Blog Thyself: ‘Do You Have The Time, To Listen To Me Whine’
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I remember when it was kind of cool to be a blogger. You’d walk around with a swagger in your step, a twinkle in your eye. Now it’s just humiliating. Blogging has become like mahjong or needlepoint or clipping coupons out of Walgreens circulars: something old folks do while waiting to croak.
(Illustration found here — one among a series of funny blog ‘toons).
In the above snip, Nicholas Carr is offering a take on results released earlier this month of a Pew Internet poll — blogging ain’t popular among the young, and the blogosphere is become mainly a playground for the gray-haired set, a communicative platform moving from cutting-edge to just another redundant device: “Tech experts say it doesn’t mean blogging is going away. Rather, it’s gone the way of the telephone and e-mail — still useful, just not sexy.”
Maybe ChatRoulette is the future — a la Logan’s Run.
Why way-not cool?
A late arrival to the blogging universe: I’m over 60 and have been working this site, Compatible Creatures (bold-face the bold face), only about two-and-a-half years, but enough time to get a measure of this online-only 15-year phenomenon — the surge in popularity coming with the Iraqi war (see a time-line of blogging here) — and how the Internet operates.
So, according to the poll, I’m the age of the blogger, but now I’m at the age of being sick of it all.
News watching nowadays sucks.
Even Vancouver’s version of the winter olympics — a nasty, fatal crash on the luge track and snow-less-weather (really, let’s not yet go to the weather thing, a really, really scary event(s) coming hard, straight and directly right at me, along of course, with the rest of humanity) — carries that now-familiar sketch of a horrid, sad and usually-unfair scenario underneath a commercial bluster or personal bravado.
An example is Haiti.
Underneath the obvious horror of the earthquake was another historical horror — how Catholic Spain and later an arrogant US policy created the horror called Haiti before the horror of the 7.1 quake — and that information is just unconscionable horrible.
See Toussaint L’Ouverture and an early instance of horrible hypocrisy via the historically-famous “Louisiana Purchase” to get just a clue.
And stir in a bit on the current state of affairs with the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the US government is enough to make me blow chunks and want to throttle Lawrence Welk.
In an instance, the Internets might contain too-much data, much-more than a shitload of information, more than a human could ingest without major bowel obstruction, or gop’stipation (so named after Republicans currently in Congress), especially as seen through a prism of whether it’s real or just a wad of monkey turds tossed into the fire to smoke-out the dumb-ass.
Anyone with walking-around sense should know by now some heavy and startling shit is at play upon the land — there’s too many gasping, gaping holes in the overloaded-ship of humanity, with piles of people getting killed in various places, climate change, peak oil, and yes, even “peak soil,” no jobs and no homes, and soon no food, some of these ruptures are well-beyond being conventionally and conveniently patched.
A frightful time, indeed, mama.
Coupled with a natural/earth/enviornment fail point — as last week’s hyper-winter storms so suggests after being cliched into “Snowmageddon” — is a paradoxical and ironically-illogical propensity for potential violence as “serial killer” has mutated into “mass killer.”
(Illustration found here).
Anyway, the subject here is blogging and blogging is writing and writing is research, whether it’s via some academic process or from my own past experience, researched by the brain, all good writing is based upon upon research — hence when in preparing a post, it seems three hundred paragraphs are researched to create one that actually appears in a story.
And hence the news-watching-sucks credo.
Despite it all, however, the Internet dishes it out closer to reality than the MSM — I agree with Lara Logan and her spiel a couple of years ago on US news coverage: “I were to watch the news that you’re watching in the United States, I’d just blow my brains out. ‘Cause it would drive me nuts.”
Blogs are a life-form all its own.
The heads-up on the bloggers’ poll mentioned above came from a kind of blogging-update-on-all-kinds of news site, The Daily Dish, which multi-posts all during the day and the Pew info was originally seen here — The Dish is also most-excellent live-covering events, such as the recent/ongoing unrest in Iran, or the Haiti disaster (I visit The Dish several times a day).
Andrew Sullivan, who administers The Dish via The Atlantic magazine, is gay and a political conservative, which appears to have no bearing on what the overall blog presents — all kinds of junk from politics to sports to sexual practices — except in his own posts and other writings in other media.
Sullivan made blogging popular — he’s currently featured high on President Obama’s reading list — and The Dish is just a sample of a vigorous, though, vaporous culture that’s found bubbling around on the Internets.
There’s even back-stabbing, over-reacting and gossip-mongering amongst the higher-escalations of the blogger community — bloggers feed/deflect off other bloggers, who in turn, although they hate it, must feed/deflect off the MSM (bloggers for the very-most part must depend on the MSM for news reporting) with Sullivan himself taking some unfair raking in the newest virtual dust-up.
Read one angle of the affair here and another here.
A sad commentary on current journalism is the needful fact the best presentation of the horrid news of the day is from false-news organizations — The Daily Show and it’s mentally-unstable twin, The Colbert Report.
Jon Stewart chimed in last week with a mock of the blogosphere’s ranklings in the nefarious ether.
Watch Stewart’s real-funny bit via HuffPost — society on the World-Wide-Web has always carried it’s own word-language, but the whole-shootin’ match really starts to appear other-worldly and preposterous when proclaimed in headlines, so says Stewart: “If you just followed this show on the blogs, you would think I was just running around town, cutting people open from scrote to sternum, wearing their skin as a trophy.”
Dude, these are serious bloggers.
I’m not too serious — NOT!
And this particular blog, Compatible Creatures (bold again), serves just as a creative outlet for myself only (and a tiny-handful of others — 59 people on one particular day last July) and since I enjoyed building/editing newspaper pages years ago, the process of putting together one of these posts is similar, and without a deadline clock on some far wall, it usually takes up considerable, though, enjoyable time — which is healthy, maybe?
Compatible Creatures, compatible creatures — a soft alliterated word sequence to describe things not-so-pretty: war and politics and life.
Funny, huh?
I find it freakin’ hilarious.
So in good standing with the Pew Internet poll, an old guy waiting to croak sits around blogging, and in this particular case, whining.
And speaking of a good whine…
A couple of weeks ago, my daughter who lives just south of Nashville, Tennessee, and I carried on a lengthy gmail chat mostly about music/culture from the 1990s, an era we both agreed was a high-point in rock-n-roll, especially alternate-rock, which came into its own during that decade.
We tossed songs off at each other for a couple of hours, everything from Bush and Alanis Morissette and Third Eye Blind and a bunch from REM and Live with the great “Lightning Crashes” and Soul Asylum and Blur’s Song 2 and Matchbox Twenty and The Wallflowers and even Smash Mouth’s “Walk on the Sun” and Blink 182 along with a shitload of others, a chat intertwined with stuff about movies, TV, friends and her siblings.
And very-much a fun time.
The song that set us off was Green Day’s “Basket Case:”
Do you have the time
To listen to me whine
About nothing and everything
All at once
I am one of those
Melodramatic fools
Neurotic to the bone
No doubt about it
And even with the creeps and paranoia and the mind playin’ freakin’ tricks, one has to get a grip and look at the positive side:
Grasping to control
So I better hold on
Indeed.
Elevate the Ether
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In the last few months, Gail Collins of the New York Times has become one my most-favorite pundits, making clear, concise points with a keen sense of humor.
This morning she looks at those insufferable computer upgrade notices that are seemingly always there, and always ready, willing and able to promise a more-wonderful life in the ether.
It’s depressing to realize that my computer is more bent on self-improvement than I am. At home, my laptop is so ready to update that it can barely be constrained.
The other day, I found three different pleas floating around on the screen. The “Dell Support Center Automatic Upgrade” was the most tempting since it sounded as if the computer wanted to give me a really good seat on a plane.
…
There was a time when I would have responded, but nothing good ever seemed to come of that. The updated computers were never any better at doing the things I wanted to do than the old ones. And there’s always the possibility that I could trigger an inadvertent disaster.
(Illustration found here).
The reason Collins’ commentary so struck me, forcing me to respond is that the “Upgrade” bullshit on my laptop is always striking without warning — although there are still those little floating notices, the real bitch is when they ‘Upgrade’ without saying a damn thing.
The last two days, when I turned on the laptop, went through the opening stages and tried to log on to Mozilla Firefox and out into the InterWeb, some bad shit would seemingly appear — white screen, the little circling indicator bubbling over with enthusiasm — that would scare the techno-shit out of me.
I couldn’t move, nothing happened — the little circling indicator would keep bubbling along.
After manually shutting off the computer a couple of times, a little box would appear and tell me that the guts of this machine was in the process of upgrading with “One of three updates complete: Do Not Turn Off Computer.”
WTF!
Technology can be dangerous to the ignorant.
After recalling how her Blackberry wouldn’t do anything other than re-dial the telephone number of a racist former US senator, Collins allows a mechanical conspiracy:
My darkest suspicion is that my computers are preparing to join their comrades in overthrowing humanity so machines can rule the earth.
I have seen quite a few movies on this theme, and really, the signs are everywhere.
The other day, Jim Dwyer reported in The Times about a man in Brooklyn whose oven broiler turns on every time the cellphone rings.
Experts think this is caused by electromagnetic interference.
However, I believe the oven is ticked off because its owners, in typical New York fashion, use it for storage rather than for actual cooking.
And it is in cahoots with the cellphone, which probably is resentful because it is not allowed to spend its time doing the things cellphones really enjoy, like talking to Trent Lott.
Read Collins’ entire post here.
This brings us to the conclusion that… Shit! Gotta upgrade or die…
Astronomical
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A couple of celestial phenomena have graced eyes and telescopes most recently, especially this evening as the longest total solar eclipse this century swept across Asia, starting in India, sweeping east across China and into the Pacific Ocean.
A blogger/astronomer who chased the eclipse from a mountain outside Hangzhou, China:
8:05 a.m. (8:05 p.m. E.D.T.)
We have an eclipse! It is four minutes past first contact, and we can all clearly see a bite out of the top of the Sun, at about 11 o’clock orientation.
The sky is hazy, but we can see the shape of the Sun very clearly through the haze. We should see the corona very well, if this sky condition continues.
Reportedly, the eclipse was visible along a 155-mile-wide path over a real-shitload of peoples in India and China, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan and Myanmar.
One wonders at the wonders.
Astronomers were also wired up today in the aftermath of a collision on the planet Jupiter.
Something — probably a small comet — smacked into Jupiter on Sunday, leaving a bruise the size of the Pacific Ocean near its south pole.
Just after midnight, Australian time, on Sunday, Jupiter came into view in the eyepiece of Anthony Wesley, an amateur astronomer in Murrumbateman.
The planet was bearing a black eye spookily similar to the ones left in 1994.
“This was a big event,” said Leigh Fletcher of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “In the inner solar system it would have been a disaster.”
The word astronomical does two meanings, one beyond that mentioned above; the word also signifies something huge, something inconceivably large or great — hence from a bitch-dust-up with cost of health reform, the rich have accumulated humongous wallets (h/t ThinkProgress):
Congressional Budget Office data show that between 1979 and 2006 (the most recent year for which these data are available)…the after-tax income of the top 1 percent of households increased by 256 percent, after adjusting for inflation, compared to an increase of 21 percent for families in the middle income quintile.
Increased by 256 percent!
An astronomical total eclipse of the mind.
Oil-A-Goner
Filed Under Environment, Finance, Technology | Leave a Comment
Just as I get my Jeep Commache finally running right and back on the road — a near-two-year traumatic odyssey — fuel prices at the pump are starting to go up again, rising 20 cents in less than a month.
Here in northern California, we’re now paying $3.25 a gallon, well above the national upwardly-mobile US average of $2.63 a gallon.
This particular increase, however, has reportedly started to act oddly beyond the summer supply/demand bullshit, and gas-pump prices might be finally reflecting the affects of what’s termed “Peak Oil.”
Crude oil closed at near $73 a barrel today, its highest point since last October.
The planet’s biggest oil fields are past peak production, declining 6 to 7 percent a year, and the end of easy, cheap fuel is near-about finished.
And the end has been a-coming awhile.
US oil production peaked in 1970, has dropped ever since and now imports about 60 percent of its oil.
The UK gushed with oil from the North Sea in the 1970s, but the field started to bust flat without warning in 1999, knocking the Brits from global oil producer to importer.
A most-excellent observation on this quickly-approaching energy disaster is from Michael Klare, author of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The Geopolitics of Energy, proclaiming the official end of cheap oil in a piece today at tomdispatch.
Klare says word comes from the US Department of Engery’s annual International Energy Outlook (IEO) report — bad moon rising.
A few snippets from Klare’s post:
Very simply, it indicates that the usually optimistic analysts at the Department of Energy now believe global fuel supplies will simply not be able to keep pace with rising world energy demands.
For years now, assorted petroleum geologists and other energy types have been warning that world oil output is approaching a maximum sustainable daily level — a peak — and will subsequently go into decline, possibly producing global economic chaos.
Whatever the timing of the arrival of peak oil’s actual peak, there is growing agreement that we have, at last, made it into peak-oil territory, if not yet to the moment of irreversible decline.
Until recently, Energy Information Administration officials scoffed at the notion that a peak in global oil output was imminent or that we should anticipate a contraction in the future availability of petroleum any time soon.
“[We] expect conventional oil to peak closer to the middle than to the beginning of the 21st century,” the 2004 IEO report stated emphatically.
…
For example, any significant increase in biofuels use — assuming such fuels were produced by chemical means rather than, as now, by cooking — could substantially reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, actually slowing the tempo of future climate change.
On the other hand, any increase in the production of Canadian oil sands, Venezuelan extra-heavy oil, and Rocky Mountain shale oil will entail energy-intensive activities at staggering levels, sure to emit vast amounts of CO2, which might more than cancel out any gains from the biofuels.
In addition, increased biofuels production risks the diversion of vast tracts of arable land from the crucial cultivation of basic food staples to the manufacture of transportation fuel.
If, as is likely, oil prices continue to rise, expect it to be ever more attractive for farmers to grow more corn and other crops for eventual conversion to transportation fuels, which means rises in food costs that could price basics out of the range of the very poor, while stretching working families to the limit.
As in May and June of 2008, when food riots spread across the planet in response to high food prices — caused, in part, by the diversion of vast amounts of corn acreage to biofuel production — this could well lead to mass unrest and mass starvation.
Read Klare’s entire post here.
Cultural Chassis
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In 1956, there were less than 170 million US peoples, unemployment was at less than 5 percent, a first-class postage stamp cost less than a nickel.
And Dinah Shore was hawking the Chevy brand.
In the illustration at left (found here), she is seen with her national, prime-time TV pitch-line, “See the USA in Your Chevrolet,” in a promotion for a chance at winning one of three corvettes, America’s only true sports car.
Four years later, the ‘vette would become a cultural prop for the popular TV show, Route 66, in which a couple of wankers/drifters traveled around “in a Corvette on an existential odyssey in which they encountered a myriad of loners, dreamers and outcasts in the small towns and big cities along U.S. Highway 66 and beyond.”
America in them days of ‘small towns and big cities‘ was crawling with optimism — most likely the height of the US experience occurred between the early-1950s to the late-1960s — fuled by the multi-faceted drumbeat of General Motors, then the biggest company in the whole-wide world:
Entering the 1950s, no corporation even came close to General Motors in its size, the scope of its enterprise or its profits.
GM was twice the size of the second biggest company in the world — Standard Oil of New Jersey (forefather of today’s ExxonMobil) — and had a vast conglomeration of businesses ranging from home appliances to providing insurance and building Chevrolets, GMCs, Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles, Buicks, Cadillacs and locomotives.
It was so big that it made more than half the cars sold in the United States and the U.S. Department of Justice’s antitrust division was threatening to break it up.
The year 1956 was also GM’s real beginning of the end — the retirement of Alfred P. Sloan, who had led the company for 30 years.
Even in the midst of the Great Depression, GM increased car sales (1936) and by 1955 profits had reached $1.2 billion ($8 billion in today’s dollars).
By the end of the ’60s, however, and into the early 1070s, GM started to tank under the weight of its own greed: As GM goes, so goes the country:
The decline of GM is a testament to how poor strategic decisions over the course of decades will ultimately lead to collapse.
The United States has followed the GM model of failure for the last three decades.
The U.S. has too much debt, too much bureaucracy, too many government supported industries, too many agencies, too many employees, and $53 trillion of unfunded future liabilities.
See any similarities to GM?
Can the U.S. avoid the fate of GM, or is it too late?
If we can learn the important lessons of the GM decline, it may not be too late to reverse our course.
Or, we can continue on the current path and follow the advice of Will Rogers: “If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can’t it get us out?”
And GM’s nefarious bankruptcy filing this week was just another up-chuck of the Great American Dream, that continual fantastical principle both inherited and highly-fueled by Baby-Boomers, which includes me.
So on a personal level, I’d somewhat culturally-foreseen GM’s demise long, long ago in switching part my success=automobile/woman aspirations (triad foundation of my own well-researched version of America’s great hope and dream) from America’s macho-iconic corvette to sleek and lean foreign machines — the success and women stuff remained intact until I got older and realized a lot of such things are not worth the trouble.
In the late 1960s, the neatest cars started to carry names like Jaguar and Porsche.
And later, Honda and Toyota.
Developed through GM’s Chevrolet marque since 1953 (work started on the project in ’51), the corvette has gone through at least six generational revisions — cheesy cool to neat cool to not-so-cool to You Suck!
In the primitive cheesy cool, a good many ‘vette people believe the 1956 corvette, shown at left (illustration found here), is the best of the lot.
Although the original 1953 model was basically a 1952 Chevrolet under a radical fiberglass body, by ’56 the ‘vette had morphed into a true sports car with the introduction of a 265 cubic inch, 195 hp V-8 engine and 3-speed manual transmission.
Even as a dumb-ass kid in the late ’50s, I felt the ‘vette then looked bulbous and a bit pretentious, a car for older people — parents of today’s Republicans, maybe.
Only with the introduction of the “sting ray” version in 1963 did I become emotionally involved with the car.
(Illustration found here).
The “sting ray” configuration lasted just four years — 1963 to 1967 — and the car captured my mental image of the man’s manly car, neat-cool and quick.
Slick little blisters on the fenders created a sense of even more clean, clear speed.
The ultimate Sting Ray was the 1967 — the year I graduated from high school — and it not only looked the neat-cool, but it could haul ass, listing a L-36 427-390 engine and carried a sophisticated sense even with all the muscle, keeping somehow that spartan, independent notion.
I spied one on a sales lot in the fall of ’67 and although I could not afford it, the image stayed burned in my fantasy life for years and years.
And like a lot of other shit, GM couldn’t leave well enough alone and the following year, 1968, redesigned the ‘vette into the beginning of You Suck!
In many ways, 1968 was indeed a watershed year — the Tet offensive in Vietnam, the King and Bobby Kennedy assassinations, the Chicago riots, Nixon elected US president etc., etc. — and GM’s introduction of the “Shark” version of the corvette, as seen at left (Illustration found here).
Life started to suck.
The corvette’s life was all but finished — the style looked awkward, and carried that not-so-cool finish.
Instead of nimble, the ‘vette also began a move into a kind of mutant luxury/sports car category.
GM’s Chevrolet encountered such problems the debut was delayed a year.
The 1968 was also the year I eloped — an idiot 19-year-old — which swiftly-launched the end of childhood.
The ’68 ‘vette was in similar circumstances, tossing aside cool for cold-hard cash, or just get bigger and bigger.
(Illustration found here).
By the mid 1980s, the corvette had fattened down into a two-seat Ford Thunderbird — like that big, ugly piece of shit shown above — and began to reshape itself into a high-ticket, exotic automobile geared for people loaded down with disposable income.
From Consumer Guide on the 2007 model:
Our Best Buys are the BMW Z4 and Chevrolet Corvette. Our Recommended picks are the Jaguar XK Series and Porsche Boxster, and Porsche Cayman.
Unfortunately for GM, however, people chose the BMW.
And what of the ‘vette with the GM bankruptcy?
The brand will live on, but the value is in the past.
A co-owner of The Corvette Center in Newington, Connecticut, on the future of the ‘vette:
“They’re a great car. They’re built really well. They last a long time. We’ve got cars here from the 50′s and 60′s that are still on the road, still running. Value tends to be a big part of it. Some of these old cars that were a couple-thousand dollars way, way back right now could be a-hundred-thousand dollars right now. So there’s that mystique about it. The car’s fast, its fun, its efficient. It’s a good car to own.”
The original concept.
Where Is We?
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Talk about being lost after eight years of failure on so many different levels!
It is uncertain whether the Air Force will be able to acquire new satellites in time to maintain current GPS service without interruption.
If not, some military operations and some civilian users could be adversely affected.
– GAO Report on GPS status
(Illustration found here).
One of the most-used modern marvels is the GPS navigational system.
The operation touches so many areas in so many different way, its break-down could cause more than just pain-in-the-ass problems, but could be dangerous.
And it could start to crash in a few months — in 2010, which to my reckoning is next year.
From PC World this morning:
Considered by the GAO to be “essential to national security” the GPS is also widely used by business and consumers and is a driver for next-generation location-based mobile applications used with smartphones and other devices.
And, too, this flip:
It is hard to imagine the U.S. government could allow this to happen.
Actually, that’s a lie, it’s easy to imagine, but there is also time for corrective action to be taken.
The first replacement satellite is expected to be launched this November, some three years after the original launch date.
Speeding up future launches can solve the problem, but is likely to come at a high price.
Just another problem linked to the asshole, incompentence of George Jr.’s eight year as head honcho.
The first replacement GPS satellite was due to launch at the beginning of 2007, but has been delayed several times and is now scheduled to go into orbit in November this year — almost three years late.
The impact on ordinary users could be significant, with millions of satnav users potential victims of bad directions or failed services.
There would also be similar side effects on the military, which uses GPS for mapping, reconnaissance and for tracking hostile targets.
Some suggest that it could also have an impact on the proliferation of so-called location applications on mobile handsets — just as applications on the iPhone and other GPS-enabled smartphones are starting to get more popular.
When one is throwing huge chunks of cash at waging never-ending war, torturing people and invading countries some project might slide through the old cracks in the foundation, and, not being too smart, also allow valuable operations to fade, fade away.