An old friend visited yesterday. Said his dad reads memepool and had forwarded him a link he had found there, to the story of June the Hitchhiking Mannequin. My friend recognized the domain - birdhouse. This is one of the oldest pieces on birdhouse classic - originally posted in Summer 1995. And memepool is just finding it now? Sometimes I almost forget about all the content sitting around on the original incarnation of birdhouse, unpruned but not unloved.

Amy headed for NY for four days; for the first time I’m taking care of Miles alone for an extended period. This morning, she calls when she’s supposed to be in the air - her plane headed out of OAK had run into a flock of migrating geese over the bay, their bodies thudding into the fuselage. She said it sounded like parts were being ripped off the plane. Then, inevitably, one was sucked into the right jet engine. Passengers felt the plane lurch in the air, blood and entrails all over the wing. Smoke started to pour out of the engine. The captain cool as a cucumber: “Those darn geese.” They turned around, landed. Stranded. Had to bring a spare plane in from another city. She returned home to reschedule. On the phone to Jet Blue, she learned that the same thing happened again an hour later, to another flight.

The wrong version of man vs. nature.

80 photos from our trip to Jamaica with Roger, Paula, Amelia. May be updated with images from their collection later. Negril, Treasure Beach, Montego Bay. Rain and shine, on land and water, grey skies and sun. No underwater images unfortunately. Should have rented an underwater housing for the G2. But am told that disposable beach cameras are good to 100 ft. Next time…

Jamaica was everything we had looked forward to, and more. A very different kind of vacation, traveling with four adults and two babies - a lot of things we couldn’t do with toddlers in tow (e.g. river rafting), but we traded child care back and forth enough that we were able to do almost everything we wanted.

Always odd to be an American in a 2nd world country — the constant realization that you have plenty of what they lack. The difference results in an ongoing “hustle” which takes some getting used to — after a while you develop the ability to be friendly and open but simultaneously firm and on-guard.

We traveled in the off-season, before most schools let out and while the Spring rains are still in effect. Rains keep the temperatures down and the bulk of tourists away. Accomodations were cheaper, and we had many beaches to ourselves, or almost. In exchange, we dealt with daily rain between around noon and two p.m., sometimes torrential. But it’s a warm rain, and you dry out quickly when it finishes. It’s a bit of a hassle at times, but I love to walk or swim in a warm rain - part of the tropical experience.

Food in Jamaica is salt-of-the earth, elemental, right out of the ground. Seldom overly sweet or fatty. Jamaicans rarely eat dessert, and most people are very slender, glowing with health. A few of our staples / favorite dishes:

Curried goat
Ackee and salt fish
Jerk chicken, jerk pork
Conch stew, jerk conch
Breadfruit
Fried plantain
Calaloo
Fresh papaya, pineapple, mango, melon

For me, a trip to the Carribean is as much about the reefs and the world underwater as it is about the island above sea-level. I felt myself quickly returning to my diving roots, and was able to fit in two major scuba and two major snorkle trips, plus many casual swims. Amy understood how important water time is to me, and was so gracious watching Miles as I dove (though we all took turns in the water).

I want to spend more personal energy raising awareness of the world’s coral reefs, their intimate connection to the ecosystem, and the grave danger the reefs are in.

Creatures experienced in the wild for the first time in two short weeks:

Sea turtle
Moray and spotted eels
Dolphins
Crocodiles
“Rat Bats”
Chameleons
Giant moths

As we traveled from Montego Bay to Negril, down to Treasure Beach, and back to “Mobay,” kept notes in my Visor. I’ve edited them a bit and posted / backdated them here in the previous 11 blog entries. Click the MORE links for continued descriptions of each day.

Update: Images from the trip are here.

Now home to cold gray skies in California, an unwelcome (for me) end to the humidity, a mysteriously dying lawn, and tomorrow, back to work.

Irie.

An interesting bit of cultural relativism: Met a woman who told us that when her baby had a runny nose (babies can’t blow their noses; it’s very hard to get their noses clean), she would put her mouth over his nose and suck out the snot, then spit it out. “It’s my baby and I love him. What is the harm?” Then she told us that when a breastfeeding friend had pain from engorgement, her husband sucked out the milk to relieve the pain. She was careful to emphasize that he spit it out. What interested me was that she saw both acts as being on the same grossness par. I’d expect it would be rare to find an American woman who would be willing to suck out her baby’s snot; but it’s probably not uncommon for men to sample their nursing wives’ breast milk.
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Before leaving home, I bought a hat with an insignia on the brow reading “Life Is Good,” which is how I felt almost every minute of every day on this trip. That insignia was like a tatoo on my mind. Feeling so positive about life, the universe and everything.
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Miles and Amelia like to read about the adventures of Carl the Dog — Carl babysits and the baby rides on his back — madcap hijinx ensue. In front of Clarissa’s house is a life-sized dog sculpture that looks much like Carl. Miles immediately climbed up on his back, so delighted. Thereafter we could not pass the sculpture without Miles taking a “ride” on Carl.
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Amelia can’t say “Carribean” but she can say “Carrot” and “Bean” so Roger and Paula have been trying to get her to refer to the sea as the “Carrot Bean.” Almost successful!
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Chill day. Regroup , hang out do laundry.

A prevalence of speakers mounted on top of cars driving around announcing upcoming concerts etc. in a funky patois. Why did this practice disappear in the States? Last I saw it was in John Waters’ “Polyester.”
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Big day for Miles - he’s been working at putting on his own shoes - today he succeeded in putting on and buckling his sandals without help! So proud of our children - Miles and Amelia playing so nicely together, both learning new tricks from each other. Miles seeming to be inspired by Amelia’s advanced language skills, Amelia seeming to be inspired by Miles’ physical precociousness. It’s empowering for us parents to know that we can pull this off - take a major vacation like this and the kids are troopers. It’s tough in a lot of ways, but we make it work, and I think the kids benefit immeasurably.
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Big scuba day - China Reef w 4 other divers. No wetsuit. Water inTENse blue pounding blue sonic blue, fall backwards overboard 60 ft down to reef. Vibrant purple chalices of hard coral that looks like it was fluttering in waves and then frozen. Sting rays. No nurse sharks, as had hoped. Discovered a family of white lobsters, two adults two children under ledge. We stared at each other, they waved their foot-long feelers at me. Vast fields of drapery-like coral hanging from ledges. Fish and coral colors so vibrant it’s hard to believe nature could produce. Is this for real? One never gets used to it. I remember now why diving is so addictive. Surge lifted my bare back up into an outcropping of fire coral, stung like a string of bee stings, rash lasted for a week. Safety decompression stop at 20 feet for five minutes, hovering in the blue like babe in the womb, gazing out at creation. Maybe I should reconsider my belief in God?
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Ackee and saltfish for breakfast. Played in water w babies. Rained and more rain. Taxi to patty shop — patties are Jamaican replacement for American hamburgers - beef or chicken or calallo wrapped in pastry dough and baked. Cheap and ubiquitous.
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8:30 a.m. snorkel trip with Amy on a glass-bottom boat named “Children’s Bread” with pilot shorty. Three miles out to coral reef. Angel fish, long skinny trumpet fish, sargent majors. Brain coral, fan coral, every kind of coral. Water like a bathtub. Amy was a champ, not afraid at all. Stunning in every way except that all the recent storms have left water a bit murkier than usual (which means “only” 40 feet rather than 150).
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Early swim, breakfast at Seline’s: ackee and salt fish, calaloo (local leafy green, similar to spinach), dumplings, fried plantain, banana pancakes.

Walk to the west end of town to get cash. Enter “Jamaica time” — Jamaican banks are the slowest - four people in line could means one-hour wait. Snafu - my cards are refused. Why? Must go to “call center” to reach U.S. fraud dept. ($8 phone call) which reports that my cards are fine. Return to bank, wait again, cards go through fine. Took 90 mins to get money. We’d find this kind of thing all over Jamaica - seemingly simple things made frustratingly complex by polite but slow or confused employees. “Yeah mon, no problem.” Everything’s cool. No one has high blood pressure, but it’s tough for Americans to adjust, not have expectations that things will go as planned.
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Amy’s and my fourth wedding anniversary. Landed in Mobay and traveled by van to Negril. Our driver is the gregarous Jinx Elegant, couldn’t ask for a better info source for first hour trip. Taking in the roadside shacks, hand-painted signs. Many shacks do double service as businesses and homes — people live and sleep in them, but also serve lunch from the front stoop. Passed one labeled “Rastarant.”
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Well, not quite, but we’re heading for Jamaica, mon! Two families, two babies, small volcanoes, big waterfalls, expansive coral reefs, endless beaches. Posting will be light for a bit.

Miles is learning to talk backwards. The donkey says “Haw Hee. Haw Hee.” If you ask him to say “Doggie,” he reports back: “Geedaw.”

He also likes to do this ecstatic whirling dervish dance, head cocked back, eyes on the sky or branches above, smiling so huge you’d think his head would pop, until he falls backwards or sideways to the floor or lawn, laughing uproariously.

Words cannot describe how much we enjoy his company. Most. Fun. Ever.

How did Bush manage to base the bulk of his presidency on a “war on terror” when his very own State Department reports that incidents of global terrorism are at a 20-year low?

Finally starting to put energy into updates at kissthisguy.com again, and today signed up for Google’s AdSense. Replaced the mid-page graphical ads from Burst Media with context-sensitive text-based ads. Burst pays per impression; AdSense pays per click. Weirdly, Google won’t disclose exactly what they pay, though they make a vague reference to paying as much as or more than competitors. We’ll see.

I was most interested in using AdSense to see how well they could parse misheard lyric pages in real-time. If ads were targeted well enough that people could purchase the album from which the mondegreen originally comes, I figured things might go very well. What I’m seeing in the first couple of hours is that Google is succeeding at placing almost exclusively music-related ads (and no PSAs), but only a small percentage of ads are targeted specifically at the artist in question. Still, that’s a big improvement over Burst’s totally unfocused scattershot placement. I’ll be curious to see how things tally at the end of the month.

Another benefit: AdSense ads don’t blink, flash, or buzz.

Follow-up to ~? What ~?. Clever piece by William Safire on naming — and deciphering the meaning of - all the obscure / lesser-used symbols on the standard modern keyboard.

The brackets with the nipple in the middle are called bracelets or curly braces, and here’s the latest renaming of the signs: forget less than and greater than. It’s now left angle bracket and right angle bracket, or bra and ket for short; this locution is in hot competition according to the Hacker’s Dictionary, with read from/write to; suck/blow; crunch/zap, and comes from/gozinta.

In the above symbolic sentence, I was trying to say, “At this point I close.” However, many hackers will translate that as modern poetry: “Snail this dot I right banana.”

Thanks Abe.

A Jackson 5 post from December ‘02 is still receiving comments. One cat wrote to let me know he had MP3s of The Jackson 5 doing Alphabits commercials, asked if I wanted copies of them. Well, duh.

Commercial One | Commercial Two

There’s something so… blissed out innocent funky about the Jackson 5. “Tito, stop teasing!”

Amazing to see how many box designs Alphabits have gone through over the years. My mother didn’t allow sugar cereals in the house, so I don’t remember many of these, but a few ring bells.

Currently webcasting: Social Justice & Social Empathy featuring Robert Reich:

What does empathy have to do with inequality? Robert Reich, former United States secretary of labor in the Clinton administration and a distinguished visiting professor at UC Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy.

Pretty amazing spiel, although the drag about these events for me is that as fun as it is to run the webcasts, doing so detracts from ability to pay full attention. Some salient points I took away:

- We are a society of “exit-ers” — we simply leave situations we don’t like rather than sticking around to “give voice” or get involved and try to repair our own communities.

- Our fates are connected, you and I. “Insightful selfishness.” You are wealthy and you are willing to pour money into education. Why? Doing so makes society more productive. Productive citizens will partake of your goods and services, thus increasing your wealth. Rising tides raise all boats. My actions bring society up or down, as do yours.

- (via audience member) We don’t breast feed or sleep with our babies as commonly or for as long as in Canada, Europe, Japan. Is there a correlation between the extended core bonding giving to infants in these places and the greater inclusivity of countries with democratic/socialistic tendencies?

Some of the American and British soldiers charged with torturing and humiliated Iraqi prisoners were working under orders to “soften up” prisoners for future interrogation. That’s one of those terms that’s left entirely up to the MP on duty to interpret.

Former Army interrogator Mike Ritz refers to the famous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment in which regular college students were asked to role play prisoner/guard for an extended period. After five days, the study had to be cut short because the students in the role of guard were becoming sadistic.

The media offers explanations for these MP’s behavior dissmissively (”A few bad eggs”) or suggests a power chain encouraging the behavior. The Stanford study suggests something even more frightening, and in my mind, more probable — that ordinary people put in a position of control will often become sadistic and abusive.

This of course not meant to somehow excuse.

Remember the famous Wired Magazine feature declaring “Push” the next big thing? (March 1997). Push was going to be so significant it would kill the browser:

“The Web browser itself is about to croak. And good riddance. In its place…”

The feature is famous both for exemplifying Wired’s tendency to make huge, sweeping declarations and for being so painfully wrong (the public ignored push, PointCast died a painful death, and Wired scraped egg from face).

Now, seven years later (Wired 12.05, not online), the magazine has the cojones to run a story “The Return of Push,” asserting that the idea’s time has finally come. Author Gary Wolf makes the case that the rapid rise of RSS has finally proved Wired right. There’s only one problem: RSS is a pull technology. Just sent this letter to rants@wiredmag.com:

”
Gary Wolf is right about one thing (“The Return of Push,” Wired 12.05): RSS is fulfilling some of the original promise of push. But that doesn’t mean RSS is an example of a push technology. If I leave a plate of cookies on my doorstep and invite you to come take one every hour, would you then say that I brought you cookies?

In order to call something “push,” the publisher has to willfully send it to the user (and, ipso facto, to know something about that user). Thus, an email newsletter is an example of a push technology. In contrast, RSS “feeds” sit on a plain vanilla web server waiting for an anonymous client to come pick them up. This is plain old http and apache we’re talking about - no magic “push” protocol makes RSS delivery different from the rest of the Web. I request a web page; I pull it toward me. RSS works exactly the same way. If RSS is a push technology, then so is Tim-Berner’s Lee’s original web.

RSS probably is the Net’s next big thing. But it sure isn’t push.
”

Today’s portion of the J-School’s China and the Internet conference kicks off with a live webcast of Stanford Law Professor Lawrence Lessig, who has fought valiantly and eloquently against the world’s most overzealous copyright giants. Lessig is the author of “The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World” and helped create the Creative Commons license.

Update: Not sure who linked to the stream, but we suffered the /. effect — suddenly swamped with requests, which took out the streaming server. Back up with the rest of the conference now. Apologies to everyone who tried to connect to the Lessig stream - the archive will be online early next week.

My (incomplete) notes on Lessig’s keynote are posted behind the MORE link.
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