travelertrish

Wow

2009-10-31T05:19:10Z

One thing I like about this is what a great French accent this kid has. Wanna brush up on your vocabulary? I think I even heard a passe simple verb tense go by. Play it phrase by phrase, and when you've got it down, you'll be ready for the Big Trip!

While we're in French, karlkunkel wanted me to comment on the fact...not confirmed by me, by the way, that Micky D is going to open up a shop in the Louvre. MacDonald is an American icon...it stands for everything the French think of us, including the fact that we eat badly. Including, but not limited to, mind you. JF loves to say that the French LOVE to eat at MacDonald's just to come away talking about how badly they've just eaten. It's a sort of reverse snobbism. In the Louvre, they'll have even more opportunity to cluck and do their Gallic shrugs. And can you imagine the numbers of American tourists who will flock there? It's a marriage made in heaven.

Bead Shop Cat - 3

2009-10-30T02:57:39Z

Bead Shop Cat - 3, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

Click on the photo of this wonderful cat to access all the photos from our birthday celebration spa in Hot Springs, North Carolina. The cat lives in this fabulous bead shop in Asheville, one stop on our way home. Other photos include extensive pix from the Duckett House Inn, where we stayed, and some from the hot tub where we relaxed and got massages. Ahhhhhh.....

Catching Up

2009-10-26T19:25:18Z

1. Visit our new website: www.faihouse.org. I must say, says she, dusting her fingernails, I am pretty proud of it. And having to rebuild it from total scratch wasn't a bad exercise. Some things I got righter the second time.

2. Spa! one of you asked how that went. Well, it was just lovely. I do have some photos that WILL get uploaded sooner rather than later, but for the past week, I've been trying to restore the backed up files to my wiped-clean computer. The B&B we found was reasonably priced and more like a European B&B-- shared bathroom (though we were the only ones in the building besides the owner, so we didn't have to end up sharing anything.) Nice quilts. Very antique-look. Wood. Nice lamps. The breakfast was scrumptious. And then we headed over to the Hot Springs themselves. This is something I love to do, and have done maybe five or six times. Only before we stayed in the campground. We read aloud from Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. We talked about our vision of our future. It was wonderful. The masseuse was not brilliant, but was perfectly adaquate. I give her a B+. It was a great getaway.

3. Computer woes: Here's the rule I broke and so read it and learn: Back up your computer files. And THEN test your backup. I worked with Judy on Sunday. That girl has enough on her computer to copy in about three minutes. She doesn't need a complicated backup system. Me, on the other hand, I've got something like 130 GIGA bytes. Sheesh. Takes hours. I need to get it done overnight. I had done the backup because that computer was acting sort of wonky and I didn't trust it not to crash on me. Which it did. But what I hadn't done was TEST the backup system. It turns out I just couldn't get the computer to recognize my backup files AS backup files. So it won't go in and restore them for me.

4. Tell No One. If you can't stand to read subtitles, you should get a reading course and get better. This is not a movie I thought I'd go for. I thought it would be too violent. It was violent at times, but so wonderfully shot, so well-crafted, such a nuanced and compelling story, that the violence didn't bother me. Rent that sucker!

5. Movie-making. Whew! All the movies are finished, though a couple of students needed some outside help to GET finished. I'll put the evaluation of the course up on the Worlds Touch Blog when I get it done. I learned a lot, including that not all students are going to love me. What a concept! Not loved by all? How can that be? But I do know that I'm a very intimidating teacher to some people...one reason why, if I ever tell you I'm going back to teaching high school, please shoot me on the spot.

travelertrish @ 2009-10-26T12:54:00

2009-10-26T15:54:51Z

Movie-Making Gala Premiere

Posted using ShareThis

The Gardenia Bush

2009-10-25T22:34:04Z

The Gardenia Bush, originally uploaded by travelertrish.

Where my mother's ashes are buried, along with some from my father.

Building, building

2009-10-18T12:01:40Z

I did a couple of things right to get through the computer disasters of the past couple of days. The best decision I made was to call the young man who had helped me set up the web site for FaithAction in the first place, Dave. I had started out thinking I could think my way out of the problem, but after talking to him, I realized that I had not adaquately understood the underlying structure of the way WordPress works. I knew the information for your site is store in a MySQL database. Somehow, I imagined that the database lived in the files up there in the control panel when I log into the place I keep my site, my host is the way we geeks talk about it, my garage, is how I've come to think of it.

So when I uninstalled WordPress and saw all those files still there, I thought I hadn't actually ERASED anything. Ha. I had in fact erased everything. All that was left was the shell, the icing without the cake, the glory without any of the guts.

Dave and I did a bunch of exploring around...and of course he had to see all the clumsy things I'd done to try to rectify the situation in my ignorance. What on earth do people do who are hesitant to appear stupid and inept and ignorant in front of others? How do they get their messes cleaned up? Do they just not MAKE messes? Of course, Dave assured me that everything I'd done, he too had done once. Whither thou goest, I too have gone kinda thing. Which of course assuages the embarrassment of being a techie who didn't quite realize that if I uninstall WordPress, about two weeks of work is going to slide right down the tubes into oblivion.

And while it did take me two weeks to GET there, it won't take me two weeks to get BACK there. I spent about five hours last night after our board retreat reconstructing the site. It's still bare bones, but it's at www.faihouse.org. I have a couple of tweaks I'll do to it today before we leave for Hot Springs, but basically, this is the site. I rebuilt all the pages and put all the words on there and I'll get the pictures up next week. And there will be some changes anyway, since at our board retreat, we revised our vision and mission. Not a total tidal wave of change, but some good solid changes.

Now, as regards my laptop, which also crashed Friday. I have found my backup files and while Windows won't just "restore from backup" easily (because it thinks this is a new machine, is all I can gather from it), I can certainly just move the files manually from the backup. I need to check out and see why we aren't all just using Windows' generic backup on a regular basis. And the whole thing is a wakeup call about getting backups into the system as a regular and ongoing thing.

That'll fix the files, the photos, the documents, the videos. After that, there is the patient and steady evaluation of what programs need to be reinstalled here. I've got to get ahold of my virus protection people, since this machine thinks I didn't have any and so wants me to pay for a new deal. And there's iTunes and my podcast subscriptions. Essential. I've got my Office to install as well. After that, it's sort of waiting to see what comes up. My guess is that I've swept out a bunch of stuff that I wasn't using and didn't need.

So besides the most important technology lesson (BACK IT UP! BACK IT UP! BACK IT UP! -- JF says the NASA rule is three backups and that is what he does, methodically and consistently-- and amazingly for the rest of his space looks like haphazard chaos), what am I taking away from this disaster? One is that panic and drama just would not have served anywhere in this process and boy am I glad that my boss didn't fall into even the first particle of that because I might have if he did. The other is that, with all things computer, patience is really the most important virtue. When intelligence fails (as mine did...I KNEW there was a database back there. I should have known I couldn't uninstall the program without eliminating the database. Duh, really!) then patience saves. The other of course is to get help from people that know more than you do, and that carries with it the willingness to turn up flat stupid.

Okay, I'm off to install iTunes.

Upheaval

2009-10-17T04:12:06Z

My disconnect with my technical world is complete. The web site that I've spent the last two weeks building has gone south, from my own lack of presence of mind this afternoon. I may be able to recreate it before Monday... I have to, my boss is announcing the new site already on the newsletter. I suppose I could go in there and take the mention of it out...hmmm....last resort.

But THEN! I got home and my laptop has gone into recovery mode. That is...everything EVERYTHING everything has been wiped off and it has been returned to the condition it was in when it arrived from the factory.

I don't have to reinstall the drivers, there IS that. And I did do a backup of the video, photo, and documents just day before yesterday. But all the software I had installed on the machine is gone. All the comfortable little things...my desktop photo, all that. Gone.

And tomorrow, I have an all-day board meeting and after that...web site recovery. It boggles the mind.

JF and I have reservations for Sunday night at a bed and breakfast in Asheville. And an appointment for a hot tub and massage on Monday morning. I'm boggled at the moment. Do forgive me.

Protest against France's immigration laws

2009-10-14T14:49:56Z

Protest against France's immigration laws, originally uploaded by looking4poetry.

I loved this woman's face. I searched for Immigration on Flickr in the creative commons licenses and this one came up. Loved the whole atmosphere, etc.

What I Was Saying...

2009-10-13T11:11:51Z

Yesterday's post(s) got away from me, I think. Well, I like that. I'm also thinking how it's funny to have a public blog but be reluctant to advertise it on Facebook, where so many people from my Real Life are keeping track of me. I like this little club. Think about it. Sweden, Chile, Spain, Texas, Oregon and a goodly number from right here in High Point. How did we all get here?

Anyway, what I was trying to get at, but got distracted, was that I get these ideas, these thoughts that are winking and blinking at me, saying "Blog post, blog post," and then my day surges in, and off they go.

Today's thought, well, really last night's, is that Neal Stephenson is even better than I remembered, and I remembered a fantastic writer. lizardek , have you read anything by him? I started with Cryptonomicon, super oversimplified when I say it's the history of cryptography. He is just a master character artist, a brilliant turner of phrases, and just a whopping good read. The only problem with Quicksilver, the book I started last night, is that it's so heavy, it's hard to read from a prone position.

I like to read myself to sleep at night. Indeed, I'm not sure I could actually get to sleep without a book in my hands. So having a weight roughly equivalent to a BRICK is tough.

So..yoga done, just a little blog post done. Dishes done from last night. I may be the only person I know who doesn't MIND getting up to dishes. In fact, I'd much rather do dishes while my coffee brews in the morning than tackle them at night, when what I really want to do is get up from the table and just wander into my bedroom, pick up my book and settle in.

Okay, day. Surge in. I'm ready for ya.

So I decided to do another post...

2009-10-13T02:02:29Z

I found the notes from the radio program I was listening to this morning. Here's the link to the podcast: http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/ta/

Here's the blurb:

America's social state is withering at the expense of its expanding prison system and the UK is heading in the same direction, with potentially disastrous consequences. That's the argument of Laurie Taylor's guest, Loic Wacquant, Professor of Sociology at the University of California.

From 1980 to 1990, spending by the US government on operating its prisons and correctional establishments doubled while at the same time spending on public housing more than halved. According to Wacquant, this process is continuing; he says that 'the construction of prisons has effectively become the country's main housing programme'. Are America's penal policies too harsh, and if prisons and correctional facilities are becoming increasingly important, what are the social consequences?

He talks to Laurie about why he believes America is too ready to accept a state of poverty for huge sections of its population and at the same time see the social state obliterated. Is America punishing its poor and is the UK at risk of following the same path, overly dependent on prisons while eroding its social state?

Actually, the fact that blew ME away was that America's prison population has QUADRUPLED in the last twenty-five years. That's 400 per cent. And over the same time period, the amount of actual crime first stabilized and then declined.

I've known that violent crime in the USA has been declining for some time and that the PERCEPTION of violent crime has increased sharply. Americans are more and more afraid and more and more seeing bad guys around every corner...guys who are young and black, primarily, it seems. And we're sending them off to prison at an astonishing rate.

Listen to the podcast. It's really quite remarkable. And what is most remarkable is that while sociology is being presented, it is not neatly pidgeon-holable as leftist or rightwing conservative. Well, the points of view expressed on this show might be characterized as more left-leaning to our sensibilities. But this prison discussion lays out the facts of our penchant for incarceration really very matter-of-factly.

And throws me into a wild blue funk. What sort of world do I live in here? Obviously, not in any danger of going to prison, and so not really touched by the truth. I think that is what strikes me the most. I'm not touched by reality. I'm safe, warm, well-fed and I just got a new Neal Stephenson book out of the library. While my country, that supposedly believes in liberty and justice for all, has turned into a police state. One that starts wars of imperial ambition. One that doesn't believe in due process, or speedy trials, or the rule of law for everybody. Wow.

Prisons and other social science topics

2009-10-13T01:36:02Z

A week. Wow. Where is my life going? It seems to be flowing out from under me at a rate that astounds me. I think what happens is illustrated by an episode this morning. I got up at 5, as I do on Mondays, when the possibility of spending a week eating less, smoking no cigarettes, NOT gorging on candy or pie or cake-- seems within my reach. Off to the gym I trundle. I have a pact with myself not to get on the scales more than once a week, and Mondays are my day to do that, too.

I was listening to a fascinating piece on "Thinking Allowed," the BBC program that examines social science research and interviews the researchers.

[Diversion here-- looking for the link for Thinking Allowed, I found this cool blog that reviews podcasts:

...end of diversion.]

Having a weekend

2009-10-05T22:30:53Z

Because I am working on the movie-making class, I'm spending at least four hours every Saturday doing that when I could be painting my toenails (not) or doing my laundry. So I have this deal with my boss: every couple of weeks, I'll just take Monday off.

Only it didn't exactly work that way at first. It turns out that it is pretty hard to take a day off during the work week. Even today, when I should have been NOT WORKING, I sat for a couple of hours and went systematically through the files that JF has saved, supposedly backup, of all the students' work in our class.

And was appalled. What the heck have these people been DOING for the past three weeks? Of course, this is not fair. Sara has really finished her movie. Mercy only has subtitles to do and she's halfway through with them.

But Eduardo? He's got four or five live action sequences taken in the club where he DJ's, but there is no story there. I MADE him record a story several weeks ago, but he has no still shots, no real meat that he can hang on the bones of the voiceover that I insisted he do.

Amina has basically stuck all the videos and all the photos one after another into a storyboard and the whole is over ten minutes, with lots and lots of places where she really has to cut and delete. Like when I walk right into the set while her supposed doctor is speaking with her supposed sick Aunt.

When we originally conceived this movie-making class...not this one, but the one we did here in High Point, we thought that we'd basically get everybody through the shooting and the story, and then designate a couple of talented students to do the post-production work. Oh, no, no, said one of the students last winter. We want to learn to edit ourselves! So we taught them.

I am trying to analyze why it is harder for this class to learn this skill. Language, certainly. Some of the students are much more inexperienced on the computer than our other group. The reality of the equipment we have to use has proved an astonishing obstacle. Stuff that we tested before the class started suddenly decides not to work. Stuff that was working last week isn't working this week. Are we just not being fussy and obsessive compulsive enough? Or are we hitting the technical wall that all creative movie-makers come up against--- art and creativity versus The Machine. Windows Movie-Maker is a weak vessel for our creative endeavors, we know that, but it is what most of our students are going to find on the PC they take home. We want to do Grass-Roots Video. Goes to show us all that the tools that the poor have to work with are just plain inferior. They tell me that iMovie is a better product, but how many of my folks are going to go out and buy a Mac?

You don't buy a Mac unless you have already absorbed the snob appeal. Like you don't eat organic until you can afford it. Like you don't stop shopping at Wal-Mart until you have the money not to.

I'm going to talk to JF when he gets home tonight...hmmm...it's 6:30...where IS he, anyway? And we are going to come up with a plan. We may just decide that the post-production work can be done by some of the students that are already finished with their own movies. Or maybe we'll do a kind of group editing thing, where we take each student's raw material and edit it together in class. One idea I had was to meet individually with each student who hasn't finished his/her movie for an hour. We could take three volunteers and spend a little over an hour each on one Saturday.

Actually I started this entry intending to talk about the mystery of laundry. I do love laundry, but it is totally outside my powers of understanding to know why it has taken me all day to get it done. I mean, I have futzed this entire day. Changing the tablecloth. Foiling the ants. Scrubbing the bathroom sink. Folding laundry and folding laundry. Taking the garbage out to the street. Really, how do I manage with just a two-day weekend in Real Life?

Natasha's in this

2009-10-04T07:52:32Z

My daughter Natasha went to India from her grad school in Sweden. This is a video done by one of the Swedish participants in the program. What I like about it is the way it really FEELS like India when I watch it.

Pudding recipe

2009-10-01T10:42:44Z

Oops. I posted the recipe in the comments to the last post. It's early. I'm off to the Rotary Club for breakfast at the Country Club-- hoity-toity! as my mother used to say. They do have the very best grits in town. Well, and the only ones I ever see. JF is only a grits eater when he's making one of those truly huge breakfasts that we only eat as brunch these days, with biscuits and gravy and eggs and bacon and ham and...gee, that sounds like what the Rotarians get!

Persimmon Pudding!

2009-10-01T03:00:28Z

Susie came over just after work to show me where the persimmon tree is just behind our house in the park. We gathered a total of five cups of persimmon pulp and used two of them to make the pudding I raved about at her house the last time I had dinner with her.

It was one of those things that some people cite when trying to prove there is a God. I'm not talking about the taste of this pudding, though perhaps a good case can be made for that, too. I had this pudding about a year ago at one of our music nights. Susie is famous for the wonderful desserts she brings to these evenings of truly amazing food and wonderful singing. I loved it the first time I made it, and she swears she gave me the recipe then. But where do you find persimmons just hanging out in the marketplace?

She served it again last week. And told me she'd gathered the persimmons just behind my house in the park. There are trees all around town that nobody notices unless they happen to STEP in a pile of rotting persimmons. I wouldn't have known a persimmon if one of them came up and bit me.

Then, two days later, my boss at work shows up with...of all things...persimmon pudding! And his recipe comes from a Cherokee Indian recipe. His apparently has sweet potatoes in it, but the one we did tonight was Susie's recipe. A classic custard: milk, eggs, butter, sugar, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, two cups of persimmon pulp-- JF had to go out and buy another food mill since I have apparently let ours ("...and it came from FRANCE!") get away from us. And both baking powder and soda and a dashlet of salt. Really, it could be a pumpkin pie except for that...je ne sais quoi.

Danielle came over to have some with us and laugh and laugh and talk about how when she was little her mother MADE her eat two of these horrible little things. The slimy texture...one thinks of stewed okra...yuk! But in pudding? Ah, ambrosia for the gods.

You see? Proof is in the pudding!

Quote of the Day

2009-09-28T11:04:45Z

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead, (16 December 1901 – 15 November 1978), an American cultural anthropologist.

We were having dinner last night with two of our friends and there came a moment in the conversation where I really REALLY wanted to remember this quote.

I love my husband, but he is dedicated to the idea that the world has never changed and never will. He believes that what passes for progress is not progress at all. What passes for enlightenment-- even worse-- is delusion. He started off on that hobbyhorse last night, and I reminded him of the time that one of our friends, much more solidly knowledgeable about American political history than Jean-Francois, took him step by step through the environmental movement, demonstrating conclusively that this small group of thoughtful, committed citizens had indeed changed America. And prefaced his argument with this quote.

I wanted to be able to quote the quote. I am not good at that sort of thing. Remember the FlipVideo Arrival video? Where I couldn't remember the exact words of "Be the change you want to see in the world."

Now there is another quote that I hold even dearer. I actually have it on MY computer since a search with its keywords doesn't tend to turn up anything.

"It makes a great deal of difference whether you call life a dream, a pilgrimage, a labyrinth, or a carnival." (Kenneth Burke, American critic, 1897-1993)

I found this quote in a little book put out by a now-defunct organization that sent people overseas to do Peace Corps-like work. The book is a set of questions that are aimed at leading you INTO the culture, rather than coasting along on the surface like a tourist. The table of contents is organized by topic: politics, education, food, family, etc. At the beginning of each chapter is a quote and this quote was at the head of, if I remember correctly, the chapter on Religion.

Did you know that the Hindu version of the world is that God is really dreaming all this? How about "Row, row, row your boat"? The pilgrimage we can all understand. And certainly we've known people for whom life was indeed a carnival. There's something intriguing about the labyrinth as a key metaphor for a worldview. What is that in German? Weltenshaum...well I was close but no cigar: Weltanschauung.

The other thing I like about this quote is that it flies in the face of our dearly held "We're all the same" thing, that I have railed against on this blog and elsewhere. It makes a great deal of practical difference, and people who pretend otherwise often end up with projects that don't work, with inexplicable resentments bubbling up, with the stress-headaches that eventually send them home before their service is up.

One third of Americans (and this might apply to others who send their citizens overseas, but I'm not sure) who go overseas to work, in both for profit and nonprofit work, come home before their time is up. Because they simply can't get there from here. Because the "everybody's the same, under the skin" thing is patronizing, ethnocentric-- though it purports not to be-- and impossible to maintain.

And so...I'm off to my carnival of a week. Ya'll enjoy! Gather those rosebuds!

Blindness

2009-09-22T12:48:19Z

Since I've "discovered" Pandora.com radio, several people have told me that they already told me about it... My boss has music coming out of his office the whole long day. Pandora. I sent my brother an email, and he said, "Oh, I've known about it for a long time, meant to tell you." And then last night Susie told me she had told me directly and I'd brushed it off..."I don't listen to music," I told her.

I remember that belief about myself. And then the cute new boys at work were listening to such cool stuff. And since it was up, they showed me how you add a radio station and explained about the way they pick the songs they play.

Just goes to show you-- a cute boy can STILL take me places nobody else can. Ha!

What's in there...

2009-09-21T12:21:54Z

I finished Inheritance of Loss last night, one of those books one is sad, sad to see end and a little disappointed that we don't know how EVERYONE turned out. What did happen to the dog? Did Gyan and Sai ever seen one another again? And on, and on. But good.

This morning, I woke with fresh intentions...not one cigarette this week. That I would write about my dieting and the various wagons I fall off regularly on the Calorie Count blog. A nice place to whine. I don't want to whine here. I know, from time to time it's good just to be vulnerable, but it's a piece of my brain, this weight/exercise/diet/sugar craving/willpower have or have not issue, that I want to contain somewhere. It is not, it will not be who I'm about. When I spent six years teaching in a girls' boarding high school, I just got lost, even while I fought it, in the obsession about weight and food. On the one hand, the school would have junk food nights where the tables were heaped, HEAPED with candy, crackers, all kinds of sweets and salties. On the other, half the teachers were as anorexic as the girls.

This morning, I remembered that the body's muscles need to get TIRED to do you any good. I've been letting 'em slide through. Counting it as good exercise just because I showed up, and I think it's important to do that. Give myself credit for showing up. But today I wanted to push it. There was a speaker at my Rotary Club last Thursday who reminded me that exercise isn't supposed to be "fun." One of the great de-motivators about getting our exercise done is this fiction that it is supposed to be fun, said the stern, judgmental character who spoke to us. He was selling his exercise machine, though, and I resented the time he took up out of my day. I really dislike being sold to. He proposed some bogus giveaway: Buy six of my machines and I'll give one to the local school of your choice. But without the training on the machine, it will just sit in a closet anyway. In fact, after $300, it'll probably sit in the closet of most of those who buy the damn thing. But he did remind me to tire myself out. So I did.

The Speaking of Faith episode I listened to this morning at the Y has really inspired me. Click on that link and see the western Irish landscape that made this man philosophical and poetical. There is a quote I want to take with me all day: "There is a place inside us that has never been wounded."

It isn't that I don't know that. I feel myself healed a lot of the time. But NEVER BEEN WOUNDED. Wow.

What else is in there? Wordpress, the web site system. I spent yesterday working on the Alliance Francaise site. I spent time last week putting together a site for the United African Sisters that I particularly like. Simple. Elegant. Black and orange. What's not to like? Raphael, my son the graphic artist, did the logo: http://unitedafricansisters.wordpress.com. The French site is still under construction. I don't have the English version up, and I am not impressed with the theme, I don't think. But it feels great to be designing web sites again. It taps into a creativity that I really like in myself.

And? Making a video to convince the people at Salesforce to bring me to San Francisco for Dreamforce. It's lacking one really definitive moment somehow. Making videos in general. Want to do more. More, more, more.

And? The movie-making class on Saturday, still reverberating around in my brain. I'll write about THAT on the Worlds Touch Blog and get back to you on it.

I look down the week, and like the guy I listened to this morning, I step into the possibility of myself.

Up Late...

2009-09-21T02:54:03Z

I had a firm intention of getting to bed EARLY. But then, having finished the new Alliance Francaise web site-- completely redid their site today-- I settled in to listen to pandora.com. I put all of the artists that Natasha recommended in the same station and called it "Natasha Radio." I think you can actually search for it, and get both the list and the sound.

So I sat here for two hours, listening to music, feeling close to my daughter, and playing Spider Solitaire. Now I'm off to read my amazing book. When I was in Darjeeling, there were back-to-back strikes as my friends the Nepalis demanded autonomy from the Bengalis who have them by the throat. Still, haunting every march, every discussion, was the spectre of "the last time," the mid-80s, when things got really REALLY ugly. People's heads were impaled on stakes. Friends of my friends died. Jean-Francois freaked completely out when he saw the last of the tourists leave town. The emotion of the streets, as people marched peacefully chanting slogans, made him hyperventilate.

The book I'm reading is about "that other time." The main characters are what's left over of the English-loving "civilized" people who ate orange marmalade and read Dickens. It's a beautiful book. So, yawn...I'm off to read. As soon as this Patty Griffin song is over...

Oh, I got a call today from Dan, he of the new toilet. Somebody told him about my blog piece on him. Who? Who does he know that I know that reads my blog? He said Dana. Huh? Anyway, he liked it. And every time I sit, I praise him. Ha!

False move, lost masterpiece.

2009-09-15T12:30:09Z

Well, folks, today we will all miss the brilliant piece I was writing about the book I'm reading and how it feels to recognize intimately a part of the world you are reading about in fiction. Just shit. I had quoted long sections from the book and talked about how I discovered I was reading about the cities in the Himalaya where I spent my Rotarian Ambassadorial Scholarship. You know, it feels really sad to lose a piece you're writing that you think is good, worthy of your twelve faithful readers, worthy of Life Itself. Just shit.

Crowdsourcing and other early Sunday morning thoughts

2009-09-13T14:24:14Z

I was thinking about this Pandora.com thing. Just in the last week, I've fallen into it as if into a delicious feather mattress and also heard about another application that does something similar with reviews of books. That way of using a whole lots of people to refine the analysis of a set of products fascinates me. Of course, Amazon. Of course so many other online retail outlets, but I'm rather impervious to attempts to sell me stuff, even books at Amazon.

So I wondered this morning whether that was what is known by the term "crowdsourcing," which I've heard over and over but never really bent down and picked it up. There's a bunch of these theories of the internet and the way it makes certain things more possible than our limited face-to-face world. I mean, think of it. My most faithful readers are in, among other places, Sweden, Spain, Oregon and India. And I only have about twelve readers, really, so that is truly amazing. The web makes it possible for me to find the twelve people most likely to find my weird and eclectic passion of thought also interesting.

So I looked "crowdsourcing" up on the internet's own version of crowdsourced encyclopedic knowledge, Wikipedia. They've got a very cute little diagram there and provide several very enlightening examples of crowdsourcing. Basically, a company provides a kind of competition to improving its product. Okay, here's one. The gum I chew has an ongoing contest for people to come up with advertising taglines. And now I realize that this sort of thing has been going on since television...jingle contests.

But while I learned something fascinating about Netflix, I also learned that the phenomenon I was looking for isn't called crowdsourcing. Essentially, places like Netflix, Pandora and this thing I got recently called WeRead. I just looked at WeRead, and it's not the same thing. It's more like Facebook for readers or something. The other two, Netflix and Pandora, are using the power of the thousands, even millions, of onliners to create a Tailored-to-ME offering of their product. I give them more and more information by rating products up or down, and based on their formula (called an algorithm, a word I love for no rational reason), they give me more and more of exactly what I like.

The fascinating thing I learned from Wikepedia about Netflix is that they have a crowdsourcing contest to get people to come up with a more and more accurate...no, I think it's PREDICTIVE...algorithm. They provided the contestants with a huge data set. The cool thing about it is that some people jumped in from scratch to learn about this stuff and give the contest a shot. There's something meritocratic about that. In fact, I really like meritocracy, and there's some sort of connection between that idea and this other one that it's in an exchange between me and Pandora that I end up with just exactly the kind of music I want to listen to, today.

All this before breakfast! And I got to this thought because of the book I'm reading, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai. It is an absolutely DELICIOUS book. Here's the description of an annoyance: "The way someone would not blow her nose but went sur-sur-sur in the library, laddering up the snot again and again. " Laddering. Or this description: "Lola was in the garden picking caterpillars off the English broccoli. The caterpillars were mottled green and white, with fake blue eyes, ridiculous fat feet, a tail and an elephant nose. Magnificent creatures, she thought, studying one closely, but then she threw it to a waiting bird that pecked and a green stuffing squiggled out of the caterpillar like toothpaste from a punctured tube."

Just brilliant. There's a bunch of more uplifting metaphors, too, of course. But snot and stuffing appeal to my perverse nature. What an amazing time to be alive. All this will vanish one day, and life will inevitably return to its "nasty, brutish and short" normal state, but for now, let Pandora sing!

Pandora.com

2009-09-11T03:41:13Z

I've been mystified for some time now about the fact that I don't listen to music. My writer friends used to have music playing all the time. Not me. I know people who walk in the door and put on their favorite tunes. Not me. I listen to spoken word radio-- This American Life, Savage Love Podcast, Thinking Allowed.

Today, though, and I'm not sure exactly what did it, I discovered Pandora.com and have been listening to this music ever since. I started with Procol Harem...not even sure why...added a Flamenco/Turkish/Celtic station I found, and then mixed it up with the Be Good Tanyas. I'm just enchanted. Feels like one of those twists that turns me totally around.

I love SINGING songs with friends. I love DANCING to live music. But I haven't just listened to it. Now I am. I love not being stuck.

Me 'n' Will

2009-09-10T23:57:31Z

Okay, here's the photo taken last Christmas of Will, my brother, and me. Do we look alike? Alike enough so that Will's next door neighbor could tell I'm his sister? Ha!

Dussera

2009-09-10T23:40:50Z

On the 28th of September is Dussera, a Hindu festival that has completely escaped my notice. How did I manage that? I've been in India or Nepal during this season several times in the past few years, but I don't remember the Festival of Joy at all. Do the Nepalis simply give this one a miss? Hard to believe, since this link says it is one of the four holiest celebrations of the calendar.

Well, I won't miss it this year, if my Nepali friends celebrate it. I'll be there with bells on. Am I turning into a Hindu? I sure like to party with them, that's the truth. This one has a whole convoluted story associated with it, something like Exodus or one of our more intricate and complicated fairy tales. I don't plan to take up somebody else's long religious story, but there is still something wonderful about the colors, the flowers, the fruit and nuts, the bells and getting the little splotch of red stuff on my forehead that I really appreciate.

New Bag Out; Old Bag In

2009-09-09T16:28:07Z

I've gone back to my all-time favorite bag. Here's me explaining how wonderful it is.

Pam gave me that bag the Christmas of 2007 and I forsook it this summer for a snazzy leather bag that daughter Natasha said was more stylish and also "ME!" The pockets were too deep. I couldn't find the pens. I couldn't find the flash drives. I dug and dug and dug...No more digging. I'm back to my fave.