Google chairman: Google+ is completely optional!

Google Plus is completely optional. If you don't want to use it, you don't have to.

--Google chairman Eric Schmidt (via Gawker)

Gee, thanks, I took you up on that the very first day, without your specific permission.

It's amazing that despite its relatively infinite capacity to store and study data, Google feels it needs to know even more about me than it already knows after I've been using GMail for years. Schmidt would probably say Google can't protect me as well as it might be able to, if only it knew I liked the Yeah Yeah Yeahs -- but it already knows that, because I've written about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on this blog, which is on the Blogger platform, which is owned by Google. So how is me filling out a profile on Google+ going to give them any more?

Anyway, I wrote a whole novel about this -- or rather, half the novel is about this kind of thing, and half, more than half really, is just loads of sex. Which was a lot more fun to write about.

Check it out.

Child soldier-turned-Marine-turned-fitness coach's story sounds fishy

This Reuters profile is about a man called Tchicaya Missamou, who says is is a former child soldier in Africa who became a US Marine. He is now a fitness instructor in southern California and is on a book tour (which is how he comes to be the subject of a profile. I wonder how many personalities, ideas and language memes first enter the public notice through book tours) for his memoir "In the Shadow of Freedom."

According to the story:

Growing up in Congo-Brazzaville as one of 16 siblings born to his father's seven wives, Missamou's childhood was shaped by the violence that sprung up in the 1990s following the oil-rich central African nation's first democratic elections. Missamou describes how, at around 14, he and his teenage friends were handed guns and a few grenades and put in charge of a checkpoint with orders to block members of rival ethnic groups from entering the area.

"I saw awful things during this time," he wrote in the book... Violence broke out again in 1997, and this time Missamou became a war profiteer. He assembled a convoy of armed men and struck lucrative deals with Brazzaville whites, most of whom had fled, to rescue abandoned suitcases of cash and valuables. "The Congo was falling apart, but I was rich," he wrote.

As Missamou's success grew, so did his notoriety. With the help of his father, a police captain, he fled Africa while still a teenager. He ended up in California and found work at a martial arts studio. There, Missamou met a U.S. marine recruit who encouraged him to enlist. Soon, Missamou was deployed overseas, going to Afghanistan and Iraq to fight for his adopted homeland. Through an executive order that fast-tracked citizenship applications of U.S. soldiers, Missamou became a U.S. citizen in 2003....

But Missamou, who wears his crisp, white U.S. Marines uniform on his book tour, said he also wants to give back to his adopted country. In 2007, he opened The Warrior Fitness Camp in Valencia, California, where he trains students in military techniques as well as the skills he learned as a child in the African bush.

Really? Is this all from the guy's book and from an interview with him? Did the reporter do any checking at all? Is it even possible to do fact-checking on the memoir of someone with a resume like that? Or are we just supposed to take the guy at his word? Of course we are.

It's the "white Marines uniform" that made my bullshit detector go off. Who goes around the country on a book tour in a dress uniform? Not even Colin Powell. I mean, really -- could this guy's story possibly be true?

One of the saddest things I've ever read

Read this vapid article comparing social website use by gays and straights. Then read the bio of the guy who wrote it:

A long-term New Yorker, Mark Thompson has also lived in San Francisco, Boston, Provincetown, D.C., Miami Beach and the south of France. The author of the novels WOLFCHILD and MY HAWAIIAN PENTHOUSE, he has a PhD in American Studies and is the recipient of fellowships at MacDowell, Yaddo, and Blue Mountain Center. His work has appeared in numerous publications.

That's just sad.

The desert 'love lost lawyer'

There is a body of internet practice called search engine optimization or SEO. It is the art and science of engineering a web page, or blog posting, to try to ensure the page floats to the top of the results dellivered by Google and other search engines when certain phrases are the subject of a search.

One look at this page and you'll see what I mean.  Titled "Twentynine Palms Wrongful Death Attorney, Lost Love Lawyer and People Search Attorney for Twentynine Palms -- Find Your Lost Love," the page features a 1325-word supposed article about a lawyer in the desert town of Twentynine Palms, Calif., a small town adjacent to both Joshua Tree National Park and the world's largest Marine Corps base. According to the article, a lawyer named Sebastian Gibson will attempt to "find your lost love or obtain compensation for you for the wrongful death of a loved one ... (using) the highest quality legal resources that can be utilized to find the person you are looking for."

In reality, this so-called article consists of repetitions of certain stock phrases, reworded into a variety of different sentences. The idea behind SEO is that you can't just put a bunch of phrases onto a page over and over again; you have to make it look (to the bot, at least) like an actual blog posting. This is where the art comes in: to cram as many key words as possible into something that looks like an actual article. 

Such an "article" begs comparisons to the compositions of certain dull-minded high school students with whom I made my acquaintance back when I was an English teacher. In each class I always had a couple of students who couldn't write at all, and who, when assigned to write an essay, would simply string together certain key phrases, usually drawn from the question itself. Asked about the character traits that make Atticus Finch so memorable, such a student might write, "Atticus Finch had very good character traits that made him memorable. These traits showed good character, such as memory and strengh. I thought Atticus Finch was a strong character and had a good trait." (Only they were actually more poorly written than that.)

Clearly the so-called article exists entirely to draw the attention of search engines to the law practice of Mr. Gibson -- and a search on his name reveals he makes something of a hobby of SEO. Or maybe it's someone in his office, or some internet SEO firm he's hired. It looks like he's getting his money's worth.

But what I'm interested in is the mythical qualities embodied in this picture. The lawyer in the remote desert town whose practice is, in part, the search for "lost loved ones." In between working on a few wrongful death cases, he trolls the internet looking for your old high school girlfriend -- or maybe, in the case of Marines returned from their third or fourth deployment in the war on terror, that foxy female tank mechanic they used to drink beer with in Tikrit back in  2005.

This cries out to be a movie, starring perhaps Jim Carrey or Woody Harrelson,  as a hard-drinking lawyer with a client played by, I don't know, Ben Affleck. The client is trying to find an ex, played by Charlize Theron (if this were the 80s she would be played by Nastassja Kinski, a la Paris, Texas). The film could be written as a straighforward comedy, but I like it better as a bittersweet film (again, a la Paris, Texas), the real subject being the fact that the lawyer character's life was wrecked when he lost the love of his life (played in the present by Helen Hunt and in flashbacks by, say, January Jones).

Related: The Lonely Brinks 'Stockroom' Man

technorati: SEO, films, 29 Palms

Focus on the Fundies: They'll pay you to save money?

Another update on the strange Pentecostal minister who, in my last mention, begged for money so he could work on his book without having to actually work. This guy has a few obsessions, and money is definitely one of them -- I guess having several kids and no job has something to do with it.

One of his so-called income streams is from an Amway-like business with the unfortunate name of Melaleuca. In a recent post he and his wife agonize over why someone "declined to participate" in the pyramid scheme-like business:

I wonder if we communicated what we were really trying to say well enough. Did this person really understand that they will not be paying any more money than they already do now and that they will be getting much better products? It's really strange. And, we offered to write them a check to pay for a bunch of their groceries this month. What did we miss here? I can't think how it makes sense to NOT enroll. They actually lost money by declining. Plus, it would have been great way to support our ministry. Hmmmm...

OK, here's a clue: Some people don't want to "participate" or "enroll" -- you have to fill out a form just to shop with the company, much less become a marketer -- just to shop for household items. They just want to buy the stuff. It's too much trouble.

Even if (and I'll take your word for it) it saves them money? Well, maybe they don't want other people to be privy to their household purchases. Maybe they'd like their grocery shopping to be separate from "supporting your ministry;" assuming they want to do so, they'll get a tax deduction for just writing you a check instead. And offering what seems like a bribe to get them to "participate" makes it even creepier, even as it provides another example of how this guy's "ministry" is practically inextricable from his focus on lucre.

As for whether or not the Melaleuca business itself is on the up-and-up, I can only point out that the phrase "Melaleuca scam" gets over 75,000 results on Google, including several videos. I think if someone has taken the time to actually make a video about what a scam something is, that might be a bit of a red flag.

technorati: MLM, Melaleuca ,

Bing tastes great! and gives you cancer

Am I the only person to look at the sample screens for Microsoft's new search engine and wonder, why do they have a big cigarette on their page?

technorati: bing, advertising, marketing

Pilates godfather: Yur doin it wrong

Ron Fletcher, the man who is responsible for passing on the Pilates bodywork technique, says it shouldn't be thought of as an exercise regimen but as "an art, a science." Millions of grim-faced twenty- and thirty-somethings disagree.

No one ever points out that the regimen, or whatever it is, is named after the Roman administrator who famously washed his hands of guilt for the crucifixion of Jesus, and how fitting it is that such a strenuous exercise should be named for a torturer. Coming soon: the Torquemada.

If being on hold weren't bad enough

A company is marketing the "wasted time" you spend on hold, delivering advertisements to you instead of hold music. It's bad enough to hear happy-voice promotions for the company you're calling while you wait on hold; I pity the customer service people who wind up on the receiving end of callers' wrath after listening to some unrelated advertisement.

This goes on the list of signs of the apocalypse, along with advertisements on the floors of supermarkets, on little TV screens in hotel elevators, and in the corner of TV screens while you're trying to watch the ballgame.

technorati: advertising

'The modern world is absolutely fascist'

From the point of view of mass propaganda and advertising, I think there's been nothing new since the time of Goebbels. Women must look like this, this and this. All who are not within these bounds must strive for them, or be losers. That's a completely fascist doctrine. I'm surprised there aren't people standing with rulers outside nightclubs and measuring the distance between people's ears. Probably they will be soon, and that will be right in this situation.

All of modern consumer society, without a doubt, is profoundly fascist. You can see this by Africa. People have problems finding drinking water. But you can always find Coca-Cola. How is this possible?

I studied the history of the Third Reich. I found incredible facts. It's clear that the Soviet Union of those years and Fascist Germany were twins. It's no secret for anyone. But the fact that in the contemporary situation, all of these speeches, all of these propaganda approaches, in one way or another serve as the template for the speeches of many politicians. The direct speech of Goebbels is incredibly modern, just change radio to television and no problem.

That's Russian novelist Sergei Minaev, profiled in the NYT today. The article is good, and there's also a Q and A sidebar, from which I drew the extended quote above.

In addition, I was struck by this quote:

I had a period when I was 24-28 years old. I was part of a heavy scene that began Friday evening and as a rule ended on Monday morning. This was about age 24-27. Now, I don't go out except for exceptional cases... Now, we get together at home and talk, the same format as in kitchens in the 1980s. That's much more pleasant because you're surrounded only by those people whom you like. There's none of that showing off. It's completely peaceful.

I was struck by the similarity of this depiction of life with the description of the life of a member of the Chinese intelligentsia of the 17th century in the latest New York Review of Books. From the article (not yet online) 'Ravished by Oranges' by Simon Leys, a review of "Return to Dragon Mountain: Memories of a Late Ming Man":

A great number of scholars gave up the idea of entering public life and opted instead for an existence devoted to the exclusive cultivation of art and letters in the privacy of their homes... Zhang Dai... designed exquisite pavilions and gardens; he gathered a huge library, collected antiques, and was a connoisseur of calligraphy and painting...

Here you have two men, separated by 450 years, who respond to the bankruptcy of public and political life in the same way -- by retreating to the domain of the home and forming a world built around friends, art and talk. I'm not saying it's the best solution, but an understandable one in the face of a morally and politically bankrupt society, one becoming increasingly fascist -- which is to compare Ming Dynasty China and modern Russia.

technorati: writers, novelists, Russian, advertising, marketing