Cart vs Horse

If you are living anywhere along the coast in our Gulf States, you might be wondering whether oil-soaked birds will soon be dropping dead on your lawn.

- OR -

If you are a Gulf-Coaster and fish for a living (or just live for fishing), you might well be asking when you can get back at it.

In other words, in either case your main concern would be when are they going to stop the leak?

- BUT -

If you are a member of your country's government, or the 4th Estate, your attention will have moved on past the mundane concept of fixing the problem. After all, when 'Top Hat' didn't fit, and 'Top Kill' fizzled, and British Petroleum moved on to that leaky semi-cap, semi-suck procedure which didn't have a catchy name, what was the point of caring about a fix?

No, your attention has moved on to an easier topic to grasp: make the bastards pay ...

- NOW -

I know it is important to ensure BP takes care of anyone and everyone with a legitimate claim to damages, including the oil-soaked Pelican lobby (if there isn't one, I have dibbs), but let's not take things too far out of sequence.

When President Obama begins making his trips to the Gulf all about 'kicking ass' to get BP to cough up reparations, he is perhaps missing the bigger picture. The freakin' oil is still gushing!

Imagine your house is on fire. Would the first call you make be to the insurance company? Or the Fire Department?

Mr. President, please put the horse back in front of the cart. Stop the leak, then soak the bastards!

Fading Hope

American Presidents have to be thick-skinned. They can't let what they hear in the media get to them, or they'd lock themselves in the Lincoln bedroom or hide in a secure undisclosed location, refusing to come out until their term was over. They have to be made of sterner stuff.

But they can't ignore the press. Or entertainment masquerading as the press, for that matter.

If you were President Obama, the last thing you'd want to hear is criticism coming at you from Jon Stewart and his Daily Show team. Those folks are smart, and funny, and are watched by most of the throngs of independents and democrats that are your base of support. They helped you get elected, but they can just as easily kick your ass.

But criticism is just what the Daily Show is beginning to serve up. And the President better be paying attention. When Stewart recently lampooned Mr. Obama's statement that he was looking for the right 'asses to kick' about the Gulf Oil Spill, he was more than half-serious.

And that same show's ridicule of the President's apparent categorization of every problem he faces as 'complicated' or 'complex', wasn't just good-natured ribbing. It came off sounding almost like bitter disappointment.

Which does not bode well for our President.

I know it's just TV, but the administration would be wrong to ignore it. Obama and his advisors can safely disregard Glenn Beck and most other conservative pundits, but it would be fatal to ignore his own court jester. Rather he should use the Daily Show as a mirror, and take a good, hard, look. People are beginning to laugh at you Mr. President, not with you. And that never ends well for politicians.

Just Plain Nuts

Recently, on a cross-country flight, the attendant came on the PA to announce to the passengers that no peanuts would be served. Given that peanuts are about the best of what you get these days, that was a real blow. No amount of pretzels could fill the void.

The reason? A passenger on the flight had peanut allergies.

There was hardly time to ponder what life must be like, being so sensitive you'd be hurt by trace bits or smells loosed into the cabin air from other people's peanut consumption, when the substitute pretzels arrived.

A quick review of the contents revealed a hidden surprise, a label warning:

"made on equipment used to handle nuts and nut by-products "

I wonder if that nuttiness, once-removed, had any effect on the poor allergic, unidentified passenger?

Actually, until today, I was sure that the alleged passenger was just an excuse for running out of nuts. But then comes an article from the Daily News, featured on Yahoo.

Apparently, the Feds are considering banning peanuts on commercial airplanes. They attempted this once before but were shut down by the courts. Maybe they will get their way this time. And maybe the airline I was on was willing to inconvenience 100 passengers to keep just one passenger from itching and sneezing, in an attempt to stave off such draconian legislation.

Who knows what will happen at this weird nexus where genuine medical disorder meets perceived entitlement, bureaucratic zeal, and litigation?

Not me, but one thing I do know: the processed food manufacturers in this country better stop making every snack food 'on equipment used to process nuts' or we tired travelers won't have anything to sop up the alcohol on those long, long flights.

Designing The iPocalypse

So, Steve Jobs says he got the idea for the iPhone, while developing the iPad.

Ok, I'll buy that, but I have to wonder about his memory when it comes to the iPad's development. Strange that he doesn't mention certain people and ideas from Apple's past, when the topic turns to tablets and Apple's latest product.

People like Alan Kay.

Luckily for us, certain reporters on the tech scene have long memories.

Not me - all I remembered was that Alan Kay was recruited from Xerox Parc, where he'd pioneered GUI interfaces, to work with Steve Jobs at Apple designing the Lisa (predecessor to the Mac). Kay stayed at Apple for quite some time after Jobs was forced out in the late 80s, but left to become a Disney 'imagineer' before Jobs rejoined Apple in 1998. I also remembered that one of Kay's dream projects was the Dynabook, a computer in the shape and form of a notebook, that would be easy to use by everyone.

Sounds a little like the iPad may be the realization of Kay's dream. Only Jobs doesn't seem to acknowledge the lineage.

Good thing one of those reporters with long memories I mentioned commented on this with more detail than I could muster. The article ends by painting Jobs in a decent light - no pirate He, it seems.

But I'm still inclined to think the worst - after all, I've never forgiven him nixxing the licensing of the MacOS and killing Power Computing. Plus, my policy is to always kick someone when he's UP. (I was a steadfast Jobs supporter during his NeXt years-in-exile).

So, Steve - you've done an awful lot. You have much of which to be justifiably proud. Sully's hair, for instance. Would it kill you to send a few kudos someone else's way? Alan Kay should at least be acknoweledged as the spiritual father of the iPad, if nothing else.

Oh, and license the MacOS now, will 'ya?

Memorial Day 2010

For some, Memorial Day may hold meaning more as the first long weekend and harbinger of Summer, than it does as a time set aside to remember those who have served and fallen in America's wars.

If so, then they must have missed the airings of HBO's miniseries 'The Pacific', and the current re-running of the HBO film, 'Taking Chance'. The former shows us in bloody high-definition just how completely our troops sacrificed themselves in our service in World War II. The latter gives us a view of the impact of a single life lost, through the narrative lens of a marine's body being escorted home from Iraq.

Individually, each depiction makes sacrifice clear. Taken together, the effect is like a simultaneous punch to the gut, slap to the face, and kick in the ass. Together, they also remind us that sacrifice is not confined to the past.

All of which is to say it's a bit difficult for me to barbecue and celebrate Memorial Day this year. The memories, old and new, aren't conducive to much more than hoisting a toast to all those who have given us their last, best, effort.

For those of you who'd like a slighter more energetic (and exercised) post about this day, you can check out my thoughts from 2009. For the rest, may you have a pleasant day with those you love.

Fix It

American's believe in fixing things. When something breaks, fails to work as planned, or when a problem arises that needs an urgent solution, we want it fixed. And fixed NOW. Yesterday, if possible.

I heard on the radio - on 'This American Life' (Episode: 'Island Time'), a feature about relief efforts in Haiti. And it was all about our focus in fixing things quickly versus the local's slow, convoluted, 'evolutionary' way of getting things done.

Apparently, our patience is thin when it comes to waiting for hospitals to be built, and getting people the treatment they need to survive. Which is understandable, the story revealed, but counterproductive in the long term. Our desire to move quickly leads us to push the local people out of the picture. They become followers to our commands, and not in control of their own destiny.

This state of affairs gets needed things done, but never provides the structure for a self-reliant future. Some relief workers in Haiti were voicing the opinion that it might be tragic, but necessary, to let the locals manage the process. Some people will suffer or die needlessly, in exchange for a better Haitian future.

A tough trade-off, and not one that all foreign relief workers can accept. And specifically not American relief workers.

If Americans see a problem we can fix, or we think should be quickly fixed, we want and expect it to be done now.

Which is why our collective growing frustration with British Petroleum (BP) over the Gulf Oil Spill is no surprise.

There's a hole. Plug It.

There's a leak. Stop It.

There's a Spill. Clean it Up.

We can't seem to fathom why these things can't be done. And quickly.

But I guess we'll have to take a tip from the more progressive Haitian relief workers and let the locals handle their own affairs. If we don't let BP figure it out for themselves, they'll never get better. And isn't that a future worth a few extinct species and a decade or so of oil blobs and collapsed fisheries?

The 'God' Percent

The Earth and You and Me, and all The Stars that We Can See ...

Shouldn't really be here, at all. At least not based on cosmological theories, which postulate there are equal amounts of matter and anti-matter and that each should cancel each other out, giving rise to a sum of exactly zero - nothingness. Or perhaps better phrased, 'not somethingness'.

But wait, We are Here, and so are the Earth and all those stars. Billions and Billions of stars, swirling in perhaps more billions of galaxies. And every bit of all that is matter, presumably.

So, what gives?

Well, some of that matter than shouldn't be here, in the form of particle physicists working with the Tevatron accelerator at the Fermi Lab here in the good old USA (take THAT, Large Hadron Collider), believe they have discovered the reason matter wins out.

Apparently, over the years particle collisions created during their experiments with the Tevatron have resulted in about one percent more matter than anti-matter being created. Pretty trivial sounding to those of us without beautiful minds, but perhaps enough to explain why we are all here to ponder these points.

Of course, these results will now be up for debate, and there's no telling how that debate will end. But, for the time being at least, it looks as if we may all be here due to a slight error in the balance of the universe. Which goes a long way towards explaining Hannity.

You know the old saying, 'The Devil is in the details'?

Could it be also true that, 'God is in the one percent?'

That's what I'd call a miracle ...