In Our Eyes

Lilly Calls Out Lord Of Our Earthly Realm?

“Remember on Monday when Steve Jobs, Lord of all our Earthly realm, proclaimed Safari as the best browser ever and that Apple wanted to steal market share from Internet Explorer? The COO of Mozilla noticed that too and didn't like it one bit. So he called Apple out."

According to crunchgear, anyway, and that's good enough for me.

What I got to say to John Lilly, I doubt he cares to hear: What's With That Funky Browser, White Boy. Yet I suspect he knows, deep down, knows his precious Mozilla-anything is the strangest piece of crap to come down the highway in a long time—only Captive Nation would clasp to its bosom a misbegotten mess like Firefox.

Why mess? Let's start with all those extensions. Where is any intelligent advice for management of all these add-ons? Left for the poor fucking user to find out, and, as I say, only a captive nation etc etc.

Yes, if you're on Windows, use them, use Firefox, Sea Creature, whatever their latest weirdness is called. Because they will keep you safe online. I know, I know, you're sick unto barfing of hearing it, but were you on a Mac, any Mac, the whole frigging point would be moot.

Moot, not mute, nor any other of the misuses and misspellings that litter the web. Moot seems like a particularly hard one. God knows why. You bunch a stinkin' illiterates.

The Illiterati. A much larger group than the Illuminati or whatever they call in on Edge. Does anybody read Edge anymore. Now that it is not the edge.

(This is me in a good mood.)

Mozilla “extensions” and themes. I believe I already ranted the theme rant ... but to a Mac user of lo these many years, you gotta know, people, those ... those things you call themes are a horror show of atrocious design, (I like the pink kitties) and the fact that people are happy with them, that people make more, reflects an aesthetic (aesthetic?) that makes my brain hurt.

New one: Tasteless Nation.

To bring today's wander of a rant to a close, we know that Lilly's remarks are drenched in envy by virtue of kindergarten psychoanalytics. Nothing could be more obvious.

Show me an actual critique, I may not like it, but I will also not be able to go to work on the author.

Let that be the lesson for today. And if you find out what it is, be sure and let me know.

Big Stink, Little China, A Sequel

When did I write this? Write, as opposed to post. A distinction that oft escapes me ... I do not by nature pay much attention timelines. Which is how that Forty Years Since The Summer of Love crap snuck up on me. File under: What Makes Zo A Bad Blogger. I'd turn in my badge ... but to who? I mean, to whom? Not that I have a badge, to begin with.

Sometime around the Ides of March, maybe a little later:

I see by the newspaper that ol' Tim is busy today, representing, um, you. I had no idea the largeness of personage ... but do I care. What's fascinating about the current WWW Parade of Narcissism isn't just its infinitude, no no no! It is the way people get so big, so padded, so fatuous, even those with ol' Tim's layer of earnestness. So removed. I expect the answers aren't that complicated; it's just one of those days where it's hard to think straight. Not, of course, for guys like ol' Tim and Beavis, or is it Butthead, onstage, the two of them determining your future like it was theirs to play with, chuckle chuckle.

People seem to need someone to represent them. No ... people need someone to represent what they wish they were, so that they may applaud its embodiment. Other cultures ululate—we bang hands. Weird, either way, and without intrinsic meaning, except to raise a happy clamor. Ol' Tim, ol' Tim, I love you, you warm and fuzzy thing!

Tim and his endless badges thread. Bet he wishes he'd never allowed comments along about now. Badges have been hashed half to death, if not completely killed. People are talking about crap like civility. Fuck, if I wanted to be civil, I would move back to West Hartford. 

I did notice, avid little student of power-and-powerlessness that I am, that all the important people were replied to, and I mean pronto. It was quite a thread (okay, I skimmed) ... the badgers, the anti-badgers (no, nothing to do with animal rights) ... the long and deadly posts of engineer bloggers who really need to get out more often, the long and scrappy posts of those scrappy little types who can't let anything thing go ... and then this pearl, which I wanted to let shine on its own:

                "You shouldn't brand civility."

This comment was left by a young Swedish blogger, who in many ways needs a good slap upside the head, but I am nonetheless enchanted by it. Whether his intention was "You cannot brand civility" or "You really should not, to try and do so signals the end of all humanity," or even, "Fuck your stinking badges and the horse they rode in on," it seemed to me a voice that harkened to something larger and as yet unseen.

A warning away, perhaps, from Web 2.0, the goal of which appears to be precisely that. To brand not only civility but every other aspect of being human and sell back to us. To our own immense, irreplaceable loss.

Note on method: 
1. trivialize the need-desire-feeling into a small, manageable size
2. give it a focus-grouped name that drops a key vowl
3. launch the beta by invitation only, creating buzzzz ...  

edited june 16 to add: 4. profit!!!

Aw, Scooter

Libby must begin perjury prison sentence: judge: "Former vice presidential aide Lewis 'Scooter' Libby must begin serving his 2 1/2-year prison sentence while he appeals his perjury conviction, a U.S. judge ruled on Thursday."

People just don't realize!

I know! 

The Pain of the Suits! 

Heartbreaking! Humiliating! There. Has. Got. To. Be. A. Way. Out. 

Phillips, Yale, Columbia, Dechert Price & Rhoads, The RAND Corporation. Northrop Fucking Grumann. If this ain't a free lifetime pass, I don't know what is.

What has happened to our country, dammit? 

I am ashamed of us.

Really I am.

Really.

- - - - - -

"Every time a Suit goes to prison, an angel gets her wings."

I Knew There Was A Reason

Top Ten Thousand Ways Women Drive Men Crazy:

The contents of the collective unconscious are represented in consciousness in the form of pronounced preferences and definite ways of looking at things. These subjective tendencies and views are generally regarded by the individual as being determined by the object—incorrectly, since they have their source in the unconscious structure of the psyche and are merely released by the effect of the object. [emph. mine]

Isn't that lovely ... released.

But they are stronger than the object’s influence, their psychic value is higher, so that they superimpose themselves on all impressions.

Just as it seems incomprehensible to the Introvert that the object should always be the decisive factor

OMG.

... it remains an enigma to the Extraverts how a subjective standpoint can be ...

Is.

... superior to the objective situation. He inevitably comes to the conclusion that the Introvert is either a conceited egoist or crack-brained bigot.

Or worse. It gets much worse. This piece was obviously written by a male—not that I remember the link. Links—feh.

The Introvert certainly lays herself open to these suspicions, for her positive, highly generalizing manner of expression ...

Which may be #1 on the list. Higher than one.  Maybe the list goes to eleven.

... which appears to rule out every other opinion from the start, lends countenance to all the extravert’s prejudices. Moreover, the inflexibility of her subjective judgment in setting itself above all objective data ...

I don't know that you'd call it inflexibility so much as, Why waste my time and yours?

... is sufficient in itself to create the impression of marked egocentricity. Faced with this prejudice, the introvert is usually at a loss for the right argument, for she is quite unaware of the unconscious ...

Who you callin' unconscious.

... but generally quite valid assumptions on which her subjective judgment and her subjective perceptions are based.

I don't know why he has to say unaware—projective identification, no doubt, for are we not the receptacle for all things inferior? Were we not thought to have the mental capacity of Idiots, and therefore unable to fucking vote? FCS?

Does that tick you off when you think about it? It does me. Think about it.

The Feeling Of What Happens

So Salon has a Sopranos prediction pool, an unsurprising disappointment. Why is it that journalists cannot buckle down and write a simple paragraph for these things but have to be Smarty-Asses, coming off instead as fumbler-writers.

Except for this one which made the little hairs on the back of my neck stand up—so I suppose (the body being smarter than all of us, body memory, bodily intuition) it may be right. I hope it isn't, but I have this awful feeling ...

"My guess: A.J. kills Tony. I've thought that for the past several episodes, ever since they played 'The End' by the Doors in a Bada Bing scene." —Tucker Carlson, of all people.

Charley, Easy, Dog, Fox

June 6, 1944 "Already the sea runs red. Even among some of the lightly wounded who jumped into shallow water the hits prove fatal. Knocked down by a bullet in the arm or weakened by fear and shock, they are unable to rise again and are drowned by the onrushing tide. Other wounded men drag themselves ashore and, on finding the sands, lie quiet from total exhaustion, only to be overtaken and killed by the water. A few move safely through the bullet swarm to the beach, then find that they cannot hold there. They return to the water to use it for body cover. Faces turned upward, so that their nostrils are out of water, they creep toward the land at the same rate as the tide. That is how most of the survivors make it."

—S.L.A. Marshall, via allthingsnews