inane story on NPR, dancing around the hype of ubiquitous computing (still?) -- with the installment of sensors on house plants that will send wifi info about their condition.

who sets up this network? who maintains it? who interacts with it? when and why is it interacted with? under what conditions is it necessary to interact with it? or is it ever necessary to interact with it? those people who are so interested in spreading digital networks somehow forget the necessity of deployment, installation, configuration, and, especially, maintenance. not to mention the actual (life-)time necessary to interact with the data being gathered, tweaking it if necessary or even possible to a form that is understandable and usable to the idiosyncratic self, NOT the generic Everyman (who is the Grail of the data collectors).

these questions point back to the cultural (d)evolution which mandates a rolling over of systems from localized individual control to a centralized social command-and-control. now, a big argument used by the ubicomp community is that the existence of these networks liberates the localized Everyman from the drudgery of some localized chore or another. watering house plants, in this case. but there is a hidden factor -- the subsequent reliance of the individual on the centralized system of production and (standardized control) -- which creates and deploys these devices. it costs money to have these devices. and the greater the deployment, the larger the social infrastructure necessary to produce and deploy these devices and systems. think, for example, of the mining and basic industry that provides the raw materials that go into the construction of the machines used to make and deliver the devices. the individual consequently must be participating in this larger system in order to receive the device. to participate in that system requires a payment of (life-)time (converted in the grind of social production to cash). so the (life-)time freed-up by the device is more than consumed by the (life-)time drawn from the individual in this general participatory process. think of working at a long-term job so that you have the long-term income to pay for the apartment where you have the house plants. stability is a core value here to consider here as well -- without long-term stability (a stable environment), exotic house plants are imperiled. to have house plants assumes this long-term stability (which the social system relies on!). so not only is this further reliance on the deployed ubicomp system NOT about liberation -- it is the opposite -- it is about a subtle enslavement to a greater social system for which instability is anathema. the drawing-off of the lifetime (and life energy) of the individual into that social system is the primary source of power for the centralized social system.

all of this is on a sliding scale. but assuming that condition, there likely is a certain tipping point where one might go too far and not have the possibility of retrieving individual autonomy. where is this point? have we reached it? clearly it is different in different social systems, despite the healthy state of global systems which draw their energy from widely-dispersed humans. tolerance for autonomy is different in different socio-cultural systems. intolerance for instability is generally higher in more organized systems (which came first, the need for organization or the intolerance for instability and dis-order?)

continue the slogging with Kevin's website -- getting the painting images processed (200 of 460 done) is incredibly time-consuming. they do look good, though. hope to have an organized catalog up as well soon, with complete information on each painting for possible sales. and trying to finish the Gaithersburg High School 1976 series (138 done of 450). suppose I could just do these for two weeks, finish both of them, and be done with it, but there are so many other things to be done. when Loki's gone back to Iceland, I'll endeavor to do that.

Fling-Dinger laughs aloud with glee over this favorite passage from Hesse, strictly accurate, it reflects Rousseau's lament between the social and the individual human.

My dear friends, let me sing you the song of solitude. Without solitude there is no suffering, without solitude there is no heroism. But the solitude I have in mind is not the solitude of the blithe poets or of the theater, where the fountain bubbles so sweetly at the mouth of the hermit's cave.

From childhood to manhood is only one step, one single step. In taking that step you break away from father and mother, you become yourself; it is a step into solitude. No one takes it completely. Even the holiest hermit, he grumpiest old bear in the bleakest of mountains, takes with him, or draws after him, a thread that binds him to his father and mother, to the loving warmth of kinship and friendship. My friends, when you speak so fervently of people and fatherland, I see the thread dangling from you, and I smile. When your great men speak of their "task" and responsibility, that thread hangs out of their mouths. Your great men, your leaders and orators, never speak of tasks directed against themselves, they never speak of responsibility to destiny! They hang by a thread that leads them back to mother and to all the cozy warmth that the poets recall when they sing of childhood and its pure joys. No one severs the thread entirely, except in death and then only if he succeeds in dying his own death.

Most men, the herd, have never tasted solitude. They leave father and mother, but only to crawl to a wife and quietly succumb to new warmth and new ties. They are never alone, they never commune with themselves. And when a solitary man crosses their path, they fear him and hate him like the plague; they fling stones at him and find no peace until they are far away from him. The air around him smells of stars, of cold stellar spaces; he lacks the soft warm fragrance of the home and hatchery.

Zarathustra has something of this starry smell, this forbidding coldness. Zarathustra has gone a long way on the path of solitude. He has attended the school of suffering. He has seen the forge of destiny and been wrought in it.

Ah, my friends, I don't know whether I ought to tell you any more about solitude. I should gladly tempt you to take that path, I should gladly sing you a song of the icy raptures of cosmic space. But I know that few men can travel that path without injury. It is hard, my dear friends, to live without a mother; it is hard to live without home and people, without fatherland or fame, without the pleasures of life in a community. It is hard to live in the cold, and most of those who have started on the path have fallen. A man must be indifferent to the possibility of falling, if he wants to taste of solitude and to face up to his own destiny. It is easier and sweeter to walk with a people, with a multitude -- even through misery. It is easier and more comforting to devote oneself to the "tasks" of the day, the tasks meted out by the collectivity. See how happy the people are in their crowded streets. Shots are being fired, their lives are in danger, yet every one of them would far rather die with the masses than walk alone in the cold outer night.

But how, my young friends, could I tempt you or lead you? Solitude is not chosen, any more than destiny is chosen. Solitude comes to us if we have within us the magic stone that attracts destiny. Many, far too many, have gone out into the desert and led the lives of herd men in a pretty hermitage beside a lovely spring. While others stand in the thick of the crowd, and yet the air of the stars blows round their heads.

But blessed be he who has found his solitude, not the solitude pictured in painting or poetry, but his own, unique, predestined solitude. Blessed be he who knows how to suffer! Blessed be he who bears the magic stone in his heart. To him comes destiny, from him comes authentic action. -- Hermann Hesse

break down and have (huh?) to buy Loki a copy of the Harry Potter book (uff, even writing the name here is annoying). why? because each summer for the past however many that have been a target for the marketing of Rowling's tale, some one, me on several occasions, has gotten him the latest installment for an early birthday present for the first of his usual two or three birthday parties. he always has one party in Amurika, sometimes with cousin Lexie, though she's not here now, used to be that Amma Lil would make him a nice cake, too. then, when he gets back to Iceland there is one party for his friends and then another one for the adults in his family. but what is so annoying is the feeding of Rowling's billion-dollar fortune. all because the local, the personal is gradually but inexorably being stripped from culture. I realized this too late in my child's upbringing (and my own consciousness) to alter the trajectory to any significant degree. but the idea that parents (elders!) spend time telling stories to the young. those stories, and that process of telling, spending time (not money!), is a core value itself. the sharing of life-time. where now, parents are made too busy to tell stories, and the kids are too jaded to listen anyway if the personal story doesn't have murder and mayhem with Dolby sound effects. one point of realization came gradually when a 90-minute story that I made up and taped while driving alone across the US from New York to Arizona seemed to have made a heavy impact on my child a third a world away in northern Iceland. it is still mentioned long into teenager-hood as something memorable.

I still remember the stories that my mother told me at bed time, sometimes featuring the exploits of my "Teddy", always full of adventure and to my recollection, completely spontaneous.

but here we are, standardized stories translated into 75 languages, the forcefully marketed imaginations of one English house-wife-cum-writer. not that I think her stories are so bad. not that I object to the effect on reading enthusiasm among media-headed tots, that's not the point. it's the hole that they fill in contemporary culture. it is a hole of our own passive making. and falling into, blindly. and represents yet another blow to idiosyncracy. imagine when every bedtime story from Denver to Chaing Mai, and Trondheim to Auckland is the same? What to we have left?

I read at least three of the books cover-to-cover aloud for Loki, readable, adventurous, yup. and I did manage to read aloud the Lord of the Rings trilogy before the movies were deployed. what I just can't stand anymore is the hyped marketing hysteria that really and practically every media outlet participates in trying to sell us something or another. one nasty effect is the complete and utter ostracization of the unfortunately shrinking percentage of kids who don't participate in mass culture. to be accepted you HAVE to buy a copy and read it. this is the tyranny of the intellectually impoverished masses as instigated by the greed of the phenomenally wealthy few and compounded by the synchronized choreography of The Media. try being the parent who doesn't buy their kid a copy. unless you really have a song and dance, you stand no chance. we have been effectively taught that our own freakish or dull ideas should be subject to those of the placid group, that sameness rules.

here's to telling stories to kids -- any stories, risque stories, challenging stories, flamboyant, outrageous, ridiculous, complicated, intelligent stories -- they need to hear local voices, local stories. stories of the like of the News from Lake Wobegon but not from Garrison Keillor or American Public Radio, instead from Aunt Mary or Uncle Al, grandly embellished with innuendo, gossip, faulty memory, and defective objectivity. here's to the propagation of rumor, tall tales, and exaggerated experience. here's to speaking with ones own voice. and connecting that inspiration and expiration deeply, humanely, with the next generation through the stories of the ancestors.

Woytek of boringdesign sends a link to his collaborative blog project TypoTrip documenting global typographic explorations. join in!

the second anniversary of the accident. while doing yoga, the body muses on the possibility that the technological solution to the shattered spine will fail, catastrophically, one day when in the Warrior One Pose. rendering the body in two halves. one which does not function, and one that might.

There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveller. Therefore wander! -- Aitareya Brahman

so, movement beckons, re-reading Bruce Chatwin's Songlines, and recalling the little snippets of antipodal behavior that resonate. going walkabout, as the Aboriginals do, seems to be a highly developed form of psycho-geography with a substantial spiritual element fused into the embodied core.

but two years later, I am calmly ecstatic when I am able to do a six hour bush-whack in a landscape where I recognize most of the elemental features as well as the more universal vibe of the place. to do the same in an unknown place would cause a bit of stress, but with an equal dose of thrill. to see the unknown world, absorb the sounds, colors, the people, the life. what more can one ask in this incarnation?