One of the sharpest wits in American history, George Carlin, has died at 71 of heart trouble. He and Shelly Berman were my two favorite comics and I'm a big fan of comedians and comedy.

"Coincidentally" this morning's email brought me a reminder of one of his best lines. Commenting on Martha Stewart's legal problems:

'Boy, I feel a lot safer now that she's behind bars. O. J. Simpson and Kobe Bryant are still walking around; Osama Bin Laden too, but they take the ONE woman in America willing to cook, clean, and work in the yard, and they haul her off to jail.'

One of the things about getting older is you watch a lot of your friends -- and people like Carlin who only *seemed* like a friend -- move on to what's next. I'm not sad for them, but I *am* sad for me.

Give 'em Hell, George.

My good friend Paul Anacker is dead. I just got the news today in a letter from his mother. I am incredulous. Even though Paul had suffered for many years with a diseased pancreas and even though everyone who knew him knew he would inevitably die younger than he should after having lived far more painfully than anyone should have to, still news of his passing came as a shock.

Paul was the consummate gentleman, a great raconteur, a magician of the first rank, a technologist, a writer and a wonderful human being. And he was a great and true and loving friend.

He and I worked on numerous projects over the years, ranging from collaborating on books and magazine articles to poring over legal briefs as he defended the rights of medical patients to have access to certain classes of drugs that the FDA, in its Big-Pharma-Protecting wisdom, had deemed unsuitable for human consumption despite massive mountains of evidence. We disagreed -- sometimes loudly but always good-naturedly -- about whether software emulation could ever become a mainstream solution to many computing problems (he was right; I was wrong).

Last time I saw Paul, he was looking pretty good, dressed in a suit and tie as he escorted me and my wife and two other couples on a personal tour of the Magic Castle in SoCal. He made the tour as magical as the place and the magicians who inhabited it, most of whom he knew by first name. That was nearly four years ago; I remember because it was on the drive home from that visit that six of us sat in a car and listened in stunned as George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove stole the White House for a second time.

Since then, one of the other men on that trip, my best friend Rev. Rory Elder, has also passed away.

The bad thing about getting older, my lovely father-in-law used to say, was you got to watch too many of your friends die.

I loved you, Paul. Still do. I'm glad you're free of pain. And I know you're happy. But one thing, buddy: don't try to pull any magic tricks where you are now. I think they know how they all work.

Peace

My good friend Donna Briley passed away suddenly and unexpectedly this week. I am sad at the loss and bewildered by the inexplicability of the passing of one so vibrant and health-conscious.

Donna was much too young to leave us. She was a bright light of healing wisdom in a world too often filled with fear and loathing. Her bright smile and constant willingness to help were signatures of her life as a model, actress, healer, teacher, mother, friend and leader. She was also a great hugger.

It is of course always difficult for those of us left behind by such a passing to grasp the meaning and the significance of the transition itself. We feel only loss, where our friend feels unbounded joy and peace and light. We see only what is not, while they see only what is and what will be. We feel pain where they feel only well-being and health.

So I bless Donna on her way as she reunites with so many loved ones who have preceded her. Knowing she is back whence she came is great comfort to her even if it doesn't make the gloom of that empty place she leaves behind any easier for us to bear.

This has been an extremely busy week, so much so that I haven't been able to squeeze out time for my blog. I've spent hours and hours this week trying to get video to play over the Web well for all modern browsers and common screen sizes. What a chore. I'm going to blog that separately.

It feels strange not to have written for several days. I don't particularly like being away from my writing. I haven't been writing anything except audio scripts for the training videos I'm recording for a client and one lesson on the "Sermon on the Mount" I delivered in church last Sunday.

Hopefully that big project is out of the way now and I can resume more or less daily reportage here. There certainly is enough going on that is worthy of comment.

Just a quick reminder for some of my readers and friends who live or work in one of the several parts of the country experiencing stormy weather today, including my home base of Monterey to save often. I mean really often. Particularly when it's been a while since the last storm, power outages are fairly common. This morning, we have had three very brief outages, usually a harbinger of a day of unreliable power.

This is one of the main reasons I'm reluctant to part with my PowerBook; it keeps running for quite a while during such outages. My desktop machine goes down immediately. I'm going to buy a small UPS for it today.

I'm thankful for the rain, not so much for the damaging winds!

As reported, among other places, on Huffington Post, former Mass. Gov. Mitt Romney plans to make a "major address" from (of all places) the President George H. W. Bush Presidential Library in College Station, TX, explaining how his Mormon faith will influence his decisions if he's elected President.

Pay close attention.

Members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS, or "Mormons") are decidedly not entirely free agents in the exercise of the private or public lives. Speaking as a former member of that church I assure you that to the extent that Romney offers any explanation that diminishes the fact that he is ultimately responsible and accountable to a man he believes to be God's prophet on earth today, he will be lying to you.

When I was very active in the Mormon Church in Salt Lake City in the mid and late 1970's, I took a strong personal stand against the infamous execution of Gary Mark Gilmore in the name of the people of the State of Utah. I was reprimanded by my superiors and summoned to the downtown headquarters of the church and instructed not to attend a vigil protesting his execution. I was an Elder in that church. I had been an active and willing participant in many work projects. I worked for a church-owned computer company. But it was made very clear to me that the church's doctrine of "blood atonement" -- a doctrine, by the way, of which I was never informed until it became an issue in this case -- absolutely forbade me from acting on my conscience in this situation.

Gov. Romney is a former bishop and stake president (chief leader of a local and regional church body) in the church who can be presumed to understand very well the beliefs of his faith and the degree to which they make it impossible for him to remain a faithful Mormon in good standing and take any action opposed by the President and Prophet of his church.

The comparison with President John F. Kennedy and the questions he faced with respect to his Catholicism is specious and seems designed only to distract from the fundamental difference. The Pope claims infallibility only with respect to matters of church doctrine; the prophet claims to be a singular pipeline to God on matters such as social issues and political stances.

I will never support a Mormon for President of the United States. I am an interfaith spiritual leader and thinker and I am not anti-Mormon. I believe firmly and strongly that it is every individual's right to pursue whatever faith path they wish, or to pursue none at all. But when you've chosen a path that clearly conflicts with a request for public trust, I think you should have the courage of your convictions and stand up and admit that.

I doubt Romney plans that course of action.

It seems like every day or so I get an email from someone touting the latest and greatest Internet marketing opportunity of the century. Every one is crammed with secrets never before known to mankind. Every one is so simple you can do it even if you're not a salesperson and have no interest in selling. Every one these days seems to be coupled with a greater cause of some sort.

And every one of them makes the same stupid mistake and loses, I'd guess, a huge percentage of people who might be willing to listen to the sales pitch but who aren't willing to divulge their identity for the "privilege" of doing so.

It happened again today. A colleague of a good friend used his name to get me to read an email about this "opportunity." I read his email and was mildly intrigued, so I clicked on his link. The page I went to said, "We'll tell you all you want to know about this opportunity on the next page." To get to that page, though, I had to be willing to part with my email address and my phone number.

Right. I'm going to give someone I've never met and never done business with my contact info so they can spam and telemarket me to death for the rest of my life without my being able to do anything because they can prove a business connection between us.

Needless to say, I closed that window, deleted the email and now not only will I never respond to email from this individual again, I'm also telling my friend what happened when he shared my email address with this numbskull.

You want my email address? Give me something of value to earn it. You want my phone number? The price of infopoker just went up.

Grab a clue, folks. Why do you think your MLM programs are in the crapper? Why do you suppose most of the people who sign up for your program turn out to be losers and whiners? Because you're cutting out the potentially serious associates and colleagues at the front door, that's why.

I am blessed by having a lot of great friends in this world. One of my favorite people is Clay Cotton, a lovable, warm, intelligent, bright human being whose career as a giant of boogie-woogie was cut short by multiple sclerosis (MS).

Clay can no longer play piano, though he manages to find his way around computers well enough to be revered as one of the smartest Internet marketing guys on the planet.

You'll be doing yourself, me and Clay a big favor if you'll listen to this movie in which he plays one of his all-time-great original hits, "Cotton Balls" and then go buy his CD, "Rough Stuff" for yourself and several of your friends for Christmas.

Check out his other albums, too: Speechless and Do You Know What it Means...?. The guy's amazing.

Just listen to this man...er...boogie!

An empty inbox is a beautiful sight. But if you start obsessing about it, it can become almost as much a distraction as an overcrowded In box.

That's the two-headed lesson I've learned in the past three days of maintaing an empty email in box in my Google gMail account.

GMail checks for new email almost incessantly. If I let myself, I can easily slip into a mode of rushing to my in box just for the purpose of handling, deleting and archiving incoming messages so the in box stays pristine. I guess I'm a bit like a recent religious convert: zealous in my desire to be painstakingly faithful to the tenets of my newfound path.

Clearly, however, reinstating the discipline I had toward email when I was a busy Silicon Valley exec, is paying dividends in terms of the time I have available to do other more productive work. Unfortunately, the zero-tolerance inbox principle has collided with the wow-Miro-is-cool principle, with a net loss of productivity the result.

Sigh.

Inspired by Mark Hurst's wonderful book, Bit Literacy, I decided tonight that I had once again allowed my email In Box to become a cluttered filing cabinet. So I rolled up my sleeves, put on some tunes and dug in. Three hours later, the pile of 3,576 emails that had been in that unbelievably crowded space had all been dealt with: deleted, archived, turned into To Do List items, or dealt with.

My plan is to end each night with an empty gMail In Box. I'm not yet sure how this feels. I sort of miss my old friends. We'll see.