I’ve updated the look of my Web site a little. Just a couple of screens. The first page and the technical writer page. What do you think?

Everything is green, except

the lavender Jacaranda.

I hear the jagged bounce

of a basketball and the happy

Spanish of boys. The dogs

beg me to keep their bellies

full and the blue jay skips

along the redwood rail

in search of crusts. Iraq

is full of smoke and rattles

like bones

like a skull of sharpened teeth.

© Kyle Kimberlin

June 16, 2004

This crocodile hunter guy isn’t all there. Seems he’s in trouble again.

He’s a sandwich short of a picnic.

He’s got kangaroos in his top paddock.

If brains were gunpowder, he couldn’t blow off his hat.

He’s a sanger short of a barbie.

I’m tellin’ ya, mate, he’s not the full quid.

Link

The last widow of a veteran of the Civil War has died. It’s amazing to me that such a person was still living in 2004.

Link

In case you’ve been as worried about the implications of grey goo — and the potential for nanotechnology to run amok — as I have, this article should help ease your mind.

Experts put ‘grey goo’ in perspective

OK, his timing could have been better. Kerry could have called on Der BushFührer to reverse his stem cell policy a long time ago. The day after Reagan’s burial seems a tad opportunistic. But what the hey.

News Article | Reuters.com

I sat down this afternoon and wrote a nice post for the blog, about Reagan, memory, death, etc. It was pretty good. Unfortunately, I wrote it longhand on a yellow legal pad, and now it’s too late and I’m too tired to type it up. Maybe tomorrow.

Just a note then, on the burial of Ronald Reagan in Simi Valley this evening.

I thought Nancy Reagan couldn’t have comported herself with more dignity. And I was impressed with the Eulogies of Reagan’s kids as well. Way to stand up and do it for the Gipper.

The main reason I watched it, however, was the honor guards. There’s just something about those guys that fascinates me. It’s moving to watch their precision and poise. Nobody loves a good American ceremony more than me. Especially when they do a missing man flyover with the jets. Great stuff.

My friend Erik at All That Arises has a great post today about the transition of sovereignty in Iraq.

Well, Reagan’s dead. This blog will not bother to note the arguable merits of his conservative legacy. It’s being done to death, so to speak, on lots of sites. I just want to say that Alzheimers is a horrible disease, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. Anyway …

Now he’s Gone

but cool inside

— the Dead

It’s warm, I tell ya. It’s 40 minutes ’til midnight, and 73 degrees, per yahoo weather. Feels like 85 to me. A good night for sleeping with a fan blowing on the bed, which I enjoy anyway.

My brother and I are spending the night in my grandparents’ house in a small town north of Bakersfield CA. They’re not here, except very strongly in my mind and heart. As you read in my birthday post, Grandma’s in a care facility. Papa died in October 2002. I miss them both tonight. They are present in every creak and corner of this old place.

I’m at the kitchen table with a laptop, and over my right shoulder, deep in shadow, is the place where Papa sat and watched TV for decades. How is it possible he’s not there? How can the world change so much as to cast off someone so present, so real to me, and yet still contain this room, this table, and me? How can such a different world, so much the same, still turn?

In response to my birthday post, below, my friend Erik suggests that some folks missed my birthday because I affect an aspect of timelessness. Perhaps so, as with the Sybil in the jar in the marketplace at Cumae. But I’m tired.

I grow old … I grow old …

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

So the old dog and I shall limp and toddle off to bed, leaving you all, gentle readers, with a bit of Yeats.

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,

And nodding by the fire, take down this book,

And slowly read, and dream of the soft look

Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,

And loved your beauty with love false or true,

But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,

And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

Television’s perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don’t have to concentrate. You don’t have to react. You don’t have to remember. You don’t miss your brain because you don’t need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man’s nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn’t got the price of a television set.

-Raymond Thornton Chandler, writer (1888-1959)

from wordsmith.org