Separating the amateurs from the pros from the cons

Well, back to the storyline that won’t go away quietly.

Turns out the Committee has issued its final opinion to settle the debate on what separates a professional athlete from an amateur athlete and either one from a convict.

Simple: the best body modification that money can buy.

Therefore, from this day forward, all professional sports association must allow players to use as many chemical concoctions and prosthetic additions as they and/or their sponsors can afford.

Amateur athletes must continue to refrain from enhancing their bodies in any way that requires more than basic nutrition to supplement a hard exercise regimen.

Of course, this puts pressure on the professional spectacle that used to be a competition between amateur athletes called the Olympics.

Because professional athletes can participate in the Olympics, all Olympic athletes may take whatever steps they, their family, their sponsors and/or their country deems necessary to win.

Or, as they like to say in scifi, may the best cyborg crush its opponent in glorious technicolour!

The starving barbarians at the gate will still be barred from entry until such time as they prove themselves civilised enough to behave like a normal doped-up athlete in the Olympic spotlight — sorry, no more grunting in front of a microphone and camera like a tennis player on the court — you must be able to speak in sentences longer than two words, even if your opponent is bleeding to death in the arena from your crushing blow to the head.

Confused about politics…

Okay, so I was driving down the road when a news flash interrupted my meditative music.

Apparently, Public Radio International has claimed the top spot in the Mexican government, led by Enrique Pena Nieto.

As you can see, I’m confused.  Public Radio International, or PRI, is, according to wikipedia:

a Minneapolis-based American public radio organization, with locations in Boston, New York, London and Beijing. PRI’s tagline is “Hear a different voice.” PRI is a major public media content creator and also distributes programs from many sources, competing with National Public Radio and American Public Media to provide programming to public radio stations.[1] Additionally, the company is increasingly focused on fulfilling the unmet needs in global news and cultural perspectives, created and curated specifically for relevance for Americans.[2]Therefore its competitive set in the larger media and information landscape consists of organizations focused on creating, partnering and providing global news and cultural perspectives content.

PRI is the “managing partner” of American Public Radio, which provides satellite radio programing via Sirius XM Satellite Radio. APR is composed of PRI, Chicago Public Radio, WGBH (FM) in Boston, and WNYC in New York City.[3]

Am I to understand that the Mexican government is now in direction competition with Carlos Slim’s media empire?

What does that say about the drug cartels?

Who, at the end of the day, will rule the streets?

Will kids listen to the likes of Ahmad Jamal, Hey Rim Jeon, or Yomo Toro?  Does that mean the pop days are just about over for the dynamic duo, Justin Bieber and Paul McCartney?  Will Dolly Parton release an album inspired by the Tijuana Brass?

Do Australians celebrate Christmas in July?

Can someone give those idle folks in Mali something to do besides tearing down burial sites?  Don’t they have jobs or some other useful constructive occupation?

Will Microsoft copyright the phrase “Higgs boson” before it’s too late and the phrase becomes a common household name like “collaterized mortgage obligations” or “six degrees of freedom”, depriving the corporation of calling itself “The House that God’s Particle Built!”?

Do you Roku?

While the tech world buzzes about the latest mass media consumption device, I play with a refurbished unit called the “Roku XD 2050X 1080p Streaming Player, 802.11n/g, Ethernet Port, Enhanced Remote with Instant Replay.”

Purchased one at Woot.

Well, I actually made the classic “duh” error when I ordered the box.

I pressed the Big Button (if you’ve wooted, you know) and got an HTTP 404 error that the page I sought no longer exists.

So I pressed the refresh button…

Four times!

Tried to cancel but the Wootiers behind the virtual wall told me, “Sorry!  Our robots are scurrying through the warehouse, happily scooping up four Woot boxes just for you.”

Anyway, the one box that I wanted, I opened.

Within minutes, I was watching a free Amazon On Demand movie on the ol’ 1999 55-inch standard definition projection TV in the comfort of my overcrowded living room.

Letterbox version of a popcorn flick, “Mission Impossible 3: We Suckered You Into Watching This Fluff a THIRD Time!”

Easy as making a pie.

No, easy as pulling a frozen pie out of the freezer, sticking it in the countertop convection oven and cooking it unevenly, burning one side and leaving the other side nice and cold.

As a comedian, I’ve got to find something funny about the inconvenience of convenience foods.

Besides, writing satyrical skits gets old.  And the burlesque dancers even more plastic-looking than Cher singing at a NASCAR race full of robot drivers and their plastic, Valley of the Dolls, Stepford wives!

Enough already.

Let me save the insults for the young kids.

Time to get serious, if not a few Syrians.  Assyrians, you’re time has come and gone.  I’ve got my safari gear on and ready to hunt cougars.

Experience counts where experience counts but who’s counting?

I know there’s somebody important in this time period who died I’m supposed to add to the list of celebrity eulogies but I’ve forgotten.

Thanks to Kristyna, Connie, Muriel and others.

Respect the Sanctity of the Cones

There is a phrase, common to officers of the law patrolling Colorado streets at night, that defies description here in the Martian colonies.

“Respect the sanctity of the cones.”

You see, back in 2012, the President of the United States, seeking reelection, decided to interfere with the operation of police and firefighters to offer his condolences in the midst of a state emergency.

Ask yourself if you would rather have a firefighter working hard to save YOUR house rather than standing for a photo op with the Prez.

Or a police officer holding back traffic for a firetruck heading into your neighbourhood rather than an entourage of national security folks establishing a clear perimeter of security for the Prez.

You see, I’m reading historical blog entries like these:

I support any person who wins the majority of electoral college votes for U.S. President.

But I can also call into question his motives when he puts his reelection campaign ahead of a real emergency.

You ask me, this stinks.  Mr. Obama, you are making yourself an annoyance in this case.

It is poor decisions like these that make me question your honest attempt to be a leader rather than a vote chaser.

Remember, I am one of the Undecided.

Unfortunately, I live in the state of Alabama, which is all but guaranteed to support your opponent to take office in 2013.

But those of us in swing states, we look to our President for a true vision, not just another politician gladhanding the homeless and asking to remember you come November when you blocked the way for those who are really sacrificing themselves.

You see, I thought I lived in a great country where protection of the people was not just something that happens “over there” in Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq or Afghanistan.

I expect protection of my people here and now.

But go ahead, bring the posse down to the Centennial State and see exactly who remembers you for what you did to those people whose homes were destroyed because one too many police and firefighters were diverted from their primary duties to shake your hand on primetime TV.

Hey, I’m just a regular citizen, occasionally remembering to donate plasma to the Red Cross and give clothing to Goodwill.

I’m no saint.

But I am a voter.

And there are a lot of people like me not expressing their opinion in the ocean of voices floating in the blogosphere.

We read the history of your times in the early decades of the 21st century and wondered when we were supposed to see the Rebirth of the Enlightenment cause it ain’t happened yet!

Earthquake, cyclone, fire or flood

Fire and Ice

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Robert Frost
=========================

Look at some of these pictures and decide for yourself (from: http://photos.denverpost.com/mediacenter/2012/06/photos-waldo-canyon-fire-near-garden-of-the-gods/38318/)

  •  click for full size:

My thoughts and prayers go the families whose homes are gone — although we can replace houses and their possessions, the loss of objects to which we’ve attached precious memories is often just as heartbreaking as the loss of someone close to us.

Hole Punchers and Drive-Thru Windows

“Yes, yes…what is it, Rick?  I thought you were harvesting fungi and making algae soup for breakfast this morning.”

“Well, I was looking at the growth patterns of vines in the woods this morning, paying attention to capillary action, when I saw a branch of the future you might want to tell my…I mean, your readers.”

“Rick, Rick, Rick.  How can I do that?  I’ve already told them you’ve retired and here you are, still setting up your supercomputer to extend prediction paths out into the forest.  That doesn’t sound like you’re retired to me.”

“‘You young whippersnappers!’  Why, I ought to give you a good whoopin’ for backtalking me but then you are taller and stronger.”

“Oldtimers.  Geez.  Look, am I or am I not in charge of your network?”

“Let’s just say you were handpicked for the job.  Kinda like the way we maneuvered the population of the United States to put a man who had an African Muslim father and Caucasian Christian mother into the White House.  Which goes with one of these future predictions I see.  The way the vines tell it, now that we’ve secured a member of the Muslim Brotherhood as president of Egypt, we need to convince one of the U.S. President’s daughters to marry a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, thus cementing the bond between the U.S., and thus the West, and the Middle East.  It’s the only longterm way to secure peace within certain circles of the Muslim community and get rid of terrorist breeders within their ranks.  And if they adopted a Chinese baby, that’d perfect the deal!”

“Man, you and your wildlife.  I suppose the ants were talking to you again today, weren’t they?”

“Now that you mention it…”

“Naw, forget it.  I’ve got my own show to run.  You want this gig, you gotta take it from me!”

Rick says to thank Nancy for the smile and laugh she shared this morning.

Fast Food News

Hey, movie fans, this is Neau Tahm Toulouse here with Entertainment Tweetly.

In political news, the governor of Tennessee today signed legislation banning scratch-n-sniff cards in children’s toys.  The legislation is called the “gateway drug prevention” bill by the press.  The governor countered that the new bill also contains subsections that approve the issuance of government IDs like social security numbers and voting cards but not driver’s licences to online personalities, keeping kids more strongly glued to their gaming devices in the hope that obsessive video gaming will act as a form of abstinence from physical contact with other humans, let alone any gateway sexual activity such as breathing the same air as another young adolescent in the room with you.

The Solicitor General has already posted a notice that the new Tennessee bill will probably be challenged in lower courts, so the Supreme Court took the preemptive move to issue an immediate comment about the Tennessee legislative act, stating that with one state recognising the legal right of virtual citizens, corporations now have the right to vote in elections, the corporations’ voting power (i.e., number of votes per voting district) proportionate to their monetary size, number of employees, superPAC donations and former legislators/judges/executives on their consultant/lobbyist payrolls and/or board of directors.

The governor, son of the founder of a large corporation, responded, “He who laughs last usually has his vast wealth in offshore accounts and trust funds.”

I caught Julia Roberts in a moment of regret and sadness during a recent interview, who was bemoaning the fact that she’s almost forgotten and reduced to playing the role of mean, wrinkled witches because she’s considered past her prime.  She admitted that she had wanted to perform nude or topless scenes in film but had been discouraged by her agent because Julia’s breasts are asymmetrical in shape and audiences weren’t ready for mainstream stars to have imperfect bodies displayed larger-than-life.  I only had my cell phone, which has a lousy microphone but I believe she also said, “younger actresses are lucky — audiences are so jaded they don’t pay attention to nudity anymore, as common as it is on the Internet — exhibitionism is expected, not shocking.  Getting a job via the casting couch has changed, too, now that women are sitting in the director and producer chairs these days.”  Julia wouldn’t elaborate when I asked her for details about that last comment.

This is Neau Tahm Toulouse, returning to his hopping spot in the French Quarter.  I gotta take a break and read some real literature.  This pop news reportin’ is ruinin’ my vocabulary and eloquent speechmakin’.

Organisational Skill Assessment

Before I compose a hand-drawn animation sequence with the Bamboo Capture graphics tablet and fill my future with out-of-date electronic debris, I finish sorting through the piles of debris that constitute the bulk of written material which emanated from this set of states of energy called me.

Watched a commencement speech by Laurie Anderson [I thought, for a public performance multimedia artist, her acting was rather stilted], which has prompted me to click my way to a website and order a copy of the book, “How to be idle,” which in turn opened my eyes to the reams of office paperwork stacked in boxes around me.

Here’s one from 03/24/98:

Kiersey Temperament Sorter Results

Your Temperament is Idealist: NF
Your variant temperament is Healer: INFP

Any Personality Test, including the Sorter is just a rough indicator of temperament.
You might want to look at different temperament descriptions to verify the results and learn about other types of people for comparison.

I+6 N+16 F+12 P+14

David M. Keirsey
keirsey@mail.orci.com

At that time in my life, the department manager was all about fitting us into jobs that matched our personalities.

What she didn’t account for was a chameleon like me, a people pleaser who assesses the wants and desires of the people around him and blends in, hiding his personality behind layers and layers of masks, revealing himself to a select few.

I told the manager I’m not who she thinks I am and she responded that was a normal reaction to the test results from an INFP like me.

Later, I learned that she gave the same response to everyone who questioned the test results.

I wasn’t questioning the test results.  I just wanted her to know that the test results indicated my exteriour in relation to giving her the test results I thought she wanted to see.

For instance, let’s say I find out my college History professor is a dopehead and adherent to the philosophy of Timothy Leary… I make sure my term paper for the class, a review of a book about socialist utopias, contains plenty of illicit drug references and hippy religious conversations.

My goals are not your goals.  My goals are outside of the time and place in which we encounter one another, so it doesn’t matter to me about the profit targets you want to reach or the edifices you want to build in your names.

Ideas and images associated with temporal moral and ethical practices are imaginary, as far as I’m concerned.

We either reproduce our genetic material or we don’t.

Everything else is fiction about how we decide to protect our reproductive organs until we’ve produced progeny that need our protection.

Me, I have only these works of art — the sketches and writings that were birthed by me with your influence, a part of the universe, upon me.

I have no genetically-related or adopted children.  The closest I got were the nieces and nephews who [might have] looked up to me as an adult member of their clan/tribe.

They are adults now.  My influence upon them diminishes as they decide how to protect their reproductive organs until they’ve produced progeny that need their protection.

One of my hidden goals was to live long enough to be a great-uncle.

I held up my step-niece’s little one-month young girl in my arms, making me the great-uncle I wanted to be ever since I was a little boy and looked up to my childless great-uncle and great-aunt who seemed to have extra spending money my parents never had, despite the great-relatives’ middle-class wages as a postman and office secretary, respectively.

I have grown tireder as I’ve aged, exercised less and eaten minimally-nutritious chemically-treated foodstuff.  I no longer want to be a model for others or someone to look up to.

It’s time to slow down and concentrate on the dreams and desires of the personality behind all the masks…

The boy who saw macabre nightmares come to life when his favourite politician of all time, Richard Nixon, resigned.

The boy who looked down at his plate of spaghetti and thought he was eating a dish full of bleached worms covered with red sauce to hide their little heads screaming for mercy.

The boy who heard the grass talk to him.

The boy who sailed the universe at night when no one was looking.

The boy who knew that stone gargoyles and cast-iron mailboxes were like three-dimensional photographs of a reality hidden inside other people’s heads, finding an outlet, me wondering where they came from before they appeared in people’s thoughts.

The boy who earned his Eagle Scout badge and went on into Explorer Scouts, later to become a Unit Commissioner, an adult role in Scouting, because he never thought he had gained his father’s love and trust, constantly seeking, seeking, seeking approval up until he reached his adult age of 18 where he received a full college scholarship via the U.S. Navy ROTC program, accepted at both Vanderbilt and Georgia Tech, but realising he no longer had to seek his father’s approval and flunked out on purpose.

I had become the man I never thought I’d be able to grow up to be.

I never was my father and never will be.

I am me.

My hidden visions, the alternate reality that I carry in my thoughts as I interact with people who seem to like to embrace the inconsistent reality of [sub/ex]urban lifestyles and belief systems, are crawling out of me and into the world in which we meet and greet one another cordially.

They are not perfect.

They are not commercialised, plastic products for mass production and insane profit margins.

I don’t even care if others steal, borrow or marginalise my work.

My work is not me but my work came from me so I associate myself with my work but I do not tie my self-worth to what I’ve written, drawn, danced, sang or sewn.

This is the only moment in which I live and I claim this moment as mine, declaring myself absolutely insane in comparison to the insanity of boxed stuff that we only call food because the pretty picture on the outside tells me it is.

Unlike Madison Avenue marketers, I don’t have to make money from my creative redefinition of ordinary life.

I can, have been and will be me, willing to use the excess capacity of our species’ social structure that produces a buffer zone outside of basic survival to express myself here and elsewhere, on paper, in blogs and wherever I feel I want to breathe what always has to be my last breath because the next one is not guaranteed.

On to the graphics tablet, building upon my first animation!!!

As an independent filmmaker said,

Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it. In any case, always remember what Jean-Luc Godard said: “It’s not where you take things from – it’s where you take them to.”
—Jim Jarmusch, The Golden Rules of Filming[

Class rings and calendars

Going through my mother in-law’s drawers as we packed up her belongings, throwing away nonfunctional appliances, opened up vistas, windows into the past.

For instance, this simple pocket calendar (my favourite calendrical timekeeper format):

I suppose the year was 1946 when this was issued, a time when the U.S., Europe, China and Japan, amongst others, were mending global relationships.

In 2012, war on that scale is more a memory, a chapter in a history book, than anything else.

Now…well…we live history every day, don’t we?  Our lives, our individual lives, are ours to call our own, with many wanting our attention to make their lives seem more important than what we have planned to think and do.

Jostens, for instance, was once willing to trade a metallic perpetual calendar for a moment of your time thinking about class rings, announcements, awards and other objects that a commercial jeweler and stationer could provide not long after national rationing had reduced the frivolity of consuming items in daily living in exchange for items in daily killing to preserve a relatively peaceful way of life.

These days, the areas on this planet where we can openly play wargames amongst ourselves dwindle.

When average citizens can share their daily lives, the minute details of their subculture, without fear of oppression by bullying forces keen on preserving their wealth and prestige at the expense of the average citizen’s meager means, then what is war for, exactly?

What about a class ring?

I had a class ring once but sold it to take an older woman on a weekend snow skiing trip.

The ring meant more to my parents (who used their hard-earned cash to purchase it for me) than to me, a person who rarely sees the value in status symbols, fleeting as they are in the grand scale of our species’ history.

But without class rings and graduation announcements, I wouldn’t have this piece of nostalgia in front of me.

Somewhere, someone is wearing a piece of jewelry made of the gold from my class ring.  There may also be someone who mounted the citrine stone, once ordaining my class ring, that closely represented my secondary school primary color — orange — as well as the birth month of the girl I spent most of my time with.

There are stories to tell, observations to make, cats to feed and laundry to fold.

Yet, here I sit, imagining the year 1946, a year of promise, when the UN was formed and a year before the CIA was formed.

Syria’s independence from France was declared.

Project Diana bounces radar waves off the Moon, measuring the exact distance between the Earth and the Moon, and proving that communication is possible between Earth and outer space, effectively opening the space age.

The precursor to Sony was founded.

A Greek referendum supports the return of the monarchy. Later, George II of Greece returns to Athens.

Italy became a republic.

The World Bank began operations.

The interim government of India takes charge.

The ISO (International Organization for Standardization) starts setting standardised standards for standard bearers everywhere.

In the first Basketball Association of America game, the New York Knicks defeat the Toronto Huskies 68–66 at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens.

The Casio Company is founded by engineer Tadao Kashio.

One calendar year — what a turning point!  Even 22 years later, 1967, the last year of the perpetual calendar, seems so far away sometimes…