Betty Monroe runs into her Father at Buck’s

My new friend Betty Monroe came into Buck’s a little while back. She sat next to a photograph on the wall and there she saw her father looking back from a picture taken in 1918 when he was mule skinner (archaic term for a mule wagon driver) for the army. On Nov. 11th, 1918 he with 30,000 of his comrades posed in the shape of the U.S. Emblem for a photo at Camp Custer in Battle Creek Michigan. Thomas Mole shot a series of ten photos all on patriotic themes using the ten’s of thousands of soldiers who were about to be sent to the European theater. On the day the Emblem was shot the shooting stopped in Europe. All ten are available from the Library of Congress. They were posed with artificial foreshortening in that there a few dozen men in the first rows and progressively more to the back making it look as if it was shot from a much higher place than the actual 70 foot tower Mole used.

The crowd at Ft. Custer was the largest in the series and it is in this picture that Betty saw her father. She says she can locate him because he is right next to one fellow who was goofing with his hat as are many if you look closely. Very like in high school when a few of the fellows are always trying to ruin the group photo. That makes sense. Most of these young men were just out of high school.

Betty and I looked at some of the letters her father wrote telling of the Great Influenza Epidemic which swept through the military camp in Georgia where her father did his basic training. After the war fizzled Betty’s father returned to farming, married and raised a family. His daughter became a nurse and married her grade school sweetheart who eventually ended up In Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7th 1941 “A day that will live in infamy forever” according to President Roosevelt. Betty’s husband was on the Oklahoma, a ship that was bombed so completely that it quickly rolled over. Her husband was on an upper deck at the time and was thrown into the water, from there swimming to shore. Betty said that the survivors were allowed to send two postcards home telling their families they were alive. She still has hers. Some 30 years later the Oklahoma was raised and some of the seamen’s lockers were opened. There they found Seaman Monroe’s locker and in it a well preserved photo of Betty’s at her high school graduation.

Today Betty’s a spry and engaging resident of Mt. View and after retiring from nursing tells me that she reinvented herself as a painter and world traveler. She has painted many hundreds of stunning paintings and been to 57 countries, so far.

AlwaysOn and On On On

In 1993 Tony Perkins launched the Red Herring Magazine with Jaron Lanier on the first cover. It is particularly fitting that at the recent AlwaysOn conference at Stanford Jaron was a featured panelist with a host of other big thinkers. Much that transpires in The Valley is a result of the folks who regularly attend and present at the many conferences hosted by Tony Perkins. These gatherings grew out of the Red Herring conferences that are now the stuff of legend. I fondly recall standing with Ron Conway at The Chateau Marmot in LA asking Pamela Lee Anderson why she was at an Internet party and she said, “Honey, I own the Internet.” In 1998 this was actually true as she was one of the first online megahits.

Well you can feel the pages fall off the calendar like in an Orson Wells movie as we zip into 2007 and all anyone seems to be talking about is how to save this creaky ol’ planet (with the unsaid subtext of continuing to make ungodly piles of money). Me, I think we ought to just deep freeze our heads until we figure out the planet saving but short of that I guess we will have to buckle down and do the hard work. Through these conferences we get to tackle some of the big issues.
But first: Entertainment, with the OnHollywood conference. Yippee! We get to hang out with movie stars. Let’s face it, much of life is entertainment. Who isn’t crazy about sitting in front of the flat god and absorbing mind numbing canned laughter and zipping back and forth on Tivo between Curb Your Enthusiasm and The View (I know that you only watch PBS and are exempt but trust me someone is watching). One thing about Hollywood is that it is completely American and so far it can’t be knocked off in a Chinese chop shop. We own Britney (for good and bad) and if you, Ms. International Consumer, want her you have to pay us. Of course even Hollywood is slipping off its slimy pedestal and getting all conscious n’ stuff. Jeff Skoll and Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth sparked many to action followed by Thank You for Smoking and Fast Food nation. Hey, I want Key-rap from Hollywood! If I wanted a lecture I’d give it myself. Entertainment is supposed to be like those 8% real fruit juice drinks and these new, evolved moguls are diluting our water with more juice, darn them!

On the strictly business side the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit deals more with technology issues although we did take political timeout for a keynote from Senator John McCain.

Misc notes on the candidates in 2007
McCain is running hard for President and although I think his politics are wrong headed the man is a towering figure in a field of candidates many of whom would be hard to bring home mama. Ron Paul is just bizarre. He is so far off the chart that even the Libertarians won’t have him and even though Dennis Kucinich makes sense on paper, he is scary in a lives-to-close-to-the freeway-fumes sort of way. Fred Thomson is amusing as the sleepwalking “nominate me if you run out good ideas” candidate who tells the religious right he is too busy (sleeping) to go to church. And Mitt Romney? I love the question as to whether we should elect a Mormon. Statistically (and I say statistically, metaphorically) at least a third of the candidates are atheists and are lying about their spiritual beliefs. But not Mike Huckabee who told an NRA convention that “angels guided my bullet into the head of the antelope” and “I’m sure there is duck hunting in heaven.” Maybe he was kidding, but still. Giuliani is the prochoice, progay, prodivorce, guncontroling big city Democrat ahhh Republican. Barak Obama was famously criticized for not being “black enough” at the same time being criticized for pushing his way onto the national stage too soon in our racial maturity because he might be “too black.” So far it seems likely that Hilary Clinton will be elected. In fact it has to happen. Look, we elected Reagan because he was folksy, Schwarzenegger because he was a famous, smack talking, movie star and now we will elect Hilary because she was the First Lady and that’s just damned odd and odd is what we do.
The Stanford Summit is a three ring affair with CEO pitches in one room all day long. Every few minutes a presenter gets up and gives a five minute rundown about their companies. What I find interesting is how much solid effort is behind sometimes small, nitchy applications proving my old axiom that, “It takes a lot of effort to do stuff.” On the main stage panels discussed the latest buzzly sizzle like: collaborative filtering, the disintermediation of social friction, swarm publishing, interactive advertising, and disambiguating signal to noise. Humm, maybe we know where the missing bees are.

Joe Schoendorf of Accel Partners is always hanging ten on the wave of the latest international trends and he reminded us that Moore’s Law drove the last 40 years of innovation and that globalization will drive the next 40. An old Indian scout once told me that to see the trail you have to look to the horizon because it is vanishingly faint but our new scout, Joe, tells us to look right at our feet. He said that those of us who remember disco (my words) are just getting comfortable with Mega, Giga and Tera but the kids are living in a Peta, Exa, Zetta and Yoto world and that one in eight new couples met online up from about zero ten years ago. Joe loves to remind us that we are ripping forward at warp speed and he always makes it sound like fun.
Phillip Rosedale demonstrated Second Life and we say that is still a bit hard to use when even he had a little trouble with the controls. As most folks around here know Second Life is the virtual world where boys will boys and more, and girls can be dragons or screaming hot bartenders in taverns, where the alcohol is digital and the pick up lines are literally typed lines of text. Social issues in SL include civility, honesty, productivity, aesthetics and all the issues we face in real life but, of course, it isn’t real. Or is it? In another virtual world Craig Sherman, CEO, Gaia Online told us about a teenager who wanted to buy a virtual hat but his mother wouldn’t give him the money at the time. Later the lad was at a real trade fair and found the Gaia booth where they had cloth versions of the virtual hat. He was heard to remark as he bought the cloth hat (with no hint of irony) that he wasn’t able to buy the real virtual hat but he had a real fake one. The emerging virtual worlds and the weird turn video viewing and producing is taking are blending business and entertainment. Like an Escher print we are producing and consuming at the same time following such Yoda-like characters as Lanier, Kevin Kelly and Ray Kurzweil.

At Tony’s GoingGreen conference in Davis, Zem Joaquin introduced Bill McDonough as the keynote speaker. Many of us met Bill for the first time at the TED conference in Monterey a few years ago. McDonough is a soft spoken optimist about the future of society seen through his architect eyes. His ideas are so profound that sometimes you have to rewind to make sure you heard correctly. If you don’t know this man’s work check out his speech and I believe you will be stopped in your tracks. alwayson.goingon.com/permalink/post/18864. And scroll around in this and some of the other conferences. Join AlwaysOn. It’s free and you become an instant Silicon Valley insider. You really can attend the conferences virtually or virtually go in person or ahhhghhh!... you figure it out.

Forget Saving the Earth

There has been a great deal written about, spoken about and screamed about with regard to saving the Earth. But what do you think the Earth feels about it. Let’s look at the situation from the Earth’s point of view for a mo. If you buy the theory that the planet is about 4.5 billion years old (as opposed to the theory that it is 6008 years old and was build in six days) then we have a span which, by most measures, is on the longish side. For about a billion years the place looked like hell, I mean the Old Testament Hell, all fire and lack of amenities. The the surface was molten and oxygen could not attempt to be a gas yet. Talk about global warming! As soon as a crust formed, volcanoes started popping up like a puppy on a griddle with much the same result.

Eventually continents formed but they moved around a bunch -- beach front became mountain tops, became deserts became ice bound and this kept on until today and it’s still going on. As time stretches back things become vague but we are pretty sure that in the Permian Epoch (about a quarter of a billion years ago) either a meteor hit or someone spilled a really big latte and 90% of the species turned to compost. Nature did its thing until 85 million years ago in the Cretaceous period (many think it was the Jurassic but that was movie magic) and this time 75% or so of the species got wacked.
Today many folks are worried about a tiger here a whale there. Back in the 90’s when small pox was almost eradicated there was actually an advocacy for keeping some of the microbes alive for biodiversity sake. This either makes perfect sense or is completely crazy. You can make the point both ways, nay? Anyway, to even question some enthusiastic citizens pressing need to raise condor chicks with $50,000 puppet parents or fly injured monkeys 5,000 miles to monkey repair shops is considered insensitive. If you suggest that ½ million dollar heart/lung transplants for newborn babies might be a questionable use of resources you are considered a cad. But some people profess that Man is some sort of divine creature and we should spare no expense for glory except for cell research which is the Devil’s Tool for subverting the human race. Sometimes I wonder, if man is so special why are there so many bugs? And if Man is the last word wouldn’t we be better engineered. What’s with the nail on the little toe? It’s hard to cut and, at it’s best, is not that good for climbing trees.
So we have ol’ Planet Earth in one corner and tiny toe-nailed Man in the other. Some folks subscribe to the Gaia Theory that the planet is a living creature in danger of Man killing it. Well there really is a gulf between biology and geology so unless you are an American Indian or maybe a Buddhist it really is a hunk of slowly cooling rock. One thing is sure though, Man is poisoning the air, water and land. We bury radioactive waste which will not cool for 100,000 years and we lament that we are destroying the planet. Well we aren’t. The planet if anything is amused at our grand notion and it doesn’t give a rat’s potootie about how we manage our little span of time. The planet is actually doing quite well but our tenure can be made quite unpleasant if we act like a bunch of frat boys on Spring break shooting out the TV and stuffing all the towels into the toilet of this Motel 6 we call home. We should change the slogan from Save The Planet” to “Save Ourselves.” We need short term solutions to our short term problem. Heresy, insanity or at best politically incorrect suicide? Well the fact is we should become very selfish. We should clean our rooms and not for the next 4.5 billion years or for the future of The Human Race but for ourselves, in this lifetime, for our children in theirs and for our fellow revelers all around the world.

Editorial
So often I hear that the planet isn’t supposed to be messed up. In fact things are working out exactly as they should because of the simple fact that they have worked out like this. We can nudge the future but it is a pretty big ship to turn in new direction. If we want to affect change we need to realize that spoilers like Ralph Nader are good place to nudge. Ralph Nader thinks he’s funny by making himself the impossible choice and subverting the last election by urging his hollow headed supporters to vote for him. His point was that it makes no difference who is president. Reeellly? Trust me it does because we need to look at the SHORT term. Forget what the distant future holds. We need to save ourselves now and by now I mean the next four years.
As inflection points go, the tragic war in Iraq is a pretty minor one, unless it touches you personally which being in the here and now it certainly can. We do hit inflection points and go backwards now and then. I don’t think we are actually going backwards right now so much as stopped from making progress for a time (this is hard to define unless you take a longer view). Some big retreats include the Dark Ages and a smaller one could be WWII. But for sheer catastrophe try a gigantic one like the potential of global warming. Some of the things that set us back like rocks from space blotting out the sun are plain old bad luck. Others like the sacking of Alexandria (if the library had not burned we might not have lost 1,000 years of progress) was a political inevitability combined with a fragile intellectual infrastructure. But this new danger is perhaps the biggest challenge yet. Wouldn’t it be nice if Ralph worked on this one.
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