Towse: views from the hill

obTrivia: What is the unit of money in Ecuador?

Currency in Ecuador: US Dollar (USD)

You are a MASTER of the English language!

While your English is not exactly perfect,
you are still more grammatically correct than
just about every American. Still, there is
always room for improvement…

How grammatically sound are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Must’ve been all those lays and lied and laying questions …

Here’s another.

Ready? Aim. Shoot!

I really need to get a digital camera — just a cheap one, maybe, to play with. The Fry’s ad last Sunday, or maybe it was the Office Max ad, had a cheap digital camera for $10 with rebates. His nibs asked if all the connectivity ware &c. was included at a price like that.

Beats me. I just know the time is ripe. I’ve been thinking about getting a digital camera for going on five, six years now. We were on a trip in China back in … 1998, I think it was — Shanghai and the gardens in Suzhou, Wuhan, up the Yangtze and through the Three Gorges (before the dam) to Chongqing and down to Chengdu, Hong Kong. One of our fellow travellers was having fun with his then cutting-edge digital camera. That looks interesting, I thought at the time. Some day, I thought.

The prices keep dropping. The cameras keep getting better. I wouldn’t pop for a top-of-the-line right now, but maybe something inexpensive to play with and take quick pix, maybe something inexpensive so if I decide to sell something on eBay I’ll be able to include a picture with the description. I really need to get a digital camera so when I’m tapped to take pictures of the new Foothill Club members at the orientation meeting (as I was yesterday), I can take a bucketload and erase the ones that don’t turn out and not have to take the film to Costco and wait a couple days for developing (’cause I’m too cheap to pay for one-hour processing) before I see whether any of the pictures turned out. It’s that immediate gratification thing, isn’t it?

The real reason, though, I need to get a digital camera is so I can take part in q & a : the photographic interview and Theme Thursday and other community photo shoot-outs.

Theme Thursday publishes a new theme every Thursday, and photographers have a week to upload their pictures. Last week’s theme was “purple.”

The irises I’ve been nurturing from little bits of rhizome — shared out with sibs after we split up our mother’s irises last fall — are sending up their first flower spikes. The first bud opened yesterday and two other plants have buds that are shooting up as we speak. The iris that opened yesterday is a beautiful white iris with deep, deep purple edging — perfect for last Thursday’s theme, but last Thursday’s theme will be replaced with a new theme tomorrow.

I really need to get a digital camera.

From Topix.net Weblog comes this interesting note re Google’s hardware (100K servers) and development and possible future plans. Speculation — all of it — but did you know Rob Pike has moved on to Google? I hadn’t. Educated guesses as to what he’s doing there and, no, he’s not the executive chef.

I just really like Greenspan’s glasses. Would he come through as a different personality if he wore aviators or Ray Bans?

Some day … some day, I’ll be in Omaha for Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting. Anyone can ask whatever question they want of his Buffettness. What would I ask him, should I ever be in Omaha?

The Village Voice brings you Signature Collection by Lawrence Block — subtitled, “OK, you wrote a book, but how many times can you stand to write your name?”

The essay covers the travails of Block’s book tour and signings and concludes, “Item: James Ellroy signed the entire first printing of My Dark Places, some 65,000 books in all. He wrote two words, James and Ellroy, 65,000 times each. That’s 130,000 words, which is more than he took to write the whole damn book.

“Why, I sometimes wonder, does anybody want a book signed? I have a whole wall of books by friends, and it never occurs to me to ask them to sign them.

“My wife, who has an abiding passion for hagiography—we have a surprising number of editions of Lives of the Saints, not one of them signed—has her own theory. As she explains it, a book signed by its author is a second-degree relic, not as precious as a finger bone, but on a par with a pair of cast-off sandals.

“I like the explanation, but how long before the bastards start wanting the damned books signed in blood?”

David Chin’s A Picture’s Worth has been up since last summer and is a healthy (and interesting) collection of photographs and 1000-words (or so) essays by a wide-ranging assortment of people.

Loved this photo — what you hope won’t happen when your French visitors have only three days in San Francisco and you take them out to see the view.