Fragments From Floyd

Table With Me

Terry Oglesby of PossumBlog, architect by trade and always one to eschew obfuscation, enjoys new and creative architecture-- even in the so-called language of our day. Read about another noun actionified and coming soon to verbiage near you!

Tick Tockery

Well we may need to move further north to see the aurora (Seth, I think you hold the record for southern observations). But we may need to move above the Artic Circle to get beyond the realm of TICKS! Dang, almost November and this past week has been the worst week for these weensy bloodsuckers we've had all season. There had been dog ticks around every spring and fall; they are slow and relatively large, easy to see, slow to start feeding. They bothered Buster quite a bit, and being black, we couldn't detect them until they were engorged and lumpy. With Tsuga being a yellow lab, we thought it would be easier. But now for some reason, we have "seed ticks" (sp unknown) that are about the size of the period at the end of this sentence. And quick to set up housekeeping.

The PreventTic collar (a hefty $17) hopefully will do its work. Matter of fact, Ann and I are thinking about giving each other one of these as stocking stuffers this Christmas. I think a rugged leather tick collar might be sort of macho; a slender pink one for the missus. Whaddaya think?

Poisoned Hemlock

"We walk this land every day; but more often than not, it is in the pauses that I've come to know these hills best. This morning, sitting under the dying eastern hemlocks where the creek gorge narrows, I struggled to accept the passing of these trees, this species, forever. I'm grieved by the sight of the few that remain barely alive, gray and gaunt, with boney arms uplifted frozen in a final unanswered prayer. Tiny bracket fungi have already begun to colonize crevices in the listless bark, a step ahead of death."

This is truly a "tragedy in the making". I've mentioned this forest disaster a few times here in Fragments over the past year. A few of you understand, most folks do not. Could not. If you don't live among them, they are merely anonymous trees. When you see them out your window every day, they are neighbors. Friends. And they are dying in their boots, standing drained of their sap-blood, anemic and losing whatever it is that a plant knows as consciousness. Soon they will have no life left.

A particularly well-told eulogy is told by Elizabeth Hunter in this piece called "Coming Soon to a Hemlock Near You".

Elizabeth will be leading the Nature Writing workshop I am attending next week at the Campbell Folk School. We have exchanged several emails and I feel certain she and I will share some sad conversation about the passing of the hemlocks. But mostly, I look forward to infectious enthusiasms and passions and exuberance among my "classmates" in the beauties and wonders that survive in these magnificent forests we call home. I expect to be among kindred spirits for a whole week, and I can't tell you how affirming it will be to find I'm not alone in my eccentricities! The Folk School week may be the next best thing to having my Fragments Friends come down for a week-end camp out on the creek! Hmmmm. Now there's an idea!

Op-edited: A Cautionary Tale

"You need to start sending more of your writing locally, like to the hometown newspaper, to increase your visibility as a writer, maybe meet some more folks with your writing interests".

This I have been told by more than a few well-wishing, forward thinking friends and coaches. They say these things with my best interest in mind, and I know there is some truth in what they say.

So, after polishing up a piece from a few months back that I thought would have rather wide reader interest, I emailed it to the local press and asked, if there was space, would they please print it. When the weekly paper came in the mail yesterday, I eagerly turned straight to page two to find the editorials.

And there was my essay. Correction. There was two-thirds of my essay. I looked frantically for the next column that would bring my thoughts and words to closure as I had so carefully crafted them. I expleted loudly (hey I don't care if that's not a word. It ought to be.)! Someone had amputated my creation in mid-paragraph. To the resulting stump, a staff writer's shave and a haircut abrupt end had strange and illogical words coming out of my mouth.

Dwarfed and truncated, it would seem that the afflicted writer must have had an acute episode of hemorrhagic aphasia there in mid-sentence. Maybe the piece was found on the unfortunate chap's desk as they wheeled him off to the home. Poor fellow.

And so much for proclaiming my presence as an area writer. I wish I'd used a pseudonym. But then, Fred First couldn't be anybody's real name, could it?

Being There

Chris Corrigan on Bowen Island near Vancouver caught the Northern Lights last night. And so, our son, Nathan, saw them too, maybe from the shoreline of Vancouver near his dorm. That he saw this wonder is the next best thing to my unfulfilled and remote hope that we might see the aurora last night, even this far south, during this solar surge. Nathan has seen the Northern Lights. That he is having good life experience, putting down lasting memories for later years is satisfying and comforting to know, even if he is so far away from home.

This time last week, Nate and Chris actually met for the first time and had a quick cup of coffee and some good words there on Bowen Island, three thousand miles from here.

I've never met Chris, but feel that I know him through his weblog and his close affinity to place, his love of the details in the ordinary around him. He has befriended me, a stranger, by helping to welcome our son to new surroundings, to be a neighbor-- someone with some 'family' connections, an ambassador from Nate's new homeland. Several weeks ago, another blog-reader, Lisa, welcomed our son into her home there in BC-- a friend of a blogger friend extending hospitality to Nate because of the bonds arising from mere words on these pages. In loco parentis.

I'm thankful for this medium that brings me into your study or office or den. It also brings me to a quiet place in the far northwest, sitting under the magnificence of Truth revealed by the magnetic storm we call the Northern Lights that I may never see, but my son has seen them, and he is among friends.

Jots and Tittles

This really seems to work to hide your email address (posted on your webpage, for instance) from spambots. Thanks for the link to Philip Cartland (Flotsam) who has a snazzy new front end to his site. Go see!

Maybe you already know this: In Google, you can type in define: followed by a space, then a word or abbreviation... like DSL, RSS, DVD, etc... and it will give you an instant page of definitions. Quick and simple.

PublicRadioFan.com will give you the offerings of a scad of Public Radio stations for whatever time period you access their site, with click-throughs to their Real Audio, Windows Media or other real-time broadcasts. Pretty snazzy, huh?

Wild Kingdom

It was odd but comforting to have someone but me here during the day. Even odder, Ann was upstairs humming to herself as the much-neglected Singer whirred intermittently as she repaired my favorite jacket for my trip next week.

"Ah! Fred! Look out the front window" she called down from her perch.

Through the knee-high pasture grass, fifteen turkeys (or rather turkey heads) undulated through the field in their odd stop-start head-bobbing fashion. They moved methodically, kicking in the soft soil for the last of the insects not hibernating for winter, fifteen reptilian birds moving east in a cooperative phalanx flushing out a meal. I ran up the steps to get Ann's better view, grabbing my binocs on the way up.

There is nothing about a turkey I haven't seen. I can't say what was so exciting about this sighting. Maybe because it was unexpected and that we had been suddenly privy to the orderliness and intracacy of a nature that goes on without us. There is beauty and blessing in that providence.

While I watched the turkeys disappear into the pines along Nameless Creek, a blur flashed by out of the corner of my eye-- a squirrel leaping through the tall grass. It sure looked like it might be a fox squirrel. I've tried since late August to get a good view of one. Yep. Tail as long as the gray body, russet belly, white blaze on the large head. I watched him until I couldn't hold the binoculars to my eyes any longer.

Life is good.

Oh Please!

Northern Lights. Tonight. Outside. I've never seen the aurora borealis. Could happen tonight. Oh please!

New Ground

Next week I will be at the John. C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, NC. Brasstown gives the lie to those who think that North Carolina ends at Charlotte. Almost in Georgia, almost as close to Tennessee, that region is not totally unfamiliar to me. We lived in Sylva for two years, but even there an hour west of Asheville, we were almost two hours east of Brasstown. You can get there from here, but only if you take the byways not generally taken, and that's okay by me.

Campbell is one of the remaining Appalachian "Settlement Schools" that began forming in the late 1800s' at time when there was widespread poverty there. I've read that, had the Civil War not started when it did, Lincoln had already agreed to a mass relocation program to move 'backwards' folks out of the uncivilized hills and hollers.

The Appalachians had not assimilated America's culture. This was disturbing to the growing number of newly-college-educated ladies of the day. They saw the unmet needs of southern mountain communities and set out to elevate the "needy" by educating them in proper manners, dance and music and language, and by organizing groups to produce traditional products--- especially items useful in everyday self-sufficient daily life: quilts, jugs and crocks, household items carved from wood. The farflung loosely-organized communities needed churches, schools, and health care.

Not everyone took kindly to these "interveners" as they were called, and their wide ranging effect on local community and tradition was not entirely positive. Still, the impact of settlement schools on local economies and communities are still felt even today. Some -- like Hindman in Kentucky and Campbell-- continue as creative centers.

Here's a good overview of the Folk School. I've never been. I only know what I read. I will soon know much, much more. Stay tuned.

Honing In

Thanks to the ever-vigilant aesthetic eye of Numenius out on the Left Coast, my artsy and antsy sides are coming closer and closer together. I think maybe this might be a creative outlet I could cheerfully pursue from the hinterlands here. The dog could certainly help me find my creative agents as hardly a day goes by that he doesn't offer us a source he's found in the nearby woods... an inexhaustible resource of art supplies.

I can see it now: Fred First, Grampa Moses of Maggot Art.

Aesthetic Appetites

"I'll not bother grabbing the camera" I thought as Tsuga the Barricuda tugged at my pantsleg, ready for a romp down the grassy road along the pasture. It was a bit overcast and blustery, after all, and not the best lighting anyway. We would stalk squirrels and pretend-hunt-- maybe scare up that flock of turkeys we flushed yesterday afternoon. I need not be a slave to the camera.

But, as they say__ As Fate Would Have it__ there on the side of the path lay an exquisitely composed image of rain beaded up in perfect crystal symmetry on a fallen Fraser Magnolia leaf. This is one of my favorite leaves of all times under any circumstance or lighting-- its color the richest of deep red-browns, a foot in length with prominent feather-pennate veins off the heavy central petiole. But this one... ah, this one could not have been placed in any better light if it had been brought into a studio. It was the archetype of fall beauty sequined in dewdrops.

The dog noticed my rapt attention to this wonder. He licked off the water and ate the leaf.

Surely there's a life lesson in here somewhere.

Life Beyond the Underpass

I think about it every single day. When I'm in the shower. The fact that standing there under that wonderfully warm water, luxuriating in a moment of hygenic bliss in a heated bathroom with thick towels waiting... I am among the very smallest fraction of mankind who has ever known this kind of indulgence that I take so for granted. Literally billions on earth now will never take a single warm shower.

I think of the fine line that lies between having and not having access to daily bread, showers, clean clothes. We dismiss these things as givens.

Here are some folks that, for one reason or another, live on the streets. But they're taking their lives and dignity back. I will think about them the next time the steam fills the small, clean room and I go ho-hum about my ordinary boring comfortable safe belly-ful day. link via PathToFreedom

Pre-emption

This morning's posts have been delayed by the unfortunate circumstances of getting actual work done. I'll try to never let it happen again.

What most of you don't know is that I have an honorary Doctor of Pharmacy Degree conferred by the good Doctor herself, granted in return for taking a shoebox full of highly technical medical terms, assorted would-be tables, columns and bullets (indicated by countless tab-tab-tabs and space-space characters) and turning the whole mess into a logically laid-out presentation, paper or policy. We're talking hundreds of these over the past half-dozen years. She can earn an advanced professional degree but she can't remember how to center text. I dunno.

This, just to let you know I have this important credential to keep current, and occasionally I am called away from more important blogging matters to revise a policy going before the Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee on Vitamin K administration or other trivia. Type, type, type. I try not to think of myself as just another secretary with good legs, more than just another pretty face. I earn my keep around here. And I make a darn fine pot of coffee too.

Crime Scene Insects

Lee Goff is a Forensic Entomologist. His business card reads: "Know maggots, will travel." It depicts a little worm staring through a detective's magnifying glass.

Cha-chingg! I think I've found my next profession! Whaddaya think?

And where can we go on field trips when I go back to school as a maggot specialist? Why, the Body Farm of course! And how perfect for Halloween! I'm trying to imagine what folks who work here tell people they do for a living.

Sorry. So as to put my little friends, the insects, back in a better light... by all means go see Butterflies as Art. Now seriously: this photographer has created some kind of wonderful niche in the working world, don't you think? To travel around the world to photograph the "M" in a moth wing.

The Agony of Going

TravelerTrish says that with all my dyscombobulation about being gone next week, I may just have About-to-Leave-itis. She is the Frequent Flyer. She should know.

Writing Toward Home

Empty Emails. Or Not?

Okay. What is the deal now. And am I the only one-- getting emails from fictious senders with plausible sounding names who send an email in which there is no content and the subject is a random assortment of 10 or so letters? I've had a dozen in the past two days and this is getting old!

Should we suspect that somebody is testing our email address validity with a spam bomb to come our way at some future date? Postini does not catch these and I don't know how it could.

I right click these messages and shift-delete them. But I still have this uneasy feeling the deleted messages are even now gathering in some dark corner of my hard drive, donning their camoflage and blackening their wicked faces and assembling strange-looking weapons, soon to swim through my *.doc files looking for something to eat.

What are you doing about these mystery emails? Should we do anything other than delete them immediately? Should I alert my nearest T.I.P. snitch?

Ho Ho No!

It's almost November and I have SantaClaustrophobia again. October and December are closing in on me from both sides and it's time to Xmas shop or be damned. And for certain if past years tell the tale, I'll just be damned because -- I don't know about the rest of you guys-- I break out in prickly heat just thinking about wandering around a shopping mall looking for panty hose or potpourri. And I'm not much more at ease with the idea of thumbing through the catalogs from Crap And Barrel, Plow and Horse or Shopper Image. I have this mercifully short Christmas list of names followed by dashes followed by-- empty spaces. I'm not cheap, I'm practical. Frugal Fred. For the life of me I can't force myself to force on any of my would-be giftees a present just for the sake of giving it. And so from now until the week before Giftmas I'll wallow in guilt and dread. At the last possible minute I'll succumb to the Grinchy spirit and become an unhappily Malled American Consumer in the Blessed Season of Spending.

Not to worry. I'll deal with the Extrinsic Gift List closer to the 11th hour. The In-house list is easier to manage. It works like this: Ann makes her own personal list and orders what she wants (to be honest, it's mostly things she absolutely needs.) In September when the UPS man brings her gift, she wraps it up in pretty paper with her name on it (from me or from Santa). On Christmas morning she is "surprised" and exclaims as she upwraps it -- "Look what a thoughtful and perfectly chosen gift you got me this year! I couldn't have gotten anything better if I bought it myself!" and I see my choice for the first time. I am such a wise and caring husband, don't you think? And we never have any returns.

As a gift receiver, I am not much help and cannot tell would-be gifters a single thing I need-- or want, for that matter. Except for this year. There is this one thing I saw just yesterday at a friend's house and I was overtaken by a tsunami of covetousness: Here it is. For those who won't click to see, it's a Wirelss 433MHz In/outdoor Min-max Thermometer with Built-in Atomic Clock Alarm.

No, I'm not kidding.

But then I am a closet meteorologist. "In my next life" as I am fond of saying, "I'm going to be a weatherman." Weather is real, it's relevant and it's darn near everywhere. Given a choice when I'd hold the TV clicker, my kids would groan because I'd go straight to the Weather Channel. It was the only authentic and consequential thing on TV back then, and if this was true ten years ago... A hundred channels and I watch weather. But is it any wonder? Is this so strange? (A rhetorical question so hush.)

Weather is the breath of this remarkable planet, powering and impacting human lives in unfathomable ways. The great mixing machine of weather is part of what makes this Blue Orb livable. That the planet conveniently is also tipped on its axis first pointing one hemisphere toward the sun for six months and then the other means we all take our turn getting a bit too much or a bit too little sun energy to suit our nekkid hides. And the thin skin where weather happens (that we call the atmosphere) cooperates by filtering out the excess of bad rays that would make life unlivable but for the simplest organisms living underground and deep in the lakes and seas. It is a wonder to me how it all works together. The movement and infinite permutations of air masses the size of continents is the best show going. I am suspicious of those who aren't fascinated by weather in the same way that I don't quite trust people who don't like dogs or cats. There's something just a little cockeyed about'em, y'know what I mean?

So. You needn't ask me what I got for Christmas this year because I can already tell you: some nifty new underwear and a ramfrazzle superdooper thermometer that is my desktop connection to the Greatest Show on Earth-- that I wrapped myself.

Caught Me With My Posts Down

Nada. I got nothin. I don't seem to be able to focus on my thoughts and words this morning. Maybe it's daylight savings demise and the fact that the dog is still on the old time--he got us up at quarter til 3, EST... right on time by his clock at the old quarter til 4.

But it's more than that. I'm just distracted by the fact that a week from today I'll need to have an act in gear that is distinctly spinning in neutral at this moment. A week from today, my truck will contain everything I need to write, hike, photograph, play music, stay reasonably clean and clothed, sleep, read and so on and so forth. I'll have more to say about where I'm going and what I'll be doing there-- although honestly I don't really know exactly what I'll be doing there.

Seemed like a good idea to sign up for something like this back in the summer when I was full of enthusiasm after the Highland Conference on Appalachian Writing and Writers. I determined to be involved with another meeting of that inspirational sort again, and found this workshop in November. "Sure, go on, I'll be fine" said Ann.

She didn't care that the woodstove would have to be tended every day before work and she'd be scraping ice off her car in the dark. At that time, we didn't know we would be bringing up a puppy and that the time he would have to spend alone inside in my November absence would push his bladder tolerance to the max. She will have to feed and walk Tsuga a hour before daylight while I am away.

So. This week I will be distracted with this glorified camping trip I'll be embarking on. And the following week I'll be blogging intermittently (I hope) from the nearby community college library. It may be a little chaotic around Fragments for a while. I'm feeling both guilty and excited about my trip but more than a little unsettled and scattered in the current moment. Maybe later today the fog will clear. And maybe a nap will help. Already been up three hours and it's not even six o'clock (that's five o'clock dog daylight savings time.)

AMENDMENDED: Okay you knuckleheads! Guess you're letting me know what a poor job I did in my chronlogy of events in the post above. This week I'm just distracted about my trip. NEXT WEEK I'll be actually gone from home. Don't turn off the Fragments Channel quite yet. 'kay? And by all means, you'll hear about it. I'd love to be able to blog from the place, but don't think that's going to work out. Rustic and DSL just don't go together. Unless you live on Goose Creek. :-}

Kill to Live

If I had to, could I kill in order to eat? Should I, again this year, set out with a gun on my shoulder pretending that, if I don't kill, we will not eat? Shall I pretend to find any satisfaction in the taking of the life of a squirrel, for gosh sakes! a glorified tree-climbing rodent that makes more gravy than meat? I dunno. This I pondered as I watched the tiniest of squirrels-- our Mountain Boomers or Red Squirrel-- in the walnut tree by the garden yesterday.

Late in the afternoon, backlit against the low sun, the dazzling outline of an arboreal acrobat ran sprints to the end of every branch holding one last walnut. Too big to carry back the way he had come, a little squirrel paw reached out and lightly tapped the walnut-- three times as large as the creature's head-- sending the blackened lump falling kerplopp! to the gravel road below. There, passing vehicles will cooperate in the gathering of winter's larder by not only dehusking but cracking the kernel as well. Ingenious, I thought, and for this cleverness you shall live. And I took my make-believe gun and walked up the New Road toward the head of the valley.

More squirrels everywhere! Gray squirrels fat and meaty and naive of predatory hunters who view them across their gun sights, there, sitting on a pine stump, turning a nut in their dextrous little paws like corn on the cob, unafraid. And then a fox squirrel-- the largest North American squirrel-- stopped in the grassy road ahead of me lifted himself up on his haunches with that elegant tail curving up his back to the top of his head, mocking me. My crosshairs were only mental, and he knew this. I've always wanted to get close enough to get a really good look at the secretive fox squirrel, but I do not want to hold a dead one in my hands.

Bow season started several weeks ago. Rifle season for deer starts in mid-November, and in our county, it will run for two additional weeks this year, either sex legal all season. Deer, lacking any natural predators, are ruining gardens and orchards and sending auto insurance rates here soaring. And so I will have my hunting seasonal dilemma again this year. There is enough meat on a deer to make a lot of meals of low fat protein. They are a nuisance and their numbers need thinning. And I could sit at my desk and shoot one over by the barn without getting out of my computer chair.

But, I am not a hunter. Not that kind.

Solitary. Solo Tarry

"During the last few weeks I have been thinking lots about the solitary life. Or as I like to call it ‘the solo tarrying life.’ For many people the idea of a solitary life means being alone, bereft in some way or conversely living life on some higher plain as mystic or holy person. Well, neither is what I think of when I consider my solo tarrying life" explains the articulate solo writer at AnimatedStardust.

I struggle also with the blessings and bane of solitude and aloneness.

Here's a full page (enlarge the font for gosh sake!) of "resources and reflections on hermits and solitude" to consider.

Search Inside the Book

"Let's say that you're interested in finding books about "rocket experiments." Just as you do today, type "rocket experiments" into our search box and click the GO! button. You'll get a list of the books that contain that term in the author's name, the book's title, or in the book's text. Books participating in our Search Inside the Book feature with "rocket experiments" in their text will show an excerpt with your search term highlighted. To see all references to "rocket experiments" within a particular book, click the "See more reference to 'rocket experiments' in this book" link. From Amazon, of course.

Ten Mistakes Writers Make

Been there. Made those.

And while we're talking language and its use/misuse, go through the first page of "Tense Present" in this Harpers article. See yourself there? The second page begins a tale of lexicographic intrigue...

"Did you know that probing the seamy underbelly of U.S. lexicography reveals ideological strife and controversy and intrigue and nastiness and fervor on a nearly hanging-chad scale? For instance, did you know that some modern dictionaries are notoriously liberal and others notoriously conservative, and that certain conservative dictionaries were actually conceived and designed as corrective responses to the "corruption" and "permissiveness" of certain liberal dictionaries? That the oligarchic device of having a special "Distinguished Usage Panel ... of outstanding professional speakers and writers" is an attempted compromise between the forces of egalitarianism and traditionalism in English, but that most linguistic liberals dismiss the Usage Panel as mere sham-populism? Did you know that U.S. lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?

Go today and hug a Grammar Nazi ora SNOOT, a Usage Nerd, Syntax Snob, or Language Policeperson out there in your blog readership. If you're not sure how to recognize one, don't know who they are and what they stand for and why, then by all means... read this article!

Flotsam

"Where I’m from we have a reputation for professional hunters and wildlife experts, movie stars and eccentrics, tycoons, empire builders, adventurers, aid workers, researchers, hard working farmers and writers... I am none of these. Even though I write these words, I remind myself that I would be lying to claim myself as a writer until the day my pen makes a living for me."

So writes Phillip Cortland in his "Introduction". Where he is from, however, or coming from, is not an easy thing to say. Kenya. Prague. London. From my brief visits to Flotsam after a friend's referral yesterday, it seems Phillip is from a number of places and writes and will write from more than a single frame of reference... on Alfred Russell Wallace, on the Bounty's crew, on the keeping of servants. And that he will write more in future also seems certain, as he is hoping to shift his focus to words and perhaps turn them into a book some day.

Go visit. Bookmark. Watch.

Friday Flashback: Hope Has Wings

There are very few things in life that are predictable. And this is why I mark my life by the tiny immutable boxes of the calendar. That there will be other Octobers in my lifetime is likely. That Octobers will go on and on when I am gone is certain. The calendar is a weaver's loom that holds our months and years, but we may never look back at it to see the pattern our lives create. So many busy friends could not tell you what they were doing last October, or five Octobers past.

You will have to indulge me my frequent returns to a history that is written now on a calendar year and also on a writing year. In returning to last year's October, the pattern in the tapestry begins to show, themes and rhythms become audible to my inner listener. The year's outbreathing into winter is not an end but another turn of the cycle going back, going forward in one soul's short sojourn.

I read "Hope Has Wings" to a writer friend a while back, and when I was finished it puzzled me why, of everything I've written during the past year, this and a few about the dog's death were in the third person. "That's curious" I said. "Wonder why I that wrote from that perspective?"

And my friend, a wise man and writer by trade, said "because you needed the distance from your subject. It was too painful to put yourself directly into the writing and the third person gave you some distance from something that was very difficult to write about."

And so this retrospective look at last October 23 and from that vantage point to this month in 1997 is a personal reflection over our calendar of life, saccharine perhaps, not stellar writing but dense with memory for me. And today, when Ann gets home, if my back is up to it, we will walk to the top of the ridge and remember how we got here. It is recorded in last year's Hope Has Wings.

The photography, too, becomes a way of mapping the journey. Two images from the steep hillside behind the house are here: Storm Home and From a High Place.

Fly United

Wide-eyed observation brought Kees Moeliker, of the Rotterdam Nature Museum, the Ig Nobel biology prize. Birds began colliding with the museum's new glass-walled wing as soon as it was built in 1995. But an unusually loud thud one day sent Moeliker dashing to investigate.

He found a dead duck on the ground, and a male mallard standing nearby. He then watched in amazement as the unhurt mallard mounted the dead bird and mated with the corpse for over an hour, stopping only when Moeliker interrupted it. He summed up the incident as "The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard" duck in the journal Deinsea (vol 8, p 243). NewScientist

Technorati Trashed

And now this. Anybody got a fix to prevent porn sites registering links in Technorati? Sheesh!

Come Into My Parlor

I was planning to save this final (?) webby picture until the week before H'ween but think I'll go ahead and pin it up now. I've been using the full size image as a desktop for a week, and it always makes me grin. Three different spiders (only one visible) and three strikingly different webs caught in dramatic lighting: Miracle Number One. But what the photo doesn't show and only the photographer knows is Miracle Number Two: this shot was physically almost impossible to get. Only after I came back to the house and looked at that morning's iamges (that also included the "Emphemera" web posted a few days ago) did I know that I'd captured a useable composition I was happy with.

What could be so hard about taking a picture of a spider web, you ask?

Had you driven down our gravel road at about 9:30 that morning, this is what you would have seen: A man (grizzled and frumpy, about some odd task to be sure, obviously hastily clad in ill-matched slightly-ripped flanel shirt and week-old work chinos, black rubber boots, and camoflage GoreTex cap.) The man was standing in such a way that one booted foot kept slipping back into the creek, the other attempted to hold him midway up the steep bank below the dewy pasture where the sun was just flooding the valley with golden light. The man appeared to have both hands fully occupied with his odd employment: with his left he held a small compact black box unsteadily below his face while with his right hand, he held his cap out at an awkward reach as if to give it to an invisible partner (trying to minimize lens flare, of course) flailing it wildly as he slipped from time to time back into the creek.

I couldn't see through the view finder because of the dazzling sun. I couldn't both hold my cap to block the sun and hold my position on the bank. And with all this, a steady press of the lens was just not possible. I had no idea which, if any, of the webs was in focus or even in the frame! And so, this picture of three webs... like most of my images, has a story behind the composition that burns that moment, that day, that feeling of wet grass and discovery and brilliant threads into memory. And that is why I get such a kick from photography!

See other Spider Web Images from October:

Ephemera; Truth Plain and Simple; and Lost in Space

I Like To Have Written

Here's another wonderful quote from William Zinsser (On Writing Well):

"Learn to enjoy the tidying process. I don't like to write. I like to have written. But I love to rewrite. I especially like to cut: to press the DELETE key and see an unnecessary word or phrase or sentence vanish into the electricity. I like to replace a humdrum word with one that has more precision or color. I like to strengthen the transition between one sentence and another. I like to rephrase a drab sentence to give it a more pleasing rhythm or a more graceful musical line. With every small refinement I feel that I'm coming nearer to where I would like to arrive, and when I finally get there I know it was the rewriting, not the writing, that won the game."

So, dear bloggers: when you issue a post to your weblog, what's the process-- before and after?

Before you post: Do you keep notes on a scrap of paper and amend it often during the day while you mull over just exactly the right points, perfect phrases, and organization to use? Do you sit down the night before and rough it in, preview it just for the aesthetics of the post on the page, research your topic and collect your sources?

And especially, after you have written: Do you read your post to yourself at least twice? Do you read it aloud to yourself or some unfortunate listener-victim? Do you spellcheck (blush)? Do you ever scrap the post entirely because it is not full-grown or seriously disfigured in the gestation process? Do you enjoy having written but dread the rewrites?

These of course are rhetorical questions, as most blog questions are, because we are all so busy thinking about what we will tell our wonderful readers next that we don't have time for silly questions. And of course we are busy with our hours and hours of rewriting. Aren't we? Don't answer that.

A Thousand Uninvited Guests

Got any people you would wish to have a really bad day? Maybe some snooty types in your neighborhood having a dinner party alfresco this weekend? Want to give them a night they'll never forget? Watch this 30-second movie at Insect Journal (no extra software needed) and see if this swirling cloud of insects might be just the ticket! It's probably available via one of the twenty catalogs you got in the mail just yesterday. Order today while supplies last!

Backward, Christian Soldiers

Many are not happy with General William Boykin's recent Christian jihad language. Many of those who are alarmed are Christians like Sojourner's Jim Wallace...

..."General, your theology bears no resemblance to biblical teaching. You utterly confuse the body of Christ with the American nation. The kingdom of God doesn't endorse the principalities and powers of nation-states, armies, and the ideologies of empire; but rather calls them all into question. You even miss the third verse of "Onward Christian Soldiers," which reminds us, "Crowns and thrones may perish, Kingdoms rise and wane, But the Church of Jesus, constant will remain." And let's not misinterpret the famous first verse, "Onward Christian soldiers marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before." The cross, General, not the Special Forces. ... "more

Word of Gratitude

Just a quick Thank You note to Fragments readers, commenters, lurkers and friends (you may belong in more than one of these categories simultaneously!)

Back in July, Bigwig at Silflay Hraka-- one of the heavier hitters in the blogworld by all measures-- did me the mixed blessing of including Fragments in his analysis of blog readership. In that little study he multiplied number of visitors by the average visit length to get "reader-time-per-day". Fragments, a very small fry to even be included in this unofficial study, showed a paltry 1.5 hours compared to 526 hours a day for Instapundit, 79 for Amish Tech Support. Tra la.

Against those readerships, my current six hours of reader-time a day seems pretty weeny. But I would rather hang around a smallish group of folks as nice as you than have a thousand anonymous clickity-clicks. I'm honored that you come around at all and you're not taken for granted. I look forward to meeting more of you, online and in person, as more people open up their thoughts and creativity and dreams to new friends from across the world. And good night, Mrs. Calabash, where ever you are.

Please BookMark

Not just a link. Too much stuff here to just click through. This site is more a portal than a weblog and will lead to great destinations for those of us who are simple-minded. Not stoopid. Simplicity minded.

The Path to Freedom is an off-the-grid organic permaculture DIY resource base you'll want to bookmark like I have. Maintained by 'urban homesteaders', these are the folks that are walking the walk that so many of us just talk about.

You DO know how to bookmark, don't you?

Until I Met a Man That Had No Feet

Stephen Hawking lectures at Cal Tech from an email published at BoingBoing

...One of the most brilliant minds alive on the planet today, he is cruelly trapped within a useless body, which slumps like an understuffed and oversized rag doll in his large and gadget-filled wheelchair.

In a smart grey suit and white shirt with fine blue stripes unbuttoned at the collar, he was smartly dressed, with a mop top-type short haircut that made him look like an escapee from Quadraphenia.

Yet his movement is minimal. He blinks his eyes, his right knee vibrates up and down with an involuntary tremor, and only the slow rise and fall of his stomach indicates that he is still alive.

[...]Once, early on in the lecture, his head slumped forward like a broken doll, and an aide had to walk on stage to readjust his body: an undignified moment as Hawking's head was manhandled and repositioned, and then his whole body picked up and put down, as if the aide was plumping up a particularly large and unwieldy pillow.

It was simultaneously eerie and inspiring: to know that within this frail, almost lifeless carcass, there hummed the thrilling genius of the mind that produced A Short History of Time, and The Universe in a Nutshell, and some of the most seminal work on black holes.

(... and I'm whining because of a little back pain. What are you whining about today?)

Fragments Senior Moment

I built up the suspense as we approached the Puppy Reunion on October 11, expecting a whiz-bang post with pictures of Tsuga and his siblings in all sorts of antics. Didn't happen, exactly. I wrote the story, but then forgot to post it. And so, here is the old news, and those interested can read on...

How the brothers and sisters had turned out in their various homes, and the differences in size and color and temperament; tales of horror and humor from the first six weeks of puppyhood; helpful hints about how to prevent digging, nipping, and general disobedience in young yellow lab puppies... these were some of the things I looked forward to learning from those who would bring Tsuga's littermates back to the Puppy Reunion yesterday. And of course, the pictures would be wonderful... little boy and girl doggies frolicking together fighting over a tennis ball; one puppy up to his knees in the cooler of water the dogs were supposed to drink out of; pups and owners lined up in blurred haphazard order with one pup halfway out of the picture as the shutter snapped. I could imagine it all and hardly wait to post pictures today!

'Tis better to travel hopefully than to arrive, it is said, and such was the case at the puppy reunion. Only one came. There were lots of neighbors and church and work friends of the hosts where the yellow lab litter was born on June 26, and what I guess I had misunderstood was that the party was for them, and the puppy owners were also invited to come. I had thought it was for the purpose of bringing the pups back, and some neighbors were also invited. Ah well. The barbeque was very good, but I would not have spent two hours in the car with a barbarically yowping dog if I'd known Tsuga was going to be an only child.

I'll have to say, the pupster behaved rather admirably. He was so overwhelmed by all the strange smells and other adult dogs. This included meeting his mother who paid him scant attention and his 'aunt' who is now in a family way and scared him considerably when she snarled at him when he showed a bit too much enthusiasm at their first encounter. We put him on the leash and choke chain to contain him rather than letting him run under people's feet and steal their fried chicken and jump gleefully on tiny terrified children. The few times we've tried the leash around home it has been very much like marlin fishing, with Tsuga thrashing, lunging and leaping against the line, and me, the old man and the sea, trying to stay in the boat. But yesterday the little guy was so intimidated by the unfamiliar that he tended to ignore the leash and even heeled for the most part when we attempted to walk around. Good boy, Tsuga! You might grow up to be the pick of the litter after all, and it's just a shame your siblings didn't get a chance to marvel at your mature behavior and sturdy features. Maybe next time.

Changing of the Guard

Crepuscular: at twilight. Adjective describing animals who become active at this time of day.

Just when we humans are starting to wind down, go inside for the night, thinking about how good it's going to feel on these cooler nights to pull the covers up to our chins, there are other creatures who make good use of the nocturnal side of the human day-- lives lived while we dream.

First come the birds that feed overhead only as shadows lengthen late in the day: chimney swifts and nighthawks sweep the air with wide open mouths, scooping up invisible insects that rise like a cloud in the late-day thermals. Later will come the mammals that exploit the same in-flight feeding niche-- the bats -- that we see mostly as shadows against the sky, black against deep indigo, irratically finding beetles and midges and moths by sonar. And last night, just before we reached the barn coming home from our walk at quarter til dark, a screech owl trilled from the edge of the woods, invisible. Deer snorted and huffed indignantly as if to tell us we were infringing on their shifts, go indoors, and give them their due share of solitude and sky.

With the shorter days, the nights are beginning to chill and there will soon be no insects at dusk, and those that feed on them will move on to find other work to the south. The deer will hide from hunters back in the steepest woods; and the owls will own the crepuscular day until spring comes.

Little Things

• Cracked walnuts in a coffee can sat there next to my breakfast fixin's this morning as the Bran Flakes and granola filled the bowl. What th' heck, I thought, and picked a tablespoonful of nutmeats free from their rocky craniums. I don't think walnuts have ever tasted better, and I'm wondering why I've lived this long without trying fresh walnuts on my cereal before now.
• Odd to hear the heavy, solid-seeming winter winds blow across the bare branches and through the remnant few brittle leaves here in late October-- and stand blown about by hot air in shirt sleeves. It sounds like winter, feels like August. Confusing. And arrrgggh! the grass is growing again.
• Tsuga has developed a limp this morning. While, in a young healthy dog, it is probably not anything more than a stone bruise on his toe pads, an innocuous limp is the way Buster's demise started, and the scars from that have not yet healed. Come on, boy, let's not go there.
• I got a package of videos wrapped in a paper grocery bag in typical mom fashion. She sent me eight VCR tapes of...well, I'm hoping NOT the home shopping network... taking pity on my pitiful whining about our cancelling the DISH last month. Heck, come January, I might be looking for costume jewelry or the latest Foreman Grill. I'll watch two hours of test pattern in mid-winter.
• Thankful I am for new visitors sent our way by the out-of-pocket Rebecca Blood. I don't know what she's up to with this week away, but happy she tuned her guests towards Fragments (and Panchromatica, a Fragments-friendly blogger; and to Mark Woods in Canada...) and a couple of new places to visit as well!
• I've managed to booger up my back (once again) while splitting wood yesterday; and so am moving around this morning like I was in a body cast. Physician, heal thyself. Tsuga says I'm especially boring today. Dang that wood. They can put a man on the moon but they can't invent firewood that will pop apart in sections like one of those Christmas Orange Chocolate balls with a sharp tap against the kitchen counter?

Changing Horses

Thanks all for suggestions about the "flowchart" kind of software I asked about yesterday. Among the options were several useful programs, some familiar, some not. What has totally distracted me from those links for my son's needs is this situation of my own: I am disappointed with Microsoft Word that I purchased in my recent computer upgrade and would love to find something better for the long haul as a reliable writing and graphics-capable tool. Commenter Tony suggested Open Office that has a Draw component for my son's project; I'm considering it as a MS Office replacement. (I think this package has some Sun Microsystems history? Right, David, Gretchen?)

I'm not excited about being at the bottom of the learning curve. Learning a new office-type package seems like it would be second only to learning a new operating system! If anybody has experience, horror stories, glowing praise or other input on Open Office components, pullleeeze let me know about them before I spin my wheels in the sand on this one. Making the switch even more tempting: Open Office is FREE!

Some knowledgeable people seem to like it. I'd love to know what you think.

Life is a Miracle

I did not fully own the parochial and insular "faith" in Science that formed the central dogma of my grad school years, and so the smugness of reductionists like E. O. Wilson and Richard Dawkins always gnawed at me. I was not wise enough to explain fully to myself or colleagues why I could not just pledge allegiance to the creed that promised us some day that Science would explain All. I still wrestle with the seeming strife between my faith and the "knowns" of science but am not willing to capitulate, not ready, apparently for Wilson's "Consilience" any more than Wendell Berry:

"Science cannot replace art or religion," he writes, "for the same reason that you cannot loosen a nut with a saw or cut a board in two with a wrench." Against science's "false specification and pretentious exactitude," Berry notes quietly that the more he observes his own little corner of the planet, a small Kentucky farm, the less patient he is with reductionist, materialist explanations of the way things work--for here, and everywhere, "life ... is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated." (Amazon.com)

Mr. Berry expresses his concerns over the terms of this discussion in a long essay called "Life is a Miracle". A Counterpoint Press review has this to say:

In his best-seller Consilience, E.O. Wilson presented a blueprint for the reconciliation of science with religion and the arts. In a carefully measured response, Wendell Berry demonstrates that Wilson's reconciliation is nothing more than the subjugation of religion and art by science, which alone, according to Wilson, would set the boundaries of discourse among the three disciplines. Berry argues that religion and art are not subject to the reductionist and materialistic assumptions of modern science, and cannot be contained within its boundaries or explained by its explanations. He says the aims of science have become hard to distinguish from those of industry and commerce, and he advocates a new Emancipation Proclamation to free life itself from enslavement by the corporations and their scientific underlings. The aim, according to Berry, is not consilience among the disciplines, but rather conversation. He concludes his argument by suggesting a number of changes in thought which would enable such a conversation to take place.

I'll be ordering a used copy of "Miracle" today and very much look forward to the conversation started by Mr. Berry's carefully considered point of view.

Alpha Male ~ Early Adolescence

Here you have it: the "before" at seven weeks old and Tsuga's first day at home with us. And "after"-- which is by no means the ultimate after but only a very intermediate one-- at almost four months of life -- and about half of that here with us. The changes have been evident daily, sometimes between morning and night of the same day. He's growing like Kudzu. The younger pup could stand between the legs of the elder and he's lost those round infant features that make puppies and other babies so lovable.

We've entered that in-between stage where not everything he does is cute, much of it is mere attention-seeking with the additional weight and strength of a dog half his ultimate size and (oh I hope) only a tenth of his final intelligence. His personality (dog-ality?) is beginning to appear now that he is gaining confidence in himself, trust in his caregivers and familiarity with his new domain. And we can't help but compare him to Buster, our second black Labrador who left us in July at only four and a half years.

We used to say, because of his open acceptance of strangers, naivete and innocence to the larger world, and limited social exposure, that Buster was our 'home schooled' dog. Well, Tsuga seems to have been born with more of a James Dean 'reform schooled' attitude -- not mean, just a bit self-important and mildly rebellious. Buster was a big-framed dog with a massive chest and head, but he always had a chihuahua self image and he did not tolerate change. We first realized this when, at Tsuga's present age, Buster went bonkers the morning he first saw the "for sale" sign we had put in the yard the night before. Tsuga is a smallish dog yet (maybe 40# at 15 weeks) but imagines himself to be worthy of the Serengeti and a pride of lionesses. He is very much in touch with his Inner Wolf. If we pretend to be sneaking up on him, rather than slink back to the porch like Buster would, Tsuga goes into full stalk-and-attack mode. But when the attack comes, at the last moment before we would become the limp gazelle pulled up onto a low limb against the sunset, he pulls back and does the lick-and-wiggle display of appeasement. But I think in Tsuga we will have the dirt road watchdog we never had with mild-mannered Buster, and that is a good thing. Tsuga is much more like Zachary, our first lab.

So. He's passed through his cute stage and the thrice-weekly pictures have stopped-- I'm sure you've noticed. Who wants to look at a gangly teenager? Oh, we're trying the "Click and Treat" method of training, just started yesterday, actually. Now all my pockets have a half dozen crumbly kibble in them, just ready for Tsuga to accidentally do something right and get a reward. Funny. The kibble supply doesn't seem to be going down very fast. But the pup is becoming a member of the family and our daily routine once again has a warm tawny pup in the empty place that big black Buster left. I am confident (well, hopeful) that Tsuga will grow into those big paws. His boldness and confidence will become wonderful assets someday, and if we play our cards right, he'll allow us to continue living with him here in this glorified crate called home.

Flowchart-Timeline-StoryBoard

Technical support: HELP! Can you believe I'm still helping my kids with homework! Son has a project in which he needs to create a timeline-flowchart depiction of a story with characters through time; the finished product will cover a single page of 17" x 11". He asks what software to use for this.

I dunno. MS WORD (PC) with DRAWING toolbar might do the trick. Does anyone know of another commonly available software program or "FREEWARE" downloadable that might be just the ticket for this project?

Thanks...

Stumped on Goose Creek

Time Pressured, Anyone?

TAKE BACK YOUR TIME DAY (Friday, October 24th) is a nationwide initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.

WHY SHOULD YOU CARE? Are you, or your friends or relatives, working more now but enjoying it less? Does your family's schedule feel like a road race? If so, you're not alone. Millions of Americans are overworked, over-scheduled and just plain stressed out.

IT STARTS AT WORK.

• We're putting in longer hours on the job now than we did in the 1950s, despite promises of a coming age of leisure before the year 2000.


• In fact, we're working more than medieval peasants did, and more than the citizens of any other industrial country.


• Mandatory overtime is at near record levels, in spite of a recession.


• On average, we work nearly nine full weeks (350 hours) LONGER per year than our peers in Western Europe do.


• Working Americans average a little over two weeks of vacation per year, while Europeans average five to six weeks.

But really: this is a serious, coordinated attempt to call attention to lives out of control, blogger-friends. And we know how to fix the problem. If you want some reminders why this is necessary for your health, listen to Dr. Cecile Andrews talk you through the Circle of Simplicity. I'm listening. Share this with someone you know who needs to slow down, while there's still time to simply live.

Detrititus

Earth as Art From a Distance...(my favorite).

Sound as Healer New Agey, but something to it.

David's new blog! Ripples

DocRoc's coming up for air: Educational Angst

The new blogs of Seth, CopCar, LinB, Trish: TBA. We're waiting...

And I'm sorry: What's the deal with Gazing Balls?

A HorseFly on the Rump...

...of copy editors. That's me. Just enough typos on Fragments to keep'em unbalanced, mildly agitated, not quite able to personally jump in there and apply the red pen to my dropped leters and trasnpositions. Yesterday I got another of my not-infrequent kindly pointers to a typo I might have caught eventually, transcribed early this morning on my way out the door. I should do better. I repent, mostly. I understand how hard it is to see deficiencies and negligence and want to correct them. You see, I used to be the "Posture Policeman."

"My gosh, look at that guy's thoracic kyphosis" I would say to myself of a complete stranger just met. "Bet it started out as a lazy adaptive posture, maybe slumped sitting in an office chair. Now he probably couldn't straighten up his upper back if his life depended on it."

"And the secretary over there. Looks to be about 5'10" tall, grew like a weed when all the boys her age were a six inches shorter. She did everything she could to stand 'short'-- head and shoulders below the rest-- and that slouch of teen-age years never left. Some day her neck and shoulders are not going to thank her!"

The latest posture statement that seems to go with the baggie pants that say yes to crack is the chicken-necked "forward head" posture I have seen in the last couple years in early teenage skater-dudes. I've tried to tell them as patients (and more than that, their parents who should already have told them this) that they can pay now or pay later; and paying now with attention to their horrible but correctible skeletal engineering we call posture will save them a world of literal hurt in thirty years when them chickens will certainly come home to roost.

Back knee. Anterior pelvic tilt. Protracted shoulders.

Sentence fragments. Mismatched verb tenses. Even words that aren't in the dictionary (just to get'em riled up good).

Our professions lower our thresholds for noticing the kinds of nuance that 'outsiders' are blind to... to their peril, be they owners of skeletons aligned (or not) against gravity for the long haul, or would-be writers who are lazy about punctuation and spelling.

Be sure that sooner or later, somebody is going to grab you by the collar and set you straight, bucko. And that means, you, Fred.

Fragments WOTD: NIMBY

In regard to the recent discussion regarding WallyWorld, this is a very useful term that might not already be in your vocabulary: NIMBY

Walmart: Good for Business?

Not everybody thinks so: ... a coalition of community groups have mobilized to defeat Wal- Mart's counterattack. But they face a formidable enemy. Over the last 40 years, Wal-Mart has grown into the nation's biggest employer and the world's largest retailer. Every two days, Wal-Mart opens another superstore. It has more people in uniform than the U.S. Army. Last year, it banked about $7 billion in profits.

But hey! Walmart means jobs! Well yes, but... Wal-Mart, she points out, lowers wages among working families and crushes family businesses. "It not only pays workers less than most of its retail competitors, two-thirds of workers don't have health-care coverage -- a cost taxpayers are picking up across the country. link

A favorite "old fashioned" hardware store in a nearby town has closed, I learned. Why? Because nobody comes downtown since Walmart opened, I was told. Replay this every two days.

Been There Done That

Ouch. That hurts.

Yes, I confess. I'm an uncloseted retrophiliac. Help me somebody. I've fallen into the good old days and I can't get up!

Come Together

Symmetry and design in life happen at unexpected times-- in those rare moments when things seem to be as they ought-- right, solid, intertwined in yin-yang complementarity, ordained. It would do no good to pick these epiphanies apart, to dissect them to see what meaning they might contain because like dreams, you may be the only one who knows there is a kernel of truth to them. The magic will likely be lost in the telling to any other. Even so, I will tell you I had one of those warm moments of rightness a few days ago. And I will tell you something of why-- although I cannot tell it all because the story is still being told and its truth remains to be established, even to the dreamer.

In June I took part in my first "writer's workshop"-- the Highland Summer Conference at Radford University. There I met a wise man who would lead the first week of the conference. He listened to my dreams and saw a purpose, and wanted to know where they would take me if I followed them as a writer. We talked of many things and of countless gifted people including a writer of "natural history" that I kept running across and whose writing and point of view I had admired. "Oh", he said, "she was over at my house last week. We get together every so often and have grand conversations. I'm going to tell her about you when I get back home next week."

He did. She and I exchanged a couple of emails, short at first, because her dog of twelve years had died the same week as our Buster, and neither of us were in very congenial spirits. Later we wrote at greater length about our nature interests and writing-- enough to know that there could be many long and deep conversations on these topics given the opportunity.

And then. I sat down to kill time with the recent issue of Blue Ridge Country Magazine at the library last week and the magazine fell open to a poignant essay written by my email friend. She skillfully built her structure and end point for the essay around the following poem:

The essayist weaves the poem's essence into the details of her own life. From the midst of the decay and death and disappointments that her summer has left her, she recenters on the heaven and earth attainable in her own garden, on having enough.

Yes! Well done. I've felt those needs, known those longings, but perhaps I could not have found the words to tell it any more than I find words to tell why this matters so much just now.

The end of story-- for now-- and the way things come together: She will be facilitating a week-long "Nature Writing" workshop in a beautiful place in November. I signed up months ago to be a participant.

Hear Garrison Keillor reading "The Wild Geese" on the August 05 Writer's Almanac.

Just Because You're You

Writers are obviously at their most natural when they write in the first person. Writing is an intimate transaction between two people, conducted on paper, and it will go well to the extent that it retains its humanity. Therefore I urge people to write in the first person: to use "I" and "me" and "us". They put up a fight.

"Who am I to say what I think?" they ask. "Or what I feel?"

"Who are you not to say what you think?" I tell them. "There's only one you. Nobody else thinks or feels in exactly the same way."

"But nobody cares about my opinions," they say. "It would make me feel conspicuous."

"They'll care if you tell them something interesting, " I say, "and tell them in words that come naturally."

Ready to Molt

Since I often regale and photograph and otherwise patronize the insects, I'll put this in entomologocal terms. Let's just say that my little blogger body is about to outgrow it's current hosting home and it may be time to molt into a larger and more flexible abode. Yup, it is about to be metamorphosis time, good buddies and buddettes. I've paid for a year at Cornerhost where I have had 100 MB to grow into, and am weighing in today at 92 MB.

By the first of the year I'm gonna have to take the next step... from $10/month to $20/month (to move up to 250MB at Cornerhost) or option two: (and here's where I need your help and advice) consider moving to hosting at Typepad at the Pro level that gets me 200MB for $15 a month plus the features of Typepad; or three: find simple server space that's way cheaper than $20 a month but reliable, and stick with MT.

I guess my dilemma is not knowing if the move from MT to Typepad will be a hassle; if Typepad is enough more user friendly that I might actually enhance (rather than screw up) the Fragments front page I've had up since January 2003; and wondering if I can keep the domain name I paid for or would I have be to typepad.com/fragmentsfromfloyd or somesuch.

Anywho, I'm fishing about once again for more room and need to decide something soonish. I'll be looking for Typepad usergroups, forums, et cetera, and listening to you folks who are already using Typepad or know more about it than I do just now. I dread it, but it's time to expand 'cause Fragments grew like Topsy! (And we all know now where that phrase came from now, don't we?)

Life On The Margins:

The Necessity Of Neighborhood Wilderness

Ms. Dickenson may have been on to something with her prairie that consisted of only one flower and a bee. When I was new to the world, a quarter acre vacant wooded lot and one small boy was enough to make a wilderness.

I grew up in the city limits of a sprawling Alabama city, but I was happiest when I imagined myself to be surrounded by 'wilderness'. In the leafy chaos of vacant lots and wooded neighborhood margins I was able to pretend to be a pioneer... like Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier... to imagine that I existed for an afternoon in a place that was just the way God had left it. Playing in the woods--even though it might be just a fraction of an acre-- I could imagine that there I was closer to 'native land', and so I was closer to being a native myself. Playing 'cowboys and Indians' in those tiny woods connected me to an earlier time when men were more in touch with the land than any of our white-collared fathers were.

As I grew older, I found I needed more of the unspoken nutrient of wildness than my small neighborhood woods could provide for me. I went to summer camp and there found my backyard forest magnified a thousand fold. Living for a week smelling of creek water and pine straw with a hundred other feral children made me feel more connected to the larger life of the world than an entire summer of chlorine-smelling swimming pools and organized, sanitized sports ever could.

I fished. Fishing possessed its own sense of isolation and otherness and was its own foreign country fit for a young explorer. Mostly I fished alone and from the shore, and more often than not, I'd find myself thoroughly distracted by some little thing in the woods along the lake and forget fishing entirely. It was not the fish I was after, after all. I tried hunting, but killing things was not the manly adventure it seemed to be when Davy killed him a 'bar' and so I never became a hunter either.

And I played golf. Like many of my friends, I followed my father onto the golf courses that spread into the countryside with the expanding city. Our dads went there to find tranquility, solitude and serenity by chasing behind a little white ball. I worked on a golf course one summer, but I'd wander off into the rough turning logs for salamanders. I decided that for me, just being there was the point-- and guns, rods and reels, clubs and other toys were merely visible tickets into wilder natural places, icons required by a society that seems to expect grown men to display a reason for going happily out-of-doors.

All of the tiny wilderness sanctuaries of my childhood are paved over now, locked behind guardhouses of gated communities, uninviting and forbidden domesticated places. Even the margins and edges from youth were not far enough away to provide lasting wildness. Maybe it has been this experience that has compelled me to find remoter places when looking for a place to put down roots in our later years.

And so today, we live every day well beyond the edges of a town so small there are no suburbs. I have a vast woodlot around me, two creeks full of bright fish and sunlight, tranquility by the sky-full, and no neighbors to disturb in my rambling walks. This little valley may be the 'place' I felt I belonged to long ago. And I have to wonder if I did not start moving to Floyd County while picking berries with small hands, behind my suburban house in a secret patch of woods where natives lived.

(This is the original radio piece (before edits for length) that aired today, now posted for comments, ripe tomatoes and open for the astutidity of Fragments readers... Pascale tells me that astudidity is not a word, but what she means is that it didn't used to be. It's my creation and I'm sticking to it.) Astute Seth writes to remind me to post this-- thanks.)

Chimera:

[n] (Greek mythology) fire-breathing she-monster with a lion's head and a goat's body and a serpent's tail; daughter of Typhon. (Search Engine accuracy) what happens when Fragments from Floyd blogrolls Cassandra Pages.

Googling can create an awful alchemy complete with visuals. Avert your eyes ye faint of heart.

Ephemera

I drove past a meadow not far from here one late August afternoon last year to discover sunlight slanting over it in a dazzling spray of color. The reddened light of near dusk kindled the yellows of goldenrod to a pale incandescence against the lushest growth of tall deepest purple ironweed. It was breathtaking, but I didn't have my camera. I made note of the time and a few days later drove back to the meadow to capture its wonderful color and form. But it was not the same-- the yellows had gone to browns, purple passed into grays. The meadow was sallow and tired, even in perfect light. Next year I would not miss it, I told myself, marking a date when I expected the color would be at its peak again. And so I returned to the very place at the appointed time a few weeks ago. Lush and green after the wet summer, it is still a pleasant meadow but not a place worthy of visiting for its color or composition. New plants have taken over the neighborhood. Its fifteen minutes of fame had passed.

I tell this trivial tale because it describes a lesson I have learned from living close to home this past year: Nature deals in one-of-a-kind blue-light specials and you'd best be prepared. By the time you get back with your camera the carnival will have moved along to the next town. Ice formations along the creek in winter change from minute to minute in kaleidoscopic fashion, like clouds morphing between eyeblinks. A winter snow evolves before your eyes while you stand at the window to finish a cup of hot cocoa before launching out to capture some bit of it with your lens. When you are finally dressed for the cold and ready to go, the light has changed, the winds shifted and the perfect play of winter shadow on blue light has become flat featureless monochrome. Fall colors of yesterday are gone with the wind today.

Spiderwebs are by their very nature the ultimate expression of the transient and emphemeral, inconsequential matters in time and space and invisible by their very purpose. How unlikely in timing, perspective, illumination and meteorology that I should find a spider's web at all in my morning walk. And so it is a miracle to be on my knees in wet grasses at the only place at the exact moment when sunlight will turn the radians and whorls of invisible stealth into silver threads of liquid light. So delicately laid out, so beautiful and frail, nothingness visible for moments, and gone.

See other Spider Web Images from October: Truth Plain and Simple; Lost in Space and Come Into My Parlor

Dulcid Duplicity

Before the first astute Fragments reader calls this to my attention (assuming the astutidity of said group)...

In the previous post, I apparently used a word that is not in any online dictionaries I could find and therefore perhaps not a real word at all. DULCID finds 163 hits on Google showing I am not the only person who seems to think this is a real word.

If anybody can help sort out this disconnect between usage and formal acceptance of this very nice, soothing, smooth-sounding word... please let the word-sleuths amongst us know about it.

Public Disservice Announcement

The Fall Fund Drive is underway at our local Public Radio Station, WVTF in Roanoke. And even though the radio staff are working long and hard this week with the hope of generating more listeners and more contributions, they have nevertheless decided to air another of my three-minute word rambles tomorrow in the very midst of the fund-raising. I just have to trust that they know what they're doing here.

Here's the scoop:

Listen via Real Audio: HERE (Live, real-time only)

Regional broadcast: 89.1 - Roanoke; 89.5 - Lynchburg; 88.5 - Charlottesville 89.3 & 89.7 - Charlottesville, Waynesboro & Staunton; 91.9 - Marion, Wytheville, Galax & Abingdon

Date: Friday 17 October

Time: Immediately after the regular short Civil War that airs at 6:50 and again at 8:50 a.m., EDT

Y'all can tell me how much Alabama you can hear in my dulcid (or just dull) voice.

Just Another Pretty Face

In the interest of equal time, there has been way too much devoted here to spiders and butterflies (this from a recent complaint filed by the Dipteran Civil Liberties Union) and so today we are fulfilling our requirements for equal representation by showing a member of the group ... the parasitic Tachinid Fly. Noted for their edginess and punk tendencies, you can see here the typical black-leather-and-spikes attitude characteristic of these fat bad boys of the Fly Set.

Tomorrow, we will be returning once again to the world of spiders with another in the series of web images. (You can understand why there is a certain animosity between the two groups, spiders and flies, and I understand there is arbitration underway called the Roadmap To a Peace Accord between Dipterans and Arachnids but they have yet to decide if the meeting will be held in a large round sticky web or on a pile of steaming cow manure.)

Last Year's Images: Lost in Space

Last year, due to some regrettable neurosis on the part of my server-host du jour, most of my images for last fall were not accessible from the old server because I was cruelly and unjustly prevented from redirecting visitors to my new site. (I was attempting to move from Blogspot to Moveable Type, and the horrible tale is told in allegory here.)

So if you go to the October archives, there are unsightly (no pun intended) empty boxes where the pictures should be. While I don't think many readers go back to my archives, still this gaping void bothers me, and blemishes my 'oeuvre' (can I say that Fragments is an 'oeuvre' or maybe an opus without being a magnum)?

I spent a good bit of yesterday-- a windy presage of the 60 mph winds we had overnight-- trying to photograph a Monarch Butterfly on the very same Chrysanthemums as last year to replace the image that accompanied Insect Epistemology from last October. No luck yet, nothing but blurry black and orange smudges with wings held tightly together like a modest woman crossing her legs.)

The flowers are past their prime now and the butterflies need to be moving right along toward Baja, so that particular image box may remain vacant for another year. But be assured we have our technical support personnel working on the problem. Please be patient. (Begin Elevator Music... Barry Manilow, I think....please hold, your call is very important to us...)

UPDATE: After giving up on this year's Monarchs, I grabbed an acceptable shot yesterday afternoon and the awful blank box in last year's post is no longer empty and my sense of order is restored! (I am so easy to please.)

New Banner Mascot

Note the Red *Eft (immature stage of the Redspotted Newt) in the left banner today. We happened across him on the Middle Road on a walk one day this week. I'm not happy with the image so he won't stay long, just a quick hello. He was much more impressive against the background of Beech and Striped Maple leaves on the trail-- brilliance on brilliance-- a psychedelic amphibian among gaudy plant-parts.

I would know the same disappointment with efforts to bring back stunning images of the beeches themselves, lovely in a holistic viewing in place, less than stunning in the single frame out of context. There is a large part of nature's beauty that just does not render from inside a rectangular viewfinder. Sometimes, ya just gotta be there.

* See Comments...

Mystical Experience of Early Music

In random websurfing this week I ran across just the mere names of two songs that I have not thought of, much less heard now, for decades. From the names long forgotten I was drawn to find the lyrics. With words now fresh again in my mind and melodies conjured from some deep place in memory I was transported back to the darkened bedroom of a five year old boy hearing music he did not understand-- an alchemy of music that was full of wonder and mystery.

In those days, The "Hit Parade" was a family regular on Saturday night television. I can still see shadows from the blue glow into the den as they flickered across my bedroom walls. I couldn't see the grainy images dancing on the small round screen, but the words and the ethereal refrain of these two songs gave me goosebumps, and the feeling of something Beyond comes back, even now. The imagination of a five year old is disproportionately large, and the mystery of strangers in Paradise and secret loves made me believe that there were doors into a much, much larger and stranger world than I had known.

When our kids were about that same age as I was when this music entranced me, Ann and I read to them at bedtime about the Magic Wardrobe-- that open door through which Lucy and Edmund and Peter entered into Narnia. I wonder if they can recapture that same sense of portage across thresholds of imagination into worlds that seem so real, the same worlds that came to me from these two silly songs? Is it a universal trait of the very young to be receptive to the mysteries of other realities, places we could go, already belong and cound visit if only someone would show us the entryway? Heaven, perhaps? Would we be better off as adults if we could recapture that sense of wonder and astonishment?

I am embarrassed to admit that the two songs I'm talking about are Secret Love sung by Doris Day, and Stranger in Paradise sung by Tony Bennett. Not bad songs, really, but you wouldn't think a five year old would give them a second listen. It helps me to realize that when I was five years old, I was madly in love with my kindergarten sweetheart and at least partly, it was that other world of LOVE, I think, that seemed so haunting and unreachable. Sigh. But there was more to it than that.

Lyrics follow...

STRANGER IN PARADISE

Take my hand
I'm a stranger in paradise
All lost in a wonderland
A stranger in paradise
If I stand starry-eyed
That's the danger in paradise
For mortals who stand beside an angel like you

I saw your face and I ascended
Out of the commonplace into the rare
Somewhere in space I hang suspended
Until I know there's a chance that you care

Won't you answer this fervent prayer
Of a stranger in paradise?
Don't send me in dark despair
From all that I hunger for

But open your angel's arms
To this stranger in paradise
And tell him that he need be
A stranger no more

SECRET LOVE

Once I had a secret love
That lived within the heart of me
All too soon my secret love
Became impatient to be free

So I told a friendly star
The way that dreamers often do
Just how wonderful you are
And why I am so in love with you

Now I shout it from the highest hills
Even told the golden daffodils

At last my heart's an open door
And my secret love's no secret anymore

Mutually Assured Scorpions

Apparently, Chem-Bio warfare is not a product of modern evil genius after all.

"While the ancient world's arsenal of biological and chemical weapons was trivial compared with the horrors of the modern world, those weapons raised the same terrifying moral and political dilemmas then as now. Is a bunker-buster bomb dropped from the sky more civilized than a clay pot filled with scorpions thrown into an enemy's cave?

Mayor quotes a king in Asia Minor of the 2nd century BC who was defeated when Hannibal "catapulted live snakes onto his ships." The king remarked that "he did not think any general would want to obtain a victory by the use of means which might in turn be directed against himself." link

BR549

Don't ya just hate those phone numbers that spell out catchy mnemonics for businesses? You know: like "Call 1-800-ADIPOSE for weight loss while you sleep" and such.

If you find you can turn your home phone into an interesting jingle using the services of PHONESPELL, by all means tell us and we'll check it out. What time will you be sitting down to dinner. Hmmm?

Can Your Children Think?

In a Christian Science Monitor article called "Rethinking Thinking" comes this paragraph:

"Critical thinking, social responsibility, reflective judgment, and evidence-based reasoning ... are the most enduring goals of a first-rate liberal education," says Ms. Schneider. Yet research shows "many college graduates are falling short in reaching these goals."

I certainly tried-- with varying success-- to make this kind of reasoning happen in my students in biology classes (versus rote memory required to simply regurgitate facts) and when I was a forty- year-old Physical Therapy student myself, I was very much called on for "evidence based reasoning" in every test and practical exam I took in that two years.

But it is alarming that you can pay the very big bucks to send your children through four (or frequently more) years of college and they still may not have the skills (and yes, critical thinking to some degree is a learned process and a skill) to think and reflect clearly and deeply on their major subject, much less on general issues that will face them in the world outside academe. If you have or will have children in college, demand that they be truly educated by educators who have rethought thinking.

Bless This House

Place Names

The biweekly topic at the Ecotone for October 15 is Place Names. Got any interesting place names near you or place name stories you'd be willing to share? You can leave them as comments here if I can't talk you into contributing to the Ecotone.

My wife thinks it odd that if I can find an old road map under the seat of the car somewhere, I can amuse myself for a half hour while she is in the fabric store. And this is a fact, I admit. It doesn't matter how old or of where; a map contains a hundred stories in the names that places have been given, and the imagination is free to ponder and concoct. While there may be the kernel of a fact wrapped up in the names of villages, mountains, crossroads and rivers, more often than not, the names make me wonder about the part of the story that they don't tell.

Just glancing at the map of southwest Virginia now, for instance... over there is Barren Springs. I bet there's a story in the name. Maybe it wasn't the springs that were barren. Perhaps it was thought at one time that the water contained a poison that would result in stillborn children. Hmmmm. And over a county or two is Porter's Crossroads-- like many names, commemorative for an unknown (most likely Mr.) Porter. Some once-significant roads intersected there, and so it became a center of commerce. Maybe it was just a farming community, but possibly it nurtured an early industry related to the lead mines that made shot for the Confederate Army. And obviously this was a former glory as PC now lies now in the middle of nowhere. Shooting Creek, right here in Floyd County, was the scene of a fierce battle between the moonshiners and the revenuers come to bust up their moonshine stills, if I'm remembering my tales right, and I would have imagined just such a history from seeing the name on a county map. Boone's Mill; Haymakertown; Yellow Sulfur Springs... all tell of a central enterprise that once happened in those places with enough regularity or importance that the little settlements got labeled by them.

Other names are more geographic, like Five Mile Mountain that meanders down the Blue Ridge towards Ferrum; Bent Mountain that plunges zigzagging off the same geology toward Roanoke; and Buffalo Mountain, so named not because the creatures used to live there but because the outline of the 4000 foot tall monadnock looks in outline like a resting buffalo. It is the most outstanding single physical feature of the county and the high school teams take their names from it.

Place names can be mystifying. You wonder what the town fathers were thinking when they came up with the name Breeding Ranch over in a nearby county, until you understand it was named after a Mr. Breeding and does not promote promiscuity in any way, as your mind might at first have imagined. What you can't tell from looking at map names is that town names often take on their own local pronunciation. Wytheville, where we lived for 12 years, was widely pronounced Whiffle; the nearby sleepy village of Rural Retreat (the home of Dr. Pepper) had way too many "R"s to get your teeth around, and it was called simply "Earl Treat". One was thought affected if they enunciated the third syllable of Fort Chiswell, and instead it was often simply Fort Chissel. Nearer to Floyd, Staunton is Stanton, Buena Vista is Byou-na Vista, Meadows of Dan (near the headwaters of the Dan River) is MedduzzaDan...all one word. You know you got yourself a tourist if they pronounce the "of".

When we first moved from Alabama to Virginia long ago, I was a little ruffled to find that so many of the counties in the "commonwealth" (Virginia is technically NOT a state, you see) were high-falluting names of colonial royalty: Prince William, Prince George, Prince Edward, King and Queen, King George Counties. I imagined powdered wigs and lacey collars and poofy cuffs on all the local farmers in those counties. Where I had come from we were less pretentious, more earthy and yet also recognizing of our roots: Lochapoka, Notasulga, Saugahatchee, Euphapee, Chewalkla, Sylacauga, Coosa, Tallapoosa were little Alabama towns or creeks near Auburn where I first started enjoying maps and map names. They were the multisyllabic names the Cherokee and Choctaw (two Alabama County names, by the way) had given to those places; although how they knew one place from another without these convenient municipality lines and county seats layed out nice and neat on the map is a mystery to me.

So. Next time you get stranded in an interstate motel room with nothing to read but Gideons Bible and the Rand-McNally Atlas, after you've read a selection from the Psalms and one from the gospels ('cause this is as close as some of ya blamed heatherns are gonna get to going to church)-- head straight for the atlas pages that show Idaho, Minnesota and Vermont. Find the three most intriguing place names on each; amuse yourself by making up stories to explain each name. By the time you're done, you'll be ready to nestle down under those stiff, smoky sheets and listen til morning to the ice machine and the biker dudes in the room next door.

Hug Your Pup

Damn.

Goldenrod ~ Pasture margin, October 2003

I have umpteen slide carousels of wildflower pictures going back I hate to confess how many years. Wildflower taxonomy and photography have been interests since grad school days. Two years ago, in the process of installing a CDRW drive so I could back up all my digital camera wildflower images (many hundreds) my hard drive crashed and they were all lost. Some among them were carefully composed portraits of strikingly beautiful and dramatically illuminated natural bouquets.. of Lady's Slippers, Indian Pipes and Virginia Bluebells. Most were simply mugshots... utilitarian reminders of unpretentious and common roadside and pasture-edge plants from around here that would never get much attention from those demanding a show from the world of flowering things.

The goldenrods are so abundant in pastures and along roadsides that it is easy to overlook the fact that these common weeds are quite stunning when examined from up close in the slanting sun of late afternoon-- a light that only enhances the gold in this late-flowering autumn floral arrangment. There are two or three other fall flowers I'd like to find posing in the right light to have their pictures taken durning their last days: the blue asters, witch hazel, and beech drops are at the top of the list. Stay tuned.

Building a Better Comment Spam Bomb

I'm gen'lly a mild mannered kindofa guy. Takes a lot to get me riled. But some slob throws a beer can and an empty cigarette pack out their rusty truck window into my yard-- makes me as mad as if they'da spit in my face. And when a Customer Service desparate-for-a-job person calls my house at dinner time to sell me another credit card... well, let's just say I don't spend a lot of seconds between lifting the phone and returning it to its cradle. And I feel the same way about this most recent insult: "comment spam". It seems to be growing in frequency daily on my weblog. How about you? And what are we going to do about it?

This is the list from yesterday. Can we start a registry of these folks and put some Denial of Service pings their way? Is there a way to slip a stink bomb into an email attachment? I'd like to take their litter and throw it back in their yard. How do we do that, hmmmm folks? The longer we wait, the worse it's gonna get. And that makes me very angry. And you don't wanna get your weird ol' Uncle Fred angry...

UPDATE: Steve at OnePotMeal sends good news... MT Blacklist code should be available later today. See comments.

To Boldly Trek

"I guess I'd better trek on" I said, attempting to pull away from a lingering conversation with a neighbor. And as I drove off, the verb "to trek" resonated from my last goodbye as sometimes words do, seeming odd and alien when held up to scrutiny. I repeated it over and over out loud to see if the sound of it would give me any clues to its meaning or derivation. We use words so thoughtlessly, pulling them without effort from a sock drawer in one little lump of our temporal lobes. This time, I couldn't quite stick the work "trek" back where it belonged among seldom used and uninspected words, and it replayed in a loop over and over as I drove along the narrow gravel road to the house.

And it was still spining like a broken record when I got home, the word... obviously not Latin, didn't seem Greek either... demanded to be (to use a new noun-made-verb)... GOOGLED. And here's what I found out about the source of this gutteral word, trek.

Trek, Great: The journey by Afrikaner farmers (Boers) who left the Cape Colony to escape British domination and eventually founded Natal, Transvaal, and the Orange Free State. Trek is an Afrikaans term, originally meaning a journey by ox wagon. In this most famous trek, 12,000 Boers left the Cape between 1835 and 1843. The Voortrekkers (as these Boers are known) migrated beyond the Orange River. After defeating resident Africans, most remained in the highveld of the interior, forming isolated communities and small states.

Christianity and The Survival of Creation

I write quite often about nature and the senses here in the weblog. While I find great wisdom and solace and beauty in the details of the natural world and celebrate the aesthetic pleasures of the senses, I don't laud Nature as an end in itself nor am I a hedonist. My perception of beauty, order and complexity... those features of the world outdoors that allure and fascinate and inspire me... are to me signs of a created order and point my mind and heart toward the Source, while they are not that source themselves, worthy of honor but not of worship.

As a Christian who places high value in the world that God created and called good, it has been an appalling disappointment to me over the past decades to see what 'conservative Christians' have been willing to do to creation in order to sustain the engines of wealth. Where have they missed the mark, and how do we find a way to right livelihood and the gathering of our daily bread without the wholesale rape of the very firmament under our feet in the process? The heavy footprint of a "Christian nation" on other cultures and the living world is a matter that disturbs me a great deal.

Wendell Berry-- poet, essayist and defender of traditional rural life and small-scale farming-- has voiced his concerns on these matters, making a rare presentation from the pulpit. This is a matter about which, as a Christian, he feels strongly, and of course, speaks eloquently and from the heart. The long essay from which these clips were taken is called "Christianity and The Survival of Creation". I'd encourage you to read the entire essay, but I know most won't, so here are some snippets, with more in the "Read More" that follows.

... if Christianity is going to survive as more than a respecter and comforter of profitable iniquities, then Christians, regardless of their organizations, are going to have to interest themselves in economy--which is to say, in nature and in work. They are going to have to give workable answers to those who say we cannot live without this economy that is destroying us and our world, who see the murder of Creation as the only way of life.

... The Bible leaves no doubt at all about the sanctity of the act of world-making, or of the world that was made, or of creaturely or bodily life in this world. We are holy creatures living among other holy creatures in a world that is holy. Some people know this, and some do not. Nobody, of course, knows it all the time. But what keeps it from being far better known than it is? Why is it apparently unknown to millions of professed students of the Bible? How can modern Christianity have so solemnly folded its hands while so much of the work of God was and is being destroyed?

... It is clearly impossible to assign holiness exclusively to the built church without denying holiness to the rest of Creation, which is then said to be "secular." The world, that God looked at and found entirely good, we find none too good to pollute entirely and destroy piecemeal. The church, then, becomes a kind of preserve of "holiness," from which certified lovers of God dash out to assault and plunder the "secular" earth.

... our destruction of nature is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God's gifts into his face, as of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them. To Dante, "despising Nature and her gifts" was a violence against God.(n3) We have no entitlement from the Bible to exterminate or permanently destroy or hold in contempt anything on the earth or in the heavens above it or in the waters beneath it. We have the right to use the gifts of Nature, but not to ruin or waste them. We have the right to use what we need, but no more, which is why the Bible forbids usury and great accumulations of property. The usurer, Dante said, "condemns Nature. . . for he puts his hope elsewhere."

... if we are to maintain any sense or coherence or meaning in our lives, we cannot tolerate the present utter disconnection between religion and economy. By "economy" I do not mean "economics," which is the study of money-making, but rather the ways of human housekeeping, the ways by which the human household is situated and maintained within the household of Nature. To be uninterested in economy is to be uninterested in the practice of religion; it is to be uninterested in culture and in character. Probably the most urgent question now faced by people who would adhere to the Bible is this: What sort of economy would be responsible to the holiness of life?

.... I don't think it is enough appreciated how much an outdoor book the Bible is. It is a hypaethral book, such as Thoreau talked about--a book open to the sky. It is best read and understood outdoors, and the farther outdoors the better. Or that has been my experience of it. Passages that within walls seem improbable or incredible, outdoors seem merely natural. That is because outdoors we are confronted everywhere with wonders; we see that the miraculous is not extraordinary, but the common mode of existence. It is our daily bread. Whoever really has considered the lilies of the field or the birds of the air, and pondered the improbability of their existence in this warm world within the cold and empty stellar distances, will hardly balk at the fuming of water into wine--which was, after all, a very small miracle. We forget the greater and still continuing miracle by which water (with soil and sunlight) is fumed into grapes.

[...] By denying spirit and truth to the nonhuman Creation, latter-day proponents of religion have legitimized a form of blasphemy without which the nature- and culture-destroying machinery of the industrial economy could not have been built--that is, they have legitimized bad work. Good human work honors God's work. Good work uses no thing without respect, both for what it is in itself and for its origin. It uses neither tool nor material that it does not respect and that it does not love. It honors Nature as a great mystery and power, as an indispensable teacher, and as the inescapable judge of all work of human hands. It does not dissociate life and work, or pleasure and work, or love and work, or usefulness and beauty. To work without pleasure or affection, to make a product that is not both useful and beautiful, is to dishonor God, nature, the thing that is made, and whomever it is made for. This is blasphemy: to make shoddy work of the work of God. And such blasphemy is not possible so long as the entire Creation is understood as holy, and so long as the works of God are understood as embodying and so revealing God's spirit.

Blogger's Tool Kit

I recently had the chance to give a little demo to a future blogger of how a weblog entry is created in Fragments. In the process, we looked for info in several software 'storage bins' that I use often during the day as I browse and compile and cogitate. I sent him the list by email so he could take a look and see if any of these programs suited his organizational style. Since it was already in link format, I'll just post them below for you.

I'd like to know what you consider to be software you "can't do without" in the information gathering, writing and organizing that happens from your desk. Please send links! (Real men tinker with engines and machinery; geekguys fine-tune their 'puters. What can I say.)

Ecco Pro PIM ~ Free

Clipcache ~ Super Clipboard and Organizer

NoteTab Pro ~ HTML and Text Editor and More

TurboNote ~ Sticky Notes and link launcher

Netcaptor ~ Multitabbed Browser

Dances with Wolves

Many of the dog-behavior websites I have visited talk about how important it is for puppies to be well-socialized, mingling frequently with as many humans of all ages as possible as well as with a variety of dogs. Sequestered here on Goose Creek, our 14-week-old pup doesn't get out much. We've had few people and no dogs come to visit since he's been with us. And so when new friends came to dinner Thursday night, let's just say Tsuga did not handle himself with the deportment one would hope to see in a refined and mannerly young male canine of fine breeding and upbringing. And his upbringers were mortified.

"Look at me! I'm running with a stick in my mouth!"

"Look at me! I'm gonna jump off this six foot ledge into rocks!"

"Look at me! I'm eating deer poop!"

One thing Tsuga doesn't cope with is not being the center of attention, and while David and I tried to have a conversation as we walked down the valley, the dog did every bad thing he could think of that would garner attention... even if it was BAD attention. How very spoiled and child-like!

I bring this up because later today we will drive back to our dog's birthplace for the Powell's Puppy Party Reunion and Pig Roast. Tsuga's litermates and their upbringers will convene for an afternoon of... well, I am not quite sure what to expect. But I think I have an idea.

The Truth Plain and Simple

That should make for some raised eyebrows, don't you think?

Better Living Through Chemistry

"Do you feel woozy, have an itchy scalp, experience glaucoma, hate minorities, have problems reading, fear clowns, midgets, midget clowns? Does the nightly news scare you, are you having a hard time understanding multi-variable calculus, does Memento still fail to make sense? Do elves make fun of you in your dreams, wish Old Yeller wasn’t shot or want your future wife to be chosen by an American TV audience? Do you succumb easily under torture, is the sun currently setting, find difficult decisions vexing, have a hard time distinguishing between good touch and bad touch? Well, then Paxil may be for you.

Paxil is a member of a new class of antidepressant medications known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors that help restore critical chemical balances in the brain. This restored homeostasis may help if your computer speakers a bit fuzzy, your mother-in-law constantly nags, you find yourself crying while peeling onion or even if your gums bleed."

(It's satire, m'kay? From DukeSatire.com)

Be Still

Listen. What do you hear right now where you sit at your computer? Possibly you're reading this from work where fax machines and telephone voices drone and sirens wail from the window and the florescent lights buzz overhead and your computer's hard drive whines and distant conversations rise and fall in constant droning noise throughout your day. Are you aware of it, or has it become so commonplace that you take no conscious notice of it anymore?

There is great value in quiet. With our streaming media, perpetual links to each other with handheld beeping "necessities" of our business and busyness we are not even removed from our work while driving, shopping, walking between office and parking lot, even in wi-fi motels where we 'rest' while traveling for business-- we are seldom in a quiet place. It's easy to forget how healthy a daily dose of quietness, stillness and solitude can be. We no longer expect it and may even feel uneasy when we find ourselves in a rare moment free of crowds, hurry and noise.

To cope with the stressors of clamor and clatter, we learn to tune out, filter and ignore. I wonder if in this we also become less sensitive to each other and to our own inner voices to which we would do well to listen. Freedom from outer chatter and the babel of inner noise comes with a peace that only quiet times of solitude can provide. Losing quietness takes only a single cell phone melody in the middle of a complete thought.

I hope you'll create five quiet minutes at your work today and twenty when you get home; and teach your children how to be still. There are so many wonderful things to ponder, so many weighty problems to solve, and noise is the death of both reflection and careful thought.

We live in a very tense society. We are pulled apart... and we all need to learn how to pull ourselves together.... I think that at least part of the answer lies in solitude. ~Helen Hayes

Never be afraid to sit awhile and think. ~Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun

Listen to What They Don't Say

Watch your candidates closely for Adam's Apple Jump this November.

Usage: The Adam's-apple-jump is an unconscious sign of emotional anxiety, embarrassment, or stress. At a business meeting, e.g., a listener's Adam's apple may inadvertently jump should he or she dislike or strongly disagree with a speaker's suggestion, perspective, or point of view.

U.S. politics: The Adam's apple gained it's 15 minutes of fame when former Vice President James Danforth Quayle's thyroid cartilage "jumped" in the 1988 vice-presidential debates, as he listened to his opponent, Lloyd Bentsen's pointed claim: "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy!"

From the Dictionary of Gestures, Signs and Body Language Cues

Do You Have Style?

"You will be impatient to find a "style"-- to embellish the plain words so that readers will recognize you as someone special."

..."This is the problem of writers who set out diliberately to garnish their prose. You lose whatever it is that makes you unique. The reader will notice if you are putting on airs. Readers want the person who is talking to them to sound genuine. Therefore a fundamental rule is: be yourself.

"No rule, however, is harder to follow. It requires writers to do two things that by their metabolism are impossible. They must relax and they mush have confidence."

from On Writing Well by William Zinsser

Why Write from an Ordinary Life?

"At bottom every man knows well enough that he is a unique being, only once on this earth; and by no extraordinary chance will such a marvelously picturesque piece of diversity in unity as he is, ever be put together a second time." - Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Light of Day

"These blessed mountains are so compactly filled with God's beauty, no petty personal hope or experience has room to be... the whole body seems to feel beauty when exposed to it as it feels the campfire or sunshine, entering not by the eyes alone, but equally through all one's flesh like radiant heat, making a passionate ecstatic pleasure-glow not explainable. One's body then seems homogeneous throughout, sound as a crystal." -- John Muir

Close Encounters: Company is Coming!

Dear Lord preserve me. We are having folks to dinner tonight.

"BlahblahblahblahDUSTMOP BlahblahblahblahPLACEMATSblahblah..." shouts the General in charge of Counter-Invasion Forces; er, force...just me. An Army of One.

I honestly try to follow her endless list of orders and heed the warnings of what will take place if I go AWOL. I make sincere effort to feign interest by continuous affirmative head-bobbing...sort of a military wobble-head doll...eager to please but more eager just to get on with my day! Good Lord, it's two adults coming for a meal, not the approach of the DeathStar Battallion!

IF JUST ONCE, the Dire Consequences foretold by the General in her anticipation of engagement with these Others would actually happen, I would become a believer. I might even re-enlist. If just one time:

• The invaders refused to eat from the plates because there are water spots on the underside.
• The Landing Forces actually did examine my sock drawer and the top shelf of my closet and demanded to see our storage room AND cellar, particularly looking behind things in the corners with their X-ray vision.
• The Exotic Ones became ill, dissolving into green goo before our eyes because the salad forks were INCORRECTLY PLACED on the left side! No, make that the right side! WhatEVER!
• The Horde became enraged and violent (or lapses into a comatose state) because the Army of One made the incorrect choice in dinner music. Or it was too loud. Not loud enough
• If just one time The General-in-Charge was actually the object of disdain and loathing by the Visitors, this resulting from a list of slight infractions and errors because of the negligence, dalliance and incompetence of the Troop, and that she was indeed thereafter condemned as a Really Bad Person, and excommunicated from the Legion of Friends forever.

Remember, Troop: Pretend to be a good soldier, but don't dustmop until you see the whites of their eyes!

This is a revisitation of a post from last summer because, well, company is coming to dinner. Wish me luck. Guys.

Memo for Next October:

Don't bother gathering walnuts until after the first freeze of the season.

In one hour (while we were away in town) 75% of all our walnuts fell thudding to the ground, along with most of the feather-like compound leaves, making a most untidy cluttering as if a massive wind had swept through, but only rattled the walnut trees. It happened well after sun-up after a night with temperatures in the mid-twenties down in this valley where cold settles hard. The gravel road was literally edge to edge lumpy with walnuts when we rounded the bend approaching the house-- the proverbial bumper crop. I wish I'd been here to see this extravaganza, but from a safe distance, mind you. A man could be killed in that one hour of falling nuts the size of baseballs, but I can think of worse ways to go.

I easily filled a half dozen 5-gallon buckets with the green nuts in the husk-- a mere tithe from what is probably three hundred gallons of nuts yet on the ground under the crowns of the four trees by the garden. As if we needed more dehusked nuts than the passing cars would leave us on the road, I poured these six bucketsful of green baseballs out in the graveled space where we park the cars; we'll dehusk them with the front tires over the next week or so. Conceivably, we'll get around to picking the nuts from the husks soon, but this is not certain, and the word 'hoarding' comes to mind in my obsession to gather more than we can use.

We have a walnut cracker that's been with us for decades, a product I think from one of the Inquisitions... a wormscrew cranking affair that in the end will crack even the toughest nut. From a coffee can of broken shells of former tough nuts I picked a mere half cup of brainshaped pieces of actual walnut. I hate to think of the effort-to-product ratio for those few ounces of fragrant seed. As I tediously picked specks of oily nut from bonehard casings with a homemade nut pick, I had the momentary illusion that I was the only worker in a nutty sheltered workshop.

I can't say why I'm so driven toward walnut rescue this year. It can't be just about the walnut pound cakes Ann will make in January, although there is that. Maybe I'm responding to some latent squirrelly anticipation of a hard winter ahead. Or it could be simply that, in light of this year's bounty, when opportunity knocks, it just seems right to answer. As my ol' mammy always told me, "for free, take. For buy, waste time".

If anybody is interested, we're having a "pick your own" walnut gathering from now until the squirrels have hid all remaining nuts. And if you don't mind, please BYOB (paper or plastic?)

Give Me Google Or Give me...

...some other search engine. Google isn't always best. (Ever tried Vivisimo?) And the usefulness of any search engine depends on what you ask it. I learned some good general search tips that will increase my chances of finding targets with fewer clicks... here.

And snoop around. From that last link, you can find Resources for Journalists like The Reporter's Desktop... a handy one-page net sleuth.

What To Give Her for Christmas?

"In this issue of Visionaire (a fashion and art publication) experience 21 original scents made exclusively for this publication in individually marked glass vials that correspond to specially-created visuals."

"Smell the scent of...Cold, Noise, Heat, Hunger, Gigabyte, 2Am, Sadness, Success, Violence, Softness, Electricity, Mother, Wasteland, Fear, Fetish, Strange, Drunk, Wet, Space, Broken Glass, Instinct."

Perfume? For real? Sounds like an Allen Ginsberg poem about my years in college.

Going. Going.

Not going. Not gone. The 1989 Volvo 740 we hoped to sell sits in the driveway, a perfectly useful first car for some young person. Safe as a tank. That's why we bought it from the first owner, friends of ours, back when Nate was in highschool. Lots of miles, cosmetic issues inside, yep. But no car lot wants it. It got precious little visibility in the local paper with last week's ad. It's not moving.

It will become a charitable donation, I guess, as we need it out of here before winter sets in. There are all sorts of places Google finds searching for "give a car to charity". If anybody has any experience with any of them, I'd love to hear. Of, if you'd like to swing by and take'r for a test drive and never bring it back...

Fragments: Odd Blog

If I feel just a wee bit out of the loop in the blogosphere, it's only because I am a statistical outlier way at the far side of what's "normal" for blogs and blogging. I've known this, deep down, but now I have the stats to support my suspicions from a White Paper called The Blogging Iceberg.

Consider the following points made in the article:

• First is the amazing fact that there are 4.12 million hosted weblogs. This does not even include blogs using Moveable Type, Radio, Grey Matter and the like. The subtitle goes on to declare that "of 4.12 Million Hosted Weblogs, Most Little Seen, Quickly Abandoned".
• The most dramatic finding was that 66.0% of surveyed blogs had not been updated in two months, representing 2.72 million blogs that have been either permanently or temporarily abandoned.
• Blogs are updated much less often than generally thought. Active blogs were updated on average every 14 days. Only 106,579 of the hosted blogs were updated on average at least once a week. Fewer than 50,000 were updated daily.
• "Even as MP3 sharing and instant messaging began with teenagers, teenagers have created the majority of blogs. Blogs are currently the province of the young, with 92.4% of blogs created by people under the age of 30." A whopping 0.4% of bloggers are 50-59.
• Nanoaudiences are the logical outcome of continued growth in blogs.

SleazeBlogging

Dear Mr. Discount Life Insurance,

I am so happy that you have visited my weblog and left the inspiring comment "interesting" (text which I am sure is coded into your blog-bot) on several randomly chosen posts from my archives. Please know that I am not the least bit interested in clicking on your weblog or emailing you as I am sure you hope to promote your business. This weblog is not a place from which I conduct business other than that of writing to friends, and for your own benefit, I am telling you that your efforts to obtain business via this weblog are wasted. I am sure that my fellow bloggers feel the same way and will soon block their weblogs from future comments from you if you persist. Have a nice day.

Mindfulness of Winter Wood

The body has a kind of memory unknown to the mind, its cues and prompts coming from the feel of things held by hands, joints flexed just so, tension held here and there, a certain vantage point more than the thing seen. I cannot stand behind someone at the computer and tell them what steps to take to complete a complex task they don't know, even if it is something I do 'mindlessly' a dozen times a day. It is only after I sit down in the seat, put my body into the routine, feel my way through its steps that the sequence for the task comes flowing out my fingers to the proper keys in perfect order that in a sense, I did not know. It is the same way with building a fire.

It has been almost thirty years since the first time I fumbled with strike-anywhere matches, crumpled newspaper, and gathered the three stages of kindling that will build a quick fire. The routine unfolds unconsciously when my body moves into that certain configuration kneeling before a cold stove. Each motion is stored in the moving parts of trunk, eyes and hands, in the timing and sequence and plans that the soma uses while the psyche attends to other matters on a cool early morning in October. Suddenly a fire pops and sizzles in the stove behind me, and I am barely aware that my hands contributed to its presence.

And yet, considered as a whole the home industry of wood burning, I cannot imagine a more intentional and premeditative endeavor than heating a house with wood that must come from the woodburner's own efforts. My calendar runs two winters ahead to fetch and cover wood to dry for the long winters. In January, my week will be governed by the snowstorm that is expected as the weekend approaches; will I have enough of the right mix of high-heat maple and oak and smaller quick burning starter wood under cover from the snow? My morning fire anticipates the day ahead, and I load it full, or put just enough in to keep some coals, acting as the house's thinking thermostat and weatherman all together.

I know the source of it from the forest, and can often say with precision where any given piece of stove wood fell to earth. After four winters here, I know well the temperament of this old house, and I understand the moods of the stove itself-- how it will draw in all manner of winds, when it will need ashes cleaned, how long with the present feeding it will keep the kettle hissing happily on its cast iron top. Heating with wood is both a discipline and a reflex; it requires constant attention to comforts in the present but always with a distant gaze ahead to provide for months and years of cold to come.

Madder'n a Wet Hen

Hmmm. That's odd. I don't seem to be able to record from the microphone like I used to using Syntrillium's Cool Edit 2000. I probably need to get new drivers since I switched to XP. I'll just find them at the vendor's site.

Say what? The is no Syntrillium any more. Cool Edit Pro is no longer supported. The software has been purchased by Adobe and I can upgrade to the new version of Adobe Audition for only $99. If I'd wanted to spend that much I would have bought Cool Edit Pro a year ago. And I am SOL, with a useless piece of software and no recourse.

Well t'ell wittum. So much for my second annual Goose Creek Christmas CD I was going to start recording this week. It's the world's loss, I tell ya. Was gonna be a doozie.

Alpha Male ~ Keeping His Place

Here the dog is "helping" me with the woodpile. He's going to be so much help chewing on firewood in coming months I can hardly stand it. Tsuga (pronounced "sooga" and named for the dying Eastern Hemlock, for those who are new to the pupster) is now twice as tall, twice as long, and at 35 pounds almost three times as heavy as the pup we brought home seven weeks ago. His neck is now almost as big as mine (but then I am a certified pencil-neck geek) and unfortunately, he still has all 100 of his puppy teeth.

Modified behavior du jour:
The lower level of the house is carpeted. Dirty dog feet and carpet make a bad mix. We want him to stay on the hardwood. He wants to come down here where I am most of the day, on the lower carpeted level. We've had two wooden chests pulled across the doorways into the lower level and have been stepping awkwardly (and dangerously) over them now for almost two months. This is not going to work now that I have to bring firewood past these barriers several times a day, so starting today, I'm leaving a foot of space between the chest and the wall. The dog can get past, but I'm hoping with enough reinforcment, he'll learn that he shouldn't. Buster learned this as a full grown dog in one day. Tsuga, on the other hand, is sort of the James Dean Bad Boy of the dog world and I'm afraid I'm going to have to threaten to take away the keys to the car before he backs off and behaves. It's gonna be a long winter.

BoomBoxed Boomers

Okay. I'm a boomer (an early one at that). And I confess, this is the kind of music that I find comfortable in the background during my computing day. We get exactly one FM station here in the canyon, so the variety of online music (when the DSL is working) has been a nice addition.

Check out Boomer Radio. After installing a little Windows Media app (AbaCast) to speed things up, the music loads fast, plays without breaks, and offers a nice mix of 'stations'. My current favorite is Acoustic Cafe, but in addition to Smooth Jazz Favorites, Sweet Soul Music and Classic Mix, the sidebar tells of other channels soon to come. Very little chatter, good back to back music, though I wish it would scroll the artists names for some of these whose voices are so familiar though I haven't heard them in years while I can't quite place if that's Carol King or Carly Simons, Neil Young or Cat Stevens.

Always On. Mostly.

I have to give (faint) praise to my ISP... the local phone cooperative... for bringing DSL to the hinterlands. When it works, it's great. This morning, and off and on every day since it was installed two weeks ago today, not so great. An added feature of the new service (in addition to periods of dead air) is the fact that when I use our cordless phone and talk with someone also on a cordless or headset, they sound like they are three rooms away with the doors shut.

They're working on it. And so I may suddenly disappear from the blogosphere until they can get those chipmunks running in the squirrel cages at full speed so that I can be truly 'always on'. Always off is not an acceptable alternative, PhoneGuys.

The Creative Habit: It's Work

From an interview by By Linda Kulman with Twyla Tharp, author of The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

[...]Anyone can be more creative. I'm not talking here about creative with a capital C, as in Rembrandt, Mozart, Beethoven, Matisse--the pantheon of gods. You do the best you can do, but the best you can do is a little better every day. It's a little more focused; it's a little more accomplished; it's a little freer. It's got a little more chutzpah. It's got a little more authority to it. In the end you don't ultimately make the decision as to whether you were or were not creative. You just practice the creative life. Let others make that decision. You'll be long gone, anyway.

[...]Do the best you can do. And be there because you know that it's good for you to be there. Either you do what you do very well, or it does something for you such as giving you solace, giving you a companion, giving you a place to practice being yourself.

Why does being creative matter?

[...]So that you walk out the door believing in yourself a little bit more. So you believe that in any given day you've made more of it than it might otherwise have been. So that you do not take things for granted. Creativity, ultimately, is a way of saying thank you.

Savoring Autumn

It is a mercy that leaves in their dying-- massive dying from leaf-fall to total decay between September and the first signs of early spring-- are not subject to putrescence and rot in the odiferous way that animals are in death. Can you imagine! There is so little to a leaf, being mostly air spaces between large jumbled palisade and mesenchyme and parenchyma where the advanced chemistry of photosynthesis happens. And when that job is done, there remains only the carbonaceous shell of the factories of summer to steep into pleasant aromas like tea leaves in the last of the warmth of late autumn. Death smells wonderful in the world of leaves under a painfully blue October sky. And it is not only the aroma that leaves offer this time of year. There is something here for eye and ear as well.

Listen. Can you hear in the gentle currents before first light the papery sounds of leaves jostling still clinging, barely, to twigs where already the watery sap is heading south for winter? Summer leaves, supple and soft, do not rustle and clatter like fall leaves after rigor mortis has set in. The death rattle of fall leaves bears little grief because already, the incipient buds of spring's translucent greens are forming just there where a death has overtaken the stem.

Look. Underpaintings of ochre and sienna and titanium yellow show through as the chlorophyll blush passes from each leaf in dying like a watercolor wash. Watch as a walnut leaflet falls twirling about its axis falling in a straight line without fanfare. The the maple leaf, lopsided by its heavy petiole rocks stem to stern and twirls in a dizzying circle following a spiral path, not giving up gracefully before joining fallen comrades on the driveway. I sometimes have to stifle applause after a particularly brilliant performance.

It is early yet, with so much more to come. I should keep a list of autumn's pleasant details to look back on from the short days of February. Yesterday while gathering wood over behind the barn, Ann stopped as if she had heard something off in the distance or was trying to recall something forgotten, staring unfocused as people do when remembering. "Peach cobbler that ran over in the stove" she said. And she was so right. And so there is one of those potpourri fragrances of fall we can add to our list. There will be more.

Seems a Shame

Up the valley, just at the bend where Nameless Creek and its old stone wall disappear from view, is the foundation of an old barn. Nothing remains but the large stacked rocks. Many of them are the angular shaley variety. The sedimentary shale formed from the ancient seas that covered the area in the eons that followed the massive uplift giving rise a billion years ago to the hard quartz and granite core of the Blue Ridge. The more rounded and aged rocks are from the very heart of the Appalachians, stones that have resisted the relentless forces of wind and rain, freeze and thaw, smooth-edged only after millenia of scouring in the rivers and creeks that have come this way since animals with backbones walked here.

You can still see the gaps in the wall where a door used to be. We find odd chunks of metal from old cast iron stoves and farm implements buried in the effluvium of time. There are lives under the leaf litter there, leaves falling to fill the crevice of valley from either ridge and from a massive elm that grows up through the very center of the imaginary roof of the old place. Just outside one of the walls, a small tree with rippling, sensuous legs has sprung up in several twisted trunks and grown to its characteristic smallish size; but it is ancient as lifetimes go for this species. One fork has pulled away in the past month from those still standing alive but elderly, and it lies now severed and dead across the old stacked stone wall.

A relative of the beeches, it is known scientifically as Carpinus carolinianum, and it grows pretty much everywhere across the US, largely unnoticed. But if you want to see it, look along creek and river bottoms for smooth trunks and limbs that resemble the trunks and limbs of a well-ripped athlete. My favorite common name for this tree is very apt: "musclewood". It is also called American Hornbeam (horn=hard and baum=tree), Blue Beech, and Ironwood. It has been used a little in old days for tool handles because of its strength. What little I could find was not encouraging as I wondered what could be done with this wonderfully sculpted bit of dead wood: Hornbeam checks and warps badly in seasoning. The wood dulls wood working tools quickly.

I can leave it for the molds and mushrooms to take. Or I can cut up the sinewy strength in its granitic deltoids and biceps and it will warm us a year from now when all the life is gone out of it, and it is segmented dry and stacked with other fallen comrades. Seems a shame to cremate this wonderful wood without more of a viewing of the body. This picture will have to be its only memorial. It's more than most trees get, I suppose.

Braindead Blogging

MAdGE:
Mothers Against Genetic Engineering
And no wonder. It's hard enough to find a good comfortable underwire two-holer. Right ladies?

Status:
I'm tired of being the only one not punching numbers into a little box or holding something with little buttons up to my ear in public places. It's time to take matters into my own hands. Now. Where were those scissors?

Told Ya!
His brain takes in less sensory detail than a woman's, so he doesn't see or even feel the dust and household mess in the same way. Anyhow, the male brain attaches less personal identity to the inside of a home and more to the workplace or the yard -- which is why he doesn't get worked up about housework. Don't ya just love science? Huh, guys?

Pukin' Pumpkins
Gather 'round kiddies and let's put our demented, sadistic, macabre little heads together and see what we can do to a pumpkin to make this miserable cold November walk for tooth decay even weirder!

Druthers

I druther have a tooth pulled. We have to take both the dog and the cat to the vet today for scheduled maintenance... rabies shots and such. Risking the double insult of stolen plates followed by a ticket for driving the car while someotherperson uses our car tags, there's no way I'm letting that dog in the cab of the truck with me, "held" by Ann's loving but quickly mangled arms. Whichever vehicle, the cat will be wailing pitifully from the cat-carrier in the back seat and it will no doubt be a tale told by an idiot. Make that two idiots.

My Map of the Mundane

From the journal devoted to the study of mundane behavior comes this "outburst" essay that seems aimed squarely at moi... be sure and follow the links to historic maps and savor the writer's enjoyment of language. Fragments is, after all, only a personal "mappa mundi" of one mildly disoriented traveler.

"All maps are historical. And history, as we know, is a branch of rhetoric. Maps only capture a momentary glimpse of the turning world with a particular argument contained in the vision. Although we turn to maps to give us a picture of the world, they often rather give us a picture of ourselves and how we see ourselves in the world. Although we trust them as a scientific view of an objective, unchanging state of physical geography, in truth, maps only reflect the fantasies, fictions and ambitions of what a particular time and ideology thought the world ought to be. On a mundane map, orbis non sufficit."

Neighborhood Watch

Would the doofus or doofi who removed both front and rear license plates from our Subaru during the past twenty four hours please give it up. Come on, guys. This iddn't funny. We're gonna have to have them prettysoon.

"Yes sir, Mr. First" (the deputy's only fault was excessive use of the term "Mr." and secondly maybe a few verb tense issues) "I'll report this in all fifty states and your tags may show up real soon".

"Great" sez I, "I'll give it a few days before I go through the hassle and expense of getting replacements".

"Yes sir, Mr. First, I apologize for this but you cannot drive your car legally without license plates".

"Understood. But isn't stealing license plates also sort of against the law? Surely there is an allowance for this, a temporary tag or such, so that new plates aren't paid for and the old ones found the next day" I huffed. "We have to drive that car, it's a Friday and we won't be able to sit in line at the DMV for two happy hours".

"Yessir, well there used to be a temporary tag, but our governor's done changed all that. You will be ticketed, yessir."

And so, Bubba, you see we're kindly up a crick. So if you'd just drop those tags in the mailbox sometime today, we'd be grateful. It was fun, sort of exciting, but a joke's a joke, son. And would you please also leave those mounting screws. They're a little hard to find. Oh, and if you come back for the tires, you'll have to bring your own cinderblocks. And one more thing: I got me a bad dawg here. I thought you ought to know.

Sit on it

The quest for the perfect sit (with major constraints by wallet issues) goes on, and the Chairmanship for the search committee goes to Jeremiah, who in his brand-spanking-new blog, points my derriere in the direction of some most cushiest of seats, all ergonomically correct and full of levers and bells and whistles. This page from Herman Miller is an education in itself, and I will sit in one of these in Roanoke later today... for coveting purposes only.

Thanks much, Jeremiah, who has been a technical consultant at Fragments lo these many months but should not be blamed for any of the content for which I give all the credit to my wife and dog.

The Only Book I Ever Read

...online. All of it. Scrolling page after page down the computer screen. I was living alone on the edge of the world, sequestered in a cabin on the rim of the Blue Ridge, just me and the cat. This online book-- once I started, I couldn't 'put it down'... to borrow from an old-fashioned (and frankly, more pleasurable) way to read a book.

The book: Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler. Written in 1986, I read it in 1997 and have never been able to hear the word "nanotechnology" without seeing Drexlers tiny engines making more tiny engines making useful stuff out of raw feeds of atomic parts.... the most wonderful and terrible creative tools man has ever known (well, not yet, but-- as we've mentioned recently-- it's just a matter of time.) His ideas of Molecular Nanotechnology persist unrealized but increasingly possible. Still, more immediate less futuristic applications of 'nano' are finding applications every day. Some of these new technologies are intrusive, invasive, or "disruptive" as this MD in "Yale Medicine" describes them. Ever heard of "smart dust"? You will. If nanotechnology doesn't interest you, it should. It will change your world. For the better? Perhaps.

Lost in Space

Only a Matter of Time

"There is no theoretical difference between a dental implant and a mental implant except that we know how a tooth works and can manufacture a functional replacement. Currently, the same cannot be said for the neural network of the brain. But from a bioengineering standpoint, that is only a matter of time."

There's this mandate that, when I was young and green, politically, was attributed to the Army Corps of Engineers (pertaining chiefly, I think, to stream channelization in the south at the time). The saying that was said to be the motto for the Corps was:

And, although Fragments readers may be no more interested in this topic than they are in my raving rhapsodies about caterpillars and the like, I'm likely to voice some of my questions, concerns and opinions on these important matters in coming weeks and months. Along side of a steady stream of Tsuga pictures, of course.

(You have to watch a brief ad about stopping smoking to view this Salon full article. Pretty painless, really).

Putting My Money...

... where my mouth is.

Well, while not exactly anatomically accurate, I do have intentions of spending what I think will be wise dollars to ward off CTDs, RMIs, and other forms of what a patient once called 'them competitive motion diseases' -- of course meaning conditions like carpal tunnel (also rememebered from the annals of PT patient malaprops as: copper tunnel, carpet tunnel and my all-time favorite-- 'tunnel corpuscle' disease).

I am on the very verge of ordering this ergonomic office chair unless one or more of you vigilant consumers sends urgent caveat emptors my way by tomorrow.

The seat-pan/back angle control I need, elevates easily for the vertically challenged in our household (no, not Tsuga) and especially for me to ward off the various bursitis gremlins that seem determined to ruin my good times-- elevating arm support that I have always had in office chairs at work since the early 90's.

I'm open for alternative providers, but these folks pay UPS shipping! How kewl is that!

WallyWorld In Your World

"Wal-Mart is so big it's like 10 companies getting together to force bar codes through 25 years ago," said Eric Peters, senior vice president for business development at Manhattan Associates, a supplier of software for product distribution systems. "Even if you're not in their top 100, you might want to do it so people think you are."

Radiotags and chips are smaller, cheaper and will soon be coming to Walmart underwear.

"Very few people grasp the enormity of this," said Katherine Albrecht, director of Citizens Against Supermarket Privacy Invasion and Numbering, a group that was founded in 1999 to protest the use of frequent shopper cards and credit cards to collect data on individual consumers' purchasing habits.

In theory, there may be benefits from keeping the tags active once a product is sold. Washing machines, for example, might identify the clothes in a load and automatically select the appropriate cleaning cycle. And a smart medicine cabinet could tract the expiration on drugs."

No Recent SitComs, Please

If we still subscribed to the DISH and upgraded to the Channels Actually Worth Watching Package, I might want to catch this one.

But alas, we traded off the One-Eyed Brain Sucker for this here DSL line. Mostly, that's fine. But I tell ya, there are some days I'd like to sit down and have my brain sucked for a half hour. At this point, I'm moving-picture-deficient enough I guess I'll even get around to watching the videos with the remaining episodes of the first season of M.A.S.H. that Ann gave me for Christmas almost two years ago. My mom sent me back from Bama in August with two VCR tapes of some of Johnny Carson's last shows, a few MASH's (several with the endings clipped off-- mom!) and darn if I didn't sit through an entire Hallmark Hall of Fame weeper chickflick, just because pictures were moving on the screen.

One VCR tape seems to meter out about a month's worth of sit-time in short snatches like I prefer. I bet I could find somebody to TiVo me one tape a month. Now if I just had a foggy notion if there was anything truly worth watching from that somebody's two hundred channels. Seen all the Gunsmokes (found myself thinking in Festus Hagan's voice there for a while last summer) and Andy Griffiths and Seinfelds, yadayadayada. Any suggestions?

Hmmm. With the DSL, I wondered about downloading movies. Anybody know anything about downloading movies?