* My Blogger POLL(s)

----A "Sticky" Post [orig. 8/2/07]----
[--text hidden until next poll--]

* SPAM: Writing Software

Spam is especially delicious when its very message belies the offer, as in a writing-aid company that can't spell (or punctuate):

"Writing a business email? Feeling short on words? WhiteSmoke writing software takes your writing from simple to sophisticated. [. . .]

To no lnger be included in mailings about this send an email to support@whitesmoke. com

Wish to no longer get mail, rmove here"

* Of Computer Nerds & Birds

. . . a hobby fit only for little old ladies in tennis shoes.Another "nerd" tip from the desk—er, laptop—of TCG, for those of you who are both proud iPod owners and (sheepish?) birders. "Sheepish"? You see, when I was growing up, anyway, birdwatching was the height of nerdsville, pictured in the popular media as a hobby fit only for little old ladies in tennis shoes. I'd slink around the alleys and woods and sloughs with my 7x35 K-Mart binoculars, hoping that people thought that I was merely a peeping Tom, or some other human category less socially ostracized than that of—BIRDWATCHER. Things have changed at least a bit, apparently: I just read the other day that ""[o]ne of every four Americans is a birdwatcher" (Birding Nebraska 144), but that stat is pure hyperbole, unless one includes (as this source does) those who take a nature walk at least "once or twice a year." (We real birders know that such people lack the requisite requirement, which is a veritable MANIA that cannot be eased by the occasional "nature excursion.") . . . I've just invested in a cheap (of course) spotting scope and cheap but humongous tripod—for those "pesky" gulls and other waterfowl often visible only at an extreme distance. I set it up in my apartment, to practice with it, looking out my patio window at distant trees, the moon, etc. Well, now, I'm sheepish about being seen using it for a far different reason. Yes, the irony: in this day and age, I don't want anyone thinking I'm a peeping Tom! . . . I imagine it now, one police officer saying to the other: "Ah, the perv has cleverly strewn his apartment with bird books. An interesting but transparent ruse. Take him away." To the iPod and the "nerd" tip, finally. Buy one or both of the Stokes Field Guide to Bird Songs CD sets. (If you're in the Midwest/Great Plains like me, you'll want both the Eastern and Western sets.) Then transform them all to iTunes. (Or you can be selective, if jealous of hard-drive space: I omitted many birds that I'll never hear in the northern Great Plains—unless global warming gets on with it even more quickly.) Now, of course, sync your iPod with iTunes, and—voilà—you now have a great birding field-trip aid. If, like me, you hate waiting for hours after having heard a strange bird's song to check it out at home, via a recording or that paragraph-long description in a tome you'd never lug w/ you on the road, and your own faint memory and a bad transliteration that you scribbled down—wait no longer, dear friends! Simply whip out your iPod on the spot, find the two or three bird names/songs that your bird guide has suggested as most likely: [insert Christopher Walken imitation:] ah, that new species is yours, baby, and life is good! If you want to match my compulsiveness—and don't we all?—you can also cut&paste a photo (readily found on the 'Net) of each species "into" its mp3 file as iTunes "album art." But, assuming that you have a bird guide per se, this is no doubt overkill. (But, ah, an iTunes/iPod digital BIRD GUIDE. I thought of it first! The standard bird-guide textual info can be put into the mp3 file's text fields, and the range map—also readily available on the 'Net—can be a second "album art." [Though I'm not sure the iPod handles multiple albumart yet.] You could even use specific mp3 text fields for personal info on date first seen, et al.) Finally, and the final irony: I've never remembered to bring my iPod on my birding trips as of yet. As I've mentioned before, I hate the idea of a mini-stereo that I've got to attach or pocket somewhere; plus, I'd have to bring some "real" (bulky) headphones, since those earbud deals drive me to distraction. Hey, but I bet somebody else has thought of this idea, and has tried it and liked it. Or will try it. And maybe like it. I don't know. . . .

* John & Martha VIII

(There are several levelsl of irony here, too.)

* The Untranslatable (this really BYTES)

[I just got my first outside reader's feedback on my book manuscript, but (I couldn't open the attachment)—]
Question: If a Windoz document gets sent to a Mac computer, and it can't be opened, does it even "make a sound"? What is the sound of one OS "clapping"? Does being a (humble-Zen) disciple of the iMac, and of iTunes, and of the i-bloody-universe(-that-is-Maya) necessarily make you a fan of—uh—e. e. cummings?

<do loop eternalreturn.c>
i
don
't
know
<repeat loop>

* HTML Table insert-check

I don't agree with those who find white text on a black background—i.e., this blog template here—to be virtually unreadable. But it does get hard on the eyes sometimes, so I'm trying something different as a change of pace.

* A Philosophy of Blogging

Quot. of the Day:

The NEWSPAPER is the second-hand in the clock of history; and it is not only made of baser metal than those that point to the minute and the hour, but it seldom goes right.
    --Schopenhauer

The BLOG, then, is the millisecond "hand" (or LED)?—and almost never goes right. But therein lies both its charm and power.

* Complete Filler!

This blog entry is COMPLETE FILLER. You see, I'm disappointed that I don't have as many blog entries this month ("as per usual"), and I need more. So here's _one_. . . . You see, I spent much of the first half of this month among people, and family (those bastards): "not that there's anything wrong with that." And I spent a good deal of the rest of it OUTSIDE, driving backroads around Lincoln, and neighboring counties, and even up to South Dakota by-ways, watching, uh, BIRDS: "not that there's anything wrong with that." (And rendered my relatively new car a veritable rattle-trap-clap of a vehicle: but it was worth it.)

But I'm back, in earnest, to the Macintosh and to the digital world. I just revised and submitted an article on the Passenger Pigeon to a journal (yeah, one of those lame, uh, print, things, but younevermind); I'm getting ideas about doing something actually funny with the John&Martha cartoon series; and I'm back to converting the rest of my Classic/OS9 documents to OSX versions (mostly WordPerfect and HyperCard; the bane of my existence right now).

You see, I have fruitfully once again forgotten any human contacts. Yes, my daughter in Colorado just had some traumatic dental work—I sent her flowers. Yes, my wife is at wit's end regarding her job, her son, and her raison d'être—I told her that I'd take her to a nice Indian restaurant the next time she limped her sad—auto into town.

So you NETmeisters who thought I'd abandoned our posthuman project—never you mind! I'm back!

* Mac Geekdom: Backing Up Yr Blog

I swear that I spend half my life backing up my "shtuff" from one drive to another. So I was initially nervous about relying on a 3rd-party server to hold all my blog entries. Solution—to my own paranoia, anyway—and for those of you on a Mac w/ Safari: go into Dashboard and choose "display all posts" as a preference. Then in Safari: File: Save as ... Web Archive. It's a good-sized file, but all yr "shtuff" is saved to yr hard drive. (Now change yr prefs back to the 10 or 15 entries-to-be-displayed that you'd previously selected.)

* John & Martha II

* RADIO RANT: Fox Sports Flag-Wavers

I have nothing against Memorial Day in principle. (Well, maybe I do: are "we" supposed to be honoring U.S. troops who died in the 19th-c. "Indian Wars," too?) But I consciously had sports talk radio on in the background today to escape all the flag-waving on the cable news networks. However, Fox Sports Radio's segues today are little more than an extension of the Republican-P.R. arm of Fox News. Besides these constant reminders to remember our troops (including quots. from G. W.), how many sports-talk people have I heard in the last few days say something like—"Without our men in uniform, we wouldn't have the freedom to even be talking here." Ah, and what a freedom that is—to deliberate on whether the Yankees can make up a 12-and-a-half-game deficit in the American League East. John Fricke–whom I usually consider one of the more intelligent & articulate personalities on FSR—even said today that, without the troops, we wouldn't be able to enjoy "our braughts and beer"! And we wouldn't be able to surf for internet porn, and droolingly follow the tabloid reports on Lindsay Lohan, and freely & bravely choose—between Coke and Pepsi.

Obviously, our "freedoms" are much more limited than we commonly think, by the sheer ideological force of the discourses in which we live, speak, and act. The founder of French surrealism, André, once wrote, [Quot. of the Day:]

The man who cannot imagine a horse galloping on a tomato is an idiot.

But, au contraire, the person who does imagine such things today is deemed psychotic. Politically, the U.S. political spectrum from the most radical liberalism to the most reactionary conservatism is but an iceberg-tip of ideational possibilities. Musically, the same old chord progressions and clich$eacute; lyrical hooks are recycled over and over, as if the really new would blow open the "doors of perception" that corporate capitalism must keep closed, or else. . . . I'm going to take a nap now, to better consider the opportunities of pRuNe CiRcUsEs and SiLiCoN lIzArDs. . . .

Wait—there's Memorial Day, on TV right now: it's Pat Boone, dressed in an American-flag suit, hawking his new book. Hmmm. I think he just called me a communist.

* "Back in the Day"—of the Internet

Back in my day {get off the grass, punk!}, when the Internet was young—the early 90's—there was email, there were USENET groups (of specialized interests), and there were web pages written with the textual content paramount—since graphics, etc., were pretty bandwidth prohibitive. It was then that a person {get off the grass!} measured his/her words, to make them worthy verbal entries in a Brave New Digital World; it was then that "written" discourse (if you will) still mattered. {Get off the grass!} Sure, acronyms soon became rampant (e.g., ROTFLMAO) and type-emoticons were popular (   :-{  ). But, given the bandwidth investment, an email was often more an essay than some toss-off casual affair, and a web page was an original contribution to the world of knowledge, not a mere digital appendage to a capitalist enterprise, or a report to the world on one's children and pets.

Now I can barely READ my email, without a plethora of misspellings, comma splices, et al. (and oh, yeh—sex for sale). Now I can't access a web site for information purposes, without gaudy & mindless graphics, commercial banners (and misspellings & comma splices), etc., etc. {Get off the grass!} Supposedly, the democratization of the 'Net has been a good thing—that is, if Fortune 500 companies and pornography are your forte. They're not mine. {Get off the grass!}

So—humankind IS the "rational animal"?! Some sociologist should do a content analysis of email spam and/or web pages to document once again—what Nietzsche & Freud already well knew—that we are ultimately arational and, above all, animals.

And then there's the irrational stupidity of the boxing match I just saw on ESPN2 tonight: a "bloody, brutal TKO win!"—as the announcer said . . . and I loved it, ANIMAL that I am. (But isn't this also the human sacrifice that many of the world's religions require?)

* Cell-Phone Youths

In response to my wife's blog entry, on the subject of new technologies and student communication (oh, there's a picture of her there: "pretty hot, for a wasicu (winyan), en'uh?"), I would like to comment upon the cell phone as an pretty much an entirely novel habitus. This techno-phenomenon has created a whole new sense of "place" for, say, the college students on this campus—and for me. Besides being personally irked by the person behind me yelling "Tom"—and turning around to see that the person is talking to a "Tom" on the phone, I must note that, in general, the cell phone has created a strange breakdown of "borders," a weird going-public w/ one's own personal life. For instance, I can recall at least two instances, in the last year or so, of students sitting on a campus bench or stoop, bawling their eyes out w/ phone to ear, obviously having just learned—on their cell phone—that a significant other has just died. (Hey, in "my day," we at least had the courtesy of doing that initial mourning in the privacy of our homes.) More petulantly, I also can't get over walking into a campus bathroom and hearing a student talking on his cell phone while he was taking a shit. It was bad enough that I knew of such multitasking: my biggest question was—did the person on the other end know it?!

I guess my biggest/general beef is with the erasure of any time "alone," and/or with one's immediate environment. I can understand necessary calls; I can't understand how 2/3's of the students on the UNL campus seem to have to have a phone (or iPod) at/in their ears at all times—as the cardinal and catbird are waxing eloquent with their wonderful courtship songs; as the trees themselves "stand" for something more wonderful than all human discourse. . . . That's what I have trouble stomaching in this whole botched human scenario.

(Yes, I have an iPod myself—but I use it mostly as a backup for my iTunes and iPhoto[s]. When I need to "crank the [I]tunes," headphones thru my PowerBook work just fine, thank you. [Geez, I sound like such an old fogey.])

* RADIO RANT: Conservative Contradictions I

[Some of these early blogs are catch-ups of sorts, reactions to media trends, etc., that have been bothering me for months or years. This is a revision of an email I sent in 2003, and thus some of the anachronisms.]

[Quot. of the Day:]

America's poet once wrote, "Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself. . . ." So often epitomes of the American character, Walt Whitman's words in this instance have never rang truer than today. And never have these national contradictions been more lamentable and portentous.

I must admit to being an addict of the popular media, especially talk radio and cable news. One current refrain in said media that would seem to allow for no contradiction, a mantra of both conservative radio pundits and administration mouthpieces, is that "this is the greatest country on earth," an utterance inevitably accompanied by the assumption, spoken or not, that this greatness stems from our morality and our godliness as a "chosen" people. But then I casually channel-surf through the "reality" television shows that—as the ratings tell us—Americans now most like to watch; and I find nothing but Americans lying, cheating, and stabbing each other in the back—an environment, at last, of petty selfishness and cruelty. Then I recall the "greatest country" mantra, and realize how much of this ideology is occasioned more by a political reaction to our espoused enemies—those Shadow complexes of "evil" and "barbarism"—than by any real examination of our own national character. And on the nightly news I see mothers killing their children, friends of the family kidnapping children, and endless (however moralistic) speculation about Michael Jackson and children: these are symptoms of a society in its final decline, not of a society that should put itself forth as a model for the world.

We would benevolently impose our "democratic" way of life upon our "lessers." But what has our democracy come to? Ubiquitous Internet polls, that's what, mostly involving questions of the most inane nature, which nonetheless give us the false faith that we are making important, self-willed choices. Worse yet are the poll questions on national and foreign policy that really matter; we vote on these just as eagerly as we do on questions about our favorite "movie hunk"—not with any great thought based upon knowledge and research, but rather as knee-jerk, emotional outlets of our "free will," and our blind biases. And our insecure politicians are too often apt to devise policy based upon such public opinion. Worst of all, perhaps, such unthinking ease in exercising our "vote" in Internet polls may be having, or will have, a carry-over to actual elections, in which voting becomes another casual outlet for our now inveterate habit of clicking a box or circle in a web browser. (Or—perhaps closer to the truth—the electorate has always been, for the most part, a knee-jerk bundle of blind biases.)

The real quandary of democracy is that the opinion of the majority is often wrong, as any examination of American history makes clear—e.g., the majority attitudes towards slaves and women circa 1800. But conservative commentators still blithely and gleefully quote polls showing that, say, 70% of the U.S. public support the war, are against affirmative action, etc. However, the inanity of their logic comes to the fore when the polls are against their conservative agenda: what now? "Well," Rush Limbaugh says, "the people are in need of my enlightenment"—that is, they are ignorant, a rationale, however, that could just as well be applied to the majorities in the polls that support their agenda. This is the grand aporia, the logical contradiction, at the heart of democracy.

Another part of the conservative talk-show testament to our "greatness" is our First Amendment right to freedom of speech. But at the same time that they run this tenet up the flagpole of chauvinism, it is becoming clear that, in conservative discourse, the very right to dissent is becoming more and more limited. A too-common sentiment is that, in the wake of 9/11, those against current administration policies are unfit Americans who should leave the country, who should "go back where they came from." (As someone part Native American, this leaves me in something of a quandary.) As for our vaunted "equal rights"—admittedly, conservatives are now usually careful to avoid blatant racist statements; however, their knee-jerk negative reactions to, for example, African-Americans who continue to speak out for racial equality is actually a closet racism all the more insidious. And our vaunted open-minded embrace of all peoples and cultures—well, the current harangues against our erstwhile European allies—now they suddenly are "frogs" and "krauts" again—attests to an ongoing insulated xenophobia that put Japanese-Americans in concentration camps only fifty years ago. (Of course, the demonization of the Islamic world is the most blatant present example of all this.)

At last, the current contradictions in public discourse have coalesced into a seething, polarized virulence that is a danger to the very democracy that both sides would defend. My own attitude towards what I consider the irrational virulence of the conservative right is no doubt obvious. But at least I have listened long and hard—and with great angst—to their arguments. Many of my liberal friends and acquaintances (most in academia) have not, living more firmly in the ivory-towered realms of high culture and NPR, and thus have little first-hand experience with this frightening world of conservative talk radio and of "fair and balanced" (and utterly conservative) cable news. So I am afraid that many of their reactions are just as unthinking and virulent—gasps of disgust at the very names of Bush and Limbaugh, an elitist disdain for this whole "redneck, trailer-house" culture. It also seems to me that many of my liberal academic friends know as little about current political events and debates as their opponents, and that their pet liberal projects, such as the pro-choice and pro-environmental movements, are often championed in just as knee-jerk fashion. And there's the problem I perceive—an increasingly polarized populace yelling at each other more and more loudly, with less and less knowledge and discernment. But then, I never said that humankind was a rational animal.