The Artiste of the Slightly Funny Deal

Phil's in the news again. The New Yorker magazine this time. I like this line, "Dick’s allegiance was not to literature but to writing and to the possibilities of writing as a form of protest and instant social satire. Another twist of fate, or circumstance, and he could have ended up as Rod Serling." The article also says, "Dick’s last big book was a work of cosmic explanation in which lightning bolts of brilliance flash over salty oceans of insanity. Poe’s explanation of everything was called “Eureka.” Dick’s was “VALIS.”

And, William Gibson's tour de force was "Neuromancer." I know I just went off on this topic a few days ago, but I'm not done. (sorry Phil, but I've got Gibson and Cyberspace on the brain right now.) I just blogged about the fact that Gibson coined the phrase cyberspace in 1982, a good ten years before mainstream America was about to step head-long into it. I was tinkering in that virtual realm myself back then (running a BBS from 1983 until I converted to a website in 1994.) I've paid homage to both Gibson, and Neal Stephenson (of SnowCrash fame) as my cyber godfathers. Both clearly visualized worlds where we exist virtually, rather than physically (in meat space, as Gibson called it.) And, yes, Philip K Dick was certainly a visionary, also. He was writing about computers and alternate realities in the 1950's, for gawd sake! But, did you know that on the same page where Gibson first used the now famous word Cyberspace, he also called it the Matrix!!! Here's the groundbreaking line: "He operated on an almost permanent adrenaline high, a by-product of youth and proficiency, jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the Matrix."

In fact, our anti-hero Case (the protag of Neuromancer) was a "console cowboy" using a cyberspace deck to jack into the Matrix. So, the Matrix (aka, Metaverse to me and Neal) was the destination. I searched just now (in cyberspace, of course) and found that the directors of Matrix, the Wachowski brothers, credit Gibson, Stephenson and Philip K Dick for their concepts! That's cool. I was always kind of pissed off thinking they plagiarized the stuff.

Anyway, what got me going on all this (again) is the release of Gibson's newest book, "Spook Country." This is the second of his "current time" novels and uses some of the same characters as Pattern Recognition. I'm anxious to LISTEN to it on audiobook CD while traveling in a few days. I purposely didn't put links to a lot of the references to keep you moving forward. But, here, by all means, jack in yourself to the book that started it all and go ahead and veer off to PKD 's latest tribute (of sorts.) Even take a quick click on Johnny Mnemonic, an even earlier Gibson creation

Oh, and as for the title of this entry... that was a line from the first page of Neuromancer where the bartender Ratz refers to Case as "the artiste of the slightly funny deal." PKD, and hell, me, too!

Fast Money

I'm still laughing over the stock show on CNBC. Ex-hedge fund manager Jim Cramer started this trend of screaming and acting out on his "Mad Money" show. But, truth-be-known, the Kahuna and Brain were spewing witty stock talk on early morning Squawk Box years ago before it became so fashionable. But, I've got to hand it to these guys on "Fast Money." They're pretty witty. I don't know what was funnier... their repetitious growling about hanging at the buffet with "the old man" (which is only funny if you know they mean Warren Buffet, the famous Oracle of Omaha) or their talk of fall TV trades. What made this funny was the talk of manna falling from heaven and helicopters thanks to the upcoming political ads. TV networks and cable TV will be the ultimate beneficiary of the 2008 Presidential election when, as they say, "multi" millions will be spent by the top candidates. That's sick (as in bad, not impressive.)

OK, so I'm alternating between laughing and shaking my head. "Money, money, money" -- it is so pathetic, really. This sub-prime loan mess doesn't surprise me. I never could understand how or why banks were willing to make such huge, extravagant home loans to people who could barely make these payments. Now we know -- they couldn't make them and foreclosures are at all time highs. It's just one more crisis. The ridiculous, inexplicable war. Global warming generating bizarre weather, and 2012 is looming (the end of the Mayan and Hopi calendars.) I should just go back to gambling. Roll the dice, cut the cards -- it's all fast money, and who knows how long we have to spend it.

Testing the Water

What do fish and stocks have in common? Hmmm. You can say both stink. What I had in mind was how I have literally been testing the water this week. My betta fish is sick and I keep testing his water, trying to regulate his tank so he can get well, live long and prosper. (Betta Release 1.0 is three fish years, which equals about 35 human years. Still young.)

The stock market is sick. The Fed has been trying to regulate those turbulent waters. These wild Tsunami swings are tough to take. I wanted to buy RIMM (Research in Motion, aka Blackberry) before Monday. I can reveal now that it splits 3 for 1 Monday. It's waaaaay too expensive at $200 per share. But, as I suspected it closed up $22.50 per share today, closing at $220. I'm sick because I should have bought RIMM back in 2005. I actually thought it was too expensive then. Ha! It's up about 2000% from then. I have owned AMZN (Amazon) since the beginning. I rode that baby from a $20 stock to a $400 stock, watched it split (several times), collapse and now come back as one of the alleged "four horseman" of tech stocks. AMZN has been very, very good to me. I owned AAPL, another of the "horsemen" (these are the four.) It was the very first stock I ever owned (1980's!) I could be Warren Buffet if I had kept that one. I sold it in the 1990's when I thought Macs and Jobs were washed up. Ha! Didn't see iPods and iPhones coming. It trades around $125 a share after who knows how many splits. I'd love to own GOOG (Google) but it has never been less than $200 a share for the average person and currently trades at -- get this -- $500 a share! When will it split? People will go crazy and it will immediately run amok again.

What will I do when I retire? Come on. I could keep an eye on the market, which is far too time consuming for a working person. I can travel and write (more likely.) Or, I could renounce my materialistic ways, meditate and teach T'ai Chi. I'll be doing the Buddhist thing tomorrow -- a retreat. Let's see which wins out ;) For now, I'll just keep testing the waters.

Second Life

I only gave a few seconds thought to the name of this blog. I've been blogging in my Zen Blog since 2001, but I'm really tired of that closed community. I can't get any feedback unless people join. No one wants to join these sites unless they blog there. I thought of setting up my own blog software, but that's just too much work. Which brings me to today's topic. Living in cyberspace.

Blogosphere, a term coined in 1999 as a joke, is becoming common slang now. When I first created a web site in 1994, I called it the Metaverse after the virtual reality existence envisioned by Neal Stephenson in his landmark cyberpunk, sci-fi novel "Snow Crash." Ten years before that, William Gibson (another idol) wrote "neuromancer" and created the original concept of cyberspace as a consensual hallucination for the alternate reality of console cowboys. Gibson was an early adopter of AI, neuro and bio-genetics, and helped fashion virtual reality. Both Gibson and Stephenson envisioned a dystopian society where multi-national corporations, pollution and over-population make living in cyberspace preferable to "meatspace" (Gibson called the "real" world.) SnowCrash had us designing our own avatars for virtual life. If you were a skinny nerd, you might take on a bulked-up super hero appearance in the Metaverse.

Now that the 21st Century is established, maybe they weren't too far off. Global warming and multi-national corporations are making life miserable enough that some people are actually living SL. What's that? Check it out. Second Life. Remember the Sims and Sim City? Well, SL is Sims gone amok. "Residents" are so addicted to this second life, that I understand the KOS blogger convention actually ran a second convention in SL. that's pretty weird. But, who am I to judge? I can sometimes get immersed in my own web/blog/poker virtual reality, and I know some folks that spend a little too much time in online multi-player games. And, for sure 13 years ago I wanted to live in the Metaverse myself. Heck, maybe that's where I'll be living soon anyway. I'm anxious to leave behind the work-day world. And since I'm too young to retire, I like to think of it as Phase Two. Pretty similar to Second Life, eh?