...and what it doesn't mean. And never has.
Call this a thinking-through rant of sorts. Or a self-induced meme. Or a partridge in a pear tree with only a strange sense of celebration in sight. My thoughts are too scattered to come up with more than mini-diatribes, so here we go...
1. Internet companies google my email and everything else I do, and they let anyone else who pays them in on any of my heretofore private stuff. Look up the purchase of Doubleclick if you don't believe me. I have a cell phone that I signed up for 'do not call' and 'keep unpublished' (and, goddammit, why did I even have to do that shit when I'm paying for that number) and yet I have in the past few days gotten calls from a company that could only have gotten if they were given my number by our new cell phone carrier. And I'm supposed to take this shit? Apparently I'm supposed to just take all this shit lying down, huh? Cookies and bought lists and Facebook that pretends to be a nice helpful place to meet up and find old friends and new friends but in reality is a place to extend personal power all right - power over me by someone other than my self.
All I can say is, Orwell would shit himself in his grave if he woke up long enough to look around. 1984 has come and gone, George honey. Ain't nuthin' private no more. Welcome to the fucking zoo.
2. Coming tomorrow. OK. I'm leaving coming tomorrow on (for ril). Ah, ril, how did ya know, buddy? How did ya know?
3. In the early 1990's I lived in Kansas, about an hour out of Kansas City. Had a hairdresser who had a little shop you entered from a side door in somebody's house in a neighborhood. It looked like a reworked family room, with the fake wood-panelled walls and the orange and brown plaidy furniture still sitting in the back of the room, used as a waiting room for the two-seat beauty shop now inside.
Hey. It was a living, and it saved on rent for the shop. It was a good idea. You did what you had to do to get along out in that neck of the woods.
This lady was nice but always broke. She was nice but was always trying to sell me this kinda-fair-to-partly-cloudy homemade bead earring stuff her sister-in-law or somebody made. She was nice in that every day way that's, well, pretty nice in its place, but not so nice out in the wide open. One day we tried to talk politics, or really, she told me the story of why she would shortly vote for Billy-The-Hey-I-Did-It-Yep-Yanked-Down-My-Tighty-Whities-in-the-back-of-my-old-El-Camino-on-indoor-outdoor-carpeting-in-the-floor-of-that-puppy-hey-I'm from-Arkansas-baby-Clinton. (And being from Kentucky, I'm guessing you should be able to surmise, I've known the type who tried this crap on.)
Anyway, so the hairdresser says to me...I'm votin' for Clinton because he's the only man I ever heard that mentioned hairdressers in a speech.
Good Lord, I remember thinking...The Emperor's new clothes still fit him just fine.
There's a helluva lot more I could say here, but as you're an intelligent lot, I'll leave it alone for now.
4. More coming, tomorrow.
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
A patchwork of thinking about what living means..(#2 & #3)...
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18 comments:
Big Brother is watching and listening and reading and trying to sell you all kinds of crap.
Somehow I wound up on the Fred Thompson PAC e-mail list. Not sure who signed me up for that crap. I'm reporting it as Spam - like that will do anything. At least it makes me feel like I'm doing something.
And Facebook? Steering clear of that even though it's supposed to help me get published. Hopefully my writing will be strong enough without it.
I once signed up for something as Vaughan Zucchini, and lo and behold, in spite of data protection and all that, guess whose mail I started receiving?
I'm on the "do not call" list and I mostly get automated calls. I can only get those stopped if I take their number and hey, guess what? They withhold their number.
Not to mention the amount of spam I get, despite using spamgourmet whenever I sign up for anything suspect. On my website and blog I use an image for my email address, and link it to a spamgourmet account. So where do they get my address from?
2. Coming tomorrow.
Yeah, definitely, some things should be kept private.
I'm on the do not call list, too, and I provided my phone number (in an experiment) to one of the Facebook surveys. I got a phone call not five minutes later.
I also scrub my hard drive every evening to remove the spyware that Facebook plants on my computer. I'm tempted to drop Facebook, but it does allow me to stay in touch with a couple of friends I wouldnt' otherwise hear much from.
But if you know what you are doing, you can find out the size of someone's nostrils if you dig enough.
I unplugged the home phone. In my case, that works, because we only have it as part of the package for our Internet and cable.
...you can find out the size of someone's nostrils if you dig enough.
Yeah -- mine go to the second knuckle.
It really pisses me off that the things I pay for are abused by the very people I'm paying for the things I pay for...
Yeah. It's the loop from hell.
Well you've got to admit, if you were a hairdresser during the Clinton administration, then, well, happy times...
Privacy. It's not that the trading of personal information is a new thing. I mean, how long have our mailboxes been cluttered with catalogues we don't seem to recall ever asking for? Since long before the Internet became fashionable. But now, we give it up so easily (you want to see/try/buy this? Just fill in this form and it's all yours), and it's so damned cheap and easy to trade: bits of our lives. You can tick all the "don't bother me; really, don't bother me" opt outs, but they'll always have one hidden away, a get out of jail free card. I have to wonder if they actually make more money trading the people lists than they do with their "core" business...
All that being said, I don't do too badly here. It doesn't seem to be the same epidemic. We get a lot of stuff crammed in our mailbox -- some addressed to us, some just mass distributed -- but not too many phone calls. When a salesperson does call, it's inevitably one of those "we know you must be home because it's dinner time calls," which inevitably elicits the "we don't want to talk to you because, gosh, we're having dinner" responses.
Those calls are few and far between, though. I wonder if it's because of the work culture here, though, with "work" hours traditionally extending to ten or eleven at night (including going for a drink and a few sticks of yakitori with the guys on the way home while wifey feeds and bathes the kids and tucks them into bed, so Salaryman Sam can roll in after midnight, pop on his slippers, break open a cold beer and ignore his wife until she gives up and goes to sleep...) so Mr/Ms Salesperson isn't going to get a whole lot of joy calling at 6:30pm to try and sell life insurance or cable TV/phone service bundles.
I don't have to play that game, because I'm "foreign" and don't understand the culture. When it suits me.
Sorry, what was the question?
Hey ril,
I could've picked just about any candidate from any party and had a stupid sound bite or a 'piece of a speech' be the reason someone voted for him or her - but this is the story I heard first-hand, without any prep or prop, so it's stuck with me, and I think it says worlds about how fucked up the reasoning behind the actions taken (like voting, for instance) by what passes for the 'en masse world' really is - led around with a ring in its collective nose, because well-trained people know which buttons to push to achieve the desired effect - in this case, electability. This is party-neutral stuff.
Love your description of the culture in Japan, along with your weaving in and out of 'foreign-ness' to suit the occasion! Sounds like a fine game. I think I've been there, although not in Japan. In fact, I'm getting ready to suit up and go there now, in a manner of speaking. I live in a foreign land myself - and play pretend every day, in a land called Washington DC...
The only moderately useful advice I have is, don't vote for the sort of person who would want to get elected.
Okay, I just got a spam email about fishing. The only way anyone could know we fish is if they saw us at the pond. Um....
I've never seen ril this chatty before.
Hey — this post is like a beard.
I drop by, and I witness a goatee, and when I check back in, it's the full-on Santa.
Sproutoid.
I had a long yesterday and didn't get to post the rest, so I'm gonna pop a new one on now, a quickie that I'll add to...
ril, by the way, I wish there was a way we could elect people who honestly had no inclination to lead, but were natural leaders.
Chris, hi!
Whirl, well, there ya go, son. From goatee to beard. Sometimes it just does grow, doesn't it?
Robin, the ancient Greeks forced members of the populace to be leader. I think the had a lotto system or they took it in turn, but that way everyone who was a voter had the potential responsibility for dealing with the results of their voting, so they tended toward conservatism and fiscal responsibility. Nobody was safe from the job, so they planned as if they were going to be the ones inflicted with the task of implementing said laws. Ingenious, but it really only worked for a small city-state like Athens. Can't see it working in a huge nation like the US, especially when everyone has a vote and half of america can't even read at high school level. (Sorry, but most of us, including me, wouldn't be that capable of keeping all the myriad balls in the air that a president must.)
Hey WW,
I'd totally forgotten about that! I agree, we're too big to make that work, but that's too damn bad.
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