Got this link in an email from Dean Landsman — a future EPIC not to be missed.
It’s 2014, and Google and Microsoft have figured out how to be in charge of all the informational media available to us. They pay bloggers to be a part of their networks. Our news comes to us based on our topic preferences. The NY Times et al are defunct.
How does that happen? How does it work? Watch the short piece here.
It’s what we wanted. Isn’t it?
Got this from Jim Culleny of NoUtopia.
I NEVER EVER watch Fox News, and I didn’t think I have the option to take it off my cable list of channels. I never thought of writing Fox to express my disgust at their biased news coverage. But a friend of Jim’s sent him the following e-mail, which I share here in hopes of generating some direct dissent against Fox News Network:
Subject: Foxless in America:
This is such simple, brilliant, potentially effective idea, I wish I could say I thought of it. It was actually sent to me by a friend who is impatient for grass roots action against the right wing to begin. I’m doing this at once. I hope you’ll decide to do the same and circulate the idea to at least a hundred million of your closest friends.
LET’S SEE THE STOCKS PLUMMET- FEED YOUR STRENGTH
If you, too, have had enough with the FOX news channel, please read below. This action will make your voice heard while simply choosing not to watch the station can not.
I have decided to make a political statement. I called mySatellite TV provider and asked them to remove Fox News from my television. Since the election I have wanted to stick my head out of a window of a tall building and shout I can’t take it anymore but I soon came to realize that there is a better and easier way to send a message to Rupert Murdoch and his blathering bunch at Fox News and that was to simply make them disappear from my life.
I called my cable TV provider and had Fox News deleted from my television. It was simple I called the Repair Department at Comcast and said I wanted to be Foxless in America. I then wrote an email to the following: Reed Nolte VP Investor Relations for News Corporation (the parent company of Fox News) at rnolte@newscorp.com and Brian Lewis, Senior VP Corporate Communications for Fox News at brian.lewis@foxnews.com and to top it off I copied murdoch@newscorp.com. I told them that I cannot take the Fox distortion and biased presentation of the news any longer and that they ought to inform their sponsors that there are millions like me. I can’t tell you the immense satisfaction I gained from becoming Foxless in America.
I am asking you to follow me in this protest and let it be heard by all that want to control what we all see and hear. This could be a way to have your voice heard-Become Foxless in America. We can start a movement if each of you send this email to all the others you know who are fed up with Fox News.
The email ends with some quotes worth sharing here:
I remember when Thanksgiving was fun — noisy with relatives who all lived within a block of each other and nosey with relatives who drove in from the next county or the next state. Everyone ate too much, drank too much, and laughed enough to keep us going until Christmas, when we’d do it all over again, except on a larger scale and a different menu.
It was just me and my mother this year. I cooked the traditional fare (including Polish kapusta, which is traditional for my family), but I don’t know why I bothered. While my mom ate up (she’s too frail and forgetful to have helped prepare anything), I was full from all the tasting I did along the way from cutting board to table. After dinner, I went and watched the same tv programs that I usually watch on Thursday nights (at least the ones that were on despite the “holiday”) while my mother napped in her recliner.
My daughter and her family (a couple of hours’ drive away) went out to dinner with her in-law family. She’s still getting her recently purchased home set up, and no one else wanted to cook.
My brother, who’s a vegetarian and lives an hour and a half away, is working on his house, so he didn’t even bother acknowledging the holiday.
Back in my home town, it was my aunt (who’s about in the same shape as my mother), her daughter, and her sister-in-law. They usually have pork, anyway.
Rituals and holidays used to be celebratory. Now so many of them are just a chore. We do what we’ve always done. Except everything else is different. And so we go through the motions. Motions without the satisfying E-motions.
I think that next year, I’m going to tell my brother to take my mother down to my aunts’ for Thanksgiving, and I’m heading out to my daughter’s. By then, her home wil be more than ready for company, and she plans to really get into the process and the product.
I’ll volunteer to make the kapusta. Maybe some butternut squash with apples and brown sugar, too. But that’s it. And I’ll eat too much and drink too much and laugh a lot.
I will bask in the noises of families fraternizing while the turkey bastes and new memories emerge. And, again, I will feel the full flood of thanks.
In his widely read blog, New Media Musings, respected writer/blogger J.D. Lasica promotes the efforts of the Portland community to find funding for b!X’s Portland Communique.
Just before Thanksgiving, the Willamette Week newspaper in Portland came out with a Giving Guide, which — at the behest of many of b!X’s Portland fans — included a piece on the Portland Communique as a fitting recipient for charitable donations.
As Lasica states:
b!X’ has already announced that he may have to shut down his Portland Communique weblog at the end of December unless it begins to generate some revenue. The Communique
I was driving around with NPR on my radio the other day when I heard this poem by Ginger Andrews, from An Honest Answer
Yesterday was the 41st Anniversary of the assassinationi of President John F. Kennedy. Yet, if you Google the subject, there is little recognition of the horror of the actual event. Instead, headlines focus on the awful
….. new video game ….. called “JFK Reloaded.” The goal of the game: To assassinate John F. Kennedy just as it really happened. Shooting the ex-president in the right spots (according to the Warren Commission) earns you points, while shooting wrong “targets” such as Jacqueline Kennedy costs point deductions.
It all becomes a game, doesn’t it? Living, dying, voting. Everything becomes unimportant because when the game’s over, you’re still the same. You turn around and plug into another game. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and nothing changes. You disconnect from life’s bloody messes and connect into the clean, flick-switch, walk-away game.
But I remember that day in 1963 when, half way up the hill, taking my toddler daughter for a walk, my neighbor stuck her head out her door and yelled “The President’s been shot!”
“The president of what?” I called back, never even beginning to think that it might be THE President.”
JFK was our hero. Our hope. We believed in his ability to lead us. He knew how to inspire us, stir our sense of pride in being Americans.
My daughter and I scuttled back home and turned on the television. And that’s pretty much where I sat for the next few days, watching real “reality” television.
It seems to me the good die young.
Or maybe too many of our young are forgetting what’s good in life in favor of playing the goodless game.
Frank Paynter is asking bloggers why they blog. From some of the early responses, I have to admit that their reasons are a lot more engaging than mine. Their answers to that question are a lot more clever, creative, and funny than mine (which I will include at the end of this post).
The main difference between a simple website and a weblog is that (most) weblogs invite comments. Therefore, most weblogs are invitations to conversations. And so lots of webloggers are as interested in generating comments as they are in posting interesting stuff. I started out that way, and I still appreciate getting a good comment conversation going. But that’s not why I blog.
Here’s why I blog:
I
He was here — beard and funky hat and laptop, and wearing one of his Agitshop t-shirts. The surprising thing was the little splotch of silvery gray hair right where his widow’s peak is and the flecks of other such strands throughout as well. Some things have changed a lot in the six or so years since I last saw him outside his old Millennium Cafe. But most things haven’t changed. He’s still the b!X we know and love.
It was Thanksgiving and Christmas and their birthdays all rolled into one — food and family-filled, noisy, and much too short.
And so, still half-asleep, we waited together for the morning train that took him to New York City, where he’s staying at the Algonquin Hotel — a combined birthday/Christmas gift to our much-loved writer/son — so that he can catch up with some old-time blogger buddies before he catches his plane for the other end of the country.
I don’t want him to go, hug him tightly, kiss his bearded cheek, this man who’s my only son and who’s leaving. Again. I think back to the Kahil Gibran piece On Children I sent my mother my freshman year in college.
Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you, yet they belong not to you.
You may give them your love but not your thoughts.
For they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams………
He’ll be back at his home, 3,000 miles away, before Thanksgiving. Who knows when we’ll have a chance to see him again. We might all be very very silvery gray by then.
I stand by the train station window and watch him disappear, remembering the first time:
Leaving Home
Young Dionysus, a faded blue bandana
circling his head like a halo,
layers himself with choices
forgotton by the gods.
He smells of earth, of dreams,
of rain that flows with ease
along acres of hilly woodland,
filling some final need
in the deep hollows of stones.
He releases himself to the magic of motley,
to the wind, alive in his unbound hair,
to sweet pickings, scattered
like ripening berries
along miles of roadside vines.
As he leaves, the hearthfire
crackles softly.
Blackbirds loose feathers
from the heights of sky-borne oaks,
and honey bees sing to the sun.
(copyright Elaine Frankonis 1987)
There’s the Spam we all hated as kids — that salty, odd-tasting, hammy block of mystery meat that everyone ate during WWII because there was rationing of the good stuff and Spam was cheap. We put up with it because he had to.
Now we have another kind of spam that I’m getting more fed up with than I was with the original edible version. This weblog had over a hundred spam comments hawking drugs and whatnot from the same IP address. I do have a blacklist package that’s supposed to alert me when I get a comment; then I can decide if I want to delete it and blacklist the poster. Somehow this clever spammer has figured out how to leave a comment without being noticed by the blacklisting mechanism. I finally figured out how to get rid of the spam comments in a very roundabout way. b!X says that when he gets back to Oregon he’ll upgrade the software that makes this blog happen and the problem should be fixed.
Meanwhile, this spam is making me about as nauseous as the Spam of old. I wish I could puke all over the “Socrates/Antonio” who keeps leaving spam comments from IP 64.19.80.100. He’s indefatigable. Well, guess what, so am I.
Everyone else will be gathering with their families next week for Thanksgiving dinner.
My thanks and feasting will come this weekend, when, for the first time in more than six years, my offspring will both be here with me — along, of course, with my son-in-law and my grandson. And — unless something happens between now and then — my 88 year old mother.
I’ve been cleaning and cooking — pierogi — three different kinds; chocolate cream pies; potato salad; cooked Chex cereal; beef, bean, and macaroni soup — all the comfort foods from their childhoods. Well, not the soup. That’s a more recent addition to my menu.
b!X will meet his toddler nephew for the first time. He zig-zagged across the country in a 12-hour trip today (that’s what happens when you get a cheap flight) and should be arriving at his dad’s soon. His sister and her family will actually drive from Massachusetts to New York for the first time since they got their first drivers’ licences and their first car over the summer. This family reunion is a big deal for all of us.
I am thankful for the graces of this odd-ball family of mine. Thankful that we are all getting together while my mother can still enjoy their presence. Of course, I have lots of presents for them. And food. Lots of food. Love, you know.