Lots of “censorship” stories in this week’s links, but also a couple of fun things. Remember the text-based games you played on your ancient computer? Even if you don’t, have a read over Revisiting ‘Zork’: What We Lost in the Transition to Visual Games. Personally, I remember games like this quite fondly; they’re especially nice because there is NO action, just thinking through problems and remembering where you’ve been. Good stuff. And even if you don’t think you like photography, Lytro has come out with a camera which lets you shoot first and focus later – read the article, then watch the video. Enjoy!
Continue reading “Links”
Pirates and Zebras and Bards (Oh, My.)
Since the temperature has hovered in the mid-to-low sixties (16-18°C) here, it’s been harder to think “summer,” but lately it’s been hovering in the sixties when it’s overcast, and OY! Hello, humidity hair. Along with the bouffant locks, and we have clouds of “midgies” around our back gate, hideous, nearly invisible specks that actually hurt when they bite. Strange times over here, weatherwise.
Fortunately, we’re having positive times with regard to friends and activities. AB is on a QUEST to make SURE we enjoy ourselves for what might be our last summer in the UK.* A dizzying array of concerts and picnics and dinner activities have us wandering from one end of the city to the other, and next month she plans to drag us back to Edinburgh for the Book Faire…during the Fringe Festival (Be afraid).
Our most recent excellent time was last weekend where we rose and went back to BBC Halls in Candlerigg… and once again forgot to take a picture of the BBC Stage Door sign. ::sigh:: The gathered crowd was given pencils and scores and directed to various sections of the performance hall, where the audience became the performers. The BBC Chorus and orchestra, under the direction of Andrew Manze, played a sang the solos for Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance, and we were the chorus.
We had been invited by AB to accompany her mother, and her mother’s good buddy, both of whom are in their seventies, and knew all the words and the tunes to the rollicking piece from their school days (Apparently, it was de rigueur to have students learn light opera in British schools in the thirties/forties). While the rest of us frantically sight-read, having only listened to the entire piece the night before, they had a marvelous time.
And, in the end, so did we. We weren’t very sure of the whole thing, to begin with — tongue-twisters? Policemen? Pirates? And though indeed the words are ridiculous (Inshort, inmatters animal,vegetable,andmineral, (gasp) heistheverymodelof amodernmajorgeneral), it’s a workout for the brain to get it all right, and it was fun to have our section rehearsals, and then a final “dress rehearsal,” after which we left, feeling like we’d accomplished something, if only for ourselves. And that was the nice thing – it was only for ourselves. The purpose of the morning of play with the orchestra was simply to learn. Bonus: we sounded really wonderful.
We thought we’d only be recorded for BBC Radio 3, and were a little astounded to see… cameras. Oh, the rushing toward the toilet during the break between section rehearsals and the dress rehearsal! Oh, the pounds of makeup whipped from various bags, and hastily applied! Oh, flying hairbrushes, couture adjustments, and puckered lips in the mirror! Oh, the primping! Oh, the snarking AB and T. did… ::cough:: Eventually, BBC 3’s Light Fantastic will have pictures and a recording up — we don’t know when, but the fun for us was just in being there.
T. decided that she would like to kidnap the conductor and make him direct every single chorus she’s ever in, for the rest of her life. Maestro Manze was amusing and patient and soft-spoken and just was into the music – no fuss, no frowns. (AB did not swoon, tending to be rather cranky at that hour of the morning, but it was a close thing for T. – his courteous mien truly is a big departure from some other conductors we’ve had in this country.)
While we loved Pirates, we were disappointed that the rehearsal overlapped with the Come-and-Sing Messiah held at St. Mary’s just up the block from our house! Our friend Dr. B played a big part in celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi with her church – she got to process up the aisle on strewn rose petals and swing what T. somehow insists on calling the “thurigible.” (AKA thur-i-ble) The Messiah was just the culmination of a day full of song and celebration, including Parry’s I Was Glad for the hymn and the orchestral evensong the following night. We are making a point of wandering over to St. M’s sometime soon — they do a lot of that orchestral/organ/choral stuff, just as part of their regular services. Some days here it feels like we are surrounded by the best music in the world.
Our post-musicale quest for food found us wandering through the city to a place called Khublai Khan. A Mongolian bbq joint for a bunch of vegetarians (minus one) seemed an odd choice for lunch, but truly, one can have the very best stir fry in the world there, and the chefs kindly reserved a clean grill simply for our veggie-only orders (you can get them to do that when there’s only two other parties in the whole restaurant. Just don’t try that on a Saturday night). They supply diners with a bowl, and they load them up with their favorite veggies, meats, and seasonings — they had various oils, sauces, and spices in a station, and “recipes” supplied to help people choose complimentary flavorings.
The statuary was meant to bring to mind the Qin terracotta warriors, and while the restaurant itself was pretty nifty, we were a little startled by the menu for the omnivores. Apparently the restaurant, for good or for ill, culls safari parks in Southern Africa for their meat. They had springbok, ostrich, zebra, kangaroo, and camel on the menu, to name a few beasts. Khublai Khan is definitely a good place for the gastronomically creative to eat… and those who like to watch the gastronomically adventurous eat and ask, “So, does it taste like chicken??”
This week’s adventure includes The Bard in the Botanics — we’re off to see A Midsummer’s Night Dream in the botanical gardens — the main Victorian glasshouse called the Kibble Palace. We’re going to dress lightly, as we expect the venue to be a bit warm, and we’re going to take along picnic foods so as we sit on our benches we can enjoy our play with dinner.
Speaking of picnic foods: we are loving the early strawberries that are cheap and plentiful at present. We are experimenting with an unsweetened life for a few weeks — just adding no sugar to anything and not eating desserts, and early on in the experiment, T’s skin is suddenly clearing up. She is torn between being disgusted and delighted, as she rather likes her sugar, thankyou. On the other hand, the berries right now require no sweetener whatsoever, and will be a welcome addition to Thursday’s feast. Sadly, we have no photograph of our after dinner repast from last weekend – Claire and T. set to those piles of strawberries, and they are GONE.
Thank you for keeping us in your thoughts. We are deciding right now not to think about, answer questions about, or talk about moving, relocating, or anything to do with what will happen “next.” Paramount to our lives right now is T. finishing her science fiction revision (1/3 of the novel to go, and she’s been urged to use a cliffhanger and make it a series, because she was told that, “you may hate them, but readers love them, dear,”), and D. finishing and turning in his Big Fat PhD Paper without losing what is left of his precious sanity. Too much job hunting and talk about “what next” to the exclusion of all else has produced an incredible amount of pressure and stress and more than a few bad moments and sleepless nights. We’ve decided that level of panic isn’t conducive to what we need to do, so for now it is a closed subject. *Thus, this COULD be our last summer here, or the path may lead elsewhere in the UK. We don’t know, and we’ve stopped trying to pry a glimpse of the future from the hands of the divine – for now, it is enough to just take each day, and enjoy it, end of story.
And, at present, there’s a sliver of blue in the sky, and a cricket game going on. We’re going to go run outside.
Links
And another batch of links for your enjoyment and edification. If you’re at all interested in Artificial Intelligence (and what that term might mean), have a read of Norvig vs. Chomsky and the Fight for the Future of AI. There are, of course, lots of good ones in here, as I’ve been a bit remiss in publishing them despite having read the articles. Enjoy!
Continue reading “Links”
Victory!
For those who have ever participated in a pub quiz, you know sometimes those things are HARD.
If you watch QI on BBC America, you know that Stephen Fry asks random, weird questions for no points at all, and while the randomness of the questions may be similar, there are teams at a quiz, and you strive for the glory of your mates and your place in the ‘hood. Or something like that.
Well, the Hobbits, who are generally useless at things like this, despite having two heads stuffed with minutiae, were on a winning — okay, within a half point of — team! We were invited to attend The West End Festival Literary Quiz at Partick Library on behalf of the Langside Book Group, our friend AB’s book club. The quiz was tough. We covered books and authors from the countries of India, Spain/Portugal, China, America, and Scotland. Guess which ones we were most helpful on? Um, yeah. Yay for Anne Tyler, Amy Tan, Pearl S. Buck, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and knowing the names of all the girls from Little Women, and who wrote The Little Princess. Good old children’s lit to the rescue; T. mopped up that section. She was fairly useless at India, but D. turned out to be surprisingly competent in supplying replies for some of the rest. We had a 38-years-in-the-trenches librarian on our team, and she was fifty-eight shades of impressive. She continues to kick herself for losing us a point and a half, but without her, we wouldn’t have even come close.
More fun than just flexing our wee brains over tea and tiny cakes was the fact that we got prizes!!! Did we need more books? No. Did we covet them anyway, especially with their commemorative World Book Night 2011 covers? Well, yes! A book of the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi a new book by Christopher Brookmyre — a local gent, apparently — a wee cake of a notepad with pencil from Costa Coffee (purveyors of REALLY big mugs of anything) and eraser from the Aye, Write! Bank of Scotland Book Festival, a Glasgow: Scotland With Style pin they HAD to have dragged out of the vaults somewhere*, and a lovely Waterstones book bag completed our stash. We were as ridiculously gleeful that we had conquered the other teams to receive all of this.
The West End Festival is usually good for the spectacle of the Festival Parade, for fun coffee talks, and a concert or two, and we’re pleased to have participated. And (mostly) won.
T. plans to proudly display her “Scotland With Style” pin right along next to her “Yoga Kills” pin. They both make the same amount of sense.
The Dance
*This post is a slightly modified version of an essay on T’s blog
On with the dance! let joy be unconfined;
No sleep till morn, when Youth and Pleasure meet
To chase the glowing hours with flying feet.
~George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
This weekend we attended the epic wedding of friend Axel and were the on-the-spot photographers, as our gift to him. It was an epic wedding because a.) it’s Scotland, and people here party like it’s 1999 pretty much every night, b.) Axel is Romanian, and the Romanians party like it’s… 1989 (when Communism fell) as often as possible, and c.) it lasted for two days, and many, many, many sweaty, midge-biting (at the outdoor bbq) hours.
T is an introvert, socially backwards in some ways, and sometimes weirdly shy – so there were parts of the whole thing which made her break out in a sweat, including waltzing into the bride’s dressing room and photographing she and the groom’s sister getting ready (We teased Axel a long time about his imaginary girlfriend, because we’d never met her – so, “Um, yeah, hi. Don’t mind me, I’m just here to photograph you while some random chick puts lipstick on you. Just ignore me, thanks,” was T’s introduction.). D. was the quietest photographer on record, and also was too shy to be as bossy as he needed to be, but with a camera in front of his face, he is fairly impervious, and got some amazing, excellent shots (most of which we cannot share, because they are not ours. But! We will share some innocuous ones soon).
There were moments which were beautifully surreal, which included the sung Greek orthodox service with the cantor and the priest singing lovely duets, and the mystical looking gold-leafed icons, and the marching around the altar three times, and the crowns – the bride and groom are crowned in an orthodox service, which, along with the sugared wafers they got to eat was pretty great. (NB: The sugar represents the sweetness of marriage; some use sugared almonds for this symbolism. The crowns represent their new authority as a couple, since marriage gives them their own wee “kingdom.” The crowns also stand for the crowns of martyrs (!!) as the sacrifices of marriage are many. ::cough::) The cake was adorable – a stack of suitcases for all the bride and groom’s travels over their long distance, Minnesota-Scotland Skype dating; the Romanian gents, resplendent in their kilts, were too cute – they wore them well. But the moments we loved the best were the dancing.
Like many of you reading this blog (Hi, Adventists, Muslim ladies, Pentecostal folks, and Southern Baptists!), we were raised not dancing. The Hobbits, during their Bad Movie Nights, have never yet sat through (okay: suffered through) FOOTLOOSE*, that angsty 80’s dance film, but we’re told our lives run a parallel to the theme – churchy folk Just Didn’t Do That, because dance Led To Lust And Other Things. The only differences we see are a.) we’re not angsty 80’s boys, and b.) we figure we’re too physically awkward to worry about dancing anyway. (True or not, that’s our conclusion, and we’re sticking to it.)
The not dancing, though, takes something away from a person. We’re talking actual dances with steps, not what the “kids” these days call grinding or freak dancing or whatever – please. Real dance. To not dance — as families, as cross-generations, as human people — is to miss a pair of middle-aged women attempting the Virginia Reel and ending up in a breathless giggling tangle – or to miss being the groom quick-stepping his mother around the floor and singing with her some silly ABBA song, and to miss first-date couples and grandparents and shy Scots boys paired with shyer Romanian girls attempting cèilidh dancing for the first time, trying desperately to remember which way to step, hop, clap, and twirl. To not dance would be to miss all the suddenly unselfconsciously delighted Romanians of all ages — resplendent in their kilts, oh, yes — who ran shouting out onto the floor, arms raised, at the first strains of their traditional music. To not dance is perhaps to miss the turning of the world.
It was joy in action, celebration embodied. And we both felt crippled that we couldn’t stand up and join in. (Technically, we could have, but we weren’t really guests. And, T. begs you remember the descriptor “socially backwards and weirdly shy.” Thank you.)
English 102 in the undergrad years gave us William Carlos Williams’ The Dance, and T. recalls first looking up the painting. We still laugh at the words to the poem — Williams was so right about the round butts and heavy shanks — and this weekend we remembered again the circular phrases that remind us of the dances – running along, laughing, stepping and trying to keep up with the crazyfast Romanian circles, or the amusingly named “Dashing White Sergeant” or “Strip the Willow” or “The Pride of Erin Waltz” in the cèilidh – all stumbles and laughter, wild twirling and fumbles — learning grace with a slow, slow, quick, quick step. The laughing, the joy, the freely swinging hips, the stomping feet — all of those images swirled through our heads. So, these are our fantastic memories of someone else’s celebration – and a reminder to learn to uncripple ourselves and join the dance, metaphorically and literally.
The Dance
~ by William Carlos Williams~
In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies, (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess
* Okay, here’s the scoop on Footloose, which we know is deeply unfair to hate without ever having seen. It’s T’s fault, totally, and let us tell you why: A#1 Reason She Hasn’t Seen It:) the music. Okay. It’s fun, catchy, whatever. But. T. had this Eeeeevil Aerobics teacher, pre-Zumba days, when people still did plain old aerobics. She made T. do this… well, it can only be called a chicken dance thing — complete with rapid, full-extension can-can kicks, arm flailing, and side hops — to the title song to this film.
A lot of hate going on, after that. A lot of hate…
The News from Lake Glasgow…
Last night we saw animals going by, two-by-two, and in herds of seven…
After one of the “driest April’s on record” in the UK (to which we said, “REALLY!???” Apparently it’s true. Central England birding societies claimed people should flood their gardens with hoses so that swallows had mud to build nests. It was never, in Glesga, anyway, that warm or dry…!), it rained almost daily through the month of May, and is well on its way to deluging through the month of June — with sporadic hail, and what T. swears was slush the other day. Welcome to the lake! At least it sounds like a summer destination…
People are CRANKY, hilariously so. We always talk about the weather in Glasgow, but now it’s devolved into swearing about the weather. What’s amusing is that people are making up one-liners and pithy little asides — and even as they’re being cranky, they’re making us smile. The minute the sun peeps out — and it tends to do that first thing in the morning, and last thing in the early evening — there are fifteen people running into the crescent park, tossing down their disposable bbq’s and filling the air with the smoke of their burnt offerings. Eventually, the rain gods will be propitiated…
Meanwhile, the flowers have given up on waiting and are bursting forth at last. We have some stupendously bright poppies in the Kelvingrove Park promenade area. Whoever is responsible for changing the plantings each year should go on our Christmas list. The flowers have been wonderful every year, but this year is especially fine. We have never seen poppies so bright or so big! (No, it has nothing to do with the extra rain.)
The world seems brighter because D. is so much better. T. opened the last can of pumpkin in celebration. (Yes, she actually shared her pie. She was that happy.) He is making up for lost time and working hard every spare moment on his big final paper. So far with not a lot of direction, as it appears his supervisors are both concurrently on holiday. However, D. merely is continuing to make the expansions and adjustments he noted that were missing in his first draft — as those edits are approved, he can’t go wrong.
In more work news, D’s company is being sold. Again. Apparently it happens every three years, and makes sense to the owners/shareholders — somehow it makes them all more money. D. was hired on almost four years ago, right after the last sale went through, and missed the time of panic and chaos that went with it. This time, all i’s were dotted, all t’s were crossed, and everyone was pushpushpushpushed into making themselves look as good as possible on paper and otherwise. D. took as much pushing as he could, and then retired to his “home office” to work, but at last the nonsense is over, and his department has received a commendation. (Yay!) That sort of thing doesn’t make much sense to T., but she’s glad it’s over, since that, on top of everything else, has been more stress than D. really needed, just recovering from being so ill! Meanwhile, T. finally has finished the edits for Book #3, and that is off to copy editing at Knopf/Random House. Book #4 is in the queue with the editor, and #5 is in that mid-revision stage where T. sighs a lot and groans about Why Did I Think I Could Write Science Fiction. She spends a lot of time Googling NASA and reading up on the statistics of newly discovered planets. (This may or may not help.)
Things are continuing to wind down — as we reach midsummer, we have to start seriously focusing on, “Okay, what next?” D. has so far sent out twenty+ resumes to various companies on the North American continent, and we’re eager to begin hearing back from them.
Job-hunting remains a supremely vexing, highly amusing exercise. With the plethora of job sites around, it’s easy enough to do all of this from the comfort of one’s own home, and then the groans and sarcastic mumblings are that much more fun. D. kept a tally of those recruiter words that he hates — passionate (one ad managed to use the word SIX TIMES), dynamic, fast-paced, amazing, innovative, thrilling, fun, high-end, top-flight, agile, amazing, awesome, live-and-breathe your work, trendy, hip, and the phrase, “we get it.” Technology positions – whether in the academic realm (we did find a few of those) or just in the business environment, are detail-oriented, precise, maybe even painstaking. But passionate? Dynamic? Hip? Trendy? Really??
Seriously, though: does one often feel that one’s job is amazing and dynamic? Are you passionate about the top-flight place where you work? Does your boss “get it?” Do you live and breathe whatever it is you do in your fast-paced, amazing office, doing whatever, which is both thrilling and innovative and any of the other adjectives which would mean that you’re successful in the baffling dot.com boom/recruiter parlance? Except for T’s eldest sister, who loves her job, and whose boss is a seventy-year-old nun (this does not mean she is made of spun sugar, people, just that she’s straightforward and amusing), most people don’t have this glorious relationship with their workplace. (At Big Sister’s office, they even get a dog. That’s probably both hip and trendy. Nun bosses: who knew!) At this point, we’re merely praying for something which is reasonably stress-free, pays decently and doesn’t suck up D’s whole life.
D. is finding it hard to remember life before working and going to school full time. Once upon a time, he used to play the violin, draw on a scratch board, knit, bake, sketch, skate, cycle, swim, garden… you know, live? We’re grateful to our friend AB and others for dragging us to concerts and plays and trying to help us remember to make time to live a balanced life — it will be easier once we get away from having to worry about That Huge Paper…! Two weeks from this Friday, he turns it in…
Many of you have asked us where we’re off to next, and we’ve concluded that what’s important to us right now is perhaps not so much a familiar place, but a place that’s a little closer, thus the continent switch. For all we know, we could still end up in Hong Kong or something, but our aim at this point is to put a little less travel time between us and our nearest and dearest. We’ll see how that goes.
The season of celebrations has arrived – in spite of the weather – or, maybe because of it – there are parties all over. D. discovered a great little pub down an unexplored side street when his office had a going-away party for a mother-to-be, and is planning to drag T. over for their “skinny French fries! Real ones!” (She is resisting thus far, arguing that her life has been better with no French fries, because she refuses to eat the thick-cut chips people restaurants seem to prefer here, but D. is insistent. She may have to cave.) A chorus friend is departing for Tanzania, another friend for Germany. Many farewell celebrations are planned, and it’s almost more difficult to see friends go, not knowing where we’re going, but we’re glad that so many people already have a “next destination” planned.
The first of our summer weddings will be celebrated this Friday. Our darling Axel is marrying his Minnesota belle (Sadly, she is not from Lake Wobegon, but we can pretend), and we’re on work detail to man the cameras and capture the event for posterity. This is so much better than being a mere guest. T. has “martha-ing” in her genes, and finds it hard to just sit still in a floofy dress in the middle of strangers anyway, so now with a camera in hand, the Hobbits practically have press passes. We can hang with the caterers and snitch food, and run around paparazzi-ing everyone.
Our last wedding is in July, and T. plans to get a professional henna-ing job done on her hands, and is getting a specially made wrap from India. Neither the first nor the last wedding is going to be in English, which will be interesting, but we’ll be glad to celebrate with our friends as they embark on their hopeful life journeys.
Well, that’s the news from Lake… um, the West End of Glasgow, where the men are fair – pale, poor lads, since the sun refuses to shine – the women are stuffed into “jeggings” and teetering on cobblestones in high heels, and all the children are in wellies and colorful raincoats, watching the animals go by toward the Ark…
User Registration
Awhile back we had a problem with spambots registering new accounts (hundreds of registrations a day), so we disabled new user registration for awhile. Registration is now opened up again. Apologies to those who wished to register (and comment) and were unable to do so.
This site requires that you create an account if you wish to comment. Your first comment will be moderated, as will any comments including more than 2 hyperlinks. This, also, is to cut down on the spammers. After you’ve proven yourself to be a human being, and one who is actually interested in this site as this site (rather than as a place to hawk your bogus pharmaceutical deals), you’ll be able to comment and have the comments come through immediately.
-D & T
A Problem With the Playlist
For those of you who happily listen to your music in “shuffle” mode, this post should mean very little. For those who listen through the albums in the order in which they came on the CD, and who have organized their playlists in a particular order of albums, this post may not mean anything unless you use music as I do. Yes. Music, for me, has a very distinct use: blocking out the external world so that I can focus.
Don’t get me wrong: I love music, and happily listen to the radio (although I do object when, say, we transition from Sibelius’ Finlandia to the theme song from The Big Valley, which happened just Wednesday afternoon). But when I’m at work, I need something which is consistent, and which I’ve listened to so many times that the next song isn’t any surprise. The music all needs to be of a fairly high energy – to get the fingers flying over the keyboard – and the albums must come in the same order, which my player kindly does by default. The order in which I place the albums is the order in which they’re played, and I typically array the music out from happy pop music (Lenka, the Cranberries), through darker pop music (10,000 Maniacs, Tori Amos, Sinead O’Connor), and then conclude with the hard stuff (Metallica and Paris, Sonic Jihad). Lenka just recently supplanted The Cranberries as the lead album, as she’s a new addition to our music collection.
I don’t always start at the beginning, and I usually don’t make it all the way through because I’ll have had a particular mood which suited me for that day’s work. Yesterday, however, I began with Metallica, carried through Paris … and got the shock of my life when everything rolled over to Lenka. It was truly, truly horrible. I actually had to pull out the headphones and tell T. about it, it was so startling, and then roll back the playlist to Pearl Jam (comes before Metallica). After a few times through Pearl Jam, I could work my way back, and reconsider Lenka, but it was tough.
Music gets into your brain, folks. Very far into your brain.
-D
“Fresh” winds and “Worthy” causes…
We love the BBC Weather icons (the sun/cloud/raindrops icon is so classic — and classically indecisive — that people have had T-shirts and bags made) and their banal Radio 4 descriptions of how the forecast is shaping up. We have snickered for months about the alleged “Wintery Mix,” which is apparently what the confused state of rain/sleet/hail/snow/rain again is supposed to be called. Spring — which it seems we’re finally having, despite a “Wintery Mix” just at the beginning of this week — is affording us new things to amuse. We snorted the other day to hear 35 mph gusts of wind described as “fresh.” When there’s a vent to the outside right behind your bed, however, one must disagree. In particular, we disagree because the pigeons nesting in the vent disagree so loudly… MAN, we wish those birds would finish with the eggs already and GO AWAY.
Anyway.
As with the tidbit vs. titbit controversy, wherein we received an email from someone we actually thought to tell of their typographical error – briefly, until T. used her mad OED skillz – the word “worthy” was another thing T. thought she ought to warn someone about… then she looked it up.
One of the definitions of “Worthy,” sez the OED, is “showing good intent, but lacking in humo(u)r and imagination.” Soo, when T. saw the word in a children’s book review — “Emotionally charged, this is a wonderfully touching story which never slips into worthiness” she thought the writer had meant, wordiness or …SOMETHING else.
Nope.
Right, then.
We’re off this morning for a short, slow walk — short, yet slow, so we don’t overtax newly energized muscles — and to brunch at our friend C.’s house, where we’ll just chat and catch up with thoroughly unworthy topics, and hope the wind isn’t too fresh on our way home…
And though we didn’t get to say it last weekend when it was all going down, The Hobbits are officially proud of their wee-tall Little, D’Nic, who last weekend graduated from high school. The Hobbits also send good wishes and their presence in spirit to their sister Bulia, who graduates from nursing school next weekend. We’re proud of you two, and all others of our circle who are moving on to the next phase of their existence. Unlike what all the graduation speakers will try to tell you, the world is not your oyster (what does that mean, anyway? That it’s something you can gag on with salt and lime juice?), and you cannot do “anything” you please now – not just because of the present economy, but because the world never works that way. Individual excellence often depends on teamwork. We look forward to cheering you on as you do as you’re intended to do in this world, which is to find your place in the madness, put your skills and talents to work for the whole, and thrive. Here’s to being part of the team, peeps.
Links
Another batch of links for you. One of the stranger links this week is about how a Violinist Taps Artificial Intelligence to Interact With Her Unique Sound. I find myself reluctant to dig into that story, having once attended an “experimental” violin concert, from which we fled in agony as soon as possible (they didn’t give us an intermission, so all we avoided was the reception afterwards, but still). Enjoy the links!
Continue reading “Links”