Tech Exec Makes (I mean, Does) Good

My old friend Daniel Cheifetz is written up in the Chicago Tribune today:

Donors look past cash to aid community fixes
Tech exec funds Evanston project

By Rob Kaiser
January 7, 2002

The bars recently came off the windows at the Dollar R Us store on the corner of Church Street and Dodge Avenue in Evanston. Soon the store’s sign will come down too.

A clothing store called Homefield Advantage is moving in and its owner hopes the surrounding neighborhood will also adopt a different look and feel.

“This corner is notorious for drugs and police stings,” said Marcellus Johnson, the store owner who grew up nearby. “We want to change that.”

That “we” includes people like Johnson, a 32-year-old promoter with connections to athletes and musicians; Lonnie Wilson, a 45-year-old social services veteran; and Daniel Cheifetz, a 54-year-old former technology executive who has poured more than $1 million into an effort to convert the corner of Church and Dodge from an eyesore into a center of community activity.

That corner is an unlikely location to find Cheifetz, a one-time struggling entrepreneur who became a multimillionaire after his software firm was sold and went public in 1996…

There’s no one like Daniel. Too bad. We could use more of him.

[Thanks to Tom Gross for pointing this article out to me.]

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Passion and Anger, Part 3

On the Cluetrain list at Topica, where Eric pointed to our “What is passion?” blogfest, Marek has once again exhibited his tendency to blurt out the truth beautifully. He writes:

passion=love+memory

passion=love+giving up anger+forgiveness

passion=love+loss

Follow the links. Really.

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Passion and Anger, Part 2

Eric Mysterious Norlin counters my counterblog of his metablog about the nature of passion. He writes that I am

trying to enlarge the word *too* much. I would argue that one does NOT feel passion toward their children — unless their children are threatened. They feel love and enthusiasm and joy, but not passion. Passion occurs upon threatening because suddenly anger is thrown into the mix.

By this path, one *does* feel passion toward one’s spouse, but this treads onto the always dangerous ground of Senor Freud — passion towards one’s spouse does involve mixing anger and love, just as passionate sex *always* (don’t lie to yourselves kiddies) involves sublimated violence.

As for compression algorithms, etc: I would argue that those things fall more under “enthusiasm” than “passion”.

So, yes, we are using the word differently. Let sleeping semantics lie. I don’t know what exactly Eric would count as examples of passion other than the ones he gives — passion towards a spouse, passion upon a threat to one’s children — but it seems to me that the word applies wherever feelings are strong and — except in the case of “making passionate love” — persistent; you can have a passion for art, but not if it lasts for thirty minutes. Anger isn’t the only strong feeling. Let’s hope.

Passion = (Deeply caring about something) + (time)

As for whether passionate sex “*always* involves sublimated violence,” well, maybe in the Freuds’ household it did, but there is a possibility of mutuality (not the same thing as simultaneity) which is the opposite of violence. (Do really have to talk about this in public?)

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Cheesy Flash Cards

David Herman responds to our request for cheesy corporate holiday Flash cards with this one from Forrester. It’s actually not quite as cheesy as some, but it remains a mystery who they thought they’d be pleasing with it.

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Passion and Anger

The mysterious Eric Norlin said in an email that he’s cracked the code:

Passion = Love + Anger

he wrote. I asked him to write a bloggerino on this so I could respond, so instead he meta-blogged as follows:

I wrote in an email the other day: Passion = Love + Anger. The good doctor disagreed and asked for a blog so that he might counter-blog….the stage is yours, David.

The small point is that this is obviously wrong. Passion is sometimes love and anger, but there are lots of things we don’t need anger to be passionate about, including (in no particular order): our children, our spouses, compression algorithms, and marzipan in the shape of small household objects.

The larger point is: Why does Eric’s equation seem plausible? It helps that it’s sometimes true. It helps that it’s true for some of the most prominent of passions, including for Linux and Open Source which wouldn’t be nearly as much fun if Microsoft weren’t around. But it is also distressingly true for so much of what passes for passion on the Net. With so many voices clamoring for attention, the Web has a natural inclination towards flaming. And anger adds a moral gravitas to one’s outrageousness: you can grab people’s attention if you dress in a tie-dyed shirt, a fake boa, and no pants, but if you burn your draft card at the same time, you’re a rebel, not just a flamboyant asshole.

That’s one reason I so appreciated Gary Turner’s “sentimental” blog entry the other day. No histrionics, no hiding behind the protection of a good head of self-righteous indignation.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s nothing I like better than a bout of sweet, foam-in-your-mouth-not-in-your-hands self-righteous indignation! But this isn’t the only form of passion … and all too often it’s merely a self-indulgent, look-at-me fit in the guise of passion.

Back to you, Eric!

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David Isenberg’s current Smart Letter quotes extensively from a 1998 article by David Reed about why outmoded accounting techniques are leading to a telcom meltdown. David says:

The local telephone companies could well have to replace their old switching technology to keep up with newer competitors that have a more efficient approach. Such replacements, while cheap to buy, would entail huge write-offs, given that existing switches are almost worthless and yet are carried on the books at fantastic sums. The central office switches and line cards of the phone companies could become the nuclear power plants (the “stranded assets”) of the telecommunications industry. We could wind up with a debacle on the order of the S&L problem …

David follows this up with an intelligent update and discussion, and then lots of reader mail from a gaggle o’ gurus.

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The Mathematics of Gonzo

Interesting thread at Gonzo Engaged started by the preternaturally smart Clay Shirky who challenges the math behind Gonzo Marketing. Will it cost more and achieve less than traditional marketing? The responses generally don’t take on the math but instead challenge his premises.

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Blogstickers and the Value of Sentimentality

Gary Turner says some incredibly nice things about RageBoy, Doc, me and some others in his blog today. Way over the top. And it’s great. Gary gets a little self-conscious towards the end and writes: “Trying desperately not to over-senitmentalize this posting (too late) …” No apologies accepted, Gary! As much as I love cynicism, irony and post-modern meta-nihilism, after a while it gets a little predictable. It’s a relief to have someone express actual sentiments — other than anger — without guile. Gimme more!

Gary continues his collection of weblog bumperstickers. (My current favorite is “My other blog is a newspaper column.”) Here are some suggestions:

• I blogged at the office.
• I’d rather be blogging.
• Blog me, baby. Blog me hard.
• You are what you blog.

Post-modern ironic meta-commentary on pop culture bumperstickers without a shred of sentiment or honesty? Gimme more!

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Words of the Years

Michael Quinlon’s weekly emailer, World Wide Words, today summarizes the awards by the American Dialect Society last night in San Francisco:

• Most Outrageous: “assoline“, methane used as a fuel.
• Most Euphemistic: “daisy cutter“, a bomb used by US Air Forces in Afghanistan (not new, but definitely a distinguishing word of 2001).
• Most Useful: there was a tie between “facial profiling“, videotaping a crowd to identify criminals and terrorists, and “second-hand speech“, overheard cell-phone conversation.
• Most Creative: “shuicide bomber“, a terrorist with a bomb in his shoe.
• Most Unnecessary: “impeachment nostalgia“, longing for the superficial news of the Clinton era
• Least Likely to Succeed: “Osamaniac“, a woman sexually attracted to Osama bin Laden
• Most Inspirational: “Let’s roll!“, the words of the late Todd Beamer, who mobilised passengers on Flight 93 on 11 September to overcome the terrorists who had hijacked the plane.

Previous awards are viewable here. Previous Most Likely to Succeed were:

2000: muggle (27). Other candidates: m-commerce (14), buying and selling over a cell phone, and WAP (3), Wireless Application Protocol, a specification that enables wireless devices to connect with one another.

1999: dot-com (31) company doing business on the World-Wide Web. Others: portal (9) entry site to the Web, e-tail (7) retail business conducted on the Web, baby Bills (2) companies that Bill Gates’ Microsoft might be broken up into as a result of the government’s antitrust lawsuit.

1998: “e-” 25 votes. Others: “rage” as in “road rage,” etc. (18); “moment” as in “senior moment,” “Kodak moment” (12).

1997: “DVD” (30) Digital Versatile Disk, optical disk technology expected to replace CDs. Others: “handheld” (4) (noun) handheld digital device; “push” (2) automatic delivery of customized Internet content to one’s desktop; “be dilberted” (2) to be mistreated or taken advantage of by one’s boss.

1996: “drive-by” (25) designating brief visits or hospital stays as in “drive-by labor,” “drive-by mastectomy,” “drive-by viewing.” Runner-up “nail” (7) to accomplish perfectly, as an Olympic feat, election victory, or movie role.

1995: “World Wide Web” and its variants.

1994: No Most Likely to Succeed but Most Promising was Infobahn.

1993: Quotative like with a form of the verb be to indicate speech or thought.

1992: snail mail , s-mail, mail that is physically delivered, as opposed to email.

1991: rollerblade , skate with rollers in a single row.

1990: notebook PC , a portable personal computer weighting 4-8 pounds, and rightsizing , adjusting the size of a staff by laying off employees.

Not a bad record, although choosing a word as most likely to succeed because the technology it denotes is likely to succeed strikes me as a bit craven.

Here are the group’s Word of the Year awards:

• 1990: Bushlips (insincere political rhetoric)
• 1991: Mother of All
• 1992: Not!
• 1993: Information Superhighway
• 1994: Cyber, Morph
• 1995: Web, Newt
• 1996: Mom
• 1997: Millennium Bug
• 1998: E-
• 1999: Y2K
• 2000: chad

In 2000, the group widened its scope for its awards:

Word of the Year 1999 was Y2K.
Word of the 1990s Decade was web.
Word of the Twentieth Century was jazz.
Word of the Past Millennium was she.

Yes, she, the feminine pronoun. Before the year 1000, there was no she in English; just heo, which singular females had to share with plurals of all genders because it meant they as well. In the twelfth century, however, she appeared, and she has been with us ever since. She may derive from the Old English feminine demonstrative pronoun seo or sio, or from Viking invasions.

So, before 1000, there was no direct way to differentiate between a reference to a woman and a reference to a group of indeterminate sex? That is very weird.

In response to my challenge to come up with neologisms, Ken Meltsner writes:

I came up with (I believe) “”netstalgia”” — musings on how the Internet used to be.

Joe Murphy writes:

There’s a thread on Plastic.com about this very topic. Do you Plastic?

My favorite so far is:

Neolojism:

A combination of neologism and jism meaning the end result of this particular type of linguistic masturbation.

Oh. My other favorite is:

For Canadians only: A friend of mine refers to our far-right newspaper as the Notional Past.

Yes, Rich Hall’s 1984 Sniglets lives (and was followed by More Sniglets, Sniglets for the Soul, Who Moved My Sniglets and this year’s Gnozo Sniglets). (If you haven’t had enough, you can go to The Atlantic Monthly’s Word Fugitives compiled by Barbara Wallraff.)

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Web Journalism

Tom Matrullo has a superb piece on journalism and weblogs in which he enlarges the context, opening — so to speak — a magnificent vista. (Tom is replying to a thread begun by the Weblog King of Questions, Mike Sanders.)

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