Hummer Style

Do you have what it takes to ride in a Hummer Limo?

‘Hummer Style…’ (pdf)
by B. Tyler Burton

They say guys never worry about their hair, but tonight is special. Tonight, I’m going out in a Hummer Limo.

It was all Rube’s idea, if you wanna know the truth. But from the moment he told me, I knew I’d be there, riding high, hooting through the sunroof at all those girls that would be so desperately wanting to know just who are those guys in there–they must have style!

Wow! It’s almost seven; and that means just a half-hour till the Hummer Limo pulls around the corner, all stretched and awesome. It’ll be the first time this street has felt important since it was built–whenever that was. Man, this is gonna be great.

Well, it looks like I’m going to have to walk up a few blocks to the big intersection. What a bummer; but the driver says he’s worried that he won’t be able to get enough clearance to turn around in our little cul de sac. It’s too bad my mom and dad won’t get to see me; but they’ll see the pictures. At least, the ones I choose to show them. Just thinking about all the things that haven’t happened yet that I won’t want them to see gets me nervous.

Yes I’m being honest here, this is my first time riding so high in the City…

Okay, so it’s been an hour, and they’re not here. They probably got stuck in some mighty traffic pile-up at the Hooter’s, and they’re just trying to sort out the really hella hot babes from the ones that are just half-to-hella; but it’s getting tougher to feel as excited as I was before. Maybe I should never have said yes. I’m not good enough to ride in a Hummer limo. That’s it, I’m not good enough. They just should have told me. They didn’t have to lie and say they were coming when they weren’t.

I take it all back. My friends are the greatest. They even had a wine cooler left over that they let me have, for free.

Live and in the Wild, Tyler Burton reading this October 27th at SF Green Party HQ!

Hey All,

I’ve been offered a slot on the line-up for the SF Green Party’s Goodbye Office Art Auction & Blowout Party this October 27th from 6pm to midnight.

Please come out and show your support for the one party that has consistently recommended crucial progressive reform to our country’s electoral process, and not had the opportunity to yet fumble the ball!!

“Drink cocktails and bid on some great artwork! Eat rum cake while ranting about politics! All ages and political affiliations are welcome. Those still recovering from drinking too much Obama-lade are especially encouraged to attend!”

Live Entertainment by JAH YZER!! and more TBA

For more info see the original event release page:
http://www.sfgreenparty.org/events/events.gem

Notes From the Cooler

Just recently, I cleaned up my desk; or, I should say, I began to clean up my desk. Because it’s not yet rightly even what some would say organized at this point, and here and I am writing about how I’ve cleaned it and that is just patently untrue.

For those who know me, and my desk, or have desks like such of your own that are so entrenched by things that you’re not yet ready to throw away but have found no alternate place for, you might enjoy the somewhat temporary and odd solution I have employed for the past few years that solves, at least, the problem of all those stray bits of paper I jot ideas down on and just leave strewn about.

For the last several years, I have been tearing off the excess and throwing these scraps, or even sometimes whole notebooks, into an old green plastic picnic cooler. I dredged this cooler up a few days ago and opened it, as I hadn’t for some time, and the smell of six month old air filtered out. And there is something about the odor of those white plastic coolers that just puts me in a happier place. Maybe its the smell of vacation?

While I looked down into this vat of ideas layered in strata going back years, I had an idea. I mean, I’ve been keeping these things…Why not actually do something with them? Now that’s an idea!

Why not share them, finger though them. Of course, I’m not under any delusions. But you never know.

For the foreseeable future, in any case, I’m planning on dredging. And you’re coming with me, dear reader. Because there’s nothing worse than a lonely walk down memory lane.

I hope you do enjoy these “Notes from the Cooler”.

The True Story of Pinky Frasier, The 256th Annual World’s Greatest Liar

The True Story of Pinky Frasier, The 256th Annual World’s Greatest Liar (pdf)
by B. Tyler Burton

I am the World’s Greatest Liar. No kidding. (That’s a little joke we in the business like to make from time to time.) All you have to do is ask one of my colleagues and he’ll probably give you the straight answer. After a good few hours of hard prying on your part it’s even possible to get the World’s Greatest Liar to tell a truth sometimes. I didn’t say we were politicians.

In fact, to be a liar of the first class you must disavow any interest in politics. (For the record, at least. We have to make our money somehow.) That is to say: no kissing babies, no reapportioning the middle-classes’ taxes to retrofit a cabana in Bali with palm trees that bear sausages instead of coconuts, and absolutely no promising them they’ll get their money back in the end (though this is certainly one of the greatest lies of all). It’s just too easy. And that’s why, in 1932, under the venerable leadership of Sir Thomas Snively, the Chapter voted to permanently exclude all politicians from our ranks (but not our rolodexes). This was probably done out of spite, for Sir Thomas was a self-made man and not a rich boy’s patsy, who came from a family with a long history of Prevaricators in their line; and after years of failing at everything from novel writing to selling electric vacuums that wouldn’t exist for some years afterwards, he must have gotten sick of coming each year to these hallowed halls, forced to raise his glass to the fat cats at the head of the table who had taken the easy route and gone into the business of governing.

As was characteristic of the time, Sir Thomas staged a liar’s revolt, and in a few weeks, with the purported pantaloons of the former chairman hanging from the flagpole, he established this most important edict. “A lie must strike from the bottom up.”

The politicians, furious at first to be excluded from their own club, were rumored to have gathered together in some New York penthouse to grumble over what they’d lost, and were in the process of planning a full-scale counter-revolution of the highest order when the former chairman himself, who had spoken not a word since his guests had arrived, began to double over with laughter. He had retired to the balcony, and none dared follow; but when they heard his howls they had come to see what was the matter. “Gentleman,” he famously declared, “What in the sam hell’re we so worried about?”

New York lay sparkling beneath them like a jewel to be cut, polished, and sold back to those who should have owned it from day one. Later that evening it’s told the chairmen, his few closest advisors, and the chief of police made a good racket by going from speakeasy to speakeasy, drinking the place out of liquor, then sending in the vice once they’d made their departure to the next hole in the wall.

That’s the story, if you believe it. I can’t imagine them retiring from a fight so easily; but history, she has a way of making everything into a lie without any of our help.

As for me, and my accomplishments? As for what it was exactly that led me to raise my glass to the great seal above my head? Well, my resume is anything but glamourous. We all learn to lie because of our parents. And the more religious your parents are the better a liar you become. My father’s love was more of what you’d call the Old Testament variety, with many a slinging of belts and fists and bottles in my direction. When I wasn’t close enough, he’d call me over to his side, very kindly at first, then he’d wop me atop the head with the sole of the shoe he was shining for instance, and when a prop did not manifest itself old dad was never shy to bruise his own knuckles. God bless him. If it weren’t for him, I’d never have got so good at lying.

Remember the Love

There is this professor. He doesn’t teach like normal folks. He asks questions, he insinuates, he pulls out the small personal details about your life without you even knowing it and suddenly you have learned something more valuable than the socket states of electrons. He encourages you to bring food to class, but if you do then he will ask you to hand it over and he will share it with the rest of the class, or rip it in half with the skill of a monkey if you bring, say, a banana…

We stroll into class a bit late. But that’s de rigeur. Russel is our escort, and he introduces us. He has assured us people do this all the time. They just come and listen even if they’d had the class last fall, or yesterday, or are just coming in to check it out, like we are. Russel is taking an independant study class with him this semester

“So I told him I’d already bought the book he told me to buy, and he says, ‘What book?’ And I tell him, and he says, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a good book. What about it?’ And I ask him, “Well, what am I supposed to do?” And he just says, ‘Whatever you want, man, I don’t care.’”

Just two days ago I was lucky enough to be invited to a lecture at Laney College by Amir Sabzevary. What had first started out as an odd stop-gap between a beer after work and seeing Sacha Baron Cohen’s newest comedy masterpiece, Brüno, turned out to be something altogether mellifluous and wonderful and unlike any other lecture I had ever borne witness to. Here was a professor, a teacher and not just a lecturer.

The lesson that day was on the Ten Commandments. Before that, a quick review of some religions. But mostly he just asked people to introduce themselves again (more than likely, at least somewhat, for our benefit), and somehow it just got the ball rolling. While he went around the room, he parsed his sentences with bits and pieces of the various religions.

I had a professor, similar to this, in college. His name was Lee Brown. Some people complained that the way he taught it was impossible to take notes to, that it was impossible to organize. And yet he never asked for anything but for you to contribute your thoughts, in the end, so why bother taking anything down but those bits and pieces of wisdom that occur to you while you’re sitting there sucking up air. Lee Brown used to take us out for beers at the local graduate bar, and he invited us over to the small house on a side street, nearly invisible to the street behind its large shrubberies, that looked like something out of the Hobbit; and there he served us hummous and baba gannoush- or it was someone else who brought that, I don’t remember.

Later, I heard from a friend who kept more in touch with him that he’d come out to San Fran and they’d met up there and still at 80 years old he was talking about poon tang- and she was sure, she said, that he was hiring hookers.

“Well good for him,” I’d told her. As far as I know, he’s still teaching, too- and inspiring people. The best educators, though they be challenging to authority and the forces of calm, cool order, develop too much of a following from those who are seeking more out of college than just a factual printout, who are seeking to gain in wisdom as much as in knowlege, and they are tough to remove; they find their place- right where they need to be.

About Amir Sabzevary. A student on his Laney review page had this to say:

Definetely different. No prof anywhere who teaches like him. If you have life ? his class is a must. To remain an unthinking robot his class must be avoided. You will either fall in love with him or hate him but you will not remain indifferent. He will inspire, anger, frustrate you. He will make you laugh, cry and think. Incredible and adorable.

One of the things that stuck with me most was that he said the ideal government, in a way, must be a theocracy. But not like Iran; “a piece of shit”, he called it; but something better- better than capitalism, which fails to nourish the heart as it nourishes the pocket. Better than just cold science that doesn’t believe in a spiritual ethic as much as it believes in legal precedent. Better than just surviving, there is living. Because the Buddha did not say, “Life is suffering”. He said it had the potential to be brilliant. We have just made it suffering by striving for permanence in a world that is anything but…

We skipped out a little early, refreshed and full of love, our girls hands in the palms of our own, the sun going down as we walked across the parking lot, a tatter of newspaper whipping by in the not so chill wind.

>And Brüno? Don’t believe what any of these blow-hard critics have to say, Sacha Baron Cohen is making the funniest comedy there is today in the world. Brüno is über-alles, and as fantastic as Borat. What you might say is there’s just not as many Kazakstani reporters writing for major publications and web outlets.

Do Something “Smart”

The most enriching thing about my job here at the Breakthrough Institute is that I get a keen perspective on who is really making progress in the fight to bring sound science to the debate on climate change, and who is, alternately, just braying into the wind. Unfortunately, there’s no real shortage of the latter.

The election of Obama notwithstanding, things just haven’t seemed to really change much for the better as quick as we had all hoped [at least as far as climate policy goes*], and these days the people we will soon have to blame for the failed policy are the ones on “our side”.

That said, I’ve never been much a fan of our side or their side; I’ve always just kind of gone my own way, because once you pick a side the hive mind expects you to be at once a devout cheerleader for each and every cause that side dreams up–which is stupid.

Take the stop the war movement, or the public push to save ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). I never really understood how dressing up as a bloodthirsty Uncle Sam or a sad polar bear, and then going around marching through the streets, was going to lend credence to your argument. As much as I hate how stuffy everything must be on the policy side, I can appreciate the need for a little decorum. Would you like every courtroom to be run by Judge Judys? Nah, I didn’t think so. And you wouldn’t want the leader of the free world tromping around in raver pants sucking on a hemp lolly either. No matter what he (or she) supports, it’s just better that we abide by some modest standard. With the world moving ever towards the casual, we’ll have a president who wears ironic t-shirts to work in about 50 years whether we like it or not, so why hasten the process and de-legitimize ourselves while we’re at it. One of our Breakthrough fellows from last year sums up this argument pretty well here, in a ascerbic take on the whole “street theater” movement (“Save the Polar Bear Suits for the Afterparty”).

This policy also applies to what I like to call “useless action”.

When you slap that bumper sticker on the back of your car that says “Keep Tahoe Blue”, you’re not really doing much. Now, I won’t protest that just doing subtle things like putting a bumper sticker on your car are wrong, they should just be called out as they are, which is pretty damn near useless except for its noted effect at putting some eyeballs to the ink and connecting the concept with a few more neurons on the highway than it would have met with previously. So whilst sitting in bumper to bumper traffic, a few more peeps can glimpse a vision of a clear, blue getaway, and maybe they will do something about it–something beyond just slapping a similar sticker on the back of their car.

Because while this sort of “non-action” is all well and good, what really irks me beyond belief is the dangerous assumption by people — like Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth and 350.org (a site I will excoriate a bit more in detail briefly) — that this is actually contributing to change in the slightest.

It’s like saying, well I put a “Change We Can Believe In” sticker in my yard, so hopefully none of the scary black folks who live in our quickly gentrifying neighborhood will ever have a beef with us, because we “believe in change”. … Well, are you doing anything ELSE about it?

Most recently, the website 350.org began running a campaign that has been furthered by none other than the content hungry LA Times that aims to “change the world” with an awareness day this October 24th that will put 350 people doing various things all around the world to publicize this little stat that they feel is so crucial : “that 350ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere is the current safe maximum number agreed upon by various scientists for the earth to continue functioning in stasis” — that is, without major cataclysm…

Our plan is simple. We asked people around the world, through our website, to hold organized actions on Oct. 24 — from high in the Himalayas to underwater on the Great Barrier Reef, from Easter Island to inner-city America — in an effort to take that number and drive it into the human imagination. … Already, more than 700 actions have been planned in a third of the countries of the world. There will be 350 bicyclists leaving on 350-kilometer trips, and 350 surfers on the waves in one beach town after another; 350 divers at the Great Barrier Reef.

Environmental groups from across the spectrum have pledged to help, as have human rights organizations such as Oxfam, and big networks of young people in the developing world, and leaders from every faith community — hundreds of churches have pledged to ring their bells 350 times on Oct. 24.

Great point about the numbers, Bill. But I think us ringing 350 bells isn’t going to get us much closer to getting any real money for clean energy research. Neither is 350 people dressed as polar bears. Or 350 surfers surfing new breaks that didn’t exist before the most recent sea rise.

If empty PR and/or blog traffic is what you’re after, then by all means go right ahead. I just wonder what would happen if all this energy we put into “theater” was redirected into actual meaningful protest and action. Then again, if we did that then we’d have to fire the people in charge; and I doubt those presidents who blog for their own ineffective org’s are all too ready to step down…?

I’m just saying: maybe you should demand change instead of speaking about it in a rap song released on creative commons…

It will not be easy, and it will not be clean, and more than likely some people will get hurt; but those are the casualties of real movements.

Do something, sure; but why not do something smart…

* UPDATE: The Obama administration is making great strides in most arenas, accomplishing all but a 180º turnaround on just about everything that Bush was doing horribly wrong. On climate change, and the clean energy solution his stance has proven to be cautious (at least preliminarily) and rather pedestrian. If this is change we can believe in then how do we end up with the Waxman-Markey cap and trade solution? How do we get Diane Feinstein coming out with open opposition to solar plants in the desert because of a turtle? The answer that it’s liberals doing what liberals do best, and that is: destroying each other, is not what I’d call productive. We need to end the infighting, and along the way some things will have to be sacrificed. Hopefully, what we will end up with is something other than just a liberal back-slapping circle-jerk. Only time will tell…

Breakingthrough the Noise

I work for a great company called the Breakthrough Institute. My two bosses, Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus wrote an amazing thesis called the Death of Environmentalism, which argued that global warming, unlike the rest of the problems faced by the environmental movement thus far (like CFC’s and other specific pollutants), was bigger than just a small tweak here or there. For the atmosphere to chill out, it’s basically decarbonize or bust. And that requires large public investment.

The book they went on to publish would advocate for the same, while coupling it with social science research done by our partner firm American Environics, a public opinion and social science research think-tank which I also work for (it’s complicated, but we all share the same projects: one company grew out of the other. To make it fun, we share the office with a third company, who’s (almost) completely unrelated–except for the fact that they field our data survey. These wacky interconnected times!!)

In between balancing the books, and managing the office and keeping the server running I also sometimes find the time to pen a blog or two about what’s fucked today with climate policy or social science. I try not to make any jokes, as that is paramount to not being an unserious dude–as unserious dudes, it seems, cannot be serious about changing the world. It’s like wearing a suit at church was in the 1950’s. But if that’s what ya gotta do, then that’s what ya gotta do, right? (Let a few slip by occasionally, but who’s counting…) Walk the walk, brother. No use yammering at the gates if all you got to do is to cut your hair and put on a nice natural fiber shirt and then you can at least get the media on your side.

Sure, I would like to be playing a more analytical and prosaic role, as opposed to managing the books. But I’ve been a greenie to the core, and a dissatisfied one for nearly half that. As such, given the opportunity, it feels great to be a part of something unique. Plus, I can turn out a pretty good blog post or two, given the chance.

Check out my stuff here, collectively. (http://thebreakthrough.org/blog/tyler-burton/)

Also, what I’ve done for American Environics here. (http://americanenvironics.com/blog/tyler-burton/)

So Fresh Y So Clean

Good Morning, Bienvenido, Wie geht dir? Welcome to the new “Wonderful World of the Jabberlope”. I hope you like the new site update. I find far too little time to blog these days, mostly because I’ve realized that 92% of the time I’m just rehashing shit that’s already been said, and if that’s the case then, I realized, I can do that in less that 140 characters almost 94% of the time.

Speaking of, you can follow me on twitter at http://twitter.com/jabberlope. 

And until I can figure out how to get WordPress to import my twitter feed directly into my blog, I plan to use this space here, then, for things that require more than just 140 characters; which is pretty much anything but the most rudimentary sentence structure and the most straight-forward point of view. Also, finally and for the first time, I’ve started to put my fiction writing front and center, which, for a fiction writer, is something of what you might call a step in the right direction. 

Until the next time…

UPDATE :: The RSS feed is now live. Join here.

Jabberlope.com is changing SOON!

Stay tuned.
Makeover in progress!

Warm it up, Lawrence

Lawrence Livermore Lab’s long overdue fusion generator (the National Ignition Facility) is un-officially finished. At a cost of roughly $4 billion dollars, hopes are for the NIF to boil hydrogen to the point that it reaches fusion and for that fusion reaction to ultimately reach the point of “ignition” — that is, when the experiment becomes self-sustainable.

To do that requires some pretty snazzy computing skills though!

Like a giant strainer for the Flying Spaghetti Monster

Every NIF experimental shot requires the coordination of up to 60,000 control points for electronic, high voltage, optical and mechanical devices – motorized mirrors and lenses, energy and power sensors, video cameras, laser amplifiers and diagnostic instruments. Achieving this level of precision requires a large-scale computer control system as sophisticated as any in government service or private industry. The meticulous orchestration of these parts will result in the propagation of 192 separate nanosecond-long bursts of light over a one-kilometer path length. The 192 separate beams must have optical pathlengths equal to within nine millimeters so that the pulses can arrive within 30 picoseconds of each other at the center of the target chamber. Then they must strike within 50 micrometers of their assigned spot on a target the size of a pencil eraser. Because the precise alignment of NIF’s laser beams is extremely important for successful operation, the requirements for vibrational, thermal and seismic stability are unusually demanding. Critical components, weighing tens of tons, were located to a precision of 100 microns using a rigorous engineering process for design validation and as-installed verification.

Well, at least if it fails the engineers can say they didn’t waste their time playing Crysis.

(via Wikipedia’s home page 3/31/09)