SILICON SOAPWARE wafting your way along the slipstreams of the Info Highway from Bubbles = Tom Digby = bubbles@well.com http://www.well.com/~bubbles/ Issue #182 New Moon of October 17, 2009 Contents copyright 2009 by Thomas G. Digby, with a liberal definition of "fair use". In other words, feel free to quote excerpts elsewhere (with proper attribution), post the entire zine (verbatim, including this notice) on other boards that don't charge specifically for reading the zine, link my Web page, and so on, but if something from here forms a substantial part of something you make money from, it's only fair that I get a cut of the profits. Silicon Soapware is available via email with or without reader feedback. Details of how to sign up are at the end. ********************* I saw something unusual while driving home from a recent lunch get-together. There were a couple of young men standing in the median at a busy intersection, holding a hand-lettered sign. That in itself wasn't unusual. What was unusual was the sign. It didn't say "Homeless" or "I need a job" or otherwise appeal for money. It just said "Free smiles". While I was waiting at the light I blew them some bubbles. They seemed to appreciate that. Then the light changed and I went on my way. I'll probably never really know their story. They looked suntanned and dusty like they were homeless or had spent a few weeks on the road, but of course there was no real way to tell their history just by looking at them. And they may have been asking those drivers who were turning left (and thus in the lane closest to them) for money. But again, I wasn't in that position. But even though there's no real way to know, short of spending zillions of dollars on private detectives and such, and maybe not even then, I can speculate. Maybe they were doing something like "Candid Camera" or some other TV reality show. I didn't notice any cameras, but they may have been hidden and I wasn't thinking about that at the time anyway. I was occupied with getting the bubble-blowing done in the few seconds I had before the light would change. Or maybe they were doing some kind of anthropological study, keeping count of the different reactions they got: This many smiles, that many obscene gestures, so many bubbles, and so on. Maybe they're doing this in other places as well, to see how the statistics vary from place to place. If it's part of an organized operation there could be other teams dressed differently: Carefree vagabonds here, spiffy-looking businessmen there, robed gurus or swamis or some such somewhere else. See how physical appearance affects people's reactions. If this were a science fiction movie, instead of anthropologists they might be advanced beings from some other world or dimension or something, studying humankind or maybe testing us. Or if this were a slasher movie, they could be serial killers celebrating a recent kill. And maybe one of them works for the DMV and can look up potential new victims from their license plate numbers. On the other hand, they could be eccentric billionaires looking for people to hand out large sums of money to (remember that old TV series "The Millionaire"?). They were probably not anything other than what they looked like. But they could have been. ********************* There's a bunch of us who get together about once a month to watch a movie or other video. Recently, in honor of the season, we saw "The Nightmare Before Christmas". That's the one where there's a "town" for each holiday. Various legendary characters associated with holidays (such as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny) live in the appropriate realms and go out into our world on the appropriate days. The two Holiday Towns we actually see are the ones for Halloween and Christmas, although the Easter Bunny makes a cameo appearance and we see the entrances for some others that look like they might be St. Patrick's and Thanksgiving. It occurred to me that what's interesting is what we don't see. In Christmas Town we have Santa's workshop and houses full of happy children dreaming of opening their presents, all surrounded by snow-covered countryside traversed by toy-like railroads. Holiday music plays constantly. What we don't see in Christmas Town is anything related to the religious side of the holiday. There are Christmas trees with stars on top, and there may be an angel figure here and there, but I didn't notice anything like a Nativity Scene. We hear songs like "Jingle Bells" and "Here Comes Santa Claus" but we don't hear "O Come All Ye Faithful" or "Little Town of Bethlehem". And later, when a character unfamiliar with Christmas is looking through books of Christmas stories we see a copy of "A Christmas Carol" and a number of other titles I can't recall right now, but the Christmas stories from the Bible are not among them. Neither do we see the less attractive side of Christmas. We don't see stores jammed with frazzled shoppers, or people trying in vain to escape the relentless holiday-season media blitz, or anything else about Christmas that is not festive and joyful. Maybe all these things are there, perhaps on the other side of some snow-covered hill, but if they are the camera never finds them. We also get a rather incomplete view of Halloween. We see the macabre and scary, ghosts and skeletons and coffin-shaped furniture and such, and there's lots of talk of making people scream, but that's pretty much all we see. We don't see the festive side: The costume parties, or children carving Jack-O-Lanterns or bobbing for apples, or the like. There is one instance of someone knocking on a door and saying "Trick or treat," but that too is in the service of the Dark Side. Likewise, we don't see the solemn side of the day. There's little or no hint of the traditions some religions and cultures have of this being a time to honor their departed ancestors or to otherwise mark a turning point in the wheel of the year. Of course it may well be that there wasn't room in the plot for any of that. The whole thing is basically a tale of one person's discontent with how things have always been and what happens when he decides to try something new that he's not really suited for. There's also a love interest and a couple of other sub-plots, but all in all it wasn't meant to be a detailed scholarly treatise on Halloween, or Christmas, or the similarities and differences between them. It was meant to be entertainment. And as entertainment it does a pretty good job. ********************* About three years ago I wrote of finding the quote "All thought is anthropomorphic" written on one of the pillars of an underpass, and adding a comment. A year later the line and my reply were still there. http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0145.txt http://www.well.com/~bubbles/SS0157.txt Although I didn't mention it, it was still there last year. This year it was gone. But that doesn't mean that human thought is no longer anthropomorphic. ********************* So what else do I have to write about besides how anthropomorphic thought may or may not be? There's the bit about the antimatter cell phones. I read an article in the paper about how rumors were going around about one of the major cell-phone makers. Well, maybe I didn't really read it. I just glanced at the headline and let my imagination work on what those rumors might be. So maybe there's a rumor that they're making cell phones out of antimatter, and users are rather unhappy when the antimatter phones explode when they try to use them? Of course real antimatter doesn't behave that way, at least not as far as we know. But maybe these were cartoon phones, intended for use by cartoon characters. Cartoon antimatter can behave in all sorts of ways, as long as it's funny. It started when they went to make copies of the engineering drawings for the assembly line to use, and found the copier wasn't working. There was an old blueprint machine sitting off in a corner, so they used that. Problem was, blueprints are like a photographic negative, so the prints came out with white lines on a dark blue background. Then the people building the phones interpreted the negative images as meaning they should build negative phones. So they made them out of antimatter. Nobody caught the error until the phones went on sale. There were a few reports of phones exploding on store shelves, but those were dismissed as terrorist activity. It wasn't until customers started complaining about phones blowing up when they tried to use them that the quality control people were called in to investigate. They figured out the problem fairly quickly, but by then that model of phone had gotten a rather bad reputation. The company's stock price dropped several percent. Rather that try to explain to the public about what antimatter is, they're reportedly planning to just change the model number once the problem is corrected. The company's stock price has risen on the strength of this news. ********************* There was an odd item in the news: Someone dressed a dead deer in a clown suit and left it on someone else's front porch, according to police in Sioux City, Iowa. They suspect it was a Halloween prank. The story, or at least the version I saw, didn't say what the deer died of. Had it been shot? Hit by a car? Did it die of natural causes? Did anybody even bother to look? The story did say the police had not opened an investigation. Even though an Animal Control officer was quoted as saying this kind of thing is illegal, the police evidently don't consider it a high-priority matter. I'm reminded of another time when some newspaper columnist was driving around some residential area in the middle of the day when almost everybody was off at work. All looked nice and normal until, lo and behold, there in the middle of the street was a guitar. On fire. There were no people around that he could see, and no debris or kindling or anything else that might give a clue as to why there would be a guitar burning in the middle of a deserted street. And no, he didn't say whether the guitar was acoustic or electric, and if acoustic, whether it had steel or nylon strings. It just now occurred to me that it could possibly have been electric with nylon strings. Then the magnetic pickups wouldn't have worked, possibly leading the guitar's owner to burn it out of frustration even as the neighbors applauded the resulting peace and quiet. But that scenario doesn't seem very likely. Another time someone impaled the remains of their holiday turkey on a West Hollywood street sign. It stayed there several weeks, and then was gone. There's a thing sort of between pranks and art, where the object is to set up unlikely and unexplained tableaux for people to happen upon: A guitar burning in an empty street. A dead deer dressed in a clown suit. A Christmas tree in an elevator in the middle of August. A turkey carcass impaled on a street sign. Coins taped to walls all around the neighborhood, seemingly at random. And so on. Having these things be unexplained usually implies that whoever does them does so anonymously, although some have come forward after a time. Or at least someone has come forward and claimed to have done whatever it was. There may be no real proof. This type of art probably has a name, but I'm not sure what it might be. ********************* There's that mad scientist with a sort of stereotype mad-scientist European accent who's been genetically engineering snakes to crawl around on the fronts of cars, sweeping water droplets and dirt and snow and such off with their undulating twisting bodies. He calls them "vindshield vipers". ********************* The Blue Angels (the precision flying team) had to cancel one of their San Francisco shows recently because of fog. People were rather disappointed. So I had a thought for future foggy occasions: Send up a bunch of blimps with giant loudspeakers playing computer-generated synchronized jet-fighter noises. Then people will think the Blue Angels are still flying around up there even if they can't see them because of the fog. They may still be disappointed because there's nothing to see, but that may be less disappointing than having them not fly at all. Of course the Truth In Advertising people may grump a bit, but so what? ********************* Have I mentioned that Rainy Season has arrived? The Bay Area has had two fairly hefty storms over the past couple of weeks. That reminded me of this: [NOTE: This was written for places with dry fallow summers, where the main growing season is a mild wet winter.] Winter Construction We're half the year away From May. The dance of the ribbons and the joyful proclamations Of the season of outdoor frolic Are but dim memories, distant and unreal. This is a time for turning inward, As Nature rebuilds the world. As the cool rains of winter Bring new life to the parched land We gather 'round the hearth By Jack-O-Lantern light To welcome back old friends From the other side of Eternity. Then we defy the deepest darkness With strings of artificial stars And feast on songs of joy Among loved ones in the here and now. Finally, as the sun takes its first baby steps back to us We can begin to look forward To another season of light, When Nature once again takes down Her cold gray Construction signs And the time of outdoor frolic is proclaimed anew. -- Tom Digby First Draft 11:52 Sat October 22 2005 Edited 13:33 Sun October 23 2005 Note added 17:24 Wed October 26 2005 Note edited 14:42 Sun October 30 2005 ********************* HOW TO GET SILICON SOAPWARE EMAILED TO YOU There are two email lists, one that allows reader comments and one that does not. Both are linked from http://www.plergb.com/Mail_Lists/Silicon_Soapware_Zine-Pages.html If you are already receiving Silicon Soapware and want to unsubscribe or otherwise change settings, the relevant URL should be in the footer appended to the end of this section in the copy you received. Or you can use the above URL to navigate to the appropriate subscription form, which will also allow you to cancel your subscription or change your settings. -- END --