Stones From a Zen Garden

It's 1946 again, but it's agin' the GOP this time

Wandering around the Web this morning, Salon.com eventually led me to Blue America, a site for raising money for Democratic candidates. The site is full of reasons for change, including this fun video. This commercial could have been written and aired in 1946. Back then, the GOP was rousting the Democrats from Congress with the ad slogan, "Had Enough? Vote Republican!" (Just one year after WWII ended, a campaign that was shorter than Iraq and changed the face of the world.) The music, the graphics, all circa Film Noir...

Democrats have been no basket of posies this year, either, considering how many of them voted for the new FISA spying bill, the one that lets the US trash our civil rights just like the Nazis and other dictatorships did in the 20th Century. But as the saying goes, if you're not outraged by now, you haven't been paying attention. Blue might not be the only color for Congress, but it doesn't make me see red like the leaders of the last eight years.

An old friend of mine had the scales fall from her eyes this summer, and she says "I don't know what I was thinking, supporting Bush." She's changed her mind, maybe in the wake of the lousy economy. There's no changing what's been done to us all in the name of "feeling safe," but we can make changes in our government, one Congress seat at a time. All to a swinging, 40's jazz beat!

He knew it right after the birthday song

I sang for my brother Bob's 50th birthday last month, a moment of tears and joy. My wife leaned over to me and said, "Out of everybody in this room, you have known him the longest." A happy, proud moment indeed.

I thought of that moment with Bob once again today, while I listened to a podcast about The Last Lecture. The lecture performance by Randy Pausch, the professor dying of cancer, was immortalized by Wall Street Journal columnist Jeffrey Zaslow. Zaslow wrote the column the day after the lecture, and within 24 hours, by way of ABC.com, a million people had looked at the WSJ video of the lecure. A book followed, and the lecture has become viral in its Internet penetration (head to thelastlecture.com to get started). Here's the lecture in its fullness if you haven't caught the wave yet — entitled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams.

The Last Lecture Video

Zaslow talked with Tara Parker-Pope of the NY Times about the book that resulted from that column, the book Zaslow co-wrote with Randy as the professor was dying. Parker-Pope asked Zaslow in her blog Well how soon he knew that what he'd seen and written about was so special.

Right away, Zaslow said. He'd driven 300 miles to see the lecture, since his WSJ editors were a little leery of the $850 airline ticket the writer would've had to purchase. There were 400 people in the lecture hall at Carnegie Mellon, and "all of us had a feeling we were seeing something astonishing." Randy delivered on the lecture on his wife's birthday, and made it up to her in a grand gesture.

There's the moment when he brings out the cake for his wife, for their last birthday together, and he asks us all to sing to her. I've never had an emotional Happy Birthday sung to equal that. And I think everyone in the room would agree.

Emotion rings in lots of songs delivered to people we love. It took Bob and I 50 years together to get that moment of my own tears. "And many happy returns of the day," is the old saying attached to birthdays, a message that wishes for many more. I wish this for my brother and others I love so long.

Always a laugh to enjoy about computing news

One of my favorite reads for many years is Good Morning Silicon Valley, the wry and comic news take on what's happening in the world of the Internet, computer makers, and the users and customers of the world of bits. In today's entry of the news blog, for example, we learn that the Chinese have insisted the foreign-owned hotel chains install spyware on journalist and foreign guest computer links at the hotels to monitor access. A story probably not to be mentioned in NBC's glowing accounts of the games next month.

(Gee, do they even call it computing anymore?)

Good Morning Silicon Valley

Be sure to laugh to stay well

Target Women

If there is not enough laughter in your life, there's always the Internet. (Kind of like relationship needs, hey?) You: Staying Young reports that laughing actually releases chemicals that improve your immune system. Laugh more often. Out loud is even better.

Here's a couple of links that might get you laughing:

McSweeny's Lists, like this one of I Think My Soulmate Might Have Done Hard Time.

Current TV's InfoMania -- especially feminist comic Sarah Haskins' series of shorts Target Women.

Haskins has a wicked, razor-sharp sense of humor and Harvard-caliber writing skills to lay out these brilliant 3 minute comedy shorts. By Harvard-caliber I mean she graduated from the university; by comedy I mean years working with the Second City group in Chicago.

Have a look at one of my favorites, about botox. Be sure to laugh!

target women botox

Waffle Bike: An antidote to TDF religion?

Waffle Bike on YouTube

I ran across this You Tube video, an 8-minute short titled "Waffle Bike." It's a "fully weaponized, mobile, waffle-making machine, complete with a call-to-prayer public address system."

If that can't get you to click on the video link below, I don't know what will. Either you love cycling this month with the Tour de France in its tightest competition ever — or you're fed up with those self-important cyclists who wear spandex no matter how much they weigh (guilty, me). Or bog down traffic.

Waffle Bike on YouTube

Me, I'm a TDF lover. Watch those hills in the Alps tomorrow, for the classic Alp d' Huez climb.

A long run to keep the blood up

Viva Viagra!

Look who's celebrating a tenth anniversary. Oh honey, it's Viagra, savior of slowing libidos and sparkplug of countless adult film stars (well, certainly less than half of them, if you do the math). Talk about an economic stimulus...

Pfizer is calculating its celebration to remind everybody that not many men have died using the erectile dysfunction drug of the decade. When you think about it, though, sustaining an erection for up to four hours could be counted as dysfunction all by itself. Overkill, probably, but that's not a sin that pharmas like Pfizer will ever avoid. A company with a mediocre history in medicine before this ED drug popped up to create magic wands for men, Pfizer might get pulled over by the karma police someday for not doing all it could to slow cholera, malaria or HIV. In the meantime, what a ride, baby!

Fun facts about the Pfizer machine:

• An American company founded in Brooklyn just before the Civil War
• First great success: creating citric acid for use in food products
• Made its bones by specializing in fermentation, leading to
• Wartime riches made mass-producing penicillin for WW II soldiers injured in combat
• Owns Lipitor, which it purchased from another pharma after Viagra took off
• Contributed the maximum $250,000 to Geo. W. Bush inaugural celebration

But hey, who can put a price on being a stand-up guy? The Pfizer machine can afford it, with sales of $48 billion and a profit of $8.4 million this year. Microsoft sold just a few billion more in software last year, but served up twice as big a profit. [Insert your own joke here.]

Keeping the blood up a long time

Viva Viagra!

Look who's celebrating a tenth anniversary. Oh honey, it's Viagra, savior of slowing libidos and sparkplug of countless adult film stars (well, certainly less than half of them, if you do the math). Talk about an economic stimulus...

Pfizer is calculating its celebration to remind everybody that not many men have died using the erectile dysfunction drug of the decade. When you think about it, though, sustaining an erection for up to four hours could be counted as dysfunction all by itself. Overkill, probably, but that's not a sin that pharmas like Pfizer will ever avoid. A company with a mediocre history in medicine before this ED drug popped up to create magic wands for men, Pfizer might get pulled over by the karma police someday for not doing all it could to slow cholera, malaria or HIV. In the meantime, what a ride, baby!

Fun facts about the Pfizer machine:

• An American company founded in Brooklyn just before the Civil War
• First great success: creating citric acid for use in food products
• Made its bones by specializing in fermentation, leading to
• Wartime riches made mass-producing penicillin for WW II soldiers injured in combat
• Owns Lipitor, which it purchased from another pharma after Viagra took off
• Contributed the maximum $250,000 to Geo. W. Bush inaugural celebration

Slagging another bank

I cancelled my last checking account at Compass Bank this week, cleaning up a non-sufficient funds check in the process. (That can happen when a writing instructor takes six weeks to cash a check.) I discovered that Compass was charging me a $38 overdraft fee for a check that was $46.01 short. Plus an extra $7 for each extra day.

Now you can see how Compass looked good enough to get scooped up in a buyout by Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria, the second largest bank in Spain. One month before the deal was completed last summer, Compass sent all of us good-paying customers a little note: "We're not sure, but an outside company we employed might have compromised your identity," the letter said. Sure enough, somebody was looking for a loan in Hawaii on my credit report. Nice security service, fellas.

I'm not the first guy to look at a bank's fees and feel the vein throbbing in my forehead. But while I was cleaning out my Compass house, I mentioned that I used to do all my Writer's Workshop banking at Compass, until my son moved on to the greener pastures of WaMu — and my identity got rifled, if not boosted, thanks to Compass

WaMu's busy week

The Compass branch manager couldn't let this pass, not even at 5:15 on a Friday when neither of us wanted to be across his desk. "I have bretheren at WaMu, and many of our people have moved there," he said. "It looks like there is a lot a trouble ahead for WaMu, if you read the news." WaMu lost about half its share price on Monday, but rebounded. I gotta say, if you look at last week's chart, some people made great money on buying WaMu last week. Looks like it finished on Friday higher than it started on that spooky Monday.

I had to correct the Compass guy on the scope of the banking trouble — this was a week when government loan groups withered right alongside WaMu, a Top Five household lender. When he was done making me an ex-customer, I had to share this, before I rose to go out the door:

"I've been in business for myself 15 years," I said, "and I've learned there are two kinds of people in business — those who slag their competitors, and those who don't have to." A tight-lipped moment of silence from him, then he says, "I'll take that as feedback." If I had an identity full of bad-mouthing my bretheren, I wouldn't care if anybody stole it.

Great book, even if you don't RTFM

Staying Young

I got my copy of You: Staying Young in the mail yesterday. What a great book. The designers had the moxie to set up the book in the Comic Sans font for the headlines, a typestyle that gives a relaxed feel to the vital information inside.

C'mon, there's even cartoons a-plenty. And advice to watch The Daily Show because laughter is good medicine — specifically,

increased natural killer cells that destroy tumors and viruses, "along with gamma interferon (a disease-fighting protein) and T cells and B cells (which make disease-fighting antibodies.

As for the RTFM, it's a computer advisory that can be deciphered as "Read The Fine Manual." This book is a fine manual for anybody beyond 30. It's written in a snappy style, as tight as the copy on "How It's Made," the addictive TV show about manufacturing all sorts of things, from safes to boomerangs.

A love story told without words

Wall-E

You might not think of the above title as a way to describe WALL-E. But Pixar's latest (and best) animated feature is a love story, despite what you might have seen in trailers. The movie is a gem, worth every bit of its outta sight ratings on Metacritic or Rotten Tomatoes.

When WALL-E finally hit screens, it arrived as the last of the original ideas pitched in 1994 when Pixar founders launched the movie company. You've already seen Toy Story, Monsters Inc., A Bug's Life, Finding Nemo, It's taken the leap in technology of 2006-2008 to create a story like this. But the movies owes one element to grandpa of all modern science fiction, Star Wars.

The "words" of WALL-E's voice — a collection of plaintive and joyful squeeks, eeps and whatnot — are created by Ben Burtt, who won an Oscar for his sound design of R2-D2 and the rest of Star Wars. There, robot love. Also a good story about being a careful user of the beauty of Earth too. Out of this world movie!