My cab driver tried to convert me to Islam the other day, on the way from Oak Park to O’Hare.

I didn’t have the heart to tell him that if my own mother couldn’t convert me back to Catholicism, the religion into which I was born and raised, that a non-relative had little chance of converting me to a religion that I know very little about—a conversion that I suspect, also, would piss off my Catholic family and Hindu in-laws equally.

Not that I’m against Islam. If I had to rank the religions of the world (a noncontroversial pass-time we can all enjoy) Islam would be right up there; way past Mormonism, for example, or Scientology, the one religion we can all laugh at without fear of offending anybody who’s not already insane.

The driver started out with, “Did you hear that NASA discovered a line on the moon?”

This is before I knew he had any particular religious proclivities. I entered the conversation warily, thinking maybe it was a set-up to a joke (“No, why DID NASA discover a line on the moon?”).

Yes, he said. My brother read it the other day, in a magazine, that NASA discovered a line going all the way around the moon.

Really? Wow, I said. A line going all the way around the moon is a general interest story. Or at least a nerd interest story. Either way, I was listening.

NASA had the pictures in 1969, he said, but they hid them. Now they’ve come out.

A conspiracy! I thought. But why? Why hide pictures of a line on the moon? The cab driver seemed very excited about this. I knew there was something else going on, a significance to this story, but I didn’t know what it was.

Until he told me. He said Muhammad, in the Koran, split the moon in half. Some skeptics said, show us a sign—proof that you’re really talking to God. Oh yeah? Muhammad said. And then he cut the moon in half.

That, I have to say, is pretty hard-core. I mean Jesus’ miracles, walking on water, multiplying the bread and fishes, turning water into wine, that’s fine. Not bad at all. Coming back from the dead is pretty impressive. But even that one, even hopping back onto your feet after a serious case of death, still pales I think to cutting the fucking moon in half.

So now I was getting the picture. The driver was telling me the story of Muhammad and the moon, and how NASA’s picture of the line on the moon proves that the story was real. Proves that it happened. For him, this was proof that Islam was the one true religion.

He would have liked it to be proof for me as well.

He went on to talk about how people just don’t want to believe, even when the truth is right in front of them; and about the bible of Barnabas, where Jesus says, “I’m not God, just a prophet, and Muhhamad is coming;” and how Jesus wasn’t really crucified, and how basically it’s OK to be a Christian if you don’t know any better, but now, with the line on the moon and all, everyone should come to God’s truth . . .

If my Mom had succeeded in winning me back over to the Catholic fold—if I was Christian, rather than a 70/30 atheist-agnostic split—I would have had something to say.

“I don’t think so, buddy,” I would have said. “Muhammad could never have convinced God to cut the moon in half for him. Jesus all the way!”

Or at least: “As a Christian, I feel that I have already come to God’s truth. We probably won’t ever see eye-to-eye on religious issues, but thanks for sharing your interesting perspective.”

But as me, my only honest option would have been: “There’s probably not any personofiable higher power in the universe. And I don’t know what empirical evidence you think you have, but the general concensus of astronomers is that the moon has never—not once—been halved.”

I think it would have been more than a little mean to just cry: “Bullshit!”

So I said “Interesting,” and “I hadn’t heard that.” Eventually he dropped the subject and we talked about traffic.

The line on the moon pic, by the way, can be found here. Unfortunately for the cab driver, although it extends hundreds of kilometers, it’s nowhere near all the way around, and doesn’t indicate any moon splitting. The Gospel of Barnabas is a real thing, but is considered to most likely have been written in 1634.

But those could just be the protestations of someone who doesn’t want to believe, even when the truth is right in front of him.

Six months ago around this time, I got laid off from my job.

Somebody from an unfamiliar branch of the org tree invited me to a conference call. This higher-up wanted to talk to me, my boss, and somebody out-of-state I didn’t know too well.

I tried to blow if off, as the e-mail for the one o’clock phone call came around ten that morning, and I already had a standing “doctor’s appointment” at just that time (the bi-weekly basketball game I had going in MPLS, which precariously balanced improving my cardio-vascular health with avoiding my permanent physical injury).

But she said it was an important meeting, so I stayed, hoping to join the game late. Even with that red flag, I still thought I was going to a meeting where they’d pile new tasks on the three of us to make up for some other laid off people. There had been a lot of that going around.

The HR higher-up didn’t even say it straight. “The company is closing the X and Y brands, and this brand closure is affecting your jobs.”

Silence. I was trying to lace up my basketball shoes and cradle the phone on my ear at the same time. Wait a minute. “Are you saying we’re fired?” Like our jobs are negatively affected by these brand closures? Like they got so affected they disappeared?

The answer was yes. The company closed two business-to-business magazines and laid off about 12 people, including my boss, the publisher, the salesmen, and the people who hired me in Minneapolis.

There was a denial stage, like the grieving process. I thought, “Well, there’s still another brand I do work for that’s open.” Surely this was more about those brands closing, but I still have my job? That kind of a thing?

And I had hated my job. I mean hate. I had actually been considering quitting this job, where I worked from home, and going into an office somewhere again. Getting up before 9 AM again. I can’t imagine what the stages of grief would have felt like if I had loved my job.

But that led to another cliche. Later, I looked in the mirror, and thought, “Did I lose weight?” (I hadn’t really, so don’t try this at home. Losing your job doesn’t actually help you shed pounds; at least not in the first 18 hours, while your refrigerator remains well stocked.)

But I felt lighter. I looked skinnier in the mirror due to that powerful, proverbial weight-off-the-shoulders thing. Experiencing that cliche made me understand how it became a cliche in the first place. I clicked off 137 red-flagged e-mails in Outlook. Then deleted them all, giddy. Let out a sigh like a death rattle.

And getting laid off turned out to be, as another cliche goes, the best thing that ever happened to me.

Well, no. Many, many better things have happened to me. And not just meeting and marrying the love of my life. Or sex, drugs, and rock and roll. Even yesterday, getting a sweet deal on red peppers was a smidge better (39 cents a pound). But getting fired did kick-start my freelance Web design business.

Being a freelance Web designer was my dream for escaping the job I hated. I just thought I needed another year — to learn more, to build my portfolio more, to figure out how the hell you get clients (Pulao and I were discussing my Web designer dreams in a Vietnamese restaurant once and I asked, suddenly, “How do you get clients, I wonder?” an unforseen flaw in my plan) — but without the old job to do, I found myself with much more time and not much choice other than to go ahead and be a freelance Web designer.

And that’s a whole nother story, involving bong shop owners and fake windows that play videos, but the shortest answer to the where-the-hell-do-you-get-clients question is Craigslist. At least to start. And the transition was a success — as in, I’ve built Websites, I’ve been paid.

We’re only broke ’til September, by the way, when Pulao starts her faculty position at Columbia College, Chicago (which kept an apparent cosmic job bank in balance, as we heard about her job three days before I lost mine). And my old magazine that folded reopened in June, under new management, and hired me part-time, at my freelance rate. This helps, also, the broke-ness.

This isn’t the story you’re going to hear a lot nowadays. You’ll hear the losing the job part. You’ll be hearing that, or have heard that already, from a lot of friends, friends of friends, and family.

But finding new work right away, and having one good job per family, doesn’t happen as much. We’re lucky.

I’m working with an employee of a Web client of mine who, on the phone to me, thanked God for her job, just matter of factly, as an aside between other bits of business, and I thought, this means something to her that it doesn’t mean to me.

Like I said before: don’t try this at home. If you can help it.

1. Ragged gash on palm from futon’s splintered wood while carrying outside for yard sale.
2. Single cat claw to bared nipple while stuffing cat into cat carrier.
3. Bruised ego after resorting to pliers to remove key from new apartment door lock.
4. Wallet hole from two parking tickets in twelve hours while parked in front of new residence.
5. Acute second thoughts re: moving to new street with Draconian parking restrictions.
6. Pangs of regret at not pausing to put shirt on before stuffing cat into cat carrier.
7. Strained chest muscles from carrying two boxes of books at once from one room to the next.
8. Cluttered kitchen from giant mound of flattened cardboard boxes and no cardboard recycling nearby.
9. Environmental guilt from stuffing giant mound of cardboard in Dumpster.
10. Fear that, if band-aid over single nipple discovered, people will assume embarrassing sex life.

This one’s from Mumbai… y’ know the city in the country famous for its snake charmers and…

JD Salinger drank his own Kombucha. Pass it on.

This explains Sarah Palin’s existence, and the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.

http://www.slowpokecomics.com/strips/terminatrix.html

Thanks, dbay!

And Fall, too, I guess.

All I have to say, weather gods, is that there better be an effin’ warm day in January to balance this out.

Friend and avant-garde folkster Normanuniform (some 12apostrophes readers may know him as Eric Nolan) has released his new album, Woodways, on a Website I built for his music.

Check it out: www.normanuniform.net.

Dang. This does make me want to gamble! (and maybe get a baby pig or puppy with that $1 million)

Remember that scene in Minority Report, where Tom Cruise walks through the mall of the future, and retinal scans trigger the holographic billboards along the walls to call his name, and do some seriously targeted advertising?

No? Well, OK, here it is:

This scene is one of my favorites in Minority Report, since this kind of intrusive technology seems just over the horizon, and that the ideas behind it, at least, are already here, in Google Adwords, or the banners of dancing mortgage refinanciers who know where you live.

Then today, in my work inbox, I find this:

September 30, 2009, Budapest

Face Analytics Based Retail Customer Analytics Software is Being Launched

Intellio’s new face recognition technology based Retail Customer Analytics Solution provides real-time customer behavior data for retailers and marketers

This was sent to me, I suppose, soley because as a Marketing Manager, they thought I would be interested in evil.

Intellio’s new software solution VisiScanner™ provides detailed statistical data about visitors to retail outlets and the target audience of offline display media, such as billboards and digital signage systems. Intellio’s VisiScanner™, based on the in-house developed face analytics technology, provides a detailed, real time analysis of the number, gender and estimated age of potential customers.

VisiScanner™ sounded enough like a joke to me (and Intellio would make a great satire/sci fi company, if it weren’t real) that I checked Snopes before posting — but I suppose the tech in Minority Report didn’t seem that far off because it isn’t.

The press release also contained a video download, which I uploaded below — silent footage of people walking past a security camera, with little blue and red text bubbles displaying their age and gender on the screen like a heads-up display.

I’m genuinely interested in which identifiers they use in a face (or a body) to tell male from female, old from young. The range of people in the video seem to all be 20 to 40, I wonder if it’s less effective for folks outside that range . . .

Finally, I got to their privacy policy:

Privacy Policy

The Face Recognition software was designed to comply with general privacy policy standards. By default the software does not record images of the faces as it only creates anonymous statistics. Users, however, have the option to override the default setting. In this case, they need to be able to prove that their actions are in line with the relevant local privacy and data protection regulations.

It’s only a (short) matter of time before the billboards will call your name.

Read the full press release from Intellio.