Last week I couldn’t help but come across the 2005 bloggy awards site. The nominees are already in so don’t bother nominating this patch of turf. Among the categories included the “best meme” category. A meme has some fairly wide and far reaching definitions but I would prefer to think of a meme as an infectious idea virus. The difference between an idea virus is that a physical virus needs to have a way of infecting cells while an idea virus goes right in the senses, finds a home in the neural system, and then pops back out through the body through communication. Susan Blackmore wrote a thorough book exposing the nature of these nearly live things and was so bold as to claim that memes themselves are the source of latter evolution of humans to have higher functions. The idea goes back to the work by Dawkins that exposes that the only real point of an elephant is a very complex but functional mechanism to make more elephant genes. So the reason to make humans (make is loosely coupled from the biblical creationist bent on the word since evolution is a creative process – thus the elephant) is so that those memes have a place to scurry around and live. Once they carved a niche somewhere they cut it wide open to make brains as large and interesting as Einstein’s. He had a miraculous year about 100 years ago. Blackmore’s book is called The Meme Machine for anyone interested in such things. I’d recommend reading Climbing Mount Improbable before reading it if you have the chance.

The meme’s eye view of the world is a great way to look at the continued evolution of the Internet and the ideas floating around on search engines. In the Internet the meme has found it’s way to a reproductive panacea with data traveling quickly and scaling rapidly from host to host. The fast movement can suddenly make a green pornographic image of Paris Hilton the most sought after idea for a brief point in time only to move on to another idea like Janet Jackson’s exposed breast a few months later. Now the memes are getting recognition at the top of an awards category about the meme-like blog phenomenon. Jump on the bandwagon – don’t worry nobody will care. The memes will love you.

Through the best meme category I found some interesting sites with infectious qualities. My favorite one was Photo Friday, a site that holds a free contest for people to send their best picture to match a specific idea. Past items included modern, crowded, and signs. I looked for what I thought would be the meme of the past few weeks but didn’t find it used yet - freedom.

I’ve been hearing a lot about freedom the past few weeks. Partly it is because I was reading The Case for Democracy but that was just an effect of reading about the election in Iraq and trying to understand it’s importance. If I could paint I would take pictures of some of the images in my head from the news. One was the terrorist acts against the voters in Iraq. The voters in small towns used a voting system that turns your finger blue. That way you can tell who has voted so that nobody votes twice. A group of terrorists attacked a group of voters singling them out because their fingers were blue and killed them for voting to intimidate future voters. Although the Superbowl is just a game the symbolism of freedom is rampant on the east coast with a team like the Patriots clad in the red white and blue colors and the Eagles from Philadelphia standing in the uniforms with the symbol of a raptor at the top of the food chain that symbolizes freedom for our country. Gadi recognized that freedom is the popular word today and littered an invitation to his monthly SabAbaS party with references to freedom.

What is interesting is that the argument made by Sharansky is that peace between countries begins first with the establishment of democracy and the best and apparently only avenue to achieve it is to first create human rights. His questions to determine whether human rights are upheld in any country are simple ones:

Could people in that country speak their minds?
Could they publish their opinions?
Could they practice their faith?
Could they learn the history and culture of their people?

So the meme machines are hard at work fighting for freedom over fear. People around the world are openly or secretly hopeful that countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia that surround Iraq will be infected with the meme-virus of freedom. The dictators of those countries must be afraid of the pending epidemic infection and are working to innoculate themselves with new strains of a virus of fear that they will unleash upon their people and will send in small bits through terrorists crossing borders into Iraq, Afghanistan, Israel, Africa, and America.

Maybe with the help of the Internet we can crack the nut wide open in this century through our new found meme amplifier and move into the next phase of civilization without so much bloodshed. It is too bad fear can't always die as it should - Not with a bang but a whimper.

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On Friday Aaron retold a good joke to me. It was a Stephen Wright joke. “I plan to live forever – so far so good.”

Stephanie and James were going away for the weekend so the pug dog is over for a few days. It must be an odd experience for Leelin to go back and forth between locations. Some people think that Sarah and I have joint custody of Leelin as though he was a child from a failed relationship. This weekend we scheduled a play date with Manju, a female pug puppy owned by Hattie’s friend Alex, and then we left Leelin at Alex’s place. From Leelin’s perspective he had been at his home, then kidnapped into our apartment, and then transported to another apartment and abandoned for half the day. I never recall having play dates as a child. We would just get beaten-up by the Griffins, the family across the street. A play date with friends of a friend who we casually know is an interesting social experience because we don’t actually know each other very well. Our dogs know each other much better than we do. So we spent time at the table introducing ourselves as the dogs would clamber up and down our legs to stop for a break before pouncing and panting into other rooms. Dog owner bonding is an interesting situation. Most of the time when you walk your dog it takes about thirty interactions with an owner peer before you learn their name. People go by the names of Manju’s owner or Spike’s father and you can learn many things about them like the colleges their children go to, professions, and illnesses long before you actually learn their names. But a play date means you have some real quality time amidst the yapping to get to know your fellow owners. It is hard not to feel a bit awkward given that we aren’t actually dog owners, just pug-sitters a couple of times a month.

Alex had brought food from a Japanese bakery for us all to eat while the pug dogs skidded in circles around the wooden floors. The Japanese had made some progress on standard baked goods by inventing new items like a croissant covered with egg salad. I noticed that they have a Roomba vacuum and don’t have rugs on the floor. We talked about the tassel limitation of the Roomba. The problem is that it can’t deal with rugs with tassels and because the rug in my living room has tassels the Roomba has been retired. Alex retired his rug instead of the Roomba.

Alex is a video game developer so he gave us a demo of his latest game, Antigrav, a game that uses a camera to allow the user to control the action in the game by moving their body. It looks like a great workout. I can’t wait for the people at the gym to come-up with some work-out games based on the same technology. He also gave a demo of how the pugs chase the laser pointer. Alex will often take the laser pointer at the end of a session of laser chasing and direct it under a door leaving Manju to guard the door in anticipation of when the red dot will return for another game. We had been talking about the top-secret world of pet gaming but every development is hush-hush at the moment.

Kim came to help us organize in the afternoon. Sarah had her sights set on invading and cleansing Jeremy’s room. We had moved a lot of our junk and furniture from the other rooms into Jeremy’s room and yesterday we opened Pandora’s room. Many items could still find new homes like Marshfield, my new office at Viapoint, return to Stephanie, garbage, and for the two biggest items we hatched a plan to redistribute in a socialist capitalist way on craigslist. So we posted a couple of ads for the recliner and an entertainment center. Kim and I got into a brief argument that there is nothing entertaining about a piece of furniture so it should be called a TV holder but the Sears catalog vindicated Kim’s opinion by clearly labeling a similar item as an Entertainment center. The craigslist ads got an immediate response of about seven people all asking the same question – “Is the entertainment system still available”. It is tough to reply to these people. I would prefer that they said – I want your entertainment system. So I have candidates of people interested in these items but nobody has taken the time to haul them away for me. There should be a clearer etiquette when you give away junky furniture on craigslist. Now I have a whole bunch of people and nobody has taken the furniture. Before we finished Sarah decided to purchase a shag carpet from Target and I didn’t oppose it because I thought that the lack of tassels would give the Roomba a new opportunity to roam in the living room. But I decided to buy a wireless mouse from Gyration so that I could better control the living room PC (the current mouse is on the fritz) as long as we were making unnecessary Internet purchases.

Last night Sarah and I set out on a mission to see the Improv Boston 8PM show. I had told the folks in my class that I would be there for the 8PM. I had a stiff neck because I had forgotten my headphones and had chosen a machine underneath the televisions with closed captioning. With all of the snow blocking parking spaces we drove around Cambridge for about half an hour before realizing that we didn’t have a chance at parking within a mile of Improv Boston. So we drove near Bertuccis and Cuchi-Cuchi and stopped for dinner. Cuchi-cuchi was filled completely with overdressed Brahmin Bostonians out for a good meal so we figured we didn’t have much of a chance of getting a seat. But when we went to the counter to check the wait the woman told us it was our lucky day and that we should buy a lottery ticket because although there was a two hour waiting list for any other size group, she could seat a table for two immediately. So Sarah and I decided that we were going to declare Saturday night an early Valentine’s Day and for once celebrate a stupid holiday early rather than late by having a nice dinner. I still think that Cuchi-Cuchi is the best place to go for a funky upscale dinner and drinks in Boston. Last night was no different with the wait staff dressed fully for the evening in fettish gear, gaudy jewelry and vintage 20’s outfits.


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Tonight I rushed back from Burlington to see Hattie’s friend Daphne Kalotay’s reading at Brookline Booksmith. I was an idiot and thought my perfect memory served me right by storing the reading as starting at 7:30 but it had started at 7:00. I arrived exactly at 7:30 with Daphne in the middle of reading one of her stories from her first published book – Calamity and Other Stories. If you are nice you might get a signed copy through me.

The story she was reading was a detailed account of a divorced forty year old woman waking-up after having a hook-up with her ex-husband. The story divulges a lot of detail about the lives of the characters in a short sequence of events during the morning after. The woman starts annoyed about the man singing in the shower.

I was standing in the entrance at the bottom of the stairs with my big grey winter gloves as I realized a few moments too late that the loud Velcro strap sealing each of the gloves would make a loud zapping sound that would draw even more attention to my lateness and I couldn’t get my hands out of my gloves. So I stood with my coat on and listened to the story and then snuck my gloves off during the clapping after the story ended. Robert also appeared along beside me during the reading and I could see that Hattie was sitting with Matt and Kate.

Daphne answered the typical writer questions for an event like this like "did you write this with any specific reader in mind?" "who are your influences and do you see them in your work?",
"how did the publishing process differ from your expectations?" She did a great job answering the questions and listed some authors that I forgot to write down that I should read. I’ll ask her later who they are but I am backlogged reading anyways.

The basement of Brookline Booksmith is an interesting place. Someone who works at Booksmith is definitely a fanatic of pug dogs. They have two porcelain pug dogs on top of the cash register, cut-out photos of pugs on a door in the back and behind the counter and if you ask the cashier will show you the cutest picture of a black pug puppy sitting with a white human baby that you have ever seen. On the way up to the top of the stairs you can find a Dancing with cats book that was made by the same people who brought you the famous bestseller Why cats paint. They also have some great art posters for a reading from some guy with a name like Jack Snickers for a reading of a book called I Want Candy. I saw all of this as we headed out to Lucy’s for the reception.

It was awkward at Lucy's at first because we were early and not the hard-core book launch groupies that normally flock to these events. So I wasn’t sure if the mini-tacos, gourmet mushroom pizzas, and giant herd of chicken drumsticks in soy sauce were supposed to be eaten by us. The discomfort would have been fine and I would have refrained from attacking the mini-tacos if I had eaten some dinner or grabbed a bag of chips as I cut through CVS from my parking space in the lot behind the Coolidge Corner theater. But I did put enough food on the mini-plate that had been stolen from some poor child’s doll set and had a wonderful meal surpassing my expectations of Lucy’s. This is good for Lucy’s because my prior experience was when I was served my one and only serving of tofu-bacon. I had thought that I was going to get something interesting like a tofu dish with bacon in it but tofu-bacon is actually synthetic bacon flavored soy product that looks like a fruit roll-up crossed with a dog treat. I don’t recommend it. Since that experience I had avoided Lucy's despite Lucy's being very proximal to my apartment.

At the table I mentioned that there were some rectangular triangle pastries and Matt caught me in a major geometric miscue. That left us in a tailspin leading to discussing inscribing triangles into circles such that when Lisa and Dave arrived I asked Lisa if she could calculate whether an equilateral triangle inscribed in a circle takes up more or less than half the area of the circle. Thus our paper tablecloth was covered with obscure sin, cosine, circles, Pi symbols, you name it as folks around us were discussing literary history and other book related topics. Kate mentioned that she was launching her blog officially but I didn’t know how to spell it so she wrote it on the paper tablecloth as well. The first post is now available for viewing. We joked about it but the theme of this blather I spit out should be DanHousman.com - Saving the world one post at a time. A mention of it is already posted on the Katehedgepeth.com site.

As the evening ended and we all thanked and congratulated Daphne, (and she deserves as much congratulation as we can give her being a published author among amateurs like myself) we got to chatting about mega-trends. We were talking about how if Hattie may have a secret site at HattieSchroeder.com but she was just hiding it. Web development isn’t cool these days but knitting is. So I thought it would be good to have a piece of software that scans someone’s web site and knits it into a sweater. Daphne thought it was pretty funny that you can just connect any two mega-trends to make an even bigger but probably stupid trend. The two trends we came up with as we were rushing out were Pilates poker – an exercise poker game at night where you stretch to put bets on the table and possibly make some bets on how far you can stretch. It is best seen with mime. We also worked on the popularity of people knitting cozies for their Hummers.

I promised Daphne I would see if Jenny Lawton, who I had found is running a bookstore earlier in the day would be able to host a reading. I dropped her a line. I’d love to reconnect with Jen Lawton. It’s been so long.

Other incidents of note today:

Robert used the google video search tool to count how often the f word appears in movies. That is the rough equivalent of looking-up dirty words in the big dictionary in the school library in fourth grade. But for now the results are:

1. Tigerland- 527 times
2. Another Day in Paradise- 327 times
3. Sweet Sixteen- 313 times
4. Narc- 298 times
5. The Big Lewbowski- 281 times
6. Fubar + Made- 274 times
7. Pulp Fiction- 271 times
8. Resevior Dogs- 252 times
9. Dead Presidents- 247 times
10. The Boondock Saints + Goodfellas#- 246 times

There was an interesting Seinfeld reality check when Aaron came back from the doctors and he had a five minute appointment only to make another appointment. The same thing happened to George in the Seinfeld first season episode Sarah and I were watching on the DVD last night. It must happen all the time.

I head a very interesting speech about religion and democracy on NPR The basic premise was that priests aren’t politicians and priests don’t believe that the republicans have it totally right about religion. The bible has a lot of content about charity, freedom, love that you wouldn’t find leading to tax cuts for the rich, cutting of social programs, and war. So a large part of the republican agenda is mis-aligned with the church. What has happened is that the republicans are much better at using the language and two big issues (because they are politicians) to make religion and a political party into a binary debate. The democrats should have just as much of a right to connect with the church and resonate with religious people but they have taken a stance of secularism and alienated religious people by not appealing to them. So the church is stuck with a need and a desire for a new way to approach politics.

In the Sharansky Case for Democracy book I so far have learned a bunch. I wish there was a diagram people could see about his main point. It is quite a simple one but even Bush and Rice aren’t latching on to it. It actually is the point which makes me think that going to Iraq was a right thing to do but for the wrong reason. Unfortunately you should fail the test when you get the answer right but you can’t show your work because there is no reason to believe you actually understand how to solve the problem. But Sharansky points to an interesting shift that if adopted could put a lot of pressure to lead towards world peace. The person he gives credit for it is Ronald Reagan. The idea is that any society that is run through tyranny is inherently unstable, it is like a soldier maintaining control by holding a gun at a person. Sooner or later the soldier will tire and the person will be free. In order to free the people in countries run by tyrants is to put direct pressure on the tyrants to respect human rights. In the case of the soviets trade sanctions and economic pressure was tied directly to the freeing of political prisoners and opening-up of human rights. This pressure rapidly cracked the entire wall of tyranny and put the soldier to sleep in a hurry. That is because without the human rights restrictions the tyranny can’t sustain it’s power by fear but without the help of the outside world they will fall apart from within. But this philosophy means moving away from a philosophy where a tyranny is ok provided the tyrant is our friend. This will be the hardest part for us to overcome since we have tyrants like the Saudis at the top of the tree who are powerful and necessary friends. We also can't push them around with sanctions since they can push us around with oil. Why do we need peace and freedom? Because that is what is right for all people and that is the dream.

Beauty king contestant number 3, Dan Housman, what is your wish?

Dan (blushing): World Peace.

Elections in Iraq have begun tonight in Australia for remote ballots. The live election begins on Sunday and it is bigger than the Superbowl even for me.

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On Monday afternoon Sarah and I took a trip to Dover to enjoy the snow. She did a good job of not crying too much when we climbed to the top and she fell in the snow without gloves on. We met a black Labrador who was running through the snow with a giant stick. It was good to get out of the city to appreciate the snow.

Yesterday I spent a good deal of the day at VMS events. At lunch there was a very interesting presentation by a company based out of research where they have a patented way to produce stem cells from adults by amplifying them with the right cocktails. It piqued my interest more than usual as I am always looking for the potential tipping point discovery that will lead to the fountain of youth. While this may not be a fountain of youth, the potential applications of having abundant stem cells for therapy could be huge. The initial targets are for blood factors but they could repopulate an aging body with a new set of stem cells and make it young again, or add stem cells that have been genetically modified to resolve a core problem with the body (either one that is inherent in all of us that causes us to age) or problems that are specific diseases related to aging like heart disease, muscle loss, bone fragility, and neural degradation. The team is only 5 people right now. I was tempted to stop in my tracks and offer cash, time, sweat, blood and potentially bone marrow. It could be that the fountain of youth is the media filled with the right cocktail of proteins to make a shaking petri dish shaking grow an infinite supply of each person's own stem cells. I’ll be following what they do and maybe will need to involve unqualified self in some way.

Sherwin gave some good advice to a group regarding luxury products. Basically the idea at Bose has always been that you can’t expect the channel to effectively create value for your products. So you need to do direct marketing. But in order to afford direct marketing you need to have more margin in the products. Customers will complain that a product is more expensive and luxurious but they will buy them anyways. If people only cared about price then everyone would be driving Kias because they are the cheapest cars on the market. Purchases are emotional decisions and having the lowest cost product doesn’t help that emotional decision – having the clearest message and a way for the consumer to appreciate the value in the product does. It has made me think about how to position any product in markets where there are free products. Maybe free isn’t the killer price point? In Sherwin’s quick diagrams the perfect price is at the elbow of value where any more cost doesn’t add to the value and the price is beyond what the user is willing to pay for the value. It was an interesting lesson at least. We were talking about rechargeable flashlights.

Today I have been combing the Internet for press contacts and bloggers who would have a potential interest in the smart organizer. It has led me to discover lots of odd products and sites that I otherwise wouldn’t have been using. I started using feedster and pluck in order to find bloggers with comments on desktop search. I also took a look at some odd organizer tools like grouper, an application that I thought would be useful for sharing videos but thought it was rather complex and required me to invite friends. I have the same problem with hello, I don’t want to invite my friends to do some sharing thing. I barely want to use the IM tools like Yahoo IM and I installed the Microsoft one again today just to chat with Aaron. I promptly uninstalled the grouper software. I also found a site called 43things where people all list what they are doing. I posted my new years resolution to it. There were some other interesting things like Neville Hobson’s weblog where the most striking thing is a gadget on it that shows who has been there and where the people currently looking at the page are from called Geoloc. The sidebar in the blog now has it included. I also played around with the new video search tool from google. It will show you every television show that mentioned Johnny Carson last week. I somehow got connected from one site to 43things, a site that lists people's goals and objectives. It is very overwhelming, like a buzzing of humanity crying out their goals and proclaiming them when they are achieved. I'm not sure I can look at it without having a panic attack. The interesting thing about it is that it allows you to find other people trying/hoping to do the same thing as you or those who have done it and can speak from the other side. The only thing that might allow me to relax is that thought of eternal life so that I could have more time to do all the things I would love to do. So I added that as my 11th thing was to "become immortal". My final discovery was the cheesus site. It was 30 seconds of entertainment.

At lunch today I read a bit of the Sports Illustrated article about the Patriots win against the Steelers. I was surprised to learn that Brady had a fever of 103 the day before and was attached to an IV. That information wasn’t in the news at all. It makes the win on Sunday all the more impressive. It would be great to go to the Superbowl but I don’t think it will happen. As season ticket holders I figured my dad and I would get some kind of information like an invitation to participate in a lottery for tickets. But as of today we are still waiting for our golden invitation. My fantasy of it was something out of Charlie and the Chocolate factory. I reality checked on Stubhub. The Stubhub ticket range is already $1695-$9000 per ticket. That is way out of the price range I am interested in paying. Oh well. I guess it is time for our second annual Superbowl party. Included below is the press release issued for the first one.

Sarah and I watched the movie Code 46 recently. It was great from a cinematography standpoint. They were mixing Gattaca, Lost in Translation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Rather than spending money on creating futuristic sets they went on location to Shanghai so things looked like the future but were all present tense scenery. My problem with the movie is that it lacked the strengths of any of those other movies and ultimately didn’t make enough sense or leave a completed feeling. Some of the problems came from this futuristic vision where IVF and cloning is everywhere but people get pregnant when they have sex once and then get arrested if they have sex again and it is genetically not a good idea. I saw it in sharp contrast to the end of an episode of ER where Dr. Green dies of a brain tumor that Sarah and I watched while eating lunch in Brookline Village the other day. In less than a minute they had Sarah's tear ducts working in overdrive and mine spilling some tears. The big difference is that you don't care what happens to Tim Robbins' character because he has a wife and cute child and then he screws around with some woman for one night. So what if he can't love her. At least Lost in Translation showed problems with a relationship. If they wanted to show a situation where two people get stuck they should have studied Miss Saigon. That was a successful tearjerker. Code 46 is worth a watch if you want to see some good cinematography of foreign futuristic buildings but it gets a C for story and the characters in it.

Press Release



MIT Professor installs high-definition television in preparation for Superbowl festivities

NEWTON, Mass Jan 30, 2004


The Superbowl preparations for a major party of hard core New England Patriots scheduled to be held at Housman family headquarters in Newton MA are going according to schedule. Stars from throughout the Massachusetts folk scene, Lisa Housman and David Falk, are rumored to be in attendance. In a recent attempt to boost Superbowl viewing pleasure professor David Housman, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, purchased a Samsung television set at Circuit City and had the cable provider Comcast install a high-definition hook-up to the cable television to the new television.

"He just walked in and bought the TV" said Marc Knopfeller the 19 year old sales agent from Circuit City in the Galleria Mall who helped with the purchase. "It was like he knew something big was going to happen and he needed to see it better. It was pretty cool."

Referring to the new installation professor Housman said "Dan The tv is in place, hooked up to a hi-def cable box and working like a champ. It is a 32" Samsung plasma. You are welcome to come by to see it any time before Sunday or check it out when you get there."

In addition to watching the television there is also expected to be a wide variety of food and drinks brought by various people to the event. Matt Swift will be bringing some choice bottles of wine. A run to the popular Whole Foods, formerly known as Bread and Circus, is expected to precede the Superbowl event where food including fresh filet mignon steaks, stinky cheeses, chicken sausages, and lemonade will be purchased. Matt Swift and Kate Hedgepeth are expected to stun attendees at the event with fine selections of wine from foreign countries. Hattie Schroeder will bring a selection of fresh rice-krispy cakes. Lisa Housman will be making her world famous Garlicky Hummus.

"With Robert Frigault coming and him being a citizen of Canada and all we realized this was an International event."

While Waichi Wong, the famed kidney doctor, may make an appearance but may need to be on-call in case anyone at the party suffers from unexpected kidney problems.

"Go Pats!" said Ruth Housman, excited about the commercials as well as a chance to try out her new third floor apartment set-up.

Due to a cellular phone problem with the new change your phone number program between providers, Dr. Housman's son Daniel was unavailable for comment.



About The Housman Family

The Housman family is a group of people living in Newton that enjoys going to Patriots games as well as getting together periodically for holidays. They believe that any problem can be solved with a good batch of chocolate cookies.

Housman is a registered trademark of Housman, Inc. All other logos, company and product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

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It was great to see the Patriots take it to the Pittsburgh Steelers. So far the playoffs couldn’t have gone any better. Even though as a Pats fan we had to root for the Jets against Pittsburgh or for the Broncos against the Colts it couldn’t be any more gratifying to see the Pats not just play an amazing defense and offense, but to beat both of them without any doubt, questionable call, or lucky break. It so far has been so very different from the first time the Pats won the Superbowl when Brady had a fluke play against the Raiders at the end of the Snow bowl, Pittsburgh cried about a couple of interference calls and someone stepping in bound or out of bounds. We just won the AFC Championship this year and there is no argument about it. The Pats are finally favored for the Superbowl.

So the past few days have been dedicated to Blizzard and Patriots worship. The blizzard gave Sarah and I an excuse to dust off the cross-country skis and to ski to Matt and Kate’s to watch the game. The journey to the game was a fun little expedition including a romp down a sledding hill where I went over a jump in my cross-country skis.

I had been reading anything I could get my hands on that was Patriots oriented in preparation for the game so on Saturday I polished off most of Patriot Reign, the book about the rise of the Pats under Bill Belichik. I always love how sports books cover topics like teamwork. This was a good little passage about Belichik learning about teamwork.

“He believed in some of the principles of the Naval Academy, where one of the traditions is a classic teamwork exercise. The young midshipmen or plebes, are required to climb the twenty-one-foot Herndon Monument after it’s been covered with 200 pounds of lard.”

I also found Scott Pioli, director of personnel for the Pats relationship as a son in law to Bill Parcells while working for Belichik to be of interest. It’s a quick read. Sarah and I had a long ski trip back from Matt and Kate’s. Just at the beginning Sarah was freezing to death because her gloves weren’t warm enough. Drinking a few bottles of wine probably didn’t help.

The deadline is looming in Iraq for the democratic elections that we have been promising since we invaded. Most of New England is focused on the Patriots going to the SuperBowl. We are Patriot fans and a home to revolutionaries who fight the imperialists. Some doctors, like Waichi my downstairs neighbor, are off to Sri Lanka to do what they can to try to stop people from dying in the wake of the tsunami. Yes I realize that tsunamis probably don’t have wakes. A boat has a wake. A tsunami is like the wake of an earthquake. Pardon the mixed metaphor I am too lazy to fix it.

I heard on CNN that they are going to change the amount of money that they give to the families of US Military that die in combat from $12,000 to $100,000. Anyone who hears about this money exchanged has to be amazed that the $12,000 was anything but an insult from the government to begin with. “I’m sorry Mrs. Jones to have to tell you that your husband and the father of your two year old son was killed by a suicide bomber last week. Here is a check for $12,000” Cut away to a politician wiping his hands back and forth together relieved that the slate is now clean between him and this happy to serve American military family. Now with the price at $100,000 the picture changes all so much.

I imagine this new change is the basis for the plot of a Hollywood movie where a suicidal man decides that the best thing he can do for his wife is to serve in the Iraq war so that he can die and have the $100,000 family benefit. So he goes to Iraq and takes on all the toughest riskiest assignments figuring he most likely will die. In each assignment he doesn’t die but instead does something amazing and heroic like saving children, protecting his fellow troops, convincing a fundamentalist not to commit suicide. Finally he realizes that humanity and life is a good and valuable thing and that his life is worth living. So he returns to his wife and two year old son after his tour of duty with an American flag waving in his hand. I always do wonder why suicidal people don’t take suicidal jobs. Maybe they do?

I am not saying that I am opposed to war or the war in Iraq. I didn’t vote for Bush. I generally get very annoyed when I hear people pushing hard to have the US abandon Iraq before they have instituted a democratic constitution and government. Getting democracy up and running in Iraq was the plan regardless of who was going to get elected. I get the distinct feeling that many anti-Bush people would prefer us to fail in Iraq. The most destructive thing we can do from here is to not follow through on our commitment to institute a functional democracy to replace the Hussein dictatorship. People pushing to pull out the troops because they are dying aren’t working towards this. What makes me most want us to stick around is who the terrorists are targeting other than the American troops. The freedom fighters are targeting people who are trying to run for political office or police and volunteers working to run and protect the polls for a free election. Imagine if whenever someone ran for Mayor of Newton there was some thug who had him killed and for good measure they offed the chief of police and the librarian who takes your ballot at the Mason Rice School. On principle the targeting of people trying to create a fair election is unacceptable behavior and I’m on the side that is against it, whatever side it is. In this case it is the American side.

What prompted this little tirade was that I was listening to NPR on Friday and the host was interviewing the man most responsible for the concepts in the President’s Inaugural speech, Nathan Sharansky. Apparently the Bush inaugural address was written after a few readings of the Russian dissident and Israeli politician’s book – The Case for Democracy. This is probably because in December Bush and Rice spent time with Sharansky in the White House. It is easy enough to throw Sharansky into the neo-con bus but he has some real credentials as a Soviet dissident regarding how history should move forwards to bring democracy to countries that don’t allow freedoms so I thought I might be able to learn something by reading his book. He didn’t write it with the idea that Bush would appropriate it.

The whole situation reminds me of when I was on the train in Italy from Venice to Milan and I was sitting with a group of Iranian men who were happy to talk to a real American. They wanted to make it clear that the biggest problem they have today in Iran is freedom and they can’t figure out how to get it given the current climate. They even hinted that it could be possible that the only answer is for the US to invade since the only other option is to have an Ayatollah who is benevolent and cedes power to the people rather than forcing his rule through the right to override any democratic decisions.

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Sarah had an overnight babysitting assignment last night leaving me to my own devices to seek out trouble. So when Lisa called to invite me to a show to see her talented friends from Blue Horizon play a gig in Portsmouth New Hampshire at the Dolphin Striker I took her up on the offer.

Blue Horizon was an amazing band with a great sound. I could hear influences in all sorts of genres and the Boston music scene. At times I could hear hints of the Lemonheads rockin’ with some sultry emotional Aimee Mann-like singing in the front. The harmonies between Elizabeth and Jason are heavenly. Elizabeth had written one of her songs in a Tori Amos moment and she is a master with the electric violin. I especially enjoyed Make me a gypsy, and When the sun goes down. Blue Horizon is coming out with a new album and they played some of the music from it. It was worth the trip in the zero Kelvin weather that had me superconducting without the windchill and the long drive to Portsmouth to hear them play.

People in Boston are lucky to see them when they are just playing in Harvard square outside. Lisa and Elizabeth were chatting about doing some sledding and cross-country skiing once the snow hits. That would be fun. (BTW: Don’t miss the Club Passim homeless shelter benefit event at the end of the month.)

It was no easy feat to get there. I ended-up in a long discussion with Aaron on the way out the door from Burlington about how to make organizational software help people get more organized instead of adding more work to their life. I was rushing out the door to play squash with Matt and I had accidentally forgotten about meeting-up with Hattie. Matt beat me soundly at squash. I think I won the last game but lost about six games in between. We spent a good chunk of time prior to playing squash trying to map out where we would all get together to watch the football game on Sunday. The problem is that you have to factor variables like the size of screen, dogs/no dogs, people who can only make one of two games, airplanes, weather, unknown invitations. It is nearly as complex as trying to create a defense to stop the Steelers offense with Jerome Bettis, Deuce Staley, and Plexico Burress. I later talked to my dad, who is very sick and doesn’t want to get other people sick so that nixes Newton. I think the final result will be to watch that game at Kate and Matt’s sans pug dogs. At least we have a tentative game plan.

I was about to drive over to Lisa and Dave’s as I pulled out of the gym so I called Robert who thought it was too late for him to be included in the plan. He was at the Prudential Center and it is only twenty minutes from the gym. Robert has managed to recruit the daughter of the zit guy from New York subway ads to act as an intern to support his many projects. She claims to have learned more from him in 45 minutes than she learned in two years of a liberal college. She believes that Robert is the next David Foster (the guy who discovered and produced hits for Celine Dion, Garth Brooks, and 'N Synch). While we were scouting talent in Portsmouth he left her hard at work to design the requirements for an independent music portal. I had some intern jealousy but I can probably get an unpaid intern from BU. I got this email from them the other day.

“You can advertise unpaid internships through the Office of Career Services (617-353-3590), future@bu.edu).”

Robert’s real problem these days is that he finally launched his web site frigault.com but he doesn’t appear as the first item in Google searches. Instead what appears is a site that contains this content “HOMMES AYANT DES RELATIONS SEXUELLES AVEC D’AUTRES HOMMES”. So Robert would like friends to add his real web site about him as links to their sites so that people stop pointing out the site that Google favors over him. It is especially ironic because his site advertises measurable marketing results. I think this problem will take care of itself quickly enough. Robert also put a link to his formerly dormant blog.

Robert is in transition now that he has left ChannelWave and is thinking of moving to another city. I have been pushing him to continue his business of creating communities of people living on city roofs. The roof citizens would be a new era of conscious humanity with a society of reuse acting as wise city leaders. These people would be called roofies. The idea came to him when he was inspired while reading about Buckminster Fuller’s life and times and he read about Fuller moving into a city roof and having elaborate parties with artists and musicians of the time. It is Robert’s hope to achieve Fuller’s dreams that we are still behind in achieving but we may be able to accomplish some day.

“Fuller predicted that by 1989, the youth who have lived their entire lives in the Space Age, will be of age to command and execute a world-embracing design-science revolution. This will result in the "conversion of all humanity into an integrated, omniharmonious, economically successful, one-world family" (xix).
From Doctreus Neutopia

If you have the power pitch-in and link your high traffic site to Robert’s to help him through this tough time. He is also once again actively looking for a low cost rentable roof in Boston to place a geodesic dome to establish the roofie community.

I mentioned to Robert my secret million dollar plan involving cranberry juice and seltzer but everyone agreed that it is best to not discuss it in case the Allaire brothers have planted listening devices everywhere. Maybe that will help us to achieve an omniharmonious state.

On the ride back we passed many Bank of America ATMs as we were driving through the city at 2am. The old ATMs were Fleet and they were green. It was nice during the holidays because they were switching over from the green ATMs to the red ones and because it wasn’t done overnight the red and green holiday colors were everywhere in the city. Now the bright red white and blue are sticking out everywhere. The banks look like they should be called Bank of Captain America and have a person dressed-up as captain America standing outside of each one to answer questions or give you money.

Aaron told me this little gem about opportunity.

Two shoe salespeople both go to remote villages in India to investigate whether they should create an office there. When they arrive they both see that nobody in the villages they visited wears shoes. On returning to their companies one salesman tells their boss - There is no market for shoes in India because nobody wears shoes. The other tells their boss - The market for shoes in India is unlimited - nobody has them yet.

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While waiting outside in the cold for the T yesterday morning I was reaching to grab my daily Metro when I spotted another more interesting paper with a picture of a hot chick wearing a cut-off Brady jersey. As an avid sports fan I couldn’t help but pick up the week old edition of Barstoolsports. Despite being so out of date that the content didn’t yet acknowledge that the Patriots had beaten the Colts it was a fantastic find and one that I look eagerly forwards towards. It is a Boston Maxim for sports. Among the articles was probably one of the best summaries of what it’s like to be a Pats fan that grew up through tough times and how grateful we all are and should be to have

“The success the Pats have had in the last three seasons is beyond anything I could have dreamed of as a kid. It’s like my wife’s minivan with the DVD player, or Sunday liquor sales, or free abundant internet porn. I‘m living to see it, but I still can’t believe it‘s real.”

The ads in this rag are pretty entertaining too. They feature services like legal help to get out of a drunk driving offense. Call Jack Diamond 1-800-NOTDRUNK! I also had a good experience learning something new while listening to sports talk radio today. Paul Giamatti, who is in the new movie Sideways, is featured in a picture with his father during the movie. Sideways is about two guys having their last bachelor party like fling before one of them gets married. The sports radio person didn't know Paul Giamatti (famous for roles like American Splendor, Duets, and Private Parts) but he was wondering why there was a picture of former MLB commissioner Bart Giamatti, his father in this movie.

My morning started off with a clear omen that the holiday season had passed as I was stuck behind a Christmas tree destruction vehicle. It basically has a conveyor belt where discarded Christmas trees are carried to a mulch making grinder that then sends the Christmas tree in tiny bits, Fargo style, into the back of a truck. I can only imagine the little kids who fell in love with their Christmas tree looking out the window to see the careless and painful death that their beloved tree befell. I wanted to take pictures of it but I was driving and behind it at rush hour so my Brookline neighbors were mainly interested in my passing it. So my camera has a video of me passing a Christmas Tree destruction death star vehicle as a Christmas Tree begins it’s descent into it’s demise.

Today Aaron came up with a good idea for a funny little product. At first I thought it was a real product. He wanted to make a Homeland security screen saver that changes your desktop based upon the current security level. I did a write-up of it on halfbakery.com. It was then pointed out to me that there is something similar available through the government has a tool available. BTW - The current status of the HLS color warning system is yellow or elevated, probably because of the Chinese people who were trying to bring a dirty bomb or fried rice into Boston yesterday (so I was feeling a little worried). The FBI identified their names are as follows: Zengrong Lin, Wen Quin Zheng, Xiujin Chen, Guozhi Lin, Quinquan or Quiquan Lin, Liqiang Liang, Min Xiu Xie, Xiang or Xing Wei Liu, Mei Xia Dong, Xiuming Chen, Cheng Yin Liu, and Zao Yun Wang. The FBI wants us to remember that list the next time you ask an asian tourist their name.

I was trying today get Robert to download the new beta version of the software I am marketing and to collect on the breakfast that I won from him last Friday but he sent me an email to tell me that his PC is off to the doctor and that he has been mistaken for a wise man by a zit doctor’s daughter so he is otherwise occupied.

While roaming the halls at MIT today I found that building 1 is one of the harder locations to find. I should recall how to get to every building at MIT but once you are done forgetting quantum mechanics, synthetic organic chemistry, and Medieval literature you can move on to forget other important things like how to find building 1. It made me think of how useless most of my education really is. I can barely remember the names of my teachers in high-school let alone try to work through the dates, names, and roles of the emperors of Rome and other critical things I had to give oral reports on in high school.

As I was walking down the halls I couldn’t help but be drawn to all the posters. I have always had this problem of being unable to ignore text that I see beside me. As a kid once I had learned to read I used to read any sign that the car passed. So I would say things like Bill’s House of Pizza, Stop, Montrose Spa, and Boys and Girls Club, and Girls XXX. My parents taught me that it was best to read these signs to myself and not say the words out loud. So now I generally try not to point out a funny sign unless it is really weird. For example – There are signs everywhere in Massachusetts that say “remember chicken man”. So every time I pass one of these signs I have to bite my tongue to avoid telling people that I saw another one of these cryptic signs. I had been wondering what they were all about for a long time and only today while reading barstoolsports did I learn that Wade Boggs was called the fried chicken man and he was up for a hall of fame nomination for the past couple of years and only got one this year. So now I know what the signs are all about. They were to show support for Wade Boggs.

Anyways the hallways of MIT are a trap for me. My heart rate nearly goes through the roof as I scanned the many signs in the infinite corridor during my four trips back and through it while lost looking for building 1. I couldn’t help wanting to participate in the East Campus bad ideas competition, or to be involved in a research study. I wanted to know more about the lecture on becoming a science journalist. I was considering buying tickets to Musical Theatre Guild’s presentation of Tommy. I wanted to see the screening of Trouble with Tribbles at LSC during the sci-fi marathon that starts with Ghost in the Shell and includes Space Balls. The most interesting of the signs was that Roadkill Buffet, my old MIT improv comedy troupe, is still alive and performing. They have a show this upcoming week. It sparked my imagination to get Jorey, Igor, Nadia, and Ron together with them for the full Roadkill Buffet alumni reunion show. I’ll try to pitch it to all required parties when I get a chance.

Jeremy continues to send dispatches from Australia analyzing the various differences in male sexual diversions. He sent this to me among some of his trip notes recently

“I've finally figured out Australia's system of rating the dirty magazines and found that they have basically three classes of magazine. One is called unrestricted which is basically topless girls i believe and can sit out on the newsstand, the next two categories are restricted 1 and restricted 2. Most magazines come in all 3 flavors with increasing hardcoreness. What we have on the newsstands in the states is basically category 2 which includes anything you want to show. Category 1 magazines are identical to category two versions but they have re-cropped all the pictures to cut off all insertion of anything into anywhere and have airbrushed all bodily fluids from the photos. Frankly i wouldn’t mention all this but i accidentally bought a category 1 and 2 of the same magazine and found the amount of work they had to do to make the American version of hustler into the category 1 version absolutely ludicrous. In several instances they have had to airbrush so much of the photos that the girls could be said to be more cartoon than real, of course you wouldn’t notice unless you had the other version of the magazine and knew what they were airbrushing out. In other instances they will just take a tame picture from one part of the layout and replicate it in various sizes shapes and aspect ratios over
the pictures they couldn’t show from the harder version. Its all very
amusing.”

DK also has his notes about foreign sex clubs. His rare anthropological gem is that the anus is taboo in New Zealand although strip clubs are completely nude so the strippers always cover their butts. It is a big lifetime pursuit of all men, especially the ones who read magazines like barstoolsports or Maxim to understand the differences in culture with respect to pornography and strippers. Speaking of strippers… one of the good ideas that I found while poking around on halfbakery.com today was the idea of anniversaries for bachelor parties.

Anyways my phone rang silently while Sarah and I were wolfing down food at Zaftigs and it read that DK had called me. We were sitting between two pairs of people. On my right was a beady eyed half bald man that looked like the guy who is looking for food in the SUV commercial where the boyfriend decides to spend more time in the great outdoors. He kept giving me an evil look. The woman on my left had a haughty accent and was planning on going to Amelia Island. I felt bad that no matter what she says people will think she is a snob because her accent is so classically stereotypical snobby. If I could record it and do impressions of it I would have. Sarah and I were pondering why DK would call me and her theory was that he might be calling to tell me that he had gotten engaged. I was sure that couldn’t be it because he would have sent me an email to say such a thing. I told her that if he did tell me he was engaged on the phone that my first question would be whether he had knocked-up his girlfriend. When I finally checked by calling DK to see what the email at dinner was all about he told me that he just happened to have his phone in his pocket and it hit my number because he had dialed it recently.

I got tired of having such a two dimensional universe so I thought I'd check-in from MIT with a 3D view of 77 Mass Ave. I made the 3D picture using Photo3D from Mission3D. I was reminded that I could do this sort of thing when I was in Toronto a few weeks back and my grandfather was looking for unique items that were lightweight that he could distribute in Canada. He was always interested in 3D products and had distributed a physical system for making stereoscopic pictures when he was about 75. Since I had bought and used (but never published) some 3D images using the tool I figured I should pick it back up. Normally you are supposed to use a tripod but I eyeballed this one. It is tricky to do. If you don't carry 3D glasses with you at all times I am not sure what to tell you in order to see this. Maybe you should come to my place. I have some real 3D glasses. Or you can order nice ones on the Mission3D web site.

Aaron and I went to a meeting yesterday at a venture capitalist's office. We are too early stage for taking VC and it isn't necessarily our style at the moment but we are always interested in keeping options open. Aaron had been delayed by a few minutes because he had to run an errand at the Prudential Center and he couldn't find his way out of the building after he ran the errand. So Aaron made a joke out of it by telling them that they should be familiar with the problem of not being able to find an exit. One of them responded that they did fine as long as they could find their way out of the mall 30% of the time.

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Last night while Sarah and I were renting some new movies we decided to make spaghetti and meatballs. So we stopped over at the store to pick-up some meat, freshly grated pecorino cheese, and garlic bread. We came home with a host of other items including a new loofa sponge, a replacement can opener, a new brush for Sarah, and US Magazine's weekly update on Brad and Jennifer's break-up.

Sarah was mildly annoyed with me during the shopping excursion because I had refused to help her reach for the brush that she wanted that was on an overhanging hook where Stop and Shop has decided to sell odd items that you didn't used to find in a supermarket. It is like a whole other world when you look up at the overhanging items while you shop. I mainly was just giving her a hard time because she always pushes the pug dog to jump onto the bed or into or out of the car instead of helping him to do it. The reaching for the brush reminded me of that experience so I decided to give her a similar response. The "Good girl" command that I gave her after she successfully retrieved the brush after six or seven jumping swipes at her fingertips was probably what really made her miffed. Remember New Years resolution number 10 - Be nice to Sarah. Ooops.

When we got home we were still sweaty from the gym so we went to our respective corners to make telephone calls to people. I called Robert to ask if he wanted to come to dinner and Sarah talked to Lynne. We both invited folks over to dinner but Lynne was going over to Francisco's place so we didn't manage to get our Italian consult on spaghetti and meatballs. But Robert was over at Lisa and Dave's so all three of them came over for a big Italian dinner celebration. Robert has declared 2005 the year of the dinner party. I personally think it is the year of the Poker night as movies like Tilt are even coming out about Poker. Poker is the new trend that has knocked out Swing dancing. It is too bad because swing dancing is more active. Regardless of the mega-trend. The local trend is that we are all eating dinner in because it is cheaper.

So Robert, Dave, and Lisa came with a bottle of red wine. Because of that we left our bottle of white wine that we had put in the freezer to chill quickly in the freezer. I found it this morning frozen. It had dripped a little through the cork to form a frozen wine puddle in the freezer. Hopefully it is still drinkable but it could just be a casualty of irresponsibility. Things could be worse.

The meal was quite tasty and we spent plenty of time getting the scoop from Lisa and Dave about their lives and times. They launched their new blog Musings today through their newsletter that is promoting the big Club Passim show at the end of the month. See below.

A good chunk of the end of the evening was spent watching Robert trying to make a copy of Renaldo and Clara, a Bob Dylan movie only available through a bootleg made off of Spanish television. DVD copying of a 4 hour movie takes over 4 hours and tons of disk space so Robert eventually had to abandon the project.

Today was a big day for software because Picasa 2 was announced. I'm psyched to play with it to improve the indexing of those photos on my site.

Monday, January 31, 7 PM
CLUB PASSIM
Street Performers' Night-A Benefit for the Harvard Square Homeless Shelter47 Palmer StreetCambridge (Harvard Square), MA(617) 492-7679
Featuring Tom Bianchi (host), Danielle Miraglia, Lisa Bastoni, Teresa Storch, Kevin So , Rachel McCartney, Brian Webb, Ari & more

Click here to order tickets by internet

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On Friday night Robert and I went down to Flattop Johnnie’s. Normally we would just go down to drink but the bar was crowded and the pool tables weren’t so we rented a pool table instead. Since Robert and I are gamblers we gambled on every game. The first game Robert decided that the winner would need to buy the first beer. While I was excited to win the first game it was a bit of a bittersweet victory buying Robert’s beer for it. So after that I pushed for loser buys the beer. After a few rounds we ran out of things to gamble for because there is only so much beer and appetizers we can drink so we tried to get creative.

The first creative gambling suggestion was to play for making fried eggs. The loser had to provide eggs and fry them for the winner. I won that game too. We tried to get suggestions from the waitress but her main suggestion was to have the loser wash the winner’s car. Since Robert doesn’t have a car that was out. Finally we switched to playing darts and I opted to win a more complete breakfast from Robert including toast, bacon, and coffee. Robert did win a few games and we had a good time chatting with the bartender and taking blurry pictures of her. We also were waiting to play darts behind a pair of mismatched people where the woman was incredible looking and the man was completely unattractive. Robert kept pushing me to get a photo of the woman but without the flash it wasn’t easy to do.

Dave K. came back from Chile this week to start his business school experience. He stopped by Matt and Kate’s place after we had a social get together to watch NFL playoff football. Matt B. also attended. We found him on the street as he was walking home from Staples with a large paper shredder and offered him a ride as we were going to the thrift shop to donate more clutter from the apartment. The main item we were donating was the two brown vintage 1970s Bose speakers that had been mercilessly clawed at by the Housman family cat Jackson throughout the ‘80s. So we put Sarah on Matt’s lap and the paper shredder on Kim’s lap in order to fit everyone in the car with the two gigantic speakers. The first place we tried to donate it to was the place where we had donated a ton of items a few weeks ago but this time I was there doing the donating instead of Kim and Sarah. The guy took one look at me and said “I’ll pass” on the speakers. So we made Matt B. carry one of the giant speakers to another thrift shop around the corner where a nice man pulled a shopping cart up to us and took the speakers away as we ran out the door before anyone asked questions.

I was listening to the NPR radio on Saturday as I was driving back to pick-up the pug dog after Kate made a specific request to have us bring him for the second half of the NFL Sunday. The radio show was about comic book artists who started a company to bring US comics to foreign markets. The first comic they were working on was a version of Spiderman for the Indian market. The comic stars Pavitr Prabhakar instead of Peter Parker. Instead of just translating the comic they localized it to fit the market which meant many very interesting changes. The characters aren’t as connected to science and technology as they are to ancient cultural deities. So Spiderman doesn’t get his powers from a radioactive spider but instead through some spiritual connection to another life. The Doc Octopus character doesn’t have mechanical arms but instead the multi-armed demon arms from Indian literature and art. Even the stories need to be changed because western plot lines involve a hero who sets their own destiny and path while eastern stories involve a hero who is fulfilling a destiny with forces around them greater than themselves controlling them. The broadcast is available on NPR.



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Last night was the big Pats game. My dad and I were there for the whole game. It was great to finally see a game where the Patriots clearly beat the Colts and was one of the first decisive wins I’ve seen the Patriots have in the playoffs. The past few years there has been so much whining by the Colts and other teams that they would have won against the Patriots if one call had gone another way. Since the Jets blew their chance to beat the Steelers we get to play a strong team in the next round. It would be most fitting if the Pats could beat the Steelers decisively next week and then win the Superbowl against the Eagles. Then the Pats could have a case with no arguments against it that they are the world champions and didn’t catch any lucky breaks to land them in the winners circle. I also loved the swirling snow queuing just as the game was about to start knowing that the snow is a big challenge for a visiting team from a dome stadium.

Folks in the park were calling out “Cut that meat” based on the Peyton Manning Mastercard commercial. Mastercard is the only company still making good commercials. The ones with the dog finding his way home were great too but it is hard not to laugh at the Manning ads. The winner for most annoying ad campaign for me at the moment is the Jared Subway ads. I don’t have anything against Subway. I actually like the Indian family that established a Subway a block away in Coolidge Corner. I just don’t believe that anyone who has been thin for more than four years can keep claiming that he got thin eating sandwiches and is staying thin by doing so. They either need a new fat guy or something else because I can’t watch Jared without wanting to gag myself anymore and soon that Indian family who owns the Subway down the street are going to pay for it.

After I returned from the game Sarah and I decided to watch a movie. Unfortunately for us it turned out to be bad movie night. We had rented Before Sunset the sequel to Before Sunrise so we tried to watch it. Both movies are plagued by a low budget all dialog based way of exploring the two characters. But unlike Before Sunrise, Before Sunset is pretentious and very boring. We had to turn it off halfway through the two-hour conversation between the two stranger characters so I don’t know the ending. I am sure they will make two more of them over the next 20 years. After Sunset and After Sunrise where eventually Ethan Hawke and the French girl meet in old age homes and funeral parlors.

So we turned one bad movie off only to see another bad movie. We also had rented The House and Sand and Fog. It is by some Russian guy who probably watched Jennifer Connelly in Requiem for a Dream and wanted to make another downer of a movie with JC as an idiot drug addict. Connely’s character was annoying rather than someone you could be sympathetic towards and the overall plot based on a foreclosure would drive any lawyer crazy and the relationship with a cop with family problems would make any real police officer wonder whether the officer in this movie was lobotomized before he got mixed-up in the plot. I like Ben Kingsley but I had to wonder what race or background Kingsley is from. In this movie he is Iranian but he played Ghandi. To me he looks Caucasian.

This morning we attempted go tube sledding with the pug dog. It was less than simple given that we had to hand pump the tube sleds and our journey to find a suitable site for sledding was epic. We started with the plan to go to Albemarle in Newton where I have fond sledding memories but when we arrived there after some clever driving to locate the slowest possible route we learned that the Fessenden school had decided to build a new facility and road where the sledding hill once was. So we went back to the Newton Centre playground and tried again. While we were spending twenty minutes lightly inflating one of the tube sleds a group of twenty children started-up a snow football game at the base of the hill. So we took a few slides down crashing through little kiddos with my 205 point frame at forty MPH knocking them down like candle-pin bowling pins before Sarah determined that the added liability and necessary insurance coverage for killing children was beyond our means. So we packed-up and returned home.

I have been trying to market Viapoint and among my tasks was to create an account in MediaMap, a site that is designed for PR professionals. They do have some public resources including some magazines that request help from the community of PR folks to find them sources for their stories. This week Woman’s World was putting lots of feelers out for stories including fun ones like this one.

"I need a story about a woman who was addicted to shopping, details of what she bought, how she paid for all of it, where she stored it, etc. Also need a story about a woman who was addicted to clutter - piles of newspapers stacked everywhere in the house, things all over the place, couldn’t throw anything out. These women must be cured now, and everything must be great again. Please help! Nancy Minikes, Research Editor"

I also followed a link to a site called Trendsetters.com because they were looking for people with a scoop on the sexy side of the Sundance Film Festival. They did have some good information on the current state of affairs of online dating. Among the areas pointed out was an online dating site for tall people (or people who date tall people) called Tallfriends.com. I would like to post a really short person on the site who loves to date tall people or just join the club to see how tall they really get. Are we talking about six five women here? I also found that one of Jeremy’s better ideas has been productized and monetized by someone else. His idea was to create a dating site for rating people on other dating sites. It is available through lemondate.com. At least he can finally get revenge against some of the women who stood him up because he had a roommate.

Sarah and I finally hunkered down to watch a serious movie last night so we watched Control Room. It was a pretty strong movie about Al Jazeera and how they fit into the puzzle of the fighting in Iraq in the latest war. It has some great and rich characters like a producer who chain smokes and a clean cut US army press relations guy. I think the presentation was balanced although the premise of the movie was that no presentation from any side is ever really balanced because the balance is always tipped towards what the viewers in the audience want to see. The arab viewers watching their television station reporting on the Iraq war want to see some anti-American sentiment just as much as Americans want to see some jingoist hoorah's about our role in the war.

Probably the best scene in the movie is when they cover the presentation by Al Jazeera of dead and captured American prisoners of war. I recall the television coverage and at the time watching Fox I thought about Al Jazeera as some form of monstrous lying propaganda organization. But in Control Room the army news correspondent goes through his thought process when he was first horrified by seeing the footage of the images of Americans dead and injured after a few hours earlier seeing similar footage of Iraqi collateral casualties and not being affected emotionally at all. So he realized that the arab world must be deeply offended and horrified by our lack of emotion when arabs are shown dying as if these people don't matter but our people do.

Speaking of unilateral conversations I also was reading Infinite Jest yesterday on the train home and David Foster Wallace gave a compelling reason why video phones ultimately will always fail. The basics are that most people when on the telephone enjoy doing lots of other things and assume that the person on the other side of the line is actually paying full attention to what they say. Because of the illusion of unilateral commitment to the conversation both sides believe they are getting the better of the other and are satisfied by the experience. Once video comes into the picture people need to be on their best behavior and to look attractive, neither of which is particularly appealing and makes the experience worse than a purely aural interaction.

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On Saturday night Matt turned 35 and hosted the first poker night. Normally poker night would be filled with zealous poker folks hoping to hone their skills in preparation for a big trip to the high rollers room at Bellagio. The crowd including myself were complete poker nincompoops. We needed Matt to draw on a piece of paper the order of the hands so that we knew whether three of a kind beats a flush or if a straight beats a flush. Now a few days later I still would need the paper to remember which hand would win.

Poker night actually fell on the Venn diagram overlapping with NFL Wildcard playoffs. So Sarah and I had worked out at the gym while watching the first half of the NFC game. We went to the BSC at the Landmark center so that Sarah could go to Bed Bath and Beyond to return a gold drapery that she had bought with Kim as a test for the living room. She had created a model of one of the windows and it looked positively too regal for the living room. Plus the curtain wrapping was over $80 so it better look great if we are going to get three of them. At Bed, Bath, and Beyond she then proceeded to purchase matching white curtains to match what was left of the model window after removing the gold drapery to just get the basics covering the windows and avoid neighbors peeking into our exciting lives where they might see things like us watching movies in the living room. Sarah put those new curtains up on Sunday afternoon. Later in the day she realized that we had two sets of off-white curtains and one set of white curtains that was a great disappointment to her given that she needs to make another trip to the great beyond.

The AFC playoff game was a great distraction because it provided much entertainment whenever I needed to fold my cards. I don't think it is proper poker etiquette to fold as soon as you see your cards and then go to watch the Jets vs. Chargers game. The poker game itself showed some competitive spirit and strangely at first the guys playing were winning while the women were losing. I am not sure why this was but it may be some basic social capacity for men to be deceitful and successful at it. It also might have had something to do with the cards that we were dealt. Sarah did get a straight flush, which is almost impossible to beat, and she didn’t raise her bet with it against me so being poker nincompoops could also have contributed to some of the women’s results.

One thing about poker that is dangerous is that it encourages people to bluff each other outside of the poker table. Once you learn that you can get someone to concede by concealing that you don’t have a great hand that behavior carries over into other pursuits. For example, good sales people are normally good poker players.

This would be good if it doesn’t potentially have disastrous consequences when someone overplays their cards in real life. Suppose during a sales process the sales representative decides that they have the client convinced that they can only do business with their company. They then press the client to pay high rates beyond what they should be able to afford or would normally agree to because they have bluffed the client into resigning that they only have one solution. Siebel, SAP, and Oracle used to be great at doing this. The client is backed into a corner and the sales rep is basically gambling that they can still get what they want once they know that the client’s negotiating position is weak.

The rep is encouraged to bluff as much as possible and push for the highest possible price but at some critical breaking point they can overplay their hand and the client can be forced to go to a competitor causing the deal fall apart completely and screw-up the work that the engineering department, customer service teams, marketing and management team have put into making it possible for them to have a good hand in the first place. But you need to have sales people able to gamble and when they win it can be very rewarding but when they lose… everyone around them loses with them. That’s why a lot of people get annoyed with sales people.

When I start to think of life again as a pure entrepreneur with no income to fall back upon I quickly fall into financial panic mode. Not having a normal job conjures fears of frightening things like the dreaded COBRA. Why did the federal government choose to name a health insurance continuation system after a deadly poisonous snake? Aren’t unemployed people scared enough that they might crack their uninsured skulls on the pavement in the winter? I think they wanted people to fear using this beast of a system to keep citizens held firmly to their jobs to leave becoming an entrepreneur to the crazies like me.

The health insurance scare is not the only area where I panic. I also start to think of what I might need to do to save money. Since dining out is a major expense I will need to change my diet so that I can eat in order to survive as a starving entrepreneur. I may need to focus on the key low cost food items like canned tuna fish, pasta, peanut butter, potatoes, bread, and ramen noodles. Each of these foods holds some place in my memory as a cheap and necessary survival food. Canned tuna and peanut butter go back to my days as a child. I think my parents fed me tuna and peanut butter when we lived in Watertown because it is expensive to feed a young child and my parents didn’t have much money until I was ten. I almost prefer to eat these low cost products since I grew up on them. They are familiar. In college when I wouldn’t have food to eat in the summer I would eat spaghetti or ramen noodles. Just add water products taste great and give the illusion of cooking.

I also should be monitoring all my expenses and cut-off the ones that I don’t need to spend on. I can take a look at my credit card statement to see where the money is going. I’ll have to cancel my subscription to Internet karaoke. That’s $50 every three months that I just shouldn’t be spending. I’ll have to cancel the cleaning service that comes every two weeks – That’s $150 a month that I shouldn’t be spending either. I’ll need to make sure that if I buy clothing that it comes from outlet malls or thrift shops. I can borrow clothing from friends and never return it. I can switch my gasoline down to Regular from Super. My car won’t notice. Maybe I can save some money on power by turning lights off during the day and not air conditioning in the summer. I could use someone else’s Internet connection in my building by connecting to their wireless network. I could charge rent to a boarder living in the third room. Maybe I should rent the apartment completely and then move back in with my parents and sell possessions that I don’t need like my car in order to raise money. They have plenty of space and would probably pay me an allowance to walk the dogs.

I may even need to get a real job that requires an interview? (Gasp).

So I worry about all these things but it is worth it in order to follow a dream to build a company, make a film, or create many companies that will most likely take 10 years to build with lots of blood, sweat, and tears and then topple under unforeseen circumstances leaving me back where I am today, worried about what will happen if I jump without a net. I should consider myself lucky because next time it might be trickier because I’ll probably have kids worried about their college education, a wife worried about the kids college education, and a nasty 30 year mortgage on a house to put the kids in until they get a college education.

In the Metro this morning Finagle a Bagle was advertising the availability of a new service to make lower carb bagels called “make it skinny”. The offer is to scoop out the inside of your bagel to lose up to 25% of the carbs and calories. The service is the equivalent of throwing out half of your bagel for you. At some point in the future people will look back and laugh at the low carb craze and the silly activities to convince consumers that their beers, donuts, bagels, and candy bars could help stay fit. I am still waiting for the surgeon general, hopefully one that looks like an ancient mariner, to announce that reducing carbs causes strange side effects like incontinence, erectile dysfunction, and heart disease.

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We had been held over for an extra day in Toronto because of the snow but on Friday we were able to get back. In the airport we didn’t have any trouble getting through customs and into the terminal where the plane takes off so my dad and I both got our shoes shined. We tried to guess where one of the men shining our shoes was from. He looked like he was from India, Pakistan, and Egypt but he was actually from Tel Aviv Israel. In general if someone thinks it will be hard to guess where they are from I can’t figure it out. But I play the game every time anyways. One time one of our clients challenged me to guess where he was from. I guessed India and Pakistan. It turned out he was Egyptian. Next time I’ll guess India, Pakistan, Egypt, and Israel. Eventually I’ll just go through the whole list of countries.

Before the flight we went to the TGIFridays bar in the terminal near the gate we were leaving from. We couldn’t find a table near the bar so we had to go to the empty glass cage that is better known as the smoker section. We were the only ones there and I felt like we looked like what humans in a zoo would look like on an alien planet. Having been through the full family tree on my mother’s side of the family Lisa and I spent time with my dad diagramming the family tree on his side of the family.

We hit on some interesting facts and people like my great uncle Audie, who had been a revolutionary interested in fighting in the Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish civil war. The Spanish Civil War was the prelude to World War II. The Nazi Luftwaffe got their practice in Spain running bombing runs there and one bombing run resulted in the total destruction of the city of Guernica. Guernica is most famous to people because of the Picasso painting about the massacre, and not the massacre itself, and especially not as the beginning of the Nazis practicing mucking about in the world and doing evil things.

I also learned about my grandmother’s aunt Becky who had some fame in her time. She hung out with Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman. They were all anarchists. The story goes something like this. Berkman tried to assassinate a steel magnate but at the time was the lover of Emma Goldman. When he returned from prison he was distrustful of most of the world and only would consort with a small number of people including Emma Goldman who was then starting to get a little older, maybe 35, and a young woman who he took an interest in and also became a lover with who was 16, Rebecca Edelson (aunt Becky). Becky had her own claim to fame when she got arrested during an anarchist fight during a union strike against the railroads where she was helping the railroad workers strike. While in prison she went on a hunger strike and became the first woman in modern history to have tried a political protest through a hunger strike. Somewhere in the archives of history a headline in the New York Times reads - “Girl ends eating strike by eating bon-bon.” That girl is Becky.

On the flight I spent most of the time reading Infinite Jest. It is obvious that David Foster Wallace has read Faulkner since I think of it as a modern equivalent to The Sound and The Fury. It is a little less pedantic and more drug oriented. I especially liked some passages on pg. 38 about a high-school relationship and on pg. 48 about a Canadian documentary about a paranoid schizophrenic that is studied in the show. The schizophrenic is afraid that someone is trying to inject radioactive materials into his bloodstream to extract information from his brain. Later in the documentary they take a PET scan of his brain to understand it better and inject radioactive materials to highlight the brain activity. I also liked this joke from Infinite Jest although when I retold it to Lisa she said she had heard it before.

“What do you get when you cross an insomniac, an unwilling agnostic, and a dyslexic? … You get somebody who stays up all night torturing himself mentally over the question of whether or not there is a dog”.

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For the past two nights we have been going out to Einsteins bar after the funeral activity dies down. It is in the University of Toronto campus near fraternity row. Einsteins is a bit of a dive but my dad declared it to have been the best bar he had found when he went to a 3 day drag of a meeting at the airport so we had to trust him. The bartender at Einsteins has a tattoo of a DNA double helix on his bicep. He is studying neurology. The screens behind the bar flash trivioke questions of various levels of difficulty and complexity. My dad knew most of the answers and I knew a few of them. My sister was immune to looking at it. Two nights ago the bar was full of students there to watch the junior hockey championship game between Russia and Canada. Normally it wouldn't be a major event but with the NHL season cancelled the bar was full of people dressed in Canada hockey jerseys. The NHL shutdown has united Canada to support their youth to beat the Russions. We could barely find a seat and we couldn't get the waitress to come to our table to serve us nachos so we gave up and went home.

After this fun experience last night at Einsteins the whole Housman family returned to Einsteins dressed fully for a funeral amidst the crowd of students out to have a good time, meet friends, hook-up, and listen to amateur musicians play their music on open mike night. One fan was wearing his TGIW (Thank God It's Wednesday) t-shirt. The MC was shouting a quote from Lord of the Flies that sounded like “Kill the Pig - Bash its skull - Spill the blood”. A singer with a giant afro that the MC called on called 'Frobot' played a few songs. Frobot was one of two members from the band fire-hydrant, (www.firehydrant.ca) who each played successive solo sets to promote the band. A two man band appeared afterwards with a lead singer and a bongo drummer. Both of them were completely stoned and the bongo drummer with a ganja hat drummed the bongos slowly and apparently randomly using full sized drumsticks instead of his hands. Among their antics was a rendition of Freebird before ceding the stage to a man who played some morose songs followed by a whiny cover of “no surprises” by Radiohead.

This morning Lisa and I ventured out into the snow to get breakfast while mom and dad went to my grandparents place. We stopped into a few potential breakfast spots but the first one turned out to be a college cafeteria although it advertised as an all day breakfast buffeteria open to the public. The word buffeteria sounded like vomitorium to me so we moved on. Next we stopped into a little diner that looked good but was run by a Chinese woman behind the counter that didn’t have any breakfast foods and smelled like a stale smoky hotel room. So we passed on it.

We finally settled on the future bakery. It is across the street from the restaurant where we filmed Philip interviewing a lesbian for our Manufacturing Attraction film. The woman taking our orders at the bakery was a charming and beautiful young Russian woman. I love the unintentional hope of Russian translations of English. She asked me “How do you wish your eggs?” She relayed my order of a spinach and feta omelet back to her mother, an older woman in the kitchen in Russian. The future bakery has great ambience, excellent music, wonderful coffee, good prices, and mediocre breakfast food. My omelet wasn't very good and the mother somehow managed to make a terrible grilled cheese for Lisa with only a pair of slices of processed American cheese.It was good to be outside in the snow even though the snow cancelled our flight to Boston.

We took the subway to my grandparents place on Heath Street. I noticed on the subway that the danger warning signs had a character that looked like Kenny, the kid who always dies in South Park episodes. It would be pretty funny to license Kenny to make him the poster child for warning signs. I couldn't figure out one warning sign that I ultimately decided was a no dancing sign. We got off of the train at the wrong stop but had been waiting in the DWA (Designated Waiting Area) rather than walking to the front of the train. The result of this was that we exited through an exit that was far from my Grandparent’s apartment. I called my dad to give me directions and he told me to "go north". I looked around in the cloudy snowy sky for the sun to tell me which way was north and then I told him I would get my compass out. Then he told me that Toronto was rectilinear so I could figure it out. Finally he told me to walk towards the Loblaws which took us to Tichester that connected to Heath Street. I recalled the time we came to Toronto before and I had yelled to my navigator Sarah "What the hell is a Tiechester?" as my grandfather was trying to direct us in a minivan full of Bob Dylan fans driving northbound, westbound, and southbound in random directions on the rectilinear streets of Toronto.

At my grandparents place Rosy was just leaving but she left my family with a couple of old Yiddish jokes. One joke is quite long and involves an Indian/Jew named Geronowitz who is asked to kill a buffalo to increase the size of the family tee-pee to make room for a family and to feed a wedding party. He sees one buffalo and it is too thin, the next one has an ugly hide, finally he finds the perfect plump nicely shaped buffalo and he couldn’t kill it because when he reached for his tomahawk he found that it was the dairy one and not the meat one.

Another Yiddish joke was that there were two bees that saw a big Jewish celebration. They buzzed over to get a bite to eat. One bee looked at the other to see that the bee had a kippa on its head. So the bee asked his friend why he was wearing a kippa. The other bee said “I don’t want to be mistaken for a WASP”.

A great uncle of mine in an untraced part of my family tree named Ronnie came over with his wife. My mom was happy to inform me that he is in the diamond business as a wholesaler of uncut diamonds with the glint in her eyes of unborn grandchildren. Ron told an interesting story about how his grandfather escaped the Nazis. His grandfather had been living in Belgium and he knew that he had to leave when the Germans were coming. So when the Germans were invading and they were one day away from arriving he gathered the family into the car and put mattress on the roof to deflect and absorb any bullets being fired from behind. He was in the diamond business so he took a massive fortune worth of all the diamonds from the diamond company he worked for. He managed to stayed one day ahead of the Nazi’s when he arrived in France but had to stay overnight to wait to take a ship to England as the Nazi’s continued to reach towards France. He then boarded a boat designed to hold a capacity of 43 people that was filled with twelve hundred escaping Jews. When he arrived in England the blitz was going on and the Nazis were bombing them regularly. He then took his family to the US by riding across the ocean in a convoy of ships that were under constant siege by many German u boats that sunk almost half the boats in the convoy. He finally traveled to Canada and returned the diamonds to the company and received a well deserved thank you.

My great uncle Ronnie also speaks fluent Flemish so when he was in Belgium a man asked him how a Canadian came to speak Flemish. So he told the man that actually most Canadians speak fluent Flemish and that anyone from Belgium should come and visit as they would feel quite at home. Ronnie had to leave but I learned from him that wholesale to retail mark-up on diamonds is about 300%. So if he sells a diamond wholesale for $500 it goes on sale retail at $1800.

Things got busy with far too many people I needed to chit-chat with. One very nice elderly woman told me all about how much she loved the Ellen Degeneres talk show at ten AM every morning and that she would put off all incoming calls when Ellen goes into her dance number. The woman also dances with her housecats to Rod Stewart’s new album.The Rabbi came and answered some questions. He explained how he was taught in rabbinical school to approach grieving people. You are supposed to take cues from the person so that you say the most appropriate thing. You don't say something about the weather if someone is sad and overcome with grief that would trivialize their feelings but you also shouldn't interrupt a joke or fond positive remembrance to direct someone’s attention on grieving make the person feel guilty while remembering.

My mom, my sister, and me all had awkward moments independently of one family friend whose name is the same as an ancient prehistoric plant. My problem was that she and her husband were impossible to talk to while I was stuck eating with them at the table. My conversation went something like this.

Dan: So how did you meet each other?(Awkward pause looking at each other)
Man: We met professionally.
Dan: So did you work together on a production?
Man: She came to sell to me?
Dan: Did she sell you anything?(More awkward silence. Prolonged this time.)
Dan: Can you pass the cranberry juice? Actually I am going to go clean my plate.

My mom had given her the food we were eating in the kitchen a few minutes before and when my mom expressed concern with figuring out where to put separate recycling items and talked about how important it is to her to not leave the world around us a pile of garbage the woman said that she didn’t care and that it was ok not to care because the city makes you recycle anyways.

Lisa was in a conversation with her that went something like this…

Lisa: (makes a kind comment that everyone overhears)
Woman: See that type of caring comment is the heart of Judaism. I am trying to convince my partner to convert to Judaism.
Lisa: Oh. I think of Judaism as cultural and not just religion. A lot of what we learned was how we should act.
Woman: See how thoughtful Jews are. Lisa is such a good example of what you should be like. Actually I can look around the room and meeting with people I can tell that a few people aren’t Jewish because of listening to their conversations and seeing how they aren't as caring.
Lisa: (Jaw dropped with aghast look and walking away hoping to not be implicated)

I have seen some interesting things the past few days. One of the more impressive reminded me how clear thinking my grandfather is despite his many physical difficulties. We were discussing some of the projects I am working on and we got to the topic of how producing an item of media like a great song or a book is something you can do today for relatively low cost and make it available on the Internet for anyone to buy. The problem is that you can’t easily find people interested in buying it. When my grandfather was listening to this conversation he recalled verses from Gray’s Elegy From a Country Churchyard and recited verbatim…

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear,
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

I’ll be quite happy if I can sing happy birthday when I am 93 let alone quote great lines from poetry.

A big positive about having come to Toronto for the funeral is that I was able to see so many people, especially family members that I hadn’t seen in many years. I received a full education in the family tree on my mother’s side complete on two pieces of paper that showed me how I am related to people named Blanche, Blossom, Leon, Romie, and Robin. Without this context I would otherwise have thought these to be flavors of ice cream or breeds of flowers but these are real people who I am related to and who are interested in my life and I am interested in theirs. I learned many things these past few days. Here are some of them.

My uncle great uncle Romie who lives in New York and was unable to come to the funeral because it would break his heart at 95 to learn that his sister died frequently dines with the famous Dr. Ruth Westheimer for dinner.

My great grandfather was an avid salesman who was so committed to selling that he worked until the day he died. At age 83 the knitting factory that he worked as a salesman for closed down. They made knitted sweaters for department stores with logos for sports teams like the Maple Leafs. When the factory closed down he convinced another knitting factory that he was an excellent sales person and he then continued to sell for them from age 83 until age 86 when he died.

The Wigdor family tree, my grandfather’s family, traces back to the head rabbi at Warsaw. The family of famous rabbis is the Rabbinovitches and they include rabbis in the family tree back to rabbis in the 1500s who were the head rabbis in places like Venice. Some of the Rabbinowitzes changed their names when they reached America to Robbins and one of them became the Robbins from Baskin Robbins. Another of them started Birds-eye vegetables.

My grandfather met my grandmother on a blind date in New York. He had met a man in Montreal while he lived there who noticed that his name was Wigdor. The man knew a girl named Avigdor and because their names of similar wanted to introduce them to each other. The girl was purported to be very beautiful. My grandfather was interested in meeting her but when he corresponded with her and she was interested in meeting him in Toronto he was being moved to New York City for his work. The woman told him that she couldn’t meet him in New York but that she had a very good friend in New York that he might like to meet instead. That good friend was my grandmother Evelyn.

During the war one of my grandfather’s jobs was to do testing to help fit airplanes made in America so that they would work with Brittish equipment. The problem was that the American planes were built to different standards and the equipment like chutes to deploy flares were incompatible. One of the experiments they needed to do was to test the deployment of flares. So the people in the airplane took a live flare and put it into the deployment chute and it immediately got stuck. The problem was that it was a live flare and if it went off it could ignite the plane on fire. In a panic the pilot flew a deep and low route to try to put the flare out. This didn’t work and they then tried to force the flare through the tube. Finally they landed the plane praying that the flare wouldn’t go off. Luckily it didn’t ignite and they removed it. The lesson learned is that when you are testing whether explosives fit through your chute try sending something through the same size before you try the real explosives.

My grandfather highly recommends the Swedish city of Bergen. When he went there his camera was broken and having a problem. He mentioned this to a man he was talking to and the man knew someone expert in fixing cameras. Within a few minutes he had brought the camera to a camera shop and the expert was tooling away at his camera. After an hour he had fixed the camera and when my grandfather asked him how much it cost to fix the camera the man told him that it was free of charge because “Bergen is too beautiful for you not to have pictures to take home.”

I also heard plenty of stories from my mother’s childhood friend Rosy. Rosy is a short woman and she mentions that she knows that she is short and shrinking so it isn’t a problem to mention it to her. She is well under five feet tall. When Rosy went to the doctor when she was younger she was thin but the doctor looked at her and told her to be careful because she saw that there were more places to hang fat on her than any other person the doctor had ever seen.

I didn’t eat eggplant for ten years because of an incident at Rosy’s home when I was a child. I ate eggplant and turned purple and became sick. My parents from then forwards told me that I was allergic to eggplant and to avoid it. So when my friends parent’s were cooking eggplant parmegian I used to tell them that I couldn’t because I was allergic. One day in my twenties I decided to brave the risk and ordered eggplant. I not only discovered that I wasn’t allergic to it but that I loved the flavor and texture of it. Rosy thought it was funny because she loves eggplant. That is why she had served it to me so long ago.

Rosy also had some interesting experiences when she was younger. Her maiden name is Birnbaum. Her sister met a man with the last name Birnbaum. With thorough checking they determined that there was no relation between Rosy’s Birnbaums and her sister’s boyfriend’s Birnbaums as they came from different countries. So her sister married the man. When her sister was in the hospital pregnant with their first child Rosy went to buy flowers. She told the florist that the flowers were for her sister who had just had a child. When they asked the name she said her name was Ruth Birnbaum. The florist looked at her and shook her head and told her that he was so sorry, thinking that the young Birnbaum was a bastard child.

Rosy’s father had contracted Shingles in his old age. Shingles is a disease like an adult Chicken Pox but far worse. What happens is that your nerve endings form water blisters on the ends of them. Each blister is incredibly painful because it is the end of a nerve. The doctor prescribed a special cream to rub on the blisters and her father’s back had a long string of Shingles blisters in a row such that they created a furrow in his back as you traced them. He was in such pain that he asked Rosy’s mother, who was almost completely blind to rub the lotion into his back. Her mother had been working earlier on a project involving glue and when she went to rub the lotion into his back she mixed-up the bottles and rubbed the glue into the wound instead of the lotion. The blisters hurt more so Rosy’s father asked her to put more lotion into his back to soothe the pain and she continued to add glue to rub into his back. Later Rosy came and saw what had happened and removed the glue from the wound.

I was telling one of my grandmother’s friend’s husband about my dangerous sailing trip in the spring. He thought about it for a bit and then told me that he had been on a more dangerous trip. He had invaded France three days after D-day and had been shot through his cheek by a sniper. Ten men from his troop were captured by the Germans and when they surrendered they were shot on site. When they captured the Germans they also shot the Germans on site. “It was they way things were back then,” he explained. “Things are different now.”

We also talked about superstitions. My mom was wondering what would have happened in the World Series this year of everyone from Boston hadn’t done exactly what they had done to try to make the Sox win. Maybe it was that guy who wore his lucky underwear to every game or the man who didn’t shave his beard, or the girl who closed her eyes every time Jason Varitek came to bat, or the woman who walked out of the room to not watch whenever the bases were loaded. People did so much to will the Red Sox to win and they seemed to need every ounce of energy we supplied them with.

One psychology experiment, according to my father demonstrated how superstition works by feeding a group of pigeons in the dark. Food was dropped into the cage every fifteen minutes as the pigeons were in the dark. Over the course of a night this was done repeatedly. By morning each pigeon had developed a unique set of gestures and mannerisms that they thought might bring the food to fall. Some would flap their left wing while others would peck at a toy or hop on one leg.

I am skeptical of some of these things but the more I know about my own past the happier I can be.

My Grandma Evelyn was royalty to me. She wasn't just tall with an elegant Brittish accent and sophisticated from having avidly read so many books. What made her most regal to me was that she worried about the happiness and security of people throughout the world.

When I would visit my grandparents we would sit to eat dinner in the apartment that she finely decorated, and feast on food she skillfully prepared. She would ask curious questions about me that followed who my friends were, what trips we had been on and would inquire about the health and happiness of my sister, my mother, my father, and my friends. Then we would grow lost in conversation about what we should be doing to help solve difficult problems in the world. We talked about the healthcare system, homelessness, poverty, and how to acheive peace in the middle east. Wars, violence, pollution, ignorance, and inequality deeply disturbed her.

She taught by example the lesson that anyone and everyone should volunteer what they can to make the world a better place, that our job in life is to repair what we can in the broken world around us.

Now that she is gone I see in my family a legacy of caring and love and a responsibility for our world. I take great pride in the reponsibility I inherit from a grandmother and the pieces of me that through her are elegant, reponsible, caring, and deserving of admiration.

I'll always remember her strong and loving kisses when she greeted me and when she said goodbye. I always felt when she hugged me that she could crush me with the strength of her love.

As I crept into bed last night at two am Sarah was fast asleep. Within a minute she started to talk in her sleep. It sounded like she was calling for help but the words were gibberish. She then settled down again but didn't look like she was sleeping so I asked her if she was awake and if she remembered talking her sleep. She didn't remember talking but she told me that her dream had forced her awake because it was a nightmare where she was being suffocated intentionally by our baby. We don't have a baby.

In general when I am about to die in a dream it forces me awake. I've had a few dreams like that. When Ron and I were living in the studio apartment in Cambridge above 930 Mass Ave. he went home to Chicago for the week and left me alone in the building I had a dream that I was in a convenience store and a crazy truculent man with a gun was holding-up the store. The crazy man found me cowering on the floor and I pleaded with him not to shoot me but he pointed the gun at me and fired. I could feel the bullet beginning to enter my skull as my eyes bolted open and my body filled with adrenaline. I pounced out of bed. Neither Sarah or me sleep well when nobody is beside us. We both grew-up with siblings and never got accustomed to sleeping alone. I was one of the people who was happy to sleep in a double or a triple when other fraternity brothers were fighting over the few coveted single rooms available. Among my worst fears is to be alone.

This morning my phone was ringing at seven thirty am. Sarah was getting ready to go for her day. I looked at the callerID and saw that it was from David Housman, my dad. I had an immediate feeling of dread because I don't get calls with unexpected good news before 8am on a weekday. I assumed that something terrible had happened to one of the dogs. I imagined a car accident. He let me know that my grandmother Evelyn in Toronto had unexpectedly passed away.

The morning was a scramble to find Lisa. Nobody could reach her on the phone. Dad called the T station and the token collector said that they had seen two folksingers enter the subway so dad and I discussed going into common T stops where Dave and Lisa might be performing to find them. Luckily Lisa was actually home feeling sick and eventually called dad so we were all back together by two o'clock rushing to get to the airport to catch the flight to Toronto. In the car ride over Lisa and my parents were talking about Dave's father who had a heart attack over the weekend while he was working in the hospital. He is having open heart surgery tomorrow. The mood in the car was very somber as we felt the combined weight of another relative who was recently diagnosed with cancer, the hundred thousand people dead from the tsunami and hundreds dying from suicide bombers every month. Lisa mentioned one web site she had visited on New Years that was advertising that this would be the best New Years ever. Dave noted how out of touch the author must have been. I thought back and realized that it was just an assumption I had made a few days ago that all was going well in the world as a grand new year had begun.

Now I am here in Toronto with my whole immediate family on my mother's side. We aren't very big. There were seven of us and now there are six of us. I am mainly in shock because my grandmother had been the stronger of my grandparents. My grandfather is nearly blind, doesn't hear well, and broke his hip in the fall. Grandma Evelyn was tall and always fixing dinner complete with tea and cookies whenever I arrived even a few months ago. We would all debate politics and economics and I would never agree with my grandfather. I think I got a strange gene that gives me pleasure when arguing from him. Now I could see my grandfather slouched in his chair alert but trapped in a decaying body and more than ever he was almost alone in the world. I could almost see myself as him and I counted the years in my head. In less than sixty years I am slouched in that chair asking the question - what is the point of living like this? I wondered who would be around me then.

My mother has always had challenges with her family so her mother's sudden death is difficult for her. She has been arguing with them for the past few years because she wanted them to relate to her in a more loving and informal way. It didn't ever work well and both she and they got frustrated with each other. Dave told Lisa last summer when we visited Toronto after the Dylan conecert that it was like my grandparents were a family of penguins who gave birth to a rainbow colored unicorn and they didn't know what to do with her. Mom was touched by this. I didn't have such beautiful things to say so I just kept quiet.

So she now is feeling guilty because she lost the contact that she had with them when she reached out to change their relationship and she has regrets that she didn't spend more time with them. Now there will never be a resolution and reconciliation that she had hoped might arrive.

It is hard not to think about my relationship with my mother when I hear her talk about her relationship with her parents. It often sounds like she is talking to me about us when she is talking about them. We have our own troubles and have fought about some of the same things she has always worried about with her relationships with her parents. Her relationship with Lisa is much more emotional than her relationship with me. I am more stoic and more cold. I don't show much affection and love. My mother worries that I don't ever call her and I avoid her when she calls. She tells me that she is hurt when I don't comment on her poems and that she wishes we could have a closer connection like she has with Lisa.

I go out with my dad all the time to sporting events like the Patriots games and the Red Sox games. With my mom there isn't that natural overlap of activities. We discussed going to plays but since we had the discussion six months ago we still haven't gone to a play. We had one good chat over lunch in Newton Center a month back when we both found ourselves in Newton because I was returning the car to the space. Now I have a space again in Brookline so that won't happen by accident again. I imagined that I might be a penguin whose mother is a colorful unicorn and she doesn't know what to do with me.

I haven't seen a lot of death in my life so far. I didn't have the heavy gut emotional reaction that my mother, sister, and aunt had. I did relate to her death in my own way. In bits and pieces I felt many of the things that they are feeling now from when Bijoux, my pug dog puppy died.

When I got Bijoux I had been depressed because the Internet bubble had burst and my life around me had seemed to burst along with it. I had needed to lay-off my girlfriend or at least be the one to break the news to her. I had been in a real funk but when I got that puppy I could see the world through these wonderful fresh childlike eyes. He wanted to sniff everything, eat everything, follow me anywhere. I fell totally in love with him and my world outlook was hopeful again. I could feel it the day he arrived.

In the fall of 2002 Falkoff and I went on a hiking trip and I figured it was a perfect place to take a ten month old pug dog, to the Franconia notch trail and to sleep under the stars. Pug dogs aren't the most athletic of animals but Bijoux was fit because I would keep him chasing balls and sticks and playing with other area dogs in Brookline. As we hiked up the mountain he would stop and bark at streams until I would carry him across. He seemed to stop to eat mushrooms which I kept trying to stop him from eating.

We camped out at a site in the woods near nightfall and after Falkoff and I pitched our tent I placed Bijoux in his pug dog carrying case. It was just big enough for him to turn around once but he looked cute as though he had his own personal tent. He usually went right to sleep once inside. I was exhausted from the hike and went quickly to bed but I heard him barking in his carrier and I worried that he might bother the other campers.

In the middle of the night I heard thumping sounds from outside the tent and I took a minute to figure out what they were coming from. I got out of the tent to see Bijoux inside of his carrier covered in vomit and convulsing. I quickly pulled him out into the cool night air hoping that whatever he had eaten was causing him a temporary discomforting and confusing hallucinogenic trip. He looked-up at me confused at everything that was going on and I cuddled him to comfort him. He set into more convulsions with short barks in between and within an hour of these rhythmic siezures the siezures became more powerful and I could see him struggling and barking louder as though he was fighting some horrible terror. At the final point he let out a long loud bark for over a minute and all four of his legs sprung out stiff as I held him. I could tell that he was dead or dying so I tried to give him an improvised form of mouth to mouth but it seemed more like I was blowing into the wide mouth of a dead dog. I was crying and in shock.

The hard part about watching someone or something that you love die is that it is never a moment you want to remember them by but it is among the most memorable moments of your life. As people were talking about my grandmother dying I kept thinking back to how I felt and how I still feel about my puppy Bijoux. Nancy feels terrible guilt for not having taken my grandmother to the hospital. I still wonder whether I accidentally suffocated my dog by placing him inside the carrier, or if he died of being trapped in his own vomit in the carrier, if I had killed him through heat stroke by pushing him too hard on a hot day, or if I had let him eat a poisonous mushroom. How could it not be my fault that this beautiful creature dependent upon me for every decision in his life that I loved more than anything or anyone in the world was suddenly dead before he had ever led a full year of life.

My mother told us that she still remembers when her grandmother died. She had been there and seen her grandmother just before she passed away. My mother would see visions of her grandmother's death haunting her when she saw a picture of her grandmother. I sometimes see a similar image of Bijoux when I look at his portrait in the hall outside our bathroom. It isn't a complete nightmare of an image. I see his death in a picture of him from the first day he arrived in my life but I also see life and my love for him and I am filled with a mix of loving emotions with the guilt. The picture isn't just haunted with one memory. As I grow older I can see that more and more ghosts will come to live with me and that ghosts are the cost of loving people that will eventually die before I do.

I could see the look of horror and despair that Nancy had when she cried as she told us how ghastly it was to shop for a casket. We had hiked Bijoux's body down and out of the trail for ten miles to the car with his stiff cooling body in my backpack. I called Stephanie to tell her the news after I had packed the body in a box from a snowboard shop. Falkoff and I drove home quietly and when I returned to Brookline I handed her his hard stiff body and she hugged his body and cried with me for nearly half an hour. We took him to Angel Memorial hospital since we thought they would know what to do but animal hospital emergency rooms prioritize cases based on urgency of need and a dead puppy is near the bottom of the list. After a few frustrated hours sitting in a waiting area with Bijoux's body we were finally given the option to either cremate him or bury him.

With the family huddled together around the dining table that I had been served by my grandmother every time I arrived the telephone behind my grandfather's shoulder rang every once in a while. One of the calls was Nancy's friend and it was clear that she hadn't heard the news. It is so hard to tell your friends when you are grieving. Your instinct is to go back into your cave and hide. I recall waiting two days before Stephanie and I went for a walk in the park where we used to walk Bijoux and telling the dog owners that we had seen every day that he had passed away. That was a second wave of grief as we had to watch the shock and grief of our friends reverberate around us.

Last summer when I went camping with Sarah we were together in the tent and sleeping. Near dawn I started to dream that a killer was standing outside the tent watching us sleep. In my dream I tried to be quiet hoping that if he thought we were asleep and not going to fight with him that he might rob us and not hurt us. He kept coming closer and opened the door to the tent. I stayed pretending to be asleep in my dream. He lunged towards me and Sarah with a knife in his hand ready to attack and kill us. I leapt up out of my sleep and into the air to fight him and stood in the tent petrified and confused between my fantasy and reality looking to confront the killer and crying out.

For me, I think of the fear of death and the fear of being alone as one integrated nightmare. That is why it is so tough to take a risk to love and to move forwards when someone I love passes away.

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I guess that Dave and Lisa were going to let me know sooner or later that Dave Falk had started to write a blog. Dave's blog is called Musings. I was recommended that I take note of it by Robert during a Scrabble game at Robert’s apartment that began as a way to get rid of two live lobsters in his refrigerator. How we came to play Scrabble this evening is more complex than that but for now I’m glad to see that I can have some great reading on the comings and goings of my sister and Dave. So far he only has written three posts but it is good to see he is taking good care of the dogs in Newton and keeping them free of Chocolate chips.

Lately people around me have been getting more active in their pursuits to publish. I am quite happy to see a growing garden of creative Internet activity among my family and friends. I heard from Kate that she intends to launch her own personal site shortly. Robert showed me a long set of amazing photos that he took over the course of his past few years of travels that he intends to place online to showcase his talents. Hattie registered demokitty.com and demomonkey.com. We are going to work together on Demomonkey as a consulting team focused on making prototypes and demos for companies that don’t have the creative talent to do it properly. Demokitty is reserved for when Hattie perceives that I lose interest in the venture and she can go at it alone. At least we are going to try.

So far those sites are all that I have heard about but I am sure there are dozens of underground projects amongst my friends and family that I could scoop before they go live with new domain names being registered left and right for cool new personal and business web projects.

On New Years Eve Sarah and I decided to be homebodies and stay in Brookline to host folks who were interested in spending New Years Eve in Brookline. Robert also had a party that he created the night before to host his friend Mark and his girlfriend. The concept for Robert’s New Years Eve festivities are best summed-up on the web page he created for it. Unfortunately I don’t recall the URL right now but I’ll try to find it at some point. Robert is a web designer so most projects he works on have a URL.

New Years was fun. Sarah lit plenty of dangerous candles throughout the apartment and we put out wine, cheese, and some unsalted pistachios that I was hoping people would get rid of for us. I got very tense and worried that we didn’t have any non-wine alcoholic beverages and worried that we didn’t have sufficient decorations so I quickly whipped together a photo-mosaic of the year 2004 that was a pretty rainbow color but very small and thus unimpressive and then went to the liquor store to purchase three six-packs of beer. I also futzed with the network until I could control the living room PC from the bedroom with VNC so that I could do remote control karaoke later in the evening.

Karaoke is among my favorite things to do with a bunch of people. It always entertains me that people feel that they haven’t had enough to drink in order to feel comfortable singing. I would sing karaoke in front of an audience in my underwear while stone sober. Note my New Year’s resolution number 1. (Get a job as an exotic male dancer). But I was happy to intoxicate our guests so that they were able to sing properly and with enough wine and champagne in them many of our guests were asking for Dolly Parton tunes to sing along to.

We also played some board games to pass the time until midnight. It wasn’t a lot of time since although I had panicked about not having ample entertainment at 9:00 including a quick pit stop at Stop and Shop to purchase mixed vegetables in a bag nobody really appeared until about 9:30 and most people didn’t arrive until about 10:30. That meant that most people only had to kill about an hour and a half with us in Brookline before the clock struck midnight and they could disperse and go home drunk or stick around and sing karaoke with us.

Meanwhile Robert had created his New Brunswick Bostonia celebration at his place and had lured Lisa and Dave to sing carols in both French and English throughout the downtown area along with a violinist that he had hired through Craig’s list, his friend Mark and Mark’s girlfriend. Apparently Mark and his girlfriend were reluctant to wander through the city followed by a violinist singing obscure Christmas carols in French but once they began they could be heard far louder than professionals like Dave and Lisa. I know this because I spent about twenty minutes watching the video at Robert’s place tonight prior to our Scrabble game. Mark’s girlfriend, who was the most adamant about not caroling, can be seen on the video buzzing the doorbells of many random people throughout Boston to inform them that carolers are awaiting them below. Mark and his girlfriend also brought the two lobsters that we consumed tonight all the way from New Brunswick. They had been living in Robert’s refrigerator until we interrupted them for our dinner tonight.

At out party we didn’t have singing until the streamkaraoke.com site was brought out but before then we did have a couple of board games that we played. I had wanted to play the game Go Mental because I had bought it for Nick and Christina for Christmas. They had brought Go Mental and Apples to Apples so we started with Go Mental. We tried to adapt the rules of the game to a drinking game but that was not very effective. Sarah and I were hopeless at the game which involved figuring out which item didn’t fit with the others. If we didn’t know we could challenge someone else and regardless of whether the question was about operas or sports Matt and Dave, the only people we could challenge seemed to always get them right. So we drank a lot of alcohol early in the evening despite not being able to create meaningful drinking game rules for Go Mental.

Sarah’s sister Christina called for the frozen margaritas that her husband Nick had brought. Nick’s birthday is on New Year’s so he was planning on having a grand time and both Nick and Christina were having a great time with the margaritas and an even better time when we finally switched from Go Mental to Apples to Apples. The Apples to Apples game was very effective for up to 11 people and worked just as well for large numbers if not better than with smaller numbers because the judge had so many entries to compare.

At midnight I had to improvise the countdown and since the TV didn’t work I turned to the Internet. MSNBC was broadcasting online a live feed from Times Square. It wasn’t a good feed and plenty of people made fun of our lack of a television but it took us into the New Year of 2005 and we cranked open lots of champagne and celebrated.

Sarah’s sister didn't agree with the many margaritas and took sick as we were cranking-up the karaoke. So Nick and a woman who loved singing karaoke, who was Dick’s friend’s fiancée, helped Christina outside and Nick and Christina made an early but post midnight exit. I generally have been avoiding drinks with tequila in them. It is way too easy to get sick drinking them. This woman who was a loose connection to us was great fun karaokeing with and was interested in going out on our karaoke team when we next decide to go out again. I was thinking that this Tuesday is the last good day for a while but it might be too close to New Years.

So folks slowly disappeared until nobody was left and then in the morning Sarah took sick to the point where she asked me to bring a pillow to the bathroom for her. The apartment looked like it had been trashed by the Huns from the Capital One advertisements.

We cleaned up the apartment a bit, ate some breakfast to replenish Sarah’s strength, and spent the whole day watching silly movies including Anchorman, Euro-trip, and Billy Madison while slowly recovering from some minor hangovers. Sarah’s was worse than mine but it reminded me to drink lots of fluids and made me glad that I had taken two Flintstones vitamins the night before. I can highly recommend all three movies as goofy comedies worth watching. I was surprised at how entertaining Euro-trip was.

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So tonight while I was at the Pats game with Sarah in the upper-deck Robert called to ask me if I wanted to go on a midnight picnic tonight. I gave him a tentative vote yes but I could tell that Sarah was going to have nothing to do with freezing outside while eating. But once we got back from the game it had started raining so even I vetoed the outdoor picnic and Sarah and I went to Robert’s place to cook-up the lobsters in his fridge and played Scrabble. Robert won by spelling some difficult words like vixen and gonads. So did the Patriots although they probably didn't have much use for the word Vixen but maybe gonads? The Pats beat the 49ers 21-7. Both the lobsters lost but they tasted good.

Robert also loaned me one of his two copies of David Foster Wallace's book Infinite Jest. It is about a thousand pages with very small print so I probably will never finish it but I need something now that I finished Bob Dylan Chronicles Part I and Jeremy said that Salt was a boring book. How could a book just about salt be boring?

I figured I needed ten of these. I'm not sure I can complete all of them so I wanted a variety to choose from. I may have to update them throughout the year.

1. Get a job as an exotic male dancer
2. Finish making one film for the Boston independent film festival spring 2006
3. Visit a country in Asia other than Japan
4. Climb Machu-Pichu with friends
5. Create the first prototype of the pet video game system
6. Establish a consulting practice
7. Execute phase I of world domination plan: Gain control of the media (hypnosis?)
8. Add an FAQ to my personal website
9. Have a great party in Marshfield once the house is fixed-up
10. Be nice to Sarah