Comedy and Social Commentary

The role of "comedian" (as in standup) is especially interesting, and inherits from "court jester", a truth teller who knew the mind of the king well enough, so the story goes, to give him much needed cues in the form of harmless jokes.  "Hey King, you're being a jerk" might not be the right way to approach a particular king.  

They say King Trump was rather not into court jesters, but that's a rumor (he had Steve Bannon, Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani), and besides we're supposed to pretend he was a President, not a King (I compromise on "impotus"), as if The District were still capable of staging anything remotely constitutional, now that unfettered money rules the roost.

Anyway, Ramy Youssef had a much easier job than Trump's jester (Biden is his own jester they tell me), with a large friendly audience of many fellow Arabs.  Pan-Arabism is alive and well once Arabs find themselves moored in distant places like Portland.  From this distance, Egyptian and Palestinian are very much one people, a lot like ethnic Russians and Ukrainians.

Actually, I'm somewhat off the mark.  Intra-Arab tensions and stereotypes must be addressed.  Ramy had a set of jokes about marrying a Saudi and thinking she might be inner circle enough to know something scandalous.  The audience responded with hoots and hollers.

In another sequence he psychoanalyzed  the role of the therapist in Muslim culture, a somewhat new thing for some, especially the oldsters.  Fears about what one's spouse might be saying, behind one's back, to her therapist, seemed to hit a note.

Ramy mocked how unsuited a Muslim would be for this therapist job, especially when it came to preserving confidentiality.  "Let's go tell your mom right now!" she would command.  No, if you want a competent therapist, you really need someone Jewish (laughter).

The jokes about Israel had to do with Ramy going back to a new girlfriend's house, and when she went off stage for a bit (in the story) he turned on the light and saw the giant Israeli flag used as decor.  Only a USA flag could have scared him more, in terms the twisted psycho-pathologies it suggested.  How could one reconcile such fears with sex when she came back?  Something to bring up with one's therapist later perhaps.

My friend Dr. T., a college professor who had the extra free ticket, found the show pretty funny, as did I, but we both noticed our place on the bell curve, in terms of age.  This was a mostly younger crowd.  When it came to the grandma and grandpa jokes, those were about us.

Ramy had some jokey stories about: loving his rescue dog (countering a stereotype) and how he came to own it by competing with white privilege; changing mask mores over the course of the pandemic; his refusal to endorse impotus Biden despite some arm twisting from the 2020 campaign.

Upon entering the theater, we had our phones imprisoned in felt pouches, which were handed back to us for safekeeping. At the show's conclusion, we filed past theater staff with magic pouch-opening devices.  

Given I'd had a couple Jack Daniels before the show down the street, at Bear Paw Pub (many thanks to Dr. D. for driving me), this funny phone business just added to the comedy.

Fun Homework (School of Tomorrow)

Circling Back

One may find it easier to give in to the doomy gloomy reports coming in from all corners.  These were tumultuous times.

However when one thinks back, those corners have always been there.  One's personal vantage point changes, but against something a lot more fixed and remote, or so it seems.

Halloween has come around again, with more of the usual bellyaching about how it might all be some Satanist plot and so on.  If you study folk religions, going back, you find some people are always up in arms about something or other.  What is life without melodrama?

I'm looking back over work around the Trucker Exchange Program, variously named.  I'd be foolish to back away from the Peace Corp influence, given my long history with Thirsters here in Portland, and as part of  a family that might invite you to dinner, give you a place to stay, if you were a volunteer overseas.  So were we (overseas voluntarily).

I'll be accused of trying to "gentrify" the job of trucker, now that tables might have turned, and coders are looking to learn a new lifestyle.  They used to tell truckers to "learn to code" which came across as obnoxious and annoying.  Part of the conceit was the coders were actively working to put truck drivers out of a job, because "driverless" would be just around the corner.

Some types of convoy service, like a truck-to-train hybrid, might be in the near future, but the fantasies they've been projecting lately have felt like recycled 1920s stuff.  You'll have those conversational robots tomorrow, as you prepare by becoming more like robots today (the better to converse with them, right?).

Probably this was one of those dialectical things, where apparent thesis (the profession of trucking) and its antithesis (no drivers needed) were on a collision course to higher synergy.

The job of "truck pilot" (and "crew") was about to get more data centric and feature more programming.  The coder-driver would take on multiple languages (human and computer) in the context of a work-study scenario in the Global U.  Truckers are the new citizen diplomats, with truck stops (campus facilities) our new venues for mutual understanding and diplomacy.  Don't leave it to the cube farmers and think tankers.

On the Synergetics front, I think we have a pretty good flow among the various websites, should browsers get into the groove, which is not saying they will.  

Let's just say some already have.  

We're not aiming to be too insistent or "in your face" as they say.  

I won't say "subliminal" so much as "peripheral" in the Amber Case way of talking.  We're here when you need us.

Food Not Bombs Story

What you see above is but a screen shot, not an embedded video.  I'm taking a YouTube I made, and adding it to Rumble.  This morning I made more content, exclusive to Rumble.  

If you're interested in following up, look to the Links widget on the right for a link to my 4Dsolutions channel on that network.

Dymaxion Map in the Foreground

Thanks to Alec's bio of Bucky being juicy, leading to higher sales, more capitalizing has occurred.  

Alec brings the Dymaxion Map into it, as he follows the chronology (Dymaxion Car, Dymaxion House, Dymaxion Bathroom...).  

By the time of that Life Magazine issue in 1943, Bucky was a King of the Hill when it came to lecturing the public on the drawbacks of using distorted maps.  National Geographic was quick to proffer up a host of better alternatives.  We've been watching the YouTubes about all this over on TrimTab.

Data scientists e.g. users of hex tile libraries, geopandas, ESRI products and so on, are going to think in terms of "data layers".  

The overlay of "nation states", like an endocrine system, or lymphatic, occupies its place on the stack of transparencies.  Fancy medical science textbooks came with these multi-layer anatomies.  

Now we have computers and animations that will perform even better.  Geo-spatial data visualizations are anatomy and physiology by another name, with their planetary focus.

Bucky wanted to pioneer a space of neutrality, using what one might call a map of prehistoric earth, but not in the sense of "continents shifted".  

We might still go with dinosaurs though, on this mythical Whole Earth with its Jurassic Park.  We could have several branches of hominid.  Unreal or Unity or Blender might be enlisted at this point.

Fast forward and we get to the Napoleonic Period, slowing to the US acquiring its fifty stars, teetering on the edge with Puerto Rico.  

That data layer is still accessible, through the Mercator, through the Gall-Peters, through whatever projection (mapping framework, coordinate system) you like.  

Just not the Dymaxion.  

We're deliberately ignorant and innocent of post Napoleonic stuff.  Give us our Neanderthal Ken and Barbie dolls, and our Dymaxion Map.  Forget the future, or at least that one.

These remarks provide some atmospherics designed to evoke that spirit of neutrality, when it comes to geopolitics.  

Given all the world maps on the shelf, it makes perfect sense that at least one would be nation free by deliberate design.  Why not?  We won't be trapped in some "time period". 

Not only that, it's sophisticated in other directions as well.  

I sound like a salesman don't I?  One who "believes in his product".