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I don’t know what is happening in Ferguson, Missouri or Syria or Sierra Leone. And frankly, I don’t care. I’m not there to see and hear for myself, so I don’t know. I trust you find this as disturbing as I do. In the past, with limited technology, life-changing events were relatively opaque and relatively unknown. Silence and private mis-information were rampant. Most information appeared via word of mouth, chanted over fires, whispered in religion-huts. Today, with ceaseless communication flowing like warm beer overflowing its barrels, silence and privacy have disappeared and rampant global mis-information is a blanket covering cold ignorance. Unlike most tweet and comment and shop at Amazon people, I have no opinions on what I don’t know. But I do know history. How? I am an intuitive genius and in the 85% of the brain cells that you don’t use, I intuit the truth, a whole cloth of mis-informed truth.
History - Copyright
My colleague Michael Bettencourt wrote an open letter to Samuel Beckett (of all people!), in the August 2006 issue of Scene4, . It included this:
“Copyright, as it now exists, is a poison -- the only antidote is some equivalent to what the open-source people in the computer programming world have done...”
Michael and I have diametrically opposed “opinions” about Copyright.
He - that almost all copyright restraints should be abolished and “works” should be freely available to the “public”.
Me: - that all copyright violations should be prosecuted by the DEA and violators should lose anything gained by their violations which usually includes all of their possessions.
He and Me remain colleagues and friends and smile at each other through my electrified, guard-dog-ed fence.
So to strut my case, I am now publishing a history, of sorts, on Copyright.
You can read A Brief History of Copyright - Part 1 in this issue.
History - Cats
Because of a deluge of sillymail and hatemail, and awful photos and trinkets, I ceased publication of my history of cats with Part2. Now there is astonishing news of recent genome research discovering that domesticated cats are only “semi-domesticated”. I know that. I’ve always known that. And... if you ever eat with, sleep with, dance with your Feline Domesticus , you know that too. Semi-domesticated? They, the researchers, are being kind and slightly flamboyant. More like “faux-domesticated”, a purveyor of almond-eyed, purr-drugged mis-information.
You can read A Brief History of Cats - Part 3 in this issue.
There you have my “this month’s” column on things I don’t and do care about. If anything of this is unclear, I can move my tongue from one cheek to the other. Just ask.
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