Image Courtesy of DevilCrayon (http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035676122@N01) under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.

(That title sounds like something I never hoped I’d write. The first part is admittedly stolen from the Round Table via this Monty Python sketch.)

If you’re an office worker like me, you probably spend quite a bit of time clicking a mouse and pounding on a keyboard.  The time you spend doing this also might lead to some manner of repetitive stress injury.  In my case, my right index finger is nearly perpetually swollen, stiff, and in pain because I learn my lessons slowly and rail in the face of common sense when it comes to my own well-being.

There are a number of ways to combat your office-wrought deterioration.  You could drop money on ergonomic products like gel pads to support your wrist or braces designed to prevent the common motions that bring on Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, and while there is some debate as to how efficacious many of these interventions are, they’ll probably bring you some physical respite.   Your other option would be to take the less expensive route and attempt to reduce the number of mouse clicks and keystrokes you perform each day.   Here are two ways you could do that.

AutoHotkey

AutoHotkey is a tool known — I would imagine — to most computer nerds, and while my brother, a Computer Science major, recommended I learn to use it, I took quite awhile to start digging into it.  Before I go any further, let me stress that I am a computer/coding/technology enthusiast.  I learn what I can and pick up things here or there, and for personal purposes, I’m relatively proficient, but as a handful of my friends and my aforementioned brother are either professionally or scholastically involved in the computer fields, I should extend the caveat that you take my tech advice as gospel at your own peril.  Indeed, I have a pronounced case of cybernetic penis envy.  Read that as you will.

Anyhow, AutoHotkey essentially allows you to write scripts, macros, shortcuts, etc. once you’ve downloaded the program.  The nice advantage to AutoHotkey is its simplicity.  Even a dullard like me can manage to streamline a few processes and cut down the daily digital (think fingers) mileage.  For instance, I’ve assigned shortcuts that open up the programs I use most often.  In the following example, “#” represents the WIN key, and “w” represents, well, the letter “w”:

#w::
Run WINWORD.EXE
return

This bleeding simple code launches Microsoft Word when you press WIN+w.  Let’s say you’re running a program like Firefox that doesn’t have such an obvious Windows call:

#f::
Run C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
return

So if you pres WIN+f, Firefox will launch without your having to go to your Desktop and find the icon or even start the program from your Quick Launch bar.  The problem with the way I’ve written the Firefox shortcut is that I haven’t made it incredibly portable.  In other words, if I wanted to convert the AHK (AutoHotkey format) file into an EXE and run it on another computer, it might not work depending on the local configuration or Windows version running on that machine.  There are ways to make it more portable like using the built-in variable %A_ProgramFiles% in place of C:\Program Files (this is paraphrased from the Quick-start Tutorial on the website), but I have no imminent plans to do so.  You’ll have to check AutoHotkey’s documentation.

Other than that, I have to copy and paste a number of form letters for a variety of reasons and send them to people via email.  I’ve gotten pretty quick at navigating from file to file, but every time I go on a rampage, my right hand begins complaining and cramping up something fierce.  Why not write a script to type everything out for me?  That way I simply create a new email and press the shortcut.  In the following example, “^” stands for Ctrl, “!” stands for Alt, and {Enter} sends a Return/Enter keystroke:

^!h::
Send Dear Widgets Inc.,{Enter}{Enter}I am extremely displeased with the quality of your widgets. I demand a full refund for the widgets I have purchased in bulk, and I plan to take my business to Customized Widget Solutions.{Enter}{Enter}Sincerely,{Enter}{Enter}Lord Knickerswitch
return

There is probably an easier way to do this, and please, if anyone who actually knows what they’re doing wants to posit a few suggestions, I’d love to hear them. If you’ve downloaded AutoHotkey already, write this into a Notepad file, save as an AHK file, and run it. Then open a new Notepad file, place your cursor in the body and hit Ctrl+Alt+h. See what happens.  If you performed all actions correctly, you should have seen this letter typed out before your very eyes after pressing just three keys.  Your joints will thank you.

I stress again, these are very elementary examples of two things I’ve done with a base and exceedingly simple knowledge.  The AutoHotkey documentation provides a very complete reference of the variables and other functions available.  They are numerous, and hopefully, I’ll have some more layman updates for which my brother and tech-pro friends can chastise me.

NiftyWindows

The second bit is more of an endorsement and less of an example.  Download the NiftyWindows EXE from Enovatic-Solutions.

This program also uses AutoHotkey, so to use NiftyWindows, you’ll need to download the former.  Reading through the features, you’ll notice that NiftyWindows provides a set of mouse and keyboard shortcuts that help in dealing with the dearth of simultaneous windows you’re liable to open throughout a full working day.  These shortcuts allow the user to quickly resize or make windows transparent, stick windows on top so that they stay in view as you click through others, minimize, close, and roll up all the annoying work and non-work related windows littering your monitor.

In the twenty minutes or so it takes to program the NiftyWindows shortcuts into your muscle memory and grow comfortable with using the various interactions, you’ll have saved yourself future time, hassle, keystrokes, and mouseclicks.  As far as the website notes, this program works with Windows XP and previous versions.  I haven’t tested it on Windows Vista or  Windows 7, so I cannot vouch for it in those environments.  However, I do run Windows 7 at home, and I wouldn’t be surprised if NiftyWindows’ benefits are much less pronounced when used with 7, which is a much better and more convenient operating system than XP, as it should be after all this time.

NiftyWindows is also an open-source project under the GNU General Public License, so you’re free to modify it to suit your needs if you’re able and willing.

To get any real benefit from either of these solutions, you’ll need to dig through the documentation yourself, and if there are AutoHotkey junkies or efficiency gurus out there with suggestions that are easy to implement for idiots like me, please post comments.  I’d also like to hear about anything that helps refine or correct the information above.

Image Courtesy of Ian Britton and FreeFoto.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommerical-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported license.

As best I can remember, I originally posted this blog post some time during 2005 or 2006 on the now-defunct WritingUp.com, and because I’ve been too busy (or something) to maintain a semblance of a working blog these past few months, I hereby provide this tasty archival morsel.  It is my sincerest hope that posting these foul words precludes some increased production on my part in the near future.

In case my words are misunderstood in these strange and uncertain times, let it be known in no uncertain terms that I do not promote or condone violence against anyone for their race, religion, creed, or sexual orientation.

Indeed. Remember the Sabbath, and keep it holy. This is perhaps the most important Commandment ever carved into a stone tablet, and it is one you would all do well to heed if you wish to avoid finding yourself in the Sea of Souls at the mercy of your best friend. He will gnaw upon your head like it is beef jerky for all eternity. Dante seemed to think absolute zero epitomizes ultimate suffering, but I would much rather spend my Afterlife in excruciating frigidity than splashing about with billions of other lost souls. This is your future, though, if you fail to worship every Sunday.

But this thing isn’t about Dante or Inferno. Certainly not. For the first time in a few years, I picked up a New World Translation (NWT) Holy Bible and got farther than I ever have before. I got all the way to Chapter Five of the Book of Matthew, in fact, with a .38 Special from about sixty paces away. It took me three shots to do it, but that third hollow-point bullet made the thing dance a jig for one split second. I was lucky to have hit it at all from such a distance seeing as how twilight was falling upon the land, and aiming the pistol proved more difficult in the dark than it had earlier in the afternoon. After savoring the feat for a few brief moments, though, I reloaded the pistol and fired five more shots point blank through the Bible. I could hear them screaming – Noah, Bathsheba, Abram, Jonah, and all the rest. I got every one of those miserable fuckers. They’ve been asking for it for a long time. They should consider themselves lucky, though. If I hadn’t have been immersed in a game of Pistol Baseball, I would have fired twelve more rounds into the thing.

Before I get any further, I must stress that I would never terrorize a King James Bible in this manner if only because the King James Version exhibits more grace and style in Genesis 1:1 than the NWT manages to all the way through Revelation. A King James Bible is truly a thing of beauty not be sullied by bullets, fire, or half-assed updates meant to sedate modern day human beings by appealing to them on their level. Whoever thought putting the NWT into widespread circulation was a good idea should be castrated for crimes against quality and literary eloquence. The NWT is nothing more than a dogmatic abortion that foretells of darker days to come. It is a harbinger that we mustn’t ignore, for if we do, one day we will be seeing biblical translations in text-speak and backwoods West Virginian slang. The Bible will swell with inaccuracy. It shall be overrun by anachronism, and we shall all be worse people for it because, as it stands, the King James Bible could very well be one of the greatest works of literature every composed. However, my money for the top spot is on Gilgamesh.

Nonetheless, this outburst against the Good News and its preliminary component was not just an attack against literary inadequacy but an exorcism of sorts of lingering demons from fifth grade when I was made to memorize the Lord’s Prayer, the Nicene Creed, and the Lutheran Pledge of Allegiance (I shit you not) and recite them all in front of my class. Word travels fast in parochial schools, and it was a well-known fact that I was an unbaptized heathen running amok among good, upstanding young Christians. The bastards made an example of me, and they might as well have marched me down the hallway while letting the entire student body take bites out of my legs. I am not normally a patient man, and I have been looking for revenge for a long time without ever saying a word.

But this is all the distant past, as everything is becoming the distant past more quickly than we recognize. Sometimes the only thing to do is shoot a bullet straight through those old memories, wake the fuck up, and realize when you’ve been hoodwinked.

“God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked. I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder: he hath also taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground. He breaketh me with breach upon breach, he runneth upon me like a giant.” Job 16:11-14, King James Translation

“God hands me over to young boys
And into the hands of wicked ones he throws me headlong. I had come to be at ease, but he proceeded to shake me up; And he grabbed me by the back of the neck and proceeded to smash me, And he sets me up as a target for himself. His archers encircle me; He splits open my kidneys and feels no compassion; He pours out my gallbladder to the very earth. He keeps breaking through me with breach after breach; He runs at me like a mighty one.” Job 16:11-14, New World Translation

Simon Read. War of Words: A Tale of Newsprint and Murder. Union Square Press, 2009. 320 pages. ISBN-10: 1402756127

“Journalism [is]… a low trade and a habit worse than heroin, a strange seedy world of misfits and drunkards and failures.” — Hunter S. Thompson

Simon Read begins War of Words: A Tale of Newsprint and Murder with two quotations, the first an excerpt from the Daily Dramatic Chronicle (later the San Francisco Chronicle) comparing the marksmanship of American journalists to that of their French counterparts and the second a fitting quote from Thompson’s indelible The Great Shark Hunt, a landmark collection of essays and articles that chronicle Thompson’s slog through the mid- to late-1960s and 1970s.

It is hard to imagine anything (journalistically, at least) that rivals the depravity Thompson encountered and, in some cases, perpetuated during the Hippie movement, the 1972 presidential campaign, and Richard Nixon with the notable exception of the Vietnam Conflict.  Enter War of Words, Read’s account of an unimaginable and, by turns, almost comic rivalry between the founding editors of the San Francisco Chronicle Michael and Charles De Young and Reverend Isaac S. Kalloch, mayor of San Francisco from 1879-81.  While not an account of drug-fueled rampages like those of the often prescient Thompson, it is somehow fitting the events Read recounts are prefaced with a quote from a writer who spurned the journalistic establishment as cowardly and hypocritically beholden to calling itself objective.  While Michael and Charles de Young couldn’t be considered cowards nor — as Read illustrates — objective, their actions and involvement with Mayor Kalloch were something of an antecedent to the activities that spurred Hunter S. Thompson to write those words and were coincidentally driven by the founding editors of a paper for which Thompson himself would one day write.

At its heart, War of Words is a quintessential American story, a tale of two ambitious, young men who built one of the largest and most influential newspapers of the day almost from scratch and the eventual corruptive influence of the power they eventually gained. Michael and Charles de Young literally began their endeavor with a $20 loan from a friend in order to start a theatre review that they would hand deliver throughout San Francisco.

Read doesn’t necessarily comment or appear to push a morality tale upon us, though it is telling that he makes sure to note that the de Youngs’ transition from entertainment editors to political opinion-makers came under the auspices of providing San Francisco with a newspaper willing to expose graft and corruption among city and state politicians in an attempt to restore dignity to the government.  It was to be a paper for the people, but as circulation grew, the de Youngs (more notably Charles) began to take personal stake in the outcomes of elections.  The San Francisco political scene in the 1870s was tumultuous and marked by immigration disputes over how to deal with a swelling Chinese workforce and the doldrums of a gold rush that had waned over the past twenty years.  This new xenophobia in many ways led to the creation and galvanization of the Workingmen’s Party, a political entity that Rev. Isaac Kalloch, the de Youngs’ eventual nemesis, would eventually come to lead.

Ultimately, Kalloch proves to be the lynchpin and powering force behind Read’s narrative in War of Words.  In his review of War of Words for the Chronicle, Joshua Spivak notes that Kalloch is the richest of any of the characters, and I tend to agree on this account.

Kalloch started as a minister in New England whose riveting, boisterous speeches gained him a considerable celebrity among his parishioners.  An inspiring orator, he found his public life considerably altered by allegations that he’d had an affair with another woman, an old friend of his from university, at a nearby hotel.  It is during Read’s descriptions of the trial that War of Words truly hits its stride and becomes a brisk account of mostly salacious details.  There is no insignificant amount of comedy for the modern reader as Read notes that descriptions of sexual acts such as those given under oath by the hotel manager were certainly not commonplace and likely shocking to attendees of the trial.  One can easily imagine the fodder such a trial would provide for trash magazines and tabloids were it to happen today.

Though he was eventually acquitted, Kalloch eventually moved away from New England, and after a foray into the Plains states where he remained beset by further rumors of lechery and financial misdeed, he moved west to San Francisco in 1875.

I am obviously skipping over important bits here and there, and I should mention that what makes Kalloch so interesting is his willingness, for a time, to stand up for some progressive views of the time.  An abolitionist since childhood and later a supporter of Asian and black rights, the reader’s introduction to Kalloch (aside from the adultery) is largely favorable until the man once known as “the Golden Voice” becomes the helmsmen and mayoral candidate for the Workingmen’s Party, an upstart movement responsible for rioting and violence as well as fervent opponents of immigrants, especially Asians, in California.  In the end, Read paints Kalloch as an opportunist who, by the time he comes to San Francisco, becomes more enamored with the acquisition of power than with the sincerity of his beliefs and who abuses the charge of his status as preacher for the Baptist church to further his political ambitions.

The book comes to its boil when the de Young brothers and Kalloch butt heads, initially over perceived slights, and then Kalloch reading publicly an old smear article published by a rival of the Chronicle’s depicting the founding editors’ mother as a whore in crude, shocking language.  The article itself had been a point of violence for the de Youngs upon its original publication, and the consequences proved similar the second time around eventually resulting in the gruesome assassination of Charles de Young.

War of Words is an interesting story, one of those historical anecdotes normally served to the public by little else than local historical societies and out-of-the-way websites.  Read specializes in rustling up these old stories (SEE: On the House: The Bizarre Killing of Michael Malloy, The Killing Skies) and dusting them off, their prior neglect sometimes due to nothing more than a selective mainstream taste for history. In the case of the events surrounding the San Francisco Chronicle in the 1870s, the murder of Charles de Young was a well-publicized event not only in San Francisco but around the country.  Sometimes we tend to lose even seemingly major events to the ravages of time.

Read has found a way to bridge the gap, though, and his excitement for his subject matter is apparent.  War of Words reads much more like a novel than a historical account and its narrator possesses a notable lack of impartiality.  That’s not to say Read takes sides, but the book pitches and swells along with pointed, often bilious excerpts from the Chronicle and its contemporaries as well as accounts from witnesses and those involved with the various rifts presented throughout in such a way that the reader is swept up in the fray.  The amount of research Read has invested in his tome is quite staggering.  He has plumbed the depths of many newspapers and other publications of the time and has resurfaced with scores of fascinating excerpts for the history junkie.  More importantly, he knows when to allow the historical literature to do his talking for him.

There are times when some of his descriptions such as those of a physical twitch or rolling of the eyes seem unverifiable, and it is the one potential downfall of novelizing, so to speak, the narrative, but the citation list ought to quell at least some of those fears.  All in all, Read appears to bet the pot on immersion rather than didacticism while drawing from a sound base of material, which he describes richly and with great enthusiasm.

This review originally appeared in the Sloth Jockey Books section.

Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paladin27/ / CC BY-NC 2.0

I am forced to sit here and suffer through another long afternoon of pretending to work largely because I have become more efficient as a worker.  I wouldn’t even go as far as to say that I’ve automated everything because, in truth, I haven’t automated anything.  I’ve simply succeeded in cutting down the number of steps it takes to complete certain tasks, eliminated needless components of the job, and don’t have to amass a library of printed pages to do one simple thing on the computer.  Combined with a relatively high level of aptitude for quickly executing brain-wasting computer work, my total output exceeds that of a normal worker  by High Noon.

Mind you, I’m running my own internal statistics, and it is a rare occasion indeed that such numbers should be trusted or taken at face value, but I assure you, any discrepancy between my findings and reality are not due to any nefarious deed on my part.  I’m fairly confident that any independent and unbiased panel of experts would come to similar conclusions, perhaps pushing my time-efficiency estimate back by a maximum of two hours.

The difference is largely generational.  Walk in the front door of my office, and you will find a large wall of file cabinets.  What they contain, I do not know.  I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt that some of the documents contained therein are kept necessarily in print form.  There are legal entanglements I don’t anticipate experiencing that might loom over those with a different job description, but regardless of this fact, I’d bet a quick combing of the archives would effectively reduce the lot by at least half.  There was a day when that sort of pack rat mentality probably served the office worker well.  A reliable filing system was tantamount to maintaining the stability of an office’s everyday operations, and in many ways, it still is.  But the filing of today does not require paper.  There is virtually nothing that can’t be done without the aid of a printer or even a fax machine (why we still have one of those, I can’t imagine) because all paper does, except in very rare instances, is slow you down.

This is all obvious stuff, chapter headings in the Child’s Office Primer, and non-adherence to a paperless office can more often than not be attributed to a lack of desire or effort to train the brain to utilize the tools available to it.  It’s adherence to the Old School, the paper trail, which is no more than a crutch these days.

I don’t mean to engage in a Young vs. Old argument here, though the lines do tend to fall slightly along those lines.  Hell, one of my high school English teachers was a coder and programmer at seventy-six, an age at which one surely has plenty of excuses to resist adopting new ways of doing things.  If he would have spurned everything post-dating the electric typewriter, he could have been forgiven for beholding the swelling tides with the scowl of a seasoned curmudgeon.  To this date (he, sadly, passed away a few years ago), his final knowledge of computing probably still exceeds mine, so what I’m on about here is not complicated.

Administrative tasks have been simplified to the extent that it’s almost silly to rent office space anymore.  There is nothing in my job description that I couldn’t do from the comfort of my own home without ever stopping to pull up my pants.  Same goes for everyone else, and since I am in a vindictive mood today, I’ll just go ahead and shift the blame for my having to dance through this intricate pantomime of artificial busyness to everyone else.

If we all work together, goddammit, we’d spend less time at our jobs, get more done both professionally and personally, and save a few trees while we’re at it.

Who’s with me?

Correction (10/21/2009): Due to a silly grammatical oversight, the title originally read “Children of the Office, I Implore Thee”.  Thanks to commenter vet’s bringing the error to my attention “thee” has been changed to “you.”

Image from Wikimedia Commons

It happened very suddenly. A large pair of artificial breasts shrouded in a loose-fitting shirt of the Renaissance Period slid into view at eye level as I was standing in a circle of my friends. I tilted my head upward to meet the large middle-aged man’s gaze. Thin lines of lavender set his lips apart from the rest of a ruddy, sweaty face, and the curly, black nylon wig he wore hung below his shoulders in little cascades. However, neither of these observations tempered the suffocating closeness of his breasts to my face.

“Oh, you don’t want to go there,” he said waving a loose finger at our map.

I was visibly flustered. “Where do we want to go?”

“You want to go where the fun’s at.”

“Where’s the fun at?”

“The fun’s where you are.” He stood there expectantly for a moment and looked around at us before becoming perturbed at our silence. “It’s a riddle!” he screamed angrily and stomped off with his two friends in what must have been eight or nine-inch high heels.

It was gay pride weekend at the Bristol Renaissance Faire in Kenosha, Wisconsin, a place with an almost mystical sanctity to me since I had not visited the fair since the age of seven when I sat at the feet of an almost portly woman in a green robe who told us stories from the old Arthurian legends. Somewhere in one of my pack-rat cardboard boxes, I still have the storyteller’s stone she gave me all those years ago, a distant relic revived in a memory bereft of the weirdness I experienced upon my return to Bristol. At such a young age, I had perceived the experience as authentic in my ignorance. The visual aid provided by costume must have been enough back then, but in the year 2009 at twenty-five years old, it would, understandably, take a bit more to conjure similar sentiments.

To be fair, I had no expectations of a repeat experience, and any diminished wonder on my part comes simply from cynicism and knowledge of what it means to pass a hat around for money. As a child, I viewed the act of throwing a dollar bill into a sack as a novelty, whereas this time I tended to bounce back and forth from cynically declaring each sideshow a scam to feeling a deep sense of compassion for the performers who clearly were taking every chance to practice their craft for the sake of exposure.

I can only imaging how many out-of-work actors have ended their careers after a summer-long run at Bristol or any other fair (SEE: Feast of the Hunter’s Moon). They are lost in a vast feeding frenzy for artisans of anachronistic arts, and, hell, I would have fed it provided the financial backing. The war horn my friend purchased remained the only material indulgence of the day.

Some people apparently thought that a renaissance fair would be a good place to get kinky as evidenced by men in black spandex sporting fairy wings, goth angels, and no shortage of large riddling transvestites. My offenses in this regard have absolutely nothing to do with the sexuality of these patrons as anyone remotely familiar with my writing or soapbox barroom ranting knows well enough that I am a fervent supporter of gay marriage and equal rights. What I oppose here is the injection of gothic fantasy motifs into an event that should probably attempt to approach authenticity, if only in garb alone. It’s a simple enough request for the most renowned renaissance fair in the region, and a good number of the costumed attendees appeared as if they had learned everything they knew about renaissance fashion from the front of a Trapper Keeper. Obviously, there is no dress code for these things, nor should there be, and who am I to talk? Last I checked, the English Renaissance was marked by the non-existence of Levi jeans.

What really troubled me were the fashion transgressions promoted by some of the exhibitors. A friend recently cautioned me of a disturbing trend in renaissance fair. They are being infiltrated by pirate enthusiasts. I’m not talking about people dressed as seafaring merchants, which would be appropriate, but people proliferating the image of the Tortuga-bound, syphilis-ridden pirate while at renaissance faires. Both Christopher Moody and Edward Teach’s flags hung proudly at the event, which is transgression enough (both pirated between 60-100 years after the English Renaissance), but when I walked into the pirate boutiques, I saw one set of Captain Jack dreadlocks — a reference to Jack Sparrow played by Johnny Depp in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies — as well as a Pirates banner hung up in a corner.

I love pirates as much as the next scabby wart. Believe me, I do. I even have Moody’s flag hanging in my hallway above the stairs, but that doesn’t mean I’d show up with a parrot on my shoulder at a Revolutionary War reenactment or a Trekkie orgy.

These are nitpicks, though. Who really expects to uphold the wonderment of childhood? Disneyland and renaissance fairs and trips to Six Flags don’t hold that same innocent swell of emotion that they used to, and that’s fine. I loved going back to the Renaissance Faire, and if I’m lucky, I’ll go again next year toting my replica claymore remembering that I’m where the fun is at, and so are you.

Image Attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eurleif/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

There are too many stimuli and no way to unhook from the Delivery System.  Every thirty seconds or so, TweetDeck chirps and notifies me that some Twitter entity or another has posted something to the web.  Facebook is running and constantly updating itself with video, status updates, and one friend who is rebuking me for becoming part of the background noise.  He doesn’t know that I’ve downloaded the Twitter plug-in that updates my Facebook status whenever I write a tweet, nor does he know that Brief, my Firefox RSS reader, keeps flashing feed updates at me for no good reason.  If I am constantly disseminating information, it is, perhaps, only as a form of purgation lest I suffer neuronal overload and slip into a vegetative state.

I can’t help it.  Neither can most of us who’ve fallen victim.  That we will suffer enlarged prostates and blood clots in the leg brought on by our increasingly sedentary lives is of no concern.  The needle must stay in the vein at all times.

If you asked me to trace this hideous addiction, to run all the algorithms and interpolations, I probably wouldn’t be able to find the seed.  I remember the old DOS games like Castle and Mosaic that I used to play as a kid, and I have a faint recollection of being comfortable with nothing more than a command line in front of me, but that was a long time ago, and all the years of wandering around in the GUI has effectively dulled those familiarities entirely. Even if I did have a better memory of the spark that lit this obsession, I can’t be sure anything worthwhile would come of the knowledge.  The age of Web 2.0 has so proven so immersive that it has inevitably catapulted us into the age of Human 2.0.  Take a lesson from Lot’s wife, and don’t look back.

Our transition into the next world is going to be rough.  The transcendence of the next wave of technologies will be hindered by shifting climate systems, political opposition, and religious fervor, and while that might only sound sane to someone who believes it, there is little doubt it will prove true.  Success is not guaranteed.  In truth, the next one hundred years could — and depending upon whom you ask, probably will — end badly for us and with the heinous, collective whimper of wasted opportunities.  While the Green Movement is busy plotting our next generation of energy technologies, Washington and the rest of the world are moving slowly to curb emissions and create initiatives to house our future infrastructure, opting instead to plaster their cars with the right bumper stickers and their websites with the right banner ads.  But the religious zealots and climate change naysayers will win because time is on their side.  We have a couple of decades (optimistically) to stop this runaway train, and nothing short of total commitment will do the trick.

And now that I’ve been using Twitter regularly for a few months, and Facebook for years, I know what I’ve gained by the expediency of information.  In some cases, it has been very valuable.  I grab web design tutorials and typography blogs from users who post them to Twitter, and I’ve got enough stored up to last me a month.  I have absorbed a tremendous amount of knowledge in a very short span of time thanks to the informational paradigms under which we operate.  I get my fun fast and the news even faster, and there is always something to read, so much, in fact, that it is difficult to concentrate on any one thing for an extended period of time.  Certainly, our attention spans have suffered en masse and to a great degree.  Information will be our downfall just as it became our apex.

Evolution has  a pretty good track record for creating efficient, sustainable organisms, but hidden in that long history, of course, are all the failures and extinctions, fossilized remains of beasts that couldn’t keep pace with the paradigm shifts of our planet.  When humans finally evolved, when that ultra-logical tweak entered the primate brain, the game changed entirely.  All of a sudden, brute strength didn’t hold the same currency in some circles and the increased efficiency of abstract thought put homo sapiens at the top of the heap, maybe for good.

That’s not to say that animals don’t possess similar abilities in some instances.  I’ve long thought that we as humans have been unduly deferential to the intelligence of our fellow denizens, and yes, I’ll even go as far as to at least partially agree with the theory Howard Bloom espouses in Global Brain: The Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century that organisms exhibit a certain level of altruism.  I think this is especially true in more advanced mammals, but as Bloom argues, one can perhaps find echoes of this inherent empathy in single-celled organisms as well. [We won't get into this now.]  While we are the most advanced species on the planet and do possess certain brain powers unparalleled by other animals, the Biblical idea that provides us dominion over other creatures is both narrow-minded and selfish, not to mention fatally short-sighted.

But maybe we’ve gotten too smart for our own good.  Maybe we’ve overloaded our own brains with our technology, and yes, maybe we will eventually prove to be one of nature’s mistakes — an overzealous attempt at a super-organism that went badly awry, that outgrew the planet’s ability to sustain it.  Humans are nature’s most astonishingly efficient virus.  We are resistant as a whole to most of it’s control measures save for massive impact and our own forward progress, and after all, as our own numbers increase, so does the imminence of our demise.  The first sign of species collapse barring disease in any given ecosystem is usually overpopulation, and we might reach that point soon enough.

Until then, as the constant flow of information continues to clog our synapses, corporations and governments will continue to operate more or less nefariously, confident that their dealings will be sufficiently drowned out by the din.  They’ll be right, of course, and they’ll remain in charge until there is a mass extinction or another bottleneck in the human race, until the cards are reshuffled, if you’ll pardon the phrase, and we’ll keep running to the computer every time it chirps marveling all the while with masturbatory ecstasy at how far our technology has come since the bone knife.

If we’re lucky, maybe we’ll even eventually learn to use our advancements constructively and separate the notions of progress and excess from one another.  Then we can remember Human 2.0 as an upgrade instead of a fatal error.

I’m not one of those people that plays golf often as I find it is best enjoyed sparingly and only after adhering to a months-long regimen of intense meditation, masturbation, and dieting.  Anything less might allow for my violent competitiveness to creep in and ruin the day for everyone.  Indeed.  No one who competes against me in anything, be it darts, pool, basketball, or jacks (etc.) will end up enjoying himself very much.  If I perform well, I normally win by a large enough margin to make the game seem pointless, and if I am losing, I will fall into petulance and throw a conniption fit with little regard for the embarrassment caused by my actions. It’s a bad scene and one from which I recommend abstinence at all costs.  There is nothing like seeing a grown, half-bearded man in a straw hat and brightly-colored Hawaiian shirt stomping on the green and digging large ruts into the fairway with his 9-iron as happened today.  By the sixth hole (of nine) I was putting with a severely bent Diamondback putter that became so when I took aim at my golf bag with an old 9-wood and made what essentially proved to be my only solid contact of the day.

That was my Father’s Day gift to my dad.  How proud he must be of his 25-year-old son.

For now, it might be feasible to blame last night’s thunderstorms for flooding the course and forcing me to decide against wearing my red canvas Converse One-Stars.  Whereas the bane of my golf swing since time immemorial has been a more or less consistent and wicked slice, I kept hitting the ball off the heal of my club and putting a nasty draw on it.  Somehow, my monster drives were stolen and replaced with low-flying line drives that seemed almost magnetically attracted to the tree lines.

But it does seem shortsighted to bitch and moan about a golf game, let alone my first of the year, no matter how badly it went awry.

After all, Tehran continues to reel in the turmoil of Ahmadinejad v. Mousavi.  I have no doubt the election was fixed, but without international press allowed into Iran to report on the situation, it is difficult to know exactly what is what.  Mousavi was the former prime minister of Iran and has ties to Khomeini that are badly covered or glossed over in the Western press, facts that don’t require access to the country and should be well-publicized.  In perusing the blogosphere, I saw one comment on Anonymous Iran that went like this: “Agreed, Mousavi was more of an excuse than anything. And the spark led to a fire that is by no means about him anymore.”  So it sounds to me like Mousavi is not the reformist/outsider he was cracked up to be, and it stands to reason the the comment from Anonymous Iran might not be far from the truth.

Long before the election and the subsequent Iranian protests, the conventional wisdom stated that most Iranians did not possess the combative, ultra-conservative bent of the clinically insane Ahmadinejad.  The kids listen to Western music, wear Western clothes, and more or less, adhere to Western ideals while behind closed doors.  Sure, the view from the street was much different, but the society operated on a society-wide version of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.  Now, they’ve got a figurehead and a rallying point, and for their sake, I hope they win.  I don’t think they will, but anything that serves to dislodge or destabilize the theocratic element in their government — and, by that, I mean the Ayatollah and his clerics and, while they’re at it, Ahmadinejad — is a movement I’m likely to support.

Don’t get me wrong.  During the Bush years and before, I get the sense that the United States dealt with Iran very crassly and without nuance, and to some extent, Obama might not have sufficiently changed that tune yet.  There has been eerie but understandable silence from the White House on this matter, and any commentary that they have proffered has been tepid and unsure.  Unable to offer blunt support for the protesters, they’ve opted to criticize the Iranian government for little more than the obvious, the deaths of innocent civilians.

Until everything boils over, though, we might as well add a supportive green tint to our Twitter avatars since that’s the level at which political action operates these days.

When the World Wide Web first popped up in the late 1980s and 90s, there was a feeling that this was the new Wild West, that cyberspace would be unregulated and anonymous for the rest of its days. I was a child then, and my association with computers was limited to what I could find on the 5-inch floppy disks in my father’s office, mostly DOS games like Castle or Mosaic. It wasn’t until the rise of Napster, when I was somewhere in the bowels of middle school, that the Internet became a thing of interest and potential.

Lessig strikes a stark contrast between the ferocious, libertarian genesis of cyberspace and our increasingly regulated internet. In much more eloquent and nuanced terms than I can muster here, he investigates various facets of our online lives, our anonymity and privacy as well as the ways in which what happens in cyberspace relates to our lives in real space — or at least these are part of his overall thrust.  ^[1]

The real purpose of Lessig’s book is to flesh out how we may cope with property and copyright laws in the near future and the new ways in which we will need to define our Constitutional principles where precedents simply do not exist. He spends a great deal of time on the evolution of copyright infringement in the music business and the Recording Industry Association of America’s (RIAA) and other organizations’ repeated attempts to nip piracy and unauthorized copying in the bud. This battle dates back to DAT tapes and VHS, but those from my generation will undoubtedly remember the day that Napster went down, a victim of the industry Goliath that finally won its suit over the filesharing network. His arguments, in part, seek to in many ways condemn the old cops ‘n’ robbers paradigm saying that record companies failed to change their models quickly enough and recognize the potential of the Internet to reach wide audiences. One gets the sense as well that Lessig seems to think that the old Draconian method of dealing with piracy will soon prove unsustainable and give way to an era of freer copyright and access to various works online.

His own involvement in Creative Commons — an organization that seeks to revamp online copyright by allowing authors to define the restrictions and freedoms governing use of their own work — might be a hint as to his own vision of copyright law’s future as the world increasingly moves online.

The value of Code: Version 2.0, and incidentally, the part of Lessig’s book that really sort of dredges up Orwell’s sentiment about the best books, comes in his synthesis of the natural system of checks that governs our interactions, what he calls “modes of control” or “constraints”. Neither of these terms is meant negatively, not necessarily. Lessig takes pains to describe the productive and destructive ways in which all of these constraints might conceivably play their parts. The modes of control he describes are architecture (code), norms (taboos), the market, and the law, and each one affects our association with the Internet in different ways.

To use but one example from the book, Lessig describes the potential use of something akin to a universal identity on the Internet. This would be something different than an IP address, which simply assigns a series of numbers to the computer you are using to access the web. The suggestion Lessig envisions would resemble a sort of electronic government-issued drivers’ license in which websites that require certain information — for instance, age-restricted sites that sell pornography or tobacco products — would be assured that one fulfills the age requirement without that person being required to release any other personal information to the site.

Naturally, this system brings to mind at least a few questions not the least of which might deal with the logistics and security involved as well as the concern over privacy, though I have boiled down the discussion to its bare bones. These concerns are not lost on Lessig, and in each solution he posits or scenario to which he refers, he presents the pros and cons, the potential ramifications, and the boons in a very digestible way. One need not be a computer geek to appreciate or understand the concepts he introduces, and those who are well-versed with cyberspace or computer science or law will benefit from the exhaustive reference list Lessig provides.

It would be wrong of me to say, however, that Code: Version 2.0 only tells us what we already know. As Lessig points out toward the beginning of the book, there are those of us who simply use the Internet for things like shopping, banking, and email, and then there are those of us (an ever-increasing number) who spend time in cyberspace, who possess what can only be considered as lives online. Those from the latter group might have thought a bit more deeply about what it means to be a citizen of the Internet, but for everyone else, Code: Version 2.0 might present some much-needed food for thought. I can say, even speaking as a computer hobbyist and one involved relatively deeply with the Internet (notwithstanding professionals and legitimate freelancers), that Lessig’s book did not fail in illuminating many issues of which I either had only a latent understanding or, sometimes, even none at all.

In this way, I suppose Lessig’s observations don’t exclusively adhere to Winston Smith’s own feelings, but I still maintain that much will seem oddly familiar. When he cites those who have criticized his work, Lessig’s refutations and clarifications sound almost like echoes from past conversations, and though much of the book is undoubtedly tinged with his own views and opinions, most of his reasoning is sound, and his knack for making seemingly complicated subjects easy to understand makes plain a relatively even-handed approach to tackling what might be some defining questions of the next ten years.

The internet is a still-evolving phenomenon, and though it increasingly encompasses larger and larger portions of our lives, it is still ill understood, both in the possibilities it creates and the concerns it aggravates. With technology on its exponential tear into the future, we are all inescapably tied to its evolution and must take an active part in deciding how we are going to shape the Internet, and thus, parts of our lives. Lessig would argue that we do have the power to affect a change and make these decisions for ourselves, but sometimes, the avenues to such change or modification of the architecture are not apparent. Even if you might not agree with all or any of Lessig’s assertions about the globalization of the Web or the role of government in deciding its nature, his book serves as an invaluable springboard to meaningful consideration of the issues that confront us now and will continue to do so in the near and immediate future.

To put it plainly, Code: Version 2.0 should be required reading for anybody with a stake in the future of the Internet — and that’s just about everybody.

Lawrence Lessig’s Code: Version 2.0 is available as a free PDF download.

Alas, I don’t think I have a leftist, pinko Commie diatribe in me tonight.  I have yet to respond to American Patriot’s comments on my Patton article, which are well-received regardless of whether or not I share a political hair with him/her.  I appreciate a little scrutiny now and again (maybe even always), and if there’s one thing my half-assed, lazy commentary can use, it’s some point-by-point analysis.

Two things I will address now, however.  The first is that the Marijuana Question should not be a point of contention or debate any longer.  Legalization is the only sensible route, and this concept will only be confirmed in the next ten or twenty years.  The government does not have the right to tell people not to use drugs (recreationally or for medicinal purposes) and wastes resources prosecuting and apprehending “criminals” who pose no threat to society at large.  Coupled with other drug-related efforts such as needle exchange programs, there should be a shift toward a sensible drug policy, one that does not uphold prohibitive law.  American Patriot seems to harbor an additional moralistic attitude to drug use and general inebriation, which I would discourage at all costs.  Lifestyle morality has no place being legislated by governing bodies as long as a person’s activities are non-violent, and to answer American Patriot’s question, yes, I do think there are more important things on America’s plate right now than the legalization of drugs.  Our current policy, however, reflects a troublesome national mindset that is constantly bothered by petty things like marijuana and tits on television and ignores issues like unsustainable housing bubbles and corrupt credit markets (until the shit hits the fan, of course).  Think where we might be now if our resources had been allocated toward useful endeavors in the first place.

I should stress that while I had my college days like most other people, I am sober almost one-hundred percent of the time these days, and by that, I do not mean to insinuate that I am recovering from any lingering addictions or recreational drug habits save for nicotine.  The comment American Patriot made: “I have never heard of a ’social’ pot smoker — a person who has a joint here or there just because they like to smoke or like the flavor of marijuana. No, they do it to get stupid and get high, just like alcoholics drink to excess and act irresponsibly. Legalize pot and you’ll see a lot more drunk driving occurring in this country,” makes so little sense that I feel odd even addressing the remarks suffice it to say that A.P. clearly has not spent much more than superficial time with pot smokers or has solely been exposed to “stoners”.  Personally, stoners don’t bother me, but I can understand how the stereotype of the lazy, listless pothead might hold water with someone unacquainted to that scene or its denizens.

But that’s all well and good, and I’d prefer not to go on.  The legalization debate is much like the religious one.  No one wins.  No minds are changed.  The entire debacle proves to be one monumental waste of time, and we must hope only that time will eventually allow logic and tolerance to gain a foothold in this most illogical and intolerant world.  It is to my detriment that I either initiate or get dragged into many of these debates, and I suppose I am the instigator in this case.

The second issue to which A.P. made reference that I’d like to address is my insistence on bashing conservatives.  For the most part, I mean the Republicans and roughly half of each libertarian.  To say the Republican Party is braindead is to put it most delicately.  To say that the GOP is bat-shit crazy might be a dangerous underestimation.

However, I will admit to speaking generally, and I do not mean to make the blanket statements that all conservatives are uneducated hillbillies with little care for the rest of the world.  As it seems to me that American Patriot — while grossly misguided on certain issues in my own estimation — is not one such person, I hereby tender any necessary apologies.  I must also express my disappointment that the word “patriotism” has been hijacked and made to mean nothing more than blind, flag-bleeding obedience to nationalism and principles of Manifest Destiny.  If there is a seed of suspicion in me about the wiles of our good A.P., it comes only due to the choice of moniker.  One cannot be sure that people mean words as they were originally intended or as their [the words'] current bastardizations imply.

And what the hell.  Here’s the final answer regarding your critique of my Patton post, American Patriot.  You’re right that I meander and fall off track.  I’ll be the first one to admit as much, but as for my criticism of the speech itself, I did not necessarily mean to belittle it wholesale.  I disagree fervently, and I realize that it was made under duress, as you said, like a football coach might try to pump his team up before a big game (though the stakes were obviously much higher in Patton’s case).  I suppose reading Patton’s words on that day reminded me too much of the Dick Cheney and Glenn Beck camp, and while Cheney is a sociopath and Beck is a witless boob, you cannot deny their influence on people, which is why I bring them up in the first place.

Trust me, it’s my considered opinion that the likes of FoxNews conservative pundits bear no weight whatsoever on the actual political dialogue, but that opinion, as much as I might like to believe it, probably isn’t accurate.  Yellow journalism is the running intellectual currency these days, A.P., and if I speak too generally about conservatives, it is only because most of those I know (again, not quite all) or speak with spout the same deranged horseshit I hear coming from the O’Reilly people and the Hannity people and any others you want to put in the same boat.

I will say that O’Reilly was right about one thing — and, Jesus, how it pains me to write those words.  We are in a culture war right now, and much of it boils down to whether I’m on the side that wants America to be a citizen of the world or on the side that wants to see the rise of the American Empire.  The other conversations you and I might have if we were sitting in a room together are only peripheral subjects compared to this central conflict.

That scares me and — to put it bluntly — pisses me off.

In fact, I’m giving the record its fourth listen as I write this, and I still don’t know what to make of it. If you take Together Through Life at its face, you’d find it a breezy, playful venture through blues, Tex-Mex, and New Orleans styles, never getting too serious with the lyrics and throwing in a few instruments one might not equate with Dylan’s music. A light accordion laces much of the album together with lazy melodies and is accompanied by a stray banjo or violin here or there, which is befitting, I suppose, of Dylan’s elder rhinestone cowboy persona. If he hasn’t always bucked convention, he’s at least bucked expectations.

And as an album, Together Through Life works if you don’t take it too seriously. Robert Hunter, lyricist for the Grateful Dead, cooperated with Dylan on the words for this one, but it’s difficult to feel anything different from other recent records. The lyrics are a mix of the genius one has come to expect from Bob Dylan and the tossed off clichés about gypsies and dreams and love that he’s relied upon to string his songs together since Time Out of Mind. Again, forgive me. For all I know, this has been the way of his records since the late-1970s, but I’ve had to work my way through the more dismal parts of the catalogue piecemeal to avoid certain mental collapse. I get Shot of Love and Infidels mixed up to this day, and I almost checked into a hospital after getting through Knocked Out Loaded.

It’s difficult, though, to think about Together Through Life in a vacuum. All of Dylan’s records immediately beg comparison with others and consideration of his evolution as a songwriter. In many ways, I feel about this album the exact same way I feel about Love & Theft and Modern Times. Half of it is really great, certainly worthy of Dylan’s name, and half is entirely forgetful. There are times on all three albums the band sounds as if they’re plodding through a practice session. For some songs, this approach works, and for others, it doesn’t. There seems to be little consistency, and one must think that Dylan does what he feels like when he feels like it, so you take what you can get from his recent work.

His voice, these days, is so gravelly that he speaks in little other than a beautiful, worn croak, and almost nothing that comes out of him can be considered a “note” even if you are able to hear a little hint of melody. In many ways, this is the voice he’s been waiting for since the early-1960s, and you almost wish he’d resurrect old talking blues songs like “Talking World War III” and “Talking Bear Mountain Picnic Massacre Blues” and retell them with all those years behind him, and the melancholy that oozes out through Dylan’s playfulness in Together Through Life is most likely dually wrought. Some of it comes from the memories of his old works and the stark relief provided by his age, and some from Dylan himself, though he makes it seem always that he can look just about anything in the eye now and come away laughing. And despite any misgivings I might have about some of his current music, Dylan shines in the minor keys. We hear it on “High Water” from Love & Theft, “Ain’t Talkin’” on Modern Times, and “Forgetful Heart” on Together Through Life. He sings with a sense of foreboding or suspicion that he lacked, for the most part, in the past and which we saw first and most jarringly in “Blind Willie McTell” from The Bootleg Series, Vol. 1-3 boxed set.

But I’m getting a little esoteric now, I suppose, but it’s difficult to write about Bob Dylan to anyone other than rabid fans. The truth of it is that if you’re not familiar [somehow] with his music, you shouldn’t start with Together Through Life or any other album that came after 1966. Even if you’re a casual fan of his music, acquaint yourself with his iconic folk era first and move on from there. No sense in jumping on the train at the end of the line.

Most importantly, though, fans know that you don’t listen to reviews of Dylan’s albums. Especially recently, there is a struggle between reviewers who will never say anything bad about Bob Dylan, who gave both Modern Times and this record 4-stars apiece and immediately anointed them masterworks in an equally masterful catalogue. The naysayers berate Dylan’s loyal reviewers and are often pushed to the margins of the debate with nothing good to say about his newer records, and the real truth lies (as it often does) in between.

As Bob Dylan seems to realize, there is much to love and much to lament, and in that regard, this review, like most others, will be of little use to anyone with a genuine interest.