Tag Archives: satire

Who are you? I asked you first.

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Sometimes I think about a former work colleague of my wife who, paralysed from the neck down, learned to create artwork with a paintbrush in her mouth.

Here I sit, wondering what I’d do if  only I had better computing tools to accomplish my tasks.

If I can’t sing, I can use LaDiDa, by Khush, Inc., to turn my wailings into song.

If I can’t afford to pay for copyrighted music as background to my amateur home comedies, I can use Songify, also by Khush, to turn narration into a backbeat tune.

What to “film” next?

Another satire?

Another tribute?

A view of the future?

The Cameron and Clegg Show

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A friend’s facebook status* easily sums up the Cameron screwup at the EU conference, with Sarkozy making the following comment, you can imagine:

“Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries”…Watching the French taunting of the silly English k-niggits. Gotta love me some Python!

Life imitating art, or something like that.

Tonight, while sitting with Chuck, Sharon, Janet, Steve and my wife at my wife’s office Christmas party, I pondered the universe and my place as reluctant leader of the Committee…

When my wife is too tired to dance and the room is full of lovely ladies willing to dance, why am I sitting at the table writing in my pocket Moleskine?

When senior leaders walk the crowd to show off their ties in hopes of winning the ugliest tie contest, why is the latest supercomputer output sitting unread in my home office?

Do you have your finger on the pressure valve of your subculture?  Are you citizens easily placated?

Can you tell the difference between the two clones, Cameron and Clegg, the Yin and Yang of British politics?

Thanks to AC and Rachel at Walmart, the staff at the Huntsville Marriott, the Huntsville police on patrol, and the coordinator(s) of the Torch Technologies Christmas party.

A group of my work colleagues are happily celebrating the official receipt of their U.S. patent number.  I’ll help them with specifications and marketing docs because I believe in their faith in themselves.

As Richard Branson said, helping others is what we do best.  Profit is the aftereffect of a life well lived.

Sorry I missed Christabel and the Jons last night — my wife was too ill to dance so I stayed with her, watching a college football game while she make homemade holiday gifts for friends.

Back to the supercomputer output — time waits for no report that feeds on the report that fed on itself iteratively.  Should I buy a [Flash] Gordon style supercomputer to put in the attic and displace the raccoons?

Is it just me or are the Nobel Peace Prize winners getting younger and younger?  When will a newborn child, the result of genetic reengineering, receive the Nobel Peace Prize and Time IoT Object of the Year award within days of birth?

Thanks to Coleen Monroe, *Kimberly Lewis, Elexa Rose, all the new friends on facebook, and the guy at Walmart who plans to raise a flooded houseboat tomorrow (the whole thing about 12/20/2011, though, will pass in a little over a year, and society will move on to the next great prediction of doomsday, as it always has and always will, because of the need to feed our survival traits when things are generally going well for some but not others (i.e., all the time), a favourite subject for those in public (e.g., politicians) who want your attention AND your money/time/investments/labour credits).

Ever wonder why no one seems to talks about acid rain anymore?

Seven Billion People and Countless Other Beings to Talk About

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What is Julia the Thanksgiving Girl or Jenn the rocket propulsion specialist doing right now?

What about John in the checkout line or Michelle in the deli at Publix?

Terrence or Mildred of Comcast, what does either one do on the weekend?

Or KK at Carson’s Grille?

Imagine a small fleet of crafts heading toward a distant habitable planet, sending and receiving reports along the journey, landing 1,000 years from now, funded by private individuals and companies on Earth that no longer exist in 3011.

What if government as we know it anywhere on Earth right now is no longer tenable in the near or distant future?

Would you trust the backers of a privately-funded, online voting or vote-matching system?

Shouldn’t our new system of cooperating with one another (what we commonly call politics or government) be more, not less, transparent?

Many business people are used to meeting in private, negotiating and signing nondisclosure agreements or other documents that prevent the average person on the street from seeing the details of average business transactions.

We call it competition, trade secrets, intellectual property and similar terms that ensure protection of privacy.

Government is that odd amalgam of public and private interfaces, where sole-source contracts and competing bids go up against marketing and advertisement campaigns.

If two ideas are competing against one another for limited resources, which of the ideas’ weak points or strengths is more important than the other’s?

I can talk about free, live, open source software (FLOSS) because there’s enough profitmaking available and excess resources for such a concept in small to medium markets.

What about on a global scale?

After all, a gaboodle of mobile phones contain Android, which contains a core, or kernel, of Linux code.

In our newly-connected global economy, which operates by and large as a supergossip network, where much of what we say to each other is superfluous but informational, we have created a citizenry that lives and loves outside the bounds of geographically-based political entities.

[Cue several paragraphs of historical comparisons to previous interconnected civilisations]

Are you interested in the status quo — government as it is and has been — or something new, something that develops from grassroot efforts, where we seamlessly become part of the Internet of Things, and transparency is commonplace but there’s room to respect the needs of profitmaking and intellectual/personal property rights?

I grew up playing board games called “Monopoly,” “Risk,” “Life,” and other cultural teaching tools centered on competition.  I didn’t play boards games that directly taught cooperation.  Instead, collusion of players ganging up on another was the indirect lesson I learned when one player was dominating and the others didn’t want that player to win.

It was in team sports and partner-based card games that I learned to cooperate with others in order to win against a respected opponent.

What are we teaching each other and our children about the future?

Overheard in a barber shop

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Conversation between old barber and young kid:

Barber: We were very bad when I was a kid your age.

Kid: Oh yeah?  How bad were you?

Barber: We were so bad, we’d sneak into furniture stores at night and tear the tags off of mattresses.

Kid: Wow! And I thought downloading illegal music was bad!  Did you ever get caught?

Barber: No, but there were a lot of store owners who got in trouble when we reported them to the mattress tag removal police.

Kid: A thief and a snitch.  Man, that IS bad.

Barber: You want to keep your sideburns?

Kid: What, with my mohawk?  Are you kidding?

Barber: Hey, these days, it might be a new fashion statement.  I never know with you kids.

Kid: What are you trying to say?  At least I’m not breaking into stores and tearing off mattress and pillow tags.

Barber: True, true.  Anyway, watch out for the thought police.  They might think you’re thinking of violating copyright laws, shut down your Internet domain and throw you into jail, turning you into a virtual slave for the private prison system.  You kids aren’t as careful as we were.

Kid: Yeah, well, you didn’t have mobile phones or even calculators in your day, old man…sir, I mean.

Keeping my conspiracy theory readers happy…

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I get a number of readers who like what I post, a few who allow themselves to be categorised as conspiracy theorists.

Me, I have no conspiracies.  Either the facts tell it like it is or there is no “is” worth writing about.

However, sometimes I skim over user comments and user forums to gauge the mood of people after major news events.

In other words, how does an event act like a pebble in a pond.

Take the following news item, for instance — DEA agents apparently admit laundering money to see how cartels launder money.

Well, the user comments and forum entries filled up quickly about that one.

My favourite:

The government finally admits laundering money to Mexican cartels! Haven’t we said that all along?  The gov’t launders money to the gangs in exchange for the cartels murdering potential immigrants trying to enter the U.S., serving as an unofficial deterrent method because the U.S. can’t get caught murdering people crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. and the border fence, as we all know, is a joke!  Those are the kind of death squads, not nat’l health insurance committees, that the gov’t is keeping us from knowing about.

Interesting idea, I guess.  We don’t need missile defense shields against a country that is barely under the control of a central government, let alone capable of launching missiles across the southern border of the U.S.  Save the missile defense systems for real threats elsewhere.

Enough about conspiracy theories, readers.  Let’s move on to a different view of the future, one where facts are projections, not conjectures.

How Tight are Your Specifications?

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How vivid is your imagination?

How long have you spent time inventing a new universe, complete with new laws of nature and familiar anthropological storylines (the last in order to relate your imagination to our universe)?

What about the here-and-now?  How crazy are your ideas in comparison to contemporary thinking?

Do you have the courage to pursue/achieve your dreams, no matter how out-of-the-ordinary they appear?

Would you live in a society in which talking and listening no longer existed, where vocal folds/cords and eardrums were not precise enough to interpret/produce stimuli in social settings?

Imagine a world where eyesight is no longer necessary, a relic of another place and time.

How, then, will we communicate with one another?

We already do.

Didn’t you know that?

Do you not understand yourself, your complete states of energy, in the moment?

It’s all just a matter of training.

Let go of your preconceptions.

Feel the environment around you with your skin.  Touch the wind with your finger.

We need not conjure up magic or develop a third, unseen eye to sense and communicate with one another.

A hammer is good for nails and banging out dents.

We are good for many activities we rarely allow ourselves to enjoy.

Are you sensible and sensitive enough to know what this blog entry is all about?

Can you tell which wavelengths are produced by and passing through you?  Do you know your thresholds of measurable input?  Can you change them together or individually?  Can you increase your amplification? [Answer: yes, you can — temperature and pheromone levels, for instance.]

When you’re comfortable with prosthetic interface devices — pen, paper, TV remote control, computer mouse/keyboard, mobile phone, tablet touchscreen — will you readily move on to the next more-integrated interface device?

Are you prepared for the interface device(s) fully integrated with and/or installed in your body?

We can enhance your perception, change your concept of reality — always have, always will.

After all, you can read or hear this being read using cultural meme sets you barely remember integrating in your formative years.

In 1,000 years, your symbiotic interface devices will grow with you from conception to birth and beyond — some of the devices integrated in virus-like infection processes, some through DNA reprogramming (some both of the previous two) and some simply receptor sites for interchangeable cybernetic attachments like tree grafting.

Today’s cybernetic heroes and warriors are preparing the way for your descendants.

Are you preparing your children for this future?  Will they be able to compete with our species’ elites?

Today’s technological advances are nothing compared to tomorrow’s.

Passive or active, your level of participation is yours to freely choose, wisely or foolishly.

See you tomorrow.  That seems like a great place to be right now!

A Load of Thanks

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Thanks to: Jim the bus driver, Sherry, Adrey, Polly from Houston, Amy, Eileen of Security, Tammy, Heather, Georgia, Bria, Rey, Tika, Ashley from Hermitage, Ryan from Riverside and Adam from Allegan, the worker at Christie Cookies who looks like the younger sister in the movie “Coming to America,” every unnamed friendly face, all at Opryland Hotel complex (aka resort and convention center); Radio City Christmas spectacular Rockettes, emsemble, cast and crew; Aerial, Matt and Stacey of Blue Plate Cafe; Mapco; Jane, Charmin and Heather of Walmart; Joe, Harold and dancers at KCDC; Jim at PetSmart; Gift, Penny and Rainy of Thai Garden; Kim and Crystal and Kim of RiteAid; Leporise (LP) of Arby’s; Julia Michaux and Gail Milton of Torch Technologies; The Way, Inc.; Ellie and Ricky of Chili’s; Desiree of Rave; Ben from Chicago, Rowena and Jim Nicholson of Zaxby’s; Sherry of Buddy’s BBQ; BP of Colonial Heights; Reatha and Kathy of Lowe’s; Robyn and Justin of Hobby Lobby; Arlene, Shelby and Justin of Kmart; Adam of Food City; Brenda of Honeybaked Ham; Brenda of Dreamland BBQ; Gary and Labria of Office Depot/ Tonya of Aubrey’s; Jason Swain on Knox ch. 100 callin show; Foothills M all UT football game bus drivers; Ty of UBC; Knoxville Hilton; Joshua of PetSmart; the Scene bar; Amanda, Janice, Jennifer and Dr. Staup of Southeast Eyecare; Beth M of Carson’s Grille; Gala of Brookdale Place; Matt of Another Broken Egg; Jamal and Calvin of UHaul; Barbara Little, Gary, Carol and Tom of LobsterFest; Hayley of Papa Murphy’s, Amanda and Jessica of Steak n Shake; Barry and Kenita of Bath n Body Works; Maria of Target; Shea Click and Sean of RiteAid; Brandi of Amis Mill Eatery; Stephanie of Beauregard’s (now closed).

Best bumper sticker: “My other car is a planet.”

Saw a large metal tanker truck converted to an RV with airplane-like windows, big guy driving. Bumper sticker: “Warning, explosive gas hazard”.

Thanks for all the stories you’ve told me, including a ’96 Chevy Cavalier breaking down in the middle of an intersection to being appointed a new elementary school principal (with principles).

Now, about that behind-the-scenes slapstick comedy around the Rockettes show…