The Raven

Saturday, November 23, 2002

Coffee Talk

I always thought a coffee house was a place where you could get a cup of coffee, and chat with people if you felt like it. This must put me in a minority, because according to this story over at the LA Times, "Coversation Cafes" are a "new phenomenon" breaking out all over the country.

Yikes, I think, there's got to be more to it than that. Seems that in these coversation-oriented establishments, they have signs up telling people what sort of conversations are going on at which tables, posted guidelines for talking rules, a lot of structure.

"Whenever two people engage in conversation, it not only impacts the individuals...the people change society," said Vicki Robin, who came up with the idea for the chatter-house cafes.

Ah, it's the old Power of Communication thing. It's amazing what you can package nowadays. Here, it's social interaction for the price of a cafe latte. Robin's places have "trained cafe hosts" who guide the talk around specific issues. I took a look at their Website, conversationcafe.org, and found that they have a 5-Step Program for talking to people. Works like this:

Level 1
Glance up from your book to see who else is around. Say hello to the bus driver who has driven you to work for 6 years.

Level 2
Glance up from your book, catch someone's eye, and smile. Quickly, go back to reading. Smile at the bus driver, say good morning, and thank her as you get off.

Level 3
Comment on what someone near you is reading. Sustain a one-minute exchange. At the bus stop, say good morning to someone who has waited with you for the bus for years. Ask them how they are.

Level 4
Come to a Conversation Café. Only talk when you want to. Make up a bogus name if you need to. Promise yourself you can politely leave after half an hour if you are suffocating, angry, scared, bored, or sitting with people so much smarter or dumber than you that it's not worth your time.

Level 5
Talk. Listen, Learn. At will. Feel at home in your skin. Feel at home in the world.

Something must be wrong with our society if people need this much guidance to interact socially. Still, if you're feeling isolated and trapped in the weird solitude big cities can enmesh you with, it could be interesting to drop into one of these places.

Classic Headline

Nigerian Beauty Pageant Turns Ugly. Wish I'd thought of that one. But I gotta say, half the fun of doing this is thinking up good headlines. It requires an odd sort of skill that you get better at with practice.

Oops

Over in Fort Worth, Texas, James Andrew Smith was giving a PowerPoint presentation at Exel Inc., and using his own laptop connected to one of those In-Focus projector deals. As he was wrapping up, "he tried to open another document on his laptop computer."

The image of the young, nude boy appeared on screen, according to the co-workers.

Smith, a businessman and former pastor, tried to explain this away as a "computer virus" but nobody bought that line of malarky and the cops nailed him with porn on his disks, and "65 pages of printed child pornography."

Moral of the story? If you're a scumbag you're eventually gonna get caught and sent to jail.

8:32:21 PM

Guerilla TV

I like the Idiot Box as much as the next guy. I try to avoid spending too much time slacking around watching it, but when something good is on, sure, I'll tune in. Shows like OZ on HBO blur the line between TV and film, and when NBC cancelled Freaks and Geeks, I shot 'em an e-mail in protest because that particular program was the story of my high-school life. I understand viewer disappointment.

But the Farscape fans have gone to a whole new level: They've been taking up a collection to produce a commercial that begs the SciFi channel to revive the outerspace soap opera.

Last week, fans sent out dozens of press kits to TV stations and networks drawing attention to the ad.

If you want to see what they're working on, the Save Farscape headquarters has links that explicate the fan's efforts, which look like strung together Apple iMovies in which gung-ho Farscapers praise the program. Watch David here, who seems quite impassioned about all of this. You can view other fan's efforts, too, but David is definitely The Man. Look at the guy's desk—he's totally wired, but what's worth noticing is the end where he says, "I am Farscape" and logo fades in.

These people aren't just putting up Web pages, they're producing their own commerical video and getting it distributed for on-air playtime. This could go way beyond pleading for the resurrection of a TV series, it could branch into politics, environmentalism, whatever we think is important to us.

Digital cameras and desktop video publishing are powerful tools and if these people pull something off here, it indicates that we can use those tools to widen public discussion beyond the boundaries established by corporate interests.

Pey it Forward

Jonathan Fowler, an American Indian, was in court yesterday arguing that he should be able to administer a religious sacrament to his son in a religious ceremony. In this case, what's notable is that the sacrament is peyote and his son is four years old.

The Raven believes we should all have more control over our states of conciousness and we don't think the federal government should be legislating our perception of reality. That is, in a sense, the most profound intrusion of all. Still, giving peyote to a four-year-old? Fowler wants to smear mescaline paste on his son's forehead, which is a bit different than letting the kid chew a dozen buttons, but there's still something unnerving about administering any kind of hallucinogen to a toddler.

While expert testimony presented during the court hearing did establish that there is no record of any adult or child being harmed by ceremonial drug use in cases like this, don't you want to say, "Um, maybe the kid should be a bit older," just on general principles of developmental psychology? Childhood's tough enough as it is.

How Did This Happen?

Somehow, some way, 34-year-old Lynn Stuckey has managed to breast-feed her son for eight years.

Didn't anybody notice this? You'd think someone would have stepped up and said, "Hey, Lynn, the kid's 8 years old fer crissake, it's weaning time already! The state finally did, and Judge John DeLaMar elected yesterday to allow her to retain custody of the boy while Children and Family Services keeps a close watch on things.

DeLaMar said Stuckey's most misguided decision was appearing on ABC's "Good Morning America" program to promote her philosophy of letting her son slowly wean himself from breast feeding.

This kid is going to be one weird date in high school.

1:12:52 PM