Category: universe

politics, sports, pop, fashion, science with a sprinkling of thinkings

Tear Chasm

President Obama with tears running down his face because more people were killed with guns and he wishes it would stop.

I saw the President cry yesterday.

One of the most powerful men in the world wept. On national TV. In front of God and everybody.

I watched him wipe away a tear of sorrow, tears of frustration and tears of anger. Tears of mourning as he, once again, remembered the little kids–kindergartners–who were massacred by a man with a gun in Sandy Hook. You can see photos of their beautiful faces, and those of their brave teachers, here.

Go ahead and look at them. I’ll wait for you.

See their smiles with missing teeth, their dimples, their smirks and their headbands. See their birthday candles, itty bitty sneakers, temporary tattoos and baseball caps.  They are frozen in time as children. They won’t get a chance to become the amazing young women and young men that they could have been.

That is a vast sadness. A sadness that chokes you if can bear to think about it.

I’m glad that the President cried. Everyone should be able to cry. Men, even powerful men, need to cry. And it’s okay. No, it’s more than okay. It’s what humans do when they are feeling sad, frustrated and angry.

The President asked us to feel those feelings with him. Of course he cried. I cried, too.

Posted on by docthink 0

It Is Time

I swore after the last time that I wasn’t going to do it again. And it was easy, too. After a 25/8 (yeah, somehow it even overtook the time space continuum) diet of pundits and plaudits, polls and pans, giggles and gaffes, and insider news that turned out to be flawed, I was done. I gave up my steady diet of political horseracing, the press reporting on itself, and the bubble of Washington, D.C., where you don’t have any idea of how the race is shaping up because nobody buys TV or radio time and you don’t get even a black and white postcard in the mail. (D.C. is not a politically competitive market–or even important for that matter.)

But over the past few days I was dragged crying into the Edwards’ very sad, personal backstory to his political aspirations, shook my head at the Huckabee –“sure this ad is too mean, you can see for yourself”–hucksterism, was surprised by both the George Will and the David Brooks assessment of the Obama “experience” factor, cringed a bit watching Hillary Clinton sharing a wink and a nod as well as her infamous laugh with former Bill Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos, and was not surprised with reports of McCain’s reticence to make a bigger deal of his brave service.

So, I think that I will have to work on moderating my intake. And hope that there will be some big doldrums between February 5th and the Conventions (R, D). At least I hope. Oh, and Happy New Year!

(c) 2005-2016 Doctor of Thinkology. Some rights reserved under Creative Commons License.
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‘Bout Times

Looks like the NYTimes got cyber-religion.

After two-years of blocking off their money-columnists from non subscribers, and after two years (to the day, they say) of making any article more than two weeks old unavailable, the New York Times realized that this was not such a good idea.

Like people were not reading their columnists. And like the columnists didn’t like this so much, either.

I was a Times Select subscriber for the first year. I thought that I couldn’t live without Maureen Dowd, David Brooks and Frank Rich. Or without being able to retrieve an article from last month.

But what happened instead, was I left the NY Times as my primary news source and turned to the Post. Even though I had already paid. Weird.

It was like as I was trying to keep track of my columnists and getting my money’s worth the Times lost value to me. I can’t say why, but it did.

So when time came for my renewal, I didn’t renew my subscription. I soon discovered that if there was a column that got my attention that I wanted to read, all I needed to do was search and I could find it.

The Times wants to regain those search eyeballs. Maybe I will read Dowd again. But maybe I have moved on.

(c) 2005-2016 Doctor of Thinkology. Some rights reserved under Creative Commons License.
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Hierarchy of Needs

Here’s one for the kooks. As a point of reference, Government Computer News is some geek vanity press weekly that preys on the ga-zillions of dollars that the feds spend on technology. That’s where this came from.

Now here’s the rub. There is this Emergency Interoperability Consortium, that likes to use the acronym EIC. This meaningless acronym primarily signifies a relationship with the government, which–of course–pees all over itself in acronyms. But I digress.

Anyway, this Emergency Interoperability Consortium has this incredibly brilliant idea that what we really need during a catastrophic emergency of biblical proportions is a new flavor of XML, a Common Alerting Protocol. This is key because at a time of extreme emergencies, we expect people in governments that are not functioning because they HAVE NO ELECTRICITY, and, yes, their offices (including computers) were swamped and there’s no place to sit, to somehow enter information into a database so that we can magically get fire-trucks, bomb-sniffing dogs, and helicopters to where they need to be. Shoot, if it were that easy, why didn’t FEMA use XML to set up disaster recovery centers in Pass Christian, Miss.?

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING? I love geeks, but are some still unclear that people don’t have water six weeks after the hurricane? There was one voice of sanity in the article. Charles Werner, fire chief in Charlottesville, Va., and a geek himself, thought that it might be better to invest in practical first level stuff. Like investing in the primary systems of communications first. If we know Level 1 doesn’t work, couldn’t we just work on that?

What is better, being able to radio to someone what you need? Or how about a big complex system dependent upon electricity, internet access, trained staff that are missing or evacuated, and sensitive computer equipment?

To hell with meeting basic, physiological needs. The latter is a technology project, so let’s fund it.

Posted on by docthink 1

Mainstreamin’

I didn’t watch American Idol this season. I don’t really remember if I watched it last season either. I am, however, stuck with William “She Bangs” Hung in my head. Except via the Numa Numa guy, and I don’t think that is a positive.

But some guy from TV Guide did a really lame analyis on what makes an Idol a commercial recording success. (I always like it when my analysis is better than the pundit/experts. My next career will be to be the color football announcer. But I digress again.)

TV Guide-guy said that Idols who kept “mainstream” were more successful. Going “urban” was a mistake. So black Idols need to continue to sing Bonnie Raitt, Bee Gees, and Miami Sound Machine circa 1980-something. And the white Idols are okay, since they sing “mainstream?”

I have another idea, since more than 1/2 of the Billboard Top 50 Pop, Hot, and Airplay are hip hop or rap, maybe the issue isn’t the “urban-ness.” People listen to and buy rap. Maybe the problem is that the failed Idol product was bad.

The top song last year was Yeah! with Usher, Ludacris and Lil’ Jon. This is not your daddy’s pop-mobile. Let’s stop beating up on “urban” music. It’s like saying that music in the 60’s would have been okay except for that Motown stuff.

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