First let’s check Fox News. Hmmm. Geraldo Rivera is there reporting on the outbreak at the high school in Queens.
A search on twitter shows thousands of tweets… sixty-nine more swine flu tweets came in while I wrote the preceding sentence. Oops, now it’s 179 tweets since I looked. This is like drinking from a fire hose. (247 more tweets) @carrieedwards says she’s effing scared about the the swine flu @kevpham says, “This swine flu epic is outrageous! Its talked about on every news channel.” (In the two minutes since he shared his critique, another 271 swine flu related tweets have come in.)
Okay. I’m bored. Anybody think the whole thing is sucking more media bandwidth than it’s worth? Does the fixation say anything about the lingering culture of fear left behind by the Bushies?
Wake me when it’s over or when they indict Karl Rove, whichever comes first.
There’s an onomatopoetic resonance to “Platboom.” It sounds just like surf to me. Mike Golby—photographer, blogger, writer, and surfer—has some amazing pictures at his travel blog, “Cape Point Reserve.” You can find a more complete set of Mike’s breathtaking photography here at Zoopy. And of course there’s a facebook group.
Mike’s been building the Cape Point Reserve blog for a couple of months. It represents a lifetime of his experiences of the Southwestern-most point of Africa. Here’s what he has to say about the online coffee table book he’s publishing there:
A Capetonian, I’ve come to know Cape Point better than most locals or visitors. One of the world’s most popular tourist destinations, the South Peninsula’s fast-vacillating moods and myriad faces ensure it remains an enigma to many. This blog — through its images, tries to bridge the gap separating perception from reality at Africa’s most south-western tip — where two oceans and many cultures meet.
It’s about the photography, certainly, but the photographs are accompanied by commentary, anecdotes, history—you know, your basic LORE! Mike’s photographic and writing talent are on display here. Subscribe, you’ll be glad you did.
To those who have inquired and anyone else interested in why Listics has been silent so long, I’m okay. The first quarter of 2024 has been difficult, but things are looking up. Two months ago I had a mild heart attack, but everything now is groovy. The cardiologist has given me a handful of pills and a clean bill of heath. Thanks for your concern. On with the show…
The internet is both complete and never will be. The geeks encrusted around the edges—pontificating, pushing product, trapped in a meta narrative that will not die, though it longs for a brave soul to stand up and shout “Put a fork in it, fer Chrissakes”—the nerds, the wonks, the technoid dweebs continue to pick away at the surface revealing new shiny bits. The mob, like a murder of crows flapping and cawing, stealing the bright shiny objects, claiming them as their own, flutter along, or wander, or strut, bedazzled by the gadgetry, the handhelds, the laptops, the notebooks, the netbooks—yes, and even the Wii—the people whose attention (whose cash!) the entrepreneurs seek to corral are really happy to have an ever changing landscape of pastimes available, from online Scrabble to Hulu TeeVee, from Java juiced gaming to online shopping. They differentiate themselves into the “Mac community” and the “non-Mac so what” community, but really all they seek is the connection, the celestial hook-up. Anything else is superfluous.
Down below, in the boiler room, the huge, powerful engines pump bits around the globe. It’s here the real work has been done. Paving the information super highway, cabling, routing, maintaining the infrastructure, is a subterranean task that the gaggle of geeks up top quite rightly consider to be beneath them. And it’s fundamental. All else is SMOP—Simply a Matter Of Programming.
Somebody wake me for intermission.
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On a lighter note, Leslie recently linked to ADA Online, reminding me that time passes… hard to believe that I first read the book forty years ago. The online thing, begun in 1992 and annotated in frame sets, reminds me of the Pynchon wiki.
@kevpham says, “This swine flu epic is outrageous! Its talked about on every news channel.” (In the two minutes since he shared his critique, another 271 swine flu related tweets have come in.)