Better Late Than Never

April is apparently National Poetry Month, at least according to Nickykaa, who tends to be apprised of such random matters.   He claims that if you love poetry, and you’ve got an on-line journal, you can best celebrate this fact by putting up a poem thereon.  And as it is still April for another 2 hours and 45 minutes, and oh look!-  I have an on-line journal!-  I will obey the Orbital Mind Control Lasers and capitulate.

It is the first poem I turned to, in a book I purchased less than half an hour ago.  You may make of that what you will.

—

Wake up lovers, it is time to start the journey!

We have seen enough of this world, it is time to see another.

These two gardens may be beautiful but

let us pass beyond them and go to the Gardener.

Let us kiss the ground and flow like a river

towards the ocean.

Let us go from the valley of tears to the wedding feast,

let us bring the color of blossoms to our pale faces.

Our hearts shiver like autumn leaves about to fall,

in this world of dust there is no avoiding pain or feeling exiled.

Let us become like beautifully colored birds

and fly to the sweet land of paradise.

Everything is painted with the brush of the Invisible One

let us follow the hidden signs and find the Painter.

It is best to travel with companions

on this perilous journey only love can lead the way.

We are like rain splashing on a roof

let us find our way down the spout.

We are like an arched bow with the arrow in place

let us become straight and release the arrow towards the target.

We have stayed at home scared like mice

let us find our courage and join the lions.

Let our souls turn into a mirror

longing to reflect the essence of Beauty.

Let us begin the journey home.

—

–Rumi (transl. Azima Melita Kolin & Maryam Mafi)

The Sound and the Fury

From Keeping Up with Kimberly:

Pet Peeve of the Week:

Items that are artificially made to resemble themselves.

For example-  Bubble gum that is artificially flavored—  Bubble Gum!!

Where do they get the flavoring from?

There’s a relatively concise, though not particularly well attributed discussion of exactly that HERE, at Google Answers.  (Boy, I’m turning into a Google shill.)  The salient points are that the exact chemical composition of any kind of commercial food flavoring is proprietary and/or a “trade secret”, so no-one is going to tell you just how it’s made, but “bubble gum” flavor has been around long enough and is ubiquitous enough that whatever it is, it’s probably a simple formula that’s easily duplicated.

—

Next example-  Cell phones that have a ring tone that sounds like–  (you guessed it!)  a phone!

You’ve heard these- the ring ring digital phones.  That also annoys me but I’m less clear as to why.

Think about it- there are more examples out there.  Isn’t it vaguely interesting that we have altered objects so much that they no longer resemble what they started out as?

Just a thought……

I love cel phones that ring like old plug-in bell phones, precisely because (whether intentionally or not) they’re harking back to the earlier form of the technology in a honorable and harmless way.  And perhaps because, having grown up with the bells, I find them infinitely less annoying then, say, the latest Pink song looped ad nauseum… In a society that can’t seem to remember anything that happened more than 10 minutes ago, why denigrate anything that helps preserve a continuum?

In a similar vein:  I learned how to type on a manual typewriter with electrical tape pasted over the keys (so you couldn’t cheat and look at the letters), and the biggest disappointment to me over the years as I moved from that to a Smith-Corona electric, to an IBM computer with a steel key keyboard, to various other computers with plastic key keyboards, was that the act of typing didn’t make that same satisfying noise anymore!  For a while I was hell-bound and determined to either find or write a piece of software that would make a “clack” sound every time you pressed a key, and maybe the “ding” of the carriage return bell when you pressed “Return” (which is now labeled “Enter” these days, because no one remembers anymore when there was a carriage to return.)  But there was no such animal.  Aside from having a potential market of one, it would have impossibly taxed the systems of that time-  slowed them down sufficiently to make them untenable.

To this day, though, I unleash my savage philangetic fury on every Quiet Key that dares cross my path, in retribution.  Type Loud!

Mal-War: The Smell of VMondo

“It took Louis and Chmeee pulling together to open Teela’s jaws where they were locked in Chmeee’s throat.  ‘She let her instincts fight for her,’ Chmeee gasped.  ‘Not her mind.  You were right, she fought to lose.  Kdapt help me if she had fought to win.'”

–  Larry Niven, The Ringworld Engineers

—

Speaking of viruses…

My primary computer got its sorry ass temporarily pwned by Virtumonde, aka Virtumondo, aka VMondo, aka Vundo, aka the Trojan-downloading, DLL-propagating, pop-up spewing, Internet search-redirecting malware from Hell.  If you’ve never heard of this beast or locked horns with it, count yourself fortunate.  If you have, my condolences.  I licked it, thanks to some timely assistance from a variety of friends, most notably Pigbristles, who blew an entire night plus riding shotgun through G-Mail chat on a laptop I had set up as an auxiliary.  But it was a haul, to be sure.  To nail it we had to (over a couple of days): Read the rest of this entry »

‘Keetyblogging II: Affinity

There is some unfathomable connection between budgerigars and jazz violin.

Not the Best Choice II

Man on City of Mists subway platform carrying plastic bag labeled: “Win a free trip to MEXICO!”

Yummmmm

The sound and feel of cutting through a fresh strawberry is exactly what I imagine the sound and feel would be like if the knife slipped off the strawberry and cut through my fingertips instead.

Color Commentary

Yoko shared her thoughts at some length about Memory (and has been the only one to do so to date, at least here.  The Empress herself read the entry, but limited herself to commenting, “And yes, you should buy a yearbook,” across the Easter dinner table, while doing things she forbade me to write about.)

—

Yoko: I also have a very regrettable senior yearbook picture- I have a mullet. Somehow, in my mind, I thought this would make me look cool, but I too winced when I got the proofs back, even then.

I saved the mullet for college.  It looked particularly great on ID photos.  My personal favorite was Read the rest of this entry »

Googleplex

From the comments for “Who’s Trackin’ Who?”:

Church: Interesting…  so– did you look? [at the package tracking link that G-Mail called up unbidden, when it noticed a tracking number in the text of my outgoing e-mail]

Well…  yeah.  It didn’t say “Link to the FedEx tracking site”;  it just said “track package # (xxx)”.  I was curious to see whether or not it had any idea what it was talking about (so to speak.) Are you suggesting that I justified its inclusion by pressing it?  ;)

Actually, I probably shouldn’t have been surprised.  Anyone who uses G-Mail already knows that it searches the body text of all your incoming and outgoing e-mails for keywords, and then puts up targeted advertising links in the sidebar based upon what it finds (although I don’t see them, thanks to the Firefox modding package Greasemonkey;  props to my good friend Neuro for pushing me over that barrier.)  And Google itself does the same thing if you type the tracking number of any package into it manually-  at least for FedEx, UPS and the US Postal Service.  Along with quite a few other tricks, most of which I was happily oblivious to…

You can find a quick list of some of them provided by Google itself here, or search the Web with a term like “things you can do with Google” to find plenty of articles about it.

(Do it with the Yahoo search engine.  They love that.)

Who’s Trackin’ Who?

My G-Mail account just lifted a FedEx tracking number with no surrounding indications out of the body text of an outgoing message, and automatically threw up a sidebar link to the FedEx tracking info site in response.

Scaaaaaaaary.

Easter

To the Shores of Tripoli

Right now, even as I type this, someone, somewhere out there in the Sealand night, is performing “The Halls of Montezuma” loudly enough to be heard from my kitchen window.

On BAGPIPES.

Certainty

Why is it that every year, given identical tax conditions, I get a refund from the United States government and from the City of Mists, but I owe money to the Duchy of West of the Rivers?

‘Keetyblogging I: Discovery

I was going to go to bed, but Astrid and Helena just finally figured out that those toroid objects on the string by their perch are Cheerios, and edible, and I don’t want to move the cage.

Short Story

Today on the street, an Orthodox Jewish man asked me if I was Jewish too.

I never found out why.

Dr. Brain Juice Surveys the Asteroid