That glance is our tea-leaf read on the present, because it is too complex and interconnected to truly assess in depth. We go in depth only with our specialties—academic, or entertainment. Star Wars fanatics who chronicle every single Jedi character in the franchise’s books, movies and video games take great pleasure in mastering a subject, in large part because a fictional world is simple and shallow enough to actually be mastered. Whether this tea-leaf perception is ultimately valid is beside the point. It’s valid enough for the general public to make snap decisions, which are often the only decision made about how to regard abstract or remote events.

The Great Oracle Google
I hit upon this notion through Google searches. Google is becoming our oracle, who sorts through the reams of knowledge to deliver a pithy and easily recalled executive summary. We like this format: on the news, they summed up the temperaments of the presidential candidates as “hot-headed” and “cool and collected.” Thanks, NPR aggregating lady! I want to vote for the Cool guy.

Recent weird search experiences, which lead me to believe that Google and aggregation in general serve as our tea-reading oracle of a new breed of hyper-reality:

One: Refrigerators
My day job consists of building and maintaining an ecommerce site for a chain of appliance stores. It’s rather satisfying, actually (see the Star Wars geek reference above; similar finite pleasure). Because we’re spending fat bucks on programming, salesmen stalk me. One, selling Search Engine Optimization services, approached me with a sheaf of printouts of sample searches. We’re a local company, so most of the searches included the keyword “Portland.”

One search, however, was broad, merely the word “refrigerators.” Unsurprisingly, refrigerator manufacturers like Maytag and Frigidaire came up first…but fifth in the list was a website called “Women in Refrigerators.” I knew this one! It is a modest little site by a comic writer I know through online games and correspondence, Gail Simone. The site details her research into comic book misogyny expressed through violence directed at female characters (thus, the title is quite literal, and you can imagine the rest). The salesman hadn’t noticed this strange coincidence. To him it was internet noise, an unrelated search result or another reason why my company needed his services. To me, it was a hint that Google is creating an information tapestry quite outside the reach of advertising budgets.

Two: My Mom, the Model
Earlier this year my appendix decided it had had enough. It grumbled for a month, masquerading as gas pain, until an ultrasound revealed it to be swollen and hard. I went under the knife and came back to our half-moved into home doped up and unable to bend over. My mother, bless her heart, immediately leapt upon a plane to aid in my recovery. When my girlfriend (now wife) asked me for pictures so that she could identify her in the crowded airport, I came up short—they were packed away. I figured that my mother’s picture must be somewhere online, perhaps in a photo album of her Contradance group. Google, find my mother! I commanded.

To my surprise, her name, which is fairly uncommon unless you are Portuguese, turned up a surfeit of hits. Her own site, in fact. I clicked. Mom has never looked hotter! Or more like a charming 21 year old lingerie model! Fortunately, the connection was made despite Mom’s lack of search engine ranking. But the model had, for all intents and purposes to the outside world, taken sole possession of my mother’s name.

Three: Mainstream Media is Where It’s At
I am a skeptic. I know that mainstream media outlets are merely holdings of multinational corporations who subsist on revenue streams in any form. Yet I read them as much as I read the independent news outlets, whose reporting tends to be much more reliable. Why bother?

The MSM provide the surface read of events that the average citizen uses to suss out the contents of the jungle. With their ties to corporate entities, they can never take major risks on news stories that could jeopardize their masters’ tithes. A story bubbles up through the independent media and blogosphere, an informal vetting process, until enough sources are discussing it that it can pass for mainstream news. A recent example was the National Enquirer’s scoop on John Edwards’ affair. Half the story was the fact that it was the smutty National Enquirer that beat out legitimate news outlets on a major political scandal. Har har!

Sarah Palin fascinates me. She’s like a tourist shoved into the lion cage at the zoo by cynical zookeepers. Charismatic at first, her lack of experience or knowledge has turned her into a fascinating trainwreck. Independent media outlets were pointing fingers immediately at the spectacle, but it isn’t truly a mess until it hits the public consciousness as dictated by mainstream news. In other words, it isn’t news until it’s news. Have a look at the titles on a recent CNN story aggregation page about her:

• State rep seeks witness-tampering probe in Palin inquiry
• ‘Road to nowhere’ stands alone
• Is Palin avoiding the media?
• State rep seeks witness-tampering probe in Palin inquiry
• Alaska lawmakers: McCain campaign interfering in Palin probe
• Palin mingles with media in rare Q&A
• Pakistan’s president tells Palin she’s ‘gorgeous’
• Commentary: Sexist treatment of Palin must end
• Time.com: Those Crazy Internet Security Questions
• The bridge failed, but the ‘Road to Nowhere’ was built
• Trooper probe now ‘confidential,’ Palin aides say
• Palin meets with world leaders ahead of VP debate
• Time.com: Palin’s Troopergate Moves Getting Bad Reviews in Alaska

Not such a sunny outlook for McCain’s “Hail Mary” VP pick. Nothing positive (unless you count the fact that she’s irresistible to Pakistani officials), some veiled criticism (a “rare Q&A” with a political candidate is a bad sign), and a lot of information on her failings. If we were serious researchers, we might read each story to develop our own opinion about Mrs. Palin, but in fact the vast majority of the voting public has neither the time nor the will to go in depth. They use the tea leaf approach, which, judging by this “randomly generated” aggregation page on CNN, isn’t predicting a bright future for our VP hopeful.

The Executive Summary
To take the exploration further, we could check the story aggregators on Fox, MSNBC, NYT, and then give a glance at Google’s Top Stories, which scrapes the international press. It’s a picture that changes by the minute, thousands of pages of overlapping information, but the important thing is that most readers will take an executive summary (“She’s incompetent and mean”) away from such a search. Whether the executive summary has actual value is debatable — the term is often used derisively in reference to incompetent leadership — but people do employ it.

Why is the executive summary, tea leaf glance at events so pervasive in our country? At the showroom that shares the building with the administrative offices at my employer, there is a wall of flat screen televisions for sale. Sometimes they run programming from a promotional DVD, in sync, all twenty televisions; other times, a customer fiddles with the channels and creates a montage of moving images. In the past, such a collection of information devices has been a shortcut to suggesting that a nefarious supervillain monitors all events in the world at once. It’s de rigueur now for the garden variety supervillain to invest in plasma tvs and a bevy of cable theft boxes, but what are they watching? Do Oprah, Sally Jesse and the View all include secret tips to the safe combination in their shows? Or does our supervillain merely hope to be their own tea reading oracle?

These would be exciting, galvanizing exercises to help me dig deep down into my novel, were it not for the fact that I’m still digging out of several personal, medical and logistical crises. I’m still on high alert, a state not conducive for writing. But one of the goals of my efforts to solve these crises is to make time for writing, and thus I force myself to revisit the first chapter of the cowgirl book (tentatively entitled A World To Win) and prepare it for the eyes of my classmates.

The writing’s not bad. Readable, peppy, with a nice restraint on the Big Telling details (no more oil!). But it is the prose of a writer a year younger, one excited about freelancing and writing full time, one who has not yet begun to redefine his authorial voice and approach. In a way I feel as though I’m reading a classmate’s work. Is it still mine?

I am not so seasoned a writer that I have a process for assessing and re-engaging with old work. I fear lapses in style, lost undocumented nuance, quality contrasts between older and newer writing. In the thick of the project I can’t recognize change. My guitar style has always depended on my intrinsic imprecision. Can my writing style get away with the same inattention? It doesn’t have the benefit of 50 watts of tube driven power and overloading germanium resistors in a fuzzbox. There is a sense of discovery with the vintage sound, though, a fleeting, enigmatic window into the past.

McCain does not seem as adept at using spin to his advantage, and his “straight talk” can make his speeches fall flat from a motivational point of view, according to Branka Zei Pollermann, founder of the Vox Institute in Geneva, Switzerland, who has analysed the candidates’ voices for communication consultants Clearwater Advisors, based in London.

“The voice analysis profile for McCain looks very much like someone who is clinically depressed,” [emphasis mine] says Pollermann, a psychologist who uses voice analysis software in her work with patients. Previous research on mirror neurons has shown that listening to depressed voices can make others feel depressed themselves, she says.

Pollermann uses auditory analysis software to map seven parameters of a person’s speech, including pitch modulation, volume and fluency, to create a voice profile. She then compares that profile with the speaker’s facial expressions, using as a guide a set of facial expressions mapped out by Ekman, called the Facial Action Coding System, to develop an overall picture of how they express themselves.

I think this, more than Palin’s refusal to respond to subpoenas, will doom McCain-Palin 08. Dukakis and Gore were both tagged with the “boring” label and they could not shake it, regardless of their credibility or expertise.

Last night Heather and I, after days of research, hied ourselves hence to the VW dealership and leased a 2008 Jetta sedan. The choice seemed inevitable once we took into account her condition, the age of my current car (15 grand old years), the rattly-chuggily intrepid goodness of a sturdy car being driven into the ground, the comfort level, the fuel efficiency (rather, the lack thereof), the various small things going askew that were being triaged out of repair funds. In other words, no longer a bachelor, I can’t keep driving a beater.

Can’t? What an unfamiliar word to me! In the spirit of Hawkeye or Grizzly Adams, I fancied myself a rugged individualist who cared not a whit for the benefits of luxury. Yet by spurning luxury, I began to redefine the term while the rest of the civilized world crept past me. Sidedoor airbags? Fuel efficiency? Seats you can sit in for more than ten minutes? Unnecessary for a real man who has gear to haul!

And so today I sit in my seat with the same ass that rode here in a car younger than my friends’ children and mentally review the math on the purchase (it works, it works, I swear to you).

One of the inspirations for this radical decision was Stephen M. Pollan’s book Die Broke. In effect, by leasing we spend less each month for a better car; three years after the purchase, we flip the minimal downpayment over to the next car. While we don’t own the vehicle, cars depreciate so rapidly that ownership, and the option to sell, aren’t very lucrative. Five years after you buy a car, you’re paying off a loan based on the price of the new car, which is now worth half or less of its original price. Meanwhile, we have a fresh one every few years, with full warranty on a shiny new set of car guts with no wear and tear. We like this mode of thinking.

Moreover, we like the new eyes with which we see quality of life issues. We’re not in survivalist mode any more, shopping at thrift stores (well, sometimes), salvaging furniture, ignoring the opportunity to tailor our environment to our needs. With a good job, we can embrace some simple pleasures, such as new, comfortable furniture and a fresh coat of paint on the walls. Suddenly, our apartment is a pleasant place to be.

And the drive home ain’t so bad either.

As you can see, I am still trapped in this red/teal/white/black color scheme. Damn it, I like it! In fact, our bedroom now shares that color scheme, the same that I have used on the Bloodbaths book cover and the album “The Four Walls of Today” by my old band Royal Fuzz Combine. I bet if I looked I would find more instances of it. What is wrong with me?

Anyhow, it looks sharp. I’ll fight any man in the room who disagrees.

As with any new toy, I’ll be playing with it for a spell. I promised myself I’d blog more regularly about worthwhile things. Lately I have been experiencing writer’s block, and I (READER ALERT: WRITER COMPLAINS ABOUT WRITERS BLOCK HERE… BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH… OK, HE’S DONE) new priorities. You know how it is.

So yeah.

“The franchise really depends on me coming up with a good idea,” [George] Lucas said.

Link to actual context, but man, I larfed.

– Mick Jones, Big Audio Dynamite

We’re taking the plunge–Heather and I are now engaged. Happiness ensues!

But he said Sarcos appears to have overcome the key challenge of pairing super-fast microprocessors with sensors that detect movements by the body’s joints and transmit data about them to the suit’s internal computer.

Much as the brain sends signals to tendons to get muscles to move, the computer sends instructions to hydraulic valves. The valves mimic tendons by driving the suit’s mechanical limbs, replicating and amplifying the wearer’s movements almost instantly.

“With all the previous attempts at this technology, there has been a slight lag time between the intent of the human, and the actual movement of the machine,” Obusek said.

In the demonstration, the bulky suit slowed Jameson a bit, but he could move almost normally.

I particularly like the fact that the depicted tester is tall and lanky. Skinny boys, unite! Our robo-suits make us the big men on campus.

Read it here.

Heather is a fine writer who is responsible for the pithy blog sorrytobesoheavy.com, the upcoming Subatomic book Say Something Wrong, and of course for keeping me happy and harmonious. She’s also the bravest person I know for shacking up with me.

I can’t believe it. I’m a grown up now! What a heady feeling.