Letters From a Silverware Thief

Within the next week (perhaps in the next day or so) I will be updating this website. If all goes well, this will affect none of you. However, there is the possibility that I might somehow screw up the RSS feeds. If you follow this website on an RSS reader and don’t get a new post by the end of next week . . . that will mean I somehow managed to not port the feed smoothly. In that case, you will need to delete the feed from your reader, and come back to this website and pick it back up.

But I hope I don’t make any mistakes, and everything upgrades smoothly, and nobody will need to do anything.

While not a direct parallel, the comparison one could draw between the panic of October 1907 (101 years ago) and the current economic crises are too good to pass up. The most obvious comparison,is that greed was the root cause both then and now. Some things never change.

Consider the following:

The Panic of 1907 was a financial crisis that occurred in the United States when its stock market fell close to 50 percent from its peak the previous year. Primary causes of the run included a retraction of market liquidity by a number of New York City banks, a loss of confidence among depositors, and the absence of a statutory lender of last resort. The crisis occurred after the failure of an attempt in October 1907 to corner the market on stock of the United Copper Company. When this bid failed, banks that had lent money to the cornering scheme suffered runs which later spread to affiliated banks and trusts, leading a week later to the downfall of the Knickerbocker Trust Company—New York City’s third-largest trust. The collapse of the Knickerbocker spread fear throughout the city’s trusts as regional banks withdrew reserves from New York City banks. The panic would have deepened if not for the intervention of financier J.P. Morgan, who pledged large sums of his own money, and convinced other New York bankers to do the same, to shore up the banking system. By November the contagion had largely ended. The following year, Senator Nelson W. Aldrich established and chaired a commission to investigate the crisis and propose future solutions, leading to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

That is just a short summary. Given the present financial crises, I suggest that all of you not already familiar with the panic of 1907 to go to the Wikipedia article and engage in a short history lesson. We are currently witnessing history in the making, and at such times it is always good to have a sense of history.

I will leave you with a last bit. After the crises of 1907 was over, congress held investigations into the matter. At that time:

Although suffering ill health, J.P. Morgan testified before the Pujo Committee and faced several days of questioning from Samuel Untermyer. Untermyer and Morgan’s famous exchange on the fundamentally psychological nature of banking—that it is an industry built on trust—is often quoted in business articles:

Untermyer: Is not commercial credit based primarily upon money or property?
Morgan: No, sir. The first thing is character.
Untermyer: Before money or property?
Morgan: Before money or anything else. Money cannot buy it … a man I do not trust could not get money from me on all the bonds in Christendom

And what do we see today? History repeating itself.

Sitting on my desk is a collection of old diskettes, about to be thrown out. But they are also a philosophical muse.

They are 3.5″ plastic diskettes. I remember the day when computers used 5.25″ diskettes. They were called floppy disks then, because they were floppy. They had a certain sense of importance about them–large black squares, thin like wafers, which you inserted into the computer. You flipped down the lever, and then listened as the drive ground and whined as it read the data. Back in the old days, accessing data was more tactile. Using a computer was a more physical experience.

I was about six when our family was given its first computer. It was a Sanyo. It had no internal hard drive–it required a floppy disk to boot up, or do anything. It had a little monitor with green characters on the screen. I think it had something like three games, which to a six-year-old was the most important feature. But when the games became boring you could just go to the command prompt and type on the blank screen like you were some adult, writing something important.

That was my introduction to computers. Over the years we went from one computer to the next, following the advance of technology. I saw our first computer with an internal hard drive (40 megabytes!) and in which we installed a sound card so we could get real sound. The choice of games was expanding. Exciting horizons were opening up. 3.5″ diskettes arrived, and I saw the dawn of the Windows operating system. I was somewhat belatedly (1997) introduced to e-mail and then the internet.

Technology continues to advance, faster and faster, it seems. I have now been personal witness to twenty years of it–some twenty years since that first Sanyo computer came into the house. Now I have a stack of old 3.5″ disks I’m about to throw out, and they make me reflective on those twenty years.

By appearances I am a tech geek, and there is some truth to it. Having cut my teeth on the DOS command prompts, I have traveled through years of several Windows operating systems to arrive at the point where I am now running my second iteraton of Linux, where there is plenty that would immobilize the average window user with terror, including the occasional Linux command line activity. I have repaired, disassembled, and built various computers. I am comfortable building websites, and have dabbled in setting up Apache and MYSQL servers. I am enough of a geek to appear to have some strange mystic knowledge of computers.

But in some ways I am not a tech geek. My attitude toward computers and technology is ambivalent. I am conflicted. In fact, in recent years I have come to realize I have a downright anti-technology streak that seems to grow stronger as I age. I have a love-hate relationship with technology, knowing first hand the great usefulness of digital tools while at the same time knowing their costs. I find myself trying to get rid of the cost while holding on to the benefits. That is impossible, and the more the world goes forward, the more I find myself wanting to go backward.

The 3.5″ diskettes in front of me tell a story.

I don’t remember how old I was when I saw the advertisement. I think I was around thirteen, perhaps fourteen. It was an advertisement for a computer game creation system. By that time there had been a computer in our house for some seven or eight years, and computer games of some form for just as long. As I had grown older I had become increasingly enamored with computer games. Yes, they were fun to play, but as I grew cognizant of computer games, and the elements that went into making them, the more I began thinking about how I would make them. Computer games became more than an object of fun–they were an opportunity for creativity.

When I saw the advertisement for the computer game creation system it was like a dream come true. My desire of becoming a game creator was suddenly and miraculously within my grasp. Except that, for a boy of very limited funds, the price of the software was exceedingly high. I longed for it, saved for it, could not afford it, until finally (with the help of another similarly infatuated sibling if I remember right) I had the money to purchase the long desired software.

So began my first concerted effort at doing something with real seriousness. I had sunk nearly all my life’s savings into this thing, and I threw myself into the work of game creating with zeal and determination. What I didn’t have in understanding I tried to make up in effort. Oh, the hours I spent slaving in front of the computer, punching pixels (as the parlance goes) to create the graphics for my imagined worlds. For that is what this was really about. These were my imagined worlds, my stories, come to the technological age where they would be brought to life for everyone to see. No longer was I limited to words that would evoke images in the minds of my listeners, no longer was I limited to static pictures drawn on a piece of paper. I could bring worlds to life with action and sound that would powerfully draw the audience in. They were heady dreams, those days.

And nothing more than dreams they were, as it became clear. It also became clear that my real desire was not to create games as such, but to use them to create a story. What I really wanted was to tell a story, my story and was trying to use the medium of a game to do that.

I started small with my game creation, first becoming accustomed to the software I had purchased and exploring its possibilities. My first games were very rudimentary–simple and short attempts. But as I became more confident my vision and desire expanded. I began pushing myself and the software further. The length of time required to complete my games grew longer and longer, and as I reached ever higher into my dream of stories I began to reach beyond what one person could do, or what my software was meant to do. The truth finally came crashing down upon me. What I really wanted to do in creating a game, I couldn’t do by myself. What I really wanted to do, my game creation software couldn’t do. And, even short of what I wanted to do, what I was straining myself to accomplish was such a great labor that it would take me months and months if not years to accomplish–and still be far short of what I was reaching for.

I don’t recall exactly when this realization began, and it took some time for the truth to become fully and finally fixed in my mind. To truly create games requires working with other people. Game creation, of the true sort, is done by teams and committees. How a game will develop is controlled by companies and . . . and the nature of a game isn’t the product of one person’s vision. The appeal for me in creating a game was found in the expression of my thoughts and my ideas. You don’t write a story by committee. You don’t create a painting by consensus. When I recognized what computer game creation really was–a team and company product in slavery to profit and public want, I realized I was not interested one little bit. What I wanted to accomplish couldn’t be found there.

So I stopped. The diskettes now sitting in front of me are the history from those years. I poured hours and hours of creative effort into those games. There are files upon files of digital artwork I created for those games–all of it contained on these disks. It is a record of creative effort and energy, and it is gone. It is effectively garbage, so much digital dust waiting to be swept away. Why? Because the record of digital media is the most ephemeral of all records, so uncertain as to be no record at all. The passing of years has corrupted many of the disks so they are not even readable. But even if they remained uncorrupted, in a few years I won’t even have a computer with a drive capable of reading the disks. As it is, I already don’t have software capable of reading the content on the disks, if they weren’t corrupted. The game creation system was DOS based–now I am in Linux. Most of the pictures I created were in a digital format now long lost and completely unreadable. Two years or more of my creative efforts have vanished. The labeled disks in front of me are all that remains in mute testimony to what was, and now is lost.

One could draw many morals from that story, but one for present application is the impermanence of digital technology and the implications of that impermanence. That is one reason I do not like digital technology. It is needy, untrustworthy, and fickle. You are dependent on the whims of others for design, maintenance, and usability. Digital technology is useful–oh, so very useful!–but at the price of freedom and independence. It is a price I find myself increasingly aware of and reluctant to pay.

The idea of digital technology taking away freedom might appear to many as an oxymoron. For those who skim by on the surface of digital technology, the crueler edge may be little noticed. But stop and consider for a moment. For example, compare a typewriter with a computer. A manual typewriter is a wonderful thing. You press a key and the letter appears on your sheet of paper. But in comparison, a computer with a word processor program is almost indescribably more convenient and useful. You can copy and paste text in an instant. You can print out multiple copies in minutes if not seconds. And there is that wonderful thing called a spell checker. As a writer I am most acutely aware of the great advantages of the modern word processor. So, then, what is there not to like about a computer?

The first answer comes when the power goes out. The manual typewriter keeps on working, but the computer is useless. We might reconcile ourselves to that one weakness, but it is only the beginning. This becomes apparent if we ask, “Will you be able to access the files on that computer in ten years?” I have been writing for a little over ten years and the computer I started with is long gone. More than that, the file format used by my word processor ten years ago can’t even be read by my present computer. There doesn’t need to be some catastrophic failure of modern life to make my past work inaccessible to me–the mere advancement of time and technology will render the old unusable. Digital technology is a self-devouring beast that never ceases to hunger. The only reason I haven’t lost what I have written ten years ago is if I (a) printed it out, or (b) converted the files to a readable format by my most recent computer and transferred the files. The first solution is effectively a retreat to the materiality of a manual typewriter, for once writing is printed out it loses all the advantage of being digital. The second solution is no solution at all because in the end every file that is converted will need to be converted yet again in another five or ten years.

The grave never says enough, and neither does digital technology. The due technology demands is the eternal upgrade. I am forever required to upgrade my computer, upgrade my software, and upgrade my files. What was promised to give me freedom has shackled me to its care. If I give the required service to the beast of digital technology, a life of ease and convenience is before me–my every piece of writing is easily accessible. But if I fail to perform my duty, my writing will slide into oblivion, lost forever. So I find myself a slave, held hostage by the very thing that is supposed to serve me. My computer is a ticking time bomb, into which I feed increasingly more of my creative work so that I am increasingly held hostage. The processes of upgrading becomes more laborsome as the heap of files increases, the cost of failure more anxiously avoided.

There are many things which are digital in today’s world–we have digital pictures, sound, and writing. Each faces the danger of oblivion, but as a writer what stands in the forefront for me is the contrast between digital writing and the physical word. If I write a book and have it printed, the resulting product is useful to me and requires nothing from me. I can leave the book on a shelf for a year, ten years, or a hundred years and it will still be readable. I can take it anywhere, and it will still be readable. The book doesn’t require electricity, technology, or money, to be read. It doesn’t require maintenance or upgrades. It sits there on the shelf, waiting to serve me at no cost, requiring no effort for its upkeep. By contrast, a digital file needs a computer, software, and electricity to simply be accessible. All of those things require money. And for the file to remain accessible, continual maintenance is required. Digital writing is searchable, modifiable, and easily disseminated–but the cost for those abilities is real, and lasts only so long as you serve the beast. Falter in your labor and what you have will become only so much digital dust.

In my life there is a constant tension between the digital and physical. I am not willing to give up the advantages digital technology gives me in writing, but neither am I willing to surrender to a living in the moment where all I have written before is quickly lost in the obsolescence of time, so that what was written is forgotten, never to be recalled and reflected upon. I use the digital technology because it is too useful to give up, but I love the written word because it demands nothing of me and I need not fear I will lose what I have created with the passing of ten years–like I have the contents of those stacks of diskettes.

Are you interested in local foods, both vegetables and meats? I have two links for you, with a hat tip to Rick at Caerwyn Farm and Spirits for bringing them to my attention.

The first link is for the website Localharvest.org. It is a directory of places where you can get local harvest, or submit yourself as a place offering local harvest. My quick check indicates it could be very useful. Found local grown beef and lamb in a snap. Fascinating site for anyone interested in local farming.

And on the subject of local meat, read this article about buying beef local and in bulk. I suspect the facts can vary quite a bit from location to location, but the article can at least get you thinking.

For all of my faithful readers . . . here is a video. I have never posted a video before, but this one is different. I took it. You are invited to take a journey with me, down a very long and very steep hill. As best as could be determined from a topographical map, the entire drop in elevation was about 700 ft. The really steep part of the drop doesn’t come until after the 2 min. mark, so be patient.

This ride was not my normal route taken three times a week, but nonetheless you should note that I did pedal all the way up the hill without stopping. Not that it was easy, but I did it. Also, on the descent it should be noted that I didn’t use my breaks at all until near the end, at the last sharp turn.

Am I insane? Maybe.

There is a new search engine on the block. It is called Cuil. Check it out.

The vibes are that they think Google is ripe for toppling and they would like to be the ones to do it. Join the club.

I have not subjected Cuil to vigorous testing, but it is my sense from limited experimentation that the engine is currently not a Google killer, nor is it really positioned to be a direct competitor. Google’s strength is in raw searching–Cuil seems more geared toward subject browsing. A search on a general subject in Cuil (such as “civil war history”) will not only get you search results, but also sub categories which can be browsed and explored. That is great for subject browsing. Cuil could make writing a high school paper a snap. It would also be very useful for someone browsing for material to read on a general subject.

But Cuil falls short of Google’s skill in relevance for raw searching power, and coming up with good results for obscure searching. As an example of raw searching, recently (as of this writing) there has been a flap over the company Sitemeter because of a bug in their software. A search of Google on the term “sitemeter” comes up with hits prominently displaying this recent fact. A similar search does not bring up this info so prominently (if at all) on Cuil. Then, as an example of obscure searching, a search for “ancient babylonian calendars” on Google comes up with plenty of good solid hits. The same search on Cuil brings up a first page of results which most are spam! The difference in results is stark. Clearly, Google’s methodology is still far better at eliminating spam on obscure search terms.

Cuil is yet young, so this problem may pass with maturity. Already they have started on a good path by following Google’s clean and simple style of presentation. Further, Cuil’s three column presentation of search results strikes me as visually pleasing and possible more helpful for searching.

What some people will find very appealing about Cuil is the search engine’s privacy policy, which is an obvious jab at Google, and like companies.

Something new from Amazon: Warehousedeals.com

What it is: “Open-box, Refurbished, and slightly damaged merchandise from Amazon.com at huge discounts.”

The selection of goods is (currently) very limited, and the size of the discount varies quite a bit. Nonetheless, for the deal hunter there can be some really good deals.

The book publishing industry is changing, and everyone thinks they know where it is going. Amazon is banking on the Kindle, other people have their own ideas.

The Futurist has an article on The 21st Century Writer which explores some views on the future of publishing and writing.

Meanwhile, Lulu.com has made a deal with Borders. See Reuters and The New Observer. It will be interesting to see if the Lulu-Borders deal goes anywhere, since that touches on the direction I think the writing-publishing industry should go.

Doomed

You probably have not heard of the voyage of the SS St. Louis. It took place on the eve of WW II and was a sordid piece of history for all countries involved.

It started out thus:

The German propaganda ministry and the Nazi party conceived of a propaganda exercise which would demonstrate that Germany was not alone in its territorial, exclusionary hostility towards Jews as a permanent minority within the political economy of their state. The German propagandists wanted to demonstrate that the “civilized” world agreed with their assertion that Jews constituted a continuing “hidden-hand” of influence on national and economic affairs. They wanted to demonstrate that no other Western country or people would receive Jews as refugees. Firstly it would appear that the Nazis were allowing the Jewish refugees a new life in Havana.

The Nazis were aware of rising western antisemitism and correctly surmised that these Jews, traveling on tourist visas (not immigrant visas, which none of the potential host countries would likely have issued to them), would not be able to visit Cuba as tourists when in fact they were political/social refugees; who, for whatever reason, had been forcibly removed from Germany, their home country. Furthermore, having been refused entry into Cuba and other Atlantic nations, the plight of the refugees would force the world to admit that there was, as the Nazis characterized it, a “Jewish problem” that Germany, for all to see, was trying to resolve “humanely.”

With not one of the countries of the Northern Atlantic basin allowing the Jewish passengers entry, those countries would be in no position in the future to morally object when Germany dealt with its problem Jewish population.

With the stage set, the voyage unfolded:

The St. Louis sailed out of Hamburg into the Atlantic Ocean in May 1939 carrying one non-Jewish and 936 (mainly German) Jewish refugees seeking asylum from Nazi persecution just before World War II.

However, on the ship’s arrival in Cuba, the passengers were refused either tourist entry (which in theory was valid for their tourist visas) or political asylum (which was not the stated purpose for which the tourist visas had been issued) by the Cuban government under Federico Laredo Brú. This prompted a near mutiny. Two people attempted suicide and dozens more threatened to do the same. However, 29 of the refugees were able to disembark at Havana.

On 4 June 1939, the St. Louis was also refused permission to unload on orders of President Roosevelt as the ship waited in the Caribbean Sea between Florida and Cuba. Initially, Roosevelt showed limited willingness to take in some of those on board despite the Immigration Act of 1924, but vehement opposition came from Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, and from Southern Democrats—some of whom went so far as to threaten to withhold their support of Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential election if this occurred.

The St. Louis then tried to enter Canada but was denied as well.

The ship sailed for Europe, first stopping in the United Kingdom, where 288 of the passengers disembarked and were thus spared from the Holocaust. The remaining 619 passengers disembarked at Antwerp; 224 were accepted into France, 214 into Belgium and 181 into the Netherlands, safe from Hitler’s persecution until the German invasions of these countries.

Nobody comes off looking good. Roosevelt shows himself to be a man of such backbone, sacrificing the refugees for his own political expediency. And all of the countries show themselves to be so generous in taking on the refugees. All the passengers on the ship would have been a pittance for any one country to take on.

In the end, it is estimated that between 227 and 254 of the passengers ended up dying during WWII.

Full wikipedia article here.

SS St. Louis

Want an anvil? You can get one at Amazon. Check it out Grizzly G8148 100 lb. Anvil.

Not too long ago I was wondering if it was still possible to buy anvils, and presumed it was not possible. Come to find out that not only is it possible but you can get it through Amazon. High-tech and low-tech have come together.

I want an anvil.

Hat tip aSeamstress here.