Towse: views from the hill

Found on Nath’s live journal.

Found Nath_herelf as I was backtracking through the LibeMeme.

Yow. Check it out.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: George W. Bush Quotations in Which the Words “God” or “The Almighty” or “The Almighty God” Are Replaced by Famous Names Chosen at Random From the ’80s Edition of Trivial Pursuit.

Found at UV’s pad

who got it from VoxEfx who had written:

Copy the list of ten authors below. Replace any that are not included in your home library with one(s) that are. Note any replacements in boldface. Reference where you found LibeMeme when you post.

1. Richard Wright

2. John Irving

3. Alice Walker

4. Toni Morrison

5. David Halberstam

6. Orson Scott Card

7. James Baldwin

8. Margaret Atwood

9. William Shakespeare

10. Robert A. Heinlein

The Bread and Roses precursor to VoxEfx’s list was

1. Gabriel Garcia Marquez

2. John Irving

3. Alice Walker

4. Toni Morrison

5. David Halberstam

6. Mary Gaitskill

7. James Baldwin

8. Shelby Foote

9. William Shakespeare

10. Robert A. Heinlein

Bread and Roses got the meme from PSoTD who listed

1. George Orwell

2. Jorge Amado

3. William Shirer

4. Herman Melville

5. P. J. O’Rourke

6. Joseph Heller

7. Willa Cather

8. Ayn Rand

9. David Halberstam

10. William Shakespeare

PSoTD then added, “Of course, I can’t admit to reading all of Moby Dick, but I do have it here.” and concluded, “I should be ashamed to admit who fell off the list when I posted: Arthur C. Clarke, H.L. Mencken, Kinky Friedman, John Irving, Michael Chabon and Margaret Atwood.”

UV had replaced VoxEfx’s list with

1. Milan Kundera

2. Jennifer Crusie

3. Lawrence Sanders

4. Judith McNaught

5. Carl Hiaasen

6. Linda Howard

7. F. Scott Fitzgerald

8. Margaret Atwood

9. William Shakespeare

10. Victoria Holt

Interesting, eh? Did you note how PSoTD dropped Margaret Atwood and a mere two steps later VoxEfx added her back in? How long before someone puts Alice Walker back on the list?

My list would be boring and more an indication of what I own than what I read, which is “not much” these days.

I have on my shelves (if my shelves weren’t in boxes) VoxEfx’s list. I don’t have Bread and Roses’ Mary Gaitskill. I don’t have UV’s Jennifer Crusie or Linda Howard, and I don’t have PSoTD’s Jorge Amado.

How should one interpret a book list that’s posted publicly as part of a book list meme on the Web? My stash of books are less what I’ve read and liked and kept and more what I think I might want to read some day, so I’m not sure my bookshelves make much sense to me, let alone the blog-reading public.

And what’s up with the predominance of fiction writers on the lists above? Why no David McCullough? No Rush Limbaugh? No Howard Stern? No Erma Bombeck? No Woodward and Bernstein? How come so literary? (And why no Jerzy Kosinski, for that matter?)

Sure, I find all this fascinating and I will probably wander back (and back and back!) looking at the posted lists. I like discovering authors like Jorge Amado, whom I didn’t know of before, but … I did one of these a long while back, so this time? No meme here.

Arthur Schopenhauer –

Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten – The Art Of Controversy

Came across a review by George Walden of The Art of Always Being Right: Thirty Eight Ways to Win When You Are Defeated

by Arthur Schopenhauer (with an introduction by A C Grayling. Gibson Square Books, 190pp, £9.99. ISBN 1903933617)

[snippets]

Schopenhauer’s sardonic little book, laying out 38 rhetorical tricks guaranteed to win you the argument even when you are defeated in logical discussion, is a true text for the times. An exercise in irony and realism, humour and melancholy, this is no antiquarian oddity, but an instruction manual in intellectual duplicity that no aspiring parliamentarian, trainee lawyer, wannabe TV interviewer or newspaper columnist can afford to be without.

The interest of his squib goes beyond his tricks of rhetoric: “persuade the audience, not the opponent”, “put his theory into some odious category”, “become personal, insulting, rude”.

Don’t want to fork over the £9.99? The book is based on Schopenhauer’s THE ART OF CONTROVERSY, which is available online

e.g.

Strategem VII

This trick consists in making your opponent angry; for when he is angry he is incapable of judging aright, and perceiving where his advantage lies. You can make him angry by doing him repeated injustice, or practising some kind of chicanery, and being generally insolent.

Stratagem XIX

Should your opponent expressly challenge you to produce any objection to some definite point in his argument, and you have nothing much to say, you must try to give the matter a general turn, and then talk against that. If you are called upon to say why a particular physical hypothesis cannot be accepted, you may speak of the fallibility of human knowledge, and give various illustrations of it.

Many employ these techniques. Those who are good at it and clever and crafty can do so without you even noticing, unless you already know the tricks and are watching closely.

Om Malik on Broadband >>> Six Apart to buy Live Journal

Yow. Six Apart got B round funding last fall and just made the move from San Mateo to new digs in SOMA (room to expand, eh?)

… just a short ride on the F-line from the bottom of the Filbert Steps. (Not that I’d made a mental note, mind you.)

How long before the Portlanders (Portlandians? Porters? Portloos?) have to make the decision to move to our lovely City by the Bay or find alternative employment?

Move, I’d tell them. If you can afford it, move. The City will show you a good time.

Random Web Search – Wasting your time more efficiently.

Just what I needed. As if Stumble! and Next Blog weren’t enough.

Research! It’s research!

Because A. liked the earlier photo so much, I uploaded a batch more to flickr. Click on the iguana to get to my photoset. All the photos uploaded today were taken 20 Dec 2004 in Seminary Park in Guayaquil, EC.

The park is commonly known as Iguana Park. The park folk take care of the iguanas and clean up after them and feed them when the tourists with green leafy bits in their hands don’t bring enough. Everyone around knows that if you have an iguana that you can’t take care of any more, you can take it to the park and add it to the family there.

Caution walking under the tree limbs! Piss and poop happens.

Eventually, I’ll have photos of land iguanas out on the islands, but for now Seminary Park will do.

Zoto :: towse

Buzznet: towse

flicker: towse’s photos

Last year this time, Spirit landed on Mars and I dropped an e-note to Bob, my mentor back when, when I was just a kid and he took nerdy high-school-aged Sal under his wing while I did a school-year “visiting student” gig and then a full-time summer internship at NASA/Ames, working on experiments for the early Mars Viking project.

Yo, Bob — or something like that, I said, after Spirit was rolling around on the red dirt of Mars — “Whaddya think of that!”

The e-mail went unanswered, which was unlike him, and, later, I surfed the Web and found that Bob had died, on Jan. 7, 2004, at the California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco. I hoped then and continue to hope that he knew that Spirit had landed.

Bob’s one of the reasons I have “keep in touch with people” on my list of things to do this year. Gary Pinkston’s another. I’ve lost people I cared about. I hope they knew that while they were still kicking.

Keep in touch with those you care about. Did someone make a difference in your life? Get in touch. Keep in touch. Let them know.

I’m almost through the fourth day of 2005 and as is norm, don’t have “a list” of what I want to do or plan to change or complete or discard in the seeable future. In fact, I wrote just today to an old friend I met many, many moons back in aether space

Today is January 4th and I’ve still not knuckled down to setting any resolutions for the new year except (1) to keep in touch with people (2) finish the crime novel ASAP (3) get back to fighting weight (4) get Dale ready to sell by March, if possible.

Should I be more specific? Less ambitious? More realistic? Would spreadsheets help? Some thought and contemplation?

Somehow I think those four simple to-do items might keep me busy for a while. You’ll note I didn’t have any non-quantifiable goals such as be nicer to people. I’m so gosh-durn nice already I make my teeth ache.

I took a look back at to-do lists from 2001 and further past and wondered … what will I think four years from now about things I thought needed doing today?

[TODO] 2001-11-10 (Saturday)

Bhutan photos

[2001-11-10] cream puffs

[2001-11-10] work on clearing out Sherwood

ComputerBits – January – know thyself

call/e-mail Caroline

bday card for Diane

note to Dorathy

Well, the Bhutan photos are still not in any sensible shape. They aren’t on the Web. They aren’t in a flip-flip photo book. I do know where they are, and when we start moving things out from my office, I’ll probably tape up the drawers in the storage drawer sets I keep photos in and just move them lock-stock to the office/book space at Potrero Point.

I made the cream puffs, a dangerous thing to know how to make. I spent time clearing out Sherwood, my brother’s place that had to be cleared out and put on the market ASAP. Eventually, I finished the Computer Bits column for January 2002 and got hold of Caroline and arranged a lunch date with her and Diane. I think I e-mailed the bday card to Diane because I don’t have her address. I eventually dropped a note to Dorathy. Those Bhutan photos though …

Times change.

Do I?

I’m thinking of doing the 43 Things thing.

Or not.

I certainly need to get to work on clearing out Dale and getting it ready for market and, having turned in the February 2005 column for Computer Bits, it’s time to get to work on March and see what one-off articles I can flog to other markets. … and, of course, work on the crime novel.

That short list I sent off to an old friend may be all the goal setting I’ll do.

Thanks to a link on Zen’s blog, I finally knuckled under and tried Bloglines — broke down and signed up, even added a Bloglines subscribe button to my Bookmarks toolbar.

So far most everyone in the small group I added in my trial (except Arleen! YO! ARLEEN!) has a feed I can tap into.

No more clicking through a couple times a day to see if Peej has updated her blog. (YO! PEEJ-honey! You’re picking up bad blogging habits from Kos!)

I can check with