Global Neighbourhoods

Remembering Charlie

My best friend, Charlie O'Brien would have been 68 today, except he died nearly four years ago. This is what I said at his memorial service. I post this on his birthday each year, not to lament my loss, but to share the beauty of our friendship. Charlie was my mentored me as a writer and in life. He was gone before I wrote Naked Conversations, with Robert. But what he taught me helped shape the book.

Here's what I said:

"Finally, I have the last word. After 37 years, I’m free of O’Brien’s editing. He can’t hammer me with a: “Jesus Christ, Israel, just cut to the bloody chase.” No more will Charlie tell me to move a graph up here, make a chop there. When I’m done speaking today, he doesn’t get his chance to turn to you and say: “What really happened was …”

Charlie would have enjoyed today. To him, family and friends were as good as it got. Can’t you just picture him sitting here, listening-- shaking his head side-to-side, tugging a beer, toking a cigar waiting his turn, saying a paucity of words, both wise and irreverent.

I wish this were a roast, but it is not.

For nearly 40 years, Charlie O’Brien and I laughed together, often at the expense of one of us or the other. Jousting was essential to our relationship almost to the end. So was humor. Hiking three years ago at Tahoe, we sat drying on a rock after he had guided us into a snow drift. Earlier, that day, he had demanded that I accept he was going to die which was tough and for that reason, we had been hiking mostly in silence until Charlie guided directly into a waist deep snowdrift.

As we sat there, I asked him if he had any wisdom to impart--something he now saw that he had not understood before... Some pearl to leave behind.”

He thought for a moment. “I might have been wrong about the vitamins,” he said with the straightest of faces, then he gazed pensively out at the Lake. Charlie, over the years, had fanatically consumed entire alphabets of Vitamin pills, using a vile protein concoction as his chaser.

Three years later, I would be sitting on a barstool next to Charlie for the last time. Cancer and its so-called treatments had reduced him to sipping soft drinks through straws. By contrast, I was downing his favorite droughts at a steady pace. There was a chance, he told me, that he’d be taking medical marijuana pills. The juxtaposition of preferred recreational substances would become our last good laugh. He would die three weeks later in the company of people who loved him.

I cannot believe he’s really gone. I expect to see him at any minute. I picture him packing for yet another trip. Charlie loved to travel.

Our travels and misadventures together were legendary. They began in 1968 with a hike up a New Hampshire mountain. Of course we got lost and I swear it was his fault. Over the years we probably took more than 40 trips together, many on extended Thanksgiving weekends.

There were three rules for the annual trips:
(1) It had to be an adventure.
(2) It had to be cheap.
(3) It had to be new.

Cheap fell away first. Then, we repeated a few destinations, but the adventures were always unique.

We did amazing things.

We hiked the Grand Canyon, when I was 50 and he was 55, in a single day. We dived in the Seychelle Sea Caves in Mazatland’s Mayan Jungle, meeting locals who lived in thatched huts and communicated by cell phone. We kayaked to a desert island on the Sea of Cortez where a monsoon marooned us for three days. We snuck into Cuba and spent two unsuccessful days searching for an authentic Cohiba Cigar staying in the National Hotel, once owned by the Chicago mob. We visited Death Valley, where Charlie duped me into watching a ‘pantomime ballet performed by a 75-year-old pot-bellied hag dancing to opera on a wind-up Victrola. We laughed so hard we had to pee.

Sailing to Catalina Island on "Manana," the boat we owned together—actually the stern still said “Kewtie Pie-- with a K” because we always planned to paint it Manana-- we hit a storm and I snarled the jib. We would have motored in but Charlie had bought another cheap battery that-just like the last cheap battery-- died. Ten-foot waves were breaking across our stern and we were losing our heading. Charlie shrugged and said it was a fine day to die, but it turned out to be a better one to live.

One time, we were drinking in an Ensinada, Mexico dance hall, where locals paid ten pesetas to fox trot with Indian women and Charlie almost had me convinced that I really wanted to eat the worm, when Federales with loaded and pointed machine guns suddenly appeared, lining up everyone up against the wall for a search except for us two gringos at the bar who thought it wisest not to mention that the bad guys had ducked into the woman's room and crawled out the window.

The last moment of the last night of most jaunts were usually savored on some hotel balcony overlooking outrageous beauty. We’d share cigars, cognac, philosophy and humor. “Great trip,” Charlie would conclude--then fall asleep in his chair with drink in hand. We had already planned our next Thanksgiving trip.  We were going to follow the route of the Civil War from Gettysburg to Shiloh when cancer ended our tradition.

Charlie’s versions of these stories and mine were almost always at odds. It doesn’t matter whose were more accurate. Often, we were both too loaded to know. We shared huge chunks of life together. They were among the best of my life.

I met O’Brien in 1967 at the Quincy Patriot Ledger’s West edition office. He was an editor and I a reporter. I applied to be his #2. Everyone thought I was the worst possible choice, and they were probably right. But Charlie swung the bat for me and I got the job. We sat facing each other from midnight to dawn, five nights a week for nearly four years. We got to know each other in eight-hour doses. He was my boss but became my friend and eventually the best friend I would ever have.

We were adventure companions and sailing buddies. As roommates for two years we were the oddest of couples. He was my mentor and surrogate big brother. Our adventures nearly killed us a couple of times. We nearly got arrested a couple of times, or into a brawl or two in seedy, foreign places. We laughed lots and argued a fair amount. He understood who I was but liked me anyhow.

He was always calm--even facing death. Most perils, he described as “a bit hairy.” He called cancer, "the luck of the draw."

He gave me the two things I need most—encouragement and shit. He gave a lot of people encouragement. He saved the shit for a select few of us. His encouragement pointed me toward the top and his shit stopped me from going over it.

Charlie taught me about life and living; about death and acceptance. He taught me ethics without preaching, about tolerance without suffering assholes and about patience even if I wouldn’t get to the bloody point.

Charlie usually put his focus on other people. He was always non-assuming. I never knew him to betray a secret. He contrived little custom rituals with people he liked. He became my wife Paula’s cooking assistant, where he gave her sage advice on children and her husband. He very rarely lost his temper except once when Paula hid his liquor on a camping trip.

Charlie was actually a very simple person. He didn’t change that much in the years I knew him. In the end, he just wanted to have more good days than bad and the good days were often defined by who he spent them with. He enjoyed reading or hearing “a good yarn.” He cultivated a hard-ass image but everyone knew he was a softie.

He had disdain for self-important people, Republicans and hypocrites. He didn’t usually trust people in uniform, expect Park Rangers. (Brother John, a Boston cop didn’t count ‘cause he never wore the damned thing.) He was a committed atheist. He usually had a buck for the panhandler. He read voluminously and very slowly. He preferred fact to fiction. Three favorite books were: “Memoirs of US Grant,” “Into Thin Air” and “Undaunted Courage.” The only thing I ever heard him call inspiring was “Tuesdays with Maury.” He almost never lied and was consistently objective and logical. He almost always drove too fast.

Above everything, he valued his family and friends, even more so at the end.

Charlie considered himself a better editor than writer. Yet, he authored a truly unforgettable work: “Health Updates,” which his friends received by email. It broke newspaper rules by burying hard news leads inside little good news sandwiches. In the middle graph we’d find telltale words like “inoperable” or “a mild discomfort in the lower jaw.” As the author warned, Health Updates would end sadly. Before it did, we learned about courage, strength, reality and that justice has nothing to do with it.

I last visited Charlie two weeks before he died. I stayed for only a few minutes because he was clearly suffering. There just weren’t enough good days left.

I miss him terribly. I’d give anything if he could tell me now to tighten and rearrange these few paragraphs. I still see him shaking his head from side-to-side, saying: “Jesus Christ, Israel—would you just cut to the bloody chase?

I’d even give him the last word."

My best friend, Charlie O'Brien would have been 68 today, except he died nearly four years ago. This is what I said at his memorial service. I post this on his birthday each year, not to lament my loss, but to share the beauty of our friendship. Charlie was my mentored me as a writer and in life. He was gone before I wrote Naked Conversations, with Robert. But what he taught me helped shape the book.

Here's what I said:

"Finally, I have the last word. After 37 years, I’m free of O’Brien’s editing. He can’t hammer me with a: “Jesus Christ, Israel, just cut to the bloody chase.” No more will Charlie tell me to move a graph up here, make a chop there. When I’m done speaking today, he doesn’t get his chance to turn to you and say: “What really happened was …”

Charlie would have enjoyed today. To him, family and friends were as good as it got. Can’t you just picture him sitting here, listening-- shaking his head side-to-side, tugging a beer, toking a cigar waiting his turn, saying a paucity of words, both wise and irreverent.

I wish this were a roast, but it is not.

For nearly 40 years, Charlie O’Brien and I laughed together, often at the expense of one of us or the other. Jousting was essential to our relationship almost to the end. So was humor. Hiking three years ago at Tahoe, we sat drying on a rock after he had guided us into a snow drift. Earlier, that day, he had demanded that I accept he was going to die which was tough and for that reason, we had been hiking mostly in silence until Charlie guided directly into a waist deep snowdrift.

As we sat there, I asked him if he had any wisdom to impart--something he now saw that he had not understood before... Some pearl to leave behind.”

He thought for a moment. “I might have been wrong about the vitamins,” he said with the straightest of faces, then he gazed pensively out at the Lake. Charlie, over the years, had fanatically consumed entire alphabets of Vitamin pills, using a vile protein concoction as his chaser.

Three years later, I would be sitting on a barstool next to Charlie for the last time. Cancer and its so-called treatments had reduced him to sipping soft drinks through straws. By contrast, I was downing his favorite droughts at a steady pace. There was a chance, he told me, that he’d be taking medical marijuana pills. The juxtaposition of preferred recreational substances would become our last good laugh. He would die three weeks later in the company of people who loved him.

I cannot believe he’s really gone. I expect to see him at any minute. I picture him packing for yet another trip. Charlie loved to travel.

Our travels and misadventures together were legendary. They began in 1968 with a hike up a New Hampshire mountain. Of course we got lost and I swear it was his fault. Over the years we probably took more than 40 trips together, many on extended Thanksgiving weekends.

There were three rules for the annual trips:
(1) It had to be an adventure.
(2) It had to be cheap.
(3) It had to be new.

Cheap fell away first. Then, we repeated a few destinations, but the adventures were always unique.

We did amazing things.

We hiked the Grand Canyon, when I was 50 and he was 55, in a single day. We dived in the Seychelle Sea Caves in Mazatland’s Mayan Jungle, meeting locals who lived in thatched huts and communicated by cell phone. We kayaked to a desert island on the Sea of Cortez where a monsoon marooned us for three days. We snuck into Cuba and spent two unsuccessful days searching for an authentic Cohiba Cigar staying in the National Hotel, once owned by the Chicago mob. We visited Death Valley, where Charlie duped me into watching a ‘pantomime ballet performed by a 75-year-old pot-bellied hag dancing to opera on a wind-up Victrola. We laughed so hard we had to pee.

Sailing to Catalina Island on "Manana," the boat we owned together—actually the stern still said “Kewtie Pie-- with a K” because we always planned to paint it Manana-- we hit a storm and I snarled the jib. We would have motored in but Charlie had bought another cheap battery that-just like the last cheap battery-- died. Ten-foot waves were breaking across our stern and we were losing our heading. Charlie shrugged and said it was a fine day to die, but it turned out to be a better one to live.

One time, we were drinking in an Ensinada, Mexico dance hall, where locals paid ten pesetas to fox trot with Indian women and Charlie almost had me convinced that I really wanted to eat the worm, when Federales with loaded and pointed machine guns suddenly appeared, lining up everyone up against the wall for a search except for us two gringos at the bar who thought it wisest not to mention that the bad guys had ducked into the woman's room and crawled out the window.

The last moment of the last night of most jaunts were usually savored on some hotel balcony overlooking outrageous beauty. We’d share cigars, cognac, philosophy and humor. “Great trip,” Charlie would conclude--then fall asleep in his chair with drink in hand. We had already planned our next Thanksgiving trip.  We were going to follow the route of the Civil War from Gettysburg to Shiloh when cancer ended our tradition.

Charlie’s versions of these stories and mine were almost always at odds. It doesn’t matter whose were more accurate. Often, we were both too loaded to know. We shared huge chunks of life together. They were among the best of my life.

I met O’Brien in 1967 at the Quincy Patriot Ledger’s West edition office. He was an editor and I a reporter. I applied to be his #2. Everyone thought I was the worst possible choice, and they were probably right. But Charlie swung the bat for me and I got the job. We sat facing each other from midnight to dawn, five nights a week for nearly four years. We got to know each other in eight-hour doses. He was my boss but became my friend and eventually the best friend I would ever have.

We were adventure companions and sailing buddies. As roommates for two years we were the oddest of couples. He was my mentor and surrogate big brother. Our adventures nearly killed us a couple of times. We nearly got arrested a couple of times, or into a brawl or two in seedy, foreign places. We laughed lots and argued a fair amount. He understood who I was but liked me anyhow.

He was always calm--even facing death. Most perils, he described as “a bit hairy.” He called cancer, "the luck of the draw."

He gave me the two things I need most—encouragement and shit. He gave a lot of people encouragement. He saved the shit for a select few of us. His encouragement pointed me toward the top and his shit stopped me from going over it.

Charlie taught me about life and living; about death and acceptance. He taught me ethics without preaching, about tolerance without suffering assholes and about patience even if I wouldn’t get to the bloody point.

Charlie usually put his focus on other people. He was always non-assuming. I never knew him to betray a secret. He contrived little custom rituals with people he liked. He became my wife Paula’s cooking assistant, where he gave her sage advice on children and her husband. He very rarely lost his temper except once when Paula hid his liquor on a camping trip.

Charlie was actually a very simple person. He didn’t change that much in the years I knew him. In the end, he just wanted to have more good days than bad and the good days were often defined by who he spent them with. He enjoyed reading or hearing “a good yarn.” He cultivated a hard-ass image but everyone knew he was a softie.

He had disdain for self-important people, Republicans and hypocrites. He didn’t usually trust people in uniform, expect Park Rangers. (Brother John, a Boston cop didn’t count ‘cause he never wore the damned thing.) He was a committed atheist. He usually had a buck for the panhandler. He read voluminously and very slowly. He preferred fact to fiction. Three favorite books were: “Memoirs of US Grant,” “Into Thin Air” and “Undaunted Courage.” The only thing I ever heard him call inspiring was “Tuesdays with Maury.” He almost never lied and was consistently objective and logical. He almost always drove too fast.

Above everything, he valued his family and friends, even more so at the end.

Charlie considered himself a better editor than writer. Yet, he authored a truly unforgettable work: “Health Updates,” which his friends received by email. It broke newspaper rules by burying hard news leads inside little good news sandwiches. In the middle graph we’d find telltale words like “inoperable” or “a mild discomfort in the lower jaw.” As the author warned, Health Updates would end sadly. Before it did, we learned about courage, strength, reality and that justice has nothing to do with it.

I last visited Charlie two weeks before he died. I stayed for only a few minutes because he was clearly suffering. There just weren’t enough good days left.

I miss him terribly. I’d give anything if he could tell me now to tighten and rearrange these few paragraphs. I still see him shaking his head from side-to-side, saying: “Jesus Christ, Israel—would you just cut to the bloody chase?

I’d even give him the last word."

Now we know who's spamming

Reuters reports that Hormel Foods corporate profits are up by 5%. They company attributes its success to improved margins on its bellwether product, Spam. Now we know who's behind all this spam and we should do something about it. Each of us should send them 100 emails asking them to stop.

It's Them.

This is not a post about social media, but it is about social networks and the dangers of closed networks that have lurked in diverse culturs ever since there were diverse cultures. it is the outgrowth of an incident that took place a few years back in Austin, Texas. I was sitting at a bar discussing politics with an old friend. I was telling him that one of the few places I respected George Bush was on his humane approach to the immigration problem, that was, at the time, just emerging into a national and hotly debated issue.

There was a guy a couple of stools down who heard something I said. probably it expressed the sympathy to Mexican who risk lives and suffer humiliation to cross borders so that they can feed their families. That's when he jumped in. The following is a paraphrase of what he had to say. I chose more polite words than he used to describe ethnic groups, and I use the rhythms of my writing. His terms and rhythms are much harder than my own. The remainder is less exagerated than you may think.

"It's them. It's the crawly, grimy dirty bastards that are coming into Texas in the dark of night. They are spreading their filth and their seed from here into all states. We ought to build machine gun turrets, you know, like the ones they have at prisons, and when we see those suckers coming, we ought stop 'em in their tracks. Right there and let the flies and the buzzards get 'em. That'll stop the rest from coming. They don't speakex de English so good, but they will understand bullets. We don't need expensive walls, that they'll figure ways around. We need bullets.

You guys, you bleeding heart pansies, you just don't see it. They are the biggest problem we have. Health care. These people don't even belong here, but they are filling up our hosiptals. Soe them jump in fron of cars just so the can get a nice clean hospital bed. Overcrowded schools, who the fuck do you think is over crowding them. These people breed like rats. Before we send these people back, we should have them fixed, just like I did my bitch dog.

Its not just the Mexies either. It may be them today. But it's always someone, those blacks, those Jews, those Chinese. There's always someone who wants to sneak in here and enjoy all the benefits of the USA. They want to milk the freedom we have. But it's our freedom, not theirs. And we need to defend it against them."

I'm writing about this today because I may have had a Middle-Age moment. I thought I had already written thi. I thought I had posted it years ago and was proud of it. I referred a friend to it, and was surprised when his search did not turn it up. Did it get lost in cyberspace? Perhaps I just thought I had written it and four years ago, decided not to post it because it would be too controversial, too off-subject.

That's not my view today. Closed communities, who trust only people like themselves exist everywhere. They hate our culture enough to raise children to explode themselves if it will hurt us. They pray to their god to consume the rest of us in fire and brimstone because we are them, those nonbelievers, those infidels, those devil worshippers, those goyum or Hebes. They want to make a democracy into a Christian democract where those of us who may not be Christian will some how be reduced to lesser citizens, perhaps relegated not to sit at lunch counters in respectable neighborhoods. People cluster in secrurity near people like themselves and fear those others, those people who speak in different tongues or even accents, who dress differently, whose food does not smell like our food, whose children's games are played differently, whose prayers are chanted at different time, whose music has a different rhythm.

Much if my life is centered on social media's impact on culture. I look at how technology breaks down barriers such as language and I hope so very much that people will see that the Dalai Lama's observation is true:

"We are all alike."

Sometime, listen to the cry of a baby from another culture. Watch school kids playing a game. Listen to fans cheering. Watch people from another place as they leave work. Look at face different from your own, stuck in traffic or waiting to check out in a supermarket lane.

I believe social media helps us see a very fundamental point. "Them" very much is "us."

Walking with the Dinosaurs

[Walking with the Dinosaurs at HP Pavillion. Photo by Shel]

Paula and I went to the Walking with the Dinosaurs show at San Jose's HP Pavillion. We were afraid that it would be hoaky and it borders on it from time to time. But overall it is a fabulous show and you may learn a few things that you didn't learn watching Jurassic Park.

The show is designed to be kid friendly, and the fights are mostly the roaring sound effects and flashing lights that accompany these behometh stage creatures.Two-thirds of the audience were under Age 12, I would guess and they jumped up and down with the sheer joy of it.

Times change fast. I did not hear a single kid shout out for Barney.

My thoughts on voting in the primaries

My friend KD Paine, an ardent Obama supporter from NH, emailed me that she's working on her analysis of what happened in the primary there. I started an email on my thoughts to her, then decided, Hell, I'll share it with the rest of you as well.

We Americans have started outsmarting ourselves and treating the primaries like a sporting event. We've started voting for candidates because newspapers and pundits tell us who's going to win, or who can win, or who is the best bet to beat the person the other side who may not want to win.

I began to turn against Hillary Clinton when her initial message to us Democrats was: "Because she can win." That is not good enough for me. Our current president is a poster child for demonstrating that the wrong guy can win and very often does.

I want to know if a candidate can lead and if he or she can lead, where will that leadership take us and how will that leadership change the world. There are those who think that abortion is the largest single issue and they may elect to vote for a candidate solely over that issue. I think that is unfortunate, because to me the presidency is larger than that, very much larger than that and in fact, the abortion issue barely touches upon the duties of the US president. But their right to cast their vote that way is a large issue and has to do with how this country works.

I think people are supposed to go into the booth and vote for the person we think will make the best president. We cheat ourselves when we start trying to figure out who's best in an undetermined matchup and cast a vote for someone who is leading in the polls at that moment. We waste our chance to change a direction if we vote for a front runner because the person is the front runner.

I have a friend, located in California, who really thinks Bill Richardson is the best candidate. But she's voting for Hillary because Hillary has the best chance of winning.  How do we know that? If my friend votes for the pollsters choice rather than her own choice, she is helping the pollsters prove prophetic She is not helping Democracy very much or so it seems to me.

I personally think Barak Obama is the best candidate for the America I would like to see. I don't care about his sex, age, racial makeup. I care about his vision, his energy, his style. I think about where he would try to take us. I think about the coalition of people who would join his administration. I do think it is time for a change. We have done well with young and relatively inexperienced presidents before. They include Kennedy, T. Roosevelt, Ford and oh yes, Clinton.

Conversely, the most experience presidents of my life included Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson and George Bush Sr.

I like Obama better than any other candidate and I tell people that. Some agree and thers don't and that is fine and the way it should be. I don't dislike people because they disagree. I don't try to beat them in a dinner room debate. I used to really love such discussions, but over the years they seem to have gotten mean-spirited.

I don't see Republicans as my enemy. I see them as sincere and dedicated as my friends who are Democratic. I understand their distrust of a big government who usually screws it up. I understand their loyalty of a free market economy. I believe this country has little choice these days but to maintain a strong military. I think they should go out and vote their hearts and minds, and I hope that this year, for this presidency, they will be soundly thrashed because more people believe the way I do about the war, the economy, the planet, health and education.

Like most Democrats, I believe that it is our turn to gain the White House and maybe both houses of Congress. I just hope we don't blow our turn as badly as I think the Republicans have blown there's under our current lame duck president.      

Maggie Tags me for 8 secrets

I usually avoid blog memes. To me, they're a bit like chain letters and a way to game link ranks. But they are fun, and I often enjoy reading them. But Maggie Fox just tagged me on the latest meme. This being a slow news day, I've decided to play.

I'm supposed to tell you eight things about me that you didn't know. It seems you probably could have lived your entire lives without knowing them, but here they are. Then I'll tag eight more victims who will do the same, and so one until every member of the blogosphere makes similar revelations. That will give Maggie about 1,223, 564,871,550 links.

The envelope please:

1. I used to be an avid sailor, but I've grown lazy. Now I garden. I go out in my yard and dig, weed, plant & prune. It's where I do my best thinking.

2. I used to be very shy. I was petrified of speaking in the front of a room. On rare occasions when I asked a speaker a question from the floor my knees would shake.  I got over it.

3. I have had Adult Type 2 diabetes for 24 years. It has made me a physical fitness and diet buff. In the long run, I will probably live to an older age because I have an incurable, degenerative disease. How ironic.

4. I never my own kids. I inherited a couple by marrying Paula, but it's not the same. My love of spending time with young adults who share my interests has much to do with my life inn social media.

5. I am among the world's worst dancers.

6. I once aspired to be a professional photographer. I sold my work at street fairs in the late 60s and early 70s. Got lots of compliments, but sales usually did not equal the cost of booth space rentals.

7. Robert Scoble was the 4th person I approached to write a book.The second was David Weinberger who told me he didn't collaborate very well.

8. As a PR guy, I invented the term "PC Sound." It seems obvious now, but it wasn't back in 1990. The best thing anyone taught e in PR was Regis McKenna, who had me interview corporate customers anonymously, then feed the results back to clients. That was in about 1982.

Thus I now tag Pat Phelan, Loic Le Meur, KD Paine, Chris Heuer, Robert Scoble, Toby Bloomberg, and Liz Strauss. May each of you have fun with this. More important, please do not forget to link to me.

Predictions for 2008

1. In about 10 days, about 3 million bloggers will post their predictions for 2008. Heh. But I will have been first, helping to boost this post up in the Google Search Engine.

2. Facebook, having been the most rapidly adopted social media tool of all time will crest and begin to fade, hurt by (1) it's inability to find a monetization system that is acceptable to its user base and (2) allowing spammers and pseudo groups to dampen what was once an incredible user experience.

3. Online Video will continue to expand as both an entertainent and communications tool.

4. Apple for the first time in two decades will capture more than 10 percent of the desktop/laptop market. But it won't come much from enterprise purchases. The long-awaited Vista Service Pack 1 will finally arrive for corporate customers where it will immediately disappoint in terms of performance enhancement.

5. At least two new companies will enter the smart phone market with products targeted aggressively against the iPhone.

6. The Boston Red Sox will defeat the Chicago Cubs in the 9th inning of the 7th game of the  World  Series with a  pinch hit grand slam home run.  They will have been down by three runs and the count will be 3-2 when the hit comes.

7. Ron Paul will not become president.  He will become a correspondent for Techcrunch and make guest appearances on Saturday Night Live.

8. Twitter will continue to ascend in popularity. However, it will find itself in the same bind as Facebook regarding monetization. Both companies will come to learn there is a huge chasm between what they can do for revenue and what they should do.

9.  Two major metropolitan daily newspapers will cease to exist. Best bets are the San Francisco Chronicle and the Boston Globe. The world will not be a better place.

10. I will retire as a start ups consultant after 30 years of it to become a TV star, or maybe a rock star, but certainly not an opera star.

My Seville Photos

I finally got my Seville photos all posted.  I also managed to get them nicely out of order. You can see them here. look at nearby sets to see pictures of Cordoba, & EBE07, the wonderful conference that brought me there.

It's nice to go back to the pictures a few weeks later and realize what an outrageous trip it was.

A Jew's View of Christmas

[Chrismas lover Paula Israel with Brewster & very old friend. Photo by Shel]

KD Paine just did a wonderful piece about a little girl and the meaning of Christmas. It motivated me to dust off one of my two annual reruns. This one is about a little Jewish boy and the meaning of Christmas.  I originally posted this in December 2003, my second month of blogging. I've changed a few numbers to make my personal stats current.

"I grew up in the 1950s in New Bedford, Mass., a second-tier East Coast city. Christmas was the biggest day of the year. School was closed. Parents had rare paid days off. There was usually snow on the ground and the abundant churches would chime carols from bell towers all day long.

Even if you were a Jewish kid and you knew this day was not designed for you, you couldn’t help but share in the excitement. My parents, who were born in Europe at a time when it was unfortunate to be both European and Jewish, were unable to conceal their own ambivalence. Our small family would drive to Christian neighborhoods admiring decorations. We once ventured all the way to Boston--in those days a two-hour drive-- where we saw live reindeer fenced in on Boston Commons beside a large illuminated plastic nativity scene.

More than once, my mother cooked a turkey on Christmas day and family would come for the day—but we never, ever admitted that the celebration had any relationship to Christmas. There were no stockings hung by our chimney with care, no bulbous piles of loot, no sweet smell of pine trees in our living room.

Christmas was a source of huge confusion for me as a boy and teenager. Perhaps it still is.

As a Jewish kid, we had Hanukkah. But the Festival of Lights, as it is called, seemed pale in the shadow of all that Christmas glitter of tinsel and bright blinking bulbs. Christmas was everywhere in the windows of homes and stores, on lawns in parks and even on rooftops. Yes, it was in the schools and no one even thought of objecting at that time. I still wouldn't.

While he was still alive, my grandfather, a white-haired kindly old man gave me Hanukkah “gelt,” in the form of a silver dollar. A dollar was big-time money back then, but how could my grandfather ever compete with the other white-haired guy, the one in the red suit with the elves, the flying sleigh and all his well-disguised doubles in department stores?

I liked getting a gift each of the eight days of Hanukkah, even if over-half was only socks and clothing that I would have gotten anyway. But while my Christian friends had only a single day, theirs seemed to be the Perfecta Jackpot, dwarfing our quantity of days with their quality.

In January. when we went back to Betsy B. Winslow School, I’d hear glee-filled reports of how these Christian kids had awakened Dec. 25 to entire living rooms filled with Schwinn bikes, Lionel Trains, American Flyer Wagons and Junior Builder Erector Sets. The only price they had to pay was to leave out some faith-based milk and cookies the night before.

Christmas loot was bad enough, but then there were the miracles. Theirs was the birth of God’s son on a night when animals talked. Ours was that a temple light burned for a long time. Big deal. Our most popular Hanukkah song was, “Dreydle, Dreydle, Dreydle,” which has the same melodic merit as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Not quite on par with “Silent Night,” “First Noel” or even, for that matter, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Our Holiday food featured potato latkas, still a personal, cholesterol-soaked favorite, but we had no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no TV special with Perry Como crooning “Ave Maria.“ We never dashed through the snow, laughing even part of the way.

But Hanukkah had one special part for a Jewish kid in that era-- latent machismo. The holiday story was about how Judah Maccabee had led a successful guerrilla war against the previously undefeated Roman Legions, making himself the central figure in the whole Hanukkah tale. Maccabee had kicked some serious Roman butt back when the Romans were the undefeated champs. It made me proud. He was our Rocky, our Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson. He wasn't no wimp as Jewish kids were often considered to be in the 50s.

I started remembering all this yesterday, while driving through the sad city of East Palo Alto (EPA). A few years back, EPA had the highest murder rate in the country--outdoing Detroit, New York City and Oakland. [They say it’s a lot better now that they’ve brought in a Home Depot, Ikea and Sun Microsystems campus]. But as I sat at a traffic light watching a packaged goods deal between a dude in a long coat and a kid on a bike, I saw a sign that reminded me about what I envied most about Christmas. It hung in huge, slightly lopsided, letters across University Avenue.

It said: “Peace on Earth.”

Tomorrow will be my 64th Christmas. It was a great many Christmases ago when I first heard the words, and fewer Christmas ago when I came to understand the bigness of the concept and the power of the thought. Peace on Earth is much, much bigger than Maccabee kicking Roman butt.

Not too many years ago, I met Paula who is now my wife. She loved Christmas like the kids in the old TV programs sponsored by Hallmark cards. She loved the planning, and decorating; the gifting and wrapping and opening and putting ribbons on her head; she loved the cooking and filling the house with unlikely assortments of people who somehow enjoyed each other. Her zeal put me at odds with my own deep and ambiguous feelings about the holiday. I’ve never been able to explain them to her in any way that makes sense and perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do in this particular blog.

There are now two things special about Christmas for me. The first is the big thought, dream or illusion of peace on earth and goodwill between its many inhabitants--Christians Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists and even Republicans. I don’t pray, but I do hope. If you do pray for these issues, I hope they come through and I will be grateful to you.

The second is smaller and more personal. It’s about Paula and how she catches the season’s joy as if it were something contagious. Whatever the germ, I’ve caught it as I find myself looking forward to the planning, and decorating; the gifting, wrapping and opening--albeit without ribbons on my head. Christmas Day, our home will be filled with unlikely assortments of people and I already know it will work out just fine.

Happy holidays, whichever you choose to observe, and may the New Year bring all of us closer to peace on Earth."

[Originally published December 24, 2003.

Even if you were a Jewish kid and you knew this day was not designed for you, you couldn’t help but share in the excitement. My parents, who were born in Europe at a time when it was unfortunate to be both European and Jewish, were unable to conceal their own ambivalence. Our small family would drive to Christian neighborhoods admiring decorations. We once ventured all the way to Boston--in those days a two-hour drive-- where we saw live reindeer fenced in on Boston Commons beside a large illuminated plastic nativity scene.

More than once, my mother cooked a turkey on Christmas day and family would come for the day—but we never, ever admitted that the celebration had any relationship to Christmas. There were no stockings hung by our chimney with care, no bulbous piles of loot, no sweet smell of pine trees in our living room.

Christmas was a source of huge confusion for me as a boy and teenager. Perhaps it still is.

As a Jewish kid, we had Hanukkah. But the Festival of Lights, as it is called, seemed pale in the shadow of all that Christmas glitter of tinsel and bright blinking bulbs. Christmas was everywhere in the windows of homes and stores, on lawns in parks and even on rooftops. Yes, it was in the schools and no one even thought of objecting at that time. I still wouldn't.

While he was still alive, my grandfather, a white-haired kindly old man gave me Hanukkah “gelt,” in the form of a silver dollar. A dollar was big-time money back then, but how could my grandfather ever compete with the other white-haired guy, the one in the red suit with the elves, the flying sleigh and all his well-disguised doubles in department stores?

I liked getting a gift each of the eight days of Hanukkah, even if over-half was only socks and clothing that I would have gotten anyway. But while my Christian friends had only a single day, theirs seemed to be the Perfecta Jackpot, dwarfing our quantity of days with their quality.

In January. when we went back to Betsy B. Winslow School, I’d hear glee-filled reports of how these Christian kids had awakened Dec. 25 to entire living rooms filled with Schwinn bikes, Lionel Trains, American Flyer Wagons and Junior Builder Erector Sets. The only price they had to pay was to leave out some faith-based milk and cookies the night before.

Christmas loot was bad enough, but then there were the miracles. Theirs was the birth of God’s son on a night when animals talked. Ours was that a temple light burned for a long time. Big deal. Our most popular Hanukkah song was, “Dreydle, Dreydle, Dreydle,” which has the same melodic merit as “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” Not quite on par with “Silent Night,” “First Noel” or even, for that matter, “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Our Holiday food featured potato latkas, still a personal, cholesterol-soaked favorite, but we had no Mormon Tabernacle Choir, no TV special with Perry Como crooning “Ave Maria.“ We never dashed through the snow, laughing even part of the way.

But Hanukkah had one special part for a Jewish kid in that era-- latent machismo. The holiday story was about how Judah Maccabee had led a successful guerrilla war against the previously undefeated Roman Legions, making himself the central figure in the whole Hanukkah tale. Maccabee had kicked some serious Roman butt back when the Romans were the undefeated champs. It made me proud. He was our Rocky, our Joltin' Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson. He wasn't no wimp as Jewish kids were often considered to be in the 50s.

I started remembering all this yesterday, while driving through the sad city of East Palo Alto (EPA). A few years back, EPA had the highest murder rate in the country--outdoing Detroit, New York City and Oakland. [They say it’s a lot better now that they’ve brought in a Home Depot, Ikea and Sun Microsystems campus]. But as I sat at a traffic light watching a packaged goods deal between a dude in a long coat and a kid on a bike, I saw a sign that reminded me about what I envied most about Christmas. It hung in huge, slightly lopsided, letters across University Avenue.

It said: “Peace on Earth.”

Tomorrow will be my 64th Christmas. It was a great many Christmases ago when I first heard the words, and fewer Christmas ago when I came to understand the bigness of the concept and the power of the thought. Peace on Earth is much, much bigger than Maccabee kicking Roman butt.

Not too many years ago, I met Paula who is now my wife. She loved Christmas like the kids in the old TV programs sponsored by Hallmark cards. She loved the planning, and decorating; the gifting and wrapping and opening and putting ribbons on her head; she loved the cooking and filling the house with unlikely assortments of people who somehow enjoyed each other. Her zeal put me at odds with my own deep and ambiguous feelings about the holiday. I’ve never been able to explain them to her in any way that makes sense and perhaps that’s what I’m trying to do in this particular blog.

There are now two things special about Christmas for me. The first is the big thought, dream or illusion of peace on earth and goodwill between its many inhabitants--Christians Jews, Muslims, Hindus, atheists and even Republicans. I don’t pray, but I do hope. If you do pray for these issues, I hope they come through and I will be grateful to you.

The second is smaller and more personal. It’s about Paula and how she catches the season’s joy as if it were something contagious. Whatever the germ, I’ve caught it as I find myself looking forward to the planning, and decorating; the gifting, wrapping and opening--albeit without ribbons on my head. Christmas Day, our home will be filled with unlikely assortments of people and I already know it will work out just fine.

Happy holidays, whichever you choose to observe, and may the New Year bring all of us closer to peace on Earth."

[Originally published December 24, 2003.

Marc Orchant is dead at 42

Marc Orchant, a husband, father and talented writer is died a short while ago, Oliver Starr has announced. He was loved by those close to him and respected and enjoyed by just about everyone who had the pleasure of knowing him. It is hard to believe this has actually happened and I wish there was something wise I could say but there is not.

This is very sad, very sad indeed.