The Happy Moron

Actually, misplaced desks and chairs. (If you don’t want to watch the video, it’s footage of a school prank where all desks and chairs were moved to the roof(s))

I bet the kids who displayed that amount of resource, invention and perseverance don’t do well in school.

Why did they choose to invest in classroom exertions of this sort? Tough question.  Why anyone does anything is a very involved question.

Still, if the principal thinks that suspensions will help, she’s ignoring the bigger question of, “What makes school so unattractive that students would rather spend a night of manual labor than focus on their education?”

I’m not knocking discipline, but the purpose of discipline is to provide some useful feedback to help in re-evaluating and restructuring decision making. I’m not sure that’s going to happen in this case.

A pretty big prank is pretty big evidence of a pretty big problem.

But suspensions will make the principal feel better, and that’s what really matters, right?

WARNING!

SUPERMAN

ONE MORE ACT
OF SABOTAGE
AND THE AMERICAN
GIRL REPORTER
WILL BE EXECUTED
AT ONCE!

You might think that comic book heroes represented themes and ideals, that they lived in the realm of the abstract. At least not Superman, who apparently in 1942/43 performed some contract work for the US Gov’t.

In Eleventh Hour, Superman spends his time sabotaging Japanese warships.

The funny thing is, when I saw the first ship start to go down, I thought, “Is Superman going to come save those poor souls on deck?” Nope! He’s the one sinking them!

Sure, you can try to hijack a hero for your own political purposes, but when you do, they stop being a hero, because heroism is that piece of us that is bigger than than the rest. It’s the bit that doesn’t stoop, doesn’t give in to pressure, doesn’t merchandise.

War propaganda Superman shilling for the Gov’t  doesn’t really feel like Superman, does he?

When you try and take something that is bigger than you are, ignore the bigness of what it really is, and try to fit it to what you want, things can get really ugly.

I’m trying out a little game I thought up. The game is to retell a fairy tale or children’s story while omitting one of the major characters.

This is Puss in Boots, minus the kitty (Part 1).

There once was a miller, who had three sons. He died; and his estate was divided between them. For his inheritance, the eldest son received the mill. The second son received the miller’s donkey, and the the youngest son received nothing except the miller’s cat which roamed the mill and kept the rats away.

The first two sons decided, upon receiving their shares, to join their resources and run the mill as it had always been. But the youngest could not even find the cat which was his only due. It had run away or gone feral, and he was left with nothing but his wits with which to make his way in the world.

Well, this was a problem, and he knew it. He sat and pondered his situation.

“Had I any shred of confidence, had I any guile, I could make my way easily enough.” he said to himself. “But I don’t. I’m not very clever and I can’t see any sort of greatness about me. But I’m still young, so I guess that is something.”

Seeing as he had nothing, he decided he may as well not give himself airs; he went to the village cobbler and offered himself as an apprentice. It was honest work, though not glamorous, and the boy learned to love the wood, leather and wax of the cobbler’s bench. He felt at home with the weight of an awl in his hand.

The cobbler was an interesting man who always had an opinion to share.

“You can tell everything about a person by their shoes.” he would say. “Everything.” And then he would prove it by hefting a shoe and describe in detail how its style, color and condition dictated it’s owner. He would look at the wear of the sole and the dirt in the seams before proclaiming an honest man,  a lazy man or  a drunkard.  To the boy’s immense surprise, the cobbler was rarely wrong.

“What do my shoes say about me?” asked the boy one day. The master looked back at him. “That’s a good question, why don’t you answer it?” he said.

The boy looked down at his feet. They looked the oldest shoes in the world… at least those bits which remained of them. They were cheap and tattered and filthy. The boy was filled with shame, and he didn’t look up; he couldn’t bear to look at his master.

“I hate them,” he whispered. “They’re awful and they’re not who I want to be.”

The boy felt his master’s hand upon his shoulder.

“Look at me.” said his master. The boy looked up. His master smiled and laid an awl in the boy’s hand. “Who do you want to be?” he asked.

Courtesy of Joe Namath.

So painful to watch, but I felt I needed some balance after the previous retro advertisements.

Holy smokes!

You’ve got to keep me away from the internet archive!

Ok, Ok, there’s nothing holy about these smokes, but I can only say to the ad industry,

“You’ve come a long way, baby. You’ve come a long, long way.”

There are some decisions in life which could be called “crossroads”.

Do you believe that the course of a person’s life can be dictated by just a few key moments of truth, a handful of critical choices?

Can we recognize them?

Walking from the mechanic’s shop in the morning, I paused at the corner of 109th and 61st.

Do I take the #9 bus or do I walk a little farther to take the #73 to the train? Do I walk all the way to the train? Will it make as much as a half hour’s difference?

I took the #73, and the train. I didn’t meet a mysterious stranger. There was no horrific accident. I received no epiphany, no jarring realization brought forth by an overhead bus advertisement.

But… maybe the crucial fateful decision was that I didn’t encounter any of these. Is my life veering wildly off course, in a tragic spiral of chaos, in its own mundane and placid way?

How can I tell?

I’m writing this draft… the ‘Publish’ button is at the bottom of this page, inviting me to press it. Alluring. A delicious uncertainty. An ominous dance with the unkown.

Should I press it?

The other day I was walking past a store in the mall. Exciting, I know! But wait… it gets better!

The store had a sign:

“No

• backpacks
• duffle bags
• food/merchandise without receipt “

Just as I was reading it… Someone walked in with food. But it was in a Subway bag so I assume he had a receipt and it was all okay. Whew!

Then I saw that one of the people in the store was wearing a backpack! Not okay! Even worse was that no one seemed to be doing anything about it. People were just ignoring it as if it didn’t matter. But… how?

I was stunned. It was the proverbial rule that was made to be broken.

It’s a funny phrase, “Rules are made to be broken.” It’s funny because rules are most obviously made to be kept. But it means something, because people say it, and most things that people say mean something.

I think it means that there’s a degree of sloppiness to every human system.  I think it means that the store*says* they don’t want backpacks in their store, but that they’d rather the guy with the bag still come in and buy something, so long as he doesn’t steal anything.

Rules applied without discretion are a bad thing. It’s extremely difficult to write a useful set of rules that can be applied automatically and without thought - the best example of this is the legal profession. In trying to do so, those poor people wound up inventing their own language and their own culture, and are still regarded by most philistines as having failed.

And they don’t get invited to parties. Not the good parties, anyway.

Why do I bring this up? Because there’s one area where rules cannot be broken, and that’s computing. It’s the area in which I work.

Computers basically operate according to a series of rules - “If there’s this number here, and this number here, and the number 43 over here, then I will add the first two numbers because of the 43.”

You can’t break these rules. Not even a little bit. You can try, but the result is that your computer will have a serious hissy fit, and you won’t get any work done that morning. Your computer is pretty much a stupid rock that’s not going to yield to what you want.

In return, you get the promise that your computer will do the same thing every time, which is a very good thing in some cases. If you’re a banker, every time you add two pennies together, you want to get two pennies. Every time. You’re not interested in ever changing things up, and if your computer can promise not to, that’s only a good thing.

But human systems are sloppy.

Have you ever tried to build a sloppy system on a precise machine? It takes compromise. It takes design. Most of all, it takes fakery, deception and dirty tricks. If you work at a high enough level, sometimes you can make a precise system that looks something like a sloppy one, in the right places.

Most of the time, however, why you write a system, you write a precise system with no flexibility and no compassion. Then you try and use it, and you say, “Where’s the love? Why does this system hate me?”

And that’s when you add,  bang in the middle of the application, a big red button that says, “Override.”

You’d like it to say, “Don’t do that you stupid hunk of junk, because I hate you and I want you out of my life forever.”

But the button isn’t big enough.

This is why I hate computers.

Do you remember being a small person? An unhappy person? A person without respect, power or status?

Do you remember that day when the big kid two grades above you pushed you and you fell down and you cried because your clothes got dirty and you knew your mom would be angry at you but it wasn’t your fault?

The good news is that you don’t have to remember that day any more, because you can become A Big Man On The Internet. Because the internet is limitless, you can be as big as you want to be, as big as you choose to be, as big as you make yourself.

So make yourself big! Become… Abmoti!

Abmoti never has to  care about anything that anyone thinks.

Abmoti never has to listen to anything that anyone says.

Abmoti can say anything he wants, because he is Abmoti.

Abmoti can call anyone any name he wants, because he is Abmoti.

Abmoti cross-posts across mailing lists, because no one list can contain Abmoti.

Abmoti responds to every post, because no one can have the last word against Abmoti.

If you’ve ever met Abmoti, you know that it’s not pleasant. But being Abmoti, now….

But the question of, “Stepping up to what?” is something that no one else can answer for you.

I’ve hit a busy couple weeks and the blog reflects it. But rather than just posting nothing today, I thought I’d throw out a few nifty links.

Pictures of derelict buildings

Japanese “Cat-in-a-box” sensation

Tips for life

Cool guys don’t look at explosions

Enjoy!