As I was pondering the paper, it occurred to me that while most things are moving toward a leaner, greener footprint, the parking meters are actually going the other way.

Old school parking meters require no electricity.  They generate no waste paper. They don’t involve dial up or broadband networks to process the transactions.

Moving to a system that is more “efficient” has actually moved us to a system that generates paper waste and consumes electricity (albeit relatively small amounts) for the computing power to handle the credit card transactions and keep the kiosk running.

At a time when we say we want things to be more green, we’ve replaced almost the perfect green model with one that is arguably the anti-green solution.  It just demonstrates that our commitment to environmental friendliness ends when we can come up with a solution that makes our lives a little easier.

Sure, it’s a little more mundane than my past looks, and yes, it is very, very white. But I’ve always said my theme is a reflection of my mood. I’m feeling very minimalist lately.

As for the new logo, I really liked that image. The little blue guy is definitely blocking the kick. To me, however, it still looks like the little white guy has hauled off and kicked the other one in the junk. That made me laugh really hard. I’m not sure Keith Haring would be terribly excited to know he inspired an image of a guy booting another guy in the jimmy… but hey, that’s art, right?

I hope to update the site more frequently as well. So those of you who were shocked to see two posts in your feed reader – both in one month – beware. I’ve got some stuff on my chest I need to get off, and this is where I do that.

Take, for instance, my recent retweet about a Bertolli’s ad campaign.  @LowbrowKate tweeted the following.

Marissa Tomei is WAY to good for this: http://intotheheartofitaly.yahoo.com/

I couldn’t agree more.  I have been a fan of Tomei since My Cousin Vinny.  She’s way to good an actress to be shilling frozen Italian food in webisode format.  But look at the rest of the cast and you will see the star of the short lived MTV Sports – none other than Mr. Dan Cortese.  So I added some commentary on my retweet.

RT @lowbrowkate: Marissa Tomei is WAY to good for this: http://bit.ly/aFCSJF | Dan Cortese makes sense, though. He needs the work.

Well last night I got a reply from Mr. Cortese (which has since been removed).  Here’s the screen grab from Tweetdeck.

I couldn’t help but have some fun with Cortese.  My reply back?

@dancortese1 No offense, dude. You were great in Veronica’s Closet.

Where else but social media can a two-bit political hack and a D-list TV star interact so freely?

God bless the Internet.

(For the record, I had to Google Cortese to find something he was in other than MTV Sports. I don’t recall ever having seen Veronica’s Closet.  He has apparently done more stuff recently.  Frankly I am jealous that he got to travel through Italy with Marisa Tomei.  Back in the early 90s, many a guy I know would have traded a left testicle for that opportunity.  Way to go, Dan!)

Dungeons & Dragons was a tool of Satan. Heavy metal music was a tool of Satan. Alcohol was the Devil’s elixir. It seemed like just about everything you might enjoy doing was a tool of corruption placed on Earth by Satan.

You just don’t get that much anymore. I mean, in some pockets, I’m sure those charges are still leveled. They just don’t enter the mainstream consciousness the way they used to. Video games are allegedly bad, but not because they’re a tool of Lucifer, they’re bad for much more concrete reasons. People rage against video games because they claim they rot the minds of our youth or they lead to school shootings, or they’re a gateway drug to heroine. They are no longer simply written off as a tool of the dark arts.

In some ways, that makes me kind of sad. Satan is no longer the guilty party in any activity today’s youth engage in. I actually miss a world where every issue was discussed and debated in terms of Satan’s presence. Even if you partook of the devil’s playthings, there was a certain comfort in knowing it was all part of a great cosmic Yin & Yang. Now we have scientific studies of kids who go on to commit crimes and whether too many hours spent playing Sonic the Hedgehog was to blame. It has become all too sterile, and it’s just not the same.

On Sunday I’ll be speaking on a panel about gaming and advocacy. The purpose of the panel is two-fold.

First, we are looking to teach gamers how to advocate for or against policy issues that impact them. It seems not a week goes by that I don’t see an article about some misguided state legislator who has determined that video games are the root of all evil. They typically then go on to craft legislation that seriously impedes the rights of gamers. We hope gamers will begin to take these issues seriously and organize to become a significant political force.

The second purpose for the panel is to talk a bit about how political groups and causes are using games to convey policy messages. Following the Obama team’s use of paid advertising in an online racing game, the use of such tactics is getting pretty advanced. I, for one, am looking forward to hearing from my fellow panelists as well as the audience on that topic.

If I pick up nuggets of wisdom from the panel, I’ll be sure to pass them along via my blog as well as my Twitter feed. Follow me @MichaelTurk (if you aren’t already.)

Finally, it looks like 11 of my 20 readers have voted in the “How Would Gilligan’s Island Vote?” poll. If you haven’t, I hope you’ll weigh in. I’ll be posting the reply’s over the weekend.

• The Professor – This would normally be an easy lift. He’d likely be the typical liberal academic. Definitely a Democrat.
• The Skipper – Former Navy man, the guy everyone looks to for tough leadership. He’s definitely a Republican.
• The Millionaire and Lovey – They’re unabashedly rich, and have no qualms about it. They’re Republican.
• Ginger – Like the prof, she’s the typical Hollywood starlet. She may not actually be liberal, but that’s the trendy thing, so she goes along. That’s a Democrat.
• Mary Ann – A girl from the heartland with mid-western values. She probably digs God, Guns, Country, and country music. She’s a Republican.
• Gilligan – He’s kind of clueless and rarely gets anything right. He’s a Democrat.

Like I said, that was easy enough. Until, that is, I started talking to my friend Paul about the list. He’s a liberal, so he views the world through a skewed perspective, but he had some interesting thoughts.

For instance, the Professor, he argues, is a dedicated academic, but also has a heavy lean toward technology. That may indicate he is more Libertarian. Ginger, he suggests, strikes him more as a Patricia Heaton type. He thinks she would actually lean GOP. What about Mary Ann? She may be a farm girl, but she also comes across as a bleeding heart. Could she be a closet lefty? Could “means well, but usually gets it wrong” be applied equally to paint Gilligan as a Republican? While we agree on the Howell’s, could they actually be limousine liberals?

So I decided to change the focus of this post. Rather than declaring how the Island would vote, I’m asking. I’d love to get your thoughts. I’ll tabulate it all and report back on the consensus (if there is one) view.

If you’re interested, use Twitter Search to follow the discussion.

I have, for several months now, seen a string of posts and tweets from these same lefty friends that are either mocking or dismissive of the Conservatives nascent efforts on Twitter. Here’s one example courtesy of TechPresident’s own Micah Sifry.

It’s positively quaint to listen to Republicans murmur optimistically about their “dominance” on Twitter. #polc09, #tcot, #p2

The very first time I saw one, it reminded me immediately of comments I had seen and heard before. They were the openly dismissive comments directed by complacent and cocky Republicans at the Democrats efforts online.

I specifically remember more than a few people, myself included, who watched the rise of the online left with initial derision. As late as 2004 and 2005, I heard things like, “The Democrats and their blogs. How’s that working out for them? All that effort and how many wins has it resulted in?”

Beginning with Conrad Burns and George Allen, we began to quickly see the results of “those blogs”. It’s a lesson we failed to heed early on, and it contributed greatly to our demise.

What we failed to recognize was the infancy of an effort to use new technology to mobilize. It was an effort to build a new network and the infrastructure to disseminate a coherent message.

I have argued that the reason the Democrats never mastered talk radio was very simple – they never had to. In modern politics, the insurgent party will adapt to the most interactive (and the most real-time) technology available at the time. In 1992, having lost the White House, House and Senate, the GOP gravitated toward talk radio. Despite it being a broadcast medium, it was the most interactive medium available. It was adapted to facilitate the conversation about the direction of the party and the country.

The Democrats, rising out of the loss in 2000, had to coallesce around a platform. Talk radio, had the Internet not been available, would likely have become the staging area and the rise of the left on talk radio would have been a near certainty. But a funny thing happened on the march toward the AM dial.

With the Internet, blogs and Meetup became the new polis for the exiled Democrats.

Now you could argue that two data points is hardly enough to qualify my central thesis – the adaption of interactive forums by the out party. But keep in mind that Americans detachment from one another and from in-person communities really didn’t explode until about this same time. Prior to that, most people who were politically active simply turned to their party and its structures. It’s just the last 20 years that have split us from our parties and each other, so we can only look at the data available.

That brings us back to the present day and the Republicans.

Now that we are the out party, we are turning to the Internet to discuss, debate and strategize the party’s future. It is no longer, however, simple enough to label “The Internet” as a monolithic thing the way we did with the Democratic use of the medium. The Internet is no longer about websites as it was with blogs and Meetup. The Internet, as it exists today, is more a generic platform for advanced communication services – whether they are site based, text messages, cellular applications, or anything else.

In the world of converging technologies, Twitter represents the single most interactive, most real-time, tool available. Twitter is mobile. Twitter is rapid. Twitter facilitates deep content (via linking) and fast action (via retweets and viral distribution).

For the Democrats that dismiss Republican testing of many and various models of activism on Twitter, you should watch very closely what’s going on, rather than simply mocking it. Complacency and satisfaction with your status quo is a slippery slope and it’s very easy to fall into the “yes, but what has it gotten them” mindset.

It is likely, I would even say certain, that Twitter, or some next generation concept that builds upon Twitter’s framework, will be a central component of the GOP resurgence. It most certainly won’t happen overnight. However, I guarantee you will – when you find yourself out of power again – be able to trace the roots of your downfall to this earliest of efforts.

Until then, to my friends on the left, let me say two things. First, we’ll keep using Twitter, and you can keep cracking jokes. Second, as long as you do, we’ll see you on the other side, soon enough.

Update: Based on further conversation (via Twitter) about this post, I need to clarify a point. I’m not claiming the GOP is currently “dominant” on Twitter. That was Micah’s reference. I’m simply looking at the tendency for conservatives to adapt to Twitter faster and easier than they have other online venues.

The left’s attitude (represented by Micah’s comment) seems to me to be that the GOP is putting all its eggs in the Twitter basket without doing all the other things that the left did to be successful. My argument is that’s a false assumption. It requires that the GOP mimic the left to advance online. Just as the left bypassed the right’s use of talk radio and went straight on to a different model, I think the right may be able to skip directly past the duplication of the left’s infrastructure by simply making use of what are currently the most advanced communications and mobilization tools. I see evidence that many in the right are developing new models in an effort to do just that.

Those new models have not yet become “dominant”. My central premise is, however, is that many on the left and right seem to believe we must embrace the left’s status quo. I, on the other hand, believe our salvation will not come in duplicating their model, but in creating a new paradigm for our own activism.

The outpouring of support, thoughts and prayers for me and my family this week has been tremendous and has really helped me deal with the challenge of losing my dad and the additional tragic loss of my sister-in-law.

I hope to someday have time to go back and thank everyone individually for your kind words. In the meantime, I just hope you will know that the tweets, e-mails, comments, Facebook messages and calls were greatly appreciated. You all made a very difficult situation much easier.

At times like these its important to know that you’re not alone. I feel good knowing that I have so many good friends – even the ones I have never met.

Thanks.

About ten years ago, my brother called to tell me dad had been rushed to the hospital with pneumonia. He had a fever of 105 and they had to stop his heart to break the fever. We didn’t expect him to survive that, but we got another decade with him.

My dad is tough. It was actually the third time he had pneumonia.

My dad had always said that no male in his side of the family had ever lived to be 80. The women all live to be 100, but the men just don’t have the stuff.

Tonight, dad suffered a massive heart attack and was gone. The paramedics attempted to revive him, and kept him functioning until he got to the hospital, but then he was gone.

I had talked to him on Thursday. He sounded good. We discussed politics, stocks, the economy, and the kids. It was a good conversation cut short by the fact that I had to make dinner.

Whenever I feel uncertain about the world, and my place in it, I call my dad. He doesn’t always have the best advice, but he’s the one person I always turn to.

Now he’s gone.

There is so much I wish I could say to him now – so many conversations we didn’t have about a million life topics. I’ll never be able to get his opinions on those things.

We were always really close. When my parents got divorced, I was too young to understand what makes people split up. I have realized since then that my dad wasn’t the greatest husband to my mom. But to me, he was absolutely the best dad.

I’ll miss you.