4. March 2010 by Samldanach.

IMO, any post title that has me singing Sting lyrics is a good one.

In working on my new PA setting, I came to a startling conclusion.  Our information-based infrastructure is like a gigantic balloon.  Press it at any point, and it will give.  Remove the pressure, and it will rebound.  But pop it, and it cannot be repaired.  It can only be rebuilt from scratch.

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18. December 2009 by Samldanach.

I ran across an odd statement this morning:  “Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe.”

I think that might be true.   I’ve done quite a bit of reading on and off over the years, attempting to really capture the medieval mindset.  One thing that is radically different is that very few people in medieval times were taught to question.  This is the way the world is, and you just have to deal with that.  But, as a consequence of that, people were very willing to let mysteries be mysterious.  You didn’t have to work out how the magician does his trick, or uncover the hidden meanings behind the storyteller’s tales, or know the lengths that a king must go to to provide for his people.

Things just happened.  And that was awesome.

People were allowed to just sit back and marvel in the simple wonder of the experience, whether that be religious, fantastic, or more prosaic.  A thunderstorm was powerful and emotionally moving.  This was not just because it spoke to the tiny hindbrain that still hadn’t caught up to the evolution of safe and snug shelter.  But, because no one, no one, knew what was actually making all the sounds, or where the winds came from.  Mysterious beings venting their frustrations made as much sense as any other explanation.

These days, it is much harder to simply revere the world around us.  We know too much.  We are given warning of the thunderstorm days in advance, often along with a description of why it is forming.  It blunts the emotional punch.  Further, we are now conditioned from a young age to ask questions.  Especially here in the US, we are taught, both explicitly and implicitly, that it is right to challenge authority and tradition.  That to sit on our butts and not try to learn about the world around us is lazy and wrong.  As much as I respect and cherish that attitude, I think that it does get in the way of simple reverence.  The person who has a garden filled with flowers “just because they’re pretty” is often mocked for not thinking more deeply about her choices.

What is wrong with appreciating things on a simple level?  Can we accept the beauty, power, or ability of a person or thing without having to dig deeper?  I think that we can.  And, I think that it is occasionally good to do so.  But, I think that for us poor modern sods, reverence is now something that takes conscious effort.  We have to decide to allow our jaded brains to relax, and just soak in the experience.

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20. November 2009 by Samldanach.

Anybody else remember that show?  I loved it.  I think it only went 6 episodes, though.

There are a number of mysteries of science that bother me.  These are areas that just, for whatever reason, reveal cracks in the framework of my understanding.  Some of them, I am sure, can be explained well enough by those with much greater understanding than me.  Some of them, I think, cannot.

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9. November 2009 by Samldanach.

I’ve written about this in past years, and want to make sure I note it again.  The date 9/11 has been embedded in our consciousness for eight years now.  But, the date 11/9 should be equally embedded.

Fortunately, this year you all probably already know what the date is significant for.  Or, at least the most prominent event.  The fall of the Berlin Wall.  The collapse of the great Soviet experiment.  The effective end of the Cold War.

I don’t think that younger people can really understand what that meant for us at the time (in much the same way that I cannot really understand VE Day or the end of the Vietnam War).  The ’80’s were permeated with a sense of foreboding.  Go back and listen to some of the music.  We honestly thought that we were all likely to perish in some kind of nuclear holocaust.  It seems quaint and paranoid now, but it certainly wasn’t then.

When the Wall came down, it seemed blatantly unreal.  Of course, I was a freshman in college at the time, so much of the world outside of campus seemed a bit unreal.  But, there was no question that history had just turned on a dime.  Assumptions about “how the world worked” just fell away.

There was a brief, halcyon period in there, where it seemed like rational thought and diplomacy had actually beaten out a military solution.  The Soviet Union was collapsing, and nobody had to die.  At least, not until events transpired that made the word “Balkan” a permanent part of our vocabulary.  But, for a time, we had hope again.

9/11 was all about the shattering of illusions of peace and safety.  11/9 was all about shattering illusions that the only way to win was to beat the other person into submission.

Of course, if we go back a bit further, the date 11/9 has a much darker event.  One much more similar to 9/11, and one that similarly should not be forgotten.  Unreasoning hatred destroyed thousands of lives, and evil was made manifest.  I am speaking of Kristallnacht, the night when Nazi Germany turned on its Jewish population.  The government attacked its own people, killing or arresting thousands of Jews, and destroying their businesses.  The snowball was pushed down the hill, and it would culminate in the Holocaust.

I do urge you to go read at least Wikipedia on these events today.  History can turn so quickly sometimes.  Watching the way it turned to both the darkness and the light on the same date for Germany is, I think, important.  To all of us.

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14. October 2009 by Samldanach.

I just recently completed a grand tour of my iPod.  That’s just shy of 8000 songs.  I listened to them one album at a time., in alphabetical order by album title.

(In the interest of full disclosure, I did skip a few country albums my wife likes, a few albums of Italian tenors, and most of our Christmas collection.  I intend to catch up on the Christmas albums in, oh, December, like a decent person.)

I discovered a few albums I had no idea we had.  I discovered that I really liked some of those albums, and was iffy about others.  Crash Test Dummies is much better than I remember.  I can’t really seem to get into Tegan and Sara, and can’t put my finger on why.  75 songs in a row of many bands is just too much (from a couple multi-CD box sets).  I also discovered albums that I’d forgotten how much I really liked.  Starfish by The Church is still a fantastic album.

During that time, I also discovered some other new music.  I discovered Abney Park right about the beginning of the project.  I went ahead and bought a Cruxshadows album shortly after, as many of my friends seem to like them.  About a month ago, I discovered the glory of Enter the Haggis.

Seriously, go find an Enter the Haggis album.  They are nominally Celtic rock, but with more emphasis on the “rock.”  They are phenomenal.  I wish I knew how to review albums, so I could express just how incredible these guys are.

I’ve also been thinking about other music from my life.  I realized that all of my Violent Femmes albums are actually still on cassettes.  I really need to fix that.  I also need to replace all my Heart albums that are still on cassette.

It’s kind of funny.  I don’t associate much music with particular events in my life.  However, I have a whole lot of ’80’s music that I associate with various things I’ve read.  I will always think of Spider-Man when I hear George Michael’s “Father Figure.”  Billy Joel’s  “This is the Time” is associated with romance novels (I had a stack that a friend gave me to schlep to donate to the library, and read through them in the space of couple months).

I do love music, despite a maddening inability to produce it.  And, I have to confess that I don’t entirely understand it.  I can’t ever tell what separates a good song from a bad song.  I don’t know art, but I know what I like.  It comes down to what touches me.

I also do know that lyrics are extremely important to me.  There are huge swaths of music that I can’t get into because there are no lyrics for me to follow.  I can’t listen to most opera for that reason.  And, yet, I still like Rammstein.  They are the exception that proves the rule, I guess.

I think I’m going to go back to shuffle.  I may actually get around to hijacking the wife’s computer and assembling a few playlists.  Maybe.

Meantime, if music be the food of life, then variety is its spice.  Or something like that.

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