Arnel asked for assistance with a web page, so I researched the whole spectrum again to see what might better suit his purposes. He wants music exposure. My findings suggest a mySpace account, so if you are not sure what all that entails, read on. I’ll describe what I found. Web pages are high-maintenance and so clogged with fake and misleading advertising that anything “dot com” is out of fashion (my opinion).Therefore I peeked into “social” networking, of which I previously knew nothing. I found three 800-pound gorillas. They are mySpace, faceBook and youTube. First rejection is faceBook because it is locality-based, tending to center on campuses and schools. Also, it seems they are being sued for ripping of the source code, so it might be a case of gone tomorrow.
Next youTube, which I’ve browsed. It is video oriented, meaning you have to produce a video to go along with anything you expect to sell. Anyone who has tried to come up with even five minutes of good footage knows you really have to seriously want the exposure. So youTube can wait.
That leaves mySpace with something like 140,000,000 users. It seems you can “post” anything, including pictures, video, audio, even blogs and live chats. Many of the posts (is that the correct term?) I viewed seemed downright spastic. Still, there was a recognizable template structure so I’ve advised Arnel to get his profile material together and we’ll get him underway.
I suspect things like what I saw on mySpace must cost American employers billions in lost time. It is mostly mindless distraction as your new “friends” come and go all day long. Very addictive for the highly-bored office worker.
Next, so as not to disturb the neighbors too early on yard cleanup day, I watched a documentary on Las Vegas. My stance against gambling is a matter of scale. We all calculate odds every day, but most people don’t deliberately go up against bad odds for recreation. You may know I am against the punishing of people who successfully beat the house provided (and this is important) they use only their brains. Such folks should be awarded honorary math degrees and it is the house, not the police, that should devise a deterrent.
Again I say, it is the velocity of intent which makes such things right or wrong. It is “less” of a crime to steal a dollar a day for ten thousand days than to steal it all at once, and sane people recognize the concept that slow stealing is, in fact, just a basic form of competition. Open your own bank, you’ll catch on. That means you and I should not conspire to rob a casino any more than to rob a bank. But now define conspiracy. Who is scheming if a bank deliberately leaves an inviting vault open because it has become cheaper to bribe judges to convict passersby who cannot resist temptation?
In the long run, what is competition but outsmarting your opponent using his own rules? And such activity cannot be outlawed, for such a law would be prohibition, and prohibition has every time proven historically worse than the victimless crime it set out to prevent. Plotting to win should not be okay for just one team. To me, “cheating by thinking” is nothing more than the barter system being applied to the gambling marketplace. Don’t we all wish we could outlaw the competition?
One device I saw was a shoe-computer. You wear it in your shoe and toe-tap in the cards dealt. It taps back the odds of winning. Brilliant, but I would disallow it because while it takes brains to design the device, it is hidden. Sleight-of-hand is not “using your brains”, because who would play poker with somebody who had a computer in plain sight. But calculating the odds in your head takes brains.
Then, I read the lyrics along to Interstate Love Song while listening to the music. It has a few catchy parts and at least it isn’t 12-bar [blues]. It would not be the first time meaningless verse got mixed up with a hit song. (Listen to “Islands In The Stream”.) The bass line is what I’m after, and I’m not sure I can play that. It is a Hendrix special. It’s what you get when you find a slightly retarded jazz musician who studied “modals” for ten years, hand him an electric bass along with three hits of bad acid, hide his guitar pick and wait an hour. Like, wow, man, was that Eb/C#m13(sus)+9 at 64 to the bar? That is like, sooooo totally kewl.
