Palin Fans Are Clueless

I'm not making this up, just going by their vague, uninformed responses to softball questions asked outside a Palin book-signing event last weekend.

Hilarious, until you realize that these people are basing their votes on hollow buzzwords, not common sense or fundamental familiarity with the issues* comprising Palin's platform. It's embarrassing that so many of them can't finish a sentence. It's even more embarrassing that America's unhealthy fascination with celebrity obscures the view of common sense (this is an issue of epidemic proportions that we can't address in just one post).

* To be perfectly fair, much of the so-called "Obama Nation" is the same way. You can tell they are second-guessing themselves now that he hasn't proven to be the messiah in the first 25% of his first term.

Source: Dangerous Minds, via BoingBoing.

How To Have A Number-One The Old-Fashioned Way

Taking time to talk pop reminded me of something I meant to post a while ago, yet I never got around to. That something is The Manual: How to Have a Number One the Easy Way. Long out-of-print and impossible to find, this book was hugely influential on my early forrays into the music industry. The K Foundation's combination of discordianism, Illuminatus references and unabashed pop sensibility stuck with me. I've followed the further exploits, musical and otherwise of Jim Cauty and Bill Drummond. I've had The Manual in my Amazon wish list for years, never to see it actually "available". I loved it when I read a friend's copy in college, and always wanted to have my own copy. Now we can all have it.

A relatively recent BoingBoing post about the KLF links to a PDF version of the manuscript. So while you miss some of the illustrations and the tactile sensation of holding this adorable little case study, full of instructions (which were guaranteed to work, BTW, if you followed them to the letter), you can still read it.

It's worth knowing that The Manual did in fact work, too. The Austrian Euro-trash band Edelweiss found #1 hit status with "Bring Me Edelweiss" - a song they claim was created by following the instructions in The Manual. And this was some time before you could use a MySpace page to collect friends or distribute a new single. Of course, with theories like The Long Tail afoot, it's probably not so much about having a number-one anymore.

Does anyone feel like telling Kanye?

Kurt Vonnegut, RIP

Kurt Vonnegut died at age 84.
His "profound pessimism" and sharp wit were inspirational to me.

RIP, RAW

Robert Anton Wilson has gone off the grid for good.

Author of the longest book I ever read cover-to-cover, RAW was a unique individual who quite optimistically tied the worlds of philosophy, religion, folklore, paranoia, conspiracy and counter-culture together with remarkable wit. A self-described "model agnostic", RAW did a lot more of influence than I can begin to detail here... check his Wikipedia entry for more.

From his site:

January 11, 2007

Robert Anton Wilson Defies Medical Experts and leaves his body @4:50 AM on binary date 01/11.

All Hail Eris!

On behalf of his children and those who cared for him, deepest love and gratitude for the tremendous support and lovingness bestowed upon us.

(that's it from Bob's bedside at his fnord by the sea)

RAW Memorial February 07
date to be announced

I've gleaned a lot from the works of RAW, and while I'm sad to hear of his passing I'm also glad to know his influential mix of optimism and anger will live on for years and years to come. In fact, my interest in his favorite subjects is renewed with his passing. For those of you who don't know who RAW is, check this video.



Hail Eris, all hail Discordia.

The God Delusion

I thought it appropriate to follow that last post with a quick shout-out for Richard Dawkins' new book, The God Delusion. Pre-order it now, so you don't forget about it before the October 2006 release date.

For more info, here's a Salon interview with Dawkins from last year, about how all of America's god-mongering is pushing the country back into the Middle Ages. If you want more, here's another article in which Dawkins claims religion amounts to child abuse. Given the vast amounts of misinformation, false hope and resignation to not understand the world that religion gives us, I have to agree that it's extremely unhealthy when taught as divine truth instead of moral fiction.

To Hell With Religious Tolerance

Douglas Rushkoff moves a little further into Richard Dawkins' "anti-religion" territory with his latest post about "why the Bible is much more useful as a metaphorical guide to life than as a literal document." (quoted from BoingBoing)

Cooking with social currency

Douglas Rushkoff recently posted an excerpt about social currency from his forthcoming book. He first wrote about the idea a few years ago, and ran with it as the theme for this latest book.

A term like "social currency" can help explain a bigger idea like the meme, and Rushkoff's analogy about how we listen to the telling of jokes starts getting at the meat (which, I'm fairly certain, is lurking somewhere in that new book):

Observe yourself the next time you’re listening to a joke. You may start by listening to the joke for the humor - because you really want the belly laugh at the end. But chances are, a few sentences in, you will find yourself not only listening, but attempting to remember its whole sequence. You’ll do this tentatively at first, until you’ve decided whether or not it's really a good joke. And if it is, you'll commit the entire thing to memory - maybe even with a personalized variation, or a mental note to yourself to fix that racist part. This is because the joke is a gift - it's a form of social currency that you’ll be able to take with you to the next party.

This is a lot like an example of the two ways memes spread, which I seem to recall from Susan Blackmore's The Meme Machine. I don't have the book with me, so I'll go on as if this was in fact where I got this (it may have been Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene): memes are ideas - regardless of "good" or "bad" - that spread via imitation. Memes are the building-blocks of culture; culture is based on imitation. There are two basic ways we imitate, and you can think of them around this example of an apple pie: when you have a great piece of apple pie, you can either experiement with various ingredients in an attempt to arrive at the same pie by trial and error, or you can just get the recipe.

Imitate the result or imitate the recipe - these are the transactions made with social currency (I prefer to refer to it as cultural currency, but this is mere semantics).

In Rushkoff's terms, you listen to the joke for humor (the pie) at first, then attempt to remember its whole sequence (the recipe) -- so you can retell it (spread the meme, as it were). Consider for a moment the cheap imitations of the world, which attempt to copy the product without respect for the recipe. The recipe is worth more, culturally-speaking, because it does more to preserve the fidelity, fecundity and longevity of future results.

Lillian Virginia Mountweazel

Kottke points us to a New Yorker article about fakes in your favorite encyclopedias, purposefully inserted in an effort to protect copyright.

If Mountweazel is not a household name, even in fountain-designing or mailbox-photography circles, that is because she never existed. “It was an old tradition in encyclopedias to put in a fake entry to protect your copyright,” Richard Steins, who was one of the volume’s editors, said the other day. “If someone copied Lillian, then we’d know they’d stolen from us.”

Innovation begins with "in"

My first post on PYLB was fuelled by the frustration of trend-watching being just another trend in and of itself - a futile one that never seems to help persuaders-by-trade innovate in any significant fashion. Douglas Rushkoff recently captured this frustration and put it into more neutral terms:

But this endless worrying, wriggling, and trend-watching only alienates companies from whatever it is they really do best. In the midst of the headlong rush to think “outside the box,” the full engagement responsible for true innovation is lost. New consultants, new packaging, new marketing schemes or even new CEO’s are no substitute for the evolution of our own expertise, as individuals and as businesses.

Indeed, for all their talk about innovation, most companies today are still scared to death of it.

This quote is from the flap copy for Rushkoff's new book, Get Back In The Box. Those of you who know the clients I work for already know that I face the crippling fear of true innovation on a daily basis, at an institutional level... and cannot wait for this book to come out.