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

“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

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

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

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
George Bernard Shaw

This is a beautiful mirror for my sense of idealism. And also perhaps one of the reasons that i am forever obsessed with psychopathy

April 24, 1961

Dear Mr Goodman :

I received the first annual report of the Franklin Corporation and though I am not an expert at reading balance sheets, my financial advisor, (who, I assure you, knows nothing) nodded his head in satisfaction.

You wrote that you hope I am not one of those borscht circuit stockholders who get a few points’ profit and hastily scrams for the hills. For your information, I bought Alleghany Preferred eleven years ago and am just now going through the process of disposing of it.

As a brand new member of your family, strategically you made a ghastly mistake in sending me individual pictures of the Board of Directors. Mr Roth, Chairman of the Board, merely looks sinister. You, the president, look like a hard worker with not too much on the ball. No one named Prosswimmer can possibly be a success. As for Samuel A. Goldblith, Ph.D., head of Food Technology at M.I.T., he looks as though he had eaten too much of the wrong kind of fodder.

At this point I would like to stop and ask you a question about Marion Harper Jr. To begin with, I immediately distrust any man who has the same name as his mother. But the thing that most disturbs me about Junior is that I don’t know what the hell he’s laughing at. Is it because he sucked me into this Corporation? This is not the kind of face that inspires confidence in a nervous and jittery stockholder.

George S. Sperti, I dismiss instantly. Any man who is the President of an outfit called Institutum Divi Thomae will certainly bear watching. Is he trying to imopress stockholders with his knowledge of Latin? If so, why doesn’t he read, “Winnie ille Pu”? James J. Sullivan, I am convinced, is Paul E. Prosswimmer photographed from a different angle.

Offhand, I would say that I have summed up your group fairly accurately. I hope, for my sake, that I am mistaken.

In closing, I warn you, go easy with my money. i am in an extremely precarious profession whose livelihood depends upon a fickle public.

Sincerely yours,
Groucho Marx
(temporarialy at liberty)

This letter is found in The Groucho Letters which are excellent, and moreover the only truly sound investment I can think of in these Troubled Times. [non-affiliatelinkage]

Should anyone have/find copies of the photographs in question, I would be fascinated. My searches have been fruitles.

Love, regards, etc

The mentality behind thinking that this is a useful message to display to a user is simply remarkable. You might as well go the whole way & just display Nietzschean aphorisms:

The more abstract the truth is that you would teach, the more you have to seduce the senses to it.

At least that way I could be sure that it was a joke.

If you are going to communicate to someone, make sure you have something to communicate to them. Otherwise you are just wasting their time.

Love regards etc

In terms of blogs, there are very few that I automatically read as soon as a new post turns up in my google reader. a working library is one of these.

Mandy Brown shares the most interesting passages from her current reading, along with her thoughts and observations on life, philosophy, criticism & whatever else. It is by far the most intellectualised thing that turns up in my favourites folder, but always welcome to shift me into a different mental gear.

Recent favourites have been Robin Kinross on typography, Adorno on Marxism and Terry Eagleton on Ideology.

The stimulation of receiving someones thoughts and observations along with key passages as they read fascinating books is brilliant. Short, dense posts with a real weight behind them this is a series of deft punches rather than lectures, and all the better for it.

Thank you

I now have a favourite stationary company, D!rektrecycling. They make envelopes by recycling old maps.

[photo via notcot.com]

I can assure you it is far more fascinating to receive your invoices along with a snapshot of Schleswig-Flensburg than it is to get them in a plain envelope.

Then later that day, via FriendFeed I came across barcode revolution

Who are doing fantastic things to make barcodes more interesting. Which is a wonderful example of people putting great time & creativity into something that is normally just ignored and left as the standard “good enough”.

In fact both are things that can so easily be ignored, left at the default setting. But when you bother to think about even these things with a sense of vision & identity, well then now you’ve really got my  attention.