My 212 number is YUkon 2. The exchange was retired as a spoken name sometime in the 1960s, when the phone company finished converting the system from alphanumeric to pure digits, and the YU that used to stand at the front of every Upper West Side number became a 9 and an 8 on a rotary dial. The number remained the same. What changed was the meaning. YUkon 2-8888 was an address. 982-8888 is a string of digits.
The phrase “seeing around corners” gets tossed around boardrooms and strategy meetings as though it were a compliment, a kind of secular beatification for the executive or thinker who got there first. But the phrase deserves closer scrutiny, because what it actually describes is a discipline, and one that most people refuse to practice because the conclusions it produces are uncomfortable.
We live in an age of disposable context. We scroll through the infinite ribbon of the glass screen, pausing only for a microsecond to register a flicker of recognition before sliding our thumb upward, condemning the moment to the digital abyss. We have been trained by the Technocrats, those right-brained architects of our algorithmic prisons, to view this behavior as consumption. They tell us we are “consuming content.” But they are wrong. When we pause on a meme, that pixelated artifact of cultural shorthand, we are not consuming. We are remembering.
Sorting through a box of family photos in Nebraska last year, the physical weight of them stopped me. It wasn’t just the heavy cardboard. It was the specific gravity of each print. I held a single, fading photograph of folks I did not know, captured on their wedding day. Just one. It wasn’t one of twenty-seven burst-mode variations kept “just in case.”
The future now is here and you can watch it live, weekdays, on Boles.tv! Yes, Janna and I have taken the deep leap into the world of live streaming and we’re here to tell you all about it. The most interesting thing about going live each day is the idea that social media is really nothing compared to social broadcasting. You are your own station. You are your own dream stream.
I’m sure you know the fable of the slow-boiled frog. If you drop a frog into a boiling pot of water, the frog will leap out to escape the heat. If, however, you place a frog in a pot of lukewarm water, and then slowly bring the pot to boil, the frog won’t sense the slow temperature change and will stay in the pot of rising, boiling water, until the frog is cooked, and dead.
As we step into, and away from, malleable malfeasance, we cannot but help to linger on what is, and what has been lost. In the United States, we have cheapened our culture with vulgarity, and purposeful misfortune, and cunning, evil, unrest. We have also abandoned a right celebration of our most beloved holidays.
2016 was an odd year, full of surprises, and joys, and some disappointments. We want what we need, but sometimes we get what we do not deserve. Where do we travel from here, together, as a nation — while split apart at the inseams of belief, shredded in the threads of faith, and torn asunder by the warp and woof of radicalized empathy?
As the publisher of David Boles Blogs and David Boles Books Writing & Publishing since 1991, I am often asked by others to publish their works. I’ve always been a little concerned doing that because the only way for me to effectively to publish someone else is exclusively and virtually and not under the complication of paper. Today, I introduce to you, Writing a Boles Book — a precis for learning!
Continue reading → How to Write a Boles Book: Call for Authors!
Unlike women, as men age, there’s a tendency to stigmatize our awful attempts at humor by branding us “creepy” or “perverted” or “just gross.” Plant an unfunny line on a 20-year-old guy and a teenaged woman might giggle, while the same line said by a guy over 60, to the same young teen, begets the world breaking apart as the whole tone and timbre of the conversation changes to a perceived perversion.
Why is that?
Is there always some sort of unspoken sexual underpinning to every male-to-female interaction that cannot be denied or generationally negotiated? Why doesn’t the curse cut the opposite way against older women who are labeled creepy and perverted in the same condition?
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