This past Thursday, August 12th, would have been my fathers 84th birthday. By coincidence I received a lovely email from Mr. Jon Clark of the United Kingdom. He tells me that for some reason he and his wife, Sue, had been thinking about the podcast I did when my father passed away unexpectedly, and that he tried to listen to it again but found it unavailable now because the link went back to Podshow/MeVIO. So with thanks to the Clark family, I republish it here.
This is the best I could do. Obviously I loved my dad. Obviously I had to say something about him. Obviously my grief was overwhelming. Thank you to my dear friend Bob Waller for filling time I never could fill. Bob’s story was deeply moving to us Fentons… yet it was totally expected.
You heard many things that related to my dad. Among them…
Because this show is about pranks and practical jokes, it is dedicated to the greatest teaser I have ever known, my late aunt Lydia (Fenton) Herrick. She did it to everyone, but her specialty was children. It could happen at any moment. One day when I was about 6 years old I was talking to my grandmother while she was folding laundry. My aunt Lydia walked into the room and held up her right hand in front of my face and said.. “Taste this!”. I looked at her outstretched hand. There was a glob of brown stuff on her pinky finger. It looked like it had come from a baby’s diaper. I looked up at her and sort of grimaced as I shook my head no. She repeated herself… “Taste it! You’ll like it. It’s apple butter.” Well I knew what apples were, and I knew what butter was, and this looked like neither. Again I shook my head no. She said… “What’s the problem? I’m telling you you’re gonna like it”. I told her what it looked like to me. She bellowed… “Do you think I would put SHIT on my finger? What are you crazy? If I tell you it’s apple butter… IT’S APPLE BUTTER!”
I closed my eyes and sucked it off the end of her finger. Relieved that it tasted quite pleasant, I opened my eyes and smiled at her. As she abruptly turned and walked away she said… “I can’t believe it. You just ate shit. That’s disgusting”.
It was a long time before they were able to calm me down.
There was some great music in the show by these fine artists…
3 Blind Mice –
Hank Marr –
The Beau Hunks –
Richie Havens –
Alejandro Jadorowski –
Bela Fleck & The Flectones –
I am your customer. I pay YOU for providing ME with a SERVICE.
When I call you because the service I have paid you for has stopped working… don’t start asking me a list of questions designed to establish what I did wrong. What *I* did wrong, apparently, was to rely on you to provide the service I am paying for. When I am sitting at my computer, as I do every single day, doing nothing different than I do every single day, and suddenly my connection to the internet disappears… YOU are the problem… not me.
Cut to the chase… tell me what the problem is and what you are doing about it.
I don’t need to be on the phone for 45 minutes answering questions about how I am connected to your freaking system. I was connected to your system for MONTHS…. YEARS…. exactly the way I’m connected to it now. I didn’t CHANGE anything… IT QUIT WORKING!
I know more about computers and how they connect to the internet than ANYONE WHO ANSWERS YOUR PHONE!
STOP TRYING TO BLAME IT ON ME AND TELL ME THE TRUTH.
The Tea Party is just like a religion. It’s based on irrational beliefs and fears, which are therefore impervious to facts. They have developed a mythology based on personal feelings and emotions, which they then try to prove by only recognizing things that appear to provide real world support for it.
Scientific method starts with a question, and then searches, by trial and error, for the best conclusion. The Tea Party movement, on the other hand, starts with a conclusion and then searches for anything that appears to support it, labeling anything that doesn’t as “enemy lies”.
They can’t be fought with facts. They must be offered a more attractive and emotionally satisfying mythology. It’s not lies vs. the truth. It’s not good vs. evil. It’s Coke vs. Pepsi.
This one seems a little more sinister. Anyone who has followed this blog, or any number of the social thingies I’m on, knows that when facebook made it’s recent privacy changes I quit the site. I did this by first deleting every single thing I had on my facebook pages, and then deactivating it. Well I began to have second thoughts… and third thoughts… and fourth thoughts. I decided that there were too many people I needed to stay connected to that were only on facebook. So I relented. I reactivated my account. But I decided not to share so much information with facebook so I left all the things I had deleted… deleted.
Here’s where it gets sinister. The advertising I am receiving now that I’m back is all still based on all that information I deleted weeks ago. The advertisers seem to know all about me. Apparently, I only deleted it from my own sight. Facebook and all of it’s “partners” can still see it and use it. It’s not really deleted. The ads still relate to things I had listed as interests… favorite movies… favorite musical artists… things I had discussed with other people months and months ago… and so on. I can’t retrieve any of that information… YOU can’t retrieve any of that information… but people with stuff to sell are retrieving it quite easily apparently.
I must now refer you to warnings I myself put forth not long ago… Big Brother doesn’t need to watch us… we will TELL him anything he needs to know. http://wholenutherstory.com/?p=48
On May 13th 2005, Adam Curry’s Podshow premiered on Sirius Satellite Radio. This is the actual opening I produced for that first show. Most of Adam’s online “Daily SourceCode” listeners never heard it.
Today I got a notice when I logged onto Facebook that all of my “Interests” (favorite movie, music, books, etc.) were going to now link to “fan pages”, and if I didn’t agree to that… the things I had personally listed in my profile could possibly be deleted. Well, of course, I didn’t agree to that. If I want to link to someone’s page or site, that is MY decision. I consider threatening to erase my personal information if I don’t allow it to be linked to Facebook fan pages to be extortion.
As soon as I refused… sure enough… the fact that I love the 1939 movie “King Kong” was deleted from my profile, along with many other favorite films, books, and recording artists. Facebook removed from me the possibility of controlling what I choose to represent my tastes. I can only represent myself by things for which Facebook “fan pages” exist, and that I am willing to link to.
This, for me personally, was the one step over the line.
If the notice had said… “Facebook is an expensive thing to run, and we have decided to charge you $9.99 per month to continue to use our service” I might have seriously considered it.
But it didn’t say that… it said essentially… if you don’t agree to link everything you claim to be an interest to a Facebook Fan Page… we are going to delete all of your personal entries.
In plain English… that just SUCKS.
I’m done with that kind of thinking. I probably benefited as a producer of Internet content by my presence on Facebook. I no longer care enough to stay there. They altered MY ENTRIES because I wouldn’t agree to link them to “fan pages”.
Facebook Sucks. I deleted everything I have ever posted and deactivated my Facebook account.
To those I leave behind…. enjoy Farmville.
Added 2 days later: Apparently I’m not alone in my feelings about Facebook. Plenty of folks are concerned about what Facebook is becoming. This is an example among many.
A story that starts in 1955 and ends in 1961, that involves my PERMANENT RECORD CARD. A thing, I was told, that would follow me, and possibly haunt me, for the rest of my natural life.
This one gets an explicit tag only because I believe I can make out some bad words in a song that gets played in the middle. The song fit so perfectly though.
By the way the picture above is NOT my permanent record card. It’s my report card from the 2nd grade, where the story starts. In fact the “N” in conduct in the 2nd marking period is a direct result of the first half of this story. I was looking through some of my Dad’s things just lately and discovered all of my old report cards, 1st grade through high school.
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