It’s been a pretty depressing week in the book world: too many stories of authors dying. I guess there will only be more and more stories about the passing of authors who have meant something to me as I get older myself. Robert Parker (see this, this, this) was part of my life ever since I started working in Boston, and got into the Spenser series from a “local” angle. Paul Quarrington‘s books have been part of my life ever since (like lots of Canadians of a certain age) I first ran into Whale Music. Salinger‘s books have been part of my life since high school. Howard Zinn changed the way I look at history, as part of the post-Chomsky-mind-blowing that happened in my undergraduate year, and I’ve followed him since. And while she hasn’t actually died yet, the news about Kage Baker, whose books have been with me since the SFBC did an omnibus of the first two Company books–I have all her published stuff, is pretty final. Too many holes in the future opening up all at once.
I was also saddened, speaking of dead authors, about the Poe visitor not showing up this year. Saddened in a much more abstract the-world-is-less-interesting way.
OK, I need something to cheer me up after all that. How about one of the classics: Dan Brown getting positively skewered. That always makes me feel better.
What else would make me feel better? Seeing some of Da Vinci’s sketches, and a codex of his? Seeing some of Lewis’ manuscripts for Alice? Blakes;s poetry notebooks? The British Library is doing a good thing here.
I read Brust’s latest the day it came out–I had forgotten just how much I like hanging out with Vlad. Great stuff. Jo Walton, who recently did a series of reviews of all Steve’s Dragaera books on Tor.com has a short interview with him, which teases some things about Tiassa, the next one. I’d like that now please, instead of in a year.
I’ve mentioned Matt Hughes here before. I’m a fan of his stuff, and I was thus excited to receive his latest–even if the publisher did screw up the limited edition1. Rick Kleffel reviews the new book and the series, which will give you an idea if you don’t know Hughes. If it sounds at all up your alley, pop over to Fantasy Book Critic and take a shot at wining one of two sets of the whole series, or do a bit of reading at Hughes’ site and then take a crack at winning a ridiculously cool prize.
I’ve mentioned before that my “most anticipated comic” of 2009 was the reissue of Eddie Campbell’s Alec in a snazzy omnibus. For my money it completely lived up to my anticipation, and I’m delighted to have it on my shelf (near my super-swankest Campbell). NPR has a review (with preview) that covers the details for those not familiar, and I find it suitably in awe of the work.
While we’re on comics, apparently Kean Soo’s publishers are letting the first volume of Jellaby go OOP. There are two big fans of that book, and the second one as well, in my household, and we’re shocked and disappointed that sales apparently weren’t strong enough to suit the publisher. (Of course maybe rights will revert now that it’s OOP and Kean can own his own backlist… but I think the publisher is Disney, so maybe not).
Sticking with comics, can I say that I’m really looking forward to actually being able to go to the Toronto Comic Art Festival this year. Looks like a good program this year.
…and present it with the lamest excuse ever, but let’s not get off on a rant.(back)
I always find Joel Spolsky’s essays interesting reads. Often I agree with him, and sometimes they make me want to argue with him over a beer, but I never feel like my time is wasted. His recent short piece on the problem of over-communication, though, is a one that hits a place near-and-dear to my heart. Recommended read for anyone who has ever worked on a software project involving more than 4 or 5 people.
As companies expand, the people within them start to specialize. At such a point, some managers will conclude that they have a “keep everyone on the same page” problem. But often what they actually have is a “stop people from meddling when there are already enough smart people working on something” problem.
I think most of the over-communication problems that technical organizations (and maybe all of them–I only really can speak to software shops) face are really rooted in trust issues–people don’t need to be in meetings if they can trust the people in them to come to the right conclusions, if they can trust that the managers have the right people on the problems, if they can trust that no one else is working on things that will impact them, if they can trust that the meetings won’t result in misattribution of credit or misrepresentation of facts, etc. I’d actually like to see Joel write a bit more about that–he hints at it in his comments on the kind of corporate culture you need to avoid the over-communication problem, but I’d like to see a more fleshed out look at the relationship between trust and communication.
It’s been a couple of months now since I finished the pre-move project of ripping all the CDs that hadn’t yet made it into digital form. I’ve been slowly cleaning up the metadata on them and moving them into the main collection, and then doing a lot of listening to things I haven’t listened to in ages. In celebration of all this digging up of what was lost, let me share a few of the tracks I’ve recently refound with you.
Shane MacGowan & Sinéad O’Connor – Haunted
Who’d have thought that getting these two together would result in an absolutely lovely straight-up love song? Surely you’d have predicted something with a lot of pain in it, and more capital-R than small-r romantic. Have you seen the video for this, by the way? I think it’s the absolute loveliest I’ve ever seen Sinéad O’Connor look in the, what, 23 years I’ve been aware of her (and no, it’s not just because of the comparison to Shane.)
The Headstones – Son Of A Bitch To The Core
From the Hard Core Logo “tribute album”–just about every track on there has been getting some play, but I always liked this one in particular (well, it and “Pipefitter’s Clubhouse”). As an aside, it never stops amusing me that my wife finds Hugh Dillon, the Headstones frontman, hot in his TV actor incarnation–I still think of him as the guy who put on a great rock show, so long as you were far enough from the stage to keep from getting spit on, and she would have had no time for him then. I’ve recently been hearing rumours of a sequel (actually of two) to Hard Core Logo. This strikes me as a tremendously bad idea.
Soul Asylum – Summer Of Drugs
Another tribute album pick, this time from the Victoria Williams tribute/fundraiser. I seem to have quite a few single Soul Asylum tracks on various compilations that I quite enjoy, but for some reason I never actually got one of their albums. I note for the record that another track on this tribute album that I used to like–Pearl Jam’s cover of Crazy Mary–has not aged nearly as well as this.
Rob Szabo – We’re All Alchoholics
A happy, upbeat tune from Rob. I lived the life he’s singing about for a few years1, incidentally around the same time I was seeing Rob perform live a couple of times a week, and occasionally getting into “cheers and bombs away” with him. It’s been quite a few years now since I’ve seen Rob, but I’ve been keeping up with his CDs, and am looking forward to the chance to catch a show now that I’m back in the area,
Ron Sexsmith – Lebanon, Tennessee
The received wisdom on Sexsmith is that he’s a songwriter’s songwriter–one of those artists that other musicians love. That certainly matches my experience, since I first encountered his work (this tune, and his “Words We Never Use”) as part of Danny Michel‘s cover repertoire, back in the day. While I immediately liked “Words We Never Use”, I wasn’t initially a fan of this one, and Danny had to literally talk me into liking it–I recall him expounding passionately about the whole “stranger coming into a new place, where you are the mysterious one” aspect of the song. I quite like it now.
Screaming Trees – Working Class Hero
Would you believe hearing this cover on the radio was my first exposure to this tune? My upbringing was sadly Beatles/Lennon deficient. That first radio listen made me rush out and buy the Lennon covers album this was on, and led to me digging into Lennon’s stuff. I still quite like this version. I’ve never heard anything else by the Screaming Trees incidentally.
Debbie Harry & Iggy Pop – Well, Did You Evah?
Definitely the most fun thing on the album of Cole Porter covers. I can’t recall if I knew Porter before running into that cover album–it might have been my introduction, and I might have worked around to his songs, and to some classic movies, from this–it’s plausible. The picture I’ve used to illustrate this shows our artists at a much younger age than when they recorded this, but the picture was so good I had to use it. If you want to see how they had aged at the time this was recorded, check out the video. (Odd fact: I never tell people to “drink up”, I always say “drink up, Jim”. I had forgotten how this originally got into my personal vernacular.)
Robert Johnson – Crossroad Blues
I kind of can’t believe I never got around to ripping the Robert Johnson discs until the big wrap-up… My interest in Johnson, like that of many other people my age, is at least somewhat down to the Karate Kid and Steve Vai. You’ve got to love sell-your-soul blues.
A Public Policy Polling nationwide survey of 1,151 registered voters Jan. 18-19 found that 49 percent of Americans trusted Fox News, 10 percentage points more than any other network.
…I believe the appropriate response here is: “WTF??!!?”
Seriously? Fox News is not only considered news–shocking enough–by a significant number of Yanks, but it’s actually the most trusted network new source?
Since moving to Ontario, I’ve been buying my comics at The Beguiling. This, obviously, means that from time to time I have to take a run into Toronto to actually, you know, pick up the comics. So far I’ve managed to work these trips either into other shopping outings I’m taking to the city, or to pick up a beer with a friend while I’m there, etc.
This past Friday, however, I was just doing a speed trip, since I had to get in and out in a relatively short time. I went directly to the store, parking as I usually do in a lot about a half-block away, behind a Korean BBQ joint. I think it was shortly after 8 when I got out of the car.
I’m always in a state of slightly heightened awareness when I’m in particularly urban parts of Toronto–not that I think it’s justified or required, just the leftover neuroses of growing up in a smallish city and hearing all the things one hears about The Big City–and especially so when I’m in dark or secluded spots. This particular parking lot is actually quite secluded for being within throwing distance of one of the major streets of Toronto, and it’s not terribly well lit, so my small town paranoia was in full effect.
Consequently I was fully aware of the gentleman, whom I had noticed while parking, sitting leaning against the back wall of the BBQ joint, and resting up against something that’s either a dumpster or a commercial grease trap. He could have been a kitchen worker taking a break for a smoke, or a just a homeless dude–either was plausible, although it was pretty cold for someone in either of those situations to just be sitting on the ground outside.
From my car, I would have to walk past the guy to get to the side street. I started walking, probably unconsciously having decided to walk past without ‘officially’ noticing the guy, but while maintaining a constant awareness of where he was–small town paranoia, you know. As I got close to him I could hear him making some kind of sounds. When I got closer, it was obvious that he was singing. And that he was pissed drunk–there’s no mistaking a certain kind of slurring of the lyrics.
Why someone would be drunk already at 8PM, and why they’d be hanging out in a parking lot behind a Korean BBQ if they were… who knows. But the kind of person who might be “I can’t actually maintain my Z-axis” drunk at 8PM might well think it a fine idea to have a seat behind a restaurant and belt out a few tunes. Fair enough.
What really threw me as I passed the guy, though, was what he was singing.
As I passed him, and my mind processed the slurred words coming out of his mouth, and the tune he was kind of carrying, it hit me…
“…Fare ye weel ye valley an’ shaw.
There’s nae Jock will mourn the kyles o’ ye
Puir bliddy bastards are weary.”
The shock of recognition made me turn and look him straight in the eye–a violation of all our social conventions for this kind of situation. I couldn’t make out a lot in the relative darkness, but he was a white guy, in clothes that were shabby but not in any way tattered. He might have been around 60, or maybe early 50s with a hard life. His hair was a mess, but he had lots of it, and he had a noticeable stubble–enough that I could see it even in those conditions, but not a beard. He did not meet my gaze, or look up when I stopped walking. He just kept singing.
I got moving again, and when I came back to my car he was gone from the parking lot.
Ever since, I’ve been singing the song to myself in odd moments, and wondering about who that guy was, and what his story was.
The song, in case you didn’t recognize it, is THE 51st HIGHLAND DIVISION’S FAREWELL TO SICILY, sometimes just called “The Banks Of Sicily”. It’s something I first heard in my childhood, in a situation that made it stick in my mind. I probably didn’t hear it again for 20 years after that. When it eventually did come back into my head, we were in the days of Napster, and so I managed to find a copy of it. Sadly the copy is one that has no artist attribution, so I have no idea who’s doing the performance. I’ve listened to it once every couple of months since finding it, without thinking particularly deeply about it.
Here’s the mystery-artist version I have:
Don’t worry if you can’t make out the lyrics. Unless you’re from a particular part of Scotland, you’re not supposed to be able to understand them all. Since running into my mysterious drunken singer, I’ve done a little digging into the history of the song–it was written in a carefully selected combination of Scots and English by a fellow named Hamish Henderson, about his regiment (the 51st Highland Regiment, some of the supposed Ladies From Hell) taking their leave of Sicily.
The World War II ballad “The 51st Highland Regiment’s Farewell to Sicily”, also known as “Banks of Sicily”, lyrics by Hamish Henderson, is based on and sung sung to the melody of the march “Farewell to the Creeks”. Composed while he was Intelligence Officer for the Highland Division in World War II. G. W. Lockhart (in Fiddles and Folk, 1998) relates that Henderson had been viewing the smoke curling from Mt. Etna’s crater in the distance behind the Pipes and Drums of the division’s 153 Brigade, when the band launched into “Farewell to the Creeks.” “Without hindrance,” said Henderson, “the words came flowing to me.”
There is some debate about the “proper” wording of the song. Apparently Henderson himself published a couple of slightly different versions, with small changes to how the sky over Messina is described (sometimes as “unco an’ grey” and sometimes “antrin an’ grey”). Further, while the printed lyrics refer to the “Puir bliddy swaddies” being weary, apparently Henderson always sang it as “Puir bliddy bastards
(as in the embedded version above) unless he was in swank company. Given those caveats here’s what the lyrics nominally are:
THE 51st HIGHLAND DIVISION’S FAREWELL TO SICILY
The pipie is dozie, the pipie is fey,
He wullnae come roon for his vino the day.
The sky ower Messina is antrin an’ grey
And a’ the bricht chaulmers are eerie.
Then fare weel ye banks o’ Sicily
Fare ye weel ye valley an’ shaw.
There’s nae Jock will mourn the kyles o’ ye
Puir bliddy bastards are weary.
And fare weel ye banks o’ Sicily
Fare ye weel ye valley an’ shaw.
There’s nae hame can smoor the wiles o’ ye
Puir bliddy bastards are weary.
Then doon the stair and line the waterside
Wait your turn, the ferry’s awa.
Then doon the stair and line the waterside
A’ the bricht chaulmers are eerie,
The drummie is polisht, the drummie is braw
He cannae he seen for his webhin ava.
He’s beezed himsel up for a photo an’ a
Tae leave wi his Lola, his dearie.
Then fare weel ye dives o’ Sicily
(Fare ye weel ye shieling an’ ha’)
And fare weel ye byres and bothies
Whaur kind signorinas were cheerie.
And fare well ye dives o’ Sicily
(Fare ye weel ye shieling an’ ha’)
We’ll a’ mind shebeens and bothies
Whaur Jock made a date wi’ his dearie.
Then tune the pipes and drub the tenor drum
(Leave your kit this side o’ the wa’)
Then tune the pipes and drub the tenor drum—
A’ the bricht chaulmers are eerie.
As you can see, unless you’re up on your Scots dialect, you’re only going to working with the very general meaning of the song. (And, of course, there’s rather a lot of potential for mondegreens–I thought that the lyrics “fare ye weel ye valley and shaw” were “fare ye weel ye valiant shore” for around 20 years. Then I thought “valley and shaw” was dialect for “valley and shore”. Only lately I have found out that ‘shaw’ here is a Scots word for a wood or thicket descending from the Old English scaga.)
In any case, the proper lyrics for the tune aren’t ones that would stick in the head of anyone who hadn’t spent at least a fair amount of time around Scots dialects or made a particular effort to learn the song. Which suggests that my mystery singer either had a Scots background, or had made a proper study of this particular tune, committing it to memory. The what-was-this-guy’s-story question just gets bigger.
As part of digging into the history of the tune this week, I’ve been doing a lot of interesting reading, and finding a lot of other artists who’ve recorded the tune. For instance, I found that Dick Gaughan (remember, we like him around here) includes the song in his repertoire… and even found a snippet from an interesting essay about the song at his site. The Guide To The Scots Language and accompanying dictionary at his site is also quite helpful. They give enough information to answer the question in the post title–a “bricht chaulmer” is a “bright room”, and suddenly the lyrics about the bright rooms, presumably now empty of their former noise and populace, being eerie makes a lot of sense.
Other useful references included a couple of discussions specifically about parsing the lyrics at The Mudcat Cafe: this one, and this one. Reading through those reveals a lot of additional information on the phrasing choices. Between what I already had, and Gaughan’s dictionary, and those threads, I think I could make a fair go of translating the thing–but I don’t think I will; it seems a lot more poetic in the original form, perhaps the moreso for the work I had to do to fully understand it.
I also had to do some reading on the traditional relationships within regiments, after reading this: “Henderson’s complexities make his work hard to study: for example, Dick Gaughan’s commentary on the song-poem The 51st Highland Division’s Farewell to Sicily, while insightful, does not take into account the traditional divide between pipers and drummers in the Scots regiments, the essential key to one reading of the text.” at Henderson’s wikipedia entry. I admit, whatever key is there to a supposed particular reading of the text, it escapes me. Unless that’s just referring to the stereotypical way the “pipie” and ‘drummie’ are each presented in the lyrics, of course, the one as a fey, dozie, drunkard and the other ass a kind of dandified lady’s man.
Speaking of Henderson, I found a recording of Gordon Scott performing the song, and this recording is introduced by Hamish Henderson himself, explaining the origin of the tune:
So, after a few days of picking at it, I know rather a lot more about the song, and about the proper meaning of its lyrics… but I’m still left with a lot of questions about who the mysterious singer was, why he was drunk in the January-freezing parking lot of a Korean BBQ at 8PM on a Friday, why he knew the words to the song, and why he was singing it.
Am I the only one uncomfortable with “too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release” apparently being a legit category? Doesn’t that pretty much read as “we can’t prove you did shit, but we’re going to keep you in jail anyway”? I officially call bullshit on that. Of course it should come as no surprise given that the current Administration (with the tacit help fo the mainstream American media) is more-or-less covering up murders at Gitmo.
If I were a dog guy, I would totally have dog armour (check out the domain name there).1. Actually that site also has something that might give Trish nightmares: imagine her nemesis upped his game.
Somewhere in a box, I have all these books, in those particular editions, with those exact glorious pulp covers. When I get around to starting my small press, which will have the Complete John D. MacDonald Library as its keystone, the McGee series reprints will have a uniform trade dress that will feature key elements with this pulp aesthetic. (It will also bring back into print lots of good novels that are currently MIA.)
I thought growing up in a town of 50,000 people where the only bookstores (for new books–the used market was great) were mall bookstores was bad. Imagine living in a city of a quarter million people with no bookstore, and none within 150 miles. On the plus side, if you’ve got a credit card, there’s always the Interweeb, but what about the children? What about the children!? (insert obligatory and boring Texas joke here.)
David Rees, much like Ferocious J earlier in the week, captures my feelings about the current US legislative bodies.
I have three of the things on David Bowie’s iPod in my collection: the two Canadian artists and the Gavin Byars stuff (there’s a Tom Waits connection there)… but the rest of it, well, let’s just say I plan to check that stuff out. If it’s good enough for Bowie, I should give it a listen, right?
I’m not sure about the use of the term “rich”–but it comes as no surprise to me that the salaried workers at the high end of the salary scale have a lot less “leisure time” than people at the low end, and that a much larger portion of that “leisure time” is structured and stressful. It you’re working for someone else (i.e. drawing a salary), and making a lot of money, then you’re going to spend a lot of time “doing compulsory things and feeling stressed”. If you can afford to be involved in a lot of organized leisure, especially with kids, then a lot less of your non-work time is “free” than if you can’t.It doesn’t require, or deserve, sympathy, it’s part of the deal.
California switched to pre-filled tax forms, where the government filled in all the stuff it already knew for you, leaving your work to be very, very simple for most people, and found that processing them cost only 13% of what it costs to process a traditional paper form. Who’s the biggest roadblock to getting that same plan done at the federal US level? Intuit–the guys who make the tax software. Ironically, they argue that it would be a “conflict of interest for government to be both tax collector and tax preparer” while somehow missing out on the fact that the very fact that they are making an argument is the essence of conflict of interest.
I wonder if the dude would make armour for yappy dogs, because I know someone… actually forget I was thinking that, that kind of amusing myself would probably get me killed.(back)
So, did you read about Hugo Chavez accusing the US of causing the Haiti earthquakes with HAARP weaponry? I saw some discussion of that story, and thought it was a sign that Chavez had gone off the reservation… but it appears that it’s that the story is the result of some shoddy journalism and the Internet echo-amplification, not anything factual. Now the paranoid part of my brain is wondering if someone could cook up something like this on purpose specifically to reduce Chavez’s international credibility.
If you are at all interested in how the business of publishing may change in response to some current disruptive technology shifts–and particularly if you’re interested in looking at the question from an author’s point of view–you should really pop over to Charlie Stross’ blog and read his post there outlining some thoughts on the question and asking for reader comments. This is one of those cases where the “don’t read the comments” rule does not apply: there are a couple of hundred comments there now with a pretty high signal-to-noise ratio, and lots of interesting (and some very scary) ideas are being kicked around.
What you’re looking at there is a list of the 32 most common passwords from among the set of more than 32 million users of RockYou. The top item, ’123456′ was used by more than 300,000 users.
We don’t normally get to look at actual user data in sets this large, but one benefit of the recent privacy breach at RockYou is that researchers get a look at the data (and we get to see some of the aggregate results).
Of course some caveats will apply when drawing conclusions from the data. For example, while the site apparently has 32 million users (or at least there are 32 million accounts, which isn’t quite the same thing) I think we can assume that the nature of the site (as far as I can tell from a quick inspection it’s for making slideshows that you can embed into social media? Something like that?) results in some self-selection effects in the pool of users. It wouldn’t surprise me to find that the site skews heavily towards a particular demographic, so that kind of thing would need to be taken into account when reaching any conclusions about the data.
It’s probably also likely that people would consider a password to the site to not be a “high security” item, as compared to say a banking site, or a blog/facebook/whatever. So for at least some users the password selection algorithm would only speak to their behaviour at site the perceive as “low risk”–you can’t draw conclusions about behaviour of users in all situations from what they do at RockYou.
Even with those caveats in place, though, the list says a few things. Most of the passwords are painfully simple. None of them contain symbol characters or mixed case. The ones that do mix letters and digits are the single dumbest examples of a password you could make by doing that. None of that particularly surprises me–it’s what I would expect. Most of the users probably open attachments in email from people they don’t know, and some of them probably think they’re getting a bunch of illicit money out of Nigeria.
What does surprise me a little is the set of first name passwords, and their rankings. I might have expected to see those, but I think I would have expected them to occur in the same order that the names occur in population–they’d be either the user’s name, or the name of someone special to them, presumably, and over a data set this large that should tend towards to same rankings as the names. So why is “nicole” the first one? Why “daniel” next?
I wish I thought “rockyou” being the top ten was a general result–people giving the devil horns to computers–but I’m afraid that at a site called RockYou that one’s probably a gimme.
“chocolate” I can accept–it aligns with my understanding of women. “FRIENDS” I suspect is again site-specific. But what’s up with “babygirl” and “monkey”? Lots of new parents making slideshows for the family? “soccer” one assumes is also a ‘functional’ choice–used for soccer slideshows?.
“tigger”, I admit, confuses me.
Apparently to crack a site like this I won’t need rainbow tables. A dictionary of 5000 common passwords would get me into over 6 million of the accounts:
More disturbing, said Mr. Shulman, was that about 20 percent of people on the RockYou list picked from the same, relatively small pool of 5,000 passwords.
The explanation for this that the researchers offer isn’t a shock:
Security experts suggest that we are simply overwhelmed by the sheer number of things we have to remember in this digital age.
“Nowadays, we have to keep probably 10 times as many passwords in our head as we did 10 years ago,” said Jeff Moss, who founded a popular hacking conference and is now on the Homeland Security Advisory Council. “Voice mail passwords, A.T.M. PINs and Internet passwords — it’s so hard to keep track of.”
I guess that makes sense. Particularly for what’s probably viewed as a “low risk” site by anyone in the user population who even passingly thinks about security. Still, I’m a tinfoil hat guy, so for me passwords need to look like ’6D@HOyf]PoF’ or I get nervous.
And I need to have a different password for every site I’m going to use as more than a one-off–as a paranoid I would worry that if I used the same password in different places that system operators from one place could misuse the information to access my resources at another site. I actually saw this happen a fair bit in the old dial-up BBS days before the Internet1.
Of course I can’t remember passwords like that for the hundreds of places I have accounts, so I make use of Password Safe (there are lots of equivalent tools–this is just the one I happen to have started using years ago, and it works). It’s a pain in the ass, but that’s the deal with security–it’s a trade off between risk and ass-pain.
While I understand that most people wouldn’t want to be bothered with something like that, I do wonder why we haven’t seen more wide-spread adoption of the site-specific password generators that use a master key to hash up a password for any site based on the site name. People don’t have to understand how the things work, or what a hash algorithm is–all they would need to know is that whenever they press the “password fill” button they need to enter their master password, and the computer will fill the field with the site specific password for that site. To the end user it’s functionally equivalent to using the same password everywhere, but the level of security is vastly improved. There are Firefox plugins that implement this now–things like Password Hasher or PwdHash–but I wonder why something like this isn’t just built into the browsers.
If it were, a leak like RockYou’s wouldn’t have presented the same kind of issues–yes, the malefactors would still have everyone’s RockYou passwords, but there wouldn’t be any issue of being able to reuse those passwords to get access to the users’ resources on other systems.
And we wouldn’t have this embarrassing list to look at.
Looking at politics here, and in our neighbour to the south, I am starting to think that there’s maybe something to the depressive realism proposition. I am too rage-fatigued to post about today’s particular stories, but as usual Ferocious J has it covered, saying what I would probably say if I had the energy left to rant.
Almost equally interesting, but both more immediately amusing, and more soul-destroying in the long term, are the comments on the various videos. Youtube comments are infamous as being among the worst repositories of drivel on the net, but some of these are choice even by that standard. The ones on the Cronkite report, for example, seem to contain within them the very antithesis of the rationality and clear thought that Russell argued for.
I may be doing some more Youtube searches to see what other unexpected goodies I can turn up, but I think I’m going to ignore those comments.
“The real voyage of discovery consists of not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.” If I am recalling correctly, that’s a Proust line. I’ve always liked that formulation–it ties into both what I think one of the main points of travel is1, and into that Zen-ish notion of trying to always come to things with new eyes, with the ability to see the wonder that is always there.
Or, as Thoreau puts it, in a much pithier form: “The question is not what you look at, but what you see.”
I do make a bit of an effort to try to actually see what’s going on around me, but I suspect that I fall dreadfully short a lot of the time. That’s one of the reasons I love novels–they’re wonderful little packages of “seeing through different eyes”.
And the best novelists, of course, the ones that make stories that transcend their plots and show us something about life that leaves us changed, must also look at the world through eyes that see.
Which is a long build up leading to this: I think I actually love Jonathan Carroll’s blog. Every day there’s a little something there, and with a stunning regularity what’s there is something that makes me wish I could see the world around me with Carroll’s eyes. I’ve been reading it for at around five years now, and I am always excited when I see a new entry appear in my reader.
Take for example this recent posting (yes, this is the whole post):
The two women at lunch– mother and daughter, obviously. The girl is beautiful, tall, eighteen or so. She can’t sit still in her seat. She bounces around, tosses her hair, eats too fast, talks a mile a minute while looking all around just in case there is something interesting she hasn’t seen yet. The mother is also beautiful, perhaps fifty, her eyes alone are a 500 page novel. Serene and smiling she is a total contrast to the young woman sitting across the table. How happy she is to be here with her daughter, how proud. Not many years ago this is the same child who frequently tried every bit of patience she had. The difficult student, the one with dyslexia or ADHD, or just wildly impatient about anything that didn’t interest her. But now look at her– this wonder, this young woman who is moving way too quickly out of my life and into her own. She has already set sail and I can only watch. But today she’s generous enough to have lunch with Mom and talk about things that matter with her first, her greatest pal. She doesn’t even know it is a gift. But Mom does.
Damn.
I’ve been a fan of Carroll’s novels since before I was old enough to drive–more than 20 years now–and I am always excited when a new one comes out. I have inscribed copies of all of them, in swank editions where they were made. But you know, over the last 5 years, or however long it’s been that I’ve been reading this blog, the way I primarily think of Carroll has changed. I no longer think of him as the man who wrote those novels, but instead as the guy who looks at the world and sees the stories in it2. And perhaps more importantly, can communicate that experience.
Or, to put it another way, add this feed to your RSS reader. You’ll thank me. You’ll never see moving vans, people on cell phones, Christmas contacts from old friends, or many other things the same way again.
And you’ll end up buying the novels, if you haven’t already.
Some of which he has used as basic building material in crafting wonderful novels–an exercise that uses a very different set of talents from the seeing, of course.(back)
BLANCHE
Now thou seest what happens, Lebowski, when the agreements of honourable business stand compromised. If thou wouldst treat money as water, flowing as the gentle rain from heaven, why, then thou knowest water begets water; it will be a watery grave your rug, drowned in the weeping brook. Pray remember, Lebowski.
THE KNAVE
Thou err’st; no man calls me Lebowski. Yet thou art man; neither spirit damned nor wandering shadow, thou art solid flesh, man of woman born. Hear rightly, man!—for thou hast got the wrong man. I am the Knave, man; Knave in nature as in name.
If you aren’t already laughing, you can move along to the next post now.
[THE KNAVE’s house. THE KNAVE is in his bath]
THE KNAVE
I am conducted to a gentle bath.
Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this Knave
Clean from the land?
[Alarums. Enter OLIVER and the two NIHILISTS, bearing a marmot]
Forsooth! This be a place
Of residence, and much a private place.—
O excellent marmot!
OLIVER
Anon, we crave the money, Lebowski.
We speak in neither jest nor fallacy.
We could do such stuff as dreams do feature,
Believing in nothing; empty and void.
Tomorrow if thou hast not the ransom
We shall recourse, and cut off thy Johnson.
[Exeunt severally]
Sam, of course, plays the Chorus.
CHORUS
Ay, there’s a good one. How fares the Knave?
THE KNAVE
So foul and fair a day I have not seen.
CHORUS
Such a day, I mark thee, whereupon the winter of our discontent is ne’er made glorious summer. A gentleman wiser than myself did say that on some such days, thou exits, pursued by a bear, and on others, the bear exits, pursued by you.
THE KNAVE
By my troth, a good philosophy. Was’t of the Orient?
CHORUS
Nay, far from it. I mark well thy fashion, good Knave.
THE KNAVE
And I thy fashion, stranger.
If this post isn’t just meaningless ramblings to you, go see it all.
I think we ought always to entertain our opinions with some measure of doubt. I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to believe any philosophy, not even mine.
Which is a long build up leading to this: I think I actually love 
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