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Sad and lovely and timely Hil has updated her Pemberley image gallery, which, along with her loving narrative, illustrates the early history of the Jane Austen discussion site we worked on and hung out at and internalized for years, starting 10 years ago this coming Monday. I adore Hil's illustrations and her sense of whimsy. I never hope to run into a more talented or likeminded collaborator. (Now, if I can only persuade her to come right out and reveal the Dave Winer as happy Buddha creation she's started... it's magnificent.) Finally came to me I'm usually really good at drawing parallels and coming up with analogies. It's a little game I play with myself. Usually they come quick, too; I must be getting old. Yesterday I got my hair cut at lunchtime, and made the fateful decision to have bangs again after five years (no sniggering guys). See it's a big decision because they are so hard to grow out. (Stop it.) As I was driving back to work I kept fluffing them and looking at them in the rearview mirror and thinking, "This is like something... so easy to get rid of something like a chunk of hair, so hard to get it back to how it was." Couldn't think of anything until just now. Shearing your locks is like trust in a person, whether it's a family member, friend or SO. It can be gone in 15 minutes but takes many thousands of hours to get it back. I might be a Pollyanna, but I do believe that if you once trusted a person with good reason, they can't do anything that's absolutely beyond repair or redemption or regrowth. That feeling Remember the device Spielberg used in Close Encounters of the Third Kind that compelled people who had been exposed to the alien ships to have the musical pattern and the shape of the flat-top mountain embedded deep in their consciousness? I loved that, especially the way the shape was coaxed out in different media from painting to clay sculpture to mashed potatos, depending on the materials and inclinations at hand. What a perfect movie. Now I want to watch it right now. Female enhancement products Have you seen the TV commercial for... I don't know what it is exactly, I guess some kind of stimulation cream. It embarrasses me to see it, and kind of embarrasses me to blog about it, but I keep wondering about how they decided to market it this way. The commercial can hardly show a woman in bed or anything, right? But what they chose to show is so odd. A fortyish woman glides slowly up an escalator, smiling serenely. I'll have to make myself pay more attention to it next time, but I think she's in a department store? Stepping off the escalator she sees the guy she's meeting and they do this little public-hello embrace. And that's it. Don't you ever wonder and imagine how a decision like that has been arrived at? I imagine a meeting where the agency person goes into pitch mode and describes what I just described. And then the client says, "Bingo! That's exactly right. Escalator. Genius, just the ticket." Or maybe they were no more sold on it than I am, and they picked a situation out of a hat, reasoning that one scenario that doesn't show what they are selling is as good as another? Taxonomy decisions I see Dave is reserving judgment on top-level categories for the new open podcast directory. That's always a puzzle for me too. Just this week I worked with our three librarians at work who love to be asked to classify things and be recognized as experts in that sort of thing. I've worked for some big organizations that have considerable research and library functions (Ketchum PR, NBD Bank or whatever its been sucked up into now, Indiana University) but I've never run into a staff so willing to see it as their role to take up the challenge of building a taxonomy for archived content. I gave them a video library directory last year that was so full of weeds I couldn't bear to tackle it and they turned it into an organizational thing of beauty. Librarians rock. Up all night I'm working on something kind of neat. Expression Engine convoluted template within a template within a template thing. I'll show you if I can stay awake long enough to figure out one or two more things. Bless all good tutorial writers. I needed a refresher on two PHP functions tonight and found them both at tizig.com. Later: Birds chirping. Sun rising. Good grief, how did that happen? Hi Scoble May I call you that? Trying out the blog as you try out the OPML Editor as you prepare to work on the new old podcast directory, I presume? Welcome.
Changing my mind
I'm also finding myself wishing Powell was back on the SoS job. Shoot, maybe even Kissinger... definitely Arnie Vinick. Maybe Alan Alda over Condi. |
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About Lebanon. This is getting too scary.
