RAM Rhymin',  Brooks Bashin', Occam Opinin', Kennedy Killin' and Conrad Contemplatin'.

A colleague asked me to post the patter poem below.   I always knew these IT guys were smart and funny and ever so helpful whenever my computer mutinied and threatened to toss all my files overboard, but I never knew that among them was the W. S. Gilbert of the Digital Domain. 

                           
   If a packet hits a pocket on a socket on a port

And the bus is interrupted as a very last resort

And the address of the RAM makes your floppy disk abort

Then the socket packet pocket has an error to report

If your cursor finds a menu item followed by a dash

And the double-clicking icon puts your window in the trash

And your data is corrupted ‘cause the index doesn’t hash

Then your situation’s hopeless, and your system’s gonna crash!

You can’t say this?  What a shame sir!  We’ll find you another game sir.

If the label on the cable on the table at your house

Says the network is connected to the button on your mouse

But your packets want to tunnel on another protocol

That’s repeatedly rejected by the printer down the hall

And your screen is all distorted by the side effects of gauss

So your icons in the window are as wavy as a souse

Then you may as well reboot and just go out with a bang,

‘Cause as sure as I’m a poet, the screwy sucker’s gonna hang.

When the copy of your floppy’s getting sloppy on the disk

And the microcode instructions cause unnecessary risk

Then you have to flash your memory, and don't forget to ram your ROM

Quickly turn off the computer and be sure to tell your mom!

In earlier post I referred to David Brooks as the putz/pundit. So I should explain.  Like Ellen (my wife) says: We always hurt the one we love…and though I can’t quite admit to loving Brooks, I do have an affection for him by dint of his  willingness to keep an open mind and let his wide eyed curiosity take precedence over the temptation (and perhaps perceived professional obligation?) to pass easy judgment.  But when that curiosity leads him to believe in things he doesn’t understand …and then you suffer…Superstition---thank you Stevie Wonder.   Case in point: an earlier article by Brooks about Jeremy Lin and his strong religious beliefs. You can look it up, but in short, Brooks was addressing what he thought was a conundrum—that Jeremy Lin was both athletically gifted and deeply devout. And this was to Brooks, a mystery.  Brooks went on to reveal that he thinks athletic excellence is a product of extreme self-involvement and egotism.  To Brooks, the successful athlete is a vain and entitled Peacock strutting his/her physical gifts fueled by the attention/envy/admiration of the entranced and idol worshipping spectator.  As someone once said:  “ That’s so not right, it’s not even wrong.”   

Reminds me of George Will who wrote a similarly wrongheaded essay when Jerry Garcia died.  Will questioned why anyone would pay attention or care about a musician who entertained masses of drugged hippies and social outcasts and blah, blah blah.  No clue as to the facts concerning  the man’s history or his music.  No appreciation of the years of practice, study and development of a unique and highly personal style of expression and technique. No acknowledgement of the spiritual paths of exploration and deep dedication to tradition.  Garcia was no saint, but he wasn't a rock star phony either.
He was a musician of the highest rank and Will couldn't see (or hear) the value of that because he probably never listened to a single note of it. 

When asked his credentials for being The New Yorker food critic, Calvin Trillin answered : “ I know how to eat”.  At least he was honest.  And funny.

Occam's razor (also written as Ockham's razor) is the law of parsimony, economy or succinctness. It is a principle urging one to select among competing hypotheses that which makes the fewest assumptions and thereby offers the simplest explanation of the effect.

…and therein lies one of the challenges for the “Red Bred" or "Pink Diaper" baby boomer.  It took about 20 minutes of working in the Ad. Biz to confirm my suspicion that most of the evils in the world are a lot simpler to understand than Marx, Engels and their hermetic scribblings would suggest.  Applying Occam’s razor in the most general way to the most general of circumstances almost always reduces down to something akin to the advice that Deep Throat gave to Bob Woodward about the Watergate affair.  “Follow the money”.  

SO with apologies to Father William of Ockham, I have cobbled together Drifter’s Razor,which I define as follows:

Given the choice between an explanation that presumes:

a. A coordinated, pre-arranged plan requiring unanimous agreement among many parties as well as air-tight secrecy and covert cooperation to maintain exclusive control of all information ...

or

b.  Energetic, self-interest motivated and ambitious person(s) doing, taking, getting what they can, when they can and however they can…

the answer is going to be b.

 ...and that's essentially why I don't believe that  Oswald killed JFK.  It's not because another explanation seems more likely to conform to what would seem a more carefully planned and precisely orchestrated plot.  On the contrary, I don’t think Oswald killed him because it requires too much presumption of a carefully planned and precisely orchestrated plot.  It seems more likely to me that someone(s) wanted to kill him for whatever reasons, and went to the grassy knoll with a high powered rifle(s) and a belief in a reasonably good chance (or maybe it wasn't only chance) of getting away—and simply aimed, fired some bullets and fled.  Was it the Mob? The Cuban exiles?  Jimmy Hoffa’s boys?  A Vegas Gambling Cabal? A guy with a crush on Jackie? Lyndon Johnson? …that's all up for grabs, but whoever it was and however they did it, they did it and got away with it and Oswald was the fall guy.  The story of how Oswald may have done it just requires too many variables all working together in a way that necessitates an acceptance of too many lucky breaks and extraordinary coincidental improbabilities--not to mention sequences occurring in impossible time frames and events that defy the laws of physics.   And just about every other scenario proposed simply seems more likely than the one that the Warren Commission needed 888 pages to support.

Contrary to popular belief, the Warren Commission didn't have the final say when it came to analyzing the JFK assassination. Amid great public uproar concerning the accuracy and candor of the Warren Commission, in 1976 the US House of Representatives established the House Select Committee on Assassinations, to re-examine the facts behind the assassinations of President JFK and Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Committee's results, while public record, were never widely publicized. Interestingly, the Committee officially stated that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't act alone, and that yes, there were additional shots fired by an unknown person located at the infamous "grassy knoll." The Committee stated that there WAS, indeed, a 4th shot, as shown by accoustical evidence analysis put forth by the National Academy of Sciences.  

  

Was reading The Rescue by Joseph Conrad (because I found a first edition on the shelves at the Mercantile Library and couldn't resist) but two-thirds through I lost the will to continue.  However, I was curious to know more about Conrad because his language and sentence structure is so unusual. A strange amalgam of drawing room formality, Biblical grandiosity and tavern colloquial.   Now that I've learned that  English was his 3^rd language (and he wasn’t fluent till in his twenties) after Polish and French;  he was born into cultured Polish nobility (whose fortunes changed rapidly and  left Conrad orphaned by age of 11);  then lived in exile before going off to France and England to begin a life of seafaring exploits among salty salt of the earth-ers --I can see how it all contributed to his one of a kind voice.