Latest Parries
December 2012
Some Consumer Affairs
I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
R eading Shardik by Richard Adams, famous for Watership Down. Chose it because it’s about religion, and Adams demonstrated such insight there with the rabbits’ religion — “Oh Frith on the hill, he made it all for us!” — that he’s clearly a contributor to our understanding of ourselves and our meaning addiction. Ah, once upon a time one used to be interested in such things before reading degenerated to scouring the blogosphere for news of the Reich.
All the world will be your enemy, Prince with the Thousand Enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you [music swells]. But first they must catch you, Runner, listener [something, I forget], Prince with the Swift Warning. Be cunning, and your people will never be destroyed!
What a work! How magnificently he manages to create majesty in a rabbit way with these recitations. And the movie does such justice to the novel as well. Another joy of ‘Down is that it’s set in our world but with the focus adjusted slightly, like Tom & Jerry cartoons where adults are only shown up to the knee. Shardik is also set in our world, but in prehistory, which is another reason I was attracted to it, though I’m a bit disappointed that it’s not set during the unfathomably long dawn of man that Nietzsche suggested people write about but at a time when we are already farming, building cities and forging empires.
However, instead of reading over the weekend, I took my newly retuned bike for a ride to new parts of town to see what we could see. With Gerry Rafferty’s “Garden of England” playing repeatedly in the headphones, I rode all the way up steep Elm Grove to the Brighton Racetrack, from where there’s two somewhat vast and melancholy views down to the sea. From there ‘twas down the other side to Roedean, a ‘hood maer’n a wee bit clatty. With the kids hanging out on the street kind of looking at you funny, wondering why anybody not from there would bother going there, it reminded me of Glasgow somehow. As did the streets not too far away with spectacular, grand homes overlooking the sea — they reminded me of our own old street back in the southern ‘burbs of Glasgow, with each house large and very different to the ones either side of it, though these were grander and the location rather more desirable. These streets meet the edge of the land belonging to the famous girl’s school that looks like Harry Potter’s Hogwarts but bigger.
It’s great to be back on the bike. When on it I feel very much myself, that this is very much me, who I am. When having the motorino at Rome, getting on the bicycle felt uncomfortable and hard work, but now that it’s been a few months without an engine the old biking instinct is back. Having had so many exhilarated hours on the bike it’s no wonder. So I predict: there shall be larger bike rides to parrie on about across merry England.
Previously
Short Stuff
Nextly
Mind the Dream