Regarding Train Wrecks …

By lytspeed Posted in Poetry, Signs o' the Times, Writing 2 Replies

Michael Jackson. Princess Diana. Danny Bonaduce. Anna Nicole Smith. Britney Spears.

Through the vulture eyes of the media, we watch the lives (and deaths) of famous people. If we watch television at all, or even visit the grocery store, it’s unavoidable. It’s almost a vampiric obsession; we we tune in to Entertainment Tonight and receive our daily ration of psychic energy, sucked straight through the camera lens from the life of some famous train wreck. (Since when is it “entertainment” to watch the tragic events of a person’s life?)

The latest is Andrew Dice Clay, and his new television show. God, I thought we were rid of him years ago, but here he comes, rising from the depths like a leather jacket leviathan, hoping to feed on us as we feed on him in an ouroboros cycle. We get to see a train wreck as it happens, he gets money and fame, which contributes to the train wreck, which gets hime more money and fame.

It’s easy to blame the media and paparazzi for this. After all, they are the ones really profiting from the focus on disturbed celebrities. But it’s important to remember that the reason they profit is because we tune in. We buy the magazines. We talk about this stuff around the water cooler.

In short, we are responsible, to a large degree, for the demise of these people’s lives. Yes, I know that blogging about this is not helping stem the fervor; the Web is media, and this essay will add to the 48,900,000 hits that Google currently provides for the search term “Britney Spears.” However, I’m deliberately choosing not to link to any of the sensationalist articles or advertisements for any of the above individuals, because I want to limit my contribution to the problem while still addressing the problem itself.

There’s a reason why I don’t watch much TV. If I watch too much, I feel disgusted with myself for passively contributing to the problem. There are many other things — active things — that I can do, like writing, working on web pages, playing music, reading, or visiting museums. In short, creating and learning.

Instead of watching a train wreck, I could be viewing preserved trains at the Colorado Railroad Museum, a link which I’m not ashamed to include.

Instead of contributing to the destruction of a person’s life, I could be creating a fictional character for a short story.

Instead of reading a lament on a television tombstone, I can write a sonnet for my wife.

In the end, I choose to contribute to the problem as little as I can. I would rather be part of the solution, by creating instead of destroying.

Stuck in the Mountains

By lytspeed Posted in Computers, Music, Writing Leave a reply

I’m writing this post from a Safeway cafe area in Frisco, Colorado while I wait for parts to be delivered from the East Coast (which is pretentious enough to deserve capital letters, evidently.) I stayed in Silverthorne, Colorado last night because I-70 eastbound was closed due to blowing and drifting snow.

Today is my day off, actually. But since I was stuck here overnight and my employer is kind enough to pay for my hotel room and last night’s meal, I figure the least I can do is stay here long enough to get the parts to fix the self-checkout machine at this Safeway.

I considered writing last night, but didn’t get back to the hotel room until a little before 9:00 PM, due to an overcrowded restaurant. (35 minutes to get seated, another 35 minutes to get my sandwich, and 20 minutes to eat it and pay the check.) After that I talked with my wife on the phone for a while, then talked with my bandmate John about new domain names for the band. Www.steelriverthree.com lapsed because I didn’t have the money to renew it at the time, and a company called New Ventures Services Corp. (which is, I think, a subsidiary of Network Solutions, though there may be evidence to dispute that) snapped it up. When I inquired into purchasing the domain name back, I found out that it would cost a minimum of $100 plus a $19 fee just to make the offer. Even more ridiculous is the estimate that Network Solutions suggested I make for the domain name. Based on the fact that it’s a .com domain, and on the domain’s traffic history, the suggested offer was $8,800 to $11,300! Um, no. If New Ventures Services Corp. is truly an underling of Network Solutions, it seems that there is a conflict of interest here, and frankly, I think it should be investigated and regulated. But that’s because I’m a registered Democrat, of course.

At any rate, John and I settled on a new domain name, which I will publish here as soon as I get it activated. We will also have a MySpace presence for the first time, and some of our songs will be available for streaming on the MySpace page. Maybe that will generate some gigs for us.

As I look out the window at the bright blue skies above Frisco, shielding my eyes from the glare of the snow, I realize that things are good. If I’m bitching about Network Solutions fleecing me, things must not be too bad. And there are definitely worse places to be stuck on a Saturday morning.

Enduring Inspiration

By lytspeed Posted in Geek, Humor Leave a reply

A few days ago, I found myself in a Walgreen’s store, passing through the magazine aisle. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a copy of MAD Magazine. I resisted the urge to solve the back cover Fold-In (a sure sign that I have gained some willpower at some point over the last 20 years) and flipped through the pages backwards. I stopped suddenly when I saw a feature about Multiple Personality Disorder, not because the topic gripped me, but because I recognized the artist immediately: John Caldwell.

During the mid to late 80s, “Caldwell” was my favorite single panel newspaper cartoon. It was carried by King Features Syndicate, and featured cartoons that often dealt with literary, music, or technology themes. The strip only ran for a few years, but I found it to dovetail so well with what was important in my life that I eagerly sought it out every day in the Rocky Mountain News. Occasionally, I would find a panel that made me laugh so hard I would cut it out and hang it on the shelf above my desk.

I kept some of those panels over the years, and they moved with me from house to house, state to state, office to office, marriage to marriage, always reminding me of my goals. Below are two of those panels, reproduced here with the gracious permission of the artist.

Things You Don't Say to a Poet #25
Jerry Lee Lewis School of Computer Programming

Anyone who has followed my website over the last ten years can see why these panels appealed to me. The “read your meter” cartoon tied together my love of puns with my desire to be a poet, and the “Jerry Lee Lewis” panel linked my music and computer interests. Integration has always been a theme in my life, and the “Caldwell” strip consistently brought together my interests in ways I didn’t expect.

I remember another panel in which a man is sitting in his pajamas, buried in a continuous roll of paper. The caption said something about the subject’s friend faxing back the copy of War and Peace that he had borrowed a few years earlier. Again, that panel tied together literature and technology. (It might not make sense to younger people these days, but those of us who were around for the commercial explosion of the fax machine remember that faxes originally printed out on continuous rolls, much like teletypes. See the prior post for more about teletypes.)

As the years went by, I dropped out of college, went through some hard times, climbed back up out of the pit, and now I’m finally realizing some of those college dreams. I’m a published writer and poet, I’m a computer professional for a major three-letter acronym, and I’ve played music in dozens of venues. Though I was slow to achieve some of those things, I never lost sight of them, even when times were hard, and I have John Caldwell’s tattered single-panel cartoons to thank for that.

Thanks, John. I’m glad to see that you are still writing, drawing, and making people laugh.

Update 3/2/2007 — I’ve been corresponding with John recently, and he pointed out that some of his cartoons were used in a pre-MTV video called “I Quit” by the band Blotto. That video is here on YouTube if you are interested in checking it out.

21 Years Ago Today

By lytspeed Posted in Geek, Science, Space Leave a reply

It was a cold Tuesday morning at Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO. I had attended an early morning honors class synthesizing history, economics and science, and was heading back across campus to hang out in the music lounge between classes. Elsewhere in the world, Space Shuttle Challenger had embarked on STS-51-L, notable because civilian teacher Christa McAuliffe was on board. Chicago was still celebrating Da Bears‘ Superbowl XX win the preceding Sunday.

As I walked by the campus library, I noticed that the flag was at half mast. Odd, I thought. Something big must have happened. At that time, I was also part of the news staff at the campus radio station, KDUR, so I changed direction and headed for the practicum studio.

When I walked into the studio, the Teletype machine (those machines that make the clunking sounds behind the music at the beginning of news shows) was ringing almost non stop and continuously spitting out lines of text in all capitals. In the days of the Teletype, five bells indicated either a bulletin or an urgent follow-up to a prior bulletin, and were very rare. Even more rare was a ten bell flash; these were reserved for cataclysmic events, such as the assassination of President Kennedy. I learned later that the Teletype at the radio station had received one ten-bell flash, and all the subsequent updates were five-bell follow-ups. I entered in the midst of the follow-ups.

Only one person was manning the station at the time, and he was frantic. I asked what was going on, and he said, “The space shuttle blew up.” I started grabbing slips of the Teletype paper and organizing them by time stamp so I could see the sequence of events and hand the most significant ones to the deejay.

After things calmed down a bit, I started thinking about what angle I would take on my news story about the disaster. The basic facts had already been covered repeatedly by all the news outlets, and I wanted to do something different with my story. Having been a fan of the space program for most of my life, I thought back to prior space disasters, and wondered if there were any similarities to the Challenger disaster.

I found no significant similarities in the causes of prior disasters, namely Apollo 1 and Apollo 13, but I did find that the Apollo 1 disaster took place on almost the same day as the Challenger disaster. Apollo 1 burned on the launch pad during a January 27, 1967 test, nineteen years (almost to the day) prior.

Little did I know at the time that the space program would be derailed for nearly three years after the Challenger disaster. I fully expected that they would be back in full swing within a few months, as NASA had been after Apollo 1. In the three years following Apollo 1, NASA launched numerous missions, culminating in the ultimate goal of landing on the moon in July of 1969. After Challenger, shuttles would be grounded until the launch of Discovery on September 29, 1988 and mission STS-26. (After Challenger, NASA returned to the original Space Transportation System numbering scheme that they had used until the 1983 Columbia STS-9 launch.)

All of the astronauts on STS-51-L knew the risks inherent in space flight, including Christa McAuliffe, and they chose to fly anyway. I think that was noble, and I choose to remember them as heroes and explorers who died in the course of expanding human knowledge.

Motor World Online

By lytspeed Posted in Gaming Leave a reply

Longtime readers of this blog might remember when I posted pictures of a custom Motor City Online skin I designed for my character’s 1965 Mustang. I loved that game, and was very bummed when Electronic Arts decided to take it offline to devote resources to The Sims Online.

Now, though, it looks as though a grassroots movement has taken up the mantle. Motor World Online is being developed as an MMORG (Massive Multiplayer Online Racing Game), and if all goes according to the developers’ plans, it will offer similar functionality to MCO for no cost.

I love this idea, and I hope to contribute to the project in some way. If nothing else, maybe these links will help to spread the word a little bit.