Founded 1983: Liberal Mindset; Conservative Morality

May 14, 2026May 14, 2026

The Placebo Button

The elevator in my building has a door-close button that does nothing. I learned this the way everyone learns it, which is to say I pressed it for years under the impression that it was speeding up my departure. The button lights up. It makes a small click when pressed. It provides every sensory signal of function. What it does not do is close the door any faster than the door was going to close on its own. The elevators in most American buildings installed since 1990 have door-close buttons wired to nothing, because the Americans with Disabilities Act requires the door to stay open long enough for a person using a wheelchair or walker to enter, and the button that overrides that requirement is accessible only to the fire department with a key.

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February 18, 2026

The God in the Wire: The Book That Began with an Empty Shelf

I did not set out to write a book about technology. I set out to understand an empty shelf. The shelf is at LaGuardia Community College in Long Island City, Queens, mounted on a corridor wall beneath a sign bearing the universal symbol for Deaf access. The shelf once held a TTY, one of those text telephones that gave Deaf people their first access to instantaneous distance communication. The TTY is gone. The smartphone replaced it. The sign is still there, pointing to something that no longer exists. I saw it during a workshop break, in a hallway I had no reason to be in, and for the next several years I could not stop thinking about it.

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November 4, 2010

Electroshock Therapy and My Amazon Kindle

I used to think my Amazon Kindle was a SuperStar! Then the Kindle DX crashed my party, and I swore I’d never buy another Kindle — and I have not. I read Kindle books on my iPhone and on my delightful iPad. I like a bright, backlit, screen because I spend a lot of time in dark places like theatres and dank basements and editing rooms and recording bays — so the Kindle’s need for direct light in order to be read is a real problem for me — especially eyes age and the need for greater illumination grows. I still use my Kindle to occasionally browse the sale rack on Amazon, and that means I have to infrequently recharge my Kindle. The other day, when I plugged my Kindle in to the Amazon power source shown in the image below, I got a mild tingling in my fingers: My Kindle electroshocked me! My eyes rolled back into my head as I shook off the bite.

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January 6, 2010

Gibson Brite Wires Review

My D’Addario strings review is one of the most popular articles here on BolesBlues.com, so I decided to crack open my Anvil flightcase and share more of my guitar strings experiences with you. Today, we’ll take a look at Gibson Brite Wires. These strings are installed by default on all new Gibson Les Paul guitars. When your Les Paul Standard is the guitar headstock shown on the Brite Wires packaging, you begin to get the idea that Gibson especially wants you to use these strings on that guitar.

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February 12, 2009

Semiotic Shoe on a Roof

As technology progresses, so too, must the criminal element. In a previous article — Shoes on a Wire — we learned that in the urban core, shoes hanging on a wire can indicate the house below sells drugs. As cities “urbanize” neighborhoods, and the “wire utilities” are taken underground instead of up in the air, the “Shoes on a Wire” semiotic is rendered memeingless. The new semiotic for selling drugs, according the Vice Cops on Spike TVHD, is “a single shoe” tossed on a roof as exampled in the generic image below.

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August 5, 2008

Minds On a Wire Reflect a Young Future

We are all tethered to each other via pipes and wires — but every growing day detaches us from deeper connections with the outside world — and our mind-body dyad begins to melt in the soup of technology.