Category: General

There was some after-school drama around the Churbuck household yesterday afternoon, the official ship date of Halo 2, the second version of the first-person X-Box shooter which has dominated the minds of my two sons for the past two years.

Having pre-ordered via Amazon the long delayed second version of the game for the two over a year ago, I have been receiving shipment updates, not from Amazon or the game’s developer – Bungie – but from my ten year-old who has been anticipating the game with the impatient anxiety that used to be reserved for Christmas. His reaction yesterday, the first official day the game was available, when he learned the game had not arrived in the daily mail was on the order of magnitude one would expect from the accidental amputation of a limb or the death of the hamster.

The eldest has already declared that he intends to shut the blinds and eschew college applications and all school work until he dominates the game and explores all of its dark corners. The two natter on at the dinner table about rumored new weapons, aliens, battle tactics and plots like CIA analysts going over satellite photographs.

The USPS package tracking site has been refreshed with the invoice number about a thousand times over the past 12 hours. The news that the disc has left Springfield, Massachusetts and is somewhere on the Massachusetts Turnpike, on its way to Cape Cod, was the cause of more teeth grinding this morning, with demands that if it does not appear in the Cotuit post office by the end of the school day that I will drive to the local game merchant and part with another $50 to get a copy into their sweaty palms by nightfall, before the commencement of tomorrow’s school holiday (Veteran’s Day).

I can find no historical parallels of anticipation and anxiety in my own adolescence. No movie, book, comic, or other entertainment event ever worked me into as much of a lather as this single game has foamed up my sons.

Anyone who has questions about the future of media and entertainment needs to understand the joys of walking around in a virtual world with a rocket launcher and blasting the stuffing out of a virtual sibling while screaming smack-talk.

I’m ghosting a book on outsourcing strategies for IT executives with a team of analysts and consultants at Gartner. Tight deadline, so this one is eating most of my time. Manuscript due at Harvard Business School Press in three weeks.

Then onto a long-delayed project I started at McKinsey on the history and strategic implications of technology standards (Beta vs. VHS, Windows vs. OS/2, railroad track gauges, etc.) while simultaneously beginning a book on self-surgery (people who trepan their own skulls, amputate their own limbs, and attempt their own sex changes). Then finishing a private history of a Boston rowing club (an exercise in procrastination.)

Developing a business plan for a service company serving the online newspaper publishing market.
Consulting to an environmental bio startup here on Cape Cod.

And the usual steady diet of freelance assignments, etc.

Tenet insanabile multos scribendi cacoethes et aegro in corde senescit. – Juvenal

Juvenal wrote that an incurable itch for scribbling [cacoethes scribendi] takes possession of many, and grows inveterate in their insane breast.

Oliver Wendell Homes wrote: “So many foolish persons are rushing into print, that it requires a kind of literary police to hold them back and keep them in order.”

It is said that 12,000 so-called blogs are launched every day. Here’s yet another.

In the mid-90s such efforts as these were known as “online diaries.” The late Suck.com had its way with them back in 1996.

“These gonzo journal-ists
scattered the contents of their
lives across the information
highway and now simply wait for
rubberneckers to crane for a
view of the twisted wreckage of
their minds …”

Having succumbed to the “tipping point” meme of this political silly season I gave in and set up an RSS feed reader and subscribed to those blogs commended as the best and brightest. Sigh. The reader – SharpReader — notifies me in ever-more-irritating popups, of new postings from everybody from the New York Times to some guy named Fred – all pig-piling onto the latest newsflash like word paparazzi. The good stuff, the focused stuff, shows some real reporting, and is not someone’s bloviations on current events.

So what’s my point in greasing the ways, knocking out the chocks, and swinging the champagne bottle against the prow of my ship?

Boredom, a cluttered mind, and a terminal case of cacoethes scribendi.

As a former reporter – 13 years at Forbes, four at PC Week, four at daily newspapers – I still have a verbal itch to scratch, and this is the leg of the couch I choose to do it on.