One word, and it's not "plastics"

No—it's "catvertising".

I don’t know how I’ve missed this for the past two years, but it’s just as timely now as it was back when it was first posted.

Because “Nobody wants to see ads anymore; they want to see cat videos.”

I have to say that tears were leaking out my eyes as I watched this. I mean—that “Ninja Kitty” story board? Or the bar chart on cat videos overtaking online porn? This john st. crowd are just wicked funny, eh? (They’re Canadians.)

I’m keeping this one in clicking distance. I’m sure I’ll need it. 

Ecumenical sign of the times

I think this sign, which is on my walking route to the House of Skeletons, kind of summarizes the whole California gestalt:

I don’t know exactly which element takes precedence in terms of the California life—I mean, you’ve got Methodist, Lutheran and…um, I dunno sharing premises. In close temporal quarters—looks like the Methodists are still hanging about on their coffee hour when the Lutherans show up on a Sunday. And knowing how Lutherans like to settle in for gospels and stuff, I imagine they’re still there when the unknown denominational Koreans appear.

It’s not actually that unusual to see English-speaking congregations sharing with Chinese or Korean groups around here. It’s the ecumenicalism of this one that interests me.

Plus—you just gotta love a group that calls itself “The Very Good Church of Silicon Valley”. Or of anywhere else, for that matter.

Sorry to say that I missed the junque sale. 

Something for the roadmap, Facebook

I’ve installed a FireFox add-on that blocks Facebook ads—you know, the things that appear in the right-hand rail that are the result of web activity tracking cookies.

(Actually, I didn’t quite know what everyone was talking about when they complain about them until some FireFox extension kept crashing my browser, so I cleared off everything. Then—whoo, what a load of crap. So I fished out Adblock Plus and installed it again. Relief!)

But I still get some sponsored “suggestions”, which I’ve allowed (I think there is a way to expunge them, too, but they don’t bother me so much), including groups that friends may have joined, etc.

This one, I’m not so sure about:

As it turns out, this shows up every time I like something from UK Cop Humour. You know, the suggestion is—if you like UK Cop Humour, you might like these pages.

Well, no, not really. Might want to tweak your algorithm some, Facebook.

Genius marketing...not

I had to download a “free” 30-day trial subscription to Citrix’s Go-to-Meeting for a job interview a week ago. This was followed by “buy-our-software” emails every 36 hours. I found their “unsubscribe” link buried in the very small print at the absolute bottom of the emails and unsubscribed. But here’s what it tells you:

What the hell? Ten days? How crappy is their database that it takes ten bloody days for an unsubscribe request to filter through it? Not really a ringing endorsement of the power of their software design.

Here’s something for free, Citrix: you aren’t really going to sell a lot of subscriptions to your software after someone’s already told you they don’t want to hear from you. Any decision that I can influence in the future is going to be towards your competitors.

WebEx, anyone?

Gratitude Monday: Lights in the room

Yesterday marked the first day of the Hindu festival of Diwali, so today I’m grateful for all celebrations that mark the symbolic triumph of good over evil, of light over darkness and of sweetness over bitterness.

As I have since coming to the Valley they call Silicon, this year I again massed candles to drive back all manner of dark things. Not only do I like the soft light that groups of candles give off, the very act of lighting them one at a time and nursing along some of the ones at the end of their life slows me down. It calms me down.

Filling a room with candle light takes time; you can’t flip a switch and move on to the next task on your to-do list. And if you’re lighting those floating jobbers, you have to be very focused on not disturbing the water, because then it dowses the flames and you have to wipe them off and start over again. It’s like the count-breaths-to-21 methodology of meditation: if you lose count because your monkey mind is distracted, you have to begin again from one.

There are some days I never make it into double digits.

But there’s something about knowing how happy the moving lights will make me that enables me to persevere with candles. I light them, sit back and watch; and for at least a few minutes the world around me is peaceful and full of hope. Light prevails over darkness, love conquers fear, and good triumphs over evil.

Happy Diwali, all.

Not exactly a duck to water, but...

Okay, for our post-Halloween Friday silliness, here’s a swimming cat. And one who’s evidently not too happy about it.

Frankly, I kinda wonder how that cat came to be in a partially-filled bathtub, because the noise of water through the taps isn't generally music to their pointy little ears. But it's clearly happy. 

Almost Zen, in fact; except for that nervous tapping from its pal.

Scarier than a startup

I pointed out last year that here in the Valley they call Silicon, Halloween seems a pretty big deal. At least when it comes to decorating your yard. A couple of jack-o-lanterns and a construction-paper black cat slapped on the front window just do not cut it.

That one house I showed you last year is at it again—I think they must keep adding stuff every year.

This time around the two skeletons dining outside the gate have a dish of tiny skulls and bones shaped like spiders:

And the sleeping dog isn’t just lying, it’s covered in spiders and spiderwebs:

Then there’s this welcoming…ghoul, I guess:

This thing is so elaborate that they’ve been putting it together over many, many days. I took this about a week ago:

They were just getting started; note how the flying skeletons have been “fleshed” out:

And now there’s this:

I’m telling you—those spiders are working overtime to produce all this web stuff.

But, while really paying attention to detail, this particular household isn’t by any means alone in their enthusiasm. On my morning walks around the area, I’ve been finding all sorts of evidence of, um, skullduggery. And a lot of stuff hanging from trees. Like this:

And this:

And, from the same tree, this:

Over in Mountain View, I came across a tree witch:

(If you notice, there’s a light that could shine down on her; spooky.)

Nearby is one that wins the Best Use of Child’s Swing award:

If you notice the hand reaching up from the grass, that leads us to another theme—the From the Grave category. Lot of that going around.

Then there’s the splat witch:

She would hardly count, but there was also this:

Here’s another nightmare yard:

And another view:

(Notice the red light ready to cast a hellish glow. I’m telling you—Trick-or-Treaters are walking the gauntlet these days.)

One of the interesting things to me is that the people doing this stuff aren’t in…well, I was going to say they’re not in expensive houses. But that, of course, is relative. The houses are selling around the million mark (I pick up real estate flyers, too); but that’s pretty much low-range around here.

There’s one house on Sunnyvale Road, which looks like it’s maybe a two-bedroom-one-bath crackerbox. They went completely whole hog—well, whole zombie. Take a look:

This guy is almost stepping onto the sidewalk to go down the street to Target:

Obviously, he’s anxious about the sales:

His friend is so far behind him, she’s going to miss all the good stuff:

You can see her in the yard:

Where those (probably Bangladeshi) spiders have been hard at work covering the flamingo:

And, in the pink theme, here's the next generation of zombies:

Okay—not everyone is as inventive or as extravagant. This place in Mountain View is a sad attempt:

And this one isn’t even a nice try:

Happy Halloween!

Follower number six--my claim to fame

As you know, I find the Twitter-dot-com a great place for people watching. You can follow anyone there—from convicted felons to the Pope. I use my account to tap into all kinds of perspectives, including a few people who fall into the celebrity category.

No—not Kardashian-celebrity. But it turns out that William Shatner, for example, is pretty clever. And he really understands social media: he does a pretty good job of engaging with people; he does some promoting, but isn’t obnoxious about it; and he doesn’t get involved in flame-wars.

Well, I was Twitter-searching for Names I Know one day and came across Ray Stevenson. And I quite like some of his acting work, so I became follower number six (about which I tweeted). Even though I thought his presence there was kind of, well, bewildered. In a sweet, rather Titus Pullo way:

  

Since then he’s deleted a few tweets and added a couple, for a total in his queue of six tweets in five months.

Clearly he’s not quite grasping this whole thing, not even to the extent of hiring some tenth grader to toss out a few tweets every couple of weeks. He’s still collecting followers, though; and I live in hope.

But, you know, I'm not really following him for his social media skills; he has other assets.

One more perfect day

There’s been a whole lot of verbiage swirling around the Internet about Lou Reed since he died Sunday at age 71. I really only knew him from his Velvet Underground days—which had to have been named after his voice.

But it turns out that Reed was an exceptionally thoughtful, intelligent and aware human, as well as a solid songwriter and performer. He performed at benefit concerts for Tibetan causes, for Amnesty International and the ACLU. Two years ago he joined protestors at Occupy Wall Street.

You get a strong feel for his brain and his heart in this review he wrote of Kanye West’s Yeezus.

I’m sharing two videos with you. The first is a montage that distills Reed’s creative process and shows his adeptness at dealing with interviewers. He pretty well obliterates the one with his monosyllabic responses from behind those shades. But when he talks with Rose about his purpose in writing, and how he thinks of his music as being one-on-one—damn.

I think Reed would have despised the unavoidable 30-second advertisement attached to it.

And here’s his “Perfect Day”.

Gratitude Monday: not going viral

Here’s what I’m grateful for today: I got my flu shot last week. Even with the lousiest health insurance it’s possible to pay huge premiums for, they covered the shot 100%. Because even Anthem knows that it’s cheaper for them to pay for the shot than it is to pay for prescriptions and doctor visits—possibly even a stay in hospital—when you come down with this season’s viral strain.

I get a shot every year because, as a New Military historian focused on 20^th Century conflicts, from the moment I understood the nature of influenza, I’ve been grateful that in the absence of a cure, we at least have vaccines that mitigate its effects.

More people died in the 1918-19 global flu pandemic than had been killed in four years of total war. The death toll figures range from 50 to 100 million. Dead. (Combat-related deaths came to approximately 37 million.) Since that time, scientists still don’t know how to really treat it—aside from rest, fluids and analgesics for the aches. So we’re at risk just as people were 95 years ago.

And it’s a clever bugger, flu—every year the virus mutates so that having had a previous strain doesn’t immunize you against this year’s. You have to face every one as a new enemy.

At least in the US this is generally understood—you know that when stingy insurance companies foot the bill for the vaccine, they’ve done the cost-benefit analysis and decided that this is still the cheapest way of managing health care.

When I moved to the UK, I visited my (NHS) GP around September and mentioned that as flu season was approaching, I’d better get a shot. She sat back and informed me that, since I wasn’t in a risk group (very old, very young or suffering from respiratory ailments), it wasn’t available to me. The government only ensured the production of enough vaccine to serve those “at-risk” categories.

So, on my annual trip home, I got the shot from my US internist, and then was fascinated to follow continuous news stories from November through about February, about how NHS hospitals were bursting at the seams from admitting flu patients (as in gurneys-in-corridors full), and the appalling numbers of deaths from the virus.

There was no outcry, no outrage; I was amazed. Her Majesty’s Government could run the same risk-benefit analysis as Anthem (and do it every year) and decide that a few scores of thousands hospitalized (on the taxpayers’ pounds) and a few tens of thousands dead was a better outcome than buying enough vaccine and running an awareness campaign to prevent pandemics.

So, with my historian’s perspective, and my experience of how others approach it, I’m grateful that this year’s flu vaccine has been produced to different specs than in the UK, and that even my crappy insurance company will pay for it.