Author: admin

I am very much enjoying Paris, but I am also dancing around the difficulty of trying to field lots of remote meetings in NY, on a week where I am also doing lots of demos and workshops in Paris.

I have started scheduling Skype meetings in NY at very odd times, such as midnight in Paris, because that’s when I know I will be free here.

This feels a bit like a chronological version of measuring length in feet versus meters: At any given moment of the day or night, I need to keep two time zones in my head at once — always at a separation of six hours.

Not that I am complaining. Hey, I’m in Paris. 🙂

This is probably not going to make any sense to those of you who do not have children.

In the last day, in Paris, I spent some time with my friend and her two daughters — one of them seven, the other four. We had a picnic on the Seine, the four of us, enjoying the beautiful warm weather, and soaking in the astonishingly lovely Parisien surroundings.

What I came away with, more than anything else, was the sheer wonder of children. My friend’s two daughters, feisty, difficult, completely innocent and completely high on life, were a wonder to me.

Both of them had a will of life, a fierce determination to enjoy every second, that no adult could ever hope to match. Simply being in their company, in the presence of such a beautiful and cacaphonous celebration of the now, had the effect of resetting my compass.

I stand in awe of the sheer force of childhood, the sense of wonder it brings, its will to life that we adults find it all to easy to forget.

Until we remember.

Word/sentence pairs inspired by a recent conversation with Andy Gerngross.

Acronym: A curious result of naming your memes.

Atheism: The non-existence of gods is my only unshakeable belief.

Boundless: Don’t leap to conclusions about things going on forever.

Dysnomia: I have a chronic difficulty remembering this word.

Inflammable: It burns me up when people use this word incorrectly.

Invalid: Aren’t you the guy with the fake handicapped sticker on your car?

Irony: There is only one word I don’t need a dictionary for.

Paradox: Nothing about this sentence is true.

Procrastination: I was going to start putting things off, but I decided to wait.

Xenophobia: I am afraid of strangers coming ever closer.

When the King is mad
Does that mean the whole country
Must also go mad?

Traveling so far
Nine time zones across the Earth
Turns you upside down

The title of yesterday’s post was ripped right from the news of the day. Out of context the words could seem confusing. But a search on the Web for the phrase “goddamned steam” would quickly tell the reader what I was talking about.

Since some readers seemed nonplussed by my unexplained use of that phrase, I find myself wondering whether my post violated some implicit contract between writer and reader. Of course we all know that anyone reading this blog can simply find the context through Google (or Bing or DuckDuckGo, to be non-denominational about it). But should they be required to?

Thinking back on it now, I think my decision to leave the topic unexplained was a kind of invitation. There were no words I could have used to convey my feeling of sheer horror and embarrassment, my sense of a world gone completely mad, when I first encountered this phrase in its original context — and realized that it was not, in fact, some sort of parody. I guess I wanted my reader to better understand that context by inviting her to see it for herself.

It’s possible that we will look back on this insane time in our nation’s history and single out the day the phrase “goddamned steam” was first uttered in public. That might turn out to be the moment when it became undeniable that we are dealing with a blend of insanity and stupidity far more toxic than anything we could have imagined.

You can’t make this stuff up. I mean, seriously, you just can’t friggin’ make stuff like this up.

Words fail me.

I am looking around at the people here with me at JFK airport, all of us waiting for our flights. Folks are sitting around, eating, chatting, looking at their phones, essentially waiting for the next thing to happen.

Watching this scene, some part of my mind is thinking about the fact that we have not, in any meaningful way, evolved biologically as a species in the 30,000 or so years since the Cro-Magnon era, when people were already creating the earliest known virtual realities, in the form of cave paintings.

On the one hand, we are rapidly evolving as a species in the sense that each generation is handing to the next ever new and exciting forms of technology-enabled virtual tools: Writing, agriculture, fast transportation, theater and cinema, computers, the Web, SmartPhones, wearables, and whatever comes after that, as marvelous as they may be, are all extrinsic to our essentially unchanged biological selves.

I find it significant that none of this is due to a biological shift. If you were to take a typical Cro-Magnon child and place her in a modern environment, she would be just as likely to thrive in today’s technologically evolved world as any child born into the 21st century.

To me, that is both exciting and humbling.

This time Trump is making a rather elaborate and careful point of making sure that we know he is lying. That is, in fact, the main purpose of the very particular way he fired FBI Director Comey.

To be precise: Trump wants to make sure we know, without any doubt, that the firing was the direct result of the FBI Director asking for more resources to look into the Trump-Russia connection less than a week ago. And he also wants us to know that he can give a ridiculous reason for the firing — a “justification” so absurd and self-contradictory that nobody in their right mind would believe it — and still get away with it.

This is Trump as Tony Soprano with the baseball bat. His message is clear: I can swing this bat any time I want and smash the heads of my enemies. And there is nothing any of you can do about it. You are all my bitches now.

Welcome to the new politics.

We don’t seem to have too many patriots in the U.S. these days. Yet today I read about recent statements by Stephen Colbert that, for once, give me hope for my country.

It takes a lot of courage to stand up to a rapacious conman who is systematically destroying your country from within, who is pushing hateful policies guaranteed to cause terrible suffering and tragedy for millions of hard working citizens, and for the worst of all possible reasons: Simply to line his own pockets with cash.

As an American, I am proud of Stephen Colbert for his courage, his unflinching willingness to expose villainy and vile behavior, and for his unwillingness to pretend to show respect to a shameful public figure who has taken crudity, hate-mongering, offensiveness and downright disgusting behavior to a new level.

Stephen Colbert should be given a Medal of Freedom for his valuable service to our country. Unfortunately, we will first need to wait until our country has an actual President to pin it on him.