I shouldn’t say anything, but I’m crossing my fingers that things are sorted out. Oddly enough the campus mail server is having problems too, and the difficulty seems to extend all the way to Missouri. Technology can be so grand.
I’ve been looking at the various Ballmer movies that have been flying about, but I think Meg has found the definitive remix. It’s really scary stuff. Somebody buy that man some deodorant.
On a lighter side, Mark Clarkson’s cartoons are fairly amusing. My favorite is the Swami.
Reinforcing my hatred of contemporary poetry, Edward M. Housman’s poem The Nature of Information just pissed me off.
Noise and randomness are information’s constant companions
Poetry is a tangle of bits on a pedestal, in the mind.
Poetry is information fireworks.
A poem is a hard, sparkling diamond of information.
Poetry is compressed insight, unstable and likely to explode
Poppycock. Poetry does not contain information. Poetry contains relationships; the specific and concrete exists next to the suggestion of the vague and ethereal. Poetry is not tangled bits. Poetry is not noisy, random utterance. It is hard, yes. It can explode, yes. This doesn’t. It fizzles. It’s prose broken into lines so that it resembles poetry. It contains no complex relationships, and requires no thought. It does not create a poetic performance in the mind. Blech. Poetry doesn’t make statements. It raises questions, it doesn’t answer them. My only question about this utterance is why I wasted the time reading it.
Oops, I told myself I’d listen to the swami. Cheer the fuck up, indeed.
I must spend more time at the arcades. Now that’s a web text worth exploring.
