It's a done deal
Find the new and improved Not Prince Hamlet at:
norwasmeanttobe.blogspot.com

Rocky

Experiment update
Now Playing: Mark Knopfler, "Ragpicker's Dream"
A little over two weeks into this blog experiment, I stop to ask: how's it working?

I'm enjoying it, of course, and the site is relatively easy for me to use, especially since the Firefox browser disables most of the ad clutter that comes with the blog. But I don't know if Lycos and Tripod are too much of an annoyance otherwise. Are you beseiged with pop-up ads when you navigate to Not Prince Hamlet? Do the banner ads slow things down too much (my favorite Firefox feature is the adblocker, which allows you to zap banner ads completely)?

I've created an account over at Livejournal.com with the thought that it might be easier to use. There aren't ads on it either. But this site allows me to upload pictures directly to the blog, which I--obviously--use a lot.

Let me know what the reading experience is like (apart from the self-important, lukewarm, shoddy content).

Rocky

05's First Friday
Now Playing: Tonic, "Head on Straight"
How am I spending the new year's first Friday, first day off? I'm taping cd's and writing on my blog, with the cat at my side. There's work to be done, sure, but isn't there always?

A reason why some of this week's work hasn't been done yet is the ice storm, which pretty much knocked out all of Wednesday. Another reason, though, is Douglas Rushkoff. That guy's books took much of my work time this week.

I picked up "Coersion" at the library on Teusday (just in time to be iced-in). I'm only at the second chapter right now, but it is very, very promising. Basically, Rushkoff wrote the book as a primer in media and the "coersion industry." It's a searching look at the ubiquity of persuarsion and coersion in our society, from the methods used by car salesmen to the outlay of the local shopping mall. Someone is always--always--trying to coerce you into spending your money on their stuff.

One of the tactics he discusses is the tactic of sending a free gift with a mail solicitation. Non-profits and banks do it all the time (I just had coffee with a friend who described the way that the bank he used to work for would send $1 bills out with their mailings). The tactic is to make the recipient of the gift feel a sense of obligation, like some sort of transaction has been initiated by their acceptance of it, and thus to feel compelled to sign on the dotted line or send a check. This works on me when it comes to the use of someone's time. Whether it's a door-to-door or a telephone solicitation, I can't turn people away when once they've launched into their pitch. If I can cut them off early enough, I don't feel any guilt about turning them away; but if I wuss-out and they get well into their schpeal, I feel I owe it to them to at least hear them out. Of course, once you've heard them out, you may as well give them your wallet.

It's an authoritarian play on the sense of obligation and guilt that the mass of people have. Much of the time it works. At least with me.

So let the solicitations begin.

Cigar anyone?
Now Playing: Great Big Sea, "Something Beautiful"
So on New Year's Eve Meredith and I remembered that we had these cigars. One was a gift from the stately Mr. Jim McGraw, and the other was taken from Meredith's intern gragudation dinner. Last May. Needless to say, they were old and nasty, but we didn't really care. They we were, if only for a few moments, ushering the New Year as married people smoking stogies. It was beautiful.

Jesus and George Bush
Now Playing: Rachel Yamagata,
I'm giving away my television addiction habits here, but off-and-on last night Meredith and I watched parts of PBS' Frontline piece called The Jesus Factor. It's a well-rounded look at W's evangelical conversion, the affect it had on the life of his family and his personal life, and the way it has influenced his political goals. Like most of what Frontline does, I recommend it.

In what other program can you weave together interviews with half of Wheaton College's faculty, Jim Wallis of Sojourners, the President of the Southern Baptist Convention, and the VP for Government Affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals?

The thing that I find particularly unsettling is the way in which evangelicals have become a definable voting block, a constituency that someone like Karl Rove can pin down, bully, tease, and scare into voting for his candidate. Evangelicals are flying high now, riding a wave of magnanimous victory; but there needs to be a greater deal of evangelical scrutiny of Rove and of the alliance of evanglical Christianity with political conservatism than we are presently seeing.

Obviously, I part from conservative evangelicals in the fundamental assumptions that drive their mass-mobilized issues: I don't see America as a "Christian country," a theocracy that calls "believers" to put the mandates of the Bible into national law. And I don't read the Bible as literally as most of them do, which perhaps is the main difference.

On that point of a literal reading of the Bible: one of the most frightening things that has come of George W. Bush's evangelical political belief occured on the one-year anniversary of 9/11, in the nationally-televised speech he gave against the backdrop of the statue of liberty. In that speech, W made mention of the light of freedom that shines in the American ideal, saying finally that "the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness will not overcome it." I honestly shuddered when I heard it, sitting there on my brokedown futon in Princeton, New Jersey. The verse which W had quoted was from the prologue of the Gospel of John, which speaks of the "light" of Jesus, which has shined into the darkness, and which the darkness "has not overcome." It was a very un-literal, fast-and-loose, idealogically-motivated quotation that could only lead to bad, bad things, identifying the "light" of the American Ideal with the "light" that is Jesus, the Word that has come into the world.

Who's your Google?
60 minutes had a piece last night on Google. I usually wouldn't watch very much of a technology story, but since I've used the Google search engine exclusively for over three years now, and since I jumped on board with their Google Desktop software right away, I thought I should watch the whole thing.

I love Google.

Let me say that again: I love Google.

I don't understand the technology behind their paradigm-shattering logarithms. I don't get excited about their young-and-fresh anti-corporate ethos. All I know is that they put out lots of cool stuff for free, and there is no better way out there to access loads of relevant information at once.

For example, a Google innovation featured on 60 minutes was their new text messaging service, which allows you to send a text message via cell phone to the number 46645 (googl) to search for something. You can search for phone book listings (business or personal), word definitions, and a host of other stuff. So I tried it. I searched for "pizza 64110" (that's our zip code) and got back four different listings, complete with address and phone number. It was featured as being super-fast, but it actually took close to 20 minutes on mine.

Google is great. That's all there is to it.

welcome to aught five
First, a strange admission: I cannot, for the life of me, remember what I did for New Year's Eve LAST year. For three days I have been searching my memory, and for three days, nothing. I think I have settled on the very high likelyhood of this scenario: Meredith and I stayed home and went to bed before midnight. That has to be why I don't remember doing anything, because what I did was like every other day.

That said, at least we made it to midnight this time around. Meredith made a lovely dinner, which we enjoyed together by candlelight (and sweatpants). Then we took a cobbler over to Beka's to have with her and the kids. After the kids went to bed, the three adults played Hearts and had a bit of bubbly. Meredith smacked us around at Hearts. By midnight it was time to go home and sleep.

The most memorable New Year's Eves for me are the ones I spend with good friends and family. It's not like a "family holiday" like Thanksgiving and Christmas, but if you can work it out so that there's some family involved that's nice. Here are my top five New Year's Eves, noted for their memorableness (good or bad), in random order:

1. Dec. 31, 2000. Marc Chipouras and his crew in their second annual New Year's Eve party. They rented out a club in Boulder, gave out masquerade masks, and we had a great time. Meredith was with me, and the night included such memorable occasions as: meeting Kim Hacker for the first time; sharing the last (and first) cigar with the compadres, with Kinnaird repeatedly professing his love for all of us; sleeping a few hours on Chipouras' floor before driving 10 hours back to Kansas City.

2. Dec. 31, 1999. Marc Chipouras and his crew in their FIRST annual New Year's Eve party, this one in a Knights of Columbus hall in downtown Denver. The event itself was largely awkward, as I was the depressed and sleep-deprived ex-boyfriend of my present wife. However, what makes the thing memorable is that my airfare from Kansas City to Denver was paid by the compadres themselves, a spur-of-the-moment decision they took about a week and a half earlier, while I was in CO for Christmas. They went online at Chip's place right then and there and bought my ticket. I love those guys.

3. Dec. 31, 1990. My freshman year of high school. Not wanting to go to any high school parties (and not being invited to any, even if I wanted to go), I stayed on Arizona place with Bryson Adler, Josh Cooley, and David Glen. While our parents played cards in my folks' kitchen all night, the four of us played all-out basketball on Bryson's driveway deep into the night, then played video games until near-dawn.

4.Dec. 31, 1998. I spent the night on the Belfast waterfront with my friend and fellow Young Adult Volunteer Jen. Neither of us were in much of a festive mood, being as that we both had serious relationships on the other side of the Atlantic. But we got to see an outside concert by The Saw Doctors, and we got to drink free mulled wine. And, hey, it was Ireland. What's not to like about that?

5. Dec. 31, 1997. Senior Year in college, home in Denver with the compadres, we spent the night at Jackson's Hole, across the street from Coors Field in downtown Denver. I ran into a guy I halfway knew from college, which, being as that our college was a conservative Christian college, made our greeting outside of a bar somewhat curt. Around midnight, everybody migrated south to Union Station and stood amidst a huge crowd as they dropped a Dick-Clark-style ball. It was an impressive throng, everybody was merry, and Ryan Seebury kept yelling, "1998: The year of the naked!!"

That's all the time we have. There are bowl games to watch, time to waste, and, oh yeah, some work to do.

Mainline denominations and PBS
Now Playing: www.xpn.org live stream: squeeze
Yesterday the Kansas City Star ran a small piece about a film to air on PBS last night, "The Congregation" So Meredith and I watched a bit of it (basically tha last half).

The film is well done. It's tough on the attention span, though, as it mostly shows long bits of footage covering the very routine things that churches do: worship services, staff meetings, steering committee meetings, congregational meetings, work trips. The main virtue the film possesses is its' minimal use of a narrator. It lets the church's members tell the church's story in simply living together.

"The Congregation" documents the church's tumultuous transition to a new pastor and its' navigation of conflicts having to do with theology, worship, and, of course, money. It shows, in my opinion, what is the biggest problem with most mainline congregations (and this is by no means an original insight): they understand themselves and behave like circa 1950 organizations. That is, to be a mainline congregation is to be a collection of committees and well-intentioned and principled people trying to "do good" in the world. Decisions are made by discussion and vote. Never did the film (in the hour that I watched--which may have been the more controversial hour) show the church praying. Not in staff meetings or in congregational meetings or elsewhere. What does the church do? It produces reports, gathers input from shareholders, and holds forums. The language and practice of prayer and discernment is largely absent.

The congregation that the film documents is a United Methodist congregation in eastern Pennsylvania. As such, it is theologically liberal, mostly white, and mostly over 40. But the church's demographics and theological orientation are not the main issues with which it struggles. The underlying reality is that conflict, decision-making, and mission are all viewed through the lens of a charitable organization, albeit one that feels a responsibility to a heritage and one that makes frequent reference to God. But it still behaves like a committee from top-to-bottom, and in that way it is a closed-system that cannot adapt to changes in the culture or the church itself.

Enough about that. Watch the movie. It's good.

Best of the year (cont)
Mark Knopfler's "Boom Like That" has grabbed large shares of my interest and enthusiasm over the last two months. I've never really liked Knopfler or his former band, Dire Straits, but this single is downright catchy. It only took me about four times listening to it to catch on: it's about the McDonald's mogul Ray Kroc (That's "Kroc" with a "K"; like "crocodile" but not spelled that way). This article does a little homework and gets Knopfler's take on what he was trying to accomplish with the song. At any rate, it's one of the better singles to come out this year.

Are you a "Determined Detractor"
So a friend of mine turned me on to this book called The Tipping Point, about how social trends behave like epidemics. One way in which they do that, the author contends, is that they are spread by individuals who both know a high number of people and a high amount of information. Basically, trends spread by word of mouth, which is driven primarily by a small number of well-connected, highly knowledgable people.

Now comes this story in today's New York Times about the "Determined Detractor." The DD is someone who opposes a product or company and who uses media and technonlogy to spread their opposition. Example: Morgan Spurlock, producer of last year's documentary Super Size Me, which took aim at McDonald's. Other DD's use the internet as their prime tool of opposition, like the brothers who spent a whopping $40 to produce an three minute video criticizing the IPod and post it on the internet. Because of what these guys did, Apple fixed the problem these two had singled out.

What I think is interesting is that Determined Detractors aren't everybody. They're unique people, people who probably get made fun of a lot, called "crusaders" and told to "get a life." They're people who get offended enough by hubris exhibited by the companies they buy from that they do something about it. I am not a Determined Detractor. I, as the title of this blog makes clear, don't make waves in the way that a DD has to. I, like most people I know, am content to sit back and complain about a product before I take some kind of active opposition to it. But then again, I don't buy a lot of the things that DD's get riled up about, like IPod's. I have opted out of the IPod craze not because of its' Determined Detractors, but because an IPod would be useless to me.

But I'm glad there are Determined Detractors out there. You can bet I'll be listening to what they say. Corporations themselves are starting to listen.