Tweet of the day:
“Anonymous @AnonyOps
If Anonymous knew that offering all citizens healthcare could shut down the government, we would have adjusted our tactics. #OWS”
Tag Archives: mass media
The Oracle speaks in a conquering tone
Via email: More truth in advertising about business
Dear Rick,
I am sure you have read several articles discussing how the manufacturing sector in the US is steadily declining and quickly becoming a failing industry.
The Manufacturing Leadership Journal, a publication produced by the Manufacturing Leadership Council, offers a different opinion.
Let’s examine the facts:From 1979 – 2010, the Manufacturing sector lost close to 8.1 Million jobs – FACT
Offshoring and reshoring continue to be a common theme among US manufacturers– FACT
Factory floor jobs for unskilled workers are rapidly declining and can no longer be a guaranteed source of strong middle-class employment – FACT
While all these statements are true, the following points are also true:
US Manufacturing output on a value-added basis actually rose by 73% between 1993 and 2011
The Manufacturing sector in the US generates $1.7 trillion in value each year, or over 12% of the nation’s GDP
If US manufacturing was a country, it would be the 10th largest economy in the world – ahead of India and China
What’s your opinion?
To join the discussion and find out more about this subject please read the full Manufacturing Leadership Journal article written by guest writer David Chavern, EVP and COO of the US Chamber of Commerce.
To learn more about how to participate in the Manufacturing Leadership Council, a body of executive level thought leaders in the manufacturing industry, visit us.
One small step…
…one giant gesture for mankind!
Modeling models in modules, modes and nodules
Giving the Creative Arts Department free rein is not, I remind them, the same as giving them free reign.
Free rain, on the other hand, is fine in limited quantities.
Today, I stopped by their cubes, covered in bubble wrap so they can throw books at each other just to duck and hear the “pop, pop, poppety pop” of compressed air escaping through sheered plastic sheeting.
I asked for an update.
After two weeks of work, this is all they had to give me:
Umm…I’m not prone to violent outbursts except when I’m prone to violent outbursts.
Concentrate…ommmm….meditate upon the nothingness of the universe…remember I’m not paying them anything…the Kickstarter campaign will help them recover their costs…IF THEY ACTUALLY PRODUCE SOMETHING TANGIBLE!
Okay, on to other projects. I’ll let the Creative Arts department know I’m serious by denying them more than four mochalattafrappaccinocarpediem drinks a day.
Or should I double their intake to 24 a day?
Decisions, decisions!
What I love and take for granted in my community
In the last two weeks, I have conversed with an international consortium of dance enthusiasts.
Our conversations took place in a dance studio in the town of Madison, the county of Madison, the state of Alabama, the United States of America, Earth.
Countries of origin included the Philippines, Italy, Germany, France, Russia, Mexico and the United States, of the ones specifically stated; heritage included unspecified European, African and Southeast Asian countries.
In some conversations, I was the “American” toward whom the comparison was made about ethnic/national meal preparation — I agreed that some cultures were known for watering down or making bland the spicy foods of other cultures, such that a Mexican or Italian restaurant in the U.S. was not “authentic”.
[this blog entry was interrupted so my wife and I could watch an episode of “SNAPPED” about the murder of a high school mate of mine, Jeffrey Freeman, one of the funniest guys I knew, an impersonator who was great at portraying Carnac the Magnificent, both Jeffrey and Johnny an inspiration for my humour then and now — my thought trail has been shifted as a result]
What I heard from every one of the people with whom I talked was their love for the variety of foods available from countries all over the world here in the U.S. — if there wasn’t a restaurant serving their favourite dishes, there was almost always a grocery store that carried the spices, fruits and vegetables of their home country with which they could cook their family secret recipes and share with friends/family.
Millions of people travel around the world, settling down in new places, rediscovering themselves and their subcultures.
In fact, it’s the story of the billions of us who’ve lived and wandered this planet to make a better life for ourselves.
I have learned a lot about myself in preparation for a dance showcase — rediscovering the joy of living with people of many different backgrounds just as important.
How people outside the state of Alabama see the people inside the state is a perception I don’t control. What I see is the thriving community around the Marshall Space Flight Center and Redstone Arsenal responsible for moon landings and solar system exploration, with all the ancillary occupations that give the community’s residents a healthy lifestyle.
I have taken my fulfilling life in Huntsville for granted. For that alone, I am thankful this beautiful autumn day, leaves falling on the driveway, and chipmunks, their cheeks filled with winter food, hopping across the flagstones surrounding the backyard pond.
OOBE
Although the image of me as an 85-year old man standing on the front steps of a church after Sunday services handing chewing gum to children who adore me as a wise elder is as strong as ever, I still can’t believe I have lived into the second 50 years of my life.
Thirty-three or more years have passed since the last time I remember standing in the green room surrounded by beautiful women and handsome men changing costumes without worrying about modesty, waiting for their cue, their scene change, their chance to shine on the stage, under the spotlight, the scripts memorised, live.
So how do I explain to you, the faithful reader, that we are actually 200 years into the future?
Can time have passed so quickly that we’ve forgotten that we’ve built Moon bases and Martian colonies?
Mesmerising as the past can be, nostalgic even, we clean up the main meeting hall, the tourists returning to their guest quarters, making last-minute changes to their allotted space for clothing and souvenirs before their habitation modules will be trucked over to the launch site for their return trip to the Moon or Mars, depending on their travel agendas.
Tonight was exciting, wasn’t it?
All the performers, including some of the tourists who wanted the chance to say they danced in front of a live audience on the Martian surface, displayed their best talents.
Every one of them can recall a skipped step or miscue but the audience didn’t know and didn’t care — they were entertained and that’s all that matters to them, their last evening on the planet a memorable experience shared between scientists, tour guides and tourists alike, broadcast on the ISSA Net for all to see, reinterpret and create viral video neural implants.
Tomorrow, normality returns to the Red Planet as researchers go back to their laboratories, tourist modules are sent back to their home planet and new patterns of living are applied to the bot net monitoring and terraforming Mars.
A package lay in the corner of Lee’s room, a single acronym adorning the outside: OOBE.
Out-of-box experience or out-of-body experience?
Lee didn’t know.
It was addressed from both Guin and Bai, undated.
Lee’s years of meditation training had allowed him to exist outside of time.
He looked at the package from 100 years later.
It was the collective memories of Guin and Bai’s marriages, woven into a mass media blanket, the fibers containing electroneurochemical memory traces that intersected at perpendicular and diagonal angles, every crossing point a mixed memory that canceled out or magnified similarities, doing the same for precise differences.
Lee saw that he carried the blanket with him for decades, having shared and created some of the memories before the blanket was made.
After hundreds of years of life, time was meaningless to those with perpetually-rejuvenated circuitry, body parts replacing old ones causing joint pain memories to fade from disuse.
Perspective changed as lifetimes had no statistically-expected endings.
Lee saw the night of a dance showcase on Earth as if it had just happened a few hours ago.
He knew his dance partners wanted him to take control of the dance floor but he relished the small feeling of chaos, the hint of uncertainty that felt like having a random number generator built into every one of the changes to his set of states of energy, his partners unsure of his next move, no matter how many times they had practiced them and anticipated what he was supposed to do rather than what he wanted to do or might do just to mix things up.
He was consistent, inserting chaos in order to test theories in realtime, keeping separate the body in motion from the theoretical responses he calculated to regenerate the out-of-body experience he called life.
The OOBE — the soul, the Übermensch, the god within.
Thriving on chaos is the only way to live.
Living inside and outside the labels, letting our fear and misunderstanding of chaos melt away.
Embracing change because nothing is in our control despite the illusion of conditions at the local level.
For instance, move your finger. Now, think about all the aspects of the universe that existed and the changes that occurred in the moment your finger moved that effected you and your finger — statistically, you had no control of the universe’s influence upon your finger, let alone in or on the finger itself.
It is good to remind ourselves of our place in the universe, even on nights with the simple pleasure of social engagement with fellow dancers, their friends and family.
A new adventure awaits our Martian colonists, bred and designed to withstand the brutal cosmic radiation that bombards our inner solar system constantly, ironically protecting us against the random radiation outside our solar system.
Let us look forward to what we’ll read about the colonists next!
Torn between two lovers, feeling like you can rely on the old man’s money
There’s always the misconception that the Mafia is either fake or real.
So we turn to a band’s name for identification purposes:
Charles Pettigrew died of cancer on 6 April 2001, at the age of 37.
[Eddie] Chacon is currently residing in Los Angeles and fronting the electronic duo, The Polyamorous Affair, with Sissy Sainte-Marie. In 2009, The Polyamorous Affair released their album, Bolshevik Disco.
Call forth the phrase, “Dagnabbit rabbit!”
Unobtanium beer is pulling a sentence out of a dream: “I want a case of pickled anger.”
Why? Because of a new storyline, a new personality that says, “Hey, you know what? I don’t need nobody to speak for me. You know why? Cause I own my own business. I’m what they call connected, like in ‘the mob,’ know what I’m sayin’? I’m puttin’ on a show wit’ my girlfriend ’cause that’s just what I wanna do, show her off, tellin’ you fellas that she’s off-limits. You wanna touch the merchandise? It ain’t for sale. She’s spoken for. Yeah, she says she polyamorous but you get close to her, you burn. You know what I’m sayin’. I don’t need to spell it out in frank’n’beans or nothin’, do I, Lee?”
But then, the dirigible crashed into the Alps, spilling Earhart and Lindbergh onto the icy peaks.
The Mad Hatter spilled his tea.
To get out of the oxygen-thin heights, the daredevil flyers decided to put on a dance, mixing the cream components of melted white caps into the overflowing chocolate rivers flooding the Bavarian valleys, creating three new flavours that the people had wished for but never seen — dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white chocolate — not to mention Bavarian cream cheese, creamier and cheesier than ovarian, Ovaltine or oval saltines.
Yeah, it’s a crazy night for mixed-up storylines, seeing as the dance rehearsals went well, as intended, throwing the scent off the trail and the hound dogs off their common sense, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle waiting for Conan the Barbarian and Conan O’Brien to share their opinions as constructive criticism disguised as front page news stories, as, as, as, pretending that Jay Leno has any intention to call up Rich Little or Benny Hill to serve a substitute role for Jimmy Fallon who wishes Phyllis Diller was not related to Matt Dillon, Marshall Dillon, dill pickles or pickled relish.
Shaking the pepper shaker out of the Shaker’s household of a head-hold on the no holds-barred barista barristers barred windows, Windows 8.1 claimed ownership of the UI of iOS 7 which laid claims on the gold rush of iPhone sales diverting our attention in the divertimento window of opportunity in opportune opera tunes out of tune with the times listed in the back section of the New York Times hidden behind paywalls that are walled-in nonwalls with narwhals and ne’er-do-wells in wishing wells and cockle shells.
Love is a four-letter word.
Word is a four-letter love.
Letters are words of love for is is is an a.
The typewriter rhythms of grandmothers with multiple mobile phones and boyfriends saying “meow meow meow” like dorks worried they’ll be forgotten when they leave the day before their birthday — what else is of importance when conversations become fermented in the likelihood that a man’s wife is disinclined to dance the blues when she has a costume to finish for her dancing husband, the mannequin, when drunk Jenga games turn skyscrapers into pick-up sticks?
Seduction is not the answer.
The madness of one’s thoughts rules all.
When one dives into the abyss, what is money or love or love of money?
The clock watches the watcher who counts the hours before the next dance practice, wondering if spaghetti dinners are more important than uninvited guests entering the bed chamber.
But a tired perspirer whose partners don’t make him a manwhore make the whole man slimmer, if not younger.
The tick-tock-tap of the plastic keys play songs that drummers and lead singers, even two-to-three weeks’ preggers, can feel the lead beat in one’s core bouncing into the floor rather than bouncing back on one’s heels.
Type, type, type, tap, tap, tap, the music paces itself out of nothingness, into existence and back into the background noise of a universe in flux.
Time lost to hair dye and leather straps, slapped wrists and insanity at the end of madness one step away from workplace report revisions and shoe holes.
Waves in oceans turning water molecules and colloidal suspension into conflict, resolution, drama, comedy and tragedy as atomic energy is recycled, the medium medium tasting like one’s breath fresh with the cigarette taste of a lover’s lips or the scent of bath gel.
The substitute role of a trumpet player or the renewed role of a professional’s professional plays into one’s hands on the keyboard of life.
Microcosmic cosmic revelations.
Word.
The difference between fun and work, if there is any
In this moment, looking at the internal vocabulary, searching for new ways to express myself without resorting to a thesaurus, listening to the replay of conversations, realising how many details I’ve forgotten that make stories more real, feeling my face and neck break out with small infected pores that are commonly called acne…
“Learning never ends.” [from a 15-cent stamp on an envelope dated 15 Sep 1980 sent from my father to his mother containing the following poem]
Lineage [for Evelyn]
Only moments agoOur only son
Gave his oath
To his country
As his grandfather
Did fifty-one years ago
As his father
Did twenty-six years ago next month
Ah, tears well in my eyes
A lump is in my throat
For him, for we three
Grandfather, father, son
For the why we each serve our country
For patriotism, love of country
For ____ why —-?
— RLH 9/15/80
A line whispered into my ear from a dance partner. “I flew to New York for the weekend. I walked 10 miles a day, wearing poor shoes for walking the first day, and my flats for the second day. This dancing tonight, bending my knees…phew! it’s killing me!”
Multiple storylines begging to be continued — the Martian tales, the Mad Hatter chronicles, the Wondering Wanderer, the Wandering Wondering, the thinker, the doer, the tinkerer, the inventor, the investor, the Kickstarter campaign…
If I don’t write them down, they don’t get lost, they simply never exist except in the vast universe of my imagination which entertains me for as long as I live with this stimuli-driven central nervous system of mine.
I finalised the West Coast Swing routine with Abi today — enough so that we can play with the routine and keep it in time with the music — that in itself would be celebration enough for a lifetime.
But a second routine, with Jenn, has not been finalised less than two days before our premiere performance on Saturday, with scant time to polish our moves.
There is much I have learned in the past two years of dance lessons with my wife. In our 27-plus years of marriage and 40 years of knowing each other we have aged together, aligning our storylines so that one of us cannot tell the tale of our lives without including the other.
In the past few months of dance lessons with Jenn and Abi, the learning has changed pace.
I could never have imagined that I would once again know a person whose physicality was without bounds, but that tangent will wait until another day…soon.
Tonight, as I prep my thoughts for trippy dreams, I look at the faces of my two dance partners and see their futures written in features that change with aging skin and graying hair.
When I danced with one, our connection running from her big toe through her foot, calf, thigh, ribs, shoulder, upper arm, forearm, wrist, and fingers, down through my fingers all the way to the floor, I felt the warmth of a loving mother, a powerful lover and an equal dance partner that, although we have danced untold times, I had never felt deep within myself like I did today, willing to share with my wife that I took on Abi as a new lover today but in a way that surpasses sex, in the way that Monica and I, who never kissed, could say we were lovers the night we melded our thought patterns and saw how our differences made us one an evening in Knoxville during the early 1980s. I felt Abi simultaneously as a child, a young adult, a middle-aged mother and an elderly grandmother fighting for every last breath before she dies.
Jenn, with whom how many dance partners can easily brag how much better they dance than I, our connection is like…being a kid all over again for the very first time.
I want to have fun all the time — Jenn is more willing to let me just be crazy with my dance moves when I shouldn’t be than Abi — I do them both a disservice by not taking our dance practice more seriously.
I know the two of them are not the same even if our goals for this week are.
Jenn and I are not lovers on the dance floor and I cannot predict a future where we will or will not be. I have not set a goal for such an event.
Instead, it is within the pure bubble of unadulterated fun that I want to place the memorised routine with Jenn.
She was willing to come to the studio tonight, tired after a trip out-of-town, to nail down our moves but I was outside myself with mirth, unable to concentrate but wanting to make her visit not be a total waste.
When I held Jenn in my arms, I felt an older woman and saw gray streaks in her hair — I heard the voice of her husband, Gilley, speaking through her, wondering if I also heard her father and mother, maybe even her grandparents find their way to me through her.
I used to keep these observations to myself, thinking I was crazy, sensing different personalities in the sight, sound and touch of other people, wondering how much mass media representations of ghost stories, ESP and other paranormal phenomena were imprinted in my thoughts as fuzzy labels upon my irrationally-explainable emotional states rather than scientifically-testable experiences.
But I remember I am a storyteller, a tall tale spinner, exaggeration my best feature rather than my facial profile or wishful hunk of a body.
Jenn sensed a mouse in me when we first started dancing, my feeling intimidated by the laughter welling up from inside my thoughts at the silliness I felt, unable to justify why I was standing with my childlike friend trying to take ourselves seriously as adults with little time for fun before our showcase routine in two days.
Abi demands that I first treat myself as a strong dance leader seriously, putting fun second after I’ve shown my dance partner, the follower, that she is the only connection I feel with the universe, the rhythm of the dance music our source of energy. Her demands I have given into reluctantly but willingly like a latent masochist, a glutton for punishment.
Jenn asks that I take command of the dance floor.
Every leader and follower is different.
Tonight, the older woman in Jenn needed her strong, lifelong male partner to hold her up and I failed to match that need.
My distraction was the leftover euphoria of discovering what a West Coast Swing connection with Abi truly means.
The world will not end because I was unable to settle myself down and concentrate on Jenn in a dance studio dominated by my wife, Abi, Chris and his dance partner.
Jenn and I have another hour, maybe two, three at the most, before we dance our Lindy Hop routine together.
For two years I wondered what dancing with Jenn would be like, seeing how well she matched up with other guys, some better skilled than I and some less skilled.
I have learned that Jenn’s strengths come from her deep knowledge of physical skills, including track-and-field events for which she spent long hours training.
I can neither compete against her dance partners nor against her years of physical training, or more recently, her hours of physical therapy recovering from car smashups.
I will dance with Jenn and Abi again after this weekend’s showcase. Of that I am certain.
What I have before me, in the next 40-plus hours and the next 40-plus years, is a challenge to discover what this 51-year old body can do as it gets older that it never learned to do at a younger age over many days, weeks and months of arduous practice, both for the sake of my wife and for the sake of any dance partner I walk out onto the floor.
The challenge for me with Abi is how fast can I learn from her the years of training she’s had with the best dancing instructors on this planet.
The challenge for me with Jenn is how fast can I learn from her the years of the aforesaid physical training, minus the pain and physical rehabilitation, if I can help it, and training she’s had with some of the best dancing instructors on this planet, including Abi.
The challenge for me with my wife is how patient I can be to help her improve her physical stamina to be just as much fun as Abi, Jenn or any number of dance partners that I encounter in this adventure that started what seems like yesterday.
How can I convince myself that focusing my attention on the art of dance moves is fun, rather than mundane work that I abhor in any endeavour?
What is life without challenges?
Text exchange of the day
(1 of 4) U move to the city to find work. Do you A) pay more than you can afford for your own apartment or or B) live in an apartment in the slums?
A
In the capital of Manila, one third of the 12 million residents live in the slums because they can’t afford to live elsewhere. Text 2 for question 2
2
(2 of 4) Ur boss is threatening to cut your wages, do u A) stay quiet & lose wages u can’t afford to lose or B)risk retaliation & join a local union to protest?
A
Now that you’re making less, you may not be able to afford food, becoming part of the 40% of Filipinos affected by hunger. Text 3 for question 3
3
(3 of 4) You’re making minimum wage & can’t cover all your expenses. Do you A) cut back on spending or B) take on a second job & work more hours?
B
In the Philippines, poor workers make less than half of what they need to live, forcing over 23% to resort to working in sweatshops. Text 4 for final question 4
4
(4 of 4) U worked 22 hrs & ur boss wants u to take a drug to stay awake. Do u A)take the drug & risk side effects or B) not take the drug but risk losing ur job
A
Workers are often offered drugs to stay awake, some even die of exhaustion. U made 4 difficult choices women make daily. U can help! Text FINISH to find out how
FINISH
DoSomething & Kiva.org have $$ to give to 25K real women in need! Share this experience w 6 friends & you get to select who gets the $! Txt your friend’s #s
treetrunkdings 