Nothing But Prayers

          

Yes, these children are dead. Yes, Iraq. Yes, common scene.
Yes, Rumsfeld should be strung up by his ...

What else can one say. Words dissolve ... a swirl of leaves, caught by a gust, spirals up and over our heads, into a sky so bright it hurts. Hurts. Hurts.

And I am so sorry ...

tags: children death iraq war rumsfeld

Just As I Thought

pasta & vinegar, quotes a really interesting paper:
“How will computation transform the new spaces that it comes to occupy?”

“Our fundamental concern is with the ways in which we encounter space not simply as a container for our actions, but as a setting within which we act. The embodied nature of activity is an issue for a range of technologies.”

Isn't that lovely. The embodied nature of activity.

“This social character means that spaces are not ‘given;’ they are the products of active processes of interpretation. The meaningfulness of space is a consequence of our encounters with it.

Yeah, okay, so.

“Objects take on meanings and interpretations in their own right rather than as elements of a ‘system.’

Oh dear.

“This suggests, then, that user's experiences and interpretations of ubiquitous computing systems will often be of a quite different sort than those of their designers, because of the radically different ways in which they encounter these systems ... ”

I'm sorry. This has to end, right here.

I suppose research is a whole nother animal. From just plain thinking. I suppose academia cum science has gotta do what academics and scientists gotta do.

Which seems to be, to construct horribly precise papers, essays the point of which is already well and thoroughly hashed out.

To cite, as it were.

As opposed to, say, write.

I'm only just saying.

Still, the existential hook that pries off top of the skull, that allows the thoughts to float freely, to rise far above us here and join the eternal quantum cloud of thinking, it's there. In that wholly provocative headline.

And as a woman, I just adore discussing that which is yet to be as if it already existed, both at once. That's the charm of it.

Muriel Spark, In The Long Run

“I'm often very deadpan, but there's a moral statement too, and what it's saying is that there's a life beyond this, and these events are not the most important things. They're not important in the long run.”

One learns today that Miss Spark has passed into that long run ... that so many writers prepare for, I suspect, their entire writing lives. Dealing with life, with the astonishing fact that one is alive, and what that might mean, and just as evenhandedly—for all good writers are evenhanded—with the worse astonishment that all this will be over. Any day now, if not minute.

“Few people alive at the time were more delightful, more ingenuous, more movingly lovely, and as it might happen, more savage than the girls of slender means”.

Opening line, The Girls of Slender Means. One is immediately drawn in, all over again. People will be thinking of Miss Jean Brodie today, but here, in her next book, Spark captured what it is to be young and with your friends. Granted, with an unexploded bomb in their post-war English garden, but what woman can't identify with that.

Carol Shields: “Their slenderness lies not so much in their means as in their half-perceived notions about what their lives will become and their overestimation of their power in the world.”

This line made me, an old girl, shiver today. For what I had been, for what I thought I would become. For the bomb I never dreamt of, for the fact it has long since come and gone.

Perhaps our childhood, as girls, might be gauged by the lasting appeal of these two of Miss Sparks most memorable books: those with too much mothering, still dreaming of cure, finding lovely schadenfreude in Jean Brodie's fall. And those of us lacking any guidance at all, still The Girls, funny, reckless, hard as nails when called for, still living heedless of the death to come.

Name Me One

“Sedona is definitely becoming a place for the haves, not the have-nots”

Well for piss-christ' sake, name me one (scenic) place that isn't.

Maybe in the flyover states. Bye, down there. Not compelling. We're going to the coast, to buy up every inch of coastline, every single slice of view. To the Southwest as well; if it's dramatic and we can build—we're there!


When I first moved to backwoods Sonoma County, the squash lady still sold zucchini from her open trunk. The husband came out from the shade of the Tip Top (a bar) to handle their infrequent transactions. She remained in their '53 Chevy, with the curb doors open all day. She and her chihuahua. A chihuahua was pretty much de rigueur for old ladies—understandably, every other source of love having dried up and blown away. Nothing ridiculous about it, then—not so terribly long ago—for this was before Irony, and its evil twin Cool, crept out from the city, infecting minds and personalities just as surely as creeping bunch rot infected the old vines.

By the time I left, a runway for private jets was being bulldozed up near the dam, the dark strips of turned earth—although I cannot believe people really understood it—like signals to the heavens, Come. Take our way of life.

And I must say, with all ramshackleness wiped away, the valley did look good. Prenaturally so. That seamless perfection that only real money brings, the wall-to-wall chic that reassures the rich, leaves them undisturbed in their dreams. Pretending that life is like this—as so it must seem, when all you do is alight. From jets, from limos, from Lexus SUVs. It must seem as though the plaints of the poor and disenfranchised are somehow ... made up. Unreal, and rather annoying. What's more, you yourself are rather special, hence quite deserving of the hypnotic stream of goods and places money buys.

Such is—or should be—the stuff of revolution. One way or another, so it will.

Ain't Gonna Happen

MAC GEEKERY “Microsoft needs to become a lean, mean, coding machine.”

Sometimes I think I am here in order to explain what Geek is ... to/on/in/at a venue (what, pray, is the internet) ... does the term Coals to Newcastle mean anything to you?

Perhaps not. Let me think ... Pocket Protectors to SlashDot?

Engineers (oh, yeah, they all over this blog) like to get to the point. My son the engineer (Civil, Senior, so I gave birth at thirteen, what's it to ya) is, in fact, regularly stretched to the breaking point, as well as waaay beyond, because I talk to him in a manner resembling this post. Tortured yet?

Look. Y'all can pay attention, goddammit, or not, but the day Microsoft becomes anything in the remote vicinity of Mean or Lean is also the day on which snowballs freeze in hell.

Here's a visual, jack. Take (yet another) look at Dance of the CEO and then pull up any Steve Jobs MacWorld clip.

Put on your great big thinking cap (I know, I know, just one of your great big things) and ponder this: just as there are people who are Black and people who are not, there are people who are distinctly on the Autism Spectrum, and those who are not.

That's a big enough thought for today, guys. I don't wanna overtax you. Question: my dad the physicist used to whip out his slide rule in response to any problem, of any sort.

What do you guys whip out?

Pry My Cold Dead Hands

“And now that we are thinking the unthinkable, here is one more: What if Microsoft decided to buy Apple?”

Tell me the truth, Mac users, when you read this, did a little shudder cross your body like a sick-making ghost.

Hammer Time!

And why the fork not. Now that we've heard from every full-to-the-brim-of-himself-white guy, most of whom, let's face it, ought to be stripped of his Typepad membership and his DSL ... I'm a hell of a lot more interested in why The Hammer has taken up blogging. At least, god have mercy, he's not in Knowledge Management. I have a question. What is Knowledge Management? No, please, only rhetorical. I've never seen anything spawn euphemisms like blogging; serious people dedicate their lives to taking the fun out of it. Who pays them for this? Talk about hot air. Honey, you don't know it, but what you've got here is the opportunity to make art and/or revolution. MC, in his own special way, here does a bit of both.

“I was riding with my seven year old son one day taking him to breakfast because he loves it when I make time for him and I alone, our special time together. I looked over at him while we were at a stop light and he says, ‘I love you dad.’ The feeling I got from his words prompted me to ask God, ‘What is this level of love that I feel between my son and me that blesses and yet weakens me so?’ It blesses me so much that all I can think of is I never want to leave him or let him down or have this feeling go away. It weakens me because I can't fathom not having him in my life.”

link: hammer blog