April 2012
1 post
March 2012
4 posts
The Blue Angels
Yesterday a 90 year old woman walked into my museum to tell me about her husband, a veteran of the Navy who, 60 years ago Sunday, became a Blue Angel. He wanted to meet the Blues, and every avenue she took to contact anyone just led her to the typical government office-bounce. I managed to help in some small way, but my efforts were only well received by the Blues themselves - everyone in the...
“…try to cherish the questions themselves, like closed rooms and like books...”
– Rainer Maria Rilke
January 2012
1 post
Unwise Purchases - George Bilgere
They sit around the house not doing much of anything: the boxed set of the complete works of Verdi, unopened. The complete Proust, unread: The French-cut silk shirts which hang like expensive ghosts in the closet and make me look exactly like the kind of middle-aged man who would wear a French-cut silk shirt: The reflector telescope I thought would unlock the mysteries of the heavens but which I...
December 2011
1 post
November 2011
3 posts
October 2011
2 posts
Keeping Things Whole.
In a field I am the absence of field. This is always the case. Wherever I am I am what is missing. When I walk I part the air and always the air moves in to fill the spaces where my body’s been. We all have reasons for moving. I move to keep things whole.
m.strand
This is mostly about whales.
Momentum: the power residing in a moving object.
But I don’t mean this as a definition, but a state of being. Momentum is what I crave when still for too long, poised on a narrow hill. I’m waiting for the moment that I can hover one foot just over the step forward, and I savor it. That moment in decision. Knowing that the next step is not any other step I might take. There’s a...
September 2011
5 posts
4 tags
7 tags
6 tags
“By the time I feed my family, I have maybe $400,000 left over,” Fleming said.”
– John Fleming, GOP Congressman, Blasts Obama Over Buffett Rule: I Can’t Afford A Tax Hike
I hope the GOP continues to share their sad stories of not living comfortably off of 400,000 dollars…
This is not class warfare, this is math!
(via adventuresinlearning)
5 tags
August 2011
1 post
5 tags
“Human beings are by nature generators of ideas, what I didn’t understand was how...”
– Deb Meier quoted in a comment by David Loitz in We Must Look to Young Children « Cooperative Catalyst (via adventuresinlearning)
July 2011
7 posts
FACT: I should be doing a ton of other things.
I have to write a statement of purpose for the MLIS grad program at U.A., and wanted to knock it out yesterday evening. True to form with my relationship to punctuality, I have blown by every deadline for admittance and gotten special permission to apply before August for enrollment in the fall semester.
When I exhausted my first attempts at the S.O.P for MLIS, I tried to write a general...
June 2011
3 posts
Squeezing 4-Wheeled Masterpieces Into the Museum →
This made me think about the summer I worked at the Star Wars Traveling Exhibit as an artifact handler, and I walked in, and the landspeeder was leaking oil. I was utterly confused.
“Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets...”
– K.Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five. Here he describes war in reverse.
May 2011
3 posts
Weeks of Loss
Never has life folded so neatly into chapters more than 2011 has. Before graduating school, where most young adults have spent the majority of their lives, life chapters were easy to categorize by grade year, summer, grade year, summer.
This past month and some change have been the weeks of loss.
Tuscaloosa has been destroyed. There’s no escaping the destruction, and talk of the...
April 2011
7 posts
The Traveler's Dilemma
The hardest part is being home, doing work - and really being here, doing this and not avoiding work with the hundreds of places I’d rather be, or thinking of the bed at home waiting for me, or the other bed that I left you in.
“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us...”
– Ira Glass (via nefffy)
“Let me tell you something you already know. The world ain’t all sunshine...”
– Rocky.
For the modern traveler there are recent and sharp... →
March 2011
17 posts
“Double Irish Arrangement”
– A financial term, along with the Dutch Sandwich, that will be discussed at great detail on today’s show, which is about how US companies save billions of dollars by funneling their money into off-shore tax havens. (via nprfreshair)
A chat between Jon Stewart and the Republican...
STEWART: I assume you're pro-life, right?
RAYGUN: Affirmative.
STEWART: All right. Obama's parents were married in Hawaii on February 2, 1961.
RAYGUN: Fine. They were married in Hawaii. But that doesn't mean he was born in the United States.
STEWART: No, but he was born August 4, 1961, to be exact -- meaning his mother was three months pregnant when she got married in Hawaii.
RAYGUN: So?
STEWART: Obama was in the United States as a fetus.
RAYGUN: Irrelevant!
STEWART: Don't you see? Either Barack Obama's an American citizen or fetuses don't count as people. Are you saying that a fetus is not a human life?
RAYGUN: No! Life begins at conception!
STEWART: So Obama's an American citizen?
RAYGUN: No!
STEWART: I'm afraid logically, you've gotta choose one.
RAYGUN: No! No! Illogical! Does not compute!!!
(RAYGUN self-destructs)
Q&A: David Lipsky | Mark Athitakis’ American... →
mlarson:
From an interview with David Lipsky (via), here’s David Foster Wallace on the philosophical depth of country music:
Because that’s like pretty much all there is, when you’re tired of listening to Green Day on the one college station. And these country musics that are just so—you know, “Baby since you’ve left I can’t live, I’m drinking all the time.” And I remember just being real...
“Part of the mechanics of oppressing people is to pervert them to the extent that...”
– Kumasi, activist, in the 2008 documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America. (via rtothemj)