Wanderings

It’s been 16 years since my brother Gene succumbed to AIDS on September 18, 1995. There have been many memorable events in our lives. Some of them are good and some, not so good. He was the academic brain of the family – you know, the 4.0 kind of guy. He graduated from Mission High School in San Francisco in the top of his class. Even got an A.P. Gianini award and scholarship.

Gene came back to San Francisco after his Masters in Social Work. He devoted much of his life to the S.F. Welfare Department, and moved on from there to the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency. It was there that he made a name for himself. He was Area Director of redevelopment in the Fillmore. He faced anger from blacks and whites, but persisted in making the Fillmore what it is now.

Pastors, Rabbis, neighborhood activists and government officials praised his work. He served under many mayors – Moscone, Feinstein and Brown to name a few. For his work, he was honored by having Gene E. Suttle Jr. Plaza at Fillmore and O’Farrell named in his honor. If you are in the City, stop by the Plaza on the east side of Fillmore. He worked to make the Fillmore more than it was, but a reflection of it’s past – witness the resurgence of jazz in the venues of the Fillmore. Part of what he worked for was to recreate some of that culture.

Gene attended UC Berkeley, and it was after I returned to San Francisco that he introduced me to Consumer’s Co-Op of Berkeley. It was there that it was impressed on me to really know what your food cost you. Gene was a budgeteer (thanks to Grandmother), and he wanted me to understand that a dollar for a package might not be a deal – the $2 package might have 3 times the food in it. He and the Co-Op constantly urged members to figure out the price per ounce – forget the price per package. They called this “unit pricing.”

“Unit pricing” has stuck with me to this day. Out comes the cell phone or watch to do the calculation. That’s why I so often find that the $15 dollar sale package actually costs more that the $17 not on sale package.

There’s more about Gene, but that’s for another day. Thanks Bro’

With all the hub bub about the Tea Party, I’m getting a little sick of the “racist” cry. It was that cry about the John Birch Society in the sixties that turned me into a radical conservative. It seemed that every liberal black or white person you ran into, “knew” that the John Birch Society members were rabid racists.

The longer and louder they screamed at me about those blankety blank people my resolve became stronger. There was a reason…

There was this lady in my church – I’ll call her Alice. She and her husband Alan were members of the dreaded “Society.” Only problem was, they never demonstrated any racist attitudes toward me. Not only did she want to sing in a choir with me, or occasionally have me tell her what to do (assistant choir director); or that we talked about issues of the day; and the two of them tried to make sure I got invited to their house. That sure did not seem racist to me!

Lest you think that I was too “white” to not know they were being racist, remember, I grew up in Jim Crow Oklahoma. A state where negroes still got chased, had to ride on the back of buses and attend segregated schools. I was born in an all black community that was three miles from an all white town, and they didn’t want any of “us” living there. Working there was alright, but “we don’t want any ‘n……’ living here!’” As a black person, you were very careful not to go outside your community at night. And forget camping! Yep, I knew what racists were, what they looked like and how they talked. Oh, don’t forget the “colored” bathrooms, food at the backdoor of restaurants and perfect movie seats in the rear of the balcony

So, that kind of clinched it. If supposed racists are not racists, (as demonstrated by Alice and Alan) then maybe the rest of what the liberals talked was a lie as well.

The downfall of the liberals was that I could read. Off to the libraries and bookstores. What did the “Birchers” really believe? What did they want for the country? Were their positions on the issues they talked about tenable?

Amazing what you can find out when you read what people say and believe, rather than listen to somebody tell you what they said or “what they really mean!” The liberals were the ones lying. The more I read, the more convinced I became that bending the laws wasn’t the way to get to a better world. Maybe I shouldn’t have read the Bible at the same time. Bending the laws always got the people in trouble – over and over.

So there I was, no longer stuck on the horns of a dilemma.

Maybe that’s why there are people in the world who don’t want our kids to learn to read, or find books in the library. Maybe we should leave the books in English, but not teach anyone to read that ancient language. Then, we skip having the kids and new citizens learn anything about history – good or bad. We just tell them about how bad some things were…not that there were some people who wanted a change for the better. And those people weren’t the supposed saviors of the black people. It was the dreaded racist Republicans who voted for laws that ended segregation and separate schools. Read your history people!

Getting the picture?

It may be a pain, but read! “You shall know the truth and the truth will set you free.”

Just so you know, this was during a period in my life where about once a week, I visited a printing supply store…next door was the John Birch Society “Book Store.” Yes, I did eventually wander in and read some of their publications. Even got a subscription to their magazine. Never did find that they said anything racist. Very high quality articles written by people with Masters and Doctoral degrees. This was some more convincing.

Was looking for something great from Windows in mobile phones, but that’s not happening this year. When Microsoft came out with their new Windows Mobile 7, they locked up the phone tighter than the iPhone. Everything has to be synced through the cloud – your contacts and calendar have to be on Microsoft’s “Live” computers.

That was not my choice for where I want to put my business – you know, all my personal stuff. There are enough problems with identity theft and personal info getting into the wrong hands. But no, no, Microsoft actually was going to force you to use the cloud. As of this date, they have not provided any way for developers/programmers to get what you need on your phone in a direct link to your PC.

Worse, they just came out with a major update to WM7, and there is still no way to get anything other than your Zune music files and pictures synced to your phone without the cloud. So after spending all that time researching WM7 devices to replace my WM6 Blackjack II, I was disturbed to say the least. Did not really think that I wanted to move to a Blackberry, and was not ready to jump on the iPhone bandwagon. Yes, it is possible to sync my contacts and calendar to an iPhone if I use Outlook. Be still my nervous heart. Outlook is almost the last thing I would want to use – for virus and worm reasons.

My search settled on Android devices, and on investigation, I found that it was possible to sync Lotus Notes with an Android device. That would allow me to keep my stuff on my computers and backed up to my portable drive or CD/DVDs. Further investigation found that the Motorola devices would very soon (it has already happened) have the ability to sync my iTunes playlists. Wow! Now I can put my music or podcasts on my wonderful device!

Settled on the Motorola Bravo, and am quite happy. There are more than enough apps to keep me busy searching and uninstalling the “free” apps that have noxious nagging advertisements. Simple moved all my Lotus Organizer data over to Lotus Notes, and then synced up my new phone.

Stay tuned for the saga as it continues to unfold. Technical items about the Android phones will be posted on my TECH Blog.

Finally allowed comments, and without “Capcha” (those characters you have to type) for a submission, got lots of junk. There are robots (actually, computers) that search blogs and guestbooks, waiting for a chance to enter some text and electronically hit the submit button.

Those robots can’t read images, only text…so, when they have to enter the capcha text to submit their spam, nonsense or XXX rated advertising, they are out of luck.

It’s now there big as life, which will cut down on how many pending “Comments” I have to read before they actually get posted.

Last night was the second time in a month that I have had a dream about being up high somewhere, and walking across roof beams. This time, I was at some conference, and another person and I thought that we’d go to the balcony for the concert. Well, what we got to was, as it turned out, the open air roof. Kind of like an arbor, with boards laid across beams. We were on the left, but there was a guy on the right, who had traversed the boards, and was cautiously walking the beam toward the stage.

Just like before, the beams had no nets or hand rails.

I was walking across the boards, and got to the edge where it was just beams (that ran from the back toward the stage), and looked down and realized it was a long way down. A very, very long way down. Immediate stop. Looking over the edge, I knew there was no way Joe Suttle was going to walk or crawl out on that beam.

To compound all this, the board portion and beams had a downward slope toward the stage, so I was actually going down hill. Scary! Once I stopped, I had the guy behind me stop and pull me back, while I crawled backwards. There was no way I was going to try and turn around and crawl upward from the edge.

He pulled me back about 6 feet, and then we began the trek back to the stairs where we entered.

What’s funny is that once we got back to the stairs, we both commented on why anyone would build stairs to the roof of an auditorium, with the stairs being accessible to everybody.

What does this mean? You got me, but there has to be a message here, and I’m just not getting it. If you’ve got thoughts, this blog post is open for comments.