Greg Burgas Archives - Page 2 of 3

Interconnectedness

I got one of those invitations to be LinkedIn to a social networking page. I recognized the person, so I said yes. Later that morning, that same guy, who is a sales rep for a database service we use at work called to see how we were doing with the service. (I had previously spoken to him and complained about the interface of the database.) This led me to ask him, “what’s the benefit of the social network?” I can if he can just call me up, I don’t need to be “connected” to him. He explained that people that one of us is linked to is vetted, in a way. I scratched my head, knowing some people with hundreds of MySpace “friends”,e.g., are no more connected than people one night see at a bus stop.

I’ve gone to parties, and because I tend to be the one who tends more to Lydia than her mother on those occasions, I’ll not have a substantial conversation with anyone. I’ve gone to these father/child breakfast things at Lydia’s day care, and except for a couple dads I’d talk with previously, I didn’t really get to know any of them. We are in the same room, but there’s no real connection.

So how does one get to “know” people? I’m on a couple listservs at work, and just by people asking questions and answering them, I get a feel for the way their minds work. Certainly, I’ve got a sense for people via their blogs, but especially when I’ve exchanged music with them. I was reorganizing my music over the weekend – using drawers I bought at a library auction – and the mixed CDs of Green and Dymowski and Burgas and Brown (come back, Kelly!) and Brown and Bacardi all show up in the same drawer. I’ve never met any of them (well, except for Green), but I feel that I know them better than people I’ve seen face to face recently. That’s both kinda weird and kinda nice.
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I’m enjoying listening to discs from Thom (two discs) and Tosy. ROG

Angry, Nerdy, Toys & Games

Yes, Lefty, I did see Dylan and Costello last night; more soon.

Yesterday afternoon about 4:30 pm, I heard what I thought was thunder in the distance; this surprised me, as there was nothing in the forecast. Fifteen minutes later, the driving rains came, and massive lightning visible in the low sky, with one thunderclap at 4:55 so loud that I literally jumped out of my chair. During this period, went to the various weather channels; the ones operated by WTEN (Channel 10)and WNYT (Channel 13) had people telling me what a beautiful day it was. It was quite surreal. Channel 9, with a real LIVE person, did tell me that there was a rain cell right over Albany at the moment.

And now, inspired, in part, by the return of Greg’s links, though, in the words sung by Carly Simon, “nobody does it better” than Mr. Burgas, a couple things that struck my fancy:

TOYS & GAMES

MONOPOLY GAME SpongeBob SquarePants EDITION. Suitable for Hembecks everywhere.

Go check out Jason in Paris. Jason is some guy in some French city, and in his September 21 post, he talks about the French naming of Monopoly properties. And why you’re at it, go to his September 26 post and find out what this was all about:

EDISON TALKING DOLL – 1890, an expensive failure. I did not know this.

This goes back a ways: Hey kids, get your “Daddy Dearest” Talking Dolls before they sell out!

I’ve seen these on TV and find them creepy, rather than soothing: Talking dolls for Japanese senior citizens.

Web Video Cheat Sheet, a menu of online video sharing Websites.

Commuting by ICEBIKE.

ANGRY

The world’s weirdest and/or stupidest conspiracy
theories. Well, ONE I believe.

George Carlin: “It’s Called the American Dream Because You Have To Be Asleep to Believe It” [VIDEO]. Carlin: “There’s a reason education sucks and it’ll never get any better, because the owners of this country don’t want it better.” Should you worry about language? I did say it was George Carlin, didn’t I?

STUFF TO CHECK OUT WHEN YOU’RE FEELING NERDY

Blog to commemorate National Chemistry Week (October 21-27).

Climate change: A guide to the information and disinformation.

…and especially…
Quantum Physics Made Relatively Simple – Three Lectures by Hans Bethe.

ROG

I AM the Iron Lady

Which Annoying B-list Celebrity Are You?
Brought to you by Rum and Monkey.

It’s the librarian in me. Cartoonist Doug Marlette died recently, but he’s not showing up in Dead or Alive. The Pulitzer Prize winner was as least as significant as Kerwin Mathews, who “starred in the movie ‘The 7th Voyage of Sinbad’ and “had other swashbuckling film roles in the 1950s and 1960s”, who died on July 5; or Claudia Cohen, the “high-profile gossip reporter often seen on ‘Live with Regis & Kelly'”, who passed away on June 15. So, I’ve submitted Marlette’s name, so far unsuccessfully. Maybe if enough folks do it, they’ll change their minds. They’ve done it before with singer Ruth Brown, who they initially ignored.
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In this worrisome article, an argument against the (mere) censure of the President suggested by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) is made, whereas this piece says that censure is an appropriate “senatorial compliment to the burgeoning movement for impeachment.” I would support the censure.
But the main thrust of the former article is that there will be some self-generated trigger to send a population already primed for an attack on the “homeland” to war: Chertoff’s “gut feeling”, followed by a more stark “national intelligence estimate” (NIE) of the situation, compared with 15 months ago, to show that the intelligence community was “correct”. So, say, San Francisco is secretly attacked by our own government and this will justify an attack on, e.g., Iran? Very paranoid, I hope.
In any case, Mark Evanier, who linked to this article nailed it: “If [the new NIE is] right, we’re in for more terrorist attacks. Isn’t it comforting to know that either that’s true or the entire U.S. intelligence community doesn’t know what they’re talking about?”
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A YouTube video called Led Zeppelin – Rip-off Artists. I like LZ, yet this, admittedly, is a hardly exhaustive examination of the appropriation of songs by the band.
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ADD linked to a wonderful reminiscence of the glory days of local TV news in Albany by former anchor Ed Dague (the best news anchor Albany, New York ever had). This is almost certainly true. He justified the link in his mostly comic-related blog because I have a comment.

Scott answers my questions about God and baseball.

I provided 5 questions to a bunch of folks. Here are the replies from ADD and Greg and Johnny B and the person who gave me questions in the first place, Jaq.

Also, I did a meme, and at my request, Mrs. Lefty and Edwin and Gordon responded to it.

Those relationships I get, people I mostly don’t know, but I’ve read their stuff, and they mine. But I was looking at my Technorati thingy, and found that I got picked up by a couple aggregators, including this one. The Internet continues to fascinate and confound me.

Oh, speaking of Gordon, something I did a while ago and forgot about:

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matches

48%

with
CoffeeAchiever

Take CoffeeAchiever’s MatchMe Test
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***
Spam is 70. Possibly literally.

ROG

Not Such a Good Friday

I’m sitting in the choir loft last night, listening to the Passion reading from Luke as the lights get lower and lower, and suddenly get a vivid sensation about why I so oppose the death penalty: the execution of the innocent. It was a point I had reached intellectually before, but this was a more visceral understanding that I’m not sure I can explain.

In any case, I’m still feeling rather awful. Looking at computer screens is particularly not recommended, because everything looks fuzzy. So, I’ll be brief:

Thanks to Gordon for answering one of my questions,. One down, about a dozen to go. Microsoft Paint, eh?

Thanks to Scott for embracing his 2003-ness and citing me as the inspiration.

Congrats to Gay Prof for not having to go back to Texas, but will instead be at BMU.

Thanks to uberblogger Mark Evanier for posting a video AFTER I DID. This pleases me, and I’m not sure why. And thanks to Dan for sending it to me in the first place.

Thanks to Lefty’s Mixed CD pals, even Greg, and to little Stevie Brown, Lefty’s intelligent iPod.

Special thanks to ol’ what’s his name who I spoke to by phone yesterday for the first time in a while.

I’m going to rest most of the day so that I can try to sing tonight. I had about a six-note range last night, mostly in the lower register. Wish me luck.

Roger (Finally) Answers Your Question, Greg

Sir:

I don’t want you to take this the wrong way, but I have a question about black people. As a foolish white person, I have noticed a certain comraderie that black people share even when they don’t know each other. This is something I have rarely seen among us whiteys. I wonder if you notice this too, and if you have any explanation why it’s a phenomenon. It’s very interesting.

You can ignore me if I’m just stereotyping and need to get my head out of my butt.

Greg

Sir? SIR? Really! We’ve exchanged music. I know I’m about two decades your senior, but still…

You my have heard of a term called “white skin privilege”. (I’d look up a reference but I don’t have Internet access – see below). Whether you do or don’t, and I’ll contend that there is something to it, the greeting you see, I suspect, is an acknowledgement of a people looking after their own. Beyond that, there was the fact that there was the common experience. When Nat Cole had his short-lived TV show in the mid-1950s, I will practically will guarantee that 90% of the black people were watching (and obviously, not enough of the white people); ditto with I Spy or other shows with black stars, when that was extremely rare.

You don’t see that many white people doing the head nod with unfamiliars because the white male system is still the dominant culture, even as it becomes less so, statistically, in this country. But it’s interesting that you ask about it these days, because I see it far less often than I used to, when I was in my teens and twenties. There was a sense of solidarity in the common struggle, not just for justice, but occasionally for survival. Maybe it’s because the racial dynamic has changed in the country. So I’m going to assume the correctness of the premise of your question, as far as it goes, Greg. But I don’t think it’s just a “black” thing. I think it’s an “other” thing.

I have seen the nod with south Asians who don’t know each other, but feel – I surmise, since I didn’t ask them – that shared experience of feeling somewhat like the outsider.

When I was going to college in the 1970s, all the long-haired hippie freaks gave the head nod. They surmised, probably correctly, early on, that the values and experiences of those other people were not dissimilar to their own. (Later, though, when hair was not such a sign of rebellion, that assumption went right out the window.)

I find that I get it with bicycle riders, an “us against the motorists” salute.

Find a room of one businesswoman and a dozen or more businessmen. Another businesswoman enters the room, and more often than not I’ve seen it. The look. The “I’m not alone here” look, the “you may have some idea what I’ve experienced” look.

I got on a bus this year with a bunch of teenage, mostly black kids getting out of school, who were, to be generous, rather boisterous. Immediately, a middle-aged white woman and I caught each other’s eye, and in fact, ended up sitting together in our little cocoon from youth. We were surely The Others in this case.
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I didn’t plan to stretch the question-answering for three days, but I’ve been having technical difficulties with my computer at home. I try to get on the Internet; it doesn’t work; I call Time Warner Cable and a technician puts me through all sorts of exercises with the computer, the end result of which being Internet connectivity. For about ten minutes. I did this exercise thrice on Tuesday night, and once on Wednesday night. A techie is coming to my house today. Between 12:30 and 2:30, smack dab in the middle of the day.
ROG