Well, I have a new lappy. A late-night food run on my bike resulted in me marinating my old computer in Sprite for 15 minutes or so. That's not so good. It may or may not be resurrectable, but with deadlines looming I pulled the trigger and drove over to Walnut Creek to get a fancy new black MacBook (the Apple store in Emeryville was sold out).

It was a necessary thing, but the whole experience gave me The Fear. I don't like the Apple retail experience, a strange mix of yuppie consumer snobbery and cultish fanboyism. It's a dark future, and the "upscale exurban shopping area" kind of scene around Walnut Creek only served to increase my paranoia. It seems like the sort of place that will be caught in the vice pretty soon -- too decadent, too soft, lots of useless luxuries to lose.

But I can't complain. BAD Camp is rolling on well. The weather here is gorgeous. Mighty Oregon prevailed over the Sun Devils. And the new computer is pretty sweet. It's got the latest OS, and it really is way cooler to have a matte black laptop as opposed to shiny white. With any luck the old machine will live again and it can become the new house computer. At the very least, I think I'll be able to get my old data back. Lots of ancient email that I like so search through from time to time.

Commenter yesterday alerted me to my 2nd favorite example of my google footprint. My enduring favorite is the person who found my site with "give meaning to my postmodern life" or something like that. Google oracular. Anyway, it seems I'm number three on a search for "Authentic Experience." Sweet! And, for what it's worth, the post in question does really read like a bad grad-school draft:

bq.. Urban living requires a certain amount of intellectual and emotional buffering on the part of the individual for the sake of survival. You have to be able to be very close to other people and treat them like objects. Coupling that with the observational perspective I’m trying to describe, the view that everything is made up of something else and that this can be investigated, unpacked, it’s easy to get hung up on self-anthropology, a blend of narcissism and the deconstructing gaze.

I think this is part of the reason alcohol is such a popular drug. If you deaden enough of your forebrain, you’ll eventually loose the mental capacity to maintain a critical perspective, at which point you’re free from all this garbage. Problem is that you may find in reaching this point that you’ve scraped much of your personality off in the process, and may be unable to maintain a coherent conversation, an erection, or a number of other things which you might wish you could keep up in the moment.

p. That's pretty good stuff as the archives go. I've corrected some spelling mistakes in this quote -- ah, the days before FireFox told me when I was mangling language; fuck you, phonics -- but otherwise the thought holds up over the distance of a year and a half.

In terms of what's been going on lately I'll have a few good things to crack open when the spirit next moves:

So in following the advice of Wu-Tang Financial Services to "diversify our bonds" and "protect our goddamn necks," Chapter Three LLC is launching its first offshoot business venture, which is naturally a boutique fixed-gear bike business: Mission Bicycle.

Today we (or mostly our bike-savvy partner John from Cincinatti) were interviewed by the influential Bike Snob NYC blog, where the snobs are sounding off (fwiw, the frame does not "cost $25 including shipping."). We're doing biz in the Bay, with no immediate plans for east-coast distribution, but this is still a good chance for us to define our brand and get our name out there.

Here are some of my favorite quotes:

bq.. This is a San Francisco-bred bike. It can be pretty wet there. How come no braze-ons or fender eyelets?

It's a slippery slope. A fender eyelet here, a brake mount there, and pretty soon you'll end up with with 27 gears, lazy-boy geometry, and both of your Docker pant flaps pinned down by reflective yellow ankle bracelets. You can always toss a seat post mount or clip on fender if you're really in trouble.

...

Will riding without a hooded sweatshirt, colored chain or top tube pad void the warranty?

We are consulting with our legal team on this one. Likely we would probably need to know a little bit more about the musical tastes, coffee shop preferences, ironical abilities, and jean size of each rider before passing final judgement.

p. While my own disdain for hipsters is well-established, this is clearly a part of the market we're looking to hit once we've cleared our first and second-degree social connections. Don't hate the player, hate the game, etc.

Via Mr. Kos, more proof that we are not as free as we can be:

bq.. Goodwin leads me over to a red 2005 H3 Hummer that's up on jacks, its mechanicals removed. He aims to use the turbine to turn the Hummer into a tricked-out electric hybrid. Like most hybrids, it'll have two engines, including an electric motor. But in this case, the second will be the turbine, Goodwin's secret ingredient. Whenever the truck's juice runs low, the turbine will roar into action for a few seconds, powering a generator with such gusto that it'll recharge a set of "supercapacitor" batteries in seconds. This means the H3's electric motor will be able to perform awesome feats of acceleration and power over and over again, like a Prius on steroids. What's more, the turbine will burn biodiesel, a renewable fuel with much lower emissions than normal diesel; a hydrogen-injection system will then cut those low emissions in half. And when it's time to fill the tank, he'll be able to just pull up to the back of a diner and dump in its excess french-fry grease--as he does with his many other Hummers. Oh, yeah, he adds, the horsepower will double--from 300 to 600.

"Conservatively," Goodwin muses, scratching his chin, "it'll get 60 miles to the gallon. With 2,000 foot-pounds of torque. You'll be able to smoke the tires. And it's going to be superefficient."

p. Because we are serfs in our cars, beholden to a relatively small business elite when it comes to answering the automotive engineering questions of our times, we are not doing what we could be doing.

So, in 2001 the Bush Administration cut the funding that NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab was using to investigate some promising nuclear fusion technologies. This guy's project is sitting around in need of $2M in funding to do a proof-of-concept which would demonstrate something we've never seen before: a controlled fusion reaction that produces a net energy gain.

Why can't this guy raise $2M on the internet? It seems totally possible, but there's a critical gap in expertise and entrepreneurial acumen. I'm a fan of the positive disruptive potential that this here world-wide-web offers, and if we can scrounge up tens of millions for a bunch of lag-ass politicians on a regular basis, why can't we start making strategic investments in things that Make Sense for humanity?

This would be cool, and essentially means dis-intermediating existing political systems as a means of shepherding the Public Good. It's an exciting prospect, both in this particular case (who wouldn't kick down $20 if it would get this thing off the ground?) and as a test case for how we might Solve Obvious Problems going forward. It would be nice if the State were more useful here, but it's priorities are fuxxored, and its ability to deal proactively with big problems that are associated with entrenched influences (global warming for $2000, Alex) is apparently quite weak.

So on Thursday a message came across the Redwood Tech Consortium mailing list proposing to set up a website to help offer housing for people displaced by the SoCal fires. I thought it sounded like a good idea, and me and a few heads from the Drupal Dojo created a site in one night that's up for the job:

HomeMatching.org

Big ups to Matt Koglin for cooking up an excellent design, Michael Welch for snagging the domain, and to Larry Goldberg for spearheading the organizing. He's working w/the Rotary club to get folks registered, and gotten the site some press:

”We are going to simply be a broker between people in need and people who have housing to offer,” he said. “People, especially with children and families, who need to get out of the smoke can go somewhere temporarily until literally, the dust settles.”

Those who can provide housing type information, such as the number of people and pets they could accommodate and whether smoking would be permitted, into the Rotary Home Matching system. The site then matches volunteers with those in need, and it's up to the person providing housing to contact the other party.

”We're a facilitator, it's up to the volunteer to contact the person,” Goldberg said. “It's just a person-to-person endeavor.”

Anyway, it's pretty neat that this can be done in a matter of hours. Speaks well to the potential for the internet to continue driving change.

So I mentioned this bit in the show Mad Men in a post below. It's really really good, and so naturally some smart kid put it on YouTube. Here's the beef:

Good. Shit.

This is pretty neat:

More smartness from the swoopy white haired guy's tech team.

Background on why I'm caring is here. Dianne Feinstein is a pretty lousy Senator, so I don't have high hopes.

One of the shows I've been enjoying over the past couple months (thanks eztv!) is AMC's Mad Men, a stylish serial drama full of moral ambiguity set in the NYC advertising industry (Madison Avenue, hence the title) circa 1960. Aside from just generally being smart and well-executed, I'm occasionally actually inspired by the marketing presentations that the protagonist Don Draper gives.

They remind me of the best of Larry Lessig's powerpoints, but because the whole point is that Draper is being brutally emotionally manipulative -- both in the context of presenting a modern marketing strategy, and also in the sense that he's closing the deal with a client -- they resonate with my artistic side even more. Truly the greatest performance work I've done has been essentially along the same lines: stacking up rhetoric with music and stage-imagery to seduce the audience in one way or another.

There's something you can definitely feel as a performer when this is working, when the crowd is in your pocket. I've felt the same thing in business meetings and selling vacuum cleaners door to door, the energy of control when another human will folds itself into your own. It's probably the rawest power I've ever experienced, and mostly since I've used it for good, it's been a good thing. Lot of responsibility though.

Anyway, the season finale of the show had a particularly great sequence like this, and it's got me mentally cutting up the music I listen to, looking for theme-clips, thinking of images, ways of explaining. Explaining what exactly is an open question. Hopefully we'll find out.

This is a winner, from the most recent Rolling Stone, which features excerpts from an oral history of Hunter S. Thompson. This by William Kennedy:

bq. I remember talking with [Hunter] about an essay by James Baldwin about the writer's quest for wisdom. Baldwin viewed the generation of American literary giants -- Hemmingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos and Faulkner -- as looking at the world as "a place to be corrected, and in which innocence is inexplicably lost." The key phrase for Hunter was Baldwin's view that "innocence must die, if we are ever to begin that journey toward that greater innocence called wisdom."

Give all my rending of soul over the loss of novelty and innocence over the past four years, I find great solace in that notion. Bring on the wisdom!