Tag: creating

Making stuff: up, real, and nicely.

Sound Advice

LIKE MANY LATE 20th/EARLY 21st CENTURY Westerners, I have seen a lot of music in my day. This makes me prone to “ohrwurms,” as the the Germans call them — “earworms” — those annoying songs in your head that JUST WON’T STOP excuse me.

A new weapon has been unveiled in the fight against unwanted brain abrasion. Simply point your browser to http://unhearit.com/ for Unhearit.com: Get That Damn Song Out Of Your Head. They’ll instantly give you a catchy tune that’ll knock the one in your head right into next week. (This week, of course, you’ll be hearing the one you clicked on, unless it sets up one of those standing waves where you contemplate Tolstoy’s white horse for twenty minutes before going about your business. Me, I’m going to put on a little Schumann.)

Pithyism #24

A GOOD DAY IS ONE in which the artist heaves a stone and the ripples wash up smiles and murmurs.

(Or, put another way, “Blessed be the One who makes the makers.” I don’t know that one needs to “believe” in a “Creator” (or even a “creator”) for that metaphor to work. I hope not. A friend who’s a nurse speaks of the contention-avoiding “Design Group,” which both sounds cool and works well whether you take literally “impersonal forces,” Genesis 1:26 or anything in between. It’s a fine sport to find the universal metaphor embodying the idea of First Cause-ness outside of a specific agency, or even necessity. The Talmud attributes the creation of miracles to the evening of the last day of Creation itself — miracles as nothing more than well-timed and -intended natural occurrences — to which someone added “Including (blacksmith) tongs, which were made with tongs.” When I speak of First Causenesslessness, or even God, it is to just this sort of chicken-or-egg, we’re-all-here-now paradoxical origin as shrouded in mystery as the moment the first fish slithered ashore into the evolutionary chain. Somewhere or somewhen is a moment past which everything was different: the tongs were used, the chicken hatched, the amphibian evolved. It really doesn’t matter what we call it. What matters is that creating puts your hands on the moment of creation (or, if you like, the Moment of Creation). It brings something into the world that wasn’t there before — among other things, beauty, solidified intent, and self-evidence of simple existence.)

(None of which, unfortunately, fits on a bumpersticker. Ah, conciseness! thou’rt a fickle mistress.)

Tools: Spacejock Software

THIS POST IS BEING WRITTEN in yEdit, one of Simon Haynes‘ many fine Spacejock Software products. He doesn’t know I’m writing it, and until I stumbled across his website I didn’t know he was a famous Australian science-fiction author with a taste for helping others get started in the field.

But as he offers some really neato tools for writing — yEdit, a text editor which lets you set a word-count target and track it as you type; Sonar, which manages story submissions; yTimer, like yEdit but in minutes instead of words; and the novel-assisting yWriter — as well as some sound advice (well, it helped me anyway). Check his site for additional tools and links to what looks like one hell of a terrific space-opera self-parody.

How The World Works

“WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU MISS a deadline?” asked the high-school student shadowing me in my capacity as newspaper reporter.

“You don’t,” I replied.

“No, I know,” he said. “But what happens if you do?”

I just looked at him. “You don’t,” I repeated. “You just don’t.”

And sometimes, life really is that simple.

Reb Cat’s Yoga

THE STORY GOES THAT YOGA was first disclosed to an Indian prince by a cat who consented to teach the prince the secrets of feline flexibility. Whether or not that’s true, the cat who lives with Ann & I repeatedly teaches the following tranquility-yoga. The position is called “Sleeping Hand Cat,” and it goes like this:

1. “Let C = a comforting hand-shaped anthropomorphism” — i.e., of God, or Jesus, or Buddha, or your mom or dad, or whatever best evokes your own most watchful-and-protective self.* The literality of this visioning is not as important as the feeling.

2. Lay on your left side in the most comfortable manner with a firm but soft pillow under your head. Close your eyes and focus on your breathing until you’re in a relaxed state of awareness.

3. Imagine/visualize C as the pillow beneath your head. Really feel your head cradled and protected, as though nothing can get past your protector to harm you.

4. Continue until sleep overtaketh and give way to pleasant dreams, or until you want to get up. (But why would you want to?)

_____
* Atheist fanboys may find benefit with Aragorn or Eowen. (But not from their movie versions.)

5 Thoughts: The Idolatry of Gay Bashing

1. READ A LETTER TO THE SF Chronicle’s editor this morning by a gentleman saying he voted for Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative, because heterosexuals own the word “marriage.”

2. I’ve heard this argument before, and like the other arguments favoring less freedom for minorities it does not persuade me. In essence, this particular argument, a favorite of Bible-lovin’ folk, makes a word more important than people.

3. But Bible-lovin’ folk (of which I consider myself one, in some sense) must needs believe that people were created in “God’s” image.

4. And the word “marriage,” like other English words, came to us long after Biblical Hebrew. Like other words, it’s an artifact — a man-made thing — and by definition, not nearly as important as a living, breathing, bloodbeating human being made in God’s image.

5. So why are some Bible-lovin’ folk so quick to commit idolatry?

Favicon Plugin created by Jake Ruston's Wordpress Plugins - Powered by Briefcases and r4 ds card.