I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is A Guide To Better Password Practices.
LT Carl Goforth: I’m sitting in EVAC with Tim, watching the Buick Open on the Armed Forces Network. I’m not a big golf fan, but I’ll take any distraction at this point. “Just past midnight. We finally hit One July.” “Yeah. The month you’re in doesn’t count, and the month you go home doesn’t count either. Guess that means we only have one month left in…
It’s been a busy week in Wally World: the Universe’s source of cheap plastic crap. On The Writing On The Wal — the blog USA Today says should be on its readers’ radar — Jonathan Rees, Robert Feinman, Peter Sayles and I continue our work dedicated to drawing back the curtain on the Bentonvile Behemoth’s corporate disinformation and other flackery.
THIS COULD GET REALLY INTERESTING… Wal-Mart announced today that it has added customer ratings to its website. Customer ratings are nothing new, of course, they”ve been posted on non-Wal-Mart sites for quite a while. And they”re generally not favorable. So will Wal-Mart make the ratings real time? Keep reading…
HARRY POTTER AND THE WAL-MART PLEDGE… Shhh! Don”t give away the secret! We want to sell more books! If anyone really believes that people will buy J.K. Rowlings final Harry Potter book Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows simply to find out the ending, they”re not readers. Keep reading…
AT THE WALLY PLEX… There are sound stages on Hollywood”s back lots smaller than Bentonvile”s behemoths, so it”s no surprise that budding video talent has been sneaking cameras in at odd hours. And now for the midnight show at the Wally Plex featuring SophieScripts. Keep reading…
ITS CUTTING PRICES…! ITS CUTTING PRICES…! The only thing missing in this morning”s news is Steve Martin jumping up and down shouting “The phonebooks are here! The phonebooks are here! Breathless shills gush threats of price wars as Wal-Mart cuts prices on more than 16,000 items. Keep reading…
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
A man arrived at the Gates of Heaven. While he was waiting for Saint Peter to greet him, he peeked through the gates. He saw a beautiful banquet table. Sitting all around were his parents and all the other people he had loved and who had died before him.
They saw him and began calling greetings to him “Hello – How are you! We’ve been waiting for you! Good to see you.”
When Saint Peter came by, the man said to him, “This is such a wonderful place! How do I get in?”
“You have to spell a word,” Saint Peter told him.
“Which word?” the man asked.
“Love.”
The man correctly spelled “Love” and Saint Peter welcomed him into Heaven.
About a year later, Saint Peter came to the man and asked him to watch the Gates of Heaven for him that day. While the man was guarding the Gates of Heaven, his wife arrived. “I’m surprised to see you,” the man said. “How have you been?”
“Oh, I’ve been doing pretty well since you died,” his wife told him. “I married the handsome young doctor who took care of you while you were ill. And then I won the multi-state lottery. I sold the little house you and I lived in and bought a huge mansion.
And my husband and I traveled all around the world. We were on vacation in Cancun and I went water skiing today. I fell and hit my head, and here I am. What a bummer! How do I get in?”
“You have to spell a word,” the man told her.
“Which word?” his wife asked.
“Czechoslovakia.”
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.
From Starfish by Eleanor Lerman,.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
[Hat tip to Sherry Chandler for this particular find.]
This is a passage I copied from War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges.
“I come here for the rites of your unworlding.” Catullus p. 170
I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Linkin Park’s Mysterious Cyberstalker
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog awh I present: From My Dad.
We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.
This downward cellular jubilance is shared
by the wind, bugs, birds, bears and rivers,
and perhaps the black holes in galactic space
where our souls will all be gathered in an invisible
thimble of antimatter. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
From Becoming by Jim Harrison.
This particular kind of blogtheft is more common than an I, or any of us, know. I found this inept attempt this morning and wanted to conjure the ability to reach through my screen and throttle the worthless wastes of human genome responsible. But lacking Potteresque abilities, I’ll settle for more muggle-like tactics such as access blocks.
Part of being a good citizen of the blogosphere is visiting, reading and, most importantly, taking the time to leave a comment on other’s blogs. It’s all about the conversation. In the interest of setting an example I’ve decided to link to those blog posts that have compelled me to leave a comment.
0453 What is Eric Mansfield Holding Back?
0451 Ethics …. what would you have done?
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
[Hat tip to Sherry Chandler for this particular find.]
This is a passage I copied from War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges.
They called it ekpyrosis – to be consumed by a ball of fire. They used the word to describe heroes. p. 166
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,
you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho
lies dead by the side of the road.
You must see how this could be you,
how he too was someone
who journeyed through the night with plans
and the simple breath that kept him alive.
From Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye.
I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is The Tank Man.
I could never bring myself to forward all the email jokes, cartoons and other Internet comedy that land in my inbox. But then I started posting the ones my dad sends me. Judging from my comments and emails, my dad has become one of my greatest blogging assets. So for your morning blog chuckle I present: From My Dad.
My name is Jeff Hess and I’m a biblioholic. I own hundreds of books. Not valuable books, mostly Science Fiction paperbacks and text books, tomes rescued by the bag from library book sales. A few years ago, in the interest of not burying myself, I began reading more books from the library and taking notes. My electronic chapbook was born.
[Hat tip to Sherry Chandler for this particular find.]
This is a passage I copied from War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning by Chris Hedges.
A World War II study determined that after sixty days of continuous combat, 98 percent of all surviving soldiers will have become psychiatric casualities. They found that a common trait among the 2 percent who were able to endure sustained combat was a predisposition toward “aggressive psychopathic personalities.” p. 164
Male suit: So, you’re a literary agent? That’s so cool. How’s it going?
Lady suit: I just sold my first book! And the movie rights were optioned the same day!
Male suit: Totally exciting. What’s the book about?
Lady suit: Oh, I don’t know. I haven’t actually read it.
Male suit: That’s cool. I didn’t really read much until I started college.
I’m constantly tossing interesting websites into what I call my blogpile. Some of them find their way here in the form of regular posts, but more often than not they languish and get buried deeper in the pile. The end result is that I have to go back and do a bit of shoveling. Today’s item is Tessellation Do-It-Yourself.
I stopped in at Target yesterday and there saw a large display of unnoticed and unpurchased copies of Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. Unnoticed except by a 10-year-old-or-so boy reading the last chapter. He will grow up to be irritable, restless and fidgety, aggressive, and generally not self-controlled.
Or so suggests Juliet Lapidos.
When a few media outlets published early reviews of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this week, author J.K. Rowling protested that the articles contained spoilers. She declared herself “staggered that American newspapers have decided to … [ignore] the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children, who wanted to reach Harry’s final destination by themselves, in their own time.”
Presumably, Rowling assumes that half the pleasure of reading a fat, event-filled tome lays in our uncertainty about how it will end. But not every boy-wizard devotee thrives on guesswork and anticipation. According to a poll of 500 children taken for the British bookstore chain Waterstone’s, nearly one-fifth of Harry Potter fans will skip straight to the end of the final book in the series. Is there something wrong with sussing out an ending in advance?
Not if it’s something important.
And the problem is, I think, we’re not teaching our children how to tell the difference.
In a culture where it’s the destination, not the journey, that’s important, skipping to the end seems like a perfectly logical strategy. If you get an A+ on your history quiz, no one really checks to see if you actually read the text. If you graduate from high school with a 4.4 grade point average, the colleges you apply to never check with your teachers to see what kind of student you were. And if you show a net return on investment of 32 percent for the last fiscal year, your stockholders don’t check to see how you pulled off that miracle.
Part of me wants to blame the President Dwight Eisenhower and the International Highway system. When I was growing up we took family vacations and traveled state roads to get to places like Gettysburg. Then in the late ’60s Interstate 77 plowed through Marietta and vacations changed.
We went further quicker and it was all about are we there yet?
On Friday morning I listened to The Sound of Ideas on WCPN and one of the people being interviewed made a comment about just doing things to make the day go faster. How desperate, how horrible must your life be to wish to make it pass faster? What is so attractive about death that we want to get there, everyone’s ultimate destination, as fast as possible?
I finished reading Robert R McCammon’s Boy’s Life a few days ago. Not a great book but an enjoyable lazy read with enough surprises in it to make its reading a worthwhile endeavor. One of the sub-themes in the story is the importance of the time between the beginning and end of summer.
When you’re twelve you want each day of summer to stretch to an eternity. You fill each moment with an intensity of living very few of us manage to carry over into adulthood. There are a few. I think Warren Zevon was thinking about this when he wrote I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead. (Zevon, of course, provided a marvelous living example with the album he produced in the final weeks before he died of cancer in 2003.)
I do understand the desperation that leads people to live in anticipation of each Friday. I get how we lean into the future.
The future doesn’t exist, however. And neither does the past. There is only now. The rest is illusion.
I’ve Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on reserve at the library. It’s in for me and I’ll probably stop by tomorrow to pick it up. I’m looking forward to an enjoyable read.
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