Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

TUSCALOOSA, Ala., May 27 - If it is too hot to paint here on the verge of what promises to be a classic global warming summer of heat waves, droughts and forest fires, imagine how it must feel in the deserts of Iraq trying to fight an unpopular, unwinnable war.

And think of how hot it must feel in Washington, D.C. for those trying to find a way out of the war and get Americans to pay attention to the news on global warming and stop driving gas guzzling SUVs everywhere they go.

A recent study showed that only when gas prices reach $4.48 a gallon will a change take place in the U.S. car culture.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of Americans do not pay much attention to politicians or the media. And you almost can’t blame them, considering the double-sided bullshit that passes for knowledgeable information pumped out by PR men everyday.

Rather than paying attention to serious news, many Americans do seem to pay attention to TV shows like “Family Guy” on Fox, a show that makes fun of their nuclear family lives.

“Family Guy” is an Emmy award winning animated television series about a family in the suburbs of Quahog, Rhode Island, created by Seth MacFarlane in 1999.

It holds the distinction of being the first cancelled show to be resurrected based on DVD sales in 2005 after it was canceled in 2002.

Most episode titles of the show are parodies of movies, popular slogans and television shows, and for the first half of the first season, the writers tried to work the words “murder” or “death” into the title of every episode to make the titles resemble those of old-fashioned radio mystery shows. They quit when it became too hard to keep up with the limited range of titles.

TV critics panned the show, and for good reasons, Not the usual family-values based reasons of too much gratuitous violence, sex or profanity.

Entertainment Weekly seems to have an ongoing war with the show, leading to an episode in which the main character and dysfunctional dad Peter wiped his ass with a copy of the magazine when he ran out of toilet paper.

In another recent episode, a big, fat woman flirts with Peter at a party and says, I kid you not, “Do you like my ass? Would you eat cake off my ass?”

We know President George W. Bush doesn’t watch TV news, but if he had time to watch TV at all, I bet he would laugh at that joke and maybe think to himself or tell Condi, “Hey, that’s a great line. Think I’ll use it. Let them eat cake off my ass. Ha. Ha.”

The show has also been panned using premises and humor very similar to “The Simpsons,” where the writers have taken their own jabs at “Family Guy” on the same network. The show was mocked in a two-part episode of South Park. The cast called “Family Guy’s” jokes interchangeable and said their frequent “cutaway gags” had no place in the storyline.

The show is at its best when it makes fun of politicians, the media and even the Fox network.

In a recent show, a character resembling George Bush falls off the wagon, gets drunk and runs around naked on a putt putt golf course. In the season finale, the character Death tells Peter he has had a busy day: “Dick Cheney, the president of Haliburton, shot Justice Scalia in a hunting accident and the bullet went through him and killed Scooter Libby and Tucker Carlson.”

In the 400th episode of “The Simpsons,” little Lisa tried to get people to understand the contradiction between the conservative Fox News and the often irreverent Fox TV.

“They just don’t match,” she said.

Which is much like a lot of real family life in the U.S. It is sometimes hard to understand the disconnect between people’s “beliefs” and “actions.”

But maybe that’s why it seems too easy for the mass public to be manipulated by lying politicians, who toy with the line between belief and action all the time, and crass commercial capitalists, who make billions fooling some of the people enough of the time.

Beliefs don’t mean shit. It’s what we know that matters.

It’s just that you can’t get away with saying it on the stump or in the news. Sometimes you can only find the truth in satirical animated TV shows - or maybe on blogs these days.

But there are some things you can’t even get away with on a blog. Does anyone doubt that the Bush-Gonzales Justice Department would spring into action if one were to suggest that Cheney AND Scalia should be shot?

Just kidding Alice. When I say shot, I mean with a camera, not a gun.

Connecting the Dots
by Glynn Wilson

There is no accounting for taste, or for how people learn and use new technology.

While I am an avid student of how people use the Internet, especially, I hate to be called a preacher or even a teacher. Although I’ve been called both - sometimes as a compliment; sometimes not.

But I’ve been thinking lately that it would not be a bad idea to start one’s own church in the good old US of A, considering the penchant on the part of the masses to search out someone else with the aura of authority to tell them what to think and how to live - and considering the tax laws.

Present company excluded, of course, since I suspect most of the readers lurking here are more likely to search out a great watering hole than a church. But there are several points worth considering for even the most intelligent audience in what I am about to say.

One of the smartest guys to ever walk the earth, Albert Einstein, once said: “Technological change is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal.”

There is a lot of technological change going on. Some for good; some for bad. And there are some attempts being made to explain it, but you have to search them out - or find a journalist or blogger to find them for you and provide a free and easy summary you can get to on your computer screen.

That is my job, in a way. So here goes.
Read the rest of this entry »

by Glynn Wilson

Sometimes I wish I had Harry Potter’s amazing wizard powers to fight for good against evil in the world.

Alas, all I can do is blog about injustice and the maneuverings of the corporate b-b-bastards now running things like the corrupt Ministry of Magic that oversees the World of Wizarding and the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

I woke on Satuday morning and immediately got into a major tiff with Charter Communications. Why? Because as they continually change their channel line up of late to try and sell customers on upgrading to digital cable, Saturday morning was the second day the public television channel failed to work on basic cable.

Frantic and angry phone calls and e-mails to the charter technical help people in, of all places, Nova Scotia, Canada, with threats to take the issue to the FCC - along with phone and e-mail messages to Alabama Public Television offices in Birmingham - resulted in a restoration of that service.

But just as I was about to shut down the computer for the night and vege out on some more lame TV after watching a couple of Harry Potter movies this afternoon and tonight, this story flashed across the local TV news screen and popped up on the regional AP wire.

It turns out Alabama Power company is going to seek a major rate hike before the Alabama Public Service Commission Dec. 12, and they are going to try to blame environmentalists.

Alabama Power to Seek 5.29 Percent Rate Hike

And, according to the AP, President Bush is deciding whether to try and lift a ban on oil and gas drilling in federal waters off Alaska’s Bristol Bay, home to endangered whales and sea lions and the world’s largest sockeye salmon run, sources say.

Bush May Try To End Drilling Ban in Alaskan Bay

Could all of this action be coming now, during the holiday season when people are not paying as much attention to the news, and as the lame duck Congress gets ready to wrap up its business before Christmas without doing much of anything?

The Washington Post is reporting on Sunday that Congress will convene on Tuesday for what some fear will be the lamest of lame-duck sessions, and GOP leaders have decided to take a minimalist approach before turning over the reins of power to the Democrats.

Lame-Duck Congress May Run Out the Clock

Also according a column by Historian David Brinkley in Sunday’s Washington Post, while it’s dangerous for historians to wield the “worst president” label like a scalp-hungry tomahawk simply because they object to Bush’s record, Brinkely says, “we live in speedy times and, the truth is, after six years in power and barring a couple of miracles, it’s safe to bet that Bush will be forever handcuffed to the bottom rungs of the presidential ladder.”

Move Over, Hoover: Is Bush The Worst President Ever?

We are wondering what Harry Potter would do to stop these bastards. And we are wondering what you think. Feel free to let us hear from you.

You don’t need your own magic wand. All you have to do is hit the comment link below and let it fly…

You can’t fake it. If you’re gonna make it you’ve gotta live it.
- Hank Williams Jr.

by Glynn Wilson

There is no way to escape it. It is too late. America is a car country, especially in the American South.

This fact hit me in a traffic jam at the Alabama-Georgia line the other day while I was driving the Chevy van from Birmingham to Atlanta to buy a used Macintosh laptop computer from a woman in Buckhead.

I wrote a cover story for The Southerner magazine about this during the summer of 1999 after researching the issue for a chapter in a Sociology textbook: The War on Sprawl.

I have made a point of living in places where you can walk to a neighborhood store and ride a bike along the water, including Gulf Shores, Alabama, where I used to ride every day along the Gulf of Mexico. In Knoxville, Tennessee, I used to ride along the Tennessee River. In New Orleans, for almost four years I rode along the great Mississippi every day and even shopped at a Whole Foods store on Magazine Street, using a backpack for a grocery bag.

But for most people in this country, walking or biking is just not an option. Our living spaces are organized into sprawling suburbs with no significant mass transit. So the only way to get around is in a car.

Not surprisingly, people come to love their machines like they do their pets. They name them, and who can blame them?

I love my Chevy van, especially when I can get the canoe on top and the Cannondale in the back and head off for some adventure without having to fly commercial.

The Eisenhower administration first started building the Interstate highway system for defense purposes in the 1950s. Now it has become the primary travel route for moving people around the country for work and play.

So it was inevitable that “the road” made its way into the American arts, literature and folklore.

Willie Nelson is perhaps most famous for the song “On The Road Again.” He was recently arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for smoking pot on the road in his tour bus. The fact that a musician can get away with that in Bush’s America of 2006 is cool for us Baby Boomers who came of age in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when the coolness of classic rock and pot were at their zenith.

It is also inevitable that Americans love older cars. The antique car movement in America is almost as big as religion itself.

America is also a country of technology, where Apple computers and the Internet were invented. Americans tend to love their computers. I’m no different. I love my Mac. And I am not enamored of new computers any more than I am drawn to new SUVs.

The best era for the American automobile came in the late 1950s and lasted until the early ’70s, when rising gas prices and technology began to favor the smaller cars made by the Japanese.

The best era for personal computing occurred from about 1996 to 2006. It is going to be downhill from here, because the corporate bastards are taking over the business and making it harder for the little guy to break through.

So it should come as no surprise that I tend to use a car metaphor to describe why I just bought a seven year old Mac G3 Powerbook instead of something newer. I love the way it drives, like car aficionados may swoon for the 1973 Mustang.

When I talk to computer geeks about this, I have to preface my remarks with the statement: “I know I’m driving a ‘73 Mustang. But hey, I like driving a G3 and building Web pages with the fat version of Simpletext that holds a bold command and allows me to see what I’m doing amongst all the gibberish computer code.”

They understand exactly what I’m saying, if the average non-computer geek doesn’t.

It may not be possible to continue driving a computer of this era much longer, although seeing all the ‘73 Mustangs still on the road gives me some hope. Where do they find parts for their old machines? Someone’s making them.

The thing about this machine business is that we use the best machines to do something, either for work or entertainment or both. You have to have tools in this world to do what you are meant to do. A crappy car or a shitty computer just doesn’t get it.

Back in The Bunker Saturday night, I ran across a special on the Country Music channel with Kid Rock playing alongside Hank Williams Jr. They sang a song about the road called Hamburger Steak Holiday Inn. It is a song about the road, and has a message for would be musicians who buy cheap guitars and play all by themselves on the side of the road and never learn to finish a song.

I take this message to be just as true in journalism or politics. Some people think they can fake it and make it. George Bush comes to mind, along with most of the corporate PR press.

If you are reading this far you must understand it. You are looking for alternatives to the fake journalism and fake politics that passes for understanding in Bush’s America.

We are doing our best to put together the tools we need to provide that alternative and gear it up even more in the coming months.

Like Hank sings, “You can’t fake it. If you’re gonna make it you’ve gotta live it.”

We ain’t faking it folks. It may not be making us rich, but the way we live and work is rich in experience. We are determined to live it - and make it. So come on along for the ride…