Author: AKMA

I find that my students work better on questions of ethics when you supply them with concrete case studies — so when I read the first bit of this story about Pete Doherty, I immediately thought about it as an example relative to questions of truth-telling and fidelity. But the more you linger with it, the more ethical plot lines come to the fore (especially as you read on to the end of the piece). You could devote an entire semester to teaching the ethics of this narrative.

Granted that word-for-word matching isn’t the cardinal characteristic of good translation, wouldn’t it be fair to translate dipsychos as “half-hearted”? It gets at the sense of divided sentiments better in colloquial English than does “double-minded,” which sounds more like multiple personality disorder to me.
Continue reading “Pondering”

If a 4Gb iPhone costs $500 with phone technology in its guts, how much would a unit cost without the phone innards? A wide-screen, wifi-enabled, web-browsing, email-checking, video-watching, touch-screen-interfacing iPod (and gateway device to the phone version)? Cause it sounds to me as though they’d sell a zillion of them.

Yesterday’s activities included two special destinations. First, we dropped Josiah and Laura off at Midway Airport for their trip to visit Laura’s folks at their summer home; since we were in the neighborhood, we took Pippa to Springfield-in-Chicago, the local

where we gawked at the remade convenience store and chuckled at the clever Simpsons allusions. We will not rest from our critiques of consumer culture — but if you’re going to run a franchised convenience store, you might as well do it with self-deprecating wit. Jeneane swears our package of Krusty-Os will be valuable someday if we keep it unopened; I’m unconvinced that the cost of storing and reselling the cereal will be surpassed by what anyone would pay for it. On the other hand, I haven’t opened the box yet.

After obtaining a sour watermelon Squishee for PIppa and some marginally-nutritious snacks, we turned north to take Pip to the Art Institute, where Margaret and I had gone a few weeks ago. We proceeded first to a gallery in the Asian collection to which Laura had called our attention. Then Pippa led us to a photography exhibition that she wanted to see. I admired the photography treatments of Koto Ezawa (would Flickr consider that a photograph? Remember when that was a hot topic?), but Margaret and I were knocked out by the photos of Sarah Hobbs and Angela Strassheim.

Then we took a very quick stroll through the European paintings before we ran out of energy.

A splendid time is guaranteed for all.

Aretê Krista pointed my attention to the Karaoke Cowboy tape by the late Slim the Drifter, and I’ve been listening to it appreciatively. There’s so very much recorded music flooding our environment — I wonder how the music bloggers manage to listen to anything more than once, just at the level of raw time-consumption; I’ve always been a constant-listener, but at this point I’ve ripped and downloaded megabytes of recordings that I haven’t yet listened to — there’s so much to hear that one can understand how some worthy efforts get lost in the swirl.

If you have a soft spot for Bakersfield country-rock, head over to Jeff’s place and listen to Slim. (And thanks, Jeff, for so generously including me among the “usual suspects” Tom, Ray, Mark — someday I’ll have to start thinking again.)

If you want graphical ornaments for a page layout, head over to Briar Press’s Cuts & Caps section. These are EPS files, not typefaces or jpgs, but most of the page layout apps I know of — in deed, most contemporary word processors — handle EPS.

I keep a fortune-cookie slip in my wallet. It reads, “Your dream will come true when you least expect it.” Let’s bracket, for the moment, the question of whether there’s any sane reason to take fortune-cookie slips seriously; we know there isn’t, and we know that we do anyway.

What’s the effect of being told that my dream will come true when I least expect it? Doesn’t that instigate a pattern of expectation that itself militates against dream-realization? Or does it mean that a second-tier dream comes true instead, because I was too attentively expecting the unexpected realization of the most prominent dream?

I’ve got a small assortment of dreams any one of which would be an ecstatic delight. One of them was eliminated in the past couple of days; I guess I mistakenly thought too seriously about it.

I suppose it is with dreams as with zazen, that in order to attain, you must banish consciousness of wanting-to-attain. So I’ll try to relinquish my dreams — and not simply so that I might attain one unexpected one, but so that I may appreciate more fully the dream-come-true that is my marvelous family, my fantastic dear wife, and the tremendous network of lovely friends into whose lives I’ve been woven.
Continue reading “What Dreams May Come”

Last night Margaret and I spontaneously went to see Ocean’s Thirteen after dinner. We enjoyed it, though I’d have appreciated slightly more intensity to the concluding twists. I like just sitting around watching George Clooney, Brad Pitt, and their friends look stylish and ingenious.

On our way out, Margaret wondered what the movie was for which the long line had been snaking around the theater. “Why, the Transformers movie,” I answered. “No!” “Yup.”

Margaret had no idea just how deeply the Transformers reach into the dreams and nostalgia of their audience. I have only a faint appreciation for this, having fallen in with a Transformers fanboy online a couple of years ago. We spent the rest of our walk home coaching Margaret through her jaw-dropped amazement that anyone, much less a sizable crowd of mixed generations, races, and genders, would be willing to sit through a movie about cars that change into superhero robots — much less, that they’d line up for hours to see the first showing. She’s still researching Transformania this morning.

Anyone out there interested in beta-testing Skitch (requires Mac 10.4.6 or later)? It certainly looks like an interesting alternative approach to photo treatment and sharing to Flickr; high emphasis on client-side editing and annotation, without server-side interaction. Intriguingly different strengths, though.

I used to play chess, long ago (as Dennis Fischman, my teammate, reminded me last winter!), in which endeavor one of the celebrated events is the “simultaneous exhibition.” A strong chess player can examine and understand games well enough to play on numerous simultaneously (one by one, to be exact). I have enough difficulty playing at all that I would never dream of trying that — my main accomplishment since high school has been beating Nate and Si while playing blindfolded (to their amazement, and my own surprise).

I started working through my email inbox this morning at about nine o’clock, and am just now modulating to other productive modes of labor, and I haven’t even answered all the mail I got. This feels less like a simultaneous chess match than like playing tennis simultaneously on several courts at once.

I haven’t checked to see if Font Sugar has these, but the faces that Jos Buivenga makes available at exljbris would make admirable candidates for the sans-family or serif-family faces for your collection. (If only Tallys were expanded to a complete family. . . .)

During my morning stroll through bookmarks, blogrolls, and RSS streams, I came to this set of pictures of a 7-Eleven redecorated to match the Kwik-E-Mart from The Simpsons TV series (in preparation for the movie, I suppose). (Link via Jason.)

I post the link here because of the comments on this picture. “Gotsomeideas” says, “It would have been easy for them to screw up this promotion and make it unfunny, but from what I can tell from the pictures, they actually did a good job.” Bananatree responds, “Attention to detail is awesome.” Exactly. Most anyone who has watched a few minutes of The Simpsons could throw a few jokey signs into a convenience store and sit back; that would have met the Flickr commenters’ expectations of a wooden corporation lamely miming the brilliant cultural currents from which it’s hoping to draw cachet. That’s the self-appointed “funny” guy in the company repeating jokes from The Simpsons by the water cooler: thanks, I’d rather watch the show. Instead, the 7-Eleven people opted to pay attention to detail, to go with the painstaking composition that infuses such manic humor into The Simpsons — and people could tell. It makes a difference.

Now, let’s ask the embarrassing question. which is your church more like: the office funny guy repeating something that someone once thought was amusing, or the brilliantly subtle, detailed creation of a physical-world Kwik-E-Mart?

Much of the time, my rants about attention to detail and communicating carefully and responsibly and deliberately, are drowned out by a culture of casualness, spontaneity, free-wheelin’ yada yada yada. Hey, spontaneity and relaxation and freedom are good things, I approve of them. But attention to detail — by people who know what they’re doing — makes a difference, and viewers, visitors, congregants can tell (even if they can’t articulate the difference it makes). I didn’t see Diana Butler Bass when she passed through town (she was here only in father-daughter time), but it sounded as though she was saying similar things: that congregations grow not because you belong to the Single Correct Side of a theo-ideological schism, but because you realize that the work of living as a congregation, as a Body, requires care and attention to detail. People can tell the difference.