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Showing posts from January, 2009

The Art of Josh Keyes

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Josh Keyes is an artist I just became aware of who combines elements of mechanical illustration and wildlife to produce some very dramatic images. Check out more of his work on his web site . I love the incongruity of the images. They tickle the my brain like an obscure joke Q: How many surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: Giraffe. They also can be simultaneously cautionary and optimistic. The surfaces often depicit a decline of man and the rise of nature yet the depictions clearly cage the problems as a puzzle pieces that can be examined and understood and with understanding there's always hope. I think they're brilliant. Take a look.

Presidential last names

The Globe has an interesting read about the ancestry of presidents . Never knew this before: "Even the two presidents whose presidential names were not their original surnames fall into the same ancestral corridor. President Clinton, originally William Jefferson Blythe, and Gerald Ford, originally Leslie Lynch King, took the names of stepfathers, but the old names, like the new, came from the British Isles." President King. Now that would have been weird.

Ending Prohibition

Culture 11 has a couple of excellent articles condemning drug prohibition: War on Drugs: The Price Tag by Anita Bartholomew and War On Drugs: The Collateral Damage by Radley Balko . There's also a pro prohibition article called Keeps Drugs Illegal! but I found the arguments contained within very weak. The best part was a quip in the comments regarding the contention that legalization wont diminish the violence associated with the black market but I'll save you the trouble of looking it up. "This is why I often see executives from Jack Daniels executing drive-by shootings at Jim Beam corporate headquarters. Wait... I don't see that at all." Don't take me wrong, I do agree with most people that many drugs are dangerous and all should be kept away from children. I also agree that drug abuse is a problem. Where I disagree is in how we approach the problem. The current 'drug war' approach is attempting to eliminate the problem by forcefully curtaili

The War word

This post isn't political or at least I don't mean it to be. Given the subject matter, I'm sure it will raise some hackles and I apologize for that. I really only meant this to be about the word 'War'. First some background. I'm a liberal product of the 60s and as such I grew up mocking the political euphemism 'Police Action' that was used to describe our involvement in Vietnam. If my recollection is correct, (forgive me, I was but a youngster), the arguments used to justify the phrase followed this simple reasoning: no war has been declared so it was not a war. As a young person that never sat well with me. We were bombing North Vietnam; we were in pitched battles with the North Vietnamese army; so not calling it a war was just silly word play by the people who wanted to continue the fight. Time has proven that point. No one talks about the Vietnam Police Action anymore it's always referred to as the Vietnam War. So hear I am 35 o

George R. R. Martin Get Off Your Ass

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Sometime during the summer of 2008 I stumbled across the series of books known as ' The Song of Fire and Ice '. I was instantly smitten. There are four published books in the series and the author has promised at least another few. The problem is Mr Martin is way overdue on the next announced volume called 'A Dance with Dragons' which, you can see from this posts accompanying image, already has cover art. The book's status was last updated on the author's web page over a year ago and various speculative publishing dates have come and gone with no word from the author. It's becoming very frustrating for the fans. During the intervening time I've managed to entertain myself with some good reads. I'm especially fond of the series ' The Malazan Book of the Fallen ' by Steven Erikson. Alas, this series is also incomplete but it is both further along in the story and the author has a better record of timely publishing. The Malazan books are

2 TB memory stick

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This image cracked me up. Link

I work for a Branch

I'm starting to dislike the term 'Individual Contributor'. I was much happier being referred to as a developer or an engineer or even a simple staff member. Being called an 'individual contributor' is a bit dehumanizing. A manager is no more a collective than I am even though they may represent one. Since I'm sure the term stems from some business school theory of hierarchical management I say we reverse things and apply software engineering terms for hierarchies back of the tree. I'm a Leaf and I work for a Branch, who works for another Branch who ultimately reports to Root. I feel so much more human now.

Men of Honor

Jayne and I spent one whole day this new year holiday engrossed in the HBO John Adams mini series. I'm certainly more Jeffersonian in my thinking and Jayne more Adamsian but we managed to emerge from its viewing with a shared sense of political purpose. It was a day well spent. So it's with that backdrop that I today stumbled across a very humorous article by the irascible Fred Reed called The Price of Honor that skewers the concept of honor in particularly as it applies to Iraq war exit strategies. He takes great exception to the phrase 'peace with honor'. While I tend to agree with his main thesis that we should end our occupation of Iraq as soon as possible, I take great exception with his pillorying of the concept of honor in general. "Honor means nothing more than prickly infantile vanity dressed up, usually, in desperate class-consciousness. Of all the symptoms of a weak ego, honor is the most embarrassing, and the most harmful. In

Developingstorm 2009

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Hey World. You still out there? I've been doing plenty of sitting on my keister, enjoying the good life, but I haven't totally forgotten about the blog. I spent some time today snazzing up the blogger template and hope to re-engage with the blog in some form or another. In the post Twitter and Facebook world I'm not always sure how to use this tool but I haven't given up trying. I hope you're all having a good new year.