Does the despot not know that the end is nigh?

Does the swindler not wonder how hard the fall will be?

Do the mid-level players in a street gang not see that the end is near, and that the end is (probably) dead?

Does the Congress not know that we know?

It's a historical footnote, but more than ever I feel like the whole world's watching.

This is no time to pretend you're invisible.

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Tabletry (n)

1. The pasttime that refers to streaming, viewing or listening to media for entertainment or to occupy spans of time.
2. The use of tablet computer devices.

Tableture (n)

1. A form of free-hand note-taking using a stylus, and thus is not spelling-corrected and not easily transferrable to another medium.
2. Handwriting on a tablet computer.

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You Need To Be Nicer To Me

Perhaps a long-lost "cousin" will contact me, or maybe I will be inundated with proposals of marriage from some gold-digging twenty-something.

Why? Because the following just landed in my inbox.

GOOD NEWS
US AMBASSADOR TO NIGERIA
11 GARIK ROAD ABUJA
ABUJA, NIGERIA

I SHALL BE COMING TO YOUR COUNTRY FOR AN OFFICIAL MEETING ON THURSDAY AND
I WILL BE BRINGING YOUR FUNDS OF $18.5M ALONG WITH ME BUT THIS TIME I WILL
NOT GO THROUGH CUSTOMS BECAUSE AS AN AMBASSADOR TO NIGERIA, I AM A US
GOVERNMENT AGENT AND I HAVE THE VETO POWER TO GO THROUGH CUSTOMS.

AS SOON AS I AM THROUGH WITH THE MEETING I SHALL THEN PROCEED TO YOUR
ADDRESS. (SEND YOUR CELL PHONE NUMBER AND THE ADDRESS WHERE YOU WANT ME TO BRING THE PACKAGE).YOU HAVE REALLY PAID SO MUCH IN THIS DELIVERY THAT
MAKES ME WONDER. YOU ARE A VERY LUCKY PERSON BECAUSE I SHALL BE BRINGING
IT MYSELF AND THERE IS NOTHING ANYONE CAN DO ABOUT IT.YOUR PACKAGE OF
($18.5M) MUST BE REGISTERED AS AN AMBASSADORIAL PACKAGE FOR ME TO DEFEAT
ALL ODDS AND THE COST OF REGISTERING IT IS $155.THE FEE MUST BE PAID IN
THE NEXT 50 HOURS VIA WESTERN UNION SO THAT ALL NECESSARY ARRANGEMENT CAN BE MADE BEFORE TIME WILL BE AGAINST US.

SEND THE FEE VIA MONEY GRAM OR WESTERN UNION MONEY TRANSFER WESTERN UNION MONEY TRANSFER

PAYMENT INFORMATION STATED BELOW:

RECEIVER'S NAME: TONY IBE,
ADDRESS: LAGOS, NIGERIA
TEXT QUESTION: IN GOD?
ANSWER: WE TRUST
AMOUNT:$155.

AS SOON AS YOU SEND THE FEE MAKE SURE YOU SEND ME THE PAYMENT INFORMATION.
MY FLIGHT IS THURSDAY AND I EXPECT YOU TO COMPLY BEFORE THEN SO THAT THE
DELIVERY CAN BE COMPLETED.

IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY, THEN IT WILL NOT BE MY FAULT IF YOU DO NOT RECEIVE
YOUR PACKAGE.
REGARDS,
AMBASSADOR ROBIN RENEE.

All punctuation, selection of capitalization and apparent malapropisms are presented here as they have been received by me. I would never, ever tamper with the official communiqué of someone who possesses "VETO POWER TO GO THROUGH CUSTOMS"...

Rest assured that realizing this sudden extraordinary profit of $18.4845 million will not change with me, I'll still come to work and be my usual humble, unassuming self. I mean, I'll still talk to you as though we are equals, if that's what you're asking.

Please excuse me, I'm off to Western Union!

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Like many of you, I'm generally in favor of very harsh punishment for those who torture or abuse children. Really.

But there must be some accommodation made in the law to account for those times when your child plants a horrible song in your head that simply will not go away.

Then I would be just as guilty.

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Enough said.

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And, really, she was right...if you think about it...

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Yes, but Bowie goes home to Iman...

A long, long time ago I was told by Q Magazine to buy David Bowie's album "Heathen." I did. I liked it, there were some good parts, but in general it lacked what only an American would understand to be "oomph." I haven't really listened to it since.

It has been nearly a decade, but a week ago, through a sinewy path that leads through the Nine In Nails iPhone app, Cabaret Metro, and the Beeb I came to find out that Peter Murphy has a new record out. 

Stay with me.

Peter Murphy is one of those musicians whose careers I greatly admire because he has always done his own thing. He has a sound and an approach that is his. He became well-known fronting the seminal band "Bauhaus" and has had periodic success since then as a solo artist. While I don't spend time seeking his work out or posting to his MySpace page, I am predisposed to being interested in his new releases, when they make it into my radar screen.

After seeing a minor kerfuffle of activity about Mr. Murphy I did the most basic of research to find out that, in fact, he does have a new-ish record out. It's called "Ninth" and the online reviews seemed good. I recall being quite juiced to see him fronting Trent and Atticus on "Reptile", especially in a more casual live setting. So I bought "Ninth", the new album from Peter Murphy. And I have not been disappointed.

Those of you old enough to remember Bauhaus or "Cuts You Up" will find in this record a harder, edgier Peter Murphy. His voice remains the throaty cello, his annunciation selective based on the melody and rhythm of the song. The subject matter of the record is, frankly, lost on me except to say that it doesn't disturb or dismay. I have really enjoyed listening to it this weekend.

It hit me on the way in this morning that this is the record I wanted to hear from David Bowie when I bought "Heathen;" something a little more to the edge of his oeuvre, but embodying what makes him great. "Heathen" is a good record. But "Ninth" is a great one.

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There is a large picture of a senior military man and the headline reads, "I take a sheet in the cockpit."

This is why NYC is great: no ad agency would have ever come up with that, it must have been the client who probably fired the agency and told some hapless graphic designer exactly what to do.

The scatological humor is awesome but has nothing to do with the product's features and benefits. And the picture? It's of a Navy Admiral...not an airline pilot or an Air Force General. It's as slapdash and meatball as it gets.

And I love it.

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Today I got a native English-speaker doing the same thing. And you know what he's actually saying?

Nothing. Probably same as all the other ones.

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If Jason loves it, I probably will too. I bought it on the spot. $10. 

Sparrow is nice. Very nice. The interface is elegant, it's lightweight which makes it fast, and it provides context across all one's mailboxes. I migrated to it fairly effortlessly.

Then I realized why I can't use it.

Sparrow is an IMAP client, so it relies 100% on the mailserver. POP works through the server but uses local storage. IMAP does not. POP allows the user to create folders and store important messages on his local machine, erasing them from the server but keeping them for later reference. IMAP syncs to the server but does not access or recognize local message storage.

As is also typical with me, it reminded me of a larger phenomenon in the interactive world that makes my dilemma even possible.

What makes IMAP particularly attractive now vs. when it was first introduced in 1986 are two things: relatively widespread broadband and the low, low price of storage. When connectivity was painfully slow and hard disk storage frightfully expensive, POP was the way to go: hit the server once, bring everything down to your machine, and you're done. Of course, if your local machine fails that's a problem, but it was a safe gamble compared to the pain / itch / swelling of the constant handshake between your machine and the far-away large-but-relatively-weak server.

This leads us to the "the cloud". My mother - a new MacBook Air owner - asked me what the cloud is. I told her it is external storage. What I didn't burden her with - but what continues to fascinate me - is that storage and connectivity prices are such that it is really cheaper to not own your own storage. It is every bit as fast and convenient to rent the space you need elsewhere and access your materials on an as-needed basis especially since we all - my mother included - are multi-device consumers of information. If we want to handle business on the go, we need to have data parity across all our devices. This above all else is why we love the cloud, and why IMAP has returned to the fore. 

In my opinion IMAP is better than POP. But, with all my carefully curated folders of critically important emails set up "just so" on my MacBook Pro, I'm a POP dude in an IMAP world. I do not have the time or intestinal fortitude to go back through my email life and rework it to be in the cloud. So as of this morning I'm sadly right back with Mail, and a sawbuck the lighter for it.

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In the course of our friendly "we-need-to-reschedule-this" chat it emerged that our written response to the RFP was "by far" the strongest of all the respondents. So much so, in fact, that we were told the prospective client might decide just to work with us without going through another round.

It may come to nothing, or it may come to that. Either way, it was great to know that we had represented well.

It is possible to hit a bullet with a bullet, but usually you can't pull it off. So why did we impress so thoroughly? I believe it is because we took the written submittal seriously, not just as an exercise in making it to the next round. We regarded it as a document that would outlive whatever decision was going to be made. We wanted them to love our thinking even if they didn't agree with it. We worked hard to make it expressive but focused and efficient, and we respected the need for a singular vision, so when we were in danger of having too many cooks we stepped back to allow the one who was feeling it most take control.

So many new business decisions are made by the client before the team even enters the room on the day of the presentation. We all know that to be true, but we sometimes forget. Today served as a very pleasant reminder.

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