Sunday, March 12, 2006

README

This mindware is the delusion of its creator's imagination, and any resemblance to entities, sentient or existent, is incidental to its functioning as a blog. Its creator (hereafter, the Author) makes no warrants as to this ReadMe's verisimilitude and rejects out of hand liability for any beliefs arising from misinterpretations of its meaning. Reader beware! This ReadMe constitutes the entirety of its content. Reader promises to abide by its terms and conditions, which consist solely of reading this ReadMe, or "Me," the Author, who authorizes the following to be entered into this blog space on his behalf:

I've gone down in the world. Used to be, anyone could google Richard Rawles, and my name would turn up as number 1, top of the list, with a link to a web site called The Big Iamb, where you could read four poems I had written. OK, that was then. I didn't think much about it. Now there's competition--for my name, of all things. There is at least one other Richard Rawles out there, a psychologist at the University of London, who found 6,000 post cards, dating from 1953, that were used in a BBC science "programme" to test right- and left-handedness. The test was administered by no less than Jacob Bronowski himself, or so the legend goes, and now "cognitive scientists" are running the cards through modern computers to "find out what they can tell us now about the people and the time they lived in." Am I so dead that students have to go on archaeological treasure hunts to find out what people were like during the early Cold War era? What's the big ID? I just want it on record in the blogosphere that I had nothing to do with this "discovery." I should have seen it coming, what with Nancy Rawles showing up on literary billboards with that travesty of a Mark Twain book. I haven't read it, but then I haven't read John Rawls either and all his talk about liberal rationalism and its doctrine of fairness. Fairness! Whoever said life was fair? I'll give you fairness! People running around publishing things under your name. It's identity theft is what it is. I'm not the world's most famous "author," thank you, but I have published a thing or two. My name is my intellectual property. I don't want to register it as a trademark and have to sign my name with a "TM." OK, so I don't have a "domain name." But I was here first. Now I have to scroll through thousands of pages of Google output just to find a reference someone made to an article I wrote 20 years ago. I like to think I can trace my name back to the thirteenth-century English mystic Richard Rolle, who wrote "The Fire of Love." A great title but you have to be in a certain state of mind to appreciate it. So forget about the 6,000 post cards already. READ ME! You guessed it. It's all about me.

Thought leaders of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your identities!

Richard Rawles
Editor, Countersigns

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home