Other

Hi… I was wondering if you had time to talk about God.

But first, let’s talk about the economy.

Normally, as I sit down to write this blog, I try to pretend that “the economy isn’t happening”… although, ironically, even Johnny Truant has recently been seen making occasional posts about the economy.

Sometimes, though, I have to face the facts.  Those facts are:

• Teachers in my system are being asked to “voluntarily donate” part of their salary to help offset our system’s budget shortfall.
• When teachers leave the system for any reason, their positions are not being filled with new hires (we can’t afford them, but that will increase class size).
• If I do have a job, the local school system may opt not to supplement the state’s salary I earn (resulting in thousands of dollars less for teaching more students… see above).
• There is no absolute guarantee that I or my wife will have a job next year anyway.
• Obama’s tax cut has added a tiny bit to my monthly paycheck, which may help offset a fraction of my lost income, but it has also significantly reduced the income of the government which helps pay me… probably resulting in a smaller education budget in years to come, which will (over the long term) most likely reduce my earnings by several times the tax decrease.  Save $50 (approximation) per month now so that I can lose $5000 (pure speculation) per year later… that’s the spirit…

At times like this, there’s one thought that does offer a little comfort.

And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed?

(Matthew 6:28-31)

I’m toiling, and I’m spinning, and I’m doing the best I can for myself… but it’s nice to remember that God’s got my back.

I hope that this thought offers you some comfort as well in these rough times.

(Image credit and license)

So today we’ll be treading on dangerous territory.  We won’t call it “the darkest wilds” or anything 1920’s pulp fiction-ish like that.  We’ll label it accurately.

We’ll call it “how Aylad thinks.”

I have trouble… lots of trouble… making New Year’s Resolutions.  It’s not that I’m perfect (well, maybe, but I’m not the type of perfect I want to be).  It’s not that there aren’t lots of things about myself that I want to improve.  It’s not even that none of the things I want to change are achievable — most of them are.  Well, a few, anyway.

The problem is that around the last week or so of December, when someone asks me what resolutions I’m making for the new year, my mind goes completely blank.

It’s probably for the same reason that I blank out when someone tells me to “be creative.”

When a thought finally does filter into the white noise that is my suddenly-empty skull, the thought is usually something like:

“I uh I well I um I can’t do this on demand!!!”  With three exclamation points and everything.

Of course, it’s rude to tell someone that, so I usually stutter out something bland, generic, and meaningless.  Like about a month ago when my wife asked me, my response was (eventually) “I resolve to make good life choices.”

I know.  Total cop-out, right?  She knew it, too, but she didn’t call me out on it.

Then, a few weeks into January, I’ll get an idea for a goal I want to accomplish.  As I’m running it through a mental checklist to see if it’s doable (something along the lines of, “does it cost money?  does it hurt?  does it involve effort?  will my peers think I’ve finally gone totally wonky?”), it suddenly occurs to me:

This could be a resolution.

This happened three days ago.  Twice, in five minutes.  So for the first time in a loooong time, I have not one but two genuine end-of-year-goals-we’ll-call-resolutions that I’m going to tackle.

The first one is that I will read (thoughtfully) all of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (although I’m taking a hiatus from my weekly Shakespeare Saturday posts, as my willpower is waning in that regard) and two, count ‘em, two of his plays.

The other one is that by year’s end, I will have read (not counting The Sonnets but probably counting the plays) ten thousand (yes, I said 10,000) pages of printed and bound text.  In other words, stuff in books, not magazines, newspapers, or electronic documents of any kind.

Yeah, 10K.  I think it’s doable.  It’s been years since I’ve even approached that kind of literary intake.  I believe in myself, though.  I can stay away from the video games and DVDs and get this done.  I’ll even post page counts here on Shreds of Truth (although I’ll probably only update the count after finishing each book… for simplicity’s sake).

I’m already in the neighborhood of 850 pages.

Care to join the challenge or to embark upon a similar challenge of your own?  Feel free to post a comment about it and to keep me informed of your progress.

Windmill

Big admission coming:  I still play with Lego bricks.

That is, er, let me edit that a bit.  I “model” with Lego bricks.  That’s what I do.

By that I mean that once the epic castle with the small blacksmith shop and mysterious wizard’s tower has been constructed, I don’t line up the knight and soldier mini-figures and launch an assault on the battlements.

My wife takes care of that.  I just build.  Mostly.

A basic set of red, blue, and yellow bricks with a single minifig is probably the earliest birthday present I remember getting from my parents.  I played with it every day.  A couple of years later, I got a helicopter on a specially-designed flatbed truck; a year or two after that my parents and my aunt gave me two copies of the same Robin Hood-style set.

I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

From that point, 90% of the sets I bought or received were either medieval- or pirate-themed.  That includes the dozens of Harry Potter sets I bought on clearance several years ago.

I bought big castles.  I bought little guard shacks.  I bought inns and blacksmith shops.

I built massive fortifications, tiny villages, taverns and bridges and mills and hideouts.  I built an Elven library and a fortified windmill.  I built giant trees with battlements on the branches.  I built pirate bases and colonial trading posts.

I discovered Lego websites on the Internet:  Brickshelf, Bricklink, and yes, Lego.com.

I built a Lego website… one which, unfortunately, my students eventually discovered and continue to ask me about, even though I’ve taken it down…

Juliet

…but in a few days, as my students finish reading Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado,” I will review the story by showing them slides of Lego minifigs acting out the plot in a Lego catacombs.  (The Lego “Amontillado” isn’t my work – it’s better than what I could do.)

Someday, my wife and I will finish building our Lego Romeo and Juliet project, and my (already shaky) reputation as a mature, adult professional will be forever shattered.

I can’t wait.

If you don’t like LEGO, you don’t like yourself. — attributed to Jonathan P. Kennaugh

Apologies for missing my regular Saturday post.  I’ve got a lot going on during Christmas vacation with my wife, and tomorrow we leave town for our delayed honeymoon.  I’ll try to post again this Saturday, but we’ll see.  Maybe we’ll get snowed in up in the Smokey Mountains!

*Apologies if this lands in your feed reader twice… Wordpress got all wonky when I hit “publish.”

Individual science fiction stories may seem as trivial as ever to the blinder critics and philosophers of today — but the core of science fiction, its essence, the concept around which it revolves, has become crucial to our salvation if we are to be saved at all. — Isaac Asimov

Amazing Stories!

Asimov might be accused of a certain amount of bias in this matter, but that doesn’t mean he’s incorrect.  Our “salvation,” in the cultural sense, does depend on the kind of speculation and imagination that our science fiction authors have made their life’s work.

Western society has spent the last century completely reinventing itself every five or ten years… “five” more frequently than “ten” in the last five decades, especially.  Most of our cultural metamorphoses have been centered around the preservation and distribution of data.  Once the nineteenth century had brought color photography and the radio, the stage was set for people to tinker, fiddle, jury-rig, and otherwise improvise all kinds of new and exciting novelties.

For a quick summary of the last 70 years of information technology, I recommend the list “Technological Milestones of the Computer Era” by Dennis F. Herrick.  I was originally going to post such a list here… but it was a long list in an already long post.

As we enter the new millennium, many of us are cancelling our home phone services, scrapping our MP3 players, leaving our digital cameras on the shelf, and tossing our pocket notepads in the recycling bins.  Why bother with all of that junk, when our cell phones have taken over these functions (and so much more) anyway?

The obvious question is, “where do we go from here?”  The obvious question, however, may not be the most important.  The question we might need to worry about is, “how can we prepare ourselves for the next century better than our ancestors were prepared for the last?”

Think about these examples:

• Identity theft apparently took our society by surprise… our responses to this threat have mostly been reflexive reacting rather than preemptive planning. 
• Identity theft of another sort was the topic of a recent post here on Shreds of Truth… send me your name and resume, and I will work you up a fradulent MySpace profile guaranteed to get you fired from your job, or your money back. 
• The concept of email security seems to have been ignored in our recent presidential campaign, and email has been around since the 1970s! 
• Even worse, we spent decades warring against the production and distribution of child pornography; now we buy our children camera phones so that they can produce and distribute it themselves.

I am no Luddite.  I love technology.  I especially love the responsible, thoughtful, and well-informed use of technology.  Unfortunately, technology sometimes develops so rapidly that our cultural understanding of it lags behind.

The dilemma:  how do we solve or prevent problems arising from the use of technology that hasn’t been invented?

The answer:  by conceiving of the technology and the problems it poses before the technology appears on store shelves.

 So, wait, that means we need to predict the future, right?  How can we know how a particular piece of technology will be (ab)used before it has become available?

Through science fiction, that’s how.

In the 1970s, Orson Scott Card had already envisioned a remarkably accurate version of the Internet — a global, computerized medium for sharing communications, news, and information.  In his novel Ender’s Game, he also correctly predicted some of the risks inherent in a global computer network:  trolling, anonymous abuse of communications systems, deliberately deceptive online profiles, malicious hacking, invasions of privacy, and so forth.

Ender’s Game was published nearly twenty years before the news flash arrived in most Americans’ homes that their twelve-year-old sons and daughters were chatting online with (and giving personal information to) dangerous pedophiles masquerading as middle-schoolers.

The reaction, more often than not, was “OH MY GOSH do you mean to tell me that some people on the Internet are LYING ABOUT THEIR IDENTITY?”  The shock was nearly tangible.  The outrage was nearly palpable.  And every forward-thinking teen who had read Ender’s Game had seen this (or something similar) coming for a long time.

Now… if you’re interested to see what’s coming within the next twenty years… and to think about how to protect your children from it… go read Charles Stross’s Accelerando.  To get your attention hooked, I’ll share with you the first few sentences of the novel, copied and pasted from the free (!) online version linked above.

Manfred’s on the road again, making strangers rich.

It’s a hot summer Tuesday, and he’s standing in the plaza in front of the Centraal Station with his eyeballs powered up and the sunlight jangling off the canal, motor scooters and kamikaze cyclists whizzing past and tourists chattering on every side. The square smells of water and dirt and hot metal and the fart-laden exhaust fumes of cold catalytic converters; the bells of trams ding in the background, and birds flock overhead. He glances up and grabs a pigeon, crops the shot, and squirts it at his weblog to show he’s arrived. The bandwidth is good here, he realizes; and it’s not just the bandwidth, it’s the whole scene. Amsterdam is making him feel wanted already, even though he’s fresh off the train from Schiphol: He’s infected with the dynamic optimism of another time zone, another city. If the mood holds, someone out there is going to become very rich indeed.

He wonders who it’s going to be.

(Accelerando e-book licensed under CC-by-nc-nd Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs license by Charles Stross.)