Tabs from my browser…

  • el
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  • I do, however, load up on 48 AA batteries at a time which everything I own except the cat seems to require.

    A Fair(y) Use Tale

    my personal favorite, Gerald McBoing Boing, or their highly stylized version of The Tell Tale Heart or their adaptation of James Thurber’s The Unicorn in the Garden or the oft-neglected Christopher Crumpet and Family Circus or…

    The Star Wars franchise and the American Empire are all about “more.” More product for you and me, and exported to others whether they like it or not. Free-Dumb for all. Consumerism, baby. Have you consumed Star Wars yet? Bought the video game, the toys, the fast food meal?

    The pursuit of “dominance” in foreign policy led the Bush administration to ignore the UN, to do serious damage to our most important alliances, to violate international law, and to cultivate the hatred and contempt of many in the rest of the world. The seductive appeal of exercising unconstrained unilateral power led this president to interpret his powers under the constitution in a way that brought to life the worst nightmare of the founders. Any policy based on domination of the rest of the world not only creates enemies for the US and recruits for al-Qaida, but also undermines the international cooperation that is essential to defeating terrorists who wish to harm and intimidate America. Instead of “dominance”, we should be seeking pre-eminence in a world where nations respect us and seek to follow our leadership and adopt our values.

    In 1950, the psychoanalyst Erik H. Erikson, in a famous treatise on the phases of life development, identified wisdom as a likely, but not inevitable, byproduct of growing older. Wisdom arose, he suggested, during the eighth and final stage of psychosocial development, which he described as “ego integrity versus despair.” If an individual had achieved enough “ego integrity” over the course of a lifetime, then the imminent approach of infirmity and death would be accompanied by the virtue of wisdom.

    In the May, 2024 Harper’s is an article by Gideon Lewis-Kraus entitled “A World in Three Aisles: Browsing the Post-Digital Library” on a couple of rogue librarians, Rick Prelinger and Megan Shaw Prelinger. They believe that “the conflict between a so-called digital culture and a so-called print culture is fake; they think we should stop celebrating or lamenting the discontinuous story of how the circuits will displace the shelves, and start telling a continuous story about how the two might fit together” (47).

    “The affinities of all the beings of the same class have sometimes been represented by a great tree… As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.”

    Plan your web sites like you plan your parties.

    When Alex was born,
    we decided that we would not allow toy weapons in our house. Despite our best efforts, he made all kinds of things into weapons, from chewing his toast into an L shape to taking a puzzle piece shaped like Florida from a map of the US and turning it sideways. The irony there does not escape me. We kept away from TV shows and games with gunplay in them, but there was something so attractive to him about mortal combat that it seemed to be hard-wired into his brain. We relented and allowed him to have a wooden sword that we purchased on a trip to Scotland. Then there was a Star Wars lightsaber; then a knight’s helmet and plastic shield. We entered the slippery slope of war toys and battle play, and kept right on sliding.

    Google has deep expertise in designing and assembling energy-efficient PCs – it reportedly has hundreds of thousands or even millions of them running in data centers around the world. The company has also been pushing the computer industry to reengineer personal computers to dramatically reduce their energy consumption.

    The moment the writers of the Gospels set down the words of Jesus they began to kill the message. There is no room for prophets within religious institutions—indeed within any institutions—for as Paul Tillich knew, all human institutions, including the church, are inherently demonic. Tribal societies persecute and silence prophets. Open societies tolerate them at their fringes, and our prophets today come not from the church but from our artists, poets and writers who follow their inner authority. Samuel Beckett’s voice is one of modernity’s most authentically religious. Beckett, like the author of Ecclesiastes, was a realist. He saw the pathetic, empty monuments we spend a lifetime building to ourselves. He knew, as we read in Ecclesiastes, that nothing is certain or permanent, real or unreal, and that the secret of wisdom is detachment without withdrawal, that, since death awaits us all, all is vanity, that we must give up on the childish notion that one is rewarded for virtue or wisdom.

    when he was in his late 80s he developed a fear of falling. This fear arose from the fact that two of his friends had fallen and both ended up in hospital, and one of them had died. So this fear was in a sense justified, but he solved it by spending most of his time in a chair. Within a short time he developed leg ulcers and had no choice but to move into a nursing home. There he spent all of his time in a chair and the bed within two feet of it. He died within six months of a heart attack and with no quality of life whatsoever.

    Skink Lizard Brooch

    as the poems go into the thousands you
    realize that you’ve created very
    little bukowski.

    [tags]Everything is Miscellaneous, Everything is Mucilaginous[/tags]

    Posted in Creative Arts, Journalism, Miscellaneous, People, Politics, Web Publishing
    2 comments on “Tabs from my browser…
    1. tom says:

      Paynter, you really need to work on emancipating your blog from the soul-numbing rigors of Aristotelian taxonomy.

    2. The universes are a great eucalyptus tree, with a proto-galactic substance binding them like blue gum while AI monkeys scamper among the branches inventing little things like radar and proximity fuses.

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