In an effort to move on from more morose posts, I will do so. I thank everyone for the deluge of e-mail, comments, IM and even phone calls. Some people shared some very interesting, intense and often very personal stories- thank you.

For the record, I have not gone underground (thanks for paying attention Fleep), but I have been put on extended medical leave due to some unknown neurological problems. Right now my right hand and more my left hand have been greatly affected. Namely- no sensation and impaired fine motor movement in several fingers- continued tingling, pins and needles feeling and it is not as simple as carpal tunnel syndrome. A battery of tests commences, but it is very difficult to type and I have felt extremely fatigued.

I am trying out voice recognition software, so I can post occasional piece out of boredom, but the last post on Death and Shovels made me pay attention to what it is really important and for once I will shut my trap and follow my doctor’s sage advice to the letter- no work, zero out the stress, get proper rest and nutrition, and take my supplements. I still haven’t regained sensation in my hands which is very troubling as nerve damage can be irreversible, but I hope it is not permanent. But in case you have tried to reach me- now you know.

On that note I give you an interesting contraption and “does nothing” is good advice. Despite the name “The Does-Nothing-o-Matic”, this video of a Rube Goldberg-like-contraption (see below for extracts from Rube Goldberg’s biography) is perhaps a good “visual aid” to illustrate micro media and the sometimes obscure social chain reactions that can be evoked and traced. As Rosenberg says- video is frozen knowledge. At the very least this video is pretty entertaining and a good way to get someone’s attention (the comments about Congress are amusing too).

For those unfamiliar with Goldberg ( who did not make the crazy, complex contraption in the video above)…

*Rube Goldberg (1883-1970) was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, sculptor, and author.

Reuben Lucius Goldberg (Rube Goldberg) was born in San Francisco. His father, a practical man, insisted he go to college to become an engineer. After graduating from University of California Berkeley, Rube went to work as an engineer with the City of San Francisco Water and Sewers Department.

He continued drawing, and after six months convinced his father that he had to work as an artist. He soon got a job as an office boy in the sports department of a San Francisco newspaper. He kept submitting drawings and cartoons to his editor, until he was finally published. An outstanding success, he moved from San Francisco to New York drawing daily cartoons for the Evening Mail. A founding member of the National Cartoonist Society, a political cartoonist and a Pulitzer Prize winner, Rube was a beloved national figure as well as an often-quoted radio and television personality during his sixty-year professional career.

Through his “INVENTIONS”, Rube Goldberg discovered difficult ways to achieve easy results. His cartoons were, as he said, symbols of man’s capacity for exerting maximum effort to accomplish minimal results. Rube believed that there were two ways to do things: the simple way and the hard way, and that a surprisingly number of people preferred doing things the hard way.

Rube’s drawings depict absurdly-connected machines functioning in extremely complex and roundabout ways to produce a simple end result; because of this RUBE GOLDBERG has become associated with any convoluted system of achieving a basic task.

Hardly a day goes by without The New York Times, National Public Radio, The Wall Street Journal or some other major media invoking the name Rube Goldberg to describe a wildly complex program, system or set of rules such as our “Rube Goldberg-like tax system”. The annual National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest at Purdue University, which is covered widely by the national media, brings Rube’s comic inventions to life for millions of fans.

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