The ugliest logo ever, but maybe it makes sense

Logo creation is a thankless task. Almost all of the interesting shapes and doodles were trademarked years ago. Unless you have hundreds of thousands of dollars to spend on artists and lawyers, and a lot of time, you usually settle on using your company name with no artwork at all.

Or you can take the approach adopted by the newly-formed Symbian Foundation, keeper of the Symbian OS:



Yes, that's really the new Symbian logo. I guarantee no one's going to sue them for it, unless it's the producers of the movie Juno:



I've already gone through a couple of stages of reaction to the logo. The first was horror. Not only is the font something out of 1974, but the color is one of the least popular in the world (step outside and count how many yellow cars you can see, or click here or here). I know I've seen uglier logos in the past, but I can't remember where, probably because I tried to block out the memory.

The discussion on All About Symbian has been amusing (link).

Once I got over my reaction, I reminded myself that the folks at Symbian are smart and very deliberate. Let's assume they have a good reason for choosing this logo. What would it be, and what would it tell us about the company and its business strategy?

The new Symbian is an open source software project. They need to appeal to open source developers, many of whom have a reflexive hatred toward slick and calculated marketing. After all, these are the sort of folks who, when allowed to choose their own logos, spontaneously chose a fat, stoned-looking penguin and a drunken ox:



The GNU Gnu Head and Tux the Linux penguin (link)
Tux drawn by lewing@isc.tamu.edu. Gnu head reproduced under the copyleft license (link).

To the open source community, Symbian has historically been kind of an antichrist -- controlled by some of the biggest tech firms in the world, bureaucratic, closed, and incredibly complex. If you're going to win over the open source crowd, you have to overcompensate by being excessively informal, friendly and "childlike." (That's Symbian's word for it, not mine.)

Here's how Symbian explains the logo (link):

It is a brand that’s human and playful and friendly, where you feel the human hand. A brand that enables you to discover unlimited creative possibilities, that wants to share and talk A brand that’s fun, that isn’t fixed, but free to constantly evolve. A brand that’s owned by all the people that create and build with Symbian. A brand that celebrates new ideas and creativity in all forms. A brand that’s truly alive and refreshingly different, because it is! A brand that’s human to the core and that underneath beats a human heart.

In other words, the slick and calculated marketing approach is to give the company the most artless logo imaginable. And from that perspective, I think they succeeded.

I am wondering, though, what they'll do when it's time to use the logo for something other than just decorating a website. OS logos are generally used as compatibility marks. In that role they need to be displayed on screen, and preferably printed on the back of the phone, to let the user know that he or she can run Symbian applications on the device.

Picture a meeting where the folks at Symbian try to convince a product manager at Nokia or Samsung or SonyEricsson that they should print that logo on the backs of their phones, or that it should be displayed prominently on the screen. I don't think it'll go over very well. And even if they did agree to include the logo, the tiny details in the lettering won't show up well when reduced in size. The logo just isn't designed to travel.

So Symbian app developers should ask how they'll be able to market their applications when Symbian OS users don't even know what their OS is. Symbian has never had a good answer to that, and I think the new logo doesn't move them any closer to solving that problem.

Maybe the assumption is that all Symbian phones will have application stores built in, so developers won't need to communicate compatibility. Maybe, but that will still put a big marketing burden on an application developer to explain model by model which phones their apps work on.

The bottom line is that any logo artless enough to please the open source community would be problematic as a marketing tool. As is often the case in marketing, you can't please all your audiences, so you can either be universally bland or you can optimize for one audience. I think the folks at Symbian decided that open source street cred is the thing they need most.

And maybe they're right.

Thoughts on the tech industry bailout

I presume the big topic of discussion at the CTIA conference this week is going to be the government's emergency bailout package for the tech industry. I was surprised this morning when US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner replaced RIM CEO Mike Lazaridis at the CTIA keynote to announce the package, and ever since I've been scrambling to sort through all the details. A lot of it's still fuzzy, but here's what I've been able to figure out so far:


--The largest single element in the bailout seems to be the $20 billion in subsidies for Motorola. I think the biggest shock here was President Obama's decision to replace Moto's co-CEO Greg Brown with Steve Wozniak. "We tried to get Steve Jobs, but he demanded control over the Seventh Fleet as compensation," Geithner explained. "So we went for the closest substitute we could find. Besides, Woz was available since he just got kicked off Dancing with the Stars."

Geithner said the subsidies to Motorola were originally designed to protect high-paying phone manufacturing jobs in the United States, but then the government discovered that those were all outsourced to China a decade ago. So the government settled on a requirement that the guy who glues the bat-wing logos onto Motorola's phones has to be an American citizen. He has already been hired, his name is Joey Carbonic, he lives in Wenonah, Illinois, and the crowd at CTIA gave him a nice ovation when he was introduced during Geithner's keynote.

There's a rumor at the show that the government also agreed to buy 500,000 unsold ROKR handsets and give them free to poor countries as a gesture of friendship, but that was denied by a government official who spoke to me off the record. "We're trying to get people in those countries to like us," he explained.


--In the spirit of the forced mergers between failing banks, Geithner announced the combination of Sun, Sprint, AOL, and 3Com. Called 3Sprun and combining the best of all four companies, the new firm will specialize in Java-based 56kbps wireless modems.


--I haven't been able to confirm this yet, but Palm has apparently been offered $2 billion in loans if it adapts the Pre to run on biomass power and merges within 30 days with either Black & Decker, Digg, or SonyEricsson. Ironically, reports from Stockholm say that the Swedish government has offered SonyEricsson 20 billion kronor if it merges with Airbus Industrie, so we may get a three-way deal that would see Treos built into the seat backs of every A380.


--Geithner also said $40 billion in grants have been reserved for use by Yahoo and/or Microsoft. "We like to plan ahead," he explained.


Those are just the highlights. There are apparently a lot more deals being arranged, with venture capitalists and members of Congress competing to get subsidies for various firms. The most intriguing rumor so far is the plan to provide three Twitter accounts to every American as part of the stimulus package, to produce the illusion that the country's population has suddenly tripled. And then there's Cisco's buyout of Six Flags to advance the creation of networked roller coasters (hey, it makes at least as much sense as their purchase of Pure Digital).

I don't know how those will turn out, but things are certainly going to get more and more interesting now that the government has decided that the free market can't be trusted to run the tech industry.

By now you've probably realized that this is April 1, and like the extended iPhone survey last year (link), the Spitr announcement in 2007 (link), and the Google-Sprint merger in 2006 (link), nothing I wrote above is true.

I hope.

Watch out for RIM

Based on what you read in the press, you'd think Apple had conquered the entire smartphone market, or maybe that they invented it in the first place. But to me the most surprising story in recent smartphone sales isn't Apple, it's the continuing rapid growth of Research in Motion.

Check out the latest numbers from Gartner (link). As you know if you've been reading this weblog for a while, I have very little faith in third party market share numbers. They're compiled from shipments self-reported by the vendors, and are subject to all sorts of inaccuracies (link). But they do give a very rough picture of what's happening in the market, and the picture they've been drawing recently is mildly astonishing.

Nokia is still the smartphone share leader, with about 41% unit share. But that's down 10 points from a year ago, on a shipment decrease of about 17% year over year. RIM is number two, with over 19% share and shipments up about 85% year over year. Apple is in third: 11% share, up 110% year over year.

So, roughly speaking, in smartphones Nokia is about twice the size of RIM, and RIM is about twice the size of Apple.

I have to put a caveat on that. Quarterly share and shipment growth fluctuates a lot depending on whether a company has just introduced a new product or is clearing inventory in preparation for a launch. So you have to look at several quarters:


Unit smartphone shipments, worldwide, in thousands. Source: Gartner.

That gives a slightly less apocalyptic view for Nokia. It had particularly huge shipments in Q4 of 2007, so it's down year over year, but overall its shipments are flat rather than collapsing. RIM and Apple are both definitely growing fast, though, with Apple's shipments fluctuating a lot as it adjusted inventory before and after the shipment of the iPhone 3G.

But let's put this all in perspective. The definition of "smartphone" is very sketchy; the way Gartner uses the term today, it refers to basically any phone that has an externally-programmable OS in it. Nokia deploys the Symbian OS in all of its high-end phones, so they are all classified as smartphones. So RIM's not really beating up on Nokia's smartphones, it is currently out-growing the entire top end of Nokia's product line. Project out the current trends for a year, and RIM would be close to overtaking Nokia in smartphones. No matter how you parse the numbers, that's pretty amazing.


Why don't you just die already?

This situation is all the more surprising considering that conventional wisdom has said for years that RIM was doomed. First e-mail phones were just a fad, an extension of the pager market. Then they were just a vertical product that only a few specialized groups like stock brokers would care about. Then Microsoft was on the verge of destroying RIM (not once, but every time a new version of Windows Mobile came out). Then RIM was fated to fall into irrelevance unless it licensed Blackberry clones. And on and on...

Fortunately, RIM completely ignored conventional wisdom and stuck to its core business. The rewards have been immense. In its most recent quarterly report (in December), RIM had a revenue run rate of about $12 billion a year, up more than 60% year over year, and profit of about $1 billion a year. The company now employs about 12,000 people. For comparison, RIM's revenue is now about the same as Apple's was four years ago.

Companies with $12 billion in revenue aren't supposed to grow 60% a year, especially when the economy is gasping, so I'll be intensely interested to see RIM's next quarterly report on April 2. In this economic climate I won't take anything for granted. But keep in mind that Nokia is already making ominous noises about its sales (link), while RIM says its unit growth has been accelerating (link).


Face reality

I think the big message from these numbers is that the analysts and press have done a terrible disservice to all of us by creating the fiction that there is a unified smartphone market. That hides the real news. For example, IDG's writeup on the Gartner sales report focused on overall growth of smartphone sales and didn't even mention RIM until the sixth paragraph (link).

I use the term smartphone "market" here for convenience, but as I've said before, there really isn't a single unified smartphone market and there probably never will be, because different people want different things from their phones (link).

If you look carefully at the shipment numbers, this is blindingly obvious. The smartphones from RIM (and Apple) are differentiated products that have special features appealing to particular segments of users (RIM for e-mail fanatics, Apple for entertainment-hounds). They solve customer problems in unique ways that people can value, so their sales are relatively resistant to an economic downturn. Not immune, but I think they're likely to fall less than the others.

And since Apple and RIM serve different markets, they can grow rapidly side by side. One doesn't usually steal sales from the other.

But Nokia has never had a strong play with this sort of product. Most of its smartphones are bought as high-end mobile phones, purchased by technophiles and status-conscious people with money. When the overall phone market slows down, they slow down too.

The analyst numbers told Nokia a comforting fantasy that it was the dominant smartphone company, when in fact it was a very secondary player in the markets served by RIM and Apple. I think this let Nokia avoid the agonizing changes in product development that are required to make a truly differentiated smart phone.

Instead, Nokia has gone off on tangents attacking Google, Microsoft, iTunes, and just about every other target I can think of in computing. It's a bit like a guy at his home putting up wallpaper in the upstairs bathroom while out in the yard his car is on fire.

I continue to be intrigued by parts of Nokia's strategy, especially the Ovi services suite. Nokia will be able to push Ovi out to hundreds of millions of mobile phone users. In theory, that might be a very powerful way for the company to build a mobile data business. But it could be crippled if the most data-hungry users have already been siphoned away by Apple and RIM.


What happens to RIM?

The question about RIM is what are the natural limits on its growth. Not everyone wants an e-mail phone, although RIM has already stretched the market a lot more than I thought they could. But I think the bigger threat may actually be within the company. Beyond about $10 billion in revenue, a tech company starts to require different management techniques. There's enough going on that management has to delegate much more than it did in the past, and processes have to be set up to ensure quality work and smart decision-making in the lower reaches of the company. That transition is incredibly hard for the leaders of a startup to make, and I wonder if the bug-filled launch of the Blackberry Storm wasn't a symptom of a company growing beyond its processes.

On the other hand, RIM has such a long history of beating my expectations that I'm not going to bet against them again.

THE KING OF KODGERS VISITS A DYING CULT

Never mind the spelling--they welcome such as me. Their neighbors speak well of them. (I asked several)
You'd have to admit--they're aiming high.
I drive in with just a smidgen of trepidation----thinking: Here comes a new adventure!
A lovely, well kept pool, open to all it seems--the neighboring kids come often they said.
Elect Philip Lake greeted, subtley screened me and toured me.
Elect David---taciturn---Did not readily engage.
Elect Star --The soft spoken leader of the group succeeding Elect Gold.
I couldn't restrain myself---I flirted with her!The main building was exactly 120 feet long by scriptural decree and was one large room with kitchen,dining and living area.
My first meal with them. They did not object to my curiosity or photography. Notice the absence of a fork and the measuring cup with exactly one cup of water. The white stuff is sweet cream the yellow is apricots. I enjoyed the meal--felt virtuous
They sing every night at 7:30 before retiring. I did my best to keep the tune.
A songbook page--regularly amended. This song written by Elect Star is to the tune of Born to Lose.
The arrow points the spot where the new age begins.

Definition of cult: A minority religion regarded with disapproval by the majority.
(I remind my readers that Christianity itself was once a cult. Also that I use the word here in a non pejorative sense)

Traveling Interstate 8 between Yuma and Gila Bend, Az I suddenly recalled hearing about an odd religious group living far out in the desert beyond Sentinal. Inquiring at its only store, I learned that the group still functions—and got directions. I have time and curiosity so I found them, miles out a dirt road, and drove boldly into their palm lined driveway, parking by a large swimming pool.

A thin, 80ish guy came out and introduced himself as Elect Lake Philip. I was ready with my intro: I’m Randy; I’ve heard about your good work here and wanted to come meet you. In minutes I was warmly ensconced into the heart of things, taken on a tour, introduced all round, invited to dinner and to stay the night. I accepted.

Winning my way to the warm is the upside of my “pleasing personality.” Trust me there is a downside!

Dinner was strange if not bizarre. Each plate contained a date and a banana, a sweet paste of nuts and seeds, cream and apricots. No meat! And most surprisingly, no forks. (they are associated with meat eating) Each person received EXACTLY the same amount of food; carefully measured. We drank water from measuring cups. They told me the practice of measuring was based on scripture. After a hand holding ritual of thanks, we ate in silence.

At precisely 7:30 we adjourned to the comfortable living room to sing. The songs were all new; Songs they had written, though often the tune was familiar. Turns out, New is a big word with these folks. Anyone joining receives a new name. I sang out loud getting into the spirit of things; beginning to feel comfortable with my new friends-----odd octogenarians.

They sleep separately–no sex–ever. I slept in my rig. Next day they all came to see the Stealth trailer–especially interested in my solar power. They aspire to get off the grid .

Before noon I finally managed to get with Elect Star, the leader of the group. As she was carefully measuring out food she answered my questions about their history and doctrines. Here’s their story in summary: In 1949 a charismatic female preacher in Canada (later renaming herself Elect Gold) had visions of end times and a special mission. About a hundred of the flock joined her but the number dwindled to 12 when she was defrocked by her church. They wandered the US, living in tents and vehicles, for 12 years, barely earning enough to eat. Another vision showed them this particular 80 acres and they managed to buy it. They’ve been here for 40 odd years, making a lovely oasis of it. A generous benefactor willed substantial money to them so that now no one needs to work for money. They just go about their assorted interest and simple rituals. Occasionally they travel to visit family, and friends come here to visit. Walk-ins like myself are welcome.

Elect Star and I had a great time sharing boondocking secrets. She knew about the Slabs, Quartzsite and Oh My God hot springs.

Their founder died at age 98 and is buried in Buckeye, Az. They cling to the belief that they are the harbingers of a new age–showing the way with their lives –and that this particular spot is where the great transformation will begin. I think they liked me and would have had me stay awhile, but after another carefully measured meal of beets, beans, dates and the requisite one cup of water I bid them farewell. They provisioned me with a big bag of really good dates.

I like these people–think they are harmless and even well meaning–modern day monks and nuns approaching life’s end holding on to their founders vision. Better this life than one of assorted addictions but much less than a life of self actualization. I didn’t have the heart to ask if they sometimes doubted the visions and doctrines of Gold. World weary people are sometimes drawn to this sort of mystical escapism ----soothing perhaps in the short run—boring in the long—I saw it in their eyes as I drove away—they wanted to go with me!

Speech recognition: Almost ready for mobile prime time

I've always wanted to see speech recognition incorporated into mobile devices. Since you don't have a big keyboard when you're on the go, you ought to be able to just talk to your phone and tell it what to do, or dictate memos to it and have it convert them into e-mails or SMS messages. In addition to being incredibly convenient, this would increase the safety of a lot of drivers. It's a spooky fact, but in surveys I've done more than 10 percent of the US population admitted to sometimes sending text messages while driving.

Not smart, not safe.

So, is voice recognition good enough to let you just talk to your mobile device and then send the converted text as a message?

I first asked myself that question a couple of years ago when I bought a copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking and a small voice recorder. I tried recording weblog posts and other documents while driving, and then brought the recorded sound back to my computer to convert it into text. The result was a disaster. Dragon was unable to keep pace with the recorded sound in the files, and started dropping sentences, paragraphs, and eventually entire pages of spoken text. I was so disgusted, and so disappointed, that I gave up and went back to listening to sports talk radio while I drove.

Recently a newly appointed product manager at Nuance (publisher of Dragon) sent out a survey asking for feedback on the product. Unlike most product managers, she signed the survey form with her own name and with her own e-mail address. Most product managers wouldn't do that because they don't want to be overwhelmed with feedback. I don't know how much feedback she got in general, or how overwhelming it was, but she got a note back from me describing my problems with the product and explaining why I really wasn't satisfied with it.

I didn't expect to get any reply from the company; Nuance has a remarkably restrictive policy on providing technical support unless you pay extra for it. Usually, companies that do that aren't interested in getting any sort of conversation going with their customers. But to my surprise, I got a note from the product manager not only sympathizing with my problems but offering to send me a copy of the latest version of the software and a voice recorder that she said would work well with the software. I wish my weblog address hadn't been in my signature, so I would know if they do this sort of thing for every frustrated user. But anyway I took her up on the offer.

You can see the results here. I dictated this weblog post using the voice recorder, synced it onto my computer for recognition, and then corrected the (few) errors by hand. There are pluses and minuses to the dictation system. The good news is that the program can now keep up with my dictated speech. I no longer lose sentences or paragraphs of text. I'm also surprised with the way the product recognizes trade names, so for instance when I say Home Depot or McDonald's or Nike or Apple or IKEA or Lowes, Dragon gets the names correct and properly capitalized (I didn't have to fix anything in that sentence).

On the other hand it does make mistakes -- the packaging claims about 99% accuracy, which means that you should expect one word in every hundred to be incorrect. My guess is that I'm getting somewhere between 97 and 99% accuracy. That's not bad. In fact, it's pretty darned impressive. But in practice it still means you have to go back and do a lot of corrections.

The training is close to torture: reading aloud a 20-minute excerpt from a Dilbert book while trying to pronounce every word correctly. Later I tried setting up the program without any training, and it worked exactly the same. So my advice is to skip the training.

The software is not great at understanding where punctuation should be placed in the text. I have learned that I have to give grammatical guidance by saying things like "comma," "period," and "new paragraph" in order to make sure that the text will be reasonably well formatted.

If I just speak naturally the text will come out like this making it very difficult for anyone else to read and even making it hard for me to edit without punctuation inserted it is very hard to get tell where a sentence was supposed to end and another one start add in a few wreck cognition errors by the soft wear and the text is not something you would want to send to someone uncorrected

Speaking with punctuation is unnatural, and could be somewhat distracting while driving. I have to think carefully about the text that I'm dictating, and I believe for some people that could cause them not to pay enough attention to what's happening on the road. I think I can do it safely or I wouldn't do it, but it definitely is an issue to consider.

Overall, I think this approach will make me a bit more productive, so I should be able to produce a little bit more weblog content and maybe get some other sorts of things done as well.

So it's nice for me, and I finally feel like I got my money's worth from Dragon. But is the technology ready for broad deployment in mobile devices?

I think the answer is technically yes, but practically no. Mobile devices are casual-use; tasks that require too much commitment or effort just don't get used. Without careful attention to spoken punctuation, the software produces errors and the sort of run-on text you saw above. Even in a short message, I think it's likely that you'd get more mistakes than you'd find acceptable. Correcting those errors on a small screen with no mouse would be tedious at best (it's an annoying task even on a PC).

More importantly, the software is very sensitive to the quality of the sound file coming into it. I believe most phone microphones and headsets wouldn't produce the required quality. You'd probably get better results with a service that just records your speech and has someone in India retype it (such services exist today).

So, the news from the world of voice recognition is hopeful for mobile users but not yet wonderful. The technology is good enough that you can definitely use it as a substitute for typing if you have physical problems. It's also a useful PC productivity tool for someone who generates a lot of text for a living.

However, I think we're not yet quite at the point where you can just talk to your phone and have it reliably transform all of your speech into text. It's getting better, but it's not all the way there yet. For a mobile device, the dream of just talking is still a dream. But I do think it's a dream that's getting closer to reality.

===========

PS: I'd also like to compliment Kristen Wylie, the product manager at Nuance who responded to my message. Take notes, folks, this is the right way to communicate with customers online -- sign your real name, use an address they can respond to rather than a no-replies mailbox, and when someone has a problem help them solve it.

TWEAKING THE TRIBE

A "focus bringer" is absolutely essential for social cohesion. This day I am quoting from Walt Whitman's "Song of the Open Road."
Dancing under the stars
Ron Sinor, inventor of the desert dance floor tests it out with Donna Huffer. It withstood 2 weeks of heavy traffic.
The burning Kayak. Diana has much better coverage of this ceremony in her blogsite: www.lifeontheopenroad.blogspot.com
Visitors to our singles ice cream social.
CREATING CULTURE

Myself and 6 of my friends decided to tinker with our tribe’s culture–in a big way! With the cooperation of 185 members who attended our Quartzsite, Az gathering, we conducted 7 bold experiments. Amazingly, every one of them was a spectacular success.

1. TEAM HOSTING. Usually one or two people take on the job. This time we split the task 7 ways and found it ridiculously easy.

2. BUILT A DESERT DANCE FLOOR. Yes we did! And for only $70 we engineered a usable smooth surface over the rocks; removing the largest of them, coating with sand, covering with outdoor carpeting and finally securing a taunt tarp over all. Worked like a charm! We danced our boodies off night after night under the stars. Oh so romantic! Our people loved it–we saved a fortune in bar tabs and next year we’ll build a whopper.

3. CONDUCTED A SPEED DATING SESSION. Two long lines of chairs on the desert, —gals and guys face to face—2 minutes each to ask whatever—then on to the next. NO IT’S NOT E-HARMONY scientific matching but it was good enough–fun and enlightening for all.

4. HOSTED A MULTI-GROUP ICE CREAM SOCIAL. Distributed fliers to all singles groups in the area inviting them over. A hundred or so visitors showed up and we mingled in the rain–hopefully spreading good will. A good time was had by all.

5. INVENTED A NEW RITUAL. ‘BURNING KAYAK’ About a third of us carry Kayaks and one whole travel circuit is devoted to kayaking, so we threw out the challenge for someone to build us a sacrificial kayak out of firewood scraps to serve as focus to our ritual. (as in the burning man festival in Nevada) Surprise, a boatright, James, volunteered and astoundingly, had it built in two days; a full sized kayak made of wood and cardboard. Barb and Clair choreographed a new conga line style dance for the ceremony. Then, at the appointed time and to the tune of Proud Mary we danced in a long line in the desert and then round and round the fire as it burned. ABSOLUTELY TERRIFIC–WE ALL GOT LOST IN THE MOMENT.

6. OPENED UP OUR HOMES FOR INSPECTION—RIG TOURS. Those willing, let everyone see the inside of our campers; especially showing off our unique adaptations. The STEALTH TRAILER as always was the object of much curiosity.

7. FORMED AN ISSUES COMMITTEE —to deal with those rare but serious breaches of our code of conduct: RESPONSIBLE, RESPECTFUL, RESPECTABLE.

8. HELD A SADIE HAWKINS DANCE—A minor—frosting on the cake experiment where the ladies were required to do the asking. They got the hang of it quickly and so did we—fun!

RANDY PHILOSOPHIZES: All of us come to consciousness within a particular culture (shared beliefs, values, practices) and live within it like fish within water, hardly noticing it. Visit another culture—go to Mexico or visit the Amish and suddenly you become conscious of your own. Cultures often imprison peoples mind and spirit like Mormonism or Jehovas Witness or Islam. I escaped my fundamentalist Baptist culture and find life incredibly richer for having done so—I never danced till I was 27—a bit of Baptist repression.

My mobile tribe is young and our culture is still forming----a great opportunity to help create a brand-new one. Some years ago I laid out our first camping circuit, a string of short hop gatherings and was delighted that it caught on and is now part of our culture. Another of our members organized a dance rally that also caught on and is an exciting annual fixture. Still another started a kayaking circuit that is now standard.

I’m convinced we can create a culture that fits us rather than adjusting ourselves to it----and that we can do it very quickly. One or more of our experiments at Quartzsite might become part of our culture. How sweet to escape an unsuitable culture and find a suitable one. How double sweet to participate in shaping it!

A COMET SWEEPS THROUGH MY SOLAR SYSTEM

Pia visiting me in my rig. When standing, her head just touches my ceiling. Her name is a shortened derivative from a word meaning "peaceful soul."
Only I seem to be sweating in the Somewhere Bar, Bouse, Az. Her energy and stamina are legendary--often dancing every dance.
Pia shows off her modest trailer--22ft and cozy. She has no yen for more.
The world famous Desert Bar---remote---solar powered juke joint--open only on the weekends.
Pia poses reluctantly where couples often marry. It's an odd "church"--no congregation and only one wall---an addendum to the desert bar.

First, a note to my readers: I’ve been busy living! It interferes with writing and vice versa. Here’s my latest adventure.

Now and again you meet someone so sparklingly different that they alter the way you live; like a close passing comet jostles the orbit of a small planet. It’s happened to me these past two weeks.

I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with an exotic, solitary, vagabond lady; so tall her head brushes my ceiling; so slender you think of a racehorse. Her home is Switzerland where she works just long enough to accumulate traveling funds, then returns to the American West for adventure. Flying into Amarillo, Texas, she retrieves her truck and trailer from a good friend in Hartley, Texas who keeps them travel ready, then she is off indulging her whims.

One such whim was to be a cowgirl. Driving up to a remote Nevada ranch, she asked for a chance to be a cowgirl-- and got it—rounded up cattle—she loved it!

To recount more of her exploits would impress you but distract from my purpose. You get the idea—she is daringly bold–and did I mention, stunningly beautiful.

Forget any romantic connection. I quickly grasped that was not in the cards, but somehow she chose to spend time with me–perhaps because I’m a good listener and everyone wants to be understood. (the oracle lady explained that it was because I showed interest in her story) Then again, perhaps its because I too can become wild on the dance floor–as she does. Whatever, I’m grateful.

Here’s a sample of her style: We go for a walk in the desert 7 miles from Quartzsite, Az; On a whim she suggests we walk all the way to town–cross country. My macho kicked in and damned if we didn’d make it cross deep gullies and all. Once there, she’s hungry and orders a two pound megaburger with fries. The waitress suggested she might not be able to eat so much. She simply stood up, unfolding her amazonian frame. The waitress said “OH” and handed in the order. SHE ATE IT ALL!

Another sample of her style: We go to the famous Desert Bar, a converted gold mine, far in the boondocks beyond Parker, Az; the band is playing rock and roll; I release her hands so I can do my solitary wiggles. I think she took it as a challenge–show me what ya got–because she suddenly shifted gears doing a dance I had never seen before; bouncing horse-like, whirling like a ballerina, knifing between other dancers around the full perimeter, rocking in perfect rhythm to the music–as seductive as Salome dancing before Herod–absolutely mesmerizing! Jaws dropped all round. Even the band members were stunned–reluctant to end the song. No one noticed my feeble wiggles–I didn’t care! Like others, my heart expanded to witness such living joy. My friends later joked that she had demonstrated the real “Dance of Testosterone.” (My best known poem)

Another sample of her style: We’re at a dance and she asked me which lady in the crowd I fancied. I indicated a curvy blond trapped, it seemed, by a watchful partner. She immediately broke between them whisking the guy happily away, leaving the lady of my fancy free to dance with me.

Another sample: The scene is the Yacht club, Quartzsite’s primo watering hole. In walks a town big shot with his enterage. He spots the beautiful lady and tells her he will dance with her if she will remove her hat. Barely turning to acknowledge the mogul, she pleasantly responded: “no thanks.” He is so stung by this rare rejection that he leaves immediately. Wealth does not impress her.

I could go on, but you get the idea. This is a different breed of cat that crossed my path. Here is a person blessed with dazzling beauty–even at 50 plus years, strangely unsuited or unwilling for mating, never married, driven it seems to eternal adventuring. She affects all she engages–pleasantly or sometimes painfully as those who grasp at her soon learn.

With those who sense her rhythm, she will dance the dance of the moment. She treats with special respect unlovely people. I watched her engage a bearded outcast, waking up his downcast spirit.

She lives frugally so she may adventure widely; camping alone in the desert. ( Currently a quarter mile distant from others in her modest 22 foot trailer.

I occasionally encounter solitary wandering women such as the one in outlaw canyon. This one is markedly different because she moves toward, not away from the drama of life. She enjoys her body, lives sustainably, responds to her fascinations. She does not claim to have solved life’s mysteries–is not religious–but has an intuitive value system that guides her nicely down the road.

I’ve moved on and so has she, though we remain in contact. I live and dance more spontaneously for having this comet (with a beautiful tail) pass through my orbit. She is living proof of the energy released when we let go of ego, wanting and defensiveness. A master teacher in not clinging or grasping at life’s gifts.....I just flashed on an old poem of mine:
........These pleasures like the waters will
Brush us by then down the hill.
I let them go without delay,
Millions more are on the way.