“A tale told by an idiot…”

“…full of sound and fury, signifying nothing”. That’s how Shakespeare put it, railing about how life sometimes seems pointless.

That’s how I felt last night, briefly, when I learned that Ed, a good friend, died as a result of a motorcycle accident. He was a husband, father, grandfather, friend, and died doing what he loved; riding his motorcycle with friends on mountain roads above L.A. with his wife on the back (she’s bruised but otherwise unhurt). Friends behind him said it looked like the bike hit gravel. Just a few tiny rocks…

Crazy motorcyclists? I make no such judgment. He’d been riding for decades and bikes were part of him. He wouldn’t have been Ed without his motorcycles. When he had an important decision to make, he’d go for a ride to clear his mind and decide.

No, the tale of life is not told by an idiot. However sometimes the tale is sad and murky. It’s almost trite to say this at times like these, but I’ll say it anyway - Carpe diem. Seize the day. We know not what comes next.

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My camblog gets SmartMobbed!

SmartMobs is a blog from the book of the same name by Howard Rheingold. It deals with the social ramifications of “mobile communication, pervasive computing, wireless networks” especially as they lead to collective actions of all types.

I emailed Smart Mobs about my camblogging the Bush Protest, figuring it was a perfect example of smartmobbing, and they posted it.

Was I the first to camblog a protest?

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California recall echoing Florida voting debacle?

From Daniel Weintraub’s California Insider

“Big news from the Secretary of State’s office on the recall. According to a spokesman, Secretary of State Kevin Shelley has interpreted the law to say that county registrars need only be verifying the signatures they received by June 16. The rest they may set aside until the end of the next reporting period on July 23. Then they will report that number to Shelley and he will give them the go-ahead to verify the second batch. But they won’t be required to report that new number until Aug. 22. If this ruling stands, it will delay considerably the verification process and the date by which the recall qualifies for the ballot. It would almost certainly delay the election until March.

This is looking more like a mirror image of Florida every day. Instead of a Republican Secretary of State fighting to slow a recount and elect a Republican president, we have a Democratic Secretary of State acting to slow a signature count to prevent the recall of a Democratic governor.” Italics added.

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