hoodooencoding

Head Rant # 30,872: An Exercise in Genuine Anger

This is what my pen looks like when it begins to turn into acid.  I’ve been holding this in for awhile now, so its time for me to get it off-a-my chest.

You know what? It took me about eight frickin' hours to get this frickin' post up on this frickin' blog today. Eight frickin' hours, which of course I realize, is frickin' pitiful.  And by the time I'm done editing, I'll still be pissed off at the way it looks on this frickin' monitor.

And oh yeah, I can hear you asking (cause I can read your mind) "Well, why is that Mister?"

Because for cripes sake, I'm no frickin' HTML programmer. And no, I've never been employed as a frickin' IT professional in my life.

Nope.

I’ve never made a living as a frickin' computer programmer, or a frickin' computer engineer or coder or systems administrator or bloody frickin' computer designer, or any similarly intriguing occupation.

The fact is, by modern, wealthy, resource-hoarding, western standards of civilization, I'm probably what most of the „we never think about electricity“ professionals would label as barely frickin' computer literate.

And the saddest thing about this is I've worked at computer screens, almost nonstop, for at least a frickin’ decade.

"I can't get no satisfaction
Cause I tried and I tried
And I tried and I tried...
When I'm driving in my car
And a man comes on the radio, he's telling me more and more
About some useless information supposed to fire my imagination...
When I'm watching my TV
And a man comes on that tells me how white my shirts can be
But he can't be a man 'cause he doesn't smoke the same cigarettes as me...
I can't get no
No satisfaction..."

From Satisfaction by Mick Jagger & Keith Richards

  So yes, I feel totally retarded by now.

  Because today, it finally became apparent to me that it has not mattered to computer
and software makers that I've worked in at least 5 different countries during the past 16 years of my precious life.

  Or studied foreign languages, sciences, mathematic disciplines and arcane subjects.

  Or that the cultural projects I've developed have been consistently vital, unique and potentially lucrative.

  Or that somehow, I've managed to actually cultivate a few meaningful professional and social relationships with really interesting people from all walks of life, from all over the globe for decades.

  Or that my lovely wife is content and happy with me most of the time and my family is relatively healthy.  Or created enough personal failures for my person to remain humble.  Or taken the time to do volunteer work in charity institutions in each and every community I've ever lived in, making not only a valuable contribution to the process of building sustainable communities, but a positive impact on the lives of my neighbors, mostly without having to cuss all the time, along my merry way.

  It dawned on me today that none of that stuff really matters.

  Because I realized that computer technologies, for all of their wonderful miracles, however necessary and indispensable for our personal, ethical, professional, economic, scientific, artistic, political and social needs, work way too much over the heads of jerks like me to use, without pulling all of the hair out of the head, or scratching away at the skin, or biting off the nails, or chomping away at the proverbial bits.

"In the computing metaphor, we have hardware and software; the brain is the hardware and our thoughts are the software running on it. This is a powerful metaphor and its use has enabled researchers to develop new experimental protocols and make significant discoveries. But there's a cost associated with using this metaphor: it perpetuates Cartesian duality." Karl Schroeder

"Cell phones and answering machines and digital telemarketing messages and Xerox machines and Web sites and BlackBerries - these are all representational technologies too. They all siphon your attention into unreal time. They represent what is not present and confront you with something else you have to deal with, if only to discard it."from Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita

"I'm surprised people don't have cables coming out of their asses, because that's going to be a new thing. You're just going to get it directly fed into you." Jon Stewart in Wired

Heretofore, not only have the high-priests of new technologies truly blessed us with codes and formats which are usually user-un-friendly, but with designs which are user-hostile, anti-intuitive and inflexible: engineering manuals are a reflection of the minds that create them.

  And this, Virginia, is why I am not only going bald, but blind.  Seems my long years of exposure to millirem computer monitor ionizing radiation has finally, methinks, driven me cockamamie crazy!

  And oh my goodness! What a relief it is! I feel frickin' peachy now that I’ve actually lost it, having finally teetered over the edge, spilling all my marbles, gone off my rocker and become certified, stark-raving-foaming-at-the-mouth-fallen-down-and-can't-get-up mad.

  I remembered today most people in the world have never used a telephone, let alone a computer.

  Please excuse me but, am I the only one who's noticed that these little monitor screens haven't really helped much to eliminate racism, xenophobia or caste systems? Or actually prevented wars? Or solved poverty or hunger or disease? Or desertification? Or violence? Or homelessness?

  Has the promise of technology really done any of that?

  Hell naw.

And what kind of Big-tail trouble with a capital T have we received for all our noble efforts to understand all this wonderful technology?

"Printed Circuit Boards contain heavy metals such as Antimony, Silver, Chromium, Zinc, Lead, Tin and Copper. According to some estimates there is hardly any other product for which the sum of the environmental impacts of raw material, extraction, industrial, refining and production, use and disposal is so extensive as for printed circuit boards."
- CARE conference, Vienna, 1994

"In short, the product developers of electronic products are introducing chemicals on a scale which is totally incompatible with the scant knowledge of their environmental or biological characteristics."
- Mans Lonnroth, Swedish Secretary of State , 1997

  It has finally dawned on me that most of the highly sophisticated technology and
specialized knowledge communities, created through so much hard work and investment, now serve a special segment of the world population: The TechnoWunder UeberKlass.

  The techy-mecky-ben-aflecky elite. Them who speak with coded-forked tongues. The Neo Stasi Informants of the Info Age Colonialist Patriarchy who possess the time, money and telecommunications butt-plugins to remind the rest of us untermenschen every chance they get that after all, pinging has nothing to do with table tennis and FTP isn't really an acronym for FUNKY TIME PAR-TAY.

  Ya’ll know who you are.

  Ya’ll know what you look like, talk like, walk like, think like, congregate like and stare-blankly-at-your-touch-screens for hours ohne end like.

  Soooo, ya’ll wanna know what I want ya’ll to do for me right now? Other than kiss my tail?

  I want ya’ll to make me up a big bunch of drinkable, fresh water inside your computer networks right now, jillions of gallons of it, for all the people on this planet who are sick today because they don't have enough of it to drink right this frickin' minute.

  I'm totally serious: I want ya’ll to crank up all your frickin' telecommunication cables and transformers and expensive laptops and your lord-of-the-rings-precious, wi-fi connections right now and handle that shizz-it, cause I need 'round 'bout a zillion gallons like yesterday, okay?

  What are ya’ll sitting there looking like that for? DO IT NOW dog-bite-your-time!!

  And while you're at it, hook me up with about a trillion tons of nutrients for all the poor people in Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Caribbean and a specific segment of the population of the southeastern US who've spent most of the last century providing cultural products to entertain your sorry hind-pots, many of whom will have empty stomachs tonight and although they don't look like the people in your frickin' neighborhood, may certainly die before your next birthday, probably while you're drinking that nice hot cup of gourmet tea, staring at your expensive computer monitor.

  I want ya’ll to hurry up and hook up your frickin' FTP connections, with your original fancy code and uberschoen templates that nobody thinks is cool but you and upload that food and water to these people right away today...and use that high speed, fiber-optic cable connection and that crypto-shizzle you nicked last week so it won't get stolen along the way...

  Oh yeah, I know ya’ll can't do stuff like that with your computers.

  Cause when Katrina actually hit New Orleans, none of that amazing technology actually worked to help the people it was designed to help.

  I thought it was kinda kinky, in a pornographic sense, to see how Anderson Cooper and CNN were able to beam live pictures around the world, money shots that looked eerily similar to war-torn Sierra Leone or Liberia, as local police bailed `cause they couldn’t get their walkie-talkies to work.  They might have tried Dixie cups and string.

  And how about that fabulous US Navy/Coast Guard/Air Force/Marines? Let’s talk about the few, the proud, the brave, the invisible, really expensive, big boats designed to float on water, with generators and desalinators on them that strangely enough, couldn’t reach a major US port by Sept. 2nd.

  And FEMA? That high-tech disaster response agency, equipped with NASA technology. The guys who can see through concrete walls. The guys with the remote control rescue robots.  The guys that can watch you wipe your crack while you’re sitting on the toilet from their satellite cameras out in deep space. The guys that only sent 7 of its 28 urban search and rescue teams to NOLA before the storm hit, and none until after Sept. 29th?  You know, I can’t help but wonder what kind of salaries these guys were pulling down while playing video-games, as innocent people in a hospital died real slow, because the doctors and nurses responsible for them got outta dodge.

  I’ve heard people talk about crime and violence in New Orleans as if it were something unique to the American Experience: that bothersome handgun violence, the pesky drug dealing, the revenge murders, as if New Orleans was any different than Atlanta, or Detroit or L.A. or Richmond Va.  I also heard rumors that Ray Nagin’s city government was absolutely corrupt, that he used to be a Republican.  And that he made stoopid money in telecommunications, cable TV to be precise.  Oh, and that that black folk watch more TV than white folk.

  But I also heard Aaron Neville recall that in 1965, then Mayor Skiro blew up the the levees with high powered explosives so that the waters would only flood the Ninth Ward.

  So at this point, I’m really trying not to imagine that Nagin would be in cahoots with local, wealthy businessmen like F. Patrick Quinn III or James Reiss, who hire private security companies (see Blackwater) to implement their urban renewal business fantasies, while they mull over the new re-location plans for the city's black neighborhoods.

  Nah.  History would never repeat itself.

  I will remember that when it came down to saving real people in New Orleans, a city that has given the world Louis Armstrong, Mahalia Jackson, Professor Longhair, Fats Domino, Dr. John, Irma Thomas, Allen Toussaint and Art Neville...a rarefied, supremely valuable community of culture workers who gave birth to jazz, the blues, soul and zydeco, a community which has produced cultural products generating billions of dollars in revenues for film companies, record companies, television companies, literature publishing companies, visual art marketeers and ticket and event promotion agencies...that when New Orleans needed people to put technology to work for them in a pinch, in the crunch, in the nick of time, when the rubber met the road, when the chit hit the fan, none of it worked at all.

  I can imagine that using technology to do something useful would actually mean genuine work, you sorry-tail Larry Mondello lookin’ cretins.

  I know: ya’ll are too busy with your frickin' conferences and network building events. Too busy with your venture capitalist connection making and scripting computer viruses to spy on other people's shizzle, to eff with that.

  Busy, busy, busy.  Ya’ll are some busy frickin’ bozos.

  Ya’ll can create chit-loads of computer viruses and make jigga-bytes of original content, but you still can't manage a cure for end-stage renal failure.
Or cancer. Or diabetes. Or AIDS. Can't even get rid of malaria, but you still walkin’ around with your chests poked out like you somethin' special.

  Eff you and your upwardly mobile connectivity.

  And while I'm at it, eff Microsoft, eff Linux, MIT, Steve Jobs, NASA, Live 8 and your damn outer limits satellite dishes.  Not only have you haven't done nothin’, but a sense of urgency to create anything that would help most of us peons have a safer, healthier future on the planet – along with yourselves - does not exist within your pig-headed, networked minds.

  The apathy you have demonstrated, in my lifetime, astonishes me.

  And since I know you don't plan to do anything about any of this, don't bother to pretend you give a damn and tell me why I’m oh-so wrong.

  Just have another coke, a smile and a nice day.

  So then, I do wish you dingy, brownish-colored cumulus clouds, flowing gently above your insular, isolated, self-absorbed cul-de-sacs.

  Thanks for everything, really. No, I really, truly, mean it. Thank you so very frickin' much.

  You really shouldn’t have.

Dear Uncle Robert,

I hope that this little package and its contents finds you and Aunty G in good spirits, good health and in a state of good cheer. I miss you both terribly. I really hope that I will get to come to B' more this year; I bought a new suit...now I gotta get the money for my ticket (-:

Uncle Robert, about this photo that you sent to me: to say that it is amazing would be the understatement of the year, perhaps the millenniums...you know, in my lifetime, I´ve seen some pretty amazing UFO photos, perhaps hundreds, taken from the 1950´s to the present, by people from all over the world. Of course being a natural skeptic (do I take some of this after my Aunty G?), the majority of the photos that I´ve personally seen have looked obviously faked.

Then of course, there have been photos that I´ve looked on with deep curiosity and scrutiny, in which the objects were either too distant or blurry for me to really draw a conclusion of any kind.

But then, there have been a few, a very small few, that I have seen and when I looked, I couldn’t really decide. These have been the photos that have filled me with wonder and glee and astonishment.

Your photo, Uncle Robert, is absolutely one of those.

Believe it or not, the night before I got this print you sent me in the mail, I was reading about a scientific study performed at the University of Colorado in 1968 (a portion of which I´ve reprinted for you so you can laugh and see how long they´ve been thinking about this stuff and what kind of answers people can come up with when they ask really stupid questions), a part of which was to determine criteria for the ``scientific´´ examination of photographs of UFOs...

There were a couple of things which struck me right away as I looked at the photo that you took. Firstly, the clarity and sharpness of the buildings in the foreground of the photo (one can clearly see the wooden or iron lattice pylons on top of the building directly under the object) show the sharpness of the entire landscape (and the steadiness of your hand) as you snapped.

(Of course, I wondered if your hand would have been as steady if you had been all excited, trying to take a picture of something like this moving real quick. LOL)

But secondly, what really struck me was what appeared to be the tremendous speed (how can you describe faster than lightning - or the speed of light??) at which this object appeared to be traveling....probably much quicker - as they say, than the ``twinkling of an eye´´ - from the right to the left of the photo (to my eye at least).

This object, to my mind at least, gave me the impression that it was really in a big hurry to get somewhere, at the end of an earth day, perhaps late for an appointment of some kind.

Absolutely astonishing. And in downtown Baltimore, of all places....with so many people around (-:

You know what Uncle Robert? I´ve read probably thousands of pages of first hand testimony from people from all over the world who have come forward with documents which described things that they have seen or experienced— strange objects, psi phenomena, mystic experiences, sudden changes in consciousness, energy fields, ect.—which would appear to not have any mathematical or accepted scientific explanation.

For example, not too long ago, I was viewing a report about a guy in Siberia who actually built a huge pyramid, out in a field somewhere, not far from an old, partly de-commissioned Russian military base. According to the report, it seems that people from all over the region come to the site to walk around and kinda hang out inside the thing, to feel, as they described it, the ``positive energy force-field vibrations´´ that this structure generates.

No sugar-honey-ice-tea.

They swear out that the fresh beef/pork/lamb meat that the man keeps in the pyramid does not age at all, but stays fresh (okay, it IS Siberia), but that also, the bottles of water that the cat keeps inside the structure don’t freeze, until they are brought outside the structure.

We’re talking about SIBERIA now, okay?...a place where a warm day in winter can be 30C degrees below freezing...where snow and ice rock the house and in some places still, there are no electric lines for little space heaters for your hind-parts, okay?!?

Better than that though, however, are those pesky radar signals (wouldn´t you know it: that old Russian military base still maintains a functioning radar system) that the radar station keeps picking up – kinda like different kinds of energy bursts, blips, bleeps and bloops – which come from this pyramid in the neighborhood.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: the thing is made completely out of PLASTIC AND FIBERGLASS.

The really cool thing about what I saw was the attitude of the people in the village. The townspeople that were interviewed....several hundred it seems....have been making regular pilgrimages to the pyramid because of the POSITIVE HEALTH BENEFITS that they have all reported. People who have suffered with bronchitis and asthma all their lives have reported definite improvement...they are breathing clearer than with Vick´s Vapor Rub or Soltice...people who have suffered from high blood pressure, migraine headaches and other symptoms of general un-wellness have all reported marked, definite IMPROVEMENTS in their physical conditions...they even say that the drinking the water the man keeps in bottles inside the thing has been proven to provide positive health benefits when sipped in moderation.

Frankly, I don't know. Like I said, I'm a born skeptic. And I never left anything in Siberia.

But you did get your masters degree in Chemistry and I did study enough physics and trig to work in engineering for a time so, you know, we both do have some respect for math and for people who work with numbers because their lives depend on it.

So what kinda made me wiggle my ears was when a retired Soviet cosmonaut, who lives in the area, spoke up.

Kinda reminded me of a Russian version of Story Musgrave....anyway, this cat had been suffering from depression in recent years, I guess he would be in his late fifties-to-early sixties. He said that regular visits to the inside of the structure has cured him of chronic depression. He spoke very movingly of how before he began to visit the pyramid, he had really suffered from what we would call clinical depression, for quite a few years; so much so, that he had lost his zest for life: he was listless, without enough energy for day-to-day living....and insisted that over a period of a few months, after visiting the structure, his mood improved considerably. In fact, he described the relief he experienced "as if the weight of the world had fallen from his shoulders"....and that, he found a whole new lease on life.

Man, this guy sounded like he was giving a real, southern-fried-Baptist-style testimony to me if I ever heard one! But since it came from a man who has actually TRAVELLED INTO OUTER SPACE in a Soviet-made rocketship, (I can imagine he was not a C student in math) let's just say he´s got a lot more CREDIBILITY than most Baptist preachers.

And so as these things go, I guess it all depends on what and who you believe, doesn´t it???

All I wanted to say to you, Uncle Robert, is that I believe in you.

Because you are one of the really BIG people who taught me to think for myself, to questions conventional wisdom and accepted authority.

You have shown me that it is possible to struggle in any place in the world that I choose to....and not sell out. You have been, and will forever be, my primary role model as an example of honesty, courage, self-respect and dignity.

You and Aunty G have continued to demonstrate to me the value of discipline and mental toughness. That integrity is my primary tool, not for success alone, but for my survival as a human being on this planet.

I am a richer person because you both have shared your lives with me, for my entire lifetime.

And I have forgotten nothing.

I hope you will be able to enjoy the little things I have sent for your comfort...I only wish I could have sent more.

In the meantime, take care of yourself and I´ll try to call you soon, okay?

Love Always,
Rev