For an amusing diversion, check out this link, provided I did it correct this time.
Author: Ned (Page 5 of 10)
So I posted a comment on the NY Times Ethics blog for the first time.
Here’s the connection to the article. I am post #194.
Click to go to article. It’s an interesting read.
Francisco opened his eyes. Sand clung to his face, hands, and arms. He lay at the foot of a large heap of sand at the back of a construction site. The last thing he remembered from this sequence was with Rachael again. She had been sitting on his lap showing him how to convert a Youtube video soundtrack into an MP3 file. He still felt her weight pressing close to his legs. He still heard the echo of her laughter. The scent of her hair lingered. But how could her scent be there at all if he was dreaming or remembering. Something was poking his thigh from inside his pocket. He withdrew a folded piece of paper and a photograph. His life was beginning to feel as convulsive as a Barnaby Furnas canvas.
Francisco didn’t understand the pretense of the old, green liquor bottle. Since he had agreed to this trial, Pete had behaved like he was Morpheus from the Matrix, administering some kind of epiphany from the milky green bottle. When Pete told him that he couldn’t do the drug trial himself because of company policy, Francisco had thought Pete’s explanation reasonable. Now he wondered if Pete had other reasons for not doing the trial himself. Why the strange meeting places to get the drug? Why the green bottle instead of the pharmaceutical bottle it must come in? Did Pete’s dad know there were potentially harmful side effects? Is that why he hadn’t allowed Pete to do the trial? And why the hell did he have to try the drug in different environments. Francisco knew there could be reasons. Maybe it was all part of a control group. He thought about trials where participants had been given placebos. What if the blackouts he experienced were an illness totally unrelated to the drug?
I posted this on facebook, but thought I would add a little here as well. I heard Jim Harris on NPR and if you view the website, you get a little insight into his life and work – amazing. But you don’t get all the war facts he dropped during the interview. It was shocking, to say the least, to hear how many countries the US has left in a disastrous state of disarray. He also mentioned that as a nation that has never had to rebuild from modern warefare, we are oblivious to the long and often dangerous process of reconstructing a country. It was a great interview and I am glad to know more about them. Great Wisconsinites…
This is from a series I am doing on animal/human territory collisions. Somewhat related to my painting Apex. This is a parking lot near the Eau Claire mall where I saw a fox darting between two SUVs that inspired this painting of a trio of foxes. There should be two more to come, but right now I am very busy painting muslims.
Part of a series of three I am doing. The others will be quite different.
I probably not the one who should post this, but John Updike is dead. I mostly read essays and reviews by him, but he had some great things to say about faith and belief. I always seemed to take his criticism with a lot of weight too. New York Times has an article, here.
Though never as much of an influence on me as his father, Andrew Wyeth’s death does seem a bit like the passing of an era. The NY Times has a good look back.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/17/arts/design/17wyeth.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp
Eliot came home a couple of weeks ago and all of the sudden read me a book. It was quite a moment for me as you can imagine. We’re reading the Tale of Despereaux, which is better than the movie.
I just finished reading a book of essays by Wendell Berry, entitled, The Way of Ignorance (I got it for Christmas, unfortuantely, I didn’t get Life is a Miracle). One of the most interesting articles is by Courtney White on the revitalization of the western wild (his essay was included with Berry’s). I like Berry when he talks about farming, politics, and ecology. When he talks about writing and gets more philosophical, not so much. I also am enjoying Shaun Tan’s new series of illustrated stories, entitled, Tales from Outer Suburbia.
I enjoyed seeing Amanda and Peters over the break and speaking briefly with Toby. J.E., your package arrived and the ornament is quite striking. The kids were very excited. Shotts, I hope to get to the cities once the snow melts and see that little guy. It’s freezing up here. Hope you all had good holidays.
Did any of you see that movie “Once”. Sara and I watched it a few nights ago, and I was surprised by how much I liked it. It’s been out for a while now so maybe some of you have seen it?
Don’t know if anybody’s reading this anymore, since there haven’t been many posts or comments. My last painting only received comments from Toby, but here I am undaunted. I infer that many of you have moved to Facebook, but since I am not “friends” with you, this is still the best way to get people’s attention. And I kind of like this mode. Recently, I have finished reading E. O. Wislon’s Concilience, a good challenging book which was a faculty discussion book at the University. I ended up discussing the book with a bunch of scientists. I watched a pretty cool movie called the Visitor, which personalizes the immigration dilemmas in this country. Eliot turned six and Claire will soon be three. James and Sarah will likely be parents, and Kathleen has a boyfriend. Here’s a new painting called Apex. I am going to relate a bit of history that means something to me.
This painting is, of course, about some of the reading on wolves I’ve done. They have studied them for about thirteen years with regards to their return to Yellowstone and their impact on the Ecosystem there. I could go on about this, but long story short, they’re very healthy for the ecosystem. So one Sunday night I was getting ready to read with Eliot, and Sara was checking the Internet to see if there was a mystery on PBS. She called me over to show me there was a program called “The Wolf that Saved America” starting in a few minutes. Of course, I ran downstairs with Eliot, and we watched it. It was fun to see how much Eliot enjoyed it.
It was a mix of history, science, and myth, as they retold the story of an outdoorsman named Ernest Thompson Seton, who was well-known for a time as a professional exterminator of wolves. He boasted that he could rid ranches of marauding wolves in three days. A wolf in New Mexico, that he called Lobo, evaded him for three months. One incident tells of the wolf collecting four chunks of meat Seton had carefully poisoned in a pile and defecating on them. Anyway, Seton was filled with such sadness when he finally killed the wolf that he had a bit of a conversion. He began to promote conservation of the west and influenced T. Roosevelt to protect Yellowstone. One incident about Lobo tells of their ploy to catch him by trapping his mate first. Supposedly, he cried all night, howling strangely. Doug Smith, the head of the Yellowstone project, was interviewed and related a similar incident in Yellowstone. He said, “You’ll forgive the expression, but he sounded as if he was mourning.” I brought this up in my book discussion, questioning why biologists aren’t allowed to anthropomorphize animals, but they must stress the links we share with animals biologically.
When I spoke to my dad, the only person who wanted to listen to my excited rant about the program and wolves, he told me that after Seton became a conservationist, he went camping with my grandfather Clell a couple of times in the Badlands and once down south. I guess Grael has several of Seton’s books dedicated to Clell.
Thanks for listening. If you’re curious about some of the articles that influenced this painting, I’ll be happy to post more.
Here’s my newest painting. You can also see it and a close-up on my website. The Bear refers to the market and who actually pays for our financial miscalculations – a weight no one can really carry. The text is Wordsworth’s "Lines in Early Spring." If you want to know how Toby influenced this painting, I can tell you.
So I was flipping through some files on my computer at work before I take off for MI, and I passed this sketch from an old sketchbook that I scanned into Photoshop. I have a bunch of these that I intended as chapter headings for a story I wrote. Here’s the first one done in pencil w/ Photoshop duotone. I think it is in the spirit of Tob’s pumpkin.
I apologize for coming on too strong in advance. I previously said I don’t like to tell people who to vote for, but this goes beyond voting. Despite how much this election represents to me.
Maybe I am adding flames to the fire, but the amount any of us writes to the federal government is going to get a whole lot bigger because of previous Republican leadership, instead of just getting a little bigger like it might have. The truth is social security worked and the only reason we questioned it is because people wanted to be taking cruises and living in huge mansions on Caribbean islands when they retired instead of living modestly. I reiterate my arguments from during the previous election against privatization. We are basically financing a war rooted in energy issues on money from China. What’s more immoral than that? We consume more than a ¼ of the world’s oil.
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