Category Archives: Uncategorized

The Advent of Cold Weather

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It’s moving towards the end of October, which means one thing for me: It’s about to get really, really cold.

I hate cold weather. I’ve always hated cold weather. Even as I say this, there’s someone reading this (well, someone imaginary reading this because no one actually reads anything I post) who is thinking: “You don’t know anything about cold weather, warm weather guy. I live in the middle of the Antarctic and let me tell you about cold weather!”

Okay, so I’m sure someone has it worse, but I’ll let you in on another little secret of mine. I hate people who compare their lives to someone else as if to somehow lessen someone else’s experience. We all know these people, too. This is the sort of person who after you’ve just talked about losing your arm in a battle with a raging grizzly bear, tells everyone: “That was nothing. Let me tell you about the time I fought a crocodile, and he took off half a’ my right arm, my right leg and ate half of my skull, forcing me to have reconstructive surgery, bionic implants, years of therapy and…” well, I’m sure you get the idea.

For me, I’ve never liked cold weather. I grew up in California, the nice part of California where the weather was beautfiul, the women even more beautiful and the crack addicts not as much. Okay, I ruined it with that last description, but I’ve always loved the feel of the hot sun on me…while I hide in the apartment and play World of Warcraft with the air conditioner on. Okay, something’s wrong with me, but I still like hot weather.

Michigan is not known for its warm weather in the Winter. As a matter of fact, it kind of sucks here. That was the first thing people warned me about when I came to Kalamazoo a few years back to do graduate work. They warned me that the Winter was going to be the worst thing I’ve ever encountered. And then we proceeded to have the mildest Winter in about half a century. I thought, wow, these Michiganders are wimps. And then the next Winter was one of the worst Winters ever, and I no longer felt like saying the same thing again.

Last year was really bad for me because I had just moved from California after being mugged, so not only was I poor, somewhat destitute, but I was also somewhat scared of interacting with other people. And I had no car. I had sold my car before leaving for Korea the year before, so when I came back, I had nothing to get around with. This meant I had to rely on public transportation, and there are some really scary people who also ride public transportation. Had this been me a year before, I would have been fine, but after getting the crap beaten out of me by total strangers, I had a very hard time that year, constantly convinced that people around me were going to jump me, even if there was no reason to think such a thing.

And I had no jacket. So the beginning of the Winter REALLY sucked. I had to walk half an hour every morning to the bus through the snow (UPHILL BOTH WAYS), and it was freaking cold. Many days there was no sidewalk, so I found myself trudging through the snow, in the middle of the darkened street (it was early morning when I had to walk to the bus), and quite a few times the cars weren’t really all that interested in swerving to miss the stupid man walking in the middle of the street, even though he was hugging what he thought  might have been the curb (as he couldn’t see it as it was covered in snow with the rest of the street and the sidewalk). Those walks really sucked. It wasn’t until December before I was able to afford a decent pair of gloves, January before I was able to afford a decent jacket, and March before I was able to finally buy a car.

This Winter, hopefully will be much simpler and less complicated. But it’s still going to be cold, and I think I mentioned how much I hate the cold.

The last few nights have been getting really cold. I refuse to turn on my heat until I have to, which has caused no fewer than three of my stuffed animals to get really pissed at me. And they have stuffed animal fur, so you know it must be cold if they’re already complaining.

It’s not even Winter yet, and I’m already looking forward to April. If I had four months of PTO saved up, I’d take it all. Unfortunately, I just did the math, and I’m short by about, um, four months, so that’s not going to be an option.

Did I mention how much I hate cold weather?

A Few Comments That Need To Be Said

Economics, Memoirs, Politics, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , , ,

I thought I would take a moment and just make a few comments that need to be said. Unfortunately, only my stuffed animals read my blog. Well, my stuffed animals and my imaginary girlfriend…from Canada…and maybe that mysterious group of government assassins who have been trying to replace my nonfat milk with soy products, but you probably get the point.

1. If a news article is ever written about me that includes the phrase, “and police searched the wood chipper for signs of the body” then let’s just say that I’ve probably reached a saturation point of relevance and should immediately be put to sleep. Or if police were searching the wood chipper for signs of ME, then let’s just say that I’ve probably got worse problems than anything I might complain about on my blog.

2. I’m convinced Craigslist has no further relevance or importance now that they have removed the adult ads. I’m sorry, but it has no purpose any more. I attempted to put up a personal ad the other day, and it never showed up. The system said I did everything right, but it just never made it to the production side of the house. This has convinced me that all the site was ever really good for was advertising fake personal ads that were really a cover for underage girls selling sex to dirty old men and local law enforcement. Or it was local law enforcement trying to pretend to sell potential sex to dirty old men to put them in jail for wanting sex with underage girls. Or it was NBC trying to snare dirty old men trying to find sex with underage law enforcement officers, or something like that. Either way, underage girls were involved and so were dirty old men, so do the math, and you can probably figure it out. Let’s just shut down Craigslist for good. It doesn’t make sense any more.

3. No politicians are honest. At all. Oh, they talk a good game, but they’re really only interested in pretending to be something they’re not so they can get a job they probably don’t deserve. We should force them to create Craigslist ads instead, and then we can hire the underage girls to run our government. I’m just saying….

4. The “check engine soon” light on your car is a boldface liar. It doesn’t want you to check your engine. It wants you to bring your car back to the dealer so they can charge you $99 to tell you that they need to charge you $299 to replace a sensor that tells you to check your engine soon. What they’re really doing is replacing the light in the sensor so that it will go off two days after you leave the dealer’s shop. Mine did. And now it goes off for a week, goes on for a week, and then repeats the cycle. There’s nothing wrong with the engine, other than it has a faulty sensor that keeps telling me to check the engine soon. Or perhaps my engine is just lonely and wants friends. Maybe I should get a sensor that goes off whenever I’m in public that says “check duane soon…he needs friends”. And then people can pay me $99 for me to tell them they need to pay me $299 so that I’ll tell them to pay me $99 very soon.” I’m just saying….

5. The lives of celebrities aren’t important to the rest of us. It’s one thing to follow the news and be interested in celebrities. It’s another to have it thrown in our faces nonstop as if it’s important. I was tuning into the news the other day, and the point-counterpoint was all about Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton. I’m sorry, but there’s the economy, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the election around the corner, and all sorts of actual news stories that are really news. We really don’t need too political partisans going back and forth about what kind of role model Lindsay Lohan is presenting for young girls who don’t even know who she is because she hasn’t been relevant in about a decade now. Same with Paris Hilton. Since her last actual television reality show, she hasn’t been relevant, significant or even interesting in a very long time now. The people who remember her are no longer capable of being influenced. The ones who are capable of being influenced really have never heard of her and probably think she’s some old woman who their parents might have found interesting. It’s amazing how socially irrelevant celebrities become in a few years.

6. The publishing industry sucks. No two ways about it. I get so discouraged trying to make it as a published novelist, only to find out that Snooki or Tyra Banks is being given a huge publishing contract to churn out drivel that my pack of monkeys (who write Shakespearean sonnets…remember them? The ones who if they write enough gibberish will eventually duplicate a Shakespearean sonnet) could have written just as well. Bah, I get so upset at this sort of thing.

My Adventures of Gardening in the Concete City

Memoirs, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

 

One day in the Spring, I sat in the garden and looked at a wilting plant that was supposed to be a thriving abundance of vegetables I had planted earlier in the season. But there was no life, just a drooping, dying plant that had been picked clean by aphids and predatory insects. My months of nurturing this garden amounted to a complete and dismal failure. On this day, I sat down next to this dying plant and pretty much gave up. Not just on gardening, but on pretty much everything.

It’s not just you. It’s me.

Those were her last words to me. Not good-bye, not a fight, and not anything of any substance. Just an apology and then she cut the string on the two cans we used to communicate between us.

You see, this garden was to be my refuge from a life that wasn’t going as I had planned. I had such high ideals and plans for myself that should have put me in a much different place than where I ended up. My bestselling novels didn’t amount to the selling of any books, my occupation had stalled and sort of retreated because my desires were loftier than my accomplishments, and the relationship I had cultivated with the girl of my dreams had failed, miserably. The only thing that could have made this moment worse was rain.

It’s not just you. It’s me.

And then it rained. And then it poured. And then it thundered and lightning’d all over the place, as if to not only remind me that sometimes life sucks, but that sometimes life sucks times a million. Then the storm destroyed what was left of my garden. And all metaphors for a sucky life just sort of laughed at me. And I sat in the rain and got drenched.

The garden was supposed to be my way to forget about it all. Things hadn’t been working out (see above), so I lived in this house that had a really nice area for a garden. There wasn’t one there before, so I thought what a cool idea it would be to expend all of my energy trying to breathe life into some plants. I went to the store, bought a bunch of vegetables I thought might be tasty to munch on one day, and I toiled the soil, or so they say, or at least I think that’s what farmers say. I mean, I had no experience in farming. None. I might have watched Little House on the Prairie once, but that was about as close as it came. And I didn’t really pay all that much attention to the farming on that show when I did watch it, so I didn’t really have a lot of usable experience here. But I was going to garden.

And garden I did.

I hoed and hoed and planted and planted and watered and talked to the plants, and then I waited. Meanwhile, I hoed some more and watered and talked and all that sort of stuff.

You see, I didn’t want to deal with my life. I fell into a depression that was just getting worse each day. The logical thing would have been to get back out there and start regaining back some of what I had lost, but I sort of gave up. All that I really had was my gardening. And I figured if that was all I could do, then that was all I was going to do.

But it never grew. The garden died almost as soon as it started to grow. It was like nature was waiting for it to sprout and then pounced on it almost immediately. It didn’t stand a chance.

I was never going to be a gardener.

During that storm, I sat in the rain and just let the world pound down on me. I figured it was doing what the universe wanted to do to me any way. At some point, I went back into the house, tossed the gardening stuff I had with me into the trash and then went to bed. That night, I figured I had nothing left worth working for, and probably nothing left worth living for. The storm had washed away anything worth continuing.

The next morning, I puttered around the kitchen for a bit and then wandered out into the backyard to see what damage the storm had done to my obliterated garden. Hopping through the defunct garden was a little brown bunny, sniffing away, looking for something to eat.

“You’re too late,” I said. “The storm already killed it.”

The bunny just stared at me for a second, probably wondering if I was a threat, and then it hopped away, never to be seen again.

It’s not just you. It’s me.

I went back into the house and made some breakfast for myself. Somehow, it didn’t seem as bad right then as it did the night before.

Storms, power outages, and putting it all into some kind of perspective

Memoirs, Television, Uncategorized, , , , , , ,

Last night, I was sitting down to watch the season finale of Warehouse 13. It’s a quirky show that I’ve learned to like, and I was looking forward to see how they handled the final character arc they were playing out. Ten minutes into it, the cable provider’s satellite message appeared instead of the signal and indicated that it was having trouble connecting. Ten minutes after that, the message changed to “Acquiring Signal” and then suddenly all of the power went out.

So I sat in my apartment for fifteen minutes, thinking the power would eventually pop back on, but it never did. I found a flashlight to help me maneuver around the very dark apartment, and then figuring it was late enough, I went to bed.

The next morning, the power still was not on. Now, in the past I might have panicked and started thinking about all of the stuff in my fridge melting and going bad. But instead, I thought I get paid on Friday, and so what if I end up having to rebuy all of my groceries on that day. It’s not that big a deal.

Today’s a work day, so I got dressed in the pitch dark blackness and then went out to start my car. Well, I discovered a new problem: My garage door does not open without actual electricty. My garage is not attached to the apartment, so there was absolutely no way to get into it. My housing complex never bothered to include a key to the garage, so I realized I was not getting into my car. The housing complex’s manager’s office was also completely empty; apparently someone figured that with the power being off, it wasn’t a good deal to come into work on time. I guess they figured NO ONE would be interested in talking to the manager’s staff on a day when the entire complex was out of power. But oh well.

So I walked to the bus and took it to work. Haven’t done that in over a year, and it’s a very long walk to the bus, but I did it.

But all during this time I was walking, I examined the ramifications of the downed power grid. For about twenty minutes of walking, there was absolutely no power at all, although I did hear a generator working on one of the buildings. And then suddenly there were lights at about the twenty minute mark from where I lived. This area was not hit by the loss of power, or at least they had their power restored since it happened.

And this got me thinking about how little prepared so many people are for simple little hardships like this. I had a few flashlights in my apartment, so I was at least able to see. One of them burned out really fast, which told me that I had bought a pretty crappy flashlight. The others worked better, but it’s no fun finding out your flashlight is a cheap piece of crap when you need it most. It reminded me of some of those horror movies where someone’s in the dark, turns on her flashlight, and then a few seconds later it goes out. Makes the scene even scarier than if she never had light in the first place. But I digress.

What was interesting to me is that I’ve been through a few power outages over the years, including a few earthquakes that took place in California. And each one of those events caused me to prepare a little bit more for the next time. Each new scenario I came across made me feel a little bit more prepared for the next time, and that always felt good.

This time, I didn’t feel like I was really lacking all that much, and there was very little reason to panic. I did, however, hear quite a few muffled fights going on between couples and families in my apartment complex. This new entrance of events did not bode well for quite a few of them. And I wondered if this would cause them to be more prepared next time, or would it just cause them to complain a lot until things came back under normal, and then they’d be unprepared for next time as well. I don’t really know how they’ll handle it.

And that leaves me wondering about how well people are prepared for handling bad situations that they might come across. I know people have a tendency to go off like poffy hairdressers every time something doesn’t work out the way they planned, but what if something happens that occurs over a length of time? How do people handle that, and can they? I’ve been watching this BBC show “Survivors”, which is about a fictitious disaster that happens, leaving a small segment of the British population alive. It took place in the 1970s, but it was interesting how poignant those events were and how relevant they could be for today. If something happened that took away our sense of normalcy, how well would we handle ourselves? Would we live long and prosper (sorry, bad Vulcan humor) or would we end up panicking until we wasted away or died?

Unfortunately, I don’t have the answers to that. I’d like to think we’d never have to find out, but I fear that the answers aren’t ones I’d really like to hear.

The Struggle of the Independent Film Creator

Movies, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

Small Change Movie 

I have a friend of mine who makes movies. They’re independent films, but at the same time they’re very well done and obviously put together by someone who understands how to make movies. The interesting thing is that he’s relatively unknown, and the chances are pretty good that he will be completely unknown for the rest of his career. But not because he’s not any good. It’s because independent movie makers generally have about zero percent chance of making it these days.

He’s currently in the process of completing his latest film, which he made for about $15,000. Now, if you didn’t make movies, you might think that’s a lot of money. I mean, it’s more money than I have to spend. I mean, let’s face it: With my expenses for online porn, I really don’t have a lot of money to spend on anything else. Oh wait, did I say that out loud?

Anyway, he’s made a few movies before that didn’t do very well because there’s a certain amount of stigma that comes with being an independent film producer. Those of us who watch movies are very critical, and for some reason, we want high-quality, big budget productions, even when the movies being made aren’t big budget productions that can afford to have such high-quality. Yet, we expect it, so if a movie doesn’t blow $15 Million on its budget, we’re probably not going to watch it.

Which means, fewer and fewer independent films get made. Which also means we get more and more crappy remakes because Hollywood has never really been all that innovative when it closes off the spigot of new visions, which often can’t afford such budgets.

Think about one of the biggest independent successes in our time: Clerks. It was made on a shoestring budget that was essentially paid for on the director’s credit card. Granted, he made it back in huge returns, but most independent movie directors don’t succeed that way. Generally, they go into serious debt, pawn the car and then live the rest of their lives in dire destitution.

The old way of breaking into the industry was to do a shoestring budget film and then have it shown at one of the independent film festivals. Well, if you notice the current crop of movies that show up at these independent film festivals, you might be interested to know that the definition of “independent” is becoming very skewed lately. Nowadays, big stars figure on breaking out of their connections to the big studios, so they fund huge independent films, and THAT is what shows up at these festivals. The low budget guy has been forced out by the big names with deep pockets that make movies often with venture capital funding.

Our ability to see new ideas is slowly being turned off so that the future is going to be nothing but Explosion Man VII types of presentations.

My friend is currently trying to do all of the work that big budget films have hundreds of people doing the work. It’s kind of amazing to see how he goes through such stress just to try to get his movie into its first movie theater.

Is it a perfect movie? Probably not. I mean, what film ever is. But it’s probably going to be something different than what you normally get to see. And it’s completely independent, and unfortunately it’s part of an endangered species that we could easily support by actively looking for independent features and supporting them. But we won’t because we’re finicky movie watchers, wanting stuff that’s only perfect and highly produced with lots of Hollywood money. And that’s why we’ll lose in the end. It’s like appreciating a mom and pop store, but never going there, always shopping at the local Wal Mart and talking about how we have to do something to save the local mom and pop stores. Sadly, so many people do exactly that.

So, here’s your chance. I guarantee that somewhere in your community someone is trying to get an independent movie seen. Support that person or lose that creativity forever. I mean, it really is your choice, and in a day where we don’t even get to choose who we get to vote for, you have to grab onto those little opportunities while you can. Or you lose them. But remember, it was your choice.

(the image is of the poster for Small Change, the independent movie that was the impetus of this article)

Humor Writing Gets Very Little Respect These Days

Uncategorized, Writing, , , ,

I’m a humor writer. Been one for a number of years now. Sometimes it involves fiction; other times it’s incorporated into non-fiction. Either way, it is something I enjoy doing.

What I have discovered is that no matter what genre or style I utilize it in, it rarely gets a lot of respect by anyone in those respective fields. And that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

First, as most people who attempt to write humor know, good humor is very difficult to write. You either know what you’re doing, or you don’t. Those who don’t know how to write good humor end up writing really bad humor, but think that they’re funny. Such writing is very difficult to read, and quite often these conversations go something like:

You: “Um, I really like what you did with this piece.”

Attempted Funny Person: “What did you find funny about the piece?”

You: “Um…” Which quite often is followed by you dropping one of those smoke pellets that were used in cartoons and really bad spy films, where you make your get-away, realizing that if you don’t disappear quickly you’re somehow going to have to answer that unanswerable question.

Which then leads to the mistake so many people make when they think that humor must be so easy to write, and anyone can do it, even though they personally can’t do it themselves. This culminates in the erroneous postulation that humor is never to be taken seriously, so therefore it is not important enough to be used by “real” writers.

And this is the problem I find myself in today. As a serious writer of fiction (when I fall into my self-important moods), I find that some of my best fiction has been the type that has been developed through humor. My latest novel is probably the best novel I have ever written, and it is a full-fledged story of humor, involving a Greek epic of ridiculous proportions. Having said that, I have also discovered that when I discuss this novel with other people, they don’t take it, or me, seriously. They hear the “humorous” parts and immediately fall into this belief that both me and the novel are not to be considered serious, as in writing and writers. The fact that it is some of my best writing ever does not seem to make a difference. The fact that it involves some of the strongest uses of metaphor and allusion that I have seen in most modern day novels does not seem to cause anyone to consider it seriously. To everyone who looks it over, it’s a 300 page joke that doesn’t deserve that much attention.

I’ve discovered this to be the case with most humor I write. And people don’t even seem to realize that much of the humor I put forth has very serious implications when dealing with important issues. It’s just a different aperature to observe such circumstances. But because it made someone laugh or smile, it’s not to be taken seriously.

 This happens with my nonfiction writing as well. In a recent article, I attempted to deal with the concepts of cults and religions by pretending to create my own cult. The responses I received were usually derision and not very serious themselves. The fact that seriously important issues were being broached in an absurd way should have given people a reason to think about their own normal concepts, but instead of doing so, they saw a “ha ha” moment, and nothing was seen as being in any way serious.

Sadly, most humor writers, especially ones who write so that issues can be approached from a different perspective, are rarely taken seriously, except by very few readers who seem to “get” it. It’s like a conversation I had about science fiction on television, in which I was trying to argue that some of the greatest drama of our time has been covered by the science fiction genre. A person responded to me with: “I prefer real dramas, like Gossip Girl, so I don’t have time for science fiction.” Unfortunately, she wasn’t joking.

I find that same sort of criticism with humor. And no matter how many times I try to joke about it, it still manages to bother me.

Why $139 for Kindle Isn’t the Sweet Spot Amazon Would Like You to Believe It Is

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The other day, Amazon announced it was releasing a new Kindle, and the price was lowered to $139. Now, this isn’t a big deal, and that’s great, if you want one of those things, but what’s amazing is that the boss of Amazon claims that the price is so low that people are going to rush out and buy several of them for the household. Yeah, right. Not going to happen. I love how the multi-millionaire boss of a major company thinks that $139 is the sweet spot for a tech gadget, so he makes a pronouncement that the end of the road is finally here. And then the tech nuts start talking about how $100 is the sweet spot for most electronic gadgets, the sweet spot being the price people will arbitrarily just throw money away without thinking about it.

Sorry, the Kindle isn’t there yet. You see, there are some problems that no one has addressed, and that’s the fact that people actually think about these things before they shell out a lot of money for products. Oh, you say that Amazon just announced they sold out of their Kindles until Sept. 4? So what? To me, that sounds like their marketing department made an announcement to create a “need” for this device when there really isn’t one yet. I don’t personally believe a lot of the hype that these companies put out, because what they’re trying to do is manipulate us into buying their products by pretending that if we don’t do soon, it will be too late.

I went to Amazon’s page today. They’re still hyping the new Kindle as if they have a gazillion of them. They’re not going to NOT take my order if I want one. The hype is just that: hype.

What no one really wants to talk about is the actual cost of this device. Unlike a cell phone, this is not a final purchase product, meaning that once you buy it, you still have to spend a lot of money on other things, like books. If you buy a Kindle, you still need to buy electronic books from Amazon. For Amazon, it’s the product that keeps on charging. Because of that, $139 is still too much money. To be honest, $99 is going to still be too much money.

A couple of experts have pointed out that the sweet spot for an e-reader is still $49. Until they start coming down to that level, the demand is never going to happen. Because there is no demand for an e-reader. People in America generally don’t read. So pretending there is a demand for a reading product is a joke. When people buy books in America, they still buy actual paper type books, and that’s not going to change any time soon. People are so aware of the fact that few electronic products are good forever, but books are. If you bought a computer ten years ago, you wouldn’t have much success getting it to run today. So, who knows what is going to happen with e-reader technology in the future? It’s like taking a bet on the Blu Ray vs. whatever that other standard was that was supposed to compete with Blu Ray disks. It’s like taking a bet on the betamax. Remember that? Didn’t last long.

That’s why e-readers still have a long way to go, because there’s been no standardization developed, and we’re still some ways off from that happening. No one wants to buy a useless piece of garbage that has a shelf life of a few years.

Until then, only the select few are really going to jump on the e-reader bandwagon, kind of like the select few who buy Ipads, convinced it will be the coming of the electronic messiah. I almost bought one, but I’m so glad I didn’t because it would be in the back of the closet right now with my Coleco and Atari machines.

The Plight of the Hopeless Cause

Politics, Uncategorized,

Recently, there’s been a lot of talk about Haiti. CNN has been reporting a lot about it recently, including a bunch of reports of its reporters showing up there and “discovering” that things are still very bad. Not that long ago, when Haiti was all the talk, I mentioned that once Americans got over the initial shock of the disaster, we’d go back to not caring about that island nation again. And sure enough, that’s where we are.

But it is kind of important to understand why that might be. The CNNs of the world want us to think the problem is inherent in us, as if we’re responsible for the horrible conditions there. But fortunately, that’s not really the case. While we are often guilty of not caring about a certain geographical location (East Timor, Somalia, South Central LA, or wherever), this time it’s not really something to put squarely on the shoulders of those of the USA. What no one wants to face is the possibility that the problem might be a lot closer to home…their home, not ours.

Haiti is one of those places, like Liberia, where a lot of people outside of the area really care, but once we start caring, the people themselves don’t seem to care about their own plight, often neglecting all attempts to help them, either by destroying their own farmland for short term gains, or by continuing to support destructive leaders who tend to keep them locked in their plight of despair.

Americans care about people who are suffering, but there’s only so much we’re going to do before we start to think that the problem is yours, not ours. I’m sorry to say that but after awhile, we start to treat a wayward country as a family member who just can’t seem to get his crap together, who keeps knocking off liquor stores, even though we keep getting him a job at the Quickie Mart. Lots of money was raised for Haiti, but immediately after this process started, we started to see the old ways of corruption falling right back into place, so that the aid wasn’t getting to the people who needed it, but was going into the coffers of people who tend to make things worse. I’m sorry, but we’re not willing to keep giving money to destructive dictators who hold out their hands, “promising” to fix things even though they never do. Or corrupt leaders who don’t seem to understand that eventually they have to stop taking EVERYTHING and trying to do something to help their own people.

Haiti has been a cesspool ever since they cast off the reins of slavery while the rest of the world was still embracing the evil that was going on back then. It would be nice to think things might have gotten better, but they haven’t. Unfortunately, the rest of the world started to notice them again because there was an environmental disaster that cast them into the light again. Unfortunately, they didn’t do anything better AFTER it happened, so it makes it really hard for people to want to do anything when the people themselves aren’t interested in helping themselves.

It’s a lot like Somalia where the west showed up to help feed the people and then found the pirate, criminal element that was there waiting for us. If we show up with all intentions of helping and then find that the people there are more interested in playing local games and hoping to profit off of the outsiders, we’re out of there, and we’re not coming back to help. You notice how few Americans are interested in helping Somalia today? Well, that’s what happens.

It’s why North Korea is quickly pushing itself into a no help situation. The west isn’t interested in helping when the people are stupid or acting stupid. And that’s what’s happening in Haiti. Sorry, but we’re not interested in helping if the people themselves are going to act stupid. Yeah, a lot of people are suffering, but we’re not the world’s police, no matter how much George W. Bush tried to make that happen.

I’ll be honest. I hate what’s going on in Haiti. But at the same time, there’s only so much energy you can expend before you start to realize that no amount of energy is going to make things change.

iPhone 4…what the hype?

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It seems that time of the year again when Apple has announced its new hyped products and updates. Well, this year it was all about the new iPhone, specifically iPhone 4. Well, as an iPhone owner, I would like to make a few comments on the announcement.

First, I have to say that the blunder during the announcement made it almost all worth it. Steve Jobs was going to compare the old iPhone’s web browsing capabilities against the new iPhone 4. Well, the old iPhone came up great, showing The New York Times’s site. The new iPhone 4? Well, not so good. Didn’t show anything at all. Jobs blamed it on the network, but honestly, the old iPhone worked on the same network at the EXACT SAME TIME, so obviously the new iPhone had to be the culprit. No amount of talking around it is really going to get you out of it when BOTH WERE ON THE SCREEN AT THE SAME TIME RIGHT NEXT TO EACH OTHER. Anyway, with that said, I’m sure they’ll fix it, and with that behind me, I still think it’s pretty cool.

The new iPhone has video HD capabilities for filming. Looks and sounds great. The demonstration during the presentation received a lot of oohs and ahs from the audience.

Now, here’s what is bugging me about the new phone.

1. Video conferencing only works between separate iPhones. Not a great thing.

2. Video conferencing only works over wifi. Not great when most people are making phone calls over the 3G/4G network.

3. Upgrading. Jobs announced that AT&T will let you upgrade (with a new two year contract) if your contract expires before December. So, does everyone else that owns an iPhone have to wait until forever until they can use the MUCH GREATER iPhone? There was no announcement of the base price, but they really should be thinking of their current subscriber base, not just a hope of future customers.

4. No announcement of a carrier other than AT&T. Okay, we’re really tired of AT&T. You’d think Apple would realize that by now. Even during the demonstration, one audience member yelled out a solution for the New York Times problem Jobs was having on stage: “Switch to Verizon!” or something similar to that.

Anyway, that’s about all I have to say. Interesting announcements, but after the hype, it was still mostly just hype. Not as wonderful as everyone is making it try to sound. I’m almost exhausted with CNN’s continuous coverage of any time someone from Apple sneezes. Enough with it already.

The Laptop finally died….

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I’ve had an HP laptop for many years now. It’s been a great machine, and for some reason it always managed to stay current with the latest machines. This evening, I was starting it up, thinking of bringing it somewhere to write, and the screen just fizzled out. It’s still giving off a light, but the actual computer image is no longer there. Everything’s running fine, so basically the screen just no longer works. And I don’t feel like fixing it.

I’ve been thinking of getting something to replace it for awhile. I can’t really afford anything right now, but unfortunately the laptop is officially dead to me. Really not sure what to do next.