Take a hike

Tomorrow is August 1st, Switzerland’s Fourth of July. In every village of the country, celebrations commemorate the pact that was signed in 1291 by the the three founding cantons of Uri, Schwytz and Nidwald. Bonfires are built to evoke the smoke-signal communications technology that was used in the middle ages. Several days beforehand, huge piles of wood are stacked together in preparation. When they’re lit, the villages’ volunteer firefighters stand, hoses trained steadily on the fire, as it burns higher and higher into the night, sparks shooting up into the air. This must be what my 40 franc annual firefighter tax is for. Continue reading

10 reasons not to wear a tie

I was chatting with Dave this morning, and he mentioned he had an important meeting at work.
So you’ll be putting on a tie? I typed. Morning humor. Everyone knows geeks don’t wear ties.

That got me thinking. Ties don’t make a lot of sense, but like makeup and pantyhose, they’re firmly ingrained into our concept of “appropriate apparel.” The more I thought about it, the more absurd it seemed. I did a little investigating and have come up with ten good reasons for men not to wear ties. Pull this out next time someone says “dress code.”

Continue reading

Shopping

My trips home to the US usually involve a certain amount of shopping.  I’ve lived in Switzerland for 7 years now, but I still haven’t figured out how to buy clothes here. And there are some important items that cannot be found, at least at a reasonable price, on this side of the pond…  Jelly Bellies, of course, top that list. Continue reading

The smell of rain

In the vast open country of New Mexico you can watch the rain coming from miles and miles away. The clouds roil up from the Southwest, a mass of slate gray stretching out over the sky. A really dark cloud brings hail and driving rain, which will make the arroyos run. Lightning flashes in the distant dark mass; I count the seconds until the thunder booms.

One chimpanzee, two chimpanzee, three chimpanzee…

Three miles away.

Then it happens. The wind picks up, and the smell of coming rain envelops me. I go outside and drink it in viscerally. It doesn’t exist like this anywhere else on Earth. What does it smell like? Rain. Rain in New Mexico. Continue reading

It’s all about philosophy

The Thinker, by Auguste Rodin

A strange post appeared this morning on Facebook from my friend Matt:

Interesting snippet from the Grauniad:

“Proof that the road to enlightenment can begin with the most trivial subject arrived this month via Wikipedia. Start at any Wikipedia page, then click the first link (ignoring any that are italicised or nestled in brackets), then repeat. For more than 93% of articles, you will end up at philosophy.”

My first comment was “and what, pray tell, is the Grauniad?” which I shouldn’t have made because all I had to do was go to Google, which yielded a Wikipedia link to the British newspaper the Guardian and this snippet of information:

The nickname The Grauniad for the paper originated with the satirical magazine Private Eye….

Well this is fortuitous, I think to myself. Here I am on Wikipedia! Let’s test the theory. I start clicking. Newspaper-publication-content-information-sequence-mathematics-quantity-property-Modern Philosophy. Wow!

I tried it with a few other things, ignoring the first link if it was either italicized or in parentheses.

Land mine? Mining, siege, military, use of force, conflict resolution, controversy, opinion, subjectivity, subject, philosophy. Wow!

Pomegranate? Fruit-plant-living-object-physics-natural _science-science-knowledge-fact-information-sequence-mathematics-quantity-property-modern philosophy.

River? Watercourse-water-chemical_substance-chemistry-science-knowledge-fact-information-sequence-mathematics-quantity-property-modern philosophy.

Zombie? Animated_corpse-revenant-fantasy-genre-literature-art-symbol-information… here we go again. I already know that information leads to Modern Philosophy.

This is weird. So far I’m 5 for 5, if you permit “Modern Philosophy” and “Philosophy” to be equal.

I wonder how they got 93%. I’m hoping some geek somewhere wrote a program to test it and it doesn’t turn out to be one of those “urban legends.” Hey, let’s test Urban Legend! Folklore-music-art-symbol-information…

Dave will probably be able to do this. I’ll check and get back to you.

Being a purist, I want purity. If you click on the first links starting from the “Philosophy” page, you come back to the page. If you click on the first links from “Modern Philosophy” you end up going back and forth between “High context culture” and “Low context culture.” If you cheat a little and ignore the first link on the “Modern Philosophy” page, which is “Western Europe,” then you end up on the “Philosophy” page. I think someone should edit that for purity’s sake.

Wikipedia is crowd-sourced, so this can’t be intentional. It would be too hard to control.

From the “Philosophy” page:

The word “philosophy” comes from the Greek φιλοσοφία (philosophia), which literally means “love of wisdom”

I love it, indeed. Especially since I majored in Philosophy in college and have been wondering what to do with all that knowledge (fact-information- sequence-mathematics-quantity-property-modern philosophy) ever since. I particularly like the fact that “information” is not the bottom line. We need wisdom to handle it.

“That’s just random,” says my son Luc when I tell him what I’m blogging about.

I’m not so sure.


Call for input

This blog has been, and continues to be, a revelation to me. And you, I hope. I’ve been trying to post something twice a week for four months, whether I have anything to say or not.  There were times when there was nothing at all going on upstairs, so I turned on the computer to see if I could channel anything from elsewhere in the universe. Those were probably the best posts. I’m at my most boring when I think I’m being clever, or when I’ve thought the whole thing out before I sit down to write. I appreciate your steadfastness in bearing with me.


I’m fascinated by the changes that are taking place in the world of publishing. Blogs are a big part of that. I’m psyched to have jumped headlong into something so absolutely cutting edge. Who would have guessed! It’s exhilarating.


Along those lines, my CTO (Dave) and I have taken the bold step of reserving some domain names, and we’ve parked them on a server somewhere in California. I’m going to move this whole blog over to one of them fairly soon. 


I’m doing this for a couple of reasons: one, it’s the start of the Gydle publishing empire and as such needs its own dedicated web space, and two, it satisfies my insatiable appetite for minute control over things. If I can edit the CSS behind the blog page I am just a much happier camper. 


So here’s where you come in.


I was discussing the design of my new site with my writing group on Monday. Instead of bringing in a piece of writing like I was supposed to, I asked them what words I should include on the blog header. Two things came out:


They weren’t sure how to pronounce Gydle (like “bridle”, “needle” or “diddle”?) and felt that knowing this would enhance their enjoyment of my prose. Two of the writers reluctantly revealed that they had a problem with the image of jelly beans. I’m not going to tell you what their association was just yet, for fear of biasing you, but let me tell you I was really surprised. 


“If I hadn’t known you personally, I could never have gotten past the jelly bean image to read the page,” one of them said.


Wow! This is serious stuff. The idea of Jelly Bellies having a negative connotation hadn’t occurred to me. Not in my wildest dreams. I was stuck. The Jelly Belly image is a central part of my design concept.  How widespread is this phenomenon? How can I find out?


Well, obviously I can blog about it. 


What I’d like is for you to tell me if Jelly Bellies (or jelly beans) have any particular association for you. The best is to post a comment, so everyone can see each other’s responses, but if it’s too embarrassing you can also send an e-mail to me at gydle@gydlepublishing.com. 

The Bounty

The fire appears to have spared the town of Los Alamos, but it continues to spread, and has officially become the largest forest fire in New Mexico history. It’s still only 5% contained and is now decimating the sacred lands of the Santa Clara pueblo. My classmate Joe became something of a local celebrity for his efforts to keep people informed via Facebook. He was on the local news at least twice, once playing his electric guitar


Social media are changing the way we experience events like this. It has been fascinating to sit in on these exchanges and participate in the conversation. More than 3,700 people have joined the Friends of the LA Fire Facebook page (I don’t think any of us are feeling friendly towards the fire, but that was the name chosen), where the sense of community is palpable. Requests for donations, updates on the fire situation, posts by experts and reports from community meetings — and the occasional joke like this one, a reply to a post entitled “In Los Alamos…”


You know you’re from Los Alamos when you bring a friend home from college and when he asks how the microwave works, he gets a lecture from your dad about how microwaves work rather than instructions on how to operate it.


In Los Alamos, kids don’t need night lights. They ARE night lights.


The post has 224 replies so far! No lack of fuel for this particular fire.




In the meantime…


My garden has gone into production! 


Something ate all the lettuce and spinach pretty much the moment they poked their little leaves out of the soil. I suspect snails, but I haven’t caught any in the act. At least they’re getting their vegetables. 


Everything else is thriving. The arugula went from seedling to seed in about five minutes, and by the time I thought to pluck some for my salad it was way too bitter. It’s really easy and rewarding to yank the plants out of the ground, though. Très therapeutic. 


I’m pinching back the exuberant tomatoes before they get totally out of control like they did last year. I’m thinning out the carrots. It goes against all my instincts to pull out something that’s potentially edible, but I hardened myself and did it anyway. Now the lucky chosen ones can breathe. A lot of innocent baby carrots were sacrificed for that to happen. I hope they appreciate it.


So far, everything I’ve harvested has been green:

El diablo
The Schnozz
The happy farmer
Mr. Miserable

I would have taken more pictures, but sugar snap peas are one of my favorite foods (after jelly bellies) and I started eating them, thus drastically reducing the artistic possibilities. I’m looking forward to an enhanced color palette once the carrots, tomatoes, red peppers and eggplant ripen. 


A note on fireworks for this Fourth of July: why not just skip them? They scare animals, blind and dismember overenthusiastic pyromaniacs, and cause forest fires. The night sky is a pretty awesome show in itself, and it doesn’t hurt your ears.