I’m a big fan of Seth Godin, who has dropped out of sight (my fault) recently. He had a great post on his blog a few days ago, called When to start. It’s simple. Get to it. All that.
This weekend was the Canadian Football League’s Grey Cup, held here in Winnipeg. I’ve been hearing about it for months and I finally twigged on Tuesday that the Grey Cup is as big and dumb and fun as the Superbowl. It’s a big deal: $30 million will be brought to Winnipeg just this weekend, parties have been going on constantly since Thursday, major corporate sponsorships, huge hot air balloons flying overhead, traffic. It is.
After looking around for a few months for an onlnie task organizer and notekeeper, I’m trying out Backpack, the mid-weight information manager from 37signals. So far, so okay.

So, Google paid $1.6 billion for You Tube. I’m psyched for the giddy You Tube guys, who, unfortunately, made fools of themselves online.
Not that it’s gonna happen, but here’s how I’d divvy up the $1.6 billion if I had just sold You Tube:

• $200 million would be divided equally to 200 friends and family members. That comes to $1 million each.
• $100 million would be evenly divided among my 60 employees. That comes out to $1.67 million per staff member.
• $20 million would go to the two universities that were fortunate enough to grant me degrees. The funds would be tagged for the art and literature departments only. That’s $10 million each, if I did the math correctly.
• $50 million would go to each of my immediately family members, which amounts to about ten people. Let’s see. That’s $500 million right there.
• I’d probably give about $100 million dollars to charities. These would include humane societies, hunger and food security organizations, and a few choice political think tanks.
• $20 million would go into my own business and a few crazy ideas I have about helping individuals do better things online. These would include online applications, desktop applications that are missing for Mac, and a new online magazine called “Stanley.”
• I’d probably buy a new Saab.
• I might consider investing in real estate in far-out places like Paris, London, and Berlin. The homes and the car would amount to $10 million, which would include extra money for traveling to and from and furnishings and food.
• I’d probably buy some extra life insurance from Lloyd’s of London or something.

Let’s see, that leaves me about $650 million. What the hell am I going to do with that?

Our daughter turned on the tap this morning to wash her hands in the bathroom and there was self-worry that she had done something wrong. She had not. After scuffling around and across the basement for a few minutes, we noticed a truck outside that read “Drinkable Water” and a smaller, but still large, sign that said “Pull Here.” There was a pickup truck in front with a man inside reading the newspaper and drinking a coffee from Robin’s donuts. I stepped outside to ask what the problem was and he said that there was a huge watermain break down the street and that we could use the potable water that they had brought in.
I was relieved, even tearfully happy. The city had noticed the break and would repair it by this afternoon. A crew had been scheduled for the repair. I was thinking about how this crew works. Do they, like firefighters, sit around the Department of Waste and Water, awaiting the call of duty?
Today was Yom Kippur, a day of atonement, apologizing, remembering, fasting, and the not drinking of water.

In no particular order, or odor:
These are the Days of Awe. The world is awash in guilt and redemption and I stand at the short precipice of feeling in love and hate with it all.
My friend, MG, once said that “we treat our bodies like machines” and he’s right. We push chemicals into our temples and expect positive results, including greater efficiency and better productivity. Most of the time, we’re right to do this. The organic and inorganic substances we inhale, digest, inject and observe are goody bags in the cavern of a worldly Halloween.
There seems to be a trend, on television lately, away from reality programming toward comedy and dark adventure. The reasons are probably many: real boredom, aspiration, better kinds of hope taking the form of mass entertainment that, in turn, substitute in for real politic.
I’m in the process of rebranding my company. This means that I’m assigning a new visual identity to way I feel about representing my professional life. It’s a bit like taking your old clothes to the Salvation Army, kissing them goodbye, and shopping in the eternity of a store called Maybe. It would be nice if they sold coffee there. But they don’t.
My two cats, Gusty and Inky, are getting older. I can see it in the way their fur sits on their bodies. For both of them, the tufts of hair separate just a little bit from the corpus of hair upon them. It’s like me.
When I was about ten years old, my grandfather, a physician, bought for me a copy of Gray’s Anatomy. I devoured that tome, learning, by the time I was in high school, the name of every single muscle, bone and ligament in the body. I took apart a plasticine cat in AP Biology with a partner. First, we took off the skin, which was the hardest part. Then we teased apart all of the musculature. I loved the little heart. We kept the cat in a bag. I’ll never forget the smell of formaldehyde and skin.
The television show, Grey’s Anatomy, just featured a song that sounded a lot like one by My Bloody Valentine.

A friend of mine emailed me a passage from Carl Sagan’s last chapter of his book Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium:

Near my shaving mirror, so I see it every morning, is a framed postcard. On the back is a penciled message to a Mr. James Day in Swansea Valley, Wales. It reads:
Dear Friend,
Just a line to show that I am alive & kicking and going grand. It’s a treat.
Yours,
WJR
It’s signed with the almost-indecipherable initials of one William John Rogers. On the front is a color photo of a sleek, four-funneled steamer captioned “White Star Liner Titanic.” The postmark was imprinted the day before the great ship went down, losing more than 1500 lives, including Mr. Rogers’. Annie and I display the postcard for a reason. We know that “going grand” can be the most temporary and illusory state. So it was with us.

They say that most stomach ulcers happen in September.

I visited the World Trade Center many times. This is what I, and many others saw.

I’m typically not much of a believer in the 9/11 conspriacy theories that are very popular right now. I think something is definitely amiss in the way that the Bush administration investigated the events of that day and that there surely was and will be cover-ups, some very large in scale.
I’ve seen and read a good deal of 9/11 conspiracy info and much of it is tantalizing. Theorists, even the best and smartest ones, provide tremendously seductive reasons to distrust the government and flame our fears of an administration so clearly out of public visibility and control. The Bush administration, in its high jinx, denials, and outright lies about its intentions and objectives, has started the fires of conspiracy and deserves to be under incredible scrutiny (and even more than it currently holds). There is something right about all of the theories but mostly they make the government out to be more powerful, slippery and omnipotent than it is. In turn, theorists unwittingly turn the public against government as groups question every facet of its social responsbilities. Perhaps this is a simplification, but my concern (and, ultimately, my own conspiracy theory) is that 9/11 conspriacy theorists are aided (and maybe funded) by those who dislike and distrust federal government. The more that government is seen as a failure, and an instigator of failure, the more likely the public will be to dismantle its services, including those for health, welfare, and security.
But tonight I watched MIT Engineer Breaks Down WTC Controlled Demolition
a video on Google that documents what seems to be a pretty serious flaw in the 9/11 story. Jeff King, the speaker and an engineer, notes that the buildings at the WTC pretty much could not have fallen the way they did without explosive assistance. He starts the video with televised reports, which I remember seeing the next day, about explosions downtown that may have helped or caused the fall.
This is the Fall. We’re in the Fall. The Fall has begun. It’s the Fall. We’re Falling. I’m Falling. You also are Falling. We are Falling.

My daughter watches a lot of—perhaps too much—animated television programming. The total hours per day is probably 1 to 2, which isn’t a lot. It does add up when you calculate it out in terms of days, weeks, months, and years and you realize that a child’s education in large part comes from animated creatures, mostly animals, that speak, feel, act, think, react, cry, laugh and interact constantly. You know the names—Binoo and Barney and Bear and Beaver. You might worry, like many researchers and parents do constantly, that your child is being exposed to a bombardment of commercially acceptable imagery, that a young mind is being transformed by business practices that seek to motivate children to act in ways their shareholders prefer. And many do, as do I.
But there’s another side to this, a spiritually significant side to animated televisuals that often gets unmentioned and unnoticed. It’s that the animals, persons, and creatures depicted in these animated features are alive—truly and utterly alive. They speak, feel, act, think, react, cry, laugh, and interact constantly. They live in an emotionally sensitive world where things happen (sometimes not nice things) and they must live to work through and around those things. Hives fall from trees and bees chase animals around the forest. A character finds jobs for other characters as part of a class assignment but worries that he’s not doing a real job in turn. A cloud falls from the heavens and someone (maybe a chicken) says that the sky is falling.
Moreover, these characters are not just alive. They also live, just like all things do in a child’s world. From what I remember as a child, every object is living, every thing has a feeling, every animal can give off feelings. I remember, when I was maybe only 5 or 6 years old, feeling badly when I threw something out—a piece of paper, for instance. A sadness would come over me that that object would no longer live and be part of my daily observations. I never wanted to hurt anyone or anything’s feelings; this was a sensitivity of a living child amazed to be in life. I worried about what would happen to that piece of paper and how it would feel that I pushed it out of my world.
Today, when walking home from the supermarket, I asked my daughter which house she liked more, ours or that of our neighbors. She said she liked both. I asked her why and she replied that she didn’t want one of the houses to feel bad. I agree with her. Making decisions and opinions is always hard but, when one puts up the light of an animated world against one’s daily practices, they become harder.

I’m now reading two books that I’ve been interested in for some time. Freakonomics, given to me for my birthday a while ago, is quite a good read. And a friend lent me Collapse, which I started and I found to be brilliant and, at least in the intro, disengenuous. Diamond argues again and again that his studies of the collapse of ancient cultures and societies because of poor human interaction with environments do not necessarily correlate to our modern societies and cultures. But then he continues to make the point that his studies probably are applicable. It’s like he doesn’t want to get too much credit if the sh*t hits the fan and he doesn’t want to get too little credit if the sh*t hits the fan but in both cases, he knows he’s right.
Anyway, I came up with some alternative names for Freaknomics, which is a good read. The name of the book is accurate because the book, despite its attempt to argue that the authors are studying unusual economic practices, are really just studying practices. There’s no real economics in the book. Rather, the authors, who twist a good story around their studies of human behavior, examine the oddities of relationships among people that also happen to have something to do with money. Economics, or “the social science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services and with the theory and management of economies or economic systems,” doesn’t really come into play much in the book.
Without further ado, here are some revisionist titles I thought I’d share:

• Filonomics
• Flubonomics
• Filternomics
• Fanonomics
• Phenomenomics (my favorite)

It’s hot. Just about everywhere on the map of North America, there are red zones. Bright red, even.
Californians are being asked to conserve energy, folks in Queens still don’t have their electricity back, and all over this area, there’s a drought. (In Europe, twenty-two people died in France today because of the heat.)
Here’s a list of things that the heat makes us do, unwittingly:

• Talk about the heat, the weather, and global warming, more generally.
• Expose our chest hair or cleavage.
• Wonder about our 80% bodily water content.
• Hope we don’t get stuck in an electrical outage during a subway or elevator ride.
• Job search, in air conditioning, for positions that have more than 2 weeks vacation.
• Sweat.