Pick A Dilly Of A Dalliance, Mrs. Dalloway

Let the dead die intravenously.  Let them soak in their solace alone.  Let the lives of those who wander the planet with nothing in the way of commercially-viable victual-earning credits worry about weather or whether the ether will either let them live or weather their bones to nothing.

More books on the loan shelf:

• In Praise of Idleness and other essays by Bertrand Russell
• The Way: An Anthology of American Indian Literature, edited by Witt & Steiner
• British Women Writing Fiction, edited by Abby H. P. Werlock
• Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy by Bertrand Russell
• History as a System and other essays toward a philosophy of history by José Ortega y Gasset
• A Walk in the Woods by Bill Bryson

 We whittle our blocks of wood, we crochet our coils of yarns, we carve our symbols onto stone, and yet...

Yet, where are we going?  What's it all about?

A CD:

• Cikada String Quartet, in due tempi

More books:

• "And Another Thing... Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Part Six of Three" by Eoin Colfer
• "A History of Pi" by Petr Beckmann
• "Eats, Shites and Leaves, Crap English and How to Use It" by A. Parody
• "Bathroom Reader [22nd Edition]"

Piles of pylons piling up in the writings of Ernie Pyle.  Studying humour across the hummus-eating bodies of our species.  Reading much but little into what we write.  Seeing even less in who wins or loses a match, much less a match for the ages.  Getting just as much meaning out of the temperamental changes in our cyclical weather changes as what the plants in my yard say about what's going to happen next summer, knowing they really only reflect what happened in previous seasons past but recording their forecasts for fun's sake along with a small bottle of saké.

The movements are not mine to make or take away.  The movements to observe are yours to own and make anew.

So England beats Wales and Ireland wins while the Colts falter in the land of Little Cuba and the Saints go marching back to a perfect storm of a tickertape Mardi Gras parade that leads to Lent and then St. Valentine's Day.  What of cricket for India, Pakistan, and Australia this year?  What of the worldwide gathering of futbol players in South Africa?  Is there still a good chocolate shop in Vancouver to recover one's wishes for health and happiness after a poor showing in the mountainous Olympic mismatches nearby?  What day is it, again?

Why did Avocent accept a ~$25/share bid by Emerson and APC let itself go by the wayside for Schneider Electric?  Why was I not able to exercise options above $35?  Lack of vision.  Lack of clarity.  Leadership wanting someone else to lead for a while.  Forgotten deals and forgotten feelings.  Does anyone remember the cost of the Boer Wars?  Does anyone have an accurate count of the bodies thrown aside to create the empires of Russia, India, China and the United States.  Is anyone keeping count of the back-and-forth slaughter on the African continent?  Why is there no one left to speak for the people of Machu Pikchu?

Did I tell you about the time I worked for General Electric in their Aerospace Division where we designed test equipment (acronym: CASS) for the Navy?  Do you know why I have a jaded sense of trust of government contracts in general?  Because of the way the CASS contract was [wink-wink] agreed to, with the government paying GE for writing so many lines of code per deliverable, no matter whether the code worked reliably, made sense or not, guaranteeing that GE would get follow-on contracts to fix the bad code its employees wrote.

Would you buy a product you knew wasn't going to work right the first time?  The government did, for a while, until it got wise to the schedule slips and cost overruns.  Sounds familiar to you, doesn't it?  It happens every day, somewhere, between one government and one private enterprise all the time.  It happens with the commercial software you use, to a greater or lesser extent, depending on your relationship with the software manufacturer.  Part of it is built into our genes, because we aren't perfect and can't anticipate all the causes and effects of software algorithms and GUIs.  Part of it is intentionally messy.

That's where your smarts come into play.  If the deal smells too rotten or too sweet, then you know you're on one side or the other of a product design that's probably not going to look good in the light of day.  Either take your money and run or make sure the blame rolls uphill/downhill past your doorstop.  Or be like me and never put your money where your work is.  I call it freedom.  You call it whatever you like as long as I pocket the profit and can choose how to spend my untaxed earnings.

Time for a dry/wry philosophical story and let love linger in your thoughts for a more detailed tale of descriptive, contemplative, offscreen rendezvous later in your/our future...