GOOGLE BRAIN

Preface (Excerpt)

I’ve recently discovered that each of us has a Google Brain. Mine has been telling me to dig into the past to give you everything you want to know.

Having seen Silicon Valley come into being––living and working in San Jose, California, from the l950s to the l990s––I watched first-hand how computer technology advanced from a simple little game called “pong” on a home TV set to the mind-boggling services we take for granted today. How it’s changed our lives takes my breath away....

When I began thinking about writing this book I ended up going through old trunks to recover things written in the past to supplement what lay in my cranial archives. However, as someone who witnessed the remarkable change in information gathering and dissemination in the twentieth century, I began to see the possibility of supplementing the printed word with the newer technology.

That’s when I put my computer’s search engine to work. Specifically, I started searching for sights and sounds of the past now available on the Internet, thanks to their having been saved on film, discs, tape, CDs, DVDs, and other modern devices.

I spent endless days searching for anything online that would illuminate the story of my particular life, hoping to provide links in the bibliography when I found them. Mine was to be a “back to the future book”––an all-media recreation of the past––that would integrate my words-in-print with the vast archives of the Internet....

If this book called Google Brain achieves anything, I hope it’s that the print media can successfully merge with the Internet. In making my memoir an experimental “Time Machine” by using the resources online, I hope it proves interesting enough that it will encourage others to do it. There can be wonderful surprises if you use the Google search engine to see what’s there....

As more becomes available, I believe it’s one of the best ways of letting us understand “the way it was.” But if we’re going to go “back to the future,” all of must help to put it there.

As the Internet continues to grow, offering us sights and sounds of the world never before as easily available, the time has come to find out how to use this wonderful resource to better understand the past. We no longer need wait to apply what’s there. As this vast reservoir of online data continues to expand and deepen, I believe there’s the possibility of creating an entirely new kind of book.

By showing that Google Brain can be linked to the Internet, I hope this experiment will inspire others to start “googling” and enjoy the pleasure of creating their own “Time Machine.” What I hope you’ll see is that anyone’s story can be enriched by a simple click of a mouse!

Chapter 1 (Excerpt)

THE DOG ATE WHAT?

I consider it a matter of high priority that I get to the White House to inform the President of my astounding news–– even though it will come as a shock -- because as a dog owner himself he has a “need to know.” The President needs to know that a dog ate his memoir!

Certainly his own dog “Bo,” a six-month-old Portuguese water dog, wouldn’t have done it. But the guilty culprit was one hungry enough to devour Obama’s best seller––a new paperback edition of Dreams from My Father–– that I bought for $14.95 to send as a gift to my daughter. Since I had packaged it carefully, took it to the U.S. Post Office, and then found out she didn’t get it, what do you suppose happened to it?

“Did you get the book?” I kept asking my daughter by phone.

“No, I didn’t,” she said repeatedly.

Then finally one day she called to say, “Yes, your package got here today but there's no book inside. It’s torn open and empty.”

If you think about it carefully, ask yourself which animals prefer to chase the postman every chance they get? The answer is obvious! Dogs, that’s what. Obviously the mailman was chased, the dog grabbed the package, chewed it open, and buried the remnants of Obama’s memoir in a deep hole somewhere. Until somebody at the U.S Post Office can honestly explain exactly what happened, this dog seems to be the most likely suspect in this important case.

As for my own missing memoir, the story is different but hopefully may have a happier ending. Lately I’ve been trying to piece together my wonderful life story. The entire narration is so scattered hither and yon that my writing room looks as though a dog got into it and began chewing everything in sight. Putting it back together will take hours of leafing through huge stacks of old letters, notebooks, photo albums, half-finished manuscripts, diaries, newspaper clippings, and documents of every kind.

If I’m lucky it may be possible to recover bits and pieces of my memoir, which my dog––yes, our dog “Sugar”––found tasty and chewable. But with old age creeping up on me and memories quickly disappearing, I’ve every reason to believe only the government can help me reconstruct this very important memoir in this, my moment of need.

Since the U.S Treasury has been handing out billions of dollars to save banks, insurance companies, and troubled investment firms to keep them from bankruptcy, I’ve felt for a long time it should help us needy and struggling writers in this depressed economy. We, too, should get a fair share of this bounty. It’s time we were recognized as private entrepreneurs.

Writers are business people. Each of us is like the top CEO of any company, heavily involved in a “word manufacturing industry” and working hard at word management, idea development, and language investment strategy. We are private entrepreneurs who make the product ourselves, send it off to a factory to be mass produced on an assembly line and then retailed to the public like cans of beans, soft drinks, or chocolate-coated peanuts.

At tax time the Internal Revenue Service certainly considers us small businessmen who work hard at planting the seeds of ideas, harvesting them from our fields of knowledge, and delivering them as bundles of words to a waiting market. We’re as much a profit-making enterprise as any business run by a neighborhood Mom and Pop grocery store, a Fifth Avenue fashion designer, or Las Vegas casino operator.

If the definition of a capitalist is someone who dares take a risk, then we writers are the bravest or most foolhardy of the bunch.