Pilgrim Notes

Reflections along the way.

Author: dougfloyd (page 38 of 65)

American Popular Culture

November 16, 2006 / / 0 Comments

While trying to find out some words related to treasure chest, I stumbled across an old Catholic comic book series and eventually ended up at the Authentic American History Center. This site provides a fascinating collection of American pop culture artifacts that reach all the way back to the revolution.

There are pamphlets, comics, images and audio files from the Revolutionary War, Civil War, early 1900s, WWI, WWII, and each decade up to the present. The topic range from religion to politics to other elements that captured the national  consciousness.

Way cool! Plus the Catholic comic book Treasure Chest was pretty interesting as well.

Limits of Time and Space

November 15, 2006 / / 1 Comment

I put up a new reflection on Floydville. Here’s an excerpt if anyone is interested:

Despite my best efforts, nothing happened. I ran. I jumped. I even flapped
my arms. Nothing. No matter how hard I tried, I failed. After dreaming again
and again and again that I could fly, I almost convinced myself it was
possible. Sitting in church, I’d visualize myself hovering above the room,
encircling the congregation and soaring up into the sky. Then the sermon
would end, and I would realize that I was the one preaching!

A couple weeks ago while sitting in a large hall at a business conference in
Chicago, I gazed up at the ornate ceiling. The old sense of flying returned.
Ah, this looked like the perfect room to let my imagination soar. Suddenly
my mind flashed with light and I discovered this profound insight: I cannot
fly.

No matter how hard I wish, no matter how hard I flap my arms, this body is
not going to start floating. Catching my breath from this overwhelming
illumination, I wondered where does this desire to fly come from? While
there are many reasons why other people and myself dream of flying, one
reason stands out in the moment: the desire to fly can sometimes be a desire
to escape the limits of the material world.

The gift of this physical world comes with a variety of limitations. We
cannot stare at the sun. We cannot breathe underwater. We cannot walk
through walls. We cannot fly. By virtue of affirming the realness of the
world around me, I must accept the limits of this same wondrous world.
Limitations play an essential part in the game of life.

Read more.

Bobi Jones

November 15, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Here is a little poem from one of my favorite Welsh poets, Bobi Jones. Hopefully this will suffice in lieu of a good quote for the day. And I must also offer tribute to Joseph Clancy for the translation (as translation is an integral part of the poetic art).

The Middle Aged Poet

The child has dried up; his play and his sweat have died
His dance has shrivelled, besieged by bloated limbs,
And his leg’s sprightliness has grown bitter. I wonder whether
The muse can restore it in her swaddlings? Yes. Though finger
And thumb and ankle rot, praise will surely escape from their pit
By night, and make metre of the corruption: angels of mirth
Will still chat in the joints of the Poem. I bear within me
The innocents’ cheerful graveyard; an occasional night
Invites the remains of me to creep secretly out
To the early-patterned white leaves, and I dance a cradle’s questions
Through them, rhymes’ curiosity, till the dawn;
Then heavily, stooped, sad, in a magic procession,
Like lamentations that ventured out freely
For a time, they muster back to my silent daily ageing.

Is the term Social Networking accurate?

November 15, 2006 / / 2 Comments

Phil Balderson recently suggested that social networking may not be the best term for the various functions that connect media, people, or ideas in different ways. When I asked what term might replace it, Phil suggested the idea of “meshing.” Playing off the idea of “mashups,” Phil suggests three reasons for meshing:

1. Individuals without prior relationships can mesh.

2. Society is meshing with technology (via Web 2.0).

3. Something new emerges as technologies, people, and sites mesh together.

I am my own social network

November 14, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Skimming through the backlog of emails and feeds, I discovered this earth-shattering news: my brain is a social network: no wonder I hear voices all day long. Roland Piquepaille ran a piece about this last month on ZDNet. Looks pretty interesting. Our brains seem to have something like gates that can open and close, allowing information to pass through or not. For a range of articles along these lines, see this issue of Science and be sure to check out all the PDFs at the bottom of the article.

Amateur – Lasse Gjertsen

November 13, 2006 / / 1 Comment

This little sampling duet is cool!

Reminder – Be Careful with WiFi in Public Places

November 13, 2006 / / 0 Comments

Every so often these warnings come out, and it’s probably worth paying heed. Using WiFi in public places can endanger your computer (especially if you use windows). Internet News reported today that Windows-based computers with wireless capabilities are vulnerable for certain types of exploitation–even if you are not accessing the Internet. So be careful in public places and make sure you’re secure.

Get Your Brian Wilson Doll!

November 12, 2006 / / 3 Comments

Celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Pet Sounds with your very own portable Brian Wilson! Woof! That’s a hoot, and I’m sure a collector’s item. I don’t know if I’m ready for a little Brian Wilson hanging around the house, but I do like his 37 year late album Smile: a true work of genius.

brian-wilson.jpg

Reviewing Flixster

November 11, 2006 / / 3 Comments

Every week I sign up for a new social networking site just to explore their features and see what’s out there. With so many socialnet sites, I lose track of what I’ve joined, and I usually never do much with many of them. I signed up with Flixster on Wednesday and wasn’t sure if I’d use it much or not. Flixster may turn out to be a useful site. It is definitely like Netflix’s Friends feature combined with MySpace. The nice thing is that users can simply rate movies; they don’t have to sign up for a rental plan. This makes it easy to build a larger friends database and connect with a variety of people who like movies. And for someone like me who prefers to hear movie recommendations from other people, I find this very appealing.

If Netflix was smart, they’d follow Flixster lead and offer an expanded version of the Friends feature with no requirement to join. Of course, once people enter into a network and come to visit their movie page, it would be easier to encourage them to sign up for a plan, download a film or buy a film.

Integrity and Integration

November 10, 2006 / / 2 Comments

For multiple world, our modern/postmodern world has forced many of us to split our lives and now even our identities into multiple slots such as work and home, public and private, inner and outer. Now many thinkers even suggest there is no real person behind the roles we play. I don’t have time to respond to that here, but I disagree.

The nature of personhood is more complex and interconnected than modernism may have realized and the Church Fathers offered a far more nuanced view of the person than the modern idea of the individual. This tendency to create separate identities between home, office, house of faith, hobbies, friends, and the multivarious online social computing personas is dis-integrating. It does tend to make us think there is really no me to me: just another face, another mask. This potentially could lead to many negative and even dangerous manifestations.

Since I believe the person is real, I believe that integration of these various worlds and identities are important. Thus my values at home are the same at work are the same among my friends are the same in the online world. I try to be the same person everywhere (inner and outer).

Thus this blog does not section off technology away from faith away from art or other interests, and that’s why I put the Pope Benedict XVI quote earlier. It captures some of the essence I think the word

Now enough from me. I’ll have to spend more time on this on my Floydville blog sometime. If anyone disagrees, feel free to let me know. 🙂

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