Wednesday 31 August 2011
Today at work...
I did absolutely nothing that was on my "to-do" list. Instead, there was a rapid response requirement on a grant application, an administrative hangup on a course I'm teaching in January, scheduling dissertation supervision sessions for undergraduates, a variety of other random administrative emails, and so on. To be clear, I enjoyed the day, but it was fascinating to see the hours go by while hitting "Dismiss" on the various to-do reminders I'd set up for the day...
Sunday 28 August 2011
Walden, again and anon.
I come back to Walden every year or so, sometimes more often. I think I read it for the first time in high school, having heard (or read) of course, that it was one of the pinnacles of American literatures. At the time, I'm pretty sure I didn't get much of it-- the jokes, the ecstatics, the economics.
Each time I read it, I seem to find something new of interest. I once read, somewhere, that analysis had yielded at least 7 different "layers" to Walden. At the time I thought it seemed rather high-brow, but now I suspect it may be understated.
I have come to love his opening line, about not talking "so much about myself if there were anybody else I knew so well." There are so many layers just in that statement alone.
The days are gone, for me, for now, in which I could dedicate any real effort to the study of Walden. And, in many ways, I fear that while I am almost bound to return to it indefinitely, and most certainly in my declining years, it won't be the case, as Thoreau describes, that I seek to instill more education in my children than that from which I benefitted.
But still, there seems some purpose in noting the phrases or lines that strike me, though I read Walden more haphazardly each time, a chapter here, a page almost at random there.
Today: "To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts." (Where I lived, and what I lived for)
Each time I read it, I seem to find something new of interest. I once read, somewhere, that analysis had yielded at least 7 different "layers" to Walden. At the time I thought it seemed rather high-brow, but now I suspect it may be understated.
I have come to love his opening line, about not talking "so much about myself if there were anybody else I knew so well." There are so many layers just in that statement alone.
The days are gone, for me, for now, in which I could dedicate any real effort to the study of Walden. And, in many ways, I fear that while I am almost bound to return to it indefinitely, and most certainly in my declining years, it won't be the case, as Thoreau describes, that I seek to instill more education in my children than that from which I benefitted.
But still, there seems some purpose in noting the phrases or lines that strike me, though I read Walden more haphazardly each time, a chapter here, a page almost at random there.
Today: "To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts." (Where I lived, and what I lived for)
Friday 26 August 2011
Steve Jobs' Commencement address @ Stanford 2005
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF8uR6Z6KLc
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576520690515394766.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903596904576520690515394766.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.
Thursday 25 August 2011
Another example of why Edinburgh is amazing...
http://edinburghnews.scotsman.com/topstories/Mystery-still-a-closed-book.6824943.jp?articlepage=1
Mystery still a closed book as new sculptures appear
Published Date:
25 August 2011
By DAWN MORRISON
As far as stories go, this one is certainly a whodunnit.
There has been another twist in the mystery of who has been leaving strange sculptures at locations across the city - after another two were anonymously left at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Puzzled staff were left scratching their heads as to how the objects had been left without anyone noticing.
The first sculpture is of a tray with a cup of tea and a cupcake and is inscribed: "This cup is awarded to @edbookfest" and also contains a tea bag full of letters, an unmarked book and a label which says - "This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas and festivals xx."
The second sculpture was gifted to the City of Literature and is created from a copy of James Hogg's Confessions Of A Justified Sinner and entitled "Lost (Albeit in a good book)." The accompanying label says "This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas" followed by a quotation from Robert Owen: "No infant has the power of deciding... by what circumstances (they) shall be surrounded."
A spokesperson for the Book Festival said: "We are thrilled by the gift of this beautiful and mysterious work, and would like to say thank you to the anonymous sculptor and donor."
Over the past year, sculptures have been deposited randomly across the city's cultural hotspots.
As reported in the Evening News, an intricate model of a nesting dragon was found in the Scottish Storytelling Centre in July.
The dragon, carved from the pages of Ian Rankin's novel Knots and Crosses, is the fourth sculpture to have been left anonymously in the Capital - all of which have some link to the Rebus author. Mr Rankin previously said he was mystified by their origin.
A tag found alongside the paper sculpture reads: "A gift in support of libraries, books, words and ideas...", followed by the message: "Once upon a time there was a book, and in the book was a nest, and in the nest was an egg, and in the egg was a dragon, and in the dragon was a story."
Staff at the Filmhouse Cinema, the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Poetry Library have all stumbled upon mini-artworks fashioned from books.
Donald Smith, director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre, said at the time: "It's a teaser and is beautifully made out of really simple materials. It's basically paper. It appeared about ten days ago. People were coming in and saying: 'Have you seen the dragon?' and that was the start of it. The first time we saw it we thought 'Should we be moving that somewhere safer?' because we have so many families that come in and it was so delicate.
But we thought, 'No, it's been made to go there'. It fits perfectly, tucked away in a recess as if you are supposed to happen upon it."
Mr Smith said that as well as the dragon being created from a Rankin novel, there were historical connections between the crime writer and the centre.
"Ian Rankin's first job was collecting folk tales for an archiving project in London," he said. "And he's got a real interest in traditional stories and often drops by here."
The centre director added staff were turning to Rankin's Knots and Crosses to solve the mystery.
Mystery still a closed book as new sculptures appear
Published Date:
25 August 2011
By DAWN MORRISON
As far as stories go, this one is certainly a whodunnit.
There has been another twist in the mystery of who has been leaving strange sculptures at locations across the city - after another two were anonymously left at the Edinburgh International Book Festival.
Puzzled staff were left scratching their heads as to how the objects had been left without anyone noticing.
The first sculpture is of a tray with a cup of tea and a cupcake and is inscribed: "This cup is awarded to @edbookfest" and also contains a tea bag full of letters, an unmarked book and a label which says - "This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas and festivals xx."
The second sculpture was gifted to the City of Literature and is created from a copy of James Hogg's Confessions Of A Justified Sinner and entitled "Lost (Albeit in a good book)." The accompanying label says "This is for you in support of libraries, books, words, ideas" followed by a quotation from Robert Owen: "No infant has the power of deciding... by what circumstances (they) shall be surrounded."
A spokesperson for the Book Festival said: "We are thrilled by the gift of this beautiful and mysterious work, and would like to say thank you to the anonymous sculptor and donor."
Over the past year, sculptures have been deposited randomly across the city's cultural hotspots.
As reported in the Evening News, an intricate model of a nesting dragon was found in the Scottish Storytelling Centre in July.
The dragon, carved from the pages of Ian Rankin's novel Knots and Crosses, is the fourth sculpture to have been left anonymously in the Capital - all of which have some link to the Rebus author. Mr Rankin previously said he was mystified by their origin.
A tag found alongside the paper sculpture reads: "A gift in support of libraries, books, words and ideas...", followed by the message: "Once upon a time there was a book, and in the book was a nest, and in the nest was an egg, and in the egg was a dragon, and in the dragon was a story."
Staff at the Filmhouse Cinema, the National Library of Scotland and the Scottish Poetry Library have all stumbled upon mini-artworks fashioned from books.
Donald Smith, director of the Scottish Storytelling Centre, said at the time: "It's a teaser and is beautifully made out of really simple materials. It's basically paper. It appeared about ten days ago. People were coming in and saying: 'Have you seen the dragon?' and that was the start of it. The first time we saw it we thought 'Should we be moving that somewhere safer?' because we have so many families that come in and it was so delicate.
But we thought, 'No, it's been made to go there'. It fits perfectly, tucked away in a recess as if you are supposed to happen upon it."
Mr Smith said that as well as the dragon being created from a Rankin novel, there were historical connections between the crime writer and the centre.
"Ian Rankin's first job was collecting folk tales for an archiving project in London," he said. "And he's got a real interest in traditional stories and often drops by here."
The centre director added staff were turning to Rankin's Knots and Crosses to solve the mystery.
Monday 15 August 2011
Apologies for a sports moment
I remember back in 1996, when the Packers were going to the SuperBowl, there was a story in the New York Times. It pointed out that while seasons tickets were available for every other NFL team, if you signed up for Packer season tickets the best estimate was that tickets would become available in roughly the year 5700. Yes, three thousand, seven hundred years from now.
I can't say I would be likely to choose to live in Green Bay myself, and I'm not sure if I would even want season tickets if I had the option, but this article today on SI.com seemed a very powerful indicator of exactly why the Green Bay Packers are a different team than anything else in major league sports.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/peter_king/08/15/camps/index.html?eref=sihp&sct=hp_t11_a1
Peter King. Sports Illustrated.
We'll get to the news of the weekend in a few hundred words, to touchbacks and Starcaps, to playing for now and playing for later, to Colt McCoy taking a big step and Matthew Stafford taking a healthy one, to the first week of the silly season and the panic it induces, to the team trying to figure how the coin toss works and the team trying to figure where to kick off from, and to the NFL player with a tattoo thing for Elizabeth Taylor. In due time. Oh, and reading between the lines, the NFL is not happy with the Bears Wildcatting their own kickoff spot. But more about that later.
When I think about what to lead the column with, I often think: What did I see or experience in the last few days that interested me the most? Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not. This week, I thought of my conversation with Mike McCarthy on a bench next to the Packers' practice field Tuesday night in Green Bay. It was around 9:45. The players were gone, the fans were gone, and now it was just me and McCarthy, with a couple of PR people in the wings, on a chilly night that felt more like Oct. 9 than Aug. 9.
McCarthy was telling me a story about the Super Bowl championship banner the Packers had installed at the Hutson Center indoor practice facility, across from Lambeau Field, when no one was looking. The players were back at practice on an inclement day, working indoors at the Hutson Center, when McCarthy elbowed a couple and said, "Hey, look.'' And there it was.
Maybe it's not a big deal that the Packers didn't have a big ceremony to raise the banner or a ceremony when the fourth Lombardi Trophy was put in a case outside the locker room. And when the Packers play the opener Sept. 8 against New Orleans, there will be a simple "2010'' unveiled near the other 12 years the team won a championship. No flags, no banners. Just a year, with, as GM Ted Thompson told me, "sort of a tablecloth over it, and we'll pull that off, and then we'll play football. That's what we're supposed to do.''
The celebrations are Ted Thompson's responsibility. And so banners are going to be put up when no one is looking -- in this case, by stadium workers on a quiet day in June with no attention -- and there won't be any pomp, because in Thompson's world, this is the Packer Way. Act like you've been there before. This is what the Packers are supposed to do.
***
"It's funny,'' Aaron Rodgers told me. "When I was sitting in that Green Room at the draft in New York, and I was dropping, and no one would pick me, the last thing I was thinking was it was a good thing. But I'm glad I got to fall way down. I should be here. It's the place for me. The game is bigger than us. The team is more than us. It's a community team, blue-collar and understated and not at all about self-glorification. Vince Lombardi put it that way: Winning is the only thing that matters. It's about the team.''
We're in a me-first era. In most places maybe, but not in Green Bay. Not with Thompson and McCarthy and Rodgers, the leaders of this group. I have no idea if they'll repeat (a dirty word to McCarthy, who thinks every year is a new year with new players), but I do know they've created a model that every youth coach, every high school coach, every college coach and, yes, a whole lot of pro coaches would be smart to emulate. It's not just something they say in front of the minicams, and then sneak off to New York to make a commercial for Visa. It's who they are.
There's such a head-scratching lack of look-at-me in this organization. Then you see where it came from. Thompson, from the bedrock roots of Texas high school and college football. McCarthy, who learned the Pittsburgh way, who got his start in the coaching business by working at Pitt for nothing and collecting tolls at night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to pay his rent. And Rodgers, who rose from no scholarship offers out of high school to a hardscrabble junior college to Cal to Brett Favre's caddie to the Super Bowl. I told Rodgers I remembered the Dallas Morning News story about his roots during Super Bowl week in February, and his dad, a chiropractor in California, having no shred of evidence in his office -- not a photo, trophy or framed ticket stub -- that his son was an athlete of any sort.
"We're not big public-eye people,'' Rodgers said.
When he came to Green Bay and sat for three years, he was even less of a public-eye person. Favre was The Man. And when Favre continued to waffle about whether he wanted to play or not, Rodgers said nothing. When the Packers stood behind Rodgers, he said little. When Favre came back to try to regain his job, Rodgers said nothing.
And when it was the biggest story in sports back in 2008 -- pick a side: you're for Favre or for Rodgers, and there's no middle ground -- Rodgers said precious little. Rodgers knew Thompson and McCarthy had his back, and though it was going to be tough, he could trust them to keep their word. Which they did. And in the last three years, despite the mud that landed on all of them after the Favre debacle, every one of them today looks like a genius.
Thompson for sticking to his guns, McCarthy for believing in Rodgers, and Rodgers for shutting up and just playing football. Rodgers' average season since 2008: 4,130 passing yards, 29 touchdowns, 10 interceptions. And a Super Bowl win.
***
Thompson, in a conference room in the team's refurbished Lambeau Field office, sipped a Diet Coke out of one of those cute tiny bottles and considered what his regime had done. It's not something he likes to do, because any time you take time to consider the past is time you spend not working on the future.
I thought back to the time I sat with Thompson in the middle of the Favre mayhem. Same voice. I thought back to Super Bowl Sunday night in Dallas, when he could have crowed but didn't. Same voice. And now. Same voice.
"Honestly,'' Thompson said, "it takes your breath away sometimes. When you win a championship in Green Bay, you're part of a very special fraternity. You're part of the men from the teams in the '20s, '30s, '40s, '60s and '90s, the men who won a title. These players now can stand alongside the great ones. When you win in this town, you become a little bit immortal. Just like those before us. That's the beauty of this place: We didn't invent it. We're just continuing it.''
Somewhere in Green Bay, maybe in the house across from Lambeau Field with the fence painted with IN COACH McCARTHY WE TRUST, pride in this franchise is at a level not seen since Vince Lombardi coached. It's a beautiful thing, a town one-80th the size of New York on top of the football world, with a chance to stay there.
I can't say I would be likely to choose to live in Green Bay myself, and I'm not sure if I would even want season tickets if I had the option, but this article today on SI.com seemed a very powerful indicator of exactly why the Green Bay Packers are a different team than anything else in major league sports.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/peter_king/08/15/camps/index.html?eref=sihp&sct=hp_t11_a1
Peter King. Sports Illustrated.
We'll get to the news of the weekend in a few hundred words, to touchbacks and Starcaps, to playing for now and playing for later, to Colt McCoy taking a big step and Matthew Stafford taking a healthy one, to the first week of the silly season and the panic it induces, to the team trying to figure how the coin toss works and the team trying to figure where to kick off from, and to the NFL player with a tattoo thing for Elizabeth Taylor. In due time. Oh, and reading between the lines, the NFL is not happy with the Bears Wildcatting their own kickoff spot. But more about that later.
When I think about what to lead the column with, I often think: What did I see or experience in the last few days that interested me the most? Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes not. This week, I thought of my conversation with Mike McCarthy on a bench next to the Packers' practice field Tuesday night in Green Bay. It was around 9:45. The players were gone, the fans were gone, and now it was just me and McCarthy, with a couple of PR people in the wings, on a chilly night that felt more like Oct. 9 than Aug. 9.
McCarthy was telling me a story about the Super Bowl championship banner the Packers had installed at the Hutson Center indoor practice facility, across from Lambeau Field, when no one was looking. The players were back at practice on an inclement day, working indoors at the Hutson Center, when McCarthy elbowed a couple and said, "Hey, look.'' And there it was.
Maybe it's not a big deal that the Packers didn't have a big ceremony to raise the banner or a ceremony when the fourth Lombardi Trophy was put in a case outside the locker room. And when the Packers play the opener Sept. 8 against New Orleans, there will be a simple "2010'' unveiled near the other 12 years the team won a championship. No flags, no banners. Just a year, with, as GM Ted Thompson told me, "sort of a tablecloth over it, and we'll pull that off, and then we'll play football. That's what we're supposed to do.''
The celebrations are Ted Thompson's responsibility. And so banners are going to be put up when no one is looking -- in this case, by stadium workers on a quiet day in June with no attention -- and there won't be any pomp, because in Thompson's world, this is the Packer Way. Act like you've been there before. This is what the Packers are supposed to do.
***
"It's funny,'' Aaron Rodgers told me. "When I was sitting in that Green Room at the draft in New York, and I was dropping, and no one would pick me, the last thing I was thinking was it was a good thing. But I'm glad I got to fall way down. I should be here. It's the place for me. The game is bigger than us. The team is more than us. It's a community team, blue-collar and understated and not at all about self-glorification. Vince Lombardi put it that way: Winning is the only thing that matters. It's about the team.''
We're in a me-first era. In most places maybe, but not in Green Bay. Not with Thompson and McCarthy and Rodgers, the leaders of this group. I have no idea if they'll repeat (a dirty word to McCarthy, who thinks every year is a new year with new players), but I do know they've created a model that every youth coach, every high school coach, every college coach and, yes, a whole lot of pro coaches would be smart to emulate. It's not just something they say in front of the minicams, and then sneak off to New York to make a commercial for Visa. It's who they are.
There's such a head-scratching lack of look-at-me in this organization. Then you see where it came from. Thompson, from the bedrock roots of Texas high school and college football. McCarthy, who learned the Pittsburgh way, who got his start in the coaching business by working at Pitt for nothing and collecting tolls at night on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to pay his rent. And Rodgers, who rose from no scholarship offers out of high school to a hardscrabble junior college to Cal to Brett Favre's caddie to the Super Bowl. I told Rodgers I remembered the Dallas Morning News story about his roots during Super Bowl week in February, and his dad, a chiropractor in California, having no shred of evidence in his office -- not a photo, trophy or framed ticket stub -- that his son was an athlete of any sort.
"We're not big public-eye people,'' Rodgers said.
When he came to Green Bay and sat for three years, he was even less of a public-eye person. Favre was The Man. And when Favre continued to waffle about whether he wanted to play or not, Rodgers said nothing. When the Packers stood behind Rodgers, he said little. When Favre came back to try to regain his job, Rodgers said nothing.
And when it was the biggest story in sports back in 2008 -- pick a side: you're for Favre or for Rodgers, and there's no middle ground -- Rodgers said precious little. Rodgers knew Thompson and McCarthy had his back, and though it was going to be tough, he could trust them to keep their word. Which they did. And in the last three years, despite the mud that landed on all of them after the Favre debacle, every one of them today looks like a genius.
Thompson for sticking to his guns, McCarthy for believing in Rodgers, and Rodgers for shutting up and just playing football. Rodgers' average season since 2008: 4,130 passing yards, 29 touchdowns, 10 interceptions. And a Super Bowl win.
***
Thompson, in a conference room in the team's refurbished Lambeau Field office, sipped a Diet Coke out of one of those cute tiny bottles and considered what his regime had done. It's not something he likes to do, because any time you take time to consider the past is time you spend not working on the future.
I thought back to the time I sat with Thompson in the middle of the Favre mayhem. Same voice. I thought back to Super Bowl Sunday night in Dallas, when he could have crowed but didn't. Same voice. And now. Same voice.
"Honestly,'' Thompson said, "it takes your breath away sometimes. When you win a championship in Green Bay, you're part of a very special fraternity. You're part of the men from the teams in the '20s, '30s, '40s, '60s and '90s, the men who won a title. These players now can stand alongside the great ones. When you win in this town, you become a little bit immortal. Just like those before us. That's the beauty of this place: We didn't invent it. We're just continuing it.''
Somewhere in Green Bay, maybe in the house across from Lambeau Field with the fence painted with IN COACH McCARTHY WE TRUST, pride in this franchise is at a level not seen since Vince Lombardi coached. It's a beautiful thing, a town one-80th the size of New York on top of the football world, with a chance to stay there.
Sunday 7 August 2011
Kenna's Fringe events
Kenna's reviews of the Fringe shows she has seen:
Tim Bat Trick Show:
I rate it a 10. I mean a 9. Because, it was funny. There was just a man, and he did some tricks, and he did some funny things too. He was trying to give his flower to someone in the audience, and then it just went back to him! He juggled eggs.
Bubblewrap and Boxes:
It was funny because they screamed at each other because they were scared. And they didn't do much talking. I would rate it a 9. He was screaming because of the cards, he was scared of them. The shark bit! She went "chomp chomp chomp!"
Dumbs up!
I don't like it. Because it's the worst one. They only did talking and things. And also poems. I would rate it a zero.
Tim Bat Trick Show:
I rate it a 10. I mean a 9. Because, it was funny. There was just a man, and he did some tricks, and he did some funny things too. He was trying to give his flower to someone in the audience, and then it just went back to him! He juggled eggs.
Bubblewrap and Boxes:
It was funny because they screamed at each other because they were scared. And they didn't do much talking. I would rate it a 9. He was screaming because of the cards, he was scared of them. The shark bit! She went "chomp chomp chomp!"
Dumbs up!
I don't like it. Because it's the worst one. They only did talking and things. And also poems. I would rate it a zero.
Saturday 6 August 2011
Apologies for a political moment...
In the midst of the Walker-silliness in Wisconsin, the tram scam in Edinburgh, and of course, the (not-so) slow implosion of Murdoch's global empire, I stumbled on this quote from neo-conservative David Frum, which just might be the single most insightful comment from a Republican I've heard since Reagan was in office:
"Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox."
http://blogs.abcnews.com/nightlinedailyline/2010/03/david-frum-on-gop-now-we-work-for-fox.html
"Republicans originally thought that Fox worked for us and now we're discovering we work for Fox."
http://blogs.abcnews.com/nightlinedailyline/2010/03/david-frum-on-gop-now-we-work-for-fox.html
Mirazozo at the Fringe
Great weather to start the Fringe (65-70F and sunny) has finally given way to real rain. The Tattoo is clearly soaked through, but carries on nonetheless-- we can hear the cannon and watch the fireworks over the castle from our windows.
The kids have seen a variety of shows and will post on them soon. Although I was initially very skeptical and somewhat displeased with the pricing, going into Architects of the Air's Mirazozo was actually one of the highlights of the Fringe so far. It's harder to describe than it seems-- it's pretty much an oddly shaped, air pressure inflated tent, with domes and corridors, made from a material that blocks most light, but with various panels and shapes that let natural light in. As those panels are all red, blue or green, the inside feels like something out of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, but in an incredibly relaxing and mellowing way. There is ambient music playing, and you wander around or just plop down and relax. Lynn fell asleep, I rested, the kids wandered around for nearly an hour.
The kids have seen a variety of shows and will post on them soon. Although I was initially very skeptical and somewhat displeased with the pricing, going into Architects of the Air's Mirazozo was actually one of the highlights of the Fringe so far. It's harder to describe than it seems-- it's pretty much an oddly shaped, air pressure inflated tent, with domes and corridors, made from a material that blocks most light, but with various panels and shapes that let natural light in. As those panels are all red, blue or green, the inside feels like something out of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, but in an incredibly relaxing and mellowing way. There is ambient music playing, and you wander around or just plop down and relax. Lynn fell asleep, I rested, the kids wandered around for nearly an hour.
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