Category Archives: Miscellany

One big room for everything

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Imagine a big room in your house where you keep the stuff you want to find later. Things you had written; articles from magazines; newspaper clippings; excerpts from books; cassette tapes of recorded music; VHS video cassettes… everything.

To save something you simply opened the door and tossed it into the room. Yes, in time my stuff would accumulate in piles waist high. But I know where everything is. It’s in this room.

To what extent does any such saved item really exist if I can’t find it?

Now imagine said room lined with filing cabinets, each clearly labeled as to contents. In each drawer there are section dividers and folders within. A 3-ring binder hanging on the wall for quick reference to what is in each of the filing cabinets (or banker boxes).

This has been my thinking as my blog has grown to 6,000+ posts in the last twenty years. I’ve been pretty disciplined about putting each post in one or more categories, and tagging for the finer grain. Without that metadata, my blog would be almost useless.

BUT WAIT! you say. You can also search the blogs db? You can, if you can remember what to search for.

PS: Sadly, I can’t think of an appropriate category or tag for this post… so I put it in STUFF.

“What Makes A Cult A Cult?”

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It’s a little surprising how many cults I’ve seen come and go over the years. Heaven’s Gate, Branch Davidians, Peoples Temple, Aleph (formerly Aum Shinrikyo), Moonies. And let’s not forget Scientology. Yes, most of the members considered these religious sects. But who you gonna believe, me or some guy in a cult?

A fascinating essay in The New Yorker Magazine (What Makes A Cult A Cult?) got me thinking about cults. A few of my favorite bits from the piece:

“One stratagem favored by Keith Raniere, the leader of the New York-based self-help cult NXIVM, was to tell the female disciples in his inner circle that they had been high-ranking Nazis in their former lives, and that having yogic sex with him was a way to shift the residual bad energy lurking in their systems.”

“A great many people were, after all, able to resist his spiral-eyed ministrations: they met him, saw a sinister little twerp with a center part who insisted on being addressed as “Vanguard,” and, sooner or later, walked away.”

“Few of us believe in our heart of hearts that Amy Carlson, the recently deceased leader of the Colorado-based Love Has Won cult, who claimed to have birthed the whole of creation and to have been, in a previous life, a daughter of Donald Trump, could put us under her spell.”

Easy to laugh at these folks but they were never funny (and getting less so). Down in Jonestown, old Jim sometimes conducted “White Nights.”

During such events, Jones would sometimes give the Jonestown members four options: attempt to flee to the Soviet Union, commit “revolutionary suicide”, stay in Jonestown and fight the purported attackers, or flee into the jungle.

The Soviet Union is no more so I’m thinking I might flee into the jungle.

Truck full of junk

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I drive by this house two or three times a day. Yesterday I spotted this truck and the image has haunted me. A dozen question immediately popped into my head (in no particular order):

  • Where did all of this stuff come from? This house or was it brought from somewhere? And why bring it here?
  • When did the tire go flat? On the way to this house (unlikely) or after it got here?
  • Did someone really drive down the highway like this?
  • Is the thin strap really the only thing holding the riding mower to the tail-gate?

I drove by the house later in the day and the truck was parked in the same spot but with all four tires… and the bed was empty.

  • Where did they take it? The dump? Someone else’s home?
  • Were they really able to jack the truck up and change the tire without unloading all the shit?
  • Not truck related, but what about that mailbox? It has been that way for years and I can’t believe the mail carrier hasn’t insisted they fix it so he/she doesn’t have to fall out the truck to put mail in.

On not wanting children

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From a 2016 essay (My Biological Clock Can’t Tick Fast Enough) by Sari Botton:

“People sometimes commend me on how “brave” it was for us to not have children. I laugh, because to my mind, I arrived at it in just about the most cowardly way: I lucked into childlessness (if having a defective uterus can be considered luck). Deep down I didn’t want to have children, but I kept limping toward motherhood anyway, because I thought I should want them until, in the end, my anatomy dictated my destiny.”

Turbo Encabulator

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YouTube notes: “This is the first time Turbo Encabulator was recorded with picture. I shot this in the late 70’s at Regan Studios in Detroit on 16mm film. The narrator and writer is Bud Haggert. He was the top voice-over talent on technical films. He wrote the script because he rarely understood the technical copy he was asked to read and felt he shouldn’t be alone. We had just finished a production for GMC Trucks and Bud asked since this was the perfect setting could we film his Turbo Encabulator script. He was using an audio prompter referred to as “the ear”. He was actually the pioneer of the ear. He was to deliver a live speech without a prompter. After struggling in his hotel room trying to commit to memory he went to plan B. He recorded it to a large Wollensak reel to reel recorder and placed it in the bottom of the podium. With a wired earplug he used it for the speech and the “ear” was invented. Today every on-camera spokesperson uses a variation of Bud’s innovation. Dave Rondot (me) was the director and John Choate was the DP on this production. The first laugh at the end is mine. My hat’s off to Bud a true talent.”

View on YouTube

“School is largely a service for the parents.”

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“It doesn’t surprise me that kids do well without school. School is largely a service for the parents. I remember as a kid being really pissed off that so much of my youth was wasted sitting in rooms with my hands folded, with my mind anywhere but in school, learning nothing and being bored out of my mind. I thought of school as very lazy, unimaginative, typical of adults. It wasn’t really until grad school that school started working for me, on the terms I wanted it to.”

— Dave Winer