I think it may be something in the water, but there seems to be a whole lot of optimism floating around in the world right now. And in large part accompanied by a very refreshing realism such as that of this post about how we can ‘build anything we want’ that warns:

We’re nowhere near the bottom of this disaster we’ve voted onto ourselves. I don’t think the majority of Americans fully understand the severity of our financial crisis. We’re all fervently staring at Christmas, confusing the holiday spirit for hope.

To borrow a riff from Seth, the best time to start affecting the changes that need to be made was five years ago. The second best time, is now. The reason being that certainly for me, and for most of the people in the world, we can be the change we need.

I am off to do so, right after I set up a reminder to Hassle Myself just in case I forget.

Love regards etc

Related: Also, watch Davd Simon’s talk on The Audacity of Despair, which I have posted about at People Want More

This week, via the the Library of Congress flickr account, I came across the fantastic story of my (now) favourite ever ship.

In the 1850s it was employed as a prison ship off the coast of Australia, gaining notoriety when, in 1857 prisoners managed to murder the Superintendent of Prisons John Price. After this, it was “purchased by a group of entrepreneurs to be refitted as a museum ship to travel the world advertising the perceived horrors of the convict era.”

It then travelled to England before spending more than twenty years sailing up & down the east coast of the U.S., only falling into disrepair during the great depression, which coincided with a fall in the public’s appetite for buying museum tickets.

Now as far as I am concerned this, especially alongside the striking images of torture equipment makes for a fine tale. But the really remarkable thing about this museum about horror, pain & death, is that throughout its history, it retained the original name given to it. Which was the Success.

File under “Sublime Ironies”.

My thanks to Joho (the blog) who first alerted me to the existence of the LOC on the interwebs.

Love regards etc

Yes, that is a photograph of me, sometime in 2004. Until very recently it was unavailable in any digital form. I am now though the owner of this printer/scanner. Which means that such memories are possible, even on the internet.

As I unpacked it though, because I run Ubuntu I found myself in an irrational “will this work, will it be a nightmare” frame of mind. Despite knowing that linux supports more devices than any other os.

It Just Worked.

Easier than the installation would be on pc/mac according to the documentation. No installation at all in fact. Just connect & go. Which is how things should work all the time.

The desire for this to be the case is just one of the reasons I contine to use Ubuntu. A mentality that sees the worth examining itself by these sorts of criteria:

There are still many people who think that the scariness of an operating system installation is a good place to ask people unnecessary questions about things they’ve never heard of. There are still many people who seriously think that “Gnome” and “KDE” and “XFCE” are acceptable terms to use when communicating with non-technical people.
Ubuntu and “desktop environments”

I should not have to perform sysadmin tasks in order to connect something to my computer. And now I don’t. Because people have put serious thought into designing a system that makes things easy for the user.

Love regards etc

P.S. you may notice a new link in the sidebar to “Love regards etc” which, in case you were wondering, is my brand new pipes powered blogroll

I was initially made aware of Milton Acorndue to the twin factors of his excellent name, and also the wikipedia claim that he

“lost his will to live after the death of a younger sister.”

[Milton Acorn Wikipedia]

Milton Acorn

[Photo by @SheldonGrimson]

But more than just that, he was also an excellent poet whose work has a fragile brutality, dragged along by an absurdist sense of humour… Enjoyable:

In the elephant’s five-pound brain
Dwarves have an incredible vicious sincerity,
A persistent will to undo things. The beast cannot grasp
The convolutions of destruction, always his mind
Turns to other things - the vastness of green
And of frangibility of forest. If only once he could descend
To trivialities he’d sweep the whole earth clean of his tormentors
In one sneeze so mighty as to be observed from Mars.

In the elephant’s five-pound brain
Sun and moon are the pieces in a delightfully complex ballgame
That have to do with him…never does he doubt
The sky has opened and rain and thunder descend
For his special ministration. He dreams of mastodons
And mammoths and still his pride beats
Like the heart of the world, he knows he could reach
To the end of space if he stood still and imagined the effort.

[excerpt from The Natural History of Elephants]

Frankly, that should be enough for anyone to go and investigate further.

P.S. I was also recently made aware that Satan once lived in the White House, incarnated as the dog of the Second Lady Abigail Adams

Although not a US citizen, I stayed up on Tuesday to watch the US election results come in. Despite my own normally over-zealous cynicism and the inherent banality of 8 hour news broadcasts, I couldn’t help getting swept up in the power of the moment.

euphoria is a four letter word

Even now, having had time to calm down, I am overwhelmingly pleased that Obama won. Despite early misgivings, the Obama campaign has eventually won me over. Especially this video interview with Joe Biden and some of Obamas later speeches. The sense is there, that this might actually have been an election where it was possible to vote for somebody rather than against somebody else.

prediction is hard. especially about the future

What I would like to do here is to give a brief idea of what Obama would need to do in order to keep this faith. At least as far as I’m concerned. As I see it, there are four major problems facing him at the moment:

1. The way the US is viewed in the rest of the world
2. Keeping the still almost 50% of the US population that didn’t vote for him happy
3. The economy
4. The rest of our problems

plans are easy

Obama has to address all of these things to keep the undeniable momentum he has, and the faith that people have put in him. There are obviously countless ways that these things could be addressed, but I my agenda would be the following:

To get a US led mission out of Iraq as soon as possible. By which I mean within months. Keep troops there, but relinquish all strategic control to the UN. This would go an incredibly long way towards restoring America’s world standing. Especially if it was done in a quick and humble manner.

To push through with the house gains that the democrats have made and the good feeling towards them, a vastly extended universal healthcare program. There will be massive objection to this from the ‘interest’ of the medicine industry, but should he manage to push it through in such a way that benefited the average American, I cannot believe that once it was in operation it would have any other outcome than to consolidate the moderates he has won over, and also quite possibly to win new voters of the disillusioned republican variety.

To commit America to more renewable energy and reductions in greenhouse gasses than is currently thought possible. This would also be a hugely positive move in terms of world opinion and establishing America in the position that she seems to want to take. America is a hugely inventive and highly developed (technologically speaking) country. If anyone will rise to the challenge, it will be them, and for the first time they have a leader with enough political capital and enough of a mandate to make it happen.

And then comes the task of sorting the economy. For which I have no solid propositions to offer with regards to how it can be ’sorted’. Possibly, if you were committed to radical green policies as above then you could begin to operate a New New Deal type program whereby you partially state-sponsored both research into the development & deployment of green technologies, and also the improvement of existing practices. As an industry, if backed by serious tax breaks, the energy efficiency industry could be massive.

[cynicism]

In truth I suspect that very few if any of these things will happy in a way that I will be able to endorse wholeheartedly & without strong reservations. Just for the minute though, I am still happy to hope.

love regards etc

Running the risk of giving this blog a distinctly Groucho Marxist focus, boingboing have alerted me not only to The Essential Groucho: Writings by, for, and about Groucho Marxwhich looks like a fantastic book, but also to another portion of Groucho’s correspondence that can be found online:

Letter to Warner Brothers: A Night in Casablanca extract:

I just don’t understand your attitude. Even if you plan on releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don’t know whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.

One of the things that are so fascinating about reading Groucho’s letters is that the rhythm of his voice & delivery, which is so distinctive, comes through into the structure of every sentence.

*almostarealpost