June 2006 Archives

The New York Times recently reported an allegedly sustained and multi-faceted effort by the United States government to monitor its citizens' behavior in the name of national defense and homeland security with the assistance of private businesses. The pieces of this puzzle of electronic surveilling of its citizens by a government causes more than a moment of dismay and a period of concern.

An online news outlet has published details about secret rooms in AT&T buildings where government spies are said to be gaining access to millions of private e-mail messages and other Internet traffic.
Barrymore's Bar in Lincoln, Nebraska is unique. It is located in the backstage area of what used to be the Stuart Theatre. You enter the bar through an alley. The bar entrance was the performer's stage door when the theatre opened in 1929. 
Journal Square is a major transportation hub in Jersey City for bus connections and PATH train transfers. Much in the same way New York city's "Times Square" was named after The New York Times newspaper, "Journal Square" is named after The Jersey Journal newspaper.

The Journal Square area is ripe with cultural monuments and ethnic identifications. India Square is one of my favorite places to visit and eat and drink! I also do my banking in the massive Journal Square complex. 

Gay in the Womb

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Reuters is reporting today a study claiming male sexual orientation is determined in the womb before birth. This "sexual orientation-maternal immune response" theory suggests a mother's reaction to her male fetus is see as a "foreign body" in her body and her immune system goes into subconscious overdrive to purge the male within her. 
Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, announced over the weekend he was giving Bill Gates' foundation $31 billion dollars, thus creating a charitable buffet like no other in history. With $61 billion dollars in the till, the Gates Foundation will be able to do even more good in the fight to cure health and humanity issues the world over by creating a deeper dedication to healing the immense suffering in the urban human core and in bringing hope and satiety to smaller rural communities in Africa and Asia. 

Springsteen Sings Seeger

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Bruce Springsteen's new album is a tribute to Pete Seeger and it comes off as an Old-Time Revival jamboree on DVD. We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions is a celebration of Folk and Gospel music and the energy and divinity found pounding in the songs is a exclamation of joy and wonderment that we are alive and in the company of each other.
 
Springsteen Sings Seeger

Call of Duty 2 Review

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I am not a big Gamer, but when I saw Call of Duty 2 was available as a Universal Application for the Mac I had to pony up the $50.00 for the game to see how well it would play on my MacBook Pro. Call of Duty 2 is an outstanding game and I can run it in full 1680x1050 mode. 
How many hours of your awake time is spent either looking at a computer screen or at a television? Five hours? Six hours? 12 hours? More? In a recent article, Own Your Words, I said this in the comments:

I think those in the future who choose to study us after we are dead will be amazed at how much free time we had when the world was crumbling all around us and we did nothing to heal it in time. They will discover were only interested in peering into LCDs and CRTs to ignore the fire engulfing us on all sides. It will be a sad day of reckoning for memories when they realize on our behalf that we never really lived at all.

The Shortest Distance

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We all know and love the beloved and familiar chestnut Real Men always round down. We also know a Real Man never asks for directions while women don't mind asking and when a man and a woman are lost together and the woman asks a stranger for directions against the better will of The Real Man, that Real Man can never live down the tender loss of his manhood. 
Last week White House spokesman Tony Snow said the watershed number of 2,500 dead American soldiers in Iraq was "just a number."
Meanwhile, the Pentagon announced that US deaths in Iraq had reached 2500, with more than 18,000 Americans injured in the war since the US invaded in March 2003. A White House spokesman, Tony Snow, called it "just a number", then added that it was a "sad benchmark" but that President George Bush was determined to ensure that the men and women who had died in Iraq had not died in vain.
People across the world cringed at the lack of compassion from policy makers where soldiers appear to be functionaries for a quantifiable end instead of people with mourning families who volunteered their lives for an ideal with a qualitative emotional value. The recent kidnapping of two American soldiers by Al Qaeda in Iraq caused a media circus and a public White House hand-wringing that immediately made one wonder how the kidnapping of two soldiers became more valuable and more urgent than the deaths of 2,500 soldiers before them. Now that both soldiers are reportedly dead -- and no longer kidnapped -- will Mr. Snow now make their deaths "just a number" to be added to the 2,500 or have those two soldiers become more human in their graves because the entire world was left to worry -- however briefly -- for the well-being of their lives?
On July 1, 2005 Janna and I finished writing and creating images for illustration in our Hand Jive book published by Barnes & Noble in New York. The book has been in production for the last year and is now ready to be sent to the printer this week for publication and distribution and sale! You can see images of the Hand Jive book cover art below and if you have any comments or see any errors, please leave a specific comment. The first image is the front cover and spine; the second image is the back cover; the third image is the inside front flap; the last image is the inside back flap.

Hand Jive Book Cover!

Bill Gates Buys a Life

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I am a Bill Gates fan. I think he is prescient. He is valuable. He blazes a bright path in the dark where others fear to tread. He's also smart enough to know nothing lasts forever -- except for infamy and shame -- and his decision to leave Microsoft on his own terms and on his own timetable demonstrates he knows how to do the right thing even if it may bring him personal heartbreak of purpose and insecurity of mind. 
There's nothing better than talking to a robot on the phone at 11:00pm when you've been waiting over 15 hours for a delivery of a vital computer part to arrive from UPS into the root of your urban core. My advice in defeating the UPS robot call center is to just keep saying, -- Agent! -- over and over and over again at every prompt until the robot voice lady gives up and chillingly feeds you into the queue to speak to a real live person with the personality of a robot. In my neighborhood in the Jersey City Heights my regular UPS guy is great. 

Own Your Words

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When I was growing up in Nebraska, my family was famous for always telling its young, "Never write something you don't want read out loud to the rest of the world."

That sort of advice, bundled in a warning, and wrapped in a grin and punctuated by a pointing finger, was daunting for a group of nine-year-old cousins to comprehend as we scrawled our names in crayon on a Big Chief pencil tablet. 
Is it just me or are the new, hilarious, television commercials for the new Apple MacBooks some kind of weird semiotic take on the caricatures of Bill Gates at Microsoft and Steve Jobs at Apple? Windows machines are older, fatter and uglier than the younger, slimmer, prettier MacBook? Or are the commercials a more direct shiv up the backs of Windows users who may not be as cool as their Mac brethren? Or is this a more specific personal poke in the eye with a sharp barb from the Apple Boot Camp through the dawning Windows Vista? The series of commercials are funny and they tell a succinct story -- but the dark undertow beneath the raging rapids of laughter might tell us more about the real semiotic embedded in the subliminal Apple corps advertising.
(UPDATE -- Nov. 2007): I recently purchased the Western Digital My Book Premium II WDG2T20000N 2TB External Hard Drive. I mirror the drive so I have around 800 Gigs available for direct storage. Over the past month the drive has proven to be fast and killer and it works great as an iTunes server for my network.)

Do, you, like, to, use, commas, as, if, they, are, running, out, of, style? I don't like commas and I avoid them. My students, on the other hand, as well as many amateur authors, use commas as if they were free by the bushelful and need to be crammed into every bramble and sigh.  I never add a comma before an "and" though many people employ a comma there. 

Barefoot in New York

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People and their relationship with their shoes, is an important personality identifier as well as a cultural values totem. Janna, an Iowa farm girl, loves her bare feet. She wanders the apartment and neighborhood in bare feet as often as she can and as weather and circumstance permit. 

Top Ten Dude Cars

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Yesterday we provided a list of Top Ten Chick Cars and today, as promised, we provide the definitive list of Top 10 Dude Cars -- and when we say "Dude Cars" we mean these are vehicles only men should drive and no self-respecting woman should be caught dead driving or even riding shotgun -- because these cars have masculine edges, dull personalities and bleed XY chromosomes. 

Top Ten Chick Cars

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Here is the definitive list of Top Ten Chick Cars -- and when we say "Chick Cars" we mean these are cars women should drive and no self-respecting man should be caught dead driving or even riding shotgun -- because these cars have feminine curves, engaging personalities and bleed XX chromosomes. 
Three weeks ago we investigated, Uniform Urination: Analysis of Peeing Postures, where we discussed various forms of male relief. What happens if you cannot go when the urge is pulsing for release? We all suffer from pee shyness at least once in our lives and I experienced an episode after my harrowing hernia operation at Lenox Hill hospital where the head nurse would not discharge me until I peed after surgery.
Last week in my article, MacBook Questions from a Windows Heathen, I asked some questions about the new MacBook line of laptops from Apple computing. I have been using Windows computers since the rise of Windows 3.11.

My previous experience with Apple has been limited to the first generation Newton which I loved so much that Apple used a quote of mine in a press conference but without attributing it to me or asking my permission. I had posted on a CompuServe forum explaining why the Newton was "touching the future today."
In Recognizing the Uncommon Mind we discussed dreams and their associated value in living:
You're right about dreaming. It is important for children. When those dreams reach beyond the family dynamic, however, those very dreams become dangerous.
One of my favorite assignments for my new writing students is a research project involving their parents.

Art of Big City Tipping

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Yesterday my young, attractive and obviously upwardly mobile neighbor -- I don't know her name and she's lived in her apartment a year to my four years -- was in the hallway with me when her Chinese food order was delivered. The delivery guy waved at me. We are good friends because he delivers a brown rice lunch special to me at least four times a week. 

We Are Now 9Rules

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On Saturday  we were selected as one of 111 blogs -- out of 700 submissions -- to be granted membership status in the 9Rules Network.

Nine Rules

We usually talk about big ideas here -- and we'll get back to that tomorrow with some Big News and other vital matters pressing the urban core, and if you are in search of some deeper reading right now, click here -- but today we're going to take a pause that does not refresh as we virtually taste test and review together a new pox upon humankind:

 Coke Blak 
When you roast in the Summer urban core without air conditioning or a ceiling fan or any sort of reliable cooling method other than a span fan or a box fan, you need to find a way to cool your human core fast because the threat to heart and health is losing your mind and melting away your senses. Please meet the vision cured to cool you forever, the Vornado 280SSB Full Size Air Circulator:

The Vornado


After 20 years of using only DOS and Windows I am slowly making the switch over to the keen new Apple MacBook and MacBook Pro computers. With an entry point of $1,000.00 USD for the MacBook there are going to be a lot of new sales to Windows Heathens like me who can't resist a bite into an Apple running an Intel chip especially when our lives are becoming more and more image and video manipulation. 
How do we recognize a mind that doesn't think like other minds? Is there great danger in destroying ingenuity and inspiration and depth of thought that doesn't ever occur to other minds? We have discussed before how mediocrity only recognizes mediocrity but how should we handle the Uncommon Mind if we are unable to recognize it on our own? How do we naturally promote neural connections in others we may see as different and uncomfortable and unfamiliar and that we may not understand? How can we begin to appreciate the ideas that make such a mind unique?

About this Archive

This page is an archive of entries from June 2006 listed from newest to oldest.

May 2006 is the previous archive.

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Recent Comments

  • Kathakali Chatterjee: It depends David! What if they are just incapable to read more
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