Sunday, July 31, 2005

When Twelve Fools is Better than One

1. Love Fool - the Cardigans
2. A Fool For You (Live) - Ray Charles
3. I'm A Fool to Do Your Dirty Work - Steely Dan
4. Kissing A Fool - George Michael
5. What A Fool Believes - The Doobie Brothers
6. Lemon Tree - Fool's Garden
7. Chain Of Fools - The Commitments
8. Why Do Fools Fall In Love - Frankie Lymon and The Teenagers
9. Fool To Think - Dave Matthews
10. Victim of A Foolish Heart - Joss Stone
11. Fortunate Fool - Jack Johnson
12. The Fool On The Hill - The Beatles
13. At Last - Etta James (No Fool)

I'm glad DMB made the list and well done. I'm not the biggest fan of late, though his lyrics and breaks and turns did make some great moments awesome. This is a good song out of some failures in DMB's latest.

I'm a huge Sting fan, and I was determined to find lyrics of his including his Police days, but I guess he doesn't fancy himself a fool.

#s 3 and 5 are favorites, as well as the two songs that started the compilation, actually.

At Last, I dedicate to Jenn, who pointed me to that part of the universe that bulges and conspires generosity and abundance.

Saturday, July 30, 2005

The Addictive Predictive

They call it predictive messaging. But, if it were really a supercognizant program, then why do we have to even touch our phones to get the message typed and sent?

And why isn't there predictive calling? That would sure be half a blessing. Then, I would be able to call the people that I've been putting calls to off. Like right now when I should have called Kevin, who's at the North Beach Jazz Festival. Maybe once in a while, whilst dialling the number of a girl I want to ask out, I should get a recorded message saying, "Save your saliva Carlos. She didn't pick up Sunday. She didn't pick up Monday, She didn't pick up Tuesday, and she didn't pick up yesterday. Here, call your sister. She thinks you're seceding from the family."

But I'll have to admit, there is something positively intuitive about this predictive messaging software that allows it to discover pairs of words that have synonymous relations or sybolic allegory.

Try this one for example:

Type in George Bush.

While you're typing (G)4-(E)3-(O)6- and then (R)7 the word that comes out is 'hemp'. 'Hemp'? 'Bush'?

It works. It *is* predictive.

I've seen this happen with much more precise and glaring predicting brilliance. Another example is when you're typing 'home' the word 'good' is the first to spell itself out.

I'm flabbergasted.

My Outbox

Every so often, I get moved by an idea so wonderful that *not* writing it down would be criminal. Usually, I get this wind of inspiration with the pipe variety. And so I find myself on the bus or walking in the street, tripping out on the way the world works and finding little bits of insight here and there. I would love to get these moments down for future meditation and extrapolation, but sheets of paper or pen are out of reach.

Meanwhile, the next best thing to letter-writing and keeping a correspondence with my friends and relatives is using my old Nokia. It's an old piece of junk, a hand-me-down from my sister's old Cingular wireless phone plan. A klunker as this old phone is, it will *not* go away. I've flung it across the room from bruschetta-stained fingers onto pebblewash ten feet away and into peoples' lunches to see it discharge its parts like a space shuttle going into it's third stage of burn.

But it won't die. And it won't delete my correspondences with my thumb pals or with myself. I have this outbox with dozens of little parables I pick up on the way to Kate O'Briens or waiting for the BART underground. Before my 3310 or whatever PoS model this is, I think I ought to download all these little proverbial jots, these stabs at literature. I've begun to copy my phonebook onto my computer. (Word to the wise, this will pay off later on.) It's not a hardcopy which can get lost or burn. It's on a hard drive memory disk of 80 GB which can get lost or burnt just as easily.