Confessions of a Fence Sitter

When you realize that half of your friends like Brewer and Palin and the other half like Brewer and Shipley, you know why you can't throw a party and invite all of your friends. That's what Facebook is like.

Every day I watch the mounting number of cause solicitations and think they are getting even more annoying than the Farmville Send Me A Donkey's Kong messages.

Here's Common Cause, voice of the Coffee Party:


"Please, Help Free Manning and defend WikiLeaks!"

"But he gave out classified information that's getting our friend's killed? Isn't that de jure treason? Assange called our soliders 'bastards' and said he wanted to 'crush them'."

"YOU FASCIST PIG!!!"

So much for inciting civility.

The Stop The Nonsense! Save the Mosque on Ground Zero crew:


"You have to show tolerance."

"But isn't building a mosque on ground zero like building a Confederate War Memorial inside Ford's Theatre?"

"YOU RACIST PIG!!!"

So much for inciting compassion and understanding.

We'd all like to get along and have a good time, but as any nightclub owner can tell you and social media theorists claim to have discovered, some cliques should never be mixed. It isn't that they can't tolerate each other; they don't want to. Their opposition to each other is what defines them, makes them feel a part of something greater than themselves even if that something is less than fully human.

Meanwhile the White House is facing the very real possibility that after bailing out Wall Street while Americans lose jobs and sueing the State of Arizona while undocumented immigrants come to the US for free health care in the emergency wards, they may indeed be a historical but one term presidency.

In the words of Gomer Pyle, "Surprise! Surprise! Surprise!"

As a Southerner growing up in Alabama, I thought the words to Kumbayah were "Come by, y'all!" Imagine my surprise when as an adult I read the Gullah translation to discover they actually do mean "Come by here".

That at least is ... comforting. If we all sing it, Arizonans have to tolerate illegal immigrants and New Yorkers have to tolerate that mosque near the spot where three thousand people were murdered. We are a great nation. We tolerate everything.

Almost...

There is a wonderful movie making the rounds: Agora. It stars Rachel Weisz and tells the story of Hypatia of Alexandria. The story is about the burning of the libraries and the murder of Hypatia, the librarian as the Christians, Jews and pagans vowed for power and dominance while the Roman Empire fell around them. It seems I have to wait until it comes out on DVD in October because the movie is unwelcome by the American movie distributors who fear it will offend Christians and Jews. Pagans don't count. Meanwhile, years after the Pope asked the Saudi royals and the Yemenis to allow Christian churches in their countries for the over million Christians there, they are rebuked.

So much for open mindedness and freedom of expression. But we are The Good Guys.

In the 70s we were up to our hips in Iranian and Saudi students who told us as soon as they got home they would overthrow the Shah and kick us off the peninsula. We smiled thinking of course they wouldn't do that. Imagine our surprise when announcing intent indeed proved to be the best predictor of future behavior. So while the Germans are closing the mosque in Germany where the 911 attacks were planned because the members are collecting funds and planning for future attacks while the Taliban kills ten medical team members for "spying for the Americans and preaching Christianity", the Mayor of New York is telling the New Yorkers to be 'tolerant'.

We want to be. We do. It's just that past announcements of intentions to destroy the West once and for all keep being released from alQaeda known to raise funds in American mosques. This may not be one of those but who do we believe? Should we bend over backwards to understand or submit to the feeling that some people will screw us in any position we take? Sophisticates tell us that is paranoia but they also told us the Ayatollah could be trusted, the Saudis and Pakistanis are our allies, and tobacco didn't cause cancer.

They also claim Dylan is a good singer. Ok, that one was hokey on the face of it but it's right up there with Apple Supports Open Source. Ya gotta wonder.

One can't stay on the fence or pick a side to climb down. It seems one has to walk to the end of it and jump to the next back yard. But truth is often stranger than fiction and just when you think you know which side someone is on, well, you see this. Roll another one, Lawrence.

The Face of American Racism

Eric Holder of the Department of Justice announced today that racism in the American Grizzly population has reached intolerable proportions and that suit will be filed to redress this sickening development. "This legacy of hate and violence against the human race as evidenced by the desire of these animals to attack and consume humans is not in keeping with the high aspirations of the American public or our administration." The bear currently incarcerated in a Montana bear cage had no comment but her representative stated that she expects to be vindicated when the full accounting of the incident leading up to this miscarriage of justice is made public.

Anonymity and Blizzard

There is a minor tempest stirring about Blizzard exposing real identities in their forums removing the customary anonymity. It seems to upset women the most. They don't want to be treated differently for being women. Somehow the hypocrisy of that escapes them but one can counsel those who as Duran Duran said in Barbarella, "... find horrible the idea that one could do to me that which I do to others." In other words, if you are in a game where bad behavior is the norm, you're supporting bad behavior and accept that is what you are supporting or get out. The dustup over the Streamy's this year is an excellent example of what happens when 'wink-wink' suddenly bursts out of the privacy of production rooms and into real-time. Then those promoting that behavior get caught up close and personal, and the time for cute protests are over. You made the bed, as they say.

Some time ago I made it clear that anonymous postings would be o-filed here at LaMammals. Why? People used anonymity to cause harm for political and work reasons. Since I couldn't filter fairly, I decided the best policy was a transparent one that was easy to implement.

I understand better than some the problems of a real public personna, yet I've pretty consistently followed the rule that I won't use pseudonyms and if I am in an environment where a pseudonym is assumed, I think the better course is to get the hell out of that environment.

Do you require a face mask to go ice skating? A public identity at a public event is assumed. What is it about gaming on a public server that requires anonymity? You can’t choose who you ice skate with in a public rink but the dangers of someone taking an inordinate interest in you there are likely higher than in a game. Will people track down an ice skater? They certainly will and have. Should the rink be held responsible? Certainly not.

This brouhaha says more about gamer culture than civil rights. Marketing wise, it may not be wise because when targeting a demographic for a sale, one usually doesn’t try to cure them of say racism along with the sale. On the other hand, providing a room where people in hoods and robes can come and freely commit acts of racism is frowned upon and likely the owner of the establishment would find themselves party to a legal action.

Is a game forum diffferent from such a room?

General Stanley McChrystal

General McChrystal offered his resignation and it was accepted. He was not fired. As a friend notes on another blog where I posted the following as a response, there is a significant difference in the career of a soldier who has done all that was asked of him.

We train these men to be the best soldiers in the world, which is to say the best killers. If we ask a man or a woman to do that, to lead other men and women to do that, then letting them retire with honor is the decent ending for a career.

Still, it seems to me if the goals are to reshape cultures as said, then we should use the means that worked for us when we were being invited to do this instead of kicking the doors in to get one set of guys then hanging around to tell the rest how to live. I can’t think of any examples in our history where the latter strategy has ever worked.

When we have been invited to share, we do quite well. When people come to our country for education and opportunity, we do quite well. When they buy or steal our culture, we do quite well. When we innovate and share our innovations, we do extraordinarily well.

We are a strong and prosperous nation. We have been before this generation, a reliable ally and a fierce protector of the rights of the common man. When we have used our military strength to obtain prosperity, we have always sacrificed the strength of what has made our country great: our belief in ourselves as a good and decent nation. Many great friendships have been made and sustained by acting well and by encouragement, but never by our proseletyzing our way of life and belief. It is by giving of our knowledge and spirit, by fair dinkum as my mates in Oz say, that we prosper as an honorable people.

The honorable soldiers we train to protect that are too blunt a sword to be used to obtain our prosperity or to shape a culture. We train them to protect the walls and we do not dishonor them for the ambiguity into which they are finally placed by a mission that cannot be reconciled to our beliefs but have meaning in protecting life.

I’ll buy him a drink or a meal anytime anywhere.

Meanwhile, let's get the hell out of Afghanistan. We are asking our soldiers to subdue and reshape a culture, not win a war. We are fighting counter-insurgency which is another word for fighting a faction of the indigenous culture while dealing with the next least worse faction than them. We pay them money to not fight each other or fight the faction we're there to kill, but worse, our enemies are paid by our friends whom we gave the money to fight them. If knowing that we ask our soldiers to fight, we're truly frakked. As Hackworth taught, in it to win or out of it.

VietNamization. What? Really? AGAIN???

I Don't Wanta Know - Lyrics and Link To MP3

A song about a fellow who realizes the beautiful mysterious woman he married is actually a vampire. She keeps him alive because, well, she loves him and he feels the same way, but she is what she is and all he can say is, I don't wanta know.

Much of modern life is too much like this fellow's problem: it may not kill us but it hurts.

I Don’t Wanta Know – Len Bullard

June 12, 2010

Whose idea was it to burn the candles low
Who couldn’t wait to watch me … walk out the door
What wicked thirst is this that makes you act so mean
Walking around with a red dress on
Nothing for me but a sniff and a moan
Keeping the best for the backdoor man
Hiding the Bible in the bedside stand

But I don’t wanta know
I don’t wanta ever feel that feeling again
I don’t wanta know
Hunting at night with a knife and a bow
Leaving them out in the cold down low
Disturbing the peace with a hot lawman
Catching a break from any CatchAsCatch can
But I don’t wanta know
I don’t wanta know

I’ve heard you brag that you have never had to lie
Get your way with nothing but a smile
A moonlit shadow swallows up the northern sky
Sucking the blood from the heart of a man
Stylishly cruel? Oh you know that you can.
Cutting him up if he gives you a fight
Making it in by the end of the night

But I don’t wanta know
I don’t wanta ever feel that feeling again
I don’t wanta know
If you’re that hungry for a bite to the bone
First, ask your sister if I’m alone
If the time ain’t right just be prepared
If you’re raring up honey
Well I ain’t scared
Cause I don’t wanta know. I don’t wanta know.

http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/mp3/IDontWantaKnow.mp3

Snake Oil And Jimmy Carter's Sweater: Ready to Respond

Jimmy Carter's sweater is a phrase used in politics to indicate an earnest response rendered silly by the context in which it is offered. It asks for minimal discomfort when the political opponent is claiming you need suffer not at all.

It is common effort versus snake oil. I'm in a business where snake oil solutions, technology as a solution instead of enabler is a way of life.

Some say Obama failed with his speech. Exactly how so? He told us the truth, same as Jimmy Carter. We didn't listen to Jimmy. How'd that work out for us?

Obama gave us a broad agenda with three quantifiable goals:

1. Stop the leak.
2. Clean the water.
3. Get off the oil addiction.

If he's asking us, that's to use the modern yak, crowd sourcing solutions. The first isn't as amenable to crowd sourcing. The second is but relies on resources and organization.

We'll come back to that: that is the cross-jurisdictional communications problem. Years after Mike Chertoff stood there waving the early drafts of the National Response Framework/National Incident Management System (NRF/NIMS) and considerable capital investment, we haven't established a basic communications system that can enable us to establish scalable command and control. There are potential solutions that can be fielded, but that covers products I work on and this isn't an advertisement. Happy to discuss them but not in this blog.

But and Nota Bene: ALL of the oil industry response plans are straw, carbon copied, incompetent filings for mission critical response systems. Say Federal fraud. NRF/NIMS for an event of this type is a hollow suit. This is serious and heads will and must roll for that.

That leaves oil addiction and this is very amenable to crowd sourcing. A friend of mine did some math based on government figures: we are getting 6.8% of our oil consumed in the US from offshore drilling. Another web site shows that 1 billion spent on insulating 75,000 homes equals the amount of energy spilled into the Gulf currently at a current cost of 40 billion dollars. If you are one of those with retirement funds in BP or any other oil company stock, you may want to pay attention to those figures. That's money invested with no R&D. Off the shelf.

Try to think of the problem not in an either-or culture ninja whack context. For a moment put down the pitchforks, let Frankenstein turn the grindstone, and let's ask ourselves if we can start reducing our economic and cultural reliance on oil.

Imagine church missions to insulate homes. Start in your own pews and work your way down the street. See if the Methodists and Baptists meet in the middle of if the Catholics can get there first. Don't ignore; compete.

Imagine MADD Against Plastics. Again, why do I have all these plastic bags and whatever are they good for except filling the landfill? Go through your house and count the things you use that require plastic or other petroleum products. It is a sobering exercise.

Imagine empty recycle containers because the house consumes all the energy it ingests in any form.

Imagine wikipedia for disaster response, Redress the expertise imbalance of government over big money: not big gov vs small gov but Smart Gov vs Merely Technically-enabled Gov. If industry experts wrote open source, freely sharable, always inspectable response plans, for example, instead of "oh just use this copy; it worked for the other guys", we can address part of the problem of industry owning all the smarts and government being merely a forms processor that writes checks.

We can do this, meanwhile, please Mr. President, more Carter's Pills!

Big Government or Smart Goverment

It's an expertise problem. Drop the 'big government' distraction for a moment and consider the amount of training and background required to evaluate the technical details in a seemingly simple response plan that BP would be required to file by regulation. The way government run and regulated industries work, there have to be not simply GS employees (civil servants, job for life, hiring favoring social engineering goals as well as on the job performance), but real technical experts in the field who maintain their expertise given a changing industry even if their job is to read reports and sign off on them.

And before we run down the 'lazy gov workers' rabbit trails, how many of you can still do your ninth grade children's algebra assignments? Compare NASA in the days when Marshall had the complete fabrication facilities for a Saturn vs the manage-at-a-distance style now where as much of the thought work, testing and assembly is outsourced to contractors. Once expertise is lost, it is very expensive to get it back and as a result, the average government civil servant becomes expert at the process, knowing which forms have to filed, which signatures have to be obtained, bottom line costs and their own performance bonuses given objectives handed down by political processes, not technical adaptations to changes in the technology or the market.

The problem of the 'big gov' topic is it doesn't actually address the problem of 'smart government', 'trained government' and innovative government. You will never be able to regulate a complex technical industry listening to politicians instead of scientists and engineers when it comes time to make the decisions about technical risks. Physics and chemistry don't recognize the supremacy of money.

Quit playing football with your environment for the sake of bragging rights. That is how the BPs of the world shuck you for gumbo and feed you your own entrails. Demand smarter government instead of the uptown klan.

When Both Sides Quote Woody Guthrie

When both sides of the dispute are quoting Woody Guthrie, you have a real American smackdown. Once the oil well is capped, this is the next catastrophe in the making.

BP and the Big Spill: Resilience

I am reposting some comments made elsewhere so they don't get lost in the blizzard. The noise levels about the disaster are not helping. The "Bush Would Have Been Skinned" or "Obama is an idiot" discussions don't help. Obama has no magic fairy dust for this. No one does. There is blame but we need facts and that takes time. Time is what we don't have right now.

Spy Vs Spy doesn't help.

"Out! We need no urging to hate humans! But for now, only a fool fights on a burning ship." (Kang: Star Trek)" (props to Steve DeRose)

It's one of the worst habits we've acquired: have a disaster and instead of facing the work, immediately apportioning blame. There is time for that after the fire is out. The Federal government is responsible for responding but doesn't have the resources or expertise. The Feds can't handle a deep sea capping operation. There will be some investigation required to understand BP's actions in that it appears they responded to save the well instead of capping it immediately. Flawed risk analysis often sources in flawed goals. Later. Cap the well first. Get the boats in the water first.

The way the DHS/FEMA protocols work is by organized panarchical Emergency Support Functions (ESF). There are fifteen ESFs. It is a strict chain of authorities, State Federal Local and Tribal agencies and protocols. Unless a fire is built under them, they can react slowly but usually it is an issue of recognizing the incident type and marshalling the resources to respond. An unfortunate side effect of putting FEMA under DHS is it is reponsive to terrorism but a bit slower to react to other incident types. The State is in charge until the President declares otherwise. The most serious problem is this is organized around resources (think equipment, personnel, funding). The States don''t have the resources for this particular incident type and neither do the Feds. BP holds most of the marbles and BP had not planned for it so the resources were obtained and applied far later than an incident of this type demanded.

Here is a diagram illustrating the process by which the various authorities activate by presidential directive.

Another problem is the public safety industry products are centered in high cost dispatch systems for local agencies. These are good for real-time dispatch to house fires, traffic accidents, crimes, and so on but wholly unsuitable for cross-jurisdiction event-driven response. A different approach is required and the systems here are just coming on the market. In this aspect, the BP spill is more like 9/11 than Katrina. Fast reactions across the multiple authorities and agencies are required. CAD systems are lousy at this for technical and organizational reasons.

You can't touch your elbow with the fingers on the same arm. IOW, a system based on pre-placed configured assets has to understand the incident type before it happens. We can simulate and play what-if, but the fixed arm length is having the resources in place because all of the response plans ultimately come down to dispatching resources to specific detailed situations and these are spread out across agencies and jurisdictions as I describe above. To repeat, neither the Feds nor DoD have the resources or the expertise to handle oil spills in this specific situation. They have never seen this and Valdez only applies insofar as it is oil and it is washing up. As you go up the chain of authority, the knowledge gets thinner but the responsibility gets greater. That is why the advisors have to be very well-trained, the information has to be very current (real time if possible), and the locations of resources identified in advance. Then you have to have a communications system that seamlessly puts all of that together. Think $$$.

The key word is resilience: coherent response in the face of novelty. The public safety folk have become very resilient responding to and mitigating acts of terrorism, conducting mass evacuations, etc. They are adapting as fast as they can to this novel situation but unfortunately not fast enough to avoid the catastrophe unfolding before you. Also keep in mind, BP is not an American company. Coordination with foreign governments and companies is ESF#15 and that is handled by the State Department. Post-event, some learning in that function may be necessary. I doubt the State Department is practiced at this kind of work and practice is the sine qua non of disaster response.

ESF#10 organizes Oil and Hazardous Materials response. It is a specialized response and requires analysis given failures in the current incident. Important to note here is Volunteer Registration and deployment. In 9/11, volunteers appeared everywhere ready to help. It's a noble instinct; however, not everyone who shows up are a) who they claim to be and b) trained to the work. As a result, there are standards for Volunteer handling and these require positive identification and proof of skills. This enables response crews to vette and badge these volunteers. Why are the shrimpers denied access to the Gulf? Very few are trained in hazardous materials handling and are required by protocol to be trained first. What happens otherwise? They can go into the scene and injure themselves and pose a danger to others. Media plays up the fact that workers on the boat are getting ill. They have to prove it is a result of the oil but it is likely they aren't trained for the task and are not protecting themselves. Media skirts that explanation because it doesn't have the right victims.

Media IS a problem. There is an ESF for handling the media but it can't corral them or write their stories. A larger problem in our culture has been the death of professional and responsible journalism but that's a topic for another time. Simply be aware when you are seeing stories on this and other events such as the immigration problems you aren't always given the facts and even if given them, the framing is such that your emotions are being stirred instead of you critical faculties.

Critique without critical thinking is toxic. It turns you into a Weapon of Mass Distraction.

This is the good news: if everyone does their job in analyzing and documenting this, the system does learn. It is possible to enhance the safety, improve the response and adapt. This does rely on coordinated communications and here improvements in technology will be helpful. Obama did the right thing delaying or cancelling leases. That response ensures the system slows down long enough to learn even as it is adapting to the current catastrophe.

Since the nuclear option is being discussed by some, here are two videos. The first is of what is called, The Gates of Hell, the result of an accidental puncture into an underground gas cavern. This has been burning since 1971.




The second is a Soviet era film propagandizing the use of the a small kiloton nuclear device to push the surrounding earth to squeeze the well closed. I've no comment on this because emotionally it is abhorrent and technically, I'm not qualified.

Tesla's Resonator and The Web

Watching a program on Nicola Tesla a few nights ago, I am reminded of conversations I had with friends in the pre-web days of hypermedia. At the time, I was describing Tesla's experiments with resonant frequencies and observing that global hypermedia would act as a feedback system. I speculated that cultures may have communication equivalents to resonant frequencies just as material structures do and that if you could discover what these are, given the right symbol/signals pumped at the right amplitude with a feedback mechanism in place, you could literally cause a culture to fall apart or dissolve. TV never achieved that because it has built-in damping mechanisms called advertisers. Advertisers will, as Chayefsky observed in Network, drive you to become the Dream, but they usually don't turn you against each other.

They turn you against yourself.

The web on the other hand, has no constraints. It is all positive feedback. Global hypermedia worried me precisely because it enabled the formation of virtual co-located conversations with no time or space constraints that previously had slowed and damped signal propagation and feedback effects. This is one of it's much lauded characteristics. It may also be why it is toxic. Before the web, many ideas tended to stay local. Word of mouth isn't sufficient to push an idea very far without a means to amplify it and if the web is anything, it is an amplifier.

Pundits say the Blue/Red state phenomenon and the rise of the tea party is a media driven phenomenon and point to TV (eg, CNN/Fox/MSNBC). Some blame the web as well but tend to talk about blogs and punditry there.

Are we now seeing this speculation emerge in real politics? Are the formations of Blue and Red States in a time of cause du jour, of addiction to the information stimuli a direct result of the web? I am not worried about the web making us shallow. A culture that embraced pet rocks and now Sarah Palin is past worrying about that.

I am worried that it is keeping us permanently angry. And we like it. Just as the Huffington Post gets riled because of a Facebook page who's members pray for Obama to die, they conveniently forget that song a noted folk icon was singing, "I Wish George Bush Would Die" and similar ditties about Palin. Putting our political preferences down for a moment, how many people are noticining the yin/yang, back and forth, Spy Vs Spy.... frequent resonating effect at work here. Perfect mirror images of tact and tactic, call and response, angry emotion piled on angry emotion at increasing intensity and frequency?

Let's rock this house down!

What then are the resonant frequencies of our culture? For this to work, a structure has to be connected, that is, have a sharable property and a means to propagate and feedback the signal and stimulate it at some rate. What are the topics that if repeatedly fedback and stimulated will cause our culture to dissolve?

Well... race. That's one. What are the others? Anger. Natch. Love? Only occasionally. Sex? Definitely but only some topics cause dissolution because.. you can't make enough people react with enough intensity. IOW, we seldom go to war over haircuts or bad breath despite the ubiquity.

So what are the topics that if repeated at the right intensity and rate (amplitude and frequency) cause a culture to shake itself to pieces?

The web, that great jurisdiction spanning free for all because it is never censored is making it possible. Anonymity is not the cause. Anonymous posting is injurious particularly to individuals or organizations that become the targets, but in the big picture, that just ups the gain. People are perfectly willing to put their real names on hatefilled diatribes and always have been. No, the important piece that the web added to our uncivil discourse is resonant amplification. And voila! It becomes the cultural equivalent of Tesla's thumper.

Don't blame the music industry for the faults of the Internet. :)

Arlo and The People - Episode III Sailing Down The Golden River

Celebrating the last evening of their tour. I am so glad I was there for the dress rehearsals. :) To the Guthries: Sail On!!

FB Open Graph and Public Safety Applications

A strategy for implementing profitable open systems is to create variations at interfaces that act as forces on integration thus market selection. This is particularly true of web systems with a small set of mostly interoperable browser clients. The competition shifted to the plug-in protocols or application content servers. It's a natural evolution and it leads some to think high reliability is best obtained by closed systems free riding in open IP environments or at least, semi-permeable. Given local shops implementing open vocabularies, the choices made on the production floor combined with the market force of the vendor at the time/season of release create the opportunity.

Social net clients are convergence clients by fact of membership in distribution communities with overlaid meta-rules for social semantics. Social net clients are a member of cross-boundary communications client markets seen otherwise in server-side public safety systems for organizing emergency response. Change the games to resource tasks and dispatch and set up the groups and with chat, you have a basic volunteer-side emergency response system. The integration opportunities are obvious and already emerging in weather reporting and news organizations who are using the FB pages locally to keep citizens informed.

So a question would be does the OpenGraph protocol enhance the market emergence of increased integration with the classes of functions and operations over resources described in for example, the US National Response Framework with it's Emergency Support Functions? I think the answer is yes, it's a start because of the notion pages represent real world objects.

My God is a Loving God

My God is a loving God, My God
My God is a loving God, my God
Keeper of souls from the darkest obsession
Healer of hearts by the secret confession
My God is a loving God, my God

My God is a jealous God, my God
My God is a jealous God, my God
Here is the bond that I set before thee
Thou shalt have no gods here before me
My God is a jealous God, my God

Giver of life
Almighty power
Give us this day
Give us this hour
Bless us with your Eternal Love

Universes fly
We may not know why
Our lives in the palm of your hand

One God feels you
One God heals you
My God is a loving God

len bullard

Dixie Carter: How Great Thou Art

Dixie's gone. :( :( :(

She made beautiful Southern women legends by right. Designing Women was brilliant.

This is the episode I remember best because of Charlene's dilemma. It helps to know the context of the story where she performs this. In ways, it's Designing Women's finest moment.

When you can't find faith in yourself, you can sometimes find it in others who find faith in themselves by having faith in what is greater.

Domine Jesu

Last week the Hazel Green United Methodist Chancel Choir performed my composition, Domine Jesu. This is my first sacred classical work with a Latin text derived from the Jesus Prayer, a prayer of humility and a plea for forgiveness. At that service, our Choir Director's daughter, Hannah Williams performed Gabriel's Oboe by Ennio Morricone. That performance is included in the video below.

My deep appreciation and thanks to the Chancel Choir, our director, Gwyn Williams, our organist, Barry Sublett and my friend Terry Cornett, percussionist for their beautiful work on this most somber hymm.

Green Screen Paradise

The war of critics of the iPad heat up.

Some people can tune and play their guitar. Some can only play their boombox. iPad is a boombox. I'm ok with that, but I'm on the other side of the door where making software and having the freedom to access user screens sans the interference of the screen maker is important to competitive success.

Then there are the old radicals on the West Coast who traded their Grateful Dead t-shirts for open shirt dress coats and Bob Dylan blasting from earbuds, became the vendors of the over-the-counter culture and own a lot of Apple stock. They value their freedom but maintain it at the cost of the freedoms of others. They demand to be recognized as creative but cheer when that creativity is boxed. They remind me of H.G. Wells' Morlocks who fled underground and then controlled and fed on the Eloi who stayed above ground and endured. When it is a choice between their stock portfolio and their ethics, the portfolio wins every time. When Apple rings the marketing bell, they come out at night to herd the Eloi into their stewpots.

Open systems are tough to endure. Meanwhile, LA is shutting down city services for two days a week. I wonder if there is a market for garbage perfume or if they can simply green screen a paradise. Ah California: home of recyclable indignity. Here's an ode for the blowed.

It's a green screen paradise
The weather there is very nice
Bright images in focus all the time
California cats are big and fat
But, hey, they've got an app for that
Just plug right in. Enjoy that sunny clime.

With tsunamis, floods, volcanoes and drought
It's the perfect place to live no doubt
It's all the rage for the smarter set, ya know
Sliding into the sea in an earthquake zone
Thank God, Nevada's holding on
When the Santa Ana winds begin to blow.

Take a shovel when you walk the dog
Don't lose that poop in the summer fog
Concrete rivers and illegally tended lawns
Regulating collected feces
Considering exotic species
If you can't see the air you know it's gone.

The oldest trees and the largest debt
There's not a thing they don't tax yet
And still they can't believe they're out of dough
Interactive and highly polished
Can't do much but who's astonished
It's overpriced and they've sold out the show

They say politics are in need of fixing
By Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon
I think there's a slicker pig left in the sack
California is the Golden State
For give aways. They just can't wait.
We would but the Mexicans won't take'em back.

There's a rain shadow hanging on the mountain turn
When the sun goes down you can watch it burn
The girls are tan and the men are so controlled
With empty wallets, their banks are closed
A fortune blown right up their nose
They'll move to Hawaii as soon as the mansion's sold.

It's a green screen paradise
The weather there is very nice
Bright images in focus all the time
California cats are big and fat
But, hey, they've got an app for that
Just plug right in. Enjoy that sunny clime.

len bullard april 7, 2010

Get Timmy

Here is another reality check from an article at VirtualWorldsNews.com. A product launch:

“Inversoft’s software understands and analyzes how users communicate with each other, a tremendous value to our customers,” said Amy Pritchard, CEO of Metaverse Mod Squad. “In the hands of our community managers and moderators, this information not only makes us more efficient in stopping inappropriate conduct, but also allows us to channel back a wealth of information about the preferences, behaviors, and motivations of the community. These are incredible tools built by an exceptional company.”

It’s hard for me to grasp how many myths of the web this shatters or what it says about online culture. If they told me this was only being applied to the New York web scene, I might understand it, but as a much needed way to both moderate/control and harvest human behavior across the board?

T-Bone Burnett is right about this medium being cold except that the wires are just wires. All it can really be is a communications amplifier and the collective message from its users has become such that it also has to be a nanny and a snitch. Just as TV went from the great teacher to the subculture pimp, the web devolved in less than two decades from the library of Alexandria to pulp fiction.

And the technology isn’t the reason. The people using it are.

Song for Kim

The Beatles said all we need is love. Keats said, we need beauty and truth. From a life spent making art of my passion, they both were right. I wrote this song for a girl when I was twenty. A friend took her photos. A friend taught her guitar. Art is joy.

All of the men who worked on this video cared about this woman. Because of that, thirty five years later, this video could be made and given to her.

The best art we make of our own lives. This is what is true, beautiful, made of love. We take light and shadow in turn but always love, and from it emerges a greater light. Let there be light.

Song for Kim

I wrote this song when I was 20 for a wonderful girl. I sang it to her for the first time in the then trendiest restaurant in town where I was playing my first night and she was a college gal waitress. I looked up when I finished into two of the most beautiful luminous happy eyes I'd ever seen. The days of long nights playing solo in front of a fire to a room full of young college hippies were grand.

Someone asked if I would take it out of the attic.

Diane Sawyer or GMA: The Kiss of Death

Note that CNet is also running an article where newly signed bands try to refuse to social network or tweet. Note the comments are anti-social network on that announcement.

Kill The Wabbit!!

So in a single week, two trends we were promised were absolutely going to change our lives forever appear to be poised on the tip of the whiplash. True or not, it is a clue about how fragile any socially-driven technology really is. It is never about the technology itself. It is about the social perception and the enjoyment of the engagement. The first is fickle and the second is shadowed by boredom.

Note that all it took was the labels publicly telling their acts that social networks are good for their numbers. This is true. I can look at my YouTube stats and show you the exact day I started using FB to promote videos. No money involved. It was an experiment. On the other hand, Anti-The-Man sentiment is perrenial and eternal in some demographics and that happens to be the precise demographic these bands and their labels want to buy the music. Oopsie.

I have a rule of thumb: as soon as ABC Good Morning America runs a piece promoting a technology, a trend, a book, whatever, it’s on life support after that. If Diane Sawyer is into it, the hipsters are out.