Walking Eagle Doug Yeager sends this tale from New York in the Land of the Ruptured Duck.
President Bush was invited to address a major gathering of the American Indian Nation last weekend in Arizona. He spoke for almost an hour on his future plans for increasing every Native American’s present standard of living. He referred to his career as Governor of Texas, how he had signed “YES” 1,237 times — for every Indian issue that came to his desk for approval.
Although the President was vague on the details of his plan, he seemed most enthusiastic about his future ideas for helping his “red brothers”.
At the conclusion of his speech, the Tribes presented the President with a plaque inscribed with his new Indian name — Walking Eagle. The proud President then departed in his motorcade, waving to the crowds.
A news reporter later inquired to the group of chiefs of how they come to select the new name given to the President. They explained that Walking Eagle is the name given to a bird so full of shit it can no longer fly.
Florida Frost A new poem by Tony Harrison from the LRB 17 Feb 2005
Cancer carried off his cherished wife
as Florida floundered in a freak harsh freeze
and let the fahrenheit out of his life
never to gain back its lost degrees.
He still can’t quite believe she’s wholly lost.
He no more thought he’d see his dear one go
than that he’d see in Florida a frost
with that sudden drop last year to 12 below.
Grapefruit first froze then splurted slush.
Unripe oranges were cold and hard.
Tears were shed for many a blighted bush
in every northern Florida backyard.
Pipless tangelos with loose zipper skins
flashed frozen segments with a sound like farts,
burst pith with ice spikes like a hexer’s pins
hammered in to atrophy those parts.
Literally glacé, ice-candied rind
rims the ruined kumquats with a shine,
moonshafts from shadows, they’re the kind
served by Pluto to sad Proserpine.
Stacks of citrus branches burned all night
and glowed through the window of his sharpening shed
onto rows of glittering teeth that soon would bite
into more local orchards that were dead.
A man brought in his grandad’s old two-hander —
felling an orchard was a chore to share,
a source of grief to grower goose and gander
so he asks his wife to go Dutch on despair.
Her grip on the other handle steels his nerves.
She hears, as the kumquat crown bows to the blade
the boiling pock-pock of a life’s preserves
then collapsing pantry shelves of marmalade.
He gets a different memory from the saw,
and feels the rhythms they once used in love,
though the bedsprings aren’t so squeaky any more,
in the old two-hander that they pull and shove.
Gratified greed gives saws their grin.
Whether a moist juice dribbles down its jaw
or just a few dry crumbs stick to its chin,
any wood seems toothsome to a saw.
The moist eyes move from new cut stump to stump
of trees that never failed them, and, just last year
fruited when she found her frightening lump
and the whole house reeked with jamming and joint fear.
Now he sharpens saws with relish for them both
bitter that the bright oncologist maligned
their glorious groves by falling cancer ‘growth’,
and all day the whetted teeth have whined and dined.
Never had saws more venom in their bite.
Never did fruit trees struggle less to fall.
Why shouldn’t Florida feel freezing blight
walk in from the groves and touch them all?
One Sunday his sense of loss sent him berserk —
another turkeyless repast to face alone.
He took the mower out and made short work
of everything his wife had ever grown.
Earth dragged down his darling and his dear
and considered it just recompense to toss
hydrangeas his direction once a year.
All Busch Gardens weren’t worth such a loss.
What happened to vast acres north and west
of central Florida attacked his wife;
the icy celsius gnawed at her breast
and robbed the Citrus State of half its life.
Tony Harrison
The Meatrix Banning fox-hunting as cruel to animals is a sick joke in a country that farms pigs and chickens as we do. Nor is the result good to eat.
Ultimately supermarkets and farmers are unlikely to improve conditions in meat production, unless we, the chicken-eating public, stop buying cheap meat.
» Original article » The Meatrix
Tending the inbox How the world changed:
…people in Greece and Russia spend the least amount of time dealing with e-mail every day: 48 minutes on average. Americans, by comparison, spend two hours per day, among the highest in the world.
» Original article
48 minutes a day the least time? How email changed the world.
Dr Blues Privileged last night to meet former neurosurgeon Dr Ika, guitarist with the Grapevine Blues Band. Great music, doc and thank you for the introduction to the Georgian 33-character alphabet and its typography.
The Coming Wars An article by Seymour Hersh posted in The New Yorker in January describes the alarming arrangements the Bush Administration is making to “prepare the battlefield” in Iran.
The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control […] during his second term.
Straight Banana George Monbiot blows the whistle on a narrowly defeated initiative by European commissioner Frits Bolkestein to harmonise the regulation of corporate activities by making their behaviour subject only to the laws of their home country — regardless of where they operate. This would certainly have harmonised regulation, by prompting a flight to the most weakly-regulated countries. Expect your employer to reregister in Lithuania and be regulated and subject to control only in Vilnius.
Or so it would have been, had the scam not got stopped, though without any help from British opponents of Brussels. That’s the trouble with Eurosceptics, says Monbiot, they’re never around when you need them. Too busy fretting about bananas, apparently.
Missing
Have you seen this woman?
She has been reported missing and there are fears for her safety
If you think you have seen her, or if you remember her fondly, contact the Department of Fatherland Security.
Those who would give up essential Liberty to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. Benjamin Franklin
Dave Allen died in his sleep at 68. He left us these words on industrialised work.
We spend our lives on the run: we get up by the clock, eat and sleep by the clock, get up again, go to work — and then we retire. And what do they give us? A fucking clock.
Magnificent Well-Being Hard on the heels of Richard Layard’s essay in the current issue of Prospect on giving happiness priority over wealth, our Australia correspondent Andrew Gaines has sent us an essay on his Project to Make Wellbeing a National Priority.
Most mainstream writing about sustainability focuses on technical changes. In fact, psychological changes are crucial as well.
» Update See also the New Economics Foundation
It’s true money doesn’t make you happy: a man with ten million dollars is no happier than a man with nine.
Sign on foreign-exchange dealer’s desk at Macquarie Bank
Wireless encryption When I set up the wireless network here no others were detectable and I was relaxed about security and privacy. Now our computers report several networks round here, and have occasionally and alarmingly reported IP conflicts — two machines using the same network address.
Today I encrypted the wireless part of the network. When we had Windows 98, Windows ME and Windows XP machines that looked tricky. Now we have Windows XP and MacOS X machines and it’s not — just a few minutes work.
Zeno and the Art of Eating Gateau Faced with a slice of Black Forest Cake from the Hampstead Tea Rooms larger than she wished to eat, and noticing how her appetite for this treat wanes on subsequent tastings, Miki made an independent rediscovery of one of Zeno’s Paradoxes. At each sitting she eats half of what remains, ensuring an inexhaustible supply of cake. But why? She makes the best cheesecake and just did.
Miki’s new article, Ice Fishing in Lithuania, has appeared at Air BE-PAL. As usual, click on the underlined links for her pictures if you can’t make out the Japanese.
Happiness is back Prospect’s March cover article by Richard Layard argues that classical objections to utilitarianism, which seeks to maximise the happiness of a society, have been overtaken by science. Income inequalities cost us in physical and social health. Policy should take note.
Income tax is a tax on the rat race. It can help to improve the work-life balance and increase a sense of well-being.
More articles in this issue:
Hooray for Yrp An article by Mark Leonard celebrates the rise of Europe’s ‘soft power’.
A new kind of power has evolved, which cannot be measured in terms of military budgets or smart missiles. It works according to a longer timescale, and it is about reshaping the world rather than getting your way on individual decisions. Europe’s power is “transformative”—based on the idea that everyone wants to be rich and at peace. […] Rather than relying on the threat of intervening to get its way, Europe relies on the threat of not intervening.
Polymath James Wolfensohn is leaving the World Bank after a decade at its head. Sebastian Mallaby tells of the man who took up the ’cello in his 40s under Jacqueline du Pré’s tuition, promising to play in a concert on his 50th birthday — and did so, at Carnegie Hall, on his 60th and 70th birthdays as well. Robert Heinlein said it: Specialisation is for insects.
A new short story not a romance, but a love story, by John Berger
We paid the closest attention to each other’s sleep, we never forgot one another. When she was deeply asleep, her breathing was like surf. “You took me to the bottom,” she told me one morning.
Power of One Like many others, I had never heard of Noll Scott† before reading of his death; like many other Guardian Unlimited readers, I have been the grateful but unwitting beneficiary of his work.
Scott was a senior journalist at the Guardian, yet it appears he wrote much of the software behind the online edition, integrating it smoothly with the paper’s editing and content-management systems.
His demonstration of what one man with the right knowledge, tools and insight can achieve is an inspiration to programmers everywhere.
Gettajob gettajob gettajob Unemployed? Best way to find a job is to get elected to Parliament. From George Monbiot’s latest report, corporations will fall over themselves to employ you if you are a Member of Parliament. Or perhaps I’ve got this wrong, and we should pat our collective back for shrewdly sending to Westminster the most employable people in the country.
Journeyman Programming
I'm increasingly interested in the idea of programming as craftwork, and the implications of this for managing software projects. My early experience was with APL, small teams and iterative development. In the 1980s I was seduced by the Software Engineering (SE) movement into formal methods, and wound up abandoning programming for a long while. Two decades on, I’m programming again the way I started out. My colleagues and I produce results in a large company several times cheaper and faster than their conventional software development process does.
I’m going to start distinguishing in a column here a style of software development I’m dubbing Journeyman Programming. Think about the step Extreme Programming (XP) took away from SE. Then think about another, comparably radical step in the same direction.
Here are some articles by other writers that relate to this:
A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of. It should be a pencil, not a pen.
Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right place to look for metaphors is not in the sciences, but among other kinds of makers.
But the key to flexibility, I think, is to make the language very abstract. The easiest program to change is one that's very short.
… It is cheaper and simpler to just build the design and test it than to do anything else. We do not care how many builds we do — they cost next to nothing in terms of time and the resources used can be completely reclaimed later if we discard the build. Note that testing is not just concerned with getting the current design correct, it is part of the process of refining the design. […] These designs will be coded in some programming language and then validated and refined via the build/test cycle. The process is error prone and not particularly rigorous to begin with.
Designers should use anything that helps. Structure charts, Booch diagrams, state tables, PDL, etc. — if it helps, then use it. We must keep in mind, however, that these tools and notations are not a software design. Eventually, we have to create the real software design, and it will be in some programming language. Therefore, we should not be afraid to code our designs as we derive them.
It is probably better to let the original designers write the original code, rather than have someone else translate a language independent design later. What we need is a unified design notation suitable for all levels of design.
[…] the collective subconscious of the software industry instinctively knows that improvements in programming techniques and real world programming languages in particular are overwhelmingly more important than anything else in the software business.
No noise My pulse is a constant soundtrack to my life, suppressed from awareness except at moments of stress. I hear the world through the tinnitus static of my ears, usually an inaudible constant. Waiting for sleep one night a few years ago in the South Australian desert, I could hear both quite clearly.
I perceive the world through the constant static of my thinking, decades of conversational debris …
