Author Archives: Kyle Kimberlin

wake me when it’s over

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I wasn't going to look at all. Watching election night results is like watching dolphins play around the propeller of a cruise ship. It's unnerving, to say the least. So I was just going to say wake me when it's over, don't make me watch. The plan was to slip a Deadwood DVD into the player and await our collective doom in placid oblivion, come what may with the breaking dawn.

I have been silently repeating this mantra to myself all day, in which I've come to invest no small amount of belief:

We get the government we deserve.
We get the government we deserve.
We get the government we deserve.

As a younger man, I looked on the sausage factory of politics and its machinations as being essentially onanistic, the purpose and practice of government to be basically insular and moot. What do government people do? Well, they govern the government. People in the real world do the work of the real world.

I don't feel that way anymore. Not as much. A butterfly lands on Schwarzenegger's nose and he shuts down a state park, which shuts down a town. Only Providence knows what somebody like Whitman would shutter up, given half a chance. Or what manner of rough beast might confront her proboscis in the process, is my point.

Either way, whether we get bad government or good, we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
if you plant ice you're gonna harvest wind

— The Grateful Dead, Franklin's Tower

So I peeked. I clicked over to Google News in spite of my own most sane interests. Which, ironically, is how I suspect many people make their voting choices. They know what's best, and they're poised with their pen in the little styrofoam and cardboard voting booth, and then the lights go dim. 

Looks like everything is going to be OK. With the exception of the Congress of the United States. And that's been a mental hospital for 200 years anyway. Because, to paraphrase my dear ol' Dad, they have to do something, even if it's wrong.

Puts me in mind of the end of Cormac McCarthy's novel, The Crossing:

After a while he sat in the road. He took off his hat and placed it on the tarmac before him and he bowed his head and held his face in his hands and wept. He sat there for a long time and after a while the east did gray and after a while the right and godmade sun did rise, once again, for all and without distinction.

update this

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I decided tonight would be a good time to run the Automatic Updates program on my laptop. This downloads and installs the monthly “Patch Tuesday” updates from Microsoft. I always hate it, because it downloads the new software updates while the computer is running, then installs them when you shut the computer off. And typically, if I don’t plan ahead, it happens when I’m tired and I want to go to bed. Then I have to wait around another 3 minutes, maybe 5, to make sure the computer shuts down properly. So tonight I’m doing it early; it’s not quite bedtime, is my point.

I started the shut down procedure at 8:24 and it just shut down. It’s 8:53pm.That’s 29 minutes. Half an hour, just to install the monthly patches. There were 58 of them for XP, which I guess is some kind of record.  

Arstechnica reports: Compared to last month’s record Patch Tuesday, this one is massive. In fact, this is the highest number of bulletins Microsoft has ever released in one month, as well as the most vulnerabilities that are being fixed. The last record was just two months ago: 14 bulletins and 34 vulnerabilities.

I suppose one should appreciate that Microsoft is on the ball, keeping our machines up to date and as secure as possible. But it also kind of gets on my nerves. I always worry that something will go wrong and my computer won’t work right – or won’t wake up again at all – after so much change being done so blithely and remotely. 

Also, it’s putting pounds and reems of new space-wasting goo on my hard drive. It’s stuff that I can’t even play with.

Most of these patches are made to counter vulnerabilities to the acts of evildoers. Hackers and the like. Wouldn’t it be a lot better, easier, and less costly for everyone, just to hunt down the people who mess with other people’s computers, and hang them in the nearest sturdy tree? I know, it’s a luddite’s approach to the problem, but it worked for our ancestors. And this hacker-spammer-virus spewer types must be easier to track down than, say, Al Queda. After all, they tethered to the same Internet we all are.

A modest proposal, which I think would be a real boon to the economy. Couldn’t make it worse.

double double

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This just in my email. Made me laugh.

A linguistics professor was lecturing to his class one day. "In English," he said, "a double negative forms a positive. In some languages though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. "However," he pointed out, "there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."

A voice from the back of the room piped up, "Yeah, right."

the mood I’m in

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On Saturday, I posted that I’d learned about an interesting technique for visualizing a creative design project, called a mood board.

Wikipedia says, “A mood board is a type of poster design that may consist of images, text, and samples of objects in a composition of the choice of the mood board creator. Designers and others use mood boards to develop their design concepts and to communicate to other members of the design team.

As promised, I gave one a try for my novel in process. I had some images that I’d collected in a folder. They were meant to help inspire my writing, but had never been brought together to help each other jiggle. Other images I found pretty quickly online.

It was kind of fun, but challenging. I had to find photos taken by other people, in some cases before I was born, which actually look like what I’ve been picturing as fiction in my imagination. The dogs were may have been the hardest photos to find, because I’ve been not only imagining their appearance but their personality.

I think it turned out well, for a first attempt.

You can view and download my mood board by clicking here.

ethereal daze

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Well, it’s been a quiet week here in Carpinteria, my hometown.

No, that’s not right. The week started out very noisy, with a massive – by local standards – thunderstorm on Monday night. Usually, if we get thunder and lightning here, it’s pretty wimpy. Such storms are small and brief, tending to pass along the Santa Barbara channel or over the coastal mountains. This one developed right over town. And it was angry about something.

lightning1

I’ve never heard fiercer thunder, or seen more ardent lightning, in this valley or over our ambitious little patch of sea.  And of course, the power went out.

Thunder, October 18*

Cymbals and symbols, drums
and the heartbeats of small creatures passing
into their certain eternities by and by.
And nothing we can do about any of that.
Except to smile into the darkness
and leave each other searching for a light.
Shantih.

We should let the master handle it:

After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places    
The shouting and the crying
Prison and place and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains    
He who was living is now dead    
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience.
… a flash of lightning. Then a damp gust
Bringing rain.
… Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

            Shantih shantih shantih

[Link]

Creative Commons License
*Thunder, October 18 by Kyle Kimberlin 
is a rough draft poetic work, 
licensed under a Creative Commons 
Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivs 3.0 United States License.
Feel free to copy and share.

an idea for writing

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“A mood board is a collage of your ideas and inspiration for any design work, whether it be web or print, in the form of visual representations. It’s like brainstorming, but solely for the development of a design’s aesthetics and feel, rather than its content and other plans as well.”

Mood Board 101: Branding and Image Development | Most Inspired: Design Inspiration Blog.

I’m going to try one for my work, probably using Photoshop. I’ll share, if anything develops. Hope you will too.

Officer Bubbles

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Cop weirds out over soap bubbles, arrests girl. Could he be a bigger douche?

Via Boing Boing:

"A Toronto police officer whose thuggish behaviour against a young girl blowing bubbles (reported here on Boing Boing) made him an inadvertent YouTube sensation and a symbol of police heavy-handedness at the G20 protests has launched a $1.2-million defamation lawsuit against YouTube."

Seriously, what an assclown. He needs to be removed from the streets.

And this is just the kind of thing I love to see linked and re-linked around the world, its viral-ness becomes inoculation against stupidity.

Drunk Driving

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“According University of Oklahoma Police Department’s BAC Calculator, a 180-lb male registers a .08 after consuming six 12 oz. beers or five gin-and-tonics in a span of two hours.”

Drunk Driving: Is the U.S. Blood Alcohol Limit Too Liberal? – TIME

This Time article points out that deaths are lower in Sweden, where the legal limit for blood alcohol is .02. In the US, it’s 4 times higher.

In my opinion, the legal limit should be .00. It should be illegal to drink and then drive at all. Some things kill people and we can’t do much about it (natural disaster), or we can’t be too much bothered to invest in the solution (cancer). Some things kill people and we treat it like a necessary evil (war). But some causes of death are preventable, but for the fact that purblind stupidity is endemic to our species.

Duh. How drunk should we let people get, before they go slinging 2 tons of steel around at high speeds?

first, movement

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I want to lead your attention to this post on November Hill Press blog, whence my friend Billie will lead it onward to an excellent interview with the writer Jim Harrison. She’ll simply do that leading best.

There, as you sip your tea, as I do now, or your kool-aid, or Thunderbird, or Stolichnaya, maybe you’ll find a clue to why I’ve titled this post as I have. That depends on the quality and quantity of your quaffing, I suppose.