Who are these people? What is this place? If I had a dime for every time I’ve asked those questions in the last week, I’d be well-set financially.
The attic was hot, very dusty in a way that attics full of boxes can be, and peculiarly exciting. My family has usually succeeded in resisting an alarming tradition, that of getting rid of everything a relative owned as soon as possible after his or her death. When my mom died three summers ago, all her stuff got packed into boxes and taken to the attic of my sister’s house in Milwaukee. Now my sister was moving and my mother’s possessions needed to be dealt with.
Looking at the old picture, I had to laugh. I took it in the summer of 1986 in the Texas panhandle, while on vacation with my girlfriend. She was from New England and had as much knowledge of the space between there and California as most of us have of, say, Madagascar. This is not a condition at all unusual in the northeast.
We live in a time in which the greatest offenses one can commit include hurting someone’s feelings. A day does not pass that we do not hear of the need for “sensitivity training” for the “unenlightened” transgressors among us.
All the time we hear about it: the “race for a cure” or a “walk” for this or that illness. When it is explained why the event is being held, the phrase “raise awareness” is always included. Money is always raised, too; it’s never entirely clear what the money is used for. Perhaps it is used to purchase awareness from those who do not give it away.
The free software movement, which in many respects means the Linux operating system, is a puzzle to those accustomed to paying for things. Software is expensive stuff — how good can the stuff be if it doesn't cost anything?
It was bound to happen, sometime. Indeed, two-thirds of the way through my sixth decade, with most of it spent near them, it surprises me it didn’t happen sooner.
In mid-April the President of the United States announced his “space program.” It purports to move us toward sending human beings to Mars in a quarter century or so. It won’t do this. Instead, it merely the throws enough money at NASA and space contractors to keep their respective congressional districts happy. It’s a small amount by this administration’s standards of spending. It won’t take us to Mars or anywhere else.
There’s something about mining, and miners. We view those who go deep in the ground in a certain way, the way the Irish think of the men who go to sea.
A truly gorgeous Easter has just passed, one that meant more to me than previous Easters have, for reasons I’ll not go into here. As is customary, Holy Week television included lots of programming on the subject, much of it speculative “scientific” debunking of various religious traditions, some inspired by the best-selling heretical drivel of the novelist Dan Brown. The tone of this stuff is so consistent that I was truly surprised by a History Channel program about the Shroud of Turin.