JetBlue Bizmo, Blues Festival, PDX 2005.
Photo by Don Wardwell
Photo by Don Wardwell
Just to review the structure of these three blogs of mine, BizMo Diaries (this one) is supposed to be about me 'n my crew in this "traveling circus" except more corporate and button down in some ways, as we're advertising attainable futuristic civilian lifestyles, and no, not "just like on Star Trek" (too 24th century) nor "The Jetsons" (when?) either -- although both would be influences.
We're just slightly ahead of our time, more like orchestra conductors (or like "mad men"). We read the same tea leaves you do, steal ideas from the same theme parks.
The bizmo is like an RV. Some say it has military origins in dark budget projects, which adds to their mystery (the black ones with no license plates compete with the black helicopters for attention on Coast to Coast).
Be that as it may, they're oft decorated with comforting decals, from companies we know and love. You'll see these things on the road even today, just not in caravans maybe, unless military, in which case we're back to square one.
In going into the schools, we're doing like an event, for assembly, but we're mainly there to empower peer teachers, in the sense of giving them more interesting stuff to work with down the road, starting then.
Our DVDs are exclusive firsts, or, if compilations off the Internet, lovingly edited by people who really know our business. We have good games, cool toyz, work opportunities of clear benefit to others.
A curriculum isn't just a hodge podge. We have high standards. That's why it's a lot like a circus (like Monty Python's flying one) and yes, we might sometimes have helicopters, as disaster relief includes using those, as does simply getting from here to there sometimes.
In Control Room, we're aware of control room lore (in science fiction movies especially), There, I focus more on providing bizmos with their various criss-crossing itineraries, a negotiation process. In actual practice, many companies might be involved in this kind of scheduling (many control rooms), including some religious ones e.g. revivalists of some description might field their own mobile Church of Elvis or whatever.
As a Quaker subgenius type (not quite the genius I'd like to be -- I cut myself slack), I count myself as one of these "true believers" and often think how Quakers used to own Cadbury's, Lloyds of London, maybe even Quaker Oats itself (we don't at the moment, though you might imagine how that might seem a holy grail of sorts).
Grain of Sand is of course a Blake allusion, and signifies "one among many". Like I'm not wanting this lifestyle for "just me" and in a lot of ways copied it from Charles Kuralt, which CBS is well aware of my doing (no lawsuit threatened, just saying they know).
I'm a big believer in "institutional wealth" like airports, like libraries, and yes, like aircraft carriers. If you own your own personal submarine, then you're like Dr. Evil in the those Bond movies, or at best like Paul Allen or one of those. You can't just be another dweeb on the beat, not that I'd cop to being a dweeb in every dimension but you know what I mean.
I'm not hoping to own the only bizmo in town (or even own one at all really -- I'll check it out from the fleet), nor even the most wowy one, with pipes sticking out. This isn't about me being one of the super rich, in other words. I'm pretty studiously middle class, only eat caviar once in a blue moon, when I'm invited to a party maybe.
Despite the darth vader undertones, the circus bus fleets don't leave the garage much these days because Gnu Math sounds too hippie. The generals think once my fleet is on the road, it'll just be freaks chasing a Grateful Dead concert all over again, and we know how that goes.
In other words, lots of stupid projections are keeping our lifestyle in check, while they go over our curriculum with a fine tooth comb, looking for things to nitpick about.
In the meantime, USAers wallow in intellectual squalor, not learning Gnu Math or understanding much about World Game in general (they still think it's about aping Rome or living out some other antiquarian fantasy, something about 24 Hours, which I rarely look at -- but has a control room I notice -- go Team America, World Police!).
So should we do this in Russia? That'd be fine except I don't speak Russian or any of those, so would be like Family Guy in that episode where he applies for a Macarthur grant (for geniuses) but ends up two standard deviations on the other side of it (he makes the most of it). Plus I am a family guy, don't really want to move to some Gulag just yet, like my base.
I'm pretty sure the "bizmo phenomenon" will continue spreading, as we gear up around delivering better health care. The clinics will have them, some dentists already do. Whether we call 'em "bizmos" (business mobiles) or not is not really up to me, and I'm fine with "RVs on steroids" or "whatever Dave Ulmer has, except maybe smaller", whatever descriptoids. How about a "geek bus"?
The Control Room krew has to be pretty smart though, lots of GIS (i.e. global data). You don't want to promise all this Internet connectivity, get a school all galvanized, and then discover there's no affordable way to supply even minimal DSL.
Sometimes a robust intranet is all they need, if extremely remote, with fat pipes for downloading, only relatively thin ones for uploading. Some planning needs to happen, before the roadshow comes in. A lot of what happens is more behind the scenes, of necessity.
I'm not saying it has to look just like mission control in Houston, but given all the video feed coming in from the field, it's likely to resemble something rather familiar to the television industry, the industry most likely to produce these shows anyway, given those stables of celebs already rarein' to go (though in need of training a lot of 'em, some kind of geek boot camp?).
