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Last November, thousands of online viewers witnessed the wedding of Sal 9000 and Nene Anegasaki. Sal 9000 is a 27 year-old resident of Tokyo, Japan and Nene Anegasaki exists in an online game. Love, an elusive emotion pondered by poets, philosophers, fortune-tellers and songwriters throughout the millennia, has been re-engineered by a computer programmer. Love Plus for Nintendo DS is a game that allows players to interact with three different avatars in hopes of getting one to fall in love. Once this has been accomplished, players must then increase interaction to keep their avatar lover interested. The more players interact with their avatar, the more attention is required to maintain the relationship. This investment caused Sal to fall in love with his avatar and now he claims he would not leave her for a real woman.

As humans it seems we’re all programmed to love, but as society has developed we’ve done it in different ways. For example, it was well into the middle-ages before the idea of marriage by consent was established in Europe. Before that, marriage was simply a mutually beneficial arrangement between families, not between two willing parties.

In contemporary culture, the pressure to find your “soul mate” is likely contributing to both the high divorce rate and the use of computer software/websites like eharmony.com to find a compatible match. Couple this with overpopulation and the ability to fertilize eggs outside the uterus and you’ve created an environment where a marriage between a human and an online avatar might be the best evolutionarily model.

While we may need to upgrade our own “software” in order to accept this changed view of marriage, I predict the hardware is going to have no trouble keeping up. The popularity of the newly launched iPad portends that computers aware of their and our simultaneous existence (the iPad knows when it’s being flipped and tipped etc.) might soon be the norm. If love is too strong a word at this point, you might at least grant that there is a mutual appreciation developing here. (>wink<) Killin it!

Today’s Solar Eclipse went unwitnessed by millions who succumbed to the superstitions associated with this momentary disappearance of the sun.  Many stayed inside and closed the shades, worried that the literal darkness was a foretelling of personal misfortune.  Wow.  I don’t know whether I should feel like a fool, or just a foreigner, but I had the once in a lifetime opportunity to stare straight at it (with sunglasses!) from a rooftop in Mumbai, and I did.  It was like the top of a black snow-cone, a giant fire-rimmed pupil.  6 minutes of night when it should have been day.   

The bizarre has a gravitational pull.  Through embracing the unknown we discover clues about ourselves, some dormant essence awakens within us.  There’s nothing wrong with indulging superstitions, of course, but I find that these precious events can move us away from ideas and into experience.  That’s how you open your eyes. 

Killing It is revering oddity and admitting the abnormal into your life. 

Health Care. Dry and political. Clogged in the spin machinery like a sock wedged in the dryer door.  Pick your side, choose your partisan weapon and heave upon anyone who will listen. With all this chattering about who profits and who pays, you won’t hear this bottom line: Social Health Care is the spark needed to ignite the renaissance of the American workforce.

From the people I’ve talked to, health care is a big reason why people stay in jobs they dislike. They so fear spending even short periods without coverage that they remain paralyzed, unable to migrate to a job that is better aligned with their pursuit of happiness. The resulting workforce is a bureaucratic bulge that’s inefficient and uninspired.   The fundamental goal of the employment system should be matching person to position so that both are optimized.  Free people from the fear of ever going uncovered and watch a new work ethic be born.  That’s Killing It.

59 year old golfer Tom Watson just a few seconds ago won the 2009 British open! Alright, so maybe according to ESPN he didn’t.  BUT I KNOW THAT YOU ALL WOULD HAVE LIKED TO SEE IT!  Somebody even joked on twitter that Stewart Cink’s own parents would have liked to see it.  Sometimes you just want to see something happen so much that you just make it so for yourself; you create your own reality and you bask in it, no matter what the rest of the world believes.  I wanted Tom Watson to win the British open so badly, to show us all that even at the seasoned age of 59 you can still be a real player in the game, to remind us that we can all still be vital even at the dawn of our sunset years.  Here’s to you Tom Watson!  You’re Killin’ It!

There I am taking a soul recharge trek into the mountain tops, complete with rain jacket and whiskey to ensure Killing It rain or shine, when this little crit-crat pops his head up for a squeaky monologue. As you can see he’s Killing It with his use of natural backdrop to heighten the effect of his invaluable squeakings!