The BloodhoundBlog is a phenomenon; read it and you’ll become addicted to the prose, the passion, and the gem-like jewels of news. It now has a cult following and it has achieved pinnacles of success in online media. But will Pulitzer’s new criteria open the door to the likes of the “dawg??”
It is obvious by now that the best writing in the world is being written for electronic media only. Excepting Geno, we wouldn’t qualify for any awards anyway, but it remains that the Pulitzer committee is not quite ready to tiptoe the whole way into the twenty-first century. It is stretching itself only so far as to consider prose that is being committed to pretend paper. If you can hang in cyberspace without clinging in craven desperation to atoms — even purely imaginary atoms — your talents will not be considered. The Pulitzer Prize will remain a celebration of obsolescent relics by irrelevant antiques. Sic semper tyrannosauris.
America outspends China on defense by a margin of more than six to one, the Pentagon estimates. In another strategic dimension, though, China already holds a six-to-one advantage over the United States. Thirty-six million Chinese children study piano today, compared to only 6 million in the United States. The numbers understate the difference, for musical study in China is more demanding.
It must be a conspiracy. Chinese parents are selling plasma-screen TVs to America, and saving their wages to buy their kids pianos – making American kids stupider and Chinese kids smarter. Watch out, Americans – a generation from now, your kid is going to fetch coffee for a Chinese boss. That is a bit of an exaggeration, of course – some of the bosses will be Indian. Americans really, really don’t have a clue what is coming down the pike. The present shift in intellectual capital in favor of the East has no precedent in world history.
“Chinese parents urge their children to excel at instrumental music with the same ferocity that American parents [urge] theirs to perform well in soccer or Little League,” wrote Jennifer Lin in the Philadelphia Inquirer June 8 in an article entitled China’s ‘piano fever’.
The world’s largest country is well along the way to forming an intellectual elite on a scale that the world has never seen, and against which nothing in today’s world – surely not the inbred products of the Ivy League puppy mills – can compete. Few of its piano students will earn a living at the keyboard, to be sure, but many of the 36 million will become much better scientists, engineers, physicians, businessmen and military officers.
More:
Any activity that requires discipline and deferred gratification benefits children, but classical music does more than sports or crafts. Playing tennis at a high level requires great concentration, but nothing like the concentration required to perform the major repertoire of classical music. Perhaps the only pursuit with comparable benefits is the study of classical languages. It is not just concentration as such, but its content that makes classical music such a formative tool. Music, contrary Read more
The greatest danger in the current economic crisis is that the United States will lose its historic appetite for risk. The mood now is that risk-taking got us into this mess. Risk, though, is the quintessential American trait that built the nation — from the Battle of Bunker Hill to the rise of the microchip. If we let risk give way to a new ethos of commercial reserve and regulatory restriction, the upward arc of the U.S. ascendancy will flatten. Maybe it already has.
By “we” I mean the policy makers in Washington who will write the new rules of finance, our stunned bankers and businessmen, and the average Joes of Main Street who with reason have lost confidence. If all lose faith at once in the American idea of risk, refinding it when the recession ends may prove difficult.
This is the moment for Americans to rediscover the “frontier thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner. In a seminal paper delivered in 1893 to the American Historical Association, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Turner argued that the U.S. found its identity as it pushed away from the Eastern seaboard and crossed a series of frontier “fall lines”: the Allegheny Mountains, the Mississippi, the Missouri, the plains, the Rocky Mountains and California.
Every American absorbs the frontier experience from reading biographies of great Americans or from movies. Frederick Turner, however, made it clear that with this effort to transform the wilderness the Americans broke decisively with what he called, believe it or not, “old Europe.” “Here is a new product,” Turner wrote, “that is American.”
“From the conditions of frontier life,” Turner believed, “came [American] intellectual traits of profound importance . . . coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy, that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil.” Read more
I say that just about every time I speak in public, and people always ask me to repeat it, and they inscribe it carefully into their notes.
It’s a simple enough idea: What you’ve thought of all your life as privacy has simply been a function of inefficient data processing tools. The more efficacious the means of acquiring and storing data become, the less privacy — unintentional ignorance by others of observable facts — you will have.
If you find this idea repellent — dang…
It is what it is, and it’s absurd to rebel against it. We are real, physical entities. Our purposive actions sometimes have secondary physical consequences that are potentially observable to other people — and to data acquisition devices. Your best hope of achieving privacy, going forward, is to expire. Short of that, you might try to exist in some sort of extra-physical way. And short of that, you might try doing everything you do where no one — and nothing — else can observe you. And short of all that, swallow hard and prepare to have every fact of your life known, at least potentially, by anyone or everyone else.
This does not bother me at all. I deliberately lead a hugely public life. I’m not showy, I hope, but I never want for someone to be able to say something truthful about me that I have not said first myself. I try to lead a very moral life, but no one is perfect. But what I don’t want, ever, is to give the impression that I am trying to hide my imperfections. (Disclosure: I caused a car accident earlier this evening. No one was hurt, but the front end of my car was smacked up pretty good.)
(People who send me email will have grown used to me replying with multiple names in the CC line. I’m never trying to hide facts about my life, but, I am normally trying very hard to not-hide those facts.)
Another thing I say in speeches is that the world is becoming more and more the realm I would have imagined for myself. Mostly the Read more
This was a tough week for our house for a few reasons. One is that I am working through a contract, a situation in which my ability to communicate with my clients was all but shut down. This was a first for me, and painful. I understood what was happening, but not necessarily why it happened. I knew I had to keep plowing ahead though, and Wednesday we finally got back on some solid ground, something to be thankful for and grow from.
As bad as that was, the toughest thing we dealt with was a death. A teenager- a beautiful, intelligent, funny, and sweet child of 16, we had known her since she was 3, one of the few people in the world who was a friend to both of our kids, died in an automobile accident. She was a passenger on a sunny morning drive in the country, in a car with her girlfriends- cranking up the music, singing, goofing off, celebrating life with the joyous freedom that only teenage girls are capable of. I can’t help but smile when I picture a car full of girls, laughing out loud, full of life, full of hope, full of happiness… Then the driver ran a red light.
She had moved to a small neighboring community, and we didn’t see much of her any more, still, the friends of your kids hold a special place in your heart- as any Mom will tell you. The tiny community she lived in was shaken to it’s very core. The ripple effect- so many families knew everyone involved- the girls in the car as well as the couple who had the green light and hit the girls. It will take years to heal from this, and yet, and yet… The viewing was full of life. Yes, young people came to say good-bye to their dear friend, but teenagers are life itself- it oozes from them, they can’t contain it. Memories and testaments to this child and the special place she held in the hearts of so many people were everywhere you turned and this funeral was Read more
Fair warning: This post is comprised of an extract from my novel, The Unfallen. After the “more” tag, you will be exposed to romantic fiction involving sexually playful adults engaged in actual life-like grown-up encounters. If you’re not comfortable with that kind of thing, skip ahead now. The nets are awash in content, after all, and almost none of it is about grown-ups. This post is nothing but a tiny glob of glowing phosphor on the vast oceans of information. Feel free to swim away with my blessings.
But: If you do want to catch a glimpse of actual grown-ups in action, I might have what you need. The splendor that is the grail of SplendorQuest.com is a state of mind, a state of being, a mental fugue state where being and awareness of being and worship of and delight in being all become the same thing. The fiction I write — or the best of the fiction I write — is about people who live — and who know enough to love — that splendor. The extract shown below is a snapshot of those kind of people at their best.
You may want to read things into this text, and, if you do, you will be wildly incorrect, but there’s nothing I can do about that. All I can do is be what I am, and that’s why I want to start SplendorQuest.com with this text in particular. This is a work of large ambition: I wanted to rescue romance from the Romance genre as a worthy subject of literature, and I wanted to rescue sex from smut. But more than both of those, I wanted — I want, continuously — to rescue the ideas of reverence and worship and rejoicing and adoration and exaltation from the grave, from empty pie-in-the-sky promises. I know that the ideas I treasure are real because I live them in my own life, in my very best moments. There will doubtless be many more grand statements of what splendor Read more
I saw this commercial over the weekend and it’s been making me nuts:
This is fascinating to me. This is Game Console 2.0, the participatory gaming experience. Okay, that much is not new, going back to the Dreamscape, anyway. Ubiquitous at broadband speeds since the original Xbox.
What’s cool here is that the interaction is, first, among adults, and, second, has nothing to do with the game play. This is remote schmoozing through a game console, a phone call conducted from within a sim. SecondLifeLite, as it were.
I’m wondering if Nintendo got viraled on this, if a cadre of moms figured out how to use the software this way during naptime, and Nintendo is marketing to grow a niche that erupted spontaneously.
There’s way more. Simulation is emerging as a fourth branch of science. Computing grows year by year in its accretion of power. A model is not reality, a map is not the territory, but a sim of, for example, the life cycle of a star, could teach us as much in ten minutes as we have managed to learn in the last 10,000 years.
Now combine the two. Take ordinary people with better and better user-interface devices and let them work and play together by simulation in the cloud. The two phenomena are not the same, but, even so, at this incredibly cheap end-user level, we are all avidly nurturing and cultivating precisely the intellectual capital we will need going forward.
It’s daunting to stand at the threshold of what may be a calamitous economic disaster and, yet, to recognize that we are also at the threshold of an unimaginable increase in human mental prowess.
Further notice: Apparently, Nintendo has pursued an Alpha Moms astroturfing strategy for the Wii since its introduction. I don’t know if this use of this software is something they have encouraged, but presumably it is. Doesn’t matter to me. Better questions: Are moms meeting through this game? Are they strangers until they discover each other in the game — much as we discover one another through weblogs? More interesting: Are the children for whom this game is actually designed meeting Read more
We’re going to fire up SplendorQuest.com full-bore this week. For now it’s nothing, no need to link to it. But if you’ve ever done a whois on any one of our domains, you will have seen that SplendorQuest.com lives at the top of everything.
I’ve talked about Splendor a lot at BloodhoundBlog. It’s the defining metaphor of my life. I wrote my best philosophical defense of the idea, so far, in January and February of 1988, and my best ostensive definition in 1997. I’ve promised myself for two solid decades that I would get back to this idea, thinking that it was something that I would attend to in full in my retirement. Lately, that seems to me to be a less than satisfactory resolution. For one thing, this is the perfect time to talk about Splendor, just as we are about to suffer the full consequences of a hundred centuries of the worship of Squalor. And for another, I have just lately come to the realization that I will never, ever retire.
I predict that SplendorQuest.com, whatever else it might become, will be a place of manifestoes. Even so, I think I’ve already written my own SplendorQuest manifesto. There’s a lot that I’m saying in that little extract, and you could read it every day and always find something new in it. But the essence of the thing, for me, is this: “[P]art of being who I am is a conscious refusal to hide things like this just because many people don’t want to hear them. I don’t believe that I owe anything to other people, but the best gift I can offer my fellow men is not to hide who I am.” I love my life, but, much more importantly, I refuse to affect to hold my life in contempt. That’s not Splendor, not by itself, but that’s a gift I can share with my brothermen just by being alive.
What we have planned — what I have planned, at least — is simply to be alive in public as this thing that I want to become. Just to be shamelessly alive, Read more
I’m lucky… very lucky. I live in a great place that is insulated from the harshest realities that face many communities out there. I get a paycheck and not a commission and I’m 20 years from caring about the stability of my 401k.
I feel for those that are not as lucky and suggest that you follow the advice in this song by country star Rodney Atkins. I have seen many of our local Realtors immobilized – most have never seen a down market and no one has seen the historic crap we seem to step in every other day.
You’d be a fool to take any real estate advice from me, but you’d also be a fool to think that there is nothing you can do to make your situation better. Like the song says, “keep on going.” Do something – read this blog, attend a course, try a new marketing trick, or find a song that motivates you.
Well you know those times
When you feel like there’s a sign there on your back
Says I don’t mind if ya kick me
Seems like everybody has
Things go from bad to worse
You’d think they can’t get worse than that
And then they do
You step off the straight and narrow
And you don’t know where you are
Use the needle of your compass
To sew up your broken heart
Ask directions from a genie
In a bottle of Jim Beam
And she lies to you
That’s when you learn the truth
If you’re going through hell
Keep on going, don’t slow down
If you’re scared, don’t show it
You might get out
Before the devil even knows you’re there
Well I been deep down in that darkness
I been down to my last match
Felt a hundred different demons
Breathing fire down my back
And I knew that if I stumbled
I’d fall right into the trap that they were laying, yeah
But the good news
Is there’s angels everywhere out on the street
Holding out a hand to pull you back up on your feet
The one’s that you’ve been dragging for so long
You’re on your knees
You might as well be praying
Guess what I’m Read more
My brow is furrowed again and I should get this out before my wife gets home to hear yet, another one of my Andy Rooney-ish tirades on ‘how my day was’
So help me out here. How is this application helpful? In being social in any environment we are more or less on the same page. Most people feel insecure about something if not many things. It takes effort to expand beyond your own self-consciousness sometimes to get a thought out past your own nose. So why, when we are shielded with the plastic from our computers, and most likely miles between us, would you feel the need to be more excepted for what you express?
Taking a look at the ‘what’s it for‘ page, let’s run it down:
“How many hours have you wasted trying to think of something suitably witty, funny and original for your status on Facebook or Twitter?”
Not nearly as many I’m sure as days that are wasted mindlessly sitting in front of the TV. Thinking is genuinely regarded as a natural and healthy thing to do and not something to be discouraged. That is, unless you are watching TV 😉
“Let’s face it, a status like “Dave is mowing the lawn” or “Kate is asleep” is not going to impress that huge entourage of friends you’ve amassed.”
Gee, you mean now that I have amassed my very own entourage I should just spend my time with cut-n-paste churned updates from the bot. I got one even better. Why not just hire myself a social media assistant to churn babble for me. I’ve got better things to do like take Italian lessons using Rosetta Stone to build an entourage of Real Estate/Vespa enthusiasts in on Meemi.com. My take is that it’s opt in on social networks anyway. I understand everyone’s complaints about the banality of updates like Sbux is out of half and half or I’m walking my dog, but what if it does mean something in the context of how you are relating to others in the moment. I love to hear my family and friends are up through Read more
After listening to and reading the text from Paulson’s speech this morning, I had to sit down and translate it because there was so much he wasn’t saying and so much that he was saying that was just not “right.” I hope that you’ll do two things:
Take the time to read the entire thing.
Make your opinions known – tell me if you think I’m all wet. Talk to others about it, write your local paper, forward a copy of this to others, call your congressman. Don’t just sit back and say, “I don’t like it.”
Here goes:
Paulson Translated – His original speech is in “normal” type, my comments are in bold.
Washington, DC — Good morning. I will provide an update on the state of the financial system, our economy, and our strategy for continued implementation of the financial rescue package. Keep in mind that this strategy is subject to change by tonight.
Current State of Global Financial System
The actions taken by Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the FDIC in October have clearly helped stabilize our financial system. Before we acted, we were at a tipping point. Credit markets were largely frozen, denying financial institutions, businesses and consumers access to vital funding and credit. He uses past tense verbs, but I’m not sure that isn’t still true. U.S. and European financial institutions were under extreme pressure, and investor confidence in our system was dangerously low.
We also acted quickly and in coordination with colleagues We told them who we were going to buy and we all slashed rates together around the world to stabilize the global financial system. Going into the Annual IMF/World Bank meetings in early October, I made clear that we would use the financial rescue package granted by Congress to purchase equity directly from financial institutions – the fastest and most productive means of using our new authorities to stabilize our financial system. Even though that really isn’t what the program was for.We launched our capital purchase program the following week when we announced that nine of the largest U.S. financial institutions, holding approximately 55 percent of Read more
I completely by-passed the NAR, Orlando is big enough to do that. I was in Orlando for BHBU, and as a participant in both BHBU I and BHBU II, I can say that Orlando out-rocked Phoenix, but wait, there’s more! Greg and Brian are about to blow your mind. How do I know? I experienced it myself.
You ever walk into a room that crackles with energy? Ever had the privilege of hanging out with the very best at anything? You know that synergy that ignites and sparks ideas and discussion? Hanging out with the Bloodhounds was an incredible experience for that. Watching these minds toss out ideas and information to each other was a real treat. Yeah, I was there, but I felt like a fly on the wall most times- I can’t keep up with these guys. They would dial back occasionally, just as my brain exploded, tangent off to another subject and- cue the squealing tires- 0-60 in 3 seconds. They have Ferrari brains and Lamborghini brains, while I have a minivan brain.
As the resident X chromosome, it was a joy to not have to suffer through a pissing contest. These guys seriously respect each other for their unique outlooks, their unique strengths, and most wonderfully, they respect an atmosphere of sharing. If you are used to a world where hording information and knowledge is the norm, Bloodhound is a luxurious foray into a rain forest of ideas.
I was lucky if I got 4 hours of sleep a night, but I am energized by the weekend, and ready to tackle the work that I need to do and take on the world- that doesn’t happen too often at a conference, not to me anyway.
I am a very fortunate girl, I understand that more than anyone else. But you have an opportunity to put yourself in my shoes for a few days. If you’ve ever thought that one-on-one training or hanging out with the resident brainiacs and salesmaniacs sounds like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and it is- then jump. Unchained is now Read more
