Stories from the local news

You can learn a lot about the real culture by reading stories you only find in the local news.

Years ago, while traveling through Wyoming, I read in one of those small-town newspapers about a man who had recently died.

He'd been drinking with some friends and went outside to relieve himself. Apparently he passed out while he was out there, because later that night one of his friends found him lying on the bluff. 

Now here's the thing that caught my eye: this friend didn't help him up and back into the house, even though it was a fairly cold night. This was the American West, you see, the land of rugged individualism. It would be an insult to imply that someone couldn't take of himself.

So what did this "friend" do? He put a coat over the man lying on the ground and then went back in to rejoin the party.

The next day they found the man dead, still lying out there on the bluff.

That story has always stuck in my mind as the epitome of the cowboy ethos.

-- A comment I originally posted on Bruce Charlton's blog.  Reposting here with some minor edits.

Hermitage

It's a drippy, wet day here in the Pacific Northwest, so this poem seems particularly apt:

Curtained by spring showers
pouring down from the eaves,
a place where someone lives,
idle, idle,
unknown to others.

Saigyō (1118-1190), Spring Showers in a Mountain Dwelling—written at Ōhara, tr. Burton Watson

(h/t Michael Gilleland)

fads

Today I was browsing the archives of a Macintosh-related website and came across a comment I made there back in 2006:

Many trends in computing are like the CB fad of the 1970's. Technically interesting, but ultimately just another vehicle for pointless blather.

I mean, c'mon. IM, online photos, personal websites? 10-4, good buddy.

Six years later and I don't see any reason to retract a single word.   I overlooked blogs, which were already prevalent back then, but now I would have to add Facebook pages, Youtube channels, and worst of all, tweets.  It's all the same.

***

So I haven't been posting much lately.

On the one hand, I haven't had much worth saying.   I'm as prone to blathering as anyone else, but I often catch myself doing it and then fall into a prolonged, embarrassed silence.  It's been like that lately.

On the other hand, spring has arrived here in the Pacific Northwest and there's work to done in the garden.  There's a lot to dislike in Voltaire's Candide, but I think he got something right in the ending...