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Apr.03.2009 10:20PM: Empathy So, I was toting my 6-inch Subway BMT ("30,856 Restaurants In 89 Countries") up New Montgomery to our office at about two o'clock this afternoon - I've always lunched late - when I passed a woman on the sidewalk who gave my heart a hitch. About five-five, quite beautiful, tastefully but not expensively dressed, with a rock-climber's build and the sun-skin to match. Maybe thirty. Maybe younger. Maybe older. And crying. Deep sobs and torrential tears. But walking forcefully, head held high, eyes focused straight ahead. Making good time either away from pain or towards a dreaded confrontation. No way to know. And there was no way I could offer kindness. San Francisco's a city, not a town. New Montgomery is a commercial center, not a neighborhood. Protocols must be observed. She walked on. I walked into our lobby, nodded to the posted guard, rose to floor five, and stepped into our office to enjoy my BMT. Apr.02.2009 9:35PM: Aging So, it's been quite a while - just over two weeks, to be exact. The writing of a coupla-thou rent-money words per day begs for evening relaxation, not evening blogging. But as I was walking home from our office (note: not my office) this evening, I passed a 30-something whose de rigueur earbuds were plugged into neither an iPhone nor an iPod, but into an 80's-era Walkman. Remember that breakthrough consumer-electronics product? Remember the cassette tapes from which it coaxed love and striving? Remember how the Walkman (which we politically ironic folks refer to as the "Walkperson") invented on-street isolation and destroyed whistling? No matter. But that caught-out-of-the-corner-of-the-eye sighting tossed me back a few decades. Since I'm writing-fried, I'll simply offer a couple of long-gone remembrances. Both are admirable examples of pre-Spearsian musical moments - eminiently iWalkmanable cassette fodder and iPodable downloads in which performers actually played their instruments, related to their audiences, and accepted un- (or a-) fashionable folks into their midst as long as they could kick rock ass (cf. the drummer in the first example). Am I nostalgic ? Yes. Am I becoming bitter? A bit. Am I geting old? Yes. Here's an example of how music has evolved from the Walkman days to the iPod era. Back in the Pleioscene era, a 29-year-old played an audaciously orchestrated but still on-stage-produced rocker to a home-town crowd. And here's the the same guy, aging as we all are, telling the same story nearly 30 years later in a pared-down, solo acoustic arrangement.
Finally - if you're still with me - here' an undated performance somewhere in between the youthful balls-out exuberance of the first and the pro-forma tiredness of the second: Frankly, I don't recall where I'm going with this -- except, maybe, to ask if it wouldn't be wonderful if each of us could have someone to "guard [our] dreams and visions?" Or, at minimum, to load well-felt performances onto our iPods. Or Walkmen. Mar.18.2009 9:35PM: Predilections So, since Monday I've been spending my days down in Santa Clara at the Multicore Expo, reveling in the deep-geek splendor of world-class Caucasian and Asian engineers talking about world-class processor developments, then trying to make sense of the pronouncements of said Caucasian and Asian engineers in order to write about their achievements (If you're even mildly interested in what's up in multicore land, by the way, check out the first articles I've written about the event, one about OpenCL, another about the PowerVR SGX543MP, and the latest about multicore-programming support tools and future smartphone plans.) This expensive event brought together the world's top multicore processor and software engineers. It's a small gathering, as such events go - I'd estimate about 175 to 200 attendees. I was only allowed in because a) I'm in "the media," and b) I'm persuasive. But the composition of the attendees was telling. Glances around the plenary sessions, the hallways, the cozy Expo hall, and the individual sessions showed - in case you missed the not-so-subtle references in my first paragraph - that this world-class group of world-class engineers is missing one prominent sector of the world. Black folks. African, African-American, African-European, whatever - there were no (not few, but truly no) black faces among the attendees at this high-end computing conference. Hell, there were even a handful - a half-dozen or so - of women. And one of them was white; the rest (by process of elimination) were Asian. Remember, this was an international event. What is it about Africans and computing? I've been in this biz for 20 years now, and in the digital field the African guy or gal is a rara avis to the nth degree. It's not native intelligence: There are more than enough African exponents of other fields who are advancing the world's knowledge and abilities. It's not education: My current experience in France taught me that Africans can achieve the education that will allow them to take their place in any strata of society. In the digital realm - and I am, of course, simplifying - why do white folks invent, Indians dissect and employ, East Asians manufacture, and Africans take a pass? I'm at a loss. Mar.14.2009 8:50PM: Journalism So, about an hour ago I dropped Marilyn off at the Opera House where she went to watch the San Francisco Ballet perform some frou-frou jumpin' around. We have different tastes - though we fully respect each other's. For her part, she's not terribly into Don Caballero. Fair enough. Anyway, on the way home I tuned into NPR and was presented with the best definition of a journalist that I've heard in quite a while. The show was "Selected Shorts." The story being read was Dashiell Hammett’s "The Creeping Siamese." The line that defined journalism - and I am, of course, paraphrasing, seeing as how I'm a bear of very little brain and I had no way writing it down as I drove home - described a character something like this: "To him it seemed to be Tuesday." Exactly. Can you prove it's Tuesday? Who says it's Tuesday? Why should I believe it's Tuesday? Last week it may have been Tuesday, but does that automatically make it Tuesday this week? Years back, there was a popular bumper sticker that read "Question Authority." I'd broaden that to "Question %$#@!ing Everything." As you might imagine, this worldview makes me a wee bit hard to live with. "Sure, honey, that's what you think, but..." Mar.09.2009 8:05PM: Rumors So, I'm sick at home today - nothing worth writing about, just a mild ague. Seeing as how a fever always makes me a bit dense, I'll ask you to forgive me if I'm even more unfocused than usual. But I did want to mention something that happened today that goes a long way toward explaining what a strange job I have, what a strange tech-reporting world we live in, and how fanatical people are about Apple and its products. I got up this morning at 7:00 a.m. as usual, and - despite the fact that I felt dreadful - hauled myself upstairs to check what tech news was breaking and what I'd need to cover today. The first site I visited, AppleInsider, had a 400-word story entitled "Chinese newspaper says Apple building a netbook." The original rumor had come from a Chinese-language newspaper, and had been picked up by a Taiwanese website named DigiTimes, an industry-watching news service that all we reporter-geeks monitor on a daily basis. Curious to see whether anyone else had seen the DigiTimes report, I googled a couple of keywords from the story, and was blown away - dozens of stories had already been written based on the second-hand DigiTimes rumor. Here's what DigiTimes wrote: "Taiwan-based Wintek will supply touch panels for Apple's new netbook, and shipments will start in the third quarter this year, according to a Chinese-language Commercial Times report." That's essentially the entire report, minus a few follow-up details. But that's all that was needed to induce the tech press to go bonkers. No sources. No quotes. Not even the mildest attempt at second-sourcing. Just "according to..." The tiniest, least-supported rumor about an upcoming Apple product caused the tech press to lose its collective mind. So, of course, I had to write about the rumor, or we at The Register would look like we were out of touch. So I dragged myself into the office, filed my own 400 words, then came back home and went to sleep. When I woke up around 5:00 p.m., I checked Google News, and discovered that my story was on its front page, and that Google News listed a total of 83 articles based on the original Commercial Times/DigiTimes rumor. The original rumor was 29 words long. Let's say that each of the 83 stories written about it were about 400 words, as were mine and AppleInsider's. That would total 33,200 words, or about 1,150 words written for each word in the original rumor. When it comes to Apple, the tech press - and, I'm afraid, I need to include myself among the herd - are downright insane. UPDATE: It's now 5:30 on Tuesday, and the number of articles listed by Google as a result of that tiny DigiTimes story has reached 197. I rest my case... Mar.05.2009 9:05PM: Hope So, after a 10-hour work day I crested the just-repaired escalator at the 24th Street BART station to be greeted by the usual coterie of Latino women selling tamales and trinkets on the homeless-distorted plaza. Undocumented immigrants? Does it matter? Today an unfamiliar woman was among them. Years, fifty or so - though her life and my privilege may accelerate her aging. Tamales in a pot. "Pollo, queso, vegitariano" - this is San Francisco, after all. Pinned on the chainlink fence behind her was Barack Obama, carefully encased in Saran Wrap against the recent rains. Onto him was taped a plastic bloom. Without the flower he was a lure. With it, he was an icon. An homage. Remember how portraits of JFK were found on worldwide walls when he opened the doors of hope so long ago? It's happening again. I was a middle-schooler then. I'm a learning man now, a hoping man - but also a darkly pessimistic man who sees greed and mendacity in the moist crevices of an overheated body politic. But I have much to learn. So tomorrow I'll buy her tamales. Not vegetariano, however. Stalking today's economic and political landscape, I'm a meat-eater. Mar.02.2009 9:50PM: Irony So, as I was cooking dinner tonight - Dungeness crabmeat pizzas on cornmeal crusts with Kalmata olives, artichoke/lemon pesto, fresh oregano leaves, and a couple of other goodies - I was perusing an article in this week's The Economist about eastern Europe's current economic meltdown. Discussing Latvia's problems, the quite-conservative Economist opined that that country had dug itself into a fiscal hole because "that country's rulers, a light-weight lot with close ties to business" had rejected regulation during a period of economic expansion, even though "conventional wisdom would have suggested applying the brakes hard, by tightening the budget and curbing borrowing." Sound familiar? Make no mistake about it, folks, we're in this mess because our previous administration thought that the free market was sacred, and because of Alan Greenspans's even-more-insane delusion that the market would look to its collective health. We're all Latvians now. Feb.24.2009 10:40PM: Taste So, most folks work harder than I do. But - hey - despite my cushy life I still find it difficult to crank up my creative juices after a day of 9-to-5 grindstone-nosing (well, 7:30-to-6:00, if you'd prefer reality). I do think during the day, and I do have (minor, at least) insights during that period, but after arriving home in the evening, and after cooking dinner and enjoying the company of The Amazing Marilyn Bancel™ for a comforting period of time, I'm intellectually pooped. Damn, it's a good thing that I don't have a real job. That is, one that wears down the body - I still carry the debts-to-be-paid of my coke-raking ancestors. So it's now well past ten p.m. and as I relax in my unearnedly luxurious upstairs office, It's hard for me to feel put upon. But I thought that you might enjoy the following. This evening I checked my collection of 7,228 songs in my iTunes collection to find out which I've played most frequently. Below is iTune's list of my top 50, from most-played to less-played. Note: A few oddities show up because I cranked them repeatedly to learn their bass parts when I was in the abortive Future US rock band. I'm not saying that I wouldn't have as often listened to 99 Red Balloons, Hate to Say I Told You So, I Melt With You, and a couple of others that you should be able to guess - but, well, hey, I wouldn't have overplayed them had I not been in that band. Not that those are bad tunes - it's just that they earned a disproportionate number of play-throughs as I struggled to divine their innards. The rest, however, are a pretty good indication of what this middle-aged, middle-income, middle-class, middlingly educated, mildly talented musician might listen to. (And, yes, I'm a serious Kinks fan.) An interesting conglomeration, if I do say so myself -- I'd love to see your unedited iTunes 50. 50. Give Up the Funk - Parliament Feb.20.2009 9:40PM: Isolation So, I wrote about something today that may be of interest to more than the hard-core geekerati - check it out. Well, yeah, the headline is a bit over-the-top: "Social networking causes cancer, heart attacks, lupus, dementia..." But, as you know, headlines aren't written by an article's author. But, hey, digital marketing is digital marketing. Just read the story, then download the full report (PDF) and ponder. Interesting, eh? Feb.18.2009 10:35PM: Orwellianism So, I'm digging through the 1,073 pages of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 today (Argh! Argh! My eyes!!) while preparing a tiny article for The Reg on how the ARRA will affect IT, when I run across one of the most hideous euphemisms of all time. In the so-called "stimulus bill" is $100 million for what the US Army terms "warrior transition complexes." No shit. Really. Okay. Imagine that you're a vet and that you've suffered big-time damage in Iraq. You're fucked-up. Your legs are shit. Your arm doesn't work. You're blind in one eye. You may even have serious brain damage. And you come back to a country with a DoD that's so image-conscious that it can't plainly say "injured veteran's halfway house," or even "rehab facility." Instead, it piles bullcrap upon bullshit and sludges you with stinky PR effluvium - like the kind that got you to enlist in the first place. You can't get help for your PTSD unless you abandon your deeply felt understanding of the crap you've been fed. To get help from a DoD's "warrior transition complex" you must redefine yourself as an idealized "warrior," and not kindly recognize yourself as the damaged individual human being that you most certainly are. The DoD requires you to accept their marketing profile as your identity. Shameless fucks. Really. Feb.16.2009 11:15AM: Leadership So, I'm wasting a bit of time noodling around the 'net on my day off, and I run across C-SPAN's Presidential Leadership Survey. For those of us who enjoy politics, lists, and surveys, it's a time-wasting trifecta. C-SPAN surveyed a "cross-section of 65 presidential historians" and asked them to rank "the 42 former occupants of the White House on ten attributes of leadership." To cut to the chase, Dubya doesn't come in dead last. The historians believe that, overall, he wasn't the Worst President Ever™ - just 36th out of 42 (remember, Garfield held two non-consecutive terms). In order of increasing lousiness, Dubya was out-stunk by Millard Fillmore, Warren G. Harding, William Henry Harrison, Franklin D. Pierce, Andrew Johnson, and the worst of them all, James Buchanan. I'm not all that familiar with Fillmore, Harrison, and Pierce, but the other three were, indeed, worthy of lower-than-Bush ranking. Go through the historians' various ranking criteria - such as Public Persuasion, Crisis Leadership, and more - and you'll see Jimmy duh Buke tenaciously hanging onto that bottom rung. Here in San Francisco there's an intersection of Bush and Buchanan. What a lousy place to live, historically speaking. Feb.15.2009 8:05PM: Improvisation So, I know there's little redeeming social importance in linking to this, but somebody might be interested. Here's a hockey announcer wrangling 'n' mangling ejaculatory pop-culture cliches after testosterone-fueled ice folks lift the bun into the basket. Rhetorical folk art: "Make me a bicycle, clown!" And, of course, "Waka waka!" Feb.14.2009 5:40PM: Multilingualism So, my dearly beloved Epson Stylus Photo 2200 finally died after about six years as my go-to printer for everything from 13"-by-19" photos to business cards. Oh, and résumés - lots of résumés. Its replacement, an Epson Stylus Photo R2880, arrived on Thursday - and with it I am well-pleased. It's first duty was to print out a couple of 13"-by-19" photos for some friends at our local supermarket, which closes tomorrow for a nine-month transformation into a Whole Foods store. (That photo, by the way, can be found here.) But I'm not writing today to bewail the fate of a local supermarket (it could have been worse - there were rumors that it was going to become a Trader Joe's), but instead to mention my rediscovery of that modern Rosetta Stone and goldmine for future linguists: the multi-lingual instruction manual to be found in international products. Such as my new Epson Stylus Photo R2880. In addition to its English-only manual, the R2880's packaging includes a four-page bookletette with the four-language title of IMPORTANT, IMPORTANTE, WICHTIG, and something in Cyrillic. This pink pamphletette contains two sentences in 35 different languages ranging from English ("We're number one!") to Estonian ("We're number thirty-five!"). In English, those two sentences read: "Install either the Photo Black or Matte Black cartridge and keep the other package unopened until required. Refer to the manual for further details." In many of the 34 renditions of this timeless wisdom that follow, the words Photo Black and Matte Black are in English with their translations in parentheses - which makes it easy to glean those terms from the surrounding incomprehesible-to-me foreign verbiage. Many of those two-word phrases are impossible to reproduce here because I don't have the requisite Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese, and so-on fonts. But for your edification and enjoyment, here's how you can say Photo Black in 22 different languages - although many diacritical marks are missing. Notice also the capitalization and hyphenation variations: Noir Photo - French Missing due to my Roman-alphabet font set are Japanese, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Korean, Russian, Ukrainian, Kazakh, Arabic, Farsi, Greek, Macedonian, and Bulgarian. Just thought you might be interested. Or not. Feb.9.2009 8:40PM: Machiavellianism So, I've been following the increasingly anti-Obama press these days, and I can only believe that Lee Atwater is pausing for a moment from his eternal torture to smile a wee bit despite the fact that one of Satan's minions is giving him a hot-lead enema for the fourth time today. The Republican game plan is proceeding nicely: Start listening for the Carter references, then tell me if I'm right or if I'm right. Feb.7.2009 8:55PM: Discovery So, I'm not as in touch with the Youth of America™ as I'd like to be. Well, that's to be expected about us old folks, eh? Today, however, I accidentally bumped into a music genre that I hadn't even known existed. Then, after a wee bit of research, I tracked down a thoroughly enjoyable exponent of said genre. The genre is math rock and the band is Don Caballero. Yeah, sure, both have been around for over a decade, but I had never heard of either - although I'm certainly enjoying them this evening. Anyone reading this might say, "Well, duh, Rik. Where do you live - in a cave?" Well, yes. As a late-50s guy whose musical deflowering was in the 60s, it's no easy feat to keep up with that-which-is-current-and-worthwhile in the music world. The major labels are all scheisse-meisters, and indies number into the squillions. And radio? Don't make me laugh. Or cry. Or puke. So stumbling upon something as rhythmically interesting and balls-out powerful as Don Caballero was a treat. That ol' internet - what a great teacher. Here's a Don Caballero cut for your edification and enjoyment: "Fire Back About Your New Baby's Sex" from their 2000 album, American Don. Their most recent release was the distinctly heavier Punkgasm in 2006. Lemme know what you think. Feb.5.2009 9:40PM: Despair So, I've been in a good mood recently - a great new job, disappearing Bushies, vegetables other than root stuff beginning to show up in the local farmers' market. Life's good. But a news report today caught my eye and brought me down. Way down. Suicides by young soldiers are skyrocketing. One painful line: "The 24 potential Army suicides in January exceeded the 16 U.S. combat deaths that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan during the same month throughout the armed forces." Soldiers rarely kill themselves when they feel that their mission is essential to the lives of their loved ones. Despair is a disease of the lost, unsupported, and rudderless. Maintaining an empire is ignoble. Forcing young men and women into multiple tours of duty in support of an ignoble goal is destructive to their psyches. Some can't handle the bullshit of artificially imposed nobility, the stress of strained long-distance relationships, and the loneliness of cultural isolation. So they kill themselves. And we - their putative employers and well-protected beneficiaries - aren't doing enough to help. Damn, and it was such a lovely day... Feb.4.2009 9:25PM: Stereotyping So, I know I haven't posted in a couple of days, but I've been spending way too much time tearing into Apple's new iLife '09 for a series of reviews for The Reg - the first of which was published today. Reviews - especially of software - are insanely time-consuming. You need to dig into each and every nook and cranny of a product, if only to find out what bugs might be hiding there. Any less of an effort would be disrespectful to your readers. Takes time. But before I dive back into writing about that five-app creativity suite, I wanted to drop a quickie note about a wonderful moment I observed yesterday at my local Arab Grocery Store™. So, there I am, in line behind a guy who could only be described as a stereotypical illegal-immigrant Mexican laborer. About five feet tall, 35 years old, stocky in a muscular sort of way. Ragged clothes dusty and dirty from a day's work on a construction site. Knobby, calloused hands. Dry, flaking boots. Unshaven, unkempt, and - let's be honest - a bit ripe with honest sweat. He's redeeming a lottery ticket, which has garnered him the princely sum of two bucks from a one-buck risk. Behind the counter is "Chuck," the Palestinian owner of the shop, whom I've known for over 25 years, and whose given name is certainly not Chuck - he's told me twice in that time what it actually is, but I've forgotten. I call him - as does everyone - Chuck. Great guy. Chuck asks, in reference to the laborer's choice of what to do with his payout, "Do you want to play again?" And the laborer says, in an incredibly stereotypical provincial-Mexican accent - and you must read the following with that accent in your mind in order to gain the full effect - using a strong, stentorian, self-aware, and ironic voice: "To play, or not to play: that is the question: You could have knocked me over with a flour tortilla. I love this city. Jan.31.2009 11:55PM: Commingling So, this morning I'm driving back up Caesar Chavez (née Army) from washing my car at the local stick-a-quarter-in while quietly grumbling to myself about the fact that they didn't simply rename it Chavez - why isn't Polk Willis Polk, or Geary John White Geary? - when I caught a nanosecond-long retinal photograph out of the corner of my right eye that reminded me why I love this expensive, dysfunctional, self-congratulatory town. Four characters in one insta-vignette: All together, within mere feet of one another, three on the sidewalk and one in the street, each contributing to my favorite city's wonderfulness, and all caught quickly out of the corner of my eye. Jan.30.2009 5:10PM: Melting So, I'm sure that a few of my loyal readers (though my loyal readers are undoubtedly already "few") heard the news today that the GDP had shrunk at a 3.8 percent annualized rate in the fourth quarter of 2008. And how that relatively small number was good news. Having written far too many stories in my job at The Reg about the dismal fourth-quarter earnings of a broad range of companies, that 3.8-percent shrinkage sounded a bit fishy to me. But, hey, if you hear it on NPR, it's gotta be true, right? Wrong. A report on MarketWatch this afternoon told me my skepticism was correct. Y'see, that 3.8 percent figure considers unsold inventory that's hanging around in warehouses and gathering dust on shelves as growth. Which it most certainly is not - it's a cancer on the bottom lines of retailers and wholesalers. According to MarketWatch - and I have no reason to doubt them - the actual shrinkage was more like 5.1 percent - a number that sounds far more realistic. Oh, and that unsold inventory? It will obviously be a drag on future manufacturing, as well, as demand for ... well ... practically everything continues to soften. Sorry to bum you out, but we're in this meltdown for the foreseeable future. Jan.27.2009 9:55PM: Hats So, at the recent Ombamafest, Aretha Franklin wore a now-famous "I don't care what white America thinks, but this is what a tasty black woman might wear to an important event" hat.
If you were as impressed by her choice of headwear as I was, you might want to check out this collection of hundreds of takes on that magnificent exponent of cultural in-your-facitudinousness. Just keep clicking on "next" in the upper right-hand corner until you're convinced that our country is full of wonderful, inventive, culturally subversive folks. Jan.27.2009 12:05AM: Talent So, I had some free time tonight, which I spent digging around in my 50GB music collection and reacquainting myself with some buried treasures. Damn. Here are a few of the more-recognizable contributions to our culture from his 400-tune canon: "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive" Okay, the Gershwins weren't exactly chopped liver, and that other jewboy, Irving Berlin, merits a ton of kudos, but Hyman Arluck (aka Harold Arlen [hey, my uncle changed his last name to "Myles" {and Uncle Myles was a Catholic}]) also deserves some re-recognition - if that's a word. Listen, for example, all the way through the Sinatra at the Sands version of "One for My Baby," and tell me that you've never felt this way at some point in your life. Endure the dated opening monologue, then listen to Sinatra as he cajoles Arlen's music and Johnny Mercer's lyrics into reminding you of what you'd rather not remember. (By the way, I think that's Bill Miller on piano, but if someone else can convince me it's Basie, I'm open.) Jan.26.2009 6:55PM: Beauty So, I've now been working in downtown San Francisco for about two months after spending a year and a half holed up in my home office and six years before that commuting to office-parkitecture in close-by Brisbane and South San Francisco. This is better. So many people - on BART, on sidewalks, in line to buy coffee, in shared elevators. I've become an avid observer of homo laboris. Many observations, many thoughts, from sidewalk-positioning dominance maneuvers to age- and status-related plumage. But today's observation - and a quick one, since I need to run downstairs and assemble dinner - is that there are vanishingly few people in my ecosystem who could rightfully be told that they are beautiful. We rarely admit - in public, at least - that most folks are plain. We pussyfoot around this obvious fact by asserting the prominence of inner beauty, engaging personalities, disarming charm, and intellectual attractiveness. But the truth is that most of us aren't beautiful. I'm not saying that beauty is to be rewarded over other, more socially supportive attributes. I'm not even saying that beauty is intrinsically important. What I am saying is twofold: First, most people are plain - neither beautiful nor ugly. Second, that those of us who have never been accurately identified as "beautiful" - in a strictly physical sense - should chill. But... still... I'm not beautiful, and that inarguable fact has changed my life. And I'm a guy. It's markedly more difficult to be plain for the many, many women I observe during my morning and evening commutes who - deservedly, when compared with our cultural norms - have never heard that compliment, either. Odd, isn't it, how that one word, "beautiful" - or, of course, it's absence - can burrow deep inside us? I gotta go cook. Jan.25.2009 5:55PM: Erudition So, for Christmas I received a slight-but-entertaining book that has since earned the honor of joining reading materials in the room my mother refers to as The Library, but which we at Chez Polonaise refer to by its more common name: the bathroom. The bit of intellectual fluff that now rests within easy reach of the proverbial throne is Alphabet Juice, by Roy Blount Jr. This alphabetically arranged romp through the English language is a bit of a surprise for us fans of Mr. Blount, whom we know to be a laconic, drawling, aw-shucks humorist. Surprisingly - to me, at least - A.J. is both acceptably erudite and gently self-mocking, as evidenced by its subtitle: The Energies, Gists, and Spirits of Letters, Words, and Combinations Thereof; Their Roots, Bones, Innards, Piths, Pips, and Secret Parts, ... With Examples of Their Usage Foul and Savory. A.J. is designed to be read in short spurts - admittedly a somewhat uncomfortable description for a bathroom book, but an inarguably important characteristic of that genre. In the can, you want bite-sized reading - hmm... that's another idiom that doesn't quite work in this context. My apologies. Whatever. A.J. is perfect for the john - a not-ignoble posting - being divided into a series of brief word-, phrase-, and grammar-based entries. For example, Blount's section on the double negative begins: '"double negative: A no-no, according to strict grammarians." Not bad - and one that's fun to share with one's partner post wipe, flush, wash, and dry. Jan.24.2009 6:15PM: Recommendation So, I've never recommended a book that I consider poorly written and even more poorly edited, but I'm about to break that streak. Pick up a copy of The World Without Us by Alan Weisman. Read it and weep, baby... If you can manage to stick with Weisman and his editor through the first couple of chapters - which flop around like a dying salmon on a parched riverbank - you'll be rewarded with some quite well-researched and thoughtful analyses of topics such as how plastics will live so much longer than their creators, the fallacy of "clean coal," the futility of attempting to store nuclear wastes, the future of the Panama Canal, the immortality of bronze sculptures and Teddy's pince-nez on Mount Rushmore, and a whole lot more. And it's not nearly as depressing as it sounds. Really. His central conceit is a simple one: What if all humans disappeared tomorrow? What would improve? What would devolve? The answers are far more complex - and intellectually stimulating - than you might think. Check it out. And, of course, buy it at your local bookseller, even if you have to wait a week while they order it for you. Think globally, buy locally - always a good idea. Jan.23.2009 11:20PM: Commemoration So, tomorrow is the 25th birthday of the Mac. Quite frankly, it's not a little disconcerting to admit that a conglomeration of chips, software, and inventiveness has had such an influence on my life. But it has. Years and years ago I drifted past a van that had painted upon it "American Leak Detection." I presumed that the van's carefully painted sides were advertising the business that fueled that van and scheduled its oil changes. I thought, "How do people fall into careers such as leak detection? Surely no child awakens at age eight from a dream during which he or she yearned to achieve cultural prominence and personal fulfillment by becoming a leak detector." I was right, but I was wrong. I realized later that in their twenties or thirties, some grown children discover that detecting leaks - or engaging in equally unglamorous jobs - may very well be one hell of a lot of fun, and that they're quite good at it. Bonus! As for me, leak-detection has never been part of my dreamscape. In my feral youth I dreamed that being an artist was my calling. Ooops - forgot the talent part! Then in my early thirties I fell in love with computers. At about the same time, I learned that I wasn't a half-bad explainer, that writing was fun, and that analyzing data was deeply satisfying. Oh, and also that being snarkily opinionated was salable. And so here I am today. Not detecting leaks - I'll leave that to those who love that vocation - but explaining technology. So, check out the celebration of the Mac's 25th birthday that I wrote today in about three hours. (Damn, daily web news is swift!) Twenty-five years of the Mac and about thirty-five years of me getting my head out of my ass. Seems reasonable - and I like the trend line. Jan.22.2009 9:20PM: Worry So, today I was assigned two additional beats to cover in my newish job as a reporter and editor at The Register: AMD and Intel. (I'm already covering Apple - which shouldn't be a surprise to anyone who has seen the previous incarnation of Myslewski.com.) My first duty as an AMD-watcher was to listen in today on the company's Q1 '09 financial-information conference call, which I then dutifully reported on El Reg. Folks, from our view down here in the trenches of reportage, the financial meltdown is worse than you might think - and rapidly getting (as Dubya might have said, should any of us even care) worserer. The stock market's nosedive is one thing - and a bad thing, to be sure. But what's far more worrying is the rapid shedding of jobs in a market segment that the US once led: high-tech. And I gotta admit that around the office the mood is filled with gallows humor. "Who's going to be the first to use 'We're all fucked!' as a headline?" was one bit of today's office banter. Cases in point - these articles were part of today's news - I repeat: today's news: • AMD losses top $3bn in 2008 Indulge me one more time: This was today's news, and today's news alone. Similar dire news has been coming over the transom for some time now. (And then there are the occasional outliers such as Apple boasts record Q1 as revenue tops $10bn and Google flaunts Meltdown-proofiness, but they're the exception and not the rule.) Folks, this isn't a mere recession - this is a meltdown. Sales dip, so people are laid off; people are laid off, so sales dip; so people are laid off; so sales dip; so people are... Enough. We all get the picture, if only because it's so %$#@!ing obvious. Hang in there friends. To paraphrase Bette Davis, it's going to be a bumpy recovery - and a long and slow one. Jan.21.2009 6:55PM: Damage So, my kids are 21 and 23. They were 13 and 15 when Bush, Cheney, and the whole neomoron crew came to power. My girls grew into their adult years being fed a daily diet of governmental mendacity. My generation grew up watching our government reverse discrimination, fight poverty, protect nature, and mobilize industry to not only - as so many cliches immortalize - put a man on the moon, but also to create the interstate highway system and the Internet, which were both of ambitious, astonishing benefit to the whole country, and not just to monied interests. What did my girls get? Katrina, evildoers, abstinence education, unregulated greed, and a staggering debt. Oh, and lies. Lots of those. During one's formative years, deep lessons are learned - lessons about how the world works, what's important, and what's rewarded. These lessons burrow deep inside our psyches - talk to a Wobblie, if you can still find one. I fear my daughters are wounded. They're smart; they're readers; they're questioners; they're healthy doubters - but they learned to reason in an unreasonable time. It's difficult for their generation to fathom a government that's on their side - and who can blame them? Let's wish them well. Jan.20.2009 7:10PM: Welcomed So, I'm standing in the back of my office-floor's group kitchen, watching Obama's inaugural speech on a small, wall-mounted TV at the other end of the room. I'm sharing the moment with multi-ethnic middle-managers, skinny white-boy code monkeys, punky and inarguably sexy-as-hell stylistas, go-getters and those that were gotten long ago, plus two members of our staff at The Reg. In other words, I'm in America. A techy, educated America, to be sure, but, hey, my country 'tis of thee, motherfuckah - and finally 'tis of me, as well, as I was about to find out. The color on the kitchen TV is terrible - but none of the 20 strangers sharing the moment care. We're all there for the words, not the pictures. Besides, the TV gives us all something to focus our eyes on, and more than one pair in that room were tearing up. Mine did once. "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus — and non-believers." Gotta love the em-dash. Being an atheist, I've never been welcomed - hell, acknowledged - by a president. It felt great. So much so that I raised my $1.25 morning coffee in salute, and was smiled upon by someone sitting on the sink across the room, whom I can only assume was another "non-believer". Solidarity, bro. Obama be bringin' it. Jan.19.2009 10:35PM: Anticipation So, we have a whiteboard in our kitchen upon which we write chores to be done, stuff to buy at the store, messages to family, and the like. Recently we've been counting down the days until the Obamanaugural. Here's how the upper right-hand quarter of that whiteboard looks this evening:
We're not hard-core Obama fans here at Chez Polonaise, but we do know how to appreciate the end of an error. Tomorrow, the skinny new guy gets a tough job. Today, anticipation, guarded hope, and a new, stripped-down, easy-to-maintain website designed for quick and frequent thoughts and musings.
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3/18: ’07 U.S. Births Break Baby Boom Record
We much-maligned boomers can finally pass the torch - 50 years later.
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Nice move, Ms. First Lady of Soul. Seriously.