Month: May 2010

I have known a few mothers in my day, and I venture to say that it wasn’t an easy vocation for any of them. I could reel off a litany of the burdens that mothers bear, but it would lean too comfortably on the obvious; even more onerous than labour and childbirth and dirty diapers and midnight feedings and so on, though, must be the obligations so ingrained into the ways that cultures work, that we who inhabit those cultures can’t even see them. Indeed, there must be trials in motherhood that even mothers themselves can’t articulate, invisible splinters of duty jabbing mercilessly into the pace of daily expectation, foreclosed possibilities leering mockingly at aspiration.
 
I can’t say enough for mothers — for my mother (Hi, Mom!), Margaret’s mother, for my dearly beloved Margaret herself, prospectively perhaps for some of the other women to whom I’m related — but I can and must say: For what I do not understand, for what I’ve taken for granted, for what I’ve appreciated cursorily, for precisely the graces you have offered me and all of us, one day a year is but a window into the lifetime of thanks I offer to Margaret, Nancy, Pat, and all of you. Bless you, thank you, I’m sorry, and bless you and thank you all over again for not clobbering me over the head with the scale of your commitment and determination, and the 364-day years that go by without anyone saying, “How lovely, that you give so much to being a mother!”

The Comp Lit Department here teaches a two-part course for first-year students. The first part is “Heroic Men”; the second, “Heroic Women.” I was trading emails the other day with the convenor of the course, who had been asking for suggestions for texts about heroes they might use for the course. I noted that possibility of studying a record album as text; the examples that came immediately to mind were Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust and the Who’s Tommy and Quadrophenia.
 
So, the assignment (for those who choose to accept it) is to think of other albums that constitute teachable works, that depict a heroic man or woman. I know there are some hip-hop albums about the rapper as (anti-)hero; what are the best examples, would you say? And super extra bonus points if you can think of the “heroic woman” one. I’m a little dazed this weekend, but I haven’t come up with one yet.

I’m not entitled to vote here, and if I were I would be a non-voter on principle. Still, the UK election has provided a fascinating contrast to my years of observing US elections. Although the outcome of this particular election doesn’t point toward a government with which I’d be likely to sympathise, I am pleased to see a hung Parliament, within which people will actually have to work with one another.
 
In my district, Glasgow North, my vote (were I a voter) would probably have gone to Angela McCormick, the fighting Socialist. Sadly, she only got 287 votes, fewer even than the neo-fascist BNP candidate (296). I don’t know much about the Green candidate, and both Tory and Labour candidates were right out (Tory just in general, Labour because she staunchly defended the revolting Digital Economy Act). That leaves the Lib Dems and the Scottish National Party (and the Greens). I don’t know which way I’d have voted between them, but if I didn’t vote Socialist I’d have been tempted to vote Lib Dem to get someone besides Ann McKechin (Labour) into Parliament. But all that is strictly, multiply hypothetical anyway.
 
I see benefits to hung Parliament, but I’m uneasy about (if you excuse this way of putting it) the way it is hung. As things stand, there is but one Tory seat in Scotland. I can’t see this ending well under the most likely scenario (Cameron somehow puts together a government), since any cuts to Scotland will taste like English Conservatives serving their (unrepresented in government) Scots serfs bread and water. Wales’s vote is more evenly distributed, and I don’t know how the Northern Irish seats align themselves. But unless something remarkable happens, the UK is in not only for hard economic times, but also for some pretty awkward political maneuvering for the next few years.

Over the internet lifetimes I’ve been online, people have coalesced and drifted apart many times over. One of the cool moments comes when someone figures out a way to deploy new technologies to bring together a community from a while back. Through a variety of means, I’ve fallen back in touch with Sean Bonner, and I noticed a tweet from him the other day saying
 
seanbonner Just rocked some new @intelligentsia Bolivian beans in my Clever coffee dripper. Worked pretty nice!
 
I skipped the stage of remonstrating with him about adverbs, I noticed his endorsement of the Clever Coffee Dripper, and (since I had never heard of such a thing) I looked into it. I was impressed that it seemed to promise to ameliorate the things I dislike about a French press (disposing of grounds, and grit in the bottom of the cup) without the drawback of standard filtration systems (coffee doesn’t brew, it makes friends with the water and influences the water to be more coffee-like on its way through the filter).
 
So I was convinced by the premise of the Clever approach, but in the first place I already have a French press and a filter cone thingy, and in the second instance I’m trying to economise, and in the third instance. . . I’ve still got a hacker streak in me. So I looked around the kitchen and asked myself how I could realise the benefits of the Clever approach with the materials at hand.
 
Voilà! I pour the coffee and boiling water together into a Pyrex measuring cup, and cover the cup with a plate. After the coffee has brewed sufficiently, I pour it through the filter into my mug. Brewing + filtration = no grounds-disposal problem, no grit, full flavour, and the satisfaction of having done it yourself.

Because cool people like Scott McCloud notice cool ideas like David Lasky’s.

The University Library’s website called my attention to a collection of publicly-available online digital movies and clips, the Scottish Screen Archive. I’ve been skimming the full collection of films about Glasgow, but especially a selection of clips available immediately online.

(I’m just kidding about “colour”; I switched my spell-checker from US English to UK English, though, so I have to keep alert to my u’s and zeds.)
 
Randall Munroe of the top-rank webcomic xkcd amassed a gargantuan dump of imperfect-but-fascinating data about colour perception and naming. It doesn’t bring to my mind any grand conclusions, doesn’t seem to prove anything about arbitrariness of colour identification or gender difference, but it’s fun to read about anyway — and I doubt that if one had adopted a means of removing the various sorts of bias from his data, you’d get results that differed appreciably. It’s a lovely bit of online experimentation and (on Munroe’s part) presentation of results. Cheers all around!

There were overlapping episcopal jurisdictions in Scotland for a significant interval. If, in the aftermath of the years ahead of us, there were overlapping episcopal jurisdictions in some provinces, it wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. Maybe not the worst outcome, either.