Category Archives: Think pieces

If you call this thinking,

Critique of Pure Reason

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There was a time when all jazz musicians did was party and chase women and blow amazing saxophone (or whatever.) Now they are smart and do this:

So I got to ask this..
Let’s say you are sitting under an oak tree, and there is a guy next to you, let’s say he’s reading a book…Suddenly, the tree sheds a branch, hitting him, but you are (miraculously?) unscathed..
Do you proclaim “God is great” “I am blessed” or variations on this theme (which I see a lot of here on good ol FB…)
And, equally importantly–what about the dude who is injured by the branch?
Did God decide he was a bad man?
You were better?
More blessed?
More worthy of not being pounded by a falling tree branch?
I am genuinely interested in hearing rational non reactive responses from at least relatively sane individuals.

Holy shit. That was Rufus Philpot, the real thing. A bassists’ bassist. People don’t talk through his bass solos. So his philosophical quandary was not something easily blown off. Not bad poetry from a singer songwriter poet with hair like the Flying Burrito Brothers. Not some kid writing in a journal in a dark corner at the Blue Whale, discussing tonality. Not a philosophy major like the editor who so got on my nerves instantly at the LA Weekly that I walked, Johnny Paycheck style. No, this is Rufus Philpot, a heavy. Not to mention with the rare ability among jazz musicians of writing well (he should be blogging those jazz album reviews of his, they’re beautiful.) But last night I gave several smart ass responses to this and forgot about it. But you can’t just forget about it on Facebook. The next day they stare at you again. Your comments, I mean. Sitting there. Glaring. No wonder everyone is so mewly nice on Facebook. No wonder that everyone writes as if their grandmother is reading everything they post. No wonder it’s so Mr. Rogersesque. Because you can’t escape. You write the wrong thing–OK, the way wrong thing, like bragging about Hitler or something–and all virtual humanity will loathe you, make you miserable, cost you your job, and weird if beautiful women with a thing about losers will want you. Of course if you write something no one noticed nothing of the sort will happen. But it’s my blog, so I will exaggerate–well,lie–and say everyone noticed and you will probably keep reading anyway, waiting for the punchline.

But back to Mr. Philpot’s quandary:

I’d say it was just a tree branch that was ready to fall off–eucalyptus, probably, they do that, I saw one smash a Volkswagen once–and Mr. Philpot was in the right place and the guy reading Critique of Pure Reason was also in the just right place, but at the wrong time. So what’s to do but dial 911 and see if he’s breathing.

I say that now. But last night I came home from three hours of Bruce Forman and gave acerbic, misanthropic responses for which I am truly ashamed. I said that God hated that arrogant book reading motherfucker…He does that, for no reason. And then later I said that it was the guy’s fault for pissing off God in the first place. I told another lady that if she stood on her head and coughed it would get her high. There were more, too, on Facebook, on Twitter, in email. In my blog. I was making vicious fun of everything. I felt possessed by Ambrose Bierce. Had I lived near the beach I would have slipped an insulting note into a bottle and tossed it into the sea. My wife finally bopped me on the head and told me to cool it. This is what happens when you hang around jazz musicians. My mama done told me.

Of course, this mea culpa itself might be yet a further extension of cynical misanthropism. A nightmarish gyre of irony. I’m a writer, and embittered old jazz critic and we get like that. It’s all those solos. They screw up the head. I was a nice guy when I did my thesis on Peter, Paul and Mary. Oh well. But that anyone who does read Critique of Pure Reason is asking for it, you Kant deny.

I’ve never read Critique of Pure Reason. For one thing I was not smart enough. One paragraph in and I knew that. For another thing, I had a life. You can spend years on a tome like that, and by the time you finish you’d have none of your old friends left, though some very irritating new ones. And I was gonna say you can’t get laid reading Critique of Pure Reason but actually that is not true. I discussed this in a previous essay. Had I known the truth, I would have changed majors. But what, then, is Truth? The truth is I dropped out of college, joined a punk rock band and got laid instantly. I was the drummer, and came out on stage that first gig and warmed up using logs for sticks. That’s all it took. That’s the Truth. Epistemology didn’t even come into it. And while I know the jazz musicians among you won’t understand the logs thing, this was the late seventies. Two words: “Disco Monk”. And that was Sonny Rollins. Logs for drumsticks, Disco Monk, thrift stores full of abandoned pet rocks. It was an ugly time.

OK. Daylight Savings Time is over and I’m thoroughly confused. To make it worse I saved up the last twenty years of Daylights Savings Time and used it all at once so now it’s sometime next Tuesday. You don’t fuck with the calendar. I wish someone had told me.

Danette

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[Saying goodbye to a best friend, with hands.]
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Oh, I must tell you this, I remembered it for some odd reason a week or so ago. It  was my last day there at the company, and I had gone up to the top floor to say goodbye to some of the admins I worked with for so many years, and to Steve W, who I’ve known since I started and he’s company president now and I’m not. You and I had said goodbye on the phone, as you had to rush home. I was talking to Jan and you made an appearance there for just a second, so we were able to share a quick hug and a smooch and a goodbye and it was much better that way, nothing drawn out and too sad. We were clutching hands, my left, I think, your right. As we parted, we slowly let our hands slip away, fingers unwinding, till your last finger slowly freed itself….it was all very sensuous and memorable and very Danette, or at least the Danette I knew. The reason I know this is how it appeared is that Jan was watching us carefully, and really focused on our hands, which clung to each other and parted slowly, even lovingly, and Jan’s eyes grew wider and wider, she couldn’t tear her gaze away. When we finally let each other’s index finger go, we held our hands aloft a bit, waving the fingers at each other. It was very sweet. But Jan had such a look of astonishment. I have no idea why. I recall her looking at you and then back at me and at you again and you could see her mind whirring, thinking what I’m not sure. Maybe I don’t want to know. But seeing her expression, I immediately began saying whatever it was I had been in mid sentence of when you popped in, and she recovered quickly. But that look on her face was so funny…I just had to write it out.
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I have to confess this is a bit of an exercise…in fact, I remember thinking writing it up just like this not long after that last day but couldn’t get up the brain wattage to actually attempt it. I am fascinated by hands.,…have been ever since I saw the famous old Albrecht Dürer woodcut of a pair of hands. They have to be the hardest thing to describe. Not still, or grasping, not working as one unit…but instead describing the fingers moving individually as they actually do. The five independently controlled appendages–personalities, almost–on each hand, plus the hand itself, and the wrist, and describing them in writing is virtually impossible, as you have to tell all five finger’s stories at once, plus that of the hand, and of the wrist, and of the person behind the hand…all simultaneously. And here you have two hands–your’s and mine–in movement and touch, with a powerful emotional component of best friends parting being the movements of each and together…and then the reaction of Jan watching it and the imagination she was letting run riot…I mean, it’s so vastly complex that describing it is virtually impossible.  Atop all that, it was beautiful, in the way two hands together–shaking, say–never are. It was an amazing scene, and I utterly failed to even get a glimpse of it down in prose.


The dawn of post-consciousness

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Sometimes Facebook seems like a giant lobotomy. Everyone seems so much less intelligent. We aren’t, really, you meet us in real life and we’re smart as ever. But you read us on Facebook and you wonder where all the IQ went. I’m not sure why that is. Maybe it’s Facebook etiquette. Obscenity, rudeness and critical thinking are faux pas. Kitty pictures, what we ate for breakfast and believing every post we see no matter how ridiculous are good things.

Hopefully this is just a phase we’re going through. That awkward, gullible stage. Internet adolescence. If not, then maybe this is the dawn of the post-consciousness age. There was a mighty civilization here once, they’ll say, and then there was Facebook.

 

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Just go with the flow

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Though not a specialist at all, when I was working at a large entertainment consortium I spent about five years in the internet security department (full of supposedly reformed hackers) and then another eight working with the people who specialized in data mining and selling profile data. Totally ruined me. Instead of the dawn of a new era, I tend to see the ugly, scary side of the Internet all the time.

I’m not saying that’s a good thing.

But being old enough to have lived most of my life in an analog world I have piles of books and records and folding maps and videos and cassettes and boxes full of typewritten and hand scrawled writing full of white out (remember sniffing white out?) and passages scratched out but still visible. I have photo albums, a dozen photo albums, stuffed with pictures that exist nowhere else but in that photo album. I have old flyers I made cutting and pasting. Cutting with a scissors and pasting with Elmer’s glue. The glue would get all over your fingers and make a helluva mess. Glue sticks were a revelation. The slightest invention made things simpler. A glue stick then was like an app on your iPhone now, a silly assed little thing that made life easier. But now it makes the virtual easier, while, back then it made the real less sticky. I remember thinking my Mr. Coffee machine was the greatest thing ever. A Mr. Coffee machine. Imagine how much simpler existence was then if a Mr. Coffee machine was a life changer.

I found a folder full of service manuals, all of which are available online. Things were tactile then. You could feel the paper on your fingers. There was glossy and non-glossy. I look at onion paper now and can’t remember why anyone used it. Onion paper. Typing paper. Note pads. Graph paper. All kinds of paper. Construction paper in a zillion colors. Even xerox paper in various colors. Paper filled up manila folders, stuffed file cabinets, could never be found when you needed it. Paper cut down whole forests, spotted owls and all, and left ugly scars across entire mountain sides.

And things like this, what I’m writing now, remained in notebooks, real paper notebooks, never seen by anyone, and when you died they were stuffed in bins and taken to the dump and no one ever knew. Now we write them in blogs for anyone to see.  Anyone.

That’s the scary part, that anyone. Who is that anyone? I write something, think that anyone could see it, and that anyone might be someone, somebody, Somebody. So I delete it.  Were I thirty years younger that would never even occur to me. Or else I wouldn’t care. I wouldn’t know that everything I did online was part of the vast, inchoate internet, an internet that could conceivably some day reach across the entire universe, and it wouldn’t concern me a bit.  If I were thirty years younger I’d read that paragraph above about maps and photo albums and hand scrawled writing and not get it at all. An ancient clouded time, primitive, sad. Not one with the body.

But in thirty years all my age will be gone, and so will memories of black and white television and the smell of freshly mimeographed paper. Of green stamps and paying cash for everything. Of 8 tracks and writing thoughts out on lined paper. Of terrible percolator coffee and how long it took to cook things before microwave ovens. Of checkbooks. Playboy centerfolds. Reaching for a dictionary or a thesaurus. The complete set of the Encyclopedia Britannica,14th Edition, Revised, that sits ignored behind me in a corner and fed my autodidactism for decades. Those memories will be all gone.

And in fifty years the people who remember us remembering these things will be gone. People will think back to lives a hundred years before and wish they lived then, back in the 1950’s and ’60’s and ’70’s, without realizing just how much better it will be by then. They will re-create virtual versions of us doing things, fun things, mostly, but doing things. Driving our own cars. Cooking our own foods. Being hippies or punks or beatniks or fighting in World War Two.  Reading books and making music and having sex in person. They’ll look at these virtual representations of you and me and sigh and wonder and wish.

But those people won’t be nagged by the memories of the days before the internet. And privacy. And things that were corporeal and real and tactile being better than things that are virtual and imaged and electrons. They won’t look at photos of themselves tagged and profiled and commented on by complete strangers and sometimes weird out. They won’t remember privacy, and long for a time when they weren’t on a zillion databases everywhere. They won’t fear the internet. In fact, they might not be paranoid at all. Maybe paranoia itself will die out, and acceptance will soothe them. Zen has long been the balm of those trapped in lives they can’t control. Don’t fight it, people will say. Just go with the flow.

A happening, a fist fight, whatever

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An anecdote from my pal Owen Green (who probably turned me onto Sun Ra, as well as Fela Kuti and Patto) about the much-missed Palomino, which was the honkiest honky tonk this town ever had:

One of the penultimate live show ironies of my experience would be seeing The Sun Ra Arkestra at the Palomino; which included the wait staff (dressed in Daisy Dukes and the like) gawking at the stage wondering who were these crazy black people along with the equally eccentric audience watching them.

And I thought seeing the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra at an East Hollywood punk rock dive called the Anti-Club was special. Well, it was, but not Sun Ra at the Palomino special. We did get to hang out on the band bus, though, and smoke a reefer with the singer. Buddy Morrow hung with us a bit but turned down the joint, he was working. Man, this was three decades ago. Three decades before then was the tail end of the big band era. Three decades ago from today rock music was vital and crazy and still scared people. Well, not Buddy Morrow. Probably nothing scared him. He’d been around. Night Train, baby. Sun Ra had been around too. To other planets, in other lifetimes, and up on a rooftop in Philadelphia. That one there’s film of.

Do these kind of things even happen anymore? Sun Ra and cowboys, Tommy Dorsey and punk rockers? Well, not Tommy Dorsey himself, he would have punched us all out after screwing the bartendress. Herman Blount (aka Sun Ra) just floated above the audience though. I wish Waylon had been there to see it, or Jerry Lee Lewis. Or Willie Nelson…he and John Gilmore could have gotten down.

The thing about big giant cities is that everything is here, and sometimes they meet and weird, wonderful shit can happen. Or else there’s a fist fight. Whatever. It’s a happening. Space is the place, even if that place is a honky tonk.

Ya know, I tried looking for a picture of Sun Ra at the Palomino to put here. No luck. There were pictures, but they just looked like Sun Ra anywhere. I didn’t want anywhere, I wanted the honky tonk. I did find the LA Times review of the show, though. The guy wrote it up like a jazz review. Not me. I would have gone crazy. It was Sun Ra at the Palomino for crying out loud.

Now it’s time for Owen to spill about those all night Fela Kuti extravaganzas at the Olympic. I missed out on those too. You never realize how stupid you were until years later, and there’s nothing you can do about it because everybody’s gone.

The new thing with feeling

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(expanded from an online conversation today with John Altman) 

Ya know, if I’d stop writing my self-indulgent stuff and went back to writing about jazz I’d start getting invited to the pricey jazz things and fancy digs. Something to think about…..

But the last couple years I was at the LA Weekly writing Brick’s PIcks I was really hating the way I was writing. It was stuck, in a rut, doing the same thing over and over. It was so easy and I’d gotten cynical. I was feeling very dishonest as a writer and that is death.  I had to re-learn how to write so it was time to woodshed. Like breaking a badly set arm and letting it heal all over again. So I up and walked.

That gig was killing me. I absolutely hated it by the end. Hated it like you hate the worst job you ever had. It was turning me into a fake. I’d invented this ridiculous Brick’s Picks character, him with his royal we and oh so ridiculously hip, turning the emotional faucet on and off…I hated that guy. He was a joke. That’s what happens when you wind up a jazz journalist without ever wanting to be a jazz journalist. Finally I got my zillionth idiot editor and said fuck it, I’m gone. And I was.

So that’s where I went. People still ask, which amazes me. They still bitch, which irritates me. Sometimes I say nothing, sometimes (if they’re older) I mumble an apology, and sometimes (if they’re a friend and ought to know better) I tell them to just shut the fuck up. And I’m feeling better about my writing now. To quote Eric Dolphy’s post card to Oliver Lake (I wish I’d saved the picture), I’m trying to do the new thing but with feeling.

Ya know, I don’t think people realize that writing is like music and you have to practice every goddamned day. Practice till your brain hurts. Practice till everything around you is language, everything, and you need to stop and just look at things and try not to think.

Then start writing again.

Facebook knows that a sucker is born every minute

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Moved to https://bricksscience.com/2017/03/01/facebook-knows-that-a-sucker-is-born-every-minute/.

An unseen miasma of threats and spies and anarchists and criminals

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I’m just an uneducated layman at this kind of thing, strictly amateur, but I sure can see why botnets are being built up by using WordPress. WordPress does not take security seriously. Never really has. It’s a joke. Even their fix it plug-ins can crash sites. And they blow off people who complain, essentially tell them it’s their fault and refer them to bulletins and forum discussions years old. It’s a huge site just screaming to be exploited for nefarious use. Facebook is an ideal channel for predatory malware, too, but WordPress is even worse because so little effort is made to impede it. At least Facebook seems to give a damn. And in a plot device worthy of I Spy or Mission Impossible (or even Batman) It appears that someone is building up to a huge Denial of Service attack on unspecified targets in the U.S. (so far they’ve been going after Washington D.C. based media sites, interestingly enough). And they are planning to use WordPress as the means to do so. Infected javascript is snuck onto a legitimate website’s homepage (such as those media outlets in Washington) which automatically redirects visitors to a WordPress blog that was hijacked and filled with malware (or set up deliberately as a Trojan horse full of malware). Suddenly your machine is infected too, and your security software might not even realize it. You begin infecting others. This latest phenomenon began in late July. About the time, interestingly enough, that WordPress bloggers began complaining again about performance issues.

There are nearly 70,000,000 blog sites on WordPress. All those blogs with all their plug-ins and widgets, literally billions of them, each of which is a potential vulnerability. That is, plug-ins and widgets are ideal ways an enterprising hacker can introduce malware to a blog page. WordPress, staring at numbers like that has done the easy thing and barely done anything at all. The Alfred E.Neuman theory of website security. You can either be proactive or just not give a flying fuck. Hence there are no fixes (well, there are, but they tend to crash Windows, something WordPress hasn’t bothered to address).  It’s somewhat disturbing when you realize that the brass at WordPress has decided to let the teeming millions of blog owners fend for ourselves. So some of the geeks in our midst have developed their own fixes. Alas geeks that they are, almost all of these fixes are written in dense packets of code that will scare the bejesus out of anyone with social skills. No easy to download tools for these people, which means that only a tiny percentage of WordPress users can apply any of these fixes (provided they even work). And as I said before, the limited fixes that WordPress does provide, in periodic upgrades, are so badly written that they freeze up Windows (often with a very attractive flashing or windows that metastasize so fast that your only recourse is to shut down the computer.) 

You have to be impressed by the WordPress brass and their belief in their decentralized approach to internet security. Afterall, the exact same thing that is happening now happened last April. 90,000 WordPress sites, hijacked by malware that created an enormous botnet that began Denial of Service attacks that just about did in WordPress itself. Was that a practice run? Whatever it was, it worked, making the site just about unusable for about a week there. Whew. That was close. Let’s hope it never happens again. The Chinese (or whoever)  could probably not believe their luck, and so they did the same thing again. That’s what is happening now, and you can google your brains out trying to find more that a couple press releases from WordPress announcing their half-assed and unworkable fixes. They might as well sacrifice a chicken and chant. That would be just as effective.

So potentially millions of WordPress blogs can be brazenly hijacked by unknown evildoers, who draw in unsuspecting visitors to innocent sites suddenly full of malware that, unknown to them (or to the owners of the infected site), will eventually make them unwitting participants in an oncoming Denial of Service attack when it comes. A potentially massive denial Denial of Service attack. Not that any of the infected visitors will have a clue that they are doing so. That’s the beauty of it. That’s what this botnet is, that’s what it does. All these infected computers that will one day receive a signal to begin contacting targeted sites over and over, maybe thousands of times per machine, overwhelming it’s ability to respond and essentially taking it offline. And doing so without the user–you or me–having any idea we are doing so. Talk about a perfect crime. This current website hijacking campaign was preceded by a similar attack that contacted Free Tibet activists on their Android phones via a “rogue” Twitter account and led them to a compromised Tibetan human rights website infected with malware. Not only did it link them to a botnet, it also provided their location (or their Android phone’s location, anyway) on a 24/7 basis, as well as gave a look-see to the evil doers into just what these Tibetan activists had on there. (I can’t find the article now, but I believe the infected site was a registration site for a human rights conference, which probably means credit card information was requested.) Interestingly enough, the malware used (something involving Adobe) had been used previously against manufacturing and defense industry targets (i.e., for industrial and military espionage). The coding was in Chinese. You  figure it out.  One of those things Edward Snowden didn’t bother mentioning.

(I saw today, incidentally, that the Dalai Lama’s website  had been hacked in a similar fashion. What’s driving a lot of this is the Tibetan self-immolation campaign. Beginning in 2009, at least seventy-eight Tibetans have burned themselves alive protesting Chinese occupation. The Chinese, frantic to put an end to it, have infiltrated Tibetan social media. A digital campaign against self-immolation, which is about as analog a message medium as you can imagine.)

Hijacked WordPress sites have been serving malware at the core of a number attacks during the first six months of the year.  Attacks against Washington, D.C.- area media sites involved javascript injected on to the sites’ homepages redirecting victims to a compromised WordPress site hosting malware. The same tactic was used against Tibetan freedom supporters where attackers were using Twitter to send victims to a Tibet-themed WordPress blog that featured Adobe Flash, a technique that had been used in the past against manufacturing and defense industry targets. What a coincidence. It bothers me, by the way, how local media sites in the Washington D.C. area–not the Washington Post but a television station, for instance) are being targeted. Why those? Why concentrate on D.C. people? Regular people, too, the type that log onto the local happy hour news team website. I have no idea.

By the way, those Facebook issues we’ve all been having seem to be related to this sort of outside interference as well. I have no idea if they’re related. There seems to be no financial gain in this. No one is scamming anybody or stealing credit card info. This is either a domestic, politically motivated campaign (an extremely well organized Anonymous type thing, which doesn’t seem likely) or a foreign power infiltrating and damaging the U.S. cyber infra-structure. It has gotten particularly intense this summer.

I suppose it ought to make us feel better that we do it too. Snowden laid that out. Is there a Chinese whistleblower doing the same? It would be helpful. Though unlikely as hell, not with their black jails. But it would give us, that is the American public, a clearer picture of where we’re at. Is the NSA creating huge botnets in China? Is this mutually assured digital destruction? The Chinese have admitted that a massive Denial of Service attack launched against American websites in 2011 (aka “Operation Aurora”) was counter espionage, and that they acquired some very useful information (some of which sounds similar to what Snowden revealed.)

Of course, 99% of you haven’t a clue what I’m talking about, but maybe you ought to. It’s almost Cyber World War, baby, and you are all right in the middle of it. I must have a dozen security and anti-viral/malware/worm/hack programs I use now. There is not one that can do all. And who knows what remains invisible in our machines? Or on sites that we use. Your Facebook page can be infected just like your hard drive can. Any site is the same. The whole cloud is a vast network of potentially infected sites, slipping infected code between each other. Cloud virus protection is a growth industry. The impenetrable firewalls that maintained the sanctity of intranets are sooooo last technological era. Almost everything is wide open now. We’re all as connected in the ether as are the neurons in our brains. It’s surreal. And just as a brain can be shut down by seizures that overpower all the neurons, overwhelming synaptic connections till every neuron is firing and freezing the whole thing and the body is paralyzed and spazzing and unconscious, so can botnets launch massive denial of service attacks that knock out websites by the thousands and effectively cripple huge chunks of the internet for a while. This digital existence of ours is full of virtual plagues, virtual wars, virtual criminals, virtual time bombs and virtual creatures that move about in perfect sequence following binary dictates. We are so fucked, you might say. Or at least doomed to an endless battle with these forces of virtual evil.  Some of you are so web-bound, online in some way or another 24/7. And that world you have your head lost in is an unseen miasma of threats and spies and anarchists and criminals and drone like codes that just can’t help themselves as they infect whatever they can. Craziness. I remember when we were bothered by pornographic emails. And all they did was offend us. Simpler times, those. There was email, and there was our lives.Two separate things.  Now many people’s lives are their Facebook accounts. They have friends they have never met, never will, and probably wouldn’t even like if they did. Men fall in love with two dimensional naked ladies who move about on their screens. We read books in photons where once we touched paper. Our money is in electrons, we never see it, and we’re not even sure if it’s ours anyway.

We have totally surrendered ourselves to this other world. In some ways we exist more in the ether than we do in the physical world. Yet out here, in reality, we have some control over our lives. But online, in the ether, they own us. They know everything about us. Not the government so much ss we fear, not really, when compared with all the data that Facebook and everyone else you register online with has. I’ve already gone on and on about data mining and what it means for you (in You Are What You Type).That stuff creeps me out. It’s essential, but kind of creepy. Too many years working in online marketing, I guess. I scan my machine almost daily with Spybot to get rid of all the spyware (it works better in the safe mode with networking, by the way.) I’ve done deadly battle with Win32 and WebCake. DoubleClick is a pain in the ass. The ZeroAccess Trojan was a tough one. Man. Had to go through half a dozen anti-virus softwares before I found one that worked. A vicious little bastard, that thing. And who knows what is lurking on my machine, invisible. Who knows what is ready to pounce every time I log onto another website. What sneaks past us off our Facebook pages, or even via Twitter. Our iPhones are like live virtual grenades, ready to go off and wreck things.  

I try not to think about our automobiles. Though I love the status report I get every month from OnStar. It even tells me my tire pressure, for each tire. Imagine that. Yeah, imagine that. Some guy in the Midwest somewhere knows more about the tire pressure in my car than I do. Or a light comes on while I’m driving in the middle of nowhere. I call OnStar on the phone in the rear view mirror. They tell me what the light means. A little coolant,. Mr. Wahl. The lady is a thousand miles from me, and she knows that my engine needs coolant while I, in the driver’s seat maybe three feet from the radiator, had no idea. That is just amazing. Till some virus fucks it all up. Afterall, our benign internet hs turning more and more malign. And we don’t care. We leave it to the specialists to worry about that. Because we are having too much fun with all this stuff to care.

I wonder if there’s an app for that, caring. Something that’ll do the caring for you, plus tell you it’s time to feed the dog and where the best Mexican place is in Tehachapi. Pictures of tacos, Yelp reviews, directions, everything. Now that’s what I call progress. pictures of tacos on an iPhone. And to think this all began as a way to talk to each other after a thermonuclear war. Who’d a thunk it.

OMG. I’ve been sexted. Talk to you later.

Putin and the bees and the end of the world

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Look, Vladimir Putin is not pissed about the bees. That is one of those demented tall tales sweeping the Left. I remember when we all took pride in not being as dumb as the Right who believed every inane story they read in an email. Now we’ve joined in on the fun. Sheesh.

Some people were wondering if this means war. If bombs will fall and missiles fly. If the world will end because the bees are dying. 

No, it won’t.

Some of the smartest people I know fall for this shit now. It blows my mind. You can get a Ph.D in I-read-it-on-the-internet-it-has-to-be-true, apparently.

Here’s the story.

http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/monsanto.asp

Not that anybody will read it. Facebook has killed off reading. We live in an age of rumors. What a strange time this is. So inane and uninformed. Even Wikipedia is too hard to read now, apparently. All those words. Hundreds of them….

Atheist

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Someone posted on Facebook a vaguely creepy picture of Jon Stewart smirking manfully next to some quote about there being less choice in homosexuality than there is in religion. I can’t remember the whole quote but you’ve probably seen it by now, it’s everywhere. The thing kind of creeped me out….not the quote itself but the format itself…the big man looking vaguely Kennedy-esque but for that smirk utterly devoid of hubris, and next to it the quote in big strong letters–the thing looked more like one of those pictures of Stalin or Mao or Mussolini, Franco, or Petain that would be hung in public squares or on train station walls….just a creepy kind of nostalgia for more organized times. I wonder what the mindset is that finds solace in such displays? And how do they not notice? I must be the only one creeped out by this, but maybe I don’t trust anybody, or just think too much about the bad old days. Continue reading →