Archives for November 2004

If you don’t check or read your email, why even have email at all? Perhaps as a tool to frustrate your friends, teasing them into thinking they can contact you? It baffles me. How often do you check your email?

One of the more interesting newsletters I subscribe to is Global Province. Their email sometimes comes across as elitist, but the writing is excellent and generally interesting.

This week’s issue, titled Thankgiving Lassitude; The Art of Distraction is worth reading. Here is a brief synopsis:

Anticipation. You are about to get a 96-hour Thanksgiving liberty pass. Rejoice. Even back in World War II, Captain Richard Winters of the 101st Airborne could only wangle 48 hours in Paris.

But for you a genuine respite from the civil wars of daily life. We already know that you are doing too much, are hugely overscheduled, and are a victim of digital stress syndrome (too much cell phone and too much computer). Was it the Archbishop of Canterbury who thought the typewriter could only quickly lead to the end of civilization? Now all its microchip stepchildren connive against the good life.

With Thanksgiving upon us, we want to make sure you remove yourself from all the compulsions that have you running in place and, rather, to help you drift off to a planet where you are doing hardly anything at all. There you will take a creative vacillando, a journey with a destination which you are striving not to reach. Here’s our program for systematic malingering, relentless distraction, and aimless meandering:

Wednesday Night: Intense Laziness. We would have you start with several quaffs of ancient beers but we don’t know where to buy them. You can now read about them in several places. Anchor Steam out in San Francisco took on its Sumerian Beer Project to commemorate its own very short history and the 6000 year roots of beer itself in Mesopotamia. To do this, Anchor tapped into…

With beer and idleness, you surely will have gotten the best night’s sleep you have had in years. That’s just to get you relaxed enough to get through a day of sitting and eating…

Friday: Beginning Christmas. By this, we mean that you are allowed to think about Christmas but not to do anything really serious about it. A pox on you if you get your tree decorated or put up Christmas lights in the trees outside, as is the Thanksgiving custom in parts of Dallas. Oh, it’s all right to find a place for the Advent calendar out on the hall table…

Saturday: Recreation. By now, some of you will be surfeited with leisure, stuffed with food. Maybe it’s time to take up some non-competitive sport, where you even forget to keep score…

Sunday: Exultation. Whatever you did, you did too much on Saturday. Less is more for Sunday. A slow walk in the sun with family. Just a bit of low key music on the stereo. Sunday papers on the floor…

You should really read the entire newsletter to appreciate it.

A couple years ago, my most popular website was featured on Yahoo’s Daily Picks. Ever since then, I’ve been a subscriber. Most of the time I glance at the picks and then delete the email, but once in while something catches my eye.

Scott Haefner’s Kite Aerial Photography site illustrates beautifully what may become my next hobby. Haefner uses kites and a remote-controlled 5mp digital camera to create fantastic aerial views of the world. And he shares all the tools of his trade; how to build the rigs, where to find the equipment and how to get into KAP.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go revise my Christmas wish list.