[gallery] robertogreco:
This image is what got me thinking about Arabic and flags today.Manuscript from the 18th century in the Moroccan style of Arabic calligraphy.
The truth is that no one so much as herself would have approved of my doing this. Art was the only thing for which she felt very seriously. Had it been possible to her, I should have found the book on my pillow the night she was buried; and could she have opened the grave, no other hand would have been needed.
The dullness comes from this election’s lack of a compelling macro-theme. Yes, there are national refrains: Democrats in state after state call their Republican opponents heartless misogynists; Republicans call their Democratic opponents Obama clones. But there’s no big national issue on which voters feel that they can change the country’s course. It’s not that candidates today are more cynical or homogenized than in midterms past. It’s that the subjects they’re discussing cynically and homogenously don’t matter as much.
The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That’s the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then — to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.
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Edward Wilson, an old master.
You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading,
wear the same rapt expression, forgetting themselves in a function.
How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.
— W. H. Auden, “Sext”
They called it ‘interactive fiction,’ and it was absolutely interactive fiction. You read the text, and you took actions, and your actions influenced the games. And one of these games, Zork III, I played with my friend Chad, in like the sixth grade. We started in sixth grade and we played that game for two years before we solved it. … It was pre-internet. It was vastly pre-internet. We had no answers and no way to get them. … When I talk to the brilliant people in my generation — people doing things, telling stories, making things, they played Infocom games. Neil Gaiman played Infocom games, Terry Pratchett played Infocom games, Felicia Day played Infocom games, and they were all frustrated, and they all spent months trying to get the frickin’ Babel Fish in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And now it’s virtually impossible to write a game that successfully provides challenge and frustration, and that’s a shame. We are going to lose something that makes scientists, that makes doers, that makes hard-minded, witty, clever people, and I worry that those people aren’t being made these days.
[gallery] 60ansdevadrouille:
Sur le Gange au petit matin à Varanasi (Bénarès)., en période de basses eaux. février 1988.
Just as the self-esteem movement was not a panacea leading to happy, successful, and well-adapted children, … empathy interventions may not stop problems such as bullying and other forms of aggression and violence, because aggression itself may result from empathy.
[gallery] Photographs of Hong Kong by Fan Ho
a good, good man
My father-in-law, Lynn Collins — the best man I’ve ever known — has come to the last stage of his life. He won’t be with us much longer. He’s a small-town boy from Columbiana, Alabama who fought for his country in World War II and then worked in the auto parts business for many years. Until age shrank him he was a big, strong man; and all his life he has been kind and gentle and loving.
When my wife Teri was a little girl, she and her mother spent a few weeks in Florida caring for her maternal grandmother, who had had a heart attack. Her dad stayed behind in Birmingham, but wrote letters. In one of those letters he said, “We’re not very far apart. The same moon that shines on you shines on me.” And after reading those words Teri went outside and looked at the moon and thought about her father, who loved her so much.
Years later she asked her dad where he had gotten that idea. He replied that those were the words his mother had written to him when he was a soldier in France, and he had always remembered them.
Last night Teri was helping her dad get ready for bed — he needs a lot of help, these days — and she said, “Daddy, do you know how much I love you?” He hesitated a moment and said, “No.” And she said, “I love you as deep as the ocean and as wide as the sky.” He smiled.
Then she said, “Do you know why I said that?” He shook his head. “That’s what you used to tell me when I was a little girl.” He smiled again, and said, “Teri, I haven’t thought about that for a long time.” He kept smiling.