NH swimmers at sunset. I don’t remember now if this photo showed people headed down to the lake or about to come back up to sit on the porch. But maybe that’s part of what this photo really means.
Dave Winer, in the course of a blogpost called “Narrate your work.,” says:
Over the years I’ve seen ideas that show up over and over in various different forms, and when we discover one, we give it a name. Examples. Jay Rosen came up with Atomization. Doc Searls said Markets Are Conversations. David Weinberger has so many — including Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Transparency is the New Objectivity. Clay Shirky says Here Comes Everybody. Jay and I together came up with Rebooting The News. Some of mine are Sources Go Direct, River of News, We Make Shitty Software, Checkbox News, People Come Back to Places that Send Them Away, Ask Not What the Internet Can Do For You, The Platform with No Platform Vendor, It’s Even Worse Than It Appears.
I agree with Dave’s “Narrate your work,” and would just add to that — make time also to narrate your life, at least for yourself and maybe for a very few others.
Were these faintly-seen swimmers heading back up to the porch? Or down into the lake? What matters more is that I managed to photograph one lucid moment of pure summer pleasure. That memory will now be mine for the rest of my life.
Ai yi yi. My old old Hotmail account, which I opened in 1998, has been hacked into by somebody who is sending requests for money to everybody that I have ever emailed from it. Needless to say, this person has also changed the account password so I can’t get back in and Microsoft is completely unresponsive. Here is the email going out, please do NOT send money to this scammer who is, I promise you, not me!
Fortunately, this nitwit forgot to change the sigline, which points to this blog.
From: Betsy Devine
Date: July 28, 2009 5:54:43 AM EDT
Subject: Hello
Hello,
How are you doing? Hope all is well with you and your family, I am sorry I didn’t inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar/conference.
I need a favor from you as soon as you receive this email, I misplaced my wallet on my way to the hotel where my money, and other valuable things were kept. Can you urgently assist me with a soft loan of $2,600 US Dollars to sort-out my hotel bills and get myself back home. You are the only one I can trust with this, please can this be between us? You have my word; I will refund you as soon as I return.
I will appreciate whatever you can afford, I’ll pay you back as soon as I return I promise, Let me know if you can assist, to enable me send you the details to use in sending the money through western union.
Thanks,
Betsy
http://BetsyDevine.com/blog “Making trouble today for a better tomorrow.” ———————————————————–
How very complex are the surfaces that confront us, walking through real life. And yet how much simpler they seem if considered as a succession of layers, each layer with its own time stamp and simple description.
Consider this Krakow wall’s layers as a series of event reports in some kind of blog. Translating its RSS feed into English, a few entries follow:
Description: Surface layer of city grime
pubDate: multiple/ongoing
Description:Graffiti incident, Antoni & Malgorzata
pubDate: 1987
Description: Broken fragments of stucco re-expose brick wall
pubDate: 1974
Description: Deterioration of paint starts to re-expose stucco
pubDate: 1943
Description: Painted stucco layer on top of brick wall
pubDate: 1934
I’m thinking back on my own life as a series of layers — heartfelt events whose legacy remains even when others succeed them. What would your life’s RSS feed say about you?
There is something magical about musicians in concert spaces before they perform. Years of aspiration and perfecting skill, weeks of practice with friends (and perhaps enemies) — in just moments now, one more wonderful chance for their public fruition.
Last night’s concert featured two works by Mieczysław Karłowicz, a string serenade and a violin concerto, followed by Beethoven’s Pastorale symphony (#6).
I had never heard Karlowicz’s music performed before and am glad I discovered it–not least because we share a December 11 birthday. Krakow’s St Catherine Church is a wonderfully high-arched space for listening to music augmented by the occasional twittering of its few sparrows.
Vladimir Nabokov said of “articulate art,” but could also have said of music or science or any fine human endeavor, that it is a “melancholy and very local palliative.” There is something melancholy about musicians after a concert, even one that ends with a standing ovation, as last night’s performance by Capella Cracoviensis deservedly did.
Long ago, the legendary hero Krak killed a dragon here by feeding it animal skins he had stuffed with sulfur. He was just the first in a long line of clever people who have made Poland’s ancient capital one of our planet’s most interesting cities.
Last night was a prize dinner of unusual interest, honoring CERN’s Gargamelle collaboration for the first great discovery made at CERN. This was one of the first big discoveries in physics (said Frank, in his after-dinner speech) that he was around to watch happen in real time — a discovery that was strongly challenged by many, when it appeared.
So why is great work done back in 1973 getting its first international prize in 2009? Giving a prize to an experimental group (instead of to its top members) is unusual — and it’s a novelty long overdue. Experimental results have for decades been produced by teams that may often include several hundred people. The EPS had to change its bylaws to do this, and somebody should give them their own cleverness prize for having done so.
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life’s end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?
Dr. Wilczek, an M.I.T. physicist who grew up in Queens, sang a Gilbert and Sullivanish song, centered on the frustrations of an oxygen molecule in love with a human being.
The big revelation is that this physicist isn’t a bad a singer. He may have a bit of vibrato, but he’s also got a lot of bravado. And he definitely stayed on key for the entire performance.
After a while, he was so engrossed in what he was doing, that he began to move–though, I must report, he’s no James Brown. Nevertheless, the audience where I sat–heavy-duty academic types– had to repress their own desires to start dancing. Who says that scientists have to be solemn and boring?
June 2nd, 2009 · Comments Off on To duck or not to duck?
Those familiar with this blog may have noticed that ducks tend to float through its pages like a theme, perhaps, I hope, from a dreaming composer and not so much, I hope, like that annoying drum riff that the worst guy in the band loves to play.
Sinister ducks, rubber ducks, ducks in and out of water, even (way back in 2003) my first Flash animation Quack-Don’t-Quack.
So it is understandable that a clever person who knows me well, such as for instance a Nobel Laureate who is married to me, would think of me as somebody who would like this video making fun of Pat Robertson for comparing gay marriage to sex with ducks.
And I cannot resist in turn passing this on to you also, but let me just say that as much as I do like ducks, I do not like them THAT way.
My little sister barely 20 years old and looking much younger, proud of her beautiful giant baby, seen here with her then-habitual cigarette.
She beat her smoking habit, brought up her baby, made it back to college and through law school, made a busy courageous life for herself, made the lives of so many others so much better, and in a twist on the old-style fairy story, found and loved and married her Prince Charming sometime in her late forties.
She died this morning after a long long battle with ovarian cancer. I haven’t felt like blogging about her, and I haven’t been feeling like blogging not about her. We are going to miss her so very much.
