Being like Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga in a modern world.

Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga sing "The Lady is a tramp."

Call me a futurist, if a futurist is defined as being someone who sees the future decline of everything. Except Tony Bennett of course. Bennett seems to be one of the greatest role models in the world of entertainment the world has seen this century. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPAmDULCVrU

Maybe we are still a decade away from the end of traditional publishing. Maybe the world has gone to hell in a lot of ways, but when you hear a guy as old as Bennett doing a duet with a lady like Lady Gaga, suddenly tramps can look endearing. Because, I don't know about you, but esprit de corps is the best pick-me-up in the medicine cabinet.

Books may be the last remnant of literature to disappear from modern society. But newspapers and magazines are having their swan songs. The publishing industry is only one of many things that are changing at dizzying rates.

The packaging of products in stores with printed cardboard, paper, and plastic, will go on forever. There will probably always be a need for printing presses, whether the presses are run by robots or human beings. Beyond technology, not much has changed in the concept of printing since the 15^th Century. Ink is still put on a substrate. People generally are into the tactile aspect of books, but the junk mail that clogs mailboxes is going the way of the dinosaurs. Why print or mail an ad, when a banner ad can be designed for nothing and sent worldwide in two seconds to everyone who uses, for example, your rubber ducky? Ad agencies quickly adapted to the new digital age, but lots of people lost their jobs during the transition of the late 1990s.

Plastic is where the future lies. Your clothes are made of it, you drink mostly from plastic containers. The trick is to not become plastic. We are a throw-away society, but we are trying to keep from making ourselves, and a few other living creatures, from going extinct. Less newsprint paper is good. It will spare a few more trees. But what will the world look like without major newspapers on newsstands or newspapers lying on the front lawns, or porches of America? Newspapers are, after all, as American as corn-dogs. The answer: Not so different, and certainly more instantaneous. 

The shift to digital should not scare us; it has been going on for twenty years. If we were iguanas we'd have moved to Galapagos by now and learned to swim, or if we were Galapagos finches we'd have grown a new beak for cracking seeds. Older reporters are a lot like these creatures. Reporters, or anyone in their forties, fifties, or even early sixties, will find new niches to fill. It may get bloody, because the competition is extreme, but there is a plethora of online publications, or traditional book publishers to investigate for jobs. It's a dog eat dog world, complaining isn't going to slow technology. But don't let me stop you if you. Text your complaints to Bill Gates. Use the bling app you downloaded to decorate your text.

Losing a job feels like death to a lot of older workers. If you are one of them, don't reach for the cyanide capsule. Yeah, there is age bias in the world. Western society is not as appreciative of the wisdom of older workers as Japan or China. So move there if you want. Musicians and sports heroes get older too; everyone gets older. But grow some, you know what, and get on with your life. Tony Bennett got older, and he didn't let that stop him. Think how tired that man's prostate is. That's chutzpah! We have to adapt, and readjust our point of views and goals. We have to become chameleons. We have to find ourselves and be content with what is inevitable. Giving up is not an option.

The technological publishing shift came close to home this past week. My elder brother was laid off from the Oregonian. In total, the Oregonian laid off over 100 workers, as a sort of exclamation point from 2012’s layoffs that cleared half the newsroom. My brother was among thirty-five reporters, photographers and other staff members, according to the Willamette Week, which obtained a letter sent to employees from publisher N. Christian Anderson III. Strangers and friends donated $3,500 to a bar tab at a Portland restaurant where many of those who lost their jobs gathered Thursday evening.

But can we blame the Oregonian management? No; what they did is simply react to seeing a bowling ball rolling down the lane, about to knock down their pins. They adapted; they wanted to survive. It’s Darwin’s Law.

People in the know who study the reasons for things going asunder, have prognosticated about the decline of newspapers for several years. The loss of income, due to falling advertising revenues, is the cause of the decline. Why then have other advertising driven publication, such as high and low end fashion and gossip magazines, continued to thrive? 

http://bradleywilsononline.net/from-bradley/newspapers-will-cease-to-exist-by-2050-data-shows

It is due to our gladiator culture. We demand entertainment. There is nothing juicier than gossip, and seemingly no end to the appetite of the voyeuristic public.  In the future, will we  carry around giant flat screens mounted on our necks? Will the screens be called NewsPad or GossipPads? Will Apple's iPads disappear along with the company? Who knows? Life is a gamble. Hold on. Get your techno implants if you want. I'm not going to, but I'm a rebel with a cause. I didn't think the world would still be here when I got older, but I was wrong.

The manufacturers of the ultra-thin screens run a lot of ads on TV. They know what is going on, and they’ve invested billions in being ready when things go awry in the publishing world. Well, maybe ‘awry’ is too strong a term. Let’s say, when things change. When things get more mucked up with gadgetry. I will not be hypnotized! I just want to be an old singer like Tony Bennett. is that asking too much? Will you sing a duet with me when I am old?

http://www.phonearena.com/news/The-Daily-iPad-newspaper-ceases-to-exist_id37244

But let's get back to Tony Bennett for a minute. Here is a man who has declared he will never retire. For his 85^th birthday, in 2011, he decided to do duets with singers he likes. Released in September of that year, it included many well-known singers, including Sheryl Crow, Lady Gaga, Marc Anthony, John Mayer, and a host of others.  Bennett loves singing, and music loves company. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVQEysBM404 

Crow's advice is to “Be present, in the moment.” That is good advice for everyone who has something they love to do. You give it your best shot. Being true to yourself is what this new brave world should be all about. That’s an old school value that has endured humanity’s technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duets_II_(Tony_Bennett_album)

And there is this one too. OMG, there are so many people he's sung with. I'm agog.

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/tony-bennett-duets-ii/about-the-program/1223/

So get out there and be present, and in the moment, and who knows, you may find the path you were meant to be on. I am sure my brother and his wife will find their footing somehow, because, whatever happens because of the changes in the world, if you stop and think about it, you will be right where you belong. You just have to be willing to adapt.

AHHHH! Captain X-Ray and his lost planet airmen take over Planet Earth!

 Life on Earth will never be the same. Not for me, and not for you

I am having a pity party because I had six X-rays this morning. I didn't want to glow in the dark, but I do. It is a shade of pale lime green. 

This really bothers me.  I pouted most of the afternoon. I'd had my own personal Three-Mile-Island. The X-rays were to see how twisted my spine was after my bike versus car accident. But couldn't my chiropractor have just felt around my body and trusted his own eyes to determine his diagnosis? Sonny, you don't know much about modern medicine do you? Doctors, even witch doctors, want big billings, and they need to have proof in their files so you can't sue them. Besides, X-rays are lovely works of art, aren't they? They give new meanings to the old song, "I'm Looking Through You." There should be a gallery with only X-rays on the walls. There was Man Ray, wasn't there? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_Ray why not be even more avant garde?

Ad copy idea: "Ladies, looking for that special glow that lights up a room? Try our fabulous mud facial formula (imported from Japan and Russia), 'Eau de Madame Curie.' Now you can have the look that says 'Oh darling - fallout - and shelter me!"

I have been so out of the loop since my childhood experience with being zapped by my family's drill happy, radiation relishing dentist. Actual conversation remembered from my childhood in the dentist chair: "Open wide, Denny. Jane, stuff the lead shield further into his mouth! More cotton. Hold your breath, boy, here come the cosmic messengers! And spit. Good. One more time, Janie, and crank that dosage up, this kid has a whole bunch of filling free teeth! Ha, ha, ha, hee, hee, hee!"

Even years ago, when I went to my first chiropractor after a terrible car wreck in San Francisco, I never had X-rays. Now it is de rigueur. OMG, I need to go to a place far away that has no fruits with radiation, somewhere underground perhaps, on a lost island that has no bananas or Brazil nuts. Somewhere in a parallel universe perhaps, where bad things here will be good things there. An antimatter planet.

But the sad reality is we get dosed with radiation not only by dentists and medical practitioners, but by simply by going to work each day. Or by eating food. And if we are sick and stay home? There too! And while we are sleeping. . .zap, zap, zap. . .the cosmic rays are breaking us down, cell by cell until one day we get up and look in our mirrors and we look old. Tired. Worn out. Ruined. Ready for a face lift. Prune city. Kaput.

But hold on. Isn't radiation essential to something? Can't we be open-minded and consider that radiation may sometimes be our friend and not our foe?  After all, isn't it good for mutations? Let's say you were a simple fish-like creature a million years ago, and as a result of the random bombardment by radioactive particles from outer space, or the very mud you were flopping in, you grew yourself a flipper that helped you survive. Why, that would be good, wouldn't it? So not all radiation is bad. On the one  hand my X-rays showed my chiropractor what was wrong with my bones, but on the other hand the X-rays possibly made cancer cells in the bone, or soft tissues, and I will die ten years earlier because of it. But we all have to go sometime, don't we? I just want to keel over one day after hitting a winning serve on the tennis court. That would be grand.

My father, a man who inherited fish-like scales for skin on parts of his body, benefited greatly from being out in the sun during the summer. In Denmark, the land from where my ancestors embarked, they have lakes where scaly naked Danes soak, to let little carnivorous fishes nibble their dead skin off. Isn't that a fun party fact? Try using it at a party when you run out of things to talk about. Thus, the sun, which is a ball of enormously hot radioactivity, can be the giver of life to skin-hungry fishes, and the sun-hungry skin of human beings. Confused? Me too.

I am okay with radiation in low dosages. Just don't screw around with my DNA. I am not a simple organism. Thank you, I don't need an extra flipper or triple lead lined eyelids to protect me from highly charged radioactive particles. I don't want to look like Swiss cheese. As appealing as it might be to someone, I don't aspire to have a myopic comic book artist make a graphic novel based on my mutation story.  http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/questions/question/3428/

Mostly, I have remorse that my sudden cravings for Brazil nuts and bananas have aged me. It is right out of a science fiction novel where I become a swamp thing because some dumb kid lost his watch with the glow in the dark hands and it made an ordinary polliwog into a big green seething angry thing. Hmm. Well, check out the foods you should avoid. But in reality, most of the radiation isn't absorbed by our bodies. It goes down into the sewers and there it affects pleasant creatures who are minding their own businesses. Like rats, worms, bugs, or polliwogs. http://blogs.houstonpress.com/eating/2010/08/radioactive_foods.php?page=1

I don't mean to diminish the joy you have about your frequent flyer mileage. But seriously, flying will make you a human glow worm. From being scanned before you board the plane, and also while in the air. The higher you go up in the atmosphere the less protection you will have. You are doomed. So cash in your mileage and take one last trip and be done with it. Personally, I highly recommend Tahiti. Why? Well, I have my reasons. They speak French there, for one thing. Oops, but wait! Tahiti has four types of bananas. Well, I guess I have to scratch it off my list. Is there any place safe from radiation? No. Even the Earth wears a radiation belt. Again, let me be redundate here: WE ARE DOOMED. Q: Why does the Earth need a radiation belt? A: To keep its pants from falling down, of course! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Allen_radiation_belt 

Okay, relax. False alarm. You won't die. Not today. Soon though. You don't have to go to Lead Is Us to buy a lead suit, or Lowe's for a lead roof. But maybe think about building a bunker. Yes, a gigantic concrete bunker hundreds of feet underground. Then, and only then will you and your children, and your grandparents will be safe. But wait, is concrete radioactive? Oh dear. Sorry, it is.

http://www.concreteconstruction.net/concrete-articles/radioactive-buildings.aspx

But what about our pets? Can't we pet darling Foo-Foo after the rain? Nope. Rainwater will get you too.

http://www.king5.com/news/environment/High-levels-of-radiation-detected-in-Northwest-rainwater--125391598.html

Doomed, doomed, doomed. But what about lipstick or makeup in general? Is it safe to kiss the wife? Maybe. But to be safe, hire someone you don't like to do it. Makeup used to be radioactive. You thought I was kidding about the mud, didn't you? Sorry, I wasn't. It is a mad, mad, world. http://www.cosmeticsandskin.com/aba/glowing-complexion.php

Doomed. We are all doomed. Surrender, Earthlings!

http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/questions/qotw/question/2484/

Ahem. I hope I didn't ruin your day. Pet the dog. Kiss your wife. Bath in a lead-free tub. Soak in the X-rays. I am kidding again. Here, let me be serious. To be safe, maybe you should read up on setting your own bones and doing your own dental work. Seriously, how hard could it be?

Social Media: Opiate of the Masses

Welcome to the Brave New World.

Everywhere you look people have their heads bent, their eyes staring at screens. Someone should be making neck braces so we can stare at screens in comfort. Make the braces in colors that fit our personalities. Internet providers already know what we like, what is taking them so long to get with it?

Alas, the days when people looked at one other are passing away. We are addicted to social media. What does the future hold for the human race? Shorter arms? Longer necks? Mass myopia? Should we fear technology if it separates strangers from one another? Is technology our friend or the new slave master?

In less than ten years I have seen the few become the many in regards to the number of mini-devices that are being used in public. Our devices have become our workplaces, computers, phones, TVs, and social managers. Facebook is now passé. Tumblr will be passé soon, and its founder off developing another social media platform before he turns twenty-five. Your GPS doesn't talk to you? OMG! Make a pouty face with your colon and parenthesis key, people! I do not make those icons. Or speak Internet Slang-lish. I am very uncool.

I once thought of the fascination with social media as being an ego driven thing, and a passing fad. It proclaimed the person was hip: a mover and shaker. Now it simply equates to keeping abreast of everything. The perception we have swallowed hook, line, and sinker is that the time before these devices was the Dark Ages. How quick we forget that humanity has survived without our social media gadgetry for fifty thousand years. Then it was  tête-à-tête.  We need more vis-à-vis and less voyeurism on the viewing screen. We need more humanity in our interactions, and less chatting and texting. Time savings be damned; let us proceed backwards to the more genteel times of the past, if they can be found.

Q: Do we need to be in touch so much? What are we to do when the Tree of Knowledge is at our fingertips? Do we dare not to eat the apple? Shh, I hear the sound of a snake slithering amongst the leaves of the tree. The reality is that the Internet is a mixed bag of good and bad, like life. Porn has usurped romantic love for many people, and the Internet has the most enormous database of porn the world has ever known. 

The concept of what a family looks like is endangered due to our new freedoms. Pregnancy will soon become a test tube option. Curiously, with the use of technology, the younger generation has a higher level of impotence, and it isn't just hot baths and nicotine that have done the damage. 

It has been shown that sperm counts have decreased when in proximity to cell phones and laptops. http://miami.cbslocal.com/2011/04/05/researchers-find-sperm-counts-on-the-decline/  So, if trends continue, sterility will become the norm. Then you will have to grow your child at the corporation. Then you will program your child; choose its sex; and choose its career as easily as pie. Stud services will be in high demand. But why work so hard? Let the corporation do all the work for you! After all, don't they know their employment needs better than you? Relax. Isn't life grand? 

The Internet has made research, entertainment, work, and education, instantaneous experiences. The devices have come down in price to such a degree that nearly everyone has at least one of them. Technology has made us slaves. We have become lazy and dull, convinced we are more learned and on top of the world.

Example A: Tattoos. No one cared about tattoos twenty years ago but bikers, prisoners, and sailors. But now it is an ongoing fad for the young who have forgotten that art is best viewed on gallery walls and in public spaces. Most of the older generations were inoculated by having seen art and knew the difference between the Mona Lisa in the Louvre, and the one made of ink under the skin of a foolish generation. The young and naïve were swayed by peer pressure to get tattoos. Few are the independent younger thinkers who said ‘No.’ 

Likewise, we have been duped by those in control of the Internet, who have brainwashed us to believe that in order to survive and excel we must participate, or be left behind. Do it or die. None of the young are saying 'No' to the Internet. They were raised on it. They need it. Or so they think. But Bill Gates didn't have the Internet when he was growing up, did he? 

As we become more urban, the implements that once were understood: the hoe, the hammer, the saw, are forgotten. When I was a boy, seeds were anyone's to use, but not now; now you can be sued for using seeds owned by corporations that once made Agent Orange, such as Monsanto.  The same is true of chips. Want to see high security? Try walking into Intel's chip making facilities, or anyplace anymore. One day you will need a card to slide through a security reader at the door of Macy's and your local grocery. Why? Because if you haven't got the right software under your skin, you can't do anything. That is where this is all going, my friends.  Big Brother Land.

In the technological badlands, human beings still live in the 19^th Century.  People still make quilts and violins by hand. People make their own wood shakes for their roofs, plant crops, and listen to nature. Nature has gotten by just fine without us, and it will get on much better when we are gone. I don’t want that day to come.

But here is my prediction: there will be a backlash to the social media madness that has gripped the world. There will large desertions from the mainstream. In Portland, young and old disenfranchised people refer to the coming Zombie Apocalypse. The unemployed, less tech members of society will be the walking dead, outcasts to be feared as being barbaric. But here’s the rub: the zombies will be the normal ones.

As robot technology improves, menial labor skills such as how to replace a toilet, dovetail a wooden joint, or make an espalier with non-GMO apples, will be more rare. Monsanto will select the next president behind the scenes. They will dictate the wars that will generate the most income for the corporations. They will own us, right down to the genetically modified organisms floating in our bloodstreams.

I am not referring to a far distant future when we are terra-forming Mars; I am suggesting this will be the reality in fifteen years. We will be known by our barcodes. Our hands and heads will be scanned to pay for our groceries and merchandise at the checkout counters. Physical money will disappear from use. Our diets will be pills that are created by the government-managed companies. Take the red pill or the blue pill; ether way you are going down the rabbit’s hole, Mr. Anderson.

This scenario has been described in sci-fi books and films for years, but most of us did not believe it would come to pass. We hoped it was simply the overactive imaginations of sci-fi writers. I grew up in the generation that was certain we would blow ourselves up long before interplanetary or interstellar travel was an everyday experience. My generation expected an Orwellian future similar to the cult film by George Lucas’s THX-1138. I was foolish to believe the internal combustion engine would one day be eliminated. No. They will not stop building coal-fired power plants, not while there is still coal in the ground. Not for hundreds of years, a time when we cannot go outside for fear of the ruined ozone that lets the UVA and UVB radiation roast us.

Should we be wary of technology? Is this a witch hunt? Should we be worried we will cook our brains by the use of these social media devices? Should we submit to having chips implanted in our heads or hands so we can be online 24/7? Many would say no, but what if your employer required it or you would not be employed? And what if grocery stores and banks required it or you could not buy food or cash your check?

But wait a minute here. Am I being a pariah? Should I be concerned when I see where the world is headed? Am I being unjustly paranoid? People feared television. People feared telephones. Isn’t the social media-craze simply another great new thing to help us experience life in a better way?

Maybe. But what if everyone’s devices suddenly went dead and we were forced to join reality? Are we so afraid of dealing with strangers that we must immerse ourselves in devices? Must we be talking to everyone 24/7? Why?

Technology is the new opiate of the masses. Should we be concerned with who is directing the flow of information? Information is a powerful tool for those in power. If we are told that terrorists have forced America into another war, can we believe what we are being told? Digital wizardry is so good that if they broadcast a terrorist bombing of an embassy in the Middle East, how would we know it was faked? Is deception not the inevitable outcome of too few people controlling the media?

What is the future of the human race if our lives revolve around social media in more tailored ways? If Google knows everything you like, every site you’ve visited, everyone you know in your circles, and is customizing your experience, then are we not all simply numbers in a cloud database? I have noticed I cannot search for anything without the words filling what I am searching for before I have finished typing. It knows me that well. Or it thinks it does. And who is “it” and who is “me” and will there come a time when I do not know the difference?

In the next Presidential election, the candidates will not travel the country. They will simply appear on our smart phones and tablets to give their speeches. The outcome will have already been worked out. Either candidate is their candidate. You only think you have freedom to choose. That is what they want you to think.

I recently watched a revealing National Geographic Bee on PBS. The finalists, ages ten to thirteen, all had roots in India or the Middle-East. They had been selected from over four million children, and were the brightest of the bright. As the older generation dies off, twelve year olds will begin to rule the world. They already do.

Do we not need holograms to take us to the next level? Do we stand on the brink of Star Wars technology? Is anything beyond the grasp of human beings if we can imagine it? Do we even need to go anywhere to do our work? Will robots take over the manual labor of the usual blue-collar occupations? And once we are free to do whatever we can imagine, do we actually need to do them if we can simply do them in our heads, as in the book ‘Feed’? And if our lives are taken over by the imaginary lives those in control want us to believe, how will we know we are generating electricity as in The Matrix? 

It has been postulated that all of this perceived existence is a sophisticated computer program. If that is so, we are already more deeply entrenched as slaves than we believe. I do not think this is the case. Not yet. But soon, very soon.