What a wonderful world..
Now Playing: Queen: Bohemian Rhapsodie (with some help from Mike Myers)
Topic: Grunts, rants, and others
Television! The number one disseminator of misinformation, and not just in this US of A. However, the American networks seem to push this maxim to an all-time high nearly every night. And that's just the advertising.

During a recent bout of boredom yours truly took to a bit of channel-surfing. Do that in any given locale in this wondrous country and you are bound to come across a considerable quantity of advertising spots, most of them more entertaining than the program features interrupting the commercial airwaves. And not just on the greedy networks: with a very few notable exceptions the supposedly ad-free cable channels dilute their services with plenty of self-congratulatory campaigns. Naturally, each of them revels in hyperbole and similarly excesses, forever trying to outdo the competition.

Perhaps the most entertaining segments are the spots showing of the wonders of modern-day pharmaceuticals. Small wonder this is a pill-popping nation par excellence! One miracle drug after the other blares its miraculous cures on the air night after night - all followed by officially required disclaimers. And it is right at this moment they tend to hit the funny bone. For each and everyone of them comes along with as many (and often more) side-effects than cures. I am certain that one day there will be an all-curing laxative whose "mild" side-effect will include the demise of its user! Not surprising thus that such pharmacology is often followed by spots enlightening the viewing public to its need for life insurance - in particular for those viewers over fifty - since their rather expensive death looms just around the corner.

The car industry is, of course, equally bold in its overstatements: miles-per-gallon ratios are the latest gimmick to sell vehicles to the ill-informed and utterly confused. Strange and surely bogus ratings, paid-for-awards, and even the ever silent crash test dummies are all employed in what a conspiracy theorist might call the ultimate scheme of schemes: keeping everyone it perpetual debt.

In that the mobility manufacturers are greatly aided by the credit card companies, with American Express and MasterCard leading the mob. Were you to believe them, nearly everything would be "priceless". Still when it comes to outright lies and misinformation none are more culpable than the communications companies. Be it mobile phone services or cable providers, they all excel in overstating their case well beyond the bounds of truth in advertising by simply applying an old, old advertising trick: compare apples to oranges and you cannot be found guilty of actually lying - you are just not telling the facts.

In the end it was an amusing, albeit not to be repeated half hour. Boredom gone I turned to reading a sci-fi paperback (by none other than Terry Pratchet) - at least there the fiction is guaranteed to be just that. Fiction.

At long last..
Now Playing: Something, By Someone With A Tenor-sax..
Topic: My mind's attic
..the gallery site has had its long overdue make-over. New exhibit and all. Nothing too fancy, I might add, but I like it. For now.

Check it out at ny ny Gallery..!

The virtual exhibit shows some of the images used in the forthcoming, albeit self-published, poetry collection Disarmament Talks, due out in June 2006. Being a self-published book, it will be available, at cost, in either hard cover or soft cover format, and can be ordered from the site.

Myth of The Mac..
Now Playing: Shostakovich: The Tenth
Topic: Grunts, rants, and others
Few computer myths ever die altogether but at least some disappear or become lame jokes. Perhaps one of the most persistent and - of course - erroneous fantasies of the wonderful world of computing concerns the near infallibility of any machine coming out of the Cupertino warehouses.

The Mac, if you believe the fanatics, is impervious to virus attacks; never crashes, and can be operated by anyone with an IQ higher than his or her shoe size. Having owned a G4 PowerBook for a little over a year now - after spending nigh two decades in the Windows' camp - I find the self-proclaimed ultimate in computing cool no better (but also no worse) than an equivalent PC laptop. Only a lot more costly. And don't speak to me of "cool" - this errant design from Steve Job's henchmen gets hotter than a toaster most of the time.

As for being save from viri and spyware - it isn't just recently that the Mac's have been targeted. True enough, anything based on Microsoft's operating system has always been easier to hack. But the real reason why Apple's hardware and software has been "safe" for so long has always been that there is no point in attacking it: few businesses use it. And why would anyone want to hack into some prep student's PC? Unless you are looking for utter boredom, nothing of interest would be found. Commerce and governments have always run on Windows, for better or - mostly - worse.

Sure, the speed comparisons were always hoping on the wrong foot, and now that even Apple switched to Intel (an announcement of an AMD-based PowerBook cannot be far behind!), that benchmark is totally moot. Yet where it matters: networking, business applications, even standard productivity tools such as MS Office and the likes, Apple still lags miles and miles behind Microsoft. Even when the Redford, Oregon, company is the signing author for the application. MS Office 2004 has not seen a decent update since it came out, and underperforms even older versions of MS Office on the Windows platform. Networking is another headache: go wireless with the PowerBook and find yourself constantly disconnected. Try to maintain your PC in a mixed LAN and your Mac will throw of mapped network drives after even short periods of inactivity. And without some third-party tools (or some deep UNIX hacking) you cannot even decide what you want to share with other users on your Mac!

Apple Mac's don't crash? If anyone seriously wants to make that claim they had better stick to an OS version predating OS 10 by a couple of years! The UNIX-based brainchild of none other than Mr. Jobs himself not only crashes with great regularity, it also takes a solid 40% of your battery's action span, and slows its host PC to a crawl unless you spend some serious money and max out its memory. Nor is operating it any easier than Windows. The learning curves on both are pretty much the same, with the exceptions being the I-series of applications. They are easy enough, as long as you are happy of following a very linear path because Apple clearly believes that its user base is not intelligent enough to make its own decisions. iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes - all assume that you have already bought into Apple's numbskull "philosophy" that your PC ought to be organized as its creators see fit. I still own and operate the PowerBook. Bought originally because I did buy into the hype that it would be a better machine for photo and video editing. And as far as video is concerned, I have to concur - there's nothing in PC land that comes close to Final Cut Pro. At least I have not found it.

Still, most of the time these days people stare at my screen because they wonder if they seeing right: eighty percent of the time nowadays I run Virtual Windows XP on the PowerBook, because I still need to work in the real world. At least until I find a buyer foolish enough to pay a large sum for a year-old, 17" PowerBook!

Just when you thought it was safe..
Now Playing: Marche Funebre - what else would fit?
Topic: Rambling Rumminations

..to go back to the bookstore, another whopper lands on your preferred news page. Right on the heels of the James Frey versus Oprah debacle, The Da Vinci Code and its author, Dan Brown, are appearing before the powdered wigs of a London court. The charge: plagiarism!

The hugely successful Mr. Brown, whose intrigue-laden opus is about to hit the silver screen, is accused of having lifted the idea from an early work by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh, authors of "The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail", who sued Mr. Browns publisher, Random House. Which, incidentally, also published their book. Naturally, Random House denies the claim.

It all centers around the idea, certainly put forth in Mr. Baigent's and Mr. Leigh's book, that Jesus went ahead and married the foot fetishist, namely Maria Magdalena, the gist of which also provides a center piece in The Da Vinci Code. And thus the battle begins. And while the available jackpot was already huge prior to the sale of the movie rights, the two gentlemen's timing coincides nicely with Sony's imminent cinema release (starring none other than Tom Hanks), thus making the ensuing court battle all the more pecuniary.

Of course, there is really nothing new here: the literary battles focused on Shakespeare's alleged copyright infringements are already legendary (though not yet litigated); Art Buchwald once successfully extracted half a million dollars from Paramount's coffers for their "borrowing" his ideas for the making of "Coming to America". And who could forget Kunta Kinte of "Roots" fame, whose author, Alex Haley, had not just copied ideas but entire paragraphs from an earlier book. He apparently settled out of court.

Almost makes you wish you had something in print, never mind how obscure or obtuse, so Hollywood or some hack on his way to the publisher could steal it and thus make you rich.

I wonder, though: will Yahoo sue me for copying part of my second paragraph above straight from their news page? Or for getting the idea for this entry from one of their horribly construed headlines?

New site..
Now Playing: Same old songs, new orchestra..
Topic: Rambling Rumminations

As I warned everyone in the last posting, I am switching to a new format, at a different location.

Now that change-over has been completed. As a result updates will only happen at the new site, at my HandsOn Site. If you need, click one the previous link and bookmark it in your browser.

See you there..<./p>

Change's afoot..
Now Playing: Diane Krall: Cry me a river..
Topic: Rambling Rumminations

While the streets of Philadelphia are soggy with the slush and mush of the last winter shower (locally billed as a major storm!), I took time out to start a transition. These here blog is moving to a new address!

There's nothing wrong with my current host, but I already have more than enough web sites, and my "main" domain does have a lot of disk space along with plenty of spare bandwidth.So, while I will continue thise here venue for at least another month, a new location is going up a few blocks up the virtual street. The New Writer's Blog is not quite finished; there's still plenty of work to do. It does contain all entires back to January 2005, and will - with the exception of this on - run parallel until it has been proven solid.

Why not have a look..?

Half the lies they tell about me aren't true.. (Yogi Berra)
Now Playing: Haendel: Se piet' di me non senti
Topic: Grunts, rants, and others

Recently there's been a lot of hash in the media about James Frey and his made-up life. Probably all due to an oversized ego and a good dose of greed, I guess. I cannot really judge since I have not read the book - and am unlikely to bother. And, of course, it is a bit hard to swallow the page-loads of injured egos everywhere, seeing how their accusing fingers are coming from modern media ghouls whose own adherence to the facts is tangential at best.

Unfortunately, within the fracas the biggest fake news item of them all, Oprah Winfrey, once again gets away. All the while raking in millions of dollars from that self-same lie she promoted so perniciously before. The fact that Mr. Frey agreed to reappear on the show, certain of gleeful humiliation by an pre-paid and O-primed audience (and the ever swelling, botox-lined tear-ducts of Ms. Winfrey), only proves that no matter how much you bend the truth in today's media circus, the agents (and your bank account) will always come out ahead.

Mr. Frey's story is most likely as "truthful" as the on-screen life of Ms. Winfrey: the only real difference is the rate of profitability.

While it would probably be best for the national psyche if both Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Frey simply disappeared from the public perspective (along with the likes of Howard Stern, Bill O'Reilly and Pat Robertson), this is unfortunately not going to happen any time soon. Even if by some miracle the earth would open and swallow the lot, others, certainly as bad, are already waiting in the wings. The carnival called national media is in town and is here to stay. No matter how ugly things get.

As I lay sighing..
Now Playing: Static, nothing but static..
Topic: Grunts, rants, and others

Since I've moved to Philadelphia, I once again have a TV. That is to say there is a black box with a screen in the corner of the room. Nowadays it serves only as an additional surface to hold stuff. The keys, the camera sometimes, the gloves.

In the first week I actually did switch it on and cruised through the available channels. That got old real quick, since outside of the occasional British PBS show there wasn't really anything that interested me. A couple of nights I did indeed watch Jon Stewart's Daily Show, and it did indeed impress me as more informative than any of the so-called "real" news programs. At least Mr. Stewart, while clearly biased, did not pretend to have an inside line to the truth.

That spurious claim was reserved for the most moronic show I have ever seen, called the Colbert Report. A spin-off of the Daily Show, Mr. Colbert is supposedly funny and facetious. I found him boorish with no redeeming value whatsoever. Where his daily predecessor spins actualities into farcical opinions by simply letting politicians and other newsmakers put their own foot in their oversized mouths, Mr. Colbert seems to feel that he and he alone has anything to say. His guests are obviously chosen to make him look good, and his topics are about as riveting as an autopsy report on someone dead from old age.

The rest of the channels I get are by and large worse: sitcoms all seem to follow the same premise of a not-too-bright husband with a good-looking and intellectually superior wife and relatives fresh out of the funny farm. What movies are available on such channels like HBO get repeated over and over again. And the news segments are, of course, mainly about whatever bunch of mannequins currently shuffle the papers they never read. Collective IQ's in these broadcasts tend to be competing with that of the President, meaning there is no contest - Bush wins.

Which says it all.

Lost in my mind, again..
Now Playing: Kraftwerk: Autobahn
Topic: My mind's attic
Nothing much interesting me in the theaters these days, I went back to my movie collection last night. Among them I found Sofia Coppola's gem, Lost in Translation. Having not only lived in Tokyo once, but worked in advertising there, the cultural backdrop to this excellent feature was all to familiar.
There are few places on this planet where a Westerner could feel more alienated than Japan (the other being Manhattan). It is not just that their complex culture is so vastly different from anything we might have experienced, but the fact that on the surface it is covered with a seemingly American veneer (also true for Manhattan). The clothes, the gadgets, a commercialism so penetrating that its dictates reach into every nook and cranny of people's lives; all of it looks oddly familiar. Until you lift a corner of this patina and discover its solid roots in medieval Japan.
Miss Coppola naturally focused on the blatant encounters of her protagonists: the "gift" woman sent to him by a local business partner; the drinking culture; the gambling and video arcades; and of course, the absolute loneliness of being an outsider. It was the long shots, though, that really captured Tokyo for me. The limitless spread of low-built housing, densely packed around a handful of tall buildings; the twenty-four hour presence of the multitudes in a city that never seems to rest.
The movie did something else, too. It re-opened a small door in my mind I really thought I had sealed for good: behind it lurks the restless desire to go somewhere, to travel again. Destinations do not matter, other than as bait. The real hunger is for the journey. An appetite that has become harder and harder to still, now that every place is basically a mere jet ride away.
Maybe I ought to go to the movies after all. Surely the current fare will squelch any desires to depart.

Looking back in...
Now Playing: Silence..
Topic: Rambling Rumminations

As I write this, 2006 has begun, at least across the waters in Australia. Sidney - as always - was the first to ring in the new year with a massive display of fireworks and an equally massive show of police force; just in case the boys decided on another "little" race riot.

Everywhere else folks and media are still busy looking back on the abysmal reign of 2005. That at least seems to be the consensus: from cartoons to commentators, everyone appears to be down on the year that was. Hurricanes, Tsunamis, bombings, and the usual slew of celebrity deaths; taken together they do little to inspire anything positive. My own take of course differs slightly: 2005 was no worse than any year before. As far as nature is concerned we are just at the beginning of the kind of fireworks this planet has in store for us. Global warming is here to stay and its very direct results are on the increase. There will be more, stronger hurricanes battering the southern US; there will be bigger and more deadly earthquakes devastating the Pacific Rim countries and central Asia. And there is little the human race can do about it - nature is about to correct the biggest evolutionary error of its existence: mankind. We've messed up good these past hundred years and now we are seeing the bill for the devastation we created.

As for man's own efforts in self-destruction, Iraq and Israel and Palestine are merely the tip of the current iceberg. Given the amazing stupidity and longevity of the governments involved in these man-made disasters, things can only get worse. Which, of course, is also true for the unrest in France, the bombings in London, and whatever new targets these little minds will conjure up next.

Some ten years from now we might even look back at 2005 as one of the last "good" years.