Hello, owner of the inbox I have just slithered into,
Who are you, and can you prove it?
I know, it is a Sisyphean task. I don’t care. I am going to shove that rock up the hill if it kills me. I find it bizarre that a large portion of humanity has decided that a person must be who they claim to be if you can message their cellphone?
This week, instead of giving up my cellphone number, I have changed restaurants, deleted apps, registered with “trusted” secondary providers (which required me to put in not only my cellphone but actually-personal other numbers like SS and passport and so forth—the process of which vetting made me question the whole idea of privacy in the first place)…
But I was finally forced to give up my clutch on my cellphone number to accept a grant from the US Government — a prestigious National Endowment for the Arts grant for Pen Parentis. I had to register my personal cellphone and my individual-to-me email address on two separate identity-checking-verification websites, because the government has now stopped using the other verification-checking website it had been using to outsource this task at the time that I applied for the grant.
When did corporate America start forcing employees to give up their personal cellphone numbers to prove that they are who they say they are? Until this week, I have always been able to get around two-factor authentication for my business accounts (which makes sense if you are sitting at a desk or on a laptop that belongs to your firm, but makes no sense when it is not your own bank account that your individuality is verifying).
I understand the need to prove who I am in my personal banking (however, HELLO, retinal scans or fingerprint scans or literally any other biometric would be safer than “who can see a texted code on my cellphone and my email account”). After all, my cellphone is mine and my bank account is mine, so there is a kind of logic.
Where is the logic in “At this place I currently work, I need to be able to get into the corporate bank account so I should give the bank my personal cellphone number”?
The new “I think therefore I am” is “I receive texts, therefore I am.”
WRITING NEWS:
I do have big news that is new: Yesterday I got word that my short story, “The Heaven - The Earth” which came out in the magazine After Dinner Conversation in September, was selected to be included in a Best of 2022 anthology!
Ongoing progress…
By now you are likely aware that my story collection, A FLASH OF DARKNESS, is in the works. This week I got to look at some cover ideas and pick some fonts. It is so incredible to me that in every industry (I can say with great authority as the founder of an arts nonprofit), companies are founded that have any number of workers from zero to hundreds of thousands, and yet their products are compared as if they are equals and usually priced similarly as well. Makes me wonder about the idea of “an artisanal arts nonprofit” where all the work is done by a very small and passionate group of people, and the product (which potentially could be of a much higher quality) is less able to be mass-produced and therefore costs more.
I was inspired this week by watching a lot of the SAG-award nominated movies that were based on true stories. Blonde (based on a Joyce Carol Oates novel about Marilyn Monroe) was the hardest to watch. The lead actress gave a terrific performance, but the novel is likely a better way to absorb this chilling story. The Fablemans was in every way more watchable, and was inspiring instead of depressing. Steven Spielberg’s movie memoir about his early childhood contains a lot of fun meta jokes. You also feel the influence of Tony Kushner’s talent on the screenwriting.
A movie no one reading this has probably seen is the new Lithuanian-language documentary about Kernagis. This artist (a key point in the movie is where he asks an interviewer not to call him a musician, cabaret artist, rock star, vaudevillian, singer/songwriter or composer, but to simply call him an artist) had a music/stage comedy/satire career of 40 years, spanning from before the Soviets took over Lithuania to after they left. He is Bono crossed with Weird-Al Jankovic. The movie was interesting in that there is no narrator and not a single talking head. The entire 90 minutes is simply beautifully pieced together TV and radio interviews, home footage, archival footage, and other footage of the man in action. He basically narrates his own memoir. It’s fascinating.
Random Final Thought:
So—it turns out the thing I always thought was an urban myth (or rather, a “small-town-bordering-on-the-country” myth) is absolutely true. Horny Toads (Horned Lizards, if you must be prim) really do shoot up to five feet of blood out of their eyes as a defense mechanism. Dang!
The five-foot blood defense, their ant-eating prowess (they are sly sly sly lizard-creatures), and more about the cutie-pie, freaky little Horny Toad can be found here.
And yes, we had these little guys in our yard when I was growing up. What? Didn’t you?