The Metrics of Success

Tonight, after our private dance lesson with Joe at KCDC, I joined my wife at the Jackson Center to celebrate her new company’s 10th anniversary in business.

Of all the stats they named, one stood out the most — combined charitable giving, between the company (~$400k) and employees (~$1.1M), has been around 1.6-million American dollars to the community.

I learned a long time ago never to lecture people about their responsibilities for charitable contributions.

We develop our own habits of helping others — sometimes a simple smile or pat on the shoulder, sometimes a 100-million dollar university endowment.

Or we may scowl at the whole world and return to our solitary meditation in Quonset huts deep in the wilderness.

I give away my ideas for consumption/contemplation by the whole species — a gift with no value or debt attached.

For instance, movie aficionados question the quality of remakes because the originals were just so hard to match.

Well, there’s at least one film that was so bad to begin with that investors are urging Ben Affleck, on the chance his new movie, “Argo,” will be a hit, to let a director take a shot at
remaking “Gigli.”

Rumours say that Amanda Bynes has been terrorising fellow drivers on the streets of LA to prove she’s tough enough to act the J-Lo part in the remake.  Several Indian actors have hinted they are rough enough to reprise the role of Gigli.

We’ll see.

Meanwhile, for a brief moment of semi-sanity, American football fans applauded the return of the “zebras,” better known as nearsighted field referees, to the NFL.

The Atlanta Braves, an all-American baseball team, hope the magic of “Trouble With The Curve” will propel them deep into the postseason playoffs this year.

Can Sarah Brightman sing her way to heights that Felix Baumgartner can only dream of?

I have neglected our scientists glued to their desks in the subterranean b-b-basement chambers for too long.

Let us visit them and see if they have answer to the question, “When does a set of smartphone users with their portable handheld computers disguised as telecommunication instruments allow the use of the networked devices as a virtual supercomputer during idle CPU cycles?”

Me, with my Bluetooth keyboard and large LCD monitor, I’ve just about given up the use of a desktop/laptop PC, carrying my equivalent of an OQO in the Samsung Galaxy SIII.

Next on the list: synching the smartphone to my brain interface for better multitasking, spinning off calculations to the dedicated hardware device that displays results in my third eye, an audiovisual hybrid developed just for this new me who had to train myself to respond to a new “language” that doesn’t interfere with my normal functions within polite society.

Rewiring myself from the “reptile” brain on up has been a tiring task but one well worth all the risks so far.

Duplicating this reconfiguration via genetic code remapping will be the greatest challenge with the personal stem cells my scientists created for me to play god (note the lowercase).

Creating a genetic one-off experiment of self is the safest route at this point in our knowledge base.

Well, that’s all for now.  Time for a chemical bath to wash off all the symbiotic “germs” and see how a “virgin” self responds to the environment.

Then take “Looper” for a spin on a Möbius strip.

Questions up for debate

We can imagine the U.S. presidential debates to contain questions like these:

  • Do you consider the sense of global cooperation higher or lower than when you took office four years ago?  Examples: Middle Eastern countries considering formation of their own Internet after U.S. insult of historical religious figure; China/Japan/Taiwan tension; European economic/political unrest; a war in Syria that threatens peace in Turkey, one of our friends; al Qaeda still strong enough to surprise a consulate and kill our own…
  • You say you are for the people.  Which people?  For instance, were Wall Street banker bonuses smaller or larger after the bailout?  Who has benefited the most during your term in office?  Hasn’t it been the very same people you blame Bush for the recession?  What has fundamentally changed?
  • Reagan didn’t blame the economy on Jimmy Carter four years later.  Why do you keep blaming your predecessor four years later?  Doesn’t that mean you admit you don’t have the power base to make the fundamental changes this country needs other than plugging a few holes in a dam that’s still losing a lot of water on your watch four years later?
  • How many more Solyndras do we need until we can see your administration’s track record on picking winners is no better than throwing darts in the dark?
  • I am financially independent enough that I can make my own decisions.  You are a pure politician who has not united our government, let alone the real world.  Which one of us has the real global power to make the U.S. economically strong again?
  • They say you’re a quick thinker.  Okay, try this.  A preacher, a rabbi, and an imam walk into a bar.  Finish the joke, making sure a Buddhist priest says the punchline…

Having politicians to play with is like herding cats — open a can of food and watch ’em come running to eat, despite whatever else they thought they were doing that was important enough to pretend to ignore you.

Buy our clothes and help support anorexia

Designers at the Milan Fashion Week runway shows begged customers to buy their clothes in an effort to support anorexia — the Anorexia Automaton Army is about to take over the world with your help:

Meanwhile, mobile phones are eating us for lunch but keeping us from being bored at the same time.  Go figure!

It’s probably the same reason our antiquated telecom system means that as more and more Americans seek citizenship abroad, we had better start to speak Chinese if we’re going to understand what the majority of Internet citizens are gossiping to each other in their costly relief of boredom.

The Illusion of Freedom, Continued

When does a person who has one of the highest government security clearances which prevents that person from speaking freely about government secrets without repercussions have the right to lecture us on the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution?

According to the singer Madonna, a Black Muslim in the White House does.

Welcome to the topsy-turvy world in which I live, where citizens are being asked to accept hypocrisies as their only valid choices.

On the one hand, we can keep the incumbent, which allows us to pretend that we’re a free country.

On the other hand, we can oust the incumbent, and admit that there are few freedoms available to the majority of American followers of pop culture figures.

Or, as one writer suggests, we can, if we choose to vote at all, cast our ballot at Gary Johnson.

Oh well, enough fun playing the person who cares about political issues — it’s about to make me insane with boredom.

Return to Neverland

Today, the author J.K. Rowling hinted at the rewrite of the Harry Potter world she had created.

In the new version, 10% of the girls at Hogwarts become pregnant and quit school, 20% of the boys pass on the STDs they contracted during conjugal visits away from the school and are summarily dismissed, 15% of the students drop out (due to poor grades, lack of motivation, etc.), several instructors will be fired and arrested for inappropriate relationships with their students, the Ministry of Magic will be fired for running Ponzi schemes, dragging the headmaster down with them, and the majority of the students will be dismissed for rampant cheating, leaving Harry Potter, Hermione Granger, and Ron Weasley to fend for themselves once again, having committing all of the acts cited above.

In other words, Hogwarts needs no external enemy — it will do perfectly well destroying itself from the inside.

Latest sign of civilisation on Mars

Did you hear the latest? Apparently, the U.S. rover on Mars, Curiosity, lifted a pyramid-shaped rock and found a two-billion year old banana perfectly preserved underneath, setting off a controversy on Earth about the disputed method of using familiar, uniquely geometric objects to prevent natural deterioration of organic substances.

Just what influence does one set of states of energy have upon another, no matter how mathematically improbable?

Just now, your eyes scanned news headlines about a tiny electromechanical device on a distant planet and influenced your thought patterns, didn’t it?

Well?

Is it just?

Just us?

The spider in the bathroom isn’t saying…