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I’m The Only Serial Killer In Massachusetts

March 31, 2008 9 Comments

I have to look after a handful of websites. All of these websites collect a little information about the people who visit them. Some of the utilities have a vast array of available views of that information. Maps. Pies. Tag clouds. You can produce your own multi-hued USA Today with them, if you like. The problem is, they tell you almost nothing.

Advertising is shifting from other media, especially print, onto the Web. So people prize these statistics. They are growing adept at massaging them into something salable. Most people seem to be cobbling together a concatenation of screeds calling conventional media giants poopyheads in the hope of drawing conventional media attention and a paycheck. Because that’s where the money is.

If you’re worried about the nature of the statistics being collected about you when you cruise the Intertunnel, perhaps I could put your mind at ease. It says almost nothing. If you leave your machine wide open to cookies, people could find out the town you live in, maybe, or more likely the town the Internet Service Provider you use lives in. Webmasters can see what pages get looked at. Who referred you by hyperlink. Search terms. Nothing much.

People that have webpages generally look at one number, which they hope is a big fat one: how many people visit each day. The rest is amusing applesauce for the most part, in my humble opinion. Even the good numbers can be applesauce, because Internet prominence schemes involve getting people to look at your page whether they are really an important audience or not.

I’ve seen people painstakingly build Web edifices solely of large handfuls of monomaniac patrons, being counted over and over as they compulsively visit a page and yell stuff in the comments. Then the bloggers get a book deal based on the traffic numbers and no one buys it. It’s as if you got every person that stands on a highway overpass and yells at traffic to sign off on your business plan. If I had to rename the Internet right now, “Potemkin” would appear somewhere in its new title.

I keep seeing websites that are based on the most quotidian aspects of life become behemoths, with the only real traffic that matters if you’re trying to make money without hopscotching off the web: people who spend real money. I see pundits being asked serious questions on television news programs simply because they’ve assembled a phalanx of angry commenters. But if you had any sense, you’d never as a third party purchase their website when you could buy Celebrity Baby Blogs instead. What a sneer you’d get from the literati glitterati of the blogosphere if you mention a website like that. Sneering at it is all you can do if you can’t afford a postage stamp sized ad on there.

I’m not registered on The Truth Laid Bear. That’s a website that constantly ranks “blogs” (another nebulous term) by traffic and by their prominence based on the amount of other blogs that refer to them in the form of links. Technorati does the same sort of thing. There are many others, of course. I can’t help but notice that’s basically a closed circuit, with a few opinions racing around in a circle.

I get some attention in that closed circuit, more or less than I deserve depending upon your taste, I guess, and I do find it interesting to participate in it a little. But I’d like to remind myself, and everybody else in the closed circuit, of one little thing.

Internet information is the dumbest kind of information there is. It involves bestowing attention based solely on a very provincial kind of notoriety. If you see people arguing over some obscure point in the comments of an Internet talking shop, the gauntlet is often thrown down: “Link please.” It means you’re being called out to back up whatever the hell you said with a hyperlink to something somewhere else on the Web to prove it. That has a certain aroma to me. “This is how I go, when I go like this.”

There are many things in this world that are not amenable to “Link Please” pleading. When I had a management job in a large construction company, I occasionally had to utter: “You guys do understand that something actually happens outside this building?” to the assembled throng of beancounters, who manifestly did not understand that. And since what was happening outside the building dwarfed what happened inside, being that it involved excavators and bulldozers and dynamite and so forth, you’d think they’d know that already. They’d just look at you blankly.

I sell furniture now. I’ve been outside the Internet building. If you told me I could have a banner ad on every single blog listed on The Truth Laid Bear for a year, or I could have Martha Stewart look directly into a camera lens and simply utter my name, kindly, once, guess which I’d pick.

“Link, please.” OK. Who is the only serial killer of note in Massachusetts, according to Google?

I’d stay on my good side, were I you. “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine We’ll Kill This Dog” can’t hold a candle to me. Maybe buy an end table or sumfin’. You wouldn’t want to make me angry.

How The Who With The What Now? Yo Gabba Gabba !

March 29, 2008 4 Comments


If you don’t have young children at home, there can be whole swaths of the flickering tube landscape that you never see. Kids programs are one execrable thing after another, generally. Miss Jean made your trousers fit funny in the sixties. Sesame Street had Stevie Wonder playing on it the first time I saw it, how bad could it be? Bugs Bunny re-runs are a touchstone.

The rest of it, and there is a lot of it, oscillates wildly between watch-paint-drying dreck like Mister Rogers, to the aggressively awful stuff like the Wiggles. I’m grateful that I’ve been blissfully spared from the Barney infection and the Teletubbies pandemic and all those Vegan superhero cartoons in the nineties and all sorts of crappy totsam and jetsam. Either someone’s sitting there like an oil painting, being preachy, or everybody’s running around like someone swapped chili powder for talcum powder in the dressing rooms. I saw the Wiggles once, and wanted to drive to Australia and beat them with an elm cricket bat.

Upon reflection, that seems like an impractical way to signal my displeasure.

We’re behind the curve with any sort of entertainment here, getting it mostly as disc compilations after the thing is all over, but we appear to be caught up in one in real-time for the first time ever. Have you seen Yo Gabba Gabba?



Like all things that become ubiquitous, it must have several appeal. (If you do not know that “several appeal” is not grammatically incorrect, simply fusty, please avoid the urge to correct me in the comments anyway. If you do not know what “fusty” means, I do not know what to advise. Try prayer, or the dictionary. They’re both pretty soothing.) College kids must watch it and think it’s trippy, man. Dad must not want to put his foot in the screen when he hears the 132nd mention of the word “sharing” on April 16th. Mom would probably prefer the hosts do not look like bus station perverts.

And of course, the four year old has to be captivated by it. But it doesn’t stop there. Four year olds are captivated with dust bunnies and volcanoes alike. I have to keep my child from peering too closely into the caldera of popular culture because to fall in is to be consumed, but I must not totally cut him off from everything or he will be playing with dust bunnies.

I was pleasantly surprised when I entered the room with the screen at our house, and my tot was assiduously trying to mimic Mark Mothersbaugh drawing a face on a dry-erase board. Then he shouted: “My name is Garrett! and I want to dance”; and then he and DJ Lance Rock did.

Bootsy Collins and Mister Rogers had a love child. And I pronounce it good. Or at least harmless.

Sometimes (I Re-run Stories About) Peace Activists (That) Have Muskets

March 28, 2008 5 Comments

An older brother is sacred thing, my Father told me. Just so. But he don’t know the half of it. Father’s older brother went west on him, and disappeared. Maybe he’s in Californy. He don’t know. But he says he cares.

I care about Noah. He’s mine. Older brother I mean. Mother says he was born in 1845, in the biggest thunderstorm ever, and Mother knew he’d be taciturn forever, for he didn’t say a word that day.

Sometimes I think Mother is pullin’ on my leg.

But Noah don’t talk much around father. Mother says the oldest is the wisest. Maybe so. I talk all the time she says, even when I’m sleeping, but I wouldn’t know. And when I’m gettin’ switched for begging boiled sweets at the store, or pokin’ at the pigs through the rails, or hidin’ in the smokehouse when we play Red Rover, or hidin’ checkers from my sister in my cheeks and puttin’ ’em back on the board when she aint lookin’, Noah just smiles and carries on, quiet like. I think he’s always talkin’ to himself in his head, so the words don’t build up, and cause a jam.

Noah knows I’m little. I don’t think Father knows. ‘Cause Father tells me to do things, and turns his back to me, and goes back to what he was doing. But Noah turns my head around to the place Father told me to look, when I get distracted, and not with the cuff Father thinks I need. And when I was awful sick, and Father was away to Lafayette, Noah carried me all the way to the doctor’s brick house, ’cause the fever made Mother worry so. Noah’s always carrying me, it seems. ‘Cause he knows I’m little.

Father works too hard. He takes the trees, one by one. There ain’t but one gnarly tree left in the barnyard. And all the branches hang too high for me to reach. I ask Father, but he don’t seem to listen always, but I never have to ask Noah. He never says a word, neither; he just sees me there, and finds a way to pass by, no matter what, and give me the “ten fingers” to the branch that’s lowest.. And he never says nothing, he just does it, and walks on, wordless, and I bet Father don’t even know he does it. But I know.

I asked Mother why Father don’t always hear me, but Noah hears me before I talk, I think. Don’t Father care for me, Mother? She said hush; Father made Noah for you, he loves you so much, to give you the ten fingers without askin’. How Father knew I’d need ten fingers, before I was even born, well, Mother didn’t say. I don’t dare ask Father. He’s a good man, my Father, I guess, but why does he have to take all the climbin’ trees?

Noah came to me and said: I have to go now. Just like that.Where do you have to go? To Lafayette?

No. To the war, down South, to do my part.

But you can’t go. who’ll give me the ten fingers?

There’s others, brother, that need my ten fingers now. I’ll go and give it to them. And then I’ll come home, I promise. Maybe you won’t even need the ten fingers then. But I got you this, from the Shakers, to give you ten fingers when I’m gone.

And he gave me my little wooden steps, to reach the branch, and the bed, and the wash bucket.

Father cried when Noah left, already dressed in his blue uniform, to give the southern man ten fingers. I never seen Father cry before. I think it’s because he ain’t got no brother, to give him the ten fingers.

(Painting by Eastman Johnson 1863. Visit the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and see it.)

Reality Intrudes

March 27, 2008 11 Comments

I am not here to pass judgment. I would only like to offer an observation. It’s not my fault I notice things.

I interact with many disparate people. There are different sets of them. One group has nothing to do with another. It has been my great pleasure to talk of things here that seem new to many persons because I go places and see stuff they can’t, or haven’t yet, or whatever. If I am unusual, it is because I am a sort of rope bridge between citadels that would not be joined otherwise. My friend the carpentry framer and my other friend the book editor would not likely interact even if they were neighbors. But perhaps they see something of one another in my virtual living room.

A television is a godsend to a shut-in. Many elderly people are not ambulatory much; weary, sick perhaps, or simply know the joy of “not going.” But they can still see the world and everything in it on the television. Media can connect people, including those that couldn’t connect any other way. That’s interesting to me.

(THIS IS THE SPOT WHERE THE HAMFISTED AUTHOR GENERALLY INSERTS THE “BUT” THAT MAKES A HASH OF HIS PREVIOUS PARAGRAPHS AND STARTS INSULTING PEOPLE)

I encounter an enormous and growing number of people who have no frame of reference for the whole world, and everybody and everything in it, except that which they learned from watching, listening to, or reading entertainment. But unlike the elderly I mentioned, they are not using the TV to remind them of a world they have already participated in. They are deriving their reality from the flickering screen. Every single thing they say or do is filtered almost entirely through the lens of movies, teleplays, and magazines –paper or virtual– things that use reality only as a veneer, if that, and simply to lend verisimilitude to wholly fictitious inventions.

It is now possible to walk up to any stranger on the street, and be as likely to find a person whose views on every subject are shaped entirely by bad song lyrics as any other education. Or their understanding of economics is entirely seen through the prism of Michael Douglas yelling into a satellite phone. Love is one hour fifty-five minutes of a hooker that looks like Audrey Hepburn being wooed by a captain of industry. The only talk they have is small, and consists solely of misremembered quotes from Fletch. Their response to any query about the meaning of their life might elicit not St. Augustine, but Lloyd Dobler:

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career. I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed. You know, as a career, I don’t want to do that.

I have no idea what you’ve got, but I know I don’t want it, is an interesting worldview.

It’s very difficult to glean raw information from the media, even –or especially– from the sector of it that claims they are solely dispensing raw information. They are presenting a kind of entertainment for partisans. That is not information. But then again, information can be dull. Saying outrageous things and calling it a chaste appraisal is more fun, I suspect, especially for the generator, if not as much for the consumer.

There have only been two visions of the United States. Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton. Alexander Hamilton might be the greatest visionary the world has ever produced. Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, bartering hard goods with his hardass neighbors, is dead and buried. We are living in the mercantile division of labor fiat currency go-go world of Al Hamilton. It has brought us untold riches, and an appetite to amuse ourselves was finally joined to the leisure to do it. The pumps at the gas station play music. You must be entertained at all times. If life was harder, we would not be able to afford to act as foolishly and frivolously as we do. But it is madness to wish, as I see so many do, that misery could befall everybody so we’d have to be more circumspect and sober in our behavior. Nothing is stopping you from being sober and industrious. Why are you wishing to be forced to be that way?

The beauty of entertainment is that anything you can imagine can be conjured in front of you. It occurred to me viscerally, in a flash today, that in great measure the audience is all up on the stage and the entertainers are sitting in the seats and telling them what to do, to amuse the entertainers. What is American Idol, if not that? Since the audience is so far removed from the genesis of the prosperity and the leisure they enjoy, they have no frame of reference to reject any bizarre interpretation of reality out of hand. Elvis shot Kennedy after being anally probed in a spaceship! Hey, it could happen. I think I saw it on HBO once.

I see a lot of very insulting and condescending epithets hurled at those who exhibit simple religious piety. It is generally rained down upon the meek believers by persons who cannot bring themselves to forgo anything that might bring them a moment’s pleasure or amusement out of hand. Abstract right and wrong as a method to govern your life is assumed to be dead. Even worse than dead; it’s not cool.

There was already a time when men lived only in shadows and rumor, angry or frightened by wild tales, goaded by manipulators, envious and suspicious by default of anybody, kin or stranger alike, and were taught only by the ancient version of the movie screen: superstitious stories told around the flickering fire. We lived in a wild and vicious state of nature.

You meet a stranger on the street. It’s become more and more common that they learned all they know about economics from Trading Places. Perhaps they learned all they know about love from a depiction of a man drinking himself to death with a hooker in hotel room in a city founded by gangsters. What if they eventually get their only idea of love of their fellow man from Saw II?

When they’re carving you up with a rusty chainsaw, will they mention that the Sermon on the Mount is just a superstition, I wonder? And what difference would that make, anyway? The world is full of compelling and competing superstitions. I guess it’s just up to us to choose a pleasant one. Or not.

[Update: Gerard Van Der Leun mines gold in Steve f’s comment.]

{Up-Update: Heh.}

[Up, Up, and Awaydate: In the comments, my friend and fellow Massachusetti Sissy Willis links to her rumination about a facet of this topic. I think she’s smarter than me, but I’m too dumb to really know if that’s true.]

Month: March 2008

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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