Paul is spending his summer blogging for Global Voices Online, a roundup that he draws from this infinitely expanding blogroll.
I teased him about how attractive he will be as a Wall Street analyst after marinating in all that bad news for a summer.
Wave
Following last night’s West Coast wide tsunami alert, I was pleased to spot this inspired teaser on the front page of today’s P-I .
Sonora Aero Club
MeFi thread on the Sonora Aero Club Mysteries. Zeppelins + crazy nonsense technology + German immigrant engineers wandering around the Sonora Desert. Can’t wait to read it! My first Blimp Week post in many moons!
A rose is a
Just finished Janet Malcolm’s gripping and sympathetic Someone Says Yes to It ,which begins as an overdue exegesis of Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans before veering into a sympathetic portrait of the writer and her technique, concluding with a bang-up tale of academic intrigue. Alas, the piece does not appear online that I could uncover.
It appears in the New Yorker issue dated June 13 and 20, 2005.
The piece communicated to me what two years of intensive art historical information failed to regarding Stein’s appeal to the moderns, and as it was surely intended to, awakened a personal sense of interest in the famously hard-to-read writer’s work.
Triple
I blame the tsunami warning for my unseemly and temporary triple post.
Ropa Vieja
Stacey has posted on how we spent our Saturday.
It involved Stacey, Greg, Viv and I cooking (mostly me and Stacey in the kitchen) a big ol’ mess of ropa vieja. It was yummy, we drank a bunch of mojitos and some Spanish riojas I had brought. I was surprised that neither Greg nor Stacey knew of my Dad’s thirty-plus year hobby of winemaking and collecting, and we discussed that a bit, among many many things. I have known Greg and Stacey now just a bit longer than Viv and I have been married, and I really enjoy their friendship and company. This was a happy cooking experience and I hope we have the chance to tackle some other unknown culinary terrain.
Use and Usability
Tom shares his well-honed Outlook Tactics, and Windows-based Outlook users would be well advised to give it a readthrough. I have had conversations with Tom about this in the past, and this set of approaches he outlines is well thought through (except for his inadvisable archive deletions – this is someone who may never have employed CYA as a work tactic).
Of course, I also feel compelled to note that Tom’s done a bit of customization; hopefully, as he’s on the other side of the Great Passport Wall (a topic which I have tweaked Tom about in the past) some Outlook team members will implement his customizations as a default.
Gravity's Plumb Line
There is little like the anxiety of watching a laptop fall to the floor when one’s hands are full.
Paintnins
This AskMe thread begins with a plaintive cry into the dark void of space concerning a series of late seventies sci-fi coffeetable books, and uncovers a secret universe.
Pole
It’s intermission at the kabuki show. We just saw ‘Tied to a Pole,’ in which two rascally servants contrive ingenious ways to drink the master’s sake while tied to a pole or with their hands behind their back.
The use of bondage as a theme in a play which the program notes decribed both as stemming from an older theatrical tradition than kabuki per se and as having premiered in 1914 1916 was striking, to me.
The play provided a kind of acrobatic astonishment, as the actors traded off performing dances of increasing apparent complexity and difficulty as they mimed drinking sake while tied up.
I was also struck by the use of physical bondage as a comedic device which literally makes visible the feudal bonds of master and servant. By employing a visible metaphor for the relationship, the play provides an entertaining model for its’ intended audience. It shows how to resppnd with astonishing grace to the demands of heirarchy while simultaneously accomplishing the personal and pleasurable goal of getting drunk on the master’s sake.
Finally, at one point, I was surprised when the characters employed ‘rock, scissors, paper’ to settle a difference of opinion. Where did the game originate? How long has it been around?