Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

My Canon Powershot S300 that I bought to replace one I left at a trailhead last week arrived yesterday, and I strapped it on for a post-prandial stroll to - where else - Gasworks Park. We arrive there just in time to see the not-quite-full moon rise over Capitol Hill.  We also unexpectedly encountered there one of several dozen Cindy Sheehan vigils around the city: people standing on the hill, holding candles, chatting, some low singing.

I’ve always sort of disdained mass protests as a vehicle for public discourse. It’s always seemed to me that, yes, they’re manipulated by their organizers, and they’re too reductive, using sloganeering and the singing of cornball songs to address complex topics deserving of something more nuanced and articulate.

And, I’m not sure what to think of the Sheehan woman’s tent revival in Crawford. On the one hand, I’m all for anything that causes GWB a moment’s discomfort.   However, how wise is it to allow Bush to control the confrontation’s fulcrum point, the decision to meet or not meet?  Project forward to the conversation that might ensue if GW does bike over to chat with Cindy.  Each will have some sort of prepared statement that will be further truncated by the media and spoonfed on the 6 o’clock news.  Bush ends up looking like a human being, and Sheehan like a fool for leaving the better part of a California summer to spend it in godforsaken Texas, where no brush has been left to provide shade.  She’ll go home with a handful of platitudes that she could have gleaned in half an hour’s work on the White House website, and the “movement” will be over.  The only way this ends well is if Bush chooses not to meet her.  But that’s the problem - it’s his choice.

Robert Jamieson, a columnist for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (does post-intelligence have any analogy to post-modernism?), takes Sheehan to task:

Cindy Sheehan is no Rosa Parks. Nor is she Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. …  I deplore the disingenuous way Sheehan has politicized the death of a son who signed up to fight, but this much is true: In Sheehan, America may be finding its anti-war voice.

I haven’t followed Sheehan’s deeds, writings or pronouncements very closely, but even if Robert has, I don’t think he can be far enough inside her head to make that assertion.  I don’t know why history might not view her as it does Rosa Parks - sitting someplace where the power elite doesn’t want you and daring it to respond according to form.  She’s taking a caustic blistering from a right-wing propaganda machine that was only a gleam in John Birch’s eye in the 50s, so I’m not sure it’s fair to trivialize the consequences she’s garnered.  And MLK was certainly not without at least a dash of disingenuity and megalomania.  If I were Sheehan, I might tell Robert, “It’s a Dead-Kid thing - you wouldn’t understand.”

That said, I’m consonant with Jamieson in being chary of the rush to sloganeering and iconography that Sheehan has catalyzed, unless it morphs into something more substantial - Democrats and journalists finding the backbone to press the case that Sheehan has barely articulated: What were the real reasons the NeoCons bullrushed us into the Iraq war?  Were they so important to the national interest that it was worth engaging in a massive institutional deception in order to pursue them?  And, given that they were, why did they fuck up their prosecution so badly?  (This flatters them by presuming that what we’re seeing in Iraq is not the desired outcome.)  These are questions that should be profferred and answered in congressional hearings, on television, at the highest levels.  It’s not gonna happen between George and Cindy while dodging tumbleweeds on a Texas roadside.

That was an interlewd, not a political discussion.  We don’t do politics here at Perils of Caffeine.  What we do is walk around the neighborhood taking pictures with our new/old camera.  You’re probably getting sick of pictures from Gasworks Park, and wondering if I might actually live in one of those rusted hulks, addled and feverish from exposure to all those hydrocarbons.  I promise I’ll try to expand my range a bit, but for now, I’m gonna lay a couple more on you just because I can (again).

A couple of articles turned up yesterday, independently reinforcing a point I discussed a month or so ago in a post titled Terror Cell.  In that post I described purchasing a cell phone for my mom while she was visiting here, and the dismay I experienced at trying to show someone who’s used to just picking up a phone, hearing a dial tone and punching a number how to do the same thing with a device bristling with buttons, lights and noises.  And this is someone sharp enough to routinely destroy her friends at bridge and keep getting invited back the next week.

It was validating, then, to see an article in the Wall Street Journal about a new product from Vodaphone called the Vodaphone Simply. It:

has no camera, no browser and hardly any icons. Instead of being sleeker and cooler than ever, the phone is large and ordinary-looking.   What it is, though, is easy to use, and if Vodafone is right, the market will love it. That’s because of who its market is: people getting up in years.  

It turns out that this product isn’t a condescending sop for a PR angle:

Vodafone’s plan reflects the need for new sources of growth. Cellular markets in much of Western Europe and Japan are becoming saturated, so that the middle-aged and older are among the few places to look for new growth.

So, this represents a serious attempt to court a market segment that the industry simply wasn’t speaking to, and didn’t know how:

During development, young Vodafone product managers kept trying to add features, like software for sending picture messages. Mr. Laurence said no. He showed them an old TV comedy sketch about an elderly person being humiliated by a hi-fi salesman who delighted in the customer’s technical ignorance.

While developing ads for the phone

Mr. Laurence ran the ad by product managers working on fancy multimedia handsets for young people. “The more they hated it, the more we knew we were on the right track,” he says.

The phone isn’t being offered in the United States yet.  The article explains that cell phone growth is still brisk here, so those who might embrace the product are stuck buying devices that they will spend more time squinting quizzically at than talking into.

I’m far from a Luddite, and I would strenuously resist the dumbing-down of technology to satisfy the lowest common denominator.  I make my living helping people to use software and technology, and a lot of this involves coaxing them to accept change.  But I also have to keep chanting to myself in my 50s a mantra that I coined in my 30s, “Give them what they want, not what you think they ought to want,” because I, along with 24-year-old cell phone store employees, tend to forget that owning my product is not the ultimate goal of my clients, they’re buying my product to accomplish their own ends, however pedestrian and myopic.

Even so, I find myself becoming increasingly weary when confronted with unwanted technological learning curves as a consumer.  For one thing, I carry an uncomplicated travel alarm clock with me on trips in order to avoid spending half an hour setting the bedside clock in my hotel.  Which brings us to the second article in this vein I’ve encountered this week.  Countering a trend that saw hotel alarm clocks evolving into multifunction devices that also brewed your slacks and ironed your coffee, hotels are installing clocks that tests show can be set in less than 20 seconds.  Gives you that much more time to figure out how to use the TV remote to order adult video.

As a Platinum Elite frequent flyer on an airline whose mechanics are likely to strike the night before I have to get on one of its planes, this story about the Cypriot airliner that suddenly lost cabin pressure gives me a bit of a chill.  What a bizarre tale this is turning out to be.  Can you imagine yourself as the only conscious passenger lurching into the cockpit, lugging the co-pilot’s body off the controls, sitting down in the left seat and trying to figure out what to do next?

Not a pilot myself, I’d have to wrack my brain for ideas.  My only relevant prior experience would be the old DOS-based Microsoft Flight Simulator, which I never managed to land successfully at Chicago’s old Meigs Field.  Even on the tiny green screen of my old Compaq “sewing machine” luggable, the cracks spider-webbing through the windshield on impact were unsettling.

And why would the left seat be empty in the first place?  Where was the captain (whose body has yet to be found)?  In the lavatory with a flight attendant?  Could a flailing stiletto heel have punctured the skin of the aircraft, causing the depressurization?  If a “black box” recorded that activity, I’ll be landing with an awfully full bladder from now on.

I find this picture of the tail particularly haunting, with its combination of resurrected antiquity and fallen modernity:

It turns out that the nifty (and not exactly cheap) waterproof camera case that I use when kayaking or snorkeling only fits the S300 that I left at a trailhead last weekend, so I can’t merely upgrade to a nicer camera, I’d have to buy a new case as well.  Since I wasn’t really unhappy with the S300 (not exactly true - I was just sort of starting to want more), I looked on eBay for a replacement.  I was thrilled at first to see two listed for around $50, and threw in a bid, thinking I was going to get out of my stupidity pretty cheap.

Bidding on both cameras exceeded $100 a day later, however, so I found a third listing with a “buyitnow” price of $125, and nailed it.  It ships Monday, and with any luck I’ll have it Thursday or Friday, and the eye candy will return to Perils of Caffeine.

Meg’s running sort of a blogger’s hootenanny this week, and go take a look, it’s a lot of fun.   She asked for a subject for today’s entry, and, being the helpful fellow I am, I remembered a caption to a picture in my wife’s college alumni magazine (Carnegie Mellon).  The picture accompanied an article about the chemical engineering department, and showed a shiny contraption with many hoses and valves.  The caption read, “The ultra-high vacuum surface analysis chamber is used to study the enantioselective adsorption of chiral molecules on chiral metal surfaces.”  So I suggested that the subject of Meg’s blog entry be “The enantioselective adsorption…etc.”  In retrospect, it was sorta cruel.  I rock!

By way of contrast, my own recent alumni magazine (Ohio State) featured an article of several pages detailing what an alum can and can’t do for student-athletes and recruits.  A former Heisman trophy winner is our alumni director.  Several incidents over the last year made the article germane and essential, including a head basketball coach who paid a recruit’s family $5,000 and a booster who left an envelope of cash at his business’ reception desk for the starting quarterback (who actually showed up and took it).  These things lead one to believe that the university community’s understanding of the nuanced definition of the term “student-athlete” has eroded somewhat, and perhaps a review of some major points is necessary.

Kind of dispirited here, blogwise.  After the euphoria of finding my camera after thinking I’d lost it on a hike a couple of weeks ago, you’d think I would conduct my affairs a bit differently.  But, no, there I was turning my pack and my car inside out on Sunday after returning from a day of hiking and watching my wife and kid climb sheer rock faces, and taking a slew of terrific photographs of it all, looking for my Canon S300 again, and knowing in my gut I’d left it on a rock where I had watched my kid’s last climb of the day.

I’ve gotten so I carry it everywhere, because I’ve taken a delight in capturing the gorgeous and the oddball stuff I run across and posting it here.  I feel sort of naked, or handicapped, (or naked and handicapped - that’ll get me some Google action!) without it.  And you have to deal with the mundane black-and-white of my words as a consequence.  Collateral damage.

I don’t think it’s coming back this time, and I’ll reluctantly start looking on eBay tomorrow for a replacement that will fit into my cool waterproof case.

The Secret Summer Weather festival continues here, highs around 80, lows around 60.  My son & I took kayaks down to Lake Union last night just to cool off a bit, but I forgot my camera, so no accompanying pics.  One thing I really wish I’d had it for was the spectacle - I’m not kidding here - of a guy on roller blades pulling a kayak on wheels along Meridian Avenue.  I actually felt guilty for a second for piling our boats on top of the car just to roll a half mile down the hill to launch.  (It passed.)

In yo FACE, kayaker boy!  I actually can’t work up much envy for this sort of watercraft, but then a wet dream for me these days is more likely to involve a sweaty t-shirt than anything else, so maybe I’m just out of the game.