Shock And Awe...From Phones

"...the mobilization power of the internet was one of the Egyptian opposition's most potent weapons..."

Main Beach, Laguna

On Friday March 19, 1976, I loaded my scruffy '67 Chevy Malibu, made a right on Pacific Coast Highway in Laguna Beach, CA, and pointed the hood north towards San Francisco.

I had a hundred bucks in my pocket (gas was hideously cheap back then) and a dream of the writer's life in my head. After a year and a half, I had finally tired of Laguna's beautiful women sun-bathing topless on its beaches, Pacific sunsets perfectly framed in my kitchen window, the sweet smell of the avocado grove across the narrow road from my bedroom in Bluebird Canyon, and a series of cushy outdoor jobs. What was I thinking!

Somewhere near San Luis Obispo, roughly where southern California begins to fade, the Malibu  developed homesickness in the form of a knocking sound beneath my feet. Figuring that car-misery loves company, especially if that company just happens to be a mechanic, I picked up a hitchhiker (Dear Millennials, this act of faith should not be confused with the death-wish that picking up a stranger would be today).

Creative Anachronism

He was a cherub-like being with a thick scraggly beard, glasses and a head full of tangled curls; alas, he could not identify the cause or possible effect of the occasional knocking sound (it later proved to be a broken U-joint). He was on his way to Santa Cruz to attend a "jousting" contest, and I immediately thought maybe he was a wayward member of Kesey's Merry Pranksters, except that he seemed too young. Instead, he was a member of The Society For Creative Anachronism. No, he was not an early Reagan supporter, he was on his way to one of this society's medieval pageants ( http://www.sca.org/ ).

"...But quickly lost in the swirl of revolution was the government's ferocious counter-attack, a dark achievement that many had thought impossible in the age of global connectedness..."

You might think that this would have been the most interesting thing about my young passenger. You would be wrong. The most interesting thing he told me was that he and his grad-student friends from Stanford and Berkeley had been participating in a Department of Defense project. They were using the universities' mainframes to communicate and invent games with one another. He could speak to someone across the country or around the globe on a computer and they could speak with him through this new network ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET ).

Tahrir Square, Cairo

Naturally, I thought the guy was totally nuts, but I now recognize that this was the first time I had ever heard of the Internet. 1976. He may be sitting by his pool counting his billions while I, Dear Friends, live out my own dream in these humble words.

I dropped him by the side of the road and continued on to San Francisco, where I met my friend Karen. The next day, Saturday, I called a friend of a friend and got a construction-labor job. I began Monday. On Tuesday, my boss offered me a free apartment in the building we were renovating on Fillmore Street. I parked the Malibu one last time on a steep hill across from the light blue French-American School on Alamo Square with its tennis court with a chain-link net.

"...just after midnight on Jan 28, a technologically advanced, densely wired country with more than 20 million people online was essentially severed from the global Internet."


During the last two weeks, as Egyptian youths and others gathered in their square, determined for myriad reasons to bring down Mubarak's homegrown version of Creative Anachronism, I could not help thinking of that conversation with my hitchhiking friend. I wondered what he might have to say about the power of global, free services like Google, Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter to connect hopeful people and put fear in the hearts of hapless leaders.

Finally, we may have seen the real shock and awe of the Defense Department after all these years, not falling from planes, but ringing and glowing from phones through its own invention, the weapon of mass construction, the Internet.


Ed Note: The quotes used above are from a Feb 16 NYT's front page article by James Glanz and John Markoff, available at The New York Times . In addition to being a Contributor to The Rye (NY) Record, we are now writing a series of profiles and features  for Volunteer Square

Battle Hymn Of My Tiger Parents!

• One time, after I only flunked three math tests in a row, they made me see a tutor for five whole weeks! Then, I had to get two C's in a row before they would let me stop. Talk about strict.

• Another time, they would not let me go out one night to see my friends, even though my sister had only been missing for a couple of days. When I protested by sitting on top of my bureau reading the entire Constitution to find the part about my rights, they thought it was great, and handed me the D. of I. to read too! Torture!

• I snuck out my first-storey bedroom window often, but this one time I forgot and came back in the front door early the next morning. They actually thought I had just gotten up early for a change; then, they smelled gasoline from my helping a friend siphon from another car. Grounded for a week. Brutal!

• Sometimes they went to see a musical, ugh, and I refused to go. I had a party one time, and really cleaned up carefully before they returned. They woke me up later to ask where was the dog; they couldn't find him. They accused me of losing him. Totally unfair! He turned up in a couple of days and they made me wash him and walk him everyday for a month. Heartless.

• Every couple of months, my dad made his favorite meal: codfish cakes, baked beans and black-bread that came out of a can; and they made me eat it like in a prison or something. Then they got mad when my sister and I couldn't hold back the gas and laughed 'til it hurt. Food Abuse!

• They got really upset, when I said they could not attend my college graduation, because I had not exactly been attending college and had invested the tuition they'd given me at the track. They totally lost it and didn't understand that learning about horses and track finance from my friend John "Little Tush" Tuccio and his brother Tony "Big Tush" was just as good as college. They made me get a job in an office to pay them back and didn't speak to me for more than a year. Way too harsh!

• When I was only 30, and living at their place, working feverishly (not hard, I just always had a fever) on my third screenplay, they became aware that I had not actually sold the first two yet. They asked me to leave! And they only would give me five measly grand for a fresh start! Unforgivable!

• The final straw was after I had sold more derivative mortgage-backed securities than anyone else in my firm, and had accumulated a solid eight figures worth of cash bonuses. I wanted to buy them a new house. They wouldn't come to the door and told me to go away. They were embarrassed to even know me. So ungrateful. The irony of success!

Ed Note: If there is anyone left who has not heard of The Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, a Yale Law School Professor, they must have been in Borneo for a while. Before some of you write to tell me that you actually knew my parents and that they were very loving people, save the ink; this was just for fun and I even made some of it up.

The BlackBoard: Tools & Others Stuff

I will put wheels on all my baggage and roll, not carry.


I will eat dessert, drink caffeinated, say yes "with cheese, please" and walk 3 miles daily.


I believe that the meek will inherit the earth, but not the one they thought.


I and 111 million other people watched the Super Bowl; 6.78 Billion others didn't.


I will cease heavy-lifting and get a twin-handled snow shovel to push.


I will still need to develop a strong back to climb upon.


I promise to quit trying to eat life-soup with a fork.


I will throw away any key on my keychain that I have not used in five years.


I know that at least 50 million viewers did not know what a steeler or a packer is or was.


I know that it will snow tomorrow, because I did not buy the push-ovel today.


I want to be like Tom Sawyer and have many people improving my fence.


I will watch out for the free pen containing ordinary ideas.


I know that schools have walls, but learning has no boundaries.


I recommend reading Genesis in the present tense.


I will try to be fearless, while keeping in mind that T Rex is extinct and the Monarch Butterfly thrives.

My Blackboard

I will stop doing my childrens' homework when they get to college.


I will not speak to my Boomer friends about what Twitter does or does not do.

I will try to remember that I am a person and not just a brand.

I will no longer try to figure out why we champion democracy, except where/when we don't.

I will admit that residential real estate is not of this world despite use of the term real.

I will forget that the Super Bowl is just a 4-hr Fox-GOP commercial in which a game is played.

I will continue to buy and eat thinly sliced baloney whenever possible.

I will remember that "senior" means high school or college, and "retire" is what to do to a vehicle.

I will wear a coat and tie whenever I damn well feel like it.
I will stop trying to get others in my family to change the oil.
I will continue eating Brussels sprouts despite unpleasant childhood memories of same.
I will dream of the day when I no longer need to shovel, sand, and salt every morning.

Still More Way Back When....

©copyrightTWMcDermott2011

Way Back When.....

We had one password for everything: "Open Sesame."

A friend was someone we'd actually met and a job came with pay.

Banks employed more tellers than fortune tellers.

The only trader we knew was Vic.

Where there was smoke, there was a smoker.

And....smoke was in the office, butter was on the roll, fat was in the gym, and bacon in the pan.

Starbuck's was the brick place on Main Street, Nantucket.

healthcare provider

A visit to the doctor or his/her visit to you did not require three separate corporations to send/explain the bill, process payment of the bill, or mail your prescription in 10 days.

Soho was in London, Tribeca was a message with a phone number on a wall, and meat packers really did.


All real pizza began below 14th St, crossed the Brooklyn Bridge, spread and changed the world.

A brand was what cowboys put on a cow.

No Ball Playing!

Amazingly, many adults still read books. Reading was something that actually happened all year, not just in summer. Children read books that had absolutely nothing to do with any test, list, or anything other than the pure whimsy of doing something entirely on their own without any merit, medals, or meddling. Imagine the audacity of growing an imagination, right in their own homes! It's scary to think about, but it's true.

Kids often went outdoors after school, unescorted, on foot or bicycle, unsupervised, un-coached, and unscheduled to an open space clearly marked NO BALL PLAYING, where they proceeded to play every conceivable kind of ball game....just because.



Ed Note: We really did say, "Open Sesame," even if there was nothing behind the door or curtain; it was an adaptation of the opening lines of Ali Baba. Yes, Millennials, doctors made house visits, prescribed sulpha tablets for everything from a sore throat to a "charlie-horse," to an addiction to watching re-runs of My Little Margie. The photo is of Hawthorne Park, Forest Hills Gardens, NY, where ball playing was prohibited, and the author and his friends endlessly tormented Bill The Park Warden (RIP). This was our greatest game of all, except perhaps when we learned to lure Charlie The Private Detective into a chase each night. But, that is another story.

Couple Of Nutty Things That Bug Us

Dum, Dumber & Dumbest

"Knowledge Worker:" The brainiacs at McKinsey send me their Quarterly Review just about every week, which makes you wonder what calendars these folks use, while making gazzillions holding senior managements' hands. Today, they sent us a new piece about the "knowledge work" and the 21st Century needs of "knowledge workers." This only bothered us a little, until we figured out they were referring to us; and then it bothered us a lot.

Why would anyone hire a company and pay them huge fees, if they use language like this? Let's send a clear message to planet McKinsey, "Stop using the term Knowledge Worker!" This sentence is, we suppose, filled with knowledge, and it certainly took work to think it up, but we call it....writing. Some folks put actual fenders on automobiles in a factory, it takes knowledge, but we call them automobile workers. Some people think up ways to build bridges, parks, and skyscrapers, and we call them engineers, designers or architects.

Okay, by finding a single term for all of these people, McKinsey might be simplifying things. But, we must do better: Come to think of it, is there any kind of worker who is not a knowledge worker? No! There are only degrees of knowledge; every worker has knowledge.

I am going to City Hall right now. I am sure that I will find people there with knowledge. They will know how to do or not do what I would like them to do. Or maybe they will take a lot longer to do it than I would like if they do it at all. Their snow-knowledge crew broke my fence while plowing snow; the snow-knowledge person was obviously not a fence-knowledge person. The City Hall compensation-knowledge person is likely to find my notary-knowledge person's stamp on my letter with attached photos to be lacking in some way. This will cause a delay in decision-knowledge regarding my claim.

Will the snow melt in spring before the City reimburses us for the fence repair knowledge-person's work? As our great friend and Answer-Knowledge-person Eight Ball might say, "Highly Likely."

"Milk Fat" Explained: Have you been thinking that the 1% Milk, or Low Fat Milk you've been buying has 99% less fat than "Whole Milk?" Not exactly. These percentages measure the Butterfat content of milk. Butter itself is 80% BF-butterfat.

"Whole" Milk contains only 3.25% BF, not 100% as some might think. Are you with us? And 2% or Reduced Fat Milk? Right, 2% BF and only about a third less BF than Whole Milk.

Skimmed? Right, 0-.5% BF. Half & Half? A whopping 12.5%, almost 3X the BF of Whole Milk, since it's half cream and half whole (sorry) milk!

Milk knowledge-persons could do a Whole lot better explaining this stuff to us, don't you think? And, don't we feel 100%  better about that 3.25% BF Whole Milk? We do. Dump the H&H though. Deadly stuff.

We have more where these came from, Pilgrims.

Ed Note: Tip, when dealing with City Hall, sometimes it pays to go at lunch time. In my case, everyone was out, except the City Manager himself. He reviewed my case on the spot, gave me his card, and said to get an estimate directly to him. That is a knowledge worker. For real, so far.

©copyrightTWMcDermott2011