Silicon Soapware #222

[bubbleblower]

Silicon Soapware #222 is out. Look in

http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0222.txt

or check out my main page at

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                            SILICON SOAPWARE 
       wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway
                        from Bubbles = Tom Digby
                           = bubbles@well.com 

                      http://www.well.com/~bubbles/

                               Issue #222
                      New Moon of January 11, 2013


Contents copyright 2013 by Thomas G. Digby, and licensed under a Creative 
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.  See the Creative 
Commons site at http://creativecommons.org/ for details. 

Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback.  
Details of how to sign up are at the end.  


                          *********************

Are the holidays over?  It looks like it.

Thanksgiving, Yule, Solstice, Christmas, New Years, and my birthday 
(which for me sort of counts because it comes in early January) are all 
behind us.  It is time to get back to work, whatever that may mean for 
each of us (not necessarily structured paid employment), during the long 
gray climb out of the winter darkness.

Yes, it can be a dreary time, the aftermath of a season of merrymaking.  
Things are getting back to normal, and it's the "normal" that applies to 
a dark, cold, dreary time of year, at least in the part of the world 
where I am.  Schools and offices are settling into their no-nonsense 
back-to-work mode.

We're not completely out of holidays.  We have Martin Luther King Day and 
Presidents' Day, but they're not the kind of playful merry festivals we 
were enjoying only a few short weeks ago.  They are, in their own way, 
more of a call to get back to work, to help build a better world than the 
one we inherited from our parents.

Then there's Groundhog Day.  It, like the Winter festivals now past, is a 
reminder that better times lie ahead.  Will the dreary winter end quickly 
or will spring be delayed a while?  Either way, the groundhog gives us 
hope that something better is coming, even if it's slow in getting here.  
But it's a minor consolation, not a major round of fun and feasting.

Then Valentine's Day tells us to look at those we love, and at our 
relationships with them.  What can we do better in the coming year?

So yes, even though this season is a time of literal and figurative 
darkness, it is also a time when we start to see light off in the 
distance.  There is hope ahead, although we may need to work to bring it 
forth.


                          *********************

Media mention of the fiftieth anniversary of a list of events reminded me 
that 1963 (fifty years before 2013) was a year of transition, both for me 
personally and for the country.

At the beginning of 1963 I was in my final year of college at the 
University of Florida, on my way to a Masters in Electrical Engineering 
and a job in California.

At the same time, over in England, the Beatles were on their way to 
becoming famous.  Their debut album would come out that February, with 
their US appearance on the Ed Sullivan show (now available on YouTube) 
coming a year after that.

And also all through 1963 politicians all over the country, but 
especially in the South, were hurling angry words at each other about 
issues like racial segregation and mandatory Bible reading in public 
schools.  Sometimes people hurled things that hit harder than mere words.  
It may have been just as well that I was far away from the South by the 
time JFK was shot in November.

If you want a list of events that happened that year, look up "1963" in 
Wikipedia.

From today's vantage point we can better see trends and forces that 
eventually came together to produce the cultural upheavals of what would 
later be known as "The Sixties".  The world has become quite a different 
place from what it was then, in ways that almost no one would have 
predicted.

And I can predict that you will see lots of "Fifty Years Ago Today" stuff 
in the media during the coming few years.


                          *********************

Speaking of transitions, the final print issue of Newsweek arrived a few 
days ago.  They're going all-electronic.

So what happens to people in the habit of leaving their old magazines in 
places like doctors' waiting rooms once they've finished reading them?  
Will they print them out and leave the printouts, or maybe download the 
files to CD and leave those?  Or maybe they've got some old laptops to 
get rid of, so they'll fill them up with old digital magazines and drop 
them off when they're full?

There are also people who cut up old magazines for arts and crafts, or 
for ransom notes.  What are they to do?

They'll probably figure something out.


                          *********************

And again on transitions, I'm changing the copyright license terms for 
future issues of Silicon Soapware.  They'll be under a standard Creative 
Commons license, specifically the Creative Commons 
Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.  Their site, with all the 
details, is at

  http://creativecommons.org/

As a practical matter, the terms are pretty much what I've had all along, 
except that I'm dropping the restriction that the entire zine be quoted 
verbatim.  I had originally put that clause in for fear of somebody 
posting a distorted version of something and attributing it to me, but 
the latest version of the CC license addresses that problem while 
otherwise allowing excerpts and derivative works.  So if you want to do 
something like forwarding one item to some friends who might not 
appreciate the entire zine, that is now OK.

The CC folks admit that the exact meaning of what is or is not 
"noncommercial" is a bit murky, but I'm not going to sweat small stuff.  
Basically if you think you can make major moolah from something of mine, 
let's talk about me getting my fair share.  If significant money isn't 
involved feel free to use it, with proper attribution.

Certain people have standing permission to reprint stuff from here.  That 
won't change.  The CC license is nonexclusive so it doesn't interfere 
with such arrangements.

I haven't thought it fully through yet, but I'll probably also allow 
previous issues to go under the same license even if I don't edit the 
revised notice into all two-hundred-plus zine files.  I'll probably just 
add a note to the main index file.

I'll probably do likewise with the poetry and other stuff on my Web site, 
although I don't want to take the time to think through it all while I'm 
trying to get this issue of the zine out.


                          *********************

Someone in an online discussion group started a comment-thread game: 
Start at 50, with each man who comments adding one and each woman 
subtracting one.  See which extreme, 0 or 100, it gets to first.

But what if you don't subscribe to the binary gender paradigm?  I wasn't 
a member of the group and didn't really feel like creating an account 
just to post that one comment, but if I had I would have been tempted to 
add some complex number like "0.6 + 0.8i", which has a magnitude of one 
off at an angle to the axis.

I suspect it would not have had the desired effect.  I don't really have 
any reason to think everybody in the group has conservative views in 
matters relating to sex and gender, but over the years I've run into 
quite a few people who weren't familiar with the concept of complex 
numbers.  So, sexism and such aside, they might not have known enough 
math to get the point.


                          *********************

For your Dining Pleasure ...

A few days ago I ate at a fast-food place in my neighborhood.  Like many 
other restaurants in that price range, they had a TV in the dining room.  
I'm not normally a TV fan, but this time I ended up sitting so close to 
the set that it was difficult for me to ignore it.

They were running an infomercial for some kind of prostate pills.

There were dramatizations of men having to get out of bed in the middle 
of the night to go to the bathroom, or having to make their way past a 
row of people in a crowded theater to get to the restroom, or standing at 
a urinal while being unable to get started, or being unable to perform 
sexually, all accompanied by cutaway models of the relevant portions of 
the male anatomy showing how an enlarged prostate can cause various kinds 
of wee-wee woe as well as sexual sadness.

Every now and then text appeared at the bottom of the screen.  I couldn't 
read much of it because the wide-screen TV had been set to deal with 
traditional tall-screen material like this infomercial by cutting off the 
top and bottom of the image.  But I could see enough to tell that some of 
it was disclaimers about how the government wouldn't let the makers of 
these prostate pills call their product "medicine" because it hadn't been 
officially tested.

Other text in the middle of the screen had lists of the concoction's 
all-natural ingredients like stinging nettle and what I seem to recall as 
being some sort of palmetto, along with others I don't remember.  They 
also had phone numbers and such for viewers to order the stuff.

This went on for maybe half an hour as I finished my sandwich and read 
the morning paper.

Although I'm not easily grossed out by images on TV and movie screens, I 
couldn't help but wonder why this was being shown to customers in a 
restaurant.  My guess is that the TV had just been left on whatever 
channel had shown the last big football game or whatever, and nobody had 
complained or requested a change since then.  I also noticed that nobody 
else seemed to be looking at the screen.  That seems consistent with the 
theory that nobody really cared about the TV.

The prostate-product pitch ended just as I was about to leave.  Then they 
went on to some contractor specializing in bathroom remodeling.  That 
seemed fitting, since if the prostate pills don't fix your urinary 
problems you can at least have a spiffier bathroom to have to get up and 
go to several times every night.


                          *********************

At a recent party the TV was on, sort of for background with the sound 
off.  At various times I happened to notice some of the different kinds 
of images that now and then appeared.

While I was looking at one of those images it occurred to me that there 
are men who make their living by, if I may oversimplify a bit, getting in 
someone else's way and obstructing their progress.

If one of them is in your way at your mutual place of work he's going to 
be serious about stopping you.  A polite "Excuse me, I need to get by 
here," will be to no avail.  You'll have to literally force your way past 
him.

The usual scenario is that you and this standing-in-your-way person are 
working for competing employers sharing the same premises and that one of 
his co-workers will be trying to deliver a package some place.  Your 
employer will want you or one of your co-workers to stop him from making 
the delivery.  So the obstruction person is standing in your way to keep 
you from reaching and stopping the package delivery person.

This can get rather rough, so if you're in this situation you're probably 
wearing armor, which your employer will provide.  The obstruction person 
will also be armored, courtesy of his employer, as will the person trying 
to deliver the package.

The contents of the package, by the way, are not easily damaged.  You 
need not worry about breaking it, and even if it were to break someone 
else would pay for it.  The thing you need to worry about is that there's 
a good chance of someone breaking you, even with the armor you're 
wearing.

There seems to be no shortage of applicants for the job of package 
delivery person, delivery stopper, delivery-stopper blocker, or any of 
several related titles.  This may be because, at least at the top levels 
of this market, the pay is extremely good.  I don't have statistics handy 
as to whether you have a better chance of striking it rich in this line 
of work than at a Silicon Valley startup.  But be the statistics as they 
may, the qualifications for the two fields are probably different enough 
that very few people are faced with that choice.

But how does it feel when someone at a party asks what you do for a 
living and you have to tell them you stand around getting in people's 
way?


                          *********************


                              Hidden Wings


On a bright morning in the Season of New Beginnings, 
As the sun warms the earth, 
Fairies are trying their wings.  

Some take a running start and leap into the air,
While others climb onto a rock or tree or something 
To ease the effort of the initial takeoff.  

Results vary.  
Those whose wings are strongest, 
Or who chance upon a fortunate gust of wind, 
Or are otherwise blessed by Fate, 
Soar high into the sky, 
While those less fortunate 
Only skim the treetops for a precious moment
Before tumbling to earth, perhaps to try again.  

They say that all who persevere eventually succeed,
Although how true that is I cannot say.

The only real doom is on a nearby mountain.  

The mountain offers many good jumping-off places
From which many a Fairy has soared high into the blue.  
But it also has hidden peril. 

It is home to wingless creatures, 
Some good, some evil, and some who are neither good nor evil
But simply Other.  

Fairies climbing the mountain often hide their wings
Lest the more jealous of the wingless ones take offense.  

Therein lies the peril: 

From any jumping-off point one can always see  
Another place, higher up the hill, and seemingly better.  
So the temptation is to keep climbing, wings still hidden,
Until the next launching platform is reached.  

And as one goes higher and higher up the mountain, 
One also starts to see the gold and jewels glittering in the ground,
And is surrounded by wingless ones whose only goal 
Is to live as high up the mountain as possible,
Surrounded by sparkling treasure.  

The treasure-seekers are fascinating indeed, 
As long as you keep your wings hidden.  

That is the real doom:  
Not the unlucky wind that brings a flyer crashing to the earth,
Nor the wrath of the wingless ones when a wing slips into view. 
It is forgetting one's reason for the climb 
And forgetting that one indeed has wings.   



                                       --- Tom Digby 
                                       Written    14:47 10/06/2003
                                       Edited     09:13 10/07/2003
                                       Typo Fixed 23:41 08/22/2004
                                       Edited     15:16 01/22/2006


                          *********************

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