I am spending a couple days dog-sitting for Dr. and Mrs. Bedwell. A one-armed man broke into the apartment and forced me at machete-point to take photographs of her highness (including some using my external flash off-camera, Strobist-style). I got near two dozen shots before I managed to fend him off and deliver a thrashing he shan't forget. Thus I now have a Flickr set of puppy pictures, but remain a man's man.
After the great tumult of 2005 things have calmed down on the Morland marriage attendance front, but there are still some occasions trickling in none the lesser for their infrequency. This past weekend, in honor of Tom and Heeyoon's summer vows, 16 friends of the groom headed to The Bahamas, the most efficient and alacritous place on earth. In accordance with my new photo policy, images are available here for quick viewing and on Flickr for comments, prints, etc.
Pop culture lives in the present; it doesn't really live in the future or want to know about great ideas from the past. I'm saying there's a lot of useful knowledge and wisdom out there for anybody who is curious, and who takes the time to do something other than just executing on some current plan. Cicero said, "Who knows only his own generation remains always a child." People who live in the present often wind up exploiting the present to an extent that it starts removing the possibility of having a future.
I've removed the context of this quote deliberately, but Dr. Kay is speaking about the state of the computer industry and the web. It's easy to think, as we bask in our own information-amplified, communal magnificence, that the "now" now is a completely new "now". People are ever-obsessed with the present. No matter the decade, even the slowest news day has headlines.
Admittedly that's not what Dr. Kay is saying - he does not claim the current perspective to be the same or different than the past's. Whether our fixation is greater now or not, it does behoove us to throw our periodicals, 24-hour news shows, up-to-the-minute blogs, and closed-circuit live secret video feeds from department store dressing rooms aside then and again in favor of a little wisdom from the ancients.
I've redirected the "pics" link in the sidebar to point to my Flickr photos. All the old stuff is still here on the site in the archives, but going forward I realized it was stupid to maintain an unsearchable, uncategorized picture index (or rather fail to maintain one for years) when Flickr does all that and more. Plus there's the issue of redundantly hosting all the image media on this server... but I may continue to do that for larger galleries.
You can kick things off in true punk rock fashion by viewing a set of my friend Matty after he was punched in the face. He traveled back in time to observe the infamous 1886 Haymarket Riot and unintentionally started a chain of events that led to the great-great-grandson of a felled strike-breaker tripping over a mop and dousing his platter of fried chicken soup all over a recently-paroled Hell's Angel who mistook Matty for the culprit and called the cops on him. Then THE MAN roughed him up, because if you have pigtails in America you are guilty until proven innocent. George Bush doesn't care about Matt people.
I also added a Twitter link. I'm not sure if it's a fad, but what the heck.
