Now this is a quiet library. Unlike the Queens branches, where librarians and patrons alike routinely talk amongst each other at full volume, this place is as quiet as one would expect of the library stereotype we all know.
I brought the big fat tablet for the first time in a while.
The Second Avenue Subway, now that I’ve actually used it, is cooler than I thought. If you are, like I used to be, an upper east sider, then the new Q makes it way easier to get to Times Square and Herald Square. In my day, as was true until the 2nd Avenue line opened, the east side from 2nd Avenue over was bus country. I guess it might still be at York Avenue, where I used to live. But it’s a different transit landscape now for most of that part of town.
I don’t envy the years of explosions and gutting of 2nd Avenue and its environs. I heard about rats invading buildings which previously had basically never seen rodents, this on account of the explosions disturbing rat colonies underground and in unused buildings.
I’ve been thinking again about what it might take to get me back to the UES, maybe even in the same building I was in back in 1997. It was old — over 100 years, maybe even 150 — but not especially falling to shreds. The tiny studio I had there for $750 probably goes for double that today, even in that old place.
I am attending a concert later. I have not been to a classical concert in a while, unless Lubomyr Melnyk counts as strictly “classical”. Even that was a year ago or longer. This is a freebie and I have no idea what to expect. I just saw the listing somewhere and reserved a seat. Since listening to “New Sounds” on midnight WNYC (because they stopped airing the BBC segments for some unexplained reason) I’ve been wondering what else is going on with new composers and interesting new music around here. This concert features all new music by someone I’ve never heard of: Ashley Fure. His name reminded me of someone I worked with at Money.COM: Ainsley Fuhre, I believe was her name. Never knew much about her but I remember one day she appeared at work with a softball-sized bruise on one side of her face. She looked like Popeye, with a giant wad of tobacco in her cheek. The horrendous injury was on account of some necessary dental procedure that required her jaw to be broken. I’d never heard of that, and like everyone else in the office I could not help but think she made that story up to hide some kind of domestic abuse. But apparently it is not entirely uncommon for jaws to be broken in the interest of the greater good of the patient. All our concerns were laid to rest when the boss told us she had told him ahead of time that she might come to work with a monster injury to her face.
I knew a married couple who said that the husband elbowed the wife in the face while he was having a nightmare. He had no idea it happened and no recollection of anything. The wife’s co-workers would not let her let it go. They insisted she was in denial and that her black eye was the work of a violent and abusive husband. None of this was true but when did facts ever get in the way of intrigue and office gossip?
I’ve been thinking about the fake news thing, and how the phenomenon of fakeness and fantasy are hardly limited to news. It may be that the alleged influence of phony news stories goes farther than other examples of nonsense content. Or does it, really? No one has proven that certain of the more notorious fake news stories about Donald Trump and/or Hillary Clinton swayed one single voter to change their decision. I forget the details now but a piece claimed something to the effect that hundreds if not thousands of Hillary Clinton supporters were being bussed in from across state lines to artificially inflate the number of attendees at one of her rallies. This story, mainstream media was careful to remind us, was shared on Facebook more than 6,000,000 times. What does that even mean? Are we to assume that 6,000,000 voters who would have voted for Clinton changed their minds and went with Trump? I doubt if even a tiny fraction of 1% of anyone who read those fake news stories or skimmed their headlines was swayed in any way. Peoples’ minds were made up months before the election.
…
Well, without soliciting it or even thinking about it I suddenly know the name of the woman sitting across from me. Cynthia Betubiza. With as distinctive a name as that I could probably start tormenting her straightaway. But I’m not an asshole. Having asshole thoughts does not make one as asshole. A quick search reveals she has done a number of TED Talks. Good for her.
Ooh, another name just showed up on my bluetooth scanner. Tyler Anderson. Too common a name, I think, but I’ll try anyway…
Yeah, too many people by that name, or by names close to it. I mean, if I cared enough, and if it was easy enough, I could go to work with just these little shreds of information. I have done this on occasion, just for the hell of it, to see what I can find on someone based on nothing more than a passing glance, or an incidental receipt of some scrap of information about them. A woman I saw at the Mi Tierra had some reason to announce her street address. Maybe she was getting stuff delivered? I don’t know but with nothing more than her street address I was able to find that she ran some kind of talent agency that promoted creative types she felt were up and coming. Without any apology she favored youth over elders. She lives one block south of me, on the same street. She is married and I do not remember where she went to school now but it was all out there on the public Internet.
As for me, well, I whore my identity everywhere I go. My Bluetooth ID is either Sorabji.COM or Sorabji.MOBI, and it is visible to anyone with Bluetooth who needs to pair their device. I’ll bet I get thousands of page views this way. Hah.
I read someplace that open source facial recognition software makes stalkers and creeps feel like kids in a candy shop. Just take pictures of crowds of people, find someone you like, and figure out who they are by dumping pictures of them into a database of faces. I have never tried that but would be interested to see if it really works, or it is mere scare mongering of the press. I strongly suspect the latter. That gets back to where I think fake news is not limited to politics or seemingly vital matters of influence. One can write a technology scare piece that is genuinely fact free but either no one will question it or anyone who does will be ignored, because the writer of the story doesn’t have an answer and neither does anyone else. They are just making stuff up, and the reading audience is fine with that.
I return, once again, to the infamous Jayson Blair incident. The dude fabricated witnesses, invented quotes, made stories up from pablum, and he got away with it for quite some time. But what interested me most about that affair was not that he got away with it. Of course he did. Journalists make shit up all the time, whether it’s carefully crafted quotes that sound sort of like something an interview subject might have said, or completely fabricated punch lines from anonymous sources who do not even exist. Those are the quotes I have always suspected, not because I doubt that journalists have anonymous sources (I have been one myself) but because the quotes always seem to land such a slam dunk in the context of the stories in which they appear.
What stuck with me about the Jayson Blair affair was the response to the NYTimes’ efforts to go back and set the record straight on everything Blair had written. Re-interviews and fresh interviews with people misquoted or who were said to have made comments they never uttered. One after another these people were happy to respond to the Times’ interviewers. But when asked why they did not contact an editor at the Times to say they had been misquoted or that comments they never made had been attributed to them the responses were kind of uniform: “Oh, we just thought it was hilarious being quoted in the New York Times. We didn’t want to cause any trouble.”
I mean, no one really cared about the misinformation and nonsense they read in the papers, even when it was attributed to them.
Well, to go any further with this I would have to cite examples, and I am not ready for that at the moment. I have been sitting for exactly one hour, though. That’s not bad for this increasingly impatient and undisciplined individual… Now if only I had been writing something more incisive…
Haha, someone walking by outside is carrying a white ‘cello case over his shoulder. At a glance, and after a few seconds more staring, it looked to me like he was wearing a KKK hood.
Something smells good. For once it is not my butt, which is widely renowned for its magical scent of marigolds and cinnamon.
Going downstairs to see if I really want to go to this free concert. It is out of my routine, and I am not in a mood for routine disruption.
