timmy’s or the nearest gas station and odds are they’d walk with you to show you the way.  Down East they’d probably have you to the house for dinner later while up the line, they’d see if you’d want a pint too.  Even in hotshot Toronto, they’d at least give you the time of day.

It’s Canada lad, we’ve got time and we’ll give you a hand.

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Posted in Guest Commentator, News and politics, Social Constructs

Judgment Day Rescheduled or just a Rain Delay?

Posted on May 24, 2011 | Leave a comment

Known to his parishioners as Pastor Harold, but to the rest of us as “that nitwit” Harold Camping said that his prophesy of the coming of the end of the world was off a bit.  Now, according to Pastor Camping, Judgment Day is on tap for October 21, 2011.  Camping heads up something called Family Radio International, which raised and spent millions advising the rest of us to get our stuff together in anticipation of the end of the world.  It would seem that more than a few of the followers decided that selling all their worldly possessions in anticipation of The Rapture would be appropriate, the thinking being “why do I need a house and a big screen TV when Heaven has all that stuff, and more?”

We don’t knock people who have deeply held beliefs of a religious nature as having at least some kind of faith is a good thing in the grand scheme of things.  Having respect for others deeply held beliefs also goes a long way to creating a little civility on our planet, so we’re not going burn Harold Camping and Family Radio for being complete asshats.

What we are going to burn them for is their 2009 IRS filing.  According to the Associated Press story, the non-profit Family Radio International received $18.3 million in donations and had assets of $104 million, including $34 million in stock and other publicly traded investments. 

Now that doesn’t stack up worth a poot to the folks in the Big Show, the Major League God Brands, whose assets are easily in the billions, but FRI is doing all right.  Which is where we can be piqued.

Having read the entire Bible, both Old and New Testament, we don’t claim scholarship by a long shot, but we do have a reasonable comprehension of the documents and the overreaching concepts behind the King James’ version of the stories.  Notice we didn’t say the King Jimmy is the definitive version, but it at least is one of the more mainstream ones.  (Incidentally, we have also read the Torah, the Bhagavad-Gita, a fair amount of the Koran and a lot of the Analects of Confucius)

One of the overreaching concepts is the Church is to minister to the poor, to help feed them, clothe them and generally help them up, to become contributing members of society, so they in turn can help those less fortunate.  Ministering to the sick is another great concept, looking after the frail, the infirm and the unwell, to give comfort and healing.  No argument here.  Providing ministry to increase the understanding of the word of the Bible, we can go along with too.  Nothing wrong with trying to increase brand awareness and asking for money to help with the other two tasks, so far, we’re in agreement.

Where we part is the politicizing of certain passages to act as justification for or against specific actions.  With enough Biblical scholarship one can find a quote that supports or proscribes damn near anything depending on how you interpret the passage. 

There’s the hook; how you interpret the passage.  If one is intellectually honest, interpretation is wrong, as it is changing what God meant, based on the particular lens the reader is wearing at any particular time.  That kind of intellectual vacuity leads to the Inquisition throwing people in a lake tied to huge boulders.  If they floated they were witches:  If they drowned they weren’t witches.  They were dead, but at least they weren’t witches.

Which brings us back to Harold Camping and the prediction of the End of Days.  Unless Harold has a direct dial line to God and God himself started the conversation with:  “Harold, I’m pissed…”, then Harold Camping and Family Radio International are guilty of the intellectual sin of interpreting what God has to say, according to their own peculiar lens.  We note that Harold Camping has never claimed he has a glowing red God-Phone on the kitchen wall, so his predictions can be safely ignored and his followers might consider turning in their secret Bible decoder ring that they bought for their fellowship gift of $100 plus shipping and handling. 

Now the question becomes, what does one do between now and October 21st?.  We have a suggestion:  It is an old RoadDave called The Golden Rule from October 2006, wherein we researched and listed 31 different versions of the essential “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” concept that is at the core of every known Brand of God, without interpretation, intellectual tap dancing or trying to find some kind of scriptural quote that makes Argyll patterned socks a sin. 

It might even be one of those simple things that makes every day go a little easier.   

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