Phasor Burn

Morrison, originally uploaded by G-rant.

If darts and bowling can make it in as demonstration sports, then why not this logical progression… ghetto javelin while trying to not spill the beer.

Location: Kelowna B.C.
Position SPORTS REPORTER

This is a full time union position reporting to the Managing Editor.

The successful applicant must:
- Have the ability to be both an aggressive self-starter and a person who reacts well to direction.
- Be capable of generating good leads and following them through with flair
- Be proficient in page design and layout.
- Be able to produce photos with a digital camera that are of a quality fit for publication
- Have his or her own transportation.
- Have a knowledge of the area.

[ . . . ]

In other words, working for a small town newspaper requires a split personality, ocd, and other unmentioned mental disorders.

Cool.

It’s been four years already, and I actually have a non-zero readership for my bit of blog bile in this corner if the Internet. Of course I know all of you by name and some by ip address as well. LOL.

I know the content type, quality, and content have all had their ups and downs, but I must be doing something right. At the very least this is cheaper and likely more fun than therapy.

Therapy which I am sure some or most of you think I must require copious amounts of because of the what I spew about from time to time.

The general look and content will stay the course. Specifics like upgrading wordpress to better support iPhone posting needs to happen. Mobile safari is awful crashy on the Ajax in the compose window here.

Anyhoo I have to save and post before it kablooeys again.

When I ponder our curiously unbalanced civilization, able to put golf carts on Mars but unable to equal the verse of muddy Elizabethan London, I wonder why we are as we are. In all things technological the United States is magnificent, the Athens of solid-state physics. Yet the great orchestras die unlistened to, we have no Shakespeare or Dante nor notion why we might want them, and religious expression grows mute, or crabbed and hostile. Why?

I think the answer is that our surroundings determine not just what we think, but what we can think. We live in cities urban but not urbane, among screaming sirens, in air grayed by exhaust and wracked by the blattings of buses. The complaint is not invalid for being trite. I cannot imagine a Whitman composing in a shopping mall.

The rush and complexity of everything take their toll. As a people we might well be called The Unrelaxed. And, therefore, the Uncontemplative.

[ . . . ]

I am not religious, at least in the sense of believing that I have the answers, but I am religious in the sense of knowing the questions. I know that there are things we can’t know, things even more important than making partner before the age of thirty. Doubtless most of us know this. Yet the tenor of life is not easily escaped. We try. People rush to Europe in search of the old, the quiet, and the pretty. Peddlers of real estate understand the urge, and hawk tranquil rural life while building the malls that will make it impossible. And so hurry comes to Arcadia. People then think of escape to the next small town. We spend a remarkable amount of time fleeing ourselves. Maybe instead we should build a place we like.

We cannot, because the nature of things is determined remotely, at corporate. We have little choice in where we live, not because we cannot move but because everywhere becomes the same. A Southern town with old houses and grey-green Spanish moss hanging in beards from trees gives way to malls and Ruby Tuesdays. The town center may be retained, with parking for tour buses, so that people from elsewhere can have a Southern Experience. A town turned into a freak show is no longer precisely a town.

Good old Fred. I love his writing, though I may not agree all the time with his viewpoints this one certainly seems right.

I keep muttering about leaving everything behind to go become a goat herder in the mountains. I never could say exactly why I feel that way, not in as nice a word-picture as Fred paints in the above article.

I suppose it’s a form of “you can’t go home again”. Why not try though? There’s got to be some way of escaping, or building a place we like. Fred is talking more than a cabin in the woods. Rather, community that is local in nature and perhaps not as mass produced or efficient but certainly more pleasant that what we have been putting up with so far.

Thank you, Fred, for the reminder of what it is I mean when I say I want to be a goat herder. Perhaps I will be inspired enough not to slide back into the mindless ruts of modern day city “living”. Perhaps.

People’s Liberation Army soldiers carry the Olympic flag during the opening ceremony of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games at the National Stadium, August 8, 2008. The stadium is also known as the Bird’s Nest. REUTERS/Jerry Lampen (CHINA)

So much for this being all about the athletes.

’nuff said.