20,000 Leagues Under the Ohio River

So a few months back (December), local city workers pulled a three foot alligator out of a dumpster downtown near the Ohio River. It was dead, but no one knew for sure how it had got there. It was probably a pet that someone tossed after it died, but I was joking with some friends about the possibility that it had crawled out of the Ohio River and into the dumpster for warmth. You know the old story: A kid has a pet alligator and flushes it down the toilet. The alligator grows into a huge beast living in the sewers. You never know.

I was wondering if that was even possible, so I poked around online to see if any alligators actually have been found in the Ohio. I got more than I bargained for. Not only have people found crocodiles and piranha-like tropical fish in the Ohio River over the years, last August they pulled an octopus out of the river. That's right, an octopus. And not just any octopus, this octopus was six feet long! It was caught by an Indiana man looking for catfish in the Ohio River across from Louisville.



No bullshit, check out the news article.

I've tossed a few beers back before and waded in the Ohio looking for driftwood with my dad. I don't think I'll be doing that anymore.

Oh, the title. Well, according to according to Cincinnati's CityBeat, there's an urban legend that a submarine was once spotted in the Ohio River as well. There was at least one eyewitness to the strange event. "Back in 1961, I saw a submarine, honestly," says Janice Forte of the Cincinnati Historical Society. "We were just standing down by the river and somebody says, 'My God, look at that!' It was not submerged, and it was headed north. Nobody wrote about it in the papers, that I saw. It was really strange."

Huge octopuses + submarines = Jules Verne

Questions & Answers

I realize that some people might just want ask a question, and though I have a contact page, I'm savvy enough to realize that not everyone wants to get all chummy. I don't want to get all chummy either, sorry.

So here you can feel free to ask anything you want and I'll try and answer as honestly as I can. You do this by posting a comment. In the comments you can add your name or just remain anonymous, your choice. That's the benefit of this over email. I'll get a notice every time a new comment is added, but you'll have to remember to come back for the answer. At least you'll know I got the message though.

Enjoy! Remember, don't be shy, I'm not.

Turtles maybe, but also a grain of sand

A holarchical view of the web is also...

To see a world in a grain of sand,
And a heaven in a wild flower,
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,
And eternity in an hour.

William Blake - Auguries of Innocence

It's turtles all the way down — and across

I mentioned previously that the creation of the web collapsed the publishing hierarchy into a horizontal model. That's not entirely accurate. If true, that would mean that every website is on an equal footing and that there's no value ranking to websites. That's obviously not true or I'd have Google money.

Hierarchy isn't an accurate term either. Hierarchy ranks various levels in order of importance with the higher levels having more value than each lower level. That's almost true but not entirely. When looking for information on your very best friend, you know, me, is it better to go to Google and look me up, or is it better to go directly to my site? Exactly. In most cases, Google has a higher value than most other websites, but not always.

The correct term for ranking websites is never actually used to my knowledge. It was coined in 1967 by Arthur Koestler in his book The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler used the word "holon" to describe things that are simultaneously whole, while part of something else (from the Greek: holos, "whole"). He rightly pointed out that each level in a hierarchy is both a part of the larger system, and also a complete and whole thing unto itself. Applied to the web we see that every website is a part of the larger web, but also a complete system of it's own. If anyone's made that connection before, it hasn't seem to have caught on. Nevertheless, it's both correct and obvious when you think about it. Websites are holons.

Holons are organized in a holarchy. I'd say that they were ranked, but it's more an organization. Where hierarchies are strictly a ranking model, the value level isn't always as clear in holarchies. Because each individual holon is a whole system, within a whole system, and containing whole systems within it, it's not completely a top-down architecture. Depending on what you're looking for on the web, one holon might be the top level eventhough it's actually the junior of a larger holon. The holon of my site, for example, is the top level Jeremy site, though it's way down at the bottom rung of the web as a whole.

Thus the publishing hierarchy was collapsed, but not exactly into a horizontal model. Instead, it was collapsed into many, many, maybe infinite, smaller systems of ranking within a huge horizontal pool.

An old Hindu story (that has many variations):

A teacher tells his student that the earth is supported on the back of a tiger. When the student asks what supports the tiger, the teacher says it stands upon an elephant. When asked what supports the elephant, the teacher says it's a giant turtle. When asked what supports the giant turtle, he says: "Stop right there. It's turtles all the way down."

Snakes on a plain

So it's springtime, and I'll probably head up to Serpent Mound soon. I like to go up there when I get a chance. The Serpent Mound is the 1,330 foot long, three foot high prehistoric effigy mound located on a plateau in Adams County, Ohio, about 45 minutes or so from where I live. It's America's boondocks version of Stonehenge. That is, it has all the trappings of Stonehenge — a prehistoric effigy shrouded in mystery and mysticism — but it is Ohio. I mean, the place just happens to be down the road from a literal junkyard. It attracts people from around the world, as far off as Japan, and I can only imagine them flying into Columbus or Cincinnati and driving two hours out to find rows and rows of junked up cars. "Welcome to America! Ya'll want a carburetor with that there prehistoric mystery?" Um, yeah. So anyway, I like to go up there when I get a chance.

The term "cryptoexplosive" structure is used to describe impact craters caused by a variety of reasons. Mostly it's an anomalous circular structure, or circular deformation of rock, assumed to be caused by explosive volcanism or the impact of a meteor. The famed Serpent Mound just happens to sit on the top of one of these mysterious structures. Conforming to the curve of the hill on which it rests with its head near the point, the serpent winds back and forth for seven hundred feet and ends with a triple coiled tail. The neck is stretched out in a gentle curve, ending with open jaws around the end of a one hundred sixty foot oval, thought variously to be either an egg, the sun or the body of a frog. It is the largest effigy earthwork in the world.

It's believed to have been constructed somewhere around 800 BC - AD 100 by Hopewell Indians. That's what the textbooks say, though archaeologists readily admit that they aren't completely sure who built it, when, and why. There's some strange things mixed up in the structure from a symbolic sense. For one thing, it's best viewed from the sky. There's no surrounding hills to get that vantage point. I mean really, it seems to be a lot about the sky. The head of the serpent, for example, is aligned to the summer solstice sunset and the snake’s coils align with the winter solstice sunrise and the equinox sunrise. Carbon dating of the mound coincides with two major astronomical events: the appearance of Halley's Comet and the light from the supernova that created the Crab Nebula. The light was visible day and night for two weeks. Some believe that the snake was created to emulate a comet, slithering across the night sky like a snake. Quite a bit of sky stuff there for an earthwork. That's part of the mystery.

Practitioners of Kundalini Yoga have an entirely different view. They see the coiled part of the snake as kundalini (spiritual energy) rising through six chakras (the curved part of the snake) and ultimately reaching the crown chakra (the head of the effigy, often described as a snake eating an egg). That's a little more mysterious because chakra systems and spiritual energy being visualized as a coiled snake unfolding originated in India, all the way on the other side of the world. It's just one interpretation, of course, but it's a pretty slick one.

UFO sightings, ghosts, and other weird, paranormal phenomena have been seen around Serpent Mound as well, including this crop circle which appeared in the soybean field across from the park in 2003:



I actually got to check that one out since I was living here at the time. It was night when we got there and we had to go looking for it in the dark, but we got a few pictures and an adventure out of it.

I'm not one who subscribes to the whole crop circle/aliens theory. I mean, you know, who really knows. Instead, I appreciate crop circle art for what it is, regardless of who or what made it. These really complicated and intricate designs are somehow constructed, at night, in one night, and often much larger and more complex than the one pictured above. That's art. Who wouldn't look at that as amazing? Well, maybe not the farmer, but you get the idea.

In any case, the place is completely boring unless you take the above insight along with you. There's a small skipable museum with some artifacts, a tower you can climb to view the effigy, but better is the hike through the woods that leads down the hill and past a small river.

Still, when you take all of the above into account, it's worth the trip. I don't want to overhype it, but you can sense that the place has importance when you're out there. Think of it this way: The place has got to be important if it attracts Halley's Comet, aliens, ancient hindus, crop circle artists, the Japanese, and your's truly. I mean, this is Ohio after all.

Waiting on my ability to be cool

I'm a pack-rat. I don't throw anything out, though I probably should. Digging through a cardboard box that's been in storage, I don't know, maybe five years, I find old photos, scribbled notebooks, and love letters. This is from, like, l-o-n-g ago. I keep the photos because they prove I was there. Love letters from long ago should be burned! Jeez, my mom could read that stuff. You want the photos, but you burn the letters because then it never happened, you see?

Scribbled notebooks. Kerouac once wrote that everyone "should keep scribbled notebooks for yr own joy." I agree. Here I find a notebook that lists around 300 things I planned on doing in the next five years. Of course it was written like eight years ago, so it's an odd thing to look over. A lot of them are pretty mundane. Sadly there's like five involving a planned trip to New Orleans that I never actually took. Didn't it wash away? There's a list of clubs in Cleveland I never got around to going to either. Here's a simple one: "Go to the tallest building in Cincinnati, get to the highest part, and take a picture." I did that. That's the Carew Tower (not sure if it's actually the tallest). There's a list of people I promised myself to keep tabs on. Some of them I lost track of but the rest are pretty well scattered across the country (some internationally) now. It's hard to imagine that we were all together in the same place at one time when you think of the immense distance between us now. Heh, some of them don't even know I know what they're up to. Guess that makes me a stalker. Another one: "Drink a bottle of wine and write your life story." That's what I'm doing now I suppose.

Here's one that I almost did but things fell through:

"Go to a gas station where there's an airpump clearly visible by the attendant and at least five other people. Look really anxious. Proceed to take an inflate-a-mate out of the trunk of your car and use the air pump to inflate her/it. Scream loudly, 'Thank God!' and drive off looking well statisfied."

Almost did that, but my friend who had one of those things ended up denying it when pressed. Sigh.

Couple of material things: "Buy a '65 Mustang convertible." Got a Chrysler Sebring convertible instead. That was a yuppy-year. Let's see. I wanted to buy a special Security Rug. What's that? Well, it's my version of Linus's Security Blanket/Mr. Mom's kid's Woobe. I'd get this small rug, you see, and cart it around with me everywhere. Go to the park, got my rug. Want to sit on the floor and watch TV, got my rug. Want to [insert anything], yep, got my rug. I had one picked out, but I don't know what became of it. Sigh.

Man, there's a lot of stuff in this notebook. I'm going to have to go through it more sometime. In the back some of my friends wrote their Last Will & Testaments. Apparently Steve still owes me his pair of Chuck Taylors and his "ability to be cool".

Dude, pay up.

[Edit- 3/28/07: I think the Carew Tower is the tallest building in Cincinnati, check it out]

Server switch

While searching for a solution to my email problem yesterday, I found a better dedicated server that's newer, faster, more reliable, and cheaper. Expect a few minor outages as I switch over to the new server and feather the nest. One to two weeks, tops.

Doomsday tech geeks, emails, and epiphanies

So I spent most of the day trying to fix a glitch on my mail server. For some reason the Feds thought it'd be a good idea to switch daylight savings time around this year and a lot of paranoid tech geeks tried to hype it up as a Y2K redux. You know, nukes launching, end of the world, et cetera, et cetera. Y2K7 or something. I laughed it off but apparently karma's a bitch. I guess my mail server software needed a patch and I didn't notice a problem until I started getting emails saying that today was Tuesday. I wasn't about to let Microsoft or the Feds steal a whole day from me, so I set out to unravel the glitch. Then again, considering it has taken me most of the day to fix the problem, I guess they stole the day after all. Karma. I will never again laugh at doomsday tech geeks.

I think I lost a few emails in the process, so if you sent me one that I haven't responded to anytime between March 11th and today, that's probably why. It's not cause I don't love you : )

Crossing my fingers that the server is alright, I went outside into the warm sunshine, noticing a gentle breeze dancing with the too-tall grass that will probably need cutting soon. The birds are singing, trying to awaken the budding trees that will get around to waking in their own time. Daylight savings and dawning spring and dancing blades of grass, you just know... It is all alright. It never wasn't.

'Till next time, then

By the way, the thing about imagining the characters in a play or movie as real people living a real narrative, is that the unfortunate characters are doomed to repeat the entire scenario every time the play is acted out or the movie is shown. This is hinted at in the movie when Guildenstern says: "Well, we'll know better next time," just before being hanged. The Player, who represents a sort of God-like character, replies, "'Till next time, then." Of course we get the impression that this series of unfortunate events has being going on unaltered since the play was first written, and that in each cycle the two start off just as unknowing as they ever were. That, my friends, is saṃsāra.

At some point we could have said — no

So the last two posts were leading up to this one so I can talk about a movie I really like: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. I know, I know. Ask me what time it is and I go off on a sidebar of how to build a clock. I've been accused of that before and all I can say is sorry. To quote the movie: "Words. Words. They're all we have to go on."

Now the movie is based on the 1967 play by Tom Stoppard but I'm going to recommend the movie version (1990). The reason is because they're almost exactly the same and in the movie you've got Tim Roth and Gary Oldman as Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and Richard Dreyfuss as The Player. Awesome cast. It's also more likely that you can find the movie at Netflix than you'll find the play at your local theater.

The story is the inverse of Hamlet. It takes the two most underdeveloped characters in literature and breathes life into them, shining the spotlight on their existence while placing the other characters and events of Hamlet in the background. It not only inverts the story, but also disconnects from it; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have their own story where Hamlet himself plays a minor role. Whenever the two stories overlap, the duo remains in character, acting and saying the lines from Hamlet that they are supposed to say. When the two stories break apart, they are left wondering why they said those things, viewing Hamlet's circumstances as completely absurd.

For example, when Claudius summons the two to question Hamlet as to his strange behavior, they understand what they are supposed to do, but fail to understand why, considering the whole thing to be obvious. They debate on how to approach the subject with Hamlet:

Ros: It makes you think.
Guil: Don't think I haven't thought of it.
Ros: And with her husband's brother.
Guil: They were so close.
Ros: She went to him —
Guil: — Too close —
Ros: — for comfort.
Guil: It looks bad.
Ros: It adds up.
Guil: Incest to adultery.
Ros: Would you go so far?
Guil: Never.
Ros: To sum up: your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped onto his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?
Guil: I can't imagine! (Pause.) But all that is well known, common property. Yet he sent for us. And we did come.

They get what they're supposed to do, and when they're supposed to do it they perform exactly as it is written. They just don't understand why they're doing any of it. They don't exactly, but sort of, realize that they are characters in a story that is predetermined.

Here's part of the blurb from Wikipedia:

The two characters, brought into being within the puzzling universe of the play, by an act of the playwright's creation, and those they encounter, often confuse their names, as they have interchangeable yet periodically unique identities. They are portrayed as two clowns or fools in a world that is beyond their understanding; they cannot identify any reliable feature or the significance in words or events. Their own memories are not reliable or complete and they misunderstand each other as they stumble through philosophical arguments while not realizing the implications to themselves. They often state deep philosophical truths during their nonsensical ramblings, however they depart from these ideas as quickly as they come to them. At times Guildenstern appears to be more enlightened than Rosencrantz; at times both of them appear to be equally confounded by the events occurring around them.

The question that is really posed here is what does happen to our beloved characters when we're not looking, when they're off-stage. Are they aware? Do they know that whatever ambitions they have were already decided and written long ago? Do they conspire against this? Do they plot against the plot? Or do they simply cease to be when the curtain draws?

When does Jack Bauer use the bathroom?

A greater question beyond the literary is whether our plots were written long ago. Is choice just an illusion? Am I a footnote in your story, or you in mine?

Guildenstern: "There must have been a moment, at the very beginning, where we could have said — no. But somehow we missed it."

What I left out in the above is how hilarious the movie is and how clever the dialogue. My favorite scene:

Guil: What a fine persecution — to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened. . . . (Pause.) We've had no practice.
Ros: We could play at questions.
Guil: What good would that do?
Ros: Practice!
Guil: Statement! One-love!
Ros: Cheating!
Guil: How?
Ros: I hadn't started yet!
Guil: Statement. Two-love.
Ros: Are you counting that?
Guil: What?
Ros: Are you counting that?
Guil: Foul! No repetitions. Three-love. First game to —
Ros: I'm not going to play if you're going to be like that.
Guil: Whose serve?
Ros: Hah?
Guil: Foul! No grunts. Love-one.
Ros: Who's go?
Guil: Why?
Ros: Why not?
Guil: What for?
Ros: Foul! No synonyms. One-all.
Guil: What in God's name is going on?
Ros: Foul! No rhetoric! Two-one.
Guil: What does it all add up to?
Ros: Can't you guess?
Guil: Were you addressing me?
Ros: Is there anyone else?
Guil: Who?
Ros: How would I know?
Guil: Why do you ask?
Ros: Are you serious?
Guil: Was that rhetoric?
Ros: No.
Guil: Statement! Two-all. Game point.
Ros: What's the matter with you today?
Guil: When?
Ros: What?
Guil: Are you deaf?
Ros: Am I dead?
Guil: Yes or no?
Ros: Is there a choice?
Guil: Is there a God?
Ros: Foul! No non-sequiters, three-two, one game all.
Guil (seriously): What's your name?
Ros: What's yours?
Guil: I asked you first.
Ros: Statement. One-love.
Guil: What's your name when you're at home?
Ros: What's yours?
Guil: When I'm at home?
Ros: Is it different at home?
Guil: What home?
Ros: Haven't you got one?
Guil: Why do you ask?
Ros: What are you driving at?
Guil (with emphasis): What's your name?!
Ros: Repetition. Two-love. Match point to me.
Guil (siezing him violently): WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?
Ros: Rhetoric! Game and match!

As the indifferent children of the earth

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are two of the most underdeveloped characters in literature. This is surprising because they come from Shakespeare's Hamlet, one of the world's most widely recognized literary works. In Hamlet, the two are little more than plot devices, schoolmates of Prince Hamlet summoned by King Claudius to spy on him and discover why he is behaving so strangely.

For those unfamiliar with the story, Claudius was Hamlet's uncle, who married Gertrude (Hamlet's mother) soon after the King (Hamlet's father and Claudius's brother) died under mysterious circumstances. It is revealed that Claudius was the one who killed Hamlet's father so he could get with Gertrude. In those days, marriage to the brother of one's deceased husband was considered incest by the Church. Not to mention, all of this was revealed to Hamlet by the King's own ghost. No wonder Hamlet was a little upset. Talk about drama.

Back to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Claudius and Gertrude summon the old school chums to figure out what's up with Hamlet. They do some talking, blah, blah, plot skip and later they are ordered to escort Hamlet from the kingdom and to his execution. Hamlet discovers the plot and escapes it by engineering the death of the duo instead. Bluntly we hear later from an ambassador;

"That Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead."

Almost no character development of the two throughout the story. In fact, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are referred to interchangeably with no distinction of who's who. They're also, always, the two/one, much like Lenny and Carl from the Simpsons. It's always Lenny and Carl, and it's always Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, inseparable.

Let me back track to where Hamlet first sees Rosencrantz and Guildenstern because it shows what seems to be a deliberate downplay of the characters — almost as if Shakespeare is saying: Don't care about these two. They're just here for plot.

When they first meet, Hamlet asks how they're doing, to which one replies (it doesn't matter which as they are interchangeable):

"As the indifferent children of the earth."

The other says:

"Happy, in that we are not over-happy;
On fortune's cap we are not the very button."

Hamlet: "Nor the soles of her shoe?"

Rosencrantz or Guildenstern: "Neither, my lord."

When asked how they're doing they reply, eh, so-so. We're happy that we're not too happy. We're indifferent. Not the top of the cap nor the sole of the shoes. Shakespeare is pretty much saying, let me skip over these guys and get to the good part.

Speaking of which, the next part I'd be remiss as a guy if I left it out, though it really has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. If it's not the cap, nor the shoes, it's...

"Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?" asks Hamlet.

"'Faith, her privates we," says Rosencrantz or Guildenstern.

Faith, her privates we. Nice.

Back to the point. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in one of the most recognized stories ever. You can't tell one from the other, and because they were never actually developed as characters, you can't even describe them beyond "schoolmate".

So why am I mentioning them? Good question. I'll come back to that later.

The colours red, blue and green are real. The colour yellow is a mystical experience shared by everybody. Discuss.

- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom Stoppard

Untitled

"Consider — One: Probability is a factor which operates within natural forces. Two: Probability is not operating as a factor. Three: We are now held within un-, sub-, or supernatural forces."

- From Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, another story in which the characters somewhat realize that they are caught in a narrative from which they cannot escape. I'll come back to that idea later.

There's gold in them there words

Steve wrote:

You were telling me something about making money blogging, how does that work? Is it something I can do, or do I have to know something about something?

A couple of other people have asked the same thing, so I thought I'd post a response.

Yes, you can totally make money off blogging. Sometimes it's hard. Sometimes it's easy. The subject matter of the blog is less important than the traffic it gets. It's all about the traffic. Traffic and subject matter often have a lot to do with each other, however. It's hard to make money off a personal blog, for example, because there's so many of those out there it's hard to get a good readership base. In most cases people just aren't interesting enough to carry an interesting personal blog. Of course, if you're famous, or if your blog is so witty it makes you famous, personal blogging has worked for some people. [Note: This personal blog makes $0]

The easier way, and this has worked for me, is to pick some niche you're interested and make daily posts about that. Then the blog's mostly about that subject and less about you. People show up to read about, I don't know, stamp collecting for example, and come back because they liked what you had to say about it, or the way you said it.

The niche can be anything. If you want to do it as a hobby and make just enough to pay your internet bill, you can pick a really small niche, like 17th century American poetry (since the colonies were just being formed then, that's a really small niche). Then there's mega-niches. That's something not being covered by mainstream media but still has a huge interest. There's this one guy who makes a fortune just talking about mobile phones, for example. Then there's the stuff that is so over-covered that you might as well not even bother with it: politics, porn, celebrities, and so on. You'd have to be pretty good to carve a spot for yourself in those areas.

The way you make money off the blog is either passive or active. Passively, you can just put up Google ads. They pay you a few cents for every ad that's clicked on. The more people who visit your blog, the more likely an ad will be clicked, the more money you make. You can get as creative as you want in making blog posts, but making money off it is all statistical. X traffic divided by X clicks = X cents, that sort of thing. There's roughly a 1.5 to 2 percent average click-through rate in relation to to page views. It's a science and there's even a formula for making it successful. Actively making money off your blog means you're hitting the streets selling ads. I'm lazy, so I usually go the passive route.

Here's my formula: You find some niche that isn't being covered and that you're interested in. You have to be interested in it or else it will get old real quick. You write daily posts about the topic. The daily posts are important because you want people coming back daily. If people are interested in the topic, and you write interesting posts, and you make daily posts, they come back daily. Simple as that.

The posts don't have to be long. A paragraph or two is best. The secret to writing for the web is that nobody actually reads anything anymore. It's a post-literate society and people are more likely to train their eye on a symbol than a really long article. People skim articles. If you've read every word of this post, you're abnormal.

Really what you're doing in making blog posts (according to my formula) is summarizing things other people have posted to the web and then linking to it. You write a paragraph or two explaining what it is and why you think it is important, and then you link out to the original content. The reason readers come to you is because the web is huge place, and it's easy to get lost. You become a guide. You're like a daily digest about whatever the topic is.

And then... you just give it all away. Seriously, you let people rip you off and put the content on their sites. You even make it easy for them to do so. The reason why is because search engines rank sites with a lot of links to them higher in the search results. Doesn't even matter if your content is good. It's all about the links. Your job is to make this linking really simple by letting them just steal the content. If your blog is about 17th century American poetry, you make it really easy for other people interested in 17th century American poetry to syndicate your content to their site in exchange for a link.

I used this method to take a completely obscure website about a niche topic, buried along with the hundreds of thousands of other sites about the topic, to number four in the Google search engine results for its keyword. This was all within a year, and that's pretty darn tough. So basically the formula works.

Of course, that's passive money making. You make daily posts, people show up, you get paid. It's not a lot of money and it's completely related to how much traffic you get. Some people earn enough to live on, but they all cater to mega-niches and work the site as if it were a job. Might as well treat it as a job and take the active route. This entails going out and selling ads directly. You end up making far more than you would passively.

In short (and this is what the post-literates skim for), yes, you can totally make money off blogging. It depends on 1) How into it you are, 2) If you've got a viable niche, 3) How much traffic you get, and 4) Your money-making model.

The thing I left out above is that sometimes it's not about the money, it's about the SWAG. If you picked the town you live in as your niche, you get freebies from people. Go to a restaurant and say you want to review the place for your local blog and see how you're treated. Sometimes the perks are better than the pay : )

Snow falling on field photograph

"Marshall Homestead" - Jeremy Parnell

I was clearing out photographs I took over the winter getting ready for the coming spring. This one's my favorite. It's of the Marshall homestead in Maysville, Kentucky. That's my backyard / their front yard.

To burn out or fade in

I like subversive expression.
I'm compiling a list of writers, musicians, and artists that I admire.
It's a short list.
Most of the people on it are dead.
Half by their own hand, most recently Thompson.
The others took to drink by the age of 40 or died by syphilis.
All of them beautiful minds.
All of them killed by their own fictions.
And these are my heroes?

One still lives.
He advocates a four-part core lifestyle of
Body (diet, exercise)
Mind (reading, study)
Spirit (meditation, zen)
Shadow (art & music)
/ augmented by auxiliary modules
Ethics (social activism, honesty)
Sex (tantra, kundalini yoga)
Work (transformative, service)
Emotions (expression, art)
Relationships (commitment, sharing)

He calls it an integral lifestyle. I think I'll read more of his books.

Feeding the machine

I have a love-hate relationship with technology.

I once worked in the dishroom of a large cafeteria serving hundreds of the rudest people imaginable. As they left, they would sling their trays in through a window and my job was to [get covered in slop] stack the trays and load them onto the conveyor belt of this large silver cleaning machine. No matter how many trays I stacked and loaded there were always more coming. Stack. Load. Stack. Load. Every day the same thing. Feed the machine. Before long I couldn't tell where the machine left off and I began.

Some devices were built to make our lives easier. They serve us. They're an accessory. This monstrous steam tray cleaner wasn't one of those devices. It was large, clearly in charge, and hungry. I was but a cog in the machine feeding it endlessly. To pass the time I even took to chanting in my head: "Feed the machine. Feed the machine. Feed the machine." I was a module — the human component of a machine designed for the greater goal of clean dishes.

And today?

Today I'm partly a software coder working on Web 2.0 applications. This came about because of an early love of print, old manuscripts, and the power of the written word. I learned a long time ago how to design for and run printing presses, but when the web hit the world I was the first in my little circle of friends take an awestruck gasp. It was amazing how comparatively inexpensive you can put any strange notion you had out there. In the early days, the web was just a digital version of print, a top-down publishing scheme but nonetheless amazing, and truly revolutionary.

Web 2.0 is the natural evolution of that idea. It is the same concept that any crazy idea can be put out there, but now in critical mass. The technology that coders have assembled has reduced the complexity of publishing and collapsed the hierarchy into a horizontal model. That was the idea behind Web 1.0, but it has only just come about in any real sense. Now every crazy idea that is put out there is tagged to other crazy ideas. Links evolved from hyperlinked documents to hyperlinked everything, up to and including people. No crazy idea is a singular phenomena, it is now a part of the collective of a bigger crazy.

That's the love. In all this madness, we are building something completely new. It's something the world has never seen before in any period of history. Unless the Library at Alexandria had some system I'm not aware of for user-generated content that automatically linked the content to everything else related, including the librarians themselves, we have stumbled upon something that is the envy of philosophers, mystics, and Kings alike — no matter what the age. This machine is being constructed by everyone, not just the programmers. You, I, my seventy-something-year-old grandmother, we're building the largest human endeavor ever constructed.

In the Wired article "We Are the Web", Kevin Kelly writes:

And who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive? We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge.

It doesn't even matter if people read this crap we post. We are programming the machine itself. It's learning from it's fathers and mothers, ourselves. We are here. We are giving birth to this machine. It's exciting times because when they look back, for good or ill, it all starts right now.

That's the love. It's also what scares the hell out of me.

Maybe it's a narcissistic/nostalgic yearning to remain at the top of the food chain, or a struggle to hold fast to the distinction of a boundary between man and machine. Maybe it's that I fancy myself an artist as well as a programmer and as such I'm duty bound to promote the human condition. Or maybe it's just flashback nightmares of loading trays into the Big Silver Machine. Whatever it is, I cringe at the thought of this massive machine that is more than any of us, ourselves. As father to it, the same as any of you, I wonder if I'm not one of those deadbeat dads that marvel at the birthing but want to skip town on eighteen years committed serving the creation.

One thing is clear. We can rage against the machine all we want. At some point, however, we have to step out of denial and realize the machine is now us. Whatever line there was is blurred.

Life as vortices in the Ohio River

The Ohio River has bested the Hercules, a once mighty barge with a crane that could lift sunken vessels.

Sapped of its strength, the Hercules rests at the bottom of the river,
only its crane and two steel beams jutting above water near the shoreline.

Next to it, a towboat lies partially submerged, its pilothouse listing
like a drunken sailor. And next to that, the rusting hull of an old Navy
minesweeper breaks the river's surface like the belly of a dead whale.

Cincinnati Enquirer, 1998

"Vortices" - Jeremy Parnell

The story of the Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio River began in 1992 when a barge sank near the Kentucky shoreline outside Maysville, Kentucky. A subsequent salvage operation in 1994 tried to raise the barge with two Navy minesweepers. The minesweepers were the next victim as they too became stuck in the mud. Next came a towboat trying to free the minesweepers. Damage to its engines quickly rendered it crippled.

Finally came the salvage barge named "The Hercules" and its towering crane. The triangle made short work of it as well. While hoisting the original barge, the crane aboard the Hercules broke as the barge reached the surface, and down it sank again. Then the Hercules itself sank, coming to rest on top of the barge it was supposed to save. Eventually the minesweepers and the towboat sank as well. The entire salvage operation was caught in what an Army Corps of Engineers spokesperson would later call "'The Bermuda Triangle of the Ohio River".

Today, you can still see remnants of the wreckage peaking out of the Ohio River. Some local residents have called it a junkyard and feel that it blights the shoreline. I completely disagree. It's actually quite a remarkable addition to Maysville, especially when coupled with the story behind the wreckage.

I understand why some people may want it removed. It's old and rusty and doesn't look like it belongs there — your typical junkyard. That's all true. But I believe that if you look at it in a certain way, it really is beautiful. Even without dressing up the photo, it looks like a forgotton grave marker, a symbol of finality, especially with the city behind it that may represent life and the continuation of things. The story itself is a story of the power of the Ohio River. We build dams to control the height of it. We build bridges over it. We build walls to change the shape of it. But sometimes the river just doesn't want to let things go.

It's Life as a River. The metaphor goes way back, but I first read it in Herman Hesse's Siddhartha. It fits. You know countless little things are going on in the city in the distance, but the river brings it to a final point in these strange vortices.

Life is a process until death. You never actually see the same river twice. The water you saw a moment ago has already moved on. Likewise, life is continually unfolding. The product of life, like the river, is that at some point it will draw you in to a final resting place. There's nothing you can do to avoid it, and all of mankind's inventions (engines and cranes, science and medicine) do little to prevent it. Sometimes the end is just a little spot off to the side of the Ohio River where you're watching life go on in the distance.

Cool. I'm a sportsman.

So I was watching the evening news and during the sports segment they gave an update on what's going on in the Nascar world. Forgive my ignorance if any of you are Nascar fans, but as I was watching the clips of cars speeding around the track, I started wondering why it's called a sport.

"That's a sport?" I said to Tracie who was watching along with me.

"Yep," she said.

"They just go around in circles like that?"

I'm sure there's much more to it. People are always talking about the adrenaline rush that comes from going to the track. There's probably some science to the speed and velocity and the technology of man coupled with machine and I'm probably missing something profoundly significant. When I lived in Lakeland, Florida, I actually got to ride in one of those souped-up automobiles. The Chamber of Commerce had their After Hours meeting at the track and while hob-knobbing with the elite, they let people take a few laps shotgun with the driver. Not sure how fast we were going, but it must have been like a gazillion miles per hour. Disappointingly, it still felt like a go-kart. In any case, I got to say I rode in a race car — in a tie and collar too!

Oh, sorry. So;

"They just go around in circles like that?" I said.

"Yes," she said.

I'm not picking on Nascar. The Kentucky Derby is considered a sport as well, and the horses just go around in circles too. I guess it's just my assumption that sports have to have something to do with physical activity. The jockeys get a bit of exercise while trying to stay on the horse, and the horse itself gets plenty of exercise, but the jockey's still just riding along while going around in circles.

"But if it's just competition that makes a sport, why aren't video games?"

They are, she said, and pointed out all the gaming tournaments that gamers train for where sponsors give huge prizes to the winner. I guess so. I knew about the tournaments, but I didn't know they were considered a sport. Apparently they are. The Internet doesn't lie.

"Well I play video games."

I don't play that much, but I do every now and then. I played Neverwinter Nights regularly for about a year and dabble in first-person shooters from time to time. I'm a good sniper. We had teams and goals and all of that. I wondered if the bit that I do play would count and then thought that if someone plays just a little basketball, they still play. If someone does just a little fishing, they still kill fish, right? Tony Hawk turned skateboarding into a sport. Who'da thunk it? ESPN2 turned every other crazy thing we do into a sport (they recently added drum and bugle corps to the lineup). I'm sure I fit in there somewhere. All I need is a sponsor.

"Cool. I'm a sportsman."

You could almost hear her eyes roll.

Madlibing email bankruptcy

Dear [Sir, Madam, Other]:

I apologize that I am unable to respond directly to your email concerning [Viagara, Bush, Bin Laden, Tiny Tim needing crutches, Nigerian princes, etc.]. I was recently [abducted by aliens, out abducting aliens] which left me far too busy to answer each email I received. I am very interested in learning more about [the crap you're selling, etc.]. If you feel your email needs to be addressed, please resend it and I'll try to get back with you [when hell freezes over, in my next lifetime, when I win the lottery].

Sincerely,

[Jeremy, fluffybunny13]

P.S. If this was about [anything illegal, something where I owe you money], I apologize, but you must have me confused with that other guy.

You can't profile a prophet

I figured that if I'm going to go around saying that I know a thing or two about web design, I can't really get away with a minimalistic profile. So I set out to create a unique MySpace design that I can call my own. I figured I'd kill two birds with one stone and update my personal site as well.

Personal site. MySpace. Both are all about identity. So I got to thinking about identity in general and how one defines it. I came up blank. I can no more say what it is that makes me me than I can say what it is that makes you you. Heck if I know who I am. So I scrapped that line of thought.

I finally ended up thinking about identity like people do today, as records in a database, as a percentage chance that we'll fit some mold. Much of who we are is defined by statistics. I imagined going to a club and getting scanned, and all that information being right there on the computer screen. The bouncer's trying to decide whether to let me in. You know, Future Shock. The design also plays with today's ideas of privacy and the conflict between creating a personal site and trying to remain a private person.



The hand was a gimme. What's more personal than a hand? I was orginally going to go with just a fingerprint, but changed my mind after I put my hand through the scanner (the hand and face were shot separately). The lines on a hand are perfect for the metaphor. Fingerprints are truly unique because there are no two alike. But most of how people are identified has nothing to do with uniqueness. It's all about educated guesses. Predictions made on assumptions. In short, it's a lot like palmistry. It looks personal, but really it's nothing more than demographics. You've got a nice Heart Line there Jeremy. We'll put you on the A-list.

Fingerprints never change, and they've been there since birth. I like these "Life Etchings" better because you earn them.

When you get right down to it, profiles are a categorization of people. People that are truly unique (not saying I am one of them, of course) can't be profiled because they can't be categorized. You can't profile a prophet.

A farewell to Mothman

Beginning in November 1966, the small town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, was terrorized by sightings of what came to be known as Mothman. The creature was described as larger than a man, a near 10-foot wingspan, with the ability of helicopter-like take-offs and flying speeds of nearly 100 miles an hour. Over one hundred people say they saw him in the span of a year, and the sightings coincided with many strange happenings in the area, including UFO activity and the appearance of men-in-black. Mothman struck fear throughout the region and across the country. The bizarre events climaxed with the collapse of the Silver Bridge in December 1967, killing 46 people. Those 46 people drowned in the icy waters of the Ohio River below. Many say Mothman was an omen of the disaster because he disappeared directly after. But to this day, those associated with the Mothman mystery have fallen victim to his curse, dying each of them in strange and unexplainable deaths.

That's him in the picture below. No, the other guy. I'm a dork. I know.



Point Pleasant erected this statue to commemorate the story after the 2002 movie The Mothman Prophecies, starring Richard Gere. Each year they throw the Mothman Festival, and believe me that's the only reason to go to Point Pleasant.

So why am I talking about Mothman? Well, I noticed Kathleen is still out in West Virginia and I wanted to scare her! Hi Kathleen : )

Nah, seriously, it's cause I'm already missing an old friend. I just finalized selling an online magazine of mine to a UK company (not Kentucky, the other UK) and I sort of miss it. It's where I wrote about these bizarre stories and legends a la X-Files that I came across in the news. I am probably the last X-Files fan on the planet, but hey, I said I was a dork didn't I? I just find it more interesting to live in the mystery rather than in the know.

So anyways, they wanted it. I talked them into a good deal for it. That's that. Move on to the next chapter. It took up a good portion of my day, and I'm already backlogged on about $6,000 worth of work that I should really stop procrastinating on. Besides, it's not like I'm going to just stop making crop circles in the neighbor's lawn just because I'm not writing about it later.

That said, it's always, always hard saying goodbye to old friends, even when they're Mothman.

Gershwin and I love ourselves

I got an email from someone asking me what the poem I posted yesterday meant. I'll go ahead and explain from my point of view, but seriously, I'm fine with whatever anyone gets out of it.

I came up with the concept for the poem in darker days when I was really fenced in, but it's not a dark poem. It's based on a pastime of mine where I like to lay on my back in fields and stare up at the sky and imagine that I'm really looking down on an ocean that I can just fall into. It's something I've always remembered doing. I also wanted to play with the idea that up is sometimes down and blah, blah, literary crap.

Talking about oneself is always a little awkward. You either sell yourself short or come off sounding like a raging egomaniac. It's also not very honest — I'm both self-deprecating and a raging egomaniac. So I probably won't explain things very much in the future, just put them out there.

Plus, if I stop to think about anything I have to say, I'm running a real risk. Oscar Levant once said to George Gershwin: "Tell me, George, if you had to do it all over again, would you still fall in love with yourself?"

Yes, yes I would (egomaniac). The only problem is that I'm a neglectful lover (self-deprecating).

Falling over fences

Lying with my back to the soft grass looking Up at the blue dome of sky;
Lying with my back to the absent stars looking Down on the blue deep of oceans.
Fenced in and finding there's no fences to Jump above.
You don't jump into the sky — you Fall.

Blood letting and boiler vats

So I wanted to take a trip and decided I'd need around $300 to go in style. This was a number of years ago, back when I had maybe five bucks to my name. I wanted to take the trip, had no money, and figured I'd go down to Lexington, Kentucky, and work day labor for a week. My brother Josh was there, staying in an apartment with some college buddies of his, and I got squatter's rights. I hopped in my '86 Ford Escort, broken windshield, battery died long ago and replaced by a truck battery that was way too big and had to be covered with cardboard so it wouldn't spark off the hood - the hood tied down with bungy cords. Already I was going in-style.

The first night there we all gathered in the living room with the idea of getting completely wasted, a small handful of college drop-outs, kicked-out, just-out - all equally broke. Someone had the idea that if we mixed NyQuil with the little Kahlua we had, there'd be enough to go around. There was, but the one bathroom wasn't enough to hold this handful of deathly-ill morons. If any of us made it out of there with last week's lunch still in our system, I have no idea how.

So I was already not-in-the-best-of-conditions when I showed up at 3 AM at the day labor office looking for a job. I heard somewhere that you had to show up this early if you wanted a job because they went quick. This is true. I don't know if it's for the work, but a lot of homeless people hang out there just hoping for something. I had something the other desperates didn't have. I was riding in style. I had a car. Car = transport to job site. They give the car people the best jobs because they can take the truly down-and-out along with them.

I landed a recurring job working 12-hour shifts building scaffolding inside a boiler vat at the Kentucky Power plant.

For two days I worked those shifts. It was at least 10-stories of scaffolding fed through a tiny access panel at the base of the boiler vat. Every pole, plank, hinge, and bolt that made up that 10-story structure passed through that panel, and passed through my own hands as I was stationed on the very outside. I actually liked the work. I felt like I was doing something constructive, building the pyramids or something, though they were just trying to clean the thing. I was on target for my travel funds goal.

Moral of the story: Perseverance pays.

I was supposed to show up on the third day, but by the third day I was beat. On the night of the second day I took a little of my hard earned cash and bought Taco Bell for Josh and myself. One of us came up with the idea of just blowing all the money I had already made on the lottery. It was at least a hundred bucks. We figured, that must bring in something - you know, laws of statistics aside. I had my feel of scaffolds, so yeah, screw it.

Over one-hundred scratch-offs netted like $50 bucks. Twenty-four hours of hard labor and I'm down at least fifty.

College drop-outs, kicked-out, or just-out are a resourceful group of people. If you ever want to know how to turn a buck, give a buck to a college kid and ask them how. Again, while toxicating my body with what might as well have been crude oil, someone suggested I go down to the plasma center and see what I could get for my blood. Well, I'll try anything once, so that I did.

Turns out, for my height and body-type, they pay $70 a pop for blood letting. They strap you to a chair and let you read books or watch movies while that little stream of life-giving red stuff is slowly replaced by saline over the length of an hour or so. I told myself I'm doing good, helping give plasma to some poor guy in a traffic accident. Really, I just wanted to see what happened in the next chapter of the book I was reading and never wanted to see a scaffold again. I left Lexington with well over two-hundred bucks and nine chapters down.

Moral of the story: The man wants your blood before he comes off the cash. There's nothing you can do about that. Cut out the middlemen and just let the blood flow.