Activism

From Inside a Cage

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

From inside the courtroom cage in which he and many other defendants were held, the photographer Mahmoud Abu Zeid, also known as Shawkan, started posing as a photographer for his friends in the courtroom earlier today. In the photo at top, it looks like he is snapping shots with an Instamatic; in others he imitates holding up a heavy telephoto lens.

Today brought Shawkan to one more hearing, one more in long line of hearings in which the Egyptian court system has repeatedly postponed starting to hold hearings. Thus, once again, it was announced from the bench today that the trial start would be postponed yet again until May 17, one week. It is a Kafka-esque farce, minus any deeper meaning.

Shawkan is one of more than 700 defendants. Taher Abu el-Nasr, a lawyer affiliated with the case, told the Cairo Post last month that he expects the trial to take a long time until a verdict is issued due to the huge number of defendants: “it might take the court 20-30 sessions to only hear the prosecution witnesses; this is something annoying and exhausting to everyone.”
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Bitter Angels

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

“I’m glad I found this meeting,” a newcomer said this morning. “I went to one in” (name of nearby city that is big enough to have a dilapidated downtown) “yesterday and I was scared. I thought my car wouldn’t be there when I left.”

He was not speaking with me. I slowed down my already slow pace to hear the rest, and he supplied it: “You know, because I was the only white person there. I assumed it would be broken into or stolen.” I thought to myself, “Did I really just hear him say that?” I am grateful that racism and sexism and the rest of the hate-filled isms still possess the capacity to surprise me when I encounter them; I am furious every time I am exposed to that level of ugly stupidity, that degree of odious and casual hatred. If he had been speaking with me …

Yeah, and what, Mark? What would you have done?, I imagine someone sarcastically asking me. He was not speaking with me, and I went on with my after-meeting chores, but with my ears tuned to our new racist acquaintance, to hear if he had anything else of note to share about his fears. I do not like that I was shocked into a dull complacency, that I did not speak up.
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Marketing the Unmarketable: The PineApple Case Study

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

A few weeks ago, this web site published a post written by a guest writer, “Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Unveils PineApple, an Apple Competitor.” It was me playing a teeny-tiny part in a grand marketing prank/scheme at the invitation of a friend of a member of Time Over Distance (t/d), a social media company based in the United Kingdom.

My only up-front admission that the article was a part of someone else’s April 1st prank was hidden in front of everyone: I published the headline in italics. (Like above.) Otherwise, I published the article as it was submitted to me, by the friend; I even took dictation as some edits were offered, and I embargoed the article until after midnight on April 1. (Which coincidentally taught me how to schedule posts on WordPress, so my “Today in History” columns now appear after midnight.) The article was published on this web site and around the world on many other web sites, all of them more famous than this one. I did not write it. I was just one more tiny microphone. Here on The Gad About Town, it was the second-fastest article in 2016 to receive 200 hits, which may not sound like very many visits, but it is a large number of visits for any article on TGAT.

Here is the behind-the-scenes story about PineApple, Steve Wozniak, marketing, April 1st pranks, the ways in which truth is sometimes more interesting than fiction even when the fiction is pretty darn cool and has guest celebrities and big media companies involved. As told by “raincoaster” today on the web site raincoaster media: “Marketing the Unmarketable: The PineApple Case Study.” Here is raincoaster’s article:
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