Writing with words

Writing with words is something I don't do much of and yet I aspire to do more of.

See? Problems with that sentence there. Problems a writer would spot before they hit the ends of the fingers and would thus correct, no, fail to generate, while setting down the thought of the moment.

Saying something is a small marker along the road, saying it with words typed here is something.

fun with electricity

OK, so, you create a health club that has a lot of exerbikes.

You hook up the exerbikes to the building powergrid, since you make the bikes so they can be generators. Special bikes, yes.

You put some wind generation equipment outside or on top of the building; use water to regulate heat in the building. Green engineering throughout.

People pay on a sliding scale for membership according to how much power they generate against the cost of their membership. They make enough power, the club pays them.

Planet saved - or that piece anyway.

http://www.scienceshareware.com/bike_gen.htm
http://mariahpower.com/

looking through the shoulder of the bell's ring

getting a little lost in my head, in my job, in the general fog around me

writing will clear it writing will clear it

getting a little involved with the dust motes between me and the keyboard

writing will clear it writing will clear it

getting a bit strained when I tking of a linear series of events

writing will clear it writing will clear it

getting awfully preoccupied with the eddy trail of a falling leaf in a blue blue sky

falling, swirling. falling, twirling, rhyming by accident

OK, so, it's been awhile

Sometimes events overtake the serialization of even the most random thoughts, the effect sometimes which blots out all posts to this blog.

So be it (jedi).

Basically, I was ready, but I couldn't remember my password.

That was a couple months ago.

Today, it hit me as I was trying to comment on another blog, johnnymac's inkwork.

So, no more excuses, password-wise. Onward towards the past or whatever - don't knock into the walls as we go along - upsets the flowers . . .

continue writing now

Please continue writing now.

Continue now. Please continue writing now.

Please, write now, please.

Please continue to write.

Please write.

Please continue.

Write now, please.

Please write.

post back to MaynardWinter at thedesignersrepublic.com

MaynardWinter, talking like this qualifies you for artist, so, you're already there.

1.) Nobody listens to artists. Read much Isaiah? Painful, however beautiful, true. Continuous nuisance for the artist is, who's listening, and remembering that of those who do "listen", the vocal majority will tell you to stop. I think they're mouthing thier own internal message to stop themselves, want you to join them and have fun stopping; safer, cleaner. It's a distraction; ignore it. Go for it, as you say.
Later if you have to explain yourself, you can say it was for the community, for the glory, because the voices said so, whatever. Read up on authorial intent - you'll find there's a critical tradition of ignoring your explanations since it makes work for writers and professional lookers. Great! You're making things; keep going.

2.) You sound uncomfortable being who you are. That is an engine that the majority lack. Ride it to your own destination. You don't appear interested in becoming part of a pettable niche. You're as interesting as you are; keep it up.
California is full of scrambled ethnicity, and veiled prejudice. Is there somewhere different? -only where everyone is all the same, then it flips over to height weight $, etc. We're all treated differently; perhaps it's lucky you have a better place to observe from, and therefore to learn from. Tell us about it; we need to hear it, despite the fact we'll ignore you and tell you to shut up.

3.) We all fail. It always ends in death. That's why we're free. Value, merit, these come from relationship, from community. The future doesn't exist.

Consider this: you're very verbal. Are you writing? What's so impportant for you about creating marks from a visual language?

- back to cd burner-land . . .

Not really a poem

Here, empty college campus
populated with pale trudging staff
in sudden spring sun
treeshadows distinct for once since . . . uh,
students gone
major research institution
heavily funded installation
equipped for branded gain
in a light wind from east by northeast
witness endless wings
butterflies
all on the same course
northwest
low, high, in and over trees, buildings, bicycles, libraries, busses, hats, parkinglots, kiosks, lawns, labratories, offices, leaves, seas of blowing seed
islands of trees fill with birdsong describing this and other travel
in spring.

from the gentle pressure of the road

I have a hard time on the road. I find the differences between home and hotel discombobulating. I can do the whole live-in-the-fancy-hotel thing, I simply feel like I'm in a play or a movie where nothing is real - trapped by aliens who built a world for me to inhabit based on a newspaper or novel they found in my luggage.

Then there's typing on a laptop, doing all the odd things required of you in hotel life: cultivating tiny relationships with people along the way, finding your way around the hotel neighborhood, "settling in", all the adjustments one makes to being in a lifestyle that is impermanant and fleeting, in fact, for me, over at about 7pm today when I thankfully return home. It's living the idea that you will experience all the things you have the potential to experience in a place that desire overloads with possibility. You'll be rested, you'll sleep better, eat better, have time to exercise and think clearly; your mind will relax and get aired out a bit, you'll have insights that will natrually occur in a new environment where you'll freely associate and integrate new experiences with old ones without the limiting roadblocks of day to day life. Oh, and you'll go to museums and plays and movies and eat in fascinating restaurants and shop as much as possible. You'll call and visit friends you haven't seen in years.

In assessment on the way home, I find that I attended a conference, meaning I worked, felt lonely and disjointed from not seeing my family, ate oddly, rested indifferently. and saw perhaps a few blocks of city while I wandered, strained, from place to place finding the things I inevitably forget to bring along on a trip.

Adjustment disorder is now my research topic. I have a certain amount of energy. Most of the time some part of it is going into "maintaining" as we used to say. Maintaining as opposed to acting how I actually feel, which oscillates between shrieking in a loud barking mad fashion from a sense of being overwhelmed, to communicating to the people around me that I love them eternally or that they should die and go to ache ehee double toothpicks and stay there and I'm going to help get them get on that road right NOW kinda thing. Humanity under the hood is not pretty.

The kindly civilized gloss over the top of all this gets a bit thin from time to time, and being in odd places doing exotic esoteric things makes for unpleasant strain I find than doing little odd bits (which I'm doing all the time anyway) with my family and surroundings stable and holding me up, taking the pressure off, reassures me that all will be well, and all will be well, and that in the end all will be well.

Progression

A machine tells a machine tells a machine tells a machine tells a machine tells a machine tells a machine tells a machine . . . one thing.

And that machine replys to a machine that tells a machine that tells a machine that tells a mcahine that tells a machine that tells a machine that tells a machine . . . another thing.

the funniest things, number four

"You know why you have skin? It's so your bones won't get dirty! You don't want your bones dirty, do you, Dad?" No, don't want my bones dirty just yet.

The funniest things: three

W says, out of the blue, at the top of his lungs, "I'm hurt! I'm hurt! said the chicken." Big smile, and back to building blocks.

data-driven Mein-something-or-other

If you were prepared for it, you might already be drugged. If you were not thinking about it, you would be very normal.

As individuals we can't know what will happen. As a group, we have no awareness that translates into a spoken word.

When your life can be tracked, you can be budgeted in terms of society: consumption, relative value of your person based on your age, your insurance, your 401K, your importance at work. Once tracked, you can be analyzed and costed in a particular point in time.

Costed once in a point in time means that you can be costed again, and costed any additional number of times. It takes twice to set a trajectory or path, and if you have several measurements of several lives, you can set them in an index against each other.

Once indexed, you can then gather additional data on other individuals associated with a particular person.

Once the group of associates has been costed and indexed, it can be compared to other groups. Groups can be formed over relative factors like consumption, education, or what have you.

If you were a cost conscious government, you could decide on this basis whether to allow one group to proceed along a particular vector, consuming resources and government attention and resources, or, whether to terminate the group, the associates, or, specific individuals.

Polling was the forerunner of this approach. Currently, data assessment and the ability to increase the collection of data on key factors are the sticking points. Once these are overcome, an accurate flexible decision-guiding mechanism will be available.

The funniest things: two

"Wait, dad, I'm going to talk to Deuce."

Finger up. "Deuce, you are a cat and you can have your breakfast. You are Deuce the cat and you are sitting on our table."

. . . then in to breakfast, smiling.

Kyoto

The planet communicates to its beings, saying, I live, I move, I'm moving now; don't you remember what happened last time? - not knowing the communications scale is the same as not knowing; not hearing as an expression of being is reverencing one's place in the panoply of all being.

Highway data

If you set your cruise control to a certain speed, something safe, and park yourself in the lane that allows you to continue at that speed unhindered, you will cover more ground in shorter time than the driver who moves back and forth between lanes and in and out of gaps in traffic. The latter may have more fun and feel like they are doing more driving, but the steady driver will arrive first.

- now stuck with that not good Richard Dreyfus feeling: "this means something . . . " (when in fact, perhaps aliens have messed with my head; hey, how would I know?).

Blank

Annoying trend being one in which I have five minutes for writing and nothing witty or catchy or insightful to relate, blogwise.

This is the result of the current ruling order of things wherein we don't practice our talents. So I'm practising writing here in a catchy witty fashion without anything in my head, since, as I and others have observed, once in a while something will pop in there and voila, it's like . . .

-But the waiting, and, the endless slogging through the dross (like this), the noise, the colorless colorfulness of the products of my mental transom receptacle-device. What's up with that? Who'd a' thought? How's 'at pos'ble?

Put the pen right next to the half-used packet of Post-It notes and place it near the phone because we plan for the calls to roll in, abundant with changes which will be duly notated and attached to the hard copies we've retained here for reference.



(Note: Annoyingly accurate self-observation in that I wrote the title, wandered through the PP as shown above and then tore off the last line as a something, not knowing what would come out, and so there it is - the mind in action, folks. We are not responsible for lost or stolen articles; please exit the vehicle safely; rinse; repeat.)

No one said it would be . . . uh . . .

Unemployment is fascinating.

Now I have what looks like three fish that want to consume my skills. How to talk to these entities? Because I do want to be consumed, but in the correct fashion.

One wants me to be in charge of people and work alot and stay near my phone as a constant resource of organizational clarity.

Another one wants me to wait another month, working for little while paying my own health, etc., until they can whip up the ginger to make the position permanent, and perhaps permanently underpaying, but fully benefitted, like with platinum coffins and stuff.

The third one seems to want me to work alot and get paid something undefined, except they seem to be having problems with their HR, since one arm of the org doesn't know what the other one is doing, kind of an uncoordinated Shiva - dangerous. Also, they have a reputation of being a hell (as in working in ayche-Eee-double toothpicks) with no future within a larger organization. Nice! -my kind of place: warm flooring keeps you on the hop, puts your self-worth in perspective.

Gotta go.

New mechanism

I saw in an image search on the web that pictures of Jamie Foxx playing Ray Charles were much more prevelant than actual pictures of Ray Charles (playing Ray Charles).

. . . clearly, and in a very real sense . . .

LOSING IT!

too ma n y s p o t s a d do t s

gr a p hg s


a r

e d r
i v
i n
g


me a

round

ta b e n d


a g



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r3R

AEYJ 4

t46

t ty ˙fiÁ3y

Card catalog versus Pavlovian responses

I've been editing here and there, judging the effects.

I don't know. What do you think?

The interesting idea steamrollered over us by the Benevolent Gods of Blogger is that the latest thing comes first, and, a smaller seemingly adjunct idea that nothing is edited.

Perhaps a little too much, "In the future, the revolution will be . . . " stuff going on out there with the information design folks? I suppose I can turn the HTML around on my blog some, but I have yet to discover the mechanism of tracking the posts. I know I can change the time on a posting, and that is one thing, but the original placement in the stream is determined by time of post (whether draft or published) seemingly.

Each post seems to be a marker left on a timeline, and if you go back (hint) and touch up your marker with a drip and a drab, you are left out of the readers' attention.

I think.

Perhaps one day a person will come along, constantly reading all the entries and comparing them over and over each day, and it will occur to them that I am editing constantly. That day, when it comes, my heart will soar, perhaps to burst in glittering fragments across the great expanse of this lunchtime cube. Ah, well.

truth discovered: blogging is a subset of writing

Blogging is not actual writing, is it? Or, that is, not real joined-up formal type writing, is it?

If bread is made of crumbs, then all crumbs are bread. If you break a crumb in half, what do you have? Two crumbs?

But if you took a large number of broken crumbs and put them in a bag, it would not sell as bread, and would be poor material from which to build a hero, even though it would provide similar nutrition.

So framing counts.

This too breaks a vow

We vow certain things, humans. Once, the King of France took a vow that he would not lower his arm until he had set free the Holy City of Jerusalem from the Turk.

His friends talked him out of it, and he put his arm back down on the table.

-But what a riveting few minutes that must have been.

My vow, now twice broken, has been (was) in force for some days at the very least. Is it fully broken? Can it be remade?

Tune in tomorrow for the shriekingly suspenseful answer to this among all the questions crowded at your elbow.

Communications concept technical data

http://www.meme.com/memedef/

Worms eat blogs

I was reading a blog I like today when I heard that the building in which it was housed got worms and burned down.

This is sad. trainque@hotmail.com wrote some blazingly funny items, and blogged some incredibly idosyncratic material to create a special place where my own sort felt entertained as well as, well, a host of other (perhaps earthier) emotions.

(arms outstretched here in the cube) Oh, great serverants, protect us from the worms; protect us, protect us, protect us.

It's poetry time, again . . .

If your basket

was hung from bamboo

monkey skull attached

and my basket

was hung from willow

braided with razor clams

then our baskets

from wood dangle

as meat homes

in the phylum

of love.

Instructions

save your prompts as drafts, then write as time permits

Time is often much like tide, or, perhaps, like tidal forces.

Many moments of the writing experience strike me as slack tide where something is moving out and you may not have anything to say or anything that looks like anything to put out, while there are other times when ideas cascade out quickly perhaps too quickly to be accurately documented before they evaporate.

So, saving as a concept appears ideawise.

The prompt is a sentance or jot or word or placeholder that will give you a stab at being able to put down the original bloom which time and the schedule of commitments made impossiblke to document or spill or perhaps it was slack tide and something was moving within using up expression time and leaving no documentation time.

And isn't this an interesting blog entry devoid of characteristics we might be able to

A strong wave action in water is conveyed without loss of force through the medium, transporting the energy without much overall diminishing of impact.

The funniest things: one

When the baby champaign hits your stomach you go zooming around.

Definition: driving in fog

It is not foggy if you can see four or five hundred yards while moving at seventy miles per hour down the highway. This is low cloud, not fog, and does not present any hazard. A weatherman might call conditions foggy, but he's not on the scene driving. He is many hours in the past, trying to imagine what is happening on the road at a given time.

Fog is a little hazardous when you can't see five or more carlengths ahead if you are maintaining your interval of a carlength for every ten miles of speed between you and the car ahead, and, that the rest of those on the road are also maintaining their intervals.

Fog is actually hazardous when it gets down to three carlengths of visibility. Now it's time to slow down, especially if you are losing the tail lights of the nearest vehicle in front of you. You run the risk of overcompensating due to the visual tunnelling effect of losing your reference points at the sides of the road.

Another hazard is caused by motorists threatened by the idea of fog. Drivers who are used to crystal clear views from horizon to horizon feel threatened by low clouds and so drive erratically in safe conditions, sometimes at normal speeds and suddenly slowing for the idea of dense fog sweeping across the freeway, or some such nonsense. These people are a hazard to be avoided.

Turn on your lights, drive normally, stay alert. Thanks for your attention.

It's poetry time, again . . .

There is a button

on my coffee

that if I push it

I will be

faster than all of you

which will make me

disappear

except that

if I push

the button on my coffee

you will all see my pleasure

turn on me

inertia advancing

nets

Tastes like chicken

Gear:
roasting pan w/rack
whip (or wisk)
knife
spoon
sautee pan
big bowl
big plate
cutting board

Materials:
one chicken
two stalks celery
three cloves garlic
six slices of bread
some olive oil
two bottles of white wine (something like a Husch Chard, or, for that european finish, Mouton Cadet Bordeaux or some sort of French table white - hey, it's cheaper than the Husch, too)
some wheat flour
a handful of sausage
another half a handful of currants
a tablespoon of capers
a tablespoon each of oregano, parsely, sage, rosemary and thyme (oregano is silent in the song)
some salt and pepper


Directions:
So, the first thing you do is get the chicken ready. Take the thing out of its plastic package - if you don't have plastic around your bird, you better know what to do to get the feathers off and the guts out - and run cold water over the entire bird, rinsing away anything stuck to the carcass. Dry it off, or, set it on a rack for the next few minutes to dry. Don't leave it out too long. If you want, put it on a largish plate and put it back in the fridge, which I expect you have on hand somewhere nearby.

Now, wash your hands, and open the wine. Yes, you get to have some in a glass - if you have stemware. I guess you can use a juice glass if you have to - it's up to you, really, isn't it? Remember to chill your wine - unless you can put it next to an open window in winter weather.

First, prepare the stuffing to fill the bird. Get a sautee pan and brown the sausage, throw it in a big bowl. While that's working, toast your bread. You can use the oven if you want. Take the bread, chop it into cubes about 1/2 inch thick, throw that in the bowl. Oh, I forgot the garlic and the onions. Chop them fairly fine and throw them in the pan with the sausage.

If you haven't finished your wine, you can throw some of it in the big bowl, too. I've found it's often nice to have some dish that requires a little of everything, including the wine you're drinking, thrown together into a large container. Gumbo, minestrone or coq au vin are all a bit that way, and you can only make them moreso.

Actually, you need enough wine in the stuffing to get it damp and not sopping. You should also add some olive oil, but I'll leave that up to you.

Did I mention the celery? Chop that fairly fine and you can sautee it for the guests who are celery-averse, or, throw it in the bowl raw. Put in a big spoonful of capers, too. And add the spices to the bowl, too. Now stir the pile into a well mixed heap. Perfect. You can have a little cheese and a few crackers whti the wine, you know. You're a good two hours away from eating - hands out of the sausage!

Roasting for poultry is, what? Twenty minutes per pound? And stuffing will multiply the time. Add twenty minutes per pound of stuffing, too. Big bird, lots of stuffing. You can weigh the stuffing beforehand, or, you can break into that second bottle of wine. You're going to need it for deglazing the pan, anyway.

So, if you've completed the stuffing, you can put it in the bird. Don't shove it in, just spoon it in. Sometimes it works better if you stand the carcass up with the legs straight up. If the bird is slippery, then it's either wet in which case you didn't dry it properly, or, you didn't wash it properly, or, perhaps it's too old? What does it smell like? The top of your mom's head? -or an old dead dog in a ditch. If it's the former, chuck it and call for reservations; if not, proceed.

Now you've got the stuffing in, you can truss the bird - or not. I'm not going to get into this esoteric stuff in here. Just try to make sure you don't lose your load out the back of the carcass while you're working the meal here, ok? Are you going to carve at the table? Is this a photo op or perhaps there will be juggling? You've got to make some decisions early on, and I can't advise you.

Get the roasting pan out and use a rack that holds the bird firmly together. A v-rack is fine. Throw a bit of celery and carrot whole in the bottom of the roasting pan. Throw in some onion, too, and, hey, a mushroom works.

Oh, don't forget to put some currants in the stuffing. Ah, well, if they're on this side of the bird now, you can have a handful with the wine here while we're preparing the other dishes.

Put the pan in the oven with the bird's back up. What? Not breast-up? No, it will be better if you roast it back-up. Look, go get another chicken and do them both: one back-up and one breast-up. The breast-up will look better on a platter and be a dry piece of junk, especially if you've stuffed the thing. If ya gonna stuff, ya gonna go back-up, K? You're making a flavor bomb, not an eye-pleaser (or ARE you? What ARE your plans? You're scaring me here.)

Give it 20 minutes per pound in the oven, including the stuffing, at three hundred fifty degrees. Basting every 40 minutes or so is ok but not essential. It'll give you the feeling of doing something if you're the pot-watching type. You can throw some wine in the pan, or at the first basting. Whatever - it's all about the experience, isn't it? You want to know the temprature at middle thigh for the finished bird? I think you can look that up. It'll be high, like one seventy or so.

OK, so now you're roasting. Time to multi-task and get everything else out on the table. Move it! Oh, look out for that stemware on the counter! Ba-da baa, ba-da baa, ba-da baaa, ba-da baaa, bap bada bada bada ba baaa, bap bada bada ba da ba baaa, ba ba baa daa, ba da bada ba baaaa . . . .

OK, an hour or so has passed, maybe two hours if you've got a big capon on your hands. You're in good shape. You've set the table, done the salad, whipped up some potatoes and maybe some green beans.

Reach in the oven and pull out your steaming hunk of meat. Transfer it to a big plate.

The bird has to rest when you've finished roasting the thing. Set it on a plate and don't cover it, just leave it on the counter. Don't take the stuffing out, you'll burn yourself. Relax. Take your roasting pan and put it on the stovetop, flip it on high and prepare for deglazing.

Hopefully the bottom of the roaster is covered with various bits of drippings, from liquid goo-like stuff, to mostly burnt to carbon-type stuff. This is good.

Now, get down your sautee pan and pour out the liquid stuff from the roaster into this pan. It should be all the fat and oils and such that cooked out of the bird. Think "liquid flavor." Heat up the pan and put in as much flour as will soak up the oil as is necessary. Go by the tablespoon. Use a whisk to mix it all together. Hot now? Good. Pour in some milk or cream and keep whipping. When it's all turned from a paste to a liquid, then turn off the pan and return your attention to the roasting pan.

A good place for a slug of wine.

Put your roaster over the stove burner. Get the roaster hot and throw in the wine. Don't be shy. There should be sizzling and steam initially. Now take your wisk or whip or whatever you call it and run it over the bottom of the pan. Whip all that gunk up on the bottom. Use the wine liquid to essentially clean the bottom of the pan. When it's all sloshing around loose, pour in the oil-cream-flour mixture from the sautee pan. Keep mixing until you get something that looks like gravy with hunks of burnt stuff in it. Now pour the whole mass through a strainer. Amazingly, your guests will consider you a god for having achieved what you just accomplished. You have created a flavor bomb of immense proportions.

Now you can take the stuffing out and put it in a bowl, or, heap it on the platter next to the bird. Hey, create! Have fun with it!

Now it's time for dinner.

Remember to save the carcass after the feed. Stock is next for this bad bag o' bones!

Happy buk-buk!

Were they helmets less than nubbins from the firing line espied?

Specimin specific
coffee club card
MacAudio
Safari
These steps must be done to set up your Mailbox will work correctly
Cortelco
Logitech
clinical molecular pharmacology
Wild Horse Saloon, "Where Good Friends Meet"
Allow New Comments on This Post
Sony
Big Grab Doritos Nacho Cheesier
Total operating budget and funding requested
Usage of resource by services
3 spaces designated as visitor
Border Sauce
Fire

Too busy to Blog

I'm too busy to blog - too many actual work items have gotten over my boundaries into my "breaktime" and "lunchtime", which is all "computer time" anyway, so why not make edits and pdfs and ps-es instead of blogging? Aren't they all just inputs for the registers of that great server in the sky?

Well? Aren't they?

Biology

Apparrently, it's not a good practice to cross-tie horses when transporting them for long distances. Apparrently it opens them up to respiratory disease.

You'd think that tying them up firmly while they were in the trailer would help them feel secure. Apparently this is just a human need, not a horse need. I suppose horses are used to the vibration and bouncing and swaying and all the bodily feelings one experiences at highway speeds inside a trailer, while humans are not. Also, horses don't seem to mind not being able to see what's happening or what's coming next in such an experience, while horses, used to running together at high speed without any forward sightline don't mind not knowing what's coming along the pike. They're used to this and so it produces no anxiety for them.

Sounds

So I'm working away, and I'm doing these transformations of graphics files, right? And my computer is writing from one drive to the next, doing something advanced, like shuffling data between disks because these files are really large -

anyway, I'm listening to the thing.

It makes little cat-like noises, or maybe they're mouse-like noises -oh, duh, right: they're COMPUTER noises!

anyway, I'm listening to this thing as it shuffles, and I'm noticing that it's sort of breathing as well. There's a steady hum that, when you listen really really (and I mean really) closely (like for ten minutes straight with the top of your head resting right up against the case) you can distinguish a kind of resperation to its dwell noise (I call it dwell noise). When I'm working through a few gigs of data it starts clicking and spitting, it sounds like a beetle trying to fly out of a bottle on a really hot evening.

anyway I'm listening now, listening closely.

Cooked Bush

You may wonder, but I don't.

• Current situation with Iraq war;
• Having to finish Iraq War to get ready for Jeb;
• Republicans once again dividing into their "Religious" vs. "Business" oppositional camps, which will later frission into "Nutjob Religious" vs. "Pat Robertson-style Religious" vs. "John McCain-type Religious" who will all be in opposition to the "Nutjob Business-types" vs. the "Even Children Back to the Mines Business-types" vs. the "Just Old Women Back to the Mines Business-types" vs. the "All Manufacturing Overseas Business-types" vs. the "No Corporate Taxes Ever Again Business-types" vs. the "Major-League Sports Ownership Business-types" - it can't be pretty;
• the coming social/political firestorm over the impending military Draft;
• third-rail issues
• tax reform (?)
• impending rebellion of all environmental folk over coming policy shifts/implementations;
• impending rebellion of educators, particularly the (powerful) tenured who don't feel like dead wood;
• implosion/internal conflict of another state (pick one: Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan, North Korea, Indonesia, Egypt, a third of Africa) requiring American troops
• world trade deals in progress or coming up
• Tony Blair doesn't return this coming fall
• Cheny drops predictably dead - who replaces him?

The strategic envelope outlined by the administration appears to be defined by the making of messes, not the cleaning up, or the inclusive defining of problems, much less the solution of problems. They appear to be derivitave thinkers who divide forces in support of a thin base instead of including dissenters in their initatives.

The result will be years of mess and fuss, with the country struggling to find focus.

Inauguration day

Here I am, contemplating another march out to Cow Parking. It's a nice day - Northwest Weather: misty, gray, in the high forties. I'm looking for the upside in many ways. There are the usual positives in January: tax filing time is here; there's more light every day; trees are beginning to show signs of buds; hummingbird calls are more prominent since the other guys are mostly gone (except crows and magpies around here, who are more than ever showing off their adaptability); and so many other things which I can edit in here at a later time when I'm catching up on all the loose ends in my life.

It's a low energy wave sweeping over the countryside and settling over me. The garden tilling is there, needs doing. There is a sunflower growing in the basil pot on the pillar by the front gate. It's a volunteer. So far it's got two pairs of leaves and looks healthy despite the weather. I'm planting some seeds in another pot when I get home. I think that may be the way to start up the garden, start up the growth energy wave. We've been planning the garden, getting ready to put in a crop. Potatoes can go in now, here, as well as some other choice items. We'll sit with our plan this evening and prepare for the garden of high summer to come.

-sno

8 hours

Eight hours plus eight hours plus eight hours plus eight hours plus eight hours equals forty hours of work, which is a standard length of time for a working week.

Forty hours plus forty hours plus forty hours plus forty hours equals one hundred sixty hours of work, which is four weeks of work, or, one standard month's working time.

One hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty plus one hundred sixty is one thousand nine hundred twenty hours of work, or, twelve standard four-week months worth of work.

I'm sure that the math is not this neat, certainly. There are many variations; reality is full of variation. It's what helps us to stay sensitive to patterns in our lives and in nature. One thousand nine hundred twenty hours plus one thousand nine hundred twenty hours plus one thousand nine hundred twenty hours plus one thousand nine hundred twenty hours plus one thousand nine hundred twenty hours is five years of work time based on standardized months and weeks, or, rather, nine thousand six hundred hours of time. That's a long time, and, it's also many other types of time: time for a raise, time to be vested, time for a vacation, time for being tenured although that either takes three years or seven years or never ever comes, and it's also longer than most folks hold the average job.

Back to the postermine.

Wanna Join Up?!

NO!

- 'cause

you can not substantiate

my need to individuate

don' tell me I'm no reprobate

as I stan' here an' explicate

my mind is here to gain some weight

until the day I graduate

SO!

- back to title, repeat




Hey, sometimes when you work on a college campus you have to walk back to your cubicle really fast with a bowl of hot soup in your hand in what passes for cold weather, so your other hand is in your pocket which causes one to think in cadences because thinking is directing you physically to walk in a pattern that brings on a rhythm that stills the soup that threatens the pants that you want to keep dry for the rest of the shift.

- and, there are so many "political" things happening on the Quad, infecting my subconscious cadence-counter: the christian student coalition appears to be playing Dylan's "The Times, They Are A'Changin'" on a really nice PA system and then there are the College of Arts and Letters Snowboarders Association people seeking members and the TKE people and the Students for Clarity in Broadcast Forensics and on and on and on.

I would suggest two options for musical accompaniment: any particularly vigorous Tycho drum piece, particularly one associated with fire, or, a bagpipe march, particularly something such as by which an army might move.

-sno

Not haiku

harlequin

romance

Shiite

pressure-sensitive tape

etude

on a black velvet background

Parking by the cows is . . .

• smelly
• muddy
• approximately 800 yards from this keyboard
• in transition (because of the pipeline construction occurring all around the parking lot)
• not policed
• picturesque
• interesting, since the people you see driving out to park there as you walk in to the campus have found that they cannot get into their usual lot, and so they bear a lost look upon their faces, which seems to say, "where am I going? Surely not out by the cows? Oh my, where am I going?"
• time consuming
• awareness expanding, as in, "the administration gives not a rip for anyone driving, since it fits their agenda of the moment to destroy parking lots and put up buildings and gardens and pipelines, and those in search of parking can use public transportation to get close enough to their place of work to hike a mile or so."
• rant-producing

Another poster in the bag

Posters are large displays of information. The information is sometimes obvious and direct, sometimes layered in multiple meanings, and, deciphered into multiple specific personal meanings.

- hey, I've just discovered these undershelf lights in my cubicle. Look - light on the left. Light on the right. Nice.

OK, so when you're building a poster, you notice the meanings available in the provided information and then . . .

Light on the right, flick, no light on the left.

. . . organizing into a sequence with an emphasis that the author and the other communicating agents will find best represents their needs . . .

- flick - no light on the right.

. . . and so this is how it goes. The often overlooked feature of the process is the creation of a whole new set of meanings that are based upon the presentation media and its inherent values. What values?

- flick - light on the right.

Onward into the Blog

Well, another post.

Youp.

Well, another post here, yup.

I was trying to get the children to sleep. I really really was trying, bu they would not sleep. They really really would not sleep, and, I know they're not old enough to be reasonable, as in having reason available to them as a check against annoying behavior, but, they seemed to have reason available to them because they were being really annoying, which made me think they were prefiguring their abiulity to reason at the very most, and, they are really really clever, you know? You have to watch them and watch them and they're nothing but cute and nice and then you step out to pee or something and you come back and . . . they do things.

So they just would not sleep.

But now they are sleeping.

They sleep now.

They are both sleeping now.

It's dark outside.

-sno

First posting

A first posting is a start. -sno