Month: May 2007
Random Questions Meme
Posted on May 30, 2007 in Wastes of Time
Now, first of all, understand that these questions are not “random”. I didn’t get to dip into a magic question generation and have to answer whatever came up. I am replicating the questionaire that James answered on his blog. Think it sounds bad now? It gets worse:
- WHAT DO YOU WANT MORE THAN ANYTHING RIGHT NOW???
- From a materialist perspective, that Nikon D80 camera body. From a health perspective, the strength and the wisdom to ride out the manias of May and June.
- WHAT DO YOU MISS???
- A steady paycheck, though I don’t miss the jobs that go with them.
- WHAT IS YOUR MOST PRIZED POSSESSION???
- There’s a tough one. Not being terribly materialist, I don’t think in these terms. There are many things that I enjoy having, but the things that matters most are our computers.
- WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE SMELL???
- Bollocks! What a question! It is certainly not marijuana which reminds me too much of a brush fire. I like a fresh wind and whatever it bears on it.
- DO YOU GET CLAUSTROPHOBIC???
- I think I tend more towards claustrophilia.
- DO YOU GET SCARED IN THE DARK???
- Not for some time, though my worst nightmares all involve being in the bottom of the Marianas Trench with steamers of squid flesh and bulks of strange creatures all around me.
- WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE COLOGNE / PERFUME???
- I wouldn’t know.
- COFFEE OR ENERGY DRINKS???
- Hansen’s Tangerine Lime.
- IF YOU COULD EAT ANYTHING RIGHT NOW, WHAT WOULD IT BE???
- Ginger candy.
- WHO IS THE LAST PERSON WHO MADE YOU MAD???
- A family member. Or if you want to take an extremist point of view, me, the theory being that we are responsible for our own emotions and cannot be triggered unless we cooperate.
- DO YOU SPEAK A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE???
- Why? Am I not communicating?
- WHAT IS THE BEST WAY TO TELL SOMEONE HOW MUCH THEY MEAN TO YOU???
- Tell ’em. What must be expressed will determine the message and the medium.
- SAY A NUMBER FROM ONE TO A HUNDRED
- A number from one to a hundred.
- BLONDES OR BRUNETTES???
- For what end?
- WHAT IS THE ONE NUMBER YOU CALL OFTEN???
- My wife’s cel phone.
- HAVE YOU BEEN TO ANOTHER COUNTRY???
- Yes.
- WHERE WERE YOU BORN???
- Inglewood, California. I don’t use this for any of my password clues, so there.
- FIRST JOB???
- Stock clerk and handyman.
- WHAT DO YOU GET COMPLIMENTED ABOUT MOST???
- My supposed intelligence.
- WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF ALCOHOL BECAME ILLEGAL???
- Um, nothing much different.
- WHAT DO YOU WANT FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY???
- A party not at my own expense.
- HOW MANY KIDS DO YOU WANT???
- Can’t have kids where I live. No place to graze them.
- WERE YOU NAMED AFTER ANYONE???
- Sure. I was named after lots of people. And lots of people were named after me.
- DO YOU WISH ON STARS???
- Hmmm. Must have been written by a teenaged New Ager.
- WHICH FINGER[S] IS YOUR FAVORITE???
- The index finger because it is most utilitarian.
- DO YOU LIKE YOUR HANDWRITING???
- I am beginning to think that whoever wrote this suffers from Obsessive Compulsive Disorder.
- WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE LUNCH MEAT???
- Pastrami
- ANY BAD HABITS???/
- Yeah, wasting my time on stupid memes when I should be writing something original.
- WHAT IS YOUR MOST EMBARRASSING CD ON THE SHELF???
- Oh come on. I don’t want to get up and look right now.
- IF YOU WERE ANOTHER PERSON, WOULD YOU BE FRIENDS WITH YOU???
- I don’t know! Do I get to have the same personality, tastes, etc.?
- WHERE IS YOUR SECOND HOME???
- God, whoever wrote this had to have money, too. In addition to being a teenaged New Ager.
- DO YOU TRUST OTHERS EASILY???
- Testing for paranoia now? I don’t trust this question.
- WHAT WAS YOUR FAVORITE TOY AS A CHILD???
- A book, specifically Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling.
- HAVE YOU EVER BEEN IN A MOSH PIT???
- Hell no!
- DO YOU UN-TIE YOUR SHOES WHEN YOU TAKE THEM OFF???
- No, my wife unties them and she takes them off. Then she checks my feet.
- THING YOU ATE???
- An apple.
- SIBLINGS???
- No thank you, please. The one I have doesn’t like me.
- YOU LIKE SUSHI???
- Yes, as long as it is not alive or dead within the last thirty seconds.
- ARE YOU TOO SHY TO ASK SOMEONE OUT???
- No, I am too married to ask someone out.
I tag Bipolar Guy.
[tags]memes,wastes of time,waste of time,killing time,time killing[/tags]
The Real Tragedy of the Electronic Commons
Posted on May 30, 2007 in Commons Theft Net Neutrality
[[Howard Rheingold]] may be the most overrated and undereducated commentator on the Internet. A few years ago, he wrote an article called “The Tragedy of the Electronic Commons” in which he cited a conservative fairy tale called “The Tragedy of the Commons” by [[Garrett Hardin]] which proposed that what destroyed the English Village Commons was the greed of the villagers:
For hundreds of years, herders grazed their cattle and sheep on common land. As long as no individual tried to graze too many cattle, everybody benefitted from the common resource. When too many people asserted their self-interest above the interest of the commons, overgrazing destroyed the value of the common land.
Hardin looked at history with the eyes of a [[Herbert Spencer|Spencerian]]. The import of his article and of Reingold’s was that it was important to build fences because you can’t trust the hoi polloi. The trouble with both of their theses was that history did not happen quite like they presented it. Instead, what killed the English Commons was a different kind of greed in the form of a dastardly bit of legislation called the [[Enclosure Act]].
It worked like this: you put a fence around the land you wanted. It didn’t matter if that land included a piece of the local commons. If you got there first with the fences, you owned the land for crops or for large estates on which you could stroll at your leisure even if that land was being used for pasturage. It meant the end of the village-controlled commons because the chief beneficiaries were the local nobles who, having lost or never having had their feudal privileges in the first place, put fences around land which wasn’t theirs, which by the definition of the law (because it was not planted with crops) was free for the taking. A few villages got wind of the acts and enclosed their lands before the lords could steal it, but for the most part, the economically livelihood and independence of the English peasantry was destroyed, leading to situations such as described in Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village, a superior text for describing the “tragedy of the commons”. (See E.P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class for an account of this arrant land grab which ranks with the stealing of the American West from its native peoples.
A similar mythology is being invoked for the purpose of carving up the Net for ownership by big corporations. Conservatives point the finger at pornographers, scam artists, and others when they make public statements, but in private, they are after small businesspeople and people who have used the free speech of the net to attack their agenda. That more people read liberal blogs than conservative ones upsets them. They want to force deserted villages.
They are all talk about Big Government, but Big Government is behind their newest netspace grab just as it was behind the Enclosures Act. They are primed to drive you and me out of the Electronics Commons, claiming that they are wreaking good on our behalf.
There is no overgrazing happening on the web. What fences are needed have been created through private initiative and we, a free people, can choose among them. We can glide to whatever site pleases us without the interference of our providers or their routers. If the conservatives have their way, you will lose your power to voice dissent, to sell your product, to meet new people free of their governance and interference. There is a tragedy of the electronic commons on the horizon, but Reingold has been silent so far. What with his talk of “Amish style” interaction on the web, we have cause to wonder whether he understands what is happening right now with the campaign to abolish net neutrality and make it very, very partisan.
[tags]howard rheingold,commons theft,class,www,wild wild web[/tags]
Do This if You Blog
Posted on May 29, 2007 in Blogging Commons Theft Net Neutrality
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Speaking as a bipolar, I can say that this has meant the difference between isolation and connection. Big Corporations would prevent us from finding others with our illness, advocating for our rights, and educating others about the folly of stigma. You can do something about it: you can challenge the proposed regulations, but you must do it by June 15th. Click here to send your email. |
[tags]commons theft,internet,corporate stealing,blogging,free speech,freedom of speech,corporate theft[/tags]
Snatching the Colors Off the Desert
Posted on May 28, 2007 in Photography
It has always been about pixels except in the old days — when we sloshed coated papers in silver nitrate solutions that purpled our skin and no one could be called a photographer who didn’t develop her/his own film — we called it grain. So there I was, last week, being retrograde, traipsing about the canyon country of South Utah carrying my Nikon 8008, once the cutting edge of its time and now an interesting dinosaur except for the fact that the body of Nikon’s new line of digitals accept the lenses as Nikons always have since the F2. My 8008, the camera I bought to last forever. And to prove its continuing utility, before I left I bought four rolls of Kodak 200. Yes, it was off to slick rock and sand carrying a legacy of precision optical equipment.
I am a rebel. My forebear is not [[Ansel Adams]] who turned out pictures that the common man would love, something like this except not as filling:
So far, the not very intense voting declares that that is the best picture I took on the trip. The rest of them received a zero (no votes at all) and I have to attribute it to the fact that I am more the spawn of [[Edward Weston]] or [[Imogen Cunningham]]. I like abstracts, such as this which I think is the best photo that I snapped last week:
I turn my head and I see things. The problem with last week is that I had to keep my head close to the ground lest I see more than I had film to record. That’s the nicety of the digital age: the grain has gotten good and as a result you can click away more than the days when film took so much more room than a flash card and held so much less. Yet I did allow my eyes to wander from the necessities, the shots that had to be recorded for the hiking reports or family albums.
Oh, the Nikon was so sweet, so precise, so clear. It delivered on my abstracts and it delivered on my more banal shots:
So I am looking forward to the big change, when I put down the money I’ve been saving for a the body of a D80, gutted of its lens, waiting for the focuser of light just like Frankenstein’s golem waited for its brain. I have the old sophisticated tubes of equipment: all I need is the magic box. When I get that, I intend to go down to the sea again and seek the lacework in the sand.
Lynn thinks we might be able to visit southern Utah again this fall. I anticipate slot canyons, white domes, and streams fading in the sand. Pixels is what we call grain now a days. Oh, I know that my old paraphenalia and new image maker will snatch the colors off the desert, let me keep the sand specks in a sack meant for jewels.
Visit my gallery here. If you register, you can vote and leave comments.
[tags]photography,Southern Utah[/tags]
And in other news, check this out.
Tweeter Twitter
Posted on May 28, 2007 in Micro-blogging Whimsies
Go to TweeterVolume and enter the words California, sex, death, drugs, and rock. Expect interesting results.
Anyone dare to explain it?
[tags]twitter[/tags]
Cure for Memory Loss
Posted on May 27, 2007 in Irony & Sarcasm
Check out what Sally found on Youtube!
UPDATE: Well, the video stopped working, so Sally put up another.
On Peculiar Ground
Posted on May 27, 2007 in Photos Vacation Spring 2007
I missed having the freedom of a digital camera in that I had to select my shots all too carefully. Consequently, much of what was on the roll came out too boring. There were exceptions, however, and I hope you will visit my gallery and rate my latest, leave a few comments.
[tags]Utah,Kodachrome Basin,photos,canyons,Southern Utah,road trips,vacations[/tags]
Which Variety of Sloth?
Posted on May 27, 2007 in Bipolar Disorder Uncertainty
The pill containers lay open. I heated a muffin in the microwave and thought that it would take ages for me to lay out the morning medications — two Effexor and a Cardizem. A hard prod from the forepart of my brain made me get the pill bottles and lay out the capsules — blue and green for the Cardizem and pink for the Effexor. Then I swallowed today’s dose with a little water. The whole operation was over in less than a minute.
You’re never sure, you’re never sure if this is the bipolar or another kind of sloth.
I cleaned the kitchen floor before we went on our vacation/delivery. Now I am checking out all the floors, getting down on my hands to scrub them or pick up scraps of paper in preparation for vacuuming.
[tags]bipolar disorder,sloth,depression,uncertainty,moods[/tags]
Of Silence and Canyons
Posted on May 26, 2007 in Photos Vacation Spring 2007
I’ll try to tell you stories of Utah.
Friday Xenartha Blogging – Return of the Pygmy Anteater
Posted on May 25, 2007 in Xenartha
They are so darned cute and cuddly that I thought I’d hit you with yet another clip.
Twittering Away
Posted on May 18, 2007 in Travel
I’m off to Utah in the morning. Red rock and Mormons and my father all packed away in a box smaller than a canned ham. You can keep up on my progress by visiting my Twitter page. I’ll send daily/twice daily/thrice daily messages to let you know what I am doing.
You can comment on my travels here or yap with others. Maybe Terra has answered the questions I sent her.
Expect photos on my return.
[tags]twitter,travel[/tags]
