indefatigablog

Have you ever wondered why they call it television “programming”?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it INFLUENCES people how to behave would it?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it TEACHES people to adopt an identity that isn’t their own would it?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that it CONVINCES people that they need to act a certain way to be COOL would it?

Wouldn’t have anything to do with the fact that the WORLD would be a better place without it would it?

Fact : programming is programming you.

Yet Another Reason To Get Rid Of Your TV :

Is ANYONE here to make friends?

This “reality” makes me think there’s not much difference between television programming and how these people feel/think at work, at home and in society at large.

Are YOU here to make friends or are you just here to *win*?

You *winners* aren’t able to answer that honestly and that’s ok - you didn’t come here to make friends.

The rest of us didn’t come here to make friends with self-serving bullies.

Sadly, according to this study, the bullies aren’t going away any time soon.

It’s easy to get down about this but, fortunately, there ARE good people around who help balance them out : )

The only catch is, you won’t see or *meet* any of them on TV.

=
c

My pal Steve turned me on to this essay, written in 1999 by Neil Stephenson.

Highly recommended.

Here’s an excerpt :

If I can risk a broad generalization, most of the people who go to Disney World have zero interest in absorbing new ideas from books. Which sounds snide, but listen: they have no qualms about being presented with ideas in other forms. Disney World is stuffed with environmental messages now, and the guides at Animal Kingdom can talk your ear off about biology.

If you followed those tourists home, you might find art, but it would be the sort of unsigned folk art that’s for sale in Disney World’s African- and Asian-themed stores. In general they only seem comfortable with media that have been ratified by great age, massive popular acceptance, or both.

In this world, artists are like the anonymous, illiterate stone carvers who built the great cathedrals of Europe and then faded away into unmarked graves in the churchyard. The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.

Disney World works the same way. If you are an intellectual type, a reader or writer of books, the nicest thing you can say about this is that the execution is superb. But it’s easy to find the whole environment a little creepy, because something is missing: the translation of all its content into clear explicit written words, the attribution of the ideas to specific people. You can’t argue with it. It seems as if a hell of a lot might be being glossed over, as if Disney World might be putting one over on us, and possibly getting away with all kinds of buried assumptions and muddled thinking.

But this is precisely the same as what is lost in the transition from the command-line interface to the GUI.

Disney and Apple/Microsoft are in the same business: short-circuiting laborious, explicit verbal communication with expensively designed interfaces. Disney is a sort of user interface unto itself–and more than just graphical. Let’s call it a Sensorial Interface. It can be applied to anything in the world, real or imagined, albeit at staggering expense.

If you wish, you can download and read his essay in its entirety here.

=
c

Surely, there are many people who strongly disagreed with his views. More conservative folks especially would rather he hadn’t reached the levels of success he did. He made a career out of stirring the pot and providing balance to the hard right and its overwhelming amount of political correctness and closed-mindedness about the world.

Known as the guy who took black humor to new heights, George Carlin also left a footprint on the media world, having ridiculed television for the seven dirty words you can’t hear.

In minutes, he could make us all question what we’ve just always been told.

That’s scary for a lot of folks.

For others, it’s just good exercise :

=
c

Zach Falcon is a great storyteller because his whimsical muscles are completely intact and functioning optimally.

Most of us stop using these muscles somewhere between the ages of 8 and 10. We start conforming to our risk-averse culture, playing it safe as we say, leaving the inspirations of youth behind and stop listening to voices of mischief that often enough lead us down mysterious paths to discovery.

Falcon has managed to protect his sense of curiosity with an amazing non-stick coating, which keeps it safe from such ridiculous notions. This, combined with a rigorous training regimen for said curiosity and other, related muscles, keeps him fit and dextrous as he delivers these tales with clarity he owns.

This is the stuff that powers great storytellers who’s lives haven’t been spent only in the telling.

Perhaps, that explains how the Alaska native was able to leave his post as Assistant Attorney General in that fine state to pursue his natural gift for writing at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in Iowa City, Iowa.

His work, like “Cloud Fishing” published in Spider Magazine, is moving in a way that will help keep us all continuing to exercise this most-important-of-all muscles : our imagination.

Without it, we’re all just player pianos that might be able to reproduce a tune - but haven’t even a thimble full of the spirit of the real thing.

Don’t count him as just another sweet and jovial kid’s fiction writer, though. When he’s not writing or starring in subversive films, he’s a stone-cold Hollywood pimp.

=
c

Albert Hofmann, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD whose medical discovery inspired millions and caused controversy in others in the 1960s, has died. The good doctor died Tuesday at his home in Burg im Leimental in the village near Basel where he moved following his retirement in 1971.

For decades after LSD was banned in the late 1960s, Hofmann defended his invention.

“I produced the substance as a medicine. … It’s not my fault if people abused it,” he once said.

The Swiss chemist discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938 while studying the medicinal uses of a fungus found on wheat and other grains at the Sandoz pharmaceuticals firm in Basel.

He became the first human guinea pig of the drug when a tiny amount of the substance seeped onto his finger during a laboratory experiment on April 16, 1943.

“I had to leave work for home because I was suddenly hit by a sudden feeling of unease and mild dizziness,” he subsequently wrote in a memo to company bosses.

He said his initial experience resulted in “wonderful visions.”

“What I was thinking appeared in colors and in pictures,” he told a Swiss television network for a program marking his 100th birthday two years ago. “It lasted for a couple of hours and then it disappeared.”

He was 102.

=
c