Alan Gutierrez

I’ve found it easier to write lately. I’d had writer’s block. I’ve got a whole bunch of Writeboards in a backlog of writing. Long complicated scribbles.

Blogging ought to be easy. It hasn’t been. Blogging had become professional communication. It was a perpetual press release. It had become and odious chore.

I was afraid of turning into one of those pro-bloggers. My experiences with social media ran counter to the breathless self-referential raving of the Web 2.0 crowd.

What strikes me about a lot of these pro-blogs is the profound absence of critical thinking. People find a niche and then build a web of people who are only seeking confirmation for what they already believe.

That is the nature of pro-blogging. Coming up with a pet of an idea, then flogging it with anecdotal evidence in the form of anecdotes.

I once ran across this horrible blog post about Henry Ford and The Secret. Remember The Secret from last year? It’s the bible of the Just World Hypothesis.

The blog post was entitled Why Henry Ford Knew More Than “The Secret”. Every time I see Henry Ford, that image pops to mind, the one of him getting the Grand Cross of the German Eagle pinned to his label by the Honorary vice-consul of the Third Reich in Detroit, Fritz Hailer pops to mind. Henry Ford the virulent anti-Semite held up as model of positive thinking.

I felt like I was all lined up to slide down the chute of the idiot pro-blogger, so I didn’t blog much at all.

Celebrating John Frum Day on Vanuatu.

Some folks have written to show concern. I appreciate the concern.

I’m still getting email about policy matters. I’m inclined to respond with, oh, wow, very interesting. Hey, seen what I’ve been up to lately?

I’m going to enjoy being rid of these people who engage me as a resource, people who have no resources to offer. That has been particularly tiring.

I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Many New Orleanians are engaged in a cargo cult dance to bring down some form of funding for the grassroots efforts that drive the recovery. They dress up, wave the sticks, march and dance, and but the DC-3s do not land. The cargo is not for us.

It’s uncommon that local efforts are overlooked, that nonprofit organizations parachute in and disappear as quickly.

A sanitation worker on St. Philip. He sweeps a Coke can into a dustpan at the end of long vacuum cleaner like handle. He drops the Coke can in to a rolling fifty gallon trash can. He rolls toward Derbingy St, back the way I came. I’m wondering if the rest of my walk to the French Quarter will be Coke can free.

More than half the structures on this block are abandoned, there are vacant lots on either side, the upriver sidewalk is overgrown and crumbling, tires are basking in the sun in puddles of mud, while the worker rolls onward in search of a particular type of refuse. Packaging, I assume.

The sidewalks reconstitute themselves as I approach Claiborne. They are solid. I imagine them to have just been throughly swept, although there are tell tale scraps of wrappers. At Claiborne I see a troop of men with brooms, bins and pans rolling along underneath I-10. I wonder why one man decided to make a detour down St. Philip.

Suddenly it occurred to me that with Brian’s Latest Comments, I don’t need a side blog. I can just create my own forum.

I Love Caddyshack by Ian.

There is a ruckus in the roof sometimes. I thought they were mice, gnawing away at the insulation or the timbers in the room.

One day I saw that they were squirrels. There was a heavy scurrying in the attic, and I traced the source of the sound with my eyes. They made circles overhead ran to a corner of my room and then appeared in a perfect transition on the branches of the live oak outside my window. Two squirrels in a mad dash to the trunk and out of view, as if they were tuner sports cars, squealing out of a parking structure and onto the freeways of California to settle some score with their scurrying.
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Photogamer: In your pockets by Kenn Christ.

He is at Fair Grinds. He wants a Times-Picayune. There is fifty cents in his jacket pocket for a Times-Picayune. He knows this. He recalls putting the two quarters into his jacket pocket for the purpose of purchasing a Times-Picayune from the paper box in front of Fair Grinds. His jacket is draped over the chair that sits across from him at the table where he has set himself up with his laptop to write. He gets up to fetch the two quarters. He looks in one pocket and does not find them. He looks in the second pocket and doesn’t find them. He looks in his pants pockets, but he knows the quarters are not there. He looks in the inner pocket in the jacket, but there is none. He looks in one jacket pocket a second time and does not find them. He looks in the second jacket pocket a second time and does not find them.

He then picks the jacket up off the back of the chair, swings it over his shoulders. As his hands exit the tunnel of the sleeves and just as the jacket comes to rest on his shoulders, he reaches into his right jacket pocket and grabs both quarters between his thumb and two foremost fingers. He folds his shoulders and doffs his jacket and returns it to the back of the chair, cradling the quarters in his palm.

He looks at the quarters and it occurs to him that logically, he could have just scavenged his jacket pockets a third time as the jacket hung from the back of the chair.

At that point he understood something about doing without thinking, but he soon forgot it.

Don’t Fear Starbucks is an article about how Starbucks drives the sales in independent coffee shops by introducing more customers to blended coffee beverages. I thought that I might shoot this off into an email to Robert Thompson of Fair Grinds, but I thought it would be more interesting to see how long it takes him to find this post and comment. The article does describe Starbucks’ predatory monopolistic practices. (Personally, I think that Starbucks is an embarrassingly pasty white aberration of American culture.)

Encountered a YouTube video that amused me. Here Comes Another Bubble by the The Richter Scales sung to the tune of We Didn’t Start the Fire. It amused me. I sent a link to Dave Coustan via Jabber and said “This amused me.” In a bit he comes back with “I spotted Brian Oberkrich in that video.” Shortly thereafter the above screen capture was on Flickr. Below, you can watch the video from which it was taken.