Whether you realize it or not, your schooling brands you — fairly or not — with its historic reputation in the perception of the mainstream, middling, public mind.
Continue reading → School Branding: From Football U. to Ivy League
Genius author and thinker, Richard Dawkins, wrote in his book, Unweaving the Rainbow, how there is wonder and awe in a scientific — “non-theist” — view of a universe built on both fortuity and logic:
Continue reading → Purity of Disbelief and the Wonder of Evolution
Young people look up to other young people. Unfortunately, many of the role models young people choose to use to model are not worthy of imitation or the attention. If you ever needed proof of why young people should not look up to celebrities and imitate their morality and their behavior in the classic Aristotlean way of learning and mimicry, please read actress Lindsay Lohan’s incoherent — and frankly, illiterate — public sympathy card to genius film director Robert Altman’s family she released on Tuesday to see the sad, living proof, of a Long Island public education and the perils of false celebrity.
Neil Young makes me cry in the noble, touching, way genius creates art that erupts into an intellectual and emotional explosion of the senses in a single moment of blinding understanding. When you’ve experienced a Neil Young song in that manner you don’t look at other musicians the same way because not only can they never inspire you they cannot even inspire their own spirit.
Continue reading → The Neil Young Primer: Why Genius Never Fades
HIV and AIDS are infections that still plague the face of the earth even though there are drug treatment therapies that can buy time for those infected.
Without medical intervention and treatment the average incubation period for HIV is 9-10 years and death after a full-blown AIDS diagnosis is still only 9.2 months.
People and their deaths are not best understood on timelines and statistical averages. The value in the human component of living is in remembering those who have suffered and fallen before you.
To live is to remember.
I remember in the mid-to-late 1980’s how this unnamed “Gay disease” we now know as HIV/AIDS was eating people alive. It was a frightening time because no one really knew in a shared, universal societal understanding, how HIV was being transmitted or how AIDS was being contracted.
There were rumors in the mainstream community you could get AIDS — no one really understood the HIV component until years later — by sitting on a toilet seat or by someone sneezing on you or by just shaking hands with an infected person.
Continue reading → To Live is to Remember: A Brief History of AIDS
Last week in my article, MacBook Questions from a Windows Heathen, I asked some questions about the new MacBook line of laptops from Apple computing. I have been using Windows computers since the rise of Windows 3.11.
My previous experience with Apple has been limited to the first generation Newton which I loved so much that Apple used a quote of mine in a press conference but without attributing it to me or asking my permission. I had posted on a CompuServe forum explaining why the Newton was “touching the future today.”
I believed in that technology then and the Apple Newton set the stage and started the trend for personalized, portable computing now. I have also used a first generation iPod and I have used iTunes and QuickTime.
I don’t know much about Apple computers so if there are some things in this review you do not understand or that are wrong, please let me know. After using the MacBook for a couple of days, my plan was to make a permanent move away from Windows and become a MacBoy today and forever. I will let you know my decision about moving from Windows to Mac at the conclusion of this article.
One of the great things about the new Intel-powered MacBooks is you can dual boot into Windows and Mac OS X on the same machine so you, in theory anyway, do not have to make a choice of Operating System preference.
Continue reading → An Apple Through the Windows: My MacBooks Review
If there is such as thing as the “Blogosphere” I discovered over the weekend it is imploding with the weight of bad intentions gone wrong. We have discussed the perils and predilections of Mommy Blogging in the past — but Baby Blogging — the worst possible aftereffect of The Mommy Bloggers, takes the entire idea of precious children on the internet, into a whole new sad level of self-importance. I read one blog “written” by a one-year-old baby using words like “dimorphic” and “ball sack” and “fistula.”
We also learned what was digested that day, how it came out in the end, and how many times Daddy was punched in the groin by baby’s precocious fist. I’m making it sound much more entertaining and funnier than it was because there were five entries per day for that kind of babbling diarrhea.
What is the point of Mommy writing a blog as if her Baby had written it?
The idea can’t be humor. It must be some sort of prospecting for genius in their offspring:
“My baby was blogging at nine months, what’s your excuse for an illiterate 11-month old?”
Continue reading → Baby Blogging: Signs the Blogosphere is Imploding
I had no idea there was a “Boles University” (no, there really isn’t one) until I received the Best Ever Direct Mail Campaign (yes, there really is one) yesterday.
In the early 1990’s Gordon Dahlquist was one of my Columbia University coursemates in the MFA Playwriting program.
Continue reading → Gordon Dahlquist as the Two Million Dollar Man
There’s a new movement afoot in the Snake Oil business built on the tenuous and slippery stepping stones of childhood: The Indigo Child is on the rise and sitting on your front porch! You join the Indigo Child movement by purchasing a book or a DVD or access to a website and then buying into the ridiculous and immoral frame that is set against those children to falsely make them special in their parents’ eyes.
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