Listics

Niek and Halley have declared their intentions to avoid Orkut. After Ryze and Friendster and Fuckster and Hooked-up and Cooked-up and LinkedIn and Shout Out and Bedroom Trapeze, the jaded pair have had enough of the social software scene and will take theirs neat in an XML coffe mug thank-you-very-much.

I’m cool with that attitude. I sat straddling my board outside the line through most of those smaller waves and only when Orkut appeared with the glitz of the gated community, the velvet rope outside the club, did I struggle to be sure my name was on the list.

I just wanna tell you two that there are simple to use messaging and group formation features and functions inside that tent, features that are quite seductive. Just today I was able to refer a friend to a job opp in New York and a friend of a friend to the House of Bagels on Geary near 14th Ave in San Francisco. I kind of get off on that simple minded bullshit. Now the friend to whom I passed along the job opportunity is gravely insulted and the young Bay Area transplant I pointed toward the better bagels thinks I’m some kind of leering psycho stalker, so maybe there’s a downside. I think I’ll just go back to the Zone and play backgammon and trade insults with 12 year olds.

Well, Dave Winer is one too! Dave says…

Personal note. There’s a class at UW-Madison that’s reading my blog and commenting on it. That’s really cool. I’m an alum of UW, got my Master’s in Computer Science in 1978.

Of interest here is the registered trademark bug on the bucky.gif I ripped off from Dave’s site. This version of Bucky is actually public domain. He’s from a generation when school spirit trumped branding and marketing. Donna Shalala, a great marketer and a superb football coach recruiter and debaser of academic currency, introduced a new, stylized Bucky with all the attachments of intellectual property. if I wanted to post that nouveau Bucky, I’d need permission from the regents of UW. But the real Bucky stands proud here and on Scripting News and wherever school spirit trumps marketing. Also there are still a helluva lot of T shirts and decals and other schwag peddled with the old Bucky on them. Screw U. regents!

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In a prior post I wrote of blowing Gator Ade out my nose. This reminded me of a Gary Larson cartoon with a pride of lions lounging around reminiscing. One says to the other, “Remember that time when we were all feeding off that antelope and you laughed so hard you blew an antler out your nostril?” But the allusion is even more profound since it cross references a blog posting from Chris Locke last night where-in his daughter Selene actually did blow Gator Ade out her nose, or at least the writer would have you believe this happened. Writers are a deceptive lot though, and sometimes they throw that kind of detail into the mix just to create an effect. Take my dog Fang… please.

There’s a lot to recommend Locke’s post — an assessment of Orkut, a pop-culture etymological discussion of the phrase “out the yin yang,” and an opportunity to contribute to American letters in a meaningful way. I love the idea that with a few simple hard dollar contributions I can BUY my way into the acknowledgements in his next book. And that book is sure to be a best seller because guys like me who bought our way into the acknowledgements will be buying multiple copies and giving them away. And even if I don’t pony up the cash, I’ll still probably buy multiple copies because there are women in my past who will need to read this stuff. Barbara. Janis.

How much of my bad writing and clueless blogging is intentional? Answer: a lot of it. I think it’s funny. I could blow Gator Ade out my nose over some of my contrivances. In short, I crack myself up. Take my previous post… please. I named it Dave Rogers’ New Puppy and indeed I did carry the news of Dave’s doberman forward to the half dozen readers of my circle who don’t overlap his readers. (When I went back for the link I was also tickled to note that I’d gotten the possessive apostrophe in the right place so I wouldn’t have to edit the post - a bit of recursive reflection to which blogging will eventually lead you if you’re not already possessed by the tendency). My post was really as much about Dave’s coverage of Dean as it was about his puppy, but I was making an obscure point… wtf, you can figure it out.

For the last 35 years I’ve written with the grad students of the future in mind. My uncle has a framed bill of lading from a Phoenician merchant vessel on his wall. Not a lot of written matter survives from that period so even some business-centric bullshit is remarkable. That’s what I’m counting on. In the year 4006 someone will pull an old 40 GB hard drive out of the rubble and using data restore techniques found only in the finest Universities - I’m thinking RIT here, endowed as it has been by the prescience of corporate sposnors of the type who would continue to optimize an investment in film while the world around them has gone digital… and didn’t those boobs just lay-off like 15,000 workers? But I digress. The RIT (not to be confused with the dye makers, although by the looks of some of the faculty there may be a certain overlap there… people dipping their tresses in great vats of the stuff… at RIT some post doc will sit down at a lab bench and patiently sort the bits from the mouse turds in the freshly excavated hard drive from the dig at White Cedar Farm. I have an arrowhead collected from the knoll above the lake northeast of the house that the archeologists suggest is about 8,000 years old, so a 2000 year old hard drive isn’t too much to imagine.

“What’s the point Frank?” I’m asking myself and the reader who has wandered this far with me is obviously asking the same. If I could remember the point, do you think I’d be maundering on like this? Just lighten up and let me wail, okay?

Oh yeah, a lot of this rank shit that you would call funky writing at it’s worst is actually intentional and this post is a clue for that grad student in the distant future who will be peeved that she’s faced with an analysis of simply more puerile bullshit from the age of over-information. But blogs are literature and I can prove it. Just not right now, okay?

Dave has a new redhead named Scully in the house. Links to pictures found in this post.

Maybe as interesting on a more macro scale are Dave’s observations on where to find informed opinion on the Dean campaign - where it’s been and where it’s going. He lists the top five most insightful posts he’s read and adds a dimensiopn of his own. He concludes,

In the meantime, I still believe Howard Dean is the man to beat George W. Bush. Let’s hope that the truth of his message and abilities survives the fire of the campaign trail.

Whatever Happened to BMO Easy?

Last year one of the more barbaric yawpers … gotta thank the Dean campaign for bringing Whitman home there … someone we counted on to “Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs” was Brian Moffatt. (That’s my free American jazz movement allusion for today. If anyone asks you where “kick out the jams” comes from, you now have the Whitman reference).

Brian quit blogging in December. Shadows of his blog remain in Google cache.

A few days ago I was whining about lack of access to the gated community that is Orkut and all three of the people I pestered for an invitation were willing to let me in, but then the thing went down and I had to wait. I think I might owe Turner US$9.95 since I asked him for an invitation before I found out there were people willing to do it for free.

When they finally lifted the red velvet rope and the doorman discovered that indeed, my name was on the list and there was no reason for me to wait outside scuffling in the pigeon poop any longer, one of the first things I did was comb through my address book to be sure there would be people like me inside. I inquired of Brian and since I had him on the line so to speak, I asked him what happened to his blog. His response was of course worth sharing, because he’s a flaming genius. Here it is:

Hey Frank,

Truth be told, I only pulled the blog because my family demanded it! I have to admit I was getting a little carried away with it. My children need some attention. Which, again, truth be told, they’ve now been getting. To my everlasting benefit and joy.

As well, I could see that I was ‘wanting’ to write something a little more satiric. The last three posts I wrote were complete fabrications - valid as far as I was concerned - but I felt something of the charlatan, especially regarding the comments people were leaving. I had no intention of embarrassing anyone, but felt I had.

Plus Mike Golby wrote to say that my comments box wasn’t working properly.

Plus my web host and domain name were both up for renewal and I couldn’t justify the expense. Especially around Christmas.

Plus I was thinking that I might try my hand at finishing off a novel I’d abandoned a few years ago. (Why I persist in that delusion - a novel about delusion - I know not. In fact there might be a novel in that. A novel about a deluded wannabe novelist persisting in writing a novel about delusion -
reminds me of the Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo, the protagonist going on incessantly about his last cigarette)

Plus the house…

Read the rest of this entry »

Meanwhile, down by The River, Bruce is serving up big buckets of truth…

Here’s your first clue: There is no war on terrorism. The phrase should always have “phony” in front of it. Yet everyone in your consensual illusion must pay homage to the “war on terrorism.” Housewife in Toledo: “oh yes, I’m worried about the terrorist threat.” It would be funny if it wasn’t so freaking sad.

The use of the acronym for The War On Terrorism alone is worth the price of admission.

My post yesterday regarding Dave Winer and outlining was poorly constructed. Dave didn’t seem to accept it as appropriate suck-uppage. Here then is an attempt to do better… I’m new at this. I don’t have a history of sucking up to anybody, so I hope you’ll pardon the rough edges while I learn the genre:

Dave is willing to share his opinions. That’s a strength for anybody. Today, vis a vis the Dean campaign he avers that the Dean effort carved out a new “25% party.” I hope this is just a slice of what is at work in the Dean campaign, just as I hope that the Democrats on-board outnumber the loosely bonded. I don’t think that the Dean campaign will take their voters and go home if HD doesn’t win the nomination. At least I hope they won’t.

And something that Dave also said seemed so compelling that I think it is worth linking and quoting. Dave says, “What about the rest of us? Find a local candidate who wants to win using the Internet, and as Picard said, make it so.” I think this is profound advice… acting locally, using the new communication tools, sliding further away from the influence of “broadcast messages” to the engagement of interpersonal communication. This is what it’s all about. Thanks Dave!