I finally watched “Who Killed The Electric Car?” and thought it was great. I actually couldn’t watch it through in one sitting. I became so depressed at how corrupt business is in terms of putting profits ahead of innovation. We have this perception that the technology we use is the latest and greatest but it’s not uncommon for us to be sold something out of date or known to be harmful even, because of the money that’s already been invested in it. Just yesterday I was talking to a group of programmers about Microsoft’s answer to Flash, Silverlight. This group thought it was crap and shared stories about Microsoft bribing programmers to use it and hiring agencies to develop projects with it so they can sell it and compete with Adobe. Sony’s pushed their Blu-Ray technology for years, forcing companies they work with to use it, despite a lack of interest because they can’t afford to abandon it. (Oh, ha! WKTEC is distributed by Sony!)
By the same token, the auto technology available to the consumer is light years behind what is possible, and what’s already been developed. The auto companies produced an electric car because a California zero-emissions law forced them to but they simultaneously sued the state and had the law repealed. After that, they collected the cars on lease – as they’d never let anyone actually buy them – and destroyed them. They were whisper quiet, went zero to sixty in three seconds, were completely clean inside and out and required very little maintenance but they threatened an infrastructure dependent on fueling and maintaining combustion engines.
It made me wonder how much different city living would be without all the noise of the cars on the road. I remember when I was unemployed, having to turn the TV up almost twice as loud in the daytime to hear it over the din of cars and buses outside. We build huge walls along the sides of freeways to block homeowners from the roar of traffic but they are only partially effective. Have you ever had a conference call with someone in a car? They have to mute their phone so as not drown out everyone else on the line!
And then there’s the obvious benefit of the lack of pollution spewing out the back of every single one of these things on the road - nineteen pounds of CO2 for ever gallon of gas! I find it ironic that it was so easy to get public support for the smoking ban, even in places like New York and London where I never thought it would happen. True, it took a long time for the public to be convinced of the dangers of cigarette smoke but once convinced, it wasn’t difficult to make the argument that we shouldn’t all be subjected to it. We’ve known for decades that smog is a worse culprit of respiratory disease than smoke and causes a long list of ailments to humans and the environment. You can see it, you can smell it and yet we keep driving cars as if they aren’t making our children’s lungs look like they belong to a veteran smoker.
The car companies say that people want big cars and don’t care enough about the environment to drive a smaller car. My dad never misses a chance to tell me that the hybrids don’t save enough gas to pay for the extra cost of the car. But I don’t believe that people don’t care, I think they just haven’t been given the choice. I flew into New York yesterday just before sunset. The sky was beautiful but laying on the city was a thick black blanket of smog so heavy you could only make out the silhouettes of buildings, but nothing on the ground. It was sickening, worse than any smog I’ve seen in Los Angeles. I just don’t believe that I’m the only one who sees it and the only one who thinks it’s disgusting. We’re ready for the change!
Friday, November 30, 2007
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Hotel Michelle
I forgot to say in my post about the kitties what an inspiration Michelle was. It's easy to write off someone like her, who calls the kitties she helps her "kids," as a crazy cat lady. But she was one of the sweetest people I've ever met. Tirelessly dedicated to helping the cats of San Francisco, she calls her garage "Hotel Michelle."
There were a half dozen cats there when I visited, each in various stages of recovery from surgery or medical treatment. They all have their own cage with food and water and newspaper, and lovingly looked after by Michelle. She works full-time, owns a condo and spends all of her free time helping people like me (although in fairness, I was more dedicated in my quest than even the average person.)
Clover, the name the shelter gave momma cat, is up for adoption now and she is a cute little thing! The San Francisco SPCA is one of the best, a no-kill shelter with volunteers who keep the animals company and spend their weekends trying to get them adopted. If you need a kitty pay them a visit!
There were a half dozen cats there when I visited, each in various stages of recovery from surgery or medical treatment. They all have their own cage with food and water and newspaper, and lovingly looked after by Michelle. She works full-time, owns a condo and spends all of her free time helping people like me (although in fairness, I was more dedicated in my quest than even the average person.)
Clover, the name the shelter gave momma cat, is up for adoption now and she is a cute little thing! The San Francisco SPCA is one of the best, a no-kill shelter with volunteers who keep the animals company and spend their weekends trying to get them adopted. If you need a kitty pay them a visit!
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Inner city kitties (the saga ends)
Saturday, October 27
I'm sitting at my computer drinking coffee when I hear a little mewing outside my house. I run to the window hoping to see a cute kitty who had come to visit, but expecting to find a piece of rusted metal squeaking in the wind, tempting me with its sweet sound and the promise of a fluffy animal in my paws. To my surprise, I found a momma cat and three tiny kittens. Determined to rescue these animals from cold, hunger and the back alleys of San Francisco, I call the city to see how to scoop them up and bring them in. They tell me that I have to rent traps and it could take several days and then I have to bring them in, all in separate cages. I start thinking of the logistics of catching four cats, renting cages, driving them somewhere and returning the cages, when I'm only home on the weekends and have a big trip coming up. I buy food and feed momma cat.
Sunday, October 28
I do more research on strays and the various options available. The SPCA says they have volunteers that can help. I leave a message.
Wednesday, October 31
I have to go to New York, early in the a.m. and won't be back until Monday night. I've been leaving food out for momma cat but am worried about them while I'm gone.
Monday, November 5
I was so worried that these kitties would have grown up and jumped over the fence while I was gone and wondered how the heck I was going to have time to capture them. I couldn't do anything until the weekend. I call and leave another message with the SPCA.
Tuesday, November 6
I keep feeding mom and eventually am able to pat her head and pet her a little. She's totally adorable, a little black and white kitty with a tail that curls alongside her and gets all animated when I pet her. I feed her up on the deck by my house, training her to get closer to me in anticipation of eventually trapping her and getting her spayed. The kittens still run when they see me and hide in the basement.
Wednesday, November 7
I hear back from someone at the SPCA that I need to get traps, etc. I leave another message imploring them to send me a volunteer, "I can't do this alone!" I say. Momma cat comes back over, she even comes in my house. She seems to want to be adopted. She's still nursing the kittens but definitely weaning them as she walks away a lot while they're feeding.
Thursday, November 8
Finally a woman named Michelle called. She's a volunteer with the SPCA and lives only a few blocks from my house. She arranged to meet me at my house that Saturday morning. She said we should start early, at the time I've seen them out there, which is usually around 6:30am.
Friday, November 9
I've become used to this routine of coming home and looking out my window to see the kitty. She looks up at me through the window and the kittens play in a little patch of dirt, wrestling and fighting each other.
Saturday, November 10
I make a big pot of coffee and Michelle arrives at 6:30am with three humane traps, towels and food. The kittens are nowhere to be seen but don't usually come out until mom does. Within an hour or so, mama cat came around looking for food. I didn't see the kittens but figured we should get started. I coax her into the trap and bingo! This was going to be easy.
Now there were the kittens, hiding in the basement. We set the trap with food in the doorway of the basement and I made meowing sounds to draw them out. I had to try a variety of places and configurations for the trap. I lined it with a bit of rug that I had put out weeks before for the family to sleep on. The brave one that usually scouts ahead of the two others came out looking for mom but saw me and ran back into the basement and past the trap again where curiosity got the better of this cat and it went in. Snap! Another one caught.
Next up, the timid duo. We set up the last trap in the same place and I again coaxed the cats with meowing (and had no idea at the time that this is something I would spend several nights doing). They came right out, side-by-side, but instead of going in the trap, wandered around it, crawling on top of it at. It was like they smelled the food but couldn't figure out how to get it. They mewed and mewed for mom. At the moment they caught a glimpse of a human they dashed back into the basement. This went on for a couple more hours, trying the trap in various places and meowing to beckon. Eventually, we gave up and decided to try again tomorrow. I was feeling pretty good though, this cat trapping thing was going to be easy.
Sunday, November 11
The next morning, Michelle and I were up early again. I tried the trap in a bunch of places, eventually putting it between the basement door and the outside, barricaded so that it's the only place to go. I do my cat crying bit and after a few tries they come out, SNAP! something goes into the trap. We check and it's only one, the braver of the two. I'm pretty sure they were together and now I'm thinking the runt is all alone and knows that a trap is not something to go into. We try the same trick with her but closer to the area of the basement where she's hiding. She won't come out at all. Michelle goes home and brings mom back and we try to use mom to coax her out. No such luck. Mom just gets stressed out hearing her kitten cry. I crawl into this dark cramped place covered in cobwebs to find her. Turns out she's in the wall, under the building, no where that I can go. We leave food out for her and give up for the day.
Monday, November 12
The next morning, the food looks untouched and I'm worried that the kitten is never coming out and doesn't even know how to eat. Michelle checks with someone that adopts kittens, shows her the other two and determines that they're old enough to eat food.
That night I saw the kitten in the backyard. I sneak downstairs and close the basement door. At least now it couldn't go into the walls, and I figure it will be easier to catch in the backyard. I hear it crying in the bamboo so I go in there and search every inch. Nothing, but I still hear the crying. I call Michelle and she comes over to help. We both, with flashlights, crawl around in the bamboo. We shake the stalks, we dig up leaves, we overturn everything. I chop half of the bamboo down out of sheer insanity. Then, I saw a small opening under the cement slab of the deck. We look in the hole and the kitten is crammed in there holding perfectly still like we won't see it. Michelle puts her hand in there to grab it and moments later it's gone. I have no idea where that goes but a few minutes later I hear crying up on the deck! I sneak up there and see it, nestled in between the cactus plants my neighbor grows - he literally has a hundred. I reach slowly, not wanting to startle her but then boing! she springs over to the wall separating us from the Salvation Army center next door. She runs along the wall, through a chain link fence and she's gone!
Tuesday, November 13
On the bus that morning, I cried thinking about that poor little kitty, gone from the safety of her birthplace, without her family, and no one to feed her.
When I get home from work, my neighbors are all out on the back deck. The kitten is next door in the parking lot the Salvation Army uses for donated cars. My neighbor Joe went over before they closed and left a dish of food out for the kitten. It's locked in now and crying its little guts out. It sounds like some poor animal is being tortured. The kitty is close to the fence so I imagine that it wants to get back to my yard, to look for its mom, but just doesn't know how. I call Michelle and she comes over, we survey the situation and decide to tackle it in the morning. I know there are guys over there in the morning when I get ready so we make a plan to go over there at 6am and ask if we can come in to catch the kitty.
When I get back to my place, Joe has shown me that if he pushes on the chain link fence, there's a way I can drop down over the wall and squeeze into the parking lot. I take a flashlight and spend the next hour chasing the crying cat all over the place. It's like a bad video game, "catch the crying kitty!" as it sneaks from car to car and I chase it with the help of my two neighbors with flashlights. "She's under the Volvo!" "Over here under the grey car!" "Now she's over by the boat" I finally give up and leave food, water and a set up of milk crates designed to help her get over the fence and into our yard.
Wednesday, November 14
Michelle gets another volunteer to help with the cat and I go to work. She reports later in the day that the kitten has now descended into the area when the trucks load and unload donations. She's deep into a pile of stuff and can't be retrieved. We're both worried that she isn't going to make it. We've never seen her eat food and she's been scared for several days now, her meowing sounding more and more stressed. Michelle leaves several traps around just in case. That night, I get home late and out of habit, look out my window. I see something moving around and focus to see the KITTEN BACK IN MY YARD! She's not making any noise, just milling around the old familiar places. I can't believe it. I call Michelle to tell her that our cat is not as helpless as we think and will probably be fine whether we catch her or not. I sneak downstairs and hold perfectly still for about 20 minutes. At one point she comes out of the bamboo close to me but not close enough to grab. And then, just like the miracle she performed a few days ago, I hear her meowing up on the deck. I go up there but don't see her and then hear the meowing from downstairs. I'm baffled so I leave a trap up on the deck. After three late nights of this, I'm tired.
Thursday, November 15
Not surprisingly, she's not in the trap and I don't hear or see her anywhere. At this point I'm ready to write her off as an alley cat. I'll leave food out and maybe sometime in the next year I'll capture her and get her fixed. I move the trap downstairs and cover it with bamboo. Then I go to work. That night I came home and heard nothing and saw nothing. I was kind of relieved, done with it. I ate and was about to go to bed when I remembered I had left a trap out. You're not supposed to leave the traps unattended because you can capture another animal or they can hurt themselves being scared in there for several hours but in this case, we were desperate. (In fact, one of the traps at the Salvation Army caught a big grey tomcat, a beautiful animal with huge teeth.) I approach the trap with a flashlight and think I see something in it but figure it's just the food bowl but as I get closer I see the KITTEN IN THE TRAP!
4 DAYS, 8 HOURS and 35 MINUTES into the chase, the jig is up. As Michelle and I walked back to her place with the kitten we named him or her, Chase.
Saturday, November 17
I do work around the house and while at my computer look out the window at least a dozen times. I miss those little kitties. Even though I know it's for the best, I liked having animals around. I hope they all have better lives than they would have had here.
Sunday, November 18
I hear birds this morning and see some sitting on the railing of my deck. It strikes me as something new and I wonder if the lack of a cat's presence welcomed the birds and I start to think about ripping out that f'ing bamboo and planting trees and a real garden. Maybe I could have bees and butterflies and birds visiting me on a regular basis. That would be okay too.
I'm sitting at my computer drinking coffee when I hear a little mewing outside my house. I run to the window hoping to see a cute kitty who had come to visit, but expecting to find a piece of rusted metal squeaking in the wind, tempting me with its sweet sound and the promise of a fluffy animal in my paws. To my surprise, I found a momma cat and three tiny kittens. Determined to rescue these animals from cold, hunger and the back alleys of San Francisco, I call the city to see how to scoop them up and bring them in. They tell me that I have to rent traps and it could take several days and then I have to bring them in, all in separate cages. I start thinking of the logistics of catching four cats, renting cages, driving them somewhere and returning the cages, when I'm only home on the weekends and have a big trip coming up. I buy food and feed momma cat.
Sunday, October 28
I do more research on strays and the various options available. The SPCA says they have volunteers that can help. I leave a message.
Wednesday, October 31
I have to go to New York, early in the a.m. and won't be back until Monday night. I've been leaving food out for momma cat but am worried about them while I'm gone.
Monday, November 5
I was so worried that these kitties would have grown up and jumped over the fence while I was gone and wondered how the heck I was going to have time to capture them. I couldn't do anything until the weekend. I call and leave another message with the SPCA.
Tuesday, November 6
I keep feeding mom and eventually am able to pat her head and pet her a little. She's totally adorable, a little black and white kitty with a tail that curls alongside her and gets all animated when I pet her. I feed her up on the deck by my house, training her to get closer to me in anticipation of eventually trapping her and getting her spayed. The kittens still run when they see me and hide in the basement.
Wednesday, November 7
I hear back from someone at the SPCA that I need to get traps, etc. I leave another message imploring them to send me a volunteer, "I can't do this alone!" I say. Momma cat comes back over, she even comes in my house. She seems to want to be adopted. She's still nursing the kittens but definitely weaning them as she walks away a lot while they're feeding.
Thursday, November 8
Finally a woman named Michelle called. She's a volunteer with the SPCA and lives only a few blocks from my house. She arranged to meet me at my house that Saturday morning. She said we should start early, at the time I've seen them out there, which is usually around 6:30am.
Friday, November 9
I've become used to this routine of coming home and looking out my window to see the kitty. She looks up at me through the window and the kittens play in a little patch of dirt, wrestling and fighting each other.
Saturday, November 10
I make a big pot of coffee and Michelle arrives at 6:30am with three humane traps, towels and food. The kittens are nowhere to be seen but don't usually come out until mom does. Within an hour or so, mama cat came around looking for food. I didn't see the kittens but figured we should get started. I coax her into the trap and bingo! This was going to be easy.
Now there were the kittens, hiding in the basement. We set the trap with food in the doorway of the basement and I made meowing sounds to draw them out. I had to try a variety of places and configurations for the trap. I lined it with a bit of rug that I had put out weeks before for the family to sleep on. The brave one that usually scouts ahead of the two others came out looking for mom but saw me and ran back into the basement and past the trap again where curiosity got the better of this cat and it went in. Snap! Another one caught.
Next up, the timid duo. We set up the last trap in the same place and I again coaxed the cats with meowing (and had no idea at the time that this is something I would spend several nights doing). They came right out, side-by-side, but instead of going in the trap, wandered around it, crawling on top of it at. It was like they smelled the food but couldn't figure out how to get it. They mewed and mewed for mom. At the moment they caught a glimpse of a human they dashed back into the basement. This went on for a couple more hours, trying the trap in various places and meowing to beckon. Eventually, we gave up and decided to try again tomorrow. I was feeling pretty good though, this cat trapping thing was going to be easy.
Sunday, November 11
The next morning, Michelle and I were up early again. I tried the trap in a bunch of places, eventually putting it between the basement door and the outside, barricaded so that it's the only place to go. I do my cat crying bit and after a few tries they come out, SNAP! something goes into the trap. We check and it's only one, the braver of the two. I'm pretty sure they were together and now I'm thinking the runt is all alone and knows that a trap is not something to go into. We try the same trick with her but closer to the area of the basement where she's hiding. She won't come out at all. Michelle goes home and brings mom back and we try to use mom to coax her out. No such luck. Mom just gets stressed out hearing her kitten cry. I crawl into this dark cramped place covered in cobwebs to find her. Turns out she's in the wall, under the building, no where that I can go. We leave food out for her and give up for the day.
Monday, November 12
The next morning, the food looks untouched and I'm worried that the kitten is never coming out and doesn't even know how to eat. Michelle checks with someone that adopts kittens, shows her the other two and determines that they're old enough to eat food.
That night I saw the kitten in the backyard. I sneak downstairs and close the basement door. At least now it couldn't go into the walls, and I figure it will be easier to catch in the backyard. I hear it crying in the bamboo so I go in there and search every inch. Nothing, but I still hear the crying. I call Michelle and she comes over to help. We both, with flashlights, crawl around in the bamboo. We shake the stalks, we dig up leaves, we overturn everything. I chop half of the bamboo down out of sheer insanity. Then, I saw a small opening under the cement slab of the deck. We look in the hole and the kitten is crammed in there holding perfectly still like we won't see it. Michelle puts her hand in there to grab it and moments later it's gone. I have no idea where that goes but a few minutes later I hear crying up on the deck! I sneak up there and see it, nestled in between the cactus plants my neighbor grows - he literally has a hundred. I reach slowly, not wanting to startle her but then boing! she springs over to the wall separating us from the Salvation Army center next door. She runs along the wall, through a chain link fence and she's gone!
Tuesday, November 13
On the bus that morning, I cried thinking about that poor little kitty, gone from the safety of her birthplace, without her family, and no one to feed her.
When I get home from work, my neighbors are all out on the back deck. The kitten is next door in the parking lot the Salvation Army uses for donated cars. My neighbor Joe went over before they closed and left a dish of food out for the kitten. It's locked in now and crying its little guts out. It sounds like some poor animal is being tortured. The kitty is close to the fence so I imagine that it wants to get back to my yard, to look for its mom, but just doesn't know how. I call Michelle and she comes over, we survey the situation and decide to tackle it in the morning. I know there are guys over there in the morning when I get ready so we make a plan to go over there at 6am and ask if we can come in to catch the kitty.
When I get back to my place, Joe has shown me that if he pushes on the chain link fence, there's a way I can drop down over the wall and squeeze into the parking lot. I take a flashlight and spend the next hour chasing the crying cat all over the place. It's like a bad video game, "catch the crying kitty!" as it sneaks from car to car and I chase it with the help of my two neighbors with flashlights. "She's under the Volvo!" "Over here under the grey car!" "Now she's over by the boat" I finally give up and leave food, water and a set up of milk crates designed to help her get over the fence and into our yard.
Wednesday, November 14
Michelle gets another volunteer to help with the cat and I go to work. She reports later in the day that the kitten has now descended into the area when the trucks load and unload donations. She's deep into a pile of stuff and can't be retrieved. We're both worried that she isn't going to make it. We've never seen her eat food and she's been scared for several days now, her meowing sounding more and more stressed. Michelle leaves several traps around just in case. That night, I get home late and out of habit, look out my window. I see something moving around and focus to see the KITTEN BACK IN MY YARD! She's not making any noise, just milling around the old familiar places. I can't believe it. I call Michelle to tell her that our cat is not as helpless as we think and will probably be fine whether we catch her or not. I sneak downstairs and hold perfectly still for about 20 minutes. At one point she comes out of the bamboo close to me but not close enough to grab. And then, just like the miracle she performed a few days ago, I hear her meowing up on the deck. I go up there but don't see her and then hear the meowing from downstairs. I'm baffled so I leave a trap up on the deck. After three late nights of this, I'm tired.
Thursday, November 15
Not surprisingly, she's not in the trap and I don't hear or see her anywhere. At this point I'm ready to write her off as an alley cat. I'll leave food out and maybe sometime in the next year I'll capture her and get her fixed. I move the trap downstairs and cover it with bamboo. Then I go to work. That night I came home and heard nothing and saw nothing. I was kind of relieved, done with it. I ate and was about to go to bed when I remembered I had left a trap out. You're not supposed to leave the traps unattended because you can capture another animal or they can hurt themselves being scared in there for several hours but in this case, we were desperate. (In fact, one of the traps at the Salvation Army caught a big grey tomcat, a beautiful animal with huge teeth.) I approach the trap with a flashlight and think I see something in it but figure it's just the food bowl but as I get closer I see the KITTEN IN THE TRAP!
4 DAYS, 8 HOURS and 35 MINUTES into the chase, the jig is up. As Michelle and I walked back to her place with the kitten we named him or her, Chase.
Saturday, November 17
I do work around the house and while at my computer look out the window at least a dozen times. I miss those little kitties. Even though I know it's for the best, I liked having animals around. I hope they all have better lives than they would have had here.
Sunday, November 18
I hear birds this morning and see some sitting on the railing of my deck. It strikes me as something new and I wonder if the lack of a cat's presence welcomed the birds and I start to think about ripping out that f'ing bamboo and planting trees and a real garden. Maybe I could have bees and butterflies and birds visiting me on a regular basis. That would be okay too.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Don't you think it's funny...?
That people use "it" to refer to babies but not to any other human. We don't call seniors or disabled people or teens or pregnant women, "it," and yet you hear parents refer to their own babies as "it." Overheard at the bus stop this morning, a guy was talking about how his daughter was reacting to the new baby. "She was really excited at first about having a little sister, and then she started kicking it." I thought it quite interesting in light of the abortion debate. We basically refer to humans all through pregnancy and up until (when?) about a year old as a THING. The fetus, the infant, the baby, "it."
I think it's because without the mother, this thing can't possibly live so in essence it isn't it's own creature yet. It is attached to and depends on the mother until the age when it starts walking, talking and eating solid food. At which point we refer to IT as daughter, son, niece, nephew, child, kid, him, her, she, he or their name but never it. It reminds me of my women's studies days in college where we spoke of lexicon a lot and how it's shaped by cultural attitudes and yet can also actually shape our views. This is the argument behind why waitress became waitperson, stewardess became flight attendant and mailman became mail carrier. While when those names were invented it may have been appropriate because those were gender specific job, they no longer reflected our culture and needed to be changed so as to avoid reinforcing outdated ideas.
So is it that we used to think of babies as objects, not people, and we are perpetuating an outmoded societal view in our language? Or is that that we still view babies as objects which is why the majority of Americans, while not in FAVOR of abortion, support a woman's right to choose? Because this thing doesn't have it's own life until it's no longer a baby and it's right to life doesn't start at conception?
I think it's because without the mother, this thing can't possibly live so in essence it isn't it's own creature yet. It is attached to and depends on the mother until the age when it starts walking, talking and eating solid food. At which point we refer to IT as daughter, son, niece, nephew, child, kid, him, her, she, he or their name but never it. It reminds me of my women's studies days in college where we spoke of lexicon a lot and how it's shaped by cultural attitudes and yet can also actually shape our views. This is the argument behind why waitress became waitperson, stewardess became flight attendant and mailman became mail carrier. While when those names were invented it may have been appropriate because those were gender specific job, they no longer reflected our culture and needed to be changed so as to avoid reinforcing outdated ideas.
So is it that we used to think of babies as objects, not people, and we are perpetuating an outmoded societal view in our language? Or is that that we still view babies as objects which is why the majority of Americans, while not in FAVOR of abortion, support a woman's right to choose? Because this thing doesn't have it's own life until it's no longer a baby and it's right to life doesn't start at conception?
Monday, November 12, 2007
Cavemen, pool sharks and green chemists
A work friend was in New York last week at PopTech, a conference of remarkable people working on innovative projects, which sounded super cool. I'm not sure why half of our department got to go and not the other half but there were a slew of interesting speakers and I just discovered - it's kind of like TED - that you can download their speeches online! (Oooh, I'm totally going to listen to these on the bus to work!)
Anyway, my colleague invited me for drinks to meet a bunch of cool people that she met there, all from San Francisco, at The 500 Club - a bar walking distance from my house that has a giant neon sign that makes it look like it's in Vegas. I think it's funny that "dive bar" has become an official classification but they had Guinness on tap so I have no complaints.
There was an old guy there with a really long white/grey beard and wearing an orange jumpsuit like he just got out of prison. He was clearing tables and playing pool with everyone - in a "you don't really have a choice" kind of way. One of the guys there said he's always there and he's a total shark. He'll let you just barely beat him on the first pool game and then ask you if you want to play again for a beer. All of a sudden he hands you a can of whoop-ass, knocking in all the balls in one or two turns. But all he gets is a beer! Not a very smart pool shark if you ask me.
I met a chemist who defected from Clorox to go to the green side and was now working with Method to make their products even more natural. I talked shop with a documentary filmmaker and met an engineer from a social networking site called High Five, which, he said, is very popular in Asia and is the most popular networking site in Kazakhstan, "the home of Borat!" When a group of us went to dinner at Luna Park after, he announced that was on the Paleo "eat like a caveman and lose weight" diet which he struggled to explain until he admitted that this was only his first day on the diet.
His roommate was a guy in business strategy (whatever the heck that is) and looked like he was about 14. He had an MBA and when I asked him why he went to business school he said he was burned out of the work he was doing and needed to regroup. I figure roughly half of MBA students are there because they can't think of anything better to do or are hoping it will somehow alleviate the malaise of working but I couldn't believe this kid had worked enough to be burned out of anything. He said the "burn out" was after working for four years at around 60 hours a week which sounds like what I was doing before I did something to shake things up - move to LA to pursue acting! I met the most interesting array of folks that night and it reminded me yet again, that San Francisco is way more stimulating than Los Angeles.
Anyway, my colleague invited me for drinks to meet a bunch of cool people that she met there, all from San Francisco, at The 500 Club - a bar walking distance from my house that has a giant neon sign that makes it look like it's in Vegas. I think it's funny that "dive bar" has become an official classification but they had Guinness on tap so I have no complaints.
There was an old guy there with a really long white/grey beard and wearing an orange jumpsuit like he just got out of prison. He was clearing tables and playing pool with everyone - in a "you don't really have a choice" kind of way. One of the guys there said he's always there and he's a total shark. He'll let you just barely beat him on the first pool game and then ask you if you want to play again for a beer. All of a sudden he hands you a can of whoop-ass, knocking in all the balls in one or two turns. But all he gets is a beer! Not a very smart pool shark if you ask me.
I met a chemist who defected from Clorox to go to the green side and was now working with Method to make their products even more natural. I talked shop with a documentary filmmaker and met an engineer from a social networking site called High Five, which, he said, is very popular in Asia and is the most popular networking site in Kazakhstan, "the home of Borat!" When a group of us went to dinner at Luna Park after, he announced that was on the Paleo "eat like a caveman and lose weight" diet which he struggled to explain until he admitted that this was only his first day on the diet.
His roommate was a guy in business strategy (whatever the heck that is) and looked like he was about 14. He had an MBA and when I asked him why he went to business school he said he was burned out of the work he was doing and needed to regroup. I figure roughly half of MBA students are there because they can't think of anything better to do or are hoping it will somehow alleviate the malaise of working but I couldn't believe this kid had worked enough to be burned out of anything. He said the "burn out" was after working for four years at around 60 hours a week which sounds like what I was doing before I did something to shake things up - move to LA to pursue acting! I met the most interesting array of folks that night and it reminded me yet again, that San Francisco is way more stimulating than Los Angeles.
Saturday, November 10, 2007
Learning through the songs of America
This is just plain cool! Another example of how individuals can change the way we do just things. In this case, Janet Reno (the former US Attorney General) is hoping to change the way that U.S. history is taught and increase interest in learning history by young people. She's just released a three-disc album, Song of America, (that's only $20 on Amazon!) of music from America's 400+ year history.
Her hope is that young people, for whom music is extremely important, will be inspired by the songs and be able to better understand the men and women who shaped the country that we live in and the integral role that music has always played. It took nine years for her to complete the project in collaboration with her niece's husband, a tour manager for a punk band, and so far it's getting rave reviews. Let's hope others take the torch and run with it!
Her hope is that young people, for whom music is extremely important, will be inspired by the songs and be able to better understand the men and women who shaped the country that we live in and the integral role that music has always played. It took nine years for her to complete the project in collaboration with her niece's husband, a tour manager for a punk band, and so far it's getting rave reviews. Let's hope others take the torch and run with it!
Friday, November 9, 2007
The TV-ready creature
I'm finding amazing writing in the most unexpected places including two fantastic articles in Rolling Stone this month. One made me laugh out loud all the way through. Written by a guy my age, it's about why Mitt Romney, despite being the slickest package a president can come in, won't win because he's the energetic captain of a sinking ship. A recent article in The New Yorker about Bush & Co engineering a war against Iran the same way they did against Iraq in 2002, said that Bush and Cheney could "give a rat's ass" about the Republican party and the damage they're doing to it. Keep up the good work boys!
This article about Mitt is really worth reading. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:
Yesterday's liberalism is slowly but surely turning into a new generation's conservatism. So when some starched-up, smooth-talking, TV-ready creature like Mitt Romney, who made his fortune laying off factory workers, walks onto college campuses and starts bashing cohabitation and having children out of wedlock, he loses young people who are tired of watching our leaders fuck things up on a grand scale and then turn around and blame our problems on stoned teenagers.
YEAH! That's the kind of guy (the writer) I want to have a drink with. Creature is so my word, by the way, I've been using it for a decade. I've only recently started giving a shit about the presidential race but my opinion (in a nutshell) is that Barack Obama, precisely because he isn't an automaton but a real person, might be the ONLY candidate that can lead this country in the truly new way that the challenges ahead will require. The mere suggestion that we should work WITH Iran instead of bombing the hell out of them like Bush & Co. are hopped up to do, at this point looks like revolutionary thinking.
This article about Mitt is really worth reading. Here's an excerpt to whet your appetite:
Yesterday's liberalism is slowly but surely turning into a new generation's conservatism. So when some starched-up, smooth-talking, TV-ready creature like Mitt Romney, who made his fortune laying off factory workers, walks onto college campuses and starts bashing cohabitation and having children out of wedlock, he loses young people who are tired of watching our leaders fuck things up on a grand scale and then turn around and blame our problems on stoned teenagers.
YEAH! That's the kind of guy (the writer) I want to have a drink with. Creature is so my word, by the way, I've been using it for a decade. I've only recently started giving a shit about the presidential race but my opinion (in a nutshell) is that Barack Obama, precisely because he isn't an automaton but a real person, might be the ONLY candidate that can lead this country in the truly new way that the challenges ahead will require. The mere suggestion that we should work WITH Iran instead of bombing the hell out of them like Bush & Co. are hopped up to do, at this point looks like revolutionary thinking.
Thursday, November 8, 2007
The power of one
Sitting on the bus this morning, I was listening to music, sipping my coffee, and watching other people. There were a handful of people on the bus who were doing a bunch of things at once - reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, checking their Blackberry's, talking on the phone, playing with their hair (girls play with their hair a lot I've noticed). There was a sense that they just couldn't take in enough information, but not information in the observation sense - take my co-worker who was surprised to see a dead deer on the road. In the six months that she's been taking the bus down the 280 she's never noticed a) other dead deer b) the signs that say watch for deer and c) the DEER that are eating grass on the side of the highway. She doesn't miss a day reading the paper but isn't even taking in the information around her.
So I start thinking about how bizarre it is that humans are so interested in what other humans are doing, and how I observe humans but not any more than I observe anything - plants, animals, weather, stars. There's not much in the news about what animals are doing unless it relates somehow to what humans are doing with animals. Same with plants and space and weather. It reminds me of the hilarious comment from a lecture on environmental sustainability that a natural disaster is only considered a disaster if it kills humans. A million cows killed by Mad Cow (a disease we potentially caused) isn't a tragedy but 10,000 people killed in a mudslide is.
I was feeling like someone from Heroes who has seen the future and knows that what everyone is madly doing at this moment is so inconsequential to the big picture and so soon to be obsolete. I haven't seen the future and I don't know what it is but I'm pretty sure that the industrial age is about to come to an end. The age in which we set up factories and machines to exploit natural resources and human labor to create goods. The age in which we work in these factories to make money to buy the stuff that's made in them. It's mostly coming to an end because we're going to run out of resources to exploit but also, I think, because the kind of change that we need to make in the coming years for our species and civilization to survive will need to happen quickly and be motivated by much more than profit.
The age that's going to replace it is the age of the individual - but not everyone will be an individual. In this age, individuals, not corporations, are in charge. Companies still exist but they work for us instead of the other way around. A people-powered world where we don't have to demand change and yet suffer the constraints of an old system, we'll just collective make the change. Individuals are much quicker to adapt than companies. Think about it. How long did it take people to buy into the iPhone? Something that was literally revolutionary six months ago is now commonplace. Did people have to be cajoled into using it? No. Now think about wi-fi and the fact that if it were up to PEOPLE, all cities would be wi-fi enabled. I'd be happy to pay a monthly fee to access public wi-fi, or pay it in taxes, or not at all. But we don't have it because the communication companies spent a billion dollars laying fiber optic cable so they keep us in the dark ages (while people in developing nations access wi-fi on tiny handheld computers run that on solar power!) because they need to make money off of their investment.
Individuals are more innovative than think tanks, better benefactors than governments, better employers than corporations, better organizers than unions, and better reporters than newspapers. One could make an argument that certain things need infrastructure, like communication, but in the wi-fi scenario, that just isn't the case. Transportation, maybe, but again if individuals were in control, we'd be putting our money into railroads instead of airplanes. Big business runs the world but they're losing their grip. More people are using sites like Craigslist, eBay and Amazon to buy and sell from each other instead of companies. Etsy lets individuals sell things they've made to other people, things that are more interesting and cheaper than a lot of "made in China" crap from Target. Celebrities and philanthropists like Bill Gates and Richard Branson are doing more to change the world than our president.
In the age of the individual, reputation is everything, and these people who aren't working for the common good can no longer hide in a corporation or the White House. Microfinance is taking banks out of the equation by letting people lend money to each other. And people are starting to see that health care as something employers need to provide just isn't viable. Too many people now don't have an employer. More and more people are working from home, creating their own jobs, their own businesses and deciding how and when they want to work. We're deconstructing the power structure that was royalty, religion, government and business and increasingly breaking the world down in smaller bits that connect in new, random and spontaneous ways. We're starting to look like the internet - a place where literally anything can happen. This change adds more checks and balances to every interaction and ultimately makes us all much more accountable to each other.
There were three articles in Rolling Stone this month about big recording acts not renewing their record contracts and either going straight to the people with their music (Radiohead), working directly with a promoter and cutting out the middle-man (Madonna) or just simply letting their contract expire (Nine Inch Nails). It's an exciting time, and this trend is something that gives me hope. If corporations are in charge of turning this planet around, it will never happen in time, but if the right individuals take charge, it just might.
So I start thinking about how bizarre it is that humans are so interested in what other humans are doing, and how I observe humans but not any more than I observe anything - plants, animals, weather, stars. There's not much in the news about what animals are doing unless it relates somehow to what humans are doing with animals. Same with plants and space and weather. It reminds me of the hilarious comment from a lecture on environmental sustainability that a natural disaster is only considered a disaster if it kills humans. A million cows killed by Mad Cow (a disease we potentially caused) isn't a tragedy but 10,000 people killed in a mudslide is.
I was feeling like someone from Heroes who has seen the future and knows that what everyone is madly doing at this moment is so inconsequential to the big picture and so soon to be obsolete. I haven't seen the future and I don't know what it is but I'm pretty sure that the industrial age is about to come to an end. The age in which we set up factories and machines to exploit natural resources and human labor to create goods. The age in which we work in these factories to make money to buy the stuff that's made in them. It's mostly coming to an end because we're going to run out of resources to exploit but also, I think, because the kind of change that we need to make in the coming years for our species and civilization to survive will need to happen quickly and be motivated by much more than profit.
The age that's going to replace it is the age of the individual - but not everyone will be an individual. In this age, individuals, not corporations, are in charge. Companies still exist but they work for us instead of the other way around. A people-powered world where we don't have to demand change and yet suffer the constraints of an old system, we'll just collective make the change. Individuals are much quicker to adapt than companies. Think about it. How long did it take people to buy into the iPhone? Something that was literally revolutionary six months ago is now commonplace. Did people have to be cajoled into using it? No. Now think about wi-fi and the fact that if it were up to PEOPLE, all cities would be wi-fi enabled. I'd be happy to pay a monthly fee to access public wi-fi, or pay it in taxes, or not at all. But we don't have it because the communication companies spent a billion dollars laying fiber optic cable so they keep us in the dark ages (while people in developing nations access wi-fi on tiny handheld computers run that on solar power!) because they need to make money off of their investment.
Individuals are more innovative than think tanks, better benefactors than governments, better employers than corporations, better organizers than unions, and better reporters than newspapers. One could make an argument that certain things need infrastructure, like communication, but in the wi-fi scenario, that just isn't the case. Transportation, maybe, but again if individuals were in control, we'd be putting our money into railroads instead of airplanes. Big business runs the world but they're losing their grip. More people are using sites like Craigslist, eBay and Amazon to buy and sell from each other instead of companies. Etsy lets individuals sell things they've made to other people, things that are more interesting and cheaper than a lot of "made in China" crap from Target. Celebrities and philanthropists like Bill Gates and Richard Branson are doing more to change the world than our president.
In the age of the individual, reputation is everything, and these people who aren't working for the common good can no longer hide in a corporation or the White House. Microfinance is taking banks out of the equation by letting people lend money to each other. And people are starting to see that health care as something employers need to provide just isn't viable. Too many people now don't have an employer. More and more people are working from home, creating their own jobs, their own businesses and deciding how and when they want to work. We're deconstructing the power structure that was royalty, religion, government and business and increasingly breaking the world down in smaller bits that connect in new, random and spontaneous ways. We're starting to look like the internet - a place where literally anything can happen. This change adds more checks and balances to every interaction and ultimately makes us all much more accountable to each other.
There were three articles in Rolling Stone this month about big recording acts not renewing their record contracts and either going straight to the people with their music (Radiohead), working directly with a promoter and cutting out the middle-man (Madonna) or just simply letting their contract expire (Nine Inch Nails). It's an exciting time, and this trend is something that gives me hope. If corporations are in charge of turning this planet around, it will never happen in time, but if the right individuals take charge, it just might.
Wednesday, November 7, 2007
It's my birthday and I'll blog if I want to
My latest DVD obsession is Heroes Season 1. It doesn't have the witty banter or relevant informative quality of The West Wing but it's a unique and special show. It's shot like a feature film - beautiful and dramatic - and the cast is amazing. I love these people! Their faces, their characters, and while the show already asks the overarching questions of why are we here and what is destiny, each person embodies a philosophical question about life. Is it ethical to know what someone else is thinking? Should we know the future? How is a person's life changed by immortality? The characters struggle with being unique, wanting to be normal, their destiny as a special person and their obligation to humanity.
What I love most about it though is the way it accurately presents good and evil as two sides of the same coin. The desire to be a hero has many different manifestations. Each turn of events sends our characters closer to good or evil and back again. It's never quite clear who we're supposed to be rooting for as the characters aren't sure themselves. It focuses around a fairly simple plot point but demonstrates the multitude of decisions we make every day that affect other people and ultimately test our character and commitment to our collective world. It's the perfect show for the upcoming century as we recalibrate for global warming and try to live for the better of society. I just watched the last episode of Season 1 and even though I can watch the current episodes on the NBC site, I think I'll wait for the next season on DVD to pick it up again. If only I could stop trying to put my hand through walls in the meantime...
What I love most about it though is the way it accurately presents good and evil as two sides of the same coin. The desire to be a hero has many different manifestations. Each turn of events sends our characters closer to good or evil and back again. It's never quite clear who we're supposed to be rooting for as the characters aren't sure themselves. It focuses around a fairly simple plot point but demonstrates the multitude of decisions we make every day that affect other people and ultimately test our character and commitment to our collective world. It's the perfect show for the upcoming century as we recalibrate for global warming and try to live for the better of society. I just watched the last episode of Season 1 and even though I can watch the current episodes on the NBC site, I think I'll wait for the next season on DVD to pick it up again. If only I could stop trying to put my hand through walls in the meantime...
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
No time in the present
Folks, I'm just not sure how to keep up the blog. I'm depressed about it, in part due to my feeling of responsibility to people who want to read the blog but mostly because I LOVE to blog and I'm really despondent about the fact that I don't have the time to do it. I can't figure exactly why I have no time; I feel like I have no time to exercise, read the newspaper, call friends and a multitude of other things that I used to take for granted. In a corporate environment, we put in10x more effort than what comes out in terms of product (what I can say that I actually did). So there's this feeling of always working hard, being totally consumed by a job, yet never getting my work done and at the end of the day, not having much to show for it.
On the way back from Portland on Monday morning, after spending two days with my nephews whom I love love love, I was on the plane having thoughts of wishing the plane would just crash into the ground. It started with the whole emergency exit thing which I realized is one hundred percent bullshit. Do you realize that the exit is ONLY for a water landing? And do you know the chances, when flying over the continental United States of a water landing? It's pretty much zero my friends. If you're going down, it's into a mountain or into the ground. There's no f'ing water to slide down the wing into. It's a fantasy, a false sense of hope and yet they make you listen to this shit as if it's really going to make a lick of difference.
I don't normally have suicidal thoughts and I'm not even sure that's what was happening. Maybe it's the fact that it's my birthday tomorrow and I often have very "final" thoughts around that time, like what is life all about anyway? Maybe it's because I really don't like transportation and have had to do so much in this job that I feel like I've dramatically increasing my chances of dying. I mean, by percentage flying isn't safer than driving but certainly a person who travels by plane once a week is at more risk than someone who travels once per year? I also, while looking down on the world, had thoughts about how ugly human life is from the air. (And frankly, it's pretty ugly inside the plane as well) The world without us is beautiful and awe-inspiring - mountains, lakes, clouds, the sky and stars, the ocean - but everything human made is pretty much disgustingly ugly from up above. Rooftops, roads, airports, shopping centers. None of this is designed to be looked at from above and it all looks like a blight on beauty and I start to think about what a disaster humans are...and hence start wishing that I weren't one of them, but I am.
So here I am, way past my bedtime (already!) on a Tuesday night with a pile of handwritten blog entries that haven't yet, and may never be posted on the blog because I don't have the time. And I don't know what to do about it. How do I post when I'm on the road when my "spare" time is spent flying? I'm hoping I'll get this whole time management figured out, but it's possible this is just my life for the moment.
On the way back from Portland on Monday morning, after spending two days with my nephews whom I love love love, I was on the plane having thoughts of wishing the plane would just crash into the ground. It started with the whole emergency exit thing which I realized is one hundred percent bullshit. Do you realize that the exit is ONLY for a water landing? And do you know the chances, when flying over the continental United States of a water landing? It's pretty much zero my friends. If you're going down, it's into a mountain or into the ground. There's no f'ing water to slide down the wing into. It's a fantasy, a false sense of hope and yet they make you listen to this shit as if it's really going to make a lick of difference.
I don't normally have suicidal thoughts and I'm not even sure that's what was happening. Maybe it's the fact that it's my birthday tomorrow and I often have very "final" thoughts around that time, like what is life all about anyway? Maybe it's because I really don't like transportation and have had to do so much in this job that I feel like I've dramatically increasing my chances of dying. I mean, by percentage flying isn't safer than driving but certainly a person who travels by plane once a week is at more risk than someone who travels once per year? I also, while looking down on the world, had thoughts about how ugly human life is from the air. (And frankly, it's pretty ugly inside the plane as well) The world without us is beautiful and awe-inspiring - mountains, lakes, clouds, the sky and stars, the ocean - but everything human made is pretty much disgustingly ugly from up above. Rooftops, roads, airports, shopping centers. None of this is designed to be looked at from above and it all looks like a blight on beauty and I start to think about what a disaster humans are...and hence start wishing that I weren't one of them, but I am.
So here I am, way past my bedtime (already!) on a Tuesday night with a pile of handwritten blog entries that haven't yet, and may never be posted on the blog because I don't have the time. And I don't know what to do about it. How do I post when I'm on the road when my "spare" time is spent flying? I'm hoping I'll get this whole time management figured out, but it's possible this is just my life for the moment.
Thursday, November 1, 2007
I think I'm turning Chinese, I really think so
There are a couple of things I've been thinking about a lot lately - China and Christianity. They come up in conversation constantly and I really feel like these two monoliths will shape our global future more than anything besides global warming in the next fifty years. I've started several rambling essays on paper about one or the other, essays that never make it to the computer I think for the simple reason that I can't write on paper! Part of the generation that grew up on computers, typing is part of my thought pattern. It's kind of scary, really, but I can barely put two sentences together when I'm not typing. But I digress...
I won't pretend to know anything about China but the awareness of their significance in the world, and their potential threat to our future, is very real and something I hear expressed by people in causal conversation all the time. This is what blows me away: Nothing about what we used to hate/fear/oppose about China has changed. They still have gross human rights violations and they're still Communist. But they're very smart and they won our hearts through commerce. They catered to a greedy capitalist society, buying us for dirt cheap. In return, the Chinese got McDonald's, the Internet and cars. But it's a false world they've built, it looks like freedom but it's not. Their citizens are still monitored, imprisoned and killed for "anti-government activities." The Dalai Lama is one of their top terrorists, an enemy of the state who preaches peace and threatens the stability of the Chinese empire.
In 2007 though, instead of boycotting Chinese products like we did in the 80's, we'll be going there for the Olympics! We've allowed them to purchase our national debt, destroy their land, poison their rivers and still we encourage them to buy cars and live like us. Our president honors the Dalai Lama but doesn't take a photo with him after the Chinese threaten it will sour relations between the two countries. The argument is that China needs us as much as we need them but it doesn't stand up to logic. Twenty years ago we didn't need China at all so clearly the scale is not tipping in our favor. Rumor has it that Microsoft silenced a corporate blogger to satisfy the Chinese. As soon as the long arm of censorship can reach across the world to the US, we're doomed. The moment we start taking orders from the Chinese, the scale will have tipped...over.
I won't pretend to know anything about China but the awareness of their significance in the world, and their potential threat to our future, is very real and something I hear expressed by people in causal conversation all the time. This is what blows me away: Nothing about what we used to hate/fear/oppose about China has changed. They still have gross human rights violations and they're still Communist. But they're very smart and they won our hearts through commerce. They catered to a greedy capitalist society, buying us for dirt cheap. In return, the Chinese got McDonald's, the Internet and cars. But it's a false world they've built, it looks like freedom but it's not. Their citizens are still monitored, imprisoned and killed for "anti-government activities." The Dalai Lama is one of their top terrorists, an enemy of the state who preaches peace and threatens the stability of the Chinese empire.
In 2007 though, instead of boycotting Chinese products like we did in the 80's, we'll be going there for the Olympics! We've allowed them to purchase our national debt, destroy their land, poison their rivers and still we encourage them to buy cars and live like us. Our president honors the Dalai Lama but doesn't take a photo with him after the Chinese threaten it will sour relations between the two countries. The argument is that China needs us as much as we need them but it doesn't stand up to logic. Twenty years ago we didn't need China at all so clearly the scale is not tipping in our favor. Rumor has it that Microsoft silenced a corporate blogger to satisfy the Chinese. As soon as the long arm of censorship can reach across the world to the US, we're doomed. The moment we start taking orders from the Chinese, the scale will have tipped...over.
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