Where it All Ends

At dinner tonight my wife, Mandy, and I began discussing that we like our life. We said things like “I love our house” and “I love our kids.” We went on to enumerate many things about which we feel very blessed. They included our families, our friends, our town, our church, our dogs, and our bedroom (*wink).

As we wound down the conversation and shared a moment of silence, we heard our our 2-year-old son, Jackson, in the background.

“I like my sippy and Lightning McQueen,” he said very matter-of-factly.

How cool is that?! Leo Laporte, THE Tech Guy, talked about my photograph on his show today! I’m now a minor celeb among the geek crowd…

Leo has a radio show about technology. One of the things he discusses is digital photography. He and Chris Marquardt, from www.tipsfromthetopfloor.com give out one word assignments for their listeners to photograph. The word this time was “silly” and I entered. They then choose three or four pics from all the entries to talk about on the show, and they picked mine!

The show notes for the episode are here http://techguylabs.com/radio/ShowNotes/Show464 and here is the winning shot:

I give Pete Townshend a lot of credit. OK, I give him a TON of credit. I think he saved Rock and Roll, invented Punk, and led the greatest live Rock act ever to have graced the stage. And that is when I try to downplay his influence! At the very least, he is the single greatest writer of Rock songs evah!

I just watched VH1 Classics “Calssic Albums” take on “Who’s next.” Pete was describing where he wanted to go, and what he imagined as the future as a follow-up to the wildly successful “Tommy.” He said the following regarding his “Lifehouse” project.

“How could I make the subject of this new piece, this Lifehouse piece, I want the story to be about music, I want it to be about the future, I want it to be about hope and vision, but it’s got to be rooted in reality, got to look at the possible problems…..How could I make my character effectively deaf, dumb and blind without doing it again, you know? And I tought, I know what I’ll do. I’ll make him live in the future, and I’ll put him in a suit. And he’ll be in this suit and he won’t live real life, he’ll live pretend life. He’ll live spoonfed life. He’ll live couch potato life. He’ll live the life that film makers, story tellers, advertisers, political manipulators, and brain washers want him to live. And thus, he’ll be effectively deaf, dumb and blind to his spiritual potential which is his freedom to congregate with other human beings, interact with other human beings, and live what we now call life.”

Call me crazy, but he just described the internet. Cookies and bots know us better than we know ourselves. The more we “know” about things, the more we lose touch with the reality of things.

Remember, Pete is having these ideas in 1971. There was no internet, the PC was 20+ years away, and there was no “suit.” Pete was describing the future in the terms that he understood; a Rock concert.