“Our current system, which features massive traditional advertising aimed primarily at older voters, would become obsolete. With online voting, the average age of voters would shift dramatically lower. The young are less susceptible to advertising because they use technology such as DVRs and ad-blocking software to avoid ads. And they avoid traditional print media altogether. When big advertising budgets become less effective, special interests become less powerful because their money can’t help politicians get elected.”
“I started this post by claiming online voting would solve almost every problem in the world. My observation is that our planet doesn’t suffer from a lack of resources, just a lack of competence in managing those resources. Online voting could replace a broken government with one that allocates resources efficiently. And that one change, in time, could stimulate and release the economy to solve almost every problem in the world.”
Friends Lorna and Henry are on Sanibel Island. When I see one of H’s pix I want to toss all my cameras. But I don’t. He’s a pro and we expect shots like this from him. Every time.
“In a world where education is branded as the foundation of national defense, if we didn’t get enough high quality volunteer teachers, a draft would be instituted. If parents didn’t ensure that their kids finished their homework, the entire family would be deemed unpatriotic. I assume we can’t get to that imagined place from here because of the political clout of unions. But just for fun, imagine a third-party candidate for president who cleverly brands education as a national defense issue, and labels anyone who disagrees with him as both unpatriotic and soft on defense.”
The Guardian’s Simon Jenkins argues the job of the media is not to protect the powerful from embarrassment. “It is for governments – not journalists – to guard public secrets, and there is no national jeopardy in WikiLeaks’ revelations”
“If American spies are breaking United Nations rules by seeking the DNA biometrics of the UN director general, he is entitled to hear of it. British voters should know what Afghan leaders thought of British troops. American (and British) taxpayers might question, too, how most of the billions of dollars going in aid to Afghanistan simply exits the country at Kabul airport.”
“The money‑wasting is staggering. Aid payments are never followed, never audited, never evaluated. The impression is of the world’s superpower roaming helpless in a world in which nobody behaves as bidden. Iran, Russia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, the United Nations, are all perpetually off script. Washington reacts like a wounded bear, its instincts imperial but its power projection unproductive.”
I particularly liked the line, “An electronic secred is a contradiction in terms.”
The little southeast Missouri town of Kennett, Missouri, once had a thriving “downtown,” situated around the county courthouse. Growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, you bought your clothes and shoes and just about anything except farm equipment from one of the stores “on the square.”
James Kahn’s Department occupied one corner and although it had a second story, I never had occasion to go up there. From time to time someone would mention the “old opera house” above the department store. James Kahn’s is gone now and the opera house has been renovated.
Kennett’s favorite daughter Sheryl Crow is home for the holidays and christened the Opera House with a performance.
smays.com Kennett corespondent Charles Jolliff shares the photo above.
One final thought (shop-talk, really). It wasn’t so long ago that a town or a business would create a web page for something like the Opera House. A really, nasty-ass, ugly, useless web page. Thank you Mark Zuckerberg for giving the world a much better way.
This kind of moment has been happening more and more often. The most encouraging part of it is that it doesn’t seem to matter what the content of the scene is, only whether I’m aware enough to absorb it without assessing its implications to my personal interests. When my interests and preferences aren’t informing the picture — when I am not looking at it in terms of what it’s adding or taking away from me — it’s like I can watch it without being there. I am alive and aware without the normal heaviness of being a needy, self-obsessed human being. And that is where beauty is found. — (raptitude.com
This reminds me of the massive amount of data that floods into our brains every second. Every sense is pumping information that gets translated by the mind.
I have this fantasy of waking from a coma with no memory and being bombarded by this… tsunami? … of data. The light, sounds smells hitting my consciousness as if for the first time. What would that be like? Could we survive it?
Our minds (brain?) would throttle it back to something that would not make our heads explode. But what if we want to go the other way? Take the throttle off. Let the data come streaming in. But that’s not right. The data IS streaming in. We’re just not really experiencing it. What if I want ever photon? Every 1 and 0?
It seems logical that we have that capability. The hardware is the same. It must be the software that has robbed us of seeing all the world has to offer.
Yesterday we had a nice chat covered lots of topics. I asked them about their infuences, aspirations, etc. They asked me about The Basement Diaries.
I rambled on a bit and the conversation stretched to about 30 minutes, so I put it on YouTube in three parts. [Part 2 | Part 3]
My interviewing skills were never very sharp and have only gotten rustier over the years, but that’s okay. It was fun to talk with the band (Pete Conway, Angie Fletcher, Theresa Wrigley, James Finley and David Bigg).
If we’d had the internet in 1963 or ’64, the Rolling Stones and the Beatles would have been doing chats like this and making videos and all the rest. What a treasure that would have been.
Who knows if FISTS will soar to such hights, or be one of thousands of “bedroom bands” who make their music for the sheer joy of it.
UPDATE: To call my Skype visit with James and his friends an interview was reaching a bit. Fortunately, they’ve been kind enough to provide some of the information I failed to get:
Fists are myself and Angi (long term partners), Theresa is our old friend who we’ve known forever. Angi, Theresa and myself all live together. Our bassist Dave is our most recent addition replacing our old bassist Joe Wrigley who is Theresa’s brother. Dave lives practically next door on the same street with his girlfriend Kiri. We have a fifth member Peter Conway but he was sadly unable to be there for the interview and we neglected to tell you this!? Sorry about that. Pete lives in a co-operative with his wife and two children about 10 minutes walk away.
Our jobs are pretty wide ranging. Angi is currently working as a freelance graphic designer for a software company called Serif, she’s also a lecturer and tutor at the local university teaching Design and Visual Culture amongst other stuff to undergraduates. Theresa also works at Nottingham Trent University as an administrator for the Fine Art Department. Dave is a postman for The Royal Mail. This was a major headache when we recently went on tour and Dave didn’t book the time off work. He was getting to bed at 3-4am after the shows and getting up at around 6:30am for work for the whole week. He was very tired! Pete runs and owns an ethical screenprinting business with his wife Hannah called I Dress Myself. They source their t-shirts from ethical fair trade suppliers. They are made from biodegradable bamboo and their inks are all waterbased. They are one of the very few companies doing this in the UK at the moment. His business is pretty handy for our own band T-shirts! I’m a PA to a Professor of Gastroenterology called Chris Hawkey at the local hospital (Queen’s Medical Centre).
This is where we rehearse.
This is a little video of us performing at the record launch party for our first single which had the gorilla boxer on the front.
Here we are at the Glastonbury Festival last year.
Here we are performing at our second record launch party for the EP with the cool group shot on the front. There’s a whole series of videos from this show on Youtube.
This is a video our friend Dan Toporowski did for us for the first single. Dan is a genius who makes these beautiful animations at home on his battered, old, PC. Dan’s day job was working in a factory until he got made redundant. I’m pretty sure there’s an excellent job out there for Dan doing this stuff professionally but he refuses to do it as a job! It’s also worth checking out his excellent Franklin’s Haunted House.
And there you have it!
Once again, massive thanks for all your support and kindness over the past couple of years. You have always been a very positive, enthusiastic and useful ally of the band and we are very grateful indeed.
The Palace Theater will close its doors this Sunday. It has been Kennett’s only theater for a long time. Growing up in the 50’s, we had a second theater for a while, until the Ritz burned (can’t recall the year). During the early 50’s, The Palace was “segregated” with people of color sitting in the balcony and colorless people below. I’m not sure if this was by choice or enforced. (Just the sort of question a white kid would ask, no?)
In front of the Palace Theater in Kennett, MO
Based on the movies on the marquee, I believe this photo was taken in 1954. My father is the one riding in the wheelbarrow. Jimmy Haggett is pushing him (in the annual Fall Festival Parade, I believe) because pop won a popularity contest pitting “pop” music against country.
In its day, The Palace was a fine old theater. We were lucky to have it.
Henry Jenkins the founder and former co-director of the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, and author of Convergence Culture (what happens when,“old and new media collide.”) In an interview with NeimanLab.org, he talks about his new book, Spreadable Media, which will be out in 2011. A few snippets:
“For things to live online, people have to share it socially. They also have to make it their own — which can be as participatory as just passing a YouTube clip on as a link or making a copycat video themselves.”
“Spreadable media is media which travels across media platforms at least in part because the people take it in their own hands and share it with their social networks.”
“News sites which prevent the sharing of such content amongst readers may look like ways to protect the commercial interest of that content, but in fact, they kill it, destroying its value as a cultural resource within networked communities, and insuring that the public will look elsewhere for news that can be spread.”
And would you believe that within the past month, I had a client say he didn’t want to link to some association sites because he didn’t want to “send people away from my page.”
There are a lot of old media types who would read this interview and say, “If it doesn’t make me any money… I don’t care how far my story spreads.”
The final words of condemned prisoners in Ohio could be edited or shortened under new state prison rules announced Thursday, six months after an inmate recited prayers for 17 minutes before he was executed. The man apologized for his crime, then recited the rosary and other prayers before he died, choking back tears as he repeatedly said the Hail Mary with rosary beads in one hand. At 17 minutes, it was the longest final statement by a condemned Ohio inmate since executions resumed 11 years ago.
