Meme 123

Still uncertain as to what exactly is a meme, I have been tagged by Alex at Abandon All Fear, a British Christian I often annoy with my unbelief.

The game is to

• Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
• Open the book to page 123.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the next three sentences.
• Tag five people.

Never do this in your office, even if it is after hours. The book at hand happened to be a multidisciplinary collection of papers titled Women Immigrants in the United States. Page 123 happened to fall in the paper titled "Detention of Women Asylum Seekers in the United States" by Marleine Bastien, founder and executive director of Haitian Women of Miami, and the recipient of a 2000 human rights award from Amnesty International.

Starting on the fifth sentence on p. 123, Bastien writes:

Women detainees at TGK and other facilities around the United States lack access to basic recreational facilities. The outdoor recreation at TGK consists of a small concrete wall space exposed to the elements. The women supposedly have access to it from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. but actually do not because of frequent lockdowns and other unexplained emergencies.

Now I have to tag five people, presumably fellow bloggers:

Genevieve
Jen
Savia
Schmutzie
The Palinode

See, I can play blogger games, too!

Unblocking the Writer

If you've noticed, I have been a bit blog blocked. Everything I considered writing about seemed trite, or said, or a clichè. So now I'm taking a new tack in hopes that the blogging juices will once again flow freely.

Beginning on Monday, Jan. 21, and through the rest of the year, I will do my version of the Times 365 blog meme. This is a project started by a blogger to mark his 40th year by remembering 365 people who left an impression, one day per person.

My fellow blogger Schmutzie has been doing this with startling results. She posts 50 words every day. She has joined x365. Being a less than compulsive individualist you would not want to have on your team, I'm making up my own rules for my own people project.

I will post one 30-word note on a real person I have met, from Monday through Friday each week, for 250 days, which I calculate will take me to the end of this year. Moreover, I will attempt to recall people in order of appearance in my life. (Got my numbers wrong, think I met you before I did? Sue me.)

I will, however, make every attempt to keep appropriately private the actual identities of those about whom I write.

Pornographic or Risqué?

Savia's recent post on the joys of a toy for gals and related matters has set off an e-mail controversy: is the Savia Bella blog pornographic or merely risqué?

I only cyberknow Savia through Schmutzie, another cyber-acquaintance. They both strike me as charming women too old to be my daughters, but too young to date, who are articulate about some poignant experiences -- and occasionally a little edgy, saucy and, yeah, not quite what you would read out loud to your great-aunt Julia.

They are articulate and funny and painfully honest and Saskatchewanian -- I've never met anyone like them in real life. For all I know, they may be one 45-year-old overweight, beer delivery guy in Yonkers. But I doubt it.

I found Schmutzie's Milkmoney ... goodness, I don't remember how! Someone's blog roll, I'm sure. I was amazed to discover someone blogging about such serious setbacks as being diagnosed with cancer (and beating it!) with compassion-evoking lightness. This is how I would like to get cancer (knock on wood) if I had to.

Then Savia guest-posted on Milkmoney about her incestuous-but-not-quite adventures with her hunky Italian cousins. She revealed to me the female side of sexual temptation and limits in a way I had never quite encountered before, in a language franker than any woman I know uses, or has used, at least since college.

Part of the allure is hearing the in-your-face raw sexuality of the younger generation, of course. But another part is that it is literate, delicate and well short of raunchy.

I would argue that it is not pornographic. To me pornography aims to titillate, to profit, to manipulate the hormonal imagination. Savia seems merely to speak her mind (and body) in a "just us girls" tone that makes all of it very natural.

We all like sex. Want some. Know that some people are off limits. Would rather focus on just one, but are maybe less virginal than the nuns said we should be.

To my mind, Savia (occasionally) holds up this aspect of life for all to titter a little but ultimately enjoy in a good, clean sense. And besides, she writes about any number of things, such as the death of a loved one's parent or getting soaked in a London afternoon rain, in ways that are memorable and even moving.

Schmutzie, for her part, may prefer to have the first syllable of her blogging handle pronounced like "smut," but she is delightfully child-like and heart-warmingly adoring of her mate. Even when she's edgy. Sorry, Schmuts.

Saskatchewanians

They probably don't remember the T-shirt that said, "No, Regina, you fool!" I have fallen in with a crowd of wicked 30-something Saskatchewanians (Schmutzie swears this is a word) and, ready or not (hell with milk money!) here I come ...

Regina, we all know (don't we?) was (is) the capital of the province of Saskatchewan.

Why the temporal doubt? Because, of course, Canada hasn't really existed since my trans-Canadian trip to Kamloops, B.C., in 1978. Has it?

Don't let the Web site fool you: all they do in Kamloops is drive drunk, steal from the till drunk, rape drunk and, oh yes, get drunk.

I had graduated from university in Quebec from a province increasingly hostile to speakers of the Queen's language and my best friend happened to be covering court as a local news reporter in Kamloops. What is a Kamloops? I have no idea.

All I know is that I spent three weeks experiencing its tawdry side in court. Court as theater.

But back to my dear Saska ... what was that word, Schmutzie? (I am falling in with bad Kamloopsians tonight.)

What is it about 30-something Canadian women? So unsure they know nothing save their own experience, when in fact ... they know a thing or three.

Call me smitten, a word I reserve for my own Elizabeth Bennet. I just wanted to call some attention to them. Give them the old Saskatchewanian cheer (just a little north of the Bronx one).

Electronic Emotions

For years people have been telling me that they can't tell emotions from e-mail and now The New York Times is enabling them. I beg to differ.

The writer in this case, Daniel Goleman, author of the best-seller Emotional Intelligence, is completely wrong. The problem with communication via e-mail is not that it lacks a voice, "body language" (now there's a bogus notion!) or visual cues. The real unspoken problem is that most people know neither how to read nor how to write.

This is exasperating to me, as someone who communicates most comfortably through the written word.

Oh, sure, everybody can write a shopping list and the simplest of declarative sentences: See Spot run. Run, Spot, run! But beyond that, the vast majority of people are lost.

Punctuation is a lost art.

When people want to pause they insert ellipses (...) because they're never sure about the function of the comma and the semi-colon. When they hold two adjectives in their mind and can't decide which should be used, they toss out a slash: "I am so happy/sad." Then there are emoticons. (:-P) Please!

Of course we don't understand one another: most people can't write. Yet that's only half of the equation. Because most can't read, either.

We read e-mails -- and blogs -- all too quickly. We scan because they are often poorly written. We make mistakes because we miss a crucial word.

Some readers invest their e-mail with sentiments that the words simply do not express. Many people will not settle for the plain meaning of words if they can imbue them with hidden meanings the average writer is not imaginative enough to have considered.

Others are faced with nonsense whose meaning is undecipherable. Who can blame them if they guess?

In the end, we think we can't communicate.

Horsefeathers! To assume that it is impossible to communicate unless words are accompanied by inflection and gestures is to suggest that we start burning every John Cheever short story, every Cervantes novel, every line ever written by Geoffrey Chaucer. These authors are all dead and there is not the slightest chance that anyone will ever get to "read" their body language.

Yet who has read Tess of the D'Urbervilles without becoming breathlessly overcome at the key rustling leaves scene that hints at (very offstage) lovemaking? Victorians were shocked by even Thomas Hardy's mild suggestion.

Language can be implicitly so clear that Moses Maimonides' Masoretes were able to insert vowel notations in Hebrew texts written thousands of years before their own time.

We need not grunt and signal what we want. We have language. Words and punctuation, the suggestion of sound and visual form. We are not animals.

The Elephant in the Blog

As I begin to write this, there are 176 comments to my post on Monday, the first 20 or so more or less in response to what I wrote, the other (amazing!) 150-something representing digressions upon digressions that have taken on a life of their own.

Fascinating to watch, although at first a little scary. The vehemence of the messages had the ring of insanity that people I know detected right away. "Crazy shit" one called it.

But then it became interesting to watch, to wonder how soon they would tire of going endlessly in circles round the same non-issues.

What drives people to such obsessions? Who are these people? What do all these messages tell us about them? Why are they not tired of this after four days?

Let's look at the data.

I counted 75 discrete commenters, including 27 Anonymouses. Among these Felicity gets the gold medal for the most comments (44), although several seemed to be continuations of the previous one the minute before and perhaps should have been grouped as one. RNM, whose vehemence and persistence in debating Felicity persuades me must be Rachel herself or a very close surrogate, comes in second (34).

Assuming that the ubiquitous Mr. or Ms. Anonymous is not one person, no one else came close to commenting even 10 times -- Wombat (if all the variations are one person) came close (6), then Alex Fear (5).

I know for a fact that three commenters, plus myself, are American. One is Australian, One French. The rest, by their syntax, their spelling and their references to British arcana, are most likely Brits.

Thirteen commenters I either know or more or less safely assume from their nom d'internet, to be women. Only five are identifiably men -- one by his pejorative reference to women.

Observing the hours comments were posted reveals something else. Overwhelmingly, the comments came in between 4 am U.S. Eastern Standard Time and 6 pm -- that's between 10 am and 12 midnight London time.

There was fairly heavy traffic for what would be 10 am to noon for the Brits and then it picks up again around 4pm to 6pm, British time. Obviously many commented from work -- or are they all unemployed?

Another thing I know from the logs is that the bulk of visitors from Britain came from servers in towns that are from about north of London to somewhere in the Midlands, although there are a few aberrant Ulster folk out there. Clearly, all small town folk who are bored to tears watching the rain fall.

The truly amazing thing reading through these comments is that they are so repetitive, so artless, so concerned with minutiae of little or no transcendence.

No one will be converted to any great new ideal by these comments -- sorry, Alex. Nor will anyone gain an insight worth remembering.

Some writers display flashes of cleverness. I particularly liked some of the nicknames. My personal favorite: "My 9/11 is bigger than your 7/7." A few others were bitingly funny.

On the whole, however, there was a tad too much trite whining and loads of absolutely boring faux legalese. Lighten up, folks!

Importantly, aside from the principals involved (and even then the tiff borders on pointless obsession), these issues have no real impact on the personal lives of the commenters. Certainly not on mine.

Someone blogs about you and you don't like it? Ignore it or blog back. Someone e-mails you and you don't want it? Delete it, filter it out and so on.

People who get riled about these things need to take a deep breath and repeat after me: "This is just a hobby." Breathe in, breathe out. Repeat three times. Feels better, no?

What is it about computers that induces this kind of behavior?

I write pretty much the way I speak. Most of you would not like me and -- surprise! -- I probably would not like you.

But I sense that some of the nonsense posted here by the commenters goes way beyond what they are accustomed to saying to someone on the street. For example, how many commenters would really go around referring to women as "tits" in the presence of women capable of beating them up or, at a minimum, shaming them?

Nonetheless, thank you all for providing a window into cyberobsessions that I never imagined existed.

I'm sure also that American visitors were also enlightened as to the appalling lack of liberties in Britain -- my sympathies. As you rise and I go to sleep, rest assured I will honor your U.S. constitutional right to rant. Let the circus continue.

Johnny's in the Basement

Felicitous? -- A True Fable

Once upon the blogosphere there were two Englishwomen. One was a youngish wannabe member of the chattering class and the other was a somewhat older reclusive sort with an active imagination and sense of pique.

Let's call them Rachel Whatzername (I'm told she sues people who use her actual name but go here for hints) and Felicity Jane Lowde (who actually goes by her own name).

They had what Brits call a "row"(pronounce "ow" as in "owl"). Anywhere else it would have been a catfight. Meow!

Rachel has parlayed her claim to deep psychological scars from the London bombings of July 7, 2005, into a quasi-celebrity newspaper status in Britain, along with a column in The Times of London and a book whose launch party she has apparently postponed for reasons unknown.

Never heard of her? Neither had I. Someone could pull out the drain-plug that keeps England from sinking into the ocean and I, at least, wouldn't notice.

Not the Brits, of course. Someone else over there, namely Felicity, seems to have taken exception to Rachel's parlaying tragedy (actually a smallish, copycat 9/11-ish event, but with only 52 dead and all on surface transportation) into a PR bonanza full of emotionalism for fun and profit.

Here's Rachel's version and here's Felicity's. More or less.

It seems that Felicity thought that the physically unharmed Rachel, who was apparently somewhere about a block or so from one of the explosions, was a poseur. Claiming to be a researcher with "Special Branch" (a quasi-espionage unit of the London police), Felicity began to protest that Rachel protested too much.

Rachel began to portray herself as cyberstalked and roused a campaign of fellow Brits who raised the alarm. The salts! The salts! Mommy, mommy -- they would say "Mummy" but it sounds too silly -- someone is blogging nasty things about my blogging persona.

Brits used to be a lot more dignified. Before the bathos over the death of Princess Diana -- a talentless bad imitation Isadora Duncan if there ever was one! -- the much ballyhooed stiff upper lip did at least spare us the sight of people with sallow skin crying and despoiling the environment with millions of wrapped flowers.

(Note to emoters everywhere: take the paper and cellophane off the flowers you leave in public pseudo-shrines; the flowers will bio-degrade promptly and cleanly.)

Back to the cybertiff ... it doesn't end there.

The Rachelists managed to denounce what they perceived as malodorous blogging and, using some British law that muzzles opinions (I knew there was a good reason for the American Revolution), got the police of Oxford to go after Felicity and arrest her after she was tried and convicted in absentia. She was imprisoned on June 5 and released Sept. 6.

Sounds like out of the Middle Ages, complete with witch-hunt.

Frankly, I have no idea whatsoever who is telling the truth and it really doesn't matter. Rachel might well be trembling in a corner at the thought of Felicity blogging somewhere about her and several of her male fellow bloggers. Felicity may also well be as crazy as a loon -- although in this case, why not compassion and treatment rather than jail?

A pox on both their houses insofar as their original feud.

But jailing someone for blogging seems to contravene Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the General Assembly of the United Nations, of which last I checked, the United Kingdom is a signatory member. It reads

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

There's actually some sort of court muzzle in the U.K. on both Rachel and Felicity in this matter, as Felicity is appealing her conviction.

I'm writing about it freely under the theory that Britain will not extradite me from the United States for making well-deserved fun of the antics of her citizens and police. In the United States, opinion is protected speech. I am writing within the medium in which both Rachel and Felicity have sought to lead more or less public lives about writings that are extant in this medium.

My opinion, in sum, is that the whole thing is a complete waste of time, police resources and technology. If these two women would find their way to kiss and make up and the police to apologize and somehow compensate Felicity ... I'm expecting too much.

As an uncle of mine used to say, men and women are the worst people in the world. There is no exception in the blogosphere. Unfortunately.

A Few of My Favorite Things

Setting up a new computer the past two weekends I've felt like Maria in the Sound of Music ... "when the mouse bytes, when the keys click, when I'm surfing Web, I simply remember my favorite wares and I don't feel so blank." As I attempt to rely on freeware or open source software in my new electronic universe, I'm reminded of the growing universe of unsung programmers who have given freely so much to the world.

Few people except for those who know early computing lore realize that this was the way the pioneers envisioned the future of computing, a sentiment captured by Richard Brautigan in his poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" from which I quote the following:

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

Such sound like a fitting paean to freeware and open source software. I'm sure you've heard of the $0 Open Office general office suite, Firefox Web browser and Winamp audio player.

Let me write a few words of praise for less well-known freeware I use.

Pegasus, one of the Internet's longest-serving and most configurable e-mail programs is not idiotically simple, but it allows the user to really control every detail of incoming and outgoing electronic communications. The program was designed by New Zealander David Harris, who nearly quit his work on this gem in January 2007.

Dutch programmer Jeroen Laarhoven, from the town of Zwolle, about 75 miles northeast of Amsterdam, has given us AllChars, which provides a quick way to type accented and foreign characters such as é Ü ç î æƒ ² ‰ © £ ± ß ° 1/2 ¿ « » ™ -- all using a U.S. keyboard, which has no keys for them.

Its name a takeoff on the DOS Norton Commander file manager, which it imitates, Servant Salamander, of which version 1.52 is still freeware is a million times easier and clearer to use than Windows Explorer to manage files, copy, rename, create folders, etc. (I purchased the pay version to encourage these clever Czech programmers, but even without the newer paid bells and whistles, this is a great little program).

Marek Jedlinski, who for 10 years taught American literature and advanced translation at the University of Lodz, Poland, has given the world the very useful Oubliette, a little program that stores usernames, passwords, URLs, and free-form notes.

PathCopy is a shell extension that once installed appears in a right-click context menu when you are in a file manager. The program, developed in Denmark, allows you to copy the full path of a document or folder -- a useful thing if you're say wanting to create a shortcut or redirect something.

From Massachusetts comes Startup Control Panel is a nifty control panel applet that allows you to easily configure which programs run when your computer starts created by Mike Lin, a researcher in computational biology, what I have just learned from the Wikipedia is "an interdisciplinary field that applies the techniques of computer science, applied mathematics, and statistics to address problems inspired by biology."

Thanks to them and more. Find more free gems at Son of Spy and Pricelessware. Enjoy!

On Misanthropy and Friendship

One learns who is a friend in times of trial, but also who is not. Few people are friends and even friends have their own agendas. This is not about heroes and villains, but about how friendship, and the gratitude one feels toward friends, manages to dull the sharp truth that the more one knows humanity, more one loves one's (imaginary) dog.

My paternal grandfather was very fond of the latter saying, which I recall him voicing one morning while walking his dog. He attributed it to a Latin aphorist I have failed to come across. At the time my grandfather said it, I was a child in the quest for an answer to the question, "Are people mostly good or mostly bad?"

My mother pushed aside my grandfather's cynicism, deeming it perhaps a little too early for me to be soured on life and people. Thus steeped in an invincible optimism regarding the ever reformable character of all human beings, I have crashed repeatedly against the shoals of hearts so stone cold as to be chilling. This is so with those individuals who, deep down, are simply too painfully twisted to be able to cry out their own humanity.

To be sure, I myself carry within me my share of glacial cruelty and sorrow turned into pathology -- woe betide those who become exposed to the dark side of my moon, the lunatic I manage to talk into behaving in public ... most of the time. To an extent all of us are a bit like this: if people only knew who we really were!

Thankfully, people don't. Most people don't care enough to find out who we really are; they are busy enough with their own demons.

You learn this when a mishap strikes. You lose your job. Your marriage breaks up. Someone very dear to you dies.

People say trite meaningless things. They avoid you. (Or worse, in breakups some space cadets will call you for your former partner's new number.) You get the merest cold and it feels as if it is cancerous AIDS, because you are without a friend.

Your mailbox is empty of anything but bills and promotions. People want your money. Eventually some people want your sex. Or your humor. Or some quality that's on their shopping list.

Carry these minor toothaches to a grander scale and you have famines and genocides and the general unrelenting injustice of nearly everything in life -- especially that which makes you privileged enough to be within reach of air-conditioning, a computer, running water and enough money to inspire the funniest of Nigerian e-mail scams.

Let's face it: we humans stink. This is why I feel -- at least in the past few days -- as if I have come across a dandelion sticking out of a crack in a sidewalk.

No surprise that no one will ever love the netherman I hide in the innards of my soul. Yet what a delight that some people mildly like the man who clothes his mind in genteel language!

It happened like this. For some time now, I have been sending e-mail notifications of posts to my (mostly low-tech) acquaintances. The first paragraph and the permanent link. Then the blog got so heated that it vexed some people. The only solution was to end the notifications or turn to the opt-in method.

Predictably, I have not heard from the miscreants. Only from some who "live for your posts" or ask to "keep 'em coming."

My friends. The few and hardy ones who asked to be notified by e-mail whenever I post. One I have known since childhood, several I have only cybermet, most are somewhere in between.

For decades now, those who know me know, my guide on friendship has been Aristotle. The summer of my junior year in college I decided to go to take a few philosophy courses at a university near my father's house. I had not taken philosophy for several years, when I had thought I would become a priest.

Nixon was on the verge of impeachment. My girlfriend at the time took a trip to France. I think she was trying to decide how to break up. And none of this mattered in the long and meandering bus ride I had chosen to take, in the spirit of simplicity, from home to the campus and back every day.

Instead, I heard in the voice of Alexander the Great's childhood tutor (Nicomachean Ethics, bk. 8, ch. 3) the following words:

Perfect friendship is the friendship of men who are good, and alike in virtue; for these wish well alike to each other qua good, and they are good themselves. Now those who wish well to their friends for their sake are most truly friends; for they do this by reason of own nature and not incidentally; therefore their friendship lasts as long as they are good-and goodness is an enduring thing. And each is good without qualification and to his friend, for the good are both good without qualification and useful to each other. So too they are pleasant; for the good are pleasant both without qualification and to each other, since to each his own activities and others like them are pleasurable, and the actions of the good are the same or like. And such a friendship is as might be expected permanent, since there meet in it all the qualities that friends should have. For all friendship is for the sake of good or of pleasure-good or pleasure either in the abstract or such as will be enjoyed by him who has the friendly feeling-and is based on a certain resemblance; and to a friendship of good men all the qualities we have named belong in virtue of the nature of the friends themselves; for in the case of this kind of friendship the other qualities also are alike in both friends, and that which is good without qualification is also without qualification pleasant, and these are the most lovable qualities. Love and friendship therefore are found most and in their best form between such men.

Not to worry. I am old enough now to know not to test friendships. In my heart of hearts, however, this is what I hoped for with that girlfriend who went to France.

These days, any semblance of that, over coffee or sherry, in a cafe, a pub or in someone's home, even a shadow of it in an e-mail, a phone call, a letter, is icing on the cake.

The Bloscars

Ever since Chani (aka Thailand Gal) handed me the Thinking Blogger Award at the virtual ceremony on her blog I've been beating my brains out to fulfill the condition. She was wearing a long white dress at the virtual podium. In the hall the whole blogging industry was there in stunning dresses and black tie.

Her terms? That I find five other bloggers to reward similarly. My problem? I blog but I don't really participate in the "blogosphere."

I'm a new boy on the block, although in the fourth year (which in Internet time is what ... four centuries?). Not so long ago a faux chick blogger.

I suppose I think of blog posts in terms of the only other opinion form I know: an op-ed column. I've written a few of those for newspapers and news syndicates.

And I have a touch for choosing things that don't have commercial successes. I was a die-hard WordStar user. I didn't buy a CD player in the 80s and 90s because I was convinced they would go the way of 8-track tapes. I also predicted 10 of the last 3 recessions.

Call it the Midas curse, rather than touch.

So I looked at blogs I'd bookmarked: nutgroist, muhammad and me, langa blog. Guess what? They've all stopped posting new material. Advice to bloggers: don't get noticed by me.

Then there are two racy ones I've dabbled in: girl with the one-track mind and suburban sex blog. The saucy British "Girl" is now a publishing sensation (she says ... I'm not aware of her book, but then I'm not aware of much that is merely a fad). "Suburban" has gone back to doing what he does with his wife -- without telling the world.

There's also Daily Kos, on the correct side of the political fence, but commercial.

A neighbor has several fairly scientific blogs -- thinking, yes, but what do I know? I can barely understand what this uberbrain writes about.

One person I cyberknow, Mayou, blogs in French. She has convinced me that my French is much worse than I thought. So how am I to assess whether the blog is worthy?

Finally, I am left with Thailand Gal herself (can one award the awarder?) and Head Reactivated by my cyberfriend Tom Head. Imagine being a doctoral level academic in religious studies and philosophy, but living stuck in Jackson, Mississippi.

This man can discuss Whitehead until the cows come home ... and he does, watching them mosey in from them thar hills. Call me a snobby New Yorker, but I couldn't do it. Nor can I match the depth of his expertise in his fields.

Tom is also a limpid writer, earnest and, from what I can see, someone who seems to have credibly integrated the values for which he speaks.

Without further ado, let me award to him the well-deserved Thinking Blogger Award, so I can get out of this tux.