Listics

Of course there is already a Churchill Airport in Churchill, Manitoba (Polar Bear Capital of the World), but it’s named after the town which is named after the river which is named after John Churchill, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company from 1685 to 1691. I’m not aware of an airport named after Winston Churchill. If John Foster Dulles gets an airport… if National Airport has been somehow re-named for America’s first senex, indeed if John Wayne (who never showed his teeth) can have an airport named after him (albeit in Orange County, perhaps as distant from the common reality as Hudson’s Bay) it only seems fair that the old divider himself should have an airport.

The United States stands at this time at the pinnacle of world power. It is a solemn moment for the American democracy. For with this primacy in power is also joined an awe-inspiring accountability to the future. As you look around you, you must feel not only the sense of duty done, but also you must feel anxiety lest you fall below the level of achievement. Opportunity is here now, clear and shining, for both our countries.

Charles de Gaulle even has an airport named after him. Hell, in a fit of passionate remorse they even re-named Idlewild for a dead head of state, so I don’t see why Winston Churchill shouldn’t have an airport.

From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia; all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and in some cases increasing measure of control from Moscow.

If it hadn’t been for Winston, Reagan wouldn’t have had a well defined evil empire to conquer and hence no airport. If it hadn’t been for Winston most of the uranium extracted by the British mining companies from distant deserts would have remained in the ground, unprofitably ticking away the half lives of the death dealing plutonium within. The whole idea of Mutually Assured Destruction as a strategic posture might never have been developed.

In a great number of countries, far from the Russian frontiers and throughout the world, Communist fifth columns are established and work in complete unity and absolute obedience to the directions they receive from the Communist center. Except in the British Commonwealth and in the United States where Communism is in its infancy, the Communist parties or fifth columns constitute a growing challenge and peril to Christian civilization.

If Winston hadn’t planted the seed, would McCarthyism have flourished? We owe so much to the old reprobate, surely we could find an airport somewhere on this globe to rename in his honor — perhaps Entebbe?

…a study published in December by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that among Web users ages 12 to 17, significantly more girls than boys blog (35 percent of girls compared with 20 percent of boys) and create or work on their own Web pages (32 percent of girls compared with 22 percent of boys).Girls also eclipse boys when it comes to building or working on Web sites for other people and creating profiles on social networking sites (70 percent of girls 15 to 17 have one, versus 57 percent of boys 15 to 17).

The quote above is from an article by Stephanie Rosenbloom, who writes for the New York Times Fashion-Style section(s). The article’s placement makes Mary Hodder angry. Hodder says,

So when they interview people like Doc Searls or [Loic LeMeur] or David Weinberger, all of whom are very smart about tech, those articles are in the tech section, but when they talk to girls, who for the record, are far more technical than these three tech experts, girls are put in Fashion.

Can you tell I’m pissed? WTF?

While she has a point, she could make it more judiciously. Working for the Fashion-Style section, Rosenbloom has written loads of features like this on the quotidian emergence of webby trends. One of my favorites was on Atoosa Rubenstein’s Alpha Kitty YouTube series inspired by the book, “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol from A to B, and Back Again.” In that article, Rosenbloom asks regarding Rubenstein,

Can this old-media veteran make it in the virtual world, where so many others have stumbled?

One thing going for her is that teenage girls are more socially active than boys online and are more likely than boys to participate in blogs, bulletin boards and chat forums, according to Packaged Facts, a division of MarketResearch.com.

I think that’s the point she was sharpening with the article that put Hodder’s knickers in a twist.

*** UPDATE ***

Mary Hodder has revised the post at Napsterization, deleting the reference to Shirky and referencing instead Loic LeMeur. She’s also temporized nicely to include assurances that her post wasn’t “about David or Loic or Doc (all extremely supportive of women in tech, btw)….” She goes on to say, “My point is that the NYTimes puts men who talk tech and trends or social impact in tech/biz, and women who code web art / pages in fashion.” I’ve left a comment asking if she’d care to share the reasons for that update. My comment remains in her moderation queue.

I think I understand why the four females featured (ages 13, 14, 16 and 17) aren’t found yet in the Technology section with Doc and David; but, the feature itself is well placed to pick up a readership of young females who — we hope — will have their techno-interests validated and affirmed by their peers in Rosenbloom’s story. Rosenbloom acknowledges,

But even though girls surpass boys as Web content creators, the imbalance among adults in the computer industry remains. Women hold about 27 percent of jobs in computer and mathematical occupations, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

In American high schools, girls comprised fewer than 15 percent of students who took the AP computer science exam in 2006, and there was a 70 percent decline in the number of incoming undergraduate women choosing to major in computer science from 2000 to 2005, according to the National Center for Women & Information Technology.

It should be obvious to even the most committed feminist that spreading the word about the disparity, giving it the widest possible exposure, including in the Style-Fashion sections of the newspaper, is a positive gesture.I’m glad that people writing on the fashion beat are clued in to what’s happening in pop tech. Mary Hodder should be glad too.

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Cheeses of Switzerland

Cheeto planet

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Dueling Billboards

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“It will finally dawn on people that the most important voice on the web is their own, not the dopes’ that they’re following.”

Between four and four-thirty this morning the dog went nuts.  Beth got up and looked out the window.  Two men were standing in the drive.  She threw up the sash, opened the storm window, and asked what they wanted.

They had run out of gas.

“Tell them we have none,” I mumbled into my pillow, and the message was relayed.  This was not a verifiable truth.  There may have been a gallon or so for the lawn mower in the shed.  I lay there another five minutes until my conscience got the best of me.  I pulled on some clothes, a hat, gloves, a goose down lined coat and I sent the dog out to pee while I started the car.

It was another five minutes before Molly had made her tour of the perimeter, pointed out the abandoned ford pick-up across the road, sniffed up a few trees and made her decision about whether she’s join me in the car.  No fool Molly, she went back in the house, as I drove off to the rescue.

Meanwhile the wandering pair had visited the neighbor down the road without much luck.  I picked them up as they were trudging back to their truck, empty gas can in hand.   It was 4:45AM, it was snowing and the temperature was 14 degrees on the Fahrenheit scale.  They had no hats, their coats were thin, they were on their way home from a Friday night pub crawl and they’d dressed for style, not for survival.  They were running on fumes, they didn’t know my road, but they chose to take it in hopes of getting home before the gas ran out.  So there they were, wandering around in dress coats and street shoes before dawn on a freezing snowy morning, rousting irascible old men out of bed in hopes of getting a favor.

I  picked them up and drove them into town where they filled their gas can, then I drove them back.  I listened to their conversation, turned down the couple of bucks they offered for the lift, turned down the pinch of snuff from the proffered tin, fought down the urge to offer advice on the overuse of cologne, and generally wondered what I was doing in this company at that hour of the morning.

When we got back to their car, I watched to see that they got it started.  They succeeded, and with a merry honking designed, I guess, to insure that if Beth had gotten back to sleep she’d be rousted one more time, they were on their way.  They’ll have to cook up another act for this year’s entry in the Darwin Awards.  Freezing to death on Lalor Road, or any of its variants, isn’t happening for them in 2007.  To all my fellow humans, my apologies.  These are young men, and their genes remain in the pool.

I woke up this morning feeling like a bottom feeder, a detrivore, a great carp sucking up decayed bits of organic matter from the Interwebs floor. I am stuffed with negative criticism and a growing ill feeling regarding most of the online personalities who have been flogging their “personal brands,” their “global microbrands,” their “start-ups,” and their fantastic views of how much better life can be in this brave new webby world.

I’ve choked on the bolus of libertarian individualism that everybody else seems to have swallowed. I’m tired of the ill-informed and the self-interested pushing “alternatives” like Ron Paul into the conversation and using up band-width that should be tuned to larger issues. So many of those around us are like epiphytic plants, each one an exotic orchid or bromeliad, finding purchase high in the forest, attached to the trunk of some sturdy tree but requiring no soil, no roots to grow.

I’ve been reminded of the old Bay Area versus Rte. 128 distinction, the seventies and eighties competition in the computing network trades between the East Coast companies (like BBN and Stratus) and the West Coast companies (like Cisco and Tandem). Twitter reminds me of nothing more than the days in the sixties, sitting in front of an Anderson Jacobson terminal pumping TTY protocol through an acoustic coupler down a phone line direct dialed into a machine front-ending a CDC3600 and using those 300bps connections to chatter with each other through that multi-million dollar router.

There weren’t as many of us then, and some of the psychedelics were legal. Other than that, what has changed? The consciousness and the conscience of the community has changed, that’s what. In those days Ayn Rand was some kind of an intriguing (though nutball) social science fiction writer. Nobody believed in what she was peddling except adolescents and some fringe characters in what was called the John Birch Society. Who would have believed that forty years later the Chairman of the Federal Reserve System would craft fiscal policy based on her ravings? Does this mean that someday the L. Ron Hubbard fans will get their turn as policy makers? I’m almost afraid it does. I can speak to that issue with the certainty that the Republicans and Libertarians who believe in free enterprise above all, who support a person’s right to choose which metaphysical path they’ll follow over a person’s right to choose how they will manage their own reproductive health, that all those true believers on the right have solid enough opinions that anything I say won’t rock them.

But here in the microcosm of the blogosphere, can we critique each other, challenge each other’s ideas, can we criticize without alienating? Is there still a marketplace of ideas? Do you shop there? Are markets conversations or not? Is it worth having a conversation with an ignorant person? How many “evangelists” does this web religion need? Can we trust our global network to people who support the likes of Ron Paul, a man who renounces the United Nations, eschews the idea of global governance in favor of USian supremacy?

I started this post thinking I’d be taking a couple of scatter-gun shots at the “personalities” who have embarrassed themselves the most over the past few days during the French Web Conference, LeWeb3, in Paris. Robert Scoble, whose career seems to be public property and whose every move thousands of tech bloggers actually remark upon, used the conference to create a public story covering his separation from his company. Michael Arrington, who feeds this Photoplay version of the people and companies involved in developing consumer class networking products, provided the backdrop with a well-timed blog post. Hugh MacLeod… what can I say? Has he found “his bottom?” Joi Ito flew through Paris on his way to a Creative Commons birthday party in San Francisco. And how about that “Creative Commons?” It certainly provides a foundation that finesses international copyright protections, but is that necessarily a good thing? Scoble thinks so. Dave Winer seems to have a balanced perspective on Creative Commons. He released RSS 2.0, the XML code set he largely authored, through Harvard’s Berkman center under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license, but his web publication, Scripting News, is copyrighted.

A couple of bloggers died this last week. Marc Orchant, whom I did not know, and Anita Rowland, whom I knew through blogging. Marc’s death, I think, got Dave going on his frequently revisited idea of a blogger’s graveyard, a place for the accumulated web work of anyone who can afford it to be archived and served. Writers are certainly aware that they have a body of work in the trunk that will survive them. Some bloggers have a sense of entitlement to perpetual attention, online real-time access to their blog forever. For that bunch, Phil Wolff came up with a few tips regarding wills and such.

I began this post with an intention to criticize, but in truth there are so many entry points for criticism that I’m not sure I’m up to it. For example, I don’t want to feel like Loren Feldman when I tell Robert Paterson that his choice to do PR for Blackwater is questionable on the face of it. There are plenty of ideas I’d like to promote, efforts that provide me buoyant and positive feelings, feelings that at least get me off the bottom if not up in the epiphytic heights with the web evangelists and Venture Cartoonists. But this post is about bottom feeding. It’s about reviewing the ill feelings that so many of the evangelists and the cartoonists bring to the table. It’s about why twitter is a better medium for many of these people because they can’t read and write very well and they only understand very simple things.

I really do hope that Hugh recognizes the root of his problems, that he can be spared from what we recovering addicts call a “low bottom.” I really do hope that Robert finds well-compensated, honest work that makes use of his talents and that he enjoys. And I really do think that Dave comes up with bright ideas more often than your average bear and deserves credit for them.

That whole Robert Paterson and Blackwater thing really sucks though, and it deserves another post or two. Talk about your Soldier of Fortune masturbatory fantasy life….

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Shelley has a good post with an interesting comment thread about a social network, a virtual tree, and a virtual rope. And there in the middle of the thread, surfacing links that are as creepy as a clergyman, is Miss Ann herself. Miss Ann bats her baby blues and confesses, “I’ve been guilty of inciting a mob….”

Well, no shit.

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