Deep Thoughts

Try To Remember, That Time in September

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(An archive post for today; originally posted on this day in 2004.)

Around the time of the first anniversary of 9/11, I saw a drawing commemorating, and making a bittersweet comment about anniversaries, memory and the passage of time. Quick pen sketches of the WTC towers, each with a sequential date underneath; 9/11/02, 9/11/03, 9/11/04, but with each repetition, the outline of the towers became mistier, more diffuse. The first anniversary to me was almost unbearable, as much of a psychic battering as the event itself. The second was a sad and thoughtful occasion, and now we are facing the third year, and the day falls on a Saturday; not a work day for most of us. Curiously, that seems to set the event a little aside, this year. I will not be walking into the glass and granite lobby of the office building where I work — a lobby that looks eerily like the lobby of the WTC buildings, owing to the fact they were built at about the same time, following many of the same architectural precepts, and which houses many of the same sort of businesses, although on a much smaller scale — on a glorious September day, not knowing that the towers had already been hit, they were burning, and thousands of people doing the same job they did every day would be dust and ashes in the next few moments.

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Ambrose Bierce, ‘Fantastic Fables’

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From the ‘Collected Works of Ambrose Bierce’, Volume 6 some ‘Fantastic Fables’:

THE LASSOED BEAR
 
A Hunter who had lassoed a Bear was trying to disengage himself from the rope, but the slip-knot about his wrist would not yield, for the Bear was all the time pulling in the slack with his paws. In the midst of his trouble the Hunter saw a Showman passing by and managed to attract his attention.
 
“What will you give me,” he said, “for my Bear?”
 
“It will be some five or ten minutes,” said the Showman, “before I shall want a bear, and it looks to me as if prices would fall during that time. I think I’ll wait and watch the market.”
 
“The price of this animal,” the Hunter replied, “is down to bed-rock; you can have him for a cent a pound, spot cash, and I’ll throw in the next one that I lasso. But the purchaser must remove the goods from the premises forthwith, to make room for three man-eating tigers, a cat-headed gorilla and an armful of rattlesnakes.”
 
But the Showman passed on in maiden meditation, fancy free, and being joined soon afterward by the Bear, who was absently picking his teeth, it was inferred that they were not unacquainted.
 
 
FATHER AND SON
 
“My boy,” said an aged Father to his fiery and disobedient Son, “a hot temper is the soil of remorse. Promise me that when next you are angry you will count one hundred before you move or speak.”
 
No sooner had the Son promised than he received a stinging blow from the paternal walking-stick, and by the time he had counted to seventy-five had the unhappiness to see the old man jump into a waiting cab and whirl away.
 
 
MORAL PRINCIPLE AND MATERIAL INTEREST
 
A Moral Principle met a Material Interest on a bridge wide enough for but one.
 
“Down, you base thing!” thundered the Moral Principle, “and let me pass over you!”
 
The Material Interest merely looked in the other’s eyes without saying anything.
 
“Ah,” said the Moral Principle, hesitatingly, “let us draw lots to see which one of us shall retire till the other has crossed.”
 
The Material Interest maintained an unbroken silence and an unwavering stare.
 
“In order to avoid a conflict,” the Moral Principle resumed, somewhat uneasily, “I shall myself lie down and let you walk over me.”
 
Then the Material Interest found his tongue. “I don’t think you are very good walking,” he said. “I am a little particular about what I have underfoot. Suppose you get off into the water.”
 
It occurred that way.

Bierce’s contemporaries weren’t used to this kind of cynicism and sarcasm, so they gave him the moniker ‘The bitter Bierce‘.

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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