Do Not Install In Radiant Heat Ceilings

After Oliver Fontaine died, two friends of mine, Deena Ramos and James "Hardhat" White, had tattoos put on their skin.

Deena's tattoo was a 12-inch tall female Klingon warrior with an honourific message about Oliver written in the Klingon language (Deena at one time spoke fluent Klingon (a fictional language associated with the TV series "Star Trek" and its spinoffs), taught at the Klingon language school and was featured in the New York Times magazine in her Klingon garb).

Hardhat's tattoo was a spewing raised manhole (or confined space entry chimney, perhaps) with "In Memory of Oliver" written in English.

If I remember correctly, Jay Hereford took over some of Oliver's duties at work.  Jay is one of the most laidback people I know, transitioning from one position in life to another like he already knew what's coming next.

We all have fond memories of one sort or another.  Memories of my coworkers like Jay, Deena and Hardhat, as well as Joyce Battle, Dennis "Catdaddy" McPhearson, Janet Burns and many others, made the sewer flow monitoring business well worth working in and recalling.  Moments like the time Alan Petroff pointed out to me the influence of ocean tide inflow on a sewer outfall (in Dania or Hollywood, Florida?).

With those thoughts floating in my head, I headed out to the local fishing spots on the Flint River today.

Since the Flint is a public waterway, I can't expect to conduct experiments in complete privacy, can I?

Sometime after 13:00 I was working with some colleagues to see if a Livescribe electronic pen could communicate with an electronic fishing rod leaned against a tree and send signals to a group of fish with organic circuits in their bodies.

Just as I was about to reverify our lab results, a couple of kids on an ATV drove up and panicked the fish, which darted away and swam upstream automatically.

After the kids drove by, I packed up my fishing gear and followed the fish upstream to the collection point.

I don't know what was happening but the fish seemed to get close to the collection box and then dart away at the last minute, as if their tiny fish brains were telling the fish that although they were strongly attracted to the entryway of the box they should not swim into the box because it was unnatural.  That's not what they were supposed to do, my scientist friends told me.

That's why I always insist on proving technology in the field rather than claiming success in the lab.

After watching the fish for a few seconds, I decided to abort the test.  I activated a circuit in the fish that caused the organic circuitry to dissolve into the surrounding fish tissue (or "self-destruct," in popular vocabulary), carried my fishing gear to the car and grabbed a bite to eat from Amber at the Sonic drive-thru.  I would have preferred a butterscotch shake and burger from Inez's old place, Mountain View Restaurant, but the doors have long since been locked and the windows papered over, another local eatery lost to franchised fast-food chains.

At least while I conducted today's experiment, I chomped on a cigar and drank a beer in the midday sun while watching natural nature in all its midspring naturalness.  A brief moment of peace in the great outdoors, despite the loud sounds of traffic on the nearby highway.

Have you ever watched someone roped off with carabiners and surfing the surface of a large sewer flow, feet planted on a 2x4, a makeshift surfboard?  Have you ever watched soap suds from an upstream "one-hour Martinizing" dry cleaning business clean the crud off your waders while you're measuring the depth and peak speed of the flow through the sewer pipe?  Or choke on an illegal dump of flammable liquids from a local smash repair shop, carefully exiting the chamber full of toxic fumes and hoping not to cause a spark that would ignite the gases and send you up into the sky like a living cannonball at a circus?

Life is about seeing all there is to see in this moment, not just sitting in an office all day and wondering what's out there.

Time for this ol' fellow to ponder the inside of his eyelids and take a nap!

Volume/Displacement

After much searching, top-secret astronomers discovered where the future government's time machine ended up.

Turns out that a time machine is a timespace machine, placing the traveler(s) and the machine in the exact location of space where that time occurred, taking into account the expansion of space, the natural movement of galaxies, stars, planets, etc., as well as a previously undiscovered change in subatomic makeup (you know, that whole dark matter/energy thing).

Top-secret medical advisors think this might be a way to cure diseases, by sending people to a different place in timespace (as opposed to the conventional spacetime, a minor difference but significant), rearranging their subatomic structures such that "modern" diseases can't form.

Now, how do we communicate with the timespace travelers and figure out how to tow them back to our spacetime location?

Past Fishing Expositions

How do you sneak your people into other countries under the cover of open daylight?  Easily!

What kind of fish are you going to catch today?  Do you catch, photograph, identify and release?

For My Friends in High-Speed Internet ['Broadband'] Development/Sales

My Friends/Colleagues,

Remember talking about charts like these and the opportunities they represented?:

Verizon's preferred way of looking at the broadband penetration data [from: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/04/fact-checking-verizons-ceo-on-us-broadband-awesomeness.ars]

You still working on closing the gap between X and 100% market penetration/saturation?  Wasn't building the South Korean market fun?!  Think we could recreate that success all over again somewhere else?

Those were heady days, with compatibility tests at UNH and other locations around the globe.  Remember the ice hockey game in Huntsville that shocked DSL development engineers from Fremont/San Jose, Taiwan and Israel who couldn't believe there was ice hockey in the South?  Anyone know where the great Mr. James Infusino resides now?  Sure miss the lobster and beer at Newick's or the chef-prepared meals at Il Fornaio in Palo Alto.  Maybe Jerry could retell his story about the underground bar in Tokyo (or was that in Taipei or Seoul?).

Great memories on Earth Day!  Time to get outdoors.  Y'all stop back by now, y'hear!

Straw Hat, Fishing Rod and Real Life

Can a man not have a quiet afternoon casting his sinkers and lures into brambles and vines?

I'd just stepped off the cement trail down to the dirt path to find a spot to park my folding chair and tackle box when a "Hi! How ya doing?" barked out of a tree hanging over the river.

Two young men were joining their efforts to extract a rope swing trailing in slow-moving water on a hot spring day, near 85 deg F or thereabouts in north Alabama (Ali Baba, alakazam, alakazoo!).

Growing in the New Balance/Reebok/Redwing tread-stamped trail were spring beauty and starry chickweed, their blooms communicating to me their desire to feed insects in large numbers.

I nodded my John Deere woven head covering at them and found a meadowed spot hundreds of feet downstream of the fellows.

I'm no secret agent or sorcerer.  However, under my employ, men and women compete against one another to provide me resources with which my associates and I can readily exchange information.  The young swimmers up the way were a sign I was supposed to expect an unexpected report.

How old this gets.  I set out the chair, opened the tackle box, found an alluring lure for those lurking ichthyology subjects in the deep pool of water beside a fallen log hosting muck and a much-missed soccer ball, set the top of the pole between the wild grape vine and the water and cast the artificial bait downstream.

That is, I attempted to cast the bait.

Instead, I wrapped the line around the trunk of a small sycamore.

I gently pulled on the line, unwrapped the tree, recast and watched a few fish follow the lure upstream toward my location.

Then a message buzzed in my hand.  Those inventors!

My design team had rigged the fishing pole as an antenna to receive radio signals through the river water and transmit them to the organic circuitry installed in my palm.

I pointed the pole at the water and circled the bait just out of reach of the four- to six-inch shallow water swimmers while listening to a report from my associates.

All I asked for was a couple of weeks of letting the computer program run on its own set of binary digits!

And I'd get what I wanted if there was more cooperation.  Now I'm hearing that the cartels are getting a little machismo in their morning cappucino and think they can muscle in on the action that ain't theirs for the taking.

Look, fellows, I told you it's share and share alike.  You can't keep raking in all that profit and expect to keep it all to yourselves.

We're a family and when a family member disappoints me, I get angry.  I don't get revenge.  I don't get mad.  I don't get even.  I just let the family know it's all a matter of perspective as I demonstrate how business is business.  Get cocky and you sink with a South Korean ship or Russian-made airplane ... or worse.  Sorry, once it's done you can't bribe your way out of death.

I've asked my associates to take care of this business while I'm taking a few days off to fish.  If my ears buzz again, I won't be happy.  I won't laugh.  And neither will you, you understand?

I carry a pocket paper journal where I keep coded ledgers that track those of you still living in the dark ages before the invention of the abacus, batch cards and automatons.  After I received the radio message, I sat down with a beer and checked some notes in the journal.

Some of you are behind in your duties.  If I see you aren't interested in balancing things up the way they should be, then, again my associates have the authority to open a few closed doors and disclose a few so-called secrets that won't be secret anymore.

The Book of the Future is under lock and key.  You don't need to know what's going to happen next.  After all, the future's your business and nobody else's so why should I have to spell out what you're going to do in this public forum?

Take care of business, willya?  It's not like I'm asking you to solve world hunger, treat factory workers fairly or bring doubleknit polyester pantsuits back into fashion.

Now, back to my holiday.  Once again, a quick thanks to all you folks who're doing what the future said you would be doing anyway.  There's nothing in writing that says you have to do what you have to do.  You can change the future at any time, if you know who you are not and that you don't exist, of course.  A big if, but it can be done.

Look at a luna moth and ask yourself why such a big creature lives such a short time.  When you know the answer, you know the future.

See, I told you it's all simple, right there in front of your eyes.  Why you don't believe me, I can't say.  Why all this desire for proof?  You don't want a bunch of fireballs shaking the ground and scorching Earth, do you?  Well, most of you don't.

I haven't asked my scientists to run simulations of what it would take to change the ocean currents unnaturally but I think it's time to work out the details.  We've got the ability to create hundreds of millions of tonnes of nanotechnology that can reproduce itself radically and chaotically.  But why would we want to change the ocean currents?  I'll let you think about that one for a while.

Wyatt Before The Storm

I miss Urmi and Julia gallantly, their opinions, especially in their native languages, putting me in their place momentarily through their writing.

Well, the new and improved pencil sharpener is ready.  I had my doubts and brushed the dust off the crystal ball for a quick reading but the programmers came through at the moment at last.

First, a shoutout to Frank Messina and his air plant bloom list email, courtesy of www.airplant.com. Some days I feel like a bromeliad looking for the minimum of nutrients in the morning dew and rare rain showers.

And now, a word from your future:

They come by car, bus, train, air, foot, trailer, motorbike and bicycle.  They stay in hotels, campgrounds and wooded civil war battlegrounds.  They call in sick.  They take sudden holiday/vacation time off.  Can you see the ones hiding in the backs of lorries or tractor-trailer rigs?  Can you measure the change in people density?  Or, like Freaknik and rainbow parades, does one crowd change places with another, the density hardly changing?

What are all the houses and flats in other parts of the country doing empty this week?

When bare arms bear arms, what do bears bare/bear?

I value the opinion of Kwasi A. on this matter.  Maybe Ed J. could crack a good joke so we could break the silence enveloping us right now.

When countries and cultures do not matter in the big picture, except that opposing ones exist, what does one tell those whose lifestyles will fade into oblivion very soon?

I don't like the Book of the Future but it doesn't stop me from telling you what it says will happen in your near future.

Which one of you is willing to die, when all of us are going to die unwillingly?  We only die willingly when we think we're going to live, either through post-life somethingness or through the lives of those left living.

When we finally create the perpetual non-cancerous multicellular organism, what is life?

Which one of you is willing to kill when you don't know what life is?

When no is yes and yes is no, when longevity is considered selfish and good health is commercially rationed, will you kill or die willingly?

Have you ever sold an extended warranty plan that guarantees 24-hour support of a product?  Have you ever sat at the actuarial table to see how many customers it takes to make an extended warranty program profitable?  Do you know how many extended warranty customers are unprofitable for a company?

What is your true cost of living?  Not your standard of living.  Not your standing in the community.  What does it cost you to live?

Look around you.  How much of what you do directly contributes to your living?  How much of what others do or have done contributes to your living?

This blog pays not one centavo toward my living.  It doesn't grow food in the garden.  It doesn't build and repair roads.  It doesn't draw ethical lines in the sand where unethical people are captured and incarcerated.  It doesn't build and clean the water supply.

I have depended almost solely on you to support my living.  I thank you.

In this quiet before some storms erupt, to whom can you give thanks for contributing to your living, no matter whether you liked/disliked, you agreed/disagreed with, or you gave a moment's thought to that person or those persons?

I thought so.

Which one of you is Wyatt Earp and which one of you thinks s/he's a Cowboy?

I'll be honest here.  I've grown accustomed to the quiet woods and although I like the attraction of reading the Book of the Future to you through this obscure blog, assuming no one reads it but me, I'm ready for someone else to read from their Book of the Future.  All the years and kilometers that stretch in loops and waves get mixed up after a while - I can't tell one from another anymore.  Cabin fever is over, in other words, and spring fever in full.  Business is booming, I'm sure, and many people looking for a reason to point their fingers at something to explain something else but I don't care.  The world belongs to you, all of you.  The future is yours for the taking/making.

I'm closing this blog down.  I know the future and I'm an obscure, anonymous part of it on a worldly scale so now I know it doesn't matter if I write about it or not - my part is done and that's the part I needed to know about.  I was supposed to nudge you along until the ball rolled into the hands of others who could run the world quietly on automatic pilot.  The new computer program upgrade is up and running.  My associates are in place and have your lives safely in their hands.

I've seen the wonders of a seven-billion strong world council of subcultures that learn to live together in relative peace for a while.  All of us live.  All of us die.  How the details manifest themselves is up to you now.  Every one of us matters.  Live well.  When you give up arguing about who's in charge and take control of your lives, you join the rest of the world that wants you to live well.  Learn to roll with the changes, knowing that seasons and fads come and go.

The future says the next stage of my life is walking woods and sitting by a river watching the fish and the mosquitoes bite.  I'm ready to go on to that next stage from Middle-Aged Man to Old Guy With No Name.  My interest in who says "yes" and who says "no" and what sports / fashion / government / science fads purport continues to fade.  Time to let it go.

The urbanites tried to draw me in and I've never been a true country living kind of person - I'm just a plain ol' suburbanite wandering the tame woods watching the trees and the birds while subcultural clues play tunes in my head.  Time to unplug from this artificial world and relive my childhood nature scout life while my body still works.

I hope you learned what I've learned (and keep learning) - no one is out to get you, your subculture, your religion or your government, as long as you aren't out to get them.  We don't have to like each other.  We don't have to agree with one another.  We've got this one planet's resources to share.  And share we will.

Simple facts for simple living.  Love one another and don't tolerate the intolerable.  One big family on one planet.  Asymmetry is our friend - diversity works to our advantage.  Nothing is new - everything old is understandable so stop fooling ourselves by flooding our senses with "new" stimuli and take time to learn/relearn what we already know.

Enjoy your life, knowing your future is safely in the hands of those around you and vice versa.

I've said enough.  Time to stop talking and time to start living!  Maybe we'll see each other soon.

Bad Vlad Broods Good Mood?

Any coincidence that farming games are popular in China and on facebook right now?

Nostalgia.

Organic cat food.

The taste of beer on a boat in warm weather.

Fish scales caught in arm hair.

Flies.  Ants.

Cutting back privet to see the road - the damn hedge grows like the free weed it is.

Violent abandoned adopted babies - spanked? - and young bicyclists in the breeze.

Should black boxes be trusted to the fox guarding the hen house full of blackened Poles?

Smelling the wind for new signs now that the Cherokee mama is hunting higher grounds.

Being used to being used but sad and depressed about being used any which ol' way.

Looking at the diversions, as always.  What does the magician hand to the assistant in plain sight?

Have you ever lived under a glass ceiling for very long?

When facts become facts, who are your true friends?

Half of one is also half of the other.

Are droughts contagious?

If you're full of distrust, do you trust your distrust?

Order in the court.  Here comes de judge.  Ladies and gents, Laugh-In looks at the news.  Love, American-style, truer than the red, white and blue ... it's me and you.  Sock it to me.

Carol Burnett in Sacramento raisin country.

Sharpening a new pencil ... the pine tar gumming up the pencil sharpener ... here comes the future, baby!

In BBC news today, it was announced that factory figures had figured nicely this time around, except for the fact the figures were rigged to scaffolding around an empty warehouse rigged to look full of rigs.

In BBC, news today revealed the rags-to-riches story of the Untouchables, tax auditors who'd taken bribes to help companies get back on their feet through creative bookkeeping.  Beekeepers were kept out of the pot of honey this time.

In BBC news, today a well-placed executive gave his assistant a pretty bauble for keeping their babble secret between them.  The assistant sold the bauble to pay for a trip for her boyfriend to pay a visit to the executive's wife for a little bubbly in a bubble bath for two.

Today, the BBC news showed it was incapable of maintaining the farce of neutrality due to the infiltration of former writers for Punch who insisted on skewing the news toward sarcasm and wry British humour.  Evidence: the prime minister was shown eating a piece of Arctic-grown cheese.  A total lack of culture on both parts.

China raised its quota for American immigrants in order to secure laborers to complete the high-speed rail between all major Chinese cities.  The American qulī workers must provide their own pick axes and lunchboxes.

Poland has secured permission from NATO to randomly take down a Russian airliner flying into NATO territory in the "fog."  The Kyrgyzstan government has volunteered its two military airports to show solidarity with both the West and Russia in support of resolving this issue.

To play a trick, the Himalayas shrank several metres overnight to mess with China's and Nepal's official height of Mt. Everest.

The increased production of biomass fuel in Brazil has caused a shift in Earth's rotation due to the amount of non-flatulence based methane released into the atmosphere.  Scientists have proposed releasing a secret supply of methane-eating chemical bombs over South America to prevent Earth's orbit from collapsing.  Taiwan and South Korea have denied any connection to the production of the chemical weapons.  North Korea has taken credit but no nation has recognised their ability to make such sophisticated weapons at this time.  Iran has claimed it has harnessed anti-methane technology and could, if it wanted to, produce such weapons but it is a country of peace, not war, and thus has modified the technology for cleaning the air of restaurants where too much fiber and roughage is consumed.

The conspiracy theory of conspiracy theories was thought up by a woman working at a travel agency early this morning.  By the time she finished texting her theory, an invisible group of cyberwarfare ninjas stepped invisibly out of her phone and took the travel agent to an undisclosed location.  Throughout the day, the agent has suffered through a series of tests to ensure her theory is in fact a theory and not the tip of a tip from a lover / acquaintance / associate that prompted her to think up the theory from the hint of a tip of a fact she knows nothing about.  Meanwhile, a cybernetic copy of the travel agent continues to fill travel orders at the office, her coworkers unaware of the difference between the real her and the robotic her, she having lived a quiet life sharing superficial conversations with the people nearest her.

Unknown to the cyberwarfare ninjas, they are third generation copies of their cybernetic selves.

Unknown to the travel agent, she is still sitting at her desk filling travel orders, with only her thought patterns kidnapped and carried off to a secure location for interrogation.  Her coworkers only think they detect a change in her wan demeanor today, a few pondering the possibility that she is either an alien or a robot.

I have taken the day off and left this blog entry for my computer programmers to write using a new automatic text-generation software package to replace the one I had been using for the past few months.

My body is sitting at home staring at the flickering images of a box across the room after working in the sun-filled yard earlier today while my thought patterns have been sent to a "cleaning house" for repairs and updates, wiping out dead-end trails of thoughts that have weighed down my overall adventure-seeking life of adventure wrapped in adverts.  A bottle of Samuel Adams Noble Pils is lying while laying its lies on its side and dripping drops onto the carpet beside my moccasined feet.

Are you a "yes" or a "no"?  Do you think you know but still want to find out?  Do you invent your own carrots or do you depend on carrots others have dangled in front of you?

My computer programmers think they have worked out the bugs in the upgrade they released yesterday so we should have the new predictions programmed into the electric pencil sharpener for me to grind out a few answers tomorrow.  The shavings they scanned today made no sense.

But then again, as you know, even mistakes are part of the future.  So what do the pencil shavings really mean?  Are we really going to create a new council of panels containing those permanently-assigned and those who rotate in and out via popular vote?  Will we finally abolish trade barriers in order to take full advantage of local areas of expertise that leverage cooperative (rather than competitive) advantage instead of leveraged buyouts?  Are we going to train all citizens for self-empowerment?

Good thing for the upgrade.  The last version of the program had spun off into a utopian cycle.  A lot of nice ideas but they were being spun up too fast for subcultures to implement.  Glad we have a secret set of manually-derived versions of the future, including a few control experiments, to test against the seven-billion strong superorganism's Book of the Future prediction subroutines.

Time for me to unplug from the picture box and see if the upgrade will fully function by tomorrow's blog entry.  Okay, you programmers, show me what you've written for a blog entry today!

Viruses/Viral

How did you first get involved in technology?  For me, it was a friend, Joe Francis, who introduced me to the RCA 1802 microprocessor, a space-hardened version of which resides in the Voyager spacecraft and later the Intel 8080/8085 CPU family.  For others, it was the Altair:

Honoring the Father of the PC

Most of us are familiar with the term "computer virus," but do you think about real viruses that could prevent the use of blood to save lives?:

Potential Risk to Blood Supply Probed 

What makes a wombat mad, a Tasmanian devil bedeviled with disease and a coal ship marooned on a barrier reef?  I couldn't find the answer in Der Spiegel, the speakeasy or Mongolian desert winds.  Maybe Nigerian radioactive dirt and water will burn the Ntera image for me.  Munster and Butler know what it's like to be "that close" to knowing, too.  Can't show favoritism in despotic nepotistic depositories.

If there's dirt and gravel in your water supply, are you looking for a sinkhole to fill in the future?  I'll ask the future mayor, AMA in HHI, to find out.

In Defence of Jane

Are you keeping track of the ASBM?  Are you a regular reader of Jane's news?

I'm sad about the actions in Moscow but more worried about bigger dirty problems not as easy to clean up, coming up through radioactive rocky hotels of the Kajik metal-toothed poor and Phillipines' pine-forested potbellied birds.  How many of ADM's foodgrade rolling barrels are tasty addictive HFCS button poppers and how many are filling station containers?  Are Cancer and Capricorn tropical or topical?  Why all these words from the wordless one?  Latitudes and longitudes and chocolate orange slices make winter freezes turn out refreshingly tasty tomatoes.  One tasty tomato you won't find in Grainger County this year - she says she's this century's Tokyo Rose.  Another bitter pill to swallow?  No she won't!

The bliss of ignorance, where are you?

Are you signing petitions at petrol stations asking for the reduction of debit/credit card fees?

I love my brewskis, micro and macro, but if there's any one thing to put in prayer, thank God for Dunkin' Donuts and Krispy Kreme!  Don't go well with Bushmills or Redbreast but there's a time and a place for every taste.  Some like Jack and Coke.  Some don't know Jack.  Can you play Dark Castle on an iPad?  How does Duke Nukem like his doughnuts - Old Style, White Castle or Sears Tower?

What to do with aviation blue news?  Have the Russians learned not to fly over Scottish territory again or do I have to tell another tale worth splashing some single malt whiskey that tastes like pure charcoal?  Push buttons and buttons pop.  Pop goes the weasel!

This afternoon's worth sipping some expensive, rare whiskey in your honour, your Honour.  Then another readin' o' the Book o' the Future about ya.  Are you ready for another round?  Wink-wink, nod-nod, nudge-nudge - how about a Blackmail sketch replay?  Pop culture references are past-present-future participative.  Can you take a joke over a cup of java, Joe?

Who's driving the digital motor home?  Who's selling access to the secret network that's darpafree and internetlike and exafast?  Who doesn't have to pay?  What do Indian medical mall entrepreneurs have to say?

Who was in that white van going past?  Did that get the info that was sent to them on radio wave signal pathways?

Temperate Zone Rooftop Horticulturalism

Not, as some would hope, sclerophyllous woody vegetation habitat regeneration.

Earlier today, based on the crows circling around a hawk (dark wings, dark-banded tail and light-coloured chest), I assume the meal in the talons of a hawk would have grown into an adult crow.

Do you know the "lively red-haired man" behind the Oatmeal Creme Pie, O. D. McKee?  To him, I give thanks for Little Debbie snack cakes and a favorite after-lunch dessert of two soft oatmeal cookies sandwiched together with a fluffy creme feeling ("creme" being a word that can designate a special formula that is not exactly cream but a sweet concocted confection).  I've enjoyed the pies for 40 years.

While giving myself time to investigate the vegetation growing on the limestone hill behind my house, surveying the sedum, prickly pear and other potential rooftop crops for northern Alabama heat islands (and perhaps other areas of this temperate zone type), I saw the first flowers of late-blooming trout lilies and the first leaves of a large field of shooting stars, along with deer trails, freshly-broken snail shells, and a short-tailed lizard (perhaps a juvenile broad-headed skink).

Storms passed by last night.  Then, in clear skies, the reflection of Mars and the Moon directly overhead.

So now, while mourning the loss of a good man who died of cardiac arrest yesterday, grandfather of my niece and nephew, I think about his family's legacy and wonder what he did to teach his kids How to Be Brilliant.

Long before the last couple of generations of us arrived, our species helped usher in the dawn of a new epoch - in the past few thousand years we have demonstrated our ability to alter the landscape, exaggerating the effects of natural climate change.  Now, we have the smarts to ask ourselves, "Are we facing another silent spring?"

I met a young woman who asked me if I was more entertained by Holmes older brother or by the 8 femmes.  I asked her if a state is a state or a state and what state the state was in.  Based on her mood, she stated that recalling one's state troops from overseas missions is one state one state could state stately when pressed to recall what is the state of states on one's slate of state issues.

Exactimundo.

When pressed, a shirt starches.  Did I mean scorches or lurches?  Lunchboxes carry their own waist.  Wait, I meant weight.  Or did I mean waste?  Being mean with the mean of what one means.

That's not it, eye-thur.  Who's the author?  Who's authoritarian?  Can you be authoritarian and not a disciplinarian?

The cajones to legalise illegalities legally.  Does plastic-sealed paper money smell like money?  Where's your paperwork to paper the place with papier?  Or paper-mâché?  Or macheted spaghetti?

Noodling around again.

I cannot see the future.  I am a translator.  My power is not in me.  You are the only power I've got.  You are the future, are you not?  You are the tree rings ringing 'round the divining rod called a preshaven pencil.

We don't need the religion of global warming to make smart business decisions to reduce, reuse and recycle for higher profit margins.  You've proven that point pointedly.  We estimate our cultural industrial workplace effectiveness by the costliness of extracting metals from rock and from landfills.  When you know, you know junkpiles are money piles.

How do you pile your junk from one cycle of learning to the next determines your certitude.  Is it better to burn trash or turn it into goo?  Do you hook cows up to methane collectors?

What is manure?

Do you take away smugness if you tell the second party that the first party gets to enjoy its smugness in turn?  If we're just taking turns, where's the feeling of victory?  Ah, history.  Those who don't/can't read, don't understand, so why tell them?

Did I tell you about O. D. McKee, who drove to a salvage yard and retrieved a gear from an old washing machine to replace a hand crank at his factory, added a small motor, and "began the automation process which turned his small bakery into one of the nation's largest producers of snack cakes"? [all references to O.D. McKee taken from the back of a snack cake box purchased in 2010 - one way to think outside the box?]

Waste not, want to be knotted.

Ever watched a microwave radiation battle between two satellites orbitting Earth?  The silence of glowing things.  Space jams in space jams.

While your electronic clothes pass the electricity your body movement generates, what do you pass?  Do you pass gas?  Do you see yourself as a microwave oven?  Can you process all the waveforms passing through you?  Are you an electricity and magnetism guru, equating equations to waiting e-friends?

Are you a rooftop gardener, growing veggies and raising goats?  Do you share your chickens with the hawks, you being a ecosystem hawk yourself?  Can you extract water from the air?  Where do you store your collected carbon dioxide?  Do you sell carbon credits for batteries to store your wind generation?

If you were trapped all alone on a heat island, what would you want with you?

Sometimes you have to ask the same sets of sets of question sets to set your thought in a new subset you'd intersected more than once before.

I met a young woman who asked me a question, "What's it like to be alone?"  I told her it's not lonely if you're a lone wolf.  She's asked what it's like to be lonely.  I asked her if she was her own god.  She nodded.  I told her gods are never lonely - they have a universe of gods and servants to fill their thoughts.  She agreed.  We laughed, we gods.  Yegads!  Thankfully, we know we aren't important - two gods in the same place, one or both of them knowing a sense of importance ... you don't want that, do you?  This planet's too small.

The morning after a woodland walk I found a dead tick attached to my hip.  Damn bloodsuckers - don't they know better than to taste the power of the gods?

Time to taste time - this sluggish computer tastes funny.

Time to test the sky.  We don't own the world - we just pass the beach ball on to the next player in the next game set.  Are you ready?  Get set.  Go!

The World Did Not End Today ... Now What?

Kudos to Pelosi and Merkel for keeping their positions relevant in today's economy.

[ And now, a word from our sponsor ]

Do you feel lonely and tired?  Have you found yourself in your life?  Do you feel happy and satisfied?  Do you have no idea who or what you should be or are?

We know how you feel.

In these times of all times, isn't it time you gave a thought to why you have that nagging feeling you know what's going to happen before it happens?

You see, you do already know what's going to happen.  After all, people are people everywhere.  That's why we're here to remind you you have developed a brand-new system for taking control of your life and the lives of people around you who haven't yet developed their own system of infinite power and mind control.

Normally, we would charge weekly consulting fees to tell you what you already know.  But, for a limited time only, we're not going to charge you perpetually.  In fact, we're not going to submit a bill for any amount at all.  Instead, we're giving away, totally free, the information you already have in your head.

That's right!  If you don't call within the next 48 hours, you will receive absolutely nothing from us for nothing at all.

You heard that right, folks!  We're offering this package to you with the special added bonus of you discovering your own lifetime benefit of unlimited wealth and happiness without spending any money or investing any time in listening to us or our expert panel of expert experts.

So hurry!  This offer is only good for your lifetime.  Should you fail to take advantage of this deal, you have no one to blame, not even yourself, because you made a decision, consciously or subconsciously, to do something else entirely.  And guess what!  It's okay!  You'll live a wonderful life either way!

[ Now back to your regularly scheduled blog entry ]

Some colleagues of mine have sent me their setups on several game boards - Monopoly, Risk, Life, Go, chess, D&D, Stratego, Chutes & Ladders, Operation - and asked me to guess the outcome.  Every colleague stressed the seriousness of the game, comparing it to Jumanji or Zathura in the influence the game's moves have on real life.  My colleagues want me to prove to them that the Book of the Future predicts not only the final outcome but the changes to this part of the universe every game piece movement makes.

As you know, the universe operates according to my wishes but not my demands.  Being a retired individual, not actively involved in swaying public opinion or stock market manipulation, I view this universe of mine with a sly twinkle in my eye, allowing humourous diversions to cause occasional irregularity in the form of temporary layoffs, good times, and micro-anarchic chaos.

Disposable credit card numbers, fake caller ID, disposable phone numbers, counterfeit passports, lack of a real home address - all these add up to shuffling game pieces around the globe invisibly.  What you see on the game board, as we've seen, is never what the game is all about.  We've been here before, haven't we?

But colleagues still want to know the answers I've already given them.  They're caught in a loop of unbelievability.  They cannot accept the fact that their game-changing shots are statistically insignificant when the future is already known.

That's why I tell you I'm neutral when it comes to seeing and telling you what the Book of the Future has laid out for us.

For instance, I support my buddies who say they don't believe in government handouts.  At the same time, I've built my financial portfolio on paychecks tied to government contracts and investments in government-backed securities which exist to support those who receive government handouts and use them in the marketplace to churn the value of labor units over and over.  I know that government bureaucracies rarely shrink in size but then again they feed a lot of people on this planet, keeping them happily employed and willing to buy products developed/built in part by many people who received free primary/secondary public education and postsecondary education subsidised by the government.

We live in a complex society that's not easily represented by any single board game.  Who are the pawns?  Where is Boardwalk?  Can you really pass Go when you play Go with Play-doh?  D'oh!

I'm not a liberal.  I'm not a neocon.  I'm not a conservative.  I'm neutral and independent.  My only focus is our species in total, which represents life on this planet that can spread out into the universe regardless of moral, ethical or environmental concerns, because most everything comes out of the wash looking clean.

Did I not tell you that the Book of the Future said that Obama would come out smelling like a winner?  I did not vote for him or his predecessor.  I do not care, but others do, who holds the office of the U.S. presidency.  I understand the political hierarchy necessary to keep any government system running so I vote for independents to allow myself the freedom to observe our political-industrial complex in action without any personal vested interests.

Tomorrow, the chief executive representing one of the three branches of government established by U.S. constitutional law will sign into law a set of financial constraints tied to the institution of medical health care.  The Book of the Future indicates this is only one of several goals that must be met to prevent debt-crushing blows to another world power.

Politicians and mass media criers who want to represent the emotional buildup of opposition to the political party in power will play up the failings sensed in any change to the status quo.  So be it.  The larger the perceived change, the louder the opposition yells.  Let us celebrate our pendulum-swinging political process with joy.  After all, it works well, both historically into the past and historically into the future!

While elected public officials hit the campaign fund trail to shore up support for upcoming elections, let's pause a moment and look at other issues that will make government policies lose their immediacy and become another historic moment for schoolchildren to memorise later on.

Let's consider the role of the individual: YOU.

Are you willing to insert/embed electronic equipment in your body to vastly improve your ability to communicate with others?  Are you willing to have a disposable identity that does away with any worries about identity theft because we're all temporary placeholders for personal identification information, including fingerprints and other genetic anomalies?

Can you imagine a scenario where you have no social goals tied to a name or group because, although you may experience and apply intense social-climbing skills, you have been trained to believe your ascendancy is for the benefit of our species and not for individually-named glory?  In this scenario, you still have your independence, including guaranteed freedoms like uncensored speech, but in this particular freedom case your speech would be crowdsourced with the voices of others and blended with the rest of our species' freedoms quasi-anonymously.

The Book of the Future long ago told us about these scenarios that predicted the species-wide broadband initiative we're slowly implementing to tie our thoughts and actions together 24-hours a day.

The Power of You.  I told you this blog is only about you.  Every single one of you/me/us.

When our lives are transparent, what is a "community standard" we expect others to follow?  That's the main issue we have to address that will make all other government decisions fade in importance - the hierarchy of family, community and species' standards.  Do e-citizens have community standards separate from digital illiterates?  Can a tribe be allowed to maintain its traditional ways and slaughter the last remaining specimens of a species, even if it means the end of the tribe members' traditions/livelihood?

We have reached the point where groups like the United Nations no longer represent our species well.  We must look to something more meaningful - a world council made of all of us - the complete expansion of the Internet, where tribes, corporations, nations, civic groups and independent thinkers have equal say in our mixed-mode hierarchy of daily living.

Your Voice Rules.  We know the future laid out for us.  We know we will raise the standards of living for all of us, not just socioeconomically, but also in respect to respect for one another's existence/opinion.

For instance, Apple, Dell, HP, IBM and others have the power to empower unemployed Americans using government-backed retraining/retooling to replace the supply chain stranglehold in China and build high-tech manufacturing expertise on this continent while China builds its domestic market and stops complaining about its currency pricefixing.  Tata Motors can compete globally.  Ireland can rebuild, one website at a time.  Baidu and Google can become partners rather than competitors.  And I can rest assured that our species has plans to train a new generation of space explorers.

After all, those of us with a view of the future already know what's going to happen - how we choose to freely participate in the moment is up to us because we know life takes first priority and everything else gets seconds.

See you at the spaceport soon!

Who Are Your Suppliers?

Exactly where in the supply chain process do you have control?  Innovation occurs at all steps of the process - do you empower your suppliers or dictate your demands to them?:

• Why Apple can't control its Chinese factories

Updated my website

I updated the website, http://www.treetrunkproductions.org/.  Today is too beautiful to spend much more time in front of the computer.  The Spring Equinox is here and outside is the place to be.  See you soon!

Many important issues this weekend, including basketball scores and government legislation to consider.  Tomorrow's the day to devote writing time to them.

REACH ISO14000 RoHS WEEE J-MOSS EWRA

Welcome to Acronym City, Knowledge Edition D - WACKED, for short.

Unless you know what the business community communicates via cryptic initial caps, you may miss the benefits you receive unknowingly.  For instance, is there any validity to the Erdős–Bacon number?  Is China RoHS better than EU RoHS?  When can you throw away batteries and when do you pay a fine for disposing of harmful chemicals?  Does IBM or HP have a better environmental standard?

I live inside and outside this moment.  I see the future as clearly as if I've lived in moments that haven't existed.  Time is like an XYZ/three-dimensional component of time, is it not?  We step forward, we mountaineers, and hike up onto steppes and plateaus, looking back in time to now in order to understand, to gain a perspective that takes away the wowness of the moment and tells us if our current discovery was significant or simply amazing.

I have ignored the Book of the Future lately because I've enjoyed surfing the bumps, curves and refreshing ocean spray of the moment.  But every surfer knows you can't ride the waves forever.  Eventually, the surf or the shore comes crashing up toward you at breakneck speed.  As a middle-aged man, I take longer to recover from crashes than when I was younger.  Muscle memory and joint pain make me lazy, all too glad to pause a little while at the keyboard before I wrap a strap around my ankle and paddle out for another look at life from atop a mini-tsunami.

Back to the Book of the Future.

Do you know what defines you?  Is it your genetic code?  Is it the constant birth and death of the cells in your body?  Is it the total environment, including other living beings in and around you?  Do you have any idea of the organisms with which you carry on a quasi-symbiotic relationship?  Do you know the organisms that are needed to exist to produce and share the organisms that live in and on you?

Do you know what you don't need to still be able to define you?  Is it your skin?  Your other sensory organs?  Your skeletal structure?  Your gastrointestinal system?  Your central nervous system?  Your cultural history?

If, instead of sensing heat, cold and nervous system "pain," you could sense cosmic radiation levels and ion drive propulsion efficiency, would you?

If, instead of planetary-based gravity as the focus for your movement, you had no "center" on which to comfortably lay down at night, would you continue to explore your "world" (which is now the complete universe, using gravitational fields like roller coaster rides)?

Could you see yourself completely retrained and rewired to concentrate on decades-long goals that meant your sense of time would stretch the definition of a "moment" to months or years, your thoughts no longer subconsciously tied to heartbeats and lung expansion/contraction?  Communication with others of your kind, instead of getting closer and closer via Internet time, would take place occasionally, with every one of you having to store "conversations" for weeks or months until you found another "person" with whom you could exchange new information?

Would you carry with you a set of raw material that you would use decades or thousands of years from now to construct new images of yourself that could reproduce themselves using material native to a newly-explored region of space?

If you can imagine yourself as such a "person," then can you put aside those regular, three-dimensional, mechanistic futures and see yourself in a whole new way that hasn't been imagined yet?  Can you see a self-aware version of yourself traveling through another dimension, squeezing between the surface tensions of two bubbles into a place where you're all alone as the first "person" to enter unexplored "territory" who may or may not be able to return to the world you thought you knew?

The Book of the Future tells many wonderful stories such as these.  Some of you have already written your names in these futures.  Some of your offspring and inventions have, too.

I wish I could be there with you but my fate I've already seen and so I know won't be traveling with most of you there.  I have something like 14,660 days left to enjoy this world as the comfortable writer I've become.  So, while many of you train yourselves to live centuries long with carefully-controlled diets and wise exercise programs, I will enjoy my fatty foods and beer tankards as a descendant of pioneer Ulster Scots on this day I choose to call St. Patrick's Day, when I spend more time celebrating wearing green (although I should more appropriately wear orange), dancing to Irish jigs and drinking alcohol than I do to any religious purpose for this day.

I might see some of you on a spaceship cruising around the Moon but that's probably as far as I'll get.  I envy those who have longer journeys and greater goals than my simple goal to get some of us living permanently off this globe.

I raise a toast: Here's to you until we meet again!

Crowning An Imperial Gallon

When you hang out your shingle as a telegraph operator, expect to read messages you can never repeat because no one would believe you.

Yesterday, as an instance.

I walked out to my '95 325i parked in the driveway and noted a special set of cat paw prints on the bonnet.  According to the cat paw print language, I was supposed to pick up a science-related magazine in the lobby of my dentist's office, wait for the signal I would receive in Morse code from the leg swings of another patient in the lobby and go to the sequence of page and paragraph numbers the Morse code would tell me.

Sure enough, the message in the magazine was there.  It told me that I was supposed to drive to the Dodge petrol station and get a message written in invisible ink on the back of the receipt printed at the pump.

Invisible ink?  Are you kidding?  Is this grade school again?

Wearing my special shades sold to me by a temporary employee of Wal-Mart who is a special agent for the shadow government we all know exists and doesn't exist (now you know why I keep telling you I do and don't exist), I held the receipt up to the sunlight and read the message.

Hot humping dog!  Turns out I had received a receipt with reddish-pink ink stains at Arby's from a teenage agent named Marisa and didn't even know it.  So, I dug through the garbage, found the Arby's receipt and read the message I was supposed to have read but missed.  Will at the Blue Plate had double-verified the message contents for me in his conversation with two lovely ladies at the table near my wife and me.

What did the original message say?

I was supposed to attend a secret rally meeting hidden within the student protests taking place in California that would have revealed who was behind the Taiwanese quake.  I went back through the seismic data from Taiwan, Missouri and Chile, as instructed, and plotted the discussion points for the secret rally meeting.

I hate all this duck-and-clover, cloak-and-dagger stuff.  I'm a simple country boy who was accidentally raised in the suburban labyrinth of commercialised subliminal messaging.  When can I retire from getting exposed to adverts meant for the disposable income kinder?

Anyway, the secret rally notes were published last night and delivered to me on a roll of toilet paper I bought several weeks ago at the dollar discount store that went out of business in January.  Yeah, when time and space no longer have any meaning, you get messages telegraphed to you anytimeanyplace.

Using my old analemmic sundial, I waited until the proper time this morning to see which part of the message I'm supposed to deliver to you right now.

Based on the ambient atmospheric conditions in a tiny Chinese village you've never heard of but will produce a great hero of a renewed warrior class, here is what I have for you:

Several groups are building an alliance, even though every individual group's aims would appear to make the groups archenemies of one another.  They are basing their joint goals on the fact the leader they have pointed their hatred toward is not completely a member of any one of their groups and thus an enemy of all of them.  But they are not after that leader.  Instead, that leader is merely a symbol they can point to that any agents or spies within their ranks will think they're after.  Ultimately, they have another goal - to incite an attack by the state and national militaries against several of their groups at once, thus proving that their anti-government message is real and attracting a flash mob to their cause.  The groups are encouraging "respectable" organisations - liberal, conservative, Greens, Socialist Democrats, Democratic Socialists, Republicans, Democrats, Proletarians, Communists, Labour, Tories, Sinn Féin, Theocratic, Christian, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, deist, atheist, naturalist, agnostic, agrarian, metropolitan, technopop, goth, apocalyptic, utopian - to spread fear and uncertainty so that any perceived negative action by the established governments anywhere in the world will solidify the alliance and unite them with others instantly.  The alliance has already sworn to secrecy members within local governments and of both military leadership and soldier classes, who have promised they will, when the time is right, push their military units into the milieu.

Do I believe any of this?  I imagine there are more than a few who do, based on what I've seen of those who are "testing" our government's defenses to figure out which police and military units they can get to react the most.  At the same time, I have a lot of friends who work for or in the military and I don't see them doing anything other than making a living and providing for their families, content to sit at home and watch TV, surf the Internet or play video games when not engaged in community activities associated with their family members.

However, I'm a telegraph operator.  I don't have to believe anything I see.  I just tap out the text no matter what it says and let everyone see what's going down the wire.

Today's a beautiful day.  Think I'll wash the car and erase the paw prints.  I don't want someone to think I do or do not support the messages written in dirt on my windscreen.  I'm just a regular taxpaying guy who's thinking about taking his shingle down before he reads something he's not prepared to know about.  All I ever wanted was to find a way to get our species off this planet and what I've found is that there are those who use my desire to their personal advantage, which distorts and takes away from our ability to establish space colonies.  If someone is taking away my dream, and not pointing to a plausible solution, to whom do I turn to help me fulfill it?  China?  Private space entrepreneurs?  If so, does that mean that those of us in the shadow government will finally decide to sell out the United States and completely break it into parts owned by more responsible governments and corporations, taking away any semblance of "power of the people" the Americans thought they had?

Good thing this is a fictional blog entry and not related to the real world, eh?  Or is it?  Only the shadow knows for sure - isn't that what another fictional tale said?  Would you recognise a software or hardware keyboard logger if you saw one?  Do you know who's going after and collecting valuable data on the customers of lobbyists?  Are you raising your children to be the next ice farmers on Earth's moon or are you preparing for Farmageddon, instead, when the corporations control all farms and all seed production and you have to register the window garden in your flat?

I'm a practical joker, a writer of funny "what if" short stories who takes all the snippets of conversation, all the illogical adverts, all the autobiographical nonsense we put out and weaves an inside-out, realistic model, if you know what you're looking at (behind the "at," as my English teacher would say).  We've moved from the dawning of the Age of Aquarius to the dawning of Viagra Agrarians.  Welcome to the new age that'll be old news before your third facelift has healed.

I'm taking a few days off from writing this blog.  Your life stories are interesting and even though I know I only exist in the context of social situations and my local environment, I'm taking some time away from you folks to let myself breathe fresh air and be me who is not me away from you for a while.

Men's Topaz Ring, Makes 12 Oz.

Did you ever study MORTIE, the organisation that doesn't exist?  Talk about fiction talking about fiction.

I have to make sure many of my encounters in life have a random feel to them.  Sure, I'm giving my cohorts the slip but I also like variety within the moment.  I get tired of looking at planning diaries telling me what to do next.

Today, I randomly ate lunch at Old Heidelberg Restaurant with family and friends, seeing Dr. Nixon and her family at a nearby table, which was the clue the server knew that triggered the delivery of a stack of CD-Rs (CD-R = computer compact disc that one can store data/music onto).

During the normal-looking exchange of birthday presents at our table, I let the server know which bag I would drop the discs into.  Before that, I had "accidentally" punched one server in front of a colleague of mine who was acting as a random customer.  He passed a note written on a sales receipt read by the cook who then told the hostess to inform a server to deliver my dinner plate to me with the CDs attached underneath.  She was only to hand the plate to me after I passed the phrase "Zigeunerschnitzel" and then I would receive a dish covered in white cream sauce that told me the CDs were actually fake and I was to leave them under another "random" seat at the Monaco Theatre matinee showing of "Crazy Heart."

The actual data delivered to me was stuffed into a strip of red pepper that I "swallowed"; that is, I bit into the pepper, felt the USB drive inside, tucked it into a place between my teeth and gums and ate the rest of the meal until I wiped my lips with the napkin and spit the USB drive into a fold of the napkin.

I slipped the USB drive into my coat sleeve as I put the coat on and then dropped the USB drive between a cushion and arm of a stuffed chair at the Chocolate Crocodile that will be vacuumed by a "random" employee there.  The next morning, another "random" worker will empty the contents of the vacuum cleaner and pass the USB drive to a "random" customer first thing in the morning.

Or so I was told to lead you to believe by the bald guy sitting across the room from me who used the old folding napkin semaphore messaging system taught to me during a college miniterm in Writing Spy Fiction, given by a hackneyed Russian comedian who was going into a new line of work, jokes disguised as collegiate-level mathematical philosophy.

In fact, the data was written in some oil stains on the carpark surface that held microfilm which my shoes picked up and I am now analysing while typing this blog entry.

Old-school tech still serves us well in the business.  Just like we know that e-book theft is rising, we know that e-theft in general dominates both the teenage life and the underground (and commonly both).  E-data is meant to be stolen so why confuse those of us in the business about what is and what is not supposed to "stolen"?

Meanwhile, muscular thugs with nothing better to do are performing old school tactics of their own to convert some indebted middle class families into workers for "the cause."  I keep trying to tell these out-of-work, over-the-hill female roller derby gals to lay off the violence but they like to stay in shape.  Besides, they tell me, intimidation gives their skin a special glow they can't get anywhere else.  They think the Stanley Cup will reflect their personalities beautifully [blatant free (not blatant-free) advert inserted here: "the Stanley Cup is slated to make an appearance at the Alabama-Huntsville-Bemidji State "National Defense Night" hockey game on March 5th at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville"]!

I'll take data however it was derived or extracted.  I'm neutral, as you know.  If the church women's circle or the longshorewomen want to bring me information at their discretion, I'll nod, smile and be the delivery boy for the rest of the network processing possible future outcomes, incomes, outgoes or delicious takeaway.

Did you know a group of scientists has shown that large quantities of bacteria, large numbers of giant squid and other massive movements of biological substances can change the ocean currents?  Did you also know that cruise ships have been known to dump their trash at sea?  Well, now we know a little more about the future, don't we?

I've just about got the hackers off on a wild goose feather lasercut design contest and off my back which means I'll have time to put together the backup version of the "totally awesome, for sure, yes" scenario I promised you, the original version having been shredded by a four-year old who had rewired her father's electronics outlet store into a giant hackbot and figured out how to get into the supercomputer network stored in duplicate underground bunkers located in Los Alamos, Las Vegas, Huntsville, Oak Ridge and Lake Buena Vista.  Thank goodness she didn't know what she found and thus just rearranged the words and numbers in the files, turning them into a baby's nursery rhyme as a joke.

Yesterday, while enjoying cocoa/vanilla delicacies at the Huntsville Botanical Garden with the rest of the area's chocoholics, I saw some old friends, including a trumpet player and the guy who used to work for the Chases, and some new friends, including a drummer and a woman who told me, "Is it just me or is it getting hot in here," after she introduced me to her husband.  Made our afternoon meal at Wintzell's more enjoyable because James used his quick decisiveness to fix the confused kitchen crew and brought me hot Southern cheese grits with crawdad sauce.

You don't know who I am.  I don't know who I am.  I am unimportant.  I have nothing up my sleeve that you can see or use.  I am simply the messenger.

But data is power.  The more data you move, the more powerful you are.  Money is a symptom, not the cause.  Don't confuse wealth with power.  Don't confuse electricity with power.

I have told you over and over (and told you "over and over" over and over) - the key phrase here is "states of energy."  Focus on those facts alone and you will be able to say "yes" without hesitation.  You are but states of energy.  The quicker you change those states of energy, the more power flows through you and the easier you say "yes" every time the question pops up.

That's all I can share with you right now.  My supercomputer is overheating while rebuilding the "what if the species could say 'yes' even while thinking of mooning green cheese" scenario so I've got to shovel some buckets of dry ice to cool it down.  I told the team members who wanted to build cool gaming machines with overclocked CPUs that I'd need the computers when the time came and to have their übercomputers supercooled but they have spent too much time installing their lightshows to finish the simple instructions I gave them.  Watercooled is all I asked for, not retro rocketcar radiator tubing a third of them have half-installed!

To the double-head-swing woman in line at the Marriott job fair, I wish I had more time.  Same time, next time, perhaps?  Same signal, too.

Splintered Fractions

Belgian Framboise Lambic Beer.  How many beers (pardon me, "malt beverages") have you uncorked in your lifetime?  Stop in Vlezenbeek, Belgium, and find out why you should know the answer to the question, "Are there any connections between a chunk of ice no longer pressing down on a piece of land and a tectonic plate floating loose over a bed of magma?"

No statistical evidence for the power of prayer, yet we still gather together in rooms and beg our gods for favours.

I don't want a scoop of ice cream but I want to hear the "Bananas" song where they chop nuts on frozen slabs of marble, don't you?

If I only didn't know what lonely me knows.  Prayer is not the answer - action-based responses to prayers, where time and place do not matter, matter.  What's the matter, batter?  Don't you know how to swing that bat?

Glad I know who I am not, at this moment.  Aren't you glad I don't take myself seriously?  Otherwise...ho ho ho...I wouldn't sit here with quill in hand.  I'd gather all of you up and line you against that wall over there, next to that newly-dug ditch, and ask every one of you singly, "Are you going to do what I told you you are meant to do right now or do I have to get you to fill that ditch back up one more time?"  Then I'd hand you a shovel so you can scoop up all the self deception and false fronts pouring out of your mouths and patch over that ditch you dug in your previous moment against the wall that you don't remember because I can erase your memory at will.

But I'm not like that.  I'm a nice guy.  I don't hold mirrors up to you because I believe all of us deserve the right to live however we wish, including hidden behind our rose-coloured glasses that make the world look like a bottle of raspberry beer.

Drink up!

For the rest of you, those who know what's going to happen next, you have the chance to answer the question for the first time in your life.  You can say "yes" or "no."  Any hesitation or reasoning/excuses will automatically count as "no."  This is not a question about your afterlife, your soul, your moral/ethical standing in your thoughts or in your community, or your favourite child you think you're going to protect.  This is only about you.

Keep in mind, every one of you is the most important person (set of states of energy) in the universe at this moment in time.  No one else exists in this moment.  [In fact, you don't exist, but for this question it's easier to think of yourself as existing so you can momentarily accept a personalised, anthropomorphic request.]

Remember, I'm not the one who will ask you the question.  I am just here to serve as an easy-to-read signpost to point the way.  I am pretending to serve as a representative of the arrow of time, for those who understand theoretical physics (and the arrow of time is truly a theory but one that will make sense to many of you who like to see through mathematical lenses).

The question will appear once and only once.  It will not be posed to you as a question, but if you are quietly listening to yourself and not the demands of the artificial world around you, you will sense the moment when what seems like a question will be asked of you.  You will know when you answered the question (or rather, you will know when your response was "no").

Once in a very long while, there appears a period of time when the whole population gets to answer this question again.  That's right.  Even those who have already responded in the negative get to reconsider their answer and hear the question one more time.  How long is a "very long while"?  I don't know.  I have no concept of time.  I do not exist.  I am inside and outside the concept of time, neither quantifiable nor infinite. 

All I know is all I know and all I know is that the whole population can reset itself simultaneously.  Of course, this has never happened.  Some say it will never happen, that our universe is composed of variations on a theme in everything that constitutes the universe.  In other words, sameness can exist but it doesn't happen.  No two planets, no two suns, no two people are exactly alike.

Therefore, I can assure you many of you will say "no" and go on being you.  When you do, feel secure that most of the people around you probably did the same thing.  You will live the rest of your life just as you probably would have had you not heard and answered the question.  The universe will not end because you said "no."

For the slim possibility all of you said "yes" and proved that the universe does have its comic, uncharacteristic moments, let me show you a possible future.

As you know, this has never happened before, so to show you this future I had to borrow a lot of extra computer cycles to generate or simulate a whole species' thought patterns reaching the same conclusion within a narrow space of time.

I burned out a lot of processors and made more than a few computer programmers and IT maintenance engineers angry while they repaired their machines.  No, you don't have to thank me for going above and beyond the call of duty.  I enjoyed the looks on the faces of those folks while they figured out how an ol' country boy like me could have hacked the hackers.

Wait a minute...what's this?  The programmers are trying to access my system and erase the scenario I'm about to show you.  Okay, I can play this game back.  Pardon me while I set in motion a series of counterattacks to their countercounterattacks and come back to you later on.  I have a safe copy of the species-wide "yes" scenario stored across a number of secure locations, including keypad entry locks for houses and automobiles, air traffic control towers, a few UAVs circling overhead and in some garage door openers, too (they make some really small UAVs these days), but it'll take a while to reconstruct the scenario if I lose this hackerfest tonight.  Until tomorrow!  May the best beer-guzzling g33k wannabe win!

The High Sunbird One Certainty Principle

Another day, a new song.  Today, let us enjoy the weather - sun, wind, storm, calm - because, regardless of our conditions, we're here to sense Earth's changes around us.

I am receiving many requests to air grievances and have honoured my commitment to give voice to those who truly grieve.  I have activated some passive voices.  I have tried to calm passive-aggressive attitudes.  I am and I have.

But I am not and I need not have.  Thus, I will discontinue the current line of satirical notes, ignoring the momentary bits of humour I recorded over the past few days...well, just one more:

• According to some esteemed colleagues of mine, an obscure sociologist has developed a formula that applies the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle to the patterns generated by mobile phones and other trackable devices (GPS, etc.).  My colleagues then obtained mobile phone data, iTunes song buying data (which shows, for example, a sudden rise in an artist's sales often points to people attending an artist's public performance), social networking site location tracking data and face/voice print analysis data (from phones, webcams, etc.) - with this data, they tested the formula's accuracy.  The formula works.  Now the formula is part of the realtime "Sims" superprogram we use to predict people's occasional diversions from their daily habits.  Of course, we're tempted to sell this formula to corporations so they can refine their marketing campaigns to sell products and politicians alike.  Curious as to how it applies to my colleagues and me, we reran a simulation we'd ignored a few months ago.  Turns out it predicted us receiving the formula six thousand years.  Sure enough, we've already been using this formula for a while and just didn't realize it was embedded in the mix of subcultures that have come and gone over the centuries.  Four-dimensional modeling - if we only knew what we already knew, we'd save ourselves a lot of time! [as an experiment, I switched to Anapod Explorer instead of iTunes to see what effect removing a single person's tracking data causes - more as I get a clearer picture]

For those of you on a hunger strike this week, have you thought about the food you would have eaten?  What about the money you would have spent or the barter you would have exchanged?  Do you see the power of commerce?  What can you do with that power?  How about sharing your "bounty" with others?  At least that's the lesson I learned by starving myself this week, losing eight pounds in four days (down from 240 to 222 so far this year).  If I can live on less, why not share with others who may or may not provide useful contributions to society?

I appreciate all the input you have given me recently.  The trends you showed me told me that we have many long hard years ahead of us to heal our social ills and illnesses.  Based on what I've seen, I'm going back to my focus on curable social diseases rather than the chronic phantom pains that others want you to believe they can cure.  Most of what bothers us can be fixed with giving each other the little bit of attention we regularly need and that, I have seen, is easy, as long as we cycle through recognition of every subculture on a periodic basis, adding or removing subcultures as they rise and fade in popularity.

So, back to my simple tasks, such as working with those of you who want to figure out the form we want to take as our representatives who move into permanent living quarters off this planet.

Metaphors and similes - like and as we will be, eh?

Let's remember that change causes pain and we deal with the pain while we grow with the change.  Two steps forward and one step back.  Some of us will have to help those who falter or fall backward, while others keep the standard moving onward.  See us as one people, like a flowing river or a tidal pool, and you see all.

A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Technology

Met a bunch of good locals at the pub last night.  They were joking about my blog, remembering when I was just a snotty punk on the playground, and asking why I hadn't used any of their stuff here.  Well, y'all, here's a few of your ideas from last night:

JOE THE PLUMBER'S DICTIONARY DEFINITION

Gardenification - noun (or that's what we were taught to say in school):

1. A false sense of security, like piling rocks around your yard to keep out snails and deer, caint work for both
2. A false sense of security, like a large military force that can't prevent economic/cybersecurity losses

Hoovobamerville - verb (see noun above):

1. Having your livelihood sucked out from underneath you. (example: "I heard you lost your job."  "Yeah, I got hoovobamervilled by The Man.")

Hoovobamerville - noun (see verb reference to noun above):

1. A gathering of regular, unemployed folks who've set up residences in abandoned subdivisions
2. A self-declared, tax-free, mortgage-free, rent-free, utilities-free area that includes folks and their places in definition number 1, where out-of-work technology workers (following the recent example of Israel) create false identification papers for the new class of the permanently unemployed for these areas in which they live (following the example of Soweto); newborns will be registered in the name of the new townships, not the so-called countries in which their parents were abandoned by authorities who only catered to the rich and powerful

Textduping - noun or verb, we couldn't decide

1. Seeing someone in public watching you, obviously listening to your conversation while texting, so you and your companions make up false stories that the texter passes on unknowingly (example: "Honey, what do you think of my new blouse?  Does it make me look fat?"  "Wife, you know me.  I only have three requirements when it comes to clothes - 'One, show up naked, two, in bed, three, with beer.'" "Honey, are you serious or are you textduping that girl looking at us?")

Bobduping - same as textduping above

1. Thinking you're electing a member of your own party who crosses party lines because his American Idol daughter wants more time in the limelight and hopes her whole family becomes reality TV stars, taking over CSPAN as the next Presidential family like "The Truman Show" or "EdTV" (and hopefully a little latenight "Girls Next Door" for the non do-gooder/churchy crowd)

= = =

While I do not agree with many of the definitions you gave me, I had and still get a good chuckle out of your sense of humour.  I couldn't remember your exact term or definition for the false scare governments use when shouting words like "SARS" or "deadly, heinous flu virus" so maybe next time you can remind me at our weekly darts and draughts game.

= = =

I checked on the tip a reader gave me who wrote me about the government's secret testing of DNA on all money exchanging hands in Morristown, Tennessee, USA, which pointed to who was being paid cash for work and not paying taxes but instead using the money to buy drugs or send money orders to family in other countries.  My inside source tells me several bureaucracies are coordinating their efforts to gather evidence and sweep up whole sections of the town for illegal activity, thus setting a precedent for the rest of the country.  Right now, they're developing a marketing plan to sell the idea of internment camps so that they look like drug rehabilitation centers.  More as I receive details on this matter.  Also, I'll let you know that a few bureaucracies are opposed to this idea because they know the money being sent to other countries helps stabilise the economies of the bordering countries, which creates a nonmilitarised buffer zone while this country continues to overextend its military reach.

In the maritime, a network of naval vessels has been identified as the source of cyberattacks.  Turns out yet-to-be-identified monetary sources have funded centrally-planned training exercises that include farming out tiny computer code development to both people and cyberbots so that no one person or zombie machine can understand/show what is really going on.  The purposes of these exercises vary from gaining military secrets to getting "dirt" on adversaries in all walks of life so that large-scale population manipulation can be accomplished at the macro- and microscale simultaneously.  Schoolchildren's homework exercises and automechanic training manuals have been linked together in this massive scheme.

Experts are stumped - how to stop this complete infiltration of life as we know it without causing total chaos?  How many people's new hybrid vehicles are now working for this underground cyberattack network?  Are smartphones involved?  What about artificial limbs?  Home wireless networks?  Coffee shop WiFi links?  Your dog's embedded ID chip?  People want to know!  I can't tell you how many of my well-educated readers are hounding me for more information about this new revelation.

To be honest, there's a shakedown going on inside my own loose network of associates (or "solo operatives," for those who like spylike terminology).  We work for no one and know we pass information inertly, which means we feed predators and prey alike.  Our greater goals have no time limit and have waxed and waned with the vagaries of fashion, fame, and fortunes of our peoples.  Every generation of our associates faces this dilemma - how strongly do we nudge us along?  Since defeat and setback is only a historical perspective and not fact, what do we do about those who've put new technology to use on the global population (use, I might add, that hinders our greater goals, at least temporarily)?

As always, an afternoon of meditation will reveal which parts of the Book of the Future I should next record for your reading entertainment.  Until next time, random readers!

Cedars Falling On Snow

So, here I am again.  And wow, if you only knew where I'd been in the last 12 hours!

Like I say, I don't know much.  I make up the difference between knowledge and intuition by staying in touch with you.

But who are you?

Are you the little elderly lady at the end of the street who has seen less than me but knows more?

Are you the E3, "yes sir," Army soldier just starting your career in the military?

Are you the surgeon who's winding up a career serving on hospital boards throughout the world?

In this case, you're the group of scientists who have figured out how to transfer a person's "personality" from one body to another.  You might call it the ultimate mind trip.

How they do those things they do.  What if your name was Khan?  What if your name was Chow?  What if your name was Linda?  And then what if you had all those names in a span of a few hours?

I'm a writer, right?  Isn't that what I think I am?  Or Who I Was Supposed To Be?

Could I have ever believed my dreams of that childhood story about Merlin transforming Arthur into various animal bodies would come true in the form of changing from one person's body to another?

Honestly, no.  Always hopefully, yes.

And now I understand why some engineers and scientists, friends of mine, have been telling me not to get excited about sending people into space exploration.  Why?  Because we're justthisclose to transferring people's personalities into machines that can safely travel through solar wind and cosmic radiation.

The past few hours were amazing.  <== such a bland sentence, I know, but let me enjoy the memories for a while before I describe them.

It started with a series of brain scans.  Then it led to understanding how to read individual sets of synapses.  From that, experiments were successfully completed in showing one animal's memory set - its personality, if you will - could be "programmed" into the brain/body of a cloned version.  From cloned bodies to twins and then from twins to different species and finally to person-to-person.

To have yourself and that of another person in your thoughts at the same time!  Absolutely incredible!  To carry your thoughts, and those of others with you into another body.  Why, we're justthismuchcloser to having one social body, aren't we?  Get everyone used to the Internet and then BAM! move on to "mind melds," to borrow from science fiction.

You need not be assimilated.  It's already done, some say.  Well, they're right and they're wrong.  Social integration is NOTHING like thought integration.  To have Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin playing referee in your thoughts while your synaptic simulations of Yao Ming and Shaq play ping-pong against Peyton Manning and Margaret Thatcher.  Now that's entertainment!

I never knew that bodies felt skin itches in different ways.  Curious...