I went to all this trouble after realizing that Facebook’s existence relies on a faulty view of relationships, corporate power and the Internet itself.  Facebook exists to commoditize and profit off of your relationships.

Facebook aspires to be The Platform, displacing the Internet as we know it.  They will spend months, perhaps years, amassing personal information before leveraging it in ways that are painfully foreseeable.  They will be an authentication scheme, a content delivery system, a customer loyalty program clearinghouse, an all-seeing, all-knowing, authenticated advertising platform.  That’s all it is: it’s just another way for them to target advertisements to you.  They will be the middleman between you and the other corporations.

The expedient technical accident of anonymity online was just never profitable enough, and nearly every large internet company has been based on some scheme to overcome it.  I grew to realize that Facebook’s scheme is particularly nefarious because not only does it seek to identify you uniquely across the entire Internet, it wants to measure what you do in relation to all your friends.  My relationships mean too much to me to subject them to this.

There are numerous other, more quibbling reasons to dislike Facebook.  It’s has further diluted the word “Friend” to include, well, anyone.  I no longer have any Friends, but thankfully still have a handful of friends that will help me through this loss.  I never liked having conversations that would have otherwise been private publicly over writing “walls.”  (What a ridiculous misnomer.  Writing on walls is most often a creative, rebellious process, not scribbling on some bleak electronic parchment.)  Facebook also spawned the rather annoying phenomenon of Scrabble cheating.

All of this aside, I haven’t disappeared into the woods.  I spend a good deal of time maintaining my own web presence, one that I wholly control to the extent possible.  I use free software on a cooperatively-owned server.  I control everything here and ensure that it is interoperable, standards-based, and noncommercial.  I believe in the usefulness of technology to a limited extent, an extent that doesn’t include Facebook.  Good riddance.

This was my first trip to Yankee Stadium this year, my first game since I moved back.  In my years away, my memories of Yankees games grew to mythic proportions, fueled by discontent with the still-traitorous Dodgers and their still (and forever) new city.  I frequently employed fond memories of intoxicated, involved, intense Yankees fans as a rebuke to late-arriving, early-departing, lackadaisical Dodgers fans.  Differences in baseball fandom between the cities had a great deal of meaning for me.

I had anticipated this for a while, and it turned out to be a significant game.  The Yankees were playing well after the break and trying for a sweep of the A’s, a likely wild card rival.  Starting for the Yankees was Andy Pettite, another Houstonian that had found his way to New York and one of my favorite pitchers.

Geoff and I stopped at Stan’s before the game.  Geoff noted that “everything on the street” was named Stan’s: Stan’s hats, Stan’s shirts, Stan’s this, Stan’s that.  The bar was packed.  We ordered a couple of beers and lingered around the bar for only a few moments before a bouncer shooed us into a penned-in area in the back, perhaps four feet wide– where waiters yelled and body-checked their way through the pre-noon drunken masses.  I loathe all places with roving bouncers.

Our barely-less-than-stadium-priced beers finished, we proceeded across the street to the main event.  I was careful to bring a plastic bag, the only kind of bag allowed into the stadium.  I’ve been to Rikers Island more times than Yankee Stadium, and the searches on a visit Rikers are always less intrusive than at Yankee Stadium.

After a brief shuffle through a line, we reached the security gate.  My bag, a cloudy white color with a forgettable yellow smiling face, was not acceptable.  The bag must be transparent.  Get out of line and get another bag.

No, no, I said.  I’ll take out my two items and hold them.  No trouble.  Wait, what?  I can’t take in this sunscreen?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  It’s the middle of the day and I can’t bring in sunscreen?  (Somewhere in my head, I was outlining a torts essay.  That’s what I get for taking a break from BarBri.)  Can I at least put the sunscreen on over there and throw it away?  Ok, then that’s what I’ll do.

I went over and, seeing that no one was looking, slipped the sunscreen into my pocket.  A supervisor came over and asked where my sunscreen was.  We argued for a moment before he reached into my pocket and confiscated my sunscreen.  “Be a man,” he told me, “don’t hide things.”

I don’t like being talked to that way, I told him.  He called me a knucklehead.  I don’t like being called names, either, I say.  Geoff asks why I can’t bring sunscreen in, and he says that knuckleheads– I stop and remind him that his name-calling isn’t appreciated– come in and throw things.  Sure.  Only terrorists bring in outside food and drink.  And sunscreen.

Having been frisked, searched, and insulted, I held up my barcode and went through the gates.

What happened on the field was one of the better baseball games I’ve seen in a while.  The Yankees threw under 120 pitches and the whole low-scoring affair lasted about two-and-a-half hours, perfect time for a baseball game.  Pettite pitched a gem, Mariano Rivera came in to close, and that was that.

Being there, though, reminded me of the more irksome things about Yankee games, especially how the Steinbrenners persist in playing God Bless America before the seventh inning stretch.  I always cringe at the specter of tens of thousands of people standing to halfheartedly and obiediently droll out the lyrics to a mediocre, xenophobic anthem.  The Mets don’t do it, the Astros don’t do it, and the Yankees shouldn’t do it, either.

My first Yankees game back was unpleasant.  Given all that it meant to me, I was left a good deal upset about it.  However, my confidence in the city was soon restored.

That Monday, the yellow, oft-wrong, occasionally muckraking New York Post had this “EXCLUSIVE” story:

SUNBLOCKHEADS AT THE STADIUM
YANKS TAKE HEAT OVER BIZARRE BAN

The Post seldom misses a chance to turn the screws, and this was a Post classic.  Some reporter strung together several quotations from people calling the ban idiotic (which it was) and quoted (fabricated?) some anonymous sources within the Yankees to make them sound devious and stupid (which they may be).

But the Yankees responded! “An hour after being asked about the sunscreen ban, Yankee spokesman Jason Zillo told The Post that the rules would be changed to permit 3-ounce containers.”  Stupid still, but less stupid.  Baby steps are good enough.  Chalk another one up for sensationalist tabloids.  While other cities’ one remaining paper are facing extinction, we still have four here.

This city isn’t perfect.  (Nowhere is.)  But it works.  That’s all I ask from a city, and New York consistently delivers.

And thanks, Post.  If only you still cost a quarter, I’d still buy you sometimes.

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House arrest by bar examiners

This morning they tagged me with a green bracelet.  I wear it until tomorrow afternoon, showers and all.  (It’s already been through one with mixed results.)  I kinda feel like I’m on parole.

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