Living no small part of my life as I do on-line and in the blogosphere (reminds of a sign I always see in Willimantic, Connecticut, for a restaurant which purports to be (have?) 'Pizzarama.' I've no idea what that might mean unless it's a variant of this.) I hear from people motivated or perhaps provoked into sharing with me about a turn of phrase, what they think is my perspective on any given day or who need to tell me what an unshirted bozo I am (and with our winter in these parts, that hasn't been very easy to do).
I enjoy the notes, or have convinced myself I do. I remember from a different life, The Other Bill (TOB) offering a scale to measure radio listener feedback in the era when there were No Interwebs (after the meteor shower killed the dinosaurs but before Al Gore arrived on the scene) and listeners actually wrote letters with addresses on the front and postage to deliver them. Yep, legendary times.
Anyway, and I don't get the particulars correct, his scale gave a point to someone who typed you a letter, five points to a handwritten missive on 'regular' paper in ink and so on, ever upwards until he gave (something like) 500 points to anything written on a napkin in grease pencil or crayon.
His point being that a note such as that was nearly priceless because it meant that something you had done or said on-air had so moved your listener they were compelled to respond. Makes me old just thinking about it.
My point is we live in an era where machines write and read for us and sometimes without us at all. The process whereby I write this, a part (though I know not how of Google) called "Blogger" has, based on algorithms, typed like I know what phrase means when I don't, created a filter that grabs what it (and all of us) calls 'spam' (what, I wonder, do the fine folks of Hormel think of the appropriation of their somewhat gelatinous nearly-meat intellectual property? Probably the same as they think of this) from the comments section and stores them in a non-visible (to you) limbo where at my leisure, I can examine and re-add them to a posting or dispatch them into the void.
I'm amazed at the amount of this stuff that accrues like barnacles on a boat's bow in the course of a day and how much of it is machine-authored though the purpose of all the mentions of a variety of pharmaceuticals and erectile dysfunctional correctives is impossible for me to fully understand or appreciate.
In the last couple of days perhaps because the winds of the Web are forcing the electronic flotsam and jetsam to wash up on my shores, I have been having a fire sale on spam with the phrase "I'm gonna be careful for Brussels."
I suspect for the computers authoring the line it's the equivalent of humans who get tattoos on prominent personal pieces of epidermis with words or characters in languages other than their own without understanding what those tattoos 'say' to people literate in those languages.
Between those folks and the computers, while I fear the End of Days will find us all in a very crowded Belgian capital, I also suspect we'll be very safe.
-bill kenny
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