Archive for life
July 7, 2008 at 8:09 pm · tag/s : blog, doubt, life, melbourne, money, people
it is exactly the sort of day when you have every right to be miserable and/or worried. what with the petrol prices and the drought and the interest rates and the cost of housing and drug queen roberta williams turns cover girl.
my appointment with the dental hygienist in outer western mongolia is actually with the aptly named dr.goldberg who’s talent is not cleaning teeth but wearing a worried expression after he has looked in your mouth and poked around a bit. he tries to sell me thirty thousand dollars worth of dental work.
all of a sudden it is a bad day. not that i wasn’t expecting it, nor was i fooled by its auspicious beginning.
it starts raining. i have a bad coffee in a cafe. for no apparent reason they prop the door open with a brick and the cold air streams in. an old, old lady is munching on a sandwich. she looks worried too. she hides the uneaten half of her sandwich in a serviette.
but it is the meaninglessness of my activities and their inconsequential nature which is the cause of my misery today.
April 10, 2008 at 8:23 am · tag/s : amerika, australia, death, life, loss, love, people
a story is doing the rounds of the internets about an 80 year old man in new york who has been calling his late wife’s answering service every day since she died in 2005 just to hear her voice. unfortunately the phone company deleted the message and the old man was heartbroken. tough shit said verizon when he rang them asking if they could restore the message. then the story hit the internets and hey presto, the phone company found a backup of the message and restored it. where there is a will (or a potential public relations disaster) there is a way. there are a number of variants of the story, some of which claim the voice said : “the whitings aren’t home…” and in others “this is catherine whiting…” but no matter it is a great story. how long before there is service where you can record a message before you die so people can ring a number and hear your voice after you have passed away?
December 5, 2007 at 8:09 am · tag/s : amerika, image, life, people
cue : a random post about two sets of photographs of people : one - the life’s work of the german photographer august sander (1876-1964) currently the subject of a major exhibition at the art gallery of new south wales which contains a sizeable portion of the 1200 of his photographs owned by the j.paul getty museum - for obvious reasons these were interesting times for a german photographer to be plying his trade although the allies made a significant dent in his legacy when 30,000 of his negatives were destroyed during the bombing of cologne - call me old fashioned but this is a refreshingly sober hang too, the curator having chosen not to be creative and to simply exhibit the photographs at eye height, equidistantly spaced in plain black frames. here are a few nice examples of sander’s work i found on the net.
two - portraits by the anonymous officials of us law enforcement agencies of arrested people wearing t-shirts with slogans. i think they are meant to be funny, but mostly they just made me sad.
September 7, 2007 at 12:57 pm · tag/s : doubt, life, people, reading, strange, thinking
as a kind of ex-cyberpunk i should be a science fiction fan, but i am just not … something about being unwilling to suspend my disbelief. however william gibson explains why science fiction is about the present, and his observations on the strange kind of reality we live in this recent interview in the washington post make for a great read.
A taste :
“…EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It’s like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement…”
via boingboing
June 12, 2007 at 7:27 pm · tag/s : blog, life, text
instant life writing
no special skills required!
interesting life optional!
why bore your friends in real time?
