Before there was kleverVice the DJ, there was kleverVice the superhero maiden in a trinity of sci-fi identity crisis http://www.crucial-systems.com/crucial/kleverVice

Before that there was kleverVice the programmer.

A long time ago when I used to live in San Francisco and edit for a magazine about the internet, I would wake up at 7am and go to a coffee shop in lower height and write, mostly fiction or letters, before going to work. I remembered this and kleverVice recently when a post came through one of my lists looking for people to stand on a corner (in queens I think) and count cars for some study of some sort.

The original kleverVice used to do the same thing I did: go to the coffee shop before work, or when she was laid-off she might stay there all day. Some specific day she met a woman, Millicent, and Millicent was maybe 80 years old and had a little dog whose name I forget and have long lost the notebooks. Let's just call the dog Marx. Marx was a white poodle kind of and had pink sagging gums and crusty brown stuff in his eyes.

Millicent saw klever often in the coffee shop and one day decided to buy her some soup. Squash? Carrot ginger? I guess klever looked depressed or hungry. They began a conversation and Millicent confessed she had a problem.

See, she'd been standing on the corner for several years between 9am and 11am, counting cars. She had been conducting her own little environmental study of a particular block and charting which cars drove around each day, every other day, or multiple times on the same day. She had hoped to present a study to an unknown board of regulatory nature. She would use a pencil and when the pencil would run flat she'd yelp "PENCIL!" and Marx the dog would zip into the bodega on the corner, bark three times, and the shop person would give Marx a replacement pencil and then sharpen the old one. Meanwhile Millicent would have to memorize the cars that passed until a new pencil arrived.

Surprisingly *this* was not her problem. Her problem was that she had twelve years of data, in the form of thousands of notebooks that somehow needed to formulate into a report so she could make recommendations to the mystery board of environmental yada yada. Klever, being out of work, was perfectly equipped with the skills and time to take on this project.

And the story ended there.

What this reminds me is that *I* need to somehow formulate a report, I.e. A new story, for the mystery board of my imagination. In the meantime there is a new piece of writing about "globalization" up on www.klever.org/wrdz/ if anyone is interested. It's a brief summary and simple review of the work of Anthony Giddens and Jan Aart Scholte in preparation for a longer paper on the subject...

Love and creation,



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