Listics

Tagged to dig deep and reveal my inner-most bean…

First, the O’Neils lived next door to us when I was twelve and they had the best raspberries on Bridge Road (but not as many as they might have had if I hadn’t been such a raspberry gourmand).

b) Chuck was mean to my little brother and I’ve felt conflicted about my inadequate defense ever since. Chuck is now an Anglican priest in Kentucky, or he was the last I heard. This proves that even if you were born and raised fundamentalist, you can still beat up on people smaller than you and the grace of god may be given to you and you can climb the social ladder.

iii) I’m as mean as i ever was, but that’s no secret.

4) I read about the girls who were fighting at school and their odd interaction through MySpace with an anonymous mom chipping in and causing trouble and so forth, and I thought that I have no clue WTF is going on there, just as no one had a clue last spring when that troubled woman in Boulder and her mate used the PR power of the web to lash out and hurt people. I know how bad I felt though.

v. I don’t own my own tractor. I rent or borrow. Renting is cheaper, because if you borrow you have to come up with something nice to pay your neighbor back, and he won’t necessarily remember your attempts at finding the quid pro quo and so will probably think you owe him something anyway.

six I am a link whore, and Technorati exists to show me how bad business is on my street corner.

fin I think I would be happiest if I could simply be a food blogger. My Aunt Karen, Uncle Don’s wife, made the best red velvet cake. She had a secret recipe that she wouldn’t even share with Grandma.

do-over on iii) I like Google, I like Amazon, and my business, Sandhill Technologies, is a “Microsoft partner.” But then I also worked for Bank of America back in the day when the phrase “belly of the beast” was in common usage.

These tag deals usually require you to tag others in the hope that they will reveal seamy secrets of their own. “As if,” is the expected response from these tagstravaganzas, but just in case someone wants to grin and bare their souls, how about if we ask Helga, Ronni, Tamar, Norm, Doug, Winston, and Dean. Oh yeah, and Brian and Scruggs and Tom and Zo.

As if.

Further proof that there is no god but that somewhere Coyote is alive and well… we’re hosting a retreat for friends this weekend, a quiet and reflective gathering focussed on how we deal with people we find challenging.  Pot luck lunch.  Tai Chi.   Workshops in the hoop house.  Two people who have been harshly judgmental of me have signed up.  Breathe in, breathe out.

Technorati Tags: rageboy would hoot, welcome to my home, hope no one is allergic to cats, have you seen my fist of doom

Watching this reminded me of all the kids who’ve had their right to joyful youth ripped off by oppressive circumstance… the Jena Six and Shaquanda Cotton among them; kids who not that long ago were stomping in mud puddles and exercising their rights to make mischief, kids who at the onset of their adolescence are stripped of childhood’s privilege and treated as adults by people who have been taught fear and hatred and don’t even know it. Someday I hope they can recapture what has been stolen from them.

I thought also of autumn and of Ronni Bennett and how she helps to mark the passage for all of us older people. And I thought of Paul Ford, emotional romantic, who introduced me to Sigur Rós this morning.

I wrote this a year ago and nothing much has happened to change my mind…

It’s not about the shallow nature and the greed of the second generation brass-ring boys seeking to spin straw into gold. It’s not even so much about the immutability of the straw, although that’s a big part of it. What it’s about is the commodity nature of the widgets that the brass-ring boys seek to capitalize.

In the good old days — say 1997 — there was so much unlaundered mob money floating around in Silicon Valley that no good idea could go unfunded. Since they moved the Bank of America deeper into Christian fundamentalist country and closer to the Florida operation and the off-shore banks, there hasn’t been that much money to launder.

Of course, there are only so many drop shadow logoed, productized widgets with omitted “e”s available to fund, so the decline in drug money to launder matches the decline in products seeking funds, so the burn rates remain about the same, although the general contribution to global warming has declined.

Most of these products are like green beans. They’re tasty with a little buttr, and you can get them anywhere, cheap. Unlike green beans though, they’re mostly based on the characteristics of a current generation of browser and a sense that the whirled wide web is the internet. It’s not, and as tele-immersion applications and the like emerge over the next few years soaking up bandwidth in ways undreamed of by the brass-ring boys, their little dreams of wealth will be dashed. Fortunately for them of course, there will remain a huge market for green beans and they’ll continue to rake a little off the top of every sale, adding value with attitude.

Sorry entreprenoors, but who cares?  This year’s foam is like the 2001 bubble.  You folks that hope to get rich parlaying venture capital into market capitalization and retire to the Berkeley hills for a life of special punditry are blowing it.  The market goes up and the market goes down and our little businesses go with it.  To get so hooked in that you identify more as an entrepreneur than as an engineer, or an analyst, or a writer, or as anybody else who actually does stuff is just plain wrong.

She was practiced at the art of deception
Well I could tell by her blood-stained hands

There are people who defy the odds regarding the frequency limits on the possibility of getting what one wants. It’s impossible to say whether they proceed consciously or intuitively to manipulate, but through their own agency they succeed. A moment’s reflection reveals many paths and patterns to follow in the attempt to get what one wants: the path of heads down diligence, nose to grindstone — earnest effort is rewarded kind of thing; the path of thud and blunder, roaring into the drawing room on an outlaw motorcycle, chains rattling, pistons popping, celeriac swinging, laying waste — the mode of kill them all and let god sort them out; and the one that has me spinning this morning, disengagement.

Rather than state what’s on his mind, the successful disengager will talk all around a topic, never revealing a clue regarding his or her preference. In the end the disengager never has a loss tallied in his column, and more often than not, by derailing the conversation, the disengager will get what he wants without ever saying exactly what that is. This is very frustrating to the celeriac swingers (of whom I count myself one). There is something inherently dishonest about it.

About sixty people turned out last night at the Tenney park lagoon to remember the Japanese victims of atomic war by making paper lanterns and floating them out on the water at dusk. The Raging Grannies performed. Clare Norelle sang and read a children’s story. Some feared the rain but it never appeared. It was a beautiful event.

There’s a short streaming video at Channel3000 (scroll down to “News 3 Multimedia.”)

…and beautiful photos here!

UPDATE… more nice photos and a moving narrative from Madison Guy on FlickR and on his blog.