From the Kennett Chamber of Commerce website: “Nine-time Grammy award winner Sheryl Crow will return home to serve as the keynote speaker at the 58th Annual Kennett Chamber of Commerce Banquet. The banquet will be at 6:30 p.m. Monday, April 12th, at the American Legion Building in Kennett. Tickets for the event are $25 per person for Chamber members and $35 per person for non-Chamber members. Tickets can be purchased by calling the Chamber office at 573-888-5828. The deadline to purchase tickets is March 15th. The meal will be prepared by Simply Delicious Catering Service.” Can that possibly be a coincidence?
Lucy: 9 Weeks
We’re spending so much time with this new pup that it’s a little hard for me to observe that she is getting bigger. Of course, she is. Happy, playful, getting along well with Ripley. Trying not to go nuts with photos but couldn’t resist posting a few new ones at Fotki. Barb and I keep our Casio Exilim “Wearable Card Camera” close at hand. I can’t get over how cool these things are. This brief (40 seconds) video clip was shot with the Casio and edited in Studio 8. The camera can only shoot 30 seconds of video at a time but you’d be surprised how much fits in half a minute. If you’re thinking about a digital camera, the Casio Exilim is THE camera to buy.
Pick one memory
Jonathon Delacour on the movie After Life.
“The premise of After Life is simple. Every Monday, people who have died walk through an open doorway suffused with pale light into what looks like a derelict boarding school. Each is issued with an ID number and assigned to a counselor who will assist them in preparing for the journey to the other side. Much of the film is taken up with these counseling sessions, which commence with an explanation of the rules:”
You’re going to stay here for a week. Everyone gets a private room. Please feel at home. But while you’re here there’s one thing you must do.
Out of the __ years of your life, we’d like to ask you to choose one memory, the one you remember and cherish most. There is a time limit. You have three days to decide.
After you choose your memory, our staff will recreate it on film as exactly as possible.
On Saturday we’ll show the films to everyone. The moment the memory comes back to you most vividly, you’ll go on to the other side, taking only that memory.
Via Halley’s Comment
Cory Doctorow on blogging
“Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mental registers.”
[via Halley’s Comment]
Top 10 shows recorded by Tivo owners
(week ending 02/20/04).
1. Friends
2. Sex and the City
3. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation
4. The Apprentice
5. American Idol
6. The West Wing
7. ER
8. 24
9. Survivor: All-Stars
10. Will & Grace
Rules for Being Human
From Cherie Carter-Scott’s “If Life is a Game, These are the Rules.”
Rules for Being Human
1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period of this time around.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called Life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lessons or think them irrelevant and stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial and error: Experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ultimately “works.”
4. A lesson is repeated until learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you are alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. “There” is no better than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here,” you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”
7. Others are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie inside you. The answers to life’s questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.
Doc Searls on TV as an information medium
“Life’s too short. I’m already 56. Time gets more precious every day. Why waste time sitting still consuming thin information on TV when you can hunt the thick stuff down and eat it up at your own pace, on your own personal screen, or in a book, or on headphones while you excercize?”
Lucy: 8 Weeks
I’m only a few hours from the end of my Weekend Alone with an Eight Week Old Puppy. I think it’s gone very well and Lucy and Ripley have expressed no opinion on the subject. Ripley is getting more comfortable with the pup every day. They both want to play but need a little more time to get there.
And for those that need one more Life Lesson: Life is like our big back yard/woods. Dog shit everywhere. You know it’s there and you do you best not to step in it… but you do. And you will again. Just clean off your shoe and keep going.
Odometer of Life
The photograph was –I believe– taken on my fifth birthday. John bought the cake at the annual Rotary Radio Auction. I’m guessing it was created by Causbie’s Bakery and intended for a wedding. But it made a hell of birthday cake. This image captures the essence of the 50’s for me. Ward, June and the Beaver. Seemed fitting for tomorrow’s 56th birthday. Christ, (sorry, Mel) how is it possible I have a photograph of myself that’s more than half a century old?
Lesson learned during the past year? It’s a good thing to count your blessings but you can’t use the math you learned as a child. I have all of these wonderful birthday presents, so if I break or lose one, it’s okay because I have so many more. One would think. Unfortunately, you might have one hundred items in the Blessings column and just one in the Other column…and find you are overdrawn in your Life Book. One drop of pain can be so concentrated, it needs an ocean of Good Things to dilute it. And it never goes away entirely. How did I miss this awful truth?
SoundCover phone app
“Did you wake up late for work and you want your boss to think you’re caught in traffic? Select the Traffic Jam background and give him a call from your bedroom. He will hear your voice on top of (traffic sfx). Is one of your mates a chronic talker that just doesn’t know when to stop? Use the Phone Ring background and your friend will hear a phone ring 6 times, 15 seconds into the call. Tell him that your other phone is ringing and that you have to go. Pretend you’re at the dentist, in the park, on the street, caught in a thunderstorm, near heavy machinery or at a circus parade.”