All is quiet...

I must've been tired as well as grouchy earlier "yesterday" before bedtime, as I slept pretty much solidly for 8 hours once my head hit the pillow (getting up to turn on the A/C at 4 pm was the major bump in the timeline). That made up for a couple of days of thin sleep periods in the 4-5 hour range.

I picked up a copy of Nabokov's Butterflies on the way home from work yesterday. Nabokov was the author who, for me, sparked an interest in serious literature outside the context of making grades in school. Strangely enough, I picked up his Speak, Memory on my own - before the start of the coursework - just so I could walk into class and not be a complete nincompoop about who this fellow was (I was, after all, the only geek in a class full of lit majors).

You see, in college, I was an engineering major, and though I made my proper prostrations before the gods of the humanities, they were made under pain of receiving bad grades for failing to do so. I was a techie; a geek. Virtually all my friends were geeks, too. Like most of them, I devoured technical texts like there was to be no tomorrow. Unlike most of them, I also loved to listen to classical music and to read non-technical literature. However, in terms of the written word, my tastes ran more to Spillane, Asimov, and Heinlein than to Jonathan Swift or Joseph Conrad. In my sophomore year, I gorged on Ayn Rand.

Yet when I read the first few lines of Nabokov's autobiography, something clicked. There was music in the prose. Check out the opening line:

The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

That line captivated me. Enchanted me. Bothered me.

Ultimately, I think it changed me.

I enjoyed the Nabokov course tremendously, due (I think) largely to the enthusiasm of the professor. Somewhere, I still have the term paper I wrote for that course, and interspersed on the pages of my analysis of Nabokov's Luzhin Defense are numerous comments by the prof, written in a bold hand using a most authoritative Mont Blanc Meisterstuck fountain pen. (The comments gave me almost as much satisfaction, BTW, as the "A" on the title page.)

Now, I just need to find some time and actually sit down and read this new acquisition.

Cheers...

A find!

I am doubtlessly way behind the power curve on this one, but it turns out (according to this Wired.com article) that the widely disseminated drawing - inspired by the events of September 11 - of Liberty holding a handgun in one hand, a flag-swaddled infant in the other, and captioned "The most dangerous place in the world is between a mother and her children" was created by LJer Eliza Gauger, a 17-year-old student from Bellingham, Washington (aka vebelfetzer). The drawing is on this page.

The young lady can write, too.

Cheers...

Depressing weather...

Half of the relief this morning was not able to show up, so I stayed behind an hour or so until the quickly summoned replacement was able to arrive. It was no big deal, but by the time I got home, it was 10 am. Before I knew it, noon had crept around, so I hit the sack, hoping to be able to wake up a little earlier than I did last night.

I got my wish, though I had hoped to wake up around 7 pm or so, and not 4:30 <groan>.

The folks coming in to the MCC this morning were literally dripping as they walked. It was wet out there, and the local news on the TV downstairs showed footage of damage left by a tornado over in Pasadena, just a few scant miles away.

It wasn't raining as I went out to the car, but by the time I pulled into the driveway in Pearland, the rain had begun again. Apparently, it hasn't stopped since then, and there are pools of water out on the lawn, testifying to the saturated state of the soil around the house. (It would take quite a bit more for things to get actually dicey, but still...)

* * *Between a Winamp plugin called Tara and an Open Source MP3 encoder called LAME (which is YARA¹, and stands for "LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder"), I've cracked the problem of how to convert a RealAudio file into an MP3. This allows me to download .rm files of Jean Shepherd broadcasts from the flicklives.com site and move them - as .mp3 files - into my MP3 player.

A minor victory, but mine own.

Off to... do something around here that doesn't involve computers, or cleaning, or paperwork!

Cheers...

[1] Yet Another Recursive Acronym

Putting one's finger on the issues of the day...

An excellent satire at the Onion. Excerpts (NOTE: What follows are not actual quotes on the part of Ashcroft and Rumsfeld, they are part of the Onion's satire):

"We live in a land governed by plurality of opinion in an open electorate, but we are now under siege by adherents of a fundamentalist, totalitarian belief system that tolerates no dissent," Attorney General John Ashcroft said. "Our most basic American values are threatened by an enemy opposed to everything for which our flag stands. That is why I call upon all Americans to submit to wiretaps, e-mail monitoring, and racial profiling. Now is not the time to allow simplistic, romantic notions of 'civil liberties' and 'equal protection under the law' to get in the way of our battle with the enemies of freedom."

In the past, Ashcroft said, efforts by federal agencies to restrict personal freedoms were "severely hampered" by such factors as the judicial system, the Bill Of Rights, and "government by the people." Since the attacks, however, some such limitations have been waived, finally giving the CIA, FBI, Pentagon, and White House the greater powers they need to defend freedom.

...

"Remember, under the oppressive Taliban regime, people live in constant fear of an oppressive order to which all must submit," Rumsfeld said. "Under their system, it is illegal to practice a different religion or support a different political system. It is against the law for women to work or leave their homes without their faces covered. There is no freedom of speech, press, or assembly, as dissent of any kind is not tolerated. It is even forbidden to smile or laugh in public, and all who fail to unquestioningly obey are punished with reprisals of brutal violence. We must not allow such a regime to threaten our great democracy. We must stand for something better than that."

"It is therefore urgent," Rumsfeld continued, "that all Americans be quiet, stop asking questions, accept the orders of authorities, and let us get on with the important work of defending liberty, so that America can continue to be a beacon of freedom to all the world."

My first impression, upon reading the satire, was "It'd be funny if it wasn't so close to being real."

However, after unbending my mind from around the satire, reading the comments posted in the first hour after the initial post, and revisiting what's actually being proposed in the Anti-Terrorism Act, the House's PATRIOT bill, and the Senate's USA Act, I cannot foresee the end of the world from the perspective of civil liberties in the United States. But make no mistake, the proposals do expand the scope of what the government may do in terms of monitoring your communications, searching and seizing your possessions, and examining information you might think is protected by privacy legislation.

Cheers...