More in what-reading-the-local-news-makes-for-entertainment department:
And last but not least, a kid’s perspective (which reminds me, my wife liked the film “John Carter” better than the film “Hunger Games”; at the least the first one was quasioriginal, as opposed to the hackjob hodgepodge of the second (“Running Man” meets “The Truman Show” meets “Survivor” meets…)):
If it weren’t for the battery life I’d keep using the resistive screen of the 7-inch Sylvania Android 2.31 tablet, which meets my basic needs for checking email, listening to Internet radio, looking at some of my favourite websites (as well as a few random ones for edification) and maintaining a daily blog.
That sums up the life of one mortal human being tied to the electronic social network as defined/updated by us in this moment together.
I believe we have arrived back at a blog entry in which the storyline we’d left where the reluctant leader steps back into the picture and tells us how things are going on the Committee, don’t you?
Either that, or release random ASCII character sequences that represent the latest cracked password of a heavily-guarded secret location and let the world of script kiddies have fun for a day.
Sold by Jennifer Nye — independent consultant — the wax of a block of Amber Road ™ Scentsy wax melts in a bowl atop a Morocco warmer which sits in the place where a spider web/dropping covered book by Paul D. Ackerman used to collect dust.
As the room fills with the hints of smells of an exotic bazaar, let us step into the shoes of the reluctant leader and see what’s going on…
Hi there! Reluctant Leader here again! Just the other day I was nibbling samples at a shoppe called Nothing Bundt Cake, remembering the scene in some Greek-themed film where a character tries to pronounce the word “bundt.” In front of me, an eager man watched my every move.
You know the type, always gauging the customer’s desires, trying to meet the character’s needs, catering to the curmudgeon’s every whim, no matter how surly he may be while stroking his curly, unkempt beard.
That was me, the Reluctant Leader, in ordinary disguise, acting upon my urge to Manage By Walking Around.
You see, the Committee is back in crisis mode (is there ever a moment we’re not?).
As you’re fully aware, we coordinate the activities of people you would say are aligned with major political public business entities called nations.
It’s our policy to leave pretty much well alone the individual decisions of those who feel they have been destined to reach the highest offices of their politically-oriented business paths.
For instance, we could predict when the leaders have to use toilet facilities very easily but we’ve learned it’s best to let the leaders think they’ve decided on their own, unpredictably, when they feel the urge, regularly or irregularly (in fact, it was one of my predecessors who won a wager because he accurately predicted when and where George Bush deposited his meal in the lap of another dignitary).
Do you consider yourself one of those average citizens who is mentally engaged in silent conversations with or makes extemporaneous, expository speeches to the people around you about the goings-on of the elected or appointed officials in your geopolitical zone, and get emotionally involved in the actions of officials outside your geopolitical zone?
Chances are you will, if you don’t.
In addition to herding all seven billion of us toward establishing offworld colonies, I have the assigned goal of keeping you believing that world leaders are not actively talking to each other about the apparent rogue actions they take.
Some of you know better.
The Committee is composed of direct representatives of major trends in motion, including the most common sociopolitical movements about to change your life forever.
Because trends range in age from a few fleeting milliseconds to many centuries, the Committee membership varies accordingly.
Just the other day, I found an ancient-looking mummy propped up into a dark corner of the Committee Conference Center (sounds formal, but the room is really just an old cave in, at this time, an undisclosed location near some of you).
I started to ask if any of the Committee members knew where the mummy had come from when it spoke. Turns out the mummy is an old member of a line of Celtic leaders who’d hope to take over the world a dozen or so centuries ago, but when the vote came up, the mummy had fallen asleep and did not awaken until I started poking around in his pockets for spare change.
He gave me some wisdom that I’ll share with you as soon as I translate the curse words he had for me into something more family-friendly.
Always trust your Mummy to tell you the honest truth about yourself!
Anyway, it’s getting close to lunchtime and I’ve got a few errands to run. Afterward, I’ll sketch out the plots, subplots and false trails we’re planning to place in the popular news media to keep you clenching your teeth or nodding your head in your belief that subpopulations are out to get you or out to support you, depending on your mood we’ve set at the time.
It’s seems silly spending so much of my time making sure your idle moments are filled with what we want you to think, but if it gets us closer to permanent settlements on other celestial bodies, I’m game.
Does that mean I have to stop calling myself the Reluctant Leader? It’s not like I completely relish all the fine details of putting subcommittees in action to plant ideas in blogs, tweets and street protests which inspire editors and producers to send their reporters out to fill columns and video screens with the news we want you to use and spread…
But I’m just a character in a blog and that’s my only choice, isn’t it?
Currently residing about 80 miles from the Helen Keller Birthplace in Ivy Green, Alabama, I found this global branding of sunglasses using a blind person’s name an interesting enigma: how many people in China know who Helen Keller is?
Do you?
You should.
But is she more important a phenomenon than tardigrade egg survival in the rigours of space travel?
Time to read through my daily list of friends’ blog postings for other gems. Example:
Friday the thirteenthby effimai |
I’m planning to stay in the house today as I’m not saying I’m superstitious BUT I had enough bad luck last year without adding black-cat-walking-under-ladders-breaking-mirrors shit aswell.
I don’t want to believe in it, and on a normal day if I stubbed my toe while rushing round to get ready I would silently swear every swear word I knew and then get on with my day. But if it was Friday the thirteenth, earlier when I did just that, it was just so so typical and expected because it was this day that it happened.
I don’t really understand the whole superstition thing especially with salt. If you spill the salt you have to spill it more by throwing it over your shoulder. Therefore making a lot more mess. Also you’re not meant to put new shoes on a table. I often, very often buy new shoes but I don’t have a table so its all ok now. The black cat thing I don’t believe in, because if you’re driving a car at 70mph and a cat crosses the road, the cat will be dead. So it will be the cat’s bad luck.
One of my friends when we were younger was walking to school with me and she avoided stepping on every crack in the pavement the whole mile walk. There was a couple of paving slabs that were so broken she had to jump over them. While jumping over them she fell and broke her ankle in two places. So obviously has the worst luck ever.
SO today I am going to avoid the outside world (And not JUST because i’m hungover, really hungover) but because bad things may happen. But the good luck charms are always worth looking for. Grab a four leaf clover, try and get a seven year warranty on a mirror and travel back in time to meet a chimney sweep.
Just when this reporter thought he had seen it all, earlier today the administration announced, during an election year, no less, that it has banned personal pet ownership.
The official spokesperson for the administration, Whyte Lizun Taultayles, explained that although the administration has no direct bearing or influence on the fluctuation of petrol prices that deeply affect the feelings of citizens who rely upon transportation devices to carry them from one retail purchase to another as well as to their four or five retail sales and/or fast food jobs just to make ends meet…whew! Ms. Taultayles had to take a deep breath there!…the administration’s own privately-funded public thinktank had determined that ownership of pets or companionship with species not our own is solely responsible for the excess use of petrol that, unlike stories of speculation or market manipulation by highly-influential donors from the oil industry to the current administration (and to every administration before or after), can be tied to dragging down what should be the great news of our economy’s strong growth in these uncertain times caused by unspecified unfriendly international interests and rogue nations.
From the 9th of April onward, any person, family, household, business, nonprofit organisation or international NGO caught harbouring animals not belonging to the species Homo sapiens will be regarded as a traitor of our nation and subject to permanent retainer in baggage compartments and boxcars that have been rigged as mobile detention centers in which interrogators will ferret out all members of secret groups tied to the breeding, care and distribution of nonfood species.
The agriculture industry has stepped forward and declared that their members are in full compliance with the new executive order. Any farmers overheard giving their cattle or sheep nicknames are not to be construed as treating the animals like a pet; rather, the farmer is merely using a simple mnemonic device to separate the best of the best in breed for future sales calculations.
Political pollsters are stumped that such a drastic measure would be taken this late in the election season. Analysts are scurrying to determine if there is some new metric the administration has dreamt up to sway a particular segment of potential voters because none of the core voters of any of the main political parties has ever mentioned the desire to tie petrol prices to pet ownership or the pet industry in general.
Meanwhile, the famous author, Benton Revenge, has released a new autobiography about the 62 years her father served as a janitor of the local public school and the effect it had on Benton. The book promises to reveal sex scandals, the change in quality of chewing gum over the decades, the evolution of stuff kids paste inside their lockers and the cycle of the role of authority that teachers play in the lives of students, administrators and faculty members like Benton’s father which had an important role in turning Benton into an independent, unmarried writer rather than a teacher and mother, seeing as it denied her the access she craved to hoard guinea pigs in broom closets on school property because her father was obsessed with keeping things in their proper places, being a shining example of the perfect student in the “golden age of public education,” he has reminded his daughter on more than one occasion.
The Russian tycoon, Petr Petroyovich Petr Petroyovich, not to be upstaged by James Cameron or Jeff Bezos, launched an expedition to recover one of the Soviet exploration Lunokhod vehicles that ended its mission on the Moon. We await word from Chinese tycoons about their grand plans for membership in the oneupship club. Carlos Slim has denied the need to participate, simply being happy as world’s richest person.
In the past few weeks, I have returned to the joy of reading the local newspaper, a major source of information in my youth.
I have also sat and analysed the relationship between my father and myself, my mother and myself, and my father and my mother.
The last two sentences have given me pauses not associated with writing an app that makes Morse Code fun, exciting and optimally efficient as a modernised means of communicating.
But I digress.
No, take that back.
I regress.
I sit in front of the glowing, pixelated dots of energy one tends to call a computer monitor, although I’m not really monitoring the computer as much as I’m using its interface between myself and the wide world of webs we’ve developed as an extension of our natural need for nurturing. [Is the computer monitoring me, then?]
That is (i.e.), for example (e.g.), ergo, ipso facto, our permanent pacifiers (as opposed to Pacific pacifists) we’ve adopted as our own.
Computers of the desktop or laptop kind.
Mobile phones.
Tablet PCs/phones.
The 21st Century version of the security blanket.
WAAAAAAAHHH!!! Mommy, I can’t update my social media status!!!!
Who would’ve thunk it when we were two-year olds shouting, “No! No! No!,” that our two-year olds would be wailing for their touchscreen devices instead of plastic nipples to stick in their mouths?
Indeed.
My father values a toboggan like I value writing blog entries.
My mother hovers over my father like a nervous first-time parent.
Together, the last two sentences tell me a lot about myself and my only sibling, a younger sister.
I want to call 9-1-1 and make up some crazy tall tale in order to get my entry in the local newspaper column, the Police Blotter (which, of course, many local kids are calling the Po’ Sleaze Blighter), our own version of News of the Weird, which means we don’t have to syndicate the one which its author, Chuck Shepherd, has apparently grown tired of writing.
Well, well, well…time to go be nice to people in my hometown.
As a leader, as a writer, as a thinker, as a tinkerer, I perform many roles, just like we all do.
The chameleon, the pleaser, the hater, the lover, the fearful, the fearless, the wonderer, the doer, the wanderer, the sitter, the sane, the psychopath, the peacenik, the warmonger, the nothing, the everything…
Conscious of who I am, sometimes conscious of who I’m trying to be when I’m not trying to be anything.
Aware that censorship is an integral part of who we are but also part of us we don’t need to nurture in every situation.
Perfectly imperfect.
We pick and choose our personality traits.
I love my subculture for what it gives people but it doesn’t give me everything I want, need, desire, pine for, resist, admire, or other cultural symbols we call words which represent ideas or meme sets.
For instance, there is the “Jenn,” a set of states of energy that morphs into meme sets we can call the dance instructor, sibling, student, Scentsy sales consultant and propulsion specialist, to name but a few.
When my wife and I are taking lessons and Jenn is instructing, an image pops into my head, something like this:
We may hide behind our costumes and masks but we can’t hide the fact we’re members of the same species, with all that entails.
It doesn’t matter if we live somewhere between Erie and Pittsburgh, PA, or on the roof of a stone hut in the middle of a metropolis.
In the latest incarnation of a consistent, coherent set of states of energy as “self,” I wonder if there is a correlation between the concept of being an adult and reacting to socially-approved news outlets yelling for my attention.
Is it more or less grownup to see that being an adult reacting to advert-driven corporations wanting my reaction and thus my focus on products/services that companies want to sell, spending some of their labour/investment credit to buy space next to information reportedly “fresh” and worth my moments analysing their value, both news and parallel product/service placement, is not in my best interest?
We can look together at the statement “without advertising, nothing happens,” and stir up dust from old volumes of thoughts, burning our eyes, drying our mouths and making us cough up informed opinions on the matter.
Or we can move on.
Not only is the universe infinite from our point of view but so are our opinions. The more I look, the more I see that spending [any of] my time reacting to the output of news outlets, which, when I was a kid, was the only official source of information, is severely limiting my definition of self.
Sure, I can pretend to be sane in saying that I join others in the public square of ideas, shaping the dialogue, sharing the concept of being an adult/grownup leader of people who may or may not care what I have to say but must follow the rules I set forth for their participation in culture at large, despite (or in spite of) their subcultural beliefs.
Or I cannot.
Neither is this an either/or proposition.
I exist somewhere in-between.
Return to the example of Jenn.
Is she just a dance instructor? No, of course not. There is no such thing as “just a dance instructor” anywhere in this universe. We are not one-purpose robots designed to physically represent a simple algorithm with one input, one calculation (or state change) and one output.
We are not a set of infinite states of energy, either.
We are all somewhere past 0, between 1 and ∞ (infinity).
Thus, it is time for me to move on past this blog to a place where I don’t have to appear sane; that is, no longer writing one symbol/word after another into a coherent string of symbols you interpret as phrases that fit into the structure of a sentence that, together with other sentence-like symbol sets, builds into paragraphs and wraps a bow around a new concept or idea per blog entry, sometimes in reaction to official news headlines, sometimes in reaction to other blogs, sometimes in reaction to and observation of sets of states of energy (birds, plants, raccoons) in the surrounding environment.
I want to pretend to be the happy, insane hermit in the woods, doing nothing practical or useful to the casual observer.
It is my right, giving permission to myself to step off the narrow path of life we designate as subcultural normality, an average I no longer want to perpetuate.
My happiness is not your happiness.
Pleasing others’ idea of self at the expense of being myself is no longer worth the cost.
The chameleon wants to take off his disguise, discard his mask, his costume and let himself go into the realm of the impossible, or at least stretch as far as he can to reach the event horizon and dissolve the self, merging with whatever is there that seems infinitely improbable, although mathematically computable and definitely not profitable.
At least for a little while, as long as I can perpetuate the belief in the self’s ability to nurture its social needs from within the universe of impossible ideas the self contains, including other selves that form a self-enclosed social structure, the perpetual motion machine of self-independence, leaving space for interface with other selves when the need for food, clothing, and shelter arises.
Just like the rest of us.
While I watch Windows 8 play funny games with my ancient laptop PC, here’s another in the series of “The More Things Change…,” brought to you by the cartoonists of Punch magazine — Vital Discussion, circa 1961.09.20:
Finally, after all these years!
You know what they say, just because you don’t believe people are tracking you doesn’t me they aren’t.
Well, here’s the proof. I read an article about Collusion and downloaded the app. Attached below is a chart of the entities that’ve tracked me while I surfed the interwebs in firefox for a few minutes. Imagine what yours will look like after a few weeks!
Wouldn’t you know that Putin is all teared up, laughing at the gullibility of the international press?
Besides, give or take a few countries…say, Greece for Syria and Turkey for May Day, the following Punch cartoon, posted around the 11th of February 1948, is about the same from one leader-for-life to the next:
How many generations of kids whispering sweet nothings in their ears can an old man like me take and keep biting my tongue?
“Aww, leave ’em alone,” me wife says. “They’re going to fall out of love eventually and become ornery curmudgeons just like us soon enough.”
Good thing me wife is so wise…
treetrunkdings 