Funny (Blame Guttenberg)

Ten years ago, when Microsoft was still new to the Russian market, in a Russian web site I saw under the heading “Funny” a photo of a huge, multicolored Microsoft billboard advertising their newest Windows in Russian, attached neatly on an electric pole.  As grandeur as the slogan prizing the product was the intellectual property anti-theft warning: “Stealing a purse or stealing software - two crimes punishable by law”. Bellow the billboard, glued on the pole, printed on a simple A4 with the biggest font possible to fit on the paper, was a serial number for the Windows advertised above. About five years ago the American government prosecuted some kids for downloading and sharing music files. Today the digital piracy is still vital as always and the US government incentives like S.O.P.A. are in the vicinity.        

The technological progress makes it possible for the instantaneous creativity and innovation simply because of the instantaneous nature of the Internet. The information itself (copyrighted or not) is the biggest asset available to men today. The exchange of information on the Internet is becoming the main source of income for large industry hippopotamuses like RIAA and Google and for small Mom-and-Pop proprietorships alike so, naturally, it is going to be the main battlefield for resource distribution and re-distribution.

The Stop Online Piracy Act full title is "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes." per Wikipedia. The major accent here is to “combating the theft of U.S. property”. This seams to be all about. The property of the United States of America is endangered.

The sad misconception at the top of the food chain is that information is like the oil, the gold or the corn. Whoever controls it – controls the physical world. Blame Guttenberg for inventing the printing press or blame Leonard Kleinrock's, J.C.R. Licklider and Robert Taylor for their original idea of the network. The genie is out for good or for evil. The information (or the knowledge) is like the water in the toilet – once you flush it - is gone. But gone for you, not for the plumbing of your house, nor for the municipal plumbing or the fish in the lake where it ultimately ends up.

Innovative people (usually somewhere in Japan) collect such water, recycle it and reuse it. The waste is recycled too and turned into a fuel and used to power cities… Other places (usually in the US) start thinking about the waste in the drinking water when the taste is really unpleasant.

It is all about perspective. Marshall McLuhan was a Canadian educator, philosopher and scholar who is known for coining the expressions “the global village” and “the medium is the message”. He predicted the WWW almost thirty years before it was invented. The Internet is the medium and it is the message too.

Knowledge is from the Gods. Prometheus stole the fire from Zeus. Zeus then punished him for his crime by having him bound to a rock while a great eagle ate his liver every day only to have it grow back to be eaten again the next day. 

I think that no one could possibly contain the message when it is out in the open not even the US Congress. 

The sad guy with the birthday cake

At the line at the supermarket my wife and I were trying to apprehend our hyper active daughter who was simultaneously singing at the top of her lungs, dancing in the shopping cart and attempting at the same time to grab a candy from the shelf next to the nice lady at the cash register. Behind us came a young man with big glasses and a sad eyes behind them and placed an ugly white vanilla cake with a pink “Happy birthday Lonny” in the middle of the oversized sugar roses. My daughter has stopped singing said “Hi dear!” to the guy and then slapped with her tiny hand heavily on the plastic cover of the cake producing a loud noise, a blush on my wife’s face and my fast reaction to stop the second slap on the cake. “Sorry”, my wife said. “Sorry”, I said. “Sorry my dear”, my daughter screamed with joy.

The guy said to us with obvious embarrassment “Oh, no problem, no problem at all”, then to my daughter “You are cute little girl, what’s your name?”

By that time the news papers stand was the target of the little hands, so the nice man did not get to know my daughter’s name.

Later in the car, after we repeatedly instructed my still singing daughter what things aren’t allowed in the supermarket, my wife told me that the young man with the unfortunate birthday cake was perhaps a social worker who was taking the cake to a house for underprivileged kids. She is a child psychologist who works with many of these kids.

“Perhaps”, I said, because it was ten minutes to seven P.M. and I’ve noticed several magnetic access cards hanging on his neck,”it was one of the computer dorks from the bank building next door”. He and his co-workers are going to have a birthday party next to the water cooler”.

Perhaps none of us had guessed his occupation. I think it is interesting how we bend what we see around us around what we really are.

Friends who are suddenly too busy

Of course we all have friends that suddenly are too busy when we really need them. The feeling of sadness in such cases is only the tip of the iceberg. Why some friends stick with us even harder in times of our weakness and others vanish like the mid-morning fog chased by the breeze, does not concern me. What is amazing is the fact that the ones that stay and the ones to go are always the most unexpected.


In the aftermath of a life altering crisis I can't help but smile. I have the best friends whom I can trust. I also have a better understanding of the core substance of the friendship itself. As everything else in the universe it is alive, changing and evolving endlessly.

Time flies when spent with true friends

We all have, at some point in our lives, true friends who in the most difficult moments come to rescue us. When it is time for them to leave and go back to their own daily lives, we never insist for them to stay a little longer. They have their own pains to go back to, their own realities where they feel lonely and afraid in the silence of the night, just as we do.

When we say good bye and then they depart there is always this momentum of uneasy feeling when we separate. In such moments of sadness I smile and say a silent prayer for them and a thank you for having them. 

The Swiss watch

One day the neighbour of my friend knocked on her door and with worried look on his face told her that his dog needed an urgent surgery but he haven't have enough money to pay for it. She invited him in and started the café maker. He told her that he would like to sell some of his possessions but wouldn't go to a pawn shop as he felt this was too impersonal and desperate. “What kind of things you would like to sell”, my friend curiously asked. “Well,” he said, “I have a Swiss watch, a rifle and a bike I never use”. “A rifle?” my friend asked going instantly back in time when she was a little girl when her dad showed her and her younger brother how to hunt. “Yes, an air-gun, my Swiss watch and the bike, I never use them and I want them to go to nice person who will use them and appreciate them.” My fiend was instantly sold and bought the 3 items from her friend. She told me this story the day she gave me the Swiss watch as a present. She said that it is a man’s watch that she is not using it and that I fit into her friend’s condition for possession – use it and appreciate it. She also told me that she gave the bike to her friend to use it to go to work every morning. “I am keeping the rifle” she said it reminds me of my dad. While I write I wear the beautiful watch. It is an automatic. Nevertheless I have at least 5 watches to check the time around me including the one on my desktop, I wear it so I would stay “alive” and I could see the flywheel moving on the face of the watch. I also remember the stories that go with it – the sad one about a sick dog and the beautiful one about good people.

Commercials with hot, confused females

Ah, the commercials…Love them or hate them – they are always there to guide you when you have lost your true direction in life. The commercials with hot, confused females who for example are unable to decide what the right toothbrush is. Wandering, touching timidly brand free toothbrushes with confused, pretty face. A confident male with gorgeous 37 teeth smile and a professional looking outlook of a very successful dentist offers the right choice to the confused beauty. The music suddenly changes from depressed tonality to a full-of-life tune. The colors of the set are brighter and the confusion vanishes replaced by a confidence and an approving nod of a beautiful, bright faces. 

What makes me sad is the thought that the creators of such commercials are idiots or they believe that the potential buyers of their products are idiots. I am less sad in the first scenario. The fact that I see lately more of these wonders of commercial creativity makes me think that perhaps these ads work and then the second scenario is true. 

What makes my life easier is that I am bothered enough by such ads to write this down. Somebody might read it and little by little we will all boycott the products represented by silly ads. At least until the offending companies change their advertisement to cover the rest of us who (I wish) are the majority of the viewers.

Gypsy boy

With the most charming smile he was shouting “Hey miss, give me some change. It is now time for lunch and I am hungry”. “Sir, it is almost lunch now and I am hungry. Would you please help with some change?” Some people were smiling to the little guy and were giving him small change. Others, looking busier, and for some reason angrier than they were, were just passing him by.

I watched for a while saddened by the fact that so many kids walk hungry and truly there is no need for that as it is now 21st century not the middle ages. 

I purchased a big double cheese double meat burger and approached the kid who looked about 6 years old and said to him “Your lunch have just arrived little Sir.”

One could not possibly be happier than that little kid on that sunny East European market place at about lunch time. “Oh, a meat toast!” he exclaimed. “I am so happy!”

When I remember this boy I always feel sad. Then I smile. If that boy can smile – I can smile too.

Tantrum

My wife and I went to pick my two year old daughter up from the daycare and we saw her at the window waiting for us. Her perfect little face lit up in a smile and we could read on her smiling lips “ mammy and daddy”. Behind the window, next to my daughter little kids appeared and immediately glued their faces to the window, some of them smiling, others making funny faces. I waited in the vestibule for my wife to go inside to get my daughter.

After 10 minutes I started wondering why they are not out yet. In a few minutes they've finally got out. My wife with the typical signs of a migraine onset, my daughter with tears on her face. I instantly went into their sad state emotionally and asked my wife what happened. Aparently my daughetr’s boots were misplaced, another kid who left took my daughter's socks and the process of putting on the clothes took too long for my baby daughter’s tolerance for waiting to see daddy, so she did “the tantrum”.

Explaining the situation my wife concluded “and now I’m having a headaghe” with a miserable face expression. My daughter stopped crying and looked at her mommy. “Head hearts?”, she asked. My wife responded, “yes dear it hurts very much”. “I put a magical bandate?”, my girl asked seriously. Both me and my wife gasped in surprise. “Ok…”, my wife said. The little doctor in her mom's hands took an imaginative bandate and applied it on my wife’s forehead the she kissed her and said, “It’s Ok now”.

Were the sad moment go?  

The dream in the Moleskine notebook

The past comes to visit sometime in my dreams. It’s always behind a bullet proof glass. We can see and hear each other but we can never touch, hug or change each other no more.

Once I told my friends that sometimes I have vivid dreams that are so strange that I wish I could record them and write a story based on my dream. They got me a Moleskine notebook as a present to keep close to my bed so if I weak up from a dream with an inspiration to write to use it and record my dream. Today it happened for the first time.

I remember I recorded my dream with a pencil and then fell asleep again. When I woke up again I found the broken pencil inside the note book next to the finished story about the book and took a photograph that I placed below my story.

……………………………………………

The phone was ringing.

I was trying to talk to her trough the strange, unfamiliar device bit I could only hear her labored breathing (into the same communication device). I could only imagine her in the distant hospital room. My pencil just broke but I could still write somehow.

The phone rang once more.

Trough the vanishing dream my fingers desperately were tapping on the bizarre device where the symbol for visualization appeared to be but I could still only hear her but could not see her. Damned pencil! I will soon be unable to write…I will totally break down.

The phone rang once more.

The device, her voice and my whole dream disintegrate in rush like a Champaign bursting out of the bottle but into reverse. Like into a dream I am now partially awoken and I answer the phone. A familiar voice that saved my life once before again with a phone call is asking me "How are you:"… I say “thank you for saving me from the nightmare” and I realize the peculiarity of the moment. My pencil just broke… "I should not be sad" I thought, "It was just a dream". But I couldn’t stop the sadness or myself being a part of it. 

The squirrel

This sad story was given to me by another friend who loves the nature and little animals in particular. She has 3 cats at home and she is keen to feed any street animal that would come by to indulge the treats she always carries with her in a plastic container. She recently adopted four squirrels who reside in her back garden. She feeds then every day and knows more about them than probably they do. She even named them and was treating them as friends, perhaps an extended family – something that if all people were doing, this planet would have been a better place. One day when she was feeding them in the cold January afternoon, an eagle flew down from a tree and snatched one of the squirels and flew up to the sky. The poor beautiful rodent fought for its life and was able to free itself from the birds claws but the distance from the moment of freedom, the ground and the law of gravity ultimately decided its fate. My friend ran to attempt to revive the it but it was its day to go back to its creator so she buried her friend and went home heavy hearted. She was feeling personally hurt, unable to comprehend the cruelty of the end of a life that was part of hers for several months. She then thought about the eagle. Who was feeding the eagle? The eagle’s chicks offspring? There are no favourites in nature. If she did reside at this particular house and did not took care about this particular squirrel, she wouldn't be sad at all. This made her cope easier with the death of her friend. It is a story, but I like it. 

The right balance between love and common sense

One of my friends recently got a very prestigious and expensive scarf from a boutique in Paris. Sadly her sister did not consider the style and the colors that she likes dooming the unfortunate present to the sad future in the abyss of the things we never wear but cannot dispose of them either. Her sister gave her this gift in front of friends and family so my friend did not say anything to her. Should she have told her sister that her gift was thoughtful but she would not wear it? Should she have asked her to exchange it? How to make sense of something like this and move on? This wasn't the first time that my friend was in this place with her sister and won't be the last my friend said.
We all probably have at least one close friend or a family member who seems to not understand basic things about us. I do. My aunt is like that. She gave me a massive golden ring on one occasion and when I see her I must wear it, so she wouldn't ask me “why you are not wearing the ring I gave you?”… My friend (who is a pilot) told me that he saw my ring from his air-plane cabin while descending over the city and knew right away that I was meeting my aunt that day.
Joking aside, it is both frustrating and sad when such things tip the balance of reciprocity any human relationship requires in order to be harmonious and fulfilling. The predicament is even more challenging when the person in question is our close family member and we cannot just shut him or her off. Years pass by and this particular person again and again does things that offend the feeling of balance in us and we just cannot deal with this and move on.
All relationships are like life itself – dynamic; never static. We can and should at least try and balance the things that are out of balance in our daily life and make such sad relationships evolve and be more harmonious. For example I have tried many times to change my aunt’s behaviour that lacks common sense and sometimes is plain offensive. Well, I am still trying. She isn't a bad person. On the contrary she is always ready to offer her help or advice or a “nice” present when occasion is present. She doesn't get my taste for… well anything really. But when I think of the world where I may weak up tomorrow and she isn't in it – all her imperfections seam somewhat unimportant. 
When I see the things from that particular angle – I wonder if the missbalance isn’t partly my responsibility. Am I not too focused on the fact that I give (or take) more in my relationships with the people closest to me? Am I trying to just put myself into to the other person’s shoes?
Life isn't perfect but it’s too short to focus on its imperfections. 
Moving on…