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| Monday, August 4, 2003 |
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Plus 350-400 buddhas, among other things 
| | A year ago I called my friend James McHugh "a high profile hacker without a Web site, or I'd link to him." Well, now he has one. Which is cool. |
| | He also lives in a museum that's on its way to extinction. You should take a look before it's gone. |
| | Carved hippo teeth. Human skulls etched in silver. Interesting stuff. Visit the site to check it out. |
| | In meat/meet space it's between 8th & 9th on Folsom in San Francisco, next to the also siteless A Taste of Leather. |
Breakage
| | I feel very conflicted about taking my annual blog hiatus this August. But I'm going to do my best to take a break. If some catastrophe occurs, I'll be back. But blogging each day, sometimes thousands of words a day, is a wonderful but grueling way to write. I think bloggers do well to take time out. We can lose perspective, stop thinking in longer form, and also get exhausted. |
| | Things have been tough for him lately: |
| | Obviously, my emotions right now are also wrung out from the barrage of backlash we are now experiencing, and it may be sensible to take a deep breath and a break. I wish at times I could be immune to this - and not get wounded or angry. But this debate is not an abstract one for me or for many others. Our very integrity as human beings and equality as citizens is being weighed in the balance by others with enormous power over us. That's enough to work anyone's last nerve. But I also need some time and space for spiritual reasons. It's hard to describe the agony gay Catholics are now in; and I'm facing a pretty major life-decision. In this, you need quiet to listen to God and pray sincerely for his help in the struggle to maintain a good conscience and lead a moral life. From your emails, I know I am not in this alone, and I'll be praying hard for all of us in this storm, pro and con, to find God's will for us, whatever it is. |
| | The agony isn't only for gay Catholics, who are in the center of the conversational ring right now. It's for all people of faith who believe in a tolerant and loving God. My friend Sayo Ajiboye, a biblical scholar, once told me the hardest lesson Christianity (and all religions) teaches are those of mercy, tolerance and forgiveness. Two thousand years after Christ said "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone," even our churches have trouble getting the message. (Ambiguity withstanding. A brilliant priest once told me that the trouble with literal interepretations of the Bible — aside from the fact that its many authors reported subtle metaphors and nuanced meanings in languages and other idioms may not have survived multiple translations — is that "Christ spoke in paradox." Making message-getting and doctrine-making all the harder.) |
Going nowhere with Amtrak
| | I've been an Amtrak "member" for a couple years now, not that it makes much difference. Anyway, it's been long enough to provide some experience at dealing with the "troubled" federal railway system. (That's its de facto name: Troubled Amtrak.) |
| | I should know better by now, but I LIKE the damn service, and I'd rather take the train than a car from San Jose to Santa Barbara this Friday. So, once again, I surfed into the breach this morning, attempting to book tickets online, where various "member discounts" are available. After about half an hour of being told, repeatedly, that various pieces of provided information were "incomplete," the booking system finally gave me the message above. I logged off, gave it a few hours and tried again a few minutes ago. Same thing. |
| | How much money, I wonder, is Amtrak losing this way? It's more than zero, that's for sure. |
Smaller is bigger
| | But I don't think this upcoming presidential election season needs to be about left vs. right. That's because I'm still mulling over Andrew Sullivan's line yesterday: |
| | It's between the Democrats' Big, Solvent Government and the Republicans' Big Insolvent Government. |
| | I believe blogs are, on the whole, against bigness. And bignesss is what we get promised, by both sides, in every election. So: our work is cut out for us. |
| | I sense an opening here for a practical libertarian sensibility coming to the fore, from the grass roots — from the blogs. What makes this sensibility a moderating influence is the tie that it makes to sensible governance. |
| | This country has been whipsawed for too long between those who hate big business and those who hate big government, and who have used both to pound on both, to many bad effects. |
| | The trick is to look past the sports events we call elections, to the hard and compromising work we call governance. Are we going to fix the roads? Make public transportation work? Continue opening trade? Fix health care? Can we? (It's a legitimate question.) Should we? How? |
| | Visiting those questions with an open mind, I think, is most deeply what networked democracy is all about. |
The ongoing death of publishing as usual
| | Before the "blogs" era,we were all slaves of our webmasters . Unless you were yourself one, most people, companies and organizations who wanted to have an online presence called a Web site, needed sooner or later someone technically skilled to take care of it for hir (him+her). |
| | It has never been to no-one enjoyment to have to go through through lengthy, and not intuitive procedures to simply make some new text appear on a certain page of your site. Though the Frontpages and Tripods have attempted to come to our rescue we have further understood that Microsoft didn't have a clue about what we needed and how it should have been built and that advertising banners are really the most obnoxius partner of an information page. |
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