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.

You may have the flu if you have some or all of these symptoms:

• fever *
• cough
• sore throat
• runny or stuffy nose
• body aches
• headache
• chills
• fatigue
• sometimes diarrhea and vomiting

*It’s important to note that not everyone with flu will have a fever.

Very helpful. If you sometimes get fever, but not always, and you sometimes get diarrhea and vomiting, but not always, that leaves:

• cough
• sore throat
• runny or stuffy nose
• body aches
• headache
• chills
• fatigue

In other words, the Swine Flu could look just like any other non-specific illness. That’s not terribly helpful at all. Maybe the CDC should provide more of a narrative description:

On Day One, you will notice giant red spots on your forehead. Those will grow into huge sweaty red welts. The coughing will be uncontrollable, and you’ll wish you were dead. Then the real fun will start….

At least then I’d know what to look out for. Instead, I have non-specific symptoms and no real way of knowing whether I have the Swine Flu without a tedious trip to the doctor.

So I did a little digging and found some more useful information. I dug through blog post after blog post and compiled these actual, specific symptoms from first hand accounts. If you have any of these, seek medical attention immediately

Swine Flu Symptoms

• An urge to watch Babe and Charlotte’s Web over and over again.
• An overwhelming sense of cannibalism from eating bacon.
• Smelling like Des Moines, IA.
• Random snort and oinking sounds (separate and distinct from your normal Tourette’s).
• Developing a random stutter.
• Falling in love with frogs (or general inter-species romance).
• A tendency toward Stalinism.

So there you have it. An actual, helpful list of warning signs. Now you can consider yourself prepared.

P.S. (For those who missed them, the stutter joke is a reference to Porky Pig and the Stalinism crack is a reference to Animal Farm.)

Apologies to friends on Facebook and Twitter who have already seen a link to this. If you are reading this on Facebook, and can’t see/play the video, you can visit http://www.kungfuquip.com/surviving-the-zombie-apocalypse.

So without further ado, I’ll throw out the 26 questions I’d really like to ask, but would be unlikely to actually answer myself.

1. Have you ever been arrested?
2. Were you guilty or innocent and what were the charges?
3. Will you ever drink that much again?
4. How much do you hate your job?
5. How many times per day do you pray for an earthquake just to break up the boredom?
6. How many times per day to you hope for the sweet release that only death will bring?
7. Where did you lose your virginity?
8. How much did it suck?
9. If you could go back in time and give that person pointers, would you?
10. If you could go back in time and not be such a whore (or manwhore), would you?
11. Speaking of sex, how many kids do you have?
12. How many did you have on purpose?
13. How many times have you wished you had that vasectomy you joked about in college?
14. If you could have any celebrity killed, which would it be?
15. Would you make it painful or quick and easy?
16. Would anyone miss Lindsay Lohan?
17. Have you ever done drugs?
18. Are you still in contact with the person who sold/gave them to you?
19. Can I have their number?
20. Do you like Internet porn?
21. Ya, me either. How many times per day do you look at some just to make sure you still don’t?
22. Really? That’s a lot! You’re very thorough in your “research” aren’t you?
23. How many drinks does it take before you make really bad decisions?
24. Want to go out tonight for drinks?
25. How much time have you spent answering Facebook questionnaires/quizzes in a desperate attempt to regain some semblance of a connection with another human being?
26. How’s that working out for you?

Answer these questions then send this to or tag 20 of your closest friends then prepare for them to be terrified by your answers. Be sure to tag me so I’ll be able to keep track of the implosion of your career for my own twisted pleasure.

(To be clear, I haven’t consumed anything stronger than a mojito since I was about 23, but I also won’t claim the “I tried it once” argument because it is just disingenuous)

Anyway, Mrs. Quip suggested that marijuana and cocaine – and even substances like heroine, acid and ecstasy – simply aren’t that big of a deal now since studies indicate a staggering number of people have tried them.

She did, however, draw a line at meth use.

I’m not sure where the line exists, but I’m sure it’s still there. I’m not sure the American public would be cool with a President that used to do shrooms, LSD, or other hallucinogens. I agree that meth is also likely to preclude you from holding high office.

I’m not trying to rehash charges of drug/substance abuse from past elections. I’m just curious to know what impact drugs may have on future elections.

Drop a comment and let me know what you think.

An AdAge article by Jonah Bloom titled Dedicated Social-Media Silos? That’s the Last Thing We Need caught my eye and I took a read. Bloom thesis is pretty sound – when a “new way” appears, people split into two camps. The adherents or adopters of the new way begin to see it as a critical component of future planning and separate from those who do not adapt.

Every time an apparently foreign object is identified… the inhabitants split, roughly speaking, into two parties — those who fear the foreign body and those who are excited by it. The excited annex the object and create their own nation around it. The fearful homelanders breathe a sigh of relief and go back to doing whatever it was they were doing — albeit with just a few nagging fears about the ambitions of the fledgling country being built next door.

I have, myself, led the march of adherents in several instances and find I am still doing so today. I have, for much of my career, seen the “nagging fears“. I sense the derision and skepticism every time my fellow blogger and I walk the halls at our office and hear the “there go the ‘bloggers’ with their ‘Twitters’ and their ‘FaceySpaces”‘.” He and I often wonder if the first media guy at the association heard, “there goes the ‘TV’ guy with his ‘saturation buy’ and his ‘gross rating points’.”

When people sense change, but fear or don’t understand it, they mock it. They make it different.

But the adherents to the new way are no different. Look at my old blog post that I linked above. I sound like a cokcy prick. Only my way can save us.

At the RNC I led the creation of a new Internet division charged with overseeing all things digital. It was, to say the least, a mistake in retrospect. The problem was not one of divisional boundaries. As Bloom argues:

By dedicating resources and attention to the new medium, discipline or, in social media’s case, idea, those who work in the field are able to quickly advance it and ensure that it prospers.

The problem, however, is that the new and old states cannot exist successfully without the other, a fact they realize after they have set up separate and often competitive fiefdoms that barely speak the same language.

Elevating the importance of the eCampaign division at the RNC was beneficial as it made people think differently about the role of the Internet. Over the long term, however, I believe it has ultimately proved harmful because it has created a new layer of bureaucracy. Further, the focus on how to be tech-savvy has, I believe, detracted from the larger mission of how to be savvy.

I am hereby reversing my earlier position that the Internet be given special prominence in your organization or campaign.

The RNC dodesn’t need a division for the Internet, they need people (not a person) in Communications that recognize the Internet’s role as a channel for multiple types of communications. That could be blog outreach, banner advertising, SEO, social media, or countless other ways to move a message or have a conversation.

The RNC needs people in political that understand how these tools can be used for organizing, and more importantly, how the people can be empowered via these tools to organize themselves.

The RNC needs people in finance that understand the difference between revised direct mail copy and good e-mail. They need people who understand SocNets and the way to leverage them to make small dollars add up to big bucks.

Your online media is no more, and no less important than anything else you do. The fact that you can use new media to more quickly attract and reach customers or voters has little relevance if you have no idea what to say to them and no idea what you want them to do.

Before I became “an Internet guru” (not my word choice, but one that I hear when I’m introduced), I was simply a political operative. I did statistical analysis to determine voting patterns and I focused on things like voter files, turnout models, and coalition building.

When I listen to twenty-something consultants taking about the Internet and what it will do, most of that is gone. There is much discussion of the long tail and the crowdsourcing, but little discussion of the offline mechanics of politics – as if every conversation in every diner in America has been supplanted with Twitter.

Now don’t get me wrong. I strongly believe that every conversation taking place at every diner in America is currently taking place online. But for most people, the real world is still their playground of choice. We cannot become so focused on our love of innovation that we lose sight of the core technology at the heart of politics – people.

Just as books changed the way we told stories, radio changed the number of people to whom we could tell them, and video changed the richness of our narrative, the Internet will empower us all to be both story teller and audience. The story, however, is still the same, and no media can claim supremacy. Before we act high and mighty, we must, as Bloom says, look at what we are leaving behind.

Ok, so what if they don’t go with a completely unsatisfactory ending.

Let’s assume that the battle between good and evil, wrong and right, darkness and light, black and white, has a point. The season finale introduced a few things that we may need to reconcile.

It is clear that Jacob and company have been on the island a VERY long time. As the sailing vessel (I must assume it is The Black Rock), cruises along the coastline, our would be Johnny Cash (the man in black) asks Jacob if he brought them to the island and is still trying to prove him wrong.

This is where I dive into unknown territory to some extent. I am not a biblical scholar or a religious person by any strectch, so forgive me if I get some of this wrong.

Jacob and Esau were brothers. Jacob was the pious brother while Esau was not. When Rebekah and Jacob conspire to deceive Isaac and Jacob recieves Isaac’s blessings, Esau is angry and swears he’ll kill Jacob.

Let’s assume that the man in black will be revealed in the final season to be Esau. What is the detente that the two of them have respected? What is the “loophole”? Is the rule by which Esau is unable to murder Jacob similar to the accord between Ben and Whitmore? When the smoke monster spoke to Ben, was it Esau who commanded Ben to follow Locke’s every word? Is Esau the smoke monster? Did he kill Mr. Eko as a surrogate for his brother? Eko was, after all, now a pious man.

Are all the “visions” of the dead and or disappeared actually manifestations of Esau? Was it Esau who had kept Jacob locked in the cabin with the ring of ash to contain him?

If you view Jacob and Esau as somehow temporally unrestrained, they could be anywhere or anything. Jacob can clearly raise the dead with a touch of his hand, as he did with John. Can they assume other forms or be omnipresent?

Using the construct of Jacob and Esau, you could easily begin to make sense of many occurrences on the island. Just about everything that has happened and every vision could be explained away with these two playing an odd cat and mouse game to “test” humanity.

As they meet on the beach at the beginning of the finale, Esau says to Jacob, “It always ends the same.” It is clear that they have done all of this before. Did the crew of the Black Rock – like Danielle’s Party – come to distrust one another and kill each other off? Are “The Others” the sole survivors of each such iteration of the cycle of violence? Did they band together realizing that they were somehow a part of the island now? Did Whitmore come to the island as a soldier with the Jughead crew? Ben was the sole survivor of Dharma? Was that the common characteristic The Others shared at the beginning?

And what of Richard Alpert? Did he come to the island aboard the Black Rock? Or further back?

I can see a clear scenario where an island with abundant resources and strange healing powers would be paradise. But to borrow from The Matrix:

Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world? Where none suffered, where everyone would be happy. It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed that we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world. But I believe, that as a species, human beings define their reality though misery and suffering.

Perhaps the two brothers are running some sort of test to determine whether people can simply live together in paradise or whether they will, eventually, devolve into tribes and attack one another. Is the story of Lost simply a karmic test based on The Lord of the Flies? Could be.

So let’s cast our mind back many weeks and dive in. To set the stage, I’ll refer you to a Doc Jensen column on Entertainment Weekly. If you haven’t read Jensen’s Lost theories, they’re really quite entertaining. The one I have linked hits a very critical point (to me at least) on page two.

I like the washed-out black and white sheen that’s been given to that classic Star Wars moment ‚Äî it gives it a certain old and damaged Orientation Film feel, specifically the one that the castaways found in the Hatch back in the third episode of season 2. As your (quack) doctor in Lostology, allow me to give you a piece of advice: Watch it again, as at least some of it has direct bearing on what is currently happening back in Dharma 1979 on Lost. (Note: This version does not include a short snippet of missing footage that was later found by Mr. Eko, which instructs Swan occupants to refrain from using the computer to communicate with the outside world.)

Note the following:

1. Dr. Candle’s left arm does not move during the entire film.
2. Dharma’s founders were a pair of University of Michigan scientists, Gerald and Karen DeGroot. An industrialist named Alvar Hanso funded their work.
3. Remember ‚Äî nay, MEMORIZE ‚Äî this line as if it were scripture: ”Not long after the experiments began, however, there was…an ‘incident’…and since that time, the following protocol has been observed…”
4. The copyright date on the film: 1980.
5. The year that The Empire Strikes Back was released: 1980.
   Point No. 5 probably has nothing to do with anything.

My colleague and friend Paul Rodriguez and I have spent way too many hours discussing Lost. In those discussions this season, we have spent a lot of time on time travel and the question of whether or not you can change the past. Faraday argues that you cannot, then changes his mind to argue that you can. Once he does, however, he repeats the past and warns Charlotte not to come back – which he clearly had already done, and it made no difference at all.

It is my contention that everything we have witnessed this year is a repeat of everything that came before. From the plane crashing to Juliet falling down the well and detonating Jughead, everything has happened before. I am a fervent believer in the Deja Vu theory of time travel. Everything that happened before will happen again.

Faraday, at least on his death bed, seems to understand this. As he lies bleeding, shot by his own mother, Daniel realizes that his mother might well have sent him off to the island knowing that earlier her was going to shoot Daniel. Under his theory of humans as great variables, the one possible variable he failed to account for is she may have known the past, and the present.

So let’s jump back to that video now. You’ll note the first item that Jensen mentions is Candle’s stiff arm. Now think back to the incident at the Swan construction site and the scaffolding that fell on him – landing on his arm. Between Daniel getting whacked by mom, and Candle coincidentally having an arm crusher followed three years later by the video, I have become a believer. My new religion? The more things change, the more they remain the same.

I don’t believe they have changed anything at all. I think the islanders have become a logic puzzle.

If I were stuck 30 years in the past, and had to find a way to change/affect the future. What would my first thought be? Great! Now I can immediately discard that one because I would have already done that 30 years earlier.

Changing time in the way our island buddies are trying to requires what can be described as branching time theory. As you move down the path of time, you can introduce a significant event (Jughead’s detonation) and alter the flow of the time stream. The course of time is altered and you can avoid some specific negative outcome.

However, the fact that our islanders are hung up circa 1977 demonstrates the fallacy of this theory. Instead, the islanders and their 1977 selves exist simultaneously. Their two times are clearly different tracks on the same loop.

In this way, time is more like a cable TV system. Traditionally on cable (though this is changing with OnDemand and Switched Digital Video) channels are being fed down the line all at once. You can choose which channel to watch, but the rest are still moving along at the same time. By changing the channel, you haven’t changed anything but your perception of what’s on at that moment. You have altered your exposure, but everything else exists the same way.

I believe the islanders will now perceive that they have done some good, and will carry out the remainder of their 1977 existence, but won’t actually achieve anything. In fact, I am going to lay a bet on the outcome of the series (I’m not giving long odds on this, just a speculation).

At the end of the series, we will see our “current” castaways fate resolved in some way or another, and the island will be going along as it always has. Our “series finale” cast will be preparing to board the flight from Australia to LA and will have some vague recollection of one another as they do. The flight will take off, and somewhere along the line we’ll see the plane lurch, the tail section go flying off, and the screen will cut to black.

In the end, we’ll realize that the entire circle is beginning again, and has probably been moving along in much the same way, forever.

Apparently, the latest offense is the most serious, warranting a parent teacher conference. His latest crime? (Again, I kid you not) He was recruiting a group of other toddlers in opposition to Circle Time. That’s right. My son the community organizer was no longer content to simply sit out of Circle Time. He was actively recruiting other children to join him in his non-conformity. I think the school is afraid my little cult leader may stage a coup.

While I am concerned about his long term development on many fronts, this really isn’t one of them. I just don’t know if it’s a great idea to teach toddlers that a) they must conform to what everyone else is doing, b) they must be a happy part of the collective, and c) they must never question that authority that demands they go along.

On many levels, I find it amusing, and even reassuring that T2, at a very young age, is displaying the traits of an organizer. The ability to not only refuse to be a sheep, but to also teach others not to follow blindly, is quite admirable. From a teacher’s perspective, I get that it can be quite challenging. On many occasions, I have been trying to get his sister to focus on something only to have him lead her away. It’s annoying, to be sure.

Also, from a teacher’s point of view, conformity is key. If the kids were expressing individuality, and pursuing only those things that interest them, we might end up with a world of innovative thinkers. It’s good to have teachers who will choke out the weed of self-expression and creativity. The productivity of the collective demands that we create a workforce of nimrods capable of simply pushing a button all day because they were told to. I get it.

From my point of view, however, I’m strangely proud of my child for resisting the brainwashing. I’m actually excited that he won’t simply go along with the crowd. I have even considered introducing him to Facebook and setting up the group “One Million Strong Against Circle Time”.

Well… maybe that can wait until he’s four.

That’s a hard concept to grapple with, but in many ways it’s true. At South By Southwest yesterday, the panel tackling online privacy the panelists spent a great deal of time discussing online privacy within our current framework for such discussions – “my data is me”.

One panelist went so far as to suggest that your metadata had an assessable value. He suggested that you should have full control over it and went so far as to suggest that you should be compensated for its use.

That prompted me to tweet the following:

Your individual information has no value. Only in aggregation does it gain value. Nobody targets “you”. They target the characteristic.

That led to a bit of chatter on Twitter and some discussions with people there. Most of those forums weren’t really sufficient for really fleshing out the idea, so let me explain.

First, you should understand that the comment was made in the context of privacy and targeted advertising. My friend Paul actually took the concept in a completely different direction and has been pondering the value of individual Twitter content versus the collective. It’s an interesting take, and one I’ll think on. For purposes of this post, however, I’m talking about targeted advertising and your personal data.

You golf. You eat at various restaurants. You travel. You buy things. You have credit cards for certain stores. You are a collection on indivisual characteristics. In typical psychological analysis, those personal characteristics could probably be described as the self. The “self” is very important to our conception of the world.

In the world of digital advertising, however, the self is irrelevant. Those characteristics are meaningless. Unless you are buying very, very expensive luxury goods, there is a high degree of probability that no advertiser is targeting “you”. No advertiser will run an ad campaign with the sole purpose of getting “you” to buy their product. There is simply no economic benefit to limiting your audience to one person.

They are, instead, targeting a collection of characteristics that you happen to have, and characteristics you share with many, many, other people. Your concept of protecting “your” metadata, then, is illusory. There is nothing of value to protect.

How can that be, though? Advertisers will pay a premium to reach me based on that data. So clearly my metadata has worth.

I’m Unique, Just Like Everybody Else.

Advertisers devlop a profile of the person likely to buy their products. That information is matched against consumer information databases. If your profile happens to match those characteristics, those advertisers will deliver an ad unit to you.

However, they’re not delivering that unit to “you”. They are delivering it to a random identifier in a database which matches a random set of variables they found important.

The problem is our sense of our own identity is tied inextricably to that random set of variables. When people use it to communicate with us, we fell manipulated – we feel like big brother is watching us.

I followed up my first tweet with another that read:

A noble goal would be to get people to divoce their concept of “me” from the individual characteristics that comprise that.

I say “noble” in the sense that we hamper our ability to get the most out of the digital world when we cling to these antiquated notions of “self”. The benefit of the digital world comes from the aggregation of data, information, and creation. We recognize the wisdom of crowdsourcing movements and creating in a collaborative environment, yet we resist the aggregation of information for the purpose of making advertising more efficient.

I, for one, welcome a world of targeted advertising. I may never (at least until I’m 50 or 60) have to watch another Viagra or Cialis ad. I may never see another dancing mortgage calculator.

It is ironic that the value of your personal data, and your control over it, was argued at a conference on digital media. The panels at SXSW spend a great deal of time discussing corporations and the fact that they must give up “control”.

That takes many forms. PR practitioners must give up control of their message. Intellectual property holders must give up control of their creation. Network owners must give up control of their networks.

Despite this, we cling to the notion of “our control” of our data based on the flawed notion that it has value – on an individual level – to anyone but us. As I said, our metadata has no value in the singular. It is only in the aggregate that the information means anything to advertisers.