Deep Thoughts

Reality lives in the details

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Sometimes you come across a comment that passingly mentions a central truth that you just want to climb up on a roof and shout it out to the world. That! Pay attention to that!

Trent Telenko comments on his own excellent post:

Reality lives in the details.
You have to know enough of the details to know what is vital and to be able to use good judgement as to which histories are worthwhile and which are regurgitated pap.
No one has bothered to do that with MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area, especially as it relates to the proposed invasion of Japan.

Yes, reality lives in the details and we are living in a world that both has more of those details available and has fewer of those details capturing our attention. We leave important details unexamined and fixate on the exciting but unimportant details of celebrity and titillation.

What makes the situation supremely frustrating is that it doesn’t have to be that way. Computers are both becoming cheaper and more powerful. We’re deploying new technologies such as the Semantic Web to fix it but the progress is agonizingly slow.

Faster please

Hello From Here

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I remember an episode from a decade or so ago, when my wife and I were making some plans for our estate and we were sitting down with the attorney and discussing our wills and trust situations.

We were going to put it in our documents that we wanted certain procedures followed for disposal of our remains. The attorney looked at us and said quite matter of factly “it doesn’t matter what you put in here, everyone will just do whatever they want with your body anyways”.

That short sentence snapped me into reality a bit. You can wish and hope for things to happen when you die, but if you don’t have someone on your side to effectively run your estate upon your death such as a wife or husband, your wishes pretty much don’t mean squat. And you won’t be around to complain.

An acquaintance of mine lost his father a while ago. His father did not want my friend’s sister to have a certain set of flatware that she always coveted. I don’t know what the falling out was about. To make a long story short, she got the flatware since the other brothers knew that she wanted it since she was a little girl. The dad wasn’t around to complain.

I was reminded of all of this when I saw this story.

A man killed himself, and had put a LOT of thought into it. He left a BIG website up explaining his motives and thinking and prepaid the server costs for five years to hopefully keep it up.

Always being curious about this sort of thing, I read a lot of the site, and there is some interesting info up there. He wasn’t sick, or hurting for money (so he says), but just wanted to end it. I still don’t get why he wanted to shoot himself if he was doing alright, but the website dives into that pretty deeply.

These letters from beyond the grave are always interesting to me. I have often thought about writing a letter to my wife and kids to be found in my safe deposit box someday if I should die suddenly. I have not done that. I think it would just cause more misery.

In the end, the guy who shot himself has lost the narrative, and so does anyone that dies. For the first few days after his death some folks with a morbid curiosity about this sort of thing (like me) will look at the site and read a few things, and shrug their shoulders and move on with life. His name will be forgotten quickly and it will be hard to remember what to google to find the site again if you want to read it.

I imagine that before long, his surviving relatives will contact the service provider and the site will be taken down for whatever reason, and he will fade away into oblivion.

But it is an interesting (if not rambling, at times) look into this guys life, and his postcard from beyond.

Cross posted at LITGM.

Rebooting the Lone Ranger

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Well, the early critical reviews are out and the knives are in: the latest movie remake of The Lone Ranger looks to be tanking like the Titanic,(the original ship, not James Cameron’s movie fantasy) although the some of the reviews posted at Rotten Tomatoes are favorable, most of them are entertainingly vicious. Jerry Bruckheimer again goes over the top from the high-dive with a half-gainer and a jackknife on the way down, all with the noisy special effects, Johnny Depp was promised that he could wear bizarre hair and a lot of makeup and it appears as if the ostensible lead character is just there…

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History Friday – Plundered

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A number of summers ago, when I was still stationed in Spain, I packed up my daughter, and a tent and all the necessary gear, and did a long looping camping tour of the southern part of Spain, down through the Extremadura, and to the rock of Gib al Tarik, and a long leisurely drive along the Golden Coast. I had driven from Sevilla, past the sherry-manufacturies around Jerez La Frontera (on a Sunday, so they were closed, although the Harvey’s people should have given me a freebie on general principals, I had sipped enough of their stuff, over the years), made a pit stop at the Rota naval base for laundry and groceries. I had driven into Gibraltar, done a tour of the historic gun galleries, seen the famous Gibraltar apes, and then waited in the long customs line to come back into Spain. We had even stopped at the Most Disgusting Public Loo on the face of the earth, at a gas station outside of San Roque, before following the road signs along the coastal road towards Malaga and Motril, and our turn-off, the road that climbed steadily higher into the mountains, the tall mountains that guarded the fortress city of Granada, and the fragile fairy-tale pavilions of the Alhambra.

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Christo Anesti! – Eastertime in Greece

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(This piece was part of a much longer essay about life in Greece when I was stationed at Hellenikon AB in the early 1980s. I posted it originally on The Daily Brief, and also rewrote much later to include in a collection of pieces about travel, people and history for Kindle.)

Christmas in Greece barely rates, in intensity it falls somewhere between Arbor Day or Valentines’ Day in the United States: A holiday for sure, but nothing much to make an enormous fuss over, and not for more than a day or two. But Greek Orthodox Easter, in Greece – now that is a major, major holiday. The devout enter into increasingly rigorous fasts during Lent, businesses and government offices for a couple of weeks, everyone goes to their home village, an elaborate feast is prepared for Easter Sunday, the bakeries prepare a special circular pastry adorned with red-dyed eggs, everyone gets new clothes, spring is coming after a soggy, miserable winter never pictured in the tourist brochures. Oh, it’s a major holiday blowout, all right. From Thursday of Holy Week on, AFRTS-Radio conforms to local custom, of only airing increasingly somber music. By Good Friday and Saturday, we are down to gloomy classical pieces, while outside the base, the streets are nearly deserted, traffic down to a trickle and all the shops and storefronts with their iron shutters and grilles drawn down.

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