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  I just experienced one of the greatest moments of urbanity in my life.

Walking head-down, spaced-out down Davie Street to the post office, I heard some shouting from accross the street. Looking up, I could see a group of kids running to the small edge of a parking lot exposed above the lobby of a hotel accross the street. They grasped the edge of the half-wall which protected parkers from falling out into the street and learned over, giggling and gesticulating back in my direction.

Suddenly I could see the day-glo greenyellow streak of one of those tiny crazyrubber ultra-bouncy whackyfunballs arcing off the road and bouncing 5 metres up in the air again, coming down fast to the sidewalk a few feet behind me. Someone caught it and maybe two dozen people in various degrees of comprehension of the simple scene —in various stages of "getting it"— paused their strides to look at the road, or the kids on the second floor, or the man who had cocked his arm back with a seemingly-closed fist.

He threw, and by the time the ball hit its zenith at least 25 people on both sides of the street were speculating internally about whether it would make it over the guard wall and into the lot. When it bounced of the large metal bracket holding the glass awning over the entrance, there was a choral gasp choreographed purely by chance and the similarities of similarly-conditioned human consciousnesses. Still more onlookers were attected.

The ball weaved a bouncing path between the cars and ended up starting its final descent onto our street a few feet above my head. I reached up and grasped the ball, took a step back and threw as high and fast as I could. In perhaps two seconds, the ball was back in my hand, having ricocheted off exactly the same span of aluminum and returned in two arcs smaller than that of the original throw by some relation which must involve the golden ratio.

With nearly all of the hundred or so people who were on the sidewalks of this block, as well as many windowside workers, shoppers, coffee-sippers and diners on the inside of the mostly-glass street frontage of the buildings along the side devoting their full attention, I threw again. As the ball left my hand a took a few steps back and to the side; having less confidence than at the moment of my first attempt, I gave up my position as pitcher for the North Side team.

As the ball spun wildly back from south to north, having failed once again to make its target, I watched the the great diversity of people watching each other and smiling, those closest to the action either stepping towards their own internal anticipated future ball path or curving their shoulders inward and their bodies away, signaling their willingness to let others take on the risks and rewards of throwing (or perhaps their intention of staying as far out of the spotlight as possible).

Chimeral slapstick music and "boing!" SFX came vividly to mind as I imagined the pans, zooms and cuts which a typical A's B-iest C Video's-type show would choose to highlight the action in this street scence most candid. The expressions on people's faces —even the punks and bums, the mobile-phone talking yuppies, the cart-pushing senior citizens, everyone— was, really, really, priceless.

The next attempt, by someone who spectacularily fumbled and recovered the first contact his hand made with the ball, began with vigorously throwing the ball down instead of up, giving it a mid-point from which to gain leverage and acheive a higher y-point its intersection with the z-plane of a wall on the south side of the block. This clever change in strategy got the ball into the lot where it prompted bounced of an internal beam and back out again.

After this last defeat the "oh!"s of the half-dozen kids poking out of the parking lot began diminishing as their attention faded. People started to resume those conversations which had been pre-empted the attention-requiring action unfolding mid-block. A few of those who had become stationary resumed their stride.

Another attempt along the same lines did slightly worse and the ball ended up taking much longer to resolve itself onto either side of the street. Two men learning up against the wall clumsily fumbled it, each in turn, and the ball roll to my feet. I tossed it back to the first man who seemed to want it more, but he dropped it again and it twisted crazily away and back into the street, bouncing off the curbs, getting run over and shot into the air after emerging from the back of a tire, hitting the grill of one truck and the roof of a taxi, becoming harder to follow as the motor traffic regained the momentum it lost to the drivers' attention to the gawking of the pedestrians.

By then, almost no-one was paying any attention any more. The parking lot gang was no longer visible and had presumably lost interest in recovering their plaything. Even the people who weren't doing anything other than sit and stare or sip or smoke before the scene unfolded, returned their gaze to nowhere in particular. And the ball rolled slower and slower in the gutter.

And that was that. I started walking again in dumb wonder at how so many people can be drawn together into a shared attention and consciousness while at all times maintaining their own internal mono/dia/multi/logues. Everyone knew what was going on and knew that everyone else did as well. No acknowledgement of shared attention was offered or sought, and in the end the situation became relatively mundane and quickly fogotten

But for a short time it was wonderful, and it was mostly wonderful for its spontaneity and (for lack of a better way of putting it) obviousness; how this mere arrangement of humans (and ball) — that is all it really was — came together and then apart so easily, without any effort of plan, but was as there as a gorilla in the middle of the road would have been. The postures of the actors had pragmatic content and even semantic value as much as any written sign would; the ballistic movements involved and the noticible attention-worthiness accorded to the scene by others gave it as much hold on the minds of the people on the street as that written sign would if it was composed of metre-tall burning letters of mahogony borne by that same gorilla. The common mind, the collective (non "sub-") consciousness had never been so apparent to me.

This self-organized moment of shared apprehension and cognition (intersubjectivity anyone?) lasted maybe 30 seconds in all but contained within itself whole possible literatures and traditions of sociology, psychology, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, urban anthropology and, surely, things I wouldn't ever be able to think of. (Cf., Leibniz and Whitehead on the infinite mystery of the entire universe being present in any of its finite of even infinitessimal instantiation-bits).

Anyway, I'm off to the post office now. (Thank goodness for conveniently located internet cafes — ubiquitous access is a great thing.)




Wednesday, April 25

  To be filled in later.




Tuesday, April 24

  To be completed later.

  Some things I might want to be when I grow up (seriously) but which aren't in, say, the top five:

• parfumier
• restauranteur
• neurologist
• high school teacher
• management consultant (for a business-philosophy consultancy)
• shoe designer

  Yodle-eh-he-oo, yodle-le-ee-ou, yodle-eh-hee / Odle-le-lee oo-ouo-ee odle-eh-hee / Yodle-odle-oh-hee-ou olde-eh-hee-odle-lee / oh-lee-olde-ou oh-hee-hee ... yodle-eh-hee!

Dear reader, I have so many things to tell you, and I will be getting to them all shortly. Unfortunately, I've let a lot of things pile up and so I can't share much right now. And, even worse (this sure makes me sad) — it turns out that our Mandlebrot Monk (dated April 1st, 1999) is likely a hoax. (So Milo reports, passing on info from the Glassdog mailing list). Snakes! (Though I did find a "Web Log" on the same site as the M.Monk. Ladders!)




Friday, April 20

  After clicking on a link in an ancient Stating the Obvious essay which led to the now dead word.com and that goddamn Zapata Corp page it redirects to, we* were made to be mad. And then we were made to think of all the good times we had with word. Remember (it was really not so long ago) that whole redesign-as-Yahoo funniness? Evidence of the prank (?), which is fast disappearing from the web, is getting harder to find.

Here is an article on the whole thing from the Standard (A Word-for-Word Imitation) and a google search so you can pick up your own copies of the "Letter from the Art Director" (parts 1 and 2) and the mailbag response while they last (tip: if you truncate all the search terms from Google's cache URLs the highlighting will disappear).

*I am not using the royal "we". There were two people in the room.




Thursday, April 19

  I had this haunting dream last night which took me until the late evening to get over. A old friend (who I keep missing when we are in the same city) had a strangely swollen face and had mostly gone blind. He had lost his job because of the encroaching blindness and couldn't work. He was unloved and desperate, and quickly becoming more so. I wanted to help him but couldn't; it was like he was a leper. I knew he would die like this. It was horrible.

  The Mandlebrot Monk: "Udo of Aachen, a 13th century German monk, plotted a 120x120 Mandelbrot fractal by hand. Took him 9 years to calculate." (via Milo, quoted) Bzwaaa!




Monday, April 16

  Found today at Tanglewood books, among a half-dozen others Iamblichus' biogaphy of Pythagoras (I am on the upswing of an Iamblichus/all-things-Pythagorean kick since hearing of and ordering The Theology of Arithmetic: On the Mystical, Mathematical, and Cosmological Symbolism of the First Ten Numbers — now, that's a title!) and a book made of transcriptions of David Bohm lectures called Thought as a System.

That made me remember an old Scientific American article on Bohm's alternative to quantum mechanics which I thought I ought to re-read first ("This theory, ignored for most of the past four decades, challenges the probabilistic, subjectivist picture of reality implicit in the standard formulation of quantum mechanics"). So I found it in the last issue of the last magazine file I went through (annoying!), though I needn't've bothered: the article is also online (I am starting to love the internet again).

Do I sound smart now? Good. Because, on the other hand, I bought one of these: Swiffer: A Revolutionary Way to Clean! (cf., swiffer criticism from the CBC show Street Cents) which I had been curious about since (a) seeing an ad a year or two ago, (b) reading about its effect on P&G's balance sheets and (c) seeing some of the research photos in a book(let) published by Contiuum.

Verdict? A triumph in reinventing one of the most prosaic of products. Packaging was genius (a mop that folds into a 6" x 6" by 16" box will be stocked in many more places than conventional mops). Some very nice graphic design examples (top notch instructional illustrations). Feels good to use (we were excited running it all around my floors). Picks up lots of things that my broom missed, no need for a dust pan, viral marketing coupons inside (each time a friend uses one to purchase the "starter kit", I get sent another $2 off my next refill pack). Damn, they are getting good at this ... and it is really horrible for us all. "Disposable mop" indeed.




Saturday, April 14

  In some language, there must be a word for this kind of regret/shame over a mistake/oversight (if you know the word, tell it to me): somehow 5k haikus, a 5k entry from the 2000 competition was not made a finalist. It was really quite good.

Its creator, Michael Lascarides, runs a site called electrotone.com which includes a (now dead?) weblog (framed, no link), some good photos and the [electrotone] web design guide (this is really great, especially 'black', 'scrolling' and 'screen' — my new favorite reference for students.)

  My kitchen is now a kitchen in which food is cooked. My bedroom has never looked so good. In its final months of being mine, my apartment is becoming a home.




Wednesday, April 11

  2.5: Time it takes to go through old boxes of miscellaneous in my closets (garbage? goodwill? keep it?) in hours per cubic foot. Ugh.

  Today in line at the post office I tried to enjoy breathing, which was ok for a while. Then I tried to not listen, not even wait, but be quite still and ordinary and just let the racks of tape and envelopes and pens and Post-it® notes and pads roll in ecstasy at my feet, but I think I need to practice that more.

Mostly I was just bored, and I marvelled once more at the incredibly similar to one another all the staff at my local post office seem to be. So slow. Helpful, thorough and pleasant, but so incredibly slow. The must be either abnormally happy or abnormally sad.

After a few more minutes, something else dawned on me: how amazing it is that we humans, as a species, have developed such systems and rules and agreements and ways of behaving that are necessary for something like all the various postal system to work individually and together. Bracketing the question of whether it is as good as it ought to be, and what in particular might need changing, it is astonishing that we have managed to get it together enough for there to be money and large drug stores which contain post offices within them and medicine and prescriptions and Post-it® notes, not to mention libraries and air travel and the internet and nicotine gum.

Anyway, I was in there for so long that I realized there were a few things I needed to write down. So I grabbed a pen pack off the shelf and opened it and wrote those things down and later, having waited for a long time, and having completed my several transactions, and having left the store and walked halfway home, I realized I was still cluching the open pen pack in the hand that had all the important bits of paper in it. I had stolen pens.

  virtualom.com which, frankly, is really fucking psychedelic.




Tuesday, April 10

  A great thing about living just where I do live is being about to run down to the beach in just a few minutes to go watch the sunset. Today I went right down to the point where the water mingles with the sand and slowly moved my head up and down, watching the thin film of water sink into the sand by my feet and up and over the expanse of micro-undulating reflections to the horizon and the interesting things silhouetted against it and finally up to the sky and the oranges which lead to pinks which lead to twilight blues and then all the back again to my feet. Lovely.

Also, because I had mentioned it to a few people before, rock balancing in English Bay Beach and some good Vancouver pictures, mostly of the downtown peninsula..

  Ludwig Soprano (screen grab of Amazon screwiness).

Also for the misc_bin, some screen shots (been sitting on my desktop for months now) of Eudora doing interesting things. Like, here, one day adding an icon to the toolbar which turned out to be an ad, or here, taking me to task for overlapping my windows incorrectly.

  I have just finished going through every entry for this year's 5k. While they were coming in, my impression was mostly "hum drum". But having gone through them all at once I see that about half are pretty bad, a quarter are OK and a quarter are really phenomenal. I can't believe how much thought and then how much production work went into some of them. Really amazing. Now I'm glad we did it again.

  Mitsu usually zens me, but this was some good zen! (Synthetic Zero, March 8th.) Quoting Kafka (Mitsu's italics):

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and ordinary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

The Zen people call this the "gateless gate." We cannot gain entry because we do not have to go through the gate in the first place. There is another way. But we only have our lifetime to pass through the gate that is not a gate. More precisely, we only have this one moment. Luckily we keep getting the moment back again. But we don't get a second chance. Thankfully we don't even need the first chance.

  I wonder how I will feel when I wake up tomorrow.




Monday, April 9

  It is finally time for Ms Pink, as in, mspink.com, as in the long-awaited new site from Arwynne O'Neil who is without any doubt one of the most, let's say, "self-actualized" people I know. Nice to see a persona developed for a now-failed dot.com resurrected with indy flair.

I realized something early in the day. Bad massages are worse than bad sex. And, in keeping with the comparison, considerably worse for someone who is uncomfortable speaking up to say "harder" or "you mean that's IT?" What little relaxation was gained from the massage quickly wore off during the mile and a half walk home in the freezing rain.

  Tonight there was a fantastic sunset over a pod of tankers and hundreds of people sitting on benches and logs watching as if it was a special occasion. Then, walking back of the hill I heard people speaking in French, Cantonese, Tagalog, Arabic and (I think) Portuguese. And I thought about hassles involved in a move to Amsterdam and rued the silly bureaucracies which exists to prevent Russians from moving here or Nigerians to Italy or me to the Netherlands. Silly, silly. Mostly because it is all about the cities. Even when the old divisions between nations go, cities will remain important both as jurisdictions and as identity-givers. Amsterdam would be glad to have me and I'd be happy to take in pretty much anybody who got it together to move here for the nice sunsets and pleasant bustle.

  Great airplane reading today: a session with The Essential William H. Whyte reading a few of the essays he wrote for Fortune Magazine in the late 40s-early 50s. These articles were the basis of the book The Organization Man which followed in '56. I actually had to force myself to stop reading so I'd have some of the book left: I got through the planning and urban anthropology sections last night and not much remains.

When I tucked it into the-seat-pocket-in-front-of-me I noticed a non-airline magazine stuck in there. Lo! New Atlantic Monthly. Cover story: "The Organization Kid" by the guy who wrote the book that gave us the term Bobos (and from what I know of the extension of that term, it covers most of my colleagues and doesn't sound all that bad).

In this essay, Brooks doesn't mention Whyte even once, but it is the obvious allusion and reading it almost immediately after "The Class of '49" was fascinating. Whyte talks about the 150,000 students graduating from American colleges the 1949 as the harbinger of a "generation of managers", a group irresistibly drawn to the safety of AT&T or General Electric and one which spurns "one of the most cherished prerogatives of youth. Forty-nine is taking no chances."

Having been born into the great depression and started school right after the end of a world war, Whyte reasoned that this bunch had the entrepreneur bred out of them, and the lover of large organization bred into them. But then, 45 years later, Brooks explains that the students he recently met with at Princeton, the ones whose nights are filled with studying and stairmasters and volunteering and who have to schedule appointments to hang out with their friends, that these students came out conformist and safety-seeking for just the opposite reason: the stock market always goes up, the cold war is over, things always got better and there is no evil, only "sickness".

Further, they were raised at the beginnings of a giant shift from "the idea that children should be given freedom to chart their own learning to a belief that adults have a responsibility to reshape the minds of kids whose behaviour deviates from the norm" (Ritalin, etc.) He points out that from 1981 to 1997, the amount of time that children aged three to twelve spent watching TV was down 23%, studying time was up 20% and time spent engaging in organized sports up 27%. He cites a 1997 Gallup survey which has 82% of teenagers describing their home life as either "wonderful" or "good". Another survey the next year found the four most frequent items on teenagers' lists of "major problems facing America today" to be "selfishness, people who do not respect the law and the authorities, wrongdoing by politicians, lack of parental discipline". Hard, he goes on, to imagine the teenagers of 1965 complaining about a lack of respect for authorities and parental discipline.

It goes on like this, touching on the idea of moral education having disappeared ("It's impossible to imagine a modern university president mentioning the devil or the beast in a commencement address.") the dissolution of the generation gap (he notices a campus recruiting ad for KPMG which exhorts students to "make their parents smile") and what happens to children who grow up in "a world in which the counterculture and the mainstream culture have merged with, and co-opted, each other. For them ... it's natural that hippies work at ad agencies ... and that hi-tech entrepreneurs quote Dylan and wear black jeans to work. For them it is natural that parents should listen to Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, and the Doors—just like kids ... There have been no senseless bloodbaths like World War I or Vietnam, no crushing economic depressions, no cycles of assassination and rioting to foment disillusionment. They've mostly known parental protection, prosperity and peace."

The coming wave of leaders "spend their afternoons and weekends shuttling from one skill-enhancing activity to another" but end up appearing, in Brooks' mind anyway, remarkably similar to many the people who lead during his own very diffferent childhood and adolescence: the Class of '49. Good to read together; sorry I couldn't find the Whyte essay online.

  My phone is now more than 1000 miles away from me. Ooops. It returns Wednesday evening. In the meantime, my (normally fax-only) landline is in the book.

  An effective way to prevent your life from being unexamined is to ask yourself "what is my motive for doing, saying, feeling or thinking this?".




Sunday, April 8

  I'm at the end of Day Five of a spontaneously self-imposed week long no meat, no dairy, and no wheat regime and I am taking great pleasure in the discipline, not to mention great pleasure in raw fruits and vegetables and the occasional nut or seed. Yesterday was relatively hard though, with lunch in a nice (-looking) french bistro followed by many hours at a well-appointed backyard BBQ, but this morning's out of character decision by my dining partner to have Kraft Dinner for breakfast was by far the most challenging moment. I never knew it was so fragrant. The bits of dried safety-orange powder and clumps of half-mixed stuff which fringe the spoon and pot provoked visceral memories of the sharp cheese explosion, a flavor assualt that is - emarrassingly? - one of my fondest memories. Those tastes & smells are easy to remember.

  Canada is the world's number one pork exporting country, but in the United States you cannot prohibit the selling of books on public property by local ordinance. (More information can be found in the Swine Economics Report.)




Friday, April 6

  Ethicist and animal rights type person Peter Singer in Nerve on Midas Dekkers' book Dearest Pet: On Bestiality. Seems like it is going somewhere, but then it just ends.




Thursday, April 5

  Duck? Rabbit?
On a brisk late night walk last week, along the seawall between the ocean and the trees, I noticed all-at-once how much pleasure I was getting from each breath: In (Ah!) Out (Mm!), like some internal massage. (Maybe this is my lungs thanking me for quitting smoking.)

It occured to me how different my life would be if I could learn to always enjoying breathing like that, to deeply appreciate each in- and ex- halation. What could I possibly worry about then?




Wednesday, April 4

  Whoa! Holy duck-rabbits!*, **  I just had a seriously disorienting gestalt-shift. Coffee, sun, reasonable rates for gym-membership, juice, having a dog. I'm in love! What a great world!

**Essay: The Duck-Rabbit, Duchamp’s Fountain, and the Death Penalty. I have not read it. No warranties either implied or explicit.

  In "classical logic", the propositional calculus, that notation you might know (the one whose symbol are neither ASCII nor ANSI), conditional statements the antecedent of which are false are themselves always true. In fact "if not-p then (if p then q)" is a necessary truth, if only in the sillily impoverished world of propositional calculus semantics*. We call this kind of truth (merely) "vacuous" and we will sometimes (triumphantly) declare a certain hard-argued truth "non-vacuous" to distinguish it and mark it as having some kind of importance.

However, it sure seems that there are conditional truths which are true AND non-vacuous: like, "If I had flown on Tuesday I woulda saved $132" or "Had I known he loved me, I never would have left him for Jim." (This is one of many reasons why classical logic is just "classical".)

In Counterfactuals (abstract; interesting paper about) David Lewis develops a formal way of dealing with counterfactuals, as well as a pleasing informal semantics. The idea is that a statement of the form "if it were the case that p, then it would be the case that q" means roughly the same thing as "in the possible world which is most similar to our own in all respects other than it being the case that p, it is also the case that q". (Never mind about the nature and status of these "worlds" beyond their value as a tool of semantic interpretation.) These things are never as simple as they seem.

Lewis starts the book with the following example: "If Kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over." Of course, any world in which Kangaroos had no tails would be at least slightly different from our own in more ways than the simple presence or absence of tails affixed to Kangaroos: the Kangaroo genome would also be different, the trails they left in the sand would be different, the illustrations created for encyclopedias would be different, and so on in mind numbingly many ways. You can never just change one thing.

All of this is a roundabout way of getting to a thought about me: changing the way a person stands in relation to someone else changes the way that person stands in relation to all sorts of different things. Just like a bunch of pieces on a chess board or simple points on a plane (except far, far more complicated) you can't move A relative only to B and not also to C and D and E and F ... I am changing how I stand in relation to all sorts of things. What I notice most is the manifold of tiny, almost imperceptible and yet still non-vacuous changes; if we were together, I would ...

- - - - -

Also, really unrelated, go to calamondin and look at the March 21st right-side entry about birthday presents. Now, I bought her a copy of Freshmen magazine (here's something quite blog-like by one of their models) as part of a sort of magazine sampler, which included Nest and some magazine about metalwork. Furthermore, to say that "thirty out of thirty people at the party (of all sorts of sexual persuasions) found [the magazine] neither interesting nor arousing" is just as false as a statement can be: a good twenty-eight of the thirty found it interesting and I'd hazard that fifteen or so found it arousing (it was far and away the most passed-around and talked about present at the party). So, uh, there.

Next, at kottke.org, in this entry, third item: I saw that book in the window of a bookstore and promptly went in and bought it. On a recommendation of "looks like an interesting book". That "awareness" stuff that the branding kids talk about must be powerful.

*Glossary entry for implication and a propositional logic terms and symbols cheat sheet as written by the inventor of Nomic.




Tuesday, April 3

  I've noticed many times that fictional characters are often written to say one another's names much more frequently than seems to occur in my everyday conversations: "Can't you stay longer, Matilda?" "Thanks for all the hay Bernard." etc. It always seems jarring. I wonder if this is a conceit of fiction or something that has gone out of fashion or if I just don't notice it for some reason. What I do notice are the many alternative forms of address contextualized to specific linguistic communities or even participants in particular relationships: second person pronoun substitutes or generic emphatic markers like "brother" or "dude" or "man" or "guys" (men, man, male; notice these: Hofstadter on "guys" is very interesting: google search; all good) or "girl" or "honey" or "baby" or "sweetpea" etc.




Monday, April 2

  I read somewhere just a few days ago, in some weblog, about how one needed momentum to keep writing these things, and once you lose that momentum, it is hard to get back (where was that? anyone?). Rhythm. Rhythm, rhythm.

I lost the beat for a while; what better way to get it back than with pictures?! These are a few images from the last two weeks, interspersed with miscellaneous other things. Like, I'll tell you that in Montréal it is possible to go five days, walking around the city all day, and not see a Starbucks. (These one was spotted on our last night. Pictured from a cab.)

I got an email that said "Just when I start reading your site, it gets boring. Or was it always boring?" It was not always boring. It will become more interesting starting today. Pictured below is the reason I don't ever write anything here anymore. Isn't she a triple darling?

Pictured below her is not chopped liver, but "liver and frank", the side you get when you order a steak in certain establishments. Isn't that just triple meat?



The scenes you see in a day are like this, snapped randomly in the Metro: people's shoes. Or they are like this fragment of a description of the interior of a used computer store: "One customer intently reading every character of the daily price list as though it were the Koran and he were on acid ..."

And one hears things as well. Today, I heard a boyman talking to his girlfriend (?) on a mobile phone, in front of me in line "... is it a material thing? well, yes I guess it is ... it's not flowers, no, no ... you won't find out until, what time is now? twouhthreeuhmmmseven nine hours ... no it's not a PT Cruiser, I doan got thah kinda cash babee..."; that's a lyric if I ever heard one.

This last is some food, a snack-y dinner, which was served on a white table cloth atop a brass tablish item which I walked in and took out of my dead grandmother's house a few weeks ago. I could have whatever I wanted (except the painting I wanted). I took mostly old packages: Velcro, a dot snappers kit, some matches, super "Quink", Dennison De luxe Gummed Reinforcements, paper-wrapped pencils, and a large assortment of word games (Scrabble brand and otherwise) the names of which I had mostly never heard before.

Significant in the picture is the bottle of "vinegar" (which you are not supposed to call vinegar). Exquisite stuff, little tiny diluted bits of which contain molecules formed by plants which lived long before there was a state called Italy. Also significant is that I now enjoy olives. Another few years and I will be a "grown up".

I think that my new job may be to go to vacation homes and take pictures or people's piles of things and see where they hang and just sort of go hang out with them and take notes, but in a way that they don't notice. Or I'll move to Chicago. Anyway, I'll talk to you again soon.

  Chop Wood, Carry Water
I get these silly (?) chop wood carry water type fantasies every once in a while. You know, live in quiet solitude, enjoying simple pleasures, be patient, make things. But then I notice the pile of dishes in my sink. Run water, wash dishes. Excepting the solitude part (which, who knows, may be necessary) I could do all that here or anywhere. Enjoy simple pleasures, be patient, make things. Sweep the floor, keep the kitchen spotless and derive limitless satisfaction from making her tea or discovering a new melody or learning a new word.

I'm 28 and I don't know if that's silly or not. (Ha ha! I already know that no-one even knows if it is silly or not. 36, 43, 58, 67, 81, here I come.)




Sunday, April 1

  Slow and steady wins the race.

Here are some of the other things on this site:

The 5k contest
Which now has its own home, and so really isn't on this site anymore. Almost ready for viewing.

Stephen Toulmin's 1979 Ryerson Lecture at the University of Chicago, The Inwardness of Mental Life, reprinted with the kind permission of the Author & the University.

An excerpt from an interview with philosopher Donald Davidson, which I find complements the former.

A motion study where you can see all the frames of an animation at once, but also still see the animation.

Some pictures of my friend Paul spinning around in some art, which is really a machine.

Some pictures of Illuminares, Vancouver's annual latern festival.

Some pictures of The Symphony of Fire, Vancouver's annual fireworks competition.

A video from my second trip to Vegas in the year 2000. Sad, that.

And more, to be dusted off.