Very Small Things

That tiny pale dot so delicately placed inside that red square is
the Earth viewed from the Cassini spacecraft now orbiting Saturn 1.5
billion km from our planet.

And to shamelessly paraphrase Carl Sagan’s brilliant words in Pale Blue Dot,
that tiny speck is the home of everything we know and love — all those
people, those places, those things we enjoy and despise and desire and
kill and “struggle” for. Everything is in that tiny dot. From this
perspective, it’s very easy to realize how all our grand designs,
“immortal” aspirations, and sheer egoism is pathetically laughable — as all those “great” things will never go beyond the fragile
confines of that tiny speck we call home.

And still you think you’re such a big shot?

Pope to Convert to Islam to Appease Muslims

[...I'm still waiting for the "real" news to match this headline.]

“In The Future, Everyone Will Be Anonymous For 15 Minutes”

…and other jarring/hilarious paraphernalia seen at the special VIP preview of Banksy’s “Barely Legal” guerilla art installation in LA on Thursday.

Eerie 1979 Print Ad Foreshadows 9/11

Pakistan Airlines ran this ad on Le Point and several other
publications on March 17, 1979. Months later, Osama bin Laden was
probably in some hill in Afghanistan taking a dump with a roll of old
newspaper. He unrolls the newspaper to wipe his ass, and what does he
see? This ad, advertising nonstop flights to New York.

He wouldn’t have remembered the particular page if not for the
sorry, unforgettable moment the wind snatched it from his hand, which
makes him running after it, his stinking, freshly crapped ass fully
exposed to the sight of Russian snipers.

Today’s Roundhouse Kick to the Head is Brought to You By…

Gaping void.

Steve Jobs and Wozniak in 1976

In 1976, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were
in a room making out, which is normal, not-really-gay behavior for two
nerdy guys.

Wozniak sees a camera and wonders, “Does it have film?”

Jobs says, “Click it and see, goddamit.”

Fumbles with the camera and sighs like a schoolgirl. “How?”

Jobs says, “What do you mean how? It’s a goddamn instamatic. It’s just like biting an apple.”

And both of them stop and stare at each other; this is a great eureka moment.

So Apple was born. Touche!

Once Again, with Feeling: the Mob Doesn’t Think

Common sense dictates that “groupthinking” is the best way to run
the world, but one unflinching look at festering “democracies,” ugly
committee-bred videogames, or corporate team-based work unravels the
contrary. As David Freedman puts it so simply, “Collaboration is the
hottest buzzword in business today. Too bad it doesn’t work.”

This write-up on INC is so fascinating that I easily surrender to
the seduction of stealing large swaths of text and indulging in
blatant copy-and-paste behavior.

“Is there anyone more loathed in office culture than the
autocratic decision maker who ignores the opinion of the group? It’s
Business 101: Get lots of input, put your heads together, reach a
consensus. The primacy of groups and teamwork is so ingrained that we
seldom stop to think about it anymore. Now in the age of instant
messaging, wikis, social networking sites, and videoconferencing on
cell phones, collaboration and consensus are gaining yet more currency.
We can, and often do, get everyone to weigh in, all the time, whether
it’s by cell phone, e-mail, or instant message. As James Surowiecki
nicely puts it in the title of his best-selling book, it’s “the wisdom
of crowds,” and it’s a glorious thing.”

“So what about the wisdom of crowds? Did Surowiecki really get it
wrong? Not necessarily. He simply focused on the sorts of situations in
which large groups of people can in fact work pretty well. A group of
investors will usually outperform a single expert; the bad opinions in
the crowd tend to cancel out, so that the average is “wise.” Google can
tap a sea of websites to provide useful answers, and crowds have done a
great job creating Linux, because in these cases useful contributions
from the crowd can be leveraged while noncontributors stay harmlessly
out of the way. And to his credit, Surowiecki does note that crowds
often are not very wise at all.”

“What he glosses over, however, is the often spectacular way groups
fail in the context of organizations. Consider that paragon of group
magic, the brainstorming session. Bernard Nijstad, a psychologist at
the University of Amsterdam, explains that if you take a group of 12
people and have half brainstorm together on a topic while the other six
go it alone, all 12 will usually agree that the group experience was
more productive–even though those working alone almost always end up
with more good ideas. Nijstad believes it’s because people in groups
spend most of their time listening to others rather than thinking on
their own, while lone brainstormers are forced to stew in productive
but unpleasant silence. “When you’re alone, it’s painfully clear when
you’re not producing. In a group you can just sit there and not notice
you’re not contributing,” Nijstad says. No wonder we love to work in
groups.”

It reminds me of the usual question I’d get when job interviews were
still a part of my life: “How well do you work with a team?” I’d
usually answer it by wowing the interviewer with fascinating tales of
my flawless, team-loving character. Although everybody who knows me
would probably squirm in their seat as they hear me lie through my
teeth; they know very well how fiercely and hopelessly I’m a lone wolf,
that I despise opinion when it’s coming from groups, that I value above
all else the wild beauty of “productive but unpleasant silence.”

If You’re an “Artist,” Let Steven Soderbergh Cut Your Crap

This is a blog post where I just magically shut up and let Steve dance, dance, dance…

• “How do people change their minds? What is the process by which a
  person changes their mind about a deeply held belief? What’s the thing
  that clicks over for them? I have no idea.”
• “The original idea for (Bubble) came from a news story
  that the writer and I had seen—remember that news story about the woman
  who went into an ER with an infant and said, “I just gave birth to this
  baby”? She was, like, covered in blood. “I just gave birth to this
  baby, would you help me?” The ER people knew immediately something was
  wrong. It turned out she’d killed her friend at work, who was pregnant,
  and took the baby out of her stomach and brought it to the ER. And this
  was all because this woman wanted a baby and was jealous that her
  friend was having one. This was the craziest thing I ever read. We were
  talking about this line that gets crossed…”
• “The hardest thing in the world. It’s really easy to be obscure and
  elliptical and so fucking hard to be good and clear. It breaks people.
  Because you don’t often get encouragement to do that, to be good and
  clear.”
• “A lot of people who write about art don’t understand the
  importance of failure, the importance of process. Woody Allen can’t
  leap from Annie Hall to Manhattan. He has to make Interiors in between to get to Manhattan. You’ve got to let him do that."

Big Deal, or no Big Deal

A special edition of Kris Aquino’s show features some of the country’s finest pond scum.

Kris Aquino: Growing body count of dead kiddie activists, big deal, or no big deal?

Jovito Palparan: No big deal!

Kris Aquino: Naked Oblation runners, big deal, or no big deal?

Raul Gonzales: No big deal!

Kris Aquino: Samson Macariola slipping bombs through Davao airport, big deal, or no big deal?

Rodrigo Duterte: No big deal!

Kris Aquino: Guimaras oil spill, big deal, or no big deal?

GMA: No big deal!

Petron: No big deal!

Guimaras resident: What, now you want my opinion?

Petron’s oil tanker hull insurer: Big deal!… And screw you!

Kris Aquino: 60-day suspension, big deal, or no big deal?

Peewee Trinidad: No big deal!… And screw you!

Kris Aquino: Juan Ponce Enrile supplying my imprisoned dad, Ninoy, with hookers at Fort Bonifacio, big deal or no big deal?

Cory Aquino: [sarcastic] Big deal!.. And scre—er, let’s all just pray.

And the winner is…

Nobody.

Banksy’s Manifesto

They all were dying, and the only thing that started to bring back their humanity, their individuality… was lipstick.

I’m quoting, roughly, from Banksy’s manifesto. Banksy’s the guy who just recently launched a funny “guerilla attack” on Paris Hilton’s debut album.
But the humor, in my high-fallutin opinion, falls a bit flat. So I
resort to Banksy’s own website to dig up some dirt, only to find myself
gazing at the kind of story that made me wish I had written.

Banksy’s manifesto contains this extract from the diary of
Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first
British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945. The key word here
is something red and surprisingly vital; watch out.

“…Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too
weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we
had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just
anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was
scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself
with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a
child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived,
though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of
lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were
screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know
who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did
it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I
believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women
lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you
saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their
shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post
mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last
someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were
someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they
could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to
give them back their humanity.”