Dazed and Confucius

Holiday Time.

[kevinurban]

Shard of a dream I remember

I am the front seat passenger. I look out the window. For whatever reason, the stars are very bright and the constellations are very obvious to me.

[kevinurban]

Life After Death (of Your iPod)

Critic Hazel Cills considers a future without her faltering iPod classic and sees nothing but streaming services and music she never "owns".

I enjoy reading these State of Tech articles regarding the consumption of music in the 21st century. It's not surprise that I sympathize with the author with regards to the need to physically own music. The author also has an interesting point about how the death of the iPod brings with it the death of the music-only device. I would add that another fear of the encroaching streaming revolution (and eBooks too) is the possibility of music suddenly inexplicably disappearing from one's library. 

[kevinurban]

I watched a video in which Christopher Hitchens says anything that promotes faith over reason is rubbish. Which is fine--and probably true. But I also have never personally observed the electron in orbit around the nucleus. So I'll take that one on faith, I guess.

[kevinurban]

Record Collecting: A Haiku

It starts out slowly

One thing leads to another

All the Steely Dan

[anarchojourney]

[kevinurban]

-Tom Clark, "Bugs Ate This Lake Clean", 1971

[hatoonabdulmajeed]

[kevinurban]

She recognized that this is how friendships begin: one person reveals a moment of strangeness, and the other person decides just to listen and not exploit it.

Meg Wolitzer, “The Interestings”

[kevinurban]

Perhaps I’ve had it wrong this whole time and true happiness is finding that which enables you to stop thinking

[markrichardson]

There was an interesting article by David Carr in the NYT today about Ferguson and #Ferguson, talking about how twitter can amplify news and “turn up the heat” on people in power to spur them to action, esp. in re stories that haven’t been picked up by big media yet. And that’s definitely true,...

[kevinurban]

This may seem obvious, but sometimes I feel like twitter 1) goads me into commenting on something I normally wouldn't comment on, vis-a-vis "joining the conversation" and 2) encourages glibness in the name of space consideration.

The character limit does create some fascinating engagement though, from a formal standpoint.

[kevinurban]

We were told that MP3 players and smartphones would bring us closer to our favorite music, but they sheared it of its physical form and made it feel like it didn’t exist. We were sold a lot of these changes with the promise that they’d give us more power, more choice, but the people who made these changes to music weren’t musicians and didn’t consult musicians. They were entrepreneurs, mostly, and even though they might have posed as visionaries they were really out to make a buck, or to make a name for themselves. They dismantled a structure that happened to be working and left no structure to replace it. They sold us the ideal of our tools becoming so simple that they would just disappear, but the truth is that tools create discipline and form, and that limitations create engagement. Too much choice and too much freedom mostly just overwhelm people and cause inertia.

From this article. I could go on and on about my own stuggles with this but Mr. Sheff does a pretty good job.

[kevinurban]

”A scorpion comes up to a buffalo on a riverbank. Please, sir, says the scorpion – could you give us a ride across? No way, says the buffalo. You’ll sting me and I’ll drown. But the scorpion swears he won’t. Why would I, he asks the buffalo, when if I did, I’d drown along with you? So off they go. Halfway across the scorpion stings the buffalo. And the poor Buffalo says, you bastard, you killed us both. Before they go under, the scorpion says – it’s my nature.”

[fuckyeahvictorialegrand-blog]

[kevinurban]

This band.

[kevinurban]

Moral law is an invention of mankind for the disenfranchisement of the powerful in favor of the weak. Historical law sub erts it at every turn. A moral view can never be proven right or wrong by any ultimate test. A man falling dead in a duel is not thought thereby to be proven in error as to his views. His very involvement in such a trial gives evidence of a new and broader view. The willingness of the principals to forgo further argument as the triviality which it in fact is and to petition directly the chambers of the historical absolute clearly indicates of how little moment are the opinions and of what great moment the divergences thereof. For the argument is indeed trivial, but not so the separate wills thereby made manifest. Man's vanity may well approach the infinite in capacity but his knowledge remains imperfect and however much he comes to value his judgements ultimately he must submit them before a higher court. Here there can be no special pleading. Here are considerations of equity and rectitude and moral right rendered void and without warrant and here are the views of the litigants despised. Decisions of life and death, of what shall be and what shall not, beggar all question of right. In elections of these magnitudes are all lesser ones subsumed, moral, spiritual, natural.

Cormac, invoking Fyodor

[tennisismylifeforever]

[kevinurban]

For pedestrians, things will remain difficult. The ankle-deep gloptraps that materialized on street corners Monday froze into little moonscapes overnight.

Unexpectedly nice prose in n NYT weather section

[kevinurban]

This song makes me feel like I was born in another time to different parents.