The Arbitrariness of It All

In a few hours, the least populated time zone in the continental US will go berserk for a minute or so as the Earth reaches the same relative position compared with the sun that it was 365 and one fourth days ago. Or maybe one second earlier. Or later. They are adding a second to make up for an accumulated error in the atom clocks. Whoever "they" are. There is no significance whatsoever to any of this and it never ceases to amaze me how much people make over the "new year." We will probably all be asleep when the changeover happens at our house. Our dogs will become frightened when the guns and firecrackers start going off and they will jump in bed with us and whimper and lick our faces. There are worse ways to be awoken that to have your puppies asking you to comfort them.
The most significant thing that happened today was the alignment of Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and the Moon. I guess the Sun comes in there too since it had just set. An observer on the moon would have seen the Sun and the Earth plus Mercury and Jupiter and Venus I guess but we will never be able to prove that. My point is that these recurring curiosities of celestial positionings are remarkable only from certain vantage points and even then. . .they are fleeting and ephemeral and soon forgotten. Sort of like humanity and its pathetic endeavors that seemed to consume our consciousness for the period we now call 2008. Nothing important happened last year other than our stupid election that consumed billions of dollars and took attention away from things that needed it a lot more. The outcome was less bad than it might have been. That is all I can manage to say about it.
The only good thing I personally have to show for myself was the creation of a vacuum tube amplifier from scratch. Using a circuit from a magazine article, I figured out all the engineering of the chassis. I gathered all the specific parts which my business associate paid for, and put them all together and turned it on. It worked and makes beautiful music. Now we are going to try and sell it for more than the pieces cost him; and if we succeed we will make more and sell them. Of all the things I have tried to do, failed to do, succeeded in doing, or dreamed about doing-- this one has turned out the best of all at least looking back over a long time. If you had told me 365 and one fourth days and one second ago that I would be sitting here listening to an aria on a tube amplifier I built at my kitchen table and that I conceived in my own brain, I would have said that was not likely to occur in this universe. But something came into alignment cosmically and electronically, so thank you to the invisible hands that set me spinning on this mortal coil for a little while. And gave me the energy and vision I needed to do something good this year.

Bailing Wire and Duct Tape

I would like to apologize for ranting so loudly here the last couple of times. First of all if any of you, my friends, reading this have relatives engaged in digital pursuits, I am not going to hurt any of them and you should be righteously proud of their achievements. I do not wish to take anything away from what they have done or do for a living. I don't really run in the circles of Bill Gates and am unlikely to have my way with him. Although my cousin in Kentucky is said to be on first name basis with him and Belinda. I am totally sorry for my rude remarks.
This sort of brings me around to the shoe episode. Nobody has had the nerve to say out loud that it's too bad the war criminal who pretends to be our president was not struck between the eyes with a steel toe wing tip on world wide TV. It would be a tiny first step on the road to his just punishment for killing a half a million people for no reason. The reporter who ballisticized his footwear did a brave and bold and powerful thing and I salute him and I wish I had the opportunity myself to have done such a deed.
On the subject of behaving badly and mean spiritedly, I must confess I am not half the man I pretend to be. At least regarding backing into people's cars on purpose. I did no such thing to Wendell's BMW though I claimed as much in the previous installment. It's William Shatner's fault. I just finished his breezy autobiobook called Up Till Now which he had help with of course. But that's OK. He is a busy guy who probably has trouble putting a sentence together if it is not written for him to memorize and speak before a camera and microphone. Several times in this book, Shatner will make a bold admission about a dastardly or brazen act he committed. About the time the reader can exclaim OH MY GOD, he recants with a GOTCHA! The timing is hard to master on the written page but he and the ghost writer nail it every time. You reach a point where when he makes an outrageous admission, you are waiting for the take-back but then it does not always come. Anyway, get the book and read it if you have nothing to do for a couple of evenings. If only I had been born a generation before in a Toronto Jewish neighborhood and had a stage mother to push me into acting, I might have been William Shatner or at least had what he has today. GOTCHA! I am an idiot and a dilettante and at least I sort of know it.
My digital memory hard drive is fixed. Thanks to my friends George and Mario who coached me via email on how to proceed. A $25 box enclosure to re-house the external drive cured the trouble. This was news to me but maybe you already know that inside these external HDDs there is a small interface card to translate the ethernet commands from your computer to parallel pulses that spin the motor and skate the heads to and fro over the whirling platters. This stupid little card with some tiny chips on it can fail early and often and unexpectedly. In my case, it did not send self destruct signals to the motors and heads so I escaped. This time. If I had not been able to simply drive across town to the computer repair depot to buy this ready-made pre-packaged solution, I would still be sitting by the side of the digital road with my hood up and the smoke roiling out and a dejected look on my face after searching my trunk in vain for something, anything to make a patchwork fix to make it to Winslow.

A Real Hick

Over the last few months, my husband Carl participated in a photo contest about How I Live With HIV. Two of his images won first prize but they were ultimately un-selected from being displayed by the overseers of the contest. Our local AIDS service organization called SAAF ended up firing two of its long-time employees who just happen to be gay and HIV Poz over the artistic freedom issues that blew up in everybody's face. To save his own face, the director of SAAF summoned me to his office the other day to explain to me why things happen. It was mostly an insulting lecture from him so I posted the following entry on our Yahoo HIV Poz group.

"I spent 75 minutes on Thursday at the Southern Arizona AIDS Foundation with Wendell Hicks listening to him posture and defend what has gone on over the photo contest. He refused to discuss why two HIV Poz people were removed from the payroll citing the time honored and politically safe concept of it being an internal matter. I told him that until it can be demonstrated to me that my confidentiality had indeed been breached, which was the published reason for the firings, SAAF has no credibility in the community. He prevaricated and stammered and deflected and dissembled and squirmed his way around the topics at hand; mostly just bragging about his expertise, background and education in that cutting edge crucible of progressive and dynamic endeavor: HR. It seems that the director of SAAF got his job not for being a health care or public policy or medical or psychological or sociological expert but a human resources uh,. . person. In one of several ironic twists, he claimed to be on top of the HR issues in one breath and in the next admit he did not know what was in the Wellspring photo contest contract. Later, he said that confidentiality breaches are defensible grounds for termination due to rules about funding, then he immediately dis-ed and minimized me for assuming my confidentiality was important when it really had nothing to do with the dismissals. When a person who does not understand the concept of intellectual honesty is confronted with such a character flaw, he usually resorts to this type of shell game that mainly just made me dizzy.
His ignorance about the photo contest contract was astounding; I was not even in the contest and I knew more about the so-called agreement than he did. He first tried to claim that his Development people had nothing whatsoever to do with photo management and selection, but on cross examination had to admit that they worked hand in glove with the "Festival People" as he kept calling them to determine what pictures were child-appropriate regardless of the Wellspring prize rankings. He claimed not to know that Development is specifically cited in the agreement as having control over the Wellspring images. At the end of it all, there was nothing to show for it beyond his limp handshake and hollow assurances that "I would never want to do anything personnel-wise that would disturb my sleep." Direct quote.
Pieces of the wrecked lives of two caring, intelligent, principled men who have worked tirelessly on behalf of our welfare is swiftly fading in Wendell's rearview mirror as he speeds forward to the next fundraiser. But the only way I can sleep at night is to cut myself off from SAAF and deny them the funding they so desperately seek by claiming me as a dependent. I would rather end up in the gutter than take any more so-called help from people like Wendell Hicks.
How do the rest of you feel? --Signed Thomas Higgins"

There is a post script to this. When I wrote the original account and used the rear view mirror metaphor, I was not aware that Wendell Hicks pulls down a big enough salary squishing out people's lives to afford a BMW 540 sedan which is about a 80 thousand dollar ride the last time I checked. He pulled up in it last night to a private Christmas party I was attending, and I just about wanted to walk over and punch his sanctimonious self-righteous lights out. Instead, I "accidentally" backed my 5000 pound 1963 Imperial land yacht into his bumper just enough to crack the plastic when I left. Not a mark was made on the giant Imperial.

HATE HATE HATE

I hate every digital design engineer who ever lived. I hate Bill Gates. I hate DirecTV. I hate Samsung and Maxtor and JVC. Given the opportunity I would kill with my bare hands any of the people who ushered in this so-called digital age. Nothing works, nothing lasts, nothing can be diagnosed or fixed. Nothing is worth even dismantling if it fails, and it will fail very early in its life with no warning and leave no recourse. The products I mentioned at the beginning are just the ones that failed in my house today; there are dozens of others that have already failed that I threw in the garbage long ago and my house is filled with dozens more that tomorrow or next week or next month will fail with no warning and no recourse. If you make your living in the digital domain, drop dead. I am now adding to my list of people I hate all digital promoters, afficionados, workers and devotees. The list before now was mainly republicans, police, gov't bureaucrats, human resource employees, financial speculators and doctors.
I am so filled with hate right now for all these horrible people who have ruined the world and hurt me personally that I could explode with my blood and fluids all over the keyboard and monitor. The resulting short circuits would in turn damage the computer irreparably and there we are full circle. A tiny bit of justice. I went outside just before supper to take a sledge hammer to a stupid little toy product made by Samsung that pretended to be a DVD recorder. It might have made ten DVDs in its two year life span but it destroyed several times that of blank disks with a range of indecipherable digital code errors displayed on the screen from which there is no recovery. There is no comprehension or assistance or analysis or reversal or any of the normal avenues a reasonable person would expect to have available when the little brain inside this silly box locks up. You just throw away the thing you spent two hours making and start over. At the end of those two hours, you might be successful. But you won't know until you try and when you fail, Samsung laughs at you.
Earlier today, the external hard drive that promotes itself as the backup device to trust in the event your main computer fails, failed. Over a thousand digital pictures of my friends, my house, my cars, my dogs, my husband, my family and sunsets and lakes and mountains and lightning are gone. I might be able to get some of them back if I go in to best buy and pay them $90 to try and extract them. Failing that, I can send it to San Diego and pay $400 to have the drive platters removed and put into a new control case. Maxtor and Seagate are digital terrorists and they deserve to die for putting people in this spot with their bad machines.
If you have any Maxtor or JVC or Samsung or DirecTV boxes in your house, destroy them before they destroy you. And if you ever meet somebody at a party who works for any of these companies or their competitors, smash them in the face with your fist or any nearby solid object. I know that is what I will do the next time I encounter any of these people who have killed the machine age and brought us to the brink of madness in the digital age.