Jeff Goodell, Larry Brilliant, Rolling Stone #1050, Google give-away, Jerry Garcia, San Francisco v Los Angeles, Siliconia v Fernandia, human “saving” of System Sol from Galactic Warming is a not-so-brill wheeze that is not going to happen, and that giant sycamore weed goes green again as the night closes in…
07h47-BST Sunday 27 April 2008-CE
Jeff Goodell writes about Larry Brilliant in Rolling Stone #1050:
“Larry Brilliant, the man anointed by Google to give away hundred’s of millions of dollars of the company’s money in the next few years, admits that he’s a deeply flawed human being…
“…he is not talking just about his late-1990s turn as the head of a couple of Silicon Valley companies that vaporised $100 million or so. And he’s not talking just about his failure, which he knows is not his alone, to keep his friend Jerry Garcia from killing himself with drugs and excess.
“He’s talking about deeper things, like the mismatch between doing what he WANTS to do for the world and what he CAN do for the world. He is talking about our tendency as human beings to be distracted by money, glamour, sex and personal glory.”
Thank you, Jeff. I did not know that. I would LOVE to have been sufficiently talented to have made money, manifested glamour, experienced a little more sex than that six-month affair in 1963-1964, and discovered what personal glory was; it sounds odd. But listen, all ye that seek, cop a copy of RS#1050, chum, and pull a thrill through your eyes, and into your brain to tingle your skull, by learning of yet another crazy-cool American.
San Francisco is supposed to be the intelligent place, whilst Los Angeles gets on with it and ignores the squeaks from higher up the map, I know, but I must pause from my Fernando Valley fantasies, and pay mind to the Silicon one, as Jeff lets it out that Fortune magazine did a din-dins “at a swanky restaurant at the foot of Mission Street” for high-flyers aged 30-50 “who had spent their lives surfing the ever-cresting wave of progress in the Valley”.
Jeff Goodell doth tell that the purpose of the dinner, “according to one insider” was to “create a high-level salon to give people a chance to share thoughts on what’s happening in the tumultuously changing technology and internet business.” I have never used the word ‘salon’ but I have just looked it up in the Oxford Concise and I was right: I aint gonna need it. I do not receive people, design ridiculous togs, cut hair, or show pictures.
Sadly, Larry ‘Doctor-Optimist’ Brilliant is one of those goo-goos who claim that human activities cause the natural phenomenon of climate variation on Earth (which is a direct product of our star Sol, in its fluctuating according to galactic clouds falling by) and that human activity (especially if it goes along with loony-Left, Green-fascist, quasi-religious ranting and beating of breasts with rope-soled sandals) can “save it from global warming”.
Aside from that, the man is brill, and the piece by Jeff is brill too.
Riding the bus or the bicycle in the last few weeks and days, I have been watching the usual springing and flourishing of the vegetation out of cold sleep into giving it one more bash just in case it stays warm this time. The sycamore type of giant weed at our back is the sort that is always the last to shove its leaves out. Here they come at last. Another week and the great galooting thing will block out the sky.
Here comes the electric storm (08h57).
FIN 09h05
