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The album Tea for the Tillerman by Cat Stevens will always be part of my spirit. I was thirteen in 1970 when my older brother brought it home. He was always my window to the world of music. We had a big box of a stereo console that sat in the living room, with a sliding top that revealed the drop style LP player underneath. The speakers were built in, and it was a fine cabinet of wood veneers and polish. This was the family’s center of the new stereophonic universe.
It’s a simple matter to cruise the aisles of any grocery store and see the ever-growing shelf space devoted to organically grown foods. The increasing popularity of organically grown foods has something to do, one surmises, with the fear that we may be poisoning our environment and ourselves by using pesticides, fertilizers and herbicides. Why not? It seems rational on the surface. Look at what DDT does to bird eggs (ignore, for the moment, that DDT may have saved a billion lives). One could be forgiven for thinking that because X is bad for birds there is a pretty good chance that X is bad people. This, of course, is not completely specious reasoning, but it does ignore the larger picture. The larger picture involves taking the entire food supply into account, and when one does that one reaches one nearly inescapable conclusion: Organically grown food isn’t the answer, it’s part of the problem.
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Rondal Partridge is the last surviving member of the original all-star first team of 20th Century American photographers. You can learn much more about Ron at his website.
I first met him at his home several years ago, when Ron was in his early 80s. Since then he has published a terrific book full of quirky, idiosyncratic photos, and had several important exhibitions of his collected works.
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The Call for a Constitutional Convention
Addendum – The path to peace
There is an assumption that what makes our nation so great is the freedom of speech. There is of course a mechanical reason why this right is necessary, because you cannot make an accusation against the government without it. There is also a psychological need for people to vent their frustrations. And in the pursuit of democracy, there is the expectation that if everyone speaks their mind then a consensus will develop and a unified path will show itself. The original desire for freedom of speech, however, goes back to the Pilgrims. They wanted to express their religious view freely. That is why we have the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. Most people assume that God exists, but even the opening words to the Declaration makes the assumption that we really do not know. There is a reference to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Two distinct and separate ideas, that God is real and that maybe he is not. They sought and found a political solution with the recognition that there are and always will be two fundamentally different ideas regarding ourselves and our place in the universe.
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One of the most passionate but pointless little conflicts isn’t going on in some unknown banana republic or between mindless celebrities who used to be married to one another. Like the conflicts in Northern Ireland (or the north of Ireland) and Israel (or Palestine) – choose the noun you prefer – the origins of this war are lost in the past and don’t really matter anymore. All that remains is mistrust, antipathy and egotism, and for anyone else looking in the entire thing would seem totally incomprehensible. The war in question is that between advocates of the various operating systems, most notably between Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh users.
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By BoycottBuyMusic.com’s Jesse Perry
(Publishers Note: A few weeks ago as I write this, I received an email in regards to a recent article I wrote about BuyMusic.com. The email pointed out a few good references, one of which was BoycottBuyMusic.com. I found some of the content there very eye opening, and contacted them with the notion of perhaps writing some of their findings as an article for posting here at MyMac.com. Jesse Perry graciously agreed.)
It’s amazing. It really is, how one man can create such uproar among Mac and PC users. It’s been over a month and already 3 websites, countless blog entries, and forum posts have popped up in protest against something so amazingly stupid. It’s not even that Scott Blum (the founder of Buy.com and now BuyMusic.com) really did much to get all this started. He didn’t need to, everything his new company was going to be, was already started. It can be debated, yes, but I don’t think there are many people that can say with a straight face that BuyMusic’s ideas were original. I help run a website and here we’re going to look at what we’ve found so wrong with BuyMusic.
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Apple has many goodies in its arsenal of great things, but one of the best has to be .Mac. A lot of people were put off by the end of iTools and the subscription fee, but .Mac quickly pays for itself in ease of use, storage and “bennies.” iTools was never anything like this. If you have a laptop, which seems to be a growing number of Mac users, it is worth its weight in gold.
I am a big fan of Safari. The tab feature and the easy bookmark control is seductive. I bookmark everything, and have created quite a few subgroups on my menu bar. I love selecting “OPEN IN TABS” and watching ten of my favorites sites open instantly. It is such a timesaver. Of course, this tab power creates a challenge. Where did I put that site that didn’t fit into a category? Not everything can go into MISC. This problem was getting worse because my laptop bookmarks were different from my tower, and I would constantly be searching for X or Y in different places on the different computers. Last week I decided to try my hand at iSync. WOW! This feature alone is worth $99.00. I don’t have much of anything stored in my address book. If I had, I could be syncing my contacts and my iPod and my computers all at once. That is another project for another day. iSync was so easy to use that it is not worth describing. Trust me.
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(What’s the real price of cheap consumer electronics?)
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
I was going to write about something else, but a recent experience made a little bell go off in my head. Yep, I was searching for something to write about, and after what happened to me on a Sunday evening a few weeks back, I knew I had a better topic. I had spent my day doing some serious bicycling, and had finished by consuming an entire pizza and watching some of my favorite X-Files episodes, via the wonders of DVD technology. (Don’t you non-bicycle people wish you were one of us? Then you could put away the food the way we do, and still wear the Levi’s from ten years ago. Wink-Wink.)
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The Call for a Constitutional Convention
The Goals of Mutual Responsibility
Mutual Responsibility has simple utopian goals: food and health, education and worship, for everyone. Despite a long history of disagreement on how to achieve success, most people would recognize these four personal goals as primary to a better society: To be healthy, educated, productively employed, and upstanding. An economic system that prioritizes these qualities is well within America’s grasp.
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Company: Alien Skin Software
Price: $99.00 US
http://www.alienskin.com
Adobe Photoshop is one of the most versatile programs on the planet today, and its open, plug-in architecture make it even more so. Xenofex 2.0 is a Photoshop Plug-in, meaning you use the software from within the Photoshop working environment.
Xenofex 2.0 is an effects package, allowing you to use it to create really professional looking effects in your graphic files. For instance, you can quickly and easily add a lighting-bolt effect to a picture of the sky. Or turn a drab skyline to a clear blue with little puffy white clouds. The different effects you can create using Xenofex 2.0 is limited only by your imagination and needs.
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A strange thing happened the other day. See, a little more than a year ago, a friend of mine, and a pretty popular Mac writer many of you will remember, died. His name was Rodney O. Lain, and he took his own life on June 16th. of 2002. It was a very sad day for the Mac web, and an even sadder one for those of us fortunate enough to have actually met and known Rodney on a personal level.
I wrote an article, which was posted the next day, about his death. You can read it here. I was, if you can’t tell from that article, very upset. Not just at loosing someone, but at how it happened. By his own hand. Many people that week took the time to write me, explaining about depression and how it can really affect a person, how it can change a family, and all of the other nasty stuff that happens. While I did appreciate the outpouring of email from readers, and how many other websites linked to my article, none of it really mattered to me at the time. My friend died, and I missed him. I still do.
It has been bantered about by some that the upcoming G5 could be one decidedly long-lived computer. Friends have opined that your grandchildren will be using the next G5 you buy, even an IBM executive said that the 64 bit G5 was probably overkill for desktops. Then you have any number of sites talking about how the G5 is really a workstation powered computer wrapped up in a pro level desktop. Others feel differently, they maintain that the processor and the up to 8 GB of accompanying memory will soon be taxed be programmers. I don’t which scenario to buy into, if it’s the latter then everything is pretty groovy. If the former is correct and the G5 is so monstrously powerful that your grand kids will get good use out of it then we have a situation, a bad situation. So fire up the Bat signal and hope Michael Keaton shows up instead of George Clooney, cause we’ll need a cool Batman to take on this issue.
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Journey Well, my unnamed friend. May the speed at which you enter the unknown bring you comfort and peace. Regrettably, you have missed one of life’s surest experiences, a chance to visit the battlefield of ideas.
The living you left behind will wage moral arguments of political duplicity, with one side convinced of their sureness, and the other convinced of their unsureness. I sit uneasy with both, which is the price of being an idealist.
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Last week I looked at Quake, a first-person, shoot ‘em up game from id Software that despite being eight years old remains one of the most popular games in its genre. This week’s offering is a very different game: SimCity. Though it doesn’t give the player the same adrenaline rush in dealing with a chainsaw-wielding ogre with nothing more than a shotgun and an axe, SimCity is still a remarkably addictive and compelling game. Like Quake, SimCity has a long history and is available in a succession of versions, all four of which are still being played.
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Yeah, you swim in it every day, if you own a computer and have a dial up or some such connection to the Internet. You and I can’t help it. We have to at least cross it to get to the other side of where we are going, if nothing else.
Spending time on a computer today can be compared to nothing better than taking your life in your hands when you cross a moving river, one that is full of moving junk and debris, and where the water contains obvious filth and toxic elements. Your wife and children have to swim in this stuff too.
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Guest Review by Keith Spencer
Keith Spencer is a young musician and composer who has been studying with John Nemerovski for four years on keyboard, guitar, and music theory. Keith is an astute follower of the progressive “alt” music scene. We hope you appreciate his insights into the following two independent label CDs.
Boas – Mansion (2002)
ASIN: B00006J3SX
Review by Keith Spencer
After only a brief listen to Boas’ first full-length release, it becomes apparent that there may be another reason for choosing to entitle the album “Mansion.”
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Over the Water and Through the Bridge
Our second and third weeks in San Francisco are documented with quirky photos and captions, featuring unusual views of Golden Gate Bridge and city from the Bay.
To begin, here’s a splendid late day view from the living room of the house we’re looking after all month. July continues to be unusually warm and dry, as a result of the Texas hurricane pulling Pacific moisture south and east of central California. Fog, be gone!
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The Call for a Constitutional Convention
The Middle Ground
Americans, in general, undervalue the power and promise of self-government. We don’t trust the government with our money, but we expect them to use it to solve all our problems. The only other group with money is corporate America, but we don’t want them to control our government. The Contract for Mutual Responsibility finds a middle ground where private property continues, but the government controls the corporations in new areas. It ensures that all workers have their basic physical and spiritual needs met first in the quest for corporate profit.
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Dungeon Siege
Company: MacSoft
Price: $49.99
http://www.macsoftgames.com
Do you like breaking barrels, I mean REALLY like breaking barrels? If breaking barrels is your thing (for whatever reason: Donkey Kong fetish, barrels killed your brother, etc.) then Dungeon Siege is the must have game of your lifetime. Don’t think that barrels are the only thing you get to break, heck no, you also get to beat an Avargordos number worth of bad guys to death. Sure breaking barrels and killing things seems like it would be inherently fun, heck some people call that kind of action a weekend, but in Dungeon Siege it’s just boring thanks entirely to a weak plotline. The absence of an engaging plot is a shame because the story is the only thing holding Dungeon Siege back from greatness.
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MyMac Podcast #385
MyMac Podcast #384