Month: April 2003

otherwise the old skreeming. like a little creem in your milk? or some old bizarre. (i mean, bazaar) i’ve a mind to spearhead the unravelling rug, pin that loose thread down and fly around the world, ravelling as i unravel. (who’d go with me on my little odyssey? wrapping the world in yarn: yo, ariadne eat your heart out!)

it seems, that i’m even travelling in other dreams

way to go me! zoom zoom zoom!

but still there’s this rather gordian dilemma: namely how to separate the me that’s here from the me that might be anywhere.

inscrutable desires. and what about other kinds of travelling?

The value of creating a “whitelist” for email, as opposed to a blacklist. (In only 35 steps!)

The basic idea is that you create a system whereby, in order for someone to send you an email, you require them to send a confirmation that their listed email address is actually a valid one. (Many spam-emails are automatically generated and don’t have a valid reply-to address.)

(I found this via Scott Rosenberg’s Salon Blog. I don’t normally read Lockergnome, though maybe I should start.)

Galway Kinnell’s “Why Regret?” is beautiful. Read.

“deeply weird in a cynical, misanthropic kind of way”, eh?
hmmm.
fair nuff…
(the ides of march 14)

while visions of books circle in my head while dreaming, books go vanishing from my life. don’t leave books on window ledges. that’s my advice to you. how else to explain the (supernatural?) vanishing of my nightly read. a library book laid on the windowsill. but gone when i awoke this morning. doors, windows all latched. it wasn’t my library book either. how do i explain that?

Pretty Boohbah

…stumbled on this little tidpit while doing some platypus research:

The Fantastically Baffling Story of the Greatest Time-Space Traveler That Ever Lived: Rip Tapioca, Marshal of the Time Stream and Leader of the Semi-Intelligent Cat Toys of Arcturus-5, With His Sidekick George of the Gelatin-Brains

other than that, not much new in the world of platypi, sadly enough. i almost went looking for new armadillo things. but that’s an old symbol, wanting dusting and a new coat of paint.

imagine: the www: a giant, badly-catalogued used bookstore with lots of errata and whatsits stuffed between the pages of books that had their pages cut out in order to store pistolas and gin and carrots. better than a web, or a wave, or a munchkin, “”””super(SNEER)highway””””…

it’s a bookstore that has parts of it constantly burning down too. and other parts being renovated at great speed. with lots of poorly chosen color and pattern combinations. art deco meets pastel heaven meets warren beatty on crack, or something.

Well, they can’t plead ignorance of Iraq’s national cultural treasures.
This article describes a memo that the Pentagon’s Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) sent to senior commanders of the Iraqi war two weeks before the fall of Baghdad about the need to secure Iraqi cultural antiquities.

I’ve added links recently of two websites that I feel should get some mention. (I’ve been reading them both off and on for some time now.)

Making Light I mentioned earlier today. Very well researched and thoughtful.

The Raven is one of the legion of salon blogs out there. If I had to describe this in one word, I’d be tempted to say, “pithy”, but I’m not certain that would do it justice.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden of Making Light (or, maybe, Making Light of Teresa Nielsen Hayden?) writes movingly of the profound loss that was the burning of the Iraqi National Library. My great-uncle would be weeping in his beer, I think, were he still alive. He devoted his life to the exploration and preservation of those ancient documents which were most likely housed in that library.

I don’t even have words for the kind of grief that is. I am not even able, quite, to fathom it myself. Let alone put it into words. It’s the kind of thing that I have been waking up in the night thinking about. (And my dreams are full of books…) It troubles me that this news has affected me far more than anything else coming out of Iraq…