"To live is to war with trolls in heart and soul. To write is to sit in judgment on oneself."
- Ibsen

I came across this quote in a book by Robertson Davies (The Manticore, I think, although that doesn't matter).  For the longest time, I accepted that is some sort of absolute truth, probably because it sounded like something that an intellectual ( Read more... )

 I have a picture of my father, dead now these past ten years.  It is summer in this picture; the colour of the sky is changing from light to Alice blue with a few milk-coloured clouds settling near the horizon.  My father is standing on top of a small pile of large, heavy planks of wood, painted black and crisscross-stacked, resting upon a base ( Read more... )

"You can have information, or you can have a life. You can't have both."
Doug's Law

I've come face-to-face with a particular realization, one that I can't be certain to accurately describe here, but I'll try.

Idea Number One: I can choose to either commit to creating the most wondrous and beautiful things of which I'm capable and throwing them out ( Read more... )

You can watch this video on www.livejournal.com

Jess Hill's "A Common Bird" from her album 'Orchard'.  Got it, love it; once again, East Van beauty blossoms.

I've now joined Google+.  Not sure what to make of it yet - it's all shiny and new, Facebook-familiar with a few extra bells and whistles thrown in - but as a friend of mine posted there, "So .... now what?"  I guess we'll find out.


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I am listening to The Goldberg Variations by Johann Sebastian Bach, as recorded by Glenn Gould.  The 1981 recording of them, which also turned out to be his final recording before he died.  It is important to make this clarification, as his first recording was of these same 'keyboard exercises' in 1954.

Have you ever listened to this music?  I mean ( Read more... )

Another lovely evening.  And here I am, having consumed more alcohol in a week than I have in several months, sitting at the computer and spouting yet more irrelevant inanities.  You know, because I can.  God bless you and keep you, Interwebs!

Continuing to work on grafting tougher skin to my chubby exterior.  It gets a little bit easier every day ( Read more... )

• Our Assistant Manager got laid off this week.  He didn't do anything wrong:  the store wasn't making enough money, so Head Office's solution was to lay people off.  Too bad, because he had been with the company for almost twenty years, had so many great stories to tell and was great fun to work with.  The only positive consequence to this is that I ( Read more... )

From cnn.com:  "Scientists have turned inanimate chemicals into a living organism in an experiment that raises profound questions about the essence of life."

Okay, yes, all moral/philosophical questions aside, it's a remarkable accomplishment.  However, the following gave me cause for concern:

M mycoides was chosen as a simple microbe with which to ( Read more... )