Duped from Ethics Gradient.

They’ve started advertising the DVD version of that infernal, mendacious, highly offensive, wilfully ignorant and misleading waste of megabytes known as Expelled. Bay of Fundie has scratched the surface of their advertising and revealed some new information.

Now, given that this is the DVD release of Expelled, it makes me wonder what kind of special features they’ll include. Of course no one can know for sure, but I have something of a wish list:

- a complete timeline of all the steps taken & communication entered into to secure the participation of such people as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers, including a full explanation for the stark deviation from the premise of the original film: it was originally presented to Myers & Dawkins as a documentary named “Crossroads”, detailing the intersection of religion & science, which it clearly did not turn out to be, either by name or nature

- full, uncut, unedited interviews with the above-named

- a full explanation from the film’s producers of PZ Myer’s own expulsion from a screening of Expelled by security staff before he’d entered the theatre, despite the fact that he’d registered to attend under his own name and hadn’t attempted any kind of subterfuge, as was alleged early on by the producers (as well as an explanation of how Richard Dawkins, arguably more recognisable than PZ Myers, was allowed to enter unmolested)

- behind-the-scenes segments showing such things as exactly who comprised the audience in Ben Stein’s opening, paranoid address to college “students”and a clear explanation of Adolf Hitler’s alleged use Darwin’s theory of evolution to justify his horrific experiments

(more…)

Tired of all the fundamentalists consigning kind and reasonable people to hell on their own authority? You can now respond with these handy “Get Out Of Hell Free” cards. If they can designate people as hell-bound, then you are just as empowered to hand these out and save people. They also sell stickers, plasticized cards, and luggage tags.

The motto of the company who sells these (pack of 50 for $5) is “Sin All You Want, We’ll Print More.”

I took a two-day trip to Assateague Island recently. For those of you that don’t know, wild horses live on the island. Once a year they are rounded up and the yearlings are auctioned off to raise money for the nature preserve there and to keep their numbers in check. As we were sightseeing around the preserve, I noticed gawkers lining up along the side of the road. I quickly took out my video camera and was lucky enough to stumble upon a roundup in progress!

I also shot some footage of vacationers on and around Assateague’s sister island, Chincoteague, as well as marsh birds and the famous lighthouse and put it all together in a short video. This video is an example of a new trend that I’ve been noticing. Vacation photo albums are being supplemented with dreamy, wordless videos set to music, like this. Some do it well…others not so well. This is my entry into the genre.

My town has a tradition on the August Saturday night closest to the full moon called the Moonlight Ramble. I attended it last night, and worked up a sweat along with several thousand others on bicycles riding along 17 miles of closed city streets from midnight to 3. Most of the riders paid $25 each to join the festivities. There were lots of kids, and bikes of almost any description.

I checked the (online) local paper this morning. The ride was only mentioned in a photo spread of 6 images for which I had to search. One image taken from a scissor lift shows a few thousand people as they packed blocks of Market Street, and was captioned “Hundreds of riders attended the event”. It took over an hour for everyone to cross the starting line that was across 6 lanes.

I wonder why this event is so under-reported? I certainly don’t suspect a conspiracy of auto makers and fuel producers who need to keep the idea of bicycles on streets marginal.

But it was kind of magical to look ahead up the commuter artery known as the Forest Park Parkway and see a dense moving carpet of twinkling bicycle taillights as far as the eye could see. Bells tinkled warnings, and horns squeaked as riders of differing speed negotiated the route. Smaller kids often had blinking lights clipped to their shirt collars, as well. I was amazed at then number of weans on their first bikes, little wheels and no gears, as they gamely kept up with the slower part of the throng.  I saw teens on vintage tandems, seniors on titanium recumbent trikes, and plenty of die-hards on almost ordinary looking bikes that are worth more than my car.

Paris Hilton for President

I found it here and she actually makes some sense.

This Saturday, I visited the Atheist Coming Out Party in Westerville, Ohio. The event had numerous hosts and sponsors- American Atheists, Students for Free Thought, Secular Student Alliance, and many, many regional skeptical and atheistic groups. As such, the event drew in atheists, secular humanists, skeptics, and other assorted heathens from all around Ohio, as well as neighboring states.

Where, do you ask, does a group of such cursed godless people go to gather? A lovely event barn in a gorgeous park:

And what do atheists do at such a party? Well, they begin with a little bit of potluck dinner and socializing:

I sat at a table with atheists from Tennessee, Kentucky, and northern Ohio. Visitors had traveled for hours and hours on end for this lovely event. Our region, after all, does not generate many skeptical and atheist get-togethers. New England has Boston Skeptics in the Pub, Las Vegas has The Amaz!ing Meeting, but the midwest usually has a dearth of heatheny gatherings.

After a filling lunch of the unwashed souls of the damned (and carrot cake), we moved upstairs for a series of talks. First up was Hemant Mehta, Chicago-area atheist who wrote I Sold My Soul on Ebay, and who writes at the Friendly Atheist blog.

Hemant had one very important take home point in his talk: atheists need to capture the positive aspects of church culture. We need to provide a sense of community for one another. We need to advertise our messages as effectively as Christians do. And, especially, we need to use our organizations to do a boatload of charity work, like the Christians do.

Following Hemant came Edwin Kagin of American Atheists. He delighted the audience with a very impromptu series of atheist jokes and assorted ramblings.  Edwin does most of the legal heavy lifting for American Atheists, and has done so for quite some time. His take-home point was…well, I’m not exactly sure, but he definitely stressed the idea that atheists must come out of the closet, lest they remain a forever marginalized group.

Speaking of atheist marginalization, the event even had protesters! Unfortunately, my photo did not come out very well:

The protesters’ signs said things like “God Loves You”. They behaved in a very respectful and kind manner. We certainly returned the favor: some atheists brought the small group food and water, and I made sure to ask permission before snapping a quick shot of the gang.

Hopefully the group learned that atheists look normal, behave decently, and even have families themselves. Look at this beautiful family that attended the event:

Wow! This presumably atheist family has already taught its young daughters to play chess.

I had to leave the event not long after Hemant and Edwin’s speeches. I missed the “de-baptism” held later; formerly baptized theists were passed over with a large hair dryer, then given a certificate of their newly de-baptized state. I missed out on the certificate, but I did get a free shirt from American Atheists. It espouses the general, non-confrontational message of the event:

Conflict: competitive or opposing action of incompatibles: antagonistic state or action.

Pornography: (3): the depiction of acts in a sensational manner so as to arouse a quick intense emotional reaction.

What else could it be, other than conflict pornography, when a major media source unnecessarily frames a story in such a way as to concoct a “conflict” in order to arouse a quick intense emotion reaction in its readers? That’s exactly what Newsweek did this week with its cover story: Lincoln vs. Darwin: Who Matters More?

I can imagine what the Newsweek Editors were really thinking: Americans get easily bored unless there is conflict. Even concocted or unnecessary conflicts will do the trick. Let’s turn Lincoln against Darwin to sell more advertising. Just as we’ve turned every election into a horse race rather than a sober choice. Let’s conjure up conflicts everywhere so that Americans don’t get distracted and thus turn away to watch one of the dozens of sports contests playing at every hour of the day. Let’s frame all of our stories as conflicts so that Americans don’t run off and watch any of innumerable movies where violent conflict appears to be the plot itself, rather than a means to a higher end.

Americans can’t help themselves when there is a conflict to behold. The corporate media knows that Americans are war-mongers. They know that when we are troubled, we are always relieved to know that we can go to war. As we’ve repeatedly done in Latin America. After all, war is movement. War is doing something. Not going to war is nothing. War is conflict. All movement is progress. Therefore, War is progress. Peace is boring. Darwin is boring. Lincoln is boring. But Lincoln versus Darwin is a conflict and thus it is interesting. Just like attacking Iran is more interesting because it is laden with conflict rather than peaceful resolution based on compromise.

Therefore, let’s not have any more stories based on resolved conflict. Let’s not herald two great men. Let’s pit them against each other. Just like we’ve done with God versus Allah. Or gays versus straights. Or Blacks versus Whites. Or Liberals versus Conservatives.

Human animals are rigged to give immediate and sustained attention to conflict. We need to be more aware of our propensity because we are so easily manipulated by those who choose to frame their communications as conflict when, in reality, other frames are much more appropriate. Because we are so vulnerable to apparent conflict, manipulative news media can make irrelevant things look relevant and un-compelling things look compelling. The news media all too often feeds our base craving for stories full of conflict. For a lot of evidence, just check out your local TV news. Huge issues involving the survival of the American way of life (exhaustion of resources, overpopulation and white collar systemic fraud) are overlooked. Rather, we get massive doses of the local crime report and sports. A bit of conflict will make just about any story look compelling.

But our yearning for conflict is addictive, just like our yearning for sweets, fatty or sugary foods, drugs, physical possessions and (for some of us) indiscriminate sex. These cravings run deep in human animals. We need to be made more aware of them, so that we don’t pursue warped priorities.  We could know more about them if we studied Darwin, even if we don’t worry about whether he was more important than Lincoln.  If we take that time to know more about the biology of human animals, maybe we wouldn’t run around getting mesmerized by conflict pornography.

Do any of you remember the Nick Smith of 30 months ago? Back then, Nick, based in Decatur, Illinois, designed a brand new site called Dangerous Intersection. At that time, DI was only the most recent of Nick’s accomplishments—he had already established himself as a graphic designer for music groups and entertainers, including Red Hot Chili Peppers, Mandy Moore, the Veronicas, Eric Clapton and Paris Hilton.

That was back then, of course, and some of you might be wondering, “Nick, what have you done lately?” The answer is not at all subtle. Today is the official launch date of Nick’s newest web project: PWN or DIE. What? Huh? PWN? Think of Funny or Die, and then change the content from comedy to video games.

PWN or Die is highly interactive forum where gamers gather to announce their accomplishments, to share strategy and to offer encouragement to other gamers. PWN or Die is a place where gamers may upload videos to illustrate their finest hours. According to today’s press release issued by the Or Die Network:

PwnorDie.com, a new website for gamers and enthusiasts of all levels and the latest venture from the Or Die Networks launched today, it was announced today by Dick Glover, CEO of the Or Die Networks.

“Given the tremendous impact of the video game industry on the web, the Or Die Networks would not be complete without a site dedicated to gaming,” said Glover. “Like Funny or Die, we have established a great destination for game enthusiasts of all levels and interests to be entertained and engaged on a daily basis. It is also a site where developers, manufacturers, bloggers and everyone else associated with gaming can find and break news, information, commentary and entertainment around and about their favorite gaming community,” he added.

Designed to pick up after users put the controller down, Pwn or Die is the ultimate “hub” of gaming videos for the casual user who enjoys the classics like Super Mario Bros., Tetris, or PacMan to the hardcore gamer entranced in World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, or Halo. From user generated videos to videos featuring the best gamers to methods and tips on how to excel in games to celebrities and their involvement and love of video games — Pwn or Die is designed to entertain and engage the game enthusiast in everyone.

The site also features content from the major game companies like Rockstar Games, Electronic Arts, THQ and Activision, as well as gaming sites like NextGenWalkthroughs.com. In addition, Roberty Bowling (aka FourZeroTwo of Infinity Ward, makers of Call of Duty 4), will have a personal video blog on Pwn or Die as well as pieces from Infinity Ward showcasing the COD4 game and their upcoming releases. Pwn or Die will have crews covering major gaming events, showcasing some of the best gamers and gaming companies in the world.

Pwn or Die is the brainchild of Nick Smith, an entertainment industry graphic designer who is most importantly an avid “gamer” and ultimate fan. In addition to the signature Or Die Network attributes such as a voting system and a rich embedded video player, Pwn or Die also features a point system which will reward users for interacting with the site and a state-of-the-art video player designed specifically for the ultimate gaming fan.

Truly, this is a site that is jammed full of valuable information for gamers, as well as those who like to see what the gamers are up to.

Congratulations, Nick!

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then here are about ten thousands words’ worth of photos for you. A few months ago, I bought a small camera that I try to take everywhere I go. The plan was to make myself look more careful at the world around me, which I actually do when I’m thinking of taking photographs.

It’s been a week where I’ve seen all kinds of unusual things. These days, life is thick with memorable images. Take a look and maybe you’ll agree. For starters here a baby giraffe and his mother (at the St. Louis Zoo). It’s really hard to believe that this huge animal is only about 10 days old.

Quick! What colors are zebras? Wrong! They are brown and white all over. Here is a sample of zebra fur up close, thanks to one of the volunteer educators at the zoo.

Here’s a photograph of my cousin. Really.

Rats? Almost. This is a capybara, the world’s largest rodent. I learned about capybaras by watching “The Tick,” the cartoon superhero. The Tick adopted a capybara as a pet and named him “Speak.”

And speaking of pets, have you seen the latest in treats for your dog? I took this photo in my local grocerey store. This new product is called Frosty Paws, a frozen ice-cream like substance made largely out of wheat and soy. Only $4 per box. Let’s see . . . what else do dogs supposedly need? I wonder what desperately hungry people would think of this.

The floods are still around in St. Louis. I took this photo from an airplane flying over St. Charles County. Lots of farmland is under water.

Tonight, while one of my daughters and I were cycling through Tower Grove Park (in south St. Louis), we happened to run across some civil war re-enactors. This cannon is not original equipment–it is a replica, because these fellows like to actually fire them.  They “work” as an artillery unit–about six soldiers operated a single cannon.  During the civil war, the soldiers who operated the cannons were often highly educated guys (unlike the soldiers who fought in the infantry). This particular type of cannon comes with a sight that works well enough that an expert artillerymen could nail a carriage from 1/4 mile away.

This is a piece of stone that was being thrown away by a local granite and marble kitchen shop (I was told that it is slate). I salvaged it because I thought the colors were striking. I hung it on my office wall on Friday. People come by and take a look because they wonder what I’m doing with the Ten Commandments hanging on my wall. I didn’t shape the stone at all, however. That’s a “natural” Ten Commandments shape (in a take-home-stone-that-a-merchant-is about-to-throw-away sort of way).

And yes, there are still lots of people covering their cars with bumper stickers.

Finally, my family’s refrigerator broke today and a neighbor kindly let us put some of our food into his extra freezer in his basement. I couldn’t help noticing all the butter. Hey, Joe, WTF, man! I wondered whether he was stocking up for End Times or whether he just (really really) loves butter. He says it’s the latter. Now I know what people do with those extra refrigerators in their basements.

I hope you enjoyed the little show.

Last summer, I found myself dancing as an unpaid extra in a reality show. I’d been a dancing extra in a TV movie back in ‘98, and at least got lunch and minimum wage. This time I not only did it for free, but I had to sign a non-disclosure document. This time the show will have a wider audience than the (bad) movie that I was in before.

Why, you may well ask, do I mention it now? Well, that very show is finally being broadcast. The bit in which St. Louis Contradancers like myself will appear is just a couple of episodes away. It’s the CW’s iteration of “Farmer Wants a Wife” filmed just barely in the next county, near where the Missouri river joins the Mississippi. I say iteration because the show had already been a local reality show hit in 11 other countries before a U.S. company picked it up.

Now, I can’t say who was still standing in our episode. I don’t even remember. I don’t really care.

I am amused by the middle-of-nowhere pretension. Sure, it is in the flood plain, and out of sight of any big city. But it is also less than a half hour drive from major population and commercial support. The St. Charles airport that they flew into is about 15 minutes closer to the farm by bus than is Lambert International Airport. Lambert was the primary hub for TWA, before the industry crashed in 2001.

We were just there for a barn dance. It was fun. Cameras were everywhere, all the primaries wore wireless mikes, and camouflaged lighting kept things warm up in that depression era barn loft. Backstage has always had more appeal to me than the audience point of view.

But now I’m watching my first reality show. Sure, we record it and watch it when convenient. It is fun to see people on TV that we’ve met, in places where we’ve been. But now I have even more awareness of all the setup, production, and post production that goes in to making these 40 minute episodes.

What are we to make of this latest flap over a teen icon revealing herself as a potentially sexual being?

I was only dimly aware of Hannah Montana till the Vanity Fair scandal (if scandal is the word). Now it seems I can’t get away from her, which is, of course, the goal of marketing—to make something inescapable for the general public. There are elements of the incident that require less froth and more examination. The accusations of “whose idea was it in the first place and how was Mylie Cyrus manipulated?” are loud and in many ways naive.

First off, Hannah Montana is a Disney product. I don’t think we’re yet quite comfortable with the idea of a person—even a fictional one—being a “product” like a box of soap or a car, but this is indeed what the character is. Designed, engineered, and road tested, Hannah Montana is a money-making machine for Disney and the various participants in the show and franchise.

Pause for a moment and consider: Disney.

It is difficult to imagine a marketing machine that is better at what it does. Which means the chances of something being done with one of its properties that it (a) doesn’t know about and (b) doesn’t approve are next to zero. Especially when you add to that:

Vanity Fair.

Big magazine, famous magazine, a magazine people in show business lust to get into. In the vernacular, Lot A Bank there.

So we’re talking about two major corporate entities, huge public presence, who are involved—without a doubt contractually—in a presentation of a property. Again, the oddness of talking about a person as property is unsettling, but this is a show business idiom quite common. Agencies discuss “properties” all the time and they’re talking about musicians, actors, artists.

Throw into the mix Annie Liebowitz, who is arguably iconic herself. From the early days at Rolling Stone up through the present, Annie is a public figure. Meaning that, especially “in the business”, everyone knows what she does. She would also have been involved in the arrangements between Disney and Vanity Fair.

So far so good. Everyone knew what was going on.

Now, the photoshoot was crowded. Lots of people there. Including Mylie Cyrus’s parents. Not sure who mom is, but dad—Billie Ray—is an entertainment industry insider. He’s been around a long time. He has survived quite well. He knows the ropes. He is not a “stage dad” in the sense of not knowing what’s going on.

I’ve laid this out at some length to show how utterly unlikely it is that the photographs of 15-year-old Mylie in a pose more appropriate to a 20-something were an accident. That no one knew what was happening. It’s not like this was done in a basement studio, digitally, and the shots immediately posted to the web. Disney would have had to clear the shots. I cannot imagine it wasn’t in the contract that someone at Disney would get to look at them and say, one way or the other, whether they could be published. Of the two, Disney is by far the bigger gorilla—Vanity Fair was not likely to hold them over a barrel.

So what then is the Big Deal? And, if this is so inappropriate, why was it allowed?

Control over a teen-age superstar is doable. Look at Leann Rimes. Her burgeoning sexuality, while certain present and eminently marketable, was not “unleashed” till she was over 18. Her parents kept a handle on it. We can doubtless find other examples. Reese Witherspoon. Jody Foster. Helen Hunt. Even earlier, Annette Funicello.

(Though Annette is a curiosity—she never really stopped being a Mousketeer. Her emergent sexuality—blatant and impossible to get around—somehow failed to take her into “adult” consideration. Management may have been too tight and she remained—popularly—the girl on the beach who never went past the first kiss. This happens—actresses who have the audacity to “grow up” and find themselves trapped in an adolescent image. Sally Fields is a case in point. She went from Gidget to The Flying Nun, completely bypassing a mature sexual phase, and nearly remained stuck with it. She made a minor film—I forget the title—in which she appeared nude. In an interview, she admitted that the decision to do so was calculated to shatter the Gidget/Flying Nun image so she could then be taken seriously as an adult actress. The tactic might be questionable to some, but the result was a critically-successful career.)

Managing the property is the whole game here. And Hollywood (and Nashville, etc) have a problem with starlets like Mylie. Once they establish them as an icon for preteens to teens—what is called “tweens”—what do you do when they grow up and start acting like women?

Age here isn’t the issue. Let’s face it, sexuality strikes in the teen years, some sooner than others, and the limelight of a successful career seems somehow to advance the timetable. We are all-too-familiar with the meltdowns in instances where the transition is, well, bungled—Lindsey Lohan and Britney Speers are the poster girls of crash and burn. (more…)

I have been anticipating the FCC switch from analog to digital for several years. The original plan was to have the final demise of NTSC (”analog”) broadcast in 2006. Now, it will really happen. The change that they averted when they went to color is finally here. Everyone needs a new TV.

Unless you have cable or satellite. Then you can wait until your old box dies. But I use rabbit ears in my multipath hell of a location in the city. On good days, I can get 7 channels of regular interest, plus 4 explicitly Christian channels (24, 26, 49, 51. The 700 Club shares 11). Sometimes I cannot get ABC-30 or CW-11 clear enough to record or avoid watering eyes. Other times Fox-2 and My-46 are too bad to watch, too. So I really only have 3 reliable channels in analog.

Enter digital clarity. Yesterday I got my gummint subsidized converter box and hooked it up. Now I get perfectly clear (in numerical order) Fox-2.1, CBS-4.1, NBC-5.1, local weather 5.2, and PBS 9.1-9.4. That’s it.

(more…)

Raymond Learsy reports on one aspect of post-oil:

Renault Nissan, and California-based Project Better Place, are working together with the government of Israel to make the country oil independent by 2020. Denmark has already signed on to implement the sinews of this major electric car initiative.

In broad outline, Renault Nissan will build cars powered by lithium-ion batteries running purely on electricity and delivering performance on par with a 1.6 liter gas engine. These electric car models will become available as of 2011. A key component will be the preparation and development of a national infrastructure to access electric power. “Project Better Place” will arrange for the installation of 500,000 charging hook-ups throughout Israel. It is estimated electric power charging costs for the lifetime of this car will approximate the cost of fueling an equivalent gasoline powered vehicle for some two years at current gasoline prices.

Denmark plans to provide the power supply for electric cars with wind power. Israel is planning huge mirrors in the Negev Desert to capture the solar energy needed for its electric cars. With an extensive grid of plug-in locations there will be no need for lengthy charge periods so that charging up shouldn’t take much more time than tanking up currently.

After considerable thought, I hereby offer my predictions for the 2008 Major League Baseball season.   Unlike other prognosticators, I guarantee my predictions.  Therefore, feel free to bet large amounts of money that each of the following will occur, for certain, during the 2008 MBL season:

Unabashed optimism will surround the ritual of spring training.

Thousands of dignitaries and celebrities will show up at Opening Day baseball games to be seen.

Columnists will crank out thousands of articles on baseball, each of them suggesting that following Major League Baseball is important to the overall scheme of life.

Some young relatively unknown baseball players will impress the fans this year.

Some of the high-priced veterans will not do as well as the fans hoped and the fans will grumble, many of them expressing their displeasure at length on sports radio call-in shows, arguing that those players are washed up, on drugs, too old or slackers.

Millions of fans will go to the baseball stadiums, willingly paying thousands of dollars to attend baseball games and to buy outrageously over-priced beer and nachos (at least $170 for a family of four).  Thousands of these fans will be named Daniel, Robert, Michael, James, Mary, Susan, Karen, Linda or Donna.

During each MLB game, the fans will be subjected to an unending stream of advertising in the form of videos, posters and PA announcements.

Each team will play about 162 games, totaling about 2,500 games. [Note: Scientists have calculated that each team should play 256 games each to make certain that the truly best team ends up with the best record.]

The “great” teams will lose about 60 games each.   “Horrible” teams will nonetheless win about 60 games each.

Fans will continue to call the playoff finale the “World Series,” even though teams from only two countries will be invited.

Huge numbers of fans who have no athletic talent will buy expensive sports jerseys bearing the names of baseball players who are athletically gifted.

Some of the players will set obscure records this year, yet this will nonetheless be deemed important enough to discuss by baseball announcers.

Thousands of drunk fans will get into fist fights that begin when one of the drunk fans insults the other fan’s team by saying something like “Your team sucks.”

Players who are being interviewed by the media will employ an endless stream of clichés and platitudes. (more…)

As usual my head is abuzz with the social media explosion and the impact technology has on my world. While communication has always been a part of the technology, folks that barely own computers are becoming familiar with Linkedin, Facebook, myspace, and twitter.  iPhones are being advertised so deliciously on television ads that my lust can barely be contained, not to mention the tiniest of notebook computers making an appearance with the cutest of jingles. Sometimes I am not sure If what I am doing makes sense for my business. Sometimes I worry that I waste my time with my focus on all this geeky technology and social media web 2.0 stuff.

I am no expert, but as usual I know enough to be dangerous, and to provide a lively conduit to my less technologically focused comrades. A less kind way of saying that is that I am obsessed with technology and communication but that I have people in my life who keep me from completely disappearing into the matrix. I love social connections technology provides, and I have for as long as I can remember. I went from devouring Asimov and Heinlein as a child and dreaming about connections within world to almost going broke networking coffeehouses with chat and email and online information in St. Louis prior to the web explosion.

One of the reasons I ventured out on my own in recruiting is that I could experiment with stuff like this and the stuff that is still being developed. I have had a lot of success with the social media in recruiting, and love the heck out of it. There is truly a dizzying amount of activity, and it promises to be a wild ride as we venture even more into interactivity and robust network applications. It can be a distraction, but I have found that as long as my online activities drive me back to the telephone (or my bottom line) I am okay. It is hard to focus and be that disciplined with all the fun, crazy stuff happening out there, but recruiting success (like most of life) really is about discipline and focus. I know I have to stay balanced, and a tool like twitter is very dangerous for us folks easily distracted by shiny bits, but it is also a way to find people, and that is what I do for a living. I guess it is always all about the results, and I should just let those decide if my geeky methods are helpful or harmful.

I believe that life is always enhanced by connection, which is partly why I love being a recruiter. And though I know that a lot of folks scoff at meaningful connections through a computer or a mobile device, for me it goes without saying that the lines between the virtual world and that of my own back yard are now so blurred as to be almost indistinguishable. I have had countless virtual world interactions that changed my life, made me money, or led me to find new friends or business contacts, so there is no debate on the value to me. The challenge for me lies in finding a balance. The dizzying real time feeds of email, tweets, chat and mobile blogging are as necessary to me as my morning cup of joe, but I have to work to find a way to stay grounded, centered and balanced in my approach, otherwise I might go crazy. So I am working on it. I think it is funny that I try to do 20 minutes of sitting meditation each morning, and then I go off to work, but it does seem to help me keep my balance.

Recruiting efficiently has a lot to do with doing effective research. That is why I think my methods might be interesting to people that are not just recruiters. Here is an example of how I use twitter. Think of it as a constant explosion of 140 character thoughts into space. Steams of consciousness from an unidentified number of consciousnesses. Random thoughts, pointers to pictures and articles and interviews and what someone had for dinner. Dizzying, right? You can follow people and see, in real-time, their streams on your screen. Entertaining, fun, pretty pointless though, right? Wrong.

Enter tweet scan, a real-time twitter search. For example, I will search for St. Louis tweets, and what do we find? An ever growing and surprisingly active list of folks using twitter here in my home town. Coolio! I am seeing denizens of the web that I never realized were there. But wait, what is that? Oh, a tweet from someone I might know, who knew that guy was on twitter. Man I need to get back in touch with that guy, uh, wait, holy cow. He is tweeting that he is hiring people, and is having problems. He needs me!

Uh, sorry guys, I gotta run. Right there is some potential business popping its head up and, as a rhino, I need to charge right after it. But isn’t it amazing how such a seemingly pointless tool can help you do what you need to do?  Or at least it can if you know how to use it.

A few months ago the English alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited album “In Rainbows” as a free download, leaving it up to the fans to decide what they would pay, if anything at all.

As someone who has had the difficult and expensive experience of distributing physical copies of my documentaries on DVD I can tell you that it was with great anticipation that I viewed this experiment. I was surprised and a little disappointed to find that only 40% of those downloading actually paid for it.

I recall as a young man buying vinyl records for about $5 a piece and watching as the price slowly went up and up, hitting about $12 before giving way to CDs which eventually topped out at around $16 to $18 a pop. These days, with iTunes selling individual songs for $.99 and most albums for about $9.99, I feel like I am getting a bargain. Of course, I still have the expense of having to burn my own CDs to play them in my car, not being hip enough to own an MP3 player.

Still, I find myself wondering what I would pay for some of my favorite music if given the opportunity to decide on my own. The temptation to take it for free would be strong but I am smart enough to know that if enough people do that the ability to place our own value on music would disappear, as it has done with Radiohead. The band has since retracted its “free or whatever” offer, prompting some to accuse the band of chickening out as they saw potential revenue slip through their fingers.

In the band’s defense, Radiohead’s leader Thom Yorke contends that it was always an experiment, not a business model for themselves or anyone else, and that it had run its course. (As of December 31st “In Rainbows” has become available on iTunes and the CD can be purchased through the usual outlets.)

However, a nagging question still remains. Now that music is being freed from the cost of being physically reproduced on disk, how much should we pay for it?

What is music worth to you?

Last night I saw The Da Vinci Code for the first time.  I had read the first chapter of the book some time ago and frankly it so did not capture my imagination that I haven’t picked it up since.  Years before, I’d read Holy Blood Holy Grail, the book upon which most of Brown’s novel seems based, although the ideas in both have been around for a long, long time.

What did I think of the movie?  It was entertaining.  It moved well.  One might say it is almost (almost, not quite) a Thinking Person’s Indiana Jones.  The photography is gorgeous, the settings cool, and I am never disappointed by Ron Howard’s direction.  Tom Hanks character seems a bit too restrained at times, but this is a minor quibble.

I am frankly impressed that they had the nerve to follow the argument all the way through.  The whole notion of Jesus’ sex life drives many people into spasms of irrational anxiety and vehement denunciation.  It is not just that the early church—from the time of Constantine on—exhibited a profound and evolving misogyny, but that the very idea of sexual intercourse itself elicits a kind of systemic, reflexive revulsion I find baffling to say the least.  I mean, if it were only the subjugation of women at issue, then the notion that Jesus might have used them like kleenexes (much as most charismatic cult leaders have done and continue to do) should raise no passions.

No, it is beyond that.  It is a rejection of sex as a valid exercise between men and women.  Jesus and the Apostles become not just the ultimate He-Man Woman Haters Club, but a paradigm for an asceticism echoed down through time as some sort of ideal state for the true christian.

It falls apart, though, in the subsequent perversion of the Ideal in the very subjugation and profound misogyny that Jesus himself seems to have had no time or patience for.  Later generations of church leaders found that in order to reject sex, they had to demonize the very thing that kept pulling them away from that Ideal—the desirability of women.

(I’m speaking here in terms of heterosexuality, but the same applies to all forms of sexual intimacy.  If it was sinful for a man to lust after a woman, at least such lust was discussable, while homosexual lust brooked no dialogue whatsoever, just condemnation.)

The difficulty of this part of the standard operating procedure of christianity appears unique among the other ideals sought—honesty, humility, generosity, forgiveness.  Frankly, none of them are as difficult to achieve and live by as chastity.

The fact that sexual love can be so magnificent, so transcendent, so Other Worldly makes me wonder—has always made me wonder—if this were even an issue for Jesus.  I seriously doubt it was.  I seriously doubt it was part of his ethic.  He seems to have regularly chastised his disciples for being “boys” when it came to letting the women in as equals.  Doubtless there was a lot of competition among the Twelve for Jesus’s attention and approbation, and doubtless—because of the persistence of the aesthetic within Roman, Greek, and Hebrew cultures—there was more than a little resistance to letting women in on anything the boys did, so it would be natural, while the male competition was going on, to resent even more the intrusion of—ugh—females!

Like all oppression, misogyny on the systemic level is a control device.  The church learned early that it could control its followers best by instilling a constant state of anxiety over sin, by making them all feel guilty and requiring expiation through the intervention of priests.  If they could make you feel guilty during your most private and intimate moments, boy they had you.

Did they do this consciously?  Some probably knew very well what they were doing.  Most just followed orders.  They revered hermits and ascetics, set them up as standards—like St. Jerome, who castrated himself rather than be distracted by lust.  After a time, it becomes entrenched, and the cult of chastity becomes self-perpetuating.  It is always a mistake to think that psychological tyranny is a new thing, invented by the Bolsheviks, or that Back Then people weren’t good at it.  Nonsense.  Modern dictators study Caesar for more than mere military advice.

But was it based on Jesus’s teachings?  Likely not.  He was very much about freedom, about getting out from under the shadow of sin, about finding truth, and about people being equal.  The idea that he would somehow have found women lesser beings is not borne out in the texts, either canonical or apocryphal.

The idea that he was married is hardly the Big Deal the church makes of it.  All it would mean is that he lived life fully as a human being, eating, sleeping, working, talking…loving, in all the ways humans have of loving.  To claim, as the church does, that he was made human in order to live as us so that when he died he could die as one of us is undermined if you take away one of the most basic and powerful and intimate of human experiences.  All the rest of that list is barely more than survival.

I’ll leave the examination of why the decision was taken to subjugate women in the church to others.  It’s a lengthy topic.  Suffice it to say that they did and we’re paying the price of ridding ourselves of that condition, and have been for some time.

What interested me in the ideas behind The Da Vinci Code and it source material is the notion that the revelation of such a fact would overturn the church.  People are gullible, but stubborn.  It would do no such thing.  People would fight and cling to their faith and reject the new fact, just as they reject anything else, true or otherwise, that threatens them where they pin their hopes.  I see atheists all the time hoping for the day religion disappears (hoping, of which most faiths draw sustenance, hence an ironic condition for one who wishes faith to disappear) and thinking that this or that piece of science might dispel as if by magic the blindness of those who see the world otherwise.  Never happens.  Never will.

At best, people adapt and modify the new facts to fit with the old framework, and over time the whole thing gradually morphs into something new, even while appearing to be the same old schtick.

Therefore, I see the idea of the Priory of Scion not as a secret organization designed to guard a Great Secret until the time is right to reveal it, but as another church that has a different kind of icon at its center—a human one, but nevertheless just as potent a symbol as any other.  The bitterness of Ian McKellen’s character that when the first millennium rolled around and the Priory failed to reveal the heir misses the point.  They didn’t reveal the heir (fictionally, mind you) because it would have gotten them all killed, including the heir.  But more importantly, they would have lost their icon.  Their center.  They changed, became like the thing they sought to replace, and simply continued on, worshiping in their own idiosyncratic way.

I quite enjoyed the whole scene with The Last Supper.  Absurd in many ways, though.  While I liked the notion that the person on Jesus’s right is, in fact, Mary, it is a problematic conjecture.  The original was painted on a wall in a mess hall—the refectory of Santa Maria delle Grazie, in Milan.  It did not fare well.  Even in 1556, one commentator described it as ‘a muddle of blots.’  It has been restored more often than any other painting by Da Vinci.  The church itself was hit by a bomb in 1943 and rubble covered the painting.  The current version is the nth restoration and no doubt a lot of it is guesswork.  It is not the only Last Supper with a beardless youth at Jesus’s side, but many have pointedly identified this person as John, his brother (another point of contention among those who find the idea that his mother had sex with Joseph offensive).  If Da Vinci had been so bold as to paint a woman, I think there would have been public controversy at the time.  But who can say?  It’s as concrete as any other aspect of this particular issue.

I think we are best left to the long and slow process of just growing up when it comes to this issue.  The supernatural elements of the church have less and less hold on more and more people.  The essential points of Jesus’s teachings do not require his deification or the intercession of divinity—except, perhaps, the divinity we ourselves possess simply as conscious beings capable of greatness.  Capable of wholeness.  Capable, finally, of love.

In an article recently published on BldgBlog (HT: Boing Boing), there’s an absolutely fascinating interview with Michael Cook, a Canadian writer and photographer who devotes himself to exploring the subterranean infrastructure - that is to say, the storm sewers, spillways, abandoned hydroelectric complexes, dams, and all manner of tunnels and drains - that lie unseen beneath our cities like a vast, hidden world under the world.

The interview includes many truly stunning pictures. Many of these places are quite beautiful - often in a sort of noir, industrial sense, granted, but there are also concrete spillways running through wilderness and forest, storm drains that form spectacular waterfalls, and vast, soaring tunnels where light pours down as if in a cathedral. (There are more pictures on Cook’s own site, Vanishing Point.)

But even the less beautiful tunnels give me a feeling of obscure fascination. All my life, I’ve been enthralled by the idea of hidden places - those secret, forgotten realms, lost in the interstices of society and accessible only to the privileged few who have knowledge of their existence. There are, as Cook notes, whole interconnected layers of human history down in the dark that cry out to be studied and recorded.

As well, these explorations can give one an entirely new perspective on our society and the vast, complex infrastructure that maintains it - an infrastructure that most people never even know exists, much less see. It may well be that many people dismiss the notion of environmental protection only because they are unaware of just how much effort goes into sustaining our civilization, and what a fragile balance exists between humanity and nature.

In a recent poll, reading in America is revealed to be, well, less than appreciated by large swaths of the population. This ought come as no surprise. We live in a time of stupendous ignorance, which allows for the expression of epic stupidity. The Founding Fathers were suspicious of democracy (I learned this by reading several books on the subject of the early republic), believing that the vast majority of people were incapable of the kind of intellectual comprehension necessary for an informed plebiscite. In short, they knew people were ill-educated and believed this meant they could not parse abstraction. By the mid-19th century, though, reading was probably the most common form of home entertainment.

America has championed the idea of public education. Our publishing companies have been at the forefront of issuing special editions of “Great Books”, and we have turned our economy into a college degree-driven dynamo. Yet the most basic reasons to read seem ignored by most, along with the habit of reading after leaving school.

A few quotes:

“Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.” Mortimer Adler

“By reading, we enjoy the dead; by conversation, the living; and by contemplation, ourselves. Reading enriches the memory; conversation polishes wit; and contemplation improves the judgment. Of these, reading is the most important, as it furnishes both the others.” Charels Caleb Colton

“The first time I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; and when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one.” Oliver Goldsmith

“Resolve to edge in a little reading every day, if it is but a single sentence. If you gain fifteen minutes a day, it will make itself felt at the end of the year.” Horace Mann

And finally, a lengthier quote from someone who knows a thing or two about the subject.

“There is no single way to read well, though these is a prime reason why we should read. Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found? If you are fortunate, you encounter a particular teacher who can help, yet finally you are alone, going on without further mediation. Reading well is one of the great pleasures solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures. It returns you to otherness, whether in yourself or in friends, or in those who may become friends. Imaginative literature is otherness, and as such alleviates loneliness. We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life.” Harold Bloom

I have been an avid reader virtually all my life. I caught what is known as the Reading Bug around age 10, and ever since there has rarely been a year when I did not read at least thirty books cover to cover, averaging sixty to seventy a year. My senior year of high school I cut most days and spent them in the local public library, where I achieved an enviable (and now inconceivable) rate of a book a day, and tore through most of the so-called Classics that year.

“Why do you always have your face in a book?”

This question was never asked by my parents. My parents, when early on they realized I was reading so much, increased my allowance so I could buy more books (a paperback then was sixty cents). No, this came from “friends” who rarely read, who equated reading with school, which they disliked, and for whom reading had unfortunately become a chore.

I blame the educational system for that. English, as taught in the schools then, had the unfortunate effect of beating a love of reading out of most kids. They could never just have fun with a book, they had to analyze it and “find meaning.” The fact is, meaning is such a individualized thing, it must be discovered individually. Telling someone that what they thought was important about a book is wrong because they do not pick up on the “deeper meanings” of the text is a sure way to turn them off unless they are already dedicated readers. And ridiculing the literature of choice of a student will put the nail in the coffin.

“Why should I learn how to jump through those hoops? This reading stuff is a pain.”

Add to that the simple fact that reading is Not Social, and you have the makings of a functionality illiterate society.

Not illiterate in the sense that they cannot read a sentence, but in the sense that so many people do not know how to access literature.

It takes practice. Learning how to decode the words on the page and make the images in your mind the author hopes you do takes learning. It’s an acquired skill that improves over time and repeated exposure, and those who figure it out become those people who are content to sit alone somewhere with a book.

Is this really important?

Reading enlarges the capacity of the imagination. No other medium does that, with the possible exception of music (but only in certain limited respects). How else does one get to a point where empathy becomes so developed that we can literally understand a person from another culture without having gone through their experiences?

I do not mean understand them as if we had lived their life, but understand the differences and the depth of similarities that hang on those differences.

Movies do the work of the imagination for us. Video games as well.

When asked whether I believe violent movies and television feed violence in society, I have to admit that, yes, I do. But only because there’s nothing between the raw, unformed pysche of the young and the insistent imagery, nothing to mediate, to give context, to offer viable alternatives, and nothing that has aided the development of skeptical buffers. Reading does that. It does it by forcing the mind to do the work of contextualizing, of comprehending meaning. When you read, you are an active participant, engaged in the process of judging, of analyzing, of making sense of the text—and the text itself offers context that is often missing from a visual experience.

I hasten to add here that this is true of all reading, but more true of broad reading. People who basically read the same book over and over again may begin the process of enlarging their imaginations, but then it falters, ill-fed and poorly exercised.

People who read a lot are often more interesting—mainly because they start off by being more interested, by virtue of the worlds they’ve encountered on the page.

Lastly, though, books are the connective tissue of our civilization, past to future. You cannot talk to Ben Franklin in the flesh, but he’s there, in print. Likewise Aristotle, Plato, Cyrano de Bergerac, Twain, Tolkein, all worthy minds who left their vision behind to talk to us. Books are the avatars of their creators, and once opened are fully interactive.

I have no idea how to turn this trend around. Many things conspire to rob us of a literate culture, not least of which is a sheer lack of time. We work longer hours, necessities cost more, there are people around us demanding attention. But it’s a mistake not to see reading as a necessary thing.

Those who are parents might consider easing up on the team sports and the implicit ridicule of always forcing the child to go play with friends. Books are friends. Spending all the time with a book is no better, though, than spending no time with one at all.

I grew up in a house in which it was ordinary to see everyone quietly reading. I’ve been in houses where there wasn’t a single book to be found.

But most importantly, we need to stop asking that reading be defended. “What’ good is it? What use is it?” The use and good of it is self-evident over time, but just reading, at any given moment, should be no more odd than having a conversation with someone—which no one really questions.

Given the recent stupidity expressed in much of our public life these past several years, I think it’s time to advocate reading a bit more. And not just “prescribed” reading. I have a poster on my wall, a picture of Mary Harris “Mother” Jones—yes, the one the magazine was named for—and the quote says “Sit down and read. Prepare yourself for the coming conflict.”

I spent this past weekend in the Indiana woods, camping with a few hundred others in the cause of contradance. Near the end of the weekend I was conversing with a gent with a tale of how a pet psychic helped him solve a relationship issue by remotely reading his parrot, and he came up with a gem of a digression.

His answer to, “Do you accept Jesus as your personal savior?”
is “I wouldn’t wish to accept personal gain as a result of an act of human sacrifice”.

(The pet psychic intro is relevant as an illustration that nuggets of reason can come from anywhere.)

There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch.TANSTAAFL.

Anybody recognize that? Where it comes from? What it refers to?

This past weekend was the 100^th birthday of Robert A. Heinlein. I was not there, though I’d wanted to be. You see, Robert A. Heinlein was one of the greatest science fiction writers in the world, and when I was a child, his books informed my apprehension of just about everything. It might be questioned whether one man deserves the kind of press Heinlein gets. Even when he was alive (he passed away in 1988) he was controversial but there were still many places you could walk into where not a soul would know who he was. I think he’s important because, in a way, he made modern America.

What? A science fiction writer? Made America?

Such a statement demands clarification.

A biography is soon to be out by a gentleman named Bill Patterson. You can read it, read about the man who once wore the title “The Dean of Space Age Fiction”, and judge for yourself. I won’t go into huge detail about his life or work here. I want to make a smaller, more pointed observation.

In 33 novels and a significant number of short stories, Robert A. Heinlein established a didactic approach to science fiction that has been copied, improved, debated, revered, and hated since he began his career in 1938. Heinlein was born in Missouri. H