Will Stevens retire soon? He's an interesting guy, and a repository of institutional and cultural memory.
"For nearly 15 years, he has served as the leader of the court's liberal wing."
The Washington Post
Dangerous PCs
Users Blame Sudden Acceleration for Recent Spate of Injuries
Windows machines across the country seem to be going haywire, sending unsuspecting users to emergency rooms and undermining PC owners’ confidence in the inherent safety and reliability of the beloved proprietary computing platform. Initial reports, subsequently debunked, that the speed-ups were strictly a mechanical issue caused by a sticky Tab key served only to panic consumers further.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/192894/dangerous_pcs.html
Whoa, Nellie! … you heard it here first.
Futility
Move him into the sun—
Think how it wakes the seeds,—
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it woke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs, so dear-achieved, are sides,
Full-nerved—still warm—too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
—O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all? by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
Welcome to National Poetry Month. This poem arrived in my inbox today, and I concur it's quite right to begin the month with it. There is so much packed into its 14 lines.
Wilfred Owen died in WWI, aged about 25. And it begs the question, do they still make soldier-poets, and send them off to war? Or does war make poets of them? Do they carry futility with them, or merely bring it home? You can decide.Time to Read
Why and how to find the time to read | Dumb Little Man
Includes a suggestion to switch off the computer, which may not be suitable for all audiences.
I used to read more books than I do now, with greater focus, and it's a thing I love. So I'm going to give the computer off thing a try for a little while.
simplify your workday
13 small things to simplify your workday | zen habits
Some generally good ideas.
the eyes have it
The lost poems, or the space of blogging – Sina Queyras – at Poetry Foundation:
But on a deep level I believe that no writing is wasted. Cheesy it may be, but I believe in writing the way a runner believes in running: you do it daily, you take it seriously; you get your mileage in no matter where that “material” ends up, which often means the recycle bin. No matter though, even the discarded writing lives on in the shadows or textures of the writing to come…
I don't post my actual creative product very often, because there seems little interest in it. But I believe in writing the way a carver believes in rare wood. So for me blogging amounts to something more like draining the swamp so I can get across it to the old and haunted trees. Once I get there, every branch I cut is some small creature's home. I have to meet their eyes and show I'm keeping faith. Then writing becomes a kind of prayer.
A Blessing. That being said, here's a shaving from the chapter I'm working on tonight.It was a squat brick building surrounded by greenery. We parked Mama’s Mercury behind it and sat while Dad took a long moment to open his door. He got Papa’s coat from the trunk. Bo and I flanked him as we walked, just a little behind him. It was ceremonial, the way we moved.
We approached the back door by a cement ramp lined with bloomless potted amaryllis and ferns. The door was recessed, indented, intended to be discreet, a passage where the dead could enter gliding on gurneys, without being seen from the road. So we stood shoulder to shoulder, side to side, surrounded by brick. I noticed our breathing. It was like being in church, when everyone stands to sing the Doxology. The organ plays and there is a pause, a hush, and an intake of breath as the organist lets her hands float up from the keys and brings them down again.*
In the Zen work Tenzo Kyokun, Dogen wrote:
When washing the rice, remove any sand you find. In doing so, do not lose even one grain of rice. When you look at the rice, see the sand at the same time; when you look at the sand, see also the rice. Examine both carefully.
Back in college, somebody told us something like this: A sentence is like a dog sled. Every dog in the team has to pull his share of the weight.
*(c) 2010 by J. Kyle Kimberlin
all rights reserved
all rights reserved
Raw
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Another e-trade baby video you won't see on TV. Trouble viewing? Here's a link.
If this doesn't front load your mutuals, I don't know what will.
blogger got cooler
Is cooler the right word in that context, meaning more cool? … Dudn’t matter.
I got an e-mail from Blogger a couple of days ago, and I just got around to reading it. They have a new template designer for Blogger blogs like this, with a vast shipload of new templates, layouts, and designs. I’m trying it out. You may see Metaphor adopt a few different designs in the coming days. Or not. It depends on how funny the commercials are, since that’s when I redesign the blog.
When these guys are on, forget about it.
Trouble seeing the video? Click here.
If you’re a Blogger blogger and you want to check out the new toys, go to draft.blogger.com/home, select Layout then click Template Designer and you’re good to go.
Yep, your e-mail subscriptions – and there are 3 times as many of you as the last time I checked [woohoo!] – are still good.
E-mail subscribers are reminded that the e-mail is a simplified samplification of the blog. Click the links in the e-mail to get Metaphor in full color blogovision.
Starting tonight, one can also follow Metaphor on Twitter, though I can’t say why you’d necessarily want to. The option was there, it’s free, I clicked it. Besides, President Barak Obama is following my tweets, so I must be all that, right?
don’t wait
Don't wait for inspiration. Discipline is the key.
– Esther Freud
changing the world
In a current column, technology writer Mike Elgan poses the question whether the iPad will change the world. He cites disagreement on the matter with columnist Lance Ulanoff.
Both pieces are interesting, well-written, worth reading. Mike – an old friend and fellow high school band geek – thinks the iPad’s user interface is just that revolutionary. Lance thinks it’s not. I respectfully disagree with both writers. I can’t even buy the premise. I don’t think computer technology of any kind is changing the world. Does it even have that hope? It’s debatable.
Science in general is having a hard enough time effecting real global change. Well, there are two exceptions with big potential: nuclear weapons and self-sustaining agriculture.
Computers haven’t changed the world. They’ve had an impact and a slight effect. They’ve changed the way we work and get information. But the core realities of human endeavor, meaning war, disease, hunger, peace, wellness, wealth, sufficiency, are changing incrementally as they always have.
Even television, as ubiquitous as it is, has changed only the daily entertainment habits and sleep patterns of the regions of the planet it has reached. And TV falls a close second to the Mute button as the greatest media invention of the 20th century.
You can design a house with the help of a computer, but that doesn’t build the shelter. Guys with hammers still do that. It certainly doesn’t inspire the willingness on the part of society to make that shelter available to someone in need. A computer cannot clean drinking water for a village. Information is still more efficaciously delivered to a large part of the world via radio than the Internet.
It can be said that computing is slowly changing the way doctors learn and communicate, diagnose and treat. But in this country we’re locked in a debate over whether people should have a right to be treated or permitted to suffer; a dialog which at best should be called Neanderthal. Biden says BFD, I say wait and see.
I like my computer. It’s changed the way I spend my time. But it hasn’t changed my life in a fundamental or meaningful way. It has good tools for communicating and getting stuff done, which I used to have to do with pens and paper, postage and resulting indifference. Its immediacy is exciting. But there’s a distinction between content and context, between Being and doing.
In that distinction, the world as we know it has been changed by computers only very little since Babbage’s Analytical Engine, 30 years before the Civil War. So no, the iPad will be little known nor long remembered. And how many people know the differences between Windows 95 and XP?
If we all woke up tomorrow with heads-up displays imbedded in our eyes and terrabyte drives nestled comfortably in our sinuses, it wouldn’t change a thing unless we changed something with it. Computing isn’t life, it’s just machinery.
If you want to see industry actually changing the world, keep an eye on coal , big oil, commercial meat, and —strangely still true –paper.
talking
Until you dig a hole, you plant a tree, you water it and make it survive, you haven't done a thing. You are just talking.
– Wangari Muta Maathai
I took a few days off blogging there, I guess. I had some serious talking to do, and it needed parsing out. Last night was the annual meeting of my homeowners association. It's a 280 unit, 15 acre complex on the California coast. For the past 18 months or so, I've served as president. So I made a speech, a powerpoint presentation, don't ya know.
We have somewhere near 300 trees, and some new ones have been planted lately. They're doing alright. But, no thanks to me in particular, is my point. It's a beautiful, sunny and warm spring day here in paradise! And for the past few days, we've a special visitor over at Mom and Dad's house. They've been pet-sitting a friend's little dog, Etta. [Photos here.] She's such a great little person to play with; an affectionate, great little pal. So I've been spending some time over there as well. … Life is good.
Metaphor 