Poem of the Day #1
One of my favorite poems, Ode by Arthur O'Shaughnessy, 1844–1881
WE are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams:
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.
With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.
We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
Washington Dispatches, Day One
Well here I am in the dark, vile ever-beating heart of the empire. It's 6am and I am sipping hotel coffee, updating from the comfort of my bed at the Omni Hotel.
Train rolled in around last night at 7:30...got to the hotel about 15 minutes later by cab, then went with Yumi and four other people (doctor couples also down here for whatever conference this is) to an excellent restaurant 1/2 block from the White House - the Old Ebbitt Grill, Washington's oldest, most historic saloon, founded in 1856. Food was awesome and cheap compared to NYC..dinner for 6 plus drinks, desert (I recommend the Peanut Butter Mousse Pie) and coffee came to $216 before tip. And the food rocked, service was stellar. After dinner we strolled past the Treasury and the White House, we snapped a few pics with some of the ninja-ed out machine gun totting White House guards, which I was surprised we could do. When asked how many sniper sights were trained on us we wandered around one guard nervously laughed and refused to answer, so my guess was at least six. But the White House was beautiful at night. As an American citizen I was disappointed that while walking by the Treasury building I did not see hundreds of staffers running about inside with their hair on fire, arms flailing like epileptic muppets in response to the ongoing crisis. Seriously, I want to see some around the clock panic in that building 24/7 at the moment. The patriot in me will assume that they're confining the displays of panic to when Chinese tourists roll by during the day. Also no discernible signs of printing presses running. Will check back on that tomorrow.
DC is totally a political town. In the three cab rides I took (from the train station and too and from dinner) the cabbies all engaged us in politics. That'd never happen in NYC. And all three had political talk radio running in the car. The first driver from the train station was piping the audio from the McNeil/Leher report for christakes. Tipping is better under Obama apparently. I feel that the old cliche - that DC is hollywood for ugly people - will hold true. There is a palpable sense of humming power underneath all.
In the cab, rolled past the Watergate (now condos, which is probably telling of something) and the Cato Institute. I know where you fuckers are now. I gave them the appropriate salute from the back of the cab silently.
Today will see us move to another hotel and some sort of snapping of photographs in front of large stony monoliths depicting America's greatness. Bring it on, Ozymandais. I'll probably tear up a bit at the Lincoln memorial, but don't tell anyone.
- END DISPATCH -
RIP Joe Ades
New York City's very own singular Gentleman Peeler Salesman passed away this last Sunday. He seemed a fixture at NY's Union Square for as long as I can remember. The NY Times has a small piece on his passing. I only recently got around to buying a peeler from him about six weeks ago. NYC suddenly seems a little dimmer now. Godspeed good sir, godspeed.
Update 2-7-2009: David Galbraith deconstructs the NY Times tribute to Ades. And as a bonus, here's Joe Ades on the NBC Today show.
Watermelon Cat
Deep Thought - Planet Hardrive
Woah. Pretty deep thought about the nature of information storage and the universe over at the Bldg Blog. I'm still chewing on all the brain gum it conjectures.
I've been fascinated by what might be called the geological nature of harddrives – how certain mineral arrangements of metal and ferromagnetism result in our technological ability to store memories, save information, and leave previous versions of the present behind....perhaps someday we won't actually need harddrives at all: we'll simply use geology itself. In other words, what if we could manipulate the earth's own magnetic field and thus program data into the natural energy curtains of the planet?The earth would become a kind of spherical harddrive, with information stored in those moving webs of magnetic energy that both surround and penetrate its surface.
