Stormhoek and Corporate Social Responsibility

One of the groups mentioned in the recent discussions on the Blog-Marketed, South African wine Stormhoek -- a conversation ripe with questions about how much the company is doing to remedy the social ills in South Africa that stem from its industry and the legacy of the dop system -- is the Women on Farms Project. (Another is ActionAid, which is broader in focus).

I noticed these two groups in this article from 2006, "Worker Pleads with Tesco to Honor the Fruits of Her Labor, which South African blogger Mike Golby linked to in his post, "Tell The Truth, Nigga." From what I have read, my understanding is that Gertruida Baartman became a spokesperson for underpaid laborers in her fight to secure a wage more than the three dollars and change per day she was being paid to pick fruit for Tesco.

Awareness of Ms. Baartman shamed Tesco into action on Baartman's behalf. (ActionAid bought one share in Tesco in Baartman's name, giving her the right to speak up at the retailer's annual meeting. The share cost about the same as she earns for her nine-hour shifts.). But what has happened since then?

What are companies like Tesco and Stormhoek doing to make sure that paying wages in the currency of booze (still prevalent on 3 to 5 percent of South African vineyards according to one estimate) stops? What is being done to help displaced workers--when the CSR action of the day is to say: OKAY you sixth generation live-in laborer, you're free to go. (What? No mule? No 40 acres?) What are these companies doing to help reverse the alarming rate of alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome that are a direct legacy of the dop system?

Why am I interested in this story? Lots of reasons, because it has lots of hooks for me. As a blogger, I see a company using bloggers to market its product--a product no one really needs but some enjoy--and I wonder if they know how it got to them. Are they being exploited? Do they know? Do they care? As a PR blogger, I see an opportunity for vineyards and wine companies to actually come together as competitors to do something larger than their profit margin or next blog promotion, to help people who ARE being exploited. As a woman, as a mother, and as someone keenly aware of the legacy of slavery in this country and its toxic generational impact, I give a shit.

Stormhoek isn't going out of business because a few bloggers want to know about the practices in its associated vineyards, about its CSR programs, about the laborers who give Hugh a product to glue his cartoons on. But it would do well to address the questions

Mean Kids Disclaimer 230: I am not trying to poke holes in Hugh's project for poking's sake. I am really trying to find out what the current situation and practices are, and -- given the OPPORTUNITY TO DO SOMETHING POSITIVE (all bloggers like Positivity and Higher Purposes, right?), plus the wealth of EXPERTISE in and around the blogosphere ((which incidentally IS Stormhoek's marketing engine)) -- discuss what can and should be done.

For example, do Stormhoek vineyards have a Woman on Farms Committee on site, like Lanzerac, Kaapzicht, Fine Farms, Uitkyk, Blyhoek, Elsenburg, De Clapmuts, Spier, Groenland & Labonheur do? Do they have any representatives on the WOF's District Forum?

I'll stop now. But feel free to continue the conversation. Markets are, you know.


---

Rilly Rilly Good

The Most High Helen Razer should not be missed on Paris Hilton on Blog Sisters.

"Freshly pressed into the service of the Lord, Paris declared her intention to help Those Less Fabulous. "

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New Prince Release Coming

oooo rumors of wendy and lisa on Prince's new album, Planet Earth. Can't wait to hear the latest. Hoping it's WT & JW light.

On the dead hard drive are the high-def video files of Prince's Super Bowl show from a friendly reader who gave me some better-than-youtube renditions. Oh they were nice. waaah. every day I think of more lost stuff. s'okay. my mood will brighten when mackie's back in town. I got not much to whine about.

--

ARE YOU SERIOUS!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

All this time I thought they were saying One-a-Day VICODIN for Women!!!

No wonder I've been in such a good mood!


---

More on Women

So we got this young hamster girl from the pet store to breed with Marshmallow, who is the best fricking, longest living, cutest hamster in Georgia (exhibit A to your right) if not the continental U.S. He is friendly, kind, doesn't bite, potties in ONE spot only, and basically lives a sweet and quiet life with good genes and teeth.

Can you ask for much more than that in a specimen of any species? I think not.

That is why we decided--or I should say George decided--that Marshmallow's lineage must be preserved in a new generation. So he and jenna bought Cupcake and brought her home. She is very sweet. When we put them together in one cage, they got along famously.

REALLY famously.

Wooohooo type famously.

So imagine our surprise two days ago when we found Marshmallow cowering on his back in a corner with Cupcake swiping away at him.

"GET THE HELL AWAY FROM ME YOU NEEDY BASTARD!" she screamed.

"OH CUPCAKE--WHAT? WHAT DID I DO?"

He continued to offer her his underbelly as if to say: I know you could kill me, and I love you for it, but if it's all the same to you, I wish you wouldn't.

Clearly she's hormonal.

Another couple of incidents like this followed until we got the picture: Time to separate them--the blessed event must be getting close.

What I'm saying is, if you listen, women will tell you what they want.

And even if you DON'T listen, women will show you what they want.

And if you don't listen and don't take heed, then they will swipe at you and you will be laying face up begging for them to just not hurt you and maybe to get a cage of their own if that would be at all possible.

Then when they move next door, you go back into your plastic dome house and lay around, just like you used to before they ever showed up.

And that's kind of how it works.

Hamsters are a window on the world.

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The Hypocrisy of Blogging

Thank you, Shelley for keeping me in the loop. I try not to read hypocrites these days, and yet, I find that the blogosphere is ripe with them.

Coincidentally, I find that I feel better when I embrace the positive and avoid their negative spinnings for fun and profit. (This is a lesson they taught me! Simply ignore what feels icky!) Besides, it is often difficult for me to follow 'whim of the day' link-baiting opinions penned by Technorati's Top Turncoats. Especially when they are poorly written. And they usually are.

However, allow me a moment to celebrate victory.

Today, on the birthday of my Husband, friend to women and 23-year friend to me, I celebrate the death of victimhood among women. I celebrate those who dare to write words on a publishing platform and push "publish."

WOW we really HAVE overcome! We should each one of us consider ourselves Heroines 2.0, righteous fighters of a New Battle! Leaders of a new Land! We who DARE to travel to conferences that are PROMOTED in advance--never knowing who might want to follow us there and maim us. BRAVERY! HEROICS! PASSION! PRECISION! AIRSICK BAG!

How brave are we women who live online! O! Ye of mighty force, shes who dare to tell the world where we are and what we are doing! O! Victory for feminism! Glorious freedom--the battle we fight in blogs and on twitter.com every day! HURRAH! All of the women who have gone before us owe US their gratitude for pushing the battle for equality forward into TEH new age!

I am SO inspired. Totally.

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Redemption Song

I don't like having shit said about me that isn't true. I don't like having been cast with the current broad brush of being some sort of complainer in a world that is all good and positive. I've been here for something like six years with every emotion and type of post you can think of, from really really happy to really really not.

For a while, the nonesense about me and anyone I decide to link to who might be writing something intersting, even if critical, will likely continue. I will trudge on nonetheless, full well knowing that any time I question any thing, that brush stroke is waiting. Whatever. My friends and readers did not contribute to buying me a new laptop (so close--this week or next!!!) so that I would shut up.

That disclaimer having been penned, I give you this, which I find interesting. Period.

In Yesterday's News...

BUSINESS NEWS Call for action against 'dop system'Wed, 13 Jun 2007

A pressure group has threatened to bring a class action against government and the
wine industry over the issue of alcohol abuse among farmworkers.

The Black Association of the Wine and Spirits Industry (Bawsi) called on Wednesday for the establishment of an industry fund to change people's attitude to drinking, and to set up an institution to treat alcoholics.

It said the government and the industry were responsible for creating thousands of alcoholics through the notorious "dop system".

Bawsi President Nosey Pieterse said failure to set up the fund would leave the body with no option but to lodge the class action.

---

From April 12, 2007:

South Africa's wine country fights alcoholism scourge: Healthcare workers struggle to change binge-drinking culture in a region that has the world's highest recorded levels of fetal alcohol syndrome.

The habit of binge drinking is now ingrained in South African culture at all social levels, researchers say. In the Northern Cape town of De Aar, the rate of FAS babies is 122 per 1,000 live births, according to recent research by the Medical Research Council in Cape Town. By contrast, FAS levels in the US are between 0.1 per 1,000 and 0.67 per 1,000.

--

We have experienced the upside of wine – seeing the world, going to great restaurants – but we have to publicly acknowledge that there is a downside to our product," says François Naude, managing director of Beyerskloof Vineyards in Stellenbosch.

"Underaged children have killed themselves driving after drinking Beyerskloof Pinotage. Husbands have beaten their wives after drinking Beyerskloof Pinotage. And women have hurt their unborn children by drinking Beyerskloof Pinotage," says Mr. Naude. "We felt some social responsibility in regard to our industry to do something about this. We don't need to sweep this under the rug."

--

Beyerskloof Vineyards, the premier winery using indigenous pinotage grapes, is the first vineyard in South Africa to put labels on their bottles – a common practice elsewhere – warning pregnant women of the dangers of drinking. The founder, Beyers Truter, has also established a foundation, the Fetal Alcoholism and Interrelated Treatment Help Fund (FAITH) to raise funds for research, for information campaigns, and for smaller charities that help communities affected by FAS.

---

In light of recent conversation and curiosity, I looked up stormhoek and FAITH to see if they contribute to this charity and how much. I didn't find anything. Maybe they have their own charity? Maybe bloggers could donate some of their drinking money to help? Maybe Silicon Valley could set upt its own fund? Maybe someone can enlighten me on what this HIGHLY blogger supported company is doing to help in the aftermath--and what many say is still the current practice on small farms--of the dop system.

On the site itself I saw a post about fair trade and its challenges, but I didn't see anything about what is being done specifically around the practice and legacy of the dop system and the incredible problem of alcoholism in South Africa.

OH and: That does not mean nothing is being done by the wine companies. I am not insinuating that nothing is being done. It means that I'm asking. In my own way. What is being done? I don't have to ask with a pretty please. I don't need your permission to ask. And I don't have to be polite. That is not a rule here. Go read Tim if you want rules.

Comments open. Oh, and South African bloggerspondent Golby, what do you know?

thanks.

[[update: another article on the south african wine country dop situation here.

"The child will typically have an IQ of 75, stunted growth, facial deformities and be prone to hyperactivity. The simplest schoolwork may be beyond the child." ... AND REGARDING DOP: "It paternalised the relationship between the farmer and his labour because they became dependent on him for booze." Even today, Prof Viljoen estimates the dop system occurs on between three and five per cent of Cape vineyards.]]

[[update 2: In chat, someone popped in to say they think the numbers of the telegraph article are high--and wondered how accurate the fetal alcohol syndrome stats are--especially from a teacher. Is there solid data on the fetal alcohol syndrome rates in South Africa? How is the tie in of the legacy of the dop system measured? I'm only asking questions. Answers are appreciated.]]

--

dear hamster abby

the circle of life

Topic: Gerbils
& Hamsters
Expert: JedediahDate: 12/19/2004Subject: What is happening?Question-------------------------Followup To Question -------------------------Followup To Question - what is my hamster doing? he is climbing on top of the female's back and biting her fur. Sometimes i see him doing something to her butt. please help me. i really want to know. thank you very much.Answer - Dear Zoe,thank you for your question.Your hamsters are mating. Please get a second cage and seperate them as soon as possible. Hamsters are solitary animals and shouldn't be kept together anyway. Plus there are too many homeless hamsters out there already and they shouldn't be bred accidentally.In case it's too late and the female is already pregnant, you must give her plenty of nesting material for her nest and provide her with animal protein in form of mealworms or at least curd. You won't see whether she's pregnant or not, but since Syrian (golden) hamsters are pregnant only 16-10 days and dwarf hamsters 19-22 days, you will know it pretty soon.They can have 1-10 babies. Make sure you find good homes for them and start searching when the babies are still small, it's not that easy. You might want to get an old tank to house the mother and her babies in because the babies can slip through the cage bars. The babies can and must be seperated from their mother when they are a month old and you should seperate male and female babies because they can breed when they are about 32-42 days old.I hope I was of some help to youJenniferbut she has already mated with another hamster i think. i don't really know if she is pregnant. the hamster she has already mated with has already died.help........Answer - Not every mating attempt results in a pregnancy. She can be pregnant, but you will have no way of knowing for sure until the time of the pregnancy is over. Of course you can see a vet who is knowledgeable about hamsters with her, who should be able to tell you, but apart from that, he won't do anything.I really recommend seperating the hamsters and not putting them together again, not even for a short time. I hope I was of some helpJenniferi think she is pregnant. her tummy is getting bigger.

.

wtf happened to technorati

i've been meaning to pipe up about the latest UI design for technorati.

i'm stumped. (see my index finger flicking up and down in front of my lips to make that clueless bbbbbrrrrbbbbrrrbbbrrr sound).

Let's take it top to bottom.

The scrolling 'play lotto here' looking bar at the top: it makes me car sick. I don't understand the content of the scroll bar. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with the information: find a bomb shelter and take cover or click on some obscure reference to something else.

Maybe I'm dissheveled because my eyes are busy fighting back the shock of the 52 pt heading underneath the scrolling neon green bar thingy. The headline quotes someone who said (in the last user interface) that some blogs have to be good. Dudes: you're preaching to the choir--you're a blog search engine.

Next look over to the right, and there's a tag fest, but no organization/reason to it. Basically, it's a swiki. i kind of expect technorati to leeeeaaad in this area, not put a little square full of tags on the homepage the likes of which you can find on every joe and jane's blog on the internets. And besides, everything seems maybe 1 pt difference between every other tag, which tells me precisely WHAT about how important any specific tag is?

Let's talk aesthetics. Orange and green? Hello color police, we have a 201 in progress.

Onto the main section of the landing page as this is the MEAT of the homepage content. What we get are THREE example blogs from each category (video, blogs, and music). That's all. What happened to lists? Why do I have to dig and I don't know the difference between a favorite and a wtf and a popular. Technorati's ALL about popularity. What do these sub-sections even mean?

Back to basics, allow me to clarify: I come to technorati to (class)...

DISCOVER THINGS.

so please, give me some help in that regard, as a leading blog search tool. that's your job.

do not bury the conversation.

When I visit technorati, I expect to find the latest talk and the hottest conversations. Please, help me find these things.

Technorati, you are a search engine. You can pretend to be other things. But i don't know why you would. Stay with what you're good at. Don't portalize. It's unbecoming on you.

Try again.

--

sometimes you get pissed and write a hit.

fuck off!

"On New Year's Eve, 1977, we were invited to meet with Grace Jones at Studio 54. She wanted to interview us about recording her next album. At that time, our music
was fairly popular — 'Dance, Dance, Dance' was a big hit and 'Everybody Dance,' although more underground, was doing very well, too — but Grace Jones didn't
leave our name at the door and the doorman wouldn't let us in. Studio 54 was that kind of place. Our music might be playing inside, but the place was packed for New Year's Eve and this was early in our career. Anyway, my apartment happened to be one block away, so Bernard and I went there to sort of quell our sorrows. We grabbed a couple of bottles of champagne from the corner liquor store and then went back to my place, plugged in our instruments and started jamming.

"And since we were feeling bad, we played music to make us feel good. We started jamming on the now-famous riff — Bernard and I were particularly good at making up riffs and jamming together. We were really into jamming and we'd often start writing songs that way, sometimes drawing on ideas that were floating around. In this case, however, the riff was super, super simple, so it didn't have to be pre-planned. It's not like I'd been saving it. It was just something that happened. I had always liked the Cream song "Sunshine of Your Love," and I wanted to do a sort of riff song for CHIC, although not a complete linear riff — that wouldn't be like CHIC — so I incorporated a little linear lick and we started singing, 'f**k off!' [Repeats the lick.] 'Aaaaahh, fuck off!'

"We were so fucked off at what had happened. I mean, it was Studio 54, it was New Year's Eve, it was Grace Jones, and we were wearing the most expensive outfits that we had — back then, in the late '70s, our suits must have cost us a couple of thousand bucks each, and our really fancy shoes had got soaked trudging through the snow. So 'Fuck Off' was a protest song, and we actually thought it was pretty good — 'Aaaaahh, f**k off!' It had a vibe. I was thinking 'This could be the anthem of everybody who gets cut off on the street by a cab driver or any kids who want to say this to their parents.' You know, 'Hey, I wasn't saying it, man! I was just playing the record.' "We really had pretty big designs on completing the song as 'Fuck Off'.

You've got to remember, we didn't think of that prior to sitting down and playing. Once we did sit down and play and started singing that hook, it sounded good; just as good as 'freak out'. In fact, had we not come up with ' off' we would never have written 'Freak Out' and some other song would have been our big hit record. We were screaming it: 'Aaaaahh, f**k off!' Bernard and I usually wrote the hook of a song first, and then once we felt we had a chorus that would pay off, the rest of the song would follow. So, that night we actually converted 'fuck off' to 'freak out'. That was part of the process that first night. First, we changed it from 'fuck off' to 'freak off', and that was pretty hideous. We were singing it and just stumbling over 'freak off', because it was so lame by comparison. Then, all of a sudden it just hit me. For one second the light bulb went on and I sang 'Aaaaahh, freak out!'"

---

Way?

"Look for the good... the glass isn't always half empty.. sometimes it's half full."

Way?!?

You see, this is where i get into trouble, 'cuz, no. no i'm fraid it's not. for sheltered white westerners sipping wine and sopping up blog juice maybe. but the planet does not begin and end with a full glass of wine.

go figure.

while you're figuring, read some investigative blogging wherein Madame Levy takes Stormhoek to school on the shady business practices of Tesco, where the wine is being promoted.

Something slightly more informative -- or at least wittier -- than 'sometimes the glass is half full' is deserved in response. I doubt if we'll hear it. After all, things are well with good bloggers everywhere whose glasses are half full--well, probably a good bit more than half if it's half past noon.

--

unstrung by a commute

good writing good man that BMO good thoughts good truth: what do you do with the ordinary? numb out or see through it? who might take you down for telling what you see? anyone or no one? the whole internet or just some someone? blogging your way through things is extreme sports in pixel play. you can break a bone. sometimes it is simply beautiful. it's not so real that it has to hurt. but you never know.

i like this:

Being in traffic, is like being in a meeting. You are stuck. You’d rather be
dead.

We’ve pulled alonside a GO train. Double decker. With the entire side of one car covered in a Clinique ad. Painted on there. Little thought or art direction. Still better than the green and white. Me? I’d paint them a banana yellow.

We’re through The Green Belt now. Farms between two towns. Hay.

A beer and a bag of cashews while loading and unloading passengers at
Oshawa.

Then it’s through the Darlingtin Nuclear plant. Thing is the grounds
around the facility are beautiful.

I think I’ve decided that this is where we enter yet another country.

Farms, radio towers, power lines.

I’ve decided that when I get home I am going to weed the garden. The train is flying
over the countryside now. I’ve decided I want to live in Europe.

Most of my ideas are romantic.

Damn it.

to blog is to write the ordinary unordinary.

-->

"I didn't close that one" and other adventures in the egos of surgeons

YEOUCH!

So after confirmation from a nurse and two pharmacists, I finally called the doctor and described the incision area, deemed to be infected. I got an antibiotic and finally saw one of the doctors (not the busy surgeon) today.

She said something like, "oooooo yeeee" upon my revealing the bullet hole in my side. "You should see the deer!" said I.

She proceeded to cut away dead flesh and make sure the [word i can't remember] was in tact so that when i set off to clean it (as i have been doing non-stop) at home -- now with roter rooter and draino [[just kidding sortof]], I won't slip and go all the way into my GOOD ovary, being that the hole pretty much enters into my very guts and stuff. The red and oozy thing that it is. Nasty hole.

This is your nickel size hole encrusted in angry red flesh.

This is your nickel size hole encrusted in angry red flesh on drugs.

"Tell me when it hurts, because then I know we've hit live flesh," she said cutting. Okay sure. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. THERE we go! Let's do that again. That was as fun as the tilt-a-whirl at the mall carnival.

So I go back in a week. In the mean time it's more of the same: open it up, clean it out, close it up. Take antibiotic. No swimming. No baths. No no no no i don't smoke it no more. I'm tired of waking up.

I liked the doctor I saw today. My regular gyn, the in-demand surgeon who apparently is too busy to close his own incisions, was in surgery today.

I suppose hyperspecialists have their place. I just hope I can keep them out of my abdomen for a while.

Did I tell you that both of the two surgeons who operated on me said the same thing when they first saw the lousy job done on the big gaping hole incision? They said: "I didn't close that one."

Color me 'i should have figured there'd be a problem.'

Ah well.

Live, learn, and use hydrogen peroxide.

---

Be Sure to Congratulate The Bitch!

Susan Getgood's dog had puppies and I am STILL waiting for pictures!

The puppies were supposed to arrive on my birthday, but she had them a day early.

Now it's all nurture and nature, as Susan notes in this heartwarming tweet on Facebook:

"Puppies are here.Working,reading,watching the bitch so she doesn't roll over on them overnight."

Ahhh. Makes you feel good all over, doesn't it?

Sleep not-too-soundly, susan!

---

Tom Matrullo and the New Macros

Tom does the New Math with JSTOR.

Comment: Fourteen dollars for a superannuated scholarly article - or even a brand new one - seems excessive. The internet holds multitudes, and lends itself to micropayments. E.g.: Let's say a library pays $10,000 for a year's subscription to a substantial collection of old journals -- perhaps a few million pages worth. Let's say two million pages, though it could well be more. That comes to $.0005 per page. And that gives hundreds, or thousands, of students and professors unlimited access to the journals. So, why not offer a pay-per-view model that charges individuals $.0005 per page? Granted, single downloads would not add up to much, but over time, as people became aware of the quality, scope and depth of the scholarship, volume would build. I'm not aware that JSTOR would be risking anything here, since its current subscription model would still be intact - there would just be more revenue, to allocate however it might choose. A win-win. (Update: Micro is the new macro)

Smart people are worth listening to.

Best Blog Line of the Week, Ending Sunday, June 10, The First Day of My 46th Year.

"One can only hope she picked up a case of Pinot on the way to the clinic in Clapham."

--Madame Levy on the Two-Faced World of Blogging for Ca$h and Prizes....

Nothing Runs Like a Dear

mid-birthday

good birthday finds:

no pasa nada - loving her.

Found her through Neil who gave me a piece of birthday cake on facebook. And i just gotta say teehee to this.

You know, facebook has just outdone the other popular social spaces by a mile -- except that they don't integrate the music-band component as successfully as, say, MySpace. They don't need to though. The NEW facebookers - the people joining and accelerating their use in the last month -- are heavy social web users who will play with facebook regardless of its lack of social music stuff. The open apps will keep it interesting.

Maybe apps will be added on that let us attend virtual concerts in facebook--the kind that will beat the crap out of second life's avatar-based shows AND MySpace's "events" which are nothing more than announcements (when they could be.. well... events!) Anyway - kudos to facebook. I'm having fun there.

I haven't opened my aggregator in a month. I'm on strike. I don't think i'll be using RSS to keep up with folks. I'd rather follow my nose through summer. See who leads me to whom. Spend time on my favorites and my brand news. Update my blogroll.

Jenna made me the most precious pillow for my birthday. She hand stitched and stuffed it. it is SOOOOO BEAUTIFUL I CANNOT EVEN TELL YOU! soon i will have my own computer and i'll take pix again.

I lost all of my pix that aren't on fickr except for about 40. I mean I think I lost 500 or more pix that were on that hard drive. I try hard not to think of that.

George and Jenna are taking me out to dinner later. I think I will have steak. I will pepper it with Echinachea to try to make this stinking incision heal.

Yes, I will see the doctor Monday.

Thank you all again. I will keep saying that.

peaceout.

--

half way to 90

Can I just say that you guys are the frigging best? I am now just a few tenspots away from my new macbook, and am carefully weighing things like: should i get applecare? should i get the extra memory? do i need Office for the mac to swap .doc files with my clients who are PC strident? And please tell me track changes work in Word when passing .docs back and forth... Stuff like that.

In the mean time, I am overwhelmed and remain blown away by the response to helping me make the switch at a time when, well, life has been a bit challenging. Thank you all so much--for every email, every prayer, every good thought, every everything you have all sent my way.

And the special presents today... for the girl who has everything... like this:



and this:



I mean really. Do people who don't use the Internet get stuff like this for their birthdays? I say NAY! No they do not.

Well, I hear the scotch tape dispenser tearing away downstairs, which can only mean that Jenna is putting up birthday signage to make my day. I have an incision to clean, a breakfast menu to review, and blessings to count.

thank you all

---

Bloggers Power the Mac Switch for Fellow Blogger

I am blown away. officially stunned. dizzy. nearly speechless.

As of this morning, I am a few hundred dollars away from my new Mac. Yesterday it was out of the question. Two days ago I took a post-surgical walk through the Apple store at Microcenter thinking: no way could I do this. Instead we bought a $9.99 hard disk recovery tool, which succeeded in recovering precisely four files before my old acer drive made noises that scared even Jenna. It now has a safe resting place on the shelf in case we ever need to send it off for full-$cale data retreival.

Then you guys. Happy birthday laptop fund paypal emails in my inbox. I'm like, HUH???!!

Today I'm on the online Mac store looking at my future laptop, and asking questions of other mac bloggers 'bout glossy or matte and how Office works on the Mac.

Your generosity is overwhelming. George's jaw dropped when I told him this morning that we're close.

We are 2 mouths agape.

And the other way you say agape works here too. love.

Thank you everyone.

----

what are you doing right now?!

On chat with Madame Levy who birthed five daughters at home who is finding me hippie cream for my infected incision that looks like a necrotic silver dollar hole.

is that too many characters?

some little bird

so a 'little bird' (what people tell me when i ask them wtf) told of my laptop mac-switching plight and my upcoming birthday (my dad didn't wanna name me Nina June for nothin) and SUDDENLY my paypal account is FLUSH with FUNDS that are going toward a MAC book as soon as I can patch in the rest of the dough, and I cannot COMMUNICATE in mere pixels how overwhelmed I am at the support from more than a dozen of you--each of whom I would like to name, but I know some of you are funny about that, so it puts me in a predicament, how dare you--OMG!

I am not sure how to say thank you to the nth degree, but thank you to the nth degree.

NONE of you had to do this, some of you can't afford to have done this, and many of you did anyway. I don't know what to say.

I really have had trouble lately about what I'm doing here. Not a new story. Many of us are struggling with why. I had lost a lot of faith in the net over the whole KS afffflair, and a lot of faith in what I'm doing here, how much I should be here, where HERE is anymore, and what any of us are doing here.

No big secret that.

It's not the Generous Contributions that have restored something in me. It is the show of support from all of you--some of whom I didn't think even knew I was still around, or whom I assumed had writ me up as being some kind of Really Mean Kid unworthy of further time, love, or readership. Or maybe that was me doing that. Either way.

I'm turning 45 Saturday and this thing--this being here--there is still something to it.

Thank you more than I can say for showing me that even with all the noise, our hearts can still cut through.

----

I'm going Mac. Ain't no going back.

I'm saving up to make the switch. That's it.

So many PCs have croaked the last two weeks I don't know what's going on, but I don't see any harm in insinuating the proliferation of Vista and recent MS updates miiiight have something to do with it. Or some kind of harmonic convergence. Yeah.

I started out in business on a Mac in 1984. The first one I worked on was a 512K, singed on the inside, which we upgraded to a 512KE and thought we'd died and gone to heaven at our little startup publishing business. Added a 20 MB (that's MB not GB) hard drive in 1985 and had the power of the world in our hands.

I stayed with Mac at home and in business until 1991, going through a Mac Plus, a Mac SE, and others, including my first Apple laser printer which cost $1600 back in the day, until I joined the Big Co machinary of Eastman Kodak Company, when being able to work from home pushed me to a PC and then Windows.

Well guess what. I'm going back to my roots. What do I do? I write. What have I always done? Write and make books. What should I be doing that on? A Mac. Plain and simple.

I'm writing this on a borrowed computer--THANK YOU HONEY--who has been 'driving miss crazy' around for the last two weeks during my convalescence. One made a little more stressful without a link to the rest of you. I am thankful I have George's computer to work on. Believe me. But I need an axe. I can't be without my axe.

I want to go home. I want to buy a mac book. I'm going to.

It's over Microsoft. It's over Windows.

---

funeral for a laptop

my hard drive crashed today. oohhhh ouch. nononononoooooo.

blogger's creed

i wrote this someplace around here once upon a time. it still fits...

-----

The Blogger's Creed

what i don’t owe you/what you don’t owe me:

an out
a pat on the back
a lie
a kiss
a cover up
a glass half empty or half full
a snow globe
a flashlight
a mother
an intervention
kindness
30 lashes
anything flannel
the truth
Xanax or Ecstasy
bare naked ladies
fact checking
a sunny day
a snow cone
links
roses
a dozen or so Lincoln logs
a whipping boy/girl
six inches
smoldering embers
a reason

[ X ] clicking confirms your agreement. thank you.

OMG They are So in Love

Well, she moved into his house today. It is that simple. He had his house--it was his house and he loved it. She moved into his cage and started to eat his house (who had the idea of making an edible hamster house I do not know). Next, they fell in love and were doing the hamster dance all night, and now she has taken up residence in the house she once considered dinner.

All seems well.

I thought, what a joke to make a house out of food. A bizarre hamster fairy tale. Here is your house: it is made out of your favorite food. If you eat it, you are homeless. As if your life in a cage was not bad enough.

But things are looking up for old Marshmallow. He has a housemate and a wife. Sure her butt sticks out the doorway, but what an you do. At least she has stopped eating his house. I don't think anyone can ask for much more than that.

...

So far so good on the hamster front, what about ants

There's something peaceful and even funny about watching little animals -- their superfast miniature relationship building techniques not so different from ours. We still have an ant farm from Christmas that we haven't ordered ants for.

George and Jenna thought maybe we could collect ants from the yard, but the instructions tell a lot about different types of ants and how they behave and how getting the wrong kind of ant will either overpopulate the farm, or sometimes you get the very aggressive ants and then even the good ants you do want end up all fighting and killing each other and then you have no ants in the ant farm. Reminds me in some ways of the blogworld, and I'm not even sure how. But for $5 I guess it's worth ordering the right kind of ants that come with a queen so it's like a litte ant ecosystem in a box.

Fear is hard. I'm there too often. But things like hamsters and ants and writing about hamsters and ants seem to help. I suppose it's time to order some ants.

Going to not worry about writing for a while. Will be here as I can. Resting otherwise.

...

she ran calling wildfire

Five days post-op, six laps around the driveway today, plus plenty of steps. I was glad to get outside--the last two days have been Code Orange days in our area. Not terrorist threats, but smoke.

The smoke from the southeastern wildfires has been hanging over us for two days and folks with heath issues have been advised to stay inside. I went out to the mailbox and back yesterday, and it smelled like a worldwide backyard bonfire. The haze was pretty thick. But it lifted today enough to bring us down to yellow, so I had my driveway parade. It hurt some but wasn't too bad.

Pain is interesting. Or something like that. Mind you, what I'm going through is a drop in the bucket compared to others with chronic issues. At the hospital the nurses told me I was super for getting up and walking an hour after I got into my room. I made a point to walk a lot since walking is the best way to not get blood clots and helps fewer adhesions form. They kept pointing to the pain scale faces, and I think I hovered around 3 the whole time. They seemed pretty amazed I wasn't in more pain. I say, if you haven't woken up in the OR pre-pain-meds after a six-hour myomectomy, you don't know after-surgery pain. They are right about the laparoscopy--the pain is much less. I am so thankful for that. And good pain meds don't hurt. ;-)

All in all, so far so good. 5 days down. And counting.

Thank you one and all for your good wishes, emails, comments, and prayers. Some of you will believe me, some not, but whether you do or don't isn't the point. Before they took me into the OR, I actually heard and felt them. Straight up. We matter to each other and it matters when we get real. Real isn't always pretty. Can't sanitize it. Can't forget it. The Good Lord knows.

I am grateful to you more than I can say.

Now, it's back to the hamster action.

I just went down and had a look. Old Marshmallow hasn't been so active in a long while. He was even chewing on his wooden house. He hasn't chewed in forever. He was also chasing Cupcake around the cage. In a good way. They are both drinking from the water bottles like fish. Or something.

Hey, they have each other. They seem happy.

....

In the same cage tonight....

Muskrat, Muskrat, candle light
Doin' the town and doin' it right in the evenin'
It's pretty pleasin'
Muskrat Suzie, Muskrat Sam
Do the jitterbug at a Muskrat Land
And they shimmy, Sam is so skinny

And they whirl and they twirl and they tango
Singin' and jinglin' a jangle
Float like the heavens above
Looks like Muskrat Love

Nibblin' on bacon
Chewin' on cheese
Sam says to Suzie
Honey, would you please be my Mrs
Suzie says, yes, with her kisses
Now, he's ticklin' her fancy
Rubbin' her toes
Muzzle to muzzle
Now anything goes as they wriggle
Sue starts to giggle

And they whirled and they twirled and they tango
Singin' and jinglin' a jangle
Floatin' like the heavens above
Looks like muskrat love



..

when marshmallow met cupcake

thank you thank you thank you thank you for bein' here for my
six holes blues
grateful for walking talking stalking online funin' incision lovin'
six holes blues


Recuperation update: So far so good.

There's a new hamster in town. That's something. George and Jenna decided that my recovery would be more interesting if they brought home a female hamster to be a potential mate for the ancient three year old Max/Marshmallow we've had since Jenna was in first grade. Determined to carry on the line of the SuperHamster, they went to Pet Smart yesterday.

To wit, Vanilla Cupcake has joined the family. She has her own cage for now during this courtship phase. George thought it would be better for her to get used to her new home before introducing the two. Their cages are side by side. Last night they dined separately on special hamster popcorn. Who knew?

I enjoy sitting and watching the spry Miss Cupcake on her wheel. She is a wheel addict. Go cupcake, run for me and all of the cupcakes like me I left behind on floor 4.

For his part, Mr. Marshmallow came out and observed his new neighbor--it has been a while now since his entire family died off.

He took one look at her and went back in his house.

Not exactly a made for TV movie or Sunday night Animal Planet special. But we still have hope.

....

thanks for your prayers and good vibes

I am back from the hospital, one gallbladder, one ovary and some endo lighter, with six more holes in me, all the better to hear you with, red riding hood.

Thanks to my blog friends for your prayers and good wishes. I didn't feel like blasting the news of my upcoming surgery across these parts--because these parts aren't like they used to be. News Flash, I believe you saw the film at 11. Nonetheless, I cannot express how much gratitude I have for those of you who keep us Sessums in your hearts. You are in ours too.

Off to do laps around the downstairs. More soon. Have a sunny weekend.

...

outtapocket

Will be out of the loop for a few days -- gotta take care of some stuff. be well. take no prisoners. (and i still am not sure what that means). I'm moderating coments while away. thx!

--

Bad Blogger Pitch Week

As more and more PR firms large and small jump into the space they call social media, which only vaguely resembles the social media space we who participate online play around in, the number of bad PR pitches is escalating. There’s dough to be made. There are plenty of junior people at PR firms with MySpace pages. It’s a match made in billable-hours heaven.

I’m getting several of these pitches a day, where I used to only get a couple a week. They are getting stupider, even though the tools that slice and dice bloggers into media outlets should be getting smarter. The problem is that we were never targets; we were never outlets; we never said we were media; we still aren’t. Old PR models still don’t work here.

Word to your Account Exec.

This became oh so apparent yesterday when Toby Bloomberg let some of us in on a pitch she got from a 'teen-and-t'ween PR person who is at least somehow affiliated with Fleishman-Hillard (still pondering if this is an FH site or some off brand) trying to lure Toby into caring about the site with talk of Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore.

Allison of The Next Big Thing sent Toby the pitch that shows she’s never read Toby and doesn’t know what Diva Marketing is about. She doesn’t know the folks Toby cc’s on her reply back either—although she pledges to add us to her “RSS”. I have a Tween and I worked in BigPR long enough to know the extent to which PR cares about tween$ is reflected in that little s at the end.

Now, Toby’s gotten tired of these pitches, but is among the tireless who still take the time to respond to them in an attempt to educate the would-be media relations people or perhaps shut them up until they take the time to READ.

Because most of these pitches are veiled attempts to get you to HIRE THESE PEOPLE as YOUR NEXT "SOCIAL MEDIA PR ONLINE MARKETING WHAT HAVE YOU" CONSULTANT or to USE THEIR SERVICES OR THE SERVICES OF THEIR CLIENTS, not, as they would like you to believe, to add something useful to your day, allow me to provide my tips for choosing a social media consultant in the form of a little quiz you can use in your own business.

Make no mistake: I think that you should work with people who actually participate in social spaces – many of whom started out as bloggers and who are still bloggers – rather than XYZ PRPros or BigPR Central. So lets see how the next people who come looking for your money or attention do on my Social Media Partner Quiz:

• Do you blog? Please provide a link (with a link to your archives).
• What does the word “Blog” stands for?
• Who has been celebrated as the mother of blogging?
• Who is the father of podcasting? Who says they are the father of podcasting? Who's right? (Are you willing to say so at BloggerCon?)
• Which President invented the Internet?
  
• Do you participate in conversations with key influencers in the Technorati Top 500? Name them.
• Have you ever argued online with Robert Scoble?
• Where doesn’t Robert work?
• Is your blog among the Technorati Top 5,000?
• Is an aggregator used 1) to waste time at work, 2) to make your car go, 3) to track blogs you want to read, 4) all of the above.
• How far back do your blog archives go?
• Does a MySpace login use numbers or letters?
• Have you ever twittered before a date? After? During?
• What’s CSS?
• Have you been published on topics germane to this industry in mainstream media?
• Send me links to your blog, podcasts, videos, myspace page, orkut page, youtube page, facebook page, flickr photos and Kaneva page. When I said Kaneva, did you say God bless you?
• Do you spend at least half of your on-the-phone time with other bloggers, Internet lovers, or people in your industry?
• Name some of your best friends online.
• Name some of your best enemies online. (note: immediate disqualification if none listed -- you haven’t been here long enough.)
• Did your read Cluetrain? Was it about 1) freedom 2) the rail and transportation industry or 3) best practices?

For a brief written evaluation of test results and recommendations, paypal $29.95 to ewriter@bellsouth.net.

---

Double Chin Up Sista Frien' + Sunday Link Giving

The HOT fat chick nod was hot in 05.

This chick SO can blog. not mean. not kid. raw-grown-brilliant. textual healthfood.

Pippa got confirmed and the gang was all there. We're proud of you as always, Pippa!

Marianne's digital dynamo linkage.

Toby's Diva Marketing tunrs Three! Congrats--it hasn't been blogging's easiest three years, that's for sure, but better with Toby among us!

and whatscher fortune eating technique, anyway?

for the blogger who has everything...

Frank's giving links. It's the perfect way to say I heart you, as they say in the Valley. Because they don't use regular words in the Valley. Because regular words cost too much. And because they're one big cult with six shared brain cells among them. Did I say that?

get the JSTOR y

Tom is on a mission, and I always learn stuff when he is on a mission. Enter his posts on JSTOR - learn, read, rant.

There's stuff to learn here too--well--'cept cat's got my tongue, so to speak

Simply Wonderful

Kudos and congrats to Ronni--I had not seen the Elder Storytelling Place until tonight. I just love it.

I read Holly Stevens' story this evening and was moved in a way that you too will be moved by her courage and caring. I thank Holly for sharing her wisdom, and Ronni for bringing these stories to us.

...

How Many PR Luminaries Does It Take to Screw In a Lightbulb

...apparently 80!



---

just say no to equity lines of credit

Today I am happy to be an amerikan.

Because today I am not allowed to do this. And if I were allowed to do this, I probably would.

And if I did, I would probably like it, cause my big brother and I used to play penny poker and I can tell you it's in the blood--just try to walk jenna past the scratch-off card section of the mini-mart and you'll see. Second thought, don't you take my kid into a mini-mart. who do you think you are.

Either way, I think this would be way too much fun for me. I think I should go to Six Flags instead and shoot hoops at bottles to win a stuffed giraffe for my kid. The price would likely be the same, but at some point I'd have to actually LEAVE Six Flags.

Yahoo offering online for-cash poker is like Google offering online for-cash hookers.

Seems like search should stay search and not go looking for mini-transaction dollars off some poor sap like me except in other countries who might just get that penny-poker urge on a penny-poker budget with a Visa in the wallet.

I'm just thinking out loud here.

...

stand up

Dear Bitch,

No I will not stop blogging nice things about you. Do you know why? Moxie. Your guts that's why. Because you write your way vulnerable, bite into what's wrong and taste it, cryoutloud and seize on shag carpets in a fit of mortal so-human justice when Those People with their Armor-Alled posts come to this place and try to outshine our worn tattered leather souls.

Their shiny-protected-stronger-than-tortise-shell bullshit, in that know-it-all way they have, are no match for you. They will not show their wounds, their open oozing lesions because those wounds cannot be monetized. Because they may scare the Audience away by being who they are. And then what? No money no honey. Then what? No fans no plans. Oh dear!

Pretenders.

You stood there and said Hey Now, Waitaminute, when few other women would. Shelley did. Ronni did. Marianne did. Toby did. Even harder for the men to do: misyoongenentoitousetists!

Have you stopped beating your fucking CAT YET? WELL HAVE YOU?

Did you laugh? You-R-Evil.

That is why.

Why do you think? I know you know the scary places, not the scary places where people might come in your house or yard or workplace and off you, but THOSE scary places where you are your own intruder.

You heal my inner boogie man. What? You want I should go away? No way, sister.

Kiss me. I'm crazy.

----

so good to see you!

Love this clip of the incomparable and incredible Mr. Eddie Davis on trumpet with the Crusaders.

saints among (side)men

I have met many musical giants during my 23 years with this musical great. So many are gone now -- the silence of their missing instrumentation is deafening at first. The songs left unwritten, licks left unplayed.

The Internet to the rescue? Not quite. But user Generated Content has some good points, although it's UGC "moniker" is not among them.

More and more those we have lost show up online. Through memories and clips from fans, purposefully contributed or accidentally linked, we find those we knew. Sometimes they show up through their musical associations with the big names who they helped make big through the genius of accompaniment, their solid groove, unrivaled professionalism. Example: the incredible, honorable, Mr. St. Claire Pinkney (and here) with James Brown on youtube. St. Claire, you are long and dearly missed.

---

i hadn't opened my aggregator in a month.

i just opened it. i forgot i had one. how weird. look at all the people in there. i still type the people i want to read in the browser address field. that seems to work fine. firefox takes me where i need to go.

i'm going to see what i missed. i'll let you know if anything big happened while we weren't looking.

Here Here! You Go, Tom!

Am I going to feel like an idiot if I show up at this affair? It looms as a distinct possibility. Then again, why not simply claim my space as a been-around-the-bend elder who knows that, in the blogosphere at least, words trump technology and always will, no matter how exotic the evolution of the tech stuff.

that's right my godson! You claim your deserved place, and give David a hug for me too, because, if you can believe it, and we've talked enough to not believe it ourselves, we've never met. I hope you do go and enjoy yourself. Let us know how it turns out!

O brave and funny woman...

...whom i adore:

No I'm not going to link to the scene where Steve and the editor of PC Magazine suck and make up. Instead, maybe you want to meditate alongside me: does business have to be disgusting, to work?

----> fuckifiknow.

***

I Want One! Or, clicking thru my sponsors.

Don't they make this stuff for grownups?
No I am SERIOUS. I want to be swaddled.
Do you get it? SWADDLED!

A panel like this...

I mean, at a web2.o event, you can't touch this.

death of a talisman

when he's not busy writing joint statements, he's rebooting in what looks to be one of the most fascinating talks of the town. interested in the human condition? bootbootreboot.

runningoutoftoiletpapertoday.com

That George sent me a link to this circuits column about the High Possibilities of Web 2DotOh and I have to say, I was nearly all a flutter with excitement. The author imagined the possibilities of Web 2DotOh and thought up a website that would tell us who's sick with what so we could use good hygiene and Stay Healthy (problem being, this idea would only show which INTERNET users are sick, and everyone knows we're a sickly bunch with too little Vitamin K, but don't let that get you down):

When my kids come down with various horrible flu variations, and it gets bad enough to see a doctor, we often hear from the pediatrician: “Oh, yes, it’s going around. You’ll have vomiting for two days, and then you’ll get better.”

Well, gosh darn it, why couldn’t someone have told us? If so much is known about a certain bug, then it would help a lot — both with life planning and with managing emotions — if you knew a little bit about what was in store for you.

Somebody should come up, then, with a Web 2.0 site where people could report what they’re catching and what you can expect from it. You could see a map of your region and watch the red cloud or the blue cloud spread closer and closer to your neighborhood, the better to step up your hand washings. As you lay in bed, miserable, you’d know that at least you had only 24 hours to go. Or whatever.

The Web did what you would expect -- IT ACTED LIKE A COMMUNITY-CAMP-SOCIALNETWORK AND IT ANSWERED! OH GLORIOUS WEB! OH SO MANY PEOPLE WITH TIME ON THEIR HANDS AND AN EYE ON THEIR BANK ACCOUNTS AND OVER-THE-COUNTER SUDAFED! YES VIRGINIA, there actually IS such a site!

It is called whoissick.org. There you can track post nasal drip in YOUR TOWN! Right Now, 24x7, from any Internet browser -- cough/sore throat (as if they're the same), headaches, fever and more. You sick? ME TOO!

And I'm sure mobile is coming soon.

I can sleep tonight, let me tell you.

This got Me In the Spirit, and I sent George back some ideas of my own as I began imagining the Possibilities of the social web:

CART4YOUYOULAZSHIT.COM - A social site where grocery store shoppers enter the last location of the cart they used so geeks with PDAs can pull in and park next to the nearest empty cart that is closest to the store's entrance! Hey, CALLING WHOLE FOODS - w00t!!

EATMYGASNOW.COM - A social site where participants monitor their farts and the farts of others AGAINST where they have eaten out so that the social web can determine which eateries serve the gassiest foods! t00t!!

RUNNINGOUTOFTOILETPAPERTODAY.COM - A social site where we track how much toilet paper we use, and who is running out of toilet paper, and then perhaps we can determine who is wasteful and send trainers out to teach "new techniques" in ass wiping! Hat Tip to George for the domain! h00t!!

Apparently George is on board for site development as he sent me some of his preliminary social research:

"Your search - runningoutoftoiletpapertoday.com - did not match any documents."

Suggestions:
Make sure all words are spelled correctly.
Try different keywords.
Try more general keywords.

----

Razer Sharp on Blog Sisters

Helen Razer has been on Blog Sisters as long as I can remember. Like a lot of the posting members there--yours truly included--she doesn't post there all that often, but when she does, woooohooo it's ALWAYS wonderful and cool and day-changing. It's what blogging used to be before it was coopted by U.S.ian Web2.o zealots with few chops and even fewer clues.

Wonderful writing case-in-point -- today's Blank Paris, in which Ms. Razer explores the Meaning of Life and Love in a pixel-driven collage of absurd current day rating mechanisms--from Paris Hilton to trans fatty acids.

I give you the start here. You'll have to go read the rest.

In every life, about a handful of Truly Significant moments are collected. These, unless you’re easily given to joy upon opening stationery catalogues eating spaghetti, polishing brassware et al, are wrung from events broadly agreed to be drenched in emotion. Births, deaths, marriages and all their variants and relatives from illness to ignited love provide the stuff of big moments.

You will recognise these moments for their potency. Within these instants, some sort of emotional coin is dropped. A new mechanism is activated and, slowly then suddenly, your insides creak and you’re changed for good.

When you care to peruse your album of rare and remarkable moments, you will almost certainly find these were built in the immediate company of life, death and affection. You may also find that this record is slim. This, truly, is the way it should be. A life too well-punctuated by high drama and joy is a life drained of meaning. Unless, of course, you’re Namoi Campbell.

I suspect that I’m quite fortunate to have collected a few such moments for display and ready reference. My internal emotional directory contains a select hit list at the top of which is an “I Love You” closely followed by an “It’s completely operable”.

Occasionally, however, I find myself eager for the inclusion of new moments.
Like a brooding tween hepped up on a dissatisfying diet of Emo and trans fats, I find myself idly hoping for bad-ass, life changing emotional action.

...

What's in a Name? SEO!

In the era of search-engine-optimized names, I inherited one -- my own -- that came pre-optimized back in 1962, when there was only one Jeneane Dimino spelled my way, and again in 1986, when there became only one Jeneane Sessum, spelled my way. And back then, there was no Google.

So what's my secret? First, a 9-year-old sister who was learning that "the first vowel talks and the second vowel walks" in school (hence the "ea") when I was born, followed by a husband with Island, French, and Native American heritage that makes for an unusual-in-america (without an "s" on the end please) surname.

Sometimes luck can beat Google.

[[bonus link -- searching on my maiden name brought me to this from my 1978 high school musical chorus appearance in Godspell. And what a great musical it was!]]

...

the net begins to realize the net is just the net after all

Renee has an interesting post where she chronicles a mini-test, or not so mini really, to see just how many people in her life who are not in her online life are actually online at all. She found not many. She also lists a lot of activities that she will not move from the desktop to the ether -- email being an important one.

Now Renee makes a living, last I knew, working with Internet companies. So I found her post particularly interesting and can relate to feeling in 2007 what I did not feel in 2001, and that is: 1) too old for this medium, 2) too deep for this medium, 3) tired of this medium, 4) uninspired by this medium, albeit I am still somewhat hopeful that art and humor and joy and sorrow can rise above the unbearable noise of of tech-biz-as-usual-white-men-conferring-once-again-and all-is-right-with-the-world-god-bless-America-that-matters-amen.

I like the reality check of this post, because Renee rubs elbows with a lot of influencers who could use a dose of WTF, which she gives:

Last year, I went to a flickr party and was the oldest person in the room. I attended the event with a 27 year old girlfriend who is a lawyer in the Valley. She dragged along three lawyer friends from LA, all roughly her age and none of them had even heard of flickr.

"Everyone is using Twitter," I'm told. I don't get it and won't. It's not that I'm not open to trying something new - it doesn't solve a problem for me that is need of fixing, nor does it improve my life. Nor do I even think its cool. As for useful? Perhaps at a three or four day conference in a foreign city for all of those three or four days.

It took my immediate family six years to find my blog. And I'm not exactly low profile. So I can completely relate to Renee's take on who is NOT online the way we are online. And she mentions the specific fetish of all things web in the Valley. Ah yes, the Valley--who's writing the book on the Cult of the Valley and the Religion of Social Media? I want to help. Or at least pre-order it.

In that the reality of many, not to mention the economy of many, can be shaped by the hyperbole of a few, the Valley is a shining example of how New Religion works. It is an example of how powerful cult mind control can be. Extending its tentacles across the global Internet -- with quite literally around-the-planet reach--it's a whole new ball of wax, one the leading cult debunkers have yet to touch from what I can tell. The Valley's webcult has the potential to be a global Waco in the making. It's just waiting for its Koresh. Or maybe he's distributed this time around.

Or maybe I'm getting all worked up over nothing. Leave off the Silicon Valley element if you wish (though I don't think you should), and read Renee's take from a strictly business perspective to get a glimpse of where the rest of the world is in adopting This New Social World Order, and Renee's warning that not everybody knows what you know.

The marketer in me sees opportunity. The parent in me sees trepidation. The artist in me sees an aardvark on a cell phone. Whatever that means.

Keep in mind, Renee is also at OnHollywood, while I am only OnTheCouch, so that could account for her deep dive on the topic and my sort of abstract take.

...

y blog?

ya'll may have readers and admirers and butts in conference seats. But I have brothers and sisters.

And in other news, the hamster's awake and eating. He is currently challenging Madame's hamster for the longest life award. He is the father hamster who saw his wife eat 13 babies, the father hamster i mistakenly thought was the mother hamster and put him in the cage with the babies for an entire day, which is why they never got nourishment and when I switched parents, the mother ate them. The second round of kids went better. No one got eaten that I know of. But the father and one of the son's did get into a pretty big fight one time and the old man kicked his son's ass. This hamster's lived so long (for hamsters that is) that I don't even remember his name. I think he's the original Marshmallow who became Max when we realized he was a he and not a she. That was after the 13-hamster-baby-parent-gender-mixup snafu.

Sometimes things don't turn out like you thought.

...

knowsitall

There are so many thing I like about Tony Pierce as a blogger, person, Christian, twisted unit, writer, webworker, multi-culturalist, laist, and other things. I should have known that when he got around to group blogging, he'd find a way to do that right too.

anyways i didnt want people to think that laist was the tony pierce show because believe it or not the whole world isnt as into your pal as you think. plus it wasnt like they were discovering me naturally, they were being sent someone from mitch & murray who enjoyed drinking coffee.

long story short friday we had 17 posts by 15 different contributers.

now thats a group.

i get my titles the old fashioned way

i drink a little smoke a little and when midnight rolls around i get on the scale

then i write down my weight and write down the first title that comes to my head

this week i was so busy that i wasnt able to talk about lost or the sopranos or about how i talked to chris in africa who told me that a goat took a dump on her bag while they were IN a cab.

of all the things i teased her that would probably happen to her, that was not on my neverending list of jungle-related comedy. the lord always has the last laugh.

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simplyacquired?

I first saw simplyhired back when they launched the site, had a brief email exchange with the folks there based on my support for the site, and thought it was both powerful and easy to use--the first and best among lots of aggregated job sites to follow.

I wrote about simplyhired a year ago, thinking that a large enterprise might snap it up or at least partner with this kind of site rather than continue to lose valuable employees from the drain of attrition THROUGH these kinds of sites. Mighta been smart. But the Web is smarter.

Simplyhired had an odd effect on my own freelance business. A year or so ago, when I was worried about enough work coming in to pay the bills, whether or not I could continue to make it sans corporate job, I'd search on simplyhired and ease my mind: there are jobs out there. That knowledge--fooling myself, reassuring myself, playing mind games with a half-loaded deck, whatever you want to call it--actually helped me hold out and stay focused on building my own business.

I'm not out of the woods on the worry front. One half day at a time. But simplyhired, in an odd way, kept me on course, for better or for worst, through it's incredible database of jobs I didn't have to take.

We learn from TechCrunch that Google may be looking to acquire simplyhired. Say that three times fast.

As Google becomes THE source of support for the global virtual enterprise of miscellaneous, loosely joined workers, the acquisition makes sense. I hope it works out for the simplynhired folks.

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Blame the Twitterer, Not the Twitter?

"Like Rivers Cuomo on serotonin reuptake inhibitors."

"Indeed, a whole lot of early adopters hate Twitter with Ted Kaczynski intensity. Seriously, there are netizens out there that hate Twitter worse than the third season of Lost. Twitter’s attraction is easy to assess for those interested in the high of new technology and the camaraderie of nonstop contact. It’s the next logical step after the design inanity that is MySpace. But what’s with the animosity? I’m all for hating things, but a lot of these bloggers are downright nasty."

heh.

Look, you know I've had my on-again-off-again with Twitter. I respect Ev--he's one of the reasons I'm here blogging. But when it comes to how Twitter has evolved--or has failed to--I'm left stumped.

I checked in recently and was astounded to see that nothing had changed there. Pretty much the same vapid chatter that made us sign up for the Do Not Call List on our home phones.

It wasn't until I realized that I was PAYING to get twitters as Instant Messages on Cingular -- shelling $80 out of my pocket to find out that my favorite Silicon People were once again having dinner -- that Twitter jumped the shark for me. Maybe that's not surprising.

But what does surprise me is the lack of innovation among the users on Twitter. By now, any other open space -- even given character limitations -- would have birthed something new -- TwitterPoetry. Limerick Jam. Twit for Charity. Adopt-a-Twit. Something!

What I see? The same folks eating and drinking and meeting. It is a complete lack of innovation at the user level that can only be fully understood upon further examination of the service's power users, who continue to use Twitter to do the same thing they have used it to do from the start: Annoy other people.

Among the many things twitter is NOT, please count blogging. Text messaging charges will apply.

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one more for the road: I still think Ev has a good chance of being the first start-up maker to be double-bought by google.

guitarman

Just now, George is working out on guitar--sounds great. he's getting in touch with his inner high end.

Me, I'm thinking about cleaning the hamster cage, which means I'm getting in touch with my inner hamster. Insert your own jokes.

Telling your story

Have you seen Blogger Stories yet? One of my favorite Atlantans and blogologists, Toby Bloomberg, started the site to tell the stories of how people have been touched by blogs, podcasts, vlogs and other online interactions.

Toby and her featured guests are up to 90 chapters of stories contributed by bloggers across the globe. Reading Blogger Stories is a good way to find new-to-you bloggers to add to your aggrevator. For example, My Back Pages. I've been enjoying/empathizing with Kristen's sleep probs.

Anyone notice I'm moderating comments?

I know you have. I am sorry if I don't approve your comments quickly. Also I understand if that means you decide not to comment. I'm thinking about what to do with comments as my blogging is sporadic these days. For now at least I'll moderate.

It's amazing how many racist dimwits have come out of the closet and into comments since my newfound fame of a month or so ago (ten years, five minutes--time isn't really keeping itself straight for me these days).

So, yeah, I'm moderating comments. Jerks, death threats and racist anonycowards won't get through. I don't need a court order or a code of conduct to make it so. Isn't that something.

I may be sporadic, but I'm still here.

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shelley on damn interesting on Tuskegee

When people say there should be no Black History Month, I say ok, but can we have Black American Holocaust Month? No? What about never forget? Americans CRAVE to forget. We are the most forgettenist bunch of plow-ahead-without-a-tear-Protestant-work-ethic people to inhabit this magnificent orb.

To wit, Shelley looks at Damn Interesting, where Alan "Hot Pastrami" Bellows has an enlightening account of the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Just one of many reasons why Black Americans sometimes find it a wee bit difficult to 'get over it.' Hey, have you ever thought or said that yourself--about slavery, about Tuskegee, about lynchings? Ever thought it while listening to a co-worker of color on a rant about politics?

If so, have you said 'get over it' that to a Jewish co-worker with relatives killed in the Holocaust? No? Why not? If you live in America, the comparison is worth thinking about.

Shelley Quotes:

In the mid-1940s, however, the recently discovered antibiotic penicillin was determined to be a safe and effective cure for syphilis, and the US government sponsored a nationwide public health program in an effort to eradicate the disease.

The researchers at Tuskegee, in a bid to preserve the fruits of their labors, kept the cure a secret from their subjects. They also supplied local doctors with lists of the participants' names, and instructed the physicians not to provide penicillin lest they interfere with a government health study. The administrators of the experiment were not interested in saving the lives of the black farmers, they were interested only in dissecting them on an autopsy table. As one of the doctors unceremoniously stated, "We have no further interest in these patients until they die.

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Few of the researchers who participated in the study ever admitted to any lapse in ethics, most of them insisting that they were merely following the directions of their superiors.

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everything's coming up misc.

Excited to get a new-book-fresh-smelling copy of David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous today.

So far, I love the little yellow dot, the blurbs by heavy hitters like Esther Dyson and Chris Anderson. I love the term "information omnivores" which has summoned for me visions of bizarre half-human, half-dinosaur creatures grazing in a field lush with data. Yum!

I love David's picture on the jacket, its sparkly blueness. And -- as if you can't tell -- I haven't started reading it yet. But I'm on my way.

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Gabriel Brings a Sledgehammer Down on DRM Issue

Smart smart smart smart. We7 is a soon-to-be-launched music download solution that makes sense for all constituents. It got Peter Gabriel's investor $ and is getting a close -- albiet paranoid -- look from the folks currently sucking distribution and marketing dollars out of artists' pockets.

The new company, based in Oxford, appears to be targeting the UK first with its advert-funding model. Using technology that the company calls "MediaGraft," We7 will dynamically insert 10 second advertisements at the beginning of songs when they are first downloaded. The advertisements will be tailored to the particular user requesting the track, and a version without ads can be downloaded one month later.

Gabriel has been involved in several innovative music startups recently, including The Filter, an automatic playlist generation program that is also free to download. He was also a backer of OD2, a "digital service provider" that has formed the foundation of many European online music stores.

Put a social network behind it and BAM you've got an end-around on MySpace. A 'lil sneak attack. Hey, you never know. I've been right before. I think once or something.

Meanwhile, blogging sucks.

Film at 11.

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penpaperpower

been writing with a pen and paper lately. full circle come back around. I had lost what sloppy handwriting ability I had during lo these many years of blogging. I can't believe my letters. shapes that bend at my hand. They make me.

These keys: what? plastic.

You cant see what I write now, paperpen. I am unblogging myself. David Weinberger, what do you call that trick?

Jon's BDAY!

Frank sez it's Jon Lebkowsky's birthday -- and a holelot more. Go sing the song at frank's place. it's catchy. like SARS.

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yeah well, one poem's better than none

missing

Not the cards
crafted by stubby kindergarten
thumbs, shamrocks and elves
remember the day
get well soon!
and see you monday

Not the bus ride home,
Not the brown paper sack
of St. Patrick's Day cheer
clenched like treasure in
one hand, the
star of the show
I take them
home to my sick father

Not the climb up the stairs
heels whisking
two steps at a time.

Not the "I have something for him,"
met on the top step to keep
me from the bedroom
can't reach the door to push it open.

Not the slow walk to my room
wondering
what?

Not the talk on my bed
Jesus God in Heaven
Not the no crying, the knowing.

Not the Edge of Night slicing
mid-day silence as I pick my fingers,
think about where they have taken "him."

None of that, no.

It is something less, the absence of,
the wrinkles in crisp bedsheets
missing his form,
the tautness of the groove
that hugged us there
"What's on tv?"

It is the first time I see the open
bedroom
so-stark-sun remembering,
caresses the antique poster bed
windows lifted to sanitize,
and the March wind
reminds me I am alive.
He is not.

It is the empty bed.


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