One of my personal low points occurred in the late 1970’s when I attended the nomination/election of the next editor of the school paper at Penn State. The then-current editor-in-chief, having realized that his hand-picked successor was not the popular choice, went into a 15 minute, character-assassinating screed against the other candidate. That part didn’t bug me … it was sort of par for the course with this guy. But what bothered me was that it worked … for the few minutes that it required to force though a vote, the majority of a group of otherwise intelligent people were swayed. It’s thirty years later and I’m still appalled that it could happen.

Watching the Clinton team take a similar road in a desperate attempt to escape the quicksand of their failed campaign brings it all back. She needs to stop, if not for her sake, then at least for mine!

I spent the weekend planting 10 Frontenac grape vines in my backyard, after having been inspired to give it a try by my friend Bob. I have no interest in making wine, but this is going to beat staring out at cooking grass all summer. Assuming I prepared the ground correctly (hours excavating New England soil that is best suited for producing rocks of various sizes), and pruned the vines correctly, and … well, with me I guess it’s a bit of a gamble, but grape vines are strangely resistant to rotten growing conditions. I got a great deal of info from Jeff Cox’s excellent book, ‘From Vines to Wine‘.

The birdhouse that Jake selected and painted seems to have weathered the sub-prime scare, and a couple of sparrows have moved in. So I have that, my grape vines, and after next weekend (hopefully) a rain garden to stare at instead of my computer screen. I think this Reality thing is the next Big Wave.

Nicholas Negroponte’s ‘One Laptop per Child‘ (OLPC) program has had some delivery problems with their Give One/Get One program launched at the end of 2007. But who cares? His idea has been to design a useful, portable, low cost (ballpark $200) computer than can be given on a large scale to communities worldwide. As an enlightened, liberal American enamored with high tech, this is the charity I naturally gravitated to (which is another way of saying that my friends Reg and Julie kept sending me links about the campaign until I signed up).

I’m more than happy to wait for mine as long as they keep sending me pictures of towns and villages getting their computers. Like these from Ulaanbatar in Mongolia. The expressions on the faces of these kids tells the whole story for why this is a worthwhile effort.

Reg got his OLPC laptop … I am still waiting for mine … and loaned me his to check out. It is a solid machine that I think will readily appeal to kids. It’s not what I’d use for an everyday mobile machine (I’m holding out for the MacBook Pro), but it is just the thing that would aid a kid interested in images or music or programming or games or writing or community.

Lots of ways to participate … check it out.

I studied Liberal Arts math/science at Penn State in the late 70s, but most of my friends were journalism majors met at the school newspaper, the Daily Collegian, where I worked as a cartoonist. This was during the aftermath of the Nixon resignation, the wheelhouse of Hunter S. Thompson, and the culture of Woodward and Bernstein, and somehow it all went Horribly Wrong. Growing up means losing campus-born-and-nurtured innocence about the way things work, and maybe this was always going to happen, but from the time a second-tier actor (third tier if you count the movies with the monkey) got hired on to play President of the United States in 1980, the path seemed weirdly inevitable.

For a while CNN looked like the Brave New World, but it mutated into some weird People Magazine publicity machine. Britney’s latest on-camera flip-out or the drug overdose of blue jeans model easily moving in front of the oil companies’ campaign to apparently simultaneously annex and depopulate Iraq. The lesson, as always, is ‘follow the money’. A news organization run by MBAs is not a news organization … it is, and will always be, a profit-seeking beast.

And if that starts happening to the blogs, same story. Although for now, the Internet has proven novel enough to confuse most of the old media money. Entry barriers are low, and sites like Talking Point Memo do provide some current hope for the Future of Information.

Frank Rich is on his game today as well, speaking about Hillary’s Audacity of Hopelessness. My brother and I are split on the Hillary/Obama question. He was working lights on an event Obama was involved with and felt like he was more marketing than substance, so favors Hillary’s experience. Hillary comes across to me badly … reeking of the sort of politics that says ‘do what you have to do, say what you have to say, to win’, seemingly oblivious to the fact that we are trying to withdrawal from toxic doses of that crap. I am willing to try something very new. I don’t buy into any of the messianic messaging that seems to be springing up around Obama, but I do hope that this could signal the opening of a door. To quote the good doctor, “History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of ”history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time — and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.”. (HST)

There is a smoker out in front of our building today who is a dead ringer for Franz Kafka.  Same round glasses, short, neat beard, hunted intellectual look.  I nodded my head at him as I returned from lunch.  He waved a third arm and rattled his carapace.  Which I assume was intended in a friendly way.

Facebook facilitates the sort of ‘virtual clubhouse’ that Howard Rheingold lucidly analyzed in ‘Smart Mobs‘ … a technology that provides a sense of privacy with one’s friends. And I understand the particular usefulness of that, particularly for teenagers still under the watchful eyes of parents and teachers and lacking the mobility or means to carve out much real-world personal space. (I’d say I grok it, if only to underscore that my Baby Boomer psyche left this particular experiment a long while ago, although I can still see why it is a tool so relevant for Generation Next).

The FaceBook application platform feels convoluted. It probably has to be to maintain their very-locked-down business model (services like Google AdSense won’t work within application pages, so ‘monetized’ applications seem either hamstrung or impossible).

In doing that I had the first chance in a long time to clean up the code, so I also modified the Renaissance version in two ways. First, I improved the output display, and second, I put it back in its own page. The experiment of putting it in a WordPress blog page made no difference in the page rankings and was a little brittle anyway. I had to use runPHP to make it work inside of WordPress, and that would get shut down anytime someone entered a comment for reasons I could never fathom.

Q: Mr. Question Man. I am studying Science in high school. It is well known that the Earth is round like a ball, therefore many people must be walking on it upside-down. Why is it that these people do not fall off?

A: You are suffering under a common misconception. People are falling off all the time.

Last Tuesday I was home from work with the flu. A sort of ambulatory flu that left me physically miserable but also bored. Somehow I stumbled upon Yahoo! Answers.

The idea with this service is to provide a community where you can ask questions and gather answers. You use up points when you ask questions, but you can answer others to earn points. I’m not exactly sure what these points are for. Maybe if you get enough you turn into Aristotle or something like that.

From hours looking at this thing I have learned:

- 90% of the audience are optimistic high school kids hoping to con someone into doing their homework. Among the homework they also aren’t doing is keyboarding, so some of the typed questions leave you looking for the Rosetta Stone for translation.

- The other 10% of the audience are weirdly obsessed by the fact that a fictional headmaster of an (also fictional) wizarding school is gay. Why these people aren’t worried instead that the Justice League of America isn’t doing more to get us out of Iraq is beyond me.

- The answers will turn your hair gray. To the question ‘Should I read the Iliad or not?’ (correct answer, “Who the f**k cares what you read? Go read ‘My Pet Goat’ again and stop annoying people.”) I read the answer “Homer is looking at the ideal of a Greek hero and the model has been the warrior, so he looks at Achilles. The Iliad showcases the fatal flaw of the warrior hero - blood lust - which consumes Achilles and leads to his downfall.” (No he isn’t. No it wasn’t. He does examine Achilles’ anger … but it’s his anger with Agamemnon for stealing his girlfriend. And the dead hero at the end or the story that we care about is Hector. Achilles has lost his best friend but is otherwise doing great.)

So now I can’t stop with the smart-ass answers. Here’s today’s:

Q: Curious George and the Puppies.what is the story about?

Sort of Like Gilligan’s Island. But with a Monkey. And puppies.

The prospect of Vista filled me with all the enthusiasm of a visit to the DMV. I’d catch myself on the Apple web site, choosing a MacBook Pro in the online store, selecting all the options, getting a little sick looking at the $4,200 price tag, but still thinking “Wouldn’t that be great?”

Then, deliverance, and from two quarters: First, in an attempt to either exorcise or kill my flawed and temperamental Dell laptop, I wiped the hard disk and installed the free Ubuntu Linux distribution, and it was like drinking a mugful of Felix Felicis. Suddenly my laptop Just Works and is Fast and doesn’t take 10 minutes and jumper cables to boot up.

But the big change was an iMac 24″, a gift from my Mom. As with any Apple product these days, the design just makes you smile. It is fast and works the way you think it should.