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Text modifications are minimal in WordPress, so I set the text up in word, then cut and paste to see what special fetures will and will not follow the transition.Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Quisque sed felis. Aliquam sit amet felis. Mauris semper, velit semper laoreet dictum, quam diam dictum urna, nec placerat elit nisl in quam. Etiam augue pede, molestie eget, rhoncus at, çonvallis ut, eros. Aliquam pharetra. Nulla in tellus eget odio sagittis blandit. Maécenas at nisl. Nullam lorem mi, eleifend a, fringilla vel, semper at, ligula.
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Cosmic Lemniscate
“When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,”–that is all Ye know on earth,
and all ye need to know.”
John Keats, May 1819
I read and re-read this, considered it carefully. It is an assertion that truth and beauty are two sides of the same coin, if not the exact same thing. Is this [a] truth, or overheated poetic license – a kind of euphoric exuberance? Or is this an allusion to a deeper reality that can scarcely be spoken?
There is a linkage here that I have experienced: When I am working on a problem, I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, if I am not moved by the elegance of the solution, I know it is not the optimal solution. In fact, it might even be completely wrong.
However, truth can be shockingly ugly. The truth of an unexpected cancer diagnosis certainly does not feel beautiful to anyone.
So, I wonder, what is truth? And what is beauty?
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You-Glee
This is probably the ugliest car in America. Camille says it looks like a shoebox with wheels, I say a toaster. I know how to use Photoshop, so I win.
The Almighty: Designed in Legoland. It would look complete if there were one of those little Lego guys at the wheel.
Serena: Just after lunch, Ian and I saw one of these in the parking lot at Wal-Mart today. He said, “Look Mommy! It’s the toaster car! Where did they put the toast?” I told him, “Hey, it’s after lunch time. Where do you think they put the toast?” Hook, line and sinker. 😉
LBQ: You’re just mean. That’s all. 😀
Erection Woes
God, what an ordeal it was to put this shed up.
In between the time I built the form, and the day the concrete was poured, the form got knocked out of square somehow. Sooooo… When the cement hardened I had a concrete parallelogram instead of a 9′ x 10′ rectangle. It became quite a trick centering the channels for the shed.
Remember how we all sat in high school geometry class and thought “I’ll never use any of this crap.” Well, I actually used some of that high school geometry! (Pythagorean theorem) There is meaning in the universe after all! 😀
Then I had all kinds of trouble drilling into the concrete to mount the steel channels that the shed mounts to. I was sorely tempted to rent a jackhammer and start all over… but I resisted the temptation.
Concrete is non-uniform in consistency, so the drill bit kept wandering as it pierced the top layer and ran into subsurface gravel. I was winding up with some finished holes almost ¼” away from where I had started them. Of course, with all the dust, I didn’t know until too late that the holes were off. I eventually figured out how to use the steel channels as guides for the drilling. Meanwhile, the concrete pad was beginning to take on the appearance of Swiss cheese.
OK, I’m exaggerating.
I got a new tool out of the whole adventure (which is why guys do projects to begin with – to justify tool purchases to their wives). I now have a new Bosch hammer drill! Wotta beauty!
Which reminds me – if you’ve got masonry drilling to do, don’t buy single bits, just get it over with and go ahead and buy the 12-pak, because otherwise you’ll be cursing all the way back to Home Depot after you shatter your first and only bit. Of the five bits I ruined, I actually got one of them so hot that the steel mushroomed.
Masonry screws didn’t work – many sheared right off as they ran into harder stones inside the cement, so after a little research into the holding power of various fasteners, I would up with plastic mollys and sheet metal screws. Much to my surprise, the plastic anchors offer better holding power than lead anchors (size being equal).
I used liquid nails under the channels, screwed them down to 75 pounds of torque, caulked them with silicone cement caulk (Earthquakes? Cyclones? This puppy ain’t going anywhere, dammit!), and I painted the whole pad with epoxy cement paint. At which point Camille said, “You like to overbuild, don’t you?”
Ummm, what was your first clue?
It would have been nice to invite three or four friends over for the final construction, in the manner of an Amish barn raising, but with all the obstacles, I simply could not count on a date and time when I would be ready. Remember, I thought I was going to have this done back in June. Bah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!!!!!!
In any event, Camille and Jason Haley and I got-r-done August 26th, and that was interrupted by a two hour delay while I searched for the original hardware. Thought I knew where it was, sure-the-hell-did-not.
Now all I have left to finish is the backfilling around the concrete pad. Oh, yeah, and find the damn finials for the roof peaks. They’re in a box somewhere around here…
In the end, the shed is neat and clean enough to live in. I almost don’t want to put that filthy lawn mower and all those dirty garden tools into it…
Sux 2 B Me
Book Review – The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell
The Last True Story I’ll Ever Tell
John Crawford
ISBN 1-59448-201-2
I read this one the way the Almighty does – in one throw. (I got home from Barnes & Noble at 11:30, and turned out the light at three.)
Lots of carnage, foul language and gallows humor, just what you would expect from an infantryman. For anyone following the foreign press, there are no surprises in the descriptions of the war and the way it is being prosecuted. The book inspires a sick feeling of dread for those of us old enough to know about ‘Nam.
The book seemed too clichéd to me at first, but it has a twist at the end that makes sense of the glib bravado that colors most of the book.
I doubt this will be the best literary offering of this war – it reads like a story that was rushed to market in order to cash in on a wave of popular interest.
Having said that, I sincerely wish John Crawford peace in his soul. If that is even possible.
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It is Officially “Later”
Packing up is when you find all the nooks and crannies that you’ve been shoving crap, telling yourself “I’ll deal with this later.”
Well… It is officially “later.”
At least the library is finally packed.
The Henry
Camille and I visited the Henry Art Gallery to see the new exhibition by Maya Lin, called Systematic Landscapes. (Her most famous work is the Vietnam Veterans Memorial)
Really cool stuff – 2×4 Landscape is a vast hill built of 65,000 boards set on end; Wire Landscape, a distorted grid in 3-D space replicating the exact scaled topography of the ocean floor and undersea mountain that creates Bouvet Island, which can be walked under or viewed from above. You can also walk through Landscape³, which models an actual Colorado mountain range in ¾” MDF.
The thing I dig the most about all of the work in this exhibit is the marriage of scientific precision and artistic interpretation. Oceanographers from Woods Hole helped her with the data required to produce Wire Landscape, and the other projects rely heavily on the ability to interpret hard data that is normally the exclusive province of the left-hemisphere-driven. It’s just one more proof how stunningly beautiful technology and a technical viewpoint can be.
Bonus! There’s also seventy-seven works from Roy Lichtenstein on display as well. This is another artist who fully exploited available technology in the service of art, slyly serious, wryly mocking.
Progress
The floor coverings are in, including the carpeting, the millwork completed… the only thing left to install is the hardware on the interior doors. It seems hard to believe we started this process four months ago, and that we are now only twenty-seven days from closing.
Camille is busy sizing everything for window treatments and thinking about color schemes, and I’m just worried about how I’m going to fit all of my stuff into “man’s land.”
I have mixed feelings about this – it’s cool, exciting, to have new digs, but the physical chore of packing, moving, unpacking, reorganizing… ugh! Meanwhile, Camille is definitely getting more excited – pleased, even – about the shape of the place and the nearness of moving in and making a lot of positive changes in our life.
Movie Reviews
Camille and I watched a few things over the weekend:
Memoirs of a Geisha (four of five stars)
Arthur Golden’s fictionalized story of Nitta Sayuri, who tells the story of how she transcended her fishing-village roots and became one of Japan’s most celebrated geisha. The film is wonderfully lush, almost too polished. Gong Li is fabulous as the wicked and spoiled Hatsumomo. As adaptations go, this is one of the better ones. I notice that the movie comes out better when the author is involved in shooting. The same thing was true of The English Patient.
Robin Williams Live on Broadway (three of five stars)
Robin is one of those comedians who you can watch over and over again and still laugh your butt off. Recorded in 2002, this is a little dated, but still hysterical.
Fun With Dick and Jane (three of five stars)
All of the slapstick and wild exuberance that you’d expect from Jim Carrey. He and his wife (Téa Leoni) fall on hard times and resort to a life of crime. If you want some easy laughs, this is a good DVD to rent.
Nine Lives (four of five stars)
A fabulous ensemble cast with nine interlocking stories of women who are trapped in difficult life circumstances. No happy endings here, just another collection of tales reminding us how we are all interlaced, and that every life is a novel no one else has read.
COMMENT
The Almighty said…
Back from Hawaii, I spent late evenings there watching movies on the pay per view rather than drinking. Here’s my reviews:
Hostel (four of five stars): A gleefully disgusting movie suitable only for those who enjoy being gleefully disgusted. Ranks right up there with the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and the Japanese classic The Audition. Horny American backpackers are lured to a small Slovakian village hostel by promises of hot women, where they become the main attraction in a variation on sex tourism, torture tourism. A classic morality tale.
The Matador (three of five stars): Amusing tale of an aging hitman who befriends a meek, but happily domestic businessman and they learn the tricks of each others trade. Sounds formulaic, which it is, but its well acted, witty, and hits the right buttons for us meek family oriented businessman types.
A History of Violence (five of five stars) Just a great movie, and excellent metaphor for anyone trying to start their lives over. Hot sex scenes as well.
11:19 AM
Flame Geyser State Park
I had a job down in Enumclaw today (NY Readers: think Buffalo => Salamanca), and on the way back, I spotted a sign that said “Flame Geyser State Park.”
Anything that has “Flame” and “Geyser” in the same sentence simply HAS to be worth stopping for. The bridge leading to the park is one of the better ones I’ve seen in the area, built in 1991.
The “Geyser” is not much to write home about. It used to be 6 – 8 feet tall, but has faded over the years. Quite simply, it’s methane escaping from coal seams several hundred feet below. It’s been going on for decades. There’s a little write-up at the site explaining everything.
Of more interest (to me) is the “Bubble Geyser,” which is Methane escaping into a stream. Notice that the bottom of the stream has some kind of grey mold, or fungus, or some kind of schmutz clinging to the bottom. My uneducated guess is that it is something that likes to live on hydrocarbons.
No matter about the disappointment at the lack of a hundred foot geyser of fire I was hoping for, it was a gorgeous day for wandering around nature.
Content Adjustment
I’ve decided to split out some of the content of this blog and post it on another. Now that I’ve posted a little bit, and have gotten some replies, I can see better what I want to do with this.
Lens, Brush, Quill is becoming something fun for a few of us (and a few more as we move forward, I hope!), so the religious and political rants belong in their own space. There are three people in particular who are (IMHO) incredibly funny, and I want to make that more of a focus. (I’d like to figure out how to bring everything “out front,” so that you don’t have to click on all the comment links to see the conversation that has ensued.)
So I am moving most of the religious and political stuff to http://mitabor.blogspot.com/, and I will add material there as it occurs to me. The link Snarl & Hiss on Lens, Brush, Quill will take you there, if you have a taste for my style of editorial, or if you are getting something positive out of it.
Meanwhile, Lens, Brush, Quill is going to be devoted to more day-to-day items in the general form of a welcoming conversation among friends.
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