[Image above depicts two street paintings by Peter Gibson, which I found at the inhabitat.com site. Click it for their post about Gibson's work.] From whiskey river: Epitaph Now I’m not the brightest knife in the drawer, but I know a couple things about this life: poverty silence, impermanence discipline and mystery The world is [...]

[Read more →]

No, alas — not here to report anything like the conclusion of Seems to Fit. Just sharing a tidbit from the irrepressible xkcd webcomic. The first three panels of today’s contribution to the collective wisdom are above; click the image to see the final panel.

[Read more →]

I’m really not a fan of the telephone: give me good-old when-I-get-to-it email any day, y’know? (People at work long ago got used to the idea that I intentionally sit with my back to the phone — so I never even have to see the red “voicemail message waiting” light. They all email me, even [...]

[Read more →]

From whiskey river’s commonplace book: The whale moves in a sea of sound: shrimps snap, plankton seethes, fish croak, gulp, drum their air-bladders, and are scrutinized by echo-location, a light massage of sound touching the skin. The small, toothed whales use high frequencies: Finely tuned and focused sound-beams, intense salvoes of bouncing clicks, a thousand [...]

[Read more →]

[Note to regular readers: You may have noticed a change in my online tempo in the last week -- I sure have: my visits to your blogs are a little more erratic, my postings here a little less... I don't know... "focused," maybe? Partly, true, my spotty attendance is because the pace of my 9-to-5 [...]

[Read more →]

From whiskey river (italicized portion): The landscape opens its eyes and sits up, sets out walking followed by its shadow, it is a stela of dark murmurs that are the languages of fallen matter, the wind stops and hears the clamor of the elements, sand and water talking in low voices, the howl of pilings [...]

[Read more →]

On a recent wintry day, The Boy (Who Was No Longer a Boy) and The Missus decided to go to a movie. Now, because the day was in fact wintry, and because “wintry” seldom applied to weather conditions where The Boy and The Missus lived, they needed to undertake certain careful preparations in advance. Warm [...]

[Read more →]

From my tech-writing agent, in an email message yesterday: Did you want us to send you a check for the payment due, or did you want an electronic funds transfer to your bank acct? It took 7½ years, but my last tech book finally brought in more for the publisher than the size of the [...]

[Read more →]

[Image above: "The Long Haul," by artist Robert W. McGregor] From whiskey river (italicized portion): Excerpt from “Sabbaths 1998: VI” But won’t you be ashamed To count the passing year At its mere cost, your debt Inevitably paid? For every year is costly, As you know well. Nothing Is given that is not Taken, and [...]

[Read more →]

Centuries after the Eastern Orthodox Church began celebrating the Epiphany, the Roman Catholic Church decided to start doing so too. But for some reason, the Western Church really latched on to this image of the Persian priests bringing gifts of frankincense, myrrh, and gold to the infant Jesus, guided from their homeland of Iran by [...]

[Read more →]