Spring will bring more ground cover and everything will look very different. And this isn’t what anyone would call “pretty” woods. Lots of scrub cedar and rocks. And more rocks. But the birds love it, and so do I.
I’ve never been a fan of the ever-larger phones so I almost pulled the trigger on one of the new iPhone SE’s Apple announced last week, until my buddy suggested I take a look at the iPhone 13 mini. Didn’t know there was such a thing but it was just what I was after. Smaller phone with lots of features. Arrives tomorrow. (The photo compares the 11 and the 13 mini)
I was at the Apple event in 2007 when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone. I resisted getting an iPhone when they came out. I’d had a Tracfone since 2005. $19.95 at Wal-Mart and it lived in the glovebox of my car. In 2008 I broke down and bought an iPhone and bought the new model ever couple of years. iPhone 3GS (2009); iPhone 4 (2010); the first iPhone SE (2016); iPhone XS (2018); iPhone 11 (2020).
This week we burned the last of our two year supply of firewood so today we went to see the Firewood Man for another load. Props to Barb for the exceptional job of stacking (bottom photo).
Barb and Riley walked in the saddest St. Patrick’s Day Parade of them all. Seriously, who needs an excuse to drink?
“(You) think the Western mind is some Frankensteinian product of a botched religion and a bunch of ancient Greek pedophiles, the same unholy combination of schoolboy logic, lust for blood and glory, we-know-best, and destroy-to-save that slaughtered three million in Vietnam, most of them women and children, all in the name of freedom and democracy, before we ran away because it got too expensive.”
“Modernism is largely a form of entertainment, and a superficial one at that. It doesn’t survive environmental disasters or oil shortages. It doesn’t even survive terrorist attacks. It certainly doesn’t survive poverty, which is the lot of most of us. One flick of a switch, and the images fade from the screen. […] Confusion seeks relief in bigotry, which leads to conflict. One high-tech war, and we’re back to the Stone Age.”
— Bangkok Haunts (2007) by John Burdett
Today is my 74th birthday. I’ve never been one for big celebrations. I struggle to see anything special about the day. A cultural thing, perhaps… like Valentine’s Day or Memorial Day. I thought I’d be wiser by this time, depending on how one defines wisdom.
When I think about the future these days, it tends to be in years rather than decades. Mortality and death are no longer abstractions. For the last dozen years I’ve viewed god and the universe through the lens of Buddhism and zen. I’ve concluded the self and free will are illusions. In short, this is It. William Gibson said it nicely in All Tomorrow’s Parties:
PS: The clip below was floating around, unattached, in the media library and this seemed like a good place to park it.
(Wikipedia) “The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a website and YouTube channel, created by John Koenig, that coins and defines neologisms for emotions that do not have a descriptive term. The dictionary includes verbal entries on the website with paragraph-length descriptions and videos on YouTube for individual entries. The neologisms, while completely created by Koenig, are based on his research on etymologies and meanings of used prefixes, suffixes, and word roots.”
I shared a few of these five years ago and must have gotten them from the website. Don’t think I knew about the YouTube channel. I purchased the book (PDF) recently and find myself highlighting about every third entry. Have to give that up.
“It’s strange how little of the world you actually get to see. No matter where on Earth you happen to be standing, the horizon you see in the distance is only ever about three miles away from you, a bit less than five kilometers. Which means that at any given time, you’re barely more than an hour’s walk from a completely different world.”
“ But if someone were to ask you on your deathbed what it was like to live here on Earth, perhaps the only honest answer would be: “I don’t know. I passed through it once, but I’ve never really been there.”
“In philosophy, monism is the belief that a wide variety of things can be explained in terms of a single reality, substance, or source. Onism is a kind of monism—your life is indeed limited to a single reality by virtue of being restricted to a single body—but something is clearly missing.”
“sonder: the realization that each random passerby is the main character of their own story, in which you are just an extra in the background.”
Excellent piece in The Guardian on a new book/oral history from the pop culture reporter for The New York Times, Kyle Buchanan about the making of Mad Max: Fury Road. The piece — “A fetish party in the desert’: the making of Mad Max: Fury Road– includes excerpts from more than 130 new interviews with key members of the cast and crew, including Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, and director George Miller.
I’ve watched the movie half a dozen times and, like the author, didn’t realize the stunts were not CGI. They were real. My copy of the book is on the way.
Okay, that’s a little much. For a while I’ve been thinking about cutting some walking paths through some of our heavily wooded property. Nothing fancy, maybe four foot wide. Just to make it easier to take a little nature walk. Barb and I did a little scouting over the weekend.
My original thought was to map out a path and try to follow that on the ground…
but I’ve changed my mind. I’m going to just start walking and cutting (with my handy little electric chainsaw), making it up as I go. Truth be told, it’s pretty unlikely this will get much use by anyone except Barb and I. To launch the project –which will take a long time to complete– I picked a starting point.
Which this space for progress reports.
Following are a few of my favorites nuggets from an essay in the New York Times by Thomas Friedman:
“On the first day of the war, we saw invading Russian tank units unexpectedly being exposed by Google maps, because Google wanted to alert drivers that the Russian armor was causing traffic jams.”
A large-scale modern war will be livestreamed, minute by minute, battle by battle, death by death, to the world.
Russia, has an economy that is smaller than that of Texas.
The musician and actress Selena Gomez has twice as many followers on Instagram — over 298 million — as Russia has citizens.
Vladimir, the first day of this war was the best day of the rest of your life.