Editorial Note

The post that was here this morning has been pulled for reconsideration. I may try and rewrite it to be somewhat more diplomatic in tone. Or I may just leave it in The Cooler. If you received it in an RSS feed, and can't link to it, I'm sorry.

C'est la vie.

Cheese Sandwich: Summer Cooking

It's been a difficult time here for the last several weeks. It's kind of an old story, though I would have thought it was the kind that only happened in bad melodramas. I've since learned it apparently happens a lot, and this time it happened to me.

Suffering is the difference between the way things are, and the way we want them to be. We seldom have any power over the way things are, and we often don't recognize the power we have over what we want. So we suffer. Me too.

Something I wanted very badly became decidedly "not to be." As invested as I was in this desire, this change of state sort of took my legs out from under me, and I've been struggling to get back on my feet. Well, that's not exactly true, there was a period there where I wasn't even trying to get back on my feet. It happens.

The other night I kind of took inventory of some things I hadn't really given much attention to before, and came to something of a realization.

While I'm not exactly thrilled with being 50, I'm in the best shape of my life, and it feels great. And I'm getting better too, oddly enough. I used to laugh when I'd ask one of my old TKD instructors how he was doing and he'd reply, "Excellent, but improving!" Well, so am I, at least in that respect.

I have a wonderful dog who has been something of a life-saver to me. Bodhi is a remarkable animal, and his presence in my life, while perhaps not miraculous, is certainly a gift, and one I hardly deserved.

I have many new friends, and two remarkably wonderful ones, who I treasure very much. They've been supporting me through this, and I can't begin to measure how valuable their friendship has been to me.

Now, the thing is, I had none of these things before. Their presence in my life is something of a result of what was "not meant to be." Some more directly than others, but all are related. And so when I kind of look at what I wanted and compare it to what I have now, well, maybe I'm better off. Maybe this is what was "meant to be."

As the noted philosopher Mick Jagger once said, "You can't always get what you want. But if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need."

Anyway, my two good friends and I had dinner by the pool last night, and I shared this with them, and told them how much they mean to me. It was a very enjoyable evening, and we look forward to many more to come.

So while I'm still not exactly 100% yet, I'm beginning to get my legs back under me, and things like, you know... life... are looking more promising.

I also wish to acknowledge that I've had invaluable support and friendship from two other long-term relationships. Jonathon Delacour has been something of a rock for me, always. And Sandy, a very wise woman who also happens to be my therapist for going on more than seven years now, has also been a true friend to me through this. Again, I'm blessed far more than I deserve.

As an editorial aside, this has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with sticking a metaphorical thumb in the eye of self-promoting, egotistical internet "analysts," and it isn't offered as an excuse or an explanation. I'd be happy to do it all over again anytime. If anything, my self-absorbed preoccupation with my distress has made me deficient in letting the air out of these overheated gas-bags.

Just so we're clear on that.

Cheese Sandwich: She's Back

Caitie, the light of my life, is home again. This will not be our weekend, but I'm happy she's home nevertheless.

Social Hygiene: "Tools" Shape Us

Marshall McLuhan supposedly said, "We shape our tools and then our tools shape us." I don't know the provenance of that quotation, but you can find it in this list of supposed McLuhan quotations. Anyway, it's pretty much conventional wisdom these days, and I don't disagree with it. So you might think that, knowing this, we might consider how we want our "tools" to shape us.

Another point to consider: Not every artifact is a tool.

It seems to me that today we mostly produce products rather than tools. Granted, a tool is a product, but not all products are tools. Cheap, abundant processed food isn't a tool, it's a product and it definitely shapes us. Is television a tool or a product? It isn't always clear.

The point is, not everything we produce is intrinsically as useful as a tool. Many products are simply artifacts to be consumed, to provide a momentary diversion or distraction - Seth Godin's "junky plastic Christmas ornaments." They're not produced for their utility or necessity, they're produced simply because we can.

Having said that, there is some necessity for these products, and it's an economic one. Hallmark wants to remain in business, so they must produce something. So they exploit human sentimentality and expend energy and material resources to produce things that have no real value, other than what can be instilled into people's minds through clever marketing. But that's a topic for another day, and one I've covered many times before.

As we create new products, we might devote some of our limited cognitive resources to considering what the effects might be, if a particular category of product is widely adopted. We will probably be wrong far more often than we are right, but we might also wish to think about how we can discover, in a systematic way, what the unintended consequences are as they appear; and develop processes we could use to try to mitigate them. We always seem to be trying to catch up to a problem after a lot of people have suffered. We can get smarter at this, though there isn't a competitive incentive to do so that I can discern.

With that as a background, here are a couple of recent articles that suggest that not everything is hunky-dory in the virtual savannah, where "continuous partial attention" is considered a desirable return to man's natural state.

First, teaching mindfulness in elementary classrooms seems to have some beneficial effects for students. (This will probably disappear behind the NY Times paywall soon.) It's not a scientific study by any means, but it seems worth a read.

And this is a British study on the effects of taking away television and video games from children. As a parent, some of the most irritating interactions with other parents were with those who didn't allow their children to watch TV or play video games. A few of them were ideological about it, and as a parent who did allow his kids to do those things, I didn't always welcome the condescension or superior attitude. (Probably because I'm a "bitter, bitter man.") But it seems like they may have been right all along.

Finally, in a post called Findings, Doc Searls points to the kind of forward-looking analysis that is lacking in our competitive rush to embrace the new and the novel at the expense of the old and conventional. It's not exhaustive or rigorous or formal, but it's the kind of thinking we need more of, before we create bigger problems than we're solving.

Cheese Sandwich: Walk, don't run.

My knees are buggin' me, so I'm not running this morning. It's probably past time to get a new pair of running shoes. So I've got a few minutes to kill between Bodhi excursions.

I've been looking at cameras again. This is kind of an unhealthy interest. The technology changes so quickly, there's always something newer and more capable on the market before you've even mastered everything on the older, less capable device you own. And once the bar is raised, then the limitations of what were formerly state of the art devices become seemingly crippling defects.

Image noise seems to be the "crippling defect" in most compact digital cameras. I guess it comes down to how "seriously" you view the hobby. Small sensors enable smaller cameras, which are easier to carry around and afford some very compact "super-zoom" telephoto lenses. But, the images often contain noise. I know what noise is, I can see it in an image, but honestly, the only reason I think it's "bad" is because everybody tells me so! I mean, I understand why it's undesirable, but frankly, I'm still just a little bit amazed we can even do the kinds of things we're able to do with affordable compact digital cameras these days. So I kind of struggle with it. I read the photography sites because I want to learn what the more experienced people know, but then I have to listen to all the criticism of "noise" and then I start to feel as though I need a better camera. And I have a few. (Four, at the moment.)

So instead, I'm trying to turn my attention to features of the cameras I haven't used very much, or don't understand completely, and screw the noise. It reminds me so much of the old Steve Martin routine about his "google-phonic stereo with the moon rock needle:" "It sounds like shit."

I was interested to read some of the comments regarding the advantages of the LED backlights in Apple's latest 15" MacBook Pro. Apparently the cold cathode lamps in conventional LCDs have some sort of brightness half-life that results in noticeable dimming over the lifetime of the laptop, and LED backlights suffer from no such effect. But that makes me wonder about these LCD HDTVs. What about their backlights, which are all cold cathode lamps, aren't they? The life of a TV is considerably longer than the life of a laptop, or at least it used to be. Do LCD TVs dim faster than CRTs or plasmas? I suppose I could look it up, but I haven't made the time. I guess you can replace the backlight in an LCD TV for a certain amount of money. I don't know how affordable or practical that would be, but probably more so than replacing a plasma panel.

Caitie called me from Paris on Sunday to wish me a happy Fathers Day. She's such a sweetheart. She gets home on Thursday. I'm anxious to hear about her trip. I know she's a little frustrated with the pace, because she said that it seemed like all they were doing was packing and unpacking! It was an aggressive itinerary.

We're trying to plan a little cook-out for the Fourth with the neighbors. If the weather cooperates, we'll eat here then bike over to the beach to watch the fireworks. I will try to take pictures this year. My guess is that since we're in the middle of a drought, it will probably rain.

Well, it's time to walk the dog. For those of you who came by to watch me stick my thumb in the eye of some self-appointed genius who wants to explain what it all means to us, sorry to disappoint you. That's not what I'm normally about here, though I sometimes do indulge my own "bad" self. For those of you who were disappointed in me for calling Stowe Boyd a name, well, get used to disappointment. I never claimed to be perfect.

Competing Messages: What's in a Name?

A couple of updates to yesterday's little exercise in futility.

First, and most disturbing, is that I made a math error. It actually took me an hour and fourteen minutes to write that post. Which, frankly, makes a lot more sense. I didn't think I could type that fast. Must have something to do with old age.

Second, there seems to be some consternation over the fact that I labeled Stowe Boyd a blowhard, since it's something of a pejorative term. Stowe objects that I didn't substantiate my reasons for calling him a blowhard.

I would offer that it's entirely self-evident to any reasonable person reading his weblog. But since I could be overly optimistic in my assessment of what a reasonable person should be able to discern, I shall elaborate a bit.

First, a definition: blowhard - noun, informal, a person who blusters and boasts in an unpleasant way.

We could begin with his tag line, "Stowe Boyd on what is happening at the edge, and it's impact on the center."

The edge of what? The center of what? Well, I guess we should all just know what those things are. I don't. But Stowe's "out there," baby! Bringing it all back home for the rest of us. Telling us the impact, thank God! None of us can get "out there" like Stowe can! We can't see the impact like steely-eyed Stowe!

Is that "bluster?" Maybe not, but it sure is bullshit!

But anyway, that wasn't what brought the word "blowhard" to mind. In fact, "blowhard" wasn't the first word that came to mind, but that word was probably a little too incendiary and would have been much more of a distraction than blowhard.

No, blowhard came to mind, upon reflection, when I read this:

In the talk, I lumped her and her anti-CPA screed (Yes, Linda, that's how I interpret it, and please stop telling me I don't understand you. I understand you better than you do.) along with Toffler's Information Overload (it's driving us crazy, he asserted) and the Attention Economy mavens (free information leads to attention scarcity). I don't buy any of it.

"I understand you better than you do." That's kind of boastful I would say. And arrogant. And unpleasant. Much like that entire post. "The War on Flow." (Emphasis mine.) Bluster. Bullshit. Unpleasant.

Blowhard.

I could cite other examples, but I consider this sufficient to "substantiate" the appellation. Certainly at least as compelling as his default response to label any critic who fails to exhibit the proper amount of deference to him as a "troll." (The "proper" amount seemingly being to defer making any criticism.)

So, okay, that's more than I'd hoped to devote to the subject. The point of the post wasn't to call Stowe Boyd names. But it seems these guys get a free pass whenever they label someone a troll. Not from me. But call them a name and you do invite them to focus on that to the exclusion of everything else. Not that I had any intention of persuading Stowe Boyd of anything, I wasn't even writing to him. I was just using him as an example of the kind of crap this revolutionary internet thing promotes.

Finally, let me say I'm grateful for the kind and supportive e-mail responses I've received. As a "bitter, bitter man," it means a lot to me.

Competing Messages: "Bitter, party of one?"

Ah, Stowe Boyd. If he didn't exist, I'd have to invent him.

It's Sunday afternoon, on Fathers Day, which may or may not be relevant. Here in Ponte Vedra Beach, it's sunny, mild and an altogether lovely day. This morning, after running three and a half miles, and then walking Bodhi for another three, this "bitter, bitter man" dashed off a little bit of commentary. Judging by the timestamps on the two Tinderbox notes from this morning, I spent all of about fourteen minutes writing that little thing, which turned out to be longer than I'd actually intended.

Anyway, I did some laundry today, cleaned my bedroom, scrubbed the toilets, spoke to my daughters, called my dad, and then I spent the latter part of the afternoon hanging out at the pool, enjoying the sunshine and the company of my neighbors.

After showering, having a little dinner, walking the dog and folding some laundry, I did a little citation search on Bloglines to see if what I thought might happen had indeed happened.

It did.

Stowe Boyd, master of the arcane art of continuous partial attention, is apparently keeping one wary eye on the horizon of the vast internet savannah, lest some skulking predator (moi?) catch him unawares.

These guys need to get out more. Seriously.

I mean, really. Frankly, I'm kind of flattered that Stowe Boyd even noticed me. I'm sure he has some sort of saved search on his own name so that if anyone mentions him, he knows about it as soon as possible. Fortunately, that's one of the "virtues" of our age. We can devote continuous partial attention to what other people are saying about us. But who gives a rat's ass what Dave Rogers thinks? Much less on a Sunday? I've been complaining about Technorati for going on five years now, and they've managed to successfully ignore me. Except once when Kevin Marks went out of his way to deliberately miss every point I was making. But that's another story.

No, color me skeptical, but I think it was the fact that I mentioned that Doc Searls had called me that kind of animated Stowe. Attention by association, if you know what I mean.

So, having been alerted to a potential threat, an "enemy of the future" no less, Stowe wasted little time in mounting a spirited defense. We enemies of the future must be stopped!

You can read his response for yourself. It seems I'm merely a bitter, bitter, mean-spirited troll. (At least I know how to wear a hat.) There's really little there I care to respond to.

Instead, I simply wish to point out that the very existence of the response, in my view, affirms and validates everything I wrote about, however artlessly and briefly, in the offending post.

I don't think Stowe will "get" that. But that's okay. It probably calls for more attention than he can devote to it.

Alas, my only regret is that I've probably spent far too much time playing the game in order to help you see the game. Geeks will like this: The only way to win is not to play.

We now return to your regular programming.

Cheese Sandwich: Happy Fathers Day

Happy Fathers Day to all the dads out there. My dad is still alive, and for that I'm very grateful. He's been a great dad my whole life, and I love him very much. (I feel the same way about Mom, too.)

Still losing weight. 181 the last few mornings. Tested for my 3rd degree black belt in taekwondo yesterday and passed.

Competing Messages: What Matters?

My phone rang the other afternoon, which is something of a novel thing for me. I hope I can be forgiven for name-dropping, but I was rather surprised to find it was Doc Searls on the other end of the line. We had exchanged some e-mail a while back, and talked about perhaps having a conversation by phone, but I thought it had kind of been overtaken by events.

We had something of a long chat, by my standards anyway, I'm not a great telephone-talker. And we covered a lot of ground, but I'm not sure we came any closer in our respective positions.

This is a complicated topic, and it deserves much more attention than I intend to devote to it today, but I wanted to put something down before too much time had passed.

I pretty much can't stand the internet anymore. At least, the things it seems to be doing to people, or the way it causes people to think.

The beret-wearing, continuous partial attention blowhard, Stowe Boyd, embraces Marshall McLuhan's view that we make our tools and then our tools shape us. And I think that's true. But like all visionaries and advocates who try to sell their expertise and insight to those discerning enough to recognize the clarity of their vision and the keenness of their insight, they never think past the end of their nose.

We created the automobile, and the automobile changed our culture and civilization far more than one might have anticipated from such a simple artifact. Where were the advocates who foretold the rise of suburbs, the traffic jam, carbon emissions, forty to fifty thousand deaths every year? Where were the visionaries who offered the insight into the changes in our architecture, or the stress of a daily two-hour commute?

And all those things are, of course, merely peripheral changes. Changes to how we do things, not what we do. But, of course, many people seem to believe that how we do things is "everything." As in, "This changes everything." (Pant, pant.) Or "the world." Did the automobile "change the world?" I'm not so sure.

Then there's that internet sage, Clay Shirky, with his pithy analysis of the criticism of the whole "Web 2.0" phenomenon - "Old Revolutions, Good; New Revolutions, Bad" with his illuminating insight that, "This improved ability to find both content and people is one of the core virtues of our age." One wonders how much of a "virtuous" age ours may be, when "finding content and people" is considered a virtue. Shirky also illuminated the "virtues" of youth in another piece, because "old" people have "cemented past experience into knowledge." Thus, old people have cement in their heads. Must be why we "nod off" so often.

The thing about Boyd and Shirky is that they're competitors in an economic environment. The new and the novel is their raw material, and they produce "analysis" that "explains" the new and the novel to "the rest of us." Naturally, to make the new and the novel more appealing, better able to seize and hold your attention, it has to be "good," maybe even "virtuous." So competition distorts how some choose to perceive change.

Of course, change is inevitable, and maybe it's neither good nor bad, or perhaps it's almost certainly both. But if someone speaks up and criticizes the visionaries and their products, well then they're labeled trolls, and thus, not to be taken seriously. They're harshing our buzz, man.

Competition. We live in a competitive environment. I think it's a consequence of the law of natural selection. Various groups of our species compete in different ways. Most seem to be competing economically, in the commercial sphere. Others are competing in the political sphere. Although violence plays a role in both spheres. We can't seem to escape from competition. It's in our genes.

Doc wondered if I might be willing to help or contribute somehow to the conversation about vendor relationship management. I told him I was skeptical. I think anything that facilitates commercial interactions, does so at the expense of social ones. It's not that I regard all companies as "evil," though most of them are far from "virtuous." As I explained to him, even if all companies were "good," they still must compete with one another for our time and attention. And the universe of competing commercial entities seems to grow without limit; and they are all learning organisms, so they adapt to changes in their environment, and exploit anything that can give them a commercial advantage.

I've explained here many times, and did so again to Doc in conversation, that the notion of "authority" is an important one, one that requires a clear understanding. But because we live in a competitive, increasingly commercial society, important ideas are exploited and distorted to try and achieve a competitive advantage. I again pointed to Technorati as an example, and their claim to being "the recognized authority" on something, while simultaneously - and on a totally different page - disclaiming any responsibility for relying on that "authority." It totally guts the notion of authority, all for the sake of Technorati looking a little more competitive.

We should all be offended, but we aren't. We say, "It's just marketing."

And then we market ourselves into unnecessary wars, and we wonder how we got here.

None of this VRM, or Web 2.0 bullshit is important. It's all crap. You and I have a certain amount of time here in this life. "Changing the world," isn't why we're here. That's just a line of shit they feed you, so that your time and attention and energy are devoted to serving the needs of the competing entities. We aren't consumers, we are the consumed.

All we have, all we'll ever have, in this brief life is each other. All of our virtues, all of them, are compromised and corrupted each and every day in the name of competition. Maybe not by everybody, every day, but all of them are, every day. And because there is no logical end to competition, it will only continue to get worse. Love? What's that? Money can't buy love? No, but it can buy the security that allays the fear that marketing and our culture have instilled in us. Courage? What's that? Is there a competitive advantage to being courageous? Somebody show me.

Everything that we somehow, in our heart of hearts, still think really matters, is being lost, little by little, every day as we compete with one another over nearly everything. Not the least of which are these stupid arguments about bullshit internet technologies, and how to get along better with the people who want to sell you something.

Competition is the legacy of natural selection, of evolution. But so is our cognitive ability. It remains to be seen if we can't begin to apply some intelligent design to the ways we order our lives, or if everything we believe in will be surrendered to the relentless demands of competition.

I'm not going to be participating in any effort to develop VRM. I'm going to spend my time trying to love my neighbors. Some of them, anyway.

Cheese Sandwich: For Crying Out Loud

Sigh.

Cheese Sandwich: Up the Creek

My thanks go out to Hal Rager, Ken Loo, Karl Martino and Ethan Johnson for their birthday greetings to me last week. I didn't want to let that go too long without acknowledging them. It's nice to be remembered! And I think I responded to everyone who e-mailed their wishes, and I appreciated those as well.

I went kayaking for the first time yesterday. A neighbor of mine has a 2-person ocean kayak, and I wondered if she might teach me something about kayaking some time. She said she loves to go, but she doesn't very often because she can't handle getting the thing up onto the car by herself, and it definitely seems to be a 2-person job.

My thought was to head out into the ocean first, but she wisely suggested we try someplace more sheltered and shallow first. So we went down to Guana State Park where there's a boat ramp, and we paddled around there for almost three hours yesterday. Saw lots of fish, some great Blue Herons, lots of other birds I couldn't identify.

It was a lot of fun. Paddle for a while, then just kind of drift and talk. Find something to investigate, paddle over to that, drift and talk. It was a beautiful day too.

I wanted to take some pictures, so I bought a waterproof Pentax Optio W30 pocket digital camera. It's certified waterproof to 10 feet for up to two hours, so if you wanted to go snorkeling with it you could. Mostly I just wanted something that could handle getting wet. It's only got a 3x zoom, 114mm equivalent, so you have to get pretty close to anything you want to see clearly, but it's good for people shots. I don't really care for the body design, in terms of how it feels in your hand. It's too smooth, with an all-metal body, and I sometimes managed to get a finger in front of the lens, or one of the floats I had attached to it in case I dropped it. (It doesn't float by itself.)

My shoulders are a bit sore today, but I expect they'll be more so tomorrow. My partner said I had good rhythm. I told her that's the first time anyone's ever said that about me! Turns out she meant I new how to paddle: Left, right; left, right; left, right. (Must be all that marching at USNA.) Many of her other partners would just kind of paddle on whichever side they felt like, which kind of makes it hard to keep the kayak going in a preferred direction.

Next time I plan to bring along the GPS unit to see how far we've gone. (I'll probably be disappointed. I'm sure it feels a lot further than it really is.) When we got finished, I had a little difficulty getting out of the kayak, because my legs had been essentially motionless in the same position for a few hours. I think I'll work on changing their position with some frequency next time. But I had a great time, and I'm looking forward to doing it again. Probably still at the park, because there are lots of things to see.

In the evening we went to a Jacksonville Suns baseball game. We got tickets right behind home plate, and I brought my Kodak P880 to take some shots of the batters. Unfortunately, it kept wanting to focus on the screen that protects the spectators from foul balls. I set it to landscape mode, which should have forced it to focus to infinity, but it still seemed to keep grabbing the netting. It has a manual focus, but it's difficult to interpret whether you have the subject in focus in the electronic view finder. I seldom use that camera, though it's probably the best one I have in terms of picture quality, so I'm probably not as familiar with how to get the best from it as I should be.

And in a little while from now, we're going to head over to the grill at the pool and cook some chicken and corn on the cob to kind of wrap up the weekend. So with that, I'm out of here!

Social Hygiene: "You're not the boss of me."

AKMA suggested in a recent post that perhaps I might be irritated by his use of the term "accountability" as he was expressing some reservations regarding the notion of "reinvention." I e-mailed him a response, which he has appended to the post, and invited a little further discussion.

Rather than impose on AKMA to integrate another e-mailed response into his post, I'll just do it here.

The question seems to be what does "accountability" mean? I believe it has a very specific, limited definition and application. The precision of its meaning is directly proportional to its importance as an idea or concept in how we order our lives in civilized societies.

Some people like to abuse important ideas to lend a false air of importance to unimportant ideas. This is called "marketing," and Technorati's use of the idea of "authority" is one such example, which coincidentally was again recently mentioned by Doc Searls in a post on his blog. Sometimes important ideas are used in an attempt to justify an action that has no legitimate justification. By invoking an important idea, they hope to obscure the illegitimate basis of a particular action.

Accountability is one leg of a three-legged stool. I'll probably wish I'd picked another analogy later, but let me try this for now.

People living in groups need some way to organize the activities of the individual members of the group in order to ensure that all the necessary functions a group must perform to remain a group are accomplished. The idealists among us would suggest that the world is "flat" now, and everyone would just do whatever needed to be done in a kind of "emergent" ad hoc, sort of "smart-mob" basis, and we'd all exist in an egalitarian world, where everybody is equal to everyone else, everything is miscellaneous, and nothing that needed to be done would ever be lacking for someone to do it as we'd all be devoting continuous partial attention to whatever needed to be done. These people are deluded.

In the real world, the one made of atoms, not of bits and fantasies, decisions must be made, and not everyone can devote some fraction of their continuous partial attention to every issue that requires a decision in order to register their "vote" on it. So we've managed to evolve and refine a rather clearly defined means of ensuring that not everyone has to think about everything and then try to come to some consensus on it, and that brings us to this three-legged stool.

The three legs are responsibility, authority, and accountability. And seated at the top is civilization.

Now there are different types of authority, everything being "miscellaneous" notwithstanding, and so there are different types of responsibility and different means of enforcing accountability. Some are more clearly defined than others, but most legitimate forms of authority are fairly clearly defined.

In general, it can be said that someone has been given a responsibility or a duty to perform some function. They have been granted some authority by some controlling agency or greater authority (there's that "hierarchy" thing again) to perform that function, and by virtue of that authority, others can reasonably expect to rely on their authority, to trust them, in the performance of their duty.

A board certified medical doctor is a reasonable example. You can seek medical advice from your next door neighbor who manages the local Home Depot, or you can seek it from a board certified medical doctor, licensed by the state to practice medicine. If you rely on your neighbor, and your condition doesn't improve or gets worse, do you think he should be held "accountable?" I don't think so.

So we have recognized authorities that we may, hopefully, rely upon to carry out their duties in a manner that will lead to a desired result. At least we may expect that we won't be exploited or cheated or neglected.

Sometimes, authorities being human beings after all, authority is abused or responsibility is shirked, and people may be exploited or cheated or victimized in some way. In order to preserve the system of trust that civilization relies upon, greater authorities must impose sanctions against those who abuse their authority, or fail to exercise their authority to meet their responsibility.

If the board certified medical doctor performs unsatisfactorily and patients are harmed as a result, their certification may be revoked, and the state may revoke their license to practice medicine. The doctor in question is accountable to the greater authorities who granted him his authority. He has a responsibility to both those authorities and his patients, but his patients must rely on the greater authorities to demand accountability.

Civil litigation may pursue a claim of malpractice, although this is not the same thing as demanding "accountability" in its formal sense. Although the court is a "greater authority," its authority extends chiefly to the law. Presumably a jury of ordinary people, themselves likely not medical authorities, will weigh the competing claims of various medical authorities in the course of a trial, and will render a decision of some kind. While this may provide for some measure of "justice," it is not, to my mind anyway, strictly a demand for, or the imposition of some form of accountability.

But accountability is an important idea, and I think we all understand that part. I don't think many people understand the actual idea itself. But as I indicated earlier, people often like to abuse important ideas to lend a false air of importance, or justification, to unimportant ideas or actions.

People associate together in loosely affiliated groups that are often called "communities." You encounter this a lot in the online world. There is no formal description of authority and responsibility, it's just a social affiliation. It's not deficient because of that, by any means. But it's not the same thing as a structured, defined hierarchy of responsibility and authority.

Every now and then, someone behaves badly in the community. Now, "badly" is a subjective call, and perhaps not everyone regards the behavior as "bad." But some of those who do may seek to impose some sanction as a means of discouraging such behavior in the future. They will often use the term "accountability" to justify their actions, such actions in many cases being just as egregiously "bad" as the behavior that prompted them. But by raising the notion of "accountability" they seek to legitimize or justify their behavior. This abuses the idea of accountability, which has evolved far away from the type of behavior it is being invoked to mask.

To be sure, there are social consequences to unwelcome behaviors in any community. These consequences are not invalid by any means, and they undoubtedly serve a useful purpose. But they can often be arbitrary, capricious, vicious and unfair, and cannot be made otherwise by invoking some magic fairy dust called "accountability."

So, I hope that clears everything up.

As always, I'm an authority on nothing. I make all this shit up. You may not rely on my thinking. Rely on your own. I'm not responsible for your thoughts.

Cheese Sandwich: Miscellaneous Notes

In case you're still keeping score, the scales have been reading 183 consistently for the last several mornings. I kind of plan on stopping at 175, but honestly, I'm not really trying to lose weight. (Sorry.) So I don't know what's going to happen if I hit 175.

I went bowling last night for the first time in just about 20 years. I was kind of flashing on The Big Lebowski, and wondering if "the Dude abides," but I had a great time. It was one of the ideas the Monopoly crew had, and we'd hoped to have about five of us in our party. As it turned out, three of our number couldn't make it and I was surprised and pleased that my remaining compatriot still wanted to go. So we did!

Boy, do I suck at bowling! But it was a lot of fun. We only bowled one game, but it was kind of a reconnaissance effort too. We just wanted to see what it entailed, and next time we'll come with more people and pay for more games.

Tuesday night at Krav was just me and Mr. C. We worked on throws, and I probably took over 30 falls in the course of the evening. One thing I do seem to know how to do fairly well is land well, what's termed a "break-fall." Mr. C. is about six inches taller than me, and probably 50 pounds heavier, but the instructor assured me it was all a matter of "leverage." I could throw Mr. C., but it wasn't pretty! He pretty much tossed me wherever he wanted, and I got to practice my break-falls.

Later in the class, we worked on "exhaustion drills." That's where you'll kick or punch non-stop for about a minute. A minute doesn't sound like much time, but Einstein was right - it's all relative. A minute hanging by your fingernails is probably a long time. A minute punching or kicking as hard and as fast as you can is a very long time.

In the kicking drill, you hold a large foam pad, or target, for your partner to strike. You generally hold for three types of kicks: A round kick, which is often delivered low to the thigh; a knee-strike, somewhere to the groin or midsection; and a front kick, to the same general area. Mr. C. is left-handed, which means his left side is his strong side. I'm accustomed to working with fellow righties, so I wasn't thinking clearly when I kept putting the target on my right thigh, inviting a round kick from Mr. C.'s strong side.

It's hurt, really hurt, to go down stairs for the last two mornings.

The Monopoly crew is hoping to take in a ball game this weekend. We're going to go see the Jacksonville Suns play on Saturday, assuming I can get us tickets. This is another new endeavor, so I don't know if we've waited too long to get decent seats. We shall see. I am, uncharacteristically, "optimistic."

I'm also planning learn a bit about kayaking on Saturday with one of the Monopoly crew as well!

So life is pretty good. Some parts aren't as good as I'd like, but I'm not going to sit around and feel sorry for myself about it. (Well, maybe just some of the time.) I'm fortunate enough to have some wonderful friends who are just as eager to get out and do something fun as I am, and so that's what we're going to do. Our little circle may be expanding a bit too, and that's a welcome thing.

And that's probably enough about all that. Bodhi is waiting for me to do our last tour of the premises for the evening.

Movies: Princess Bride and Cast Away

I watched Cast Away the other day, and noticed some similarities to The Princess Bride that I'd never really thought about before.

Hero's in love with a woman. Goes off to seek his fortune before marrying said woman. Encounters difficulties at sea. Thought dead by beloved, and probably everyone else. Copes with Cliffs of Insanity (planned suicide by Noland), and Pit of Despair (Noland's cave, and his tooth extraction.) Returns to find beloved involved with another, far richer, man.

In Cast Away, the hero doesn't get the girl. Which is why The Princess Bride is a fairy tale, and Cast Away isn't.

DVD: Deja Vu (Spoilers)

I watched Déjà Vu the other day, and experienced an uncanny sense of, you know, déjà vu.

I had just watched The Terminator the day before, and so the similarities between the two movies just kind of struck me. Guy from the future is sent back to the past to save the life of a woman he's never met, yet he loves anyway. Guy saves woman. Guy dies. End of movie.

A few glaring plot holes were also somewhat distracting, and Val Kilmer probably needs to get a dog, but otherwise an enjoyable diversion for a couple of hours.

Cheese Sandwich: The Coolest Thing

Just a brief update on the weekend. TS Barry blew through here on Saturday, leaving a lot of much-needed water in its wake, and Sunday turned into a beautiful day. While I was walking Bodhi in the rain on Saturday morning, I ran into one of my friends who had been out of town all week. I hadn't expected him back until Sunday, so it was a pleasant surprise to see him on Saturday.

Later Saturday evening, I was on another tour with Bodhi, and my friend called down from his deck as I passed by, and said he was taking a break from going through the hundreds of e-mails that had accumulated in his absence. He asked me what I was up to, and I complained about turning 50. So he wanted to know what I was doing for my birthday, and I said I had no plans, it was just another day for the most part. Another day, another decade, or something like that. (Obviously, I'm feeling a bit sorry for myself.)

So yesterday, Sunday, turns into a beautiful day, and I wished I had had the presence of mind to go to the beach in the morning, because what I could see of the sunrise was gorgeous. Took Bodhi for a walk on the long loop early in the morning, and it was just beautiful. Caitie and I had no big plans for the day. I did a ton of laundry, and straightened up my kitchen a bit.

Later, Caitie wanted a sub and I needed to go the store for some milk, so off I went to Publix. While I'm there, I ran into three of my neighbors who all come up to say, "Happy birthday." I was sort of dumbfounded by the first one, so I asked him how he knew and he mentioned my friend.

After I got home, my friend called and asked if Caitie and I wanted to grill some burgers at the pool? We had done something similar a couple of weeks earlier. Because of the encounters at the grocery store, I figured there was more up than just burgers at the pool, but I was happy to say yes, and I'd bring some beer and the iPod and the HiFi like last time.

Sure enough, he'd put together a little impromptu birthday party for me. A bunch of the neighbors came by, and said hello and chatted a bit. He even bought a cake, and had a card signed by several of my neighbors as well. A couple of guys brought their guitars, and we had some live music for a while.

It's just possible I had a little too much to drink; and it's likely I talked a little too much, okay, way too much, about some things I probably shouldn't talk about at all, and I regret that, but there you go. Perhaps I can be forgiven. I had a wonderful time though.

It was really a great thing for my friend to do, and I'm very grateful. I'd mentioned back when I did the Groundhog Day party that it was time for me to "get a life." The only way to do that is to make some investments in the people in your life, and I've tried to do so, and it has been paying significant dividends ever since.

Fifty is kind of an important milestone, but only in the context of our expectations. Those can be, hell, they are misleading, but it's hard to escape them entirely. By some measures, I'm not where I figuratively ought to be in my life. In many ways, I'm starting all over again, but without the advantages of youth to recover from mistakes, and I kind of allow that to weigh on my thoughts. I'm working on that, but I'm not there yet. And some important things that I'd hoped, against logic and reason, might go one way turned out to go another. That came as a severe disappointment, which I'm still kind of not "over" yet, but some valuable things came from it as well.

At the end of the day, you really do have to put all that stuff aside because it doesn't help. Hopefully, that is something I've learned and something where age and experience works to one's advantage. Like anything, it takes practice and I probably haven't practiced enough yet, because I'm having difficulty with it. I'll get better.

But yesterday's little party, and the attention and good wishes of my friends and neighbors tells me that perhaps I'm doing something right.

Having people like that in your life is the coolest thing.

Cheese Sandwich: Uncle John

John Seitz, my uncle and godfather, passed away this morning, about the time I was getting out of bed. I think he was 82. Mom sent me an e-mail to let me know, and I haven't had a chance to chat with my parents yet. I just looked in on them through Remote Desktop, and they don't seem to be home.

Uncle John was pretty cool. He was a beekeeper, and I worked for him one summer, shortly after we moved to New York from Michigan. It was pretty hard work, which probably accounts for my short career as a beekeeper's assistant. Another cousin and I rode with him sometimes when he went to sell his honey. Those were kind of long trips for us in those days. He drove big Ford stake trucks, and my cousin and I used to enjoy riding in the back. One summer, a station wagon was behind us for many miles, and there was a pretty girl in it along with her family. I still remember the license plate number of that station wagon: WV 8105. I committed it to memory for some reason, perhaps thinking I'd track her down some day. Never did, of course.

For a long time, he lived in a trailer on his property. But about 30 years ago or so, he decided to build himself a house. And he did, all by himself. And it was a pretty unusual design too. Two stories, the bottom one being a square in plan, with the second story being a smaller square inscribed inside the first, rotated 45 degrees. He lived alone and never married.

He was a hunter, and I recall watching him skin a deer once, using nothing more than a pen knife. He always had this way of saying the word "yes," with a strong emphasis on the beginning, tapering off into a long sibilant. He always seemed to wear gray work clothes, almost a uniform. I think I may have seen him dressed up only once in or twice in my life, probably for the funerals of my grandparents, but I can't be certain.

He was a lot of fun to be around, and was great with kids. He had lots of cool stuff to play with too. One time I was at his place, playing with a blow torch, heating up a nail I was holding with a pair of pliers. When I went to examine the glowing red nail more closely, it fell out of the jaws of the pliers and landed on my left arm. For many years, I had a scar that looked a lot like a 10 penny nail. Of course it occurs to me that, these days, some people would take exception to the assertion that he was "great with kids," if he allowed us to play with blow torches. But there you go.

I'm sorry to hear he's gone. He'd been diagnosed with cancer not long ago, and had been in some pain. My mom was able to be with him at the end, along with his brother Tony who called Mom to let her know it was time, along with some of his nieces and nephews who'd been looking after him. Mom had been up to his place every day for the last week, to let the other family members looking after him have a break now and then.

He was a wonderful uncle.

Cheese Sandwich: Weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.

Tropical Storm Barry has inaugurated hurricane season '07 for us. We need the rain, and it looks as though we're going to get a bunch of it.

It kind of puts a damper on the weekend, to say nothing of making for a damp weekend! But that's okay, I wasn't planning on doing much anyway. But whatever I do, it's likely to be indoors.

As luck would have it, I bought a pair of Timberland 6" boots on sale at the Exchange the other day. Most of my shoes are very "breathable," given the type of climate here. While they are usually very good at helping let moisture out, they're just as good at letting it in. And there's quite a bit more outside than inside today. So I figured it was a good day to break in the new boots.

I'm sure I cut a dashing figure outside with my boots, shorts, long-sleeved t-shirt, umbrella and very wet retriever. But my feet stayed dry! So, I'll call it a win. I was worried the wind would destroy the umbrella, it's just a cheap collapsible one, but it survived the first walk. I think I'll just get a decent raincoat of some kind soon. It's easier to manage Bodhi with two hands anyway, though we did okay with only one this morning.

Caitie is excited about her trip to Europe next week. The passport issue has been something of an ordeal. The application was submitted more than 12 weeks ago, and it wasn't until the 17th of May that they decided to let us know the form hadn't been signed properly. Fedex is supposed to deliver the completed passport today. But it's been stressful trying to reach the passport office and get a status on the thing. She's with me this weekend, and we've got a few last-minute issues to resolve.

I managed to bang the hell out of the ball of my right foot Thursday night while sparring in Krav. I caught someone's elbow on a front kick, which is sort of a meaningful demonstration of why the instructor is always yelling, "Elbows in!" I think it's just badly bruised, there's no sharp pain, but it does swell if I sit down long enough and it hurts when I first stand on it. If I keep moving, it does okay, a little discomfort, but I don't think I'll be running on it this weekend.

We did a much different warm-up on Thursday, more like a conditioning drill, rotating through stations where we'd do push-ups, squats, jump rope, and a military press. Yeesh. My legs are sore this morning. For some reason, it's usually two days after a strenuous workout that I get the stiffness and soreness. But it feels good too. Really good.

Found a nice surprise on my doorstep yesterday morning returning from a walk with Bodhi. There, along with a card, was a twelve-pack of Heineken. Cold even. One of my Monopoly players was going out of town for the weekend, but wanted to leave me a birthday present. Pretty much made my day. I'm grateful for people like that in my life. That one, especially.

Can't say I'm thrilled about turning 50, but I guess it beats the alternative, eh?