Those of you that have been following the travelogue section no doubt know that we have reached our primary destination: Santa Barbara, CA. But some of you may be wondering “what next”, or at very least….why?

The answer to both these questions astonished reader, is economic theory.  The locational theory states that the success of any business is based on 1) location 2) location and 3) location. This can apply to the individual as well.  Yes, I have moved back to California to seek my fortune. I am fit and fin and ready for bear. And while  I have no idea what that means, it does fit nicely with the Bear motif on the state flag.

Why do I tell you all this? More information than you could possibly need/and/or/want? This is where the telethon portion of our program begins. Because I need your help. If you (and you know who you are) are a friend, or acquaintance of Don Warrick -  author of the Trifling Blog and you have an uncle in the diamond business in Antwerp and he needs a right hand fellow to run the illegal diamond trade….well you get the picture. All offers of legitimate employment will also be considered.

This year our telethon features new video footage under the “video” tab. An excerpt from a video that one of Don’s students made in a shameless ploy for extra credit. He is now using it as a shameful self promoting commercial. Disgusting. But these are the lengths he is willing to go to.

There are also new tabs for my business resume, cover letter and stageography (a nice word that I just made up.  Hmmmm, impressive)

Don’s book “Me-Mail – the big book of geek consciousness” will be available in the lobby after tonight’s lecture. Please have exact change ready.

I use a news aggregating service called Newser. http://www.newser.com/ Aside from being a testimonial to how condensed information delivery and receipt has become, it is a barometer for what makes newsworthy content.  I started using Newser as a kind of methadone for the news. It is a cute little widget that sits on my IGoogle front page and radically reduces the amount of space dedicated to national and world news. Now, I get all the news in tiny little snippets. A picture gallery with a one or two line description. I can click for a little more, or just take a pass. Usually I would take a pass on a picture of the Pope kissing babies. That’s an important part of the Pope gig. But the picture of the Pontiff kissing babies with a headline: ” Two teens die in Pope stampede” compels me to blog.

You have to wonder about the veracity of a news site that would sensationalize such a minor event in the big scope of things. When the Pope does a rally for 30,000 youth in Angola the fact that a couple of them were killed, and a few are hospitalized; isn’t this  just the capital damage to be expected? Yes, I too wish there was a word in the English language that was larger or more potent then “facetious” to describe my last remark. Let’s call it uber-facetious. And yes, it was meant to be.

Realizing that a news service called “Newser” might lack the necessary journalistic credentials to warrant raising my hackles; I immediately went to the front page of the New York Times, a paper whose credibility is slightly less questionable. There I found a headline: ” Pope Tells Clergy in Angola to Work Against Belief in Witchcraft”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/22/world/africa/22pope.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper

At the end of the very newsy article, replete with interviews and human rights angles, way down at the very bottom of the NYTimes page, was printed, as a tag to the very same article, almost like an afterthought:

2 Reported Killed in Stampede

LUANDA, Angola (AP) — The Portuguese news agency LUSA reported that two people were trampled to death in a stampede at a sports stadium on Saturday, before Pope Benedict XVI addressed young people.

LUSA cited an unidentified source at a local hospital as saying a man and woman were dead on arrival. The agency said eight other people had been hospitalized with minor injuries.

It was almost like the author of the story didn’t include this little tidbit of information thinking it un-newsworthy. Then at the last minute a copy boy rushed up to his/her desk and gave them a tear sheet off the wire….2 reported killed in stampede.

WWJD? Our individual speculations on the answer to that question may vary. What I am pretty sure of, had the sermon on the mount resulted in the stampeding death of two innocents; he would have pledged to do a little more than visit the survivors in the hospital and give them each a magic decoder ring.

Here’s hoping that some Catholic passerby reads this posting and draws arms. Go for it. Please. Pretty please.

I learned this morning that blogging is one of those activities. Now this is not to say that the Trifling Blog is not a worthwhile read (at least for the author), but I happened on the Euripides of bloggers this morning, and compared to his craftsmanship and the complexity of his bogification (blog-a-factsione in Italian) my writing truly pales. One could think of my blogging like an average day in Dayton Ohio.

Oh what a dizzying fall it was, to have met terminal velocity falling off my own pedestal. The ground was not in the slightest bit yielding. Everything about this Epiphonic moment was harsh and cruel, cold, calloused and a whole bunch of other words. In short it scared the bejeebers out of me.

As is often the case, inside the pain was a lesson. A lesson about gravity, a lesson about falling and a lesson about the very nature of blogging and what makes it compelling. It seems that it is not just the writing of the blog that is important. It is about the heat created when you attract regular commentators who are dedicated to proving you wrong on all counts.  This is where the feathers really start to fly, where the dust is kicked up. It’s better than Micky Roarke in the Wrestler. Better than Afro Samurai.

Blogging in its purest form is a shit storm. The real professionals wear pajamas all day. They live in glass houses and they surround themselves with piles of “skippers” these are the stones that we collected as kids that “skip” when you frizbee them across the water. The real-deal professional bloggers skip a stone across their blog and wait for the ripples. Pretty soon the kids on the other side of the lake start skipping stones back.

Substance only counts for minor points. This is an important concept. An hour into reading this blog dealing with some fairly topical and potent political material, I realized that no mention had been made for almost 20 minutes of the topic at all. Rather, it became a stone throwing contest over the use of a single word in the language. The word was “impish”. So was the dialogue.

Salvo after salvo, personal assault after personal assault, thinly veiled insult after thinly veiled insult. God it was fun reading. I felt so morally superior to all of them. Me and my little blog that nobody reads.

It was at this moment that I decided to create an alter ego for myself, so that I could aggregiously comment on my own blog. Taking the opposing point of view on any subject, and calling myself all kinds of names.

So in conclusion, I look forward to the ongoing dialogue with myself. I can only hope that I don’t loose the argument.  I hope I will continue to learn from the masters. Perhaps one day I can wear my P.J.’s all day and smell of cigars and sardines (I made that last part up).

Perhaps one day….I will arrive.

The title of this post is a statement not a sign pointing to some larger truth. It is in fact the only partial truth that matters. Succinctly: The News is Depressing. I’m not talking about normal every day depressing news like the kind we used to get back in the day. Sure, the news used to be depressing, sometimes sensational, but almost always deep down at its core….the very nature of the news has been deeply depressing as of late. About all we can do it to poke fun at it. We can place our thumb to our nose as we pass it by on the street, or make some equally disdainful gesture to it.

Who cares about Bernie Madhoff? Well, actually a lot of people do. Who cares what Rush Limbaugh has to say? Again, about 20 million people a day. I repeat: The News is depressing.

Systems seek equilibrium especially human systems. They have a tendency to “right” themselves like ships on the water. They may list from side to side, from time to time, but eventually they either right themselves or they sink. Continuously reporting on the sway doesn’t do much to influence the result. Except of course to cause grief to the reader/listener.

We are drawn to it though aren’t we?. I dare say that there is something deep down inside us that likes the pain, longs for the suffering, wants to have our noses rubbed in the cultural excrement as twer. So much more is the pity. So what is the answer? Stop reading the news? Perhaps. Even better, take the position to not contribute to the unrest. Next time you hear or see a piece of bad-to-terrible news, don’t tweet it, don’t dig it, don’t blog it, don’t do anything at all with it. In fact, when you read it simply accept it as inert. It is just news. And in this time and place, if it ain’t good news, we are all a lot better off if we don’t spread it around like the flu. Fur deiner Gasuntheit.

It all started with a little websurfing (Cyberspaziergang): This is where I originally found the source material: http://thephoenix.com/BLOGS/phlog/archive/2009/02/05/barack-obama-is-tired-of-this.aspx

Begin actual blog entry…

It’s like being on a treasure hunt, a few moments ago I ran across some soundbytes of the POTUS reading from his own book describing a character from his past in most ethnocentric terms.  It came as no surprise of course that the man would be capable of ethnocentric speech; but the acquisition of these soundbytes is in-and-of itself an interesting evolutionary moment in the history of our Country. Perhaps this is the first sign of our own Berlin wall falling down. The wall I refer to is the wall of prejudice wrapped in political correctness that seems to define the screwed up litigious age we live in.

The first thing I did was to pull them all into Audacity one at a time (yes, I am ignoring the obvious pun there) and started manipulating the files. I would shorten one, extract key words, play with pitch and timbre, all the while thinking of what mischief I might play armed with these tiny little Obama bullets. The thoughts began to whirl in my mind, and visions of cell-phone-tones danced in my head.

Then a wave of new consciousness swept over me, it was interesting. I picked up the soundbytes that were laying in a pile on my desktop (computer) and pulled them to the trash.  Before I erased them I put an archive in one of my production folders just for posterity.

Something inside me didn’t want to let go of that particular voice of the president. A part of me wanted to hear him go all Samuel Jackson on Congress. A part of me wants to hear him jump six kinds of bad on some recalcitrant legislator being obstinate for the sake of politics and not conviction.

I’m gonna keep these files handy and use them like the “That Was Easy” button that a friend brought me from Staples. Every time there’s a gorilla or two in my livingroom, I will simply hit play on the soundfile and hear MyPresident speak some down-home.

I’m curious to see if the POTUS,  by the power of his goodwill, will succeed in changing the very face of American prejudice and erase longstanding folkways. More interesting still will be to watch these delicate towers come crumbling down.

In case you don’t happen upon these in your own cyberspaziergang, here are the MP3’s for your collection.

The Management

BLAM.mp3
COMPLICATED.mp3
FRIES.mp3
IGNORANT.mp3
NUMBER.mp3
THAT GUY.MP3

I used to be a Rush fan. Not a true ditto-head, but a minor fan. My fan-hood was based on three things. First was my love of satire (I assumed he was a radio personality and a showman, not a spokesperson for conservative thought)  second was the fact that the radio station that came in the clearest in my garage carried his show.  And lastly, he liked a good Cohiba.

Now, as someone who has spent most of his adult life not really giving a good (Non gender identified creator)damn about politics; my attraction to Rush was a source of amusement to my family. Even my kids when they got to their teenage years, would come out to the garage when I was working on the car, and hear Rush on the radio and query: “Dad, why do you listen to that guy, doesn’t he piss you off”. No, in fact I found him quite amusing.

Ah, and here is the rub. This is all Rush Limbaugh should be taken for…amusement. You have to ask yourself about the man’s credentials. You have to seriously ask if he can, or should be taken seriously. A reasonable person would possibly perform a couple of perfunctory searches before deifying a radio personality like Rush, or even considering taking something he said seriously. Start with say a Wiki search on his CV. This is in fact what you get:

Education

Limbaugh graduated from Cape Central High School, in 1969. His father and mother wanted him to attend college, so he enrolled at Southeast Missouri State University. He dropped out after two semesters and one summer; according to his mother, “he flunked everything”, even a modern ballroom dancing class.^[4] As she told a reporter in 1992, “He just didn’t seem interested in anything except radio.”^[7]

The next step might be to wander over to Google images to see what you might find. A picture is, after all worth a thousand words. So here:

Or even better yet, here:

I think you get the point. Rush isn’t to be taken seriously. My position is that most of the politicians on Capital Hill shouldn’t be taken seriously either. I hope, as we usher in a new administration my attitude toward politicians changes. Where Rush is concerned? Only listen if you really like satire, and if it’s the only station the radio in the garage pulls in. Sheeeesh.

http://www.isteamphone.com/

Just words, and words are signposts. They point toward concepts. This is where it all gets very sticky because each of us interprets the direction these signposts are pointing differently. At very least this is amusing behavior, at very most it is at the heart of the disquiet and dissatisfaction of a planet overrun with large brained bipeds.

So, let me see if I cant shake out the dust of the rug on the front porch of our lives by providing some clarity to the actual, deepest meaning of a couple words.

First, “Amuse”…

You might be thinking this is a word that is used when looking at the monkeys in the cage at your local zoo. “Oh, how cute they are! Look honey, how amusing! That one is hurling his own poo!” Now that’s comedy.

Etymology

From French amuser (“‘to make stay, to detain, to amuse’”) < Old French à (from Latin ad) + muser. See muse, verb.

bla bla bla, and we all know about the Greek Muses etc. To this I say bullshit. All wrong. No banana. I rather like to think of being amused as a simple scale. Like the scales of justice, only in this case it is the sacred balance. My understanding of the delicate balance of our consciousness and the duality inherent in being a human being. There are two halves if you will. One half truly believes that we exist. That we are vital, unique, individual iterations. We are our own man as twer. The other half is the God half. Small G, or big G – youchoose.com

To be amused is to have your scale weighing heavily to the god (small G, or big G, youchoose.com) side of the scale. If something amuses you, it means that it has forced the scale to G side.

There. Glad I could put that to bed for us all. Now, on to “Enjoy”

This one is simpler. It could and probably should be spelled In-joy. I mean really, have you ever outjoyed the hell out of something? No. It is a word that describes an inner state. What I submit, is that if we were much more cognoscente of what we outjoyed, the world would be a better place. Rush Limbaugh would not exist. Neither would greed, corruption or conservative republican ideology.

So go forth and be A-mused. Then, take it one step further…Out-joy the hell out of your day.

The Management

or, the anglo saxon spelling: Try-flyn

1/15/09

My Space…..MyFace….MyRace……MyPlace

I finally get it. (Why does this most often happen in the shower?) Mashup. This is what the world is coming to. I want to be able to take what ever is in front of me, rearrange it and redistribute it. I don’t want to worry about plagerism, or identity theft. I don’t want to consider intelletual property law or the latest article on which high tech company is suing which other high tech company for copyright infringement, or coffee flavor infringement, or WTF ever.