Ramblin' with Roger

When George Orwell wrote 1984 back in 1949, I imagine it seemed that 1984 would reflect a none too distant future for this New Society to take hold. Of course, a version of Newspeak has been around ever since the first euphemism was devised.
(I think the degree to which it took hold in that title decade was epitomized by the lyrics from Tracy Chapman’s 1987 Why?
Why, when there’s so many of us are there people still alone?
Why are the missiles called peacekeepers, when they’re aimed to kill?…
Love is hate, war is peace, no is yes,
We’re all free…but, somebody’s gonna have to answer, the time is coming soon.
Amidst all these questions and contradictions there’re some who seek the truth. )

Science fiction has long sought to reflect on the future, possibly most notably in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Prince’s 1999 may have seen out of reach in 1983, or maybe it was just the apocalyptic nature of the penultimate year of the 20th Century that was so attractive to the songwriter.

I can’t help remembering (again) how I wish MY dad could have met Lydia. Interestingly, both of my sisters send me Father’s Day cards. It surprises me, but maybe it’s a function of me being the alpha male in the family. (Heck, except for my niece’s husband of a year and a quarter, the ONLY male in the Green line.) Certainly, I seldom (or maybe never) sent THEM Mother’s Day cards, but then our Mom is still around. My friend Mark called me last night (his daughter is 10) to wish me a Happy Father’s Day. What really surprised me is that my friend Sarah Kim sent me a Father’s Day card, handmade.

I should note that my father-in-law Richard has been great. His 70th birthday was last month, and we had a surprise birthday party for him yesterday, with his kids converging in Oneonta from Albany, Catskill, and southeast Pennsylvania, along with a few dozen of his friends and relatives. He’s coming up to Albany, so he and I can go to the season opener of the New York-Penn League game Tuesday between his Oneonta Tigers and my Tri-City Valley Cats (a Houston Astros farm team). He’ll feature in the Tales of Lydia a week or so hence.

Still, there’s some fatigue-driven melancholy – I finally fall asleep around 4 a.m. yesterday morning, only to be awakened by my favorite daughter 30 minutes later, so even though I slept last night, I’m still running on fumes – and I’ve found there is only one cure for me: listening to music. Which will be a post unto itself soon. Amazon, do you still have my credit card on file? (Answer, at least at work, no, because we have a new IP address.)

I was thinking about Bill Gates, the epitome of nerdy technogeek, having donated through the Gates Foundation $10 billion in 11 years, and how he’s getting out of the rate race and, like Andrew Carnegie, another “richest man in the world”, is dedicating the rest of his life to even more philanthropic work.

Meanwhile, the technopress has been having a field day with the “Microsoft after Gates” story. One loving story was a slide show of Microsoft’s Top 10 Flops. So, the questions:

1. If you came into money, real money, maybe lottery or inheritance money, beyond taking care of the needs (and wants) of yourself, family and friends, what cause or causes would you spend the money on? There are any number of charities I’d like to give $1000 to outright, then evaluate further.

2. What WILL Microsoft look like post-Gates? To tell you how little I know about this, of the 10 flops, I remember only 2.

3. How much money would you want to have in order to say, “I’m done with working”? With a 2-year old going to college in only 16 years, and with an aging mother and an even more aging house, I’m guessing…$10 million?

This article describes “How to identify an early adopter of the Next Big Thing”. This SO not me.

I remember kicking and screaming into the compact disc age. I mean, I had 1200 albums. Are they going to become obsolete? (Answer: largely.) My first CD purchases were new albums (Brothers in Arms by Dire Straits was definitely one), and lots of greatest hits (Elton John, Billy Joel for two) after friend Broome bought me the first four Beatles’ albums on CD and I was unable to play them.

I also had some DVDs (for free from cereal boxes), and the machines had achieved at least a 50% penetration when I finally got a player about a year and a half ago.

I still don’t own a Palm pilot (and would be afraid to do so, lest I lose it and become totally paralyzed). I’m currently without a cell phone (though that, unfortunately, will change soon), and I think Blutooth is what someone with bad dental problems suffers from. (Diffusion is the process by which a new idea or new product is accepted by the market, in case you were wondering.)

On the other hand, I never got stuck with a Betamax. I always felt sorry for Beta, which was widely considered the preferable technology, but lost out because SONY was outmaneuvered.

To my everlasting glee, I NEVER owned an eight-track. I was in someone’s car listening to The Beatles Again (that was the title), and in the middle of “Rain” , a the-minute song, the machine switches tracks. “You’re kidding!” I said out loud. “I will NEVER buy that technology. It’s stupid!” And apparently, I was right…for once.

What got me, blogger for little over a year, when seemingly half the world has been doing it forever, thinking about this, is an article in Advertising Age this week about “The Man” (their words invading My Space

http://www.myspace.com/vspink is a site for Victoria’s Secret
http://www.myspace.com/deadmanschest is the site for the new Pirates of the Caribbean movie
http://www.myspace.com/anythingbutcute is a too cute site for the Dodge Caliber
http://www.myspace.com/666, of course, is the site for the remake of The Omen. I may not know what to do with my three-month old MySpace space, but corporate America sure knows what to do with theirs.

Albany touts award-winning writer William Kennedy, who wrote Ironweed, among many other works. Not quite at his stature (yet) is Gregory Maguire, pictured above, who has written a number of books, some for children, others for the general reader. The most famous of these is Wicked, which was turned into a Tony-award winning musical. Wicked is the story of the Wizard of Oz from the Wicked Witch of the West’s point of view, and fairly sympathetic at that.

Gregory Maguire spoke at the Albany Public Library a couple months ago. He was very funny, engaging, witty. One of the things he discussed was the inspiration for Wicked, which was the first Gulf war in the early 1990s. He was living in Britain at the time and was reading the press reports that Saddam was as bad as Hitler. Hitler: that brought him short. For Hitler is the touchstone by which all others can be measured. (Recall, if you will, the suggestion by some that W’s policies, and the public reaction, or lack, was like Hitler in 1933 – most responses were viscerally intense.)

Well, Maguire didn’t want to write about Hitler anyway. He’s not a historian. Besides, lots of people had already documented him. Well, who else epitomized evil nearly as well?