"I can’t tell you how," blogs the Con Man, "and I can’t tell you why, and I can’t tell you where, but I can tell you that I spent an exceedingly comfortable evening having cocktails in the company of the American military-industrial complex, the one that President Dwight David Eisenhower warned about in his farewell Presidential address in 1960.You would be hard-pressed to find a more agreeable, interconnected group from all professions, from all over the world. There were academics and former military officers, policy wonks and journalists, and men and women who know statecraft from every angle. There were those who either buy military hardware—or sell it around the world—with everyone from every possible angle all assembled in one room fifty years after the President’s speech.
In an Aspen conference dedicated to new technology, what was all the buzz at Cache Cache? "Flipboard takes the e-magazine concept to the next level. Imagine integrating your Facebook and Twitter accounts into a virtual magazine tailored to your own personal tastes and interests. Facebook no longer looks like a website on Flipboard. The app effectively turns your Facebook feeds into a magazine. Using your fingers you can flip through Facebook as if you were reading Fortune or Fast Company. When you see something you like you can easily tweet or re-Facebook any item."
"Maybe you’ve heard of this Facebook thing," blogs the Con Man, "and maybe you’ve seen the Facebook user profile that asks everyone to fill in the blanks when it comes to their political views. People say all sorts of things. (One favorite: 'Don’t get me started….') But by the hundreds, and presumably by the thousands and millions, one Facebooker after another is describing themselves as 'liberals.' Not once have I seen anyone say they are 'progressive.'
All I can say is shut my mouth. Words matter, and in the world of American politics the word “liberal” has become a pejorative. Talk shows and politicians have lately become so progressive they are terrified of having their names and the word liberal lumped together in the same sentence. I now refer to 'Con Games,' my talk show in Aspen, as 'the last of the liberal talk shows.'”
I can’t tell you how, and I can’t tell you how, and I can’t tell you where, but I can tell you that I spent an exceedingly comfortable evening having cocktails in the company of the American military-industrial complex, the one that President Dwight David Eisenhower warned about in his farewell Presidential address in 1960.
Continue Reading 2 comments August 5th, 2010
Maybe you’ve heard of this Facebook thing, and maybe you’ve seen the Facebook user profile that asks everyone to fill in the blanks when it comes to their political views.
People say all sorts of things. (One favorite: “Don’t get me started….”) But by the hundreds, and presumably by the thousands and millions, one Facebooker after another is describing themselves as “liberals.”
Not once have I seen anyone say they are “progressive.”
All I can say is shut my mouth.
Continue Reading Add comment July 16th, 2010
The virtual world can get a little too real some days, and one of those days came last week when a couple I know—one-half of the couple to be precise—declared their marriage to be over.
In public. On Facebook. For all the world to see.
I saw the husband just yesterday—my sympathies are with him—he looked for all the world like someone had just thwacked him with a two-by-four upside his face, a public humiliation so swift there was no time to respond. Suddenly, everyone in the world knew the worst had happened—because of her—and there was not a damn thing he could do about it ever.
He had been Facebooked.
Continue Reading Add comment May 11th, 2010
I once met a bigshot from Google who had decided, as bigshots so often do, that the rules of decorum no longer applied to his kind. In this case that meant Mr. Big decided that he no longer need to bother with capital letters in his emails.
Why? For the obvious reason: creating a capital letter requires an extra step, the ultimately unhip pressing of the shift key.
It struck me at the time as a seismic shift. If the bigshot at Google was no longer capitalizing “google,” could the end of civilization be that far behind? Like everyone else I have watched as texting on cell phones became its own language: wtf, where r u ? is not a bad starting point for this discussion, but to see the means of communications changing was not to know what it all meant.
Continue Reading Add comment February 4th, 2010
The mutually orgasmic chortle of the cognoscenti missed the point about the announcement of the Apple iPad by a citified mile because a preponderance of yappers were obsessed with where said tablet fell in the pluperfect Apple pantheon of digital inamorata.
Was it cellphone or laptop? Would it set the Kindle aflame? Would it render all that had come before pale paleocentric imitations of what was meant to be?
Or is it just a beloved billing mechanism that newspapers, magazines, and movie-makers have been looking for since Indiana Jones found the Holy Grail?
In the rush to slobber over one’s self, the real point of the iPad was either missed or dismissed in a whiff of epic proportions.
Continue Reading Add comment January 31st, 2010
Darwin’s restaurant was packed, so we went next door the day after Christmas for the next form of evolution: James Cameron’s “Avatar,” albeit in 2-D, the standard stuff that fills screens to bursting and the stadium seating to capacity. Instead of plush, lush 3-D, we ended up in one of the end-of-civilization screens the Bow-Tie Cinemas keep alive at the frontier outpost of El Jebel, Colorado.
All in all, in other words, the worst possible set-up for a movie set up to break the glass ceiling of film with three-dimensional computer-generated movie-making. Even so, with the deck stacked against it, “Avatar” was much better than good: Cameron—he of “Terminator,” “Aliens,” and “Titanic” fame—has now set the bar so high that Stephen Spielberg and George Lucas will spend the rest of their careers trying to reach the planet Pandora, home to foxy and fierce nine-foot, blue-skinned babes with tails who know how to mate, bro.
Continue Reading Add comment December 27th, 2009
Okay, it’s official: the bound and tattered book is dead.
For me at least.
Continue Reading 4 comments May 22nd, 2009
No I am not kiddin' ya. Pluto and some selected Kuiper Belt Objects and possibly some Oort Cloud objects should be considered planets. Here is why. First some of the variables to consider; mass, orbital divergence from the plane of the ecliptic (remnants of the solar disk are generally found here), whether there is a solar orbit, composition, and temperature.
Why is mass imprtant? With enough mass, there is what is called hydrostatic equilibrium. There is enough gravity to overcome structural rigidity to form a fairly spherical body, subject to inertial deformation from rotation. Simple enough, the possible planet should be ball like in shape.
Continue Reading 1 comment April 15th, 2009
I have just gone online searching for “multimedia novel” and “online fiction” and can’t find anything that remotely approaches what I’m trying to do, though I did see a novel on a T-shirt and a mobile phone (no kidding) and plenty of online short stories and novels. For some reason I’ve had no fear that I was missing anything for fifteen years and now I have an idea why: the concept is overwhelmingly difficult (see above) and there’s no money in it. So lots of luck to anyone who tries it.
I finally figure out “hypertext” seems to be the active phrase these days. (Note the word “text” betraying historical origins in print.) The “hypertext” entry from Wikipedia, circa today...
Continue Reading Add comment March 26th, 2009
A few more thoughts on complexity: i.e. complexity in the Supernovel can get complicated. Think about how different the whole deal is from writing a book:
n Morphing of text into hypertext.
n Inclusion of all things digital.
n Literal appropriation of source material, sometimes in toto.
n Incorporation of “found objects.”
n Importance of contributors and contributed material.
n Idea of the unfinished symphony.
n The author who becomes an “originator” and no longer has complete control.
Milan Kundera likes to say the novelist must discover what only the novel can discover—but that was then, but the so-called Supernovelist has the same job albeit with a toolkit that just went from a putty knife to a chain saw with all the attachments.
Continue Reading Add comment March 9th, 2009
