Don’t ever believe that Western governments are “free” societies — someone must always pay.
In this case, it’s brothers Vincent and Michael Hickey, at left, of Birmingham, England, who spent 18 years in jail after being wrongly convicted — but will still have to pay for their prison room and board.
Further evidence that Franz Kafka secretly runs everything.
Think you can’t predict the future?
Ray Kurzweil says you’re wrong, in this think piece in Inc.
What I love about this:
To that point: I’m writing this on a MacBook Pro. Ten years ago I would have been writing this on a PowerMac 6300, which had one of those cool new 3.5″ disk drives. I would be writing it, but I wouldn’t be posting it — blogs didn’t exist yet, and neither did the internet in the way we know it. Ten years before that, I would have been writing this on an Apple IIGS with a dial-up modem. Ten years before that, I would have been working on paper with an IBM Selectric II, and other paper conveyances (called “a stamp and envelope”) for distribution.
Kurzweil thinks this exponential growth in power is going to hit the energy industry. I agree. And then at some point, if indeed the war in Iraq was about oil, there won’t be a need for such interventions.
Speaking of newspapers, here’s a community service from the New York Times.
If you are either a college student or faculty member, the Times’ premium service is free to you.
Yesterday, the Washington Post trained its laser vision on the zeitgeist of “dumbed-down” game shows — which had me wondering if the writer had ever seen any game shows previously. (I know that my generation took its cultural cues from “Match Game.” Oh, the good ol’ days.)
Today, I discover that the paper’s online version seems to be doing video interviews with, um, nobodies, talking about nothing in particular. Click here for a case in point. To my trained ear, Mr. New (great name) is a case study in “unreliable narration,” in which while he believes himself a knight errant, we can see what a neurotic loser he is.
If only there were some news to cover, or some interesting modern philosophers to interview, and if only we had a newspaper or a website that could disseminate this information.
He wasn’t “down,” he was ill.
One evening about 10 years ago I was walking outdoors down 3rd Street in Santa Monica with my two brothers, who were in town. We had just had dinner and were going to go see a movie called “Big Night,” which stars Tony Shalhoub, Stanley Tucci, and Minnie Driver and which concerns two brothers trying to save their Italian restaurant. All around, it was a warm, mildly festive night.
As we walked down the street, which had almost a carnival atmosphere with sidewalk vendors and various little things going on, we came across a man doing some sort of on-camera interview. He was doing what looked like a small on-location hosting segment.
“That’s Richard Jeni,” I said.
My brother Ray said, “Who?”
“Richard Jeni,” I repeated. “Stand-up comic. You know. He’s on TV a lot. You’ve seen him.”
Ray didn’t believe he had. I remain convinced to this day that indeed he had, but despite the numerous credits I rattled off, Ray just couldn’t picture him. Neither could my brother Michael. Even while they were both looking at him.
And that was kind of Richard Jeni’s career problem. Was he funny? Hell, yes. Was he memorable? Somehow… no. Although I’m not an expert on his act, I still can’t tell you what his “act” was: What was his character?
Now he’s killed himself. No one knows why for sure, and I’m not convinced that even the suicides themselves ultimately know why. But Elayne Boosler hints in this remembrance on the Huffington Post that it was frustration that other, lesser-gifted, comedians rose to prominence that Richard Jeni never quite achieved. To me, it sounds like a good theory. Because no matter how I tried, I couldn’t convince my own brothers that they recognized him.
Marvel Editor-in-Chief, Joe Quesada, is interviewed here along with Stan Lee about the death of Captain America.
Cap’s co-creator, Joe Simon, is still among us. He’s been quoted as saying that the death is a shame, because “we need him now more than ever.” Given that Mr. Simon lived through World War I, World II, the Cold War, McCarthyism, the Depression, and so many other assorted horrors and atrocities of the 20th century, this is indeed a troubling statement.
Someone close to me died and only now has it started to sink in.
That’s right, I’m talking about Captain America.
Cap and I go way back. We first met in the late 60’s, when, according to my father, hippies were attacking the country. That didn’t sound like a good thing, but it didn’t seem to affect Cap too much — he was always fighting Hydra or the Red Skull, and when he did interact with hippies or “minorities” it seemed like he was able to bridge the gaps in culture and generation. (And remember, Cap was an enlisted man in during World War II, so the gaps were huge.) He teamed up with the Falcon and learned some things about an outsider’s view of the system and what it felt like to be non-white and suspicious of the Man. And then, famously, Cap had a falling out with the Nixon administration, discovered that it was the president who was behind the vast conspiracy attacking the country from within, and quit being Captain America.
I was 12. It seemed impossible that Captain America — who set such a personal example of tolerance, yet, like Churchill, was able to spot evil early when he saw it — wasn’t going to represent us any more.
He came back later, after a number of other people tried to be Captain America. They knew the value of the symbol, and if he wasn’t going to wear it, others would. And that was the point when I realized that Captain America had never symbolized the United States of America — that he symbolized an ideal that we hoped to get to.
Now he’s dead. Will he be back? According to my subscription form — sorry to blow the surprise — after five months or so of downtime, someone named “Captain America” will be back with a new title. But if it is not this character, Private Steve Rogers, who surrendered to the government recently after waging an all-out war against what sounds to me suspiciously like The “Patriot” Act (quote marks courtesy of me), it won’t be the same. Steve Rogers turned himself in when he found that he’d lost the support of the people in the streets; evidently they liked the idea of registration for people with powers. To me, this is suspiciously close to “registering” the artists, the writers, the musicians, the philosophers, the scientists — anyone who thinks differently — and the relative quiescence of the majority of us speaks volumes.
Yesterday this nation’s Inspector General released a report documenting the extent to which the FBI has misued the “Patriot” Act in securing private information about individuals, all with no warrant. Today we have a minor hoohah over this; tomorrow, the “Patriot” Act will continue.
I’m sorry Captain America died, especially now. It seems like one more indication that we’ve lost the ideal, and that we aren’t deserving of the symbol.
Insomnia may be a blessing in disguise, especially for creative types.
At least, that’s what the writer of this feature in the Washington Post would have us believe.
I hope I feel this good about it tonight when I’m pounding the pillow, but I suspect I won’t.
I’m always asking students about the characters they’ve created, “What’s their motivation?” Although at some point or other most of us will act irrationally at least once, most behavior is defined by our pursuit of objectives. Asking what someone was trying to do, and therefore why they acted in the way they did, usually tells the tale.
Along a similar line, Deep Throat advised Bob Woodward during the Watergate investigation, “Follow the money.” If you follow the money, and track who benefits, you find the culprits.
Which brings us to Scooter Libby. Hard as it is for me to imagine, I find I’m spending some part of my thinking yesterday and today feeling sorry for Mr. Libby, who faces up to 30 years in prison. That’s because I can’t understand why he would have gone down the path of exposing one of our own spies, because I can’t track his motivation for having done so. That is, unless he was ordered to do so by someone higher up in the chain of command.
I’m not alone in that theory, as this news report shows. The jury that convicted him — comprised of what sound like very smart and highly trained people, including a former reporter for the Washington Post — also believe that Mr. Libby was acting under orders.
That makes sense.
What doesn’t make sense is that our court process doesn’t appear to be headed further up the chain of command.