Autobiography of John F. Nash, Jr. - Economic Sciences - 1994 My beginning as a legally recognized individual occurred on June 13, 1928 in Bluefield, West Virginia, in the Bluefield Sanatarium . . . Nobel Prize winner and the subject of the movie A Beautiful Mind

This autobiographic essay exhibits a curiously distant manner of writing about oneself. It has the feel of one who lives a little way outside his own body and just watches. Could he have been confused by the duality of the felt self and the observed self? Or, could he possibly have confused the self he observed sitting there with another person?

WRITING about boy meets girl or Romeo meets Juliet or the President meets his match or the ex-president failed to understand something or why I love Twig Tea, which has a sort of nutty aroma and flavor and is made from the twiggy bits of a tea plant, and toasted, and therefore, looking AROUND us, we may assume it was drunk by peasants, not aristocrats or anything like that; or possibly thinking about colors and shapes of things to come in the near (or for that matter, distant) future, we never seem to get quite to the heart of the matter, to the heart of that SOMEONE about whom we are really really writing, as we just are writing around someone.

www.walrus.nu
The perfect poem:
one word dropped into a pool
of silent context.

This site was advertised on the blogger page - he actually bought an ad for greater visibility. It was a good plan, becaue I wouldnt have seen it otherwise, and it's worth seeing, if you like poetry. The page looks and sounds like poetry

Electronic communications

Thirty years ago, give or take a month or two, Ray Tomlinson, an unassuming computer scientist at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, an engineering firm in Cambridge, Mass., sat down at his computer and wrote a relatively simple computer program that enabled electronic messages to travel from one computer to another.
-- NY Times

Just think what the world would be like without email. People would walk downtown more often and speak to one another in person. But the more distant friends and relations, they would speak with far less.

Funny, when the age of the telephone dawned, older people bemoaned the fact that the art of letter writing was dying. Now writing is back and the telephone is dying. Why call when you can send an email (and attach a few files while you're at it)?

When today's middle aged people become tomorrow's elderly, they will know already what a boon email could be to people who can't get out much, who can't hear too well, and who tire easily.

They will know that even arthritic hands need not stop people from using their computers; mouse click speed and keyboard 'stickiness' can be adjusted for comfort. Type can be increased in size to huge, to accommodate faltering eyesight. Small type like that in this page, can be overcome by user style sheets. Anyone who wants to learn more on this topic could search on the term 'accessibility.' New hardware and software is coming otu all the time. There are numerous helps written in to your basic Microsoft email and browsers that younger people, not needing them, may be unaware of.

OK, all you old people! Explore! Join computer email lists and read beyone your competence. I frequently read material which I can understand only about 30 percent. Why bother, you ask? Because I couldnt get that 30 % anywhere else. Not to mention the exercise is good for me :-)
Start amazing your children and neices and nephews when they come to visit: gab on and on about the computer world. They will be so impressed!

Come down from your ivory tower

The ivory tower refers to a place of unworldliness and lack of practical experience, variously the cloister (to the unreligious), academe (to the anti-intellectual), or the home hearth (to the roué).

It may suggest innocence or obliviousness. We all pretty much knew that. This morning I found myself wondering where and when they had ivory towers so unused they could be borrowed to make metaphors of. (Not that any ivory tower would be useful!)

I looked in the online dictionaries and was mostly given the metaphoric meaning, and, in several cases, the unhelpful hint that it is a translation from the French tour d''ivoire .

Finally at World Wide Words, I came upon an etymological history that traces the expression to the Song of Solomon 7:4, "Thy neck is as a tower of ivory." This same lady has eyes like fishpools and a nose like the towers of Lebanon. This description brings up a lot of points worth discussing, including the reasons we have come to favor far shorter noses than we used to. On the latter point I will just mention that about 30 years ago my mother, visiting California, spied the actor Marlon Brando in an elevator. She remarked, on telling the story later, that he had an incredibly tiny nose. She came from a generation that believed the longer straighter nose reflected strength of character. (My own nose is long enough to reflect strength, but has too many ins and outs from start to finish to show virtue.) Wouldn't you think your nose would change over time, reflecting a changed status?

Getting back to Solomon's beloved, I think we can assume she had a rather long, rather pale neck. That means either she stayed well covered or rarely went out in the sun. She must have led a sheltered life, physically - sheltered from the sun. I think we can deduce she wasn't working in the fields from an early age, or her neck would have been sunburnt and muscular, therefore shorter-appearing.

This gives us enough material to take the short leap to a metaphor meaning not exposed to harsh realities and therefore not practical, possibly idealist. It does not answer my initial question about the ivory tower, however. I would think towers in the middle east in biblical times were built of stone, maybe some light colored stone, say limestone. I conclude the use of ivory was metaphoric.

I would be interested in anybody else's view on this.

whirlmart_statement As a work of art, it examines and blurs the boundaries that have been established between performance art, protest, living sculpture, and direct action. As an action of resistance, it utilizes the power of silence in occupying private consumer-dominated space with a symbolic spectacle.