There's no substitute for personal interaction
in a relationship
especially with friends

No social networking, cell phone, text, email
wink, nudge, poke or like
will make anyone feel
or be filled,
with the joy
and happiness that comes
from spending time with a friend

Had a chillaxin' great time,
just hanging, talking,
having fun this weekend

I've come to realise there is no substitute
in this technological world
for human interaction

its what we're programmed for
our minds, our hearts
our souls

I like this song by James,
especially the lyric, about calling up
on the telly, and getting "the machine".

01 Out to Get You.mp3 (4.06 mb)

What Tim Booth's Lyrics are saying is
Don't hole up and isolate yourself,
when the human touch is what you need.

peace,

m.

Out to get you - James, from "Laid"

I'm so alone tonight
My bed feels larger than when I was small
Lost in memories, lost in all the sheets and all old pillows
So alone tonight, miss you more than I will let you know
Miss the outline of your back, miss you breathing down my neck
All out to get you, once again, they're all out to get you, once again

Insecure, what ya gonna do
Feel so small, they could step on you
Called you up, answer machine, when the human touch
Is what I need, what I need is you, I need you

Looked in the mirror, I don't know who I am any more
The face is familiar, but the eyes, the eyes give it all away
They're all out to get you, once again, they're all out to get you
Here they come again

Insecure, what ya gonna do
Feel so small, they could step on you
Called you up, answer machine, when the human touch
Is what I need, what I need is you

Let me breathe, if you'd let me breathe
They're all out to get you, once again, they're all out to get you

Senior, Martin Mazurik, published in New York State English Council
"The Student as a Writer", for submitted poems, 1980

Desk

A desktop screams at you -
begging for a kind word,
a new coat of paint.

You sympathize with the desk,
but your subconcsious impluses drive
your pen's tip
through the old, brittle varnish.

The ink hardly comes out,
but you've already done enough -
a mark is made.

You've become one of them now -
you've changed.

From a learned schoolboy
to an irresponsible,
worthless, graffiti artist!

Still you keep scribbling;
hoping yours will be the pen
that draws a new Mona Lisa,
a new Shakespearean verse, perhaps.

You produce nothing,
more scribble appears.

Stopping- how childish to write
on a useless piece of furniture.

No Tolstoy or Shakespeare
would waste their time
trying to help this desk.

This one more mark should help ....

Marty Mazurik

Danny Elfman wrote most of Oingo Boingo's songs,
but was an early on influence on movies and movie scores
conceived of by his older brother, Richard.

He wrote the score, and played the role of Satan, in a black and white
movie, called the Forbidden Zone (which I own), that also
has some weird scenes with Tatu from Fantasy Island in it.

From that auspicious beginning, Elfman led Boingo through the punk and
alternative phases of music, until his calling by Paul Reubins (aka Pee Wee Herman)
and Tim Burton, to score the movie Pee Wee's Big Adventure.

Other notable movie scores by elfman:
- Fast Times at Ridgemount High
- Batman
- The Family Man (Nicholas Cage)
- Hulk
- Nacho Libre (Jack Black)
- Spider Man 3
- Milk (Sean Penn)
- Alice in Wonderland (Johnny Depp)
- The Green Hornet (to be released)
on TV
- The Simpsons
- Desparate Housewives   and many more

The guy has some musical genius in him, and best of
all married my all-time favorite actress Bridgette Fonda

(I know, I know, she's not much of an actress) but I've
seen her in some great movies, like
- Bodies, Rest and Motion (Phoebe Cates, Tim Roth, Eric Stoltz) - one of my all-time favorite movies !
- Jackie Brown (Samuel L Jackson, Quentin Tarantino, Director)
- It could Happen to You (Nicholas Cage) - a good movie, she balanced Nicholas' craziness in her part
- The Road to Wellville (Anthony Hopkins, Matthew Broderick, John Cusack) - another of my favorites, about the Kellogg Family Sanitarium

I chose this song, because hearing it the other day
I realized the depth of lyrical talent,
and meaning as we all grow closer to the Darkness at the end of a Tunnel
(the name of the Album)

Enjoy,
m.

Out of Control - Oingo Boingo 

03 - Out Of Control.mp3 (7.67 mb)

Everyone says sooner or later you'll reach the end of the line
When things get rough some think it's easy to jump the ship . . .
You decide

I say--don't throw it away
There's about a million reasons why
Though you've heard them all before
And you're getting very tired
Lay your head on my lap and I'll sing you this lullaby

CHORUS
Don't you know
That everyone around you
Has felt the pain you feel today
You're out of control yeah--and you want someone to tell you
When you wake up in the morning it'll only be a dream
You're out of control . . .

There's a cloud-rollin' overhead and it seems to rain on no one else
There's a black sun--casting a black shadow,
and I know you feel so all alone
You're out of control--and you want the world to love you
Or maybe you just want a chance to let them know
That you live and breathe and suffer
And your back is in the corner and you've got nowhere to go

Nothin' for nothin'--everything's right at your fingertips--for a price
Who ever said that life on this planet would ever be paradise
I say--don't throw it away, you've got too many things to say
If you throw your life, if you throw away your life . . .
THe world will never be the same

CHORUS

You're out of control--and you move without direction
And people look right through your soul
You're out of control--and you want someone to tell you
When you wake up in the morning it'll only be a dream
And I wish that I could tell you, it'll only be a dream

I happened on this sauce, from the Lead Singer
of the Offspring

His name is Dexter Holland, holds a BS and Masters
from USC, in Molecular Biology, but decided in his
college years that being in a Huntington Beach based
punk band (the Offspring) was a better
career path.

I love the story, that he has entrepreneurial aspirations
with this sauce.

See the Gringo Bandito Website

Of course I had to buy some because
who's gonna know more about what makes
a great heatmaker for your fish tacos ...
than a surfer dude, rock band star,
from Hungtinton Beach, California ?!??!!

and its muyo caliente ... this shit
is just hot enough, to have you wanting more,
and runny nose ... but the Capsaicin is so good, it will get you excited like your last hot date!

It will have you singing "Give it to me baby, uh-huh, uh-huh ... give it to me baby..."
and has me having to admit, spending $80 american pesos on
a case of his excellent sauce, this is one dude from S. Cal
I don't mind having rob me (ariba andale! bandito!)

he's pretty fly for a white guy!

m.

In modern software development circles,
much to-do is given to the concept of Agility.

Being agile: responding to the needs of the
organization/business/customer without hesitation,
reservation and much push-back.
The theory is it will result in a better product,
if you are constantly willing to change for the customers
current whim, fancy or ultimate need.

Wow.

Or should I say, "Bow-wow". 

If it seems like the development team,
is being made to jump through hoops, in an unseemly dog-show,
or having to snap to the master's whip ... it is for good reason:  they are.

There are obviously reasons that being too agile,
can be bad, not just in software, but in life in general:

1) Noone really wants to be running endless sprints,
    in an ever-changing circuit of agility, in a dog show, all the time.
    There needs to be slack time, there needs to be defined limits to number of sprints in a release.

2) If everything can change, all the time, you approach friggin' agile  (or fr'agile)
and your project will become fragile for lack of stability and focus on the design and structure
(too focused on the features)

3) "Saying, no, leave it alone" is sometimes good for everyone involved.
Without boundaries, projects will invariably "drift".

4) You never get to learn from mistakes, if you are forever tinkering with the outcome.
    That's what "release 2.0 is for"

5) You'll end up with a Rube Goldberg machine

6) Good luck maintaining the Rub Goldberg you created, it all sounded good in the requirements stage ....

So, I have mixed feelings about Agile and agility in general, on the one
hand I've seen it work wonders for software productivity and on the
other I've seen software that is "bereft of design" (my own coined phrase)
and no matter who is pontificating about how that
isn't the case, and its solved by pairing programmers together and / or
doing code reviews ... that rarely pans out and most,
if not all agile software should be considered non-production code.

Instrument it correctly, test it intensely with well written test and maybe
it will pass the muster for production, but it still may be very costly to maintain.

You'll need to stop and design, and let your customers know in constant communication
what the impact of the changes coming in are, through a valid Change Management
process (one of the best things of the Capability Maturity Model - CMMI is the Change Management Process)

Only then can you control the agile flexibility
and turn out software that is well thought out, meets the majority of the business need,
and is maintainable over time.

Don't control the change ... and you'll continually take the developers minds off
the software being built and keep them focused on features, that they'll throw together
and patch together just to meet the need.

m.

m.

This Sunday, Father's day, is not a rough one,
its like every other one.

There's kids to wrangle,
the lawn on Spring steroids to mow
meals to plan
Church to get up for, kids hair to comb,
toast to butter.

There are fragile kids to build up,
correct, coddle and sometimes, not-too-gently persuade.
Life lessons to instill, toilets to unplug,
and laughter.

There's smiles and frowns, and sweat, tears,
and blood (usually fixed with a band-aid or three)

My Father left when I was 5 or 6, he might have checked out
of the marriage earlier than that, I don't know.
It was hard on my mom's, to this day.
Me, unbelievabley so ... more than I care to own up to.

Hard, I think because the need for a role model,
not LeBron or Kobe,
not your Priest or the neighbor's dad,
was and remains a real, unmet need.

Left without, I've embarked on this endless pursuit
of acceptance, from someone, anyone who would say
"It's all right boy.  You did fine, I'm proud of you."

To not hear those words, meant being unaturally inclined
to act kid-like and act-out with any male
figure, who seemed to fit the part:  an older confidant,
a boss, complete strangers, businessmen, even
other friends with close father-relationship's dads.

At 47, I've come to realize, in myself, this peculiar yearning I have had,
and I've grown to know it, and have peace with it.
At least for what it is ... and what it is not.

I have to admit, I've never in the past wanted to really face it
and stare it down ... this father-less existence.  It was too fucked up.
Maybe my ego, too proud, maybe too ashamed.
Tears would well everytime my mind and heart get
close to overcoming the feeling, instead waves and waves of emotions
would opens up and the world seemingly crash like a house of cards,
as blood pumps and flesh hollows out, the place that remains empty
exposing the gaping heart-hole ... the unmet need
so I'd squash it down
and run away.

It feels so unnatural and strange, so far gone and unwarranted now,
while at the same time being ever-present, bubbling up
like old faithful, over and over.   Funny, I almost now like
that its there, as my previous posts suggest, the suffering
to remind me
of my own humanity.

I'd like to not
be so strangely longing.  But it serves its purpose, in me,
and keeps me focused of my own role.

Its not all bad, not having an earthly father ... to call your own.
I have faith, and rely on and take comfort that
my Father, in heaven,
who doesn't have hangups, like us humans do ...
is always present and accounted for.
That he sent his son, as a role model in the flesh
to lead us on.

Being in faith, and Christian, lets me practice my profession as dad,
and I find that when I do ...
the hole smooths over, the ego goes away,
the mind clears.

I smile, in the face of my own responsibility,
look forward to the teenage years,
laugh inside at parental struggles when I hear, 
and strive to be strong
and present, for my own family.
So blessed to have so many to watch, and so careful
to realize they're not mine, but to guide for an
instant.

This job, this responsiblity I realize now takes
a strong man.  So next time you read about,
hear about or experience someone, even yourself,
affected by the single parent household, be it father or mother
gone astray ...
realize that being a dad (or a mom) is ot a role for the weak. 

m.

This is a strong song, in which Art Alexakis (Everclear), hits wrings out his pain: 
06 - Father Of Mine.mp3 (7.50 mb) 

Father of mine
Tell me where have you been
You know I just closed my eyes
My whole world disappeared
Father of mine
Take me back to the day
When I was still your golden boy
Back before you went away

I remember the blue skies
Walking the block
I loved it when you held me high
I loved to hear you talk
You would take me to the movie
You would take me to the beach
You would take me to a place inside
That is so hard to reach

Father of mine
Tell me where did you go
You had the world inside your hand
But you did not seem to know
Father of mine
Tell me what do you see
When you look back at your wasted life
And you don't see me

I was ten years old
Doing all that I could
It wasn't easy for me
To be a scared white boy
In a black neighborhood
Sometimes you would send me a birthday card
With a five dollar bill
I never understood you then
And I guess I never will

Daddy gave me a name
My dad he gave me a name
Then he walked away
Daddy gave me a name
Then he walked away
My dad gave me a name

Father of mine
Tell me where have you been
I just closed my eyes
And the world disappeared
Father of mine
Tell me how do you sleep
With the children you abandoned
And the wife I saw you beat

I will never be safe
I will never be sane
I will always be weird inside
I will always be lame
Now I'm a grown man
With a child of my own
And I swear I'm not going to let her know
All the pain I have known

Then he walked away
Daddy gave me a name
Then he walked away
My dad gave me a name
Then he walked away
Daddy gave me a name
Then he walked away
My dad gave me a name
Then he walked away

My daughter couldn't bring peanut butter to school last year.
No peanuts, or any nuts, for that matter.
You'd think she wanted to bring ricin or anthrax into the place for God's sake.
The kid just wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich!

I mean really, I agree with limiting oil drilling in the Gulf.
It makes sense to limit the amount of soda and high fructose corn syrup
that goes into the kids in their drinks by removing the soda machines.
But when  you take away a staple of the american kid's diet,
peanut butter and jelly, its time to re-design the flag and
re-define what growing up means.

I love to cook.   My first (non-stove) experimentation with cooking,
er, food preparation was around 4 or 5 when my mom allowed those jars
of jelly and peanut butter to be handled by my inexperienced hands.
The butter knife went in, I'm sure it went all over the place:  the counter,
my hands, my clothes ... that's not the point.
The freedom I remember to this day, of making my own meal, was akin
to the freedom you feel when you first ride a bike and realize you have
a mode of transportation other than you feet ... that can take you further, faster.
That's what I remember about my first p.b. & j. ... that feeling of
"can do" and "Freedom" that came with providing for yourself.
It's one of the most vivid memories I have of growing up ...

It's peanut butter jelly time!

m.

Playwrite George Bernard Shaw wrote
"Nothing is ever accomplished by a reasonable man"

I love this axiom.  Every time I'm an idiot.
Every time I don my "stupid cap", I stand on
the shoulders of Shaw's observation.

Its time to free stupid.
From the shackles of impropriety, and elevate it
to its rightful place of honor.

Now noone is going to honor the stupid, or are they?
Stupid, comes up with 118,000,000 google references.

Websters defines

Thomas Edison was famous for his following words, ‘Genius is one percent inspiration, 99 percent perspiration’.
He was partially deaf, from childhood on.  I'm sure a mute man working long hours, over and over on the same
invention could have been, if not called unreasonable, could have been labeled stupid.
How stupid?

Edison made his own light bulbs in a glass-blowing shed for his experiments. He and his associates tried more than 3,000 different theories for creating a high-resistance element that would significantly lower the amount of electrical power required. In January 1879, he finally succeeded in creating a high-resistance filament, using platinum, but it only burned for a few hours.

Stupid enough?  3000 theories ... he then applied 6000 different plant and mineral combinations to come up
with a filament that could burn for an astounding 1500 hours.  The light bulb was on.

Stupid.

m.

Summer meant school being out, and Silver Lake.

I always had a problem with school being out,
I'd miss my friends over the summer, that I didn't keep in touch with
There'd be too much Merv work to do in the garden, around the apartments
or working on the house
There'd be 4-H apple pie baking contests, which meant like 3-4 pies a day
being baked, until you couldn't stand the site of apple pie
(I don't eat it to this day)
until I could escape to basketball camp.

Camp Hough was on Silver Lake, really close to where we lived in
Western NY, but that didn't matter, for 6 days it was light-years away.
Apparently, the YMCA has changed the format now, it used to be
strictly a basketball camp for Week or so per summer.

Silver Lake was another interesting summer adventure, on the
one hand we had the Basketball Camp, which didn't have much to do
with the lake as we were on the courts all day, taking salt tablets to retain some water
from the sweat of the mid-day sun, but it was close enough to the lake,
that revelry at 6:00 am meant getting up out of uninsulated, dank
cabins in the frigid morning and if you were daring, doing the polar bear
plunge into the lake.  No friggin thank you.

Merv, would also take me to fish for perch and bluegills on a regular basis, in
his version of relaxation outside of working on the apartments, the house or the cars
and his day job.  We'd load up a little 14' aluminum with a 12 horse motor and
drop into the lake at the inlet (which happened to also be the outlet) end of the lake.
(On of the only lakes in America that has its inlet and outlet at the same end).
We'd fish all day, so bored, that I'd lay on the seat benches and cast the
double-hooked pole over my shoulder, behind me, into the water.
Then a thrilling, tiny tug, I'd yank my pole back out of the three foot water,
nearly slapping Merv with the two tiny perch, or blue-gills that were latched on to
both hooks!   We'd keep everything, even though cleaning meant getting a sliver
of fish no bigger than your finger ... if we got home late, we'd throw the fish in
the freeser without cleaning them ... later I'd get them out and plant them
at the base of the corn rows.  See I did pay attention to Indian farming lessons
in social studies class, and there was no damn way I was cleaning them!

One thing that summer meant, is we didn't have to go ice fishing on Silver Lake
I think we only went once or twice, we weren't Ice fisherman, and even at a very young age
I knew the perils of wind, ice and maybe falling through weren't worth the fish
we caught in the summer there.
I would beckon  "Dad, do you really think the little fish are worth the effort?"
We didn't have a shed with heat, radios, or TV's in them like the seasoned Ice Fishing
Professionals ... we didn't even have a wind break!
I guess it was a little cool to auger through the ice (no we didn't have the Briggs and Stratton,
gas auger like the ice fishing pros either)  ... but who wanted to be considered a pro
at ice fishing.

Looking back, I know it was just a way to get away from the wife and kids,
hang with your buddies and drink beer.

Guess what - its called a bar !  

Here's a picture that could have been me,
heading for the car ... I'm friggin out of here.

m.