Three small 4 by 4 paintings hung in our den for most of my childhood. They were little wood framed oils depicting farming life in the shadow of a volcano. I never knew much about them but always liked them for how their tiny brush strokes depicted such big scenes. My parents took them to Florida with them when the moved down there. After my father had a stroke and I went to Florida to care for my mother who was suffering from Alzheimer's. One day she served me ice cream on one of the paintings. I guess she mistook it for a plate.

I'm a bit sad that Manny's gone, though I agree with most that it was time. My favorite Manny moment was opening day 2001. I was sitting out in the right field grandstands and Manny comes to the plate for the first time at Fenway to the cheers of "Manny, Manny, Manny". First pitch is hit for a 3 run dinger. It was an electric moment.

After completing the four published books in the Song of Fire and Ice series my exploration of the 'good stuff' in the fantasy genre continues. I just finished Patricia A. McKillip’s Riddle Master trilogy and am into the second book of Robin Hobb's Assassin book. It's amazing that after all my years of sneering at this genre how much I'm enjoying the ride. While I don't think I have the stomach for the whole Robert Jordan Wheel of Time series, I look forward to trying out a bunch of books on this fine list: Top 25 Fantasy Books. The list's author and I seem to share similar tastes.

Pissed off about the FISA Amendments Act? The ACLU is looking for folks to add their names to a print ad they plan to run in the July 17 New York Times. I've added mine. You can add your here.

Why so quiet you ask. Well things have been pretty busy this summer. Some for the good, some not so good.

On the good side, we put our house in Groton on the market and are under agreement with a buyer - yay! We don't have a new house yet but we have some irons in the fire in the Chelmsford area.

I've also been having a lot of fun at work developing our voice driven search product for mass market mobile phones. I don't know when it will first show up in the wild but it's pretty darn slick.

Lastly I've been reading a lot (yes, I know, I always say that). I got hooked on George R. R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series and plowed through the four available books with barely a breath between pages. I generally hate Fantasy, I find it so insipid, but this series was amazing. I've seen it described as Fantasy for people who hate Fantasy. I guess that's why I liked it. I've also just finished Pirate Freedom by Gene Wolfe. It's not my favorite Wolfe book but if pirates be your fancy, you could read a lot worse.

On the bad side, I've had a bad back. Worst that it's ever been. Between doctor visits and physical therapy I've been pretty busy. The good news is that the therapists at Wellesley Theraputics in Harvard are now among my favorite people in the world. Their ability to fix a problem that's been nagging me years is just fantastic. So I guess it's really all good.

Hermit Island is coming up so I'll probably not be posting again for a while. Have a nice summer everyone.

Writing your own blog tools is fun until you get the rug pulled out from under you by your hosting service when you don't have any spare time to fix things.

Finally, I think everything is working again. Now if I only had something to say.

Sorry about that folks. My hosting service updated the Rails version on the shared server and this update removed a bunch of deprecated methods my blog application relied on. My Rails skillz were rusty and it took me some time to fix but it's back up now. This sucks on multiple levels but I guess it's par for the course.

Here's a weird and experimental poem I wrote recently. The poets in the writers group I've been working with were very mixed on it. Some liked it a lot, most did not. I think most had no idea what I was getting at. The consensus is the beginning is better than the end. I think the beginning is more accessible, but personally, I like the ending. Let me know what you think. Trust me you wont hurt my feeling if you think it sucks, I've heard that already.

MEDITATION AS WATER

The porch is ethereal
I sit in the rocker and breathe;
Watching the river of my thoughts
Flow through internal night.

The waters are swift and clean
And happiness floats silently -
A smack of pelagic jellies
In a strong ocean current.

Eddies in the stream spin-off,
Turmoil at the edge of perception.
Ephemeral maelstroms of
Stress and distraction -

The sharks of my thoughts,
Death and dread, cruise.
Jurassic neurons spark
Their ancient frenzy.

Monkey brain, monkey brain,
Who the fuck are you?
What hubris of worth
Floods your vessel?

Azure light and a grain of rice.

Some of you may think this is me just being a science nerd and nit picking but I see people making statements like this all the time and it bums me out. People have known about evolution for a long, long time and known about the process of natural selection since Darwin and still, still educated people say things that display a gross misunderstanding of the processes involved.

While reading the morning news, a fluff science piece about life in space caught my eye (link). In the article an astronaut is quoted as follows:

If we push back boundaries far enough, I'm sure eventually we'll find something out there," said Mike Foreman, a mission specialist on the Endeavour, which returned to Earth in March.

"Maybe not as evolved as we are, but it's hard to believe that there is not life somewhere else in this great universe,"

Do you see it too? Is your blood pressure rising like mine?

If I said the phrase 'evolutionary ladder' how would you feel?

Let me give you a hint, it makes my blood boil.

Okay enough with setup, here's part that bugs me:

"Maybe not as evolved as we are".

I know people say stuff like this all the time but they are all wrong. Humans are more intelligent than a giant clam but they are no more evolved. All living things are at the tips of their evolutionary tree. Intelligence is a strategy for survival we humans adopted, it is not the 'goal' of evolution. Things that are intelligent are not 'more evolved' by the fact that their species utilized that strategy. The folks at Berkeley explain this better than I will so follow this link for a good explanation: Trees, Not Ladders.

I am an unapologetic John Wayne fan. The fact is Wayne was a very good actor whose sheer presence could turn a ho-hum script into a gripping yarn.

I've always been a little pissed off that Wayne's legacy seems to have been reduced to that of a failed icon of pro-Vietnam involvement. If people actually listened to and watched Wayne's films they would see the characters he played were often far more progressive than he's ever given credit. Take a gander at the 'The Sons of Katy Elder' the next time it's on the tube if you don't believe me.

Along those lines I was happily surprised today when I stumbled across this article titled: The "Duke" and Democracy: On John Wayne. The article primarily deals with Rio Bravo, one of my favorite John Wayne and Howard Hawks films, and shows how Wayne embodied a lot of the best ideals of America.