-
Peace.
Taste their food, hear their music, visit their festivals. Read
their books, know of their education, observe their worship,
watch their children play and their people grow old. Share their
beds, dance with them, listen to their dreams. And you will not
wage war on them. – m.s.b
(27 September 2003)
-
A dozen dark eyes.
Coming back from my run baby squirrels played tag in the trees by
my house shimmying down the trunks rushing across my lawn to a
domed shrub near where I stood and they saw me too late and hid
under the dome, a large cap of fat leaves over a hollow frame of
stems and I looked inside to see a dozen dark eyes staring back
at me and I said "boo" and from the shrub they burst scampering
to the nearest tree, baby squirrels all around me fleeing to
climb and play tag again and I knew, it was the first day of
Summer. (21 June 2003)
- Pocketful of
shells. So the trendy palates got tired of eating meat
and eggs and pork rinds and following it up with Metamucil and
thinking over the whole idea of Peter Luger's dry-aged carcasses,
Phil's deceased free-range ova, and deep-fried Dooney & Bourke
leatherware putrefying in their flat big-buck bellies giving them
bad breath all for a beautiful bod, hmmm. / Rednecks and other
poor minorities eat this tripe every day and they're not sleek
and anyway the hoy hoy even if they do wear their baseball caps
backward shouldn't act proletarian without a buck in it, but high
fat, high protein, and low carb is the diet, thing, for now,
hmmm. What's a super model to do? / How about fistfuls of shelled
nuts? Tanned toasty almonds and pecans and rich
vanilla-bean-colored walnuts. Delectable lightly salted
super-jumbo cashews. Firm butter-roasted macadamia mini-globes
flown fresh from Hawaii and slivered over peanut-oil poached,
line-caught, Pacific skate or peppered lemon-grass grilled split
red snapper. And what to make of the sweet hickories from that
rustic Fiefer Farm, machine husked by a real Fiefer at $73.00 for
twelve ounces (100 seeds to the pound; inquire for hickory nut
oil prices). / Sock 'em down! The Atkins diet goes nuts! Loads of
protein, fat, and fiber for the "vegetarian" glamour-pic porn
chicks and dicks interviewed by Vogue, Town
and Country, and The New York Times. Nuts
don't enslave your viscera. Or your conscience. That aesthetic is
a was, very oh moments ago. Chic, in tune frivolous, yes. And
just so, hmmm. Now.
(02 December 2002)
- "There are only two or
three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as
fiercely as if they had never happened before." –
Willa Cather
-
Kiss the sky.
A new sports car and a used airplane cost about the same. What's
the main difference between the two? (Answer: When you accelerate
the sports car to 75 miles per hour and pull back on the steering
wheel, nothing very interesting happens.)
John S. Denker explains how airplanes behave.
-
If you build it...
"Besides learning to see, there is another art to be
learned – not to see what is not." – Maria
Mitchell
.....
Visual art:
Jon Grepstad on building and using
large-format cameras
and
pinhole cameras
.....
In your eyes:
Huib Holleman
and
Mikko Oksalahti
build a Grepstad-based 4x5 view camera
.....
Paper menagerie:
Image 1 and
Image 2,
templates for constructing the classic Dirkon pinhole camera.
- Exchange
rate. President Bush is placing 22 million Iraqi lives
in the balance to punish Saddam Hussein. Osama bin Laden made a
similar calculation, taking 3,000 lives to punish the United
States. Who is more moral?
(06 October 2002)
- "Hey, man, we don't
do this for posterity. We want it to sound good now."
– Duke Ellington
- "If you reject the food,
ignore the customs, fear the religion, and avoid the people, you
might better stay home." – James Michener
- "It's impossible to
speak Japanese with Japanese people unless you can speak
Japanese." – Kenba
.....
Well, then start with
Takasugi Shinji's Japanese language tutorial
.....
Write Japanese and test your vocabulary using
Glenn Rosenthal's free Japanese Word Processor (JWPce) and
Japanese Flashcard (JFC) programs
.....
And indulge in
Robert Murphy's multi-part Japan FAQ.
- Type cast.
Embed, a font embedding utility,
is the target of a
DMCA threat. Its author
Tom (Tom7) Murphy,
a computer science student at Carnegie Mellon University, is
successfully turning the case into a free speech test.
You can help him by linking to his site or hosting a copy of
Embed.
(25 June 2002)
- "Only by traveling
alone, and in silence, may one truly become in tune with nature.
All else is hotels, and baggage, and dust." – John
Muir
- "Fire washes away
all that is nonessential. Flames burn away all that is
superficial." – Michael Maidenberg
- The price of
freedom. The rationales offered by President Bush and
Attorney General John Ashcroft for restricting civil liberties,
using military tribunals to circumvent judicial due process, and
conducting domestic spying recall the Strangelovian phrase
attributed to a U.S. Army captain by reporter Peter Arnett during
the Vietnam War: "We had to destroy the village in order to save
it." Do Mr. Bush and Mr. Ashcroft propose destroying freedom in
order to save it?
(01 December 2001)
- The future of
computing. "The wires will disappear." –
beef! (15 December 2001)
- "No amount of
sophistication is going to allay the fact that all of your
knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about
the future." – Ian E. Wilson
- Rumors of war.
Violence emerges from powerlessness and makes all of us its
pawns. Any simplistic military response to the New York-D.C.
attacks will ignore this dynamic, amplify hatred, and spawn
destructive cycles of dehumanization and bloodshed. Join people
trying to slow this terrible momentum:
CCCO (the Central Committee
for Conscientious Objectors),
COMD (the Committee Opposed
to Militarism and the Draft),
NISBCO (the Center on
Conscience and War),
and Swarthmore
College's Peace Collection.
If violence led to peace we would have had world peace thousands
of years ago. Don't be silenced as the range of politically
acceptable debate narrows.
(11 September 2001)
- The great
divide. The opponents of stem cell research wish to
persuade President Bush to prohibit such research on the ground
that it destroys human life for the benefit of the living. If
these opponents prevail, perhaps they will carry their argument
next to battle the institution we have that already does exactly
this: the military.
(18 July 2001; a version of this
announcement appeared 21 July 2001 as a letter to the editor in
The New York Times)
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