The Blog of Wistar Watts Murray

This is a profoundly geeky thing to blog about, but perhaps it will widen my fan base to include online gamers and Wikipedians, my most neglected demographic.

Web 2.0 guru Clay Shirky recently published a book entitled Here Comes Everybody. I am dying to read this book due to the persuasive strength of “Gin, Television, and Social Surplus,” a talk the author gave at a nerd conference last week.

Shirky believes that modern society functions with a massive cognitive surplus, a surplus we primarily devote to drinking liquor and watching TV. But recently Web 2.0 - the gospel of society’s consuming, producing, and sharing information instead of just idly absorbing it - has engaged this cognitive surplus in a more worthwhile way. Now people can devote millions of hours to debating the planetary integrity of Pluto on the internet, whereas 15 years ago those same hours would have been spent on sitcom reruns.

This, believe it or not, is progress. Information is becoming more inclusive than exclusive, more interactive than inactive, more loving sex partner than life-size blow-up doll. But we can still lament the ’90s brain drain of thousands of MTV hours, time that I could have passed blogging, or that you could have passed reading and commenting on my blog.

Congratulations to the brains behind the presumably fake Frrvrr.com.

Frrvrr uses cutting-edge technology to identify topics you might be interested in based on your browsing history, public records, health records, email activity, legal filings, and web profiles. Frrvrr then directs you to those topics and connects you with similar-minded people.

It’s enough to strike fear into the heart of every web surfer.

When you sign up, Frrvrr’s AvaTroll Accelerator™ will download itself onto your desktop and begin cataloguing your web history, or “webtory,” from the past eight months. Once it gathers all of your information, it creates a personalized avatar of you based on the snapshot of you gleaned from web usage and sites visited.

No one wants to look into that mirror. Frrvrr is the absurd conclusion to the booming personalization business. Technology will know you better than you know yourself. You’re not surprising anyone with your love for awfulplasticsurgery.com. That love was mapped out years ago when your web surfing algorithm incorporated your encrypted medical records. And incidentally, we think you’re gay.

Egg to chicken. AKA breakfast to dinner in five seconds.

So gross, and yet so amazing. Is that you, God, all covered in mucus and hair?

I wish there was an appropriate segue here between my post about the vagina clown car and this post about a 97-year-old Polish woman who saved thousands of Jewish children from the concentration camps during World War II. But there’s not and there never will be, and that’s just how life is.

Mrs. Sendler, code name “Jolanta,” smuggled 2,500 children out of the Warsaw Ghetto during the last three months before its liquidation. She found a home for each child. Each was given a new name and a new identity as a Christian. Others were saving Jewish children, too, but many of those children were saved only in body; tragically, they disappeared from the Jewish people. Irena did all she could to ensure that “her children” would have a future as part of their own people.

Incidentally, Mrs. Sendler was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize this year, but lost out to Al Gore. I would hate to be on the prize selection committee and have to make those tough choices, but it would probably make me feel a lot better about humanity to read all those outstanding CVs.

This morning I caught this moving story on NPR about an archaeological dig taking place on a former slave plantation in Talbot County, Maryland, not far from the town where I used to live. Thousands of slaves inhabited Wye House Farm across the Chesapeake Bay from the 1650s onward. Many of the Maryland slaves joined the Union Army during the Civil War and then came back to the old plantation to farm their own parcels of land and to build their own churches and schools. Today, ancestors of the slaveholders and ancestors of the slaves live down the road from each other. They are all watching the archaeological dig with great interest.

Harriet Lowery, a local resident and descendant of Wye House slaves, wholeheartedly supports the dig. She says (and the written quote doesn’t do her words  justice - you have to listen to the broadcast):

It’s very hard for us to find out our roots a lot of times and so to see something so real - to hear about something so real - gave me a sense of pride…it gave me a feeling of being in touch with my ancestors.

NPR journalist John Ydstie writes that:

Lowery has been tracing her family history in the area, hoping to find some small consolation that the lives of her ancestors contained some joy.

In his memoirs, Douglass recounts the killing of a slave named Demby — likely one of Lowery’s ancestors — by an overseer at Wye House Farm named Gore. Douglass wrote that Gore whipped Demby, who ran to the river to soothe his wounds. He refused to come out, and Gore shot him.

Lowery says she was deeply touched by a few small beads and pieces of pottery excavated on the Long Green and brought to St. Stephens for display.

“It was amazing to me that they had a necklace or earring. And there was one particular bowl … it reminded me of a bowl my mother had,” Lowery said. “It’s comforting to me to know at least there were some peaceful times.”

You can read more Maryland slave narratives here.

When will American industrialists realize that they have created a chemical Molotov cocktail? If people don’t care about the environment, they can at least care about their gay babies and their back fat.

“Except for the small amount that’s been incinerated—and it’s a very small amount—every bit of plastic ever made still exists,” [Captain Charles] Moore says, describing how the material’s molecular structure resists biodegradation. Instead, plastic crumbles into ever-tinier fragments as it’s exposed to sunlight and the elements. And none of these untold gazillions of fragments is disappearing anytime soon: Even when plastic is broken down to a single molecule, it remains too tough for biodegradation.

1. Website that makes the correlation between multi-vitamins and acne.

2. Website about how our contaminated water supply is making babies gay.

3. www.eatingpiewithcelebrities.com - Photoshopped pictures of me binge-eating with famous people.

Those are the only ones I have been wanting to launch for a while now. Lengthening the list would just be being facetious.

Check out these “book autopsies.” So cool.

I just stumbled upon this amazing site, detailing final meal requests from Texas death row inmates. If I had a million dollars, I would commission a psychological study based on this data. Why would Frank McFarland, who raped and brutally murdered a shoe shine girl, request:

Heaping portion of lettuce, a sliced tomato, a sliced cucumber, four celery stalks, four sticks of American or Cheddar cheese, two bananas and two cold half pints of milk. Asked that all vegetables be washed prior to serving. Also asked that the cheese sticks be clean.

Then there’s Miguel Richardson, who murdered a hotel security guard. He requests:

Chocolate birthday cake with “2/23/90″ written on top, seven pink candles, one coconut, kiwi fruit juice, pineapple juice, one mango, grapes, lettuce, cottage cheese, peaches, one banana, one delicious apple, chef salad without meat and with thousand island dressing, fruit salad, cheese, and tomato slice.

But I am almost more fascinated by the killers who don’t request anything special for a final meal. They’re just done with life and its simple pleasures. “None,” says the table. The whole thing makes me very sad. Especially this line: “* The final meal requested may not reflect the actual final meal served,” and the fact that one man, who had stabbed two young Austin women to death, requested the Eucharist before his execution.