First Weblog

Sallie Parker Presents Tom Toolan

Tue, 01 Feb 2005 13:41:06 -0500

After a bit of ferreting around, Miss Sallie Parker has finally produced a 1997 ID mugshot of the great Nantucket murderer of 2004, Mr. Tom Toolan. Sallie tells us that this was furnished by a friend of hers who works with Smith Barney Stock Plan Services. Boy that was a long long time ago.

Sick Day, January 31st. I told the people at work I have to be in the hospital for my fatal illness.

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 08:59:26 -0500

sick day today. sent email to pc. real reason why i am out is i need to work hard for colin (parable of the unfaithful steward getting screwed and buddying up to the next master) and intended to finish TT, rough ms, by today, but am obviously going to fail. However, it may be only a qualified failure...i can get the Jackson Whites and Chux Baby and Pudge boyfriends and Sal Mineo and Muffin and Kem's crises all into two or three chapters.

1. Colin - 2 cartoon ideas. Also think about Surf Girl for the SCT. Something to establish myself.
2. Wrap up first half of TT. Notes:
Kem and Salllie meet at one point at Whitney, place to meet in those days. Just inside the door, by the Calder Circus. What was at the Whitney then? Get exhibits.
Mr. Laszlo at Sutter's. I am oblivious when Kem introduces us. Oh. Oh! Of course, gypsy fiddlers, you see them all the time. How you do, says Mr. Laszlo. Kem says we had tea a few weeks ago. Takes me a while to connect. Why didn't Kem tell me? She says she thinks she did. What other yawning lacunae are scattered in this narrative, ready to slip into that manhole.
--idea. Man Hole. Cover with a naked sewer worker on cover. This is what Tovar should be reading. Yes. I have him reading After Dark...but that is more 1971. Better if he's reading MH and we have old copies of Michael's Thing and AD scattered on the black vinyl coffee table.
--Blithering nonsense and broken sentences, talking over and under each other like in a Robert Altman movie...you could tune out for ten minutes (and I did) and come back in and you wouldn't miss anything. (In fact you could probably skip the next five or ten pages here. You might say I'm just putting it in as a sort of roman verité.)
3. Miscellany: Gallery News site. Visit a gallery or two? Review in comic-strip mode. Uncle Bill's column always starts off about art, but goes into society, politics, etc etc. Uncle Bill's Blog, with a picture of him. Must use same old Boss Crump pic. Scan in from old issue of GN. Also scan in a couple of issues of GN. Our archives.
4. Buy New Balance 991's, or at least check 'em out down on 42nd St. What size? I'll bet it's 10.
5. Run, work out, burn off every last calorie. Get yourself down to jussst under 120. This can be done but may require 8-10 loops of the reservoir as well as an extended 800 calorie burnoff at the HRC. An hour on the EFX? How boring. Stretch those damn legs too. You used to be able to put your feet behind your head.
6. Do your damn laundry? Not really top priority, is it?

Build Robots for a Better America

Sun, 30 Jan 2005 09:56:55 -0500

Whatever happened to Robots? The Robots of the Future that never came?
Great, hulking metallic humanoids that walked stiffly on Erector-set legs or rolled about silently on rubberized wheels. They've been a joke, a retro-future parody, ever since Lost in Space.
Yes, there are robots of a kind in the world around us—-whirling Frisbees on the floor that do vacuum cleaning, toy dogs with articulated hindquarters and tails that light up--but these are mere toys, novelties. There are electromechanical apparatus called "factory robots" but they're nothing more than plain old levers and pulleys and processing chambers, but with microprocessors behind them.
I will tell you what happened to robots. They got derailed by the IT industry, which is focused almost entirely on software. All the energy and gadget-making brilliance that should have been developing friendly automatons was diverted into things like internet search engines and relational databases. Instead of building things with their hands, the mass of our inventors have been coding software. Software does not roll up to you and shake your hand and make your breakfast. It just sits there in an essentially static environment, recursively considering itself and producing nothing of value. No surprise then that a software-heavy IT industry mostly leads to inventions that are self-referential and unproductive (software utilities, OS patches) or of only marginal social use (e.g., blogging).
Really, what has the IT industry brought us in the last 30 years that is on a par with photography or the steam engine? Or Edison's lamp or Ford's factory processes? I'll answer the question. Nothing. Crap software, crap society, crap jobs, crap redirection of young people's lives into stagnant tidepools of endeavor.
I further submit that software development favors people who don't like to work with their hands and have no structural visualization. This can't be a good thing for society. I suspect this factor is what's really behind the influx of subcontinental asiatics into the American IT industry. (Can't prove it; too many hypotheses and speculations; but what does your intuition say?)
This wouldn't happen if we built robots instead. Robot design requires the involvement of the full individual--hands and heart as well as head. Software coding is there, yes, but it is at the service of some end purpose rather than merely supporting other software that serves no ultimate need.

A Mighty Blast

Tue, 18 Jan 2005 21:21:28 -0500

An arctic chill (that is pronounced AR-tik chil) has come upon us these last few days and I must say it gives us all some insight into what our valiant forebears must have gone through some ten thousand years ago.