JOHN THE OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
© 2006
Observations While Attempting to Lurk
I spend a significant portion of my time attempting to find deserted places wherein I can walk and think about a) myself, b) nature and c) not the wretched, intrusive goons who comprise 99 percent of the human species.
There’s a grand garden cemetery near my home; a lovely arboretum, too. They’re considered giant back yards for crapping, wildlife-scaring dogs by the overprivileged, child/slave-substituting set.
There are
charming, brick-and-gaslamp streets around town. They
typically contain prototypical East Coasters who will slam head-on into you;
people wandering under the influence of cell phones; joggers with iPod Doppler effects; beggars; cars parked on the sidewalk
with impunity; and/or someone wearing enough perfume to evoke a bad day at
The deserted places, of course, do not exist absolutely. All is in flux, everything is under exploitation, and people will always pop up where you least expect, or accept, them.
But desertion does exist for brief times—on a sapling-shrouded glacial ridge, on a street mantled by dusk and mist from freshly spent rain. When I search long enough, those moments find me.
And then, do I have my exquisite, gem-like thoughts; poignant, nameless emotions; incisive yet wonderstruck observations of the cosmos?
Yeah, you bet I do. But mostly I think the aimless, disjointed thoughts that follow, just like I do the rest of the time.
Sigh.
The Birth of Fascism
On a sunny summer day several weeks ago, I was downtown with a fast-food lunch in hand, looking puma-like for a safe place to eat it. I discovered a relatively thin berm of grass in the shade of a church, elevated above the sidewalk by a wall. It was nice spot, but not inviting per se—which is why I chose it.
I nearly made it through lunch pleasantly enough, with my book and a couple of sparrows as company. Then two women arrived and sat on the edge of the wall, within 10, perhaps even 8, feet of me, talking, violating every precept of proxemics and otherwise annoying the hell out of me.
I looked around. The shaded part of the wall and grassy area was at least 50 feet long and otherwise unpopulated. I was near one end of it. There were plenty of other sectors they could have chosen. And yet there they were, right there.
“But I’m right here! Why?!” I thought in protest.
Then I realized I had answered my own question, and was gazing upon the paradox of pioneering and the death of revolutions.
Epistemology
We can never know more than we can imagine, but we can imagine more than we know.
Architecture, Tenuous
and Tenebrous
One of the nice things about being a poorly socialized doofus is that nobody ever told me it’s hokey to find melancholy in strolling past houses at twilight.
I like their sense of mysterious other lives, other ways, their safety and their strangeness. I pay them mind.
I’ve been around old houses my whole life. I tend to think of them as solid, permanent, ancient, even in this era of two-by-fours and Tyvek.
But over the past year or so, the opposite reality has begun to intrude on my naivete: how short buildings last. It’s 30 years before major renovations, if you’re lucky. People tear down 20-year-old structures without a thought. Even on the grand old houses that remain, how quickly did the decorations and fillips wear down? Certainly before my time; but also, I now hazard to guess, within that of their original owners.
Constructing a house or an even larger building is hard, complex work. It establishes a home for a family or an institution. Its completion is considered a triumph for the laborers and the owners alike.
And yet, how rapidly they decay, how even more quickly we demolish the vast majority of them.
I’ve noticed this firsthand thanks to my own ever-increasing age, which perhaps is on my mind as I contemplate this architectural disintegration and disregard.
But there’s another, vaguer yet more familiar feeling as well—a sense that somehow I have misread the builders’ intent, and that there is darkness in it.
Some houses are haunted, at least according to the facile ghost junk that fills entire cable channels. Haunted houses are always ramshackle houses, which perhaps speaks to the melancholy of such things.
But I think it speaks to something else as well. We had a “haunted house” when I was a kid, of course—a decaying, pine-veiled Victorian with terrifying dogs outside and an elderly couple living in just a couple of the rooms inside. Back then, that was just “spooky.”
Every town
has a house like that. There was just a story in the news about an
That’s another perspective that changes with age. You get a better handle on horror. Some houses are indeed haunted—by poverty.
Rooftops bring me much cheerier thoughts. On flat-topped apartment buildings and factories, you can see those ventilation pipes capped with a ribbed cylinder slowly rotating under whatever mysterious vapors or heat rises from within.
Those things, whatever they may be called, along with water towers, were staples of “Spider-Man” comic books, and still symbolize to me their air of gritty freedom. (Perhaps in latter days those perpetual-motion vents remind me of a more realistic superhero, Ninjalicious, and a more concrete brand of freedom, “Infiltration.”) In the comics, rooftops were so high they were invisible, so industrial they were desolate.
They were desert places, and superheroes always perched on them to think.
* * * * * *
Bonus non-lurking thoughts:
E.T. Foam Home
NASA is
getting ready to launch the space shuttle again, complete with the spray-on
foam insulation that always busts off at launch, and, a few years ago, punched
a lethal hole in the shuttle “
Normally, I’d pick up the phone and ask NASA these things. But the rain/reign of foam is so patently asinine to begin with, what’s the point of sullying the purity of my disgust? Why doesn’t somebody else ask why for a change? Say, the people making six figures to cover NASA for the networks and wire services?
In Search of Google
Google has quietly started to suck.
The search engine is so ubiquitous it’s actually taken me months to notice. But I do a lot of comparison surfing on Google and Yahoo!, and the latter has become (I say through gritted teeth) far superior.
Google is increasingly choked with irrelevant doorway pages and similar spam sites. Yahoo!’s search is noticeably more precise.
It now takes Google as long as 10 days, usually around five days, to crawl and index an updated site. Yahoo! rarely takes more than a day, often less—like Google used to.
One of Google’s best features, the caching of older versions of web pages, is simply down about 25 percent of the time, and doesn’t work at all or very well for specific pages about another 25 percent of the time. I have yet to find a problem with Yahoo!’s caching.
And here’s one that cuts to the heart of the matter: Google’s whole aura was built on indexing more pages, thus returning more results, than anybody. Yahoo! now easily returns more, not to mention better, results.
Google always had its problems. I thought the old HotBot was a much more refined engine back in the day; Google eventually beat it out, at least in my mind (and as its name implies), on sheer quantity of indexed pages, not any particular feature.
Now Google seems to be succumbing to itself. The company is famous for putting out quivering beta-ware products and letting them languish unimproved (or at least developed at a glacial pace). Its outstanding Gmail e-mail program (used and endorsed by yours truly) is still in beta even though it’s ubiquitous. Its selling point is ever-increasing free e-mail storage space, which you used to be able to watch tick up by the megabyte every few seconds on the Gmail page. Now that’s turned into a vaporware stunt, ticking away at the sixth decimal place.
While Google is famous for this languishing, it seems nobody’s noticed it’s happening to Google itself, dba the core search engine.
Now, don’t get me wrong—Yahoo! is evil. Until 2004, it just used Google’s search engine as it own. Then it came up with its own, though it still apes Google’s format in every respect. It’s just better, is all.
In fact, it
may have been better from the start. When Yahoo!’s
own search debuted, SearchEngineWatch.com editor Chris Sherman wrote,
“Interestingly, in almost all my tests with random queries, Yahoo [sic] reports
more results found than Google.” But
Because Google is god. Google is a verb. Google has to be the best. It’s unthinkable for it to be otherwise, even when it’s right there in the “Results 1-10.”
I do not want to see the China-buddying, censorship-loving, spam-enabling, dumbest-name-in-an-industry-of-dumb-names-having and, above all, Yahoo! Answers-inventing company beat the “Don’t Be Evil” company. For now, I’m sticking with Google. But I’m double-checking with Yahoo!
Then again, that’s what I once did with HotBot and Google.
P.S.: Postmodern
Irony Becomes Real; Universe Implodes
Gmail gives you advertising search results based on the contents of your e-mails. When I recently looked in my Gmail spam file, I was also given advertising (that is to say, loosely, spam) for Spam recipes.
1 Reported by Associated Press,
2 “Yahoo! Birth of a New Machine,”
Posted