Archive for October, 2007
Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
Choice Quote from ‘The Braindead Megaphone’
Our venture in Iraq was a literary failure, by which I mean a failure of imagination. A culture better at imagining richly, three dimensionally, would have had a greater respect for war than we did, more awareness of the law of unintended consequences, more familiarity with the world’s tendency to throw aggressive energy back at the aggressor in ways he did not expect. A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possible, and as cautiously, because it knows its own girth and the tight confines of the chine shop it’s blundering into. and it knows that no matter how well-prepared it is-no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny-the place it is headed for is going to be very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one’s intent, equals the evil one will do.
Now, I agree about the war. But the other thing (emphasis above added by me) is, this is exactly how I feel about racing. The smart racer doesn’t show aggression, goes along to get along. He is humble in the presence of his adversaries and acts as late in the game as possible. Lest he court pain…
The Braindead Megaphone by George Saunders. I recommend.
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
Hype Machine Redux
I’ve been a fan/user/whatever of the hypemachine since my old co-worker Annie Heckenberger introduced me to it last year.
Its a pretty good music site. The hotness is that they aggregate RSS feeds of MP3 blogs. That is, blogs that include posts that include MP3s. You can find just about anything with their search. now, that doesn’t mean that the MP3 file is still going to be out there for you to grab or listen to with their nice embedded flash player, but most times they got what you need.
You can also ‘heart’ tracks that you like and create a list of songs to share with folks. Here’s mine updated continuously….
Sunday, October 14th, 2007
Starlings in the Slipstream
I love starlings. At first glance, they are maybe slightly less ubiquitous a bird then the pigeon. But the close observer is rewarded with much: Their feathers molt from a slick black with highlights of purple and green to brown with white spots. And their flocking behavior…well click play above. Seeing a flock startle and move like that is something else, the closer you are to it, the better.
2 years ago this weekend, I did the covered bridges ride with a friend. We’re riding thru a heavily wooded area, and we were kind of engulfed in bird song. Friend doesn’t notice. At all. I look up and there were 1000s of them in the trees yapping and hopping around. I cut him off mid sentence, and made him look up. Moments like that make rides for me.
Tuesday, October 9th, 2007
The Biggest Cat in all of New Jersey.
Cape May County Zoo is totally awesome. They have a huge collection of wonderful animals who all have tons of space to walk around and hang out.
That includes this tiger. He’s got a couple thousand square feet all to himself. Not as good as the wilds of Asia, but beats the hell out of any other zoo I’ve ever seen.
Oh, and it costs $0 to see all these animals.
Monday, October 8th, 2007
Note the Depth…
and what that says, generally about the hardcore ness of a sperm whale. via Boingboing.