Name Change Again? - Part I

Once again this blog may be in dire need of a name change. When io got a job, I declined to update the "unemployed" part to better reflect reality. And now I'm drying out for a month, on the wagon, intentionally sober, absolutley boozeless. So i'm hardly "Crazy, Drunk and Unemployed" anymore.

So all I really have these days going for me is the "crazy" part. I guess I can always plead insanity. If you think about it, when you're crazy you have everything. If you're crazy, you can decide you're drunk all the time and enjoy yourself. When you're crazy, you can convince yourself that your job is really a special study of the bizarre intricacies of office politcs.

It's been two weeks now, and let me tell you, they have been long ones. I stopped drinking on January 5th since I had a family birthday party on the 4th and the family wanted me to drink and celebrate with them. I never thought my folks would want me to drink more.

I'm now at then point where it's not all that fun anymore. At first, staying sober seemed like fun. It was a social experiment where I could be aware of other people's reactions to my being intentionally sober. But after the first Friday evening after a stressful and long week at the office and then fighting 50 miles of traffic in the rain and NOT have a relaxing drink, the novelty wore off with a vengeance.

One realization is how easy it is to relax with a little alcohol, coupled with how much I miss such relaxation. It seems that I have almost entirely forgot how to relax without a drink in my hand. I'm always tired, irritable and rather un-fun. It seems like this modern life needs some kind lubricant.

Upon relating my situation to a Irish friend of mine, she told me that she had tried such an adventure once and quickly came to the conclusion that just is not as interesting without the joy of booze. And it occurs to me that when it comes to dealing with alcohol, one should defer to the wisdom and expertise of the Irish...

Please stay tuned for Part 2... There's lots more on this subject...

Hosting a Good Story

The classic relationship between an author and their readership is the same as the dinner party host to their guests. When a guest arrives, the host will welcome them, take their coat, give the guest the grand tour of the home and introduce them to all the people in the room.

The guest will then have some time to acquaint themselves with the characters at the party while casually sipping a cocktail and enjoying a few hors d'ovres. Eventually a delicious dinner will be served. How many courses there are is a choice left up to the host. Often, the dinner will build and build to the climax of the main course, followed by a tasty desert (or cheese plate) with an aperitif to wash the story down. The good host cares about the comfort and happiness of their guest.

Such is the classic arch of a novel, short story, movie or even a newspaper article. All too often these days we run into authors that are bad hosts. These are the kind of authors that casually throw your coat in the corner, do not kindly introduce you around and serve up a nasty meal. Al they're interested in is serving up whatever they feel with out regard to the guests. They only invite who their cronies and constantly steer the conversation towards themselves.

Sometimes you get cheap tricky authors that think they are clever by not showing all the rooms in the house and then constantly surprising you with new rooms. Or even sneakier authors that give you the grand tour but leave out a couple key rooms. This was the bread and butter of the great 19th century writers, like Charlotte Bronte or Oscar Wilde , who kept the unspeakable old lady (or, in the case of Wilde the picture) locked in the attic, only to bring them out right when the main course is served.

These days you will find many host that do not follow what would be considered the usual polite protocol. For example, you'll get a host like Hubert Selby Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream) that live in a burned out old warehouse, invite thieving heroin addicts to their parties to accost you and then let you fight your way out to safety.

Or perhaps you'll be invited to a Daniel Steele party who brings you to her country club and lets you hobbnob with the rich with their virulent and complex web of relationships. Stephen King (The Shining and Carrie) who invites you to his haunted mansion with psychotic and daemons for guests. Russian authors like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky will invite too many people to their party and then spend what seems like forever introducing you around. Or science fiction authors who don't even introduce you around but expect you to find a way to make sense of the bizarre cuisine that they serve.

There are many ways to host a story or article. But the most important things for any new author to remember is that a good host puts their guest first, before their own interests. If one always writes with the guests in mind, they will forever have people seeking invitations to their dinner parties.

Are we in Era Transition or are we just getting ready for One?
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Writing about the rapid change of the era in which we are now has become almost trite these days. It was 1970 (the year of this author's birth) when Alvin Toffler put his finger on the idea that people are more people behind the times than ahead of them in his book Futureshock. That was 34 years ago, and the pace of change that he was writing about is nothing compared to what has been happening since then. We all know the times are in rapid change. Fine.

A more interesting thought, is that not are we merely in the throws of all this change, but the true era change many talk about is only just approaching mankind. I would contend that what we are going through right now is merely the staging time for the era change that is about to rock the world in the next 15 to 25 years.

The reason that I write this is that we are in a time when we are starting to complete the technologies (or at least evolve them to such a level as necessary for the revolution) that enable the era change that is to come. With the abilities that we have been developing over the last 150 years, with the revolutions in metallurgy, biomedicine, communications and computational power, we are setting the stage for such things as the bio-technical and nanotech revolutions. Not only have we evolved the technology to support the coming massive leap, we are developing the mental/psychological necessities to do so.

It's been a long road. From developing a system of government, economics, security, mass production, distribution, transportation, communications, information management we can support the kinds of research that will bring sweeping revolution. We have moved beyond a time where we can only know what our god given senses limit us to. Now that we can measure the unseen, we are able to think far beyond our human condition.

The changes that we have seen to get us to this point will be, upon future reflection, small compared to how the human condition will change after the nanorevolution. The radical changes to human life will go far, far beyond the changes that we have recently seen. When achievements start rolling in from such fringe fields as biotechnology and nanotechnology, life will be almost so different as to be unrecongnizable from today. Hold on! We're just getting started!

NOTE: I must mention that much of these thoughts come from discussing these ideas with a colleague of mine Chip Young (you can see his blog site here). He put me on to a fantastic book that is the parent to many of the musings in this blog called Quantum Jump: A Survival Guide for the New Renaissance
by W.R. Clement (one of my favorite Canadian writers from Montreal).

Charles Dickens and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal
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Not to beat a dead horse, but there are some more interesting ideas in relating current Quantum their to Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". The most stimulating one is that it seems that Dickens can be seen to anticipate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal way back in 1867 in his treatment of time in "A Christmas Carol".

Put simply, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal (HUP) states that at a quantum level one cannot measure both the position and the momentum of a particle since the mere fact that you are measuring these items will effect the particle. In essence, the principal means that the simple act of trying to measure the characteristics of something will change that thing and lead to uncertainty.

Charles Dickens is very shrewd in his approach to time travel in that when Scrooge goes back in time and sees himself as a child and a young man, the Ghost of Christmas Past tells him that these things are simply shadows of the past. Dickens knows that time pollution (changing time lines due to traveling back in time and effecting the past) is an issue here. He skirts it by using a limitation of the Ghost's power to keep Scrooge from effecting the past. Clearly, this is not an example of Dickens and the HUP, but it is an interesting choice of the author.

What is an example of Dickens and the HUP is that Scrooge is never really allowed to precisely measure his life. He is given no answers by the Ghost of Christmas future, even at the end of his last journey when he asks the Ghost of Christmas Past if the images he saw of his life are simply shadows of what could happen or what will happen.

And now that Scrooge has had a chance to measure the current position his life and his life's momentum toward the future, he has in effect changed it. Not only has he changed his perception of his life, he then starts to effect change in his life to make himself a better person, a friend to the poor and a reveler of the Christmas Spirit.

If you look at his life as a one timeline, past, present and future the effect of his measuring his life at one point changes his life's momentum and then follows a change in his life's position. The net effect of the process that Scrooge unwillingly engages, using the power of the three Christmas Ghosts, whereby he measures the position (as a miserable miser) and momentum (towards a lonely death) of his life, he then changes his life (to be a generous, happy person).

Truly, Dickens can be seen to be thinking far ahead of Werner Heisenberg who came up with his Uncertainty Principal during his work on quantum mechanics in 1927. Or perhaps I am simply reading too much into it. Anyway, it's an interesting thought.

A Christmas Carol and human understanding of Time Travel before the concept of Relativity
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The other day I was treated to an excellent local production of Charles Dickens' Christmas classic, "A Christmas Carol". As much as I enjoyed the show, open of the things that I remarked upon is that even back when the story was published in 1867 at the beginning of the industrial age that people were comfortable with the concept of Scrooge's time travel.

In today's post-industrial age media, we are commonly used to the idea that the character of a fictional story a character can travel in time, like in the favorite 80's time travel movie "Back to the Future". This was not a common concept in 1867. Who would think of visiting the past or future?

Numerous movies and TV shows show time travel, but in our post-industrial minds the method by which time is navigated is something mechanical. But in Dickens' world, the method of time travel is a powerful set of Christmas ghosts.

It is interesting how the human mind, pre-mass education and pre-relativity can still come to grips with the concept of time travel. People of the past could recognize the phenomenon of time travel, however it is explained not by worm-holes, or the balance of energy and matter, but by ghosts that take on a humanoid form.

It makes me wonder about the things that we are vaguely aware of in today's society but cannot explain. At least now we know that we cannot explain everything and that just because we have reached the limits of our technology's ability to explain things does not man that some mystical power is at work.

As W.R. Clement wrote in his book Quantum Jump, once we move up a level of abstraction in the way we see the world, systems that once appeared random become understandable. Is that all that has gone on between Charles Dickens and Steven Spielberg? We've come to see the world in such a profound jump in understanding that we no longer need ghosts to explain time travel.

To give Dickens credit, he may well have had many of the notions of current theorists in his head. For example, the ghosts always told Scrooge that the images that he is seeing of the past are simply shadows. Is this an alternate reality of some kind? And in the future, Scrooge wonders if the images he is seeing are shadows of what is yet to come, or are they subject to change? Is this dealing with multiple universes again? Pre-Destination?

Dickens deals with heavy stuff you can find these days in Stephen Hawking's a Breif History of time. The human mind is a much finer instrument than we give ourselves credit for. We can intuit things we do not understand and try to make sense of them.

With this in mind, one has to wonder how much we really do understand about time travel? Or was Einstein just telling us a more complicated version of Dickens' beloved Christmas Classic?

Haiku:
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The more I feel pain,
The more your love is right to me,
Hurt and Kind, I Love.

Thoughts about the way we view the Future
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Over some sushi, a good friend told me that as a society, we have undergone a radical change in the way we view the future. It was not until recent times that we looked at the future as something that will be better than the past. It used to be that people feared the future, worrying about what would happen next.

The past used to be revered with ancestors, past deeds and tradition. There used to be this feeling that the past was what made us who we were. There was this idea of a kind of fall from grace, that things were not, at present, as good as they used to be.

Ahh, the human memory is blissfully selective. Since the dark ages, this was true. There was a dramatic fall from grace, and I'm not talking about the Garden of Eden. I am talking about the Roman Empire. After the breakup of the Roman Empire, Europe was plunged into the dark ages.

War, strife, turmoil, a halt in psychological, technological and sociological procession persisted almost 1000 years until the Renaissance. So when people looked back, there was some fondness for the civilizing force that was Rome. The Romans built roads, brought sanitation, irrigation, medicine, order and education. So of course the old days were indeed "good".

But now days, we look at the past as darker times, where people were less tolerant, life was harder and people less happy. We do have many takings to look forward to that our post-industrial society will produce for our comfort and long life.

Interesting.

TV Censorship in America
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It's been very entertaining to be watching how censorship has evolved on television in the USA. The original intent of the censors was to remove "obscene" language and material from the airwaves (and now cable) so as to protect the innocence of the young. At least that was their stated intent. But to those that became subject to such rules, it seemed like much more was going on; their message, whether political, religious or otherwise, was being edited in and of itself.

But what has struck me as quite funny is the high pitched beeping noise that is used to "bleep out" unwanted words. Rather than totally removing the word from the conversation, "eleeping out" the word makes the it into some kind of exclamation point, thus giving the word even more power than if it was said in the first place.

It makes me wonder, is this uniquely American phenomena? A much more pernicious way to edit out unwanted words is to make the sound track empty at that moment, thus down playing the word like they often do on Canadian TV. It removes the exclamation point from the word and if it's done well, is hardly noticeable. And if you think about it, this is a much more diabolical way to edit the media.

So why are they bleeping it out with that high pitched tone? Was it a compromise by the censors that the artists argued for so that the viewer would know the censor’s heavy hand has edited the piece? Or was it part of some kind of politically or religiously motivated agenda to pursue a "War on Filth" or some such thing. Makes you wonder.

The artists have responded in a rather entertaining way in that they will voluntarily "bleep out" the words. But since they know the "Bleep" will be there, they write the conversation so that the bleep will be placed in such a context that it is obvious what the character is saying. As well, sometimes they do not fully "bleep out" the word, so hearing part of the word, such as "F**K you!" makes it fairly apparent what is being said.

Can the censors ever win? Yes, but their victories are usually small and pyrrhic. If people want to hear or see things that are out there, they cannot be prevented from doing so. You can always buy the movie, get the uncut version, or see it on-line. We live in a society that is based on openness and access to information for the individual. In such a state, the censors will always be fighting a losing battle.

I thikn it's funny that with their zelous drive to "protect" America from itself, they in essence give more power to the forbidden words and deleted scenes. After all, it's the forbidden fruit that tastes the sweetest. The strategy of censorship backfires on them, as it should.

Todd's Annual Newsletter December 2003
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Greetings! I hope this letter finds you well. Once again it's been another very different year. This year the sunset at Ocean Beach told me this was to be my "Year of Good Habits". I'd like to say I slacked off on the bad habits and picked up on the good ones. But by the end of my letter, I'm sure you'll let you be a good judge.

Work: They say "All good things must come to an end". I also lost my job at KANA. Yes, the same swine who laid me off two years ago made the same call again. So I had another relaxing 7 months off this summer. I must say it was awesome. This November I picked up a job just before my Unemployment Insurance ran out. I'm programming the reports at a small software company called Movaris. I really like the people, the product and the opportunity. The only down side is that the job is 50 miles down in Silicon Valley. No, I'm thinking of moving from SF...

Travel: Once again January brought the yearly Pilgrimage to Whistler, BC for a trip with Da Boyz, organized courtesy of those crazy Johnson Brothers. Let's just say the damage deposit on our classy condo didn't even last the first night. Bringing my good buddy Josh up there and taking him to the hospital for a party injury was definitely a highlight.
In April, I went with Brian to see his home town Toronto. We hooked up with his Toronto crew and saw the town. I was sad to miss the Hockey Hall of Fame, but I'm sure I'll make it there next time.

I had one stellar trip when I took 4 days to ride my motorcycle from San Francisco, up the coast to Vancouver BC. I camped one night in each state. I met my old pal Chris in Vancouver to take his new sailboat out for a 9 day trip from Vancouver up to Desolation Sound. We had perfect weather, just enough sailing, more than enough drinking and lots of beautiful scenery everywhere (including the girls). Aside from one "Ruprect the MonkeyBoy" moment, we displayed excellent seamanship. To get home, I rode a quick 1000 miles in two days down I-5. Crazy!

My brother, Mark (who's also unemployed too), and I took a 3 day motorcycle trip to the Sierra. We had a great time riding up in the high mountain passes and camping at Lake Tahoe and then deep in Yosemite Valley.

Social Life: The social life has been pretty low key these days. I've been cutting back on some of those bad habits and not going out so late. So the social life, has slowed a bit. But like I wrote in my last letter, the friendships that I have maintained have appreciably deepened.

In regards to women, it's been a long dry year for dates until October when I met Stephanie at a sailing BBQ. And so starts another good habit. We've been dating for two months+ and having a fantastic time with each other. We're still in the honeymoon phase of the relationship, and something tells me it's gonna go on for a while...

Sports: It's been a mostly hockeyless year, and I've missed that habit terribly. Luckily enough, I recently started playing on a new team in Oakland. It's a great bunch of guys (mostly Canadians) and we enjoy beers in the parking lot after the game. I got my first two goals last game, so it's been fun. Also, since my new roommate has a dish, I purchased the NHL Center Ice Package so I could watch the Vancouver Canucks (and 40 other games a week). It's a lot of fun, especially with the TiVo, and it's making me a smarter hockey player.

A good habit that I decided to start was getting back on a crew. Once again, lucky for me, my friend and landlord Nicholas (from Quebec City) invited me to join the crew he sails with on a Santana 35. It's a great bunch of people and I think I've already started to fit in well.

School: I managed to finish my Java classes and it has surely made me a much better coder. It was a long hard slog, but it's turning out to be well worth it. Having these new skills got me my current position. Who'd have guessed?

Political Activism: I was excited to take part in on the Anti-War protesting in SF. It was great to see so many people out there expressing their dissent. I never hung out with those jerk-face anarchists and radical communists who ruined it for everyone with their trouble making. Regardless, it saddens me that the US went to war in the way it did.

Writing: I had been getting back into the habit of writing. I started a web log (known as a "blog") called "Crazy, Drunk and Unemployed" and it has been very enjoyable to write so much. I try to keep it interesting and write as much as I can. I'm down to once a week these days, but it comes in waves. If you're interested, go to http://easyt.blogspot.com.

Living Situation: For once, I did not move this year. I finally found a place so nice, I've stayed put. I did get a new roommate as my old one (John) sought a place closer to his work in San Mateo. Erik, my new roommate is turning out to be a great addition. Not only does he have great stuff (Satellite dish, TiVo and so on) but he's a great guy and very easy to live with. His girlfriend, Nina, is very cool too.

Has it been a Year of Good Habits? Well, a new job, new girlfriend, new roommate, new hockey team, new crew to sail with are all starts on good habits. The Good Lord has been very kind to me with all these new and exciting opportunities. It seemed like every time I needed something new and good, it came to me.

Until next year, Happy Holidays and Increase the Peace.

THOUGHT OF THE DAY: September 11th vs. December 7th
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Which event got Americans madder; December 7th or September 11th?

For someone who has only lived through one of these dates, it's hard to say. In the case of December 7th, America declared all out War on Japan and fought for 4 years to defeat Imperial Japan, ultimately dropping two nuclear weapons on Japan to win. America also declared War on Nazi Germany at the same time (mostly because of Peal Harbor), sending the US to war in Europe as well. It was a strong reaction to a vile action.

In the case of September 11th, there was no formal Declaration of War against any country, but against a terrorist group. America has gone openly into at least two countries to combat terrorism, ousting a repressive regime in the first and the despotic ruler of the second. Two years into the war on Terror, we are still wondering to what lengths with the current US Administration go to finish the fight?

One could easily argue that comparing the two events is not a valid exercise, but is that not necessarily true. One was a country attacking the US military. The other was a terrorist group attacking a civilian target. One caused the USA to enter the Second World War while the other cased the USA to enter the War on Terrorism.

From the standpoint of the effect on America, I would argue that these atrocities are little different. Once again we are at war. Once again we were attacked on our home soil. Once again it was out of the blue. And once again we are taking the fight to the attackers.

The differences really are just something that shows the signs of the times. Now we are fighting a faceless foe that is international in scope, informal in membership, shifting in location and fully networked. Before we were fighting a fascist imperial regime based in one country, with formal fighting institutions which had a definite personality.

One would hazard to say that the Peal Harbor Attack and the Destruction of the World Trade Center had a effect of the same magnitude for world events. But the effect of these events on America and the World easily places them in the same arena. What differentiates them is the elements of each event's period in history, what makes them the same is their viciousness.